just occasionally digging his spurs into it.
I don’t know what he found to dig his spurs into
but whatever it is it sure pisses the tornado off
so finally the tornado is like “Aww, Jesus fuck
no matter what I do
this asshole just keeps sitting on me
occasionally making cowboy or wolf noises
this is horrible
life is horrible
why me?”
So the tornado decides to commit suicide.
It flies over to the Grand Canyon
and cries itself out of existence
raining so hard it fills up the entire canyon
and as a result of this elemental emogasm
Pecos Bill finds himself with nothing to ride
and he flies through the air
and hits the ground so hard
it creates Death Valley
and then a bunch of cowboys are like
whoa that looks pretty sweet
let’s make that a sport
only let’s do it with horses instead of tornadoes
because we are stupid enough to think this looks fun
but we’re not THAT stupid.
AND THAT’S WHERE RODEO COMES FROM.
So the moral of the story is
dismantle FEMA.
Pecos Bill could have stopped Katrina single-handed
or maybe made it like
a thousand times worse
in fact probably that is the more likely scenario
seeing as he devastated like 50 percent of America
so the real moral of the story is
stay the hell away from tornadoes
rodeo has already been invented
you have nothing left to gain.
CALAMITY JANE HAS THE BEST NICKNAME
So in the Wild West
there’s a couple ways to get famous:
You can kill a bunch of white dudes
you can kill a bunch of Native Americans
or you can find a bunch of gold
(and probably kill a bunch of dudes to keep it).
In this way
the Wild West is an equal-opportunity employer
they don’t care if you’re a man, woman, or kid
all that matters is that you have guns
and that you shower as little as possible.
Calamity Jane is proof of this.
I mean, she’s pretty isolated proof of this
so either she’s like the only lady who figured it out
or the Old West is not as equal-opportunity as I said
but, uh . . .
yay, cowboys!
So Martha Jane Cannery
(her non-awesome non-frontier name)
gets born in Missouri
and then her parents die
for vague, fairy-tale reasons
and suddenly Martha is the boss of all her sisters
(pro tip:
it is way easier to be a badass lady in the Old West
if your dad is dead).
So Martha moves her family from Virginia City
(which is in Montana because settlers are dumb)
all the way to Wyoming
and along the way she hangs out with all the dudes
firing pistols constantly
and riding her horse across dangerous rivers for fun
and by the time they get to Piedmont
everyone knows she bad.
So she works whatever jobs she can
mostly boring shit like washing dishes
and cooking meals and being a prostitute
and she’s like “Wait a second
why am I doing this
when I could be KILLING PEOPLE?”
So she loads up a couple of guns
gets hella drunk
and proceeds to remain armed and tipsy
for most of the rest of her natural life.
Now, the frontier is a lot like Burning Man:
It’s hot
it’s dry
everybody’s drunk
and everybody’s got a goddamn nickname
except instead of techno-hippy shit
like “Alice in Wonderland” or “Love Laser”
you get random violence words
like CALAMITY JANE.
Jane says a military guy gave her the name
after she saved his life from some Indians
but I prefer to think she got it
by just being a walking talking crisis her whole life.
Anyway, she works for the military for a while
scouting and shooting and hanging with Custer a bit
(maybe
it is possible that she lied about that
when she dictated her autobiography for cash
but lying is manly too so don’t worry about it)
and eventually she hooks up with another badass
called Wild Bill Hickok.
Now, Wild Bill is a character in his own right
he killed a bear in hand-to-hand combat
INVENTED the quick-draw duel
and was so stupidly lucky
he made an actual PROFESSION out of gambling.
So when Wild Bill and Calamity Jane get to town
(the town of Deadwood, South Dakota
which is so crawling with famous Western heroes
that they eventually make a TV show out of it)
what do you think the newspaper headlines say?
“NEWS FLASH:
CALAMITY JANE HAS ARRIVED.”
HAHA, SCREW YOU, WILD BILL.
So Jane and Bill hang out in Deadwood for a bit
drinking and gambling
gambling and drinking
until Wild Bill gambles a little too hard
and gets shot for it
and Jane responds
by attacking the guy who did it with a meat cleaver
and then settling down to drink herself dead.
This works really well
although she does live long enough
to nurse people through a smallpox epidemic
which she is apparently immune to
due to a persistent lack of showers
and the antiseptic properties of rye whiskey.
But she finally does die
after getting thrown off a train for being drunk
and the rest, as they say, is history.
I mean, that part was history too
but I’m talking about
like
other history.
So you may be saying to yourself
“I get that Calamity Jane’s ass
was about as maximally bad as an ass can be
but did she actually . . . do anything?”
Well, yes and no.
Like, she must have done something to gain her cred
but most of what we know about her
is stuff she just straight-up told her biographer
without anything to back it up
so, just like with a lot of Old West badasses
it’s pretty hard to separate her real life
from the shit people made up about her
which just goes to show
that it is always better to talk the talk
than to walk the walk
because talk is way cheaper.
JOHNNY APPLESEED IS THE DELICIOUS KIND OF CRAZY
So America, right?
It has all these trees everywhere
but most of them suck
(this is two hundr
ed years ago by the way
today I feel like we have significantly fewer trees
but I’m not sure what percentage of them suck).
We got all these like
cedar trees
pine trees
weeping willows
what the nuts, you guys
weeping willows??
I’m supposed to feel sorry for a tree
that does nothing but weep all day?
What do you have to cry about, barky?
You’re a TREE
GET A JOB.
But what we don’t have at all
are FREE FOOD TREES.
There are hungry dudes all over America
just DREAMING of free food trees
boughs laden with bacon and waffles
cigarettes and whiskey.
(Most of these hungry dudes are homeless, btw.
Like, have you ever listened to the song
“The Big Rock Candy Mountain”
like REALLY listened to it?
It’s a song for homeless dudes, straight up.)
ENTER JOHNNY APPLESEED.
This is a dude
who for FORTY-NINE YEARS
dedicates his life
to kicking hunger in the nuts
with his bare feet.
He just walks around all over the place
with a big old sack of apple seeds
planting trees and taking names
names of people who need to be FED
and then FEEDING THEM APPLES.
He wears a pot on his head instead of a hat
and this is super convenient
because what other kind of hat can you make soup in
other than a souphat
and can someone please tell me
where can I get a souphat?
also what is a souphat?
Anyway, this dude’s feet are SO TOUGH
that one time a rattlesnake tries to bite him in the foot
and it just cannot pierce the rhinoceros hide
that passes for Johnny Appleseed’s foot skin
also when he gets bored he CHILLS WITH BEARS.
Native Americans totally dig this dude
I mean, what’s not to like?
“Here comes that white dude with no shoes
wearing a pot on his head
handing out apples.
Do you think he might be crazy?
Who gives a shit
at least he’s not setting us on fire
or taking our land.”
So even when all the tribes start murdering pioneers
(because pioneers are reliably huge bastards)
they leave Johnny Appleseed alone
which he views as a perfect opportunity
to warn the settlers when there are Indians coming
at one point he runs twenty-six miles to do this.
TWENTY-SIX MILES, MY FRIENDS.
That is only three hundred yards short of a marathon.
If you were wondering
why Paul Revere doesn’t have a chapter in this book
it’s because Johnny Appleseed BEAT HIM HERE.
Anyway Johnny does that
and thousands more Indians die because of it
so good job Johnny Appleseed?
But mainly he just plants apple trees.
The moral of the story
is that if an apple tree falls in the forest
and there’s no one around to hear it
who gives a shit?
Dude planted like a million of those.
H. H. HOLMES: THE ORIGINAL TRIPLE H
Yes, of course we have to do a serial killer
’cause if there’s one constant in America
it’s reverence for dudes who kill tons of people.
You can do it in war if you want
but you’ll get just as much publicity
if you do it in a murder castle.
“MURDER CASTLE?” you cry
“THAT SOUNDS BITCHIN’!”
Well, it’s only bitchin’ if you’re not inside of it
but yeah, that’s why I picked the guy I picked:
DR. H. H. HOLMES
PROUD AMERICAN PIONEER
OF KILLING DEFENSELESS PEOPLE.
I mean yeah, John Wayne Gacy is terrible
what with the kid-murdering
and the side-gig as a clown
and having the name of a movie star cowboy
and Ed Gein and Ed Kemper are fine
if you like dudes named Ed.
But of all those proud soulless soldiers
who captured the public’s fancy
by murdering a significant percentage of the public
only H. H. Holmes
the very first American serial killer
has a FUCKING MURDER CASTLE.
Ol’ H-bomb starts small
by which I mean “in medical school”
where he makes money by stealing cadavers
taking out insurance policies on them
then making them look like they died by accident.
Apparently the biggest problem with this scheme
is that Holmes doesn’t get to kill the cadavers himself
so once he graduates med school
he moves to Chicago
buys an empty lot
and builds a hotel
right down the street
from the proposed site of the 1893 WORLD’S FAIR
(commemorating the 400th anniversary
of when Columbus showed up in America
and killed a bunch of people for money and laughs
so if you think about it
Holmes is really just carrying on the tradition).
Oh dang, did I say he builds a hotel?
I meant to say MURDER CASTLE.
What is a murder castle, you ask?
Well, let me give you the grand tour.
On the first floor we have a drugstore
nothing to see here
and on the second and third floors . . .
we have a labyrinthine network of dead-end rooms
stairways to nowhere
and random gas vents
ready to asphyxiate you
or set you on fire
or get torn out of the wall and banged on your head.
The murder castle is not choosy about its methods.
Holmes changes builders a bunch of times
just so no one but him will know the layout
which is sort of like what Egyptian pharaohs did
except the bodies in their murder castles
WERE DEAD WHEN THEY ARRIVED.
Oh, and also the basement is a crematorium.
Have fun never staying at any hotel ever again.
The whole hotel is staffed with babes
babes with LIFE INSURANCE POLICIES
which Holmes requires them to get
but which he pays for
and is the sole beneficiary of
in case, oh, I dunno
THEY DIE IN THE MURDER CASTLE??
Add on all the random tourists from the fair
and Holmes manages to rack up a TON of murders
though I doubt he has insurance policies on strangers
so why kill them?
Well, I believe the technical term is
“for the lols.”
After the World’s Fair, Holmes moves to Texas
where he fails to build another murder castle
but manages to get in trouble for stealing a horse
&
nbsp; which I guess he isn’t as good at
so he runs from state to state for a while
(this is apparently before you could like
call ahead about people)
then hits up an old bro of his
one of the carpenters who helped with the castle
and is like “Hey, bro, it’s me, Holmes”
and his bro Ben is like “Wassup, Holmes?”
and Holmes is like “I have a great idea:
fake your own death and collect life insurance”
and Ben is like “That’s brilliant!”
and Holmes is like “Psyche, actually killing you!
Hey, Ben’s wife?”
and Ben’s wife is like “Yeah?”
and Holmes is like “Ben is uh . . . in London.
Can I have your kids?”
and Ben’s wife is like “Sure, you seem legit.”
So then Holmes kills three of her kids
for basically no reason.
But the problem with killing so many people
other than that you’re killing so many people
is that you have to hide all their dead bodies.
Holmes is really good at this
but he finally fucks up
by only MOSTLY burning up one of the kids
and the cops find it
right after they arrest him for horse-stealing
right BEFORE he escapes into Canada
and once they have him in custody they’re like “Hm.
We can tell you’re a bad dude
but all we have is this horse thief nonsense
and like, part of a dead kid.
OH WAIT
MURDER CASTLE.”
So yeah, they find the murder castle in Chicago
which pretty much seals Holmes’s fate
by which I mean his death
but also his killer rep
and he spends the rest of his short life
lying ceaselessly about his murders.
Not in a constructive way, like “I didn’t do it”
but in a totally random way
like “I killed twenty-seven people
no wait, two
no wait, two hundred
can we all just agree I killed people and move on?”
and everyone is like “YES.
If by move on, you mean hang you to death.”
And he’s like “Yeah, okay, fair enough.”
So that’s what they do
and everyone learns a valuable lesson:
DON’T GO INTO A MURDER CASTLE.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY SELLS OUT FOR EQUALITY
So at around the time of the Civil War
there’s all these women
seriously, tons of them
George Washington Is Cash Money Page 11
