Journal Notes

This past week a man confessed to a murder police have been trying to solve for thirty-one years. Although the man’s actions were vile and contemptible there is something to be said for a spirit that knows it violently transgressed and can find no peace unless and until the truth be told. News accounts of the confession note that the killer admitted to family members shortly after the murder took place that he had “done a bad thing.” He never elaborated on that “bad thing” until recently. I believe the Holy Spirit kept his heinous actions at the forefront of his troubled, twisted mind. I believe the Holy Spirit prompted the man’s relatives to remember to make mention of the “bad thing” and bring it to the authorities attention. It’s not in man alone to want to admit their shocking sins. Only the Holy Spirit could cause us to want to plead guilty to what we’ve done wrong. I used to think the three that took my brother’s life would confess, but that time has past. The Holy Spirit stops talking to a person when that individual becomes deaf to His voice. The Bible describes it as hearing, but hearing not. There is no point in setting the alarm on a clock in a deaf person’s room. He won’t hear it. Likewise, a person can condition himself to not hear an alarm clock ring by repeatedly shutting it off and not getting up. The day finally comes when the alarm goes off and she doesn’t hear it. That must be what happened. My brother’s assassins visit my website every now and then. They’re proud of what they’ve done. I think they’re cowards and liken them to cowboy Ike Clanton waiting in the shadows to ambush Wyatt Earp, or Wiley Lynn, the corrupt federal agent who shot marshal Bill Tilghman down in cold blood. The spirit that speaks to them will only ever remind them to keep quiet about what they’ve done and forget the lives they tortured. I’m probably wrong, but it feels like the man who confessed to murdering a seven-year-old boy in 1981 has a better chance at redemption than they do today.

In addition to the chance to work in beautiful Helena, Montana this week, it proved to be a fruitful time with my editors as well. Lots of books in the works including a western fiction entitled Laura Reno’s Brothers. It’s the western version of how I lost my brother, and let me assure you dear readers, unlike real life, the bad woman and her daughters in this story get theirs in the end. I couldn’t let this day pass without recognizing a brazen frontier woman named Pearl Hart. More than one hundred and thirteen years ago this week, Pearl robbed the last stage to ever be robbed in the Old West. Armed with a .44 Colt pistol and dressed in a man’s gray flannel shirt, jeans, and boots, Pearl Hart rode off into the hills around Globe, Arizona, to rob an unsuspecting stagecoach. The petite twenty-eight year-old woman had a cherub like face, short dark hair, and hard, penetrating little eyes. The white sombrero perched on her had was cocked to one side and cast a shadow over her small nose and plumb cheeks. While her accomplice seized the weapon the stage driver was carrying, Pearl lined the passengers alongside the road and relieved them of the more than $450 they possessed. Before the lady bandit sent the shaken travelers on their way, she provided them with one dollar. “That’s for grub and lodging,” she told them. Once the stage was off again, Pearl and her partner in crime rode out in the opposite directions. The brazen daylight robbery that occurred on May 30, 1899, had historic significance. It was the last stage ever held up, and Pearl Hart was the last stage bandit, female or otherwise, to perpetrate such a crime. Pearl’s mother was desperately ill and needed money to help purchase medicine. Not that it makes it right to rob a stage, but that was the motivation behind it she claimed. There weren’t many stages running in Arizona in the late 1890s; trains were not the primary means of transportation. Pearl decided to rob the stage that ran from Florence to Globe. The holdup went smoothly but the escape plan was flawed. She got lost in the woods surrounding the crime scene and was eventually apprehended by a posse sent to arrest her. Pearl Hart was charged with highway robbery, and her trial took place in Florence. News of Pearl’s crime and the hearing were reported in newspapers throughout the country. For a while she was arguably the most famous woman in the world. The first jury found that the darling Pearl was a victim of circumstances and granted her an acquittal. The judge was furious with the verdict and ordered a second jury to be appointed. After warning them not to be swayed by the fact that she was a woman, the jury found her guilty. Pearl was then sentenced to five years in jail. The bandit Pearl Hart served eighteen months for her sentence and was released on December 19, 1902. She left Arizona for Missouri and settled in Kansas City with her younger sister. There is some dispute over the date the famous lady thief died. Some historians believe she passed away in 1925 in Kansas City. Others suggest she died in Arizona in 1955. Her body lies in an unmarked grave in a small cemetery located at the base of the Dripping Springs Mountains near Globe.

One of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever visited is a ghost town called Bodie. The gold camp is not far from the booming metropolis of Bridgeport, California. Bodie has more than one hundred buildings standing in a state of arrested decay. There you can see what life was really like in the mid-1800s. I’ve spent a lot of time at the cemetery there. I learn a great deal about history wandering around old cemeteries. At the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Bodie there is a demur marble angel that sits among the faded wooden crosses and weather-ravaged rock grave memorials. The three-foot cherub holds a flower wreath in her left hand and rests her hand on her right elbow. The lone angel watches over the burial site of a three-year-old little girl named Evelyn Meyers. Evelyn was the joyful, precocious daughter of Fannie and Albert Meyers. Born in Bodie on May 1, 1894, the child had a ready smile for everyone she saw and a particular fondness for an elderly miner who was a dear friend of the family. Fannie would take Evelyn with her when she went to do the weekly shopping. The little girl played outside with the other children in town and sat with the old miner friend and listened to the stories he would tell. Evelyn would follow the man everywhere he went, from the blacksmith shop to the church. The miner was taken with the little girl’s devotion. In the spring of 1897, Evelyn spotted the miner on Main Street and took out after him. Unaware that the child was following him, the man made his way to his claim just outside the town. Evelyn crept quietly behind. Whistling and preoccupied with the job of searching for gold, the miner raised a pickax up and back to begin chipping away at a rock wall. He still did not know Evelyn was behind him as he began to work. The top of the pickax caught the girl in the head, killing her instantly. The miner was devastated. The girl was laid to rest on April 6, 1897. Thousands of Bodie visitors have passed by the angel tombstone in the one-hundred-plus years it has been standing in the cemetery. Vandals have broken the top of the wings on the statue as well as the left foot. The inscription at the base of the marble is still clearly visible and reads Beloved Daughter. If you’re interested in reading more stories like this, please read Tales Behind the Tombstones: The Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen. Written by yours truly, the book is available everywhere.

In every good western, whether it’s a book or a film, the bad guy more often than not get’s what’s coming to him in the end. That’s what makes westerns so attractive to me and hundreds of thousands of others. There’s something satisfying about a bully getting humiliated, a thief getting tossed in jail and a murderer being gunned down. I can’t help but think that’s part of what motivated inventor Samuel Colt to patent the revolving-camber pistol. Colt had a rough childhood. His mother died young from tuberculosis, he lost a sister to the same disease, and two of his other siblings committed suicide. At the age of eleven Colt was forced to work for a farmer who treated him cruelly. As soon as he was old enough he ran away. He went to work as a sailor and spent long hours staring at the ship’s wheel. He used this principle to invent a gun that could shoot multiple bullets without reloading. He excelled at both invention and marketing and today would be considered a compulsive workaholic. He struggled with a way to produce his guns cheaply but was forced to find a method of mass production after he received and order from the U.S. government in 1847 for 1,000 revolvers. By the time he died of exhaustion at age forty-seven, Samuel Colt had produced more than 400,000 Colt .45 revolvers. At his funeral in 1862 it was said of the Colt .45 he invented: “God created man, but Sam Colt [the Colt .45] made them all equal.” In 1873 the Colt SAA sold for $17.50. The complete kit with a holster and some ammunition could be covered by a $20 gold piece. The $20 Double Eagle of 1873 contained 0.9675 ounces of pure gold. Today an ounce of gold is about $1,090 and a new Colt SAA can be special ordered from Colt’s custom shop for about $1,500. It is fair to say that the invention of the Colt revolver changed the course of American history. It aided the westward expansion of America and the simplicity and effectiveness of the Colt revolver design is evidenced in the fact that they are still made and used today, both in the armed forces and in the private sector. Many have called the Colt repeating pistol the finest gun ever made. It was referred to as “law and order in six-finger doses.”

Ask any little girl what she wants to be when she grows up. Chances are she won’t say president or astronaut. Chances are she’ll say “Supermodel.” What does it say about our culture when Einstein’s original draft of the theory of relativity fetches less at auction than what a flat-line electroencephalograph Giacometti statue gets to stroll down a runway? And for goodness sake, isn’t it about time we passed an absolute edict forbidding these women from uttering the words “Modeling is hard work.” I think it would have been a thrill to have been Sacagawea. What a life she had. She was the young Shoshone Indian woman who served as Lewis and Clark’s translator on their 1803 expedition to explore the uncharted western regions of America. She made the entire journey to the Pacific, and the return trip, with a newborn baby on her back; many believe that without her aid, the journey, commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson, would have ended in failure. Some accounts say she died in 1812 at age twenty-five of putrid fever, while others believe she died in 1884 on an Indian Reservation in Wyoming. The child she carried in a papoose was Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, nicknamed Pompy, meaning first-born, who eventually attended St. Louis Academy with tuition paid by Clark. Pompy later met Prince Wilhelm of Germany while on a natural history expedition and traveled back to Europe with him, where Pompy learned to speak four different languages. But by the time he was twenty-four Pompy was back in North America living as a mountain man. When the Gold Rush of ‘49 started, he got caught up in the fever and died from too much time wading through cold rivers panning for gold. His cause of death was bronchitis at age sixty-one, and his portrait is the only one of a child on any U.S. coin. What supermodel can boast a legacy like that?

I live vicariously through the tales of the men and women of the Old West. From the research I’ve done many of the families that came over the plains cared deeply about one another and would sacrifice anything for the happiness of their loved ones. And then there’s the family I was born into. Whether or not these individuals married into the family or were brought about by the natural process of things, the majority of them have one thing in common and that’s to hurt. Making a family member bleed and watch them writhe in pain over their actions is a sport to them. I begin my Monday on the battle field of this family trying to deal with another crippling shot fired by a person whose idea of love is more akin to the actions of a character from a horror film who wants to wipe out everyone in their sight than someone who insists their behavior is motivated out of goodness or what’s best. If I couldn’t lose myself in the Old West today I’d want to hurl myself into a trash compactor. It’s seems only fitting that I’d be writing today about a man who knew how to stand up for his family but who had no regard for any other human life, Jesse James. James is perhaps the most beloved murderer in American history. He and his gang shot bank clerks in cold blood, killed passersby who looked the wrong way, and derailed trains and robbed the passengers as they lay injured. But none of that mattered. To many alive at the time James was a post-Civil War hero, satisfying the thirst of many defeated Confederates to get in a few last shots after the war. James, a handsome bearded man with blue eyes and a narrow face, was fashioned as a modern-day Robin Hood, though later historians were at a loss to find any evidence of charitableness. As a Confederate guerrilla and later as a bank robber, James came close to a violent death several times. But as long as he had his own guns, he always seemed to survive. During the war he was badly wounded in the leg and his horse was shot out from under him. Just after the war federal soldiers shot James in the lung and left him for dead. He lay on the ground for two days until a farmer aided him. When he was ambushed robbing the Northfield, Minnesota, bank in 1876, three of his gang were killed, three were shot and captured, and only Jesse and his brother, Frank escaped. His luck ended in 1882, after a local sheriff got 21-year-old Robert Ford, a less notorious outlaw, to join James’s gang to try to capture him. Ford and his brother easily joined up and were staying with James and his wife in St. Joseph, Missouri, that April, planning their next bank robbery. Early on the morning of April 3, James, who had just come inside from feeding the horses, took off his jacket and, because he trusted his friends, his gun belt. He had climbed up on a chair to pull some cobwebs from a picture when he heard the cock of a pistol. As he turned unarmed, Robert Ford shot James in the head with a .44-caliber pistol that James had given him as a present. James’s body was put in a $260 casket-paid for by the sheriff who had recruited Ford-and sent by train the few miles to his hometown of Kearney, in Clay County, Missouri. His open casket at the Kearney Hotel drew thousands, jamming the small town with their horses, and even passengers from the trains that made unscheduled stops on their way through. A collection to benefit James’s wife and two children gathered lass than $10, but that was only the beginning. Personal effects of the house were sold for about $250. The owner of the house, a St. Joseph city councilman who thought he had rented it to Thomas Howard (an alias of James’s) sold bloody floor splinters for 25 cents apiece. A year later James’s mother opened her home to visitors, also for a quarter. Of the more than twenty movies made about Jesse James, the first was financed by his descendants in 1920. Meanwhile, Robert Ford was pardoned by the governor, Ford toured Eastern cities reenacting the shooting, but the show was booed in the Midwest. Later, in a mining camp in Colorado, Ford was shot in the neck and killed by a man with a sawed-off shotgun seeking revenge for the death of Jesse James.

When news hit the airwaves about my late brother back in 2005, the reporters got everything wrong. They weren’t interested in making corrections either. Bad reporters have been around for centuries. There are very few Woodward and Bernstein style journalists. Newspapers and television news report rumors, facts are not important. Some of the worst reporters in the world work at KMBC-TV in Kansas City, Missouri. Wild Bill Hickok battled with Missouri reporters too, but he was able to convince them to make the necessary corrections. Amid widespread reports that he had been shot to death at Fort Dodge, Kansas, in 1873, quick-draw lawman Wild Bill Hickok wrote this letter to the St. Louis Missouri-Democrat: “Wishing to correct an error in your paper of the 12th, I will state that no Texan has, nor ever will ‘corral William.’ I wish you to correct your statement, on account of my people. -P.S. I have brought your paper in preference to all other since 1857.” Stories about James Butler Hickok were legendary in his own time. As a deputy U.S. marshal over much of the Plains territory, Hickok developed such a reputation as a fast shooter that other men would follow him around looking for a showdown. Hickok, a tall, a broad-shoulder man who carried two pistols in his vest and a pair of .36-caliber Colt revolvers around his waist, took to walking down the middle of the street and avoiding open windows. The former Union spy even sat in the barber’s chair with his shotgun in his lap. Still, Hickok relished his dangerous job. In fact, some say he used his deputy’s badge simply as a license to get involved in gunfights. He once advised, “Young man, never run away from a gun. Bullets can travel faster than you can. Besides, if you’re going to be hit, you had better get it in the front than in the back. It looks better.” As the frontier grew more settled and hired their own lawmen, Hickok was called on less and less. He performed in some of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West stage shows, but mainly he wandered the West in search of some action. In 1876, Hickok was in Deadwood Gulch, where gold had been discovered in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory. He had gotten married that March and hoped to strike enough gold to settle down. But meanwhile Hickok pursued his passion for gambling. On August 2, Hickok walked into the Number 10 Saloon just after noon to join a poker game. He always sat at the table with his back to the wall. But this time when he asked one player to get up and give him that stool, the other players just laughed it off, and Hickok finally took a seat that faced the front door but didn’t give him a full view of the barroom. At about 3 p.m. Jack McCall entered the saloon and walked to the end of the bar behind Hickok. Hickok had played against McCall the day before, and had even given him money for dinner after McCall went broke, so the former deputy continued to concentrate on his cards. Suddenly, McCall pulled a pistol, fired and a bullet struck Hickok in the back of his head, exited through his right cheek, and then lodged in the wrist of the card player across from him. Hickok, killed instantly, fell off his stool and slumped on his side on the floor. McCall, who said later he shot Hickok for killing his brother, ran out of the saloon and jumped on a horse. But he was caught when the saddle fell over, and he later hanged. Hickok, meanwhile, left part of his legend on the poker table. The cards he was holding – a pair of aces and a pair of eights – are known as the “dead man’s hand.”