Jack of Harts

I watched the Kentucky Derby yesterday for the first time since Mom died. I have an antenna so I turned NBC on early and watched the entire coverage. All the races. The national anthem. The state song. An Olympian saying riders up. And then I watched nineteen horses leave the gate and a champion from the East Coast and a champion from the West Coast turned the corner and down the stretch they came. It was an exciting race that I shared with one of Mom’s tumblers. It was good to watch it again.

A new Moggie Noir anthology has been published by Raconteur Press this weekend. If you like cats, cat girls, mysteries, and maybe a little classy gunplay, check the offerings out and give it a go. You never know what you’ll find in the pages of Moggie Noir, Dames, Derringers and Detectives.

The United States had a saying in the 1800s. Go West Young Man. Many historians consider it part of the movement that said the United States had a Manifest Destiny to spread the ideas of Republicanism and Christianity across the continent. It started with the Louisiana Purchase from France that doubled the size of the country all the way to the Mississippi River and opened up new opportunities of cheap land for brave young men trapped in the crowded, expensive, and already built-up Colonies on the Eastern Seaboard.

The Great American Migration built St. Louis into a prosperous center of the immigration pipeline, and hundreds of thousands of strong young men and women moved west to get their piece of the American Dream. Some land, a cow, and a home of their own, be it ever so humble. Tens of thousands died of disease or fighting Indians in Oklahoma, Minnesota, Texas and many other lands, but when only one in ten of a mass migration die, that leaves the other nine to settle the land. They built America into a continental powerhouse with a steadily expanding industrial base that formed the core of the America we know today. We built this land through the simple expedient of organized mass migration.