Historical Note - Week of February 28th

The Livingston Enterprise, March 1, 1890

Cooke City Letter.

EDITOR ENTERPRISE: I wish to inform you that the boys have started a secret society here called the Damphool Infirmary, its object being to disseminate the principles of loafing and taking matters easy generally. Frank Stone is presiding officer at present. One of the qualifications for membership is to drink every time any one is setting up drinks for the house. A refusal to do so is sufficient cause for expulsion. An applicant for membership must also have committed some very apparent act or acts of folly, such as holding on to a wild cat mining claim when a good price was offered them, or staying in Cooke eight or nine years waiting for the boom. Quite a number have been rejected, Wyman among them. The presiding officer said he was too big a damphool. Being rejected on that ground has a tendency to make a man cranky and hate everybody. Think that’s what ails Horace Dable [Double?] and Jack Allen.

The pictures you have been publishing are creating a stir in these parts. The boys have been looking up their old photos to send you. Joe Wells says he is better looking than Don Willard, and Chittenden says the same. Geo. Arnold says he has more hair on his head than Charley Berg or McKee, so you may look for his. Think you may look for a number of photos shortly. Those you have published of the Livingston people are very creditable as works of art on your part, and the biographical sketch accompanying each leaves not a doubt of their present and future usefulness. I only wish they may behave as well as they look. If so those identical pictures will not adorn a rogues’ gallery as mine does.

We had a ball here the other night. Will send you an account of it in my next, if I live.

MOGUL.

Cooke, Mont., Feb. 19, 1890.

The Cosmopolitan Hotel and Bar owned by Jack Allen.