Zane Grey, Fran Striker, and the Texas Rangers

by William H. Benson

June 25, 2020

     Zane Grey was a most prolific author who wrote more than ninety books, mainly fictional westerns, but also non-fiction books on hunting, baseball, and fishing. “His total book sales exceeded $40 million, and he became one of the first millionaire authors.”

     Grey’s books helped to shape the old West’s myths: a lone gunman, outlaws, cattle rustlers, lawmen who wore badges, horse thieves, hangings, battles over water rights, discovery of gold, and more.

     Grey’s 1912 book, Riders of the Purple Sage, became his best-selling book ever, even though it is a love story, set in Utah among polygamous Mormons. Its characters include an independent single woman Jane Withersteen, who owns a ranch, and a gunfighter named Jim Lassiter.

     One critic pointed out that sage is not purple. “For most of the year,” she wrote, “it is gray.” On the book’s first page, Grey writes the word “purple,” and then writes it multiple times thereafter. Ever since, critics have labelled Zane Grey’s forced and earnest writing style, “purple prose.”

     His 1915 book, The Lone Star Ranger, he set in Texas, and in it he featured Buck Duane, a good-hearted gunman, forced to “go on the dodge,” after killing a man in self-defense. In the book’s second half, Duane joins the Texas Rangers, to help the state’s police force nab a series of bank robbers.

     Zane Grey died in 1939, and was survived by his three children and his patient wife, Lina Elise Grey, who had remained at their home in Altadena, California, and raised their children, while Zane traveled for months on fishing expeditions, and carried on numerous affairs with a series of mistresses.

     Fran Striker was another prolific author, who began writing dramas for Detroit’s radio station, WXYZ. In late 1932, Striker created a new character, a single Texas Ranger, The Lone Ranger, that he adapted from Zane Grey’s book. It first broadcast in January 1933, and ran until 1956.

     Striker wrote 2,956 Lone Ranger radio scripts, plus numerous other radio scripts for Green Hornet, and Sgt. Preston of the Yukon. He also wrote eighteen Lone Ranger novels.

     Fran Striker built the story of the Lone Ranger around a posse of six Texas Rangers, led by Captain Dan Reid, who were in hot pursuit of Butch Cavendish and his band of outlaws. The outlaws ambushed Reid and the Rangers at Bryant’s Gap, and shot and killed five of the six Rangers.

     An Indian named Tonto arrived at Bryant’s Gap and discovered that Captain Dan’s younger brother, John Reid, although wounded, was still alive. Tonto helped this lone Texas ranger back to health, and from then on Tonto called him, “Kemo Sabe,” Native American words that mean “trusted scout.”

     The two then pursued Cavendish and a stream of other outlaws, bringing each to justice. John Reid wore a mask and assumed a mysterious identity, one who rights wrongs.

    ABC began to televise The Lone Ranger in the fall of 1949, and the show ran until 1957, a total of 221 half hour episodes. Clayton Moore played the Lone Ranger, and Jay Silverheels played Tonto.

     On occasion, truth is stranger than fiction, more grisly, more ugly. Doug J. Swanson, a historian of the west, has published in recent days a new history of the Texas Rangers, entitled Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers.

     In his account, Swanson reveals a tale of rampant racism, unlawful actions that included murder, and a refusal to investigate crimes when victims would dare to present evidence.

     For example, during the Mexican-American War, Second Lt. Ulysses S. Grant wrote to his fiancée, and said, “About all of the Texans seem to think it perfectly right to impose upon the people of a conquered city to any extent, and even to murder them where the act can be covered by the dark.”

     During the Civil War, the Rangers sided with the Confederates, and then after the war, when racial hatred reared its ugly head, the Rangers looked the other way. Swanson writes, “Between 1865 and 1930, there were 450 lynchings in Texas, mostly of blacks, which the Rangers ignored.”

     Yes, they wore their Stetson hats, their cowboy boots, and their badges, and acted under the guise of a mid-twentieth century state police force, but at the same time, they worked to “’keep black children out’ of public schools, even though the federal courts had mandated that Texas must integrate.”

     Zane Grey and Fran Striker’s fictional tales of the Texas Rangers stand in stark contrast to that of Doug J. Swanson’s historical account, that he based upon solid historical evidence.

     The fiction entertains us because in the end, before the closing credits and a commercial, justice triumphs, and wrongs are righted, all done in a quiet, humble, unassuming way—“Who was that masked man?”—but the history disgusts us, because on occasion justice does not prevail, the innocent die, and the authorities fail to apprehend the bad guy.

     Take your pick: Zane Grey, Fran Striker, or Doug J. Swanson.

DNA and Father’s Day

by William H. Benson

June 11, 2020

In Bill Bryson’s 2003 book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” he writes, “If your two parents had not bonded when they did—possibly to the second—you wouldn’t be here.” Your existence also depends upon countless exact bondings between your grandparents, great-grandparents, all of your forefathers back thousands of years.

Bryson has counted up all the people required to make you, You. He says that “if you count back sixty-four generations, to the time of the ancient Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your existence depends has risen to a giant number, a 1 followed by eighteen zeros, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.”

Bryson then writes, “Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here.”

He explains this riddle by allowing for some incest in most people’s genealogy, “actually quite a lot of incest albeit at a genetically discreet remove.” If a typical father and a mother would trace their genealogy back far enough, it is most probable that they would discover a common ancestor.

Bryson writes, “In the most literal and fundamental sense, we are all family.”

In 1953, two scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, were working at the Cavendish Laboratory in England, when they struck upon a model for DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, Mother Nature’s means of transmitting genetic information from one generation to the next.

DNA, Watson and Crick hypothesized, is “rather like a spiral staircase or twisted rope ladder: the famous double helix.” Stretched between the two side strands are a series of steps or rungs composed of two of four possible nucleotides: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine.

This DNA is found in two places within a cell: in the chromosomes inside a cell’s nucleus, and also inside the mitochondria, the cell’s “power house” that produces its energy.

First, y-Chromosomal DNA inside the nucleus.

Human beings have 22 pairs of chromosomes, plus another pair, the 23rd, that determines a person’s sex. Two X chromosomes produce a female, but an X matched to a Y produces a male.

A son receives his Y chromosome from his father, who received it from his father, and so on back through the generations. It is patrilineal, passed through each generations’ fathers.

Today, geneticists have identified certain mutations within men’s y-chromosome, and from those slight differences, they categorize men into 17 different y-chromosomal families, called haplogroups.

All members of a certain haplogroup share the same y-chromosome mutations. The Haplogroups include: A, B, D, E, C, G, H, I, J, L, T, N, O, S, M, Q, and R. Because my paternal great-grandfather, Bernt Berntsen, was Norwegian, most likely I reside within the Haplogroup I, or possibly R1a or R1b.

A genetic study would quickly determine which it is. Perhaps someday.

Geneticists have labeled that first father without any of the current identifiable mutations in the genetic code, Y-Chromosomal Adam, the most recent common ancestor, MRCA, of all living humans.

Not that there were no other men living when this Adam lived, but their genetic code did not pass down to the men of today, as did this anonymous Adam’s DNA.

Now, mitochondrial DNA.

A child receives his or her mitochondrial DNA from the mother, who inherited it from her mother, and so on back through the generations. It is matrilineal, passed through each generations’ mothers.

Geneticists have also identified certain mutations on the mitochondrial DNA, and from these, they have built groups or categories of women, based upon those identifiable mutation markers.

Geneticists call that first woman of a prior generation without any identifiable mutations in the genetic code, Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent common ancestor, MRCA, of all human beings.

All agree that both this Adam and this Eve lived in East Africa thousands of years ago, but they debate over when the two lived, and who lived first, either y-Chromosomal Adam, or Mitochondrial Eve. The estimates are over 500,000 years ago to about 58,000 years ago.

Bryson writes, “We are alike. Compare your genes with any other human being’s, and on average they will be about 99.9% the same. The tiny differences in that remaining 0.1% are what endow us with our individuality. DNA has been called, ‘the most extraordinary molecule on Earth.’”

All children look to their mothers for their mitochondrial DNA, but boys and men look to their fathers for their y-chromosomal DNA. It is science and it is biology, difficult to understand, but it is the substance of our beings, that work completed at the cellular level, of which we are unaware.

Fathers’ Day approaches.

First Memorial Day

by William H. Benson

May 29, 2020

On Feb. 15, 1865, General Beauregard of the Confederate States Army ordered the evacuation of all Confederate forces from Charleston, South Carolina. He knew that his army could not stop General William T. Sherman’s Union troops from capturing Charleston on their march north.

Union forces detested South Carolina. It was the first state to secede from the Union, in Dec. of 1860, and it was there, at Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor, that the Civil War had begun in April of 1861, when rebel forces fired upon Federal troops.

Four years later, on Feb. 18, 1865, Charleston’s mayor surrendered his heavily-bombarded city to Union army officials, who had laid a siege upon the city since July of 1863.

The city’s former slaves were overcome with joy that they were now set free from slavery, because Union troops had arrived and their white Confederate masters had fled.

Once in the city, Union army officials learned the tragic news that Confederate army officers had converted the city’s finest county club, an oval-shaped horse race track and its massive grandstand, into a prison for their captive Union soldiers.

Not knowing what to do with Union POW’s during the war’s final months, since prisoner exchanges between the two armies had slowed, Confederate army officials had transformed the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into “a makeshift prison for Union captives,” and a place to die.

It was there, inside the track, that at least 257 captured “Union soldiers died from disease and exposure while being held in the race track’s open-air infield.”

The Confederates then buried the deceased bodies in a mass grave behind the grandstands.

The Civil War ended two months later on April 9, 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

The story of what happened next at that race track was lost to history, until 1996, when a Civil War historian, David Blight, a current professor at Yale University, happened to rummage through two boxes of letters and documents at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and discovered the following story.

In 1865, the freed blacks first decided “to give the fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall whitewashed fence,” although they could not attach even a single name to one body.

They then built an archway over the new cemetery’s entrance and inscribed upon it the words: ‘Martyrs of the Race Course.’”

Then, on Monday, May 1, 1865, the freed black people gathered at the race track, “with some white missionaries,” and together they staged a parade of 10,000 people, who walked around the race track.

Some 3,000 black school-aged children led the parade. As they walked, they sang the Union army’s marching song, “John Brown’s Body,” and carried armloads of roses.

Next, hundreds of black women walked, each carrying “baskets of flowers, wreaths, and crosses.”

Then, after the women, certain regiments marched, including the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, and the famed 54th Massachusetts regiment, which performed double-time marches.

Once all arrived at the new cemetery enclosure, a dedication ceremony unfolded. First, a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and a number of spirituals, and then, a series of black ministers read passages from the Bible.

After the dedication service, the people congregated inside the track, where they “enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill.” They “did what many of us do on Memorial Day.”

David Blight goes so far as to say that, “Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration.”

The freed slaves celebrated this first Memorial day on May 1, 1865, three years before the first national commemoration of Memorial Day, held in Arlington National Cemetery, on May 30, 1868.

Yet, the history evaporated. David Blight called the Avery Institute of Afro-American History at a college in Charleston and was told, “I’ve never heard of it. This never happened.” Yet, it had.

Blight explained that once the war was over and white residents returned to Charleston, they took back control of their city. They “had little interest in remembering an event held by former slaves to celebrate Union dead. That didn’t fit their version of what the war was all about.” They killed the story.

No horses race on the track today, “but an oval roadway survives on the site in Hampton Park. The old gravesite of the ‘Martyrs of the Race Course’ is gone too.” In the 1880’s, Federal officials dug up the bodies and laid each to a final rest at a national cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina.

Bill Benson, In Retrospect

by William H. Benson

June 12, 2013

Recent news tells of a cell phone app for Iceland’s 325,000 residents. Because nearly all are descendents of about 15,000 Vikings who settled there late in the ninth century, the chances for incest are high. Software engineers designed the app so that a young Icelandic boy or girl can bump his or her cell phone with another’s and know how close or distant the two are related. If too close, the Incest Prevention Alarm sounds off.

It is a high tech method for preventing an age-old difficulty, that of marrying far enough away from one’s immediate family to avoid birth defects.

A problem for the Icelandic people is that they do not have a uniform system of last names needed to track relationships.

A person’s last name is his or her father’s first name followed by the suffix “son,” if you are a boy, or “dottir,” if you are a girl, a system that has remained fixed for centuries. One source said that Iceland’s phone book lists people’s names in alphabetic order, but by first names.

Iceland was not inhabited in 874 A.D. when a Norseman named Naddoddr landed there. Although he did not stay, others followed him, and by 930 A.D., those first settlers claimed all the good land. Iceland’s colonization was part of a wider migration out of Norway that lasted for three centuries, from the eighth through the tenth.

Because of a lack of arable farm ground in Norway, as well as the snow, freezing temperatures, and foreboding mountains, many departed their native Norway for other locations.

To the west they settled Iceland, Greenland and Vineland; to the east they marched across Russia and down to the Caspian Sea; and to the south they invaded England. They were Vikings.

Most scholars agree that on June 7, 793 A.D., it was the Vikings who raided the monastery at Lindisfarne, an English island along Northumberland’s coast. This raid “never fails to capture the imagination,” because the Vikings inflicted terrible slaughter and injury upon the Christian English people.

The only items saved were Lindisfarne’s Bible, now stored in the British museum, and the coffin that contained St. Cuthbert’s relics. All else was destroyed. The English never forgot that day.

Another migration out of Norway occurred centuries later. During the hundred years between 1825 and 1925, some 800,000 Norwegians, one-third of the population at that time, migrated to the United States to settle in Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Iowa.

One of those was my paternal great-grandfather, Ben Benson. Because his father was named Ben Davidson, he was given the last name of Benson, but once in America, that last name stayed with the family.

When growing up, I heard the stories of how Ben had worked on a fishing ship that sailed out of Tromso, Norway, some two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. In America, he settled first in northwest Iowa, near Sioux Rapids; then in Niobrara, Nebraska; and finally on a farm in Colorado, in southeast Logan County, where he built a sodhouse, farmed, and raised his three sons.

An uncle explained Ben Benson’s life best: “He fished for a living the first half of his life, but dreamed of farming. He farmed the second half of his life, but reminisced of his days when he fished.”

That is the conundrum that perplexes every immigrant. Regrets and second guesses.

Was it wise for him to leave Norway?

I think so. Even though a life on that dry-land farm meant constant wind, and dried up or hailed-out crops, and vermin crawling out of the kitchen walls, he found a life there.

National Geographic magazine’s June 2013 edition describes the difficult life that the fishermen tolerate on the Lofoten Islands near Tromso, Norway.

The work on the sea is arduous and dangerous, the cost to buy a boat is “typically three-quarters of a million dollars,” and then the large seafood companies buy up the quotas for the millions of cod that arrive to spawn among the islands each year.

First, the history books tell us of the Viking Age; second, my family’s stories tell me of another age and time when my great-grandfather left Tromso, Norway; and third, that app for the young Icelandic boys and girls tries to circumvent what their geography and history gave to them: a small closely-related population with little migration into the island.

We celebrate the Vikings when we cheer Minnesota’s football team, and for two days each week we pay homage to two of the Norseman’s gods: on Thursday it is Thor, the thunder god, the god of war; and on Friday, it is Freya, the goddess of beauty and love, and Odin’s wife. They all live in Valhalla, the most gorgeous mansion in all of Asgard where the gods feast with slain soldiers.

Sunday is Father’s Day, the day when we recognize our fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and great, great-grandfathers, and so on. My last name is fixed, and has not changed for five generations, and by it people know that my paternal great-grandfather was a Norwegian. No need for an app.

(Bill Benson, of Sterling, is a dedicated historian.)

Israel’s Independence Day

by William H. Benson

May 14, 2020

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s Declaration of Independence. He said that the new State of Israel will “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, or race.”

Despite Ben-Gurion’s promise, war broke out between Arab and Jew. Fearing the worst, the native Palestinian people panicked. They packed their bags, and fled their homes, their villages, expecting to return in days or months, never imagining that their move was permanent.

“More than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Palestine war.” To this day, the Palestinians call their exodus “the Nakba,” an Arabic word that means “disaster,” “catastrophe,” or “cataclysm.”

The refugees drifted into makeshift refuge settlements in Gaza or the West Bank, or they crossed the border into Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt. Two, three, four or more generations of Palestinians have lived in exile there since 1948.

Yet, not all Palestinians fled. Some remained on land controlled by the Israeli military and government, and there they have built their lives on their native soil, but under Israeli domination.

In 1948, the population of Israel’s captured geographic footprint stood at 806,000 people. Today it stands at 9,190,000: 6.8 million Jews, 1.9 million Arabs, and 454,000 other ethnic groups.

Each year since 1948, Israeli’s celebrate their Independence Day, May 14, on “the 5th day of the month of Iyer,” according to the Hebrew calendar. This year, in 2020, that day corresponds to April 28.

The Israeli’s also honor the day that precedes Independence Day, calling it the Israeli Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism Remembrance Day. In other words, a Memorial Day.

“To the memory of those who gave their lives for the achievement of the country’s independence and its continued existence.”

The State of Israel at various times have offered citizenship to the Palestinian Arabs who live within Israel’s borders, with the understanding that each must accept Israel’s sovereignty. “The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declares that Arab Israeli’s are citizens of Israel with equal rights.”

Today, Arab Israeli’s constitute 20% of Israel’s nurses, 45% of its pharmacists, and 17% of its doctors. In hospitals across Israel, Jew and Arab work side by side to save COVID-19’s victims.

An interesting photograph. Two paramedics appear beside their ambulance. One kneels on a Muslim prayer rug and faces to the right. The other drapes a Hebrew prayer shawl about his shoulders and faces to the left. Both attend to their prayers, while a virus wreaks havoc on innocent lives and families.

The Arab Israeli’s are philosophical about their weak position. They say, “Your independence is our Nakba.” “Jewish independence is our day of mourning.” And, “My state is at war with my nation.”

In the year 2000, ten Arabs and ten Jews from the Wadi Ara area decided to construct schools where Arab and Jewish children together would receive an education, as an alternative to the “violence and hatred,” they witness on a typical day. The founders called their schools, “Hand in Hand.”

Kafr Qara is a town of 18,675, mainly Arab, located 22 miles southeast of Haifa, a city on the coast. The Haifa district is the site of the ancient city of Megiddo, or Armageddon. It was there, in 2004, that officials in the “Hand in Hand” program established their third school, calling it “Bridge over Wadi.”

Two teachers, one Arab and one Jewish, teach each each class. One speaks in Arabic and the other in Hebrew. At first, the school had a population of 50% Arab and 50% Jewish, but in recent years, the Jewish percentage has declined some.

Students from a wide area arrive daily in Kafr Qara, a town now called “the village of doctors.” One of the school’s principals, says that “Kafr Qara is the only place in the world where Jewish children commute to an Arab village to study,” to attend school.

Memorial Day precedes Independence Day in Israel, as well as in the United States. Memory is a funny thing. It sticks upon certain things, but it fades away from others. No person though will forget a loved one killed in war, or injured in war. Never.

The Jewish people declare that they will never forget the Holocaust, the state-sponsored slaughter across all of Europe of six million innocent men, women, boys, and girls, because of their religion, their ethnicity, their culture. The Arabs will not soon forget their expulsion from their ancient homes across Palestine in the year 1948, because of their religion, their ethnicity, their culture.

May 14, 1948, seventy-two years ago this week. “Your independence is our Nakba.”

America’s Civil War—final day

by William H. Benson

April 28, 2020

Abraham Lincoln won a second term as president in the 1864 election in November, and he was inaugurated on Saturday, March 4, 1865, on the Capitol’s east front. Crowds came, stood, and “huddled in a swamp of puddles and mud,” to hear the president speak “about the issues of so grave an hour.”

As Lincoln approached the podium, the sun broke through the clouds, “and flooded the the spectacle with glory and with light.”

First, Lincoln reminded them of his previous inauguration four years before, on March 4, 1861.

“All thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it—all sought to avert it. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”

It was an awful war, a bloody carnage beyond adequate description. “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained,” Lincoln said.

Lincoln finished. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan.”

Lincoln then placed his hand on an open Bible and repeated the oath of office after Chief Justice Salmon Chase. The president then slipped away from the crowd and into the Capitol. There, he asked an associate, “Did you notice that sunburst? It made my heart jump.”

A month later, on Sunday, April 9, in Wilmer McLean’s living room in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. The Confederacy in the South was finished. The Union had won the war and defeated the South, but at a great cost of men and treasure.

Grant wrote the surrender document in “his manifold order-book,” and Lee signed it. Grant then introduced his officers to Lee, who remained stoic, until he saw a Union Colonel, Ely Parker, “a full-blooded Seneca Indian, and the reigning chief of the Six Nations.”

Lee said, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker replied, “We are all Americans.”

At 4:30 p.m., Grant sent word to Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, that Lee had surrendered.

Less than a week later, on Good Friday, April 14, John Wilkes Booth, a 26-year-old actor who often played the lead in Shakespeare’s Richard III, shot Lincoln in the head, when the president and his wife were watching a play, “Our American Cousin,” in a box in the balcony in Ford’s Theater.

A doctor pronounced President Abraham Lincoln dead at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday, April 15.

Why did he go to the theater? He had explained, “I want to get this burden off; to change the current of my thoughts. A hearty laugh relieves me; and I seem better able after it to bear my cross.”

On May 23, the Army of the Potomac paraded in front of a stand in front of the White House. General William Tecumseh Sherman said, “It was magnificent. In dress, in soldierly appearance, in precision of alignment and marching, we cannot beat those fellows.”

The next day Sherman’s troops, the Army of Tennessee, marched before the stand, before the new president, Andrew Johnson, as well as foreign dignitaries then in Washington D.C.

“Soon after the review, the troops were ordered into various camps, where the paymaster paid them his last visit, and then they separated, never again to meet in large bodies, except on Memorial Day, the 30th of May, of each year, when they meet to honor the memory of comrades who gave their lives for their country.”

The final word on a war belongs to a historian, but before the historian, there is a statistician.

Of the 2,778,304 men who served in the Union Army, 4,903 were from Colorado, 206 were from the Dakota’s, and 3,157 were from Nebraska. The “Indian Nations” provided 1,018 men, and the “Colored Troops” numbered at least 99,337 men.

Of the 360,222 Union men who died because of the war, 323 were from Colorado, 6 were from the Dakota’s, 239 were from Nebraska, 1,018 were from the “Indian Nations,” and 36,847 were from the “Colored Troops.” More than a third of the African-Americans who fought lost their lives.

The states that lost the most men included: New York, 46,534; Ohio, 35,475; Illinois, 34,834, and Pennsylvania, 33,183.

A sobering statistic. A total of 110,070 men were killed in action or died of wounds received when fighting in battle, but a total of 224,586 men died of diseases, including pneumonia, typhoid, dysentery, and malaria. Infectious diseases caused almost two-thirds of all deaths.

“And the war came,”in the spring of 1861. And the war went away in the spring of 1865.