Ike Harper's historical holiday

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Ike Harper's historical holiday by W. C. Tuttle is a humorous Western short story written in the early 20th century. It centers on a chaotic Fourth of July celebration staged by three rival frontier towns, turning civic pride, bad history, and worse planning into a free-for-all of pratfalls and gunfire.

The story follows easygoing cowhand Ike Harper, dragooned by Sheriff Magpie Simpkins into helping manage a joint Independence Day fête at Dancing Prairie with delegations from Piperock, Paradise, and Curlew. Each town insists its own “founder” of the holiday—Lincoln, Washington, or even Custer—and stages slapdash living tableaux: a rail-splitting “Lincoln,” a wildly anachronistic Custer scene that forces Ike into a Pocahontas getup, and a botched “Washington crossing the Delaware.” Gunshots, rope tricks gone wrong, a mounted brass band on broncs, collapsing platforms, and a mass dunking in the river turn the pageant into bedlam. Battered survivors finally ask Ike to settle who started the holiday; he drily picks Jonah—since they’ve had “a whale of a time.”