Pictures
and Video, (many Cowboys & Indians)
Pictures
and Video, (many Cowboys & Indians)
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(This site is rated G for all viewing) Welcome to our newest "home" page, about interesting events here in the Midwest. (There are thousands of pictures and hundreds of pages about Cowboys & Indians or the old west... also many more having to do with schools, church events, or even a good vacation spot. We also try to cover most of the parades and other "fun" related events). In the past we have featured other important events, like weddings "sometimes in New York," when we had the money. Also be sure to check our "original" home page for other pictures and video about interesting things... Each month we also served a featured event... (A good example might be St Pat's funny video of dancing nuns on the bar). One year in April our local National Guard Unit's tour of duty was extended in Iraq... (We served a number of pictures and video of them by my son, who was with the unit).
In June we started off each summer with Cavalry Days in Sturgis... Followed by Wild Bill Days in Deadwood. We go to Montana for a replay at the Battle of the Little Big Horn... (See more information on our original web site). In the past we have done some pages of pictures on the various events showing many Native American tribes in the Midwest. We also start off our local Rendezvous season with a very friendly one close to Sturgis at the Forest Glen Traders camp... July starts with Deadwood's 4th of July parade... Followed by the cowboy Days of '76. (Other years are covered elsewhere)... The month of August starts with naughty stuff at the Sturgis bike rally (DANGER... this link will be blocked by most kid-watch programs, but we also have pages showing some alternate events put on during this week for children)... At times we also leave some of the past years on this event, if we have the bandwidth going back to the year 2000. (Caution: some pictures are adult minded)...
August ends with the Kool Deadwood Nites, (a link here to page one of this event will normally take you through it)... Also past years going back to the year 2001. (Caution: some pages are too large to download by phone, watch the file size warnings)... In September go to to Nebraska and see the Indian Summer Rendezvous in Ogallala... Or the reenactment of The Last Great Buffalo Hunt of 1872 at Camp Hayes (The best rendezvous event of the year, the last weekend in September). We do still offer you the past 10 years of good times, including at least 17 major events celebrated in the Black Hills.... (With great pictures and video of Sturgis, Spearfish, Hill City, Belle Fourche, and many other areas). See many unknown things about the Deadwood area, or details on a Rendezvous, (found normally only in mountain regions). For more information on any links... just click on the pictures, (all pictures are also free, many are high quality). The "Who are we" page
has info. on what we are about, and why we are here. CAUTION: Note the color-coded printing on many sites... green is pre-teen, dark is still "alright" for adult-minded people... and red is R! Clicking on the Deadwood picture will take you to my more professional site on Deadwood. Other information about all events will be found in both the "before" and "after" pages at the top. A clear index page can also be found here. Clicking on the red name "Deadwood" within the above picture will take you to directly to events happening there! The Sturgis picture will take you to our web site about the city... That naughty bike rally can be found here (Note... the link is colored red before you go there the first time, a few of those girls must have lost their shirts while gambling in Deadwood). We had a bad start on the Internet in the "old" days... Most of our work from '78 to '93 was done in the Apple computer format, much has not been converted yet. All work before 1997 was done on our first domain, and it must now be resized correctly for larger monitors, (and to quickly serve within these pages). All work after 1998, (and before 2000), was erased in the "DotCom" crash... It will slowly reappear in the coming years. (As I find the time to clean it up and reorganize it). Most picture pages from the past will not appear again until I am better funded, many return trips are just too expensive...
When these new web domains were designed, (1995 to 1997), server space and download times were both very limiting... (Most people received files through a phone line, 28.8 Kb was about the fastest, unless very close to the main phone terminal. 33.3 and 56 K modems did not improve download time for the majority of people). Notice the small "b" in Kb, (that stands for bit, not byte), there are 8 bit in a byte... in other words, almost one tenth the speed you would think... If I had a short video or a long page of pictures that was a 900 KB download... many people thought (at 33.3 K per second) they would have it in under 30 seconds! The download took almost ten times that long, (260 seconds... over 4 minutes). Most phone lines have not improved much and many people interested in my pictures and video are still stuck with that speed... (All of my work is done for free, and much of it is for those who would not be found on the net otherwise, like Cowboys&Indians, church&school, disabled/poor/needy... whatever I have noticed that is not cover very well by all others in the web business). And, yes... at times we do have pictures of pretty girls... and at adult events they are often not wearing much! (In all pages anyone can find easy you will see we have covered them back up using PhotoShop or tricky photography)! But after spending all our money, and going broke twice in fact... We agreed to use our women to get people to remain on the sites longer than a few seconds per page! (The final goal is still the same... generating hits directed to fun things in the Hills).
We are not really fond of showing off women in this manner, and would like to serve only pictures related to the Old West, which we do... (But after ten years of tracking internet hits of interest we found the same thing even the chewing gum people found)... That without a few pretty girls in the mix, you will not get enough hits to stay online! Yearly renewals and monthly serving fees still cost quite a bit. Server space in the nineties was even more expensive... and quite limiting, also a hard drive over a "gig" was special, the average computer did not have one. (At that time serving a web site over 10 or 20 MB was considered wasteful, both of my quality web sites, even then, were over 50 MB... I had some video clips that were over 5 MB each, and many pages of pictures on major events that were over 1 MB each... hundreds of them in fact, many were deleted as the next year replaced the page). In other words, as one yearly Rendezvous, Rally, or special event replaced the last one, it was up to you to save all the good pictures before they were gone... (I used an uncommon program to most people for serving my pictures, you get the preview "thumbnail" shots on the screen, along with some brief explanation of the event... but while you are reading, a full sized version of each picture was also downloading into your computer. (Any picture, when clicked on, would soon open up full screen for viewing and saving... even printing good quality). And most importantly, I did not place any time/date stamps, watermarks, or copyright logos all over them... many pictures were color corrected and sized for standard use in your favorite slide show program. I challenge you to find any other web design work anywhere in the world this complete or intense... that was not funded or copy protected. (At times a few sites will appear for a short time, but the cost of time and money will cause them to take a different direction before long). Many of my pages have remained online since 1994... nobody else can say that! Some of the video work goes back into the early 1980's... when my video camera was the only private camera on location. My video work in 1976 and '77 was done with the first "priced under $10,000 dollar" video camera ever purchased in the Midwest, (other than those in the televisions studios). In 1983 I printed the phrase "Digital Video" in the information about a wedding we shot... years before it was actually possible! (Using a new 2000 dollar VCR that had the ability to add digital freeze-frames within the video master). Until about 1985 I was the only personal video camera at the Sturgis Bike rally or on Deadwood main street. I was also the first S-VHS shooter when it became available... and was shooting very high quality 3-chip video by the early nineties. I began shooting some major event video in the 16 X 9 wide-screen format by 1997! The web work done at that time was much more appreciated by school kids and computer "geeks" than the general public, also those overseas... I always tracked more hits from there than in all of America until after 1999! For this reason the "before 2000" will be a much larger site when completed, I have many videos and larger picture pages to recover from back-up CD's... (also over ten years of video clips to recompress and clean up nicer, many gigs of final product). This is about 2800 more hours of work still remaining, estimated time of completion of the "before 2000" web site is going to be sometime after November 2009! The new site on Deadwood took 8 months to get started up... and after the HBO "Deadwood" series began we had to re-write about one third of it to clear up and better define all errors by them, and a few by us! We will continue to do more research on the history of this area and post the information after clearing it with the most knowledgeable people on each subject. We will also continue to compress more video to better show off many past events... Stay tuned!
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Click on the letters to email us.Last updated on:October 27, 2007 |
