Wednesday, November 15, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon 17
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
Santa Anna’s leg
I do realize, of course,
and sincerely appreciate
the profundity, of our great
national obsession with
Russians, Hollywood per-
verts, Donna Brazille’s new
book, bump stocks, the NFL
kneeling/not-kneeling she-
nanigans, and even Trump’s
midnight bully-tweets meant
for a Korean dictator.
But (and here is an
admission) I personally lost
faith in travelling carnivals
somewhere around age 7—
though I did once pay a dol-
lar, when I was 10, for a peek
at “The Ugliest Man in the
World.”
It went like this: You gave
the guy a dollar. He pulled
out a wooden box and low-
ered it over his head. One
side of the box had a little
window, on tiny hinges,
which you then opened —
nervously, for who knew
what one might see — and
peered inside.
So that’s what I did. I
gave him a buck and opened
the window. All around me I
could hear the shouts of car-
neys, the peals of laughter
from people pretending to
enjoy the various rides and
baloney-booths on the mid-
way. I looked in, cautiously,
eagerly, and realized at once
that I had been had. It was a
very, well, Muelleresque sort
of moment.
See, the guy had no
teeth. All he did was pull his
lower lip over his nose and
up to his eyeballs, a kind of
gummy balaclava. He sat in
there, under the box, needing
a shave and looking at you
with sad eyeballs. I had been
sucked into this farce by the
shrieks of the girls who had
gone before me, but mostly I
felt cheated, and even a little
angry at the old guy with the
box on his head.
But the story of the guy in
the box is not where I wanted
to go. I wanted to write
about the historical trials of
General Antonio Lopez de
Santa Anna’s legs. General
Santa Anna, you might recall,
was the villain of the Alamo.
Two years later, in what
became known as The Pastry
War — a kerfuffle between
the angry French and the
angrier Mexicans — he was
hit in the left leg by cannon
fire while retreating from
Veracruz. His ankle was bro-
ken, the lower leg mangled,
and it was eventually ampu-
tated just below the knee.
But Santa Anna thought
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very highly of the leg that
had served him so well. In a
flourish of the kind reserved
for Mexican Generals, he
ordered that his left leg be
buried with full military hon-
ors — it was actually a state
funeral — and managed to
become the President of
Mexico for the fourth, or was
it the fifth, time.
Santa Anna, no malin-
gerer, had a prosthetic leg
made from cork, and ambled
around with his medals and
strategies and fancy hats,
just in time for the 1847
Mexican-American war,
wherein his prosthetic leg
was captured — after being
abandoned in the field dur-
ing a surprise ambush — by
troops from the much-her-
alded 4th Illinois Infantry.
Santa Anna is said to
have fled the field on horse-
back, under fire, which was
undoubtedly an impressive
feat of horsemanship. A
second prosthetic, more of
a peg-leg than a fancy cork
prosthetic, was also captured
by our boys and used as a
baseball bat during pickup
games in the big Mexican
sand lot. True story.
The legend of the origi-
nal, living leg, did not end
AUTO
ACCIDENT?
with its interment—it was
eventually dug up by protes-
tors and dragged through the
streets of Mexico City, by
people mad at Santa Anna.
The prosthetics, both the
expensive cork version and
the baseball bat, were hauled
back to Illinois, much to the
continuing ire of Texans,
who now want it back. The
cork leg went to the Illinois
State Military Museum,
while the peg leg is dis-
played in the home of former
Illinois governor Richard J.
Oglesby.
But those Texans, never
a people to sit idly by and
allow the universe to merely
happen to them, are peti-
tioning for the return of the
cork prosthetic. A museum,
built around the battle of
San Jacinto, wants the leg
so that it might enjoy a place
beside Santa Anna’s knee-
buckle, and an historically
important tent stake someone
brought in from the desert.
And students at St. Mary’s
University in San Antonio,
who are only trying to exor-
cise the demons of their on-
going undergraduate identity
crises, want the leg back
so they can hand it over to
Mexico where, they think, it
rightly belongs.
Naturally, all of this furor
over Santa Anna’s leg has
raised the dormant martial
ire of Illinoians, and even
the weighty editorial board
of the Chicago Tribune has
leaped into the controversy:
“In any case, we can’t
imagine why the Texans
imagine they have a claim.
At San Jacinto, Santa Anna
still had the legs he was born
with. Texans didn’t inflict
the injury that necessitated
the replacement, and Texans
didn’t capture it or preserve
it for 169 years. As we all
know, possession is nine
parts of the law,” they wrote.
So there is that. In the
final analysis the on-going
trial of Santa Anna’s leg is
much more interesting —
at least for this bemused
independent — than which
comedian was caught with
his pants down, which politi-
cal party is promising the
moon, or what Pro Bowl
linebacker was arrested at 4
a.m. for domestic violence.
And it is far more — by
orders of magnitude — grati-
fying than the buck I forked
over, in a fit of childish curi-
osity, to see “The Ugliest
Man in the World.”
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