I was reading one of Willie Dunn's accounts of his early courses in the United States and came across the following line:
"I laid out plans for twelve holes and started to work with one hundred and fifty Indians from the reservation, the only available labor."
Ok, Willie had 150 Shinnecock Indians at his disposal to build the course, and we read about the use of their burial mounds as bunkers in front of holes, their empty whiskey bottles discovered in "yawning-bunkers and sand-traps" by unlucky shots months later, and so on etc.
So I search for some of Willie's courses and come across an excerpt from
www.longislandgolfnews.com regarding SH:
"Work commenced in 1928 led by construction foreman Dick Wilson, and 150 Shinnecock Indians were employed to help with the task. The course re-opened for play in 1931 and it remains Toomey & Flynn's undoubted masterpiece to this day."
Wait a minute: that looks familiar... uh, because the text was essentially lifted word for word from gca.com.
Only, I am now wondering: Did Dick Wilson and Willie Dunn use the same 150 Shinnecock Indians to work on the course. Maybe they were still alive and in good physical condition 40 years later? Maybe the reservation have a 150 max limit on the number of Indians doled out to course construction? But did the reservation still exist in 1928? Maybe someone just mistakenly switched Dunn's Indians with Wilson's Indians? Maybe Wilson and his imaginary 150 little Indians did build the course themselves after all?
Not a big deal, but it points out how easily information -- correct, incorrect -- gains equal weight and gets passed along from source to source until it is accepted as gospel. I have discovered so many of these transpositions, assertions of fiction-for-fact, et cetera over the last few years that I could soon fill a volume.
And so ends my rant of the day. Good night.