The Calamity Papers : Western Myths and Cold Cases

Rating:
Summary: Piercing to the heart of some mysteries
Review: Dale L. Walker probes a number of western mysteries in this highly readable and absorbing collection. Most of these matters have never been resolved and continue to fascinate those who enjoy the American West and its unique history. One of the joys of this book is that we come away from it with new clues, new possibilities.

There are examinations of Meriwether Lewis's death and the question of murder or suicide; why Sam Houston's marriage apparently blew apart on his wedding night; the question of whether Montana's acting territorial governor Thomas Francis Meagher fell off a riverboat or was murdered; the enduring mystery of the murder of New Mexico attorney Albert Fountain and his son, and the unusual death of Pat Garrett, the man who shot Billy the Kid. There is also an examination of Calamity Jane and her alleged relationship to Wild Bill Hickok, and the strange case of the woman who claimed to be her daughter, and not least, the questions of whether Jack London's death was suicide or the result of an overdose of morphine and whether his great California home was torched by an arsonist.

Walker is the best historical researcher in the business, and probes all these cases with a bulldog determination, which takes him into realms scarcely touched by other researchers. Add to that his judicious and careful construction of events, his avoidance of inserting his own intuitions into the narrative, and his remarkable gifts of narrative prose, and you have here a book of uncommon power and depth, written by a master detective and historian. This is absorbing literature, and strongly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A Shadow of A Doubt...
Review: In history, nothing is "definite," nothing is beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is a well-researched endeavor with numerous sources used for each of the seven sections (long bibliography references), but it leaves the reader with more questions instead of answers. It does take a closer look at western legends of the past, but he persues his own, sometimes rambling interpretations.

Like his 1997 LEGENDS AND LIES, it makes you wonder if this man's curiosity for the perverse gives a certain taint to the factual truth, or is it all a figment of his imagination. He's not a 'definitive' historian, earned a lifetime achievement award in 2000 by the Western Writers of America due, I think, to his fertile abundant novels and his prolific supply of 'western heroes.' In WESTWARD, he admits it is a fictional history (is there such a thing?) of the American West. This volume follows in that vein.

Sam Houston was born in Virginia but transplanted to Maryville, Tennessee, at the age of thirteen. At 15, he was 6'2" and left home to live with the Cherokee Indians for three years where he was called 'Raven.' In 1813, he joined the army and made his mark at Horseshoe Bend in Alabama with General Andrew Jackson's Creek War. There, he was wounded in the groin area, an oozing wound which never healed completely. Five years later, he open a law office in Lebanon, just outside Nashville, becoming Attorney General of Tennessee. He entered politics in 1823 as a congressman for two terms, before becoming Governor of Tennessee in 1827. After a short, two and a half month, failed marriage, he resigned as Governor and returned to the Indians to 'lick his wounds', so to speak, and recover his dignity.

He found himself a mixed-blood Cherokee widow and his former bride married a Gallatin doctor. He moved on to Texas to resume his military prowess. As a retaliation for Santa Anna's demolition of the Alamo, he defeated and captured the Mexican leader near San Jacinto River, 20 miles east of the town named for him, Houston. In the action, as the battle started, he was not shot in the ankle as others declared, but it was crushed after his horse was hot and fell on him.

Due to his success in war, he served twice as President of the Republic of Texas, later became Governor but deposed two years later when he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. He had a colorful existence with many and varied careers. He was a restless, hard-drinking man of the wilderness.

In his episode about the death of Meriweather Lewis, he tells of a mysterious letter written to the daughter of Aaron Burr who had taken the Natchez Trail in 1805, and where Lewis was killed in 1810. On his monument (which I viewed and read) was his illness called melancholia, as a possible cause of death. This author called it a diseased brain. Forty days before his death, he sent a letter to Theodosia, supposedly written on Sept. 1,at the age of 35 of his premonition of his thinking he was soon to die.

This letter makes this a fine 'mystery within the great mystery' of whether his death was a result of suicide or murder. Charles M. Wilson, a newspaperman published an account in 1934 of Lewis' death at Grinder's Stand in which he wrote about the "I am going to die" note. Lewis V. Fisher, author of SUICIDE OR MURDER (1962), attacks Wilson as being a novelist, not a historian, as he failed to document his "facts" had no footnotes, endnotes, or bibliography, thus, no credibility.

Anya Seton in her first novel, MY THEODOSIA, wrote about the letter in 1941, four years before Theodosia was lost at sea, leaving a mystery behind.

Mary Canary (aka Calamity Jane) was a legend in her own time. Of the seven films about her which he lists (from 1936 to 1995), the ony one I remember was the 1953 musical starring Doris Day and the marvelous Howard Keel. His research finds her called many derogatory names (on the Western frontier, jane was a fallen woman). She was illiterate and a known prevaricator (tall tales, lies) who was a pro at profanity, growing up wild as she had unsavory parents. She claimed to have been a scout for General Custer in Wyoming in 1870, at Little Big Horn.

That same year she met Wild Bill Hickok, a marshal in Kansas. She dressed in men's clothes and frequented saloons, gambling and dance halls. She could be found at brawls and saloon shoot-outs -- thus getting the nickname, Calamity.

Later, at the age of 25, she went on to be a scout of Buffalo Bill Cody. Hickok traveled with the stage troupe in 1873 as a actor. He was eleven years older than she. He was a two-bit gambler, killed by Jack McCall in 1876.

In 1885, she married Charley Burk, a one-legged Civil War veteran with whom she had a daughter, in El Paso; then moved on to Boulder, Colorado. Many dime novels were written about her exploits after she joined Cody's Wild West show. In 1900, she performed in the Pan Am. Exposition in Buffalo, New York, where she was a big hit. IN 1903, she was almost blind and succumbed to pnemonia and was buried near her hero. Her funeral at First Methodist Church of Deadwood was one of the biggest attended. Though the actual events of her life are ambiguous, she is remembered as a legend.