You never know what you’re going to find if you google someone’s name, but this letter Papa wrote to the editors at Time Magazine has to be a classic.  The tone sounds exactly like him; the insistence on accuracy and the lack of tolerance for pretense.  He’s referring to a famous Remington stagecoach painting - one I remember seeing reprinted several times in my childhood.  Comparing the painting now to his comments below, it’s a wonder it was ever considered a masterpiece, with all due respect to the artist:

From a March 31, 1969 Letter to the Editor at Time Magazine:

Sir:

Mr. Remington may have known how to paint in a New York studio, but he certainly did not know much of Western stagecoaches.

In the picture is shown a six-horse team going down a steep hill, apparently with little or no road, about midnight.

1. No stage driver with any experience would even attempt such a foolhardy trick; the chances are the stage would have turned over or the horses been killed.

2. The man standing on the roof of the stage would be tumbled off in short order.

3. Apparently he was looking for Indians or other bad men, in which case why was the coach illuminated ?

4. The illumination looks as though the stage was lighted by electricity, whereas the only possible way it could have been lighted would have been by a small candlepower kerosene lamp.

5. If there were any passengers in the coach, they would have turned the lights out in an endeavor to sleep.

I know all of this by experience, as in the early years of the century, I traveled hundreds of miles by stagecoach in Montana and Wyoming.

CHARLES F. WIGGS Santa Barbara, Calif.