Tag: Never Caught Twice

25 Thoughts to Conclude a Strange Year

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ 1 Comment

Hi folks,

I was undecided until, well, this afternoon on what kind of post to make for New Year’s Eve. Should I do a retrospective for 2025? Should I predict weird stuff for 2026? Should I just shamelessly promote myself, or talk about my dog dying, or brag about us going to Iceland?

Hmmm . . . why not all of the above?

Here are 25 thoughts, in no particular order, about the past year as well as the year to come. I wrote this in a rush, so . . . hopefully it all makes sense!

(#1) 2025 was . . . sad. This year we lost JoAnna’s Great Aunt Margaret (who for me had become a surrogate West Coast aunt) and our miniature poodle, Eddie. We had Eddie for over 13 years, which is close to a third of my life, so to say we miss him is an understatement. However, sometimes I will feel him in the room with us, hanging out and watching our front yard for predators and mail carriers, only this time he can fly so watch out.

(#2) 2025 was . . . adventurous. This past summer we spent two weeks touring Iceland, another week in Newfoundland, and several days in Denmark. We also took a Spring Break trip to London and Paris using some of our accumulated AmEx points, and in May we visited Denali National Park in Alaska. In terms of solo travel, I went to E11 in Utah for the second time. Although a severe dust storm forced us to flee leave earlier than we wanted, the experience solidified my desire to make it an annual tradition. By the end of the summer we were a bit traveled out, though, so for the last few months we’ve been enjoying some extended time at home.

(#3) 2025 was . . . professionally discouraging. This past year sounded the death knoll for the HUX MA Program. Although I have high hopes for reinventing it at a different institution, it’s been difficult to reconcile myself to its impending closure, especially after all of the work I put into starting it.

(#4) 2025 was about . . . improving myself. On a perhaps related note, I was diagnosed with depression earlier this year. My counseling training has given me the ability to see depression in other people, but I had a hard time realizing that I was suffering from it myself. Medication, exercise, and a series of projects have made things significantly better, but I am going into 2026 with the recognition that neither physical nor mental wellness can be taken for granted.

(#5) 2025 was about . . . improving my surroundings. My depression diagnosis was a surprise, but my ADHD diagnosis last year was not. Still, though, this past year has forced me to revisit those things that help me—as well as those things that do not help me—cope with it. One of the nice things about this process was realizing that a lot of my academic shortcomings during my childhood were a direct result of my ADHD, as well as understanding the role that hyperfocus plays in my day to day life. But there are many things that I can still improve upon, and so this last year has been an exercise in searching for and implementing new tools to help me better organize (and live) my life. This is a work in progress, obviously, but when I look back on this year I see a lot of progress in my work.

(#6) 2025 was about . . . my daughter. As it turns out, Clementine has ADHD, too. So in addition to figuring out how to better navigate my own path, I am also relearning how to help my kid navigate hers. While this has not been the easiest journey for our family, I do not doubt its outcome. Our love will see us through.

(#7) 2025 was about . . . longevity. JoAnna and I celebrated our ten year anniversary last March. Time flies when you’re having fun!

(#8) 2026 will be . . . a change year. Stay tuned . . . hopefully the changes will be (mostly) good.

If you don’t know much about ADHD, here is your chance to change that!

(#9) Things I am looking forward to in 2026: Finishing and traveling around in the pop-up camper. Going on a Nile River cruise with my mom in March. Visiting my 50th state (North Dakota) in April. Watching Season 5 of For All Mankind. Taking a long summer road trip (possibly cross-country) and spending a week or two in Saint Louis. Starting work on our upstairs renovation. Going on the job market.

All sorts of things.

(#10) Things I am NOT looking forward to in 2026: Relentless political ads and an endless barrage of text messages asking for money. Economic and political uncertainty. Forcing my kid to learn her multiplication tables. A hotter and longer summer. Having to wait until at least 2027 for Season 2 of Pluribus. Going on the job market.

Stuff like that.

(#11) My “Capital R” New Year’s Resolution for 2026: To read one fun book each week. I’m sure I am not alone in saying that Academia has mostly killed my desire to read for fun. After all, when reading is work, and when work is reading, then reading for pleasure tends to take a backseat to less intellectually stimulating activities. However, as I begin writing again, I also want to begin embracing writing as a craft again, as opposed to something that checks off a professional box. But writing from a place of enjoyment requires being able to also read from a place of enjoyment. So, throughout the coming year, I want to read 52 “fun” books that have absolutely nothing to do with work. I don’t think I have ever challenged myself to do something like this before, at least since Summer Reading when I was a kid.

While I already have a sizeable backlog of books that I’m planning on reading, if there is a book that you think absolutely needs to be on my list, then please let me know. BUT: you can only recommend ONE book, so be sure that you can vouch 100% for whatever you decide to suggest . . . 🙂

(#12) My “I need to have at least one good health habit resolution” resolution: To start going to the gym at least three times a week AND/OR get back into jogging. I have already had both of these habits at one point or another, but over the past few years I have let professional concerns (and, well, some lethargic depression) disrupt them. The easiest way to do the former is to hit the gym after I drop Clementine off at school, so I plan to resume this habit next week when she returns. However, our neighborhood park has a new concrete walkway that weaves around its outer perimeter, and I am excited to find out how many laps I would need to do on it to train for a 5k.

(#13) Random thoughts about the past (and the future): I miss the old AM Coast to Coast show with Art Bell. When I was a teenager, I would stay up several hours past midnight on New Years in order to listen to people calling up the show with strange predictions about the future. Does anyone out there still do this? There’s a strange, perhaps even harrowing, intimacy to listening to cranks, truckers, and insomniacs call late-night talk shows with their own pet theories about life, the universe, and everything else.

(#14) My favorite movie from 2025: Sinners. It’s phenomenal on so many levels . . . definitely worth watching.

(#15) My favorite movie from 2025 (runner-up): Rental Family

(#16) My favorite movie that I won’t admit to most people is my favorite movie of 2025, but it may very well actually be my favorite movie of the year: The Naked Gun.

Rental Family is one of my favorite movies of 2025 . . . Fraser is a tour de force.

(#17) A Brief Story about the Most Inaccurate History Book of all Time: When I was a teenager, my mom worked at the Booksource in Saint Louis. As a book wholesaler, she had access to thousands of unsold books whose front covers were stripped in order to facilitate their return to the publisher. I got all sorts of “free” books this way.

One of those stripped books was Prophecies for the End of Time, by Shawn Robbins. When I was a kid I was really into books about Nostradamus and other weird stuff (like listening to Art Bell at 2 in the morning on New Year’s), so my mom correctly assumed that I would be interested in it. I remember reading this book, which the author alleged at one point would be the “Bible of the Future,” with rapt attention. For instance, Robbins claimed in 2001 that Puerto Rico would become a state and that surgeons would use pig hearts for the first time to save human lives.

That’s it. Nothing else. She made no other predictions for 2001.

Anyway, at that time I thought it was pretty cool, but in 1999 I went off to college and subsequently forgot about it while I was immersed in reading actual history at Southeast Missouri State University.

Well, I’ve nevertheless wondered about the book a few times in the intervening years, and earlier this year I decided that I would try to find it. And my friends, once I did . . . it did not disappoint.

Here’s a scanned image of the author’s predictions for 2024 and 2025. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether you should take its predictions for 2028 and 2030 on the following page seriously:

Here's the text for the predictions for 2024 and 2025 from Prophecies for the End of the World, by Shawn Robbins: "shut down all nuclear power facilities due to massive protests. 2024 In Nogales, Mexico, across the border from Nogales, Arizona, a group of angry union members walk off the job in a wildcat strike. Gunfire erupts and quickly involves troops of both nations fighting each other. Meanwhile, Americans and sympathetic Mexicans who are making good money from Americans and American tourists in San Jose de Cabo, at the tip of Baja California, and others in Tijuana, Mexicali, and Ensenada take over the local broadcast systems, declare the independence of Baja California from Mexico, and immediately request annexation by the United States. Complications increase as tourist-conscious Yucatan declares that its citizens---mostly descendants of Mayan Indians-also want to be free of the corrupt and inef­fectual government of Mexico City. The request for US military protection is approved by the US, which sends thousands of troops across the Yucatan Straits from Cuba. 2025 Kurdish terrorists explode an atomic bomb in down­town Ankara, the capital of Turkey, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Just about every borne in America is now wired and is online with the telecommunications superhighway­and industry and business pay for the hookups as well as reward homeowners for using the system.
A scanned page from Prophecies for the End of the World, by Shawn Robbins. Surprisingly, she was way off base.

One other thing I’ll add: the original book apparently contained a yellow envelope so that readers could send $20 to the author for a personal astrology reading. The copy I bought on eBay did not include it, so hopefully the original buyer threw it in the trash.

(#18) A Brief Lesson Learned (and One that I Clearly Ignored) from the Most Inaccurate History Book of all Time: I received my reader reports for Grandpa’s Letters last year, but I could . . . not . . . muster . . . the wherewithal . . . to finish the necessary edits.

One of my more typical ADHD proclivities is to try to avoid work that I believe will be less than perfect in execution. Books are solidly in that category, and I would not have submitted Never Caught Twice to my editor had it not been at my dissertation advisor’s urging. This time, though, the credit belongs to my wife—and to a certain book of prophecies from the 90s. After all, mistakes and inaccuracies are inevitable in any history book . . . it’s par for the course. When you’re dealing with thousands of facts and documents, it’s virtually impossible to error check them all. That being said, though, there is no way that Grandpa’s Letters will be even remotely as inaccurate as this book of prophecies, which still somehow saw the light of day from the inside of a bookstore. It’s a small comfort, but it was enough for me to hit “Send” on my email to my editor with my revisions attached.

Anyway . . . without further ado, here are my own predictions for 2026. Hopefully I won’t look quite as stupid a year from now.

(#19) Prediction #1: The Democrats will win the House and the Senate in November. Most pundits are predicting this. Historical midterm data suggests that a “Blue Wave” is all but preordained. However, the margin of victory is less certain, and to that end I think the Dems will win closer to 30 than 3 seats.

That being said, surprises do happen, so it’s more important than ever that we all show up and vote this coming November.

(#20) Prediction #2: At least one California State University (CSU) campus will announce plans for closure. It makes me sad to write this, but the CSU system is not in good shape right now. As some of my colleagues have told me privately, “It is going to get worse before it gets better.”

(#21) Prediction #3: Scientists will find a cure for Alzheimer’s. Perhaps this one is more wishful thinking (and speedy FDA approvals) than anything, but recent studies seem to suggest that a cure might be on the horizon for one of humanity’s most confounding, and bleak, diseases.

(#22) Prediction #4: The Cleveland Browns will make the NFL playoffs this year. Just a gut feeling . . . I really like Shadeur Sanders and his progression over the past few weeks. Giving Sanders an offseason training regimen with first team reps plus a draft-augmented Offensive Line will do wonders for this team. But then again, these are the Browns . . . no one will be less surprised about me being wrong than I.

(#23) Big things are coming in 2026! (Self-Promotion #1): I’ll conclude this list of 25 “2025 thoughts” (and hurry up with writing this so that I can join my family for the midnight countdown) with a reminder to stay tuned for updates about Grandpa’s Letters! It’s probably a little late to get it released in 2026, but I hope it will land on bookshelves sometime during the first half of 2027. Fingers crossed!

(#24) Big things are coming in 2026! (Self-Promotion #2): I finally have a project in mind for my Grandmother’s Letters . . they will be coming soon to a brand-new Substack account! I hope to launch it this spring. Stay tuned . . .

(#25) Big things are coming in 2026! (Self-Promotion #3): Last but not least, my writing goals for 2025 include sitting down and finally churning out a script for Earthshaking, which is the story of Iben Browning’s infamous 1990 earthquake prediction in Missouri. But don’t be surprised if it ends up being a podcast instead of a documentary . . . time will tell.

OK . . . finishing just under the wire here . . . thanks as always for reading, and of course, have a Happy Ney New Year!

Paperback Writer . . .

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ 2 Comments

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look?

“Paperback Writer,” The Beatles (but also me)

Hi all,

It’s been a busy couple of months! For one thing, a couple of weeks ago we moved from our two-acre horse property in Orangevale to a brick Tudor in Sacramento. It was the right move for our family, as it puts us closer to my wife’s work, my kid’s school, and Kings games downtown (for me). We loved hearing the roosters crow every morning and we are going to dearly miss our old house, but we wanted to split the difference between our lives there and the lives we had back in West Los Angeles. Our new home is a perfect compromise: it’s a spacious house with a yard big enough for gardening and other projects, but close enough to rapid transit and other amenities that we can hear the train crossing bells from our backyard.

Anyway, I apologize for not posting any more photo essays (hopefully I can put a couple more together at some point), but fortunately I may have as many as three or four big announcements to make over the next few weeks. There are lots of good things happening with respect to my projects, and I’m excited to let you all know where things stand with them.

So, without further ado, here is the first: Never Caught Twice: Horse Stealing in Western Nebraska is now out on paperback! This is exceptionally good news, since it means that 1) my book is now much more affordable, and 2) it is now a permanent part of the University of Nebraska Press’s back catalog. A lot of academic titles never make it to paperback, let alone within two years, and since it was released in November 2020 I had to forego all of the in-person marketing events and signings one usually does with a new book. Anyhow, I guess what I am trying to say is . . . THANK YOU! I am so grateful to you all for your support and for helping Never Caught Twice get to this point.

You can purchase the paperback edition at Amazon or at the University of Nebraska Press website (HINT: the promo code 6WHA22 should be good through at least the end of the day today for a 40% discount). You can also order it from your favorite neighborhood bookstore. Alternatively, if you are a bookstore owner in California or within a few hours drive of Denver, Omaha, or St. Louis, then please get in touch with me if you’d be interested in me coming to you for a signing event. Finally, if you already own a copy and you’re sick of reading posts about it, please take a couple of minutes and leave a review on Amazon, Google, Goodreads, or your book review site of choice. The more reviews I have, the more heavy lifting they do in terms of promoting both my already-released work and forthcoming books.

Thanks again for all your support over the last couple of years, and for your patience regarding the blog. But stay tuned . . . there’s more good news to come, and maybe some more Beatles-inspired blog post names as well.

All the best,

Matt

The Nebraska Mountains: Driving from Chadron to Crawford on the Bridges to Buttes Byway

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ 1 Comment

In honor of Never Caught Twice’s paperback release on December 1st this year, I am going to post a series of photo essays each week on my blog in order to promote the book and show readers what the pictures in the book look like when displayed in full color. I will talk a little bit about the places I shot, how the photographs fit into the story, and what happened on some of those adventures through the Nebraska Panhandle.

This image, labeled in the book as “North face of Crow Butte, near Crawford, Nebraska, 2018,” appears in the image gallery following page 140.

Picture of Crow Butte, looking from the north. It is a rocky, forested outcrop surrounded by grassy plains.
Crow Butte, as seen from the north

I never saw myself as the kind of person who would drive a Cadillac, but that’s exactly who I became when I landed at Chadron Municipal Airport on October 18, 2018. None of the major national car rental chains operate at this tiny, house-sized terminal on the High Plains, so I arranged to rent a car from a local used car dealer. They provided me with an older Cadillac . . . the kind whose owner almost assuredly used the cigarette lighter adaptor to actually light cigarettes. I could almost hear Frank Sinatra or maybe even Elvis playing over the speakers. No disrespect to people whose idea of vehicular luxury is a Cadillac sedan, since I’ve known a few folks who subscribe to the idea, but . . . well, it just isn’t for me. Nonetheless, it was what I had at my disposal, and since northwest Nebraska is a spread-out place with more cattle than people, a car was going to be necessary. A Cadillac it is, then.

My rental Cadillac
My rental Cadillac

I flew to Chadron for a few days with two goals in mind: to collect and digitize as many legal records as I could for my book research, and to take a day trip down to Fort Robinson in Crawford. Chadron is in Dawes County, which is one of the locations I chose to focus on within my book, so I needed to check out its early county and district records for evidence of horse stealing. In Nebraska, most counties continue to have some if not all of these materials in storage within their courthouses. This fact makes it logistically difficult sometimes to visit these places efficiently, but the courthouse clerks are almost always very accommodating and enormously helpful, and the towns themselves are fascinating places to visit. Having driven through Chadron a few years earlier during a trip to the Black Hills, I was already familiar with the region’s special—and uniquely vertical—beauty.

After spending my first night in town, I woke up the next morning and went to work. In the Courthouse I was able to get access to their earliest District Court case files. The District Court is where felony-level cases were heard for trial, so it was the best place to find horse stealing cases. Although I was hoping to find a wider range of court records that would give me a fuller accounting of horse theft reports across the county, I was able to get enough information there to move forward with my research. This only took a couple of days, which left me with one more free day to roam around the area.

Chadron at sunset
Chadron at sunset
Storefronts in Downtown Chadron.
Storefronts in downtown Chadron

Chadron may come as a surprise to travelers who are only familiar with Nebraska’s Interstate 80 corridor. Unlike the flat, sprawling Platte Valley, Chadron is bordered on the south by the Pine Ridge, an escarpment formed by erosion from the White and Niobrara Rivers. This has created a long, narrow corridor of buttes, canyons, cliffs, and outcroppings that stretches over 100 miles. Although none of these prominences are technically mountains, their exposed cliff faces and ponderosa pines form a stark contrast with the surrounding Plains. Or, as Alanis Morissette might describe them, they look like jagged little hills.

On my last day in town my plan was to drive about 27 miles down Highway 20 to Fort Robinson State Park. Known as the Bridges to Buttes Highway, this road connects the high, eroded tablelands in the Western Nebraska panhandle with the Missouri River near Sioux City, Iowa. Pine Ridge stretches along the southern horizon, coming within five miles of the highway at points, its low buttes sticking up and out of the prairie like solitary molars in an otherwise toothless mouth. There are few objects around to impede the view. Although the ridge itself is forested, the surrounding plains are full of long, tall grasses swaying in the wind. I no longer feel like I am on the Plains at all, but someplace even further “West.”

As I passed through the town of Crawford and approached Fort Robinson from the east, the roadway took me even closer to the ridge. But now another ridge, this one to the north, ran down toward the roadway as if trying to catch up. West of town, along the White River, these buttes come almost right up to the highway. This ridge provided Fort Robinson with some additional protection from the north and east, and gave its soldiers a commanding view of the valley.

Low-lying ridge near Crawford, Nebraska

Fort Robinson was a fulcrum point before and during the Plains Indian Wars. Established in 1874, its proximity to the Red Cloud Agency and its location between the Union Pacific Railroad and the Black Hills placed it at the heart of the growing conflict between the Lakota and trespassing whites that eventually culminated in open war. But Fort Robinson may be best known for a single incident that occured on September 5th, 1877. After Crazy Horse surrendered that previous May, soldiers at the fort killed him for attempting to resist his captors. Today a plaque marks where he fell.

One and a half years later, an even bigger tragedy occurred not far from Fort Robinson when Morning Star (or Dull Knife) attempted to lead nearly 150 Northern Cheyennes away from the fort in a daring late night escape from capitivity. The group, which has been imprisoned and held in starvation conditions at Fort Robinson, was apprehended while attempting to return north from their miserable yet mandatory reservation in Oklahoma. After their second escape, this time from Fort Robinson, soldiers pursued and fired upon the fleeing men, women, and children, killing sixty of them before recapturing most of the survivors.

Today Fort Robinson looks vibrant, clean, and not a place where people were starved and shot. The State of Nebraska has done a wonderful job preserving many of the original buildings, and there is a fantastic museum on the site.

On my way back to Chadron, I decided to check out Crow Butte. It is the most imposing, if not the tallest, of the buttes in this section of Pine Ridge. It was also the site of a climactic clash between two Crow and Brul̩ Lakota bands in 1849 (which I discuss on page 32 of my award-winning book, Never Caught Twice: Horse Stealing in Western Nebraska, 1850 Р1890, which will soon be available in paperback).

Fort Robinson
Crazy Horse monument at Fort Robinson
Fort Robinson Selfie!

The Butte itself is on private property, so I had to admire it from afar. I drove my now dusty Cadillac down one of the small roads that criss-crosses the region and got as close as I could to it without leaving the road itself. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and I snapped a bunch of pictures with my phone while listening to the wind sweep against the prairie. One of those pictures ended up in the book.

As I began to head back to Chadron and pack for the trip home, I stopped on the northbound road back to the highway to snap a few more pictures. The road was on a slight promontory, and I was high enough that I had a commanding view of the surrounding plains. In the far distance to the north and west, I saw the very tippy-tops of the Black Hills some sixty miles away. And at that point I felt immense gratitude, certainly not for the first nor for the last time, at being privileged enough to be able to come to places like this for research.

Looking north from the sloping plains just south of Crow Butte. If you look really carefully you can see the very top of the Black Hills in the distance.

Never Caught Twice . . . in Color!

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ Leave a comment

I clearly enjoy writing a lot, but I love doing photography. Although I still have much to learn about the technical side of taking a good photograph, I think I have some of the fundamentals down: proper framing and staging, the rule of thirds, optimizing light and other conditions, and most important knowing that sometimes the most mundane scenes can lead to the most incredible photographs. One of my favorite side projects while doing book research is taking photographs along the way—not just of archival documents and historical sites, but of everything else I see during my travels.

Unfortunately, of the half dozen or so photographs I submitted to be included in the book, none of them appear in color. I was told that the production price of printing them in glossy color would be too exorbitant, and frankly I am OK with that . . . cost pressures dictate a lot of decisions made in publishing, and I am not here to complain about the give-and-take of the publication process. However, it would be nice to send these photographs out there in their natural, colorful state, and perhaps include some other pictures I took while researching Never Caught Twice. Western Nebraska is a visually arresting place, and its landscape is full of contradictions.

In honor of Never Caught Twice’s paperback release on December 1st this year, I am going to post a series of photo essays each week on my blog in order to promote the book and show readers what the pictures in the book look like when displayed in full color. I will talk a little bit about the places I shot, how the photographs fit into the story, and what happened on some of those adventures through the Nebraska Panhandle.

Look out a week from today for the first essay. In the meantime, if you have not already purchased a copy of Never Caught Twice, you can now pre-order a paperback copy by visiting the University of Nebraska Press website: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496205148/

Exciting News . . .

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ 1 Comment

Hi folks,
I just wanted to post a quick announcement about some wonderful news I received last week:

Never Caught Twice is a 2021 Nebraska Book Award winner for Nebraska History! Thank you to the Nebraska Center for the Book for considering my work and to the University of Nebraska Press for submitting it! I will be joining the other winners in Lincoln, Nebraska next month to accept the award, sign copies of Never Caught Twice, and celebrate the Cornhusker State’s deep and ever-expanding literary heritage! Incidentally, this will be my first in-person book event since my manuscript’s publication nearly a year ago . . . because of COVID-19, I have not been able to do any of the traditional book release activities (e.g., book signings and launch parties). While I am obviously excited to finally have the opportunity to participate in a non-virtual book event, I am thrilled that the reason for this particular event is to accept a book award in one of my favorite cities with several other amazing authors!

For more information on the Nebraska book Awards, this year’s winners, and the festivities next month, click on the following link: http://nlcblogs.nebraska.gov/ncb/2021/09/15/celebrate-nebraskas-2021-book-award-winners/

Congratulations to the other winners this year, and thanks to every one of you for your support over the last few years.

BOOK LAUNCH: Order Never Caught Twice for 50% off

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ Leave a comment

Hi folks,

Guess what? Good news: my book is officially published!

If you’re interested in ordering a copy of Never Caught Twice: Horse Stealing in Western Nebraska, 1850 – 1890 (which you completely should) but don’t want to pay $65 for it (which I completely understand), now’s your chance to get it for 50% off!

From now until October 31st you can order a brand-new, hardback, hot-off-the-presses copy of my book for $32.50. All you have to do is visit the book’s webpage at the University of Nebraska Press and use the coupon code 6FALL20 at checkout.

While you’re there, please check out some of the University of Nebraska Press’s other new releases. As one might imagine, 2020 is a difficult year to promote new publications, which is typically done through in-person activities such as book signings and release parties. As one of the largest and most prestigious academic presses in the country, you’ll no doubt find plenty of great things to read, or perhaps the perfect Christmas gift for someone who already “has everything.” I’ve included links to three of the books I plan on buying myself using the same 50% off coupon code at checkout:

Also: if you are interested in ordering an autographed copy of my book, I can send you a signed hardback, along with a personalized note and a special gift, for $50 USD. That price includes all shipping and handling (I have to order it from the warehouse and then send it on to you) for all orders within the United States or Canada. It’s also cheaper than the current list price for the book. Give the gift of a brand new, autographed horse stealing history book to that person in your life who loves well-crafted historical monographs, Westerns, or the Great Plains in general.

If you are interested in ordering an autographed copy, please go to my Contact page and provide your name, email, and a comment indicating your interest and including any special instructions you have for the autograph, the personalized signature, or anything else, and I will respond as soon as I can.

Anyway . . . I think I’ve run out of things to promote! For now, at least.

In the meantime, have a safe, pleasant, and mildly cool autumn!

Best,
Matt

History Mystery: Was Horse Stealing a Capital Crime in Texas?

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ 1 Comment

Well, folks, I’m back . . . as in, back on Twitter. You can follow me at @luckettdr. I’m not going to sweat out my follower count too much – I like being able to opine freely, and lately that has been on politics – but I am trying to make an effort to bring more research-relevant content to my timeline. For my purposes, that means searching for tweets about horse stealing.

And after a couple of days doing just that I realized pretty quickly that there is a gaping hole in my upcoming book, Never Caught Twice: Horse Stealing in Western Nebraska, 1850 – 1890. Although I talk at length about horse stealing in Nebraska, including its status in the penal code, I don’t mention similar or comparable laws in Texas. While that makes sense, obviously, given the title, the myth that horse thieves were lawfully hanged in Texas remains strong:

This one is my favorite:

My guess is . . . no, I don’t think anyone should be worried about being hanged for horse stealing. This is not to say that horse stealing is not still a problem (because it is), and the fact that people are bringing up hanging at all when referencing modern horse thieves speaks both to the gravity of the problem and the power of the myth itself. But is it actually a myth, or can horse thieves face the death penalty in Texas still?

Let’s find out!

The first thing we need to do is research what the laws in Texas actually were and read what they said about horse stealing. Since we are looking for a Texas state law, and Texas state laws were published, all we need to do in theory is consult the Texas penal code. The earliest digitized copy of Texas criminal law currently available through the Texas Law Library is the 1879 Penal Code of the State of Texas. Passed by the legislature on February 21, 1879, the code superseded preexisting Texas law and exhaustively laid out what was against the law in Texas, and what the prescribed penalty should be for each offense. Since this is a text-searchable PDF, all we need to do is hit Ctrl-F and search for “horse” until we get to the appropriate law.

If you want to skip the searching, you can find the relevant statute on page 97, in Title XVII, Chapter 11:

“If any person shall steal any horse, ass or mule, he shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary not less than five nor more than fifteen years.”

Here’s a screenshot of the law:

Notice that the punishment for stealing cattle was two to five years in jail, as opposed to between five and fifteen. Cattle were valuable in Texas, but apart from commodity production and pulling draft they had little utility. The difference in punishment between the two underscores how important horses really were, even if horse thieves did not necessarily face the death penalty for their crimes.

This seems pretty conclusive, right? It would be, except for the fact that the above law is from 1879. Texas established its independence from Mexico over three decades earlier, and the United States annexed it in 1845. Needless to say, a lot of violence occurred in Texas during the preceding thirty years: the Texas Revolution, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, a generation of warfare against the Comanches, and the explosion of Texas cattle ranching across the Plains. Wouldn’t it be more likely for horse stealing to be a capital crime during this era, as opposed to 1879, when things presumably cooled down a little bit in the Lone Star State?

To check the law even earlier, we will have to exit the Texas State Law Library and head over to the Legislative Reference Library of Texas. This is where we will find a PDF copy of The Penal Code of the State of Texas adopted by the sixth Legislature, passed into law and published in 1856. This volume represents a codification, rather than a revision, of existing laws – meaning that the laws inside were already on the books in one way or another, but had not yet been incorporated into a single body of legal code.

Once again, it does not take long to find out what the punishment for horse stealing was in Texas in 1856:

“Article 765. If any person shall steal any horse, gelding, mare, colt, ass, or mule, he shall be punished, by confinement in the Penitentiary, not less than two, nor more than seven years.” Here is a screenshot of the law from the book itself:

One difference that should immediately stand out is that the punishment for horse stealing was actually more severe in 1879 than it was in 1856. Why was that? There are a lot of reasons for this (I talk about them in the book, of course), but one important factor bears mentioning here: horses were more valuable after the Civil War than before. The massive herds of mustangs were declining or moving north, growing ranches required enormous numbers of horses for their remudas, and urbanization elsewhere pulled horses out of rural markets. There was more competition for horses during the late 1870s, and as demand and prices for horses rose so, too, did their role in society. They were used for transportation, plowing, pulling draft, and countless other applications. This made them more ubiquitous and more essential to everyday life.

Yet despite their critical role horses were subject to a host of maladies, from epizootics to snake bites to lighting strikes to old age. They were expensive and virtually uninsurable, and people without the funds to buy multiple horses often overused the ones they had, leading them to age rapidly. Thus, of all the possible problems to plague horse owners, horse thieves shouldered much of the burden, as they were easily scapegoated and could presumably be controlled more easily with threats and punishments than lighting strikes or poisonous snakes.

One of the most famous horse theft hanging scenes can be found in the popular miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989). Shows like Lonesome Dove continued to propagate the belief that horse thieves were legally hanged. Although this is clearly a vigilante execution it is also apparent in the series that there will be absolutely no consequences for these actions.

Naturally, one possible punishment for horse stealing was hanging, and the popular mythology around hanging horse thieves was just as strong in the late-1870s as it is now. The question of whether or not vigilantes frequently hanged horse thieves in Texas is a separate question that deserves a separate answer, but if we assume that it was a strong possibility, then the harsher punishment prescription in 1879 makes a lot of sense. Texas levied five to fifteen year prison sentences against horse thieves not only in order to disincentivize the stealing of an incredibly valuable and uniquely indispensable form of property, but also in order to convince would-be vigilantes that the state was serious about punishing horse thieves.

This post just scratches the surface of what I’ve come to believe is a fascinating, multilayered story about horse theft and its vastly unappreciated and misunderstood role in shaping our laws, politics, culture, and history. It is a story I try to tell in my book. And even though my focus is on Nebraska, there are a LOT of parallels here between Texas and Nebraska law with respect to how they contend with horse stealing.

In the meantime, though, it seems as though our mystery is solved: horse stealing is not, and so far as I can tell never was, a hanging offense in the Lone Star State. Case closed.

Now comes the hard part: convincing everyone on Twitter.

Relearning How to Teach (and How to Speak)

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ Leave a comment

Hi folks,
Sorry about the lack of posts this past week. One reason is because I’ve been busy with the three courses I’m teaching this summer, as well as spending time with visiting family. Another reason is that I received the proofs for my upcoming book, Never Caught Twice: Horse Stealing in Western Nebraska, 1850 – 1890, and I need to review every word of it to make sure that the printer has correctly set the type (which looks gorgeous, by the way).

But a third reason is algorithmic: suddenly, due to both changing accounting measures at WordPress and Google Analytics, as well as too-rosy-to-be-true assumptions on my part, my day to day site traffic plunged this week from what I thought was a few hundred views a day to about a dozen. While that realization this week did not necessarily cause me to not want to blog anymore – after all, I’m not doing this to be a social media influencer or a professional blogger, but to give my actual writing and teaching work a virtual home base for both new and existing readers of my work – it has reduced the urgency I feel to produce filler content when not blogging about my Grandpa’s Letters (which, as mentioned elsewhere here, is the basis of my current book project).

I say that partly in exasperation over the sheer amount of work it takes to obtain a blogging audience, but also because I want to say a couple of things about online teaching, and while this might not be one of those promised album reviews this blog is the best place for me to do it.

First of all, teaching on Zoom in my office is more difficult and much less fulfilling than teaching in a classroom. It’s easy to understand the “less fulfilling” part: I am a bit of a ham when I’m in front of an audience (a few of you may remember me “acting” in my high school’s plays during the late 90s), and even on days when I don’t feeling like teaching a class for whatever reason the time seems to speed by when I’m in a classroom. I love the energy, the forced extroversion for an hour and a half, the campus atmosphere. I love the libraries, the manicured lawns, the trees when they explode pink and green during the spring and burn crimson and yellow in the fall. I love the ritual of grabbing a pre-class coffee, and I love it when students approach me on campus with a question or a comment. I miss all that. There’s nothing Zoom or Canvas or any other online intermediary can do to make those things better, unless they combine their AI and invent a vaccine for this ghastly disease.

Then there’s the job itself. I love telling stories. I’m thrilled that I have found a way to make it my job to tell stories. Have you ever watched Moana? In some ways I believe the historian’s job is not unlike that of Moana’s grandmother: she is both an educator and a keeper of the island’s lore and legends. She is the keeper of the island’s past and its secrets. She knows where the skeletons – and the boats – are buried. But she also loves the island and its people. History is not just a growing collection of books and vast archival holdings. It is tactile, visual (hence the debate over statues), and interpersonal. Human connection and lived experience are history’s emulsifiers. Unfortunately, these things are largely if not wholly absent on Zoom. If history was born around a campfire, it will someday die on a closed browser tab.

If you’re a Moana fan, there’s a ton of backstory in the deleted scenes . . .

Of course, Zoom and other intermediaries are necessary at the moment, especially given the sudden rise in new COVID-19 cases throughout the United States, including here in California. And we are all learning how to navigate these new challenges throughout the world of education . . . in fact, my grievances hardly compare to those who are now tasked with teaching Kindergarten and First Grade online. But those challenges do seem to exist across the board, including for those of us who already have some online teaching experience (like me).

One of those challenges is my tendency to say “um” a lot. Weirdly enough, this is something I don’t do in class, since part of my theater and speech training was to excise such filler words from my vocabulary when speaking to an audience. However, when speaking on Zoom, I am sitting down and talking to a webcam, which is not even close to being the same thing. Suddenly, my lectures are full of “um”s, whereas when standing up and giving a lecture I will typically pause when I am thinking and, if necessary, fill the time with a sip of coffee (another great reason to bring coffee to class!).

In an effort to make my lectures more accessible, I started taking the sound files and mixing them into podcast episodes. That way students can listen to their lectures on the go or while doing other things. While this was a good idea, I think, the execution sounds very different in that I realized just how many filler words I use now:

17B Lecture Series, Episode 10: World War II – 80 Years Ago Today: Grandpa's Letters from the Pacific

The 17B Lecture Series is a repository of my summer 17B Zoom lectures for my HIST 17B: United States History from 1865 to the present. In this episode we review WWII and I defend my native son attachment to Harry S Truman. Note: all episodes are labeled "explicit," not because there is an overabundance of cursing, but because a curse word does sometimes slip out every now and then.
  1. 17B Lecture Series, Episode 10: World War II
  2. 17B Lecture Series, Episode 9: The New Deal
  3. 17B Lecture Series, Episode 8: The Roaring 20s and the Beginning of the Depression
  4. 17B Lecture Series, Episode 7: World War I
  5. 17B Lecture Series, Episode 6: Progressive Era

Practice will make perfect, and now that I am aware of the problem it is something I can begin to work on. One thing that I think will help: I just bought a nice, entry-level microphone for my broadcasts. It is not unobtrustive . . . like many broadcast mics it is inconveniently large. But I hope that, in addition to dramatically improving my sound quality, it will also trick my brain into believing that I’m actually behind a podium, and not my desk.

Speaking of my desk, I built the top out of oak and attached it to a standing desk base. Maybe my lectures would be a good time to dispense with the desk chair and start standing again.

In any event, although the podcast is a fun way to distribute lecture content, I’m not a podcaster at heart. Unlike with my recent blog analytics, I won’t be bothered by the fact that I can count the number of downloads on one hand. I can’t, ummm, imagine having to do one of those podcasts, ummm, regularly, you know? But my new microphone does look pretty cool.

One corner of my table-sized desk, complete with a picture of my kid manhandling my guitar, a Buffalo Bill mug with a bunch of pens and probably more scissors than I need, a set of horse coasters I bought in Kentucky (where else?), and my new Blue Yeti microphone. And yes, I need to clean my desk.

Ads, Albums, and Almosts

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ Leave a comment

Hi folks,

You may have noticed that there are now ads on the website. That’s on me . . . this is not a free account, and I have my annual site renewal coming up, so every little bit helps. Anything above what it costs to run the site will naturally go towards my research and historical work, which as one might imagine is also expensive. I greatly appreciate your patience with this transition, and please do let me know if the ads become a hindrance to your ability to enjoy or read the posts here.

Also, as I wrote last week the final year of letters is going to take more time to produce, if for no other reason than there are twice as many letters for this period! Which is exciting, obviously, but it also means I’m going to need some time to review and write about them.

So what will I do in the interim?

First of all, I’m bringing back the book reviews! Since I have a stack of books about World War II, I might as well get started and update you on how that’s going. Since Friday is a good day for those, I will try to keep posting those each Friday, starting with this one.

In addition to that, one of my buddies from grad school recently posted a series of posts on Facebook about his ten most influential albums. I thought that was a pretty cool concept, but Facebook being what it is, I didn’t want to place my content there . . . so why not blog about them? I spent some time thinking about it, and I’m going to share them with you over the next few weeks here, along with some stories, some historical context, and a little bit of musical criticism.

Of course, those of you who know me are probably aware that I never really put away my flannel shirts and Smashing Pumpkins CDs, so I narrowed my choices down to a wide variety of albums that reflect a broader range of interests and (as the list would imply) influences. Not necessarily my Desert Island albums, but those albums that challenged me, that opened me up to new worlds and pushed me in new directions. There’s some Johnny Cash, some Curtis Mayfield, some Sleater-Kinney, some . . . well, you’ll just have to stay tuned! And as I go through the list, I would love to hear your thoughts as well. Do you like these albums? Hate them? What should be on this list that isn’t? Please let me know in the comments!

Finally, a bit of good news: on Saturday I received the proofs for my upcoming book, Never Caught Twice: Horse Stealing in Western Nebraska, 1850 – 1890. The book itself is gorgeous – the type, the font, even the title page . . . it all looks fantastic. The University of Nebraska Press does a fantastic job with all of their books, but I really love how they produced mine.

My job now is to review the proofs for typographical and layout errors over the next couple of weeks, and then send it back to be printed.

In other words: it’s almost done.

-Matt

Coming up in April 2020 and Beyond

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ Leave a comment

Hi folks,
So far I like taking a month-on, month-off approach to my posts about Elmer’s letters to his parents, so I think I am going hold off on talking about 1944 (which was a VERY eventful year for Elmer) for at least a couple of weeks. But in the meantime I have started scanning and reviewing my grandparents’ correspondence with each other, which starts in summer 1943 with Elmer’s letters to Rose and in summer 1944 with Rose’s letters to Elmer. The latter will be a nice change of pace, I am sure – while Elmer’s letters are observant and contemplative, Rose had a sharp wit and a more playful writing style. They wrote very different kinds of letters, but each kind is fantastic in its own way. For April, I have written four posts that chronicle the first few months of their courtship. Although I briefly introduce Rose here, I’ll save most of her story for when I begin discussing and analyzing her letters. And her story is extraordinary.

Although I will be writing about these letters well into the summer, there will be a few other things going on as well. Barring any COVID-19-related disruptions I am still expecting my forthcoming book, Never Caught Twice: Horse Stealing in Western Nebraska, 1850 – 1890, to be released this fall by the University of Nebraska Press. I will begin using this space this summer to promote that book as well as tell my grandpa’s story, so expect some weird pivoting between horse thieves and World War II sailors. But I have some fun things planned, including some interesting stories that did not make it into the book for one reason or another, so once again please stay tuned.

Some other notes:
  • In case you haven’t noticed, I have programmed the Grandpa’s Letters posts to drop on Monday and Thursday mornings at 10am Pacific Time. I will do the same for the above-mentioned posts coming up about other Grandpa’s Letters-related documents. Posts on other subjects (like this one) may pop up at other times during the week.
  • Once again, if you have not subscribed yet, please do so! It would be a big help to me, even if you sign up using a spam email account or something similar that you seldom check. But it’s also great for work accounts, because, let’s face it, sometimes you need a five minute break from the grind.

Thanks again for reading along, and please don’t hesitate to share any posts you like on social media to help me get the word out.

Best,
Matt

Cover Art Released

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ 1 Comment

Hi folks,
Great news: the University of Nebraska Press has just released the cover art for my upcoming book, Never Caught Twice: Horse Stealing in Western Nebraska, 1850 – 1890. Check it out:

The UNL Press has a fantastic art and marketing office, and they did an amazing job with my cover, just as they do for all of their other books. Check out their Spring/Summer 2020 catalog to see what I mean (and to maybe get some reading ideas for our collective self-quarantine) by clicking here.

The book is slated for release this November.

About the horse stealing book . . .

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ 2 Comments

It’s no secret that most of the stuff I post here stems from my work digitizing, reading, and then blogging about the letters my grandpa wrote to his parents and his future wife, Rose, during World War II. Eventually I am going to work this material into a book manuscript, which I would really like to be available in time for the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 2021).

However, most of my research and historical work until recently has focused on horse stealing in the nineteenth-century American West, specifically Nebraska. I began this research nearly a decade ago, when the Autry National Center in Los Angeles awarded me a fellowship to conduct research on the John Bratt Ranching Collection. My goal was to use Bratt’s voluminous ranching records to better understand how horse stealing affected ranchers and their bottom line. The material, which few historians have used up until now, yielded some fascinating insights, and I used these to get a head start on my dissertation writing.

After finishing my dissertation, “Honor among Thieves: Horse Stealing and Culture in Lincoln County, Nebraska, 1860 – 1890” in 2014, I was slow to pick the project back up and finish it. However, I started getting serious about it a couple of years ago and decided to expand my analysis beyond Lincoln County to Western Nebraska in general. I finally finished the manuscript this summer, and it should be out next fall.

* Not the actual book cover, which has not yet been designed . . . this is just something I whipped up on Photoshop. The photo however will be in the book. (Source: Edward S. Curtis, Brulé war party, [1907?], b&w film copy negative, Edward S. Curtis Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-46958.)

I don’t want to give too much away about the book . . . after all, it is a narrative, and I wouldn’t want to spoil the ending! But my book, which is the first to tackle both American Indian horse raiding and white horse stealing as related historical phenomena, will cover a lot of ground. As the year goes by I will periodically post updates here, as well as tidbits from the book, items of interest that didn’t make the final cut, and other stuff.

I apologize in advance if the blog seems to ping-pong between the old West and the Pacific Theater, with occasional references to Midwestern earthquakes from time to time. Most academic historians are a bit less cluttered with their varying projects, although I would argue that my grandpa’s letters project would never happen if these letters did not literally fall in my lap (my dad, after my grandpa died, actually dropped a suitcase full of these letters inside right on my lap! It was pretty heavy . . .). In the meantime, once Never Caught Twice is out I would like to write another book about the Great Plains, which I’ve grown to love over the past ten years. I have some ideas, but, for now, I think I’m going to focus on writing just one book at a time. 🙂