In 1957 CBS launched one of the most successful TV Westerns of all time, Have Gun Will Travel, starring Richard Boone as Paladin. He was a supremely intelligent and highly moral gunfighter who basked in refined luxury and the finest raiments at the San Francisco Carlton Hotel when he was not traveling about as a glorious black-clad knight-errant throughout the American West in the decade following the Civil War. Paladin was a ployglot, a wine judge, an epicurean, opera buff, piano player, chess master, and a scholar well versed in literature and history. He often quoted great authors like Homer, Shakespeare, Plato, and Keats. Women reflexively swooned in his presence. He was a graduate of West Point and a celebrated Union officer in the Civil War. It seems he had it all. In short, he was mortal, but a super-hero.I've always thought it would be nice to have a knight bolo similar to the one that decorated the outside of Paladin's black holster. So getting back to Indian Jewelry, I asked Sandy to sculpt a rough prototype. Today I took it in for the Navajo silversmith to take over and start carving in wax so it can be poured in sterling silver. I can't wait for the first one to strap on my neck. I might even wait for the first formal wearing on my next adventure back to the epicenter of cowboy cool country, e.g. Santa Fe, NM.
