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'Blood on the Moon'

Posted by Chip Carlson on May 03, 2001

In Reply to: 'Blood on the Moon' posted by ESC on February 23, 2000

I am pasting below a quotation taken from an address given by a Cheyenne, Wyoming newspaperman, about Tom Horn. Horn was an 1890s-early 1900s cattle detective who was hanged, wrongly, for the murder of a 14-year-old boy.
This piece is not a biography of Horn or history in detail of his homicidal accornplishments.

Before he appeared on the Wyoming scene, Horn had a notable career as a scout in Indian warfare and as a stock detective in Arizona and New Mexico. There is not much time to sketch this here. His Wyoming advent was during a troublous era there. The famous and infamous "Johnson County invasion" was little more than three years past; the lynching of Jim Averell and "Cattle Kate" had been perpetrated only five or six years previously; there had been numerous other dark crimes to avenge alleged cattle stealing. There was "blood on the moon" and Horn was to add to it.

Before Tom Horn appeared on the Wyoming scene, there was "blood on the moon" and he was to add to it.

: : I heard the expression 'Blood on the Moon' used some years ago to describe some particularly unacceptable activity by a minister in the last Conservative Government in the UK. I took it to mean that what he had done was so unacceptable that it couldn't be hidden. Has anyone else heard of this usage?

: I tried to find this phrase -- there's a book by that title, some music, and some really SPOOKY stuff. Here is what looks to be an Eskimo story that uses the phrase to mean war and pestilence. www.eskimo.com/ ~tinne/moon.html

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