Wyatt Earp – Auxiliary Memory

Doc by Mary Doria Russell

Doc is John Henry Holliday, legendary figure from the old west and most famously remembered for standing with Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil Earp at the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 as Doc Holliday. All too often fictional accounts of famous people of history tend to be heavy on the fiction and light on the history, but this ain’t so with Doc, the new novel by Mary Doria Russell.

To see how serious Russell treats the history start reading her blog at Starting the Next Novel. Blogs are annoying for reading older posts, but if you start here and read forward with the link at the bottom of the article, you’ll be able to track her comments about writing Doc and the next novel dealing with Wyatt. Russell even took a five day horseback ride that recreates Wyatt Earp’s Vendetta Ride. But keep reading her blog and you’ll be charmed by Russell and understand how she put so much biographical research into her fictional character.

Even covering this material in a nonfiction books like The Last Gunfight by Jeff Guinn it’s very tricky painting a portrait of a real person. History leaves a limited set of facts that’s never enough to be definitive. Like I said in Nonfiction, Fiction, History, Myth and States of Consciousness it’s extremely hard to discern nonfiction from fiction, and history from myth but Mary Doria Russell makes a climbing Mt. Everest effort to portray John Henry Holliday as fully and accurate as possible in the context of a novel.

I enjoyed this story immensely. I’ve read many books and seen many movies about Doc Holliday and the Earps and Russell’s picture of them in 1878 Dodge City is nothing less than brilliant – not in the Einstein way of thinking, but in the way the Harry Potter kids use the term. I have no idea how true this story is, but it feels right. At worst I’d say she worked too hard to make Doc likable, and even elegant and tragic. She elevates Morgan over Wyatt, but history has favored Wyatt because he survived. I do believe Russell is right in suggesting that Doc was mainly Morgan’s friend, and after Morgan was killed and his murdered avenged, Doc didn’t have much reason to stick with Wyatt.

Now if you’re not caught up in the mania for Tombstone and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral you might not give a fig about this book. It is a well written western that stands on its own even if you aren’t caught up in the history, but I think you’ll at least need to love western movies to enjoy this book. And I love westerns. And this was one of my favorite books of 2011.

JWH – 1/2/12

Nonfiction, Fiction, History, Myth and States of Consciousness

Have you ever read a book about a real life event and then watched a documentary about the same subject? The contrast of what we can learn from words and what we can learn from film is often jarring and sometimes shocking. One of my favorite books from youth is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. Wolfe made literary fame by pioneering “new journalism” which is now called creative nonfiction. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was considered the book that defined the hippies and their philosophy. I read this book back in 1969, and now 42 years later I got to watch Magic Trip, a documentary that used actual film footage of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Wolfe interviewed all the principal people right after the events, and he also must have seen the original 30 hours of film, and I was blown away by the difference between the two ways of telling the same story.

Truth is the actual events. How close can we ever come to reconstructing the truth? What is the best evidence for the truth? When Farmer Ted bets his geeky friends he’ll hook up with Samantha in Sixteen Candles and his friends demand proof, he asks them what kind, and they say in unison, “Video!” As far as I can imagine, video comes closest to the truth as any evidence we can find – but even then it’s far from perfect. For centuries, before the advent of video, our knowledge of past events was based on writing.

How much can we know from reading? Before writing was invented our worldview was limited to the here and now. We had oral storytellers that conveyed news from distant lands and remembered events and people from the past, but it was very limited. Most of the time people’s consciousness was focused on the present and the immediate world around them. Then reading and writing was invented and information about endless places and countless past moments could be recorded so people could conjure up in their minds things that weren’t here and now. But how effective is reading at reproducing the past? How accurate can reading describe distant places and events?

All my life I’ve been a bookworm, spending hours a day with my head in a book. When young I most read fiction, and felt that time away from reality was just escapist entertainment, but over the decades I’ve shifted to reading more nonfiction, and felt I was learning stuff about other places, people and the past. But am I?

Lately I’ve been reading nonfiction books and then seeking out documentaries and photographs to supplement my reading, and in every case I’m shocked by how different my mental image from reading is from the photograph or film. Words are black marks on white paper, but they attempt to encode information that comes through our five senses. How well does any word for a color convey the actual color? Does the word blue suggest any particular shade of blue? Picture the wall of paint sample colors at your local Home Depot. Which of the thousands of blues are the one we call blue? Now think about the other four senses and words for sounds, textures, tastes and smells. How close do words come to the infinite varieties of sensual details?

Last night I watched a documentary Magic Trip about Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters taking a bus from the west coast to visit New York City for the 1964 Worlds Fair. In 1969 when I read “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” by Tom Wolfe it blew me away by how exciting his non-fiction writing was at vividly conveying the story of these freaks on acid traveling across the country. Over the years I’ve read more books and articles about this event, and the people involved. To me this cross country trip was the legendary beginning of the hippies. Of course I was wrong. Kesey and his Merry Pranksters met the real hippies, like the Grateful Dead, when they got back from the trip and started promoting their acid test events. Hippies already existed in 1964.

The documentary Magic Trip was created around the actual film the Pranksters took while on the trip and it blew my mind again. It was absolutely nothing like I pictured from the Tom Wolfe book. First off, Kesey and the Pranksters didn’t look like hippies – only the women had long hair. And they all looked ordinary – I wouldn’t have named them the Merry Pranksters – that moniker seems way to grand for them. The people in the film looked like college kids from the late 1950s or early 1960s acting really silly. They looked more like early Beach Boys wearing stripe shirts. Their antics looked as sophisticated as old episodes of The Monkees.

In some of the film clips Kesey and the Pranksters are on heavy doses of acid but you couldn’t tell that from what you see. Now I know what they were feeling, I can remember that from those days. Acid is like having a hurricane in your head, but you don’t see that from the outside. What you see is kids being goofy and stupid. Now in the book, Tom Wolfe tries to convey the epic psychological discoveries they were making – things going on in their heads, and the Magic Trip film tries to suggest that too, but the physical evidence of visuals from the film and sound recordings from tape just don’t back it up. Wolfe wrote about what was going on in their heads and we can’t see that in the film.

As evidence of what actually happened I credit the film over Wolfe. But is that fair or even accurate? How much can we judge the truth of an event from what we can see and hear? As counter evidence, how much do people know you from seeing you and hearing you talk? See what I mean? Reality and truth is deceptive.

It’s impossible to convey a psychedelic trip in words – and the clips of the trip festivals at the end of the movie don’t even come close. What you see is kids dancing and acting weird and idiotic – no wonder the silent-majority Americans were freaked out by the freaks. Back then the claim was drugs took you to a state of higher consciousness, but I always felt like they took me to a state of animal consciousness – a lowering. Don’t get me wrong, it’s quite revealing, and you can learn a lot about how the mind functions, but all that talk about higher states was bullshit. But then I value the verbal mind over the nonverbal mind.

In one part of the film, the west coast Merry Pranksters, along with their legendary bus driver Neal Cassidy, famed beat character Dean Moriarty from On the Road, meet up with his fellow real life On the Road beat characters Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Hippies meet their beatnik idols. But things don’t go off well. Jack is morose and turned off by the silly pranksters. Then the west coast psychedelic legends go and meet the east coast prophets of LSD, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Leary is so turned off by them that he runs away and hides and leaves the future Ram Das to deal with them. Leary and Alpert were trying to make LSD a serious tool for studying consciousness and these proto-hippies were abusing acid like teenagers breaking into their parents liquor cabinet. In 1964 most people did not know what to make of these crazy kids.

Seeing Magic Trip was shocking to me. Imagine how disturbing it would be to discover films of Jesus and his merry band of disciples. Christianity has created thousands of different interpretations of the history of Jesus – so imagine if we got to see what Jesus really said and did? Video can be so shocking to see after studying words. We have no idea what Jesus was like or what he said. Everything he supposedly said was recreated decades after the fact. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe is deifying Kesey and his disciples just three years after the real event, and it’s impossible to know how much of the legend is Wolfe and how much is Kesey?

Tom Wolfe had used words to make this trip into an epic adventure, a transcendental experience of the first order. He totally mythologized the people involved – of course the Pranksters were trying to do that themselves even while they were on the trip. They gave each other funny names making themselves into characters on an epic adventure traveling in their legendary bus Further.

Now I don’t mean to suggest that these folks weren’t experiencing eye opening philosophical experiences. They were exploring a new consciousness, breaking out of the rigid 1950s stereotypes, and exploring new experiences that would come to be known as the psychedelic sixties – but it wasn’t new consciousness. Throughout history groups of people have rediscovered the Dionysian joys of intoxication and ecstasy – and wanting to escape from the rigid confines of society. Even in the film Kesey says they were too young to be beatniks and too old to be hippies.

I remember my psychedelic days from over forty years ago, and it pretty much followed the Pranksters. Me and my friends did a lot of silly and stupid things while exploring the doors of perception. I had been inspired by Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley and wanted my trips to be scientific experiments into the mind, but they weren’t. It was just me and my friends doing many of the same exact things the Pranksters did in Magic Trip – going group swimming, driving around in funny vehicles that got a lot of attention, trying to play musical instruments when we had no ability, getting zonked out by nature, admiring the beats, upsetting the older people. Oh, I learned a lot, but I can safely say to kids today, don’t bother, there are much better ways to explore the mind. Read Steven Pinker, Edge.org and learn how to achieve Zen mindfulness.

But does any of this answer the question about how much truth we can attain from words? In terms of acquiring knowledge, words can get you far higher than any amount of acid. Truth and experience are wordless – ineffable. I’ve experienced wordless states of consciousness through drugs and a mini-stroke, and that’s not a normal human state of consciousness. As humans, like it or not, our consciousness minds are based on words and language – and language and words do not mirror reality perfectly. Or even closely. I know there are non-verbal conscious states of mind but the past and future don’t exist in those states. The mere act of trying to recreate the past is a verbal state of consciousness.

The real question is: How close does the nonverbal reality match our verbal reality? I don’t think very much at all. My proof is the fact that we all live in different verbal realities, and even when several people experience the same event they seldom recreate the shared reality with the same words.

A good lesson in understanding this is to study writing creative nonfiction. I took two MFA writing courses with Kristen Iversen dealing with Creative Nonfiction and I learned quite a lot about “telling the truth” with words. It’s actually very hard, if not impossible. One of the first writing lessons she gave our class was to take a memory from when we were young and put it into words. Even here I’m being misleading. I can’t remember the exact assignment. I think she might have told us to pick a memory from when we were twelve, but I’m not sure. What immediately occurred to me to write about was a memory of me staying with my grandmother who maintained an old apartment building on Biscayne Bay in Miami, and the night she gave me an old fishing tackle box left in one of the apartments, and how I went out alone to fish off the concrete wall by the bay. The more I thought about the memory the more details I could dredge up, but eventually I realized I couldn’t be sure of any of the exact details. Memory is so faulty, but they’re also tricky. It’s easy to create false memories. But my final essay was praised in class for its vivid details.

Was the essay absolutely true? No, it wasn’t. But I didn’t feel I was lying either. I had recreated in words what were vague impressions and memories in my mind. Mining those memories took work. There’s a quality of effort in recreating memories that is very enlightening. But still this brings us no closer to explaining the difference between nonfiction, fiction, history and myth.

I have read many nonfiction books on Wyatt Earp. I have seen many documentaries on Wyatt Earp. I have read many fictional stories about Wyatt Earp. I have seen many fictional movies about Wyatt Earp. I have heard many people discuss Wyatt Earp as a legendary mythic character of the old west. Which of these various modes of learning about Wyatt Earp are the best for knowing who the real Wyatt Earp was like? Is Tombstone the movie better than The Last Gunfight the nonfiction book, or Doc, a fictional novel where Wyatt is a prominent character? Or the PBS American Experience episode about Wyatt Earp?

Here’s what I can tell you. It’s only based on personal feelings. Wyatt Earp the man who lived in the nonverbal reality of the 19th century is long gone and unknowable. That kind of reality is unknowable. That’s why it’s called ineffable. I can say some fictional versions of Wyatt Earp vary far from the actual reality of the nonfictional evidence, but can we say the Wyatt we create with historical evidence is actually close the to real flesh and blood Wyatt? Yes, I think we can, even though there are many nonfictional Wyatt Earps to consider. Every account, whether fiction or nonfiction creates a new edition of Wyatt Earp. But I actually doubt we really get that close to the real man – some accounts are just more factual than others.

Scientists like to entertain the idea of multiple universes because there should be an infinity of these other universes allowing endless versions of our own world, many just slightly different. That’s how verbally reconstructed Wyatt Earps exists. There’s an infinity of them. Some of them are close to the real world that did exist, but it’s very hard to judge which are the closest. We can spot the absurd examples easy enough like all the Wyatt Earps in science fiction stories, but we can’t say which historical Wyatt is actually the best.

I think we’re getting closer to understand nonfiction, fiction, history and myth, but we’re not there yet. I am reminded of a book called The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. What Jaynes suggested was for early humanity they had a different state of mind than we do now, which he called the bicameral mind. I don’t want to go into the details of his theory other than to say that in the past we shifted from one kind of consciousness to another. I just want to suggest that as our verbal consciousness evolved, we’re now shifting into a third state of consciousness. This new consciousness is based on sharing facts and building a consensus model of reality based on science.

We’re not that good at it yet – the proof can be seen by how Democrats and Republicans model our political reality. And even conservatives and liberals seldom share the same ideas. But in theory we believe through science and other forms of knowledge, that we can model our complex social reality in political and economic laws, as well as nonfiction, history and even fiction.

In other words, many of us believe given enough facts we could prove to each other the validity of a model of reality. Science has gone the furthest by explaining the physical world. The consensus is very strong with that – there’s very little fiction or myth in science. All other areas of knowledge, like politics, ethics, law, economics are a long way from matching reality with any kind of common agreement. In other words, they are mostly built on fiction and myths.

What I’m saying finally is, we all like to believe that we can separate nonfiction and history from fiction and myths. Whether that’s true or even possible, is still open for scientific evaluation. In other words, if you hold any beliefs other than those covered by a narrow range of scientific study, you can’t be sure if there is any difference between nonfiction, fiction, history and myth.

There is no way to know who Ken Kesey or Wyatt Earp was scientifically, but is there any emerging discipline that could use consensus like science, to measure the accuracy between nonfiction and fiction? Is the scholarship of History rigorous enough to make that claim? Or will all areas of knowledge outside of science always by undermined by subjectivity?

JWH – 12/30/11

The Last Gunfight by Jeff Guinn

The Last Gunfight by Jeff Guinn has a subtitle that perfectly describes the book: “The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral – And How it Changed the American West.” I’ve been reading about Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral for decades, and the story just gets better and better as historians gather more and more data and keep putting the pieces together over and over looking for the historical truth. Jeff Guinn’s book is the best yet, but I also liked Inventing Wyatt Earp by Allen Barra. Both have come a tremendous distance down the trail since Stuart Lake’s Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal in 1931.

Growing up in the 1950s meant watching a lot of westerns on television. Western movies have been around since the earliest days of silent films. The allure of the wild west began in print way before the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 with newspaper stories and dime novels. Stories of the west have always been mythic, and the truth has always been hard to know. We know the wild west through fiction – through the myths. In recent years historians have been examining and writing about those myths and the reality is startlingly different.

Back in the 1950s Wyatt Earp on TV was a squeaky clean good guy. But before the real Wyatt Earp got to Tombstone he had mainly worked in whorehouses, probably as a bouncer, but maybe as investor, and had been arrested a couple of times, including for horse stealing. After the gunfight he killed three men in cold blood, and only one in a gunfight, because he was tired of waiting for the law to catch the killers of his brother. Wyatt Earp essentially got away with murder. Many people also felt the Earps and Doc Holladay murdered the three men at the O.K. Corral. Wyatt Earp had worked for the law, but never as full Marshal or Sheriff, just as a deputy. But this work brought him in contact with criminals that wanted him and his brothers dead, and the Earps killed the cowboys first.

In the myths of television and movie westerns violence is the solution. We like to think the white hat cowboys represent good and the American way of life, and the black hat cowboys represent lawlessness and evil. Jeff Guinn’s book goes beyond those stereotypes to explain things were far more complex. As ambiguous as any complex issue today.

Even as the conflict between the cowboy rustlers around southern Arizona and New Mexico was taking place with the city folk of Tombstone, press reports about the violence was entertaining newspaper readers all over the country. At first the Earps were praised for warring against criminals and maintaining the peace, but after the famous gunfight, when Wyatt went on his famous revenge vendetta ride, the public turned against him too. He became just another killer that society needed to deal with.

Wyatt Earp lived another forty something years and fame dogged him the rest of his life. He wanted to square his story with the public, which is why he worked with Stuart Lake on his autobiography. But Earp died before it was finished, and Lake had to make it into a biography. But because of Earp’s wife Josephine, Lake was forced to clean up the story. Wyatt had already been telling lies for years about his life, and before he died already had his own mythic view of his past ready. People wanted to read about a gunman, but Earp wanted them to believe he was a peace officer and businessman.

Then the movies started coming out and the legend began to grow and Wyatt Earp was turned into one of most famous men in wild west history. He’s even eclipsing Wild Bill Hickok and other men who were more famous at the time. Jeff Guinn explores this in the last chapter of his book. I think it deserve a whole book itself.

The story is complicated. Just read the “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” at Wikipedia. It’s so complicated that it makes for a Rashomon like tale. Jeff Guinn strengthens this story by giving a lot of American history that leads up to why the various principle characters acted the way that they did. Much of the story is political – can’t get far from the Republicans and Democrats today, can we?

Because of television and movies we picture old west towns with one long street, with a sheriff’s office, several saloons, a hotel, a general store, a telegraph office and a livery stable. 1881 Tombstone was far more urban than that. It had two opera houses, a bowling alley, an ice cream store, tennis courts, a stationary story, many hotels, mines, factories, countless bars, countless whorehouses, two newspapers, and lots of businesses, including those that sold the latest fashions for women from the east and Europe. The wild west in 1881 was already becoming what we know as modern – and thus the famous shootout was less about wild west gunslingers and more about of a complicated crime.

Wyatt Earp and his brothers had common law marriages to prostitutes, mainly earned their money from gambling, and Wyatt hoped to make it big by becoming Sheriff who got to keep 10% of the taxes he collected. The Earps were near the bottom of the social/economic heap and hoped to climb up in status by working as lawmen. Unlike the movies, they weren’t famous citizens of their town. Their names got in the papers when they arrested cattle rustlers or arrested drunk and disorderly cowboys, but that wasn’t that often. They were just tough guys hired to deal with more unpleasant tough guys.

We see westerns today where the good guys kill countless bad guys. How many men did Marshal Matt Dillon kill over the course of Gunsmoke? Well Wyatt Earp is the most famous gunfighter in history for being involved in killing six men, but none in quick draw duels. There were damn few gunfight duels like we see on television that you have to study hard to find them. Most gunfights were drunken brawls and cowardly ambushes. Even the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral was not men whipping out six-shooters from their holsters. Wyatt had his pistol in a coat with a specially made pocket for a handgun. I don’t know if any of the men had guns in holsters slung low on the hip like we see in the movies. One man the Earps shot apparently didn’t even have a gun – but they probably didn’t know it since they let another man with out a gun, Ike Clanton, the man they really wanted to kill the most, get out of the way. Something like 30 shots were fired in 30 seconds by six people. More of a close fire fight than a duel.

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral was an insignificant event in America history that’s been elevated into myth and legend. Because the event is at the intersection of history and myth, like stories we find in The Bible, people can’t let them go. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral is like a meme that grows and grows. We can no longer tell reality from myth when it comes to stories about the American wild west, but there is something about these stories that deeply resonate with us. We want to define ourselves and our history by the myths rather than reality.

I predict there will be more movies about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in the future, and with each new generation of films, they will redefine the story again and again. Sometimes the pendulum will swing towards reality and other times towards fantasy. The Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell portrayals glorified Wyatt Earp even though they both tried to be realistic. The new book Doc by Mary Doria Russell tries to de-glorify them, and make them more human, and demystify the violence – but I’m worried she went to far in making them likable. My personal guess is they were both pretty damn unlikable. But the fact is we’ll never know. We can make Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday into whatever we want – and will, time and again in the movies and books.

JWH – 12/28/11

History versus Historical Fiction

I just finished listening to a new novel by Emma Bull called Territory. It’s a historical fantasy novel that takes place in Tombstone, Arizona during the legendary year of 1881. Now I have read many non-fiction books about Wyatt Earp, read many fictional accounts, and I have seen most of the major film stories about Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the O.K. corral. Territory was entertaining enough that I wanted to stay plugged into my iPod every free moment last week. Part of this is due to my love of the Tombstone myth, and part due to a good story with good characters. The narrators were excellent.

Emma Bull seems to know most of the essential facts and speculation about the famous event, and she invents new theories about the how and why of the known facts, especially about the stagecoach holdup on March 15, 1881. What she does different is add fantasy elements to the story, and I don’t mean she makes up false accusations, but adds fantasy, as in magic, to the storyline. I love fictional accounts of real people, and I love a good fantasy story that uses famous people for characters, like Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld stories, which featured Mark Twain (Sam Clemens) and Sir Richard Burton. In Riverworld there was no attempt to recreate an actual historical event, whereas Territory does build a plot around “true” events, so in that regards it attempts to be realistic.

Emma Bull stays on the periphery of the most famous characters, dealing more with the Earp wives and Big Nose Kate, than with the Wyatt Earp & brothers, except for Doc Holliday, who is one of three point-of-view characters. The other two are fictional POV characters, Jesse Fox and Mrs. Mildred Benjamin. I think this was a good choice – too many of the Tombstone stories follow the Earps, and seeing history from the sidelines is a good vantage point.

Now I don’t know about the magic element. I suppose if you’re a fantasy writer you always feel compelled to throw fantasy elements into your writing recipe, but this story could stand strong and tall without magic. In fact, I think with more history and less fantasy it would have been a better novel of any type. Obviously, Ms. Bull mined Tombstone’s history for rich historical ore and found plenty to refine. Her addition of magic creates a non-historical plot thread but that hole in history is also later plugged by the same magic.

There are two types of historical novels – the authentic and the romantic. Now the romantic historical novel can be very realistic to its time, but it’s ultimate goal is to tell a fun story, often with made-up characters. Of course, the authentic historical novel seeks to recreate everything as realistic as possible, matching all known facts, and often focuses on real people from the past. Both are fantasies in essence, because non-fiction history is a kind of fantasy too. Even our own personal memories are fantasies. I think when science fiction readers got tired of space opera, many genre writers turned to fantasy, and in recent times, turned to blending historical fiction with science fiction and fantasy. Readers and movie fans often love a good costume drama, so I think this type of story is growing in popularity.

Territory is a lightweight romantic historical fantasy that entertains with quite a few good facts. Readers unfamiliar with the Tombstone myths of 1881 can still follow the story, but I’m not sure if they can really enjoy it like it should be read. Tombstone of 1881 was about law and order, Republicans versus Democrats, American West mythology, guns versus gun control, survival of the fittest, greed, revenge, murder, love, redemption, and every element of a great story. Shakespeare would have loved the material, and could have written a play more complex than Hamlet with the famous ambiguous characters of Tombstone. That’s why the story gets filmed so much and used for background for novels.

The most interesting speculation Emma Bull conjures regards the stage holdup and its motivation on Wyatt Earp for later events. Most of the glamorous stories about Wyatt Earp make him into a frontier hero, but if you dig deep you know that he was involved on both sides of the law. I wished that Emma Bull had jettisoned the fantasy elements to make more room for the story to be an authentic historical novel because she showed a lot of talent for that, and I also wish she had even added fifty-percent more to her word count. I think having Mildred Benjamin be a typesetter and cub reporter was enough of a fantasy element for this story. Her current approach to this classic western is what I would call Deadwood PG.

Overall, I enjoyed this story, but ended up wanting more. Of course, the additional words I want might bore the average reader, because I’d like to see a lot more history and facts painted into the story. Really great authentic historical fiction makes the reader feel like they are walking through the past. Every significant detail adds to the beauty of the work, and you feel like you are learning from first-hand experience. What really sets off the feeling of reality is the voice of the characters and narrator. Ms. Bull throws in quite a few archaic words and phrases from the time, but her characters have the tainted feel of the modern mind. It’s never obvious, but I kept asking myself would a person from 1881 think or say that.

Authentic voice is very hard to pull off. One way to test modern historical fiction for voice is to compare it to works of fiction written from the time period, but to go even deeper, you have to compare the modern sound to letters and diaries of the time. It’s not just the period vocabulary, but the popular phrases, topics of interests, the pop culture of the time, common philosophical opinions and so on. Territory doesn’t go very deep in this regard.

Unfortunately, there is no Pride and Prejudice or Sister Carrie quality novel written by someone who lived during the time in the old west. About the closest thing we have is Roughing It by Mark Twain, written about ten years earlier about his 1861-1867 trip out west seeking his fortune in a Nevada silver mining camp. Of course, this might be like learning about contemporary France from the essays of David Sedaris. Another source is Isabella Bird, who traveled through the Rocky Mountains in 1873 and wrote about her adventures in A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.

The true western novel didn’t evolved until well after the west was tamed, and in many ways western fiction is often more fantasy fiction than historical fiction. If you really want to know about Tombstone you need to read non-fiction books like Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends by Allen Barra. The trouble is, reading one book is like eating one chocolate chip cookie. That’s the thing about history and historical fiction – you run the chance of getting bit by the what-really-happened bug. Emma Bull takes a particularly strange photo of Wyatt Earp that shows a sinister evil side. If you read wide enough you’ll find Wyatt Earp detractors who will back this view, but is it the correct take? You’ll have to read about six history books to get a decent idea.

Jim