"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
In the Irish Elk household this week, William F. Cody rides again:
As rendered in fringed buckskin, felt and yarn on posterboard, subject of our daughter's third-grade biography project;
Subject, by coincidence, in the same week, of the latest American Experience, showing great minds think alike;
And someone who shares a birthday today with our youngest, the most enthusiastic new seven-year-old extant.
So we strike up the Wild West Cowboy Band to play a triumphal march for Buffalo Bill -- and to say Happy Birthday, Dear Neddy.
* * *
Dear Mr. Cody,
I have seen your Wild West show two days in succession, and have enjoyed it thoroughly. It brought vividly back the breezy wild life of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, and stirred me like a war-song. Down to its smallest details, the show is genuine--cowboys, vaqueros, Indians, stage coach, costumes and all; it is wholly free from sham and insincerity, and the effects produced upon me by its spectacles were identical with those wrought upon me long ago by the same spectacles on the frontier. Your pony expressman was as tremendous an interest to me yesterday as he was twenty-three years ago, when he used to come whizzing by from over the desert with the war news: and your bucking horses even painfully real to me, as I rode one of those outrages once for nearly a quarter of a minute. It is often said on the other side of the water that none of the exhibitions which we send to England are purely and distinctively American. If you will take the Wild West show over there, you can remove that reproach.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
