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Talking through my hat

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Wyatt Earp and friends in Dodge City in 1883. Wyatt is 2nd from left in the front row. Bat Masterson is 2nd from the right in the back row. The rest of these guys you’ve probably never heard of. But there are several pristine Boss of the Plains Stetsons here.

Today I got more translation work, so that’s what I’ve been doing, pretty much. This puts us all at the mercy of my wandering brain, which alights on random topics in idle moments.

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about cowboy hats on this blog. I mean, what could be more appropriate for a book blog? (Hey, there are lots of books about cowboys. Some of them are even good. A few are excellent. As with every other subject.)

Most of us are well acquainted with cowboy hats – we think. But in fact, the cowboy hat as we think of it today is not one the old-time cowboys would have recognized.

The original cowboy hat, of course, was designed by John B. Stetson (1830-1906), a hat maker from New Jersey. He went west for his health (consumption), and used the skills he’d learned in his father’s hattery to make a wide-brimmed hat to wear under the western sun. Originally it was a joke, but he found it useful and comfortable, and later a cowboy bought it off him for five bucks. Eventually Stetson went to Philadelphia (the western climate had cleared up his tuberculosis) and started making hats for the cowboy trade. The rest is history.

Here’s an interesting detail – John B. Stetson was a devout Baptist. The profits that came from selling hats to all those wild and wooly western characters – cowboys and rustlers and gamblers and saloonkeepers – went largely toward his charitable interests, to build the Kingdom of God.

That original cowboy hat style was called “The Boss of the Plains.” It had a relatively tall, rounded crown and a relatively wide brim (though not as tall or wide as the one Kurt Russell wears so well in “Tombstone”). There was no idea, originally, of curling the brim or denting the crown. Those things happened, of course, when a fellow was working a ranch, but were considered slightly disreputable. A respectable man, like the Earps aspired to be, took pride in keeping theirs nice and flat and uniform.

I realized recently that I’ve carried quite a stupid idée fixe in my head all my life, about Wyatt Earp’s hat. I watched the old Wyatt Earp show starring Hugh O’Brien back when I was a kid. One of his trademarks was a flat-brimmed hat, sort of a Spanish hat really, which stood in for a Boss of the Plains on the show. When I first saw the photo above, where Wyatt (second from the left, front) wears a genuine BOTP, I associated that hat (often reproduced in images cropped to make the crown look higher than it is) with him. And whenever I’ve seen a Wyatt Earp movie since, I’ve compared the actor’s hat to that one. (There’s another picture of Wyatt in the same, or a similar, hat – a group photo in front of the fire department in Tombstone. Wyatt is pretty small in that one, but it’s recognizably the same style.)

What I realized recently, though, is that almost everybody wore a BOTP in those days. If I’m going to obsess about Wyatt’s hat, I should obsess about all the others. Wyatt’s hat was in no way unique. Relax, I tell myself. It’s just a movie.

By the way, you know where those turned-up sides on cowboy hats came from (“four in a pickup hats,” I’ve heard them called)? Not from the cowboys themselves, but from movies. In the early days of movie making, lighting was primitive. Scenes were shot out of doors or in open-roofed studios, in natural light. Nobody had figured out you could illuminate a person’s face from below, with reflectors. So when they shot Westerns, the hats were a problem. They shaded the actors’ faces – a real obstacle in a silent film where facial expressions are everything.

So the lighting people went around and turned the hats up on the sides, to let some light in. Then, in a weird twist, the real cowboys saw hats shaped like that in movies, and turned their own up on the sides to look cool.

Life imitates art. Fairly often.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Ride the Devil’s Herd,’ by John Boessenecker

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Notions of personal honor aside, a clash between the Cowboys and lawmen was inevitable. Since November 1878, the Cowboys—from Bob Martin to Curly Bill to the Clantons and McLaurys—had been largely unopposed. On the border the Cowboys had bullied and raided and smuggled and robbed. They had killed anyone who dared oppose them. They had, prior to that fateful October day, murdered at least thirty-two men in New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico.

Over the years, I’ve read a number of books on the Earp brothers and the OK Corral gunfight. To be fair, plain “debunkings” of the “Earp myth” have grown rare of late. Writers tend to concentrate on the ambivalence in the historical record. The Clantons and their Cowboy allies look bad, but the Earp brothers look pretty bad themselves. Writers find it hard to take sides.

John Boessenecker, author of Ride the Devil’s’ Herd, has no such problem. He reports on the Earps’ corporate and individual transgressions with perfect candor (as far as I could tell), but makes a valuable contribution by doing a job most historians have skipped – he clearly documents the long and bloody history of the Cowboys who were the Earps’ enemies. And balanced in that scale, he has no problem siding with the Earps.

I’d always assumed that the horrific first scene of the movie, “Tombstone,” was an example of cinematic hyperbole – like the entirely fictional opening to “Braveheart,” designed to get us to hate King Edward I from the git-go. But although the specific incident of the wedding massacre never happened, it’s entirely consistent with their habitual behavior. The Cowboys’ history as a criminal organization went back to the 1877 Salt War in Texas. The Salt War, a fight over mineral rights to salt in dry lakes, was a vicious racial conflict between Anglos and Mexicans, and the Cowboys took the opportunity to give full vent to their cravings for theft, rape, and murder. Afterward they mainly specialized in cattle rustling, primarily stealing cattle in Mexico and selling them in the US, though they were perfectly willing to do it the other way around when convenient. They also stole horses, robbed stagecoaches, and walked off with anything not nailed down. They could be charming when they wished to, but made sure to beat or kill anyone they thought might not fear them sufficiently. These were not the “rustlers” of the northern range wars, small ranchers resisting being bulldozed by the big cattle interests. They were, in fact, a terroristic organization. They scared off capital investment, and more than once they precipitated diplomatic crises between the US and Mexico.

The Earps, when they arrived in Tombstone, Arizona, were not a respectable family. They were gamblers (not above cheating), and had been confidence men, horse thieves, arsonists and pimps. A couple of them still were wanted in other states.

But (at least as author Boessenecker portrays it), they came to town intending to turn over a new leaf. Gambling was considered a respectable occupation on the frontier, and as a group they’d built a reputation as formidable police officers. Their record for courage is remarkable, and they were men with “no back-up in them,” as they used to say. They couldn’t be intimidated. They were exactly the men to take the Cowboys down. And that, they came to hope (especially Wyatt), would make them respectable at last.

The rest is history. The proximate reason for the gunfight at the corral was trivial, but the conflict was essential to the time and place. The Earps (as the author sees it) were the necessary implements of civilization to remove a deadly social cancer.

Boessenecker sees Wyatt Earp’s Vendetta Ride in much the same way, but more extreme. By now Wyatt had acquired a Deputy US Marshal’s appointment, and he possessed legal authority to arrest the men who killed his brother Morgan. Instead he chose to murder them. He didn’t trust the Cochise County sheriff, his enemy John Behan, to keep them locked up for trial (Boessenecker defends Behan’s record, however, saying he was never complicit with the Cowboys, only friendly with some of them). Wyatt’s means were illegal, immoral and “in the worst tradition of American law enforcement.’ But they were effective. When he was done, the Cowboys were broken, never to rise again.

Just like in the movies.

I enjoyed Ride the Devil’s Herd very much. The writing wasn’t of the top rank, but it did the job of communicating the narrative. There were lots of interesting anecdotes along the way, and good photographs, well placed in the text. Sources are well-cited. If you’re a Western buff, Ride the Devil’s Herd is well worth your time and money.

Reading, Writing

Epic writing update

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Still got some reading to do before my next book review. Picked up yet another book about Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral. I don’t know why I keep reading these things. Officially, I’m a Wild Bill Hickok partisan, but there aren’t as many books being written about the Prince of Pistoleers (got to check if there’s anything new out there). But that OK Corral business just keeps fascinating people. The book I’m working on seems promising, in terms of fresh information.

That put me in the mood to watch “Tombstone” again. Like all Earp movies, it falsifies all sorts of stuff, but it works so well as a film – and they did make the effort to make it look authentic. Love those costumes.

And it has some great epic moments. I so love epic moments, where your heart soars a few yards, like Soti in The Year of the Warrior. Made me wish I could write some of my own.

And what do you know? I have some to write! A Work In Progress nearing completion, just needing a few more edits to steer it the tradition of Cecil B. DeMille. Or Sergio Leone. Or whoever directed “Tombstone.” (I forget.)

I finished another draft of King of Rogaland last night. Then this morning as I got up, I thought of a few lines I needed to add, to contribute to the general transcendence of the epic as a whole. Tonight, I start another read-through. I’m close now, I think. This book seems to have more moving, intersecting parts than anything I’ve written before. I think I’ve got most of my ravens in a row now – I’m only aware of one point I’m still not sure about.

Of course, you never know what self-inflicted follies, of my own creation, still lie in wait for me. That’s all part of the (epic) process.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Dodge City,’ by Tom Clavin

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Long ago, based on an article I read in some magazine, I joined the anti-Wyatt Earp party. Anti-Wyatt people like to point out that Wyatt Earp was primarily a gambler, not a lawman – he was never the marshal of anyplace, though he was a deputy off and on. Also that the story of the Gunfight at the OK Corral (which took place not in the corral, but in a nearby vacant lot), is told in so many contradictory ways that it’s impossible to get at the truth, but that the Earps’ conduct is suspicious at best. And that Wyatt’s famous vendetta ride, though understandable in light of the murder of one brother and the maiming of another, was entirely extralegal and far from a law ‘n order affair. And, oh yes, there’s evidence Wyatt was a pimp, at least for a while.

Since then I’ve softened a bit. Wyatt was no Hugh O’Brien (that’s the guy who played him on TV, for your kids out there), but neither were his enemies – white hats were hard to find in them parts, in those days.

My real favorite Wild West lawman is Wild Bill Hickok. And yet I keep picking up books about Earp. Maybe because there are more mysteries in his story. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of him.

So I picked up Tom Clavin’s book, Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town In the American West. It has its virtues, but in terms of a search for the facts, I think it’s a step back rather than forward.

One great virtue of Dodge City is that it provides a lot of context. Although the narrative is centered in Dodge, it sends feelers out to touch on a lot of places that involved the main characters through the second half of the 19th Century. I appreciated this; I know my Old West fairly well, but my sense of what was contemporaneous with what was improved.

The book’s particular virtue is that, instead of concentrating on the almost mythic figure of Wyatt Earp, Clavin also keeps his eye on Wyatt’s close friend Bat Masterson. Masterson has gotten too little attention, and Clavin makes a good case (with which I tend to agree) that he was the more accomplished of the two. For one thing, Bat was actually an elected sheriff, at least for a while. But he was also involved in more adventures, from the legendary Adobe Wells fight to various manhunts, shootouts, and arrests as a lawman. William S. Hart knew both men, but it was Masterson he identified as his character model.

The great weakness of Dodge City is that it scores low on the factual scale. Clavin treats these men as if they were career lawmen, men on a mission to bring peace to the frontier, like in the movies. I don’t think you can honestly make that case. His account of the feud with the Clantons is routinely biased toward the Earps. And there are simple mistakes of fact. I’m not a “real” historian, but Clavin’s accounts of events involving Wild Bill Hickok and Billy the Kid are wrong in important details, to my best knowledge. (Although I could just be behind on the scholarship. It keeps changing. But Clavin does not inspire my confidence as scholar.)

Dodge City has some value for the reader looking for a sweeping overview of a colorful time and place in our history. But if you’re looking for objective scholarship, I’d suggest you look elsewhere.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘John Clum, Apache Agent, and It All Happened in Tombstone,’ by Woodworth Clum

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When, as often happened, one of the raiders lost his mount, he would proceed, running on his own feet, being careful not to set too fast a pace for the ponies.

Recently I saw an old Audie Murphy movie which, even within the canon of Audie Murphy’s ouvre, was fairly non-memorable. Walk the Proud Land was an attempt on Murphy’s part to broaden his range through playing, not a gunfighter, but a man of peace. That man, a genuine historical character, was John P. Clum. The movie failed at the box office in its time, but it succeeded in piquing my interest in a man I’d wondered about before. I knew John Clum as editor of the Tombstone Epitaph, mayor of Tombstone, and a staunch friend of Wyatt Earp. I’d also read he was a devout Christian. I’d been mostly unaware of his exemplary career as an Indian agent.

John P. Clum was a Dutch Reformed boy from a farm in New York state. Intending to enter the ministry, he attended Rutgers University, but had to drop out due to lack of funds. His education did earn him a job as a weather observer for the US Army Signal Corps in Santa Fe, New Mexico, however. This led, through a college connection, to his appointment as Indian Agent at the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona.

Clum was 22 years old when he arrived at San Carlos, not entirely sure what he’d find. In general, he was pleasantly surprised. He found the Apaches, by and large, decent (by their lights) and hard-working people, scrupulously honest, and historically eager to be friends with Americans (it was the Mexicans they hated). John Clum, Apache Agent, and It All Happened in Tombstone (a compilation of two books) begins with a narrative of United States relations with the Apaches, and it’s a sad and painful story. For every American willing to treat the Apaches decently, there seem to have been ten who, motivated by greed or bigotry, lied to them, cheated them, or killed them like animals.

Clum set about earning the Apaches’ trust, helping the decent ones and punishing  the (minority of) bad actors. In time he was able to set up a working self-government system. He was particularly proud of his efficient Apache police force, which operated with distinction and crowned its achievements with the capture of Geronimo (the only time – as Clum takes pains to point out – when he was captured without voluntarily surrendering).

In time, however, bureaucratic interference and changed Indian policies left Clum with no alternative, in his own mind, to resigning his post and leaving the reservation. The later history of his Apache friends is sad to read.

There is considerable pride in Clum’s account, along with great contempt for narrowminded and bigoted Americans who spoiled what might have been an exemplary peace. The only character Clum seems to hate more than these bureaucrats is the “bad Apache” Geronimo, whom he describes as a liar, a master manipulator, and a merciless killer. He is particularly offended that his friends ended up sharing Geronimo’s fate of exile and imprisonment, without the advantages that Geronimo enjoyed – celebrity status and income from souvenir sales.

The later part of his book is Clum’s own account of his career as mayor and editor in Tombstone, during the fabled days of the Earp-Clanton feud. He is staunch in his support of Wyatt Earp (who would seem, on the face of it, an odd friend for a good Dutch Reformed boy), and (regrettably) his account varies not at all from the well-known (and much-questioned) version told by Stuart N. Lake in Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal. What will be fresh for most western buffs is Clum’s own account of what he believed to be an assassination attempt against himself on a stage coach run, when he ended up leaving the stage and proceeding on foot, to be less of a target.

The book John Clum, Apache Agent was not written by Clum himself, but was edited by his son Woodworth Clum, from his father’s unpublished papers and reminiscences. The prose is not bad – generally avoiding the excesses of Victorian baroque. The main problem with this electronic edition is that it was obviously produced through OCR transcription, so there is the occasional misread word – as well as entire lines of text getting lost now and then. But it wasn’t enough to spoil the story as a whole.

If you’re interested in the Old West, John Clum, Indian Agent, and It All Happened in Tombstone makes interesting reading. I suspect Clum left out some of the juiciest – and/or most appalling – details, so the book is suitable for most readers.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Last Gunfight,’ by Jeff Guinn

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The Last Gunfight

None of the Earps were flawless saints, but they also were not shady characters who lucked into heroic places in Western history. What they did do, Wyatt especially, was exaggerate their accomplishments and completely ignore anything in their past that reflected badly on them. In this, they were typical of men of their time—and men today.

Wyatt Earp wanted a desk job. You could argue that that simple fact is responsible for the bloodletting that occurred in an empty lot next to C.S. Fly’s photographic studio, not far from the OK Corral, on October 26, 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona. All the Earps dreamed of wealth and social respectability, but they had to settle for gambling, police work (usually as deputies), and sometimes less reputable work like pimping, until they could catch the brass ring. Which none of them did in their lifetimes.

Wyatt thought he had a fair shot at being elected sheriff of the newly-created Cochise County, Arizona, on the Republican ticket. He was a deputy to his brother, Deputy US Marshal Virgil Earp, who was also Tombstone chief of police. He thought he could arrest several wanted “cowboys” (a word that meant rustlers at the time), if he made a deal with the rancher Ike Clanton to betray his cowboy friends. Unfortunately, Ike got the idea that Wyatt had been telling people about the deal, and got so mad that he spent the night of October 25 lurching from one saloon to another, bragging about everything he was going to do that two-faced Earp. This was a stupid thing to do if he wanted the deal kept secret, of course, but brains were never Ike’s strong suit. The next day Virgil deputized his brothers and Doc Holliday and led them down to the vacant lot to disarm Ike and his friends. The rest is… about 1% history and 99% myth and romance.

Though the Amazon description calls Jeff Guinn’s The Last Gunfight the “definitive” account of the affair, it’s not and cannot be, as Guinn himself admits in his Afterword. New information keeps turning up, and sometimes it’s pretty illuminating. What The Last Gunfight offers is a fairly recent, and fairly comprehensive, account of the personalities and forces that led to the shoot-out, and the events that followed, with the focus on the Earps. Continue reading ‘The Last Gunfight,’ by Jeff Guinn →