I started this October 4 and finished a good draft late today. It's long. This was one of the harder chapters because I knew the family beginning from my own memories then knew nothing except we were kept off the Choctaw tribal rolls. I had no idea how the Choctaw leaders had managed to exclude us and what I discovered, just doing basic research, was horrific each phase at a time, first one shocker, then the next, right through to the punishment of the 3 judges--one dying in late stages of alcoholism, one slitting his throat after a long alcoholic binge, another ignoring a sore on the toe that gangrene attacked to the point that the good doctors cut off his leg and the thigh and he died the next morning.
Since a young fellow at Stanford last year had talked about enucleation (taking out my good right eye) and a young woman her had talked about amputation of part of my left leg last year, I was more sympathetic to the losers than you might think. What I concluded is that young doctors have a checklist of operations they have performed and if they have not done an amputation, like the young woman here, they are apt to do one without exhausting other options. It goes on their CVSs.
I have 2 more hard chapters to do. One of them is about two of my cousins, not kin to each other, who were falsely accused of atrocities, together then led remarkable lives, separately. Here I think I know all the episodes already--but, who knows? One is about my kinfolks killed at the Mountain Meadows Massacre and partly about the strange half-life one of the children who was not killed but returned to Arkansas in a couple of years. This will be controversial.
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