If that Kent Ballard ain’t jest the dad-gummest bestest story teller I ever did hear . . . just follow this here dialogue . . . . and see for your own self!

—– Original Message —–
From: Kent Ballard
To: keyboard_and_stylus@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 9:43 PM
Subject: [K&S] Diana’s pencil

> Lyle Davis wrote:
>> >From the world’s most beautiful chiropractor, Lisa White, who got 21.

>> I, Lyle Davis, got a measly 15.

Diana writes:

> 17, and I missed the number of sides on a pencil AS I HELD ONE IN MY
HAND AND COUNTED.
> grumble (it was my only cheat on the test too)

> - D

Good Lord, girl! Hang on to that pencil! No, wait–take it and put it in a
bank lock box and keep it under lock and key until you can make the
necessary arrangements.

That pencil may be worth many thousands of dollars and could well be a
figure of historical importance.

I shall explain.

Although most folks don’t know it, the majority of pencils used in the
United States are manufactured by the Blackfoot Indians. This here is a
fact. To fight off the poverty that hounds almost all Native Americans on
their various reservations, the Blackfoot tribal council decided to open a
small pencil factory just after WW II. They made a simple, good quality
pencil. For years they were all yellow and stamped “Blackfoot” on the
side. We went through scores of them when we were kids doing our homework.
You have surely seen the Blackfoot logo. Some were yellow and made
completely round (and of a larger diameter) to fit a small child’s hand.
The rest were yellow and trimmed with multiple “facets” to hold well and
firmly in an adult’s hand. These were either labeled simply “Blackfoot” or
“Blackfoot No. 2″.

In the early Fifties the Blackfoot tribal council began to get requests
for “advertising pencils”, pencils which had the names and logos of
various businesses. It was a great way to spread your business name around
and once the Blackfoot made a few batches of them, their business took off
like a skyrocket. The Blackfoot Indians were the first to make custom-logo
pencils and they had to enlarge their factories several times through the
Sixties and early Seventies. They’re still the major producer of logo
pencils.

All this is fine and good, a happy story of a poor tribe using good
judgment and business sense to get along in a white man’s world. Except
for one little flaw…

Back in the early 1800’s, when the Native Americans still owned most of
the central, northern, and western United States, the Blackfoot were
hellacious warriors and all-around troublemakers in the Plains Indian
world.

They were renowned for their tracking capabilities, their skill at
hunting, and their apparently genetic hatred for anyone who was not
another Blackfoot. This included other Indians and all white people.
Abraham Lincoln’s short tour of duty in the Army was spent fighting
Blackfoot war parties.

The Blackfoot were so deranged and violent, in fact, they were among the
first of the western Native American tribes brought completely to heel by
the Army, and only then after nearly thirty years of hard fighting.

There were two tribes, the Blackfoot and the Crow, who–once they realized
they were unquestionably whipped by the white man’s Army–immediately saw
the handwriting on the wall and swapped sides. Both the Blackfoot and Crow
offered braves to ride with U.S. Cavalry units. They could literally track
a single man miles over bare rock. When these scouts led the troopers to
whatever the Indian victims du jour were going to be, they’d lay back,
stay out of the fighting, and let the whites go about their business of
killing and rounding up all the other tribes too. It was assumed, both
then and now, that the Blackfoot did not do this to assist the Army. They
did it because they still hated the other tribes.

The Army eventually learned not to mix Blackfoot and Crow scouts in the
same units, as the Crows would wind up mysteriously dead. When questioned
about it, the Blackfoot scouts were all wide-eyed innocents, even if the
knives in their belts were still dripping blood. To the paleface’s way of
looking at things, they were both Indians. But from a Blackfoot’s
perspective, a Crow was not a Blackfoot.

Crow and Blackfoot scouts rode with General Custer, who was wise to their
ways and assigned extra troops to watch the Blackfoot scouts around the
clock. They eventually led him exactly where he wanted to go, to the great
rendezvous of the Sioux and Cheyenne nations on the Little Bighorn River.
Crow scouts sneaked forward far enough to get a good look at the titanic
encampment and came back, telling Custer to forget it. If he rode into
that valley he would never ride out. The Blackfoot, when consulted by
Custer and his officers, told him the Crow were cowards, always were and
always had been. Go on. Yellow Hair was a mighty warrior and he could take
the encampment, no sweat. After the battle was over, two Blackfoot scouts
were the only living witnesses, along with several thousand surviving
Sioux and Cheyenne.

Sitting Bull, years later upon learning that Blackfoot scouts had been
involved in the matter, blamed them more than he blamed the whites. He had
learned since childhood of the treachery and meanness of the accursed
Blackfoot. The Sioux and Blackfoot had tangled several times before the
coming of the white man. From Sitting Bull’s undying accusations and
hatred for the Blackfoot, the word was spread to all Lakota people–the
Blackfoot were enemies and would remain so until there were no more
Blackfoot left to pollute the world.

The white man, as usual, remained ignorant of all this.

Okay. Now fast-forward to 1952.

The Blackfoot were prospering and the Sioux were living like dirt in their
reservations. Hopelessness, lack of educational opportunities, alcoholism,
and actual hunger stalked the once-mighty Sioux nation. The Sioux took
note of this and were considerably angered by it. Many young men in the
Sioux nation began to talk of making some kind of trouble with the
Blackfoot. Tribal elders tried to stop the talk, but it spread. Matters
came to a head in January, 1952, when the Blackfoot announced yet another
large pencil contract that would bring more wealth into their nation.

Young renegade Sioux decided to count coup on the Blackfoot and take them
down a notch by burning their pencil factories. If this sounds ridiculous,
think about all the history of the Indians and the white man from the time
they first laid eyes on each other. If you dwell on that for a moment, it
isn’t actually all that surprising or unusual-sounding.

The young hot-heads contacted relatives and fellow tribesmen who lived off
the reservation for assistance. Many responded. On the bitterly cold night
of January 9th, 1951, during a near-blizzard, forty-one cars and trucks
pulled up to the gates of the Sioux reservation. The renegades, full of
whiskey and years of hatred, were assembled there and quickly loaded into
the vehicles. They sat off for the Blackfoot reservation just after sunset
and arrived much later that night. The cars and pickups doused their
lights and cut their engines, coasting to the unmanned gate of the
Blackfoot reservation. From there they broke into a silent, single-file
trot for the massive pencil factory.

There had not been a Sioux war party in living memory, and the lack of
practice soon made itself evident. Things went awry immediately. Having
broken into the darkened pencil factory the drunken Sioux first realized
no one had brought a flashlight. Then a member of their war party tripped
over a five gallon bucket of yellow pencil paint, startling the rest, and
a fist fight broke out. This was only brought under control when someone
turned the factory lights on. This alerted the lone 81 year old night
watchman at the far end of the plant. He did not know who was fighting
whom at the far end of the factory, but his eyes were sharp enough to see
that they were Native Americans, some in war paint, and that he didn’t
recognize any of them. The ancient Blackfoot gene kicked in, and he
sounded the factory whistle. Lights came on in homes all across the
reservation.

By the time the furious and liquored-up Sioux came to their senses and
discovered they’d been fighting each other in the dark, hordes of
Blackfoot workers and tribal policemen were rushing towards the building
carrying everything from fire extinguishers to truncheons to antique
cap-and-ball pistols which had been hidden from the damned white men for
over a century.

There was no time to commit the sabotage and set the elaborate fires
they’d talked about. Outnumbered over a hundred to one, the Sioux ran
through the factory, throwing railroad flares and knocking over anything
that looked important. The only real damage done was when one dazed
“warrior” ran headlong into a control panel and dented the entire fixture
with his face. As he slid down to the floor his hand hit a switch. He was
quickly scooped up by fellow Sioux who dared not leave him to the mercies
of the Blackfoot who were trying to crowd in the back door and screaming
death threats in two languages at the intruders.

One quick-thinking Sioux noticed the main fuse box just inside the front
door, where the group was making its escape, and threw the plant back into
darkness. (He also punched the elderly Blackfoot guard out cold.)

The raiding party made its way to the reservation gate and threw
themselves into the backs of pickup trucks and jumped onto the running
boards of cars, all screaming for the drivers to take off as quickly as
possible. This they did at twenty miles an hour, which was as quickly as
possible under the weather circumstances.

For reasons that were never made clear, the Blackfoot blamed the raid on
the Arapaho nation and for more than a decade later beat every Arapaho
they could find within an inch of his life.

They collected the few flares that had been tossed in the factory, put out
the two small fires they had started, cursed and fumed, and went back to
bed that night. The next morning pencil production went on unhindered.
Save for one detail…

The switch thrown by the collapsing Sioux warrior controlled the planing
mechanism that put the faces (or “facets”) on the pencils in their final
shaping phase. Instead of the industry-wide standard hexagon, a six-sided
pencil, they were turning out *septagonal*, or seven-sided pencils. They
made and shipped approximately fifteen thousand of these before the
mistake was discovered and corrected that afternoon.

Among pencil collectors (yes, there are such people), the seven-sided
Blackfoot “war pencil” is the cat’s pajamas in the hobby. The last one
sold at public auction in St. Louis brought a record $25,500. And it was
merely a two-inch stub with the eraser entirely used up and gone. It had
been found underneath an old train station that was being torn down in
Augusta, Georgia by a man who’d recently read about–and laughed at–the
obscure hobby of pencil collecting.

I read about him, and that’s where all this information came from. This
also brings up a stunning possibility found in one of Tess’ old photograph
albums. There is a picture of a man who looks quite a bit like her father,
leaning against the driver’s door of a bullet-riddled 1949 Ford pickup
truck and five grinning men around him. All have the familiar features of
the Native American Indian. One of the men has a large bandage plastered
across his nose.

Could it really be? Could these be the men who…?

Well, we’ll never know. But your seven-sided pencil, whatever condition it
is in, is a genuine historical artifact, one of the very few to survive to
this day, a solid remnant of the Last Indian War known to take place in
North America.

You’re not just rich, kid. You’re filthy rich. Steenking rich. When you
find the right buyer for your pencil, do me a favor. Go into the nearest
bar, buy yourself a scotch on the rocks, and set up everyone in the
tavern. Tell them “This here drink is for Kent and the Lakota peoples and
don’t you bastards forget it!”

Kent, whose wife’s other relatives were in the Luftwaffe

Thanks again,
John

Thanks,
John

For American pencils, if you want dark and smooth, you can’t go wrong with any #2/HB Dixon Ticonderoga. The Tri-Write and “Black” are lovely, and they have a nice clear-finished version, too, though it’s hard to find in stores.

Also of note are #1/B Mirados, which are smooth and dark and neat, but also hard to find in retail stores (though I believe our friend Don has them at Pencil Things). They run along the lines of a #2 Dixon, but the yellow is not as…loud:)

Let us know how you make out!

i too find it difficult to get pencils that write dark and smooth and dont smudge easily. i found one pencil several months ago from a unknown cheap brand but are now unavailable. I like a pencil that writes dark and smooth. Does anyone have personal recommendations?

thanks!