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  #1  
Unread 01-15-2023, 12:33 PM
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RCL RCL is offline
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Default True Chili--Cowboy Literature

https://underwoodpress.com/truechili...ralph-la-rosa/


Stagecoach Mary Fields

c. 1832-1914

Just like the storied cowboys of the plains,
Mary finds Montana wild and free.
A liberated slave from Tennessee,
she’s odd in white Cascade, where cigar stains
on six-foot girls are rare. And she retains
her modesty, a shotgun keeping louts at bay.
The liberal mayor lets her drink and play
at cards in his saloon. She masters reins
to beat out angry men for stagecoach routes,
a first for women, making rounds when sun
sears and wind chafes. She wins those bouts,
protects the mail. With laughs and whiskey breath,
she tells of facing wolves one nighttime run
through snow—her knife and shotgun beating death.
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Last edited by RCL; 01-15-2023 at 05:27 PM.
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Unread 01-16-2023, 06:36 AM
John Riley John Riley is offline
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Good poem, Ralph. Congrats.
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  #3  
Unread 01-16-2023, 10:13 AM
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Jennifer Reeser Jennifer Reeser is offline
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Now I want to read about the wolves, Ralph
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Unread 01-17-2023, 04:50 PM
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Thanks, John and Jennifer! If my film script about her is ever produced, you’ll witness her encounter with hungry wolves (exaggerated, of course). There were also the many wolves in men's britches.
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Last edited by RCL; 01-18-2023 at 12:19 PM.
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  #5  
Unread 01-19-2023, 09:34 PM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
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I enjoyed you poem, Ralph. An excellent bouts-rimés!
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  #6  
Unread 01-20-2023, 06:59 PM
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Thanks, Martin. Yeah, this is an old one that finally found a home. I can't recall the rhyme set it mimes. But I must have been shocked and delighted at how well it worked.
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Unread 01-21-2023, 09:05 AM
Mark Blaeuer Mark Blaeuer is offline
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Terrific sonnet, Ralph. Glad this found such an appropriate home. I remember watching an episode on some television series about her, a few years back.
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Unread 01-23-2023, 01:05 PM
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Mark, thanks. I absorbed whatever I could about her long before Mary was well-known. Glad you like it!

In Ebony Magazine (1959), Gary Cooper gives what seems to be the earliest published account of Mary Fields; after that there is reference to Cooper and Mary in my UCLA colleague Phillip Durham’s study of The Negro Cowboys (1965). I wrote a script about her for the TV western, The Quest (1976) and an article on her for The Tombstone Epitaph. My movie script about her was under consideration by Disney, but alas!—eventually social history and the internet awoke the world to that amazing woman.
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Unread 01-26-2023, 02:38 PM
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Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
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Hi Ralph,

I like this VERY much. I hadn't heard of Mary Fields at all, and just like your poems on Thoreau, for me you draw a picture that is far more interesting than a paragraph of prose in a history book could ever be.

Sarah-Jane
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Unread 01-27-2023, 07:42 PM
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Thanks a bunch, Sarah-Jane. It's instructional if not lyrical or spiritual.
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