The cowboy who slugged young Forrest

[Old Pilot]

I agree. I think assuming there is something significant in this or any other scrapbook, and then letting your imagination come up with what that significance might be, is a good way to clutter up your thinking with useless minutiae, EVEN IF your assumption is correct. And if your assumption is wrong, there's no telling where you'll wind up. I think Ozzy's approach, a few posts up in the thread, is probably valid -- shuck the story down to a couple of kernels and see what jumps out at you. If something like "Wyoming, river crossing" worked for my solve, I might think that was surely the hint, and then I would feel safer making the assumption the scrapbook was hinting to me.

But as far as that goes, Old Pilot, and I'm sure you agree, the best approach is to solve the poem. I wouldn't let anything that's in -- or not in -- the scrapbooks dictate what my solve must look like. I think assuming significance where there is none is more hazardous than missing something significant that would help confirm your solution to the poem. I know we all receive the Sayings of Jack with varying degrees of skepticism, but one thing he said somewhere about being willing to leave a hint on the table if he couldn't be sure about it made sense to me.

Since I'm in Montana, if the cowboy is Wyoming, I would have to say punching Forrest in the nose as hard as he could for no good reason surely meant NOT WYOMING. And maybe old Forrest Fenn is the alligator who they shouldn't have irritated before they got what they wanted from him -- and it would lead me to wonder if this had something to do with all the stuff he had donated to Wyoming museums and there I would be gone off down another rabbit hole, trying to find out when Forrest may have been offended or insulted by something Wyoming. And I can amuse myself with that for a while, until I've chewed all the amusement out of it, but regardless of what I find it's not going to make me change where the poem leads me.

I do think a lot of people got lost in the maze of scrapbooks and TFTW and OUAW and even parts of TTOTC, hoping to find a key to the poem or even a way around the poem entirely. I don't think there's a way out of the maze on the other side somewhere; you just have to find your way back out and go back to the poem, let it be your key to the maze or a way to bypass the maze altogether. But that's my opinion, you know. Just how I see it from here.

(As to clumping Oak Island and the Fenn Treasure, I think these are actually different categories of unknowns.)

Good message. Thank you for posting.

[Gunrunner]

This makes sense . . . but if you assume there's something more (and significant) to the story, how does one decide what's missing? Turning on imagination and letting it flow endlessly doesn't seem to be the right approach here.

I agree. I think assuming there is something significant in this or any other scrapbook, and then letting your imagination come up with what that significance might be, is a good way to clutter up your thinking with useless minutiae, EVEN IF your assumption is correct. And if your assumption is wrong, there's no telling where you'll wind up. I think Ozzy's approach, a few posts up in the thread, is probably valid -- shuck the story down to a couple of kernels and see what jumps out at you. If something like "Wyoming, river crossing" worked for my solve, I might think that was surely the hint, and then I would feel safer making the assumption the scrapbook was hinting to me.

But as far as that goes, Old Pilot, and I'm sure you agree, the best approach is to solve the poem. I wouldn't let anything that's in -- or not in -- the scrapbooks dictate what my solve must look like. I think assuming significance where there is none is more hazardous than missing something significant that would help confirm your solution to the poem. I know we all receive the Sayings of Jack with varying degrees of skepticism, but one thing he said somewhere about being willing to leave a hint on the table if he couldn't be sure about it made sense to me.

Since I'm in Montana, if the cowboy is Wyoming, I would have to say punching Forrest in the nose as hard as he could for no good reason surely meant NOT WYOMING. And maybe old Forrest Fenn is the alligator who they shouldn't have irritated before they got what they wanted from him -- and it would lead me to wonder if this had something to do with all the stuff he had donated to Wyoming museums and there I would be gone off down another rabbit hole, trying to find out when Forrest may have been offended or insulted by something Wyoming. And I can amuse myself with that for a while, until I've chewed all the amusement out of it, but regardless of what I find it's not going to make me change where the poem leads me.

I do think a lot of people got lost in the maze of scrapbooks and TFTW and OUAW and even parts of TTOTC, hoping to find a key to the poem or even a way around the poem entirely. I don't think there's a way out of the maze on the other side somewhere; you just have to find your way back out and go back to the poem, let it be your key to the maze or a way to bypass the maze altogether. But that's my opinion, you know. Just how I see it from here.

(As to clumping Oak Island and the Fenn Treasure, I think these are actually different categories of unknowns.)

[rocky]

Is it possible that the cow punch story is about the man on a horse being offended by a kid who lessoned the man by calling him a cow's boy? It's not who he was...lesson/rule 1

[Old Pilot]

As was I, Old Pilot, as was I. "Puh-raaade HALT! Puh-raaade REST! Preee-zent ARMS!" Didn't stop me, though, from shooting my little brother in the ass one time. Don't worry, he deserved it.

I'm guessing Forrest wasn't any more angelical than I was as a youngster.

But maybe he didn't even have a BB gun yet. Maybe it was just a cap pistol he waved at the cowpoke. Or maybe it wasn't really a wave at all. Instead of a friendly "Hiya," maybe Forrest raised his hand and smacked the horse on the butt and said, "Heee-YAAH !"

I'm just suggesting that maybe Forrest isn't being quite straight with us about what happened. When kids embellish about something like that, they tend to downplay their part in the incident. Forrest does come off sounding like the naive and innocent victim in a lot of these encounters, baffled by the treatment he received.

This makes sense . . . but if you assume there's something more (and significant) to the story, how does one decide what's missing? Turning on imagination and letting it flow endlessly doesn't seem to be the right approach here. From now on, I'm just going to treat all the treasure stories as about equivalent to each other
. . . Oak Island, Crystal Cave, and Fenn Treasure. All just based on rumor and story that started relatively modestly and grew/flourished through the years. People have had the idea that Oak Island may even contain the holy grail and ark of the convenant.

[Suzy]

Yeah . . . maybe the punch (as hard as he could, according to Forrest) was a spasm caused by the same devil who possessed Will Smith recently. Yup.
I say there's a big dose of BS in the story, and I'm not sure why. I don't know whether any of it is true, or if so, which part is true and which part is BS.
Maybe Forrest was crawling down the street with Elton John riding on Forrest's back, and Barry Manilow was sitting on someone else's Porsche. Ya never know.

Wow, that's some wild imagination, OP. Climbing into your same pilot seat, I'm thinking Forrest should've been singing to Elton "when are you going to come down, when are you going to land", and maybe "I made it through the rain" to Barry. It might help make amends for whomever owned that Porsche.

[Gunrunner]

I’ve never heard of the marching command of “parade halt”…and I did 4 years of marching around in the Marine Corps. I hope you’re not pretending to be something your not…we call that stolen valor.

Wasn't much valor I could pack off when I was seven years old, jarhead. I never served a day in any of our armed forces. My dad was in the Navy during the Korea thing, and my uncle was in the Army in Vietnam the Christmas I got the BB gun. My son was a Marine in Afghanistan and Iraq. They earned their valor, every bit of it, and I don't envy any of them that.

[Gunrunner]

I'm guessing that if Forrest owned a BB gun at the time that the cowboy incident took place, that -- before the cowboy incident took place -- Forrest was well-instructed to never aim his BB gun at any people .

As was I, Old Pilot, as was I. "Puh-raaade HALT! Puh-raaade REST! Preee-zent ARMS!" Didn't stop me, though, from shooting my little brother in the ass one time. Don't worry, he deserved it.

I'm guessing Forrest wasn't any more angelical than I was as a youngster.

But maybe he didn't even have a BB gun yet. Maybe it was just a cap pistol he waved at the cowpoke. Or maybe it wasn't really a wave at all. Instead of a friendly "Hiya," maybe Forrest raised his hand and smacked the horse on the butt and said, "Heee-YAAH !"

I'm just suggesting that maybe Forrest isn't being quite straight with us about what happened. When kids embellish about something like that, they tend to downplay their part in the incident. Forrest does come off sounding like the naive and innocent victim in a lot of these encounters, baffled by the treatment he received.

[Ozzy]

In Forrest's story, he was a young boy, sitting at home (perhaps on his front porch or similar place) when a man riding a horse came by. Forrest greeted him with a called-out "Hiya, Cowboy" (or something similar/equivalent), upon which the man stopped his horse, dismounted, and without speaking to Forrest, walked over to Forrest, and slugged him in the face.

I call B.S.
I don't believe that happened as told by Forrest. He said that he learned, from the experience, to not make the alligator mad until you've crossed the river.
To me, that concept doesn't relate to the encounter with the cowboy.
If there's a poem-related clue or hint intended in that story, I don't know what we're supposed to learn/gain from it.
I suppose I could do some extrapolating/stretching, and imagine that since Forrest had an alligator named Elvis, and Elvis Presley was in a movie called "Flaming
Star" (portraying a half-breed), and singer Cher had a hit song called "Half-Breed", maybe the hint is to Cher (share). Like Jesus would have encouraged, perhaps.
Or maybe Fenn was trying to say something clever when he said "crossed the river" (speaking of Jesus, don'tcha know). If you "cross" a river, does that mean that
you put the river onto a cross? Or is the meaning more like adding a "cross" to the river, the way that "painting" something means to add paint to it?
I'd like to see any ideas y'all may have about this.

I know many will roll eyes but, here is a much simpler interpretation FF may have been saying.

“the answer could punch some people right in the nose and they still wouldn’t see what’s right in front of them. Cowboy = Wyoming, Alligator = river crossing.
Really simple, I know, but we just didn’t get it because we were focused on the FF getting punch, Elvis the alligator and just overthinking”

[Old Pilot]

This was one of those Forrest Fenn stories that left you scratching your head. He said the poem was straight forward with no subterfuge. Maybe the poem is straight forward, but it seems like Jack still struggled to find the chest. Maybe he had to cross the river before making the alligator mad. I have searched up and down the Madison, but I never crossed it. One late spring day, I stood on the bank when it was high and fast. It crossed my mind to cross it, but common sense took hold and I did not. I think a river crossing would require a bridge.
But your connections are interesting and show good imagination.

Speaking of "connections", there is a "bridge" involved, kinda sorta in a way . . . related to the correct solve (using some imagination, of course).

[Old Pilot]

A better rule of thumb is to not make the alligator mad, period. They carry a grudge a long time. Get across the river, turn around and stick your tongue out at the gator, and he'll just be waiting right there when you come back. Who knows? The kid Forrest might have been thinking he was Hopalong Cassidy and waved his Daisy BB gun at the cowboy and said "Hiya!" Mighta conveniently left that part out when he explained to his dad how he got the shiner.

I'm guessing that if Forrest owned a BB gun at the time that the cowboy incident took place, that -- before the cowboy incident took place -- Forrest was well-instructed to never aim his BB gun at any people .

[Old Pilot]

Maybe there was no intent for the cowboy to harm Forrest.
. . .

Yeah . . . maybe the punch (as hard as he could, according to Forrest) was a spasm caused by the same devil who possessed Will Smith recently. Yup.
I say there's a big dose of BS in the story, and I'm not sure why. I don't know whether any of it is true, or if so, which part is true and which part is BS.
Maybe Forrest was crawling down the street with Elton John riding on Forrest's back, and Barry Manilow was sitting on someone else's Porsche. Ya never know.

[Gunrunner]

The high incidence of pederasty and homosexual rape is the great dirty secret of the Old West frontier--and yet this is not from any lack of contemporary accounts which document or hint at it, including the famed woodcuts of men dancing with boys, descriptions of the practices of multiple men sleeping in single beds (as if there wasn't room enough out West for everyone to throw down his own bedroll), jokes about turns in the barrel, and the lyrics of certain Old West songs in which young men seem to be given women's names.

I think you may be a little too tightly focused here. Those accounts were not so much hints to a dirty secret as allusions to a reality that just wasn't talked about, and not at all unique to the cowboys of the Old West -- "Men are pigs." We take it with us wherever we go; to war, to work, to worship, wherever there are positions of authority and submission. I've always thought of "over a barrel" as coming in off the high seas, and "your turn in the barrel" is from the lumber camps. In Appalachia they'll get you over the lick-log.

But why sully the swine like that? For unabashed ribaldry and brazen lewdness the common jackass makes the boar pig look downright monkish... oh, dear, not the monks, too; it's hard to find a good simile in a world where "Perversion is pandemic." That's what I thought about when I read your post -- this short story by Padgett Powell called "Proposition." (The best copy I could find that was true to the format is this Russian site, so I hope it keeps working: https://www.rulit.me/books/typical-s...366860-26.html )

[Hear me all]

The first time I watched the video of Forrest telling this story was back in 2017. I felt sorry for poor f. That was until I realized he had either made up the entire story or embellished it to the hilt. It doesn't add up. A full grown man slugging a little kid as hard as he can in the jaw and it caused f's nose to bleed. That story has enough bullet holes to see daylight through.

[wwwamericana]

I see a lantern in here somewhere -
Guessin Billy shouldn't have robbed that Chinese laundry -
the guilty bird always sings....

[Hataska]

This reminds me of a nightmare of Cpt. William Kidd someone once had, oh well, William Kidd has nothing to do with Cimarron, NM....