Wild West Photo Friday: Apache Scouts

The Apache gave the U.S. government no end of headaches with their raids and defiance of American expansion. Some Apache, however, joined forces with the government to fight against their own and other tribes.

The Apache scouts were some of the most valuable Native American scouts in the U.S. Army. The first all-Apache units were formed in 1871 by Lt-Col George Crook. He mostly recruited Apache who had peacefully settled on the reservation, but would also accept captured "renegades". As he put it, "the wilder the Apache was, the more he was likely to know the wiles and stratagems of those still out in the mountains."

The scouts soon proved their mettle, and in his annual report for 1876, Crook's successor, Col Augustus Kautz wrote,

"These scouts, supported by a small force of cavalry, are exceedingly efficient, and have succeeded, with one or two exceptions, in finding every party of Indians they have gone in pursuit of. They are a great terror to the runaways from the Reservations, and for such work are much more efficient than double the number of soldiers."

Jump the cut to see a closeup of these guys.

The Apache way of war

"You want us to ride around your wagon circle making perfect targets while you shoot at us? I don't think so, paleface!"

In the movies we're told that the Apache were pretty dumb. As soon as our heroes, the settlers, put their wagons in a circle, the Apaches would ride around it, whopping and waving their guns over their heads, making perfect targets.

Not likely. The Apache defied the U.S. government for a century despite the Americans having greater numbers and better weapons. They did this by launching a classic guerrilla campaign.

The Apache offset their numerical inferiority by focusing their forces on isolated army detachments, giving them a localized superiority in numbers. They were also quick to adopt the latest weaponry, whether through illegal trading or by capturing guns from the enemy.

Their greatest ally was the land itself. Arizona and New Mexico, where the greatest number of Apache lived in the 19th century, is a rugged place, with scarce water and countless mountains and ravines in which to hide. The Apache knew the land well and could strike fast from unexpected directions and disappear into the wilderness.

Book Review: The Story of Texas Jack Vermillion

When writing my book Tombstone - Wyatt Earp, the O.K. Corral, and the Vendetta Ride 1881-82, I sadly didn't have much room for some of Wyatt's colorful friends like Turkey Creek Jack Johnson and Texas Jack Vermillion. I only had 25,000 words to play with!

Luckily Australian researcher Peter Brand has been hard at work researching the lives of these lesser-known Vendetta Riders and has come out with a great book on Texas Jack Vermillion. For many years it was thought that this little-known friend of Wyatt Earp was Confederate veteran John Wilson Vermillion. Brand proves conclusively that the real "Texas Jack" was John Oberland Vermillion, a Union veteran. Brand goes into detail about both men's lives so you're really getting two biographies here.

Of course Texas Jack is the focus and he's an interesting character. He ran away from home in 1864 to join the Union army, serving in the 122nd Ohio Infantry. He saw action in some of the toughest battles of the Overland Campaign such as the Battle of the Wilderness and Cold Harbor and was left traumatized by his wartime experience, unable to speak above a whisper for two years.

After the war he got restless and headed west. Like many people seeking to reinvent themselves, Vermillion left his relatives and never wrote home. He worked as a carpenter in various spots and also earned a reputation as a gunman. At some point he earned the nickname "Shoot-your-eye-out" Vermillion.

In Tombstone he was squarly on the side of the law and order Earp faction, but he did his share of nefarious deeds as well, such as hooking up with the famous gang of conmen run by “Soapy” Smith. All these coming and going are hard to document because Vermillion occasionally used aliases. Even as careful a researcher as Brand has to admit that he simply doesn't know where Vemillion was or what he was doing for large periods of his life.

What we do know, however, is fascinating, and Brand plugs in the gaps with details about Tombstone, the Arizona War, and Soapy Smith. While the book's subject may seem obscure and only of interest to specialists, Brand tells some fascinating tales that anyone interested in the Old West will enjoy.

My only complaint with this seemingly self-published volume is its poor distribution. I had to order direct from the author's American representative. These days it's quite easy to get onto all major online outlets by simply uploading your book to Amazon and Smashword's Premium Catalog. I hope Mr. Brand does this with this and any future books. I think he'll get the wider readership he deserves.

Wild West Photo Friday: Hotel in Contention, Arizona Territory, 1880

When I started working for Gadling, the editor interviewed me as a way of introducing me to the readers. One of his questions was what was my worst hotel experience. I answered, "Oooo, tough one. The Peruvian hotel with sand in the halls and no working bathrooms? The British bed and breakfast where the owner walked into our room without knocking? The Pakistani flophouse with the junkie staggering around the courtyard at all hours? I really can't decide."

At least I didn't have to stay in this place. This was the one hotel in the dusty mining town of Contention, Arizona Territory, which sprang to life in 1879 when silver was discovered there. It became one of the Wild West's many boomtowns until an earthquake a few years later made the mines flood. Now all that's left of Contention are a few weathered foundations and an overgrown cemetery.

During those few years of life, Contention had its share of shootouts and craziness. I wonder what it was like to stay in this little adobe hotel, hearing the drunken miners carousing outside your window after a long day underground? Did you have to contend with fleas and bedbugs, or just the usual Arizona problems such a cockroaches, scorpions, black widow spiders, and rattlesnakes?

Ah, the good old days, when going to Arizona was still considered adventure travel!

Wild West Photo Friday: Mexican Rurales

These tough looking hombres are Mexican rurales from the late 19th century. The rurales were officially called Guardia Rural (Rural Guard) and were founded in 1861 to fight the numerous bandits that infested the Mexican countryside.

They were a cavalry force that chased criminals across the land and quickly gained a reputation for brutal efficiency. They were trained like soldiers but acted like gunslingers. In fact, many bandits, once caught, were given the choice between prison or joining the rurales!

During the wild days in Arizona in the 1880s, when places like Tombstone were getting shot up on a regular basis, the rurales had their work cut out for them. The Cowboys, a loose-knit group of rustlers living in southern Arizona, often went south of the border to steal cattle, bring them north over the border, rebrand them, and then sell them.

Mexican ranchers, of course, resisted, and often got killed. The rurales stepped in and started fighting the Cowboys. They took some tough hits (which we'll talk about in a later post) but eventually put enough pressure on the Cowboys that they started rustling American ranches instead, as well as robbing stagecoaches. This escalation of crime north of the border heightened tensions in Tombstone with the law enforcement faction led by Wyatt and Virgil Earp and eventually led to the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

The rurales still exist and still fight bandits, although mostly they work to eradicate marijuana crops.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

My book on Tombstone is out now!

I've just received the author's copies for my latest book, Tombstone - Wyatt Earp, the O.K. Corral, and the Vendetta Ride 1881-82. This is published by Osprey Publishing and as usual they did a bang up job on the layout and artwork.

This book looks at the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral as well as the lead up to the confrontation between the Earp brothers and the Cowboys and the vendetta that lasted for some months afterwards.

As the back cover blurb states:

The Gunfight at the OK Corral on 26 October 1881 is one of the most enduring stories of the Old West. It led to a series of violent incidents that culminated in the Vendetta Ride, in which Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and several other gunslingers went after their rivals the Cowboys.
Like most tales of the Wild West, the facts are buried under layers of myth, and the line between good guys and bad guys is blurry. Wyatt Earp, leader of the so-called “good guys”, was charged with stealing horses in the Indian Territory in 1870 and jumped bail. Becoming a buffalo hunter and gambler, he got into several scrapes and earned a reputation as a gunfighter.
Several times he helped lawmen arrest outlaws, but usually his assistance came more because of a personal grudge against the criminal than any real respect for law and order. He even got fired from a police job in Wichita for beating up a political rival.

This is my sixth book for Osprey and my fourteenth overall. I'm currently talking with the editors about more projects. Stay tuned!

Guest Post: Researching a Shared World Alternate History

Today we have an interesting guest post from an old writing buddy of mine from my Tucson days. I first met David Lee Summers at Tuscon, a great local f/sf/h con. I was immediately struck by his boundless enthusiasm and dedication to the fan community. He's such a nice guy I even forgave him when he rejected one of my short stories for his magazine!

He's come out with several books over the years and is here to talk about his latest.


Last year, Robert E. Vardeman asked me to write a novella in a steampunk shared world he created called Empires of Steam and Rust.  As a steampunk author who has read and admired Bob's work since before my career began, I leapt at the opportunity.

The concept of the world is that it's an alternate 1915.  Queen Victoria is still on the throne and getting younger.  The Russian Revolution failed and the Czar is still on the throne.  The Meiji Restoration never happened and there are still Samurai in Japan.  Teddy Roosevelt is still president of the United States and has ambitions of creating an American Empire.  In the meantime, holes are opening up in the fabric of reality.  Strange substances leak out of these holes, such as gasses that defy description.  In some cases, the holes serve as portals to another alternate world.  My first challenge was to decide what story to tell in this alternate world.

A few days later, I happened upon a T-shirt my wife brought me from Palomas, Mexico with a photo of Pancho Villa dressed jauntily in a pith helmet and cravat, very similar to the public domain photo shown here.  This was virtually a steampunk vision of Pancho Villa.  I realized I could tell the story of Pancho Villa in this world.

This project essentially required three stages of research.  The first stage of research involved getting to know the Pancho Villa of history.  I watched some documentaries, looked up some history on the web and at my local library.  Villa clearly was a larger-than-life figure.  He was a man who loved beautiful women and liked to overwhelm his opponents with the speed of cavalry charges.  I did my best to understand the motivations of the men who surrounded Pancho Villa such as Álvaro Obregón, Rodolfo Fierro, and John J. Pershing.


The second stage of research involved getting to know the alternate world Bob Vardeman had developed.  Bob, with input from several of the Empires of Steam and Rust authors, including Steve Sullivan assembled a "bible" explaining what was going on in different parts of the world.  The bible mentioned two things of interest to my story.  The United States had invaded Mexico and no one had yet invented airplanes.  Only airships had been developed.  I knew that Pancho Villa would seize any opportunity he could to create a "cavalry of the air" to go after invading American airships.  Of course, I also read Bob Vardmeman's novella Gateway to Rust and Ruin and Stephen D. Sullivan's novella Heart of Steam and Rust, both set in this alternate world to understand the world better.


Finally, I decided to set a large portion of the conflict on the U.S./Mexican border at the towns of Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Mexico, a place Pancho Villa was known to have been.  One of the landmarks of Douglas is the Hotel Gadsden.  It was a classic old hotel used by ranchers in the area at the time of Pancho Villa.  I was fortunate enough to be invited down for a book signing in Douglas at the hotel, which allowed me to do the third stage of research, which was a visit to the location of the story.

Inside the lobby of the Hotel Gadsden is a beautiful marble staircase.  There are two chips in the marble halfway up the first flight.  In the photo, you see my daughters posing with the chips in question.  A sign in the lobby claims the chips were made when Pancho Villa rode his horse up the staircase.  Later research has since cast some doubt on whether this really happened, particularly since the Hotel Gadsden suffered a bad fire after Pancho Villa died.  The hotel owners claim the staircase survived the fire.  Whatever the truth, it was too good a story not to use in my novella, especially since I had a scene that would allow Pancho Villa to ride up the staircase, guns blazing!

For me, part of the fun of writing alternate history is to gain new insights into the people and places of history by imagining them in circumstances that weren't the same as the ones we're familiar with.  Even though the events are different than those of history, it still means getting to know the characters involved well enough that you can imagine how they would react in new circumstances.

My novella of Pancho Villa in an alternate 1915 is Revolution of Air and Rust.  I'd love to hear what you think of this alternate Pancho Villa and his comrades.  The novella is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

The Westernmost Battle of the Civil War

As I mentioned in my post on the Civil War in Arizona, the year 1862 saw the westernmost fighting of the war when a group of Texas Confederates made it all the way to the western New Mexico Territory (what's now Arizona) and were pushed out by the Union California Column.

The main "battle" happened on April 15 at Picacho Peak, 50 miles northwest of Tucson at 111° 24' 17'' W longitude, when the advance guard of the column clashed with Confederate pickets. This is often called the westernmost land battle of the Civil War.

Well, it wasn't really a battle but a skirmish with only 23 soldiers involved, and there was a skirmish even further west than that one. On March 30, while the California Column was still headed for Tucson, it came upon a group of ten Confederates at Stanwix Station led by 2nd Lt. Jack Swilling, pictured here in this Wikimedia Commons image. They were burning hay that had been left out on the column's route to supply the horses. Swilling's men were greatly outnumbered and after firing a few shots, one of which wounded Private William Frank Semmelrogge, they wisely withdrew. Semmelrogge later recovered.

But we're not done yet! You see, Stanwix Station was about six miles southwest of Agua Caliente, which is at 113° 19′ 28″ W. Almost a year later on May 20, 1863, there was a shooting at La Paz, Arizona, which is at 114° 25′ 35″ W. Confederate sympathizer William Edwards fired upon a crowd of Union soldiers, killing Privates Ferdinand Behn and Thomas Gainor and wounding a civilian bystander. Edwards fled into the desert, where he later died of thirst. There was no exchange of fire and Edwards wasn't in the Confederate army, so whether you want to call this a skirmish or not is up to you.

In California there was a band of robbers who called themselves Confederate Partisan Rangers. Holding up a stagecoach doesn't count as a skirmish, though. There was also a standoff between Union soldiers and Confederate sympathizers with no shots fired, so let's strike that one out too.

None of these are battles. If you want the westernmost BATTLE of the Civil War, you have to go all the was east to Valverde, New Mexico, where on February 20-21 at longitude 106° 54' 53" W, several thousand men in blue and gray had a real, proper, standup battle.

Dime Novels in the Wild West

Before Saturday morning cartoons. . .before matinees. . .before pulp magazines. . .there were dime novels! These cheaply produced paperbacks thrilled little boys and grown men with stories of adventure and derring-do from their advent in the 1860s to their demise in favor of pulp magazines in the 1920s.

During their height in the 1880s-1900, there were countless series released by dozens of publishers and written by a small army of hacks. There were Westerns, mysteries, espionage, historicals, and more. The vast majority were marketed towards juvenile boys and often featured young heroes.

I've read about a dozen dime novels and have several in my book collection. Most are atrociously written with formulaic plots yet show an energy and innocence lacking in much of today's popular writing. The most interesting ones for me are the Westerns, especially the many titles starring a heroic Jesse James. Some of these were published even while Frank and Jesse were still out robbing banks and helped add to their mythic character.

In many ways, the legend of the Wild West was born in dime novels. While researching my book on Wyatt Earp, I came across an interesting anecdote. Wyatt was chasing some stagecoach robbers outside of Tombstone, Arizona, and found their recently vacated camp. Among the items he found there was half of a dime novel. It was common back then to tear off the pages you had already read in order to lighten your load. As Earp followed the trail of the outlaws, he found another camp, with the missing pages. So real-life Western outlaws were reading dime novels!

Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

 

Civil War in Arizona

While the main focus of Civil War history is on the big battles east of the Mississippi, the war raged in the west too. It even reached as far west as Arizona.

Back then Arizona didn't exist; it was part of the New Mexico Territory. Early in the war the Confederacy suffered from a Union naval blockade and decided to send an expedition to take the territory to gain access to its mines and as a route to ports in Mexico and California. In the spring of 1862 an army of Texans under General Sibley marched into New Mexico.

At first all went well, but the army suffered a disastrous defeat at the Battle of Glorieta pass on March 26-28. The rebels were soon fleeing back to Texas. But not all of them. A detachment of 54 Texans had ridden further west, all the way to Tucson, and had claimed it for the Confederacy. As part of the reorganization of Confederate territories they renamed it the Territory of Arizona. They may even have issued an Arizona Confederate currency, a mystery that I'm still trying to clear up with the help of some other researchers.

The Confederate occupation of Arizona was to be short-lived. A column of 2,350 Union cavalry from California headed into the territory and clashed with the Texans at Pichacho Pass about 50 miles northwest of town. After a short firefight that left several men dead on both sides, the rebels retreated. The Battle of Picacho Pass is often called the westernmost battle of the Civil War. I'll be takinng up the question of whether this is true or not later this month.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The Sheriff and the Pants Tree: An Old West Story

Sheriff Carl Hayden of Phoenix had a problem. The conservative ladies of his city were up in arms over a public disgrace. They were shocked, shocked!, to see men like this walking their streets.

These men were Pima Indians, who came into town every Saturday during the first years of the 20th century in order to trade. They dressed in the traditional fashion, wearing only a breechclout. This left the rest of their bodies exposed, something the ladies didn't want to see. Whites, Mexicans, and Chinese didn't dress like that, and so they didn't want the Pima dressing like that either.

Hayden came up with a simple solution. He collected a bunch of old pants, hung them up on the branches of a tree just outside town, and told the Pima to put on a pair of pants before coming into town. Once they were done, they'd hang the pants back on the tree and go home dressed in their traditional (lack of) attire. The "pants tree" remained a Phoenix landmark for many years.

Hayden may not have been the first person to think of this. I've heard there was a pants tree outside Tucson as well for visiting Tohono O'odham.

Still the society ladies of Phoenix weren't satisfied. They complained that an old Pima chief was a polygamist, having no fewer than three wives. Sheriff Hayden rode out to visit the chief and told him that he could only have one wife. He had to pick one and tell the other two to go. The old chief thought for a long time. Then he looked at the sheriff and said, "You tell them."

Sheriff Hayden rode off. The chief got to keep his wives.

(Interestingly, a similar story is told about Comanche chief Quanah Parker, so this may just be a tall tale from the fronteir)

Carl Hayden is an Arizona icon. He was born in an adobe home on the Salt River near what is now Phoenix in 1877. His father ran a ferry boat business. Hayden became Maricopa County Sheriff in 1906, dealt with complaints from shocked ladies of society, and got a bit of fame in 1910 for foiling one of the last train robberies in the Old West.

He went on to serve in both houses of Congress for many years before retiring in 1969, the year I was born. It's not much of a stretch to go from the modern day back to a time when bandits robbed trains and half-naked Native Americans shocked the self-appointed guardians of virtue.

The No-So-Great Train Robbery

By 1910, the Wild West wasn't so wild anymore. There were no more Indian raids, cities were growing, and outlaws were becoming a thing of the past.

Not everyone realized this, though. That year two teenage brothers in the Arizona Territory, Oscar and Ernie Woodson, perhaps inspired by the silent Western films that were all the rage at the time, decided to rob a train.

There hadn't been a train robbery in the territory for years. The land was filling up and law had taken hold, but that didn't deter the two youths. One fine May evening they boarded the commuter shuttle between Maricopa and Phoenix. They had left their getaway horses tethered along the route. Once they approached the spot, they whipped out thier pistols and ordered the conductor to signal a halt.

They then took about $300 from the passengers. What they didn't know was that among their victims were several members of the territorial legislature and the Gila County sheriff. It's never a good idea to rob the rich and powerful, especially if they represent the local law.

The robbers then leapt onto their horses and galloped away, headed for the border.

Pursuit wasn't far behind. The sheriff of Maricopa County, Carl Hayden, rounded up a posse to go after them. Hayden himself grabbed a friend who owned an automobile the two set out in that. It wasn't long before the pair had left the rest of the posse in the dust. They stopped to picks up some of the lawmen as backup and continued through the desert.

Hayden and his friends soon caught up with the Woodson brothers as they rested their horses in the desert. It was a brutally hot day and they'd run out of water. When the Woodsons saw the plume of dust from the car, they thought they were miners and ran out, waving their arms in the hope of getting some water. Instead they got several rifled pointed at them. The two young outlaws had no choice but to surrender.

It was one of the last train robberies of the Wild West and the first to be foiled by use of an automobile. The press labeled the Woodson brothers the "beardless boy bandits." They did some time in prison and then disappeared from history. Sheriff Hayden went on to become a senator. I'll talk more about him in my next post.


This is the famous last shot of The Great Train Robbery, a groundbreaking silent Western from 1903. It ran a whole 12 minutes, far longer than most films of the time, and told a complete story rather than showing a simple vignette. When the bandit fired straight at the camera it's said the audience, for whom movies were still new, ducked and screamed. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Wild West Photo Friday: Pinal, Arizona, a lost boom town

I've been working on the maps for a book on Wyatt Earp and the Arizona War for Osprey Publishing. One place I couldn't put on the map with any exactitude was this town--Pinal, Arizona.

Pinal was established in the 1870s to mill the ore for the nearby Silver King mine. Pinal's post office opened in April 10, 1878. The mine was a rich one and the town quickly grew to about 2,000 residents. It even had its own newspaper called the Pinal Drill. The town benefited from its good location about halfway between Tucson and Phoenix, making it more accessible than some other mining towns.

The town had all the usual miners, prospectors, gamblers, and ladies of the evening. One of them was Mattie Blaylock, Wyatt Earp's common-law wife. In Tombstone, Wyatt had fallen in love with the beautiful actress Sadie Marcus and left her. The jilted Mattie moved to Pinal and --> went into a quick spiral of decline as a drug-addicted prostitute. She killed herself on July 3, 1888.

Unfortunately, silver prices slumped and by 1890 there were only ten people left in Pinal. The post office closed November 28, 1891. Now nothing remains of this old boom town. Even the exact location is in dispute. Imagine that--an entire town that nobody alive remembers. Probably there's nobody alive who even once met someone who remembers it. It's gone.

The top photo shows ore wagons from the Silver King mine at the Pinal mills, circa 1885. The bottom shot is a southeast view of the mill and town of Pinal, circa 1880.

For another shot of Pinal, check out my post on creative foraging in the Civil War. That blacksmith shop is in Pinal.


Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Wild West Photo Friday: Tumbleweed Snowmen!

Happy Holidays, pardner! These tumbleweed snowmen are celebrating Arizona's winter season, such as it is, in Tohono Chul Pk, Tucson

Photo by Chanel Wheeler.

A practical joke in the Wild West

The Wild West was a tough place to live. Fun was hard to come by and people resorted to such strange diversions as anvil artillery. Practical jokes were popular too.

In Tombstone, Arizona, a tenderfoot was sure to come in for some ribbing. One popular trick was to take him out "Apache hunting". The guys in on the joke would slip the bullets out of his gun. Once they got out in the desert, they'd ditch him (a bit like snipe hunting) and then some other forntiersmen dressed up as Apaches would leap out from behind some rocks and charge at him, giving out blood-curdling war whoops.

The tenderfoot would try to fire, only to find he didn't have any ammunition! This was all good fun until one newcomer in Tombstone pulled out a holdout weapon and blazed away at the dressed up cowboys. Luckily nobody was hurt. The game kind of lost popularity after that.

Image of The Apache by Henry Farny courtesy Wikipedia.

Herding turkeys in the Wild West

"They can have my turkeys when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers."

One of the side effects of writing nonfiction is that you end up with a bunch of little side stories and tidbits of information that don't fit in the book. These end up as material for later works, talking points at parties, or. . .blog posts!

I'm currently writing a book on Wyatt Earp and his involvement in the O.K. Corral gunfight and his Vengeance Ride. One minor figure in this history is Henry Clay Hooker, a prominent rancher in southern Arizona who sheltered Wyatt and his crew as they rode around the countryside hunting the Cowboys. Hooker was played by Charleton Heston in the movie Tombstone.

Before Hooker became a big rancher, he had quite a past. Born in New Hampshire, he moved to California in 1853, ran a store, and drove cattle to Nevada mining camps. A fire destroyed his store in 1866 and in order to make money he bought 150 turkeys at $1.50 each and herded them from California to Carson City, Nevada, where he turned a tidy profit by selling them for $5 each. This gave him enough money to get started in the cattle business, and he eventually became one of the Arizona Territory's most successful ranchers.

Herding turkeys? I didn't even know this was possible! While I doubt any Western movie has ever shown a hard-bitten hero with a ten-gallon hat herding turkeys, it's one of the remakrable stories of the Old West.

Book Review: Vampires of the Scarlet Order

Vampires of the Scarlet Order by David Lee Summers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I must admit I'm not a huge fan of the vampire genre, but I picked this up when I heard the author speak at Tuscon Fantasy and Science Fiction Convention a few years back and I'm glad I did.

Vampires of the Scarlet Order is the best of what the small press has to offer. What major publishing house is going to accept a book by a then-unknown author that has vampires as something other than angsty teens? The vampires in this book are most certainly not. Summers takes the implausible (the existence of vampires) and puts them in a plausible context (being used and discarded by secret government agencies). We're treated to a sweeping ride through history before settling down into modern day Las Cruces, New Mexico.

This is where it got really fun for me. I lived for many years in the desert Southwest and Summers captures the sights and smells of the desert perfectly. There's even a few inside references to one of my favorite local Tucson bands. If Summers writes more horror novels, especially if they're set in the West, I'll definitely pick them up.



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A Russian hussar in the Wild West

Wait, what's a picture of a Russian hussar doing on a Civil War/Wild West blog? Well, there is a Wild West connection.

I've been researching a book on Tombstone for Osprey Publishing and have come across lots of little stories that can't make it into the text. One of them is about Russian Bill, who passed through Tombstone claiming to be an aristocratic lieutenant of the Imperial White Hussars of the czar. He had asked for leave in 1880 to go explore the American frontier. Another story has him coming to the Arizona Territory earlier after having been court marshaled for punching a superior officer.

Russian Bill strutted around town dressed in Western gear and claiming to be a hardened outlaw. He certainly kept company with them. In 1881 he and Sandy King, another Tombstone hoodlum, were caught in the little town of Shakespeare, New Mexico, with some stolen cattle. Vigilantes hanged the both of them.

There is no record of this lynching causing an international incident. Was Russian Bill really one of the czar's elite cavalry? It's hard to say. There were lots of Europeans wandering around the Old West claiming to be what they weren't. If all of them had been telling the truth, every castle, manorial estate, and general's headquarters in Europe would have been depopulated!

Without doing some serious research in Moscow, I guess we'll never know.

There's another Old West connection to this painting. It was done by none other than Frederic Remington.

Book Review: John Ringo: The Gunfighter Who Never Was

John Ringo: The Gunfighter Who Never Was by Jack Burrows
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm giving this book three stars as an average. At times it merits five stars; at others it sinks down to one.

This is the story of John Ringo, a mysterious figure in the Tombstone, Arizona, Cowboy-Earp feud. The author, Jack Burrows, rightly points out that very little is known for certain about this outlaw and that most of what has been written about him is supposition or simple fabrication. Yet Burrows oversteps it when he says, "There have been more extravagant claims made for John Ringo than for Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James, and Buffalo Bill combined." Anyone who has read deeply into Old West literature knows this isn't true. Ringo simply isn't famous enough to compete with the mythology built up around these greater figures.

The shrill tone continues throughout this book, in which Burrows lambasts earlier writers for their inaccuracies and inventions. While they deserve it, it begins to get repetitive. I know a lot was made up, that's why I bought this book! These lesser writers could have been dismissed in much shorter order, leaving more room to talk about the real John Ringo.

The problem is, Burrows hasn't discovered enough new material to fill a book. What he has found is groundbreaking--a family diary, family stories about Ringo, and some important details about his life such as his participation in the Texas Hoodoo War. These paint a much clearer picture of the outlaw than what we had before. He also gives an even-handed, well-cited account of events in Tombstone and makes a convincing case that Ringo's mysterious death was a suicide and not murder.

Too often Burrows fills the blank spaces in our knowledge with amateur psychology. In one passage he states that his sisters couldn't have developed "strong or realistic feelings" about him before he left the family and went to the frontier (p. 139). His sisters were twelves, nine, and seven. Children of this age can't have strong feelings for an elder sibling? In another passage he actually made me laugh out loud when he described the tree Ringo sat by when he killed himself as having a "deep, all-embracing tree bole with its spreading trunks as beckoning womb", reminding him of the mother he abandoned (p. 196).

Ridiculous pop psychology and time-wasting complaints about other writers aside, this is still the only book that comes close to a serious biography of an understudied outlaw. Perhaps some day someone will write a better one.

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Another photo of cowboys with a pterodactyl

While this blog is mostly dedicated to Civil War and Old West history, my most popular post is the one I did on the Thunderbird photo and False Memory Syndrome. It's about the enduring mystery over an alleged photo of a giant lizardy bird shot down by some cowboys near Tombstone and reported in the 26 April 1890 edition of the Tombstone, Arizona, Epitaph. Check out the link for more. It includes some fun shots of various cowboys and Civil War soldiers who have downed pterodactyl-like critters.

Now another photo has emerged on the Internet. It's the best quality I've seen so far but with all the Photoshopping going on these days, excuse me if it doesn't turn me into a True Believer. I found this on Reddit from a thread that links to my Thunderbird article. Thanks buddy, hope this post gets you some traffic back! All is connected on the Internet.