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The Calamity Papers: Western Myths and Cold Cases

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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.

I thought this book about Calamity Jane but found it had other information in it about western historical figures. Informative but nothing in book is verified by the author. Since I was interested in Calamity Jane I found the information about her was duplicated in other sources.

Dale Walker's The Calamity Papers: Western Myths and Cold Cases is something of a mixed bag. On the plus side, the author did his research quite thoroughly and as a reference for anyone interested in the "cases" detailed in the book, The Calamity Papers has merit. That said, however, I found myself disappointed in the book as a read. Much like TV's Geraldo Rivera's over-hyped "investigations" of many years back, the title promises far more than the book actually delivers. For one thing, most of the specific individuals and events covered have either already been done to death in countless other works or else are so obscure or trivial that one has to wonder why Walker chose to write about them at all. And for another, while Walker is thorough and precise in his presentation of the known facts and his deconstruction of the myths that rose surrounding them, his style is dry to the point of being pedantic

The two parts of The Calamity Papers that are, however, worth reading are the sections on Martha "Calamity Jane" Canary and Pat Garrett, who is largely remembered as the man who killed Billy the Kid. Calamity Jane is an interesting study as someone who, in spite of having a real life story fairly fascinating in its own right, engaged probably more than anyone else of her period in her own myth-making, making it hard to distinguish the myth from the real woman behind it, but Walker does a fairly good job of seperating the reality from the myth. In addition, Walker relates the curious tale of a related hoax, the woman who decades later claimed to be the child of a marriage between Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok.

Pat Garrett is interesting as someone whose proverbial fifteen minutes of fame lay in his killing of a famous outlaw but who for the rest of his life was constantly bedeviled by bad luck and bad judgement, a figure far more pathetic in reality than the myth of the legendary lawman he's remembered as being. In the end, he ended up being shot from behind on a lonely New Mexico road in 1908 and the man who did it - claiming self-defense! - got off scot-free, again largely due to local politics and personal grudges.

The other chapters of the book are devoted to the following cases:

"The Yazoo Pilgrim" - based on what amounts to little more than a single anecdotal account of a Native American named Moncacht-apee who supposedly tranversed North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific almost a hundred years before Lewis and Clark.

"Oh, How Hard It Is To Die" - an investigation into the peculiar (and already much written about) death of Meriwether Lewis (was it suicide or murder?) and into his last words mentioning a woman named Theodosia. Not much mystery in either case, though Walker does do a good job of showing how various writers have deliberately muddied the waters over the years by hyping allegations long discredited and inventing a romance that never existed.

"Sam Houston's Dilemma" - an investigation into the strange breakup of Houston's first marriage (troubled from day one, cold by day two, over in less than three months) and his abrupt withdrawal from Tennessee politics. Something of a mystery as Houston only vaguely alluded to in in a single rambling letter and his ex-wife never spoke of it at all, but in truth not a very interesting one. She was half his age and apparently despised him; it would've been more of a mystery if they'd stayed married. Little more than a footnote in actual history.

"Meagher of the Sword" - an investigation into a colorful if somewhat obscure figure of Irish, Civil War and Old West history, Thomas Francis Meagher. An Irish patriot, Meagher emigrated to the United States, raised an all-Irish brigade for the Union in the Civil War, reached the rank of major general, and after the war ended up being appointed as acting governor of the Montana territory. It was there when, one night in 1867, Meagher either fell, jumped or was pushed, from the upper deck of a steamboat into the Missouri River. His body was never found and he was presumed drowned. Walker relates all the known details, but reaches no conclusions which is not surprising as there is no strong evidence for any of the possibilities. It's a minor mystery which has never had a solution, but again, it's not a very interesting one.

"Under The White Sands" - an investigation into the disappearance and presumed murder of Albert Jennings Fountain, a lawyer and former judge, and his nine-year-old son Henry in New Mexico in 1896. Their bodies were never found but there was very strong evidence of murder and some circumstantial and motivational evidence of who the killers might have been. There was a trial but the suspects were acquitted for lack of evidence. It is more of a real mystery than most of the accounts in the book, and actually involved a real crime, but again it's an obscure and not terribly interesting one.

(On a side note, both "Meagher of the Sword" and "Under The White Sands", while not terribly interesting as mysteries, do offer interesting insights into how entangled politics and crime were in the territories of the Old West and just how corrupt and violent political figures and fights in those days could be.)

"The Jack London Cases" - an investigation into the "mysteries" of the fire that destroyed author Jack London's dream home - Wolf House - and of the question of London's death possibly being suicide. Both of these questions, which never really were questions, have been covered many times over by anyone writing about London's life, and neither are any sort of mystery. The fire was due to spontaneous combustion of linseed-oil soaked rags on a 100-degree August night, and London died of kidney failure.

The book contains no illustrations except for a montage of individuals on the cover, most of whom you're left to guess as to the identity of. Another annoyance is that the book has occasional typos that apparently slipped past the proofreader, such as where a man's name is either mispelled or else spelled different ways on the same page, or as in the case where the book refers to Meriweather Lewis' "August 1913 stayover in a Shoshoni Indian village" which is a truly glaring error considering that Lewis died in 1809.

Recommended conditionally as a read for anyone with an interest in Calamity Jane or Pat Garrett, or as a reference for anyone with a specific interest in the other, more obscure, figures or events it covers.

Reviews of people in western history. Most were well done. Some were a little long. Would buy the book again.

After reading and enjoying Walker's "Legends and Lies" it was natural to see if Walker had written anything else in a similar vein. Sure enough, "The Calamity Papers: Western Myths and Cold Cases" squarely fit the bill.

Walker takes eight subjects and lays out the mysteries associated with each. Five of the subjects have more than one associated mystery. Sometimes the mysteries, such as they are, are not particularly compelling. For example, the breakup of Sam Houston's first marriage within weeks of the event is mysterious to be sure. But such things are by their very nature intensely private affairs and probably fall into one of a few mundane categories. The solution to others seem obvious (who killed Pat Garrett) and the only "mystery" is why there is a mystery.

Pride of place goes to the title feature - a classic case of overreaching. Not content to try to sell the notion that she is the daughter of one western legend, hoaxer Jean Hickok McCormick tries to sell the notion she is the daughter of two western legends and further that the two were legally married!

Whether compelling as mysteries all is compelling as straightforward history. The book is hard to put down. I stayed up way past bedtime to read "just one more". Walker also provides an extensive bibliography for anyone with the itch to dig further.

The only negative note is that there are no illustrations.

One hopes Walker can find the time for more of these collections. This one is highly recommended.

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.