Greetings,
HCN,
Readers of Scott
Bridges’s letter (HCN, 9/30/02: This land holds a story the church
won’t tell) may be interested in knowing that Ed Abbey most likely
artistically pilfered and altered Bishop Love’s carnotite-eating
from a true red, white and blue American specimen of idiotic
boosterism. In 1984, Edgemont, S.D., former Mayor Matt Brown was
pictured in Life magazine with a lump of
uranium-bearing rock held in his mouth like a cigar (the picture
was reproduced in the January-February 2001 South Dakota
Magazine).
Like so many of our Western
economic bonanzas, Edgemont is a dying town, literally and humanly
(especially relating to likely radioactive-related deaths) as well
as figuratively. It would make a good HCN story,
not that there’s any shortage of such cautionary tales, too little
listened to.
Abbey-philes may also be interested
in knowing that Jack Burns Lives! too. (Jack Burns is a recurring
character in several of Abbey’s novels, and the main character in
The Brave Cowboy.) Somewhere, I have a
photograph from the Rapid City Journal about a year ago, taken in
Utah, mentioning … that name as the surviving owner of the
pictured house hit by a rolling boulder or some
such.
If Jack’s anarching around, we may have
hope for the West yet.
David Cremean
Spearfish, South
Dakota
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Bishop Love: Based on a true story.
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