Monday's Missives- Audubon

From an image search for Audubon Texas

• A place I spent many, many hours at during the days of my ute was Audubon TX an old abandoned town near my hometown of Decatur TX. In the 1880s it had a store, gin and post office. It was located North of Decatur.
• I encountered Audobon due to my friendship with a boy whose family pioneered the area. His father owned as I recall 88 acres at the point they sold it years later and maybe more when we would tramp around that place.
• After my friends mom or dad would dump us off out there we were on our own- for hours on end or if his dad got too wasted- overnight. There was a small travel trailer we always kept stocked with water and beans. Sometimes we would go to the house of an old man named Jesse James. He would give us fruit and cookies and chewing tobacco. He could spit epically and taught us how to pinch our lips together with the first 2 fingers and throw our necks into the spitting process to extend our range. It worked- to an extent. More got on our hands than the ground but what went did go, went pretty far. 
• I do not believe in ghosts but, I can tell you that place could make you wonder.
• There were great creeks to explore crisscrossing that place that had some really huge gullies tied into them. Once we were walking down into a gully that was V shaped with a sort of peninsular area not cut away by the erosion. It was fairly large and circular- say 25 feet? across. In the middle of it was a perfect looking evergreen tree. We climbed up there to check it out and when we did could very plainly hear voices coming seemingly from inside the tree. We circled it with our .22 rifles at the ready. When we crawled under the tree the voices seemed to emanate from the tree itself while getting louder and clearer. The odd thing was we couldn't understand what they were saying even though we sensed individual words and all the voices spoke very clearly. It sounded as I recall like 3 men and a woman (or young boy). The best way I can characterize it now would be listening to a language you're familiar with but, not fluent.
• That place was a hot spot for cattle mutilations back in the 70s and I've seen with my own eyes the carcasses of the animals. Sex organs were removed. Fetus's were placed in bulls stomachs etc.
• Once, we took an older kid there who wanted to hunt and shoot a coyote. We came up out of a gully as daylight was fading and there he said one sat just looking at him (we were coming up behind him). He took a shot and we ran up to check it out. He was pale and visibly shaken. He said,  It was sitting right there, right there (indicating a point less than 10 feet away) looking at me. I took a shot. I had to have hit it but, it was like it just disappeared.
• We could see the very fresh, large canine prints it left behind. He may have lied about seeing a coyote and he may have lied about it disappearing but a large canid was there at the exact spot he indicated at some point in time very recently.
• He like others, wouldn't camp out there with us once they learned enough about the place to get spooked.
• The area was supposedly also the site of an Indian murder of settlers.
• For some reason I have a very strong memory of a dead horse in the remains of the house my friends dad was actually born in. We would monitor the progress of it's decay over the days and weeks as we would come back out there to spend the day.
• There was a huge pear tree whose fruit sustained us on more than one occasion.
• It had been hit twice by lightning.

I'm Not A Movie Critic,However Allow Me To Critique This Movie

Wow,The Assassination Of The Outlaw Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford is a long title for a story in any type of media but, especially a movie.

Music was very good-kind of spooky and dark.

Very good historical accuracy-as good as any movie that I've been reasonably familiar with the background.

No glamorization of the life style these men led-their lives were short and brutish. They lived every day in fear and often sick with TB and other ailments worsened by constantly being rundown.

They weren't Robin Hoods even though people of the time believed they were. They were self serving homicidal maniacs and man, it shows in this movie.

Jesse James' father was a Baptist preacher and hemp farmer.

Jesse James was such a bad man that the person who murdered him felt he had to wait until he was totally unarmed,standing on a chair and his back was to him to shoot him in the back of the head in broad daylight, though he had 24 hour access to him. I think most of us might picture doing such a dirty deed in the dead of night-would probably be suicidal though. The man did not hardly sleep and when he did shut his eyes he had a cocked pistol in one hand and three more in a gunbelt on his person or nearby.

Jesse's mother Zereldas arm was blown off in a Pinkerton raid on her home. As I recall a grenade was dropped down the chimney. After Jesse's death she would give guided tours of her place for a dollar. For a little extra tourists could take pebbles from his grave which she would have replenished earlier that morning from a nearby creek.

Robert Ford is pictured at top. He is holding the pistol he killed Jesse James with. He was shot in the throat with a double barrel shotgun by a man who wanted to be The Man Who Killed The Man Who Killed Jesse James.

What an epitaph?

Wonder where that pistol is now?

The house he was shot in still stands and is open for tours. It's been moved twice since the shooting.

Jesse and Frank James are in the lower picture. Frank died of old age.After retiring from the outlaw life he became a shoe salesman,theater guard and an author and lecturer on his exploits. He died at the family farm at 72 years of age.

In his early life he wanted to be a school teacher and was fond of reading Shakespeare.