It’s Frontierado Eve! Tonight is when many of us start our cookouts, poker games and Western Movie Marathons for the 3-day weekend. It goes on tonight and especially tomorrow, with the leftovers feeding us all through Saturday and Sunday. Here’s another seasonal post.
LUCILLE MULHALL – This incredible woman, the first to defeat male competitors in roping and riding contests, was born October 21st, 1885 in St. Louis. Missouri. In 1889 her family moved to Alfred, Oklahoma which was soon renamed Mulhall, Oklahoma in honor of her father Zach Mulhall as they established their ranch there.
Lucille virtually grew up in the saddle and with lassos and guns in her hands. The year 1899 saw her father launch the Mulhall Wild West Show & Congress of Riders & Ropers in the spirit of Buffalo Bill Cody’s more famous traveling troupe. Fourteen-year-old Lucille was one of the show’s original performers at trick riding and roping as well as hazing the bulldoggers.
In 1900, Zach Mulhall bet $10,000 that his daughter could out-rope any of the cowboys in El Paso, Texas. Lucille did just that, following which she and her brother Charlie had to fight their way out of a mob of angry losers determined to strip the young lady to verify that she wasn’t a boy disguised as a woman.
Our “Queen of the Saddle” and the rest of the Mulhall Wild West Show performed at President William McKinley’s second Inauguration celebrations in March, 1901. Then-Vice President Theodore Roosevelt pushed for their appearance because of his previous experiences with Lucille and her family at the Mulhall Ranch.
While visiting there, Theodore mentioned his interest in prairie wolves, so our heroine saddled up and caught one for Roosevelt with her bare hands. The following year they held a special competitive wolf hunt in Theodore’s honor.
As President, Roosevelt designated Mulhall “the Golden Girl of the West” and “the Original Cowgirl.” (No offense, I’m assuming, to the many decades of cowgirls who came before her.) Continue reading
DRACULINDA THE GHOUL-GIRL – Liz Herring, the Assistant Program Director at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, NC put her theater experience to good use as North and South Carolina’s Movie Hostess Draculinda the Ghoul-Girl. Draculinda hosted films on Nightmare, which aired Saturday nights at 11:00pm.
This Movie Host show would open with thunder and lightning as well as screams and the sound of a werewolf howling. Fake blood would drip down the screen. That would be followed by the appearance of Draculinda, seated on a stool with a spotlight on her. 
BLUEBERRY – This movie (and then television series) that never came to be was based on the 1963 – 21st Century French comic book series Blueberry by iconic creator Moebius (Jean Guirard). The character’s real name was Michael S. Donovan and he was born in 1843 in the American South. Days before the U.S. Civil War broke out, he was mistakenly believed to have killed his fiancee Harriet Tucker’s father, a wealthy plantation owner.
For decades, the character appeared in countless adventures as he spent his Civil War service crusading against slavery, then when the war ended and he was sent out west to serve in Indian Wars he came to sympathize with Native Americans to the point where he was drummed out of the army and went on to further gunslinging heroics. He also championed Chinese railroad workers. 
The Blueberry stories were basically Spaghetti Westerns told in the sequential art (graphic novel) format. Martin Kove, an intense fan of Sergio Leone’s westerns, auditioned for the title role. When the initial project fell through, Kove and other parties tried producing a Lt. Blueberry film of their own, then a television series, but neither were completed. 
THE OREGON TRAIL (1976-1977) – Another seasonal post for Frontierado, which celebrates the myth of the Old West and not the grinding reality. The Oregon Trail was basically a 1970s attempt to imitate the classic western series Wagon Train. In the 1840s a recent widower played by Rod Taylor and his children join a wagon train headed to the Pacific Northwest. 
THE OREGON TRAIL (Jan 10th, 1976) – Pilot Movie. The story opens in 1842 on the wedding day of widowed Illinois farmer Evan Thorpe and his second wife Jessica (Blair Brown). The next day, they and Evan’s children join a wagon train headed for America’s Pacific Northwest. 
BLACK ROSES (1988) – This legendarily laughable attempt at a horror film belongs to quite a few niche sub-genres. It’s a Canadian horror movie, it’s one of the wonderfully campy Heavy Metal Horror productions of the 1980s and most importantly for trivia lovers Black Roses is one of the Big Three Canadian turkeys to feature Frank Dietz in a supporting role. (The other two are Rock’N’Roll Nightmare and Zombie Nightmare. ) 
Whenever I hear AIDS, I think of Anthony Fauci’s poor handling of it. When I hear Covid-19, I think of Anthony Fauci’s disastrous handling of it and his stream of contradictory statements. When I hear “lysenkoism” I think of Anthony Fauci and that clod’s bizarre attempt to equate himself with science.
PETA was 
At any rate, PETA made an appropriate image of Fauci using multiple pics of the kind of animals tortured as mentioned above.
