Authentic Tales of the West: Part 9
The Aftermath
Arnold Ashford’s Journal Entry #9
It just all happened so fast, and the previous weeks had all seemed to move in slow motion. The sudden shock of action felt surreal, and at the end, Sweet Alice Sweetwater lay dead in Dodge City. So many of the young men in Town would’ve given their lives for Alice, and I don’t doubt it, but it just started and stopped so fast. It wasn’t some honorable or glorious Shootout between good and evil; it was just incidental violence.
It almost seems like an alternate track, a totally separate phase of life from the timeline in which the townsfolk are mourning the loss of their beloved Lawman, but Dodge City and her people seemed to have finally gotten through that hell-blighted Drought. The local Rancher had been ‘round Town quite a bit here recently; turns out he’s got a new scheme working in his restless mind.
The loss of Alice hit everyone hard, both the suddenness of it and the helplessness of it. As time put more days ‘tween us and Sweet Alice’s death, that feeling started to crystalize into anger in the men of the Town. Not a week later, ground had been claimed and a Building Project started.
Aside from that, the men (and not a handful of the women) in town had been meeting up daily to practice their shooting. I expected another Lawman to come ridin’ into town once word had spread around about Alice, but so far none had. Now it seemed that they were thinkin’ of taking up for themselves. That frontier spirit is a magnificent thing; I heard that Rancher once tellin’ a young man who had been working on his shooting to never let someone do for you what you could rightly do for yourself.
It was a challenge to recover from that Drought, but just a few weeks after they broke ground, they completed the Blue Steel Gunsmith. They aimed to be the most armed town out West; I overheard more than a few say that they wanted to see Hoss come ridin’ back in. I remember Sweet Alice, and part of me never wanted to see Jack ‘Hoss’ Holloway ever again. But there was a part of me that really, really did.
— Check back next Monday for a new entry in Ashford’s journal —