Sean Arble:
I don't know how you feel about it but in my opinion, Shackelford is probably the best, most accurate but most of all the most intuitive researcher out there.
Let's see you PROVE him wrong about something he wrote about a course.
You're beginning to sound something like Tom MacWood.
He once asked me how I could prove George Crump ever intended to have hole from hole segregation via trees at Pine Valley if I could not produce something that Crump specifically wrote to that effect.
First of all, Crump almost never WROTE anything about the course, his ideas and intentions. But what he did do is talk to plenty of people about them, and most all of that got recorded by some of his friends.
But here I have a guy like MacWood suggesting if Crump did not actually write it he couldn't have wanted it implying that the fact that so many have said he did must be a lie.
Now I ask you, what kind of bullshit logic is that?
And the man referred to himself constantly as an "expert historian".
I always felt he was an expert researcher and told him so many times. But I added that I felt in many cases he probably should've passed his research on to others who could analyze it better than he did or could.
But you are right, many stories start as rumors which have a funny way of turning into accepted truths if passed around often enough and long enough. Anything like that should be run to ground.
This was actually the thing with Pine Valley. So many on here, such as MacWood, seemed to think Colt got a bad deal with what the club said he produced there because Crump was over glorified by the club for a number or reasons and given too much credit for the course.
The real irony is that for so long Colt was considered by so many members to have routed the entire course, and perhaps for that reason was the designer of it. The reason they may've thought that is they were mildly aware of a hole by hole booklet by Colt that might suggest such a thing. But very few of them ever saw it or really analyzed it---which without question is completely necessary to do if one wants to understand it and what it meant or not about the way the course was done.
But now all the available material has been brought together and very carefully analyzed via timelines and such with contributing text from Tillie and others.
So, today, the truth of who did exactly what and when is known for perhaps the first time in 90 plus years.
But of course anyone can just step up and say it's all a big lie.