Ike Harper's historical holiday by W. C. Tuttle
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Ike Harper's historical holiday by W. C. Tuttle is a humorous Western short story written in the early 20th century. It centers on a chaotic Fourth of July celebration staged by three rival frontier towns, turning civic pride, bad history, and worse planning into a free-for-all of pratfalls and gunfire. The story follows easygoing cowhand Ike Harper, dragooned by Sheriff Magpie Simpkins into helping manage a joint Independence Day fête at Dancing
Prairie with delegations from Piperock, Paradise, and Curlew. Each town insists its own “founder” of the holiday—Lincoln, Washington, or even Custer—and stages slapdash living tableaux: a rail-splitting “Lincoln,” a wildly anachronistic Custer scene that forces Ike into a Pocahontas getup, and a botched “Washington crossing the Delaware.” Gunshots, rope tricks gone wrong, a mounted brass band on broncs, collapsing platforms, and a mass dunking in the river turn the pageant into bedlam. Battered survivors finally ask Ike to settle who started the holiday; he drily picks Jonah—since they’ve had “a whale of a time.” (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Tuttle, W. C. (Wilbur C.), 1883-1969 |
|---|---|
| Title | Ike Harper's historical holiday |
| Original Publication | New York, NY: The Ridgway Company, 1920. |
| Series Title | Produced from the Mid-October, 1920 issue of Adventure magazine. |
| Credits | Prepared by volunteers at BookCove (bookcove.net) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature |
| Subject | Short stories |
| Subject | Western stories |
| Subject | Fourth of July -- Fiction |
| Subject | Simpkins, Magpie (Fictitious character) -- Fiction |
| Subject | Harper, Ike (Fictitious character) -- Fiction |
| Subject | Piperock (Montana : Imaginary place) -- Fiction |
| Category | Text |
| eBook-No. | 78676 |
| Release Date | May 13, 2026 |
| Copyright | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 1277 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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