I made a discovery lately, while in my Wild West mood, that clears up a mystery that’s bothered me, off and on, for most of my life.
My maternal grandfather had a few shelves of books in his home. One which I read with interest, and took as my own after his death, was the extravagantly titled tome, Capt. W. F. Drannan, Chief of Scouts, As Pilot to Emigrant and Government Trains, Across the Plains of the Wild West of Fifty Years Ago (As Told By Himself, As a Sequel To His Famous Book, “Thirty-One Years On the Plains and In the Mountains”). Published in 1910.
The frontispiece is a studio portrait of the old scout:
The book tells of the narrator’s adventures, first as a young protege of Kit Carson, then as a wagon train scout, and also as an Army scout fighting Indians. It’s an interesting book in the old style, with similar pleasures and difficulties as the Buffalo Bill memoir I reviewed the other day.
The books seem to have been fairly popular in their time. A source I’ll link to further along quotes a letter to H. P. Lovecraft by Robert E. Howard, who’d seen Drannan in a Texas town as a boy:
…wandering about the streets of Mineral Wells … trying to sell the pitiful, illiterate book of his life of magnificent adventure and high courage; a little, worn old man in the stained and faded buckskins of a vanished age, friendless and penniless…. what a lousy end for a man whose faded blue eyes had once looked on the awesome panorama of untracked prairie and sky-etched mountain, who had ridden at the side of Kit Carson, guided the waggon-trains across the deserts to California, drunk and revelled in the camps of the buffalo-hunters, and fought hand to hand with painted Sioux and wild Comanche.
Over the years, as I’ve read this and that about the West, I’ve looked for other mentions of Col. William F. Drannan.
To my puzzlement, there was never one. Not one. I think I recall a passing reference in an article in a Western history magazine, but nothing, ever, in a book.
I began to smell a rat.
This post from a blog called Rational Rant (with whose author I suspect I’d probably disagree on many metaphysical issues) sets the record straight, and confirms my suspicions.
Thirty-One Years on the Plains is actually a work of fiction, with precious little in the way of facts to back it up. No biographer of Kit Carson has ever taken it seriously. Actual participants in the Modoc war—Major Frazier Boutelle, whose cool courage saved the troops in the Lost River Fight; “Colonel” William Thompson, a leader of the Oregon Volunteers and a legend in his own mind; Jeff Riddle, the son of the interpreters Frank and Toby Riddle—all of whom were unquestionably present—denounced the work as a pack of lies.
Ah well. If you want to read the books anyway, you can download them for Kindle here. (The Amazon reviewers seem to be entirely unaware the book is fiction.)
“Colonel” Drannan seems to have been lucky in his timing. When his books were popular, fact-checking was difficult. By the time it got easy, he’d been pretty much forgotten.
It seems frauds like to give themselves the rank of colonel — there’s “Col.” James Churchward of the “lost continent of Mu” books that used to catch the eye of some paperback rack browsers.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/arqueologia/esp_churchward01.htm
I wonder if there’s a cultural element with that title. I remember reading an account of Clarence Darrow in Dayton, Tennessee, for the evolution trial with William Jennings Bryan, and he said it was an honor for everyone there to call him ‘colonel’ somewhat spontaneously. I don’t know how it was started.
As I understand it, “Colonel” has traditionally been a social honorific in the south. Perhaps it rises from the old militias, which elected colonels outside the regular military command structure. As I understand it, the governor of Kentucky is empowered to confer the title of colonel on anyone. Hence, Colonel Sanders.
http://www.adena.com/adena/usa/cw/cw180.htm
The architect Latrobe . . . said that the multitudes of colonels and majors he saw in a tavern in Petersburg, Virginia, reminded him of the nobles of the Polish Republic. “The only difference is that instead of Count Borolabraski and Leschinski … we have here Colonel Tom and Colonel Dick and Major Billy…” . . .
. . . It was not necessary for one to have served in the militia or a volunteer company to be dubbed with a military title. To ascribe to a person the role of a high military officer was a gesture of respect which no gracious or ambitious gentleman would decline. [The title of Colonel] was given “causa honoris by the lavish spirit of republicanism, which scorns to confine her honors to doughty deeds with the sword, but has all worthy sons in every walk of life to kneel before her and dubs them ‘captain,’ ‘colonel,’ ‘general,’ ‘Judge,’ by right of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, thus vindicating the sovereignty of the people.” In Mississippi, in 1835, . . . [m]ost of the men of the better class were at least colonels, while every tavern keeper was a major. Occasionally there were a few “Kaptins … amongst the stage drivers, but such an animal as a Lewtenant only exits on the muster-roll of the militia, for I never heard of any one having seen a live one in Republican America.” Featherstonhaugh related a conversation which took place between a resident of Winchester, Virginia, and a ferryman.
“Major, I wish you would lead your horse a little forward,” which he did, observing to the man, “I am not a major, and you need not call me one.” To this the ferryman replied, “well, Kurnel, I ax your pardon, and I’ll not call you so no more.” Being arrived at the landing place he led his horse out of the boat, and said, “my good friend, I am a very plain man, I am neither a Colonel nor a Major. I have no title at all, and I don’t like them. How much have I to pay you?” The ferryman looked at him, and said, “You are the first white man I ever crossed this ferry that arnt jist nobody at all, and I swear I’ll not charge you nothing.”
The Militant South 1800 – 1861 by John Hope Franklin
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1956, pages 190-192.
Sorry for the trouble, Texan99. You failed a remote black list test. You may want to crack down on the spammers in your office … or sump’em.
Yikes! It’s an individual computer and individual account. Thanks for the warning, though I’m not even sure where to look.
Mark Twain wrote a story I found very funny, about a man escorting the coffin of a dear friend home in a railroad baggage car. Somebody accidentally leaves a package of limburger cheese on it. As the man travels, with just the company of the baggage handler, the weather gets colder. They light the stove and the cheese grows increasingly odorous, an effect they attribute to the corpse. The baggage handler refers to the deceased by various honorifics, and the worse he smells, the more eminent the title becomes. First he’s “the judge” or “the captain,” but eventually he becomes “the admiral” or “his excellency.” The two men end up freezing on the platform outside the car.
Well, you made it with whatever computer you’re using now, Texan99. Perhaps the issue is resolved.
As a Texas writer, it’s bothering me that I don’t know this guy….
But wandering around trying to find readers? That, I know.
That pretty much says it. I would like to give credit, however, to a person whose work on William Drannan was done when fact-checking was indeed difficult. Walter Nathaniel Bate (1893-1985) published Frontier legend: Texas finale of Capt. William F. Drannan, pseudo frontier comrade of Kit Carson in 1954 based on many years’ worth of research. Most of his results were negative, it is true–that is, he found there was no evidence for William Drannan in documents of the times and places he claimed to have been in for the most part, and that his accounts of events were often at odds with those of people who had in fact taken part in them. One of the few pieces of positive evidence he turned up came from Drannan’s (alleged) time in Seattle. Drannan claimed to have owned a hotel there that burned down. Bate’s research showed that Drannan had in fact been a part-owner in a restaurant that had operated in the hotel that burned down. Not quite the same thing, but at least he was there. But a more typical example was the result of investigations into Drannan’s (alleged) land deal in the Sacramento valley in the 1860s–no documentary evidence that he’d ever bought land, sold land, or had carried out any transaction that would have left a public record there. (And in fact, though Bate didn’t have access to this information, the 1870 census shows Drannan landless and in a quite different part of the state.)
One advantage Bate had over later researchers is that he was able to correspond with people who had known Drannan and his associates personally. Kit Carson’s family disavowed all knowledge of him, but there were witnesses who had seen “Buffalo” Bill Cody recognize Drannan and give him a seat of honor at one of his shows. The record is mixed–but generally not favorable to Drannan, and very much not favorable to his version of his life.
Thanks for that interesting information. I find this whole story fascinating.