Quickshots: Chick Bowdrie

Thanks for the intro, Beverly Garland!

I highly recommend The Collected Bowdrie Dramatizations. The audiobook versions of these come in three sets of six stories. They’re full-cast, with interviews with Louis L’Amour interspersed throughout—he talks about his writing style, his history, and the people he met while doing research. There’s a little bit of music, some great voice acting, and overall they’re just good, friendly, wholesome fun stories.

The series follows the eponymous Bowdrie, who starts off as a young man on the frontier, edging his way from the wildness of the world toward life as an outlaw. But the man manages to correct himself and, with the help of the famous Ranger McNulty, becomes a Texas Ranger. The rest of the stories are about his time as a ranger—investigations, law enforcement, that kind of thing.

Bowdrie’s career mixes classic western flavor with a bit of police procedural, and a good deal of fieldcraft, woodcraft, tracking, and survivalism. If you like any good western, imagine taking your favorite detective thriller—gritty city stuff—and setting it out in the backend of nowhere, Texas. The main character’s just a bit more wholesome than your average private dick.

These really are feel-good stories. There’s action and suspense, sure, but they’ve got that good old-fashioned “right wins over wrong” vibe I usually don’t go for. And honestly, you don’t see it that often unless it’s coming from some preachy alt-right source. But boy—these hit different. Great background listening, great to have with you on a hike or a long drive. Just overall excellent work.

The Totally Sketchy Reason That I'm Fascinated by Stories About the Natchez Trace

This is from Outlander,
but it totally fits the vibe

The Natchez Trace is a road that runs roughly from Natchez, Mississippi, up through Nashville,
Tennessee. Back in the olden days, it was mostly a one-way road for travelers. Here's why: once people got past the mountains, most commerce flowed down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Going upstream—heading east—was brutal. So, if you were a farmer in Kentucky, Tennessee, or Ohio—basically just past the Alleghenies or Appalachians—everything you made went down the rivers to Natchez or to ports in New Orleans. From there, it got shipped around the Gulf of Mexico (yes, the fucking Gulf of Mexico), around Florida, and back up the East Coast by boat.

So, people would float their goods down the river, sell everything, and then walk back home—on the Natchez Trace. That means the Trace was full of stories. Masses of people trudging through the wilderness, walking huge expanses of land. Pirates and sketchy characters on the way down, and even more likely, highwaymen on the way back, since you were walking home with pockets full of money.

Now here’s the part that’s sketchy as hell, and why I think about it so much.

Let’s say you’re a farmer in Kentucky around 1810. You and your wife and kids spend the year harvesting crops. But to make that crop portable and valuable, you probably distill it into whiskey. You barrel it up. Then you go out into the woods, chop down a bunch of trees, and build a raft—maybe with a little shack on top. You float that raft down the river, not just to sell the whiskey, but also because you can sell the raft itself as hardwood lumber to someone building something down in New Orleans.

But here’s the part that gets dark: you might keep that shack for a couple of days. And you might set it up on the riverbank, and—here’s where it turns—start saying, “Hey, anyone wanna fuck my wife for a dollar?”

So yeah, prostitution. For some extra spending money on the long walk home.

And I said "wife," but honestly? It was probably pretty often a daughter. Which is horrifying.

What a weird country.

Jedediah asked his sister to come this time, too

Sheep, Cattle, and Agricultural Science

I was looking through some of the movies I’ve purchased on Amazon recently. I don’t buy a lot of movies, but some are just a little harder to find and worth having on hand. Two of them are western comedies- A Million Ways to Die in the West and Rustlers’ Rhapsody.

What struck me is that both movies have the same core conflict: cattlemen versus sheepherders. It’s a trope that shows up a lot in Westerns, and it often plays like a joke—something about smelly sheep, or cattlemen just finding sheepherders annoying. But in some movies, it feels like there’s an underlying ethnic tension. In Rustlers’ Rhapsody and maybe a few others, the sheepherders seem to be coded as Eastern European, maybe Jewish. That’s an interesting layer, but at its heart, the cattleman-sheepherder rivalry has a real, practical foundation.

It’s agricultural science.

Sheep and cattle graze in the same places—grasslands. Grasslands are great because they’re a stable food source. You put cattle or sheep on a big open range, and they eat. Simple, right? Not quite. The problem is how they eat.

Cattle munch. They eat the blades of grass, chewing it down, but leaving the roots intact. The grass grows back quickly. Sheep, on the other hand, yank the whole thing up—roots and all. Over time, this destroys the grasslands. Eventually, the grass can grow back, but not fast enough for cattle to return within a reasonable time.

So when a cattleman sees a sheepherder moving in, it’s not just a personal grudge—it’s survival. If sheep go through an area, the land becomes unusable for cattle, maybe permanently. That’s the real reason you see this conflict show up again and again in Westerns. It’s not just about smell or stubbornness—it’s about the land itself.

Confederate Surrender Day: Traitor Generals and the Worst Participation Trophy Ever

Ah, the Confederacy—the biggest bunch of sore losers in American history. Not only did they start a war to keep people enslaved, but after losing, they somehow still managed to get military bases named after them. Because nothing says "land of the free" like honoring men who fought to destroy the country. But don’t worry, the U.S. military has finally started scrubbing their names off the map, so let’s take a moment to run some numbers and see just how much damage these traitors managed to do before their well-earned defeat.

Confederate Generals and Military Bases

For decades, the U.S. had military bases named after these nine Confederate losers:

1. Henry L. Benning (Fort Benning, Georgia) – Pro-slavery extremist, great guy.

2. Braxton Bragg (Fort Bragg, North Carolina) – Universally despised even by his own side.

3. John Bell Hood (Fort Hood, Texas) – Led his men straight into destruction, repeatedly.

4. Leonidas Polk (Fort Polk, Louisiana) – A bishop who thought Jesus was cool with slavery.

5. John Brown Gordon (Fort Gordon, Georgia) – Later became a Klan leader. Lovely.

6. Ambrose Powell Hill (Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia) – Died still thinking the Confederacy would win. Adorable.

7. George E. Pickett (Fort Pickett, Virginia) – His "charge" was basically the Civil War’s version of running with scissors.

8. Edmund Rucker (Fort Rucker, Alabama) – A cavalry guy who helped burn stuff down for fun.

9. Robert E. Lee (Fort Lee, Virginia) – Turned down an offer to be the field commander of the US Army, worst career decision ever.

Civil War Casualties and Proportions

The Civil War remains the deadliest conflict in American history, with 698,000 deaths. Let’s divvy that up among these nine Confederate figures:

698,000 deaths ÷ 9 generals = 77,556 deaths per general

Imagine being so committed to an evil cause that you're statistically linked to 77,556 deaths. Now let’s zoom out.

Deaths as a Percentage of the 1860 U.S. Population

Back in 1860, the U.S. population was 31,443,321. So let’s see how much of the country the Confederacy managed to help kill:

(698,000 ÷ 31,443,321) × 100 = 2.22% of the U.S. population

And per general:

(77,556 ÷ 31,443,321) × 100 = 0.247% of the U.S. population per general

Each of these clowns was mathematically tied to about a quarter of a percent of the entire country’s population. Truly inspiring—if you’re into mass death and treason.

Drawing Parallels to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Fast forward to today, where another historic tragedy unfolded—this time, through a virus rather than bullets. The 2025 U.S. population is estimated at 341,145,670. So if we apply that 0.25% figure:

0.0025 × 341,145,670 = 852,864 people

And wouldn’t you know it? The U.S. hit 852,864 COVID-19 deaths in early 2022—almost the same fraction of the population that each of these Confederate generals contributed to through sheer arrogance, incompetence, and cruelty.

Final Thoughts

Numbers don’t lie, but people sure do. The Confederacy was not noble, not misunderstood, and certainly not worthy of honor. Their cause was slavery, their methods were brutal, and their legacy was failure. Yet somehow, their names got slapped on military bases meant for the actual defenders of America. Fortunately, history has a way of course-correcting, and their names are finally being removed from places of honor.

So, let’s take their memory and put it where it belongs—deep in the footnotes of history, right next to "horrible ideas that got a lot of people killed."

A Slap Update: Do I Still Have That Blog?

"Hey man, do you still have that blog?"

"Yeah, I think I do... although I don’t really remember the last time I put anything in it."

"Are you kidding me? You basically wrote nothing all of last year, just posting pictures of naked ladies.”

“Surely that’s not true."

"Oh yeah? Go take a look."

Time passes.

"Holy shit. You’re right. I basically just posted naked people."

"Yeah, as if the internet doesn’t have enough of that. What the hell were you doing?"

"Don’t know. I think I got tired of writing. I spent all my day at work writing. It’s exhausting."

"Yeah, but now you finally figured out how to dictate voice-to-text, feed it through AI, and let it make sense of your rambling, right?"

"Oh yeah. We’re doing that right now."

"That’s right. So, you know, writing is not as painstaking as it used to be. Why not get back to it?"

"But I’ve got so many cool cowgirl-looking pictures, and people like them."

"Alright. Make yourself a deal. You can only post your weird picture collection on the internet if you attach something that you wrote along with it."

"You mean, like this?"

"Yup."

Feliz Navidad!

 

Happy Thanksgiving 2024!