Family History

My family has been pushing me to write a post about a certain member of the family, which is great.  It's one of those non-paying commissions that it doesn't matter what I write about him, no one but my brother-in-law is going to actually be supportive enough to read it.  If they did dad would clearly be mad about the post I wrote about having to use the bathroom after him, mom would be pissed about the duck-walker post & my sister would be enraged about the post describing how she snorts when she laughs.

Makes her sound kinda sorta like a donkey.

What I'm trying to say is that I have never been a fan of Country music...well, most Country music.  Some of it is okay in my book & the stuff that is usually comes with the label "Americana" not "Country."

Which means that it is really a closely kept secret that my family is at least partially responsible for the popularization of Country music as we know it today.  Both the good shit like Tod Snider & the shit that is really, well, just pure shit.

You know, shit.  Like Billy & Garth & who knows who the fuck else,  You know, shit country:

Because most of that shit is flag waving pro-war neo-conservative rah-rah bull shit that is really just horribly bad rock & roll & nothing like Johnny Cash, who was really very liberal & the Americana country that comes with people like Woody Guthrie that is really very extremely socialist.

But then, to be fair, the family member that helped popularize it was, well, really pretty far from the whole pro-War Americana bull shit, even though he was also kinda sorta famous for fighting in a war among other things.  But then he saw what happened after said war & listed it in his book as one of his deepest regrets.

But the family is still really proud of that whole San Juan thing & that's mainly because, like my blog, I am really the only one that has read his journal.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that my mother wants me to write a post about her great grandfather & that's all well & good because no one in my family, aside from my brother-in-law actually bothers to read anything that I write.

Thank you Jeff.

So his name is Billy McGinty & he is a famous Scottish Rugby player.

I'm just joking.

His name is Billy McGinty & he's actually very Catholic Irish & has roots in Derry from the Provence of Ulster & came from a clan that was famous as being the brutish thugs of Ulster, until they allied themselves with the O'Neil's & became the brutish thugs that was really the military branch of the king of Ireland...for the brief time that Ireland was actually unified.

You know, those whole 3 seconds in Irish history.

Originally they were the O'Fionnachta Clan until they started killing exclusively for the king & became gentlemen & the clan changed it's name to McGinty to reflect this new found, & short lived status.

They even adopted a coat of arms with the motto Felis demulcata mitis, a "stroked cat is gentle."

And they were living the high life until Ireland became a colony of England & things sort of went south, they stayed Catholic which didn't win them any favors & for centuries they took their oath to the O'Neil's so seriously that Oliver Cromwell targeted the entire clan for extinction...warts & all.

Which brings us to the 1750s when a couple of McGinty's were arrested for instigating a revolution & as punishment they were sent to Boston to work as slave labor only to, well, to do the exact same thing the British kicked them out of Ulster for doing, only this time, you know, successfully.

Fast-forward about a century, they seemed to take Horace Greeley seriously, & Billy McGinty was born in St. Louis in 1871 & he's the person that my mommy wants me to write about because she doesn't really get that we make fun of the history in the blog & don't really celebrate it.

That's Billy & his wife & the picture doesn't do justice to how short he was.

They call him an Oklahoma cowboy because that's where he was from & sort of what made him famous.

He did have a couple of run-ins, both friendly & not so friendly, with the Dalton gang.

And if it seems like everyone out west knew everyone else out west...that's because they did.  They seriously did, there were that few people out there & that's sorta kinda the exact reason why you have to roll your eyes when the pro-gun crowd compares the violence of the Wild West with the violence of today as a reason to roll back the open carry laws that were put into place to stop the violence back then.

Those four dead Dalton gang-bangers were like a third of the population.

And that actually works out great for Billy McGinty, because he kept a journal of his exploits, especially with Teddy Roosevelt which you can actually buy on Amazon & like me, he really thought that the most embarrassing facts were really the best ones to tell.

And don't worry the royalties go to someone that is not at all related to the family.

But in either case, it turns out that I am really the only person in the family that has actually bothered to read the book that Billy McGinty wrote & since he has my sense of humor, we're going to focus on the really embarrassing parts of his adventures with Teddy.

And Billy is really easy to find in the picture, because he's the one that is wearing the yellow hat.

His story starts when he was training with Seth Bullock & preparing to get shipped out to Cuba during the Spanish-American War, which took place neither in Spain nor America as we have pointed out in a previous post.

For those of you that don't know, Seth Bullock is better known as Raylan Givens on the FX show Justified.

He went into a little detail about the training, about befriending Teddy Roosevelt & breaking in what would later become Teddy's favorite horse & yadda, yadda, yadda.

But he went into astounding detail about the episode regarding his pants.

That's right, his pants.  Like I said, he spends more time with the embarrassing parts of his story than he does the parts he should be egotistical about.  This might be a product of his humility, or it could just be that he figured you'd rather hear about the funny shit than the daring-do, so out of respect for his journal, mom, we're going to focus on what were clearly his favorite stories.

 The thing about the pants is that they only gave him a single pair.

And he was a poor Irish cowboy & he was really proud of his uniform & really proud of his relationship with Teddy & they made him wear the same pants all through his training in Louisiana with Seth Bullock & the other Rough Riders, up until he got transferred to Teddy's unit after the thing with the horse.

And those pants they gave him were filthy by the time he boarded the Seneca on his way to Cuba.

So to clean them, he tied them to a rope & threw them over the front of the ship with the belief that the salt-water would clean them.

So, he sorta kinda keel-hauled his pants.

And yeah, they got ripped to shit.

To be fair, he was a cowboy from Oklahoma that was used to riding the Great Planes between the Mississippi & the Rocky Mountains so what the fuck did he know about keel-hauling?

So he sorta kinda went from dirty pants to no pants.

Now if you've seen the relatives on mom's side of the family, you would understand that at just 6 feet I am freakishly tall.  Six feet kinda sorta makes you a giant among them.

So when he did get a new pair of pants, he got them from a man about my size & that sorta kinda became a running gag for the entirety of his stay in Cuba.

He got off the boat in pants that were a few sizes too big & held on by a rope that he constantly had to tie & retie.

He was pinned down by machine gun fire in pants that were a few sizes too big.

He made friends with his first Black man in pants that were three-sizes to big.

And he captured a machine gun & charged up San Juan Hill in pants that were several sizes too big & held to his waist by a rope that didn't do too good of a job of actually keeping them around his waist.

So you know, he sorta kinda fought a war like this:

Because he keel-hauled his pants.

And that sort of self-made problem should be evidence enough that I am related to him.

And then the war was over & he stuck around for some of the occupation & yes, he got a new pair of pants that actually fit.

And the town he was stationed outside of was strictly off limits.

Mind you this is seemed to be his absolute favorite story about his time in Cuba.

Everyone else was allowed to go into their towns, but the town that he was told to secure after the war was off limits to all American soldiers.

So he sort of took it upon himself to plot with a couple of his buddies to preform a clandestine mission to sneak into town, find the first bar & brothel they could, drink & gamble away what little money they had with them & make it back to camp without being caught.

So a lot of this happened:

And a lot of this happened:

And according to my great-great-grandfather, when you have as much to drink as he did, you forget that you are supposed to sneak back into camp.

Everything else worked out fine & they would have gotten away with it had they not stumbled drunkenly back to camp being as loud as humanly possibly.

At what point they were promptly put into quarantine. 

Because the town they sneaked into & were forbidden to enter was suffering an epidemic of smallpox.

And his good friend Teddy came to personally bitch him out from a very safe distance.  According to Billy, he had never seen Teddy that mad in his entire life & it didn't help that they were still drunk enough to laugh.

And by the time they all sobered up it turned out that they were all smallpox free & about ready to return to the United States & get mustered out.

And that is where his journal ends.

It was just a war journal.

If you read the book, the part about working for Buffalo Bill in his Wild West Show.

And the part about Annie Oakley

And his performance at the Chicago World's Fair

His deathbed visit to Teddy

And his later efforts to popularize early Country music were all recorded by historians & not by Billy himself, meaning that all the embarrassing moments were completely ignored, meaning I'm not going to cover them here, I'll leave that for mom to read on her own.

But Billy did say that he went to Cuba under the impression that he was going to liberate the Cubans from the oppressing rule of Spain.

He was, in the end, extremely vocally upset about the fact that Cuba went from a Spanish colony to an American Colony & not a free country.  Despite the keel-hauled pants & the drunken smallpox, the colonization of Cuba became the real point of his journal.

I'll leave you with this: