WELCOME TO DALLAS'S wax museum. There's a good number of people coming in today. Inside the museum (door to the right) are the exhibits of wax figures of some of the most famous people from our history. Included in the exhibits are Lec Harvey Oswald, the alleged slayer of President Kennedy; Jacqueline Kennedy, the beautiful former first lady; and Bonnie and Clyde, the famous killers.

People are shuffling into the exhibit room.

1. First is an exhibit of the famous New Orleans pirate Jean Laffite. Laffite is standing life-size with an old New Orleans Hat Spanish cowboy hat on. His hair is human hair, imported from Central Europe, inserted one strand at a time with a special needle. His eyes are medical eyes imported from Germany. Laffite was a well-respected pirate who was promised a lot of money by the British Navy in return for his helping them to attack New Orleans in 1814. He double-crossed the British and helped the Americans. That won him a pardon from the President of the United States. The crowd moves on.

2. Next is the battle of the Alamo. Several people in the crowd try to involuntarily catch their breath. The scene shows Colonel Travis ("I shall never surrender or retreat... VICTORY OR DEATH.") drawing his famous line on the ground which his men were supposed to walk across if they were going to stay and fight. The wounded Jim Bowie is directing two aides to carry him and his cot over the line. Davy Crockett is there. All 187 defenders were killed in the next day's battle, but they brought down over 1600 of the Mexican soldiers.

3. And the battle of San Jacinto. The Mexicans have been routed by a surprise attack by Sam Houston's Texas army. Texas has been made a free country. Santa Anna has been discovered out of uniform in a peasant's garb. He is brought before the wounded Sam Houston. Houston is glowering at the humiliated general. Houston would never humiliate himself the way this Mexican has. Just one scene ago 187 men in the Alamo died rather than even retreat.

4. Here's the battle of Sabine Pass where 42 Confederate soldiers drove back an entire Union Naval task force attempting a full-scale invasion of Texas.

5. Now Judge Roy Bean, "The Law West of the Pecos." The judge is sitting on the porch of his general store passing sentence on a prisoner who knows his fate is being decided in that moment by the famous Judge Roy Bean. Bean is holding a whiskey bottle on its side in his left hand while he bangs out the verdict with the butt of the pistol in his right hand. A man in the crowd says to his children, "Look, there's Judge Roy Bean." His children don't know who Judge Roy Bean is so they don't get very excited. The man remembers that the Judge Roy Bean TV series stopped before they would have been watching television.

6. Opposite is a gathering of some of the most notorious bandits of the West, Jesse James, Frank James, and Cole Younger. They robbed banks and trains for ten years, killing men in most of the stick-ups, until their gang was just about wiped out in Northfield, Minnesota. With them stands William Quantrill, who formed a band of guerrillas, of which the other three were all members, and which, as a unit of the Confederate Army, sacked Lawrence, Kansas.

In the exhibit is a little machine with a sign reading; "Jesse and Frank James and Cole Younger used this 1843 mill to crack corn for their horses when they stopped in 1869-1870 and 1871 at the Abbott-Cooper-Lemmon-Ranch 9 miles west of ENNIS, TEXAS / displayed through the courtesy of Lawrence Camper of Ennis." Credit goes where credit is due.

7. Belle Starr, "Queen of the Outlaws." Belle Starr was successively the girlfriend of Cole Younger, Jim Reed, Sam Starr, Blue Duck, John Middleton, Jack Spaniard, Jim French, and Jim July, all of whom met violent deaths. Belle was killed by a blast of buckshot.

8. Sam Bass, who robbed trains of $60,000, $3,000, $50, and $160 until he was trapped and killed by Texas rangers.

7. King Fisher and Ben Thompson. King Fisher is known to have killed 12 men-not including Mexicans. He had a big ranch on the Nueces River in Texas, and he used to shoot people who came onto his property. Ben Thompson, at the age of 13, deliberately shot a playmate. He later killed a Frenchman in a New Orleans knife duel. And when in the Confederate Army, he killed several men in his company. He killed someone in Texas, and went to jail for two years. He became a hired gunfighter, and was killed along with King Fisher by unknown assassins in Jack Harris's Vaudeville Theatre. Bat Masterson wrote of him: "There was never a better-hearted man than Ben Thompson. It is doubtful if in his time there was another man living who equalled him with a pistol in a life and death struggle."

10. Bill Longley, who was once caught by vigilantes in Texas for stealing cattle, and hanged, but escaped because they didn't do it right. Bill Longley killed 32 men.

11. And John Wesley Hardin, who killed over 30 men.

12. Next is General Albert Sidney Johnston. General Albert Sidney Johnston was a Confederate general from Texas. He lost the battle of Shiloh and was killed in the fighting. (General Albert Sidney Johnston is a not-so-sly move on the part of the wax museum people to credit Texas with the War Between the States. But no one mentions this obvious fact.) General Johnston's uniform looks quite nice. Someone says so. President Jefferson Davis said of him, "His coming is worth more than the accession of an army of 10,000 men."