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The year 1844 marked the end of an era. In that year, Captain Jack Hays and part of a company of Texas Rangers, newly equipped with the Walker model of Samuel Colt’s revolver, fully demonstrated the superiority of that weapon over all others for close combat. This history-making event occurred dur­ing the Battle of the Pedernales in what is now Kendall County, Texas, where the fifteen Texas Rangers stood off and severely defeated about seventy Comanche Indians. The repeated volleys from Hays and his men sounded the death knell of a weapon which until that time had been the favorite for infighting. Part of the regular equipment of frontiersmen and backwoodsmen from the Mississippi to California, that weapon was the Bowie knife and its many imitations and modifi­cations. The question of the identity of the originator of the first Bowie knife has been argued for many years. Today, the answer can be only that no one really knows who made the first of these famous weapons. At least a dozen

  Few read his books today. Once his novels were immensely popular, not only for their literary merit but because they treated love and marriage with perceptive candor. It was a time when many young people rejected patriarchal family values and sought alternatives. He was self-taught writer Floyd Dell who had learned his craft in public libraries and on newspapers. The characters in Dell's novels talked openly about the sexual components of love. They argued about the significance of sex in marriage. These were topics that few earlier novelists had treated with such honesty. By today's standards, however, their language and actions were tame. Floyd James Dell was born in 1887 in the little  Illinois  town of  Barry , not far from the  Mississippi . He spent his youth in  Quincy ,  Illinois , a small industrial city atop the steep bluffs of the  Mississippi . His father was a failed butcher, constantly out of work. His mother was a country schoolteacher who encouraged he

   Together again in Croton, Florence Deshon and Max Eastman clashed frequently.  Florence 's continued outbursts of rage over Max's withdrawn moodiness were, by her own admission, "absolutely insane."  The couple agreed that only a separation could end the self-destructive warfare their intense love sparked. Florence  returned to  Hollywood  in an attempt to pick up the threads of her film career. She quickly discovered that it was not her talent or beauty that movie producers wanted. Without the publicity and glamour of a liaison with Chaplin, then  Hollywood 's most famous and richest star, they were no longer interested in her. When she turned to Chaplin for comfort,  Florence  found him cool. He was already amusing himself with another young actress from the  New York  stage--rising teenage starlet May Collins. . Movies were purveyors of images of unattainable goddesses and gods. This is  Florence Deshon  in 1916       Florence  made three films in 1

The love affair between Max Eastman and Florence Deshon would set the pattern for his later romances.  Initially, he was completely head-over-heels in love. The time they spent together--stolen from two blossoming careers--was a storybook romance. Max, an inveterate philanderer, wrote: "For the first time in my life I experienced no carnal or romantic yearning toward the shapely breasts and delicately upward curving calves of the summer-clad girls who would pass me on the street. Night and day I was absorbed in my greatest love. I was, in fact and to my amazement, monogamous.  "Indeed I was so completely lifted into heaven by  Florence 's body and spirit, that I feared for my own terrestrial selfhood, for my ambitions. Together with this fear of losing myself, I began also to experience a fear of losing her. I thought I saw evidences that she was drifting away from me." Movie stars sent "signed"  photo cards  like this to fans in the 1920s