Works for the character! This song was definitely part of my childhood. Gene Autry's "Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer" for Scotty in Star Trek
Thanks for the link. That was good. Through that whole thing, I kept seeing my grandfather. He was a rare earths miner from Alaska down to Central America, and wrote front page newspaper stories about his adventures.
Burros Had Much To Do With Building of the West1922
...The burro has been the real means of developing the desert West. Without the burro it would have been impossible to open up the great mining industry, which is the basis of all prosperity in the desert region. Occasionally one will hear of an alleged prospector who is quoted as saying that he has been in the prospecting business 30 years and 20 years of that time he has been chasing burros.
Put that man down as one who has no real understanding of the little animal he is so free to slander. There is not an old-time man in the hills who does not love and respect the little fellows who have been constant companions in the hardships and dangerous experiences of life in the unknown places.
Not one, but hundreds of prospectors have the burro to thank for their lives. When hungry, cold, thirsty or lost, it is always the burro that finds the way out to safety and comfort.
The burro is at once a barometer, and a guard aginst the four-legged and crawling menaces of the open. He is a foreteller of storms, and a leader whose judgment never fails. He will invariably guide one to water holes in the bleak places of the desert and will find shelter for his master in the vastness of the mountains. In such crises, that mean the very lives of himself and his packer, the burro never fails.
Nor does he arrive at all these things through intuition, but rather though common sense and actual reasoning power. Whether he turns explorer and thrusts his velvet muzzle into pastures that no other domestic animals has ever grazed upon, or whether he is made the salt-bearer for the flocks of the lowly Mexican herder, the burro is always the same - faithful to death and the chief friend of man in adversity. One thing he must have - companionship. One thing he fears - the bear. Once let him scent any kind of a bear and he will stampede his way through seemingly impassable places until he puts at least a score of miles between him and his one great enemy...
Someday maybe I can figure out how to turn his material into a music video. Other than the nature and early mail plane stories, my favorite is the
gunfight he was in in the silver mine. His obituaries say that he arranged to have all of his notebooks burned on his death.
Arthur Chapman, noted western writer, author of "Out Where the West Begins," has written the following tribute to Jack Bell, author of the article on this page today, the first of a series describing the thrilling heroism of the drivers of the air lanes.
JACK BELL belongs to the West. He would not fit into any other background. As a prospector and miner he has roamed the hills and the desert, and has pitched his tent in the deep snows above timberline and in the shadeless sands below sea-level. He has mushed over the far Northern tundra and has tramped the sterile plateaus of the Southwest. He has known the solitude of the wilds and the greater solitude of the mine depths. He has been in at the christening of mining camps, big and little. Some of them have been his own discoveries.
Through all these things, Jack Bell has walked with seeing eyes. From his own observation he has learned more of all phases of Western life than any other man I have ever. Nothing on the trail escapes his attention. He is a thorough-going naturalist, and knows animal life, not from what he has read but from what he has observed. He is a lover of the primal who has never been too keen after the Mother Lode to forget to bake an extra pancake in the morning for the birds and chipmunks about his camp. That sometimes harsh parent, Mother Nature, has talked to him fondly and indulgently. She has told him things about the birds and animals and the trees and streams and rocks, as well as about human beings that have given the old West its fascinating distinction from any other place on earth. Jack Bell's diaries, which he has kept faithfully these many years, tell the natural bent of the man for outdoor things. In them he has written more fully when alone in the solitudes in the midst of some mining camp hurly-burly.
I hope Jack Bell will be spared to get what he knows of the West into print. I know of no other man with anything like his store of valuable first-hand information, when it comes to things Western, animate or inanimate
*******
GENE FOWLER, noted New York journalist, writes as follows of Jack Bell, author of the Air Mail series now running exclusively in the Oakland TRIBUNE Magazine.
"Know Jack Bell?"
"Which I reckon I do."
That used to be the test-word [xx] welcome, hospitality and anything you needed at the moment. Anywhere, any time - if you knew Jack Bell you could come in. If you didn't they might take you in, but it wasn't quite the same.
It has been nearly eight years since I saw Jack. But I know just how he looks and just how he is. He is one of those genuinely he-men that seems to have the secret of youth. I know that Jack, peering from under the broad brim of his Stetson, hasn't changed a bit.
When I was a young squirt, I remember meeting Bell. I had read many of his real, honest-to-God stories of the actual (not movie) West. Later Jack became a warm friend. He is never halfway. Either he likes you or you can go to the devil.
I thought then that Jack could write the best Western stories that were to be written. I am of that [xx] "Mister Burro" in script, and I regarded it then, as I do now, a masterpiece. It is a sketch that experts on Western lore, including those who have mucked, busted and shot their way through the land of Sunset Trails, regard as a beautiful picture from the hand of an artist.
Stranger, maybe you have heard of Jack Bell. Now I am asking you to meet him. Lucky, indeed, if you could sit down with him about a fire at night - out in the open, I mean, and not in any drawing room - and hear him tell of his travels and adventures. The next best thing to that, however, is to meet him on the printed page. He has a faculty of talking to you that way.
You can't go wrong on Jack Bell. He is aces in any deck.
******
WILLIAM MacLEOD RAINE, famous American writer, author of successful novels of the West, has penned the following tribute to Jack Bell, author of the Air Line articles appearing in The Oakland Tribune:
JACK Bell of the Frontier! There it is in a word. For Jack Bell typifies that quest for high adventure, for the conquest of the wilderness, that is the soul of the West. In the days of his youth the dry and thirsty desert, the lands of the high snow peaks, were trumpet calls to the eager hearts whose eyes turned always to the frontier. Jack answered that call. He has been answering it ever since.
For Jack Bell is your true soldier of fortune. He has always been on the edge of civilization and beyond, tramping blithely wherever there was a promise of hardship or danger, of colorful drama in the borderlands where life was turbulent and young.
As a lad he followed the shining rails of steel to the camps known temporarily as "end of the road." He was telegraph operator, railroader, lumberjack, bartender, cowpuncher, prospector. In two waars he put on the khaki and went through. There is no city in this country of Canada where he is not known. He has mushed in Alaska and hiked through the hills of Mexico. With a burro as companion he has broken new trails in almost every state of the West. Cripple Creek and Goldfield were his habitat when the names stood for all the riotous and picturesque vitality of new mining camps. He has seen and been a part of the vanishing West, of the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in the land of wide sun-and-windswept spaces.
To look once at Jack Bell is to place him instantly. The sun-browned skin, the compact strength of the lithe, graceful body, the cool grey-blue eyes that can be warm or chill and hard as steel, mark him for an outdoor man who has lived long alone among the high pines with the stars for a roof. As much as any man I know he looks the part.
But he is more than a soldier of fortune. Always in his wanderings he has carried with him another Jack Bell, one who loved birds and trees and little chipmunks and sunsets in the high hills. He can tell you all about ptarmigan in the white snow reaches of the peaks. He can talk by the hour of the habits of beaver and blue jay and mountain sheep, and he is always interesting, because the thing he knows has come to him from first hand observation. For Jack is a born naturalist.
He keeps diaries in the long months when he is prospecting in the hills with only a burro for a companion. (By the way, you should hear him talk about the burro if you want to understand the man. I have heard men talk with the same affection about their dogs, but nobody else in that way of the lowly and despised burro.) His diaries are full of notes of the things he sees, and what he sees are the things that the rest of us ought also to see but do not.
For Jack comes to Nature with the same simple and open mind that Muir and BUrroughs brought to it. It is the inquiring mind of a child plus the trained one of a scientific observer. He studies patiently, always observing and classifying. So he makes his theories fit his facts rather than the reverse.
A man worth knowing, this Jack Bell of the Frontier - worth knowing both in his own person and in the stuff he writes. There are few of his type left. In the not distant future the last of them will have vanished.