A sheep herder from Montana fell afoul of the law and hired a lawyer to get him off if he could. The lawyer realized that it was an open and shut case, and advised the sheep herder to pretend that he had a bit of Sheep Herder's Complaint.

In the nineteen-thirties and early forties, when my grandmother Mildred was a young woman, she settled in Warren Township, New Jersey with her husband Loyd. They lived in an old green farmhouse surrounded by fields, with few neighbors, and a large white church with a revival-style campground just up the block from their home.

Folks traveling the Oregon Trail looking for a new life left almost everything behind them when they made the 2000 mile journey in their covered wagons. As the trail grew harder, the valleys steeper, the mountains more treacherous, they started abandoning furniture and luxuries of all sorts by the wayside to make it easier to move the wagons. Many of their horses and cattle died on the trail. And many lost family members to sickness or accident.

Jumbo Reilly was a giant of a fellow with the build and strength of a grizzly bear and a ferocious nature to boot. He was the roughest, toughest fellow in Portland back in the Wild West days of the 1800s and he soon found himself a job as a bouncer at Gus Erickson’s saloon, which was famed both for its nightly fist fights and for having the longest bar in the world.