00:00:00:21 – 00:00:14:17
Dan LeFebvre
Before we talk about some of the details in the movie, let’s take a step back and look at the movie overall. So if you were to give Young Guns II a letter grade for its historical accuracy, what would it get?

00:00:14:20 – 00:00:39:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I think I’d probably go with C+. It’s not the most historically accurate movie ever made. It is probably more accurate than a lot of the other Billy the Kid movies, and I think they really, like, captured the essence of Billy the Kid is personality, just kind of the way he was. This is mischievousness, I guess. So for that alone, I’m going to give it a c-plus.

00:00:39:26 – 00:00:53:13
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah, that’s pretty good. Especially being a sequel as well. Sometimes that well, well throw because they’re kind of tied to the inaccuracies of the first movie and then yeah, tying ins. I’ve had that be an issue before too. So I see plus it’s not bad actually.

00:00:53:15 – 00:01:12:27
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And it’s one of the better sequels that have ever been made. You know, a lot of times the sequels are pretty lackluster. The young guns, too, definitely lived up to the, the legacy of Young Guns one. So and I grew up with these movies, man. I used to play Young Guns at recess in, elementary school. So I was all about young guns.

00:01:12:29 – 00:01:17:19
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Yeah. Nice. I’m sure that helped influence what you’re doing now.

00:01:17:21 – 00:01:39:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s a few works of art, I guess that definitely. If it wasn’t for. If it wasn’t for the book Lonesome Dove, and if it wasn’t for Young Guns one and two, I probably would not be doing this podcast. It really instilled in me just a love of history in general. All was history. And with young guns.

00:01:39:09 – 00:01:52:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Billy the Kid, man, he he’s just the guy I keep going back to out of everybody I cover on my show. All the mountain men and gunfighters and outlaws. Billy the Kid is just the guy I keep coming back to.

00:01:52:23 – 00:02:07:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we go back to the movie at the very beginning, a Young Guns two were introduced to an older man going by the name of Brushy Bill Roberts, and he claims to be Billy the Kid. And he’s proving his claims by telling the story to a lawyer. And that story is basically the plot of the entire movie.

00:02:07:03 – 00:02:26:26
Dan LeFebvre
So we’ll be talking about that throughout just our discussion today. And then, of course, we’ll circle back to Brushy Bill himself when we see him at the end of the movie. But one of the most common things for movies to do is to just make up characters. So for those of us who have only seen the movie, is it true that there was someone named Brushy Bill who claimed to be Billy the Kid?

00:02:26:29 – 00:02:48:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yes, that is absolutely true. Brushy Bill Roberts, his real name was Oliver Roberts, but he did come forward in the 1940s claiming to be Billy the Kid. And he wanted that pardon? Just like he says in the movie at the beginning. The main difference I would say the movie, it looks like they filmed it at White Sands, New Mexico.

00:02:48:14 – 00:02:58:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’m not entirely sure about that, but that’s what it looks like to me. That’s not how the meeting went down. It actually occurred at Roche’s house in Hiko, Texas. Okay.

00:02:58:13 – 00:03:03:02
Dan LeFebvre
Other than that, yeah, it was kind of a weird location just in the middle of the desert. Yeah, the side of the road.

00:03:03:04 – 00:03:17:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I guess it they they were kind of going for the effect of, you know, he was still, a wanted outlaw, just a desperado living in the desert. But now, at that point in time, Brushy Bill Roberts was definitely living in just a normal Texas town.

00:03:17:18 – 00:03:35:29
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, interesting. Yeah. Well, we’ll circle back to him, but, if we go back to the 1800 storyline in the movie, we get introduced to some other characters as the members of Billy the Kid’s gang. So, I’ll list off the four who I consider the four main characters. Feel free to add more if you’d like, but there’s Doc Scurlock.

00:03:35:29 – 00:03:55:07
Dan LeFebvre
He’s played by Kiefer Sutherland, Arkansas, Dave Ruta by who’s played by Christian Slater, Chavez Chavez, played by Lou Diamond Phillips. And then someone that, is pretty popular. Pat Garrett, another one of those popular ones, he’s played by William Petersen. Were those characters based on real people who rode with Billy the Kid?

00:03:55:09 – 00:04:21:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yes, with a couple of asterisks. So Pat Garrett never actually rode with Billy the Kid as far as outlaw activities or anything like that, that’s they they really kind of strayed from the truth in that aspect. In the movie, Pat Garrett and Billy were friends. Pat. Pat was a buffalo hunter in Texas. He moved to New Mexico. I’m not exactly sure of the exact year.

00:04:21:15 – 00:04:41:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And he settled down, at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and he just ran different businesses. He had, he was a bartender for a little while. He had, like, a butcher shop for a while, and he and Billy would hang out whenever they were together. They would gamble together. They would dance with the senior items, all that stuff.

00:04:41:19 – 00:05:09:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
We we can kind of circle back to how close their friendship was later on. But yeah, Pat Garrett absolutely was a real person. He he was involved in Billy the Kid’s life, but there’s really not much evidence that he participated in outlaw activities. Now, everybody stole horses back in those days. Everybody stole a few cows. Every now and then, even the most respectable of people, you know, had a few stolen, some stolen livestock in the past.

00:05:09:15 – 00:05:33:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There are allegations that Garrett was selling stolen livestock out of his butcher shop. He himself may have gone and rounded up a few had here and there. I wouldn’t doubt it. But as far as him going out and, you know, killing bounty hunters with Billy the Kid or, just basically doing any illegal activities with Billy other than maybe possibly buying and selling stolen livestock.

00:05:33:06 – 00:05:59:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There’s really no indication as far as, the others docs Gerlach and Jose Chavez each others, those are both real life people. They were more involved in Billy’s life. If anybody’s ever seen Young Guns part one, where they basically cover the Lincoln County War, that’s when Scurlock and Chavez were riding with Billy the Kid. They were. They were Lincoln County regulators.

00:06:00:01 – 00:06:24:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
After the Lincoln County War, they kind of drifted apart. Chavez stayed down in Lincoln County for a while. He would end up going to prison later on. Doc Scurlock, he would settle up at Fort Sumner. So he and Billy still remain close. But doc started distancing himself. By the time the events unfold that we see in Young Guns, too, Doc Scurlock was already living in Texas.

00:06:24:28 – 00:06:49:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You left the whole thing behind. He got buried, he settled down, became an honest man. Dave Rude, a bore also very real person. He was never known as Arkansas Dave, though historically, I’m not really sure where that nickname comes from. There are stories that I’ve been unable to corroborate that he may have stolen cattle in Arkansas years prior.

00:06:49:16 – 00:07:08:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I actually reached out to John Fusco. This was a few months ago. John John Fusco was the guy who wrote and directed Young Guns one and two. He’s done a lot of great movies, and I thought maybe he had a source on that that I wasn’t familiar with. So I reached out like, hey, man, where did you find this information about him being called Arkansas?

00:07:08:09 – 00:07:31:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Dave, is that something you just made up? According to him, he could be completely pulling my chain, but he says he just made it up. He said it sounded you had a better ring to it than dirty. Dirty Dave. Rude about what he was actually known as, believe it or not. So I guess Arkansas Dave sounds cooler than Dirty Dave, but, any even that dirt, even that Dirty Dave nickname I.

00:07:31:06 – 00:07:47:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I may be mistaken here, but I believe it only comes from one source. At one point, Dave was arrested and taken to Las Vegas, New Mexico. And, there was a journalist there. A local paper published an article saying that he was wearing the same clothes that he had been wearing the last time he was in Vegas.

00:07:48:00 – 00:08:06:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So I guess that’s where the dirty thing comes from, whether or not he was unhygienic, I honestly don’t have any idea. But, yeah, he was the real deal. He was really more of an accomplished outlaw than any of these guys. He was a few years older than Billy the Kid. He had, he had been, caught robbing a train in Kansas.

00:08:06:05 – 00:08:27:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He spent time, like I said, in Las Vegas, New Mexico, sort of as a crooked lawman. And he eventually, participated in the killing of a jailer. So by the time him and Billy link up, Dave was wanted for murder. But, yeah, all these guys were real. The other two members of the gang that are that you see in Young Guns, too.

00:08:27:00 – 00:08:45:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You got Tom Foley or. Oh, weird. Depending on which version of his last name you want to go with. He too was a real life person. He wasn’t a 14 year old kid like they show in the movie, but he was real. He was a member of Billy’s gang. The other guy you see, Henry French, he’s sort of a composite character.

00:08:45:14 – 00:08:54:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There was a real guy named, Henry Newton French that Billy rode with.

00:08:54:20 – 00:09:18:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They I guess they just kind of made, like, a composite character out of a few different people. But in all reality, in the events that we see in Young Guns to Billy, the kids main core group was Dave Root of Ball, Tom folly, and two other guys named Billy Wilson and Tom Pickett. Those seem to be his main outlaw buddies at that time.

00:09:18:28 – 00:09:45:21
Dan LeFebvre
Maybe it’s just me, but when you have a nickname like Arkansas Dave, I assume that either he’s from Arkansas or he made a name in Arkansas before joining Billy the Kid. And I guess throughout the movie, he’s also kind of trying to he, he’s trying to be the one that everybody knows who he is. So I’m was just assuming that he made a name for himself in Arkansas somewhere as a, as an outlaw beforehand or something.

00:09:45:24 – 00:10:06:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And, you know, Dave was Dave got around, man. Dave. Dave knew he rub shoulders with a lot of famous people from the Old West, like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday. He knew all those guys. So, I, how, you know, I’ve heard people say that Ruta Ball was the only man that Billy the Kid feared.

00:10:06:25 – 00:10:30:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I don’t know if that’s true, but like I said a minute ago, he was a few years older than Billy, so I’m not sure how much of it was just him. Just straight up taking orders from a 19 year old rather than them just working together, you know what I mean? But yeah, he’s a really interesting guy. If anybody’s interested in learning more about him, I, I do have a full episode just on Dave Root about.

00:10:30:26 – 00:10:47:03
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, awesome. Yeah, I’ll make sure to add a link to that in the show notes so people can check that out. If we go back to the movie, New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace convinces Billy the Kid to testify against the Murph and Dolly faction who murdered, Murphy Dolan, I should say faction who murdered John Tunstall in exchange for a pardon.

00:10:47:03 – 00:11:06:18
Dan LeFebvre
That was kind of the context of the first movie, but then. So Billy the Kid and this one, young guns to Billy the Kid agrees and allows Wallace to arrest him so Wallace can protect Billy from anyone who wants to kill him before he can testify. But then Billy’s double crossed when the prosecuting attorney sides with the Irish politicians running Lincoln County.

00:11:06:26 – 00:11:29:14
Dan LeFebvre
Instead of going along with the pardon, he intends on taking Billy to trial, where he will surely be hanged. And while the movie doesn’t really mention it here, the impression that I got was this is the pardon that the older Brushy Bill mentioned wanting at the beginning of the movie. Is there any truth to the movie’s storyline around the pardon for Billy the Kid being offered?

00:11:29:16 – 00:11:51:25
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yes, that that’s also based on a true story. Billy was offered a pardon from Gov Jim. Governor Lew Wallace a little bit different. What they show in the movie, Billy actually reached out to him, as opposed to Wallace reaching out to Billy the Kid at that time, mostly due to the Lincoln County War, that area was in complete disarray.

00:11:51:25 – 00:12:17:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Like matter of fact, whenever Lew Wallace was, was made governor right around the same time, then president it was Rutherford because he, gosh, what do they call it when you you martial law. What did he something martial law. Anyway, he he, Gosh, I’m I’m blanking on the word. He imposed martial law on Lincoln County.

00:12:18:00 – 00:12:37:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I mean, there was a there was a lot of outlaw tivity going on at that time, a lot of lawlessness. But also at the same time, Governor Lew Wallace sort of issued a blanket amnesty for people on both sides, as long as they didn’t have any active indictments against them, which that didn’t apply to Billy. He was wanted for murder.

00:12:37:09 – 00:13:00:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So were several of his close friends. So I guess he wanted in on a little bit of that amnesty action. So that’s why he reached out to the governor. They did meet in Lincoln like they show in the movie. They met in secrecy. They sort of hammered out the details and yeah, Billy left that meeting convinced that he was going to receive a pardon, and he agreed to testify.

00:13:00:19 – 00:13:24:14
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, I guess it’s that’s why they call it the Wild West, right? I mean, just, you know, everybody’s got some sort of crime that they’ve done, like you’re talking about before. So I don’t know what what what was just the general public opinion of these pardons being offered, like because Billy the Kid at that point was he, well, like a well known outlaw that then offering a pardon to him would have affected.

00:13:24:20 – 00:13:37:02
Dan LeFebvre
I’m trying to think of, you know, politicians today offering a pardon and the public reaction to who they offer the pardon to. Was that kind of a thing back then, too, or is is am I projecting today’s, politics back then?

00:13:37:05 – 00:14:03:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You know, I’m not sure how that applied to, at the at the time frame when Billy and Governor Wallace agreed on the pardon, I’m not really sure what the public sentiment was. Billy was nowhere near as famous in his lifetime as he is nowadays. I mean, a lot of these famous figures from the Old West, their fame comes from bestselling novels and movies that followed the books later on.

00:14:03:07 – 00:14:35:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He wasn’t a he was notorious. He was well known in, in that area of New Mexico, certainly. And as his fame grew, you know, he would be reported on papers as far away as New York City or even Paris, France, you know, but he wasn’t necessarily a household name, I can tell you that. Spoiler alert, when he when he was killed later on, there were so many grateful people that the guy that killed him ended up receiving several thousand dollars just in donations, just from people that were glad to be rid of Billy the Kid.

00:14:35:01 – 00:15:01:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So as far as the public sentiment, you know, I’m not entirely sure that the public was aware that he was being offered a pardon. That’s another thing. There’s there’s not really any anything written down in black and white saying Lew Wallace absolutely guaranteed ability to get a pardon. It was more of an agreement. You know, there’s some people that think maybe the Billy read more into Wallace’s words than he should have.

00:15:01:21 – 00:15:11:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Maybe he put a little bit too much faith into Wallace. But as far as I’m aware, this was not excuse me, this was not a known thing that was just reported on the newspapers.

00:15:11:21 – 00:15:14:06
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, okay. More of an under the table type.

00:15:14:09 – 00:15:26:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Right. And, you know, when they arrested Billy, they had to stage an arrest so that they he didn’t just, you know, walk in one day, they arrest me. They had to stage an arrest to make it look legit.

00:15:26:18 – 00:15:37:05
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. The movie kind of alludes to that. I don’t remember actually seeing it happen in the movie, but it alludes to, oh, we gotta stage this to put on the appearance that we’ve actually caught you. Yeah.

00:15:37:07 – 00:15:39:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Right. Right. Yep.

00:15:39:04 – 00:15:58:24
Dan LeFebvre
Well, after he realizes in the movie, after he realizes he’s not going to get the pardon, Billy slips out of his handcuffs. Thanks to, as the movie puts it, a historical and biological fact that he had small hands and big wrists. Then he proceeds to escape and comes back, pretending to be part of a lynch mob. He there they have faces covered.

00:15:58:26 – 00:16:15:04
Dan LeFebvre
Law enforcement just hands over Doc and Chavez, assuming that they’re going to get killed by this lynch mob. But then, of course, the real vigilantes show up and there’s a huge shootout before Billy and his gang can escape. Did this escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse really happening the way that we see in the movie?

00:16:15:07 – 00:16:37:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Absolutely not. You know, it was nothing like that. Billy was not in chains. He was not locked behind bars. He was basically under voluntary house arrest during that period. So there are kernels of truth in there. You know, they show everybody being thrown into like a pit in the ground. That was a real thing. There was a pit jail in Lincoln, New Mexico.

00:16:38:01 – 00:16:59:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I a matter of fact, Billy had been thrown in that pit, back at the very beginning of the Lincoln County War. So he had actually spent time in there. I may I may not be, I’m not exactly sure about this, but by the time he comes back to Lincoln, I think they may have had an actual jail at that point, but, no, there was no gunfight with a lynch mob.

00:16:59:21 – 00:17:23:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Nothing like that. Billy stuck around, and, you know, they gloss over a few things. Billy did testify in real life. He, he testified in quite a few trials against a lot of his old enemies. And, he spent. Man, I want to say 2 to 3 months there in Lincoln, basically under a voluntary house arrest. And once he figured out that pardon wasn’t coming, he just got on a horse and rode out.

00:17:23:12 – 00:17:27:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That was it. No gunfight, no dramatics, nothing like that.

00:17:27:11 – 00:17:33:21
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, okay. Well, that wouldn’t be as fun in the movie.

00:17:33:24 – 00:17:55:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Oh, yeah, I know, I know, you know, one thing you touched on was the big wrist and tiny hands. I’ve never I’ve always struggled with this because I’ve never seen anybody with wrists bigger than their hands, you know what I mean? But it is an undeniable fact that Billy was able to slip out of his chains on multiple occasions.

00:17:55:11 – 00:18:06:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was able to slide out of them. So he may have had abnormally tiny hands. I really don’t know. But that is a true fact. In this instance, though, he was he was not shackled or in chains or anything like that.

00:18:07:00 – 00:18:28:10
Dan LeFebvre
I touched on it briefly too, but the movie does make a point to say that there’s one thing an outlaw feared in New Mexico Territory, and that’s lynch mob justice. And that to me, as I was watching the movie, it implied that they didn’t necessarily fear law enforcement, though. So is it true that outlaws in the Old West feared vigilantes wanting to lynch them rather than actual law enforcement?

00:18:28:13 – 00:18:53:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah, they feared both. So vigilante justice was a very real problem in the Old West, particularly in places like around that area of Lincoln, New Mexico. And part of it came from the law enforcement officials themselves being just as corrupt as the outlaws. So a lot of times they would just arrest their enemies as opposed to the people that were really committing the crimes.

00:18:53:03 – 00:19:20:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So on one hand, you had sheriffs and town marshals that weren’t doing anything about the crime. So the only recourse for justice in a lot of situations were these lynch mobs. And at the same time, if you were arrested, you know, I’ve covered a lot of these guys, man. So many times, I can tell you there would be is the stone cold killer like John Wesley Hardin or King Fisher Clay Allison, and they would gun somebody down in cold blood.

00:19:21:00 – 00:19:43:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They would make it to trial and they would get off, and they would just get off with a plea of self-defense or something like that. Nine times out of ten, if you made it to trial without being lynched by vigilantes, you would just get off scot free. So that was another reason why the vigilantes were so prevalent. They knew, if you know, this guy actually goes before a judge, he’s just going to get a slap on the wrist.

00:19:43:04 – 00:20:05:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And most so if we want justice be served, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. Unfortunately, that meant a lot of innocent people also got lynched. No due process, you know, no, jury of your peers or anything like that. So it was not a good situation. Billy would have definitely been afraid of mob justice. He knew all about mob justice.

00:20:05:22 – 00:20:26:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
In fact, I mentioned a moment ago they had a staged arrest. He was very particular in who he was going to allow to arrest him. And he was basically worried that if the wrong people arrested him, air quotes, then he would get shot in the back while once again attempting to escape. You know, and you know him and his buddies.

00:20:26:21 – 00:20:51:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They did the same thing during the Lincoln County War. They murdered a couple of guys who they claimed later on were attempting to escape. More than likely, it was just an execution. He knew the same thing happening to him would be a very real possibility, but if it was a legitimate if it was like a legitimate sheriff that arrested him, that was half ass honest, he would have been all right.

00:20:51:00 – 00:21:01:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He just didn’t want any of his enemies to. A lot of his enemies also wore badges because they would have killed him in a heartbeat. No doubt about it.

00:21:01:11 – 00:21:09:15
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, it sounds like the justice system wasn’t really great back then and then serving justice.

00:21:09:18 – 00:21:28:10
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You. Well, you know, I, I, I’ve thought about that before. I was you know, it almost seems like they aired on the side of justice, almost like, okay, we’re not going to convict this person unless we know without a shadow of a doubt that they’re they’re guilty, right. So a lot of times I think people think of Old West justice like it was very harsh.

00:21:28:13 – 00:21:38:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You get caught stealing a horse and you’re going to be executed. Nah, they would just send them to jail for a little bit or let them go. If a lynch mob didn’t get them, they were just fine.

00:21:38:29 – 00:21:56:21
Dan LeFebvre
So then is it maybe that they did? It just wasn’t proof. I mean, everybody didn’t have phones and be able to take pictures and video and stuff like that. So it’s pretty much it sounds like a lot of he said, she said type, evidence. And so if it’s really hard to prove, then they could get away with it.

00:21:56:23 – 00:22:15:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah. I mean, if you if you get in a gunfight with somebody in a saloon and enough of your buddies are willing to say that the other person drew first, you’re fine, you’re going to get by with it. And that’s that’s what I’ve seen happen time and time again with a lot of these guys. They just had really good lawyers and, some pretty good friends to testify under oath.

00:22:15:04 – 00:22:32:24
Dan LeFebvre
If you go back to the movie after escaping, Billy and his gang plan to go to Old Mexico. But they need some money first. So they go to the richest man in New Mexico Territory, John Chisum. And the movie sets it up that John Chisholm was the financial partner for Tunstall and McSween, which makes him a friend of Billy the Kid.

00:22:32:26 – 00:22:52:02
Dan LeFebvre
But once Billy gets there, he demands $500 and Chisum refuses to pay. So instead Billy kills a couple of Chisholm’s men, and that basically turns Chisolm into an enemy. So then Chisum decides to use his money to finance the hunting of Billy the Kid. Was that really how Billy the Kid turned John Chisholm against him?

00:22:52:05 – 00:23:15:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yes or no? He didn’t kill his men like they show in the movie. He did try to basically extort money from Chisholm. That much is true. Chisholm refused to pay, at which point Billy started stealing cattle from him. Now, was Billy already stealing cattle from him? Probably. Would he have stolen cattle even if Chisum had paid him the money?

00:23:15:20 – 00:23:36:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Probably. Billy. Billy was a thief, man. He stole horses and he stole cattle. That’s what he did. You know, Billy the Kid never robbed a train. He never held up a stagecoach. He never, robbed a bank. Nothing like that. He was just a cattle thief and a horse. The. A lot of people at that time were stealing Mr. Chisholm’s cattle.

00:23:36:20 – 00:23:54:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
A lot of people, Billy got the brunt of the blame, though he was the more well known of the people that were out there robbing with both hands. And even there were even certain killings that he was not involved in, that he was blamed for. And then that kind of leads back into what we were talking about earlier.

00:23:54:17 – 00:24:17:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
As far as his notoriety goes, as his fame grew, he just got blamed for pretty much everything that occurred in New Mexico Territory at that time. But yeah, as soon as he started stealing cattle from Chisum, that’s when Chisum and there was actually another guy named. Well, we’ll get to him in a minute named Joseph Lila. And they were both a let me correct that.

00:24:17:22 – 00:24:39:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’m not entirely sure I’m saying his last name correctly, Joseph Lee or Joseph Lee. But, they were both really fed up with Billy the Kid just stealing from everybody. And, but yeah, it was primarily the stealing of Chisholm’s livestock that turned him against Billy the Kid. Now, there is another story. It’s a little bit apocryphal.

00:24:39:26 – 00:25:03:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Supposedly, John Tunstall, not John Tunstall. John Chisum showed up at, Fort Sumner one day in the saloon there, in the cantina, and Billy held him pistol, gunpoint and basically demanded, I want $500 right now. Chisum said, hey, I don’t have my checkbook on me. I don’t have any money on me. Let me go back to my ranch and I’ll send you a check in the mail.

00:25:03:26 – 00:25:23:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Basically. Billy ended up. Let him go. Now, whether or not that actually happened, I don’t know. Doesn’t sound like something that Chisum would agree to. I think Chisum would have probably told him to go to hell, but the source on that is a guy named Paco. Ennio who? Who did know Billy the Kid. But, you know, sometimes Paco, like, stretched the truth.

00:25:23:17 – 00:25:30:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
A little bit. But yeah, as far as the animosity between Billy and, Chisum, that was absolutely true.

00:25:30:21 – 00:25:49:03
Dan LeFebvre
Were they ever allies then? Because when they ride in the movie, when they ride up to Chisum, it gives the impression that, in the events of the first movie, the first young guns that Chisum was an ally of, of Tunstall and McSweeney. So perhaps he and Billy were friends at one point. That’s the impression I got from the movie.

00:25:49:03 – 00:26:07:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
At least they probably weren’t friends just because at that time frame, when the Lincoln County War was going on, Billy would have been 17 or 18. Chisum was, you know, a middle aged man by that point, he probably didn’t even know about Billy the Kid during the Lincoln County War, but he would have certainly known about him at this point.

00:26:07:21 – 00:26:30:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And, yeah, Chisum was somewhat aligned with, Billy’s former boss, Tunstall and Tunstall’s partner, Alexander McSween. Chisum really didn’t take part in that conflict, though. But he was he was sort of, you know, the the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Basically, Chisum was kind of opposed to the same people that Tunstall and McSween were opposed to.

00:26:30:28 – 00:26:45:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
But as far as any as far as Billy’s claims that Chisum owed him money, I think he like I said, he was basically just trying to extort some money from him, which he would have stolen from him anyway. I’m 100% positive of that.

00:26:45:07 – 00:26:48:28
Dan LeFebvre
And, I mean, it sounds like. Yeah, stealing cattle was a thing.

00:26:49:00 – 00:27:08:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah. Oh, yeah. And Chisum stole cattle. Everybody back in those days was a it was a livestock thief. Chisum used to, send his men over to the Mescalero Apache reservation and steal their livestock because he knew they couldn’t do anything about it. No, he’s not exactly, you know, the purest of souls either.

00:27:08:07 – 00:27:30:29
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Okay. I guess, do unto others as you would have done unto you. And he’s. He. It’s happening. It’s happening, is happening. Well, you might have already, answered this some, but if we go back to the movies, versions of events, at this point, John Chisum decides to hire a thief to catch a thief. So then throughout the movie, we get Pat Garrett going from being friend and riding with Billy the Kid to wanting to settle down.

00:27:31:01 – 00:27:52:23
Dan LeFebvre
And Chisum hears about this and offers Garrett the chance to settle down by making him Sheriff Pat Garrett, giving him $500 cash up front, the men and resources to hunt down Billy the Kid, and then a guarantee of $500 cash. Once Garrett kills Billy and if were to believe the movie’s version of events, Garrett accepts the job offer and the hunt for Billy the Kid begins.

00:27:52:25 – 00:28:03:10
Dan LeFebvre
Does the movie accurately portray this swing in Garrett’s character arc, going from being Billy’s friend to then being hired by Chisum as the sheriff to kill him?

00:28:03:12 – 00:28:23:13
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Well, you know, there’s, there’s a several different caveats there. You know, Chisum had no authority to make anybody a sheriff. So really, all all he did was convince Pat Garrett to run for sheriff. He still had to be elected and all that stuff. He still had to go out on the campaign trail. Excuse me. What happened?

00:28:23:20 – 00:28:49:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Garrett got married. I want to say it was in January of 1880. Not long thereafter, he moved, to Roswell, New Mexico, which at that point was part of Lincoln County. Back in those days, Lincoln County was massive. It was it was way bigger than it is nowadays. So Roswell, New Mexico was still Lincoln County, while he was there in Lincoln, he gets buddy buddy with John Chisum and the guy I mentioned earlier, Joseph Leia.

00:28:49:07 – 00:29:15:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And they basically convinced him to run for sheriff. I don’t know where they got the $500 up front and $500 after. I don’t believe that either one of those guys paid Garrett anything to run. You know, he Garrett wanted to become a respectable man. You know, that was, a big goal of his. You. He had spent a lot of time at Fort Sumner, sort of cavorting with people that maybe had a little bit of loose morals.

00:29:15:18 – 00:29:36:27
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was a married man. Now he was going to raise a family. He wanted to make a name for himself. And, yeah, they convinced him to run for sheriff. I don’t think they there was any money exchanged. Later on, Billy would have a $500 bounty placed on its head. Maybe that’s where they’re basing it from. But that bounty was never from Chisum or, Joseph.

00:29:36:27 – 00:29:41:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Leia. That was actually offered by, the Wallace, the governor.

00:29:41:08 – 00:29:59:22
Dan LeFebvre
In the movie. The impression I got was that Chisum convinced Garrett to to be sheriff, specifically to hunt for Billy the Kid. Was that basically the reason why he became sheriff then? To hunt for Billy? Or was it more that he became sheriff and then. Well, now there’s this this outlaw, and that’s that’s your job?

00:29:59:24 – 00:30:24:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
No. Yeah, that was his problem. You’re all right about that. That was his primary reason for running for sheriff. That’s why they wanted him to run for sheriff. And you know, part of it, like you say, it takes a thief to catch a thief. While there’s not necessarily in any indication that Garrett and Billy had rode the hoot off trail together, anything like that, he was still very familiar with Billy’s mannerisms, with Billy’s various hideouts, with his habits.

00:30:24:27 – 00:30:48:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So he was intimately aware of Billy the Kid. Now, as far as their friendship is concerned, this is something that historians still debate about all the time. There’s some people that try to downplay it and say they were. They were just acquaintances, you know, there’s other people that go with, basically the same route they went in the movie that they were just the best of friends, almost like brothers.

00:30:48:26 – 00:31:13:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. If, Paulina Maxwell, she was, one of Billy the Kids gal pals. If what she said is any indication, they were extremely tight. They were very good friends. But that friendship doesn’t really seem to have extended outside of Fort Sumner now. Paul Lita would later, decades later, she would say that when they found out that Garrett was running for sheriff, it came as a big shock to them.

00:31:13:24 – 00:31:27:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Like they didn’t think he would turn on on his friends like that. And, that’s basically that basically severed their friendship from that point on. You know, if they came face to face, there was probably going to be some violence.

00:31:27:05 – 00:31:32:12
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. So it wasn’t like Garrett ran with Billy the Kid, though, like we see happening in the beginning of the movie.

00:31:32:14 – 00:31:57:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
If anybody can find any historical evidence showing this might. I’m all eyes and ears, but I have never been able to find any indication that they did outlaw activities together. Now, when Garrett won, the matter of fact, Billy actually campaigned against him during the during the election, he would travel out. Yeah, he would travel out to, like, the, local Hispanic communities and tell them, hey, don’t vote for this joker.

00:31:57:19 – 00:32:11:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Won enough. Garrett had the backing not just of Chisholm and Leah, but he had, his cronies up in Santa Fe, the Santa Fe ring. They were back in his play. Now, interestingly enough.

00:32:11:23 – 00:32:34:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You know, it was just like, nowadays you can win an election, but you’re still not going to take hold of that office until the following year, right? So if you’re elected in November, you’re not going to take office until January. February. It was the same thing with Pat Garrett. However, the guy who was the sheriff, the incumbent, the guy that he beat in the election, he was a he basically went ahead and deputized Garrett and in step back.

00:32:34:16 – 00:32:56:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So for all intents and purposes, Garrett was sheriff in just he was basically sheriff at that point as soon as he won the election, he may not have been sheriff in name, but he was a deputy with the power of the the Lincoln County sheriff. He also received a commission as a deputy US marshal is Fort Sumner where Billy the Kid like to spend time?

00:32:56:02 – 00:33:05:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That was not in Lincoln County. So even a sheriff, he would not have jurisdiction up there. But with that marshal’s badge, now you can go in anywhere.

00:33:05:07 – 00:33:17:20
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, ink. So maybe maybe that’s kind of in the movie because they hand him the badge right away. So maybe that was kind of a nod to that of, pretty much becoming a sheriff. Right away. It sounds like, even if it’s not official by title, but.

00:33:17:22 – 00:33:28:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And he did I mean, as soon as he as soon as he got that badge, he went on the hunt. That was that was his primary goal. Not necessarily to kill, but to arrest Billy the Kid.

00:33:28:04 – 00:33:43:15
Dan LeFebvre
In the movie, after he becomes sheriff, we see Pat Garrett hiring, journalists to tag along and record the hunt for Billy the Kid. So then he can turn it into a book. And then at the end of the movie, there’s some text on screen saying it. The book was called The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, and it was a failure according to the movie.

00:33:43:22 – 00:33:47:19
Dan LeFebvre
Did he really write that book and was it a failure or was it any good?

00:33:47:21 – 00:34:06:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah, it was a failure at the time. But yeah, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid was published, I believe it was in 1882. So very, very soon after the events that are portrayed in the movie. And the guy that you see there, Ash Upson, he was hired by Pat Garrett basically to be a ghost writer.

00:34:06:14 – 00:34:23:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So as far as his, you know, I have a love hate relationship with that book. You can tell the parts that Ash Upson wrote, and you can tell the parts that Pat Garrett wrote. Ash ups him. He was he was a little full of it. He never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

00:34:23:28 – 00:34:47:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Right? Ash Upson even went so far, he didn’t know Billy the Kid’s actual birth date, so he just substituted it with his own birth date. Like stuff like that. You know, he would just make stuff up. You can kind of sorta tell where ash ups and stops writing and Pat Garrett takes over, because the parts were where Pat’s talking about, especially towards the end of the book.

00:34:47:05 – 00:35:05:10
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There’s a lot more accuracy there. So it’s one of those sources that you got to take with a grain of salt or a grain of salt. You definitely need to corroborate a lot of the stuff in the book with other sources, but it’s, to me, it’s a must read for anybody who’s a fan of Billy the Kid history.

00:35:05:12 – 00:35:23:11
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, yeah, it sounds like there’s well, I guess like movies. They they they, you know, never get the truth, get in the way of a good story. It just sounds like that’s the case, too. There. Well, in the movie, while they’re on the run, Billy and his gang end up in the town of White Oaks at a brothel run by Jane Greathouse.

00:35:23:13 – 00:35:48:01
Dan LeFebvre
And she’s. She’s played by junior, right, in the movie. And she seems to be an old friend of Billy’s. And then that night, a mob of townspeople carrying torches started to burn the building down. If Billy the Gang don’t give themselves up, a local lawman guy named Deputy Carlyle goes inside, tries to talk to Billy, tries to get him to come out peacefully, but instead Billy tricks Carlyle into putting on Travis’s hat and coat and then pushes Carlyle out of the front door and the mob is waiting there.

00:35:48:01 – 00:36:06:07
Dan LeFebvre
They just open fire and kill him, thinking that it’s Chavez. But of course it’s not. And then when they realize their mistake, the town scatters. And that’s how Billy gets out of that one. Even though the older Brushy Bill says that he got pinned with Carlyle’s death, how much of that event really happened?

00:36:06:09 – 00:36:09:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Some of it.

00:36:09:22 – 00:36:12:10
Dan LeFebvre
Never left the truth anyway.

00:36:12:12 – 00:36:32:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Never let the truth. And, you know, I, I used to love that scene when I was a kid. I had the biggest crush on Jenny right at that time. But, yeah, she never existed in real life. Jane. Great. Else was actually. Jim. Great house. It was a man. They call him Whiskey Jim because he used to illegally sell alcohol to Native Americans.

00:36:32:27 – 00:36:52:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He ran a roadhouse. It wasn’t actually in White Oaks. It was about 40 miles to the north. And it was. It wasn’t necessarily a, House bill repute. It was basically a place where you could go and get a meal, a couple of drinks and a place to sleep for the night. Whether or not he had any soiled doves working for him, that I can’t say.

00:36:52:05 – 00:37:09:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’m sure he did, but I honestly don’t know about that. But it was sort of a hangout for Billy and several of his buddies. There’s a lot of people that think that that’s where Billy first met Dave Root. The bar now on the on the day in question, it was Billy the Kid, Dave Root of Ball and Billy Wilson.

00:37:09:07 – 00:37:31:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So Chavez and Scurlock and the others that you see in the movie, they were not there for this. But yeah, they they were surrounded by a posse. Deputy Carlyle. He wasn’t like an he wasn’t like a full time deputy. He was a blacksmith, believe it or not. He was just deputized to be part of this posse. And, the reason he went inside is because he knew some of those guys.

00:37:31:19 – 00:37:56:08
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was on friendly terms with them, so they sort of swapped it out. So, Jim, great house. He goes outside and he’s basically the posse’s hostage while Deputy Carlyle is inside trying to talk everybody into surrendering. Well, Billy’s not going to surrender to a lynch mob, so he’s steadily pouring whiskey down. Deputy Carlisle’s mouth gets him stumbling drunk.

00:37:56:11 – 00:38:18:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The posse outside keeps tossing out ultimatums. They finally they say, we’re going to give you five minutes. If you don’t come out and surrender, we’re going to kill Jim Greathouse. There’s a shot, and he gets fired. Supposedly, Billy the Kid would later claim the shot was fired from the outside, at which point, drunken Carlyle freaks out, jumps through the window.

00:38:18:07 – 00:38:40:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Okay, so as he jumps in the window, he’s gunned down by his posse. That’s according to Billy the Kid. Later on, gave root a ball, allegedly told somebody that he, Billy Wilson and Billy the Kid, that all three of them shot Carlisle in the back when he jumped through the window. Where the truth lies, I don’t know.

00:38:40:09 – 00:38:59:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
However, just like they show in the movie, Billy the Kid would definitely get the blame for that particular killing. And, you know, that kind of, that kind of lost him a lot of goodwill to, a lot of people, because Deputy Carlisle was well-liked and well-respected. So a lot of people didn’t appreciate the way he was gunned down.

00:38:59:23 – 00:39:20:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Whether or not was the posse or not that did it. Billy still got a lot of the blame for it. And as they show in the movie, Carlisle or not Carlisle, Great Houses Roadhouse was burned to the ground the next day. That is something that did occur. I don’t know that he got on his horse naked and rode out of town, but like, the lady does in the movie.

00:39:20:14 – 00:39:23:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
But they definitely did burn this place to the ground.

00:39:23:18 – 00:39:42:19
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, I guess it just from, as you were explaining, the two different versions of what could have happened with Carlisle, I it sounds like maybe both could be true, like they could have shot him as he went in the back, shot him as he went out the window. And then also the posse opened fire on him. And I mean, who knows?

00:39:42:21 – 00:39:51:21
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, yeah, I guess that kind of goes back to I was talking about it could be like, you know, starts to get into he said she said in the evidence and what really happened. And, you know, I don’t know.

00:39:51:23 – 00:40:09:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah, yeah. It’s one of those and, you know, come to think of it, you would think that if he was shot in the back as he was coming through the window, somebody would have made note of it, you know? But, I’m not aware if there’s any, contemporary reports that specify where his wounds were. I need to check into that.

00:40:09:21 – 00:40:12:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That’s a that’s a good idea.

00:40:12:02 – 00:40:29:20
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we head back to the movie’s timeline, Pat Garrett and his men finally catch up to Billy and his gang. And this leads to the big climactic shootout where doc Spurlock is hit badly. He sacrifices himself so everyone else can escape, but it doesn’t really work because Billy finds himself surrounded and captured, and then he’s sentenced to hang.

00:40:29:20 – 00:40:51:00
Dan LeFebvre
But before that gets carried out, Jane Greathouse comes back and she sneaks a gun into the outhouse so Billy can use it to make his escape. In the process, he kills some of the bad guy deputies that we’ve grown to dislike throughout the movie, and he rides off to join the rest of his gang. Once he’s there, we find out that Chavez was mortally wounded, and I know there’s a lot in there, but all of that happens in the movie.

00:40:51:00 – 00:41:04:01
Dan LeFebvre
It’s just like ten minutes of screen time. So it really seems like the movie is rushing through a lot of events to kind of wrap up a lot of these different storylines. Is there any truth to those things that we see happening in that fast paced sequence of events?

00:41:04:03 – 00:41:29:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
A little bit of truth in there. So like you said, it’s, they, they gloss over a lot of stuff. So, okay, at this point in time, after the debacle at, White Oaks, Billy’s on the run. Pat Garrett, hunt him down. And, you know, it wasn’t just Pat Garrett that was after him. There was, contingent of cattlemen from the Texas Panhandle who were also on the hunt for Billy.

00:41:29:03 – 00:41:50:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
What Billy was doing at this period following the Lincoln County War. Basically, he was still in horses in New Mexico, trailing them all the way up to the Texas Panhandle, selling them to ranchers there. And then on his way back to New Mexico, he was still a bunch of cattle and sell them to people here in are there in New Mexico.

00:41:50:06 – 00:42:11:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Sorry about that. And my alarm going off. But, so you had Pat Garrett hunt him down. Believe it or not, there was actually a Secret Service agent who was in New Mexico at that time hunting Billy down together. He was connected to a counterfeiting ring, and, yeah, the cowboys from Texas. So. And even the military was on the hunt for Billy the Kid.

00:42:11:12 – 00:42:31:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So a lot of people were looking for him. His sort of a safe place was Fort Sumner, where you see Fort Sumner a lot throughout the movie. The the part where he’s hanging out with the guy he keeps calling Beaver. That was a real life guy named Beaver Smith. They had a cantina there at Fort Sumner, but, Billy felt safe there.

00:42:31:12 – 00:42:55:11
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
It was a predominantly Hispanic area. He was very friendly with the Hispanics. He got along amazingly with them. He spoke their language fluently, was very assimilated into their culture. So he felt safe there. Well, as soon as Garrett gets the badge, he he ends up linking up with those cowboys from Texas. And they lie in wait at Fort Sumner and set up an ambush.

00:42:55:14 – 00:43:12:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So one day, Billy and the boys are riding up Billy the Kid just so happens to be riding sort of in the rear of the column. When they get right up to the to the gates, Garrett yells out from the halt, Billy’s friend. Tom, follow your goes for his pistol! They blasted out of the saddle. Kill him!

00:43:12:04 – 00:43:17:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Billy and the others are able to will their horses around and escape.

00:43:17:05 – 00:43:38:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Get bad. A couple of days later and the rest of the what’s called the the Stone house at a place called Stinking Springs wasn’t very far away from Fort Sumner at all. And, it was just an old, abandoned, just tiny one room building made of rocks. Basically. That’s kind of what you see in that scene where, they show Scurlock being gunned down.

00:43:38:21 – 00:44:01:08
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So basically three days later or may have been four days later, Garrett and the posse track them down to the stone house surrounded in the middle of the night. And the next morning, one of Billy’s good friends got him. Charlie Beaudry steps outside. He’s wearing, a big, sombrero of the kind that Billy the Kid also was partial to.

00:44:01:10 – 00:44:27:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He’s mistaken for Billy the Kid. Garrett gives a signal rifle sound and Beaudry shot the pieces. Charlie Beaudry was a Lincoln County regulator. He did help Billy still in live stock after Gotti wore, but at this point he too, he was kind of pulling a Doc Scurlock. He was distancing himself. He had gotten married. He was trying to settle down.

00:44:27:21 – 00:44:48:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That was the last person they wanted to kill. Garrett. And then it was a it was a complete accident. So in Young Guns two, when you see Doc Scurlock being gunned down, that never happened. Doc, was living in Texas at the time. That is actually, portrayal, pretty accurate portrayal of the death of the very real life Charlie Beaudry.

00:44:48:17 – 00:45:12:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There was a siege. Believe it or not, Garrett actually brought in a wagon. They started cooking breakfast outside to lure the boys out, and it worked. They ended up. They all surrendered. So it was. It was Billy the Kid, Ruta Ball, Tom Pickett and Billy Wilson. All of these guys ended up coming out. They surrendered. They were arrested and taken the Las Vegas in New Mexico and placed in jail.

00:45:12:20 – 00:45:30:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Billy was in jail for a while. He was actually tried and convicted for murder during this period. He’s then taken to Lincoln to await, execution. So that all the stuff that you’re saying they glossed over. Absolutely. You know, they you don’t we don’t get to see him. Well, you do see the trial. We do see that in the movie.

00:45:30:24 – 00:45:59:10
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I forgot about that. The judge says he’s going to hang by the neck until he’s dead. Dead, dead. And Billy tells him you can go to hell, hell, hell. But but yeah, it they did sort of gloss over a few things. It wasn’t Scurlock who was killed. It was actually a guy named Charlie Beaudry. Now, if anybody is not familiar with any of these people and, you’re a little morbidly curious, do a Google image search for Charlie Beaudry, and you’ll find the photo of him and his wife.

00:45:59:10 – 00:46:14:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
It was actually taken off of his body. Still has the bloodstains on it. Really cryptic image. But, he was he was a real deal outlaw. Very tough guy. And unfortunately, he was trying to go straight at the time. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That deal.

00:46:14:21 – 00:46:32:01
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Yeah. I mean, I guess that kind of goes back to. Yeah, they don’t have I know they wanted posters, but they don’t have, you know, mug shots and photographs and things like that to know what somebody actually looks like. So they’re going it sounds like what you said they were going off Garrett’s recognition of him. Right? Garrett gave the give the shot.

00:46:32:05 – 00:46:41:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Or gave it? Yeah. That’s what it seems to be. It seems to be the case to me as well. I mean, Garrett Garrett just they it was a case of mistaken identity, you know?

00:46:41:07 – 00:47:04:12
Dan LeFebvre
Well, throughout the movie, I really felt like it could have benefited from some titles clarifying dates and locations and perhaps that that sequence, there’s perhaps the most obvious at the end, because the whole time they’re talking about going to old Mexico. And there’s one line of dialog after the shootout where Arkansas Dave asks, the a couple of guys nearby if he’s in old Mexico and they simply nod.

00:47:04:12 – 00:47:20:24
Dan LeFebvre
So he seems to think that he’s finally made it. And since the whole gang talked about going to old Mexico, the entire movie, that led me to believe, as I was watching it, that maybe finally they they made it to old Mexico after this big shootout. Can you clarify the actual locations where these events in the movie took place?

00:47:20:24 – 00:47:23:24
Dan LeFebvre
I’m assuming not in near Old Mexico?

00:47:23:26 – 00:47:41:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah. You know, there is some indication that Billy was planning on going to Mexico and one of his buddies would would have write a book. Gosh, man, it was one of the Cocos. And he was either Frank or George Coe, who said that Billy was planning on going to Mexico and laying low. He just had to settle some business there.

00:47:41:21 – 00:48:04:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Fort Sumner I think. I do think that’s pretty plausible. He just dragged his feet too long about doing it and he got got. But Dave Root Ball would flee to old Mexico like they show in the movie. It wasn’t immediate like that. He would live for several more years. But yeah, he would eventually find his way to Mexico, to a place called Parral, Mexico.

00:48:04:25 – 00:48:32:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And he got crossways with the wrong guys. They shot him dead, and they cut his head off and placed it on a pike so that that part was real. I think, you see him kind of sharpening the machetes and get ready to take care of him. It just didn’t happen. As immediate as they show in the in this in the in the movie, most of the movie is going to take place either in Lincoln, New Mexico or Fort Sumner, New Mexico, maybe.

00:48:32:08 – 00:48:51:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Oh, excuse me. The scene where they show Garrett meeting with, John Chisum and being offered the job of sheriff, maybe that’s supposed to represent the capital of Santa Fe or maybe Roswell. I’m not sure, but I know what you’re talking about. It does sort of seem like they’re just on the run towards New Mexico the entire time around.

00:48:51:15 – 00:49:00:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Answer I’m sorry, old Mexico, but no, in most of what you’re seeing, there is either taking place at Lincoln or Fort Sumner or the surrounding areas.

00:49:00:03 – 00:49:08:25
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot more sense because, yeah, I got the impression that, yeah, they’re trying to trying to make it there, but they never really seem to make it there.

00:49:08:28 – 00:49:13:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The route about did, but, I’m sure at his final moments he wished he hadn’t.

00:49:13:12 – 00:49:30:29
Dan LeFebvre
At the very end of the movie, Pat Garrett is alone when he finds Billy the Kid, and he seems to regret being in the position of killing his old friend, according to the movie. Garrett says this hurts him to do it, but he’s in a place that he can’t get out of and Billy says he’s going to make it easy and then turns his back to Garrett.

00:49:31:01 – 00:49:52:18
Dan LeFebvre
There’s a gunshot, but the movie never really shows Billy getting hit. And then in the next scene, we see a casket being lowered into the ground with Garrett and Chisum, and they’re watching this going on. And then the movie cuts back to the elderly Brushy Bill telling his story to the lawyer from the beginning. So from the movie’s perspective, it seems to suggest that Pat Garrett helped Billy the Kid fake his death.

00:49:52:21 – 00:50:15:07
Dan LeFebvre
And then he lived out the rest of his days as Brushy Bill Roberts. There’s even some text at the end of the movie that says, Brushy Bill went before the New Mexico governor, Thomas Mabry, on November 29th, 1950, and despite identification by several surviving friends of the notorious outlaw Brushy Bill, was discredited. Finally, I’m going to quote this last bit of text from the movie.

00:50:15:07 – 00:50:34:02
Dan LeFebvre
So this is a quote from the movie. It says, quote, whether or not Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid remains a mystery. End quote. Can you help unravel the history that we know from the movies version of this guy named Brushy Bill Roberts, living in the 1950s, actually being Billy the Kid?

00:50:34:05 – 00:50:53:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah. So I’m glad you included that quote, especially the the word mystery. There is a lot of mystery, you know, taking taking Brushy Bill out of the equation for now. There’s a lot of mystery surrounding Billy the Kid’s life. There’s a lot of stuff that we make assumptions about that we don’t know for certain. We don’t know when he was born.

00:50:53:24 – 00:51:17:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
We don’t know where he was born. We don’t know how old he was when he died. We don’t know his his father’s name, his mother’s maiden name. There’s so much we don’t know about Billy the Kid. His death is probably the least mysterious aspect of his entire life. So once again, there’s a lot of misconceptions surrounding his death.

00:51:17:18 – 00:51:37:25
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
To be frank, there’s a lot of false information that people put out there. I’m really not sure why, but, one of the things that people seem to, to think is true, that’s not true, is that Garrett killed Billy the Kid without anybody else seeing what was happening, and then buried his body before anybody could get a good look at it.

00:51:37:27 – 00:52:02:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That could not be farther from the truth. So Garrett had two deputies with him at the time, Kit McKinney and John Poe. They snuck into Fort Sumner under the cover of Dark. They and they eventually made their way to the home of P Maxwell. So Fort Sumner used to be a legitimate military installation. A guy named Lucian Maxwell bought the fort from the Army.

00:52:02:22 – 00:52:29:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I want to say, in the late 1860s. Could be wrong about that date. Lucian Maxwell ended up passing away. Everything went to his widow and his kids. His son was Pete Maxwell. So by the time these these events are unfolding, Pete Maxwell basically had to run to Fort Sumner. Lady I mentioned earlier, Paul Lita Maxwell, that was Pete’s sister, and also Billy, the kid’s alleged girlfriend.

00:52:29:08 – 00:52:44:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So if anybody knew where Billy the Kid was, it was going to be Pete Maxwell, right? Pat and his deputies make their way once again to the middle of the night. It’s dark. They kind of sneak their way inside the fort. They go because they want to talk to Maxwell. Basically, they ask him, hey, have you seen Billy?

00:52:44:29 – 00:53:06:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Do you know where Billy could be? They were not expecting to find Billy the Kid there. Matter of fact, both. You know, Garrett obviously would write his book, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, John W Poe. Decades later, he would write his own book called, The Death of Billy the Kid. And they’re both very clear that they kind of felt like they were on a wild goose chase at this point.

00:53:06:26 – 00:53:31:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They knew Billy was in the area. They just didn’t think he would be, for lack of better words, I guess naive enough to actually be inside Fort Sumner itself when he was such a wanted man by this point. And they definitely didn’t think he’d be at Pete Maxwell’s place. Right. So Garrett goes inside to question Pete Maxwell. He leaves his two deputies outside on the porch.

00:53:31:19 – 00:53:47:13
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
This happened very quickly, like in less than a couple of minutes. Right at that moment, Billy the Kid comes strolling up. He’s he doesn’t have his boots on. He’s in his he’s in his stockings, as they call them. He’s got a pistol in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. He’s going to get a midnight snack.

00:53:47:15 – 00:54:03:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He’s. There was a slaughtered steer. He was going to cut a piece of meat off of it, take it back to a friend’s house. They were going to cook him a midnight snack and he was going to go to sleep. So he wasn’t expecting Garrett either. It was all it was. It was the perfect storm. He’s almost on the deputies.

00:54:03:22 – 00:54:24:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
When he notices them, he immediately raises his pistol and starts asking them in Spanish. Once again. You know, it was a predominantly Spanish area. He’s asking them, Kens, who is it? DNS kidnaps as he’s back in. As he’s doing that, he’s backing into Maxwell’s bedroom. The layout of Fort Sumter was a little strange. There’s a lot more involved here, Pete.

00:54:24:26 – 00:54:45:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Only he did not have an interior door going to his his room where he where he stayed. It was an exterior door. So Billy just backed into it. He. Pete, who are those guys outside? At the same moment, he sees a shadowy figure standing next to Pete Maxwell’s bed, lifts his pistol again, says kidnaps. And that’s when Garrett shoots him and kills him.

00:54:45:17 – 00:55:04:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So right off the bat, you’ve got an eyewitness and Pete Maxwell. The whole entire town converged on that building. As soon as soon as this happened, he, Maxwell, did not live alone. His mother, his siblings, other relatives all live in that house. They came to his room. They saw Billy the Kid lying there dead. Everybody else was looking in the window.

00:55:04:29 – 00:55:29:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They saw Billy the Kid’s body lying in their dead. Things were so tense that Garrett and his deputies had to follow it up inside of Maxwell’s room for the rest of the night. They were expecting the mob to attack them just to avenge Billy’s. That the attack never came. The next morning, a coroner’s jury was formed. Every single one of the people that were in the coroner’s jury where people who personally knew Billy the Kid, they saw the body.

00:55:29:27 – 00:55:54:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They interviewed Pete Maxwell, they talked to the deputies, they talked to Garrett. They issued a, coroner’s jury report. It was basically the same thing as a death certificate back in those days, describing the entire event and explicitly saying that, yes, Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Pat Garrett. Later on that morning, they released Billy’s body to the citizens of Fort Sumner.

00:55:54:27 – 00:56:17:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was a very popular figure there. A lot of people loved him. Not everybody loved him, but a lot of people did. They dressed and cleaned his body or they cleaned his body. They dressed it in new clothes. Other people dug the grave. They held a public wake, like there was a literal public wake. So many, many, many people saw Billy the Kid’s dead body.

00:56:17:21 – 00:56:44:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The funeral was attended by nearly everybody in town. According to Polly, the Maxwell. And that was it. And of course, Billy the Kid was never seen again after that happened. So there is a lot of evidence coming from multiple sources that Pat Garrett did indeed kill Billy the Kid. There was no photograph taken. A lot of people are under the false impression that every dead outlaw had their pictures taken back in those days.

00:56:44:14 – 00:57:01:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Once again, nothing could be further from the truth. I know what people are thinking of because there are a lot of. I hate to sound say it this way, but a lot of cool photos of dead outlaws from the old West. They would prop them up, take pictures of them, turn them into postcards. That is something that did happen on occasion.

00:57:01:27 – 00:57:24:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
But I mean, we only have like maybe 15 to 20 of those type of photos. At the same time, there is probably a thousand outlaws at any given time roaming the West. There’s a lot of people like Dave Root Ball, for example. We don’t have any photos of him while he was alive. Right. And he was a much more accomplished outlaw than Billy the Kid ever was.

00:57:24:03 – 00:57:44:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There was a lot of people that we don’t have photographic evidence of their death. Right. But some people will point to that and say, that’s how we know that Pat Garrett did not kill Billy the Kid because we don’t have a photo. Well, number one, he didn’t have to provide photographic proof. He had all the proof he needed in the coroner’s jury report and all the eyewitnesses.

00:57:44:03 – 00:58:09:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And we know that because he was paid the reward eventually for killing Billy the Kid, and there was no photographer that lived in Fort Sumner. This is a very tiny community. I want to say it was less than 300 people. Yeah. No, no, photographer probably within about 2 or 3 days riding, Fort Sumner. Okay. So.

00:58:09:04 – 00:58:29:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Oh, and one more thing historians have been able to identify. At least I always forget on the exact number it was. It’s over two dozen people by name who saw Billy the Kid’s dead body. A lot of these people live for a very, very long time. I’m talking up until the 1920s, 30s. Some of these people wrote books.

00:58:29:13 – 00:58:50:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Some of them had had their journals published. Many of them were interviewed by historians and journalists. And, you know, there may be certain details that people get wrong, just like any, you know, if if there’s a carjacking and a police officer shows up, somebody is going to say it happened at 115 in the afternoon, somebody else is going to say, no, no, it was after 2:00.

00:58:50:19 – 00:59:12:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Somebody is going to say the guy was wearing a green shirt. Somebody else is going to say, but they all agreed. That guy definitely stole that car, right? It was the same thing with Billy’s death. Not all the details lined up. Maybe not everybody agrees on the timing, but the one thing that they all maintained for literally the rest of their lives, even after Pat Garrett was long gone, was that Garrett absolutely killed Billy the Kid.

00:59:12:20 – 00:59:36:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So there’s a ton of evidence showing that it’s kind of all the all the mystery, the supposed mystery surrounding the kid’s death is pretty much much ado about nothing. By contrast, there is zero evidence that Brushy Bill Roberts was who he claimed he was. It’s a cool story, man. I, I when I was a kid, I believe that Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid I want.

00:59:36:06 – 00:59:56:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And to this day, if there was a new discovery that definitively that definitively prove that brushy was Billy the Kid, I would be ecstatic. You know, I don’t look up to Billy the Kid as a hero. Like a lot of people, I’m pretty neutral on the people I cover on my show. They were just historical figures, you know?

00:59:56:04 – 01:00:13:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
But he is a very sympathetic character, and he’s a very. He was a likable guy when he was alive. He was fun loving. He, if mean, you got in the time machine right now and were whisked back to Fort Sumner, we would be in no danger. Billy the Kid is not just going to shoot you like a dog in the street.

01:00:13:07 – 01:00:36:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He wasn’t a he wasn’t a psychopath. A lot of the people I cover on my show were definitely psychopaths. Billy was a young kid who got caught up with the wrong people. He probably had a little bit of, you know, he aversion to authority, but he wasn’t an evil person. And we don’t like the idea of him just being killed in the dark like that at the hands of Pat Garrett.

01:00:36:00 – 01:00:51:27
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Somebody that used to be his friend is not a it’s not a fairy tale ending. You know, we never get to see Billy the Kid grow up to be Billy the Man, essentially. You know, so I think a lot of people just don’t want it to be true. They don’t want Billy to have been killed the way he was.

01:00:52:01 – 01:01:16:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Somebody like Brushy Bill Roberts comes along. It’s a very compelling story. It’s surface level. So people just, you know, they buy hook, line and sinker and now brushy. Like I said, on the surface, it’s very compelling. The story goes that Brushy had all the same scars as Billy the Kid that he had. He he was fluent in Spanish, just like Billy the Kid.

01:01:16:23 – 01:01:34:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was ambidextrous, could shoot just as well with both hands that he had tiny hands and big wrist, just like Billy the Kid. He knew things about the Lincoln County War that nobody could have possibly known unless they were Billy the Kid, or very close to Billy the Kid. And yeah, I think he sort of touched on this earlier.

01:01:35:01 – 01:02:01:13
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There were people who knew Billy the Kid that vouched for Brushy Bill Roberts. Sounds very compelling. If any of that that I just said was true, I would be convinced. But if you dig just a little bit deeper, it all falls apart. So we can start with the multiple gunshot wounds. Brushy Bill. Well, let me just. Have you ever known a pathological liar?

01:02:01:15 – 01:02:02:01
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah.

01:02:02:03 – 01:02:28:08
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Unfortunately, a lot of times they don’t know when to stop, so they’ll they’ll they’ll take, a tiny lie and it’ll snowball until it’s just this fantastical, unbelievable fairytale story. Brushy Bill was the same. He, the the stories he told were. If you tried to print them as a fiction novel now, you’d be laughed out of the publishing house like, we’re not going to we’re not going to print this.

01:02:28:08 – 01:02:49:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
This is too silly. This would be a comedy story, you know? But. So, Bryce, he didn’t just say that he was shot a couple of times. He had been shot. I want to say 30, 34 times. He claimed he had 34 various bullet wounds and knife wounds over his body. Did he have the same scars as Billy the Kid?

01:02:49:06 – 01:03:12:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Well, how many times was Billy the Kid shot when he was still before Pat Garrett killed him? Possibly once. There’s some evidence. He took a bullet to the thigh when they ambushed and killed Sheriff Brady. Even that’s not, like, proven for a fact, because just a couple of days later, Billy was on his feet, participating in a completely different gun gunfight at Blazer’s Mill.

01:03:12:09 – 01:03:30:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So we think he was possibly wounded. It may have been a grazing wound, at one point in his life, but he certainly wasn’t riddled with scars like Brushy Bill. Roberts claimed that he was. So no, he didn’t have any of the same scars. The ability to kill because we don’t know what scars bleed to get. Have number two.

01:03:30:18 – 01:03:51:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There is no evidence that Brushy Bill Roberts had any scars. You know, there’s a lot of photos of Brushy Bill Roberts out there, but neither he or his lawyer ever thought to document any of these supposed scars. A lot of people are under the false impression that there is, autopsy report out there documenting the scars. There’s no autopsy report.

01:03:51:09 – 01:04:13:10
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He died of a heart attack. You know, when an old man dies of a heart attack, they don’t necessarily perform an autopsy. So the only evidence we have of brushy scars comes only from his attorney, William Morrison. I don’t think I’ve said it yet, but after Brushy passed away in 1950, a couple of years later, Morrison actually published a book sharing brushy story.

01:04:13:10 – 01:04:17:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
It’s called, Alias Billy the Kid.

01:04:17:09 – 01:04:38:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
As far as the supposed inside information that Brushy Bill Roberts said that nobody could possibly know, there has been nothing that he said that wasn’t already common knowledge. So there was a guy named Walter Noble Burns in the, early 1920s. He kind of made the rounds there in New Mexico, and he interviewed a lot of people that knew Billy the Kid back in the day.

01:04:38:29 – 01:05:03:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He talked to Paulina Maxwell, Billy’s old girlfriend. Another dear friend of Billy’s was a lady named Del Vino Maxwell. He talked to her. You interviewed a lot of people, and he published a book called The Saga of Billy the Kid in 1925 or 26. This book is is one of the main pieces of works that kind of catapulted Billy into superstardom.

01:05:03:06 – 01:05:24:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The book was a huge bestseller. Everybody had it. I need to double check on this. I may be wrong here, but I believe it was one of the first book of the book of the month books or but late book of the Month Club books, right? It was sold. It was such a popular book that it was serialized, and they ran in newspapers all over the country.

01:05:24:14 – 01:05:52:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Brushy Bill Roberts definitely read the saga of Billy the Kid, because while it is a very cool book, not everything, it’s historically correct in it. Burns did make quite a few mistakes. Brushy Bill Roberts also happens to make the same exact mistakes, almost word for word, that Burns made. So basically all of his insider knowledge, he was just copying off of other people, and it was information that was that had been known for decades.

01:05:52:19 – 01:06:16:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The affidavits Brushy Bill Roberts and his attorney were able to obtain five signed and sworn affidavits from people that supposedly knew Billy the Kid and boots that Brushy and Billy were one of the same. Once again, you just got to dig a little bit deeper. Out of those five people, three of them never knew the historical Billy the Kid ever.

01:06:16:09 – 01:06:32:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
One of them wasn’t even born yet in 1881 when Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid. So if he wasn’t even alive at the time, how could he possibly know of Brushy Bill? Roberts and Billy the Kid were the same. The best they could do was there were these two old men they had that had, lived in Lincoln, New Mexico.

01:06:32:26 – 01:06:53:13
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They had allegedly known Billy the Kid when they were young children. I’m talking like 12 years old. They weren’t Billy the Kid’s friends. They weren’t his outlaw buddies. They weren’t Old West lawmen. Nothing like that. These were two old men who, 70 years after the fact, they may have possibly known Billy the Kid and even one of them when he first met up with Brushy.

01:06:53:13 – 01:07:13:27
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He goes, now you’re way too young to be Billy the Kid for whatever reason, he changed his mind a couple of days later, but that’s the best they could do. So whenever, Brushy Bill proponents will try to say that people who actually knew Billy the Kid vouched for him kind of nothing. None of Billy’s old associates ever vouched for him.

01:07:13:27 – 01:07:37:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
None of his Lincoln County regulators ever vouched for Brushy Bill Roberts. Once again, the best they could find were two old guys who possibly knew Billy the Kid when they were very, very young. So every other aspect of Brushy story falls under the same purview. I mentioned earlier that he was kind of he kind of went a little bit too far in his exaggerations.

01:07:37:15 – 01:08:00:11
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
In addition to being the most famous outlaw of all time, he also claimed to have been a Pinkerton detective. He said he was a deputy U.S. Marshal under Hanging Judge Parker. He lived with three different Native American tribes at three different times. He, he fought in Cuba as a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt. He fought as a mercenary in Mexico with Pancho Villa.

01:08:00:13 – 01:08:28:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
On another occasion, he survived a running gunfight with 2000 Mexican soldiers. He, chased after horse thieves in Oklahoma. He was a gunfighter in Idaho. He was a professional boxer. He was, rodeo champ toward all over the place. He worked for Buffalo Bill Cody on his ranch, breaking horses. He’s claimed to have had his own Wild West show that toured extensively across the United States, putting on, you know, those reenactments of Old West, events.

01:08:28:24 – 01:08:55:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He caught wild horses in South America. I could go on and on with all the. He was a lookout for the famous lady bandit Belle Starr. There’s a million stories that Brushy Bill Roberts told, and I cannot stress this enough. There’s no evidence for any of it. By contrast, the evidence we do have, which is legion, shows that Brushy Bill Roberts was a toddler when the real Billy the Kid was shot and killed.

01:08:55:25 – 01:09:31:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So Rush’s real name was Oliver Roberts. You can find him on every single census from 1880 all the way to his death in 1950. Every single census. We have marriage certificates, we have divorce decrees. There is a family Bible that shows that he was born in 1879. There’s, there’s even a World War One draft registration. We know what Brushy Bill Roberts did where he lived, what his occupation was, the names of his wives, the name of his parents.

01:09:31:07 – 01:09:52:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
We know dang near every detail of his life. And in no point was he allowed law at no point did you live in New Mexico. Like I said he was. He was one and a half, two years old when the real Billy the Kid was gunned down. The, Now, you may be wondering, why do people believe in Brushy Bill’s story if there’s that much evidence?

01:09:52:16 – 01:10:14:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The one tiny thread, the one tiny little string that holds his entire story together? He never gave a date on this, but he claimed that later in life, he, was in Oklahoma and he came across, a couple of law men who had just killed what they thought was a horse thief. Well, it wasn’t a horse thief.

01:10:14:05 – 01:10:48:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
It was an undercover police officer who just so happened to be Brushy Bill Roberts cousin, Oliver Roberts. Okay. His much younger cousin, Brushy took his belongings back to Texas, to his family. Oliver’s mother mistook him for Oliver, and he just went with it. At that point on, he kind of slid into that new identity of Oliver Roberts, which is why Brushy Bill proponents will say, well, that’s why he he’s so much younger on all the census data and all the records, because he wasn’t really Oliver Roberts.

01:10:48:19 – 01:11:13:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He just kind of slid into his, identity after he died. Once again, there’s there’s no evidence of any of this occurring. I don’t know about you, but if if my brother died and my cousin returned his belongings, I wouldn’t let my grieving mother think that that was her. Her dead son. You know what I’m saying? Like, there’s just so many fantastical angles to his story.

01:11:13:03 – 01:11:33:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And when you add them all up, they’re just completely unbelievable. You can even just Google pictures of Brushy Bill Roberts. There’s a lot of pictures of him out there, and none of those pictures does he look anywhere near 90 years of age. In all reality, he was 7071 when he dropped out of that heart attack. But yeah, there’s there’s no evidence that he was Billy the Kid.

01:11:33:02 – 01:11:58:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Some people will try to tell you that there was a DNA test proving that they were, the same person. No, Billy has never been exhumed. There has never been a DNA test done on Billy the Kid. Never happened. So with. I can tell you, with, you know, there’s a lot of mysteries in the Old West. I can tell you with 110% certainty that Brushy Bill Roberts was definitely a frog, and he hung out with other frogs.

01:11:58:19 – 01:12:20:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There’s another guy that’s, there was also, an old West fraudster named J. Frank Dalton. He claimed to be Jesse James, and he and Brushy were best friends. They would hang out together. They would go to they, they, Billy, Brushy Bill Roberts, I think, attended, J. Frank Dalton’s 100th birthday. So they were thick as thieves and they were just telling lies.

01:12:20:29 – 01:12:22:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Man.

01:12:22:24 – 01:12:40:13
Dan LeFebvre
So in the movie, it suggests that the reason why Brushy Bill is coming forward is because he wants that pardon that we, we see happening, to Billy the Kid. And that seems to be the impression that I got was that’s why he came forward near the end of his life. He’s like, I finally want this. This pardon that I’ve been promised.

01:12:40:19 – 01:12:56:27
Dan LeFebvre
Was that really what he was going for? Or was the real Brushy Bill, just as you said, you know, just telling lies and couldn’t stop? And or was he trying to sell his own book or was he trying to make money off of it? Like, what was his motivation? I guess it would be my question.

01:12:57:00 – 01:13:24:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You know, I, I an acronym that I like it’s mice in Missy. So it’s a good way to kind of figure out someone’s motive money, ideology, coercion and ego. I don’t think Brushy Bill was doing this on ideological grounds. I don’t think somebody, somebody was coercing him or blackmailing him into telling these lies. I think it was a mixture of money and ego.

01:13:24:09 – 01:13:46:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Now, now, Brushy, had a very long history of telling tall tales, even even before he was claiming to be Billy the Kid. He used to tell people he was like a scout, an old army scout and a frontiersman. There’s even an old newspaper article. Gosh, man, I want to say from the 1920s. So we’re talking decades before he claimed to be Billy the Kid.

01:13:46:24 – 01:14:13:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
In this newspaper article, he’s making this wild claim that he saved a group of Texas Rangers from machine gun wielding gangsters. So he had a history of telling these type of stories. I do know that he was he was living in poverty in his later years. So I think money certainly played a role in it. Like I said, he was good friends with J.

01:14:13:17 – 01:14:34:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Frank Dalton, J. Frank Dalton was kind of being wined and dined by people. He was living rent free. He was taking trips to New York City. I think maybe Brushy wanted a little bit of that limelight. And he really did meet with the governor. That is, something that occurred. He basically got left out of there. I mean, he he forgot key details.

01:14:34:24 – 01:14:55:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He couldn’t answer very simple questions. And it was just a big joke. And about a month later is when he just fell dead of a massive heart attack. But, you know, I people people will ask me, well, why would he possibly lie about that? I don’t know, man. I don’t I don’t know why anybody would lie about that, but I have known people that told similar lies.

01:14:55:19 – 01:15:15:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’ve known old men who told similar lie. You know, there was, there was a movie, a few years ago, The Irishman with Robert De Niro, the Scorsese movie. And that was based on, a book called We Paint Houses. I believe this guy, you know, he claimed to have killed Jimmy Hoffa and claimed to have done all this stuff.

01:15:15:21 – 01:15:34:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
A lot of the stuff that that guy claimed to have done, we know that he absolutely did not do well. Yet. He was a dying old man, and he still told these stories that were lies. Why? I don’t know, but I do know it’s it’s human nature. It is something that does happen.

01:15:34:02 – 01:16:01:14
Dan LeFebvre
Well, like you said, there are, you know, compulsive liars out there too, that once you get get started on that, I imagine the money part aside, the ego, like just feeling, people asking you these questions and people focusing on you, it’s, I mean, today, you know, it’s a dopamine hit, right? We know that. But that that’s one of those things, I would imagine that he might not have known even why he did it himself.

01:16:01:14 – 01:16:12:23
Dan LeFebvre
Just that I like being Billy the Kid right? I like when people think I’m Billy the Kid. So keep telling those stories to keep more people thinking that, yeah, that’s the only hack I could think of.

01:16:12:24 – 01:16:36:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You know, it’s the same way nowadays. People will lie about stolen valor. People that were never in the military will claim to be Navy Seals and stuff like that. It happens all the time. Why? You know, and especially in Bryce’s day, there wasn’t the internet, so we couldn’t just immediately fact check the guy, right. All of those records weren’t you couldn’t get on Ancestry.com in 1950 and look at all the census records.

01:16:36:28 – 01:16:40:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So there he he probably was able to convince quite a few people.

01:16:40:18 – 01:16:54:23
Dan LeFebvre
Especially if you’re something like you mentioned, you know, with, with the wounds, like, we don’t really know what Billy the Kid wounds were. So how like, how can you how can you how would you know? Maybe he has the same wounds, but we don’t know what Billy the Kid had. So how would you know?

01:16:54:26 – 01:17:18:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And you know, I was talking to, one of my buddies about this the other day. My father. Was it my father? Recently turned 80 years old. He was in the Vietnam War. He was, in a combat intensive unit during the Vietnam War. But he was never wounded. Thankfully, my dad came home and spent the rest of his life raising a family, but he lived kind of a rough life.

01:17:18:29 – 01:17:40:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
My dad grew up on a cotton farm. No electricity. I mean, he he grew up pretty rough. If if my dad wanted to start telling stories and say that he has all these war wounds, people would probably believe him because he looks like he has war wounds. He’s missing a a couple of fingers. He, he was in a hunting accident when he was younger and got got shot in the face with a shotgun.

01:17:40:24 – 01:17:59:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He could easily lie and say he got all these wounds in the Vietnam War, which he was in the war, but they were just. These are just injuries that he’s accumulated during that throughout the course of his life. I think Brushy Bill Roberts was a lot was much the same because Brushy Bill, he spent the vast majority of his life as a laborer.

01:17:59:24 – 01:18:17:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He did a lot of blue collar work, farming, you know, I think he was working on oil rigs later on in life. Like this guy, this guy would have definitely been he would have looked rough. He would have certainly have had scars and marks of his own that were most likely work related injuries that he could have. Hey, hey, look at this.

01:18:17:26 – 01:18:37:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
This is where I got shot back in 1885. Would really, you know, he he was he got kicked by a mule when he was 12. You know. So I don’t doubt that he did have, markings that may have appeared to be scars, the uninitiated. But as far as him ever getting any type of gunfights and stuff like that.

01:18:37:04 – 01:18:39:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Absolutely.

01:18:39:26 – 01:18:57:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you mentioned the name, Jesse James and a lot of people are familiar with Jesse James. Billy the Kid, you know, because there’s so many movies that have been made about them. But let’s say you’re given the budget to make a movie about someone from the Old West that hasn’t had a movie made about them yet. Who would you pick and why.

01:18:57:09 – 01:19:20:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Is it so hard to choose? Because there’s so many great stories that have gone completely untold. What’s fresh on my mind right now? Because I’m currently doing a series on it right now. But Chief Joseph and in this purse war. Wow. I mean, just you hear a lot of stories about people having their, you know, the indigenous peoples having their land stolen and being screwed over and stuff like that.

01:19:20:26 – 01:19:41:08
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’m not sure if there’s as much of a clear, just open and shut case of them being screwed over. As much as the Nez Perce were in the events that led to the Nez Perce War, I mean, these were a very peaceful people. They weren’t raiding the American settlers or anything like that. It just basically came down to, hey, we want your land, so you have to leave now.

01:19:41:11 – 01:20:09:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And by the way, we’re going to kill some of your people until you leave, and they eventually push them to the limit. And the war broke out. But it’s a very fascinating story. And just the the way the Nez Perce, it was basically a 1400 mile running gunfight with the U.S. Army. There was maybe 250 Nez Perce warriors with hundreds of women and children, old and sick, against thousands of U.S. troops.

01:20:10:01 – 01:20:37:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And they still held them off. Time and time again were able to defeat them in battle time and time again. It truly is an amazing story, and it’s a heartbreaking story because it doesn’t end well for the Nez Perce people, but I would love to see something like that. Not necessarily a movie. I, I would love to see that made into like an HBO mini series or something, you know, something that could they could really, you know, put about 8 or 9 hours into telling the story.

01:20:37:02 – 01:20:59:23
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Dive a lot deeper into the story for that. Yeah. Wow. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about the true story behind them, guns, too. For anyone who wants to learn more about the history of the Old West, I highly recommend they check out your podcast called The Wild West Extravaganza. You obviously do a ton of research and do a great job bringing the stories of the Old West to life.

01:21:00:00 – 01:21:04:10
Dan LeFebvre
So thank you. Can you give my audience a peek into your podcast and where they can find it?

01:21:04:13 – 01:21:20:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah, I have a YouTube channel, The Wild West Extravaganza. It’s also available wherever else you listen to podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, audible, or you can go to my website, Wild West extra.com. But yeah, I mean, everywhere where you listen to podcasts.

01:21:20:17 – 01:21:24:24
Dan LeFebvre
Fantastic. I will add all those links in the show notes for this episode too. Thanks again so much for your time, Josh.

01:21:24:27 – 01:21:26:11
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Thank you man. My pleasure.

00:03:19:13 – 00:03:34:00
Dan LeFebvre
As longtime listeners of Based on a True Story know, I always like to start with an overall letter grade for a movie’s historical accuracy. So today we’re talking about 2025 Trail of Vengeance. What grade does it get?

00:03:34:02 – 00:04:00:25
Rob Hilliard
Well, it’s a little bit of a tough question to answer, mainly because it’s a fictional story. So, and they’re, you know, obviously we’re going to get into this there, there is at least one, true to life character in the story. And it certainly references real events like the Civil War and, and some specific things within the, specific actions within the Civil War that we’ll get to.

00:04:01:22 – 00:04:45:05
Rob Hilliard
But it is it really makes no pretense of being a true story. So it’s a little less like, things that you’ve covered in the past, like tombstone or, even like a series like Billy the Kid, which are based on true events, real people. And it’s kind of reshaping those. This is more like along the lines of, like a Dances With Wolves or, like there’s a movie called Shadow Riders with, Tom Selleck and, Sam Elliott and they those are both Westerns that are set shortly after the Civil War.

00:04:45:05 – 00:05:16:09
Rob Hilliard
And they reference back to the Civil War. But there, like I said, they don’t really make any pretense of being based on on, true story or all real characters. So that’s a prolonged way of saying I would probably give it a B, in because it wasn’t, there weren’t any, like, glaring anachronisms. There was nobody wearing, you know, re boxes or walking around or anything.

00:05:17:15 – 00:05:34:08
Rob Hilliard
And I didn’t go to the like the extensive trouble of looking at, well, I, I did actually a little bit, but looking at some of the armaments that were carrying and making sure that they dated to the right period and stuff, most of the things were were accurate. I did get a little bit of a chuckle.

00:05:34:08 – 00:05:55:29
Rob Hilliard
There’s a crowd scene where they show people kind of walking down the street in the town, and there’s kind of dozens of people, and the first thing that struck me was, they look awfully clean for being, you know, in kind of a, 1870 ish, type of time period. But, but yeah, that’s, you know, that’s minor stuff.

00:05:55:29 – 00:06:16:19
Rob Hilliard
So I would say it’s a B I think largely they, they capture the time period accurately. And, you know, like I said, they, they weren’t they weren’t attempting to portray it as, as an actual true story with, with one glaring exception that I, I know you’re going to hit right now.

00:06:16:22 – 00:06:43:05
Dan LeFebvre
You know what I mean? It is good. It’s good to know that, too, because I think a lot of times it just being set in a historical time period, it can just lend itself to, oh, this must be based on a true story. So it’s also good to know that. But the part that you probably are talking about is what I’m going to follow up with, because one of the key things to me when I watch Trail of Vengeance is it’s probably the first feature film that I’m aware of, at least that features John Scoble as one of the main characters.

00:06:43:12 – 00:06:54:16
Dan LeFebvre
And I know you’ve done a ton of research into the real John Scoble for your book. So what letter grade would you give the movie for just how it brings John Scoble to life on screen?

00:06:54:18 – 00:07:13:21
Rob Hilliard
Good question. And yeah, I guess it’s probably worth noting for everybody. We wouldn’t. Well, I shouldn’t say we wouldn’t be having the show, but you wouldn’t be having me on as a guest right now if it weren’t for the fact that I had written a book about, John’s Google. So, I really I won’t, I won’t, give you a long preamble on this one.

00:07:13:21 – 00:07:33:10
Rob Hilliard
I thought they did a really good job. As you might expect, I was a little nervous going into it. And I was like, hey, Amanda, they’re going to, you know, how are they going to handle this? Are they going to mess it up or whatever? But, I actually the, the letter grade I wrote that was an A-minus.

00:07:33:12 – 00:08:07:24
Rob Hilliard
And, I guess, I mean, I can just go ahead and give you the details on the only reason it’s an A minus. But really the way there’s one particular scene, where Scoble is talking to, Catherine, which is the Rumer Willis, character, and, the, he, he’s talking about his background and kind of giving, some of the story of how he was a spy during the Civil War and, that he had been, recruited to be a spy.

00:08:07:24 – 00:08:51:28
Rob Hilliard
And we’ll touch on that a bit later. But what he says there or the description that he goes through there, is really straight out of what we know about John Scoble. And so, kind of getting into that, what we know about John Scoble is entirely, there have been variations on it, but everything derives back to a book that was written by Allan Pinkerton called The Spy of the rebellion in 1883, and that, at the outset or very near the outset of the Civil War, the neither at the outbreak of the Civil War, neither the North nor the South had their own spy agency or what was then called Secret service.

00:08:52:09 – 00:09:21:27
Rob Hilliard
We use that terminology different today. When they said Secret Service, they would mean something more like our FBI or CIA. And that’s a term that goes back to England. And you know, long before that. So, but neither neither side had that at the outbreak of the war because the US was very much an isolated, isolationist country at the time, they didn’t really feel like they had the need to have one, until April of 1861.

00:09:21:27 – 00:09:46:19
Rob Hilliard
And all of a sudden they were they were in a war. And both sides immediately realized they needed that. So, the federal the Union side, they made the decision to, just much like we would today when you don’t have when you have a need that you need to fill and you don’t have a way of immediately sort of staffing up to do it at the government level, you just bring in the contractor.

00:09:46:22 – 00:10:22:10
Rob Hilliard
And so what they did was they hired a Pinkerton agency, or specifically hired Allan Pinkerton, who’s based in Chicago, and he basically picked up his whole Pinkerton Detective Agency lock, stock and barrel and brought them to Washington, D.C., and the people who the day before basically had been, detectives and investigating crimes and things like that. Now all of a sudden, they were spies and they were spies for, for the Union Army, for the Federals against the Confederacy.

00:10:22:13 – 00:10:46:26
Rob Hilliard
And so Pinkerton, 20 years later, like I said in 1883, wrote this book called The Spy The Rebellion. He’s you’ve heard me say this before, when you interviewed me in the past, Pinkerton was a brilliant, groundbreaking detective. Kind of a middling spy. He did some things that were pretty innovative, which we’ll talk a little bit about as we go through here.

00:10:47:18 – 00:11:19:03
Rob Hilliard
But he tended to over inflate, exaggerate troop numbers, and, basically not he would just sort of deliver everything in a, in a, in a batch. He wouldn’t make a concise report that he could hand to, general McClellan, who was ahead of the Army of the Potomac at the time, or to President Lincoln and and have, like, a concise intelligence report, he would just kind of almost, almost literally hand him a batch of papers and say, well, here’s what we found.

00:11:19:03 – 00:11:47:07
Rob Hilliard
And it was like, you know, one report from this person which conflicts with another report from this person, and they kind of left them on their own to sort that out. So not a great spy, spy chief, I should say. And, so. And he was a miserable writer, a terrible, a terrible author. And, so the reason I mentioned that part is when you’re reading The Spy of the rebellion, it desperately needs an editor.

00:11:48:02 – 00:12:16:10
Rob Hilliard
And it’s very confusing because you’ll say one thing in one place and then another thing in another, and you’re left scratching your head saying, well, I thought this person was doing this, but you saying on the same day they’re also doing this, you know, miles away. So the reason I launch into all that, backstory is and this finally gets back to why I’m saying it was an A minus, because the story is actually a little bit different.

00:12:16:10 – 00:12:54:03
Rob Hilliard
The way they reported it for 150 plus years, people accepted the way Pinkerton presented the story about John Scoble and about his spies being in Richmond in, this would have been spring of 1862, and there were, in Pinkerton’s book, there were four names that he that he talked about, in that contacts mainly. There’s a couple of others, but one was Timothy Webster, who was kind of the primary spy in the field, on behalf of, Pinkerton and his operatives.

00:12:55:11 – 00:13:32:15
Rob Hilliard
And in other words, John Scoble. Course. And then then he talks about how he hated Wharton and a Carey Creek lot. And so really, only difference of three letters between, you know, between the two names and it was, again, very confusing. He talks about them both being in Richmond in different contexts. And, so for the longest time, a century and a half, people were under the impression that that was one in the same person.

00:13:32:15 – 00:14:05:25
Rob Hilliard
And the Pinkerton was just such a lousy writer that he was really talking about one person, but he was using two different names, and it was understandable. When I first started researching this, I thought the exact same thing. I’m like, how can this person be here where he’s actually saying she’s here? And it doesn’t make sense. And but the key part and this is, this is how it’s stated in Trail of Vengeance, is that if you accept that they’re the same person, then he talks about, then I gotta make sure I get this right, because I can always get it backwards.

00:14:05:25 – 00:14:34:10
Rob Hilliard
I always carry who was with John Scoble and Hattie was with Tim Webster. So if you accept that they’re the same person, like I said, that was kind of the generally accepted, historiography, I suppose, to be the right term for, for a long time. Then that meant the school was with Tim Webster. So the and then when Tim Webster.

00:14:34:12 – 00:15:00:12
Rob Hilliard
But spoiler spoiler for my book and for the movie. But he was captured by the Confederates and, Hattie Laughton was also captured. Then, by extension, you have to accept that. Well, if they captured the two of them, they must have captured Scoble as well. And that’s how, I will not get the pronunciation of his name correct.

00:15:00:12 – 00:15:37:09
Rob Hilliard
But I believe with Bengay, I can ogbe. But I think that’s close. A friend of mine is Nigerian and I can argue he is also Nigerian, so I actually checked with him to try and get some more close on the pronunciation. But, that’s the actor who plays John Scoble. And when he’s explaining this in the scene where he’s talking to, Katherine or Rumer Willis, he says that he was captured with them with Webster Lawton, and then he was released because the Confederates didn’t believe, basically, that a black man would be intelligent enough to be a spot.

00:15:37:12 – 00:15:59:19
Rob Hilliard
And and like I said, that was accepted as fact for for a very long time, but specifically until 2018. And in 2018, there was a book came out with the, one of the great book titles of all time. It was called Pinkertons, Prostitutes and Spies. But we’re not going to get into the prostitutes part, but I had to look that up on their own.

00:15:59:19 – 00:16:26:23
Rob Hilliard
But, and it was, written by God and John Stuart, a historian, and John Stuart, who had really just gone deeper and dug deeper in the research than anybody had previously. And he was able to determine that they were, in fact, two separate women who both were spies for the Pinkerton Agency. Now, neither of those was their real name, which is what made it confusing.

00:16:26:25 – 00:16:54:10
Rob Hilliard
And, so the those were both names of Pinkerton and fabricated, like I said, that the how close they are made it appear as if he had just sort of screwed up and had a, as you know, one person called two different names, but at the end of the day, and this was, the conclusion of Stuart’s research was that they were, in fact, two separate women.

00:16:54:11 – 00:17:25:29
Rob Hilliard
He was able to identify who they were. And, that Hattie Lawton is actually he he poses I can’t recall now if, if this was actually verified 100%. But he poses that Hattie Lawton was actually Kate Warne, who was the famous female actor, important agency. And of course, you and I talked about her before. We talked about victims because she was kind of a lead character in that, and, but Carey.

00:17:25:29 – 00:17:58:14
Rob Hilliard
So that was Hattie Carey. Was a a woman named Kitty Brackett who was separately a female spy for the Pinkerton Agency. She was the one that worked with Scoble on a sort of separate but parallel mission in Richmond, while Webster and Warne, M.I.T., you know, whatever name you want to use, was, they were on, like I said, a separate but parallel mission, same time frame, different actors in Richmond.

00:17:58:16 – 00:18:35:24
Rob Hilliard
So with all that very confusing, I’m sure your listeners are probably scratching their heads. Now. What the heck is even talking about? And you need a, you know, scorecard to follow the players here, but, the in Trail of Vengeance, the story that’s presented is the original sort of accepted canon, which was that Goble was, captured as part of the, Webster Hattie, as part of them being caught, and then released and then he was released.

00:18:36:18 – 00:19:01:02
Rob Hilliard
It actually makes a whole lot more sense. If you look at it, the two separate people, the story, you know, kind of make sense. Better. And, and so and as you know, that’s the approach that I took in in my book. And I was very fortunate, actually, that that book came out, five years before mine, because to be honest with you, at the time, I was already working on it, and I was still scratching my head trying to figure out how am I gonna write this?

00:19:01:02 – 00:19:26:04
Rob Hilliard
Because it makes no sense. These two people are, or one person is doing two different things at the same time. So, shout out to John Stewart wherever you are. I’ve never spoken to him, but thanks a million for, you know, sorting that out. And, but that’s like I said, that’s the only reason I gave it a minus is because they didn’t incorporate that relatively new scholarship that, you know, that had been done.

00:19:27:06 – 00:19:57:15
Rob Hilliard
So one other thing to mention. I’m going to further muddy the waters here, but just in the interest of full disclosure, for your listeners, they there is, an ongoing, frankly, discussion or controversy around whether John Scoble is in fact, a real person. And so, again, the the source information that we have on Scoble is, Pinkerton’s book.

00:19:58:20 – 00:20:34:27
Rob Hilliard
As I’ve already said, it wasn’t very trustworthy when it came to his, sharing of information or reliable. Maybe trustworthy might not be the right word, but reliable. And he like to change people’s names. So wanted just to kind of set that context a little bit. The reason he did that was, spying maybe even today, but certainly in the 1800s was not considered to be a, respected profession.

00:20:35:12 – 00:20:58:17
Rob Hilliard
People really disliked spies and after the Civil War, of course, when he wrote his book in the 1880s, it was we were into the actually really almost out of the reconstruction period. There was still a lot of division in between the North and the South in the country, politically and much of other things. I say a bunch of other things, as I said, are not important.

00:20:58:17 – 00:21:27:21
Rob Hilliard
Certainly Jim Crow period in the South is extraordinarily important. I don’t want to dismiss that. But, it’s separate from what I’m trying to get to with, with Pinkerton’s handling of this. So because of those sensitivities, and because spies were not low respected, they he changed the names of every person who worked for him in the book whose name hadn’t become publicly known during the Civil War.

00:21:27:24 – 00:21:55:17
Rob Hilliard
So Webster, for example, became, he was captured. His name was in all the newspapers. So everybody knew who he was. So he used Pinkerton uses the name Tim Webster in The Spy for the rebellion. A couple other, people who worked for him, during that period. Price Lewis is one. I can’t think of any other names off the top of my head, but anyway, they their names also became known during the war.

00:21:55:17 – 00:22:31:18
Rob Hilliard
So he uses their names in the book, but, Hattie Laughton and Terry Lot and their names did not become. It was never known who they were at the time of the war, or even after. And so he chose to use, pseudonyms for them. And he very likely did the same for John Scoble. So the controversy around whether Scoble was actually a real person or not is based on the fact that there’s really no record of him prior to the Civil War or after the Civil War.

00:22:31:23 – 00:22:54:11
Rob Hilliard
There’s just the little basically one year period within the war that, Pinkerton writes about in his book, The Problem. And that’s, you know, that’s valid, right? If you can’t find any verification or second source. I mean, that’s ironically, that’s how intelligence works when you gather one sort year by gather one piece of information, you try to confirm that with a second piece of information that aligns.

00:22:54:11 – 00:23:25:20
Rob Hilliard
Right. And here we are six years later trying to do that about a spot. And but the problem is, John Scoble very likely wasn’t his real name. Almost certainly Pinkerton changed some facts about him. Facts. I guess I’ll, er, quote that, but. So, changed some of the story to, help protect Scoles identity.

00:23:25:23 – 00:23:49:27
Rob Hilliard
And in doing so, you totally lose the thread. Now, I said earlier that, Mr. Stewart had gone back and done research and was able to ferret out just who Carrie Lawton and Hattie Lawton were. There’s a critically important distinction there. And that is this was the 1800s, and they were white. Scoble was blond. He was born a slave.

00:23:50:00 – 00:24:09:12
Rob Hilliard
So there had been no record of his birth, no record of where he lived? No, he wouldn’t appear in any census records. Certainly until after the Civil War. And but the problem is, after the Civil War, we wouldn’t know what name to look for, to see whether he was there or not. Because, again, John Scoble probably not his real name.

00:24:09:15 – 00:24:17:24
Rob Hilliard
So as I like to say, you have a guy who was born a slave, became a spy, and is only biographer, probably changed his name.

00:24:17:26 – 00:24:20:24
Dan LeFebvre
So really hard to find that second source. Then.

00:24:20:27 – 00:25:06:18
Rob Hilliard
Exactly. So to get that tie and get that verification, it’s almost impossible. That’s not to say that I’m going to, you know, take a stand and say no, he is absolutely real person. Unquestionably. You know, that’s those people who don’t believe he was real or wrong. Because I don’t know that verification either. But, it is the the preponderance of historians and very well respected historians not only over 150 years, but even much more recently, there were several who, there was, a guy named Ken Nagler who worked for the CIA, who researched into Scoble.

00:25:06:29 – 00:25:26:26
Rob Hilliard
He believes in to be a real person. There was another, man who worked for the NSA. We’re getting into all the spy agencies in here. And his name was Donald Markel, who became an expert on espionage in the Civil War after you retired from the NSA. And he very much believed that Jobs Global was a real person.

00:25:27:20 – 00:25:55:19
Rob Hilliard
So, like I said, these are not people who, from a hundred plus years ago, these are much more current, people who’ve done this research in the past, I don’t know, decade or 15 years. And, so the preponderance of, proof or the preponderance of professional historians believe or accept that Scoble was a real person.

00:25:55:22 – 00:26:06:02
Rob Hilliard
But, there is there is a, reasonable doubt there, or, I don’t know, whatever you want to use. And like I said, for the benefit of your listeners, I wanted to make sure that we that we touched on that as well.

00:26:06:02 – 00:26:27:14
Dan LeFebvre
So it’s fascinating. It’s fascinating to me that they were able to separate the two women, hundreds of years later. Two I mean, that sort of thing. I mean, because you are talking about spies and they’re purpose is to not be known. All right. So, so, so, so you have all these different things working against you and still being able to do that.

00:26:27:14 – 00:26:50:03
Dan LeFebvre
So it would make sense. It just makes logical sense to me that, you know, if Alan Pinkerton is writing something that Scoble would have to be based on somebody, we might not know what his real name was, but the point of just making somebody up, like, if we know that these two women were actually two separate women, he didn’t make them up.

00:26:50:05 – 00:27:13:03
Rob Hilliard
Right. That’s that’s true. And there’s there’s a really, important point to be made. I’m really glad you said that. There’s an important point to be made there. One is, you said, you know, is he a real person? There is a school of thought that may be Scoble, the character in, Pinkerton’s book was an amalgam.

00:27:13:03 – 00:27:33:17
Rob Hilliard
Maybe it was because we certainly know that he used people who were, or employed, I should say, use employed, which is important because they were getting paid. But people who had previously been slaves, that he absolutely used them to gather intelligence and that he interviewed them when they were escaping, or had escaped across, Confederate lines into Union lines.

00:27:33:19 – 00:27:59:12
Rob Hilliard
So we know all that that’s documented outside of, a Pinkerton’s book. But the, there is a thought that he might be, like I said, maybe, maybe a combination of a couple characters together, as opposed to just one person. Again, we’ll never know. The other thing, part of the reason we’ll never know is because, as I said, the packages were based in Chicago.

00:27:59:12 – 00:28:25:13
Rob Hilliard
That was their main office. And, the great Chicago Fire of 1871 burned up all their records. So, there’s a there’s a gap there as well. So you have the time gap and then you have the, you know, physically losing all the files. Gap. And, there was another point that I want to come back to there, and I, I veered off and lost myself.

00:28:26:13 – 00:28:56:20
Rob Hilliard
But the, Oh, you you said when you were talking about. Well, he wrote about two real women, and they were able to verify that if you kind of look at the if you start to question, did Pinkerton fabricate Scoble, you know, out of whole cloth and was he not just a real person at all? The immediate question that comes to my mind is, why would he do that?

00:28:56:22 – 00:29:51:10
Rob Hilliard
Right? And now in first Pinkerton, he was a staunch abolitionist. Well, prior to the Civil War. And so he certainly believed in emancipation, for, for blacks. But he when if you put yourself in his position now spin back to 1883, I’m sure we can all easily do that. To write and write about and essentially glorify, a black character in that time period, which, as I kind of alluded to earlier, you’re talking, you know, Jim Crow era in the South, reconstruction has essentially fallen apart, very deep and, and painful racial divisions, within the country.

00:29:52:28 – 00:30:28:14
Rob Hilliard
So what would be the upside for him? Like, he wasn’t doing it to sell more books, right? If anything, it was probably going to have the opposite effect. It was probably going to cause he would sell less books if he by appearing, sympathetic to, to blacks in that time period. And so, like, just to make himself look like a cool guy or I like, there’s really no, like I said, if anything, I would have created most likely a negative or more of a negative reaction, more of a negative backlash than than any sort of positive one.

00:30:28:14 – 00:31:01:06
Rob Hilliard
So it’s hard to see what his motivation might have been in creating, a fictional Scoble character and addressing him as or, you know, advertising him as, a real person. That’s the that’s the part of the aside from what I mentioned about the historians and all those things, in their investigations. But, that’s the part that just doesn’t really ring true in the John school was not a real person argument.

00:31:01:06 – 00:31:05:22
Rob Hilliard
Like what’s what would be the benefit of Pinkerton making him up?

00:31:05:24 – 00:31:21:05
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. No, that’s a great point. And it’s speaking of the talk of changing names and things like that, that Pinkerton in his book, if we go back to the movie, there is text at the beginning of the movie that is alludes to something along those lines. It’s kind of one of the key plot points throughout the entire movie.

00:31:21:11 – 00:31:49:00
Dan LeFebvre
I’m going to go ahead and read some of that opening text. It says based on historical figures and events during the American Civil War, the Pinkerton Agency, under the commission of Abraham Lincoln, created a secret spy group known as the woods to infiltrate the Confederate army. They named the woods because their code names uniformly ended with wood. And then throughout the movie, we learn about these spies that had code names like Kirkwood and Westwood and things like that.

00:31:49:03 – 00:31:52:28
Dan LeFebvre
Was there really a spy group known as The Woods?

00:31:53:01 – 00:32:14:12
Rob Hilliard
So when I first watched the movie, which was before, you and I talked about this and, I hadn’t seen these questions and that came up on the screen, as you said, like right at the gates before the start of the movie, actually, and I’ve done I don’t certainly don’t know everything there is to know about spies in the Civil War or out of the Civil War.

00:32:14:14 – 00:32:39:20
Rob Hilliard
But I’ve done extensive, extensive research on the Pinkerton spies during the Civil War. And as soon as I popped up, I was watching with my wife, my son, and I turned to them. And of course, they’re looking at me like, is that true? And we and I’m like, no, absolutely not true. And and I’m like, it’s, you know, totally made up and so cut like, you know, first 10s.

00:32:39:20 – 00:33:32:22
Rob Hilliard
Right. I’m already off on the, a train wreck, you know, but I was wrong. Well, I was kind of wrong. What I said was correct, that they didn’t use the the wood suffix effectively, as code names during the Civil War. That part is correct. They didn’t do that. But, it apparently started very shortly, like within a year or two after the Civil War that Alan Pinkerton started using that code system, not only for his operating lives, but also for, informants who were, I’ll kind of say the good guys, people who were, who were providing that information that they were able to use to capture criminals.

00:33:33:08 – 00:33:59:23
Rob Hilliard
And interestingly, well, there’s a couple interesting points about one is he had a similar system that he used for criminals or people they were investigating, except they use the suffix stone. So it would be like, you know, Featherstone or capstone or whatever. He would assign these names to people they were investigating. So the woods were the good guys?

00:34:00:10 – 00:34:19:09
Rob Hilliard
Technically the spies, as the text of the movie said. And then they didn’t mention the stone part, but the stone would be, the bad guys. And these were just to be clear. It’s not like they took, like it wasn’t Lafayette Stone or Wolf Wood. They didn’t take those names. And added something on to it.

00:34:19:11 – 00:34:45:14
Rob Hilliard
They would make, he would make up, you know, like a four letter, thing, like I said, like Atwood or, whatever. And then that would become that would become their name. But, and they would use that in a, telegraph code, which of course, was communication, not over time or letters. And Pinkerton was a big believer in substitution codes, which he did use during the Civil War.

00:34:45:17 – 00:35:10:09
Rob Hilliard
And he had a very extensive about 170 words, if I remember right, substitution code, where it would be like, I don’t know, remember him off top of his operatives had to memorize all of them. Fortunately, I didn’t. I would have been a terrible operator because I know these, but I don’t remember them. But he would say, like lamp Boyle and that might mean cavalry.

00:35:10:12 – 00:35:38:03
Rob Hilliard
And, coal would, would instead mean, soldier or something like that. So he would use that substitution code. So this was, this would and Stone system was really just an extension of that for people’s names or and then they kept in their files extensive, extensive notes on who, what, what the real person’s name was. So it would be Dan LaFave.

00:35:38:03 – 00:36:03:19
Rob Hilliard
You know, I’ll give you a good guy named. Yeah. Them would, or call wood or whatever. And so and then it would be, you know, Rob Hilliard, capstone and I would be somebody they would be investigating. So they actually had these cards, that, that had those all listed out and they maintained them at the agency.

00:36:03:27 – 00:36:34:02
Rob Hilliard
So another thing thing about this that started, like I said, after the Civil War, so let’s say 1860, 66, 67, somewhere in that ballpark. They used that system, the Pinkerton Agency, which still exists today, by the way. They used that system until 1965, 1965, so almost 100 years or basically a hundred years. And the only reason they stopped it.

00:36:34:03 – 00:36:57:06
Rob Hilliard
So the Pinkerton Agency was being run by Pinkerton descendants up until that time. And as long as they were pictured in descendant as the president of the company, they continued to use that wood and stone system for their agents and, and, and informants and, I can’t remember his name. I want to say it was like Robert Pinkerton the third.

00:36:57:06 – 00:37:23:13
Rob Hilliard
Maybe, he was Allan Pinkerton’s great, great 2 or 3 great mature, grandson. And, when he finally retired or handed over the reins of the, of the company, that’s when in 1965, that’s when they stopped using that system. So, so, yeah, it’s, like I said when I first saw it, I’m like, no, they didn’t do that during a Civil War.

00:37:23:15 – 00:37:34:12
Rob Hilliard
Technically, they didn’t do it during a Civil war. The movie plays a little bit fast and loose with the timing, but they’re rolling off by a couple of years. And the basis of the idea is, very much factual.

00:37:34:15 – 00:37:52:10
Dan LeFebvre
You might have already answered my next question about that, though, because if we don’t really know if John Scoble was real, but not to get too far, the the storyline in the movie, we do find out that, John Goebbels codename towards the end of the movie, we find out I think his codename was like James Howard. So it didn’t even go with wood there.

00:37:52:15 – 00:37:57:00
Dan LeFebvre
But do we know if John Scoble ever used a codename James Howard like we see in the movie?

00:37:57:22 – 00:38:09:17
Rob Hilliard
He he did not know or not. We don’t. Not in any time, as documented. Let’s put it that way. Okay? It’s not again, we don’t know his real name, so he might use some other name. Right?

00:38:09:19 – 00:38:11:14
Dan LeFebvre
John Scoble might have been the codename.

00:38:11:16 – 00:38:38:27
Rob Hilliard
Right. Exactly. Yeah, it could be exactly the opposite. So, yeah, if we go back into that vortex again. But, I did do a little digging, though, and there this is very tangential, but there was actually James Howard, who, was connected to the Pinkertons during the Civil War. He was a, Somebody who was working in.

00:38:38:27 – 00:39:01:24
Rob Hilliard
And I didn’t write this down. I should have, I can’t remember if he was a telegraph operator, or he was maybe an employee of the Telegraph. Company, living in Washington, DC at the outbreak of the war. But he was a Confederate sympathizer. Now, that is not at all unusual. There were hundreds of people who fit that description, and many of them became spies during the war.

00:39:02:05 – 00:39:34:06
Rob Hilliard
Howard did, in fact, become a spy. It was passing information that he learned in Washington, DC and sending it south to the Confederacy when he was identified by Pinkerton, Allan Pinkerton, and, ultimately, I think he was arrested. And, I think they actually just sent him south. I don’t think you jail, but, but anyway, that’s, you know, an interesting tie in.

00:39:34:06 – 00:39:55:26
Rob Hilliard
It’s weird because it’s kind of the opposite of of John Scoble. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. I mean, James Howard isn’t that unusual of a name that it might might land that I’m not? But, But you. No, that was not. There was. No, I guess I should be a little bit more specific. There was never a codename.

00:39:55:28 – 00:40:04:08
Rob Hilliard
Pinkerton never identified a code name that Scoble used during his time. As a as an undercover operative.

00:40:04:10 – 00:40:12:17
Dan LeFebvre
And, I mean, especially if we don’t even really know John Scoble. Then how would we start to know someone? Those other details. We don’t know the base thing.

00:40:12:19 – 00:40:18:16
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, if you’re already given a fictitious name, but why bother trying to get to some other fictitious name? So.

00:40:18:18 – 00:40:39:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well, I have to ask then, because, you know, a lot of movies do make up characters, and maybe you already answered this in the beginning when you were talking about how it was a more of a fictional story in the movie, but the main storyline in the movie revolves around Catherine Atherton and then the main bad guy is a guy named Colonel William Davis, and the only other person in the movie that I would call a main character.

00:40:39:07 – 00:40:53:20
Dan LeFebvre
Feel free to add more if you want, but it would be, Colonel Davis’s henchman, one of the guys named Frank Cooper, and I’m really kind of calling him a main character because he’s the one kind of going around trying to find the woods. And, he’s also recognized by John Scoble because of a huge scar on his face.

00:40:53:22 – 00:40:58:07
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know if any of those people were based on real people from history?

00:40:58:09 – 00:41:29:07
Rob Hilliard
Most likely not. Catherine Allerton is a fictional character. William Davis. Colonel William Davis, who was the Jesse he character? Was, he is a fictional character. I did do some digging just to after I missed on the wood thing. Then I’m like, man, I better all the way back there. But, there were actually a couple of Colonel William Davises in the Civil War on both sides.

00:41:29:10 – 00:41:49:17
Rob Hilliard
Interestingly, some for the Union and for the, Confederacy. But none of them. None of them fit the fit. The description of this character, they were like the war was in Massachusetts or from Massachusetts or whatever. And then, the other one never served in the West. He served in Georgia, if I remember, in the Confederacy.

00:41:49:17 – 00:41:52:00
Dan LeFebvre
So, again, just a popular name. It sounds.

00:41:52:03 – 00:42:17:17
Rob Hilliard
And, that’s a good segue, because Frank Cooper, speaking of popular names, I actually got on the, National Park Service website, and they have a say if anybody out there wants to find out about their ancestors in the Civil War or whatever, you go to the National Park Service, they have a, a subsection of their site where you can search Civil War records.

00:42:18:15 – 00:42:53:03
Rob Hilliard
And really useful, really helpful. So I search Frank Cooper, which proved to be kind of a mistake because there were 45,130 Frank Cooper’s or it was 1000 results. So that was kind of a fail. And then, I tried to narrow down a little bit, on the assumption that he was from Missouri, and we’ll get to the, the Kansas, Missouri, piece of story here in a bit, but I still got when I hit the Missouri, there were 2207 results for that super not section.

00:42:53:03 – 00:43:03:05
Rob Hilliard
So, yeah, again, I think Frank Cooper was just probably, you know, they threw a dart at a, at a name board and that’s the one they came up with.

00:43:03:05 – 00:43:10:02
Dan LeFebvre
So, I mean, that’s, it sounds like one of the bigger targets on the board for a random name. I mean, it’s a it’s a real name that a lot of people had.

00:43:10:02 – 00:43:31:09
Rob Hilliard
So probably absolutely correct. And there’s and there’s, you know, hundreds of variations. There’s, you know, Francis Cooper and then there’s just Frank Cooper and then was Frank Lynn Cooper. And of course, all of them turn up results. So, yeah, I think he was, he was I could tell he was just a fictional character.

00:43:31:11 – 00:43:52:06
Dan LeFebvre
Well, one of the core plot points in the movie revolves around Katherine’s husband, Caleb. It seems to know John Scoble when they were both spies for the Pinkertons. And speaking of the names, Caleb went by William Kirkwood when he was a spy. And so the very beginning of the movie, Caleb is killed, and then Katherine reaches out to Scoble to try to help track down her husband’s killers.

00:43:52:06 – 00:44:09:17
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s kind of the whole trail of vengeance from the title of the movie. How realistic is that concept of John Scoble being called to help the family of a former Pinkerton associate? They don’t seem to be in the Pinkertons now or in the timeline of the movie. But, you know, as a former associate.

00:44:09:19 – 00:44:43:18
Rob Hilliard
There’s no record that I found of anything like that happening. But I will say that it’s plausible. And the reason I say that is, Allan Pinkerton himself. And the agency, even after he was gone, after he passed away, were very big on loyalty. Amongst their agents and, and between them and, I’m sorry, amongst their agents and between Pinkerton and and the operatives.

00:44:44:17 – 00:45:12:22
Rob Hilliard
And just to give a couple of example, like there are a couple photos of that people can find online of, Pinkerton operatives during the Civil War, actually at the time of Civil War. And, there’s there’s actually one that I use in presentations where I’m talking about whether John Scoble was a real person or not, because they have all these people sat around a table, and there’s one black man seated in the center of the table where they’re all eating dinner together.

00:45:13:24 – 00:45:42:18
Rob Hilliard
And, and he’s kind of staring in the camera. I’m like, well, if he wasn’t a real person, then who was this guy? Right. But my point there is, they clearly all kind of hung out together and there’s a couple other pictures, like people maybe seeing pictures of certain units from the Civil War where everybody’s lined up in front of a tent and they’re all, you know, got their kind of, get the beards, go and, and and, nobody’s ever smiling because it.

00:45:42:19 – 00:46:04:15
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. Because it took so long to take a picture, but yeah, they’re all standing, puffed up. And so there’s a couple of pictures like that just of the Pinkertons. And so and then the other thing, the other really good example, this is, I mentioned Kate Warner earlier when she passed away, which was just a few years after the Civil War.

00:46:05:02 – 00:46:32:25
Rob Hilliard
Allan Pinkerton actually footing the bill for her funeral and her burial plot and paid for her headstone. And that’s people can still go see that today. It’s, sort of a morbid, I guess, tourist attraction or tourist site in Chicago or outside Chicago. So there was, like I said, they they really kind of bred this loyalty, between agents.

00:46:32:25 – 00:46:53:05
Rob Hilliard
And I mean, if you think about it. Right. Those are especially if you’re undercover, those are the only people you can depend on. They’re the only people who know your real story and who are going to have your back, and try and protect you when, when you know what hits the fan. And, so, I mean, it’s understandable, right?

00:46:53:05 – 00:47:00:04
Rob Hilliard
It would be not much different, I’m sure, from like, like I said earlier from the FBI or CIA today.

00:47:00:07 – 00:47:16:23
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, we see him with military, too. I mean, you see, I mean, I’ve seen in a lot of movies like, you know, you’re fighting alongside somebody right next to you and they’re the ones that have your back. So even after towards the end of the movie, the war is over, you know, and but they’re still they still have this camaraderie.

00:47:16:23 – 00:47:26:06
Dan LeFebvre
So it does make sense that, you know, during a War two, in the Civil War, these spies would have that sort of bond as well. That makes sense.

00:47:26:09 – 00:47:36:23
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. Yeah. So like I said, very much plausible. But there’s no, I wasn’t able to find any record of that having happened with other any other agents.

00:47:36:26 – 00:47:56:05
Dan LeFebvre
What is speaking of the Civil War, the movie wasn’t really clear about exactly what year it said. It just kind of suggests that it’s happening after the Civil War and after John squabbles time in the Pinkertons. So when Catherine goes to meet John Scoble for the first time in the movie, he’s staying in a place called Cades Cove, Tennessee.

00:47:56:07 – 00:48:07:27
Dan LeFebvre
And it it seems that he’s been there for a while since Catherine was able to track him down there after her husband is killed. Do we know if the real John Scoble lived in Cades Cove after his time in the Pinkertons?

00:48:08:00 – 00:48:34:02
Rob Hilliard
Unfortunately, and I, you know, I kind of already said this, but we we virtually know nothing of Scoble. Prior a little bit prior to the war. No real details, but we kind of where he came from and. And that he was a slave after the war. We know nothing. And that’s, Again, Pinkerton wrote the book later, and he was focused on.

00:48:34:02 – 00:48:53:18
Rob Hilliard
I mean, the title of his book was The Spy of the rebellion. So obviously that’s what he was talking about was the Civil War. He doesn’t mention anything about any of his operatives after the war, even though we have documentation that several of them did continue to work as Pinkerton agents after the war. But in the in the book, you know, he doesn’t get into that.

00:48:54:18 – 00:49:19:09
Rob Hilliard
So we don’t know that there is very much a real place called Cades Cove in Tennessee. Anybody who’s been to Great Smoky Mountain National Park probably knows about that, because it’s one of the major tourist attractions in the park. Gorgeous area. Can, you know, down the valley with the mountains behind it, but, yeah, we don’t know.

00:49:19:12 – 00:49:32:10
Rob Hilliard
You know, we don’t know Scoble live there. It’s against plausible that he might have, but, he might have because he lived in Butte, Montana. I mean, we really don’t know.

00:49:32:13 – 00:49:55:03
Dan LeFebvre
Fair point, fair point. During one of the conversations in the movie between John Scoble and Kathryn, we find there’s there’s a few clues that the dialog just kind of puts in there about John’s childhood. He mentions his dad’s name was John Armstrong. We don’t hear his mom’s name, but he talks about how she read to him from an Ethiopian Bible that they hid on their mattress while they were enslaved.

00:49:55:06 – 00:50:04:17
Dan LeFebvre
And then she died when he was just 12 years old. How well does the movie do, telling the bits and pieces that we know about John’s cobbles? Parents?

00:50:04:19 – 00:50:39:18
Rob Hilliard
Well, again, this was this was to me an interesting question, but for different reasons. So we don’t know anything about his parents. We know that, he was a slave in Mississippi prior to the war. The plantation that he lived on was owned by a guy named Scoble. And much like, you know, many slaves at the time, even after they got out of slavery, they adopted the surname of of the person around the the plantation and kept them, in slavery.

00:50:41:09 – 00:51:10:18
Rob Hilliard
And so that’s the that’s how Pinkerton presents it in the book that that he lived on the plantation of a guy who’s last Abel Scoble. The we like I said, we don’t know anything about his parents. What was it funny to me? Interesting to me is. And this is total coincidence. And maybe I should have started with at the very beginning, of our talk here that I don’t have any association with the movie.

00:51:11:19 – 00:51:39:01
Rob Hilliard
Other than the fact that we, you know, we have a character in common between the two things, but, like, I don’t know that anybody I don’t know the writers or director or any of those people. And and as far as I know, they don’t know anything about me either. So, the reason I say that now is, and the reason I find it interesting is totally coincidentally, we both chose to present very similar backgrounds for Scoble.

00:51:39:27 – 00:52:01:21
Rob Hilliard
So in my book, I talked about his parents, and I had, his mom passed away in childbirth. When when John was born. And then that his father lived, I think until I forget, I said he was, I got to check my notes. I you would think I would know this.

00:52:02:07 – 00:52:05:13
Dan LeFebvre
So I wrote it down. So you have to remember exactly like.

00:52:05:25 – 00:52:24:18
Rob Hilliard
I wrote it twice. I wrote it in the book, and then I saw it in my notes. But. So in my in my story, when John’s father passed away, when, John was six years old. So, as you just said, they had a somewhat similar story where his mother dies when he was young, and she’s not named in quotes in that way.

00:52:24:18 – 00:52:49:14
Rob Hilliard
She’s named in my book either. And, and then you know that his father kind of lives a little while longer, but, but the reality is, you know, we don’t know any of that stuff. I think it’s probably not a total coincidence that we both chose that little piece of the storyline, about his mother passing away.

00:52:49:14 – 00:53:26:22
Rob Hilliard
Because, as you might expect, the lifespan, people who were in slavery at that time was extraordinarily short, and for a whole variety of reasons. But, medical care wasn’t really a thing, for them. And, so if he got sick, if you were having a baby, if you were, if any little thing happened to you, not to mention the fact, you know, very poor nutrition, extraordinarily hard work and working conditions, you know, like, go on a run, but I’m sure you get the point.

00:53:27:09 – 00:53:46:06
Rob Hilliard
So it would it would not be at all unusual, for someone’s parents to to have died young and, so, like I said, probably not a total coincidence, but I just thought it was kind of odd. Kind of funny that, we ended up on a somewhat similar path, you know, totally unrelated to each other.

00:53:46:08 – 00:54:01:25
Dan LeFebvre
So you mentioned, Scoble being on a plantation whose name was Scoble. Have you ever done research to see if you could find, like, where that was and then kind of go from that direction to see if we can learn more about John Scoble or.

00:54:02:04 – 00:54:26:14
Rob Hilliard
Yes. The short answer is yes. And I wasn’t, wasn’t able to come up with anything from the name. And, there’s even I’m now I’m trying to remember this is, this is the, the tenuous line that a somebody who writes historical fiction falls into is when I think about these things, I can’t remember what’s actually true.

00:54:26:15 – 00:54:29:04
Rob Hilliard
When I moved up.

00:54:29:06 – 00:54:31:28
Dan LeFebvre
So it’s plausible. It must be true.

00:54:32:01 – 00:54:57:12
Rob Hilliard
Right. Exactly. And so I’d have to go back and look at the spy of the rebellion. Pinkerton’s book again. But I think there was a mention. I’m almost positive. No, I don’t think about it, that there’s a mention of a specific county in Mississippi. Although I don’t remember the name of it. Now. And and like I said, I went back and looked at, this is what I was researching the book.

00:54:57:12 – 00:55:22:19
Rob Hilliard
So this is, you know, pushing ten years ago now, but I looked at, troop regiment names, officer names from, you know, from the troops who were raised in those areas. Looked a little bit land ownership records in those areas. Didn’t see anything that, you know, that had the name Scoble in it. Which probably, again, just lends itself to the fact that he that Pinkerton fabricated that name.

00:55:22:19 – 00:55:34:07
Rob Hilliard
And, it might have been Cooper. For all we know, Frank Cooper was frank there with thousands of them. So, yeah, no. No way to tell.

00:55:34:09 – 00:55:58:00
Dan LeFebvre
Well, since we’re on the topic of of John was family, there are also some conversations in the movie where he talks about his wife and kids. He says he married a woman named Fanny Woodrow in 1859. They had a daughter named says Mary Armstrong. And then when she passed away, Fanny left with their son, John Armstrong Jr. And so that’s why, during the timeline of the movie, John Scoble is single.

00:55:58:02 – 00:56:02:01
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know anything about that? If that’s accurate?

00:56:02:03 – 00:56:33:25
Rob Hilliard
Not no, we don’t. So there’s, John John’s Goebbels wife, and I’m calling her that because she doesn’t. She’s not named. She gets, a whopping two sentences in Pinkerton’s book, The Spy of the rebellion. One saying that she existed and the other saying that she, took work in Richmond, Virginia. And that’s it. That’s all.

00:56:33:26 – 00:57:00:27
Rob Hilliard
That’s all we know about her. So. And and she is, again, we’re talking about a book was written in 83. Wouldn’t be very unusual for anybody, of any color or anything else, of a woman to be described as so-and-so’s wife, right? As opposed to using her her proper name. And that was, unfortunately for researchers of the 21st century, that was the approach that picker didn’t, chose.

00:57:00:27 – 00:57:13:27
Rob Hilliard
So, we don’t even we’ll know her first name, let alone her last name. You know, no indication of whether they had kids or not. So, that’s, you know.

00:57:14:00 – 00:57:36:27
Dan LeFebvre
One of those things we don’t know, which probably means I thought it was interesting that in the movie, they they called her Woodrow, which, you know, we’ve been talking about how there all these woods in it. So I was like, well, maybe she’s a spy, too. But of course, we don’t even really know much about her. Then we’re probably not going to know if she also was recruited by Pinkertons, although I would say this is just my assumption.

00:57:36:29 – 00:57:55:13
Dan LeFebvre
If Allan Pinkerton went to the length of at least mentioning that she existed, if she actually worked for him as a spy, I would assume there would be more information in there. But I might be. I mean, that’s just my assumption. Like maybe he would have said a little bit more about her.

00:57:55:15 – 00:58:21:13
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. Well, if if I would say, I think you’re you’re on the right track there. If she was spying for him during the Civil War, but that might not be true if she were working as a, Pinkerton detective after the Civil War. Right. And because, like I said, he basically drew a line and, and didn’t really talk about any of the operatives after the war.

00:58:22:18 – 00:58:33:11
Rob Hilliard
So and I’m not saying that to be coy. I’m just I’m just saying, you know, you’re right that if she was if she was actively spying on the Civil War, she would have certainly got a mentioned.

00:58:33:13 – 00:58:43:18
Dan LeFebvre
But it was after the Civil War that they started using the word codename. Right. So those two things then wouldn’t really my, my assumption would have been way out there.

00:58:43:20 – 00:58:49:03
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, I maybe, but you know, maybe the screenwriters were they might have been setting themselves up for a sequel there.

00:58:49:03 – 00:59:06:19
Dan LeFebvre
I don’t oh, there we go. We’re to see. Wait, you already talked about this a little bit. And there is a point in the movie where Catherine asks, well, how he met the Pinkertons, and he tells her that Mr. Pinkerton debriefed runaways and free slaves, and then recruited some of them to return back to the South as spies.

00:59:06:21 – 00:59:12:14
Dan LeFebvre
And I’m assuming then that’s how Scoble, the real John Scoble, was recruited into the Pinkertons.

00:59:12:17 – 00:59:36:19
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, that’s exactly right. In fact, I was, this was the scene that I was referencing earlier where he talks about how he’s recruiting. It is spot on. And then the only little wobble that you know, was in there, from my standpoint was when he talks about being in Richmond and when he says that he was, you know, he was captured with all of Webster and, and Lorton.

00:59:37:22 – 01:00:06:17
Rob Hilliard
So and again, that’s a completely forgivable one because that was, you know, kind of the accepted, backstory for Scoble. But, the just to get a little bit into the, the Pinkerton side of it here, he was, as I said before, he was a very staunch abolitionist, and felt very strongly about emancipation with that.

01:00:06:19 – 01:00:36:03
Rob Hilliard
He was one of, if not the first, people in the intelligence community. And that not includes, like Army intelligence or whoever else, to recognize that these slaves who were escaping and coming into Union line, there were largely slaves, not exclusively. There were some people who were free, people who were also coming across, but, they they were what became known as Contrabands.

01:00:36:06 – 01:01:05:22
Rob Hilliard
And that was the term that was used for slaves who came out of the South and into the North. They were legally considered to be contraband of war, meaning that, and it’s kind of a I always thought kind of a pretty sweet, twist of, legal interpretation where the, the Southerners, the Confederates felt that the slaves were property, right?

01:01:05:22 – 01:01:29:23
Rob Hilliard
They weren’t people. They were property. And so very early in the war, a couple of slaves came across, got onto the Union lines and, and the, after the skirmish that had happened, the Confederate, officer reached out to the Union officer and said, hey, I want my slaves back. And that Union officer happened to be Benjamin Butler, who was another staunch abolitionist of Massachusetts.

01:01:29:25 – 01:01:54:16
Rob Hilliard
But he was also a lawyer. And, and Butler said, well, not so fast if you’re saying that they’re not people, that they’re property and they were captured, effectively captured during a battle, then it would be no different than a cannon or a horse or a rifle. And I’m not giving you your cannon or your horses or your rifles back.

01:01:54:16 – 01:02:28:20
Rob Hilliard
So I’m not giving you your swing back either. And that’s where the in his sort of legal decision, as it were, on that, or his legal rationale, he actually used the terminology contraband of war. And then, within a month or so, President Lincoln recognized, of course, the strategic military value that beyond the human value of it and every, you know, basically every slave that came across, I mean, this is the basis of Emancipation Proclamation as well.

01:02:28:20 – 01:02:57:08
Rob Hilliard
But every slave who was not no longer working on a plantation or working wherever in the South was either that much less production for the South, or it meant that one more soldier or potential soldier for the Confederate army had to stay home and work, right. So he did way weaken the Confederate Army. And, so Lincoln adopted, that policy, across, you know, across the whole country.

01:02:57:10 – 01:03:39:29
Rob Hilliard
And so the slaves were coming across, therefore became those contrabands. And that became kind of a common, language even among the slaves themselves. And so Pinkerton was interviewing these people as they came over because, along with two federate deserters, Union P.O.W., who would either escaped or been released, because all of them had been just, you know, a lot of cases the day before or very shortly before on the other side of the skirmish line, and they would often know, what units were there, how many people were there, how much artillery was there?

01:03:39:29 – 01:04:00:15
Rob Hilliard
Was there a cavalry unit versus an infantry leader or whatever it might’ve been? So he was very deliberate about interviewing those people as they came across and gathering that intelligence to the best that he could, and then trying to to match it up with those we talked about earlier, try to match it up to confirm it, you know, with other sources.

01:04:01:00 – 01:04:23:07
Rob Hilliard
That was, as I said already, that was kind of where Picatinny fell apart in the in doing you did not do a very good job of that part. But but Scoble specifically, you know, he was part of that and he was interviewed as a contraband coming across. And, he made such an impression on Pinkerton.

01:04:24:18 – 01:04:39:12
Rob Hilliard
Mainly because he could read and write, which, of course, most slaves couldn’t, because it was illegal to teach. So to do so in most of the South, and I don’t remember. Do you remember if they mentioned that in the movie, the. Did Skomal say something about the.

01:04:39:15 – 01:04:46:23
Dan LeFebvre
I seem to recall something about that, but I don’t know if I’m, just making that up now off the top of my head. But.

01:04:46:25 – 01:04:51:13
Rob Hilliard
You’re starting to see more into my my into that I did I invent that or was that I.

01:04:51:16 – 01:05:09:25
Dan LeFebvre
I seem to recall something about that that was kind of one of the differentiating facts, but also the other part of that, too. And for, for people listening this if you, go listen to my chat with Rob where we talk about the Pinkertons, we also talk about John Scoble there, too. So that might also be where I’m pulling this from.

01:05:09:27 – 01:05:31:07
Rob Hilliard
That’s where, like I said, you’re following in my travels. Is that really real or did I just do that or did I write that? So, but anyway, yeah, it’s, that was a differentiator is that he could read and write. I just couldn’t remember if it’s I feel like the maybe he said that quickly in the movie, but yeah, I’d like to like you.

01:05:31:07 – 01:06:05:16
Rob Hilliard
I’m not actually positive. So, but he did make such a really strong impression on Pinkerton. And I mentioned, the CIA officer earlier who had done some research into this, and I talked to him, interviewed him when I was preparing my book. And he he used a phrase that I really liked. He said, if if he if Pinkerton had been talking to Scoble today, and debriefing him as a, as a contraband, what would have impressed Pinkerton would have been his street smarts.

01:06:05:19 – 01:06:37:18
Rob Hilliard
And they didn’t use the phrase street smarts as a modern phrase. Not, you know, not one would have been used in the 1800s, but, it it conveys the idea. Right? He was he was very sharp. He understood he pick things up quickly, understood what was going on. Yeah. He could read and write, but he was also somebody who Pinkerton immediately saw could, to use Pinkerton terminology, assume a role, in and be able to go undercover and, and gather intelligence and import it back.

01:06:37:23 – 01:06:45:12
Rob Hilliard
So it takes a special person to do that. And Pinkerton recognized right away, let’s go boys, was somebody who could do it successfully.

01:06:45:15 – 01:07:11:11
Dan LeFebvre
It takes a special kind of person to be willing to do that, especially, you know, if it’s covert. I can’t imagine being in the position of, you know, being finally getting to freedom. And then there’s this job that will take you back. And I’m correct me if I’m wrong. I would assume that he did have a choice in that matter, and he chose then to go back and actually work instead of just running away.

01:07:11:13 – 01:07:54:07
Rob Hilliard
Well. Pinkerton is not explicit on that point. Okay, so, excuse me. My word. Careful here. For a couple reasons. One of them, you know, I’m tiptoeing around spoilers for my book, but, but the, Pinkerton was notoriously as a person. All about the job. And so I mentioned earlier, and he was very loyal to his operatives, which is true, but I don’t think anybody would have described him as like, a kindly boss.

01:07:54:16 – 01:07:54:25
Rob Hilliard
That’s.

01:07:54:28 – 01:07:56:26
Dan LeFebvre
The results, it sounds like.

01:07:56:29 – 01:08:30:28
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And like I said, it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t. He wasn’t loyal and that he didn’t care for his people. But, as you said, he was all about results. So I think he recognized, that opportunity was Scoble and and that he was somebody who would be uniquely positioned. And I probably should also touch on the fact that, that idea of using people who were uniquely positioned was not foreign to Pinkerton because he was the first to employ female detectives in the US, maybe in the world.

01:08:31:00 – 01:08:31:18
Dan LeFebvre
That weren’t.

01:08:31:24 – 01:08:33:08
Rob Hilliard
Him. Oh, sorry.

01:08:33:08 – 01:08:37:14
Dan LeFebvre
Go ahead. No, I was going to say like, hey, Warren, that we’ve mentioned that earlier. Yeah.

01:08:37:16 – 01:08:59:03
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. And so she was the first female detective that he hired and the first female detective anybody hired. But then after that, he actually built, I think he called the Women’s Bureau or Women Detective Bureau or something like that. Recognizing that they could you know, do things and get access to information and go places that men couldn’t, particularly in the 19th century.

01:08:59:21 – 01:09:24:09
Rob Hilliard
So the idea then of using a black man’s ability to do those things, is maybe just a little bit of a tangent off of, the idea of using a woman as a detective or a spy at that time. So, it wouldn’t have been. I guess what I’m trying to get at is it would have been a totally foreign concept for him to do that.

01:09:24:25 – 01:09:33:00
Rob Hilliard
Now, to your point about,

01:09:33:02 – 01:09:55:19
Rob Hilliard
Motivation. I always feel like. And this is really why I’m, I’m kind of choosing my words carefully. In my book, as you know, from reading it, I embedded a little bit more motivation into the reason for doing this. And, I’ll kind of, if you’ll indulge me, I’ll kind of do a little another little quick tangent here.

01:09:55:19 – 01:10:32:03
Rob Hilliard
But in the in the spy in the intelligence community, they talk about the reasons that people become spies and they use the acronym Mice, Mickey. And the reasons are money. Ideology, C coercion and E ego. Okay. Ego, the classic example that would be, from stripping a gear. The famous traitor during the Revolutionary War.

01:10:32:05 – 01:10:33:25
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, Benedict Arnold.

01:10:33:28 – 01:11:07:15
Rob Hilliard
The. Thank you for all my my work. I can think of his wife’s name in this movie. Her. Yeah, but Arnold passed over for promotion. You know, got pissed off at his superiors, and really, it was ego. So the classic example there, he he became, you know, traitor, spy for for the other side, ideology is, like, James Howard, I mentioned earlier, he was a Confederates sympathizer who happened to be living in the North in the capital, Washington, DC.

01:11:07:17 – 01:11:43:09
Rob Hilliard
But his ideology lay with the other side. So he spied and passed information to to the other side of the Confederacy. In that case, money. That’s pretty straightforward, right? Your pile of cash. If it’s big enough, you turn target tables. Coercion, though, can take many forms. And I chose to present score wars story with, a form of coercion, as, you know, his motivation.

01:11:43:25 – 01:12:07:16
Rob Hilliard
No, I think it would be in real life. Certainly a combination of ideology. Right. He he he was a good man. He certainly would have wanted to he wanted to be free himself so that he could have done to help free other black people. You know, there had to be some part of his motivation, be that, you know, how much percent ideology, how much percent coercion.

01:12:07:16 – 01:12:09:12
Rob Hilliard
Remember, we don’t even know the guy’s name.

01:12:09:12 – 01:12:12:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well, right. That’s going to say so.

01:12:12:07 – 01:12:43:24
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, but I always feel a little bit guilty, in my mind, because he might have been, he might have been that guy who was just like, you know what? I’m doing this because it’s the right thing. And doing it for, you know, to use that, that might terminology, doing it for ideology exclusively. I chose for reasons that have nothing to do with him or his personality or anything else, and everything to do with writing and kind of building a fictional story.

01:12:43:26 – 01:13:08:19
Rob Hilliard
I chose to blend in a little bit of, coercion, storyline in there. Because, frankly, because it made him a more interesting character. If you’re, you know, if you’re the the person who’s just always does things because it’s the right thing to do, if you’re always the upright, you know, person, like, you always know you’re gonna do the right thing, for the right reasons.

01:13:10:07 – 01:13:44:04
Rob Hilliard
You strangely, ironically, I guess, become a less interesting character, from a storytelling standpoint. So, so anyway, again, very long winded answer to, to your question there, but, it still doesn’t matter how you slice that. What he did was unquestionably extraordinarily courageous, extraordinarily heroic. There wasn’t you know, to your original point there, there was nothing forcing him to do it.

01:13:44:21 – 01:14:07:23
Rob Hilliard
So he did have some, you know, some freewill choice there. And, and he chose to do, frankly, probably the most frightening thing possible, which is not only risking his life, but his freedom and and probable torture and like every bad thing you can possibly think of, he risked all those things to become a spy.

01:14:07:23 – 01:14:30:23
Dan LeFebvre
So which tells you you kind of some a bit about who he who he was as a person to that he would even do that. But, before I go to the next question, I will say that that was a good job working around your, little plot line there. But, if somebody’s watching this, go pick up Rob’s book to find out that little nugget and that little plot line there.

01:14:31:00 – 01:14:57:21
Dan LeFebvre
But if we go back to this movie, one of the core plot points in the movie revolves around this, this massacre. And I mentioned, Colonel William Davis before, and we never see the massacre in the movie because it’s before the timeline. But the biggest clue that I saw in the movie is, I think it’s about an hour or so into the movie, and there’s a singular mention to something called the Quantrill Massacre, where men, women and children were killed in Lawrence, Kansas, and then the woods knew about it, according to the movie.

01:14:57:27 – 01:15:16:21
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s why in the movie’s timeline, Colonel Davis is now running for a seat in the Senate, and he kind of wants to hide that he was involved in this massacre. And so that seems to be his motivation for hiring hitmen to track down the woods and kill them. Is there any truth to the movie’s telling of this massacre?

01:15:16:24 – 01:15:40:29
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, the the massacre itself was absolutely true. And, it was, I mean, it was national news. It was extremely well known. I wasn’t like you. I think I wasn’t totally clear because it was so. Well known why he was trying to like, I’m not. Either I missed it or maybe it just wasn’t totally well explained.

01:15:40:29 – 01:15:52:14
Rob Hilliard
But why? Colonel Davis was worried about being associated with the massacre. Unless it was. The implication, I think, was that he had somehow ordered it or planned it.

01:15:52:16 – 01:16:01:29
Dan LeFebvre
That was the impression I got was he was basically responsible for it, and now he’s trying to get a seat in the Senate and he’s not going to get votes. If that was the impression I got from the when the movie explained. Yeah.

01:16:02:02 – 01:16:25:04
Rob Hilliard
Yeah. So anyway, I’m, I like to swing back around to that at the end, but just to give me the facts and figures here on, the, this is one of those, some of your listeners may know a lot of Civil War battles had two names, and that was because the newspapers in the South, used, I’m trying remember, the right way.

01:16:25:08 – 01:16:45:10
Rob Hilliard
They use stream names. And then the northern newspapers tended to use, like the closest, the closest town to it or mine on the backwards. But anyway, so you’ll see, like Manassas and Bull Run, it’s the same battle to the. This one, has two different names, but it depended on which side of the line you were sitting on.

01:16:45:10 – 01:17:16:27
Rob Hilliard
So if you were, southern sympathizer or specifically in Missouri, it was called quantiles raid. If you were a northern sympathizer, or in Kansas, it was called the Lawrence massacre. So take your pick. But it was very real event. It happened on August 21st, 1863. And the specifics of it are that a group of raiders, or again, prioritized.

01:17:16:29 – 01:17:43:12
Rob Hilliard
You’re on they were also known as bushwhackers, which is a term that we talked about in the, talked about the Pinkertons, or or guerrillas. So Cantrell’s raiders were about 400 men rode into Kansas and basically just started shooting people and then, and let the town on fire. So they killed somewhere between 160 and 190 people.

01:17:43:23 – 01:18:07:10
Rob Hilliard
All of those were civilians. They were not this was not soldiers versus soldiers, which is what made it, so terrible, what made national news. Some of those were, free blacks who lived in, in Lawrence at the time. And part of what precipitated this, I mean, this is like a you could put somebody probably does teach a whole college course on this.

01:18:07:10 – 01:18:34:18
Rob Hilliard
So I’m not going to give it justice even close. But, Kansas was a free state. Missouri was a slave state. That was the, Missouri compromise that you may or may not have learned about in history class where you’re in high school. And but Lawrence, specifically within Kansas, was known for a long time as kind of a bastion of, anti-slavery, kind of a stronghold of anti-slavery.

01:18:34:21 – 01:18:59:03
Rob Hilliard
And so there were a lot of free box there. So when controls man rode in, they were specifically, looking for black people, mostly black men, but black people who they were, shooting. And then, then they’d beyond that, though, of course, they killed many whites as well. I don’t I wasn’t able to find a breakdown of how many of you trace.

01:18:59:03 – 01:19:27:03
Rob Hilliard
It doesn’t matter. They killed almost 200 people. And burned most of the town to the ground. So, so what precipitated that? Again, this has been going back and forth for a couple of years, even prior to the war. And and then during the war, the Kansas regiments that were known as the Jayhawks, which had a college for both the and so, college sports fans will recognize that name for University of Kansas today.

01:19:27:22 – 01:19:53:11
Rob Hilliard
They conducted race in the Missouri prior to this, 1863 raid. And, so and that was really back and forth. I mean, the Missouri, the Bushwhackers were coming across and killing people, killing soldiers. A lot of this was, as I said, guerrilla warfare kind of back and forth, not, not organized set piece battles like we picture in the East.

01:19:54:07 – 01:20:21:02
Rob Hilliard
And that actually gave, rise to the term bleeding Kansas and, that was used widely in newspapers at the time. But it gives you an indication of just how bad it really was. One other thing to note. There is about a week before the Lawrence raid, there was, a Union prison in Kansas City where they were holding, Confederate, mostly women.

01:20:21:04 – 01:20:49:28
Rob Hilliard
And, they were, as you might expect, many of them were relatives of the bushwhackers. And tragically, the building collapsed, that it really knew what caused that. It wasn’t it wasn’t deliberate, but it collapsed and it killed five women. And among these, one was the sister of a guy known as bloody Bill Henderson, who was the most famous or infamous of Charles Raiders.

01:20:50:01 – 01:21:19:12
Rob Hilliard
And, and then another woman who was a cousin of Cole Younger. He later rode with, and Rob banks with just jacked. So that all and actually, speaking of Jesse James, he certainly had associations with, Raiders and probably was one of them may not have been present at the Lawrence massacre. But he definitely was part of that guerrilla.

01:21:19:22 – 01:21:24:13
Rob Hilliard
It was brother, brother Frank. Both were part of those guerrilla, outfits.

01:21:24:16 – 01:21:29:21
Dan LeFebvre
And that must have been then how they got connected to be the James Younger gang.

01:21:29:23 – 01:22:00:27
Rob Hilliard
Exactly. That’s exactly right. And, so the reason I mentioned the the prison collapse is that might have been part of the motivation for the attack on Lawrence because, you know, kind of a revenge factor. But there were at this point, by 1863, several years worth of, extremely bloody incidents that also prevented it. So, but because that was just the week before, it may have been, you know, it might have been the immediate, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

01:22:00:27 – 01:22:24:08
Dan LeFebvre
It’s also well, at the end of the movie, there’s there’s a final showdown for Katherine’s Trail of vengeance. Throughout the movie, she kills Zeke, who is one of the other, hitmen for Colonel Davis. Accidentally shoots Scoble from the long distance. Shot through the window seem to be aimed at Frank, but. And then she does get closer and actually shoots Frank in the head to kill him.

01:22:24:14 – 01:22:48:23
Dan LeFebvre
She also shoots Colonel Davis point blank range in a showdown with him. And then the movie ends by implying that she thought John Scoble was killed by her accidental shot. But then the movie fast forwards. Many years later, and the very end of the movie we see John Scoble is alive as he’s watching Katherine and her now son Caleb Junior from afar.

01:22:48:26 – 01:22:52:24
Dan LeFebvre
How historically accurate is the way the movie ends?

01:22:52:26 – 01:23:10:15
Rob Hilliard
Well, it’s, I’m not going to pick it apart because it’s a fictional story in an official, so, it’s not. Yeah. And other than Scoble and all the characters he mentioned there were made up for the purposes of the film, so I can’t say, you know, entirely accurate.

01:23:10:15 – 01:23:11:21
Dan LeFebvre
Just not historically.

01:23:11:24 – 01:23:39:17
Rob Hilliard
Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They can basically, it’s their story. They can end in any way they want. Yeah, yeah. The, the, the one thing, that, as I said, we were watching this, my wife and son and I were watching, and, when Catherine picks up the Henry rifle and she’s kind of aiming in the window, and, as you said, it was kind of a long distance shot, and I might have even said it out loud.

01:23:39:17 – 01:23:59:03
Rob Hilliard
I certainly thought it. I’m like, she’s going to shoot Scoble if she takes that shot. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. So, of course I was very offended at that, since he’s he’s my guy. I didn’t wanna see him shot. But, but, yeah, at the end, you know, they did show, as any good, heroic character.

01:23:59:03 – 01:24:22:08
Rob Hilliard
Does he? He survived it. He pulled through. So, but, yeah, I’ve touched on this previously, but we don’t know anything about, what happened was go after the war. We don’t, you know, we don’t know how long you live where he lived. Anything like, we don’t know if he got shot in the chest and bounced back from it.

01:24:22:09 – 01:24:36:10
Rob Hilliard
And it came back to check on her or not. So, yeah, like I said, it’s it’s a, you know, a fictional story and a fictional ending. So there, it was up to the writers to decide how they wanted to make that one play out.

01:24:36:12 – 01:24:57:01
Dan LeFebvre
I felt like maybe, maybe, maybe they will do a sequel to this, but I felt like when they were talking about his wife, I almost assumed at the end. But when I was watching The end there, I was like, oh, he’s going to reunite with his wife somewhere or something like that, and it’s going to be, you know, him kind of having a happily ever after, I guess.

01:24:57:01 – 01:25:05:13
Dan LeFebvre
I didn’t really expect him to come back and find Catherine randomly after that. But I guess that’s, you know.

01:25:05:15 – 01:25:08:14
Rob Hilliard
Like I said, they can make any ending they, they want. That’s their movie.

01:25:08:14 – 01:25:32:12
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s true. Well, as we wrap up our discussion today, I would like to shift from the movie storyline to another storyline. We talked about a little bit featuring John Scoble. I’m talking course about your historical novel called In Freedom Shadow. There’s a link in the show notes, and as a quick tangent of my own, I know there are people in my audience who work in the feature film industry, so if that’s you, I will highly recommend reaching out to Rob to turn in Freedom Shadow into a movie.

01:25:32:12 – 01:25:37:14
Dan LeFebvre
That would be a fantastic movie. But, before I let you go, Rob, can you give us an overview of your book?

01:25:37:16 – 01:26:03:28
Rob Hilliard
Sure. It’s, I feel like I’ve already kind of done that a little bit, and I don’t want to I don’t want to bore anybody by repeating it, but, it does. It takes the the bit, the we know, the true story about John Scoble from Pinkerton’s book and, lays that on the broader context of what was going on in the Civil War, in the Civil War at that time.

01:26:04:25 – 01:26:25:07
Rob Hilliard
I love bashing Pinkerton as a as a writer. I’ll know one more time here before we wrap up, but what, another criticism that I’m the only one who has this that people have. And reading him is everything seem to happen in isolation. So it was like, well, you know, they were doing this in Richmond during this time period.

01:26:25:07 – 01:27:02:01
Rob Hilliard
And it’s like, well, the Richmond was virtually under attack in the spring of 18. So, by, by the Northern Army during the Peninsula Campaign. And he I don’t think the words Peninsula campaign actually appear in his book. And so anyway, point of all that is, I tried to take that the true story as kind of the backbone of the book and, and then build it into something that looks at the larger context of what was going on and, and puts a little more meat on the bones to tell Scoble story.

01:27:03:00 – 01:27:28:07
Rob Hilliard
And really fleshed out, and, you know, are already talked about this a little bit, but try to get into what were his motivations, why might he have done some of these things? A couple of these people who get just a word or two mention, in Pinkerton’s, story or, the whole Carrie lot, Patty lot and thing.

01:27:28:07 – 01:27:56:24
Rob Hilliard
Like, who was Carrie Latin and what did she do? Why did she do it? And how did she interact with Scoble? There’s very little of that. Almost none in Pinkerton’s book. So try to build, a larger, fuller story. Fictional course, because we don’t know, what what actually happened between those lines. But, I try to fill in some of the, some of the space in between with, with that story.

01:27:56:26 – 01:28:00:13
Dan LeFebvre
And make sure to add a link to that in the show notes. Thanks again so much for your time, Rob.

01:28:00:29 – 01:28:15:06
Rob Hilliard
I appreciate you having me back on. I wasn’t expecting it would be this soon, but we didn’t know that, Trail of Vengeance was coming out and that it was going to feature, John Scoble, that he was going to pop up in, in pop culture so soon. So, yeah, thanks very much.

01:28:15:09 – 01:28:32:04
Dan LeFebvre
Actually, one I do have one, since you mentioned that, since you were just on we talked about the Pinkertons and now a Trail of Vengeance. Would you say that? Which one would you say does a better job of portraying John Scoble and the Pinkertons? He’s not even named Scoble. He’s John Bell. And we’ve talked about both a little bit.

01:28:32:04 – 01:28:35:24
Dan LeFebvre
Do you think Trail of Vengeance did a better job bringing John’s Gospel to life?

01:28:36:03 – 01:28:56:22
Rob Hilliard
I think they did. I mean, in fairness to the writers of the Pinkertons and I know, I, I know I lit into them pretty good when we, when we did this earlier episodes, for their complete disregard for facts. But they, you know, as you said, they didn’t name their character John Scoble. They called him John Bell.

01:28:57:10 – 01:29:40:10
Rob Hilliard
And I think in retrospect, part of the reason for that might have been that because, well, if we’re not tied to this character, no, we that to be tied to his real life storyline, either we can kind of go off whatever direction we want, which they assuredly did. Let it but as I said earlier in this interview, you know, kudos to, to Trail Vengeance for and the writers and the director for, really toeing the line on the, on the Scoble story and, and sticking to, like I said before, almost verbatim, you know, what we know about about Scoble from, from Pinkerton’s work.

01:29:40:13 – 01:29:52:18
Dan LeFebvre
It’s it’s just fascinating that we we don’t know much. So there’s going to be you’re you’re almost going to have to have a story like this that’s made up because we don’t know much. But it is great to hear that what we do know. They did a good job.

01:29:52:20 – 01:30:09:07
Rob Hilliard
Yeah, yeah. And as I said, the I can’t criticize him because I did the exact same thing. Right? I took what was known and filled in the gaps in between. They took a different approach by taking that character and fast forwarding him a few years past the end of Civil War and then creating a story around him there.

01:30:09:07 – 01:30:23:12
Rob Hilliard
But still, you know, having some touch points back to those known, to the known facts. So, you know, two different approaches. But like you said, when they’re so little known, if you’re going to tell a story and have them in there, you got to have something to tell.

01:30:23:14 – 01:30:25:28
Dan LeFebvre
Thanks again so much for your time round.

01:30:26:01 – 01:30:33:23
Rob Hilliard
Appreciate you having me on, Dan. Thanks very much as always.

Dan LeFebvre  03:13

Even though no one expects movies to be entirely accurate some movies do better than others. So let’s start today by getting a sense of how well today’s movie did with history. If you were to give tombstone and overall letter grade for its historical accuracy, what would it get?

 

Tom Clavin  03:30

I would give it a B plus B plus approaching an A minus it’s really borderline it does a good job there are some liberties taken but when you consider some of the previous treatments of the whole Gunfight at the OK Corral story and how far off the the mark they are. Tombstone does does a very good job of trying to stick to the facts. Yeah,

 

Dan LeFebvre  03:57

that’s a lot better than I was expecting a lot of movies are. Don’t even really try.

 

Tom Clavin  04:01

Well, you look at something like My Darling Clementine, so many people refer to that as like the classic movie about the gunfight at the OK Corral. And objectively it’s a really good WestEd John Ford Henry find his wider. Walter Brennan is the head of the clan gang. It’s a really good movie. But it’s it’s sort of stitched together a lot of embellishments and outright falsehoods. I think if I remember correctly, a victim which the very stocky and robust victim mature, plain dark holiday. He says he hears like he’d ever been sick a day in his life. One of the earth brothers dies before the gunfight at the OK Corral. So you know there’s been that’s an example of the kind of liberties that were taken. So a tombstone came along. I have to credit that was really trying. And Maurice the I think it’s Kevin Jr. was the screenwriter. His script really did try to make the effort to distinct stick. And I think what he found, which is not a revelation to most people, and certainly he’s And a big part of my career is that you can find that the historical accuracy can be as interesting if not more so than what they made up.

 

Dan LeFebvre  05:08

As they say truth is stranger than fiction sometimes. Just word relating to the speaking of Tombstone at the beginning of that movie were introduced to Wyatt Earp along with his brothers Virgil and Morgan. And we see the three brothers arriving in Tucson, Arizona first, along with their three wives, Ali, Louisa and Maddie. And we see the six traveling on to the Boomtown that movie is named after Tombstone is how it’s referred to them. The movie also points out that while herb is already a legendary lawman, he’s retiring his badge start a peaceful life with his family. This is how the movie sets it up in the beginning. And you mentioned that holiday their friend doc holidays there too, because he’s hoping the dry climate will relieve his tuberculosis. Do you think the movie did a good job? Given an introduction to this story, before the main characters even got to Tombstone? I

 

Tom Clavin  06:02

think they did a good job of setting up the story rather efficiently. And and showing that the you know, right off the bat, you show that these not just lone cowboys and retired ex law men roaming the reigns, they have committed relationships. I mean, Virgil, especially was with his wife, Ali. They might have been the only ones of the bunch that were actually married. You know, the, it was pretty common in those days that common law marriage was pretty much accepted. If you stayed together long enough, you call yourself Mrs. ERP, you know, Mrs. Jones, whatever. So I think they set it up pretty effectively and efficiently. And and you mentioned in your question about why it might or being presented as legendary lawmen, you know, it really was tombstone and then the earth revenge ride or, you know, retaliation ride has got to get different names. That put him more into the legend book. I mean, me to be accurate from from coming from Dodge City, White had a reputation a good one for his tenure in Dodge City, but he wasn’t even a marshal there. He was a deputy Marshal and and he was he was we worked under the marshal in Dodge City. So he was not by any means a legendary character. When he got to Tombstone, it was tombstone really, that made him go to that legendary status.

 

Dan LeFebvre  07:29

Okay, okay. Yeah. Because when he arrives there in the movie, I don’t remember who it is. But somebody’s at the local law there is already asking him to be like, hey, come join us. It just seems like he’s already this legend that his reputation precedes him was the impression I got.

 

Tom Clavin  07:44

Yeah, and that’s pretty common when they presented wide open the movies that, you know, sometimes there’s even one of the earlier movie that he’s portrayed by Randolph Scott. When he gets to Dodge City, he’s already a legend. You know, he just had a couple of small time jobs before that. But that makes sense dramatically. You know, why? Why should you spend another hour and a half of this guy if he’s not visa cut rather than significant character.

 

Dan LeFebvre  08:09

That’s the origin story that they always have in movies. Something else that we see in the movie that it sets up here is the bad guys in the movie, they call themselves the Cowboys. And the movie sets it up that they’re made up of over 100 exiled, Texas outlaws who banded together to be as the movie puts at the org, the earliest example of organized crime in America, and they’re led by curly Bill brochures that’s the leader, and they all wear wear red sashes. I thought this was very convenient for the movie to do this and made it very easy to spot the bad guys in the movie. What was the movie set up of the Cowboys accurate?

 

Tom Clavin  08:43

It was pretty accurate because what was going on is that you know, cowboys in. In the 1860s 1870s, even to the 20s were really a derogatory name. Or at least they were they was, you know, they was the first time you see cowboys use often it was hyphenated cow hyphen, boy. And basically, it was somebody who herded cows, which is not the most well respected occupation at the time. So cowboys were also those who tended to not adhere to the letter of the law. They weren’t all criminals by any means a lot of go hardworking, honest, but you know, they, they came into town with their paychecks and they spent in our one women at song, shooting, shooting things up, they were good sometimes making a real difficult time especially those cow towns in the 1870s like Dodge City and Abilene and some of the others that the the weather the end of the trail when they came up from Texas. So there was a kind of gang warfare going on in and around tombstone in the late 1870s 1880s. You had ranchers who are employed most of the Cowboys like the great like the Clintons, like the MC Lowery’s and others. They had been there for for quite some time, most of them and they wanted to keep things the way They word have access to town whenever they wanted it and they could pretty much do what they wanted to do some rustling on the side do some stealing of gas in Mexico. And then you had a different kind of gang represented by the earth or brothers or family, where they did not come to Tombstone to be any kind of law man to be any kind of, let’s let’s let’s make civilization stronger in Tombstone. They were there to make money. You know that that was the thing. But in order to make money, you had to have a certain kind of structure and peacefulness and you could be having cowboys shooting the town up every Saturday night. Inevitably, reluctantly And inevitably, the ERB gang was sort of getting getting into a warfare with the cowboy gangs, and which eventually reached its you could say it’s reached its climax with the gunfight at the OK Corral. But unlike a lot of books and movies, the story does not end with a gunfight at the OK Corral.

 

Dan LeFebvre  10:56

Upon arriving at tombstone in the movie, Wyatt Earp immediately sets up the brothers with a way to make money. There’s a rather vacant barn town called the Oriental run by a guy named Milt Joyce. The reason it’s vacant in the movie is because of a guy named Johnny Tyler. He was played by Billy Bob Thornton in the movie, and he’s described as someone who just barged in one day, and then started dealing at the Pharaoh table and run off all the customers. Milt, the owner of the Oriental can’t seem to get rid of him. And so that’s Johnny Tyler, the guy who came in milk can’t get rid of them. So white or comes in and scares off Johnny Tyler. After that, the basic setup seems to be that the brothers are working at the Orient almost some kind of protection, it seems from Johnny Tyler or someone like him, and then in exchange, they get 25% of the houses take is that a good portrayal of how the herbs made money in Tombstone?

 

Tom Clavin  11:52

Yeah, it’s it’s a shorthand version, but it’s pretty much based on fact. You know, and the earth brothers, you know, it does make them cast him in like an unflattering light. But that’s, that’s what they could do. They could offer protection. I mean, when earlier in his in his so called career, Wyatt and and was was a bouncer as was brothers, bordellos. And they ran kind of a protection racket in Wichita, and elsewhere. And so it was something they did brothers all stood together at any particular time. There could be four brothers involved with with Jim and Morgan and Wyatt and Virgil. And so the same thing in Tombstone is they saw an opportunity. They were also investing in some silver mines because that’s what was really powering the economy and tombstone was the mining and the surrounding hills. But that’s kind of iffy, you know, as little more of a sure thing, if you could run a gambling house and offer protection and and keep the money was, you know, fraud. As far as we know. It was not a crooked gambling house. But still the waves gambling house was set up to house usually one anyway, at once. And you know, part of the part of the story there is that why it was had a security, let’s say is a better way to put it of the Oriental. And then when things were getting a little more heated between he and other gambling houses. He brought his he requests his friend bat Masterson to come visit to help him out become like the assistant head of security, which is what happened. So in 1881, bat Masterson was in tombstone with his pals, the earth brothers. If it wasn’t for the fact that back in Dodge City, one of bats brothers was was being threatened with being killed. And Ben had to make his way back to Dodge City to straighten that situation out. He may well have also been part of the gunfight at the OK Corral. Oh, wow. Yeah. Which would have made it even more of a legendary event?

 

Dan LeFebvre  13:47

Yeah, yeah, I can. I mean, it’s already pretty legendary. It’s hard to imagine how much more it could be. But yeah, for sure.

 

Tom Clavin  13:54

Just imagine if you had you know, and it was it was actually truth. You had Virgil, Morgan Wyatt. Doc Holiday bat Masterson facing off against the clans and the Mughal hour. That would have been, you know, even even more sensational. Oh,

 

Dan LeFebvre  14:07

yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. Wow. But somebody else I want to ask about that we see in movie are the Mr. Fabian and Josephine Marcus. They arrive in in tombstone with their Trooper performers, and they start putting on shows that local theater, and immediately Josephine seems to catch why it’s I Much to the chagrin of why it’s wife Maddie. And this is just an ongoing theme that we see throughout the movie. So can you share some more historical context around the dynamic between Wyatt and Maddie and Josephine that we see in the movie? You

 

Tom Clavin  14:40

know, Josephine is a fascinating character in in the white urban legend. She, she is often portrayed and with some accuracy of coming to Tombstone, as an actress, I think I think in my book, she’s, it’s she’s part of a troupe This good performing a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta is traveling around and that’s that’s was often happened in those days these traveling troops of entertainers that’s how they made some money in how the town’s got some entertainment when they were out on the frontier. And, and she did catch Wyatt’s eye. He, you know, inconveniently she was the fiance of Johnny B and the marshal or the sheriff I should say a Ford county that Ford county of the county I think was Cochise County that eventually got separated to a different county. And and they had this romance and then they lived happily ever after after tombstone. And to some extent, that’s quite true. I mean, it’s it’s, she was also a prostitute, Josephine, Marcus, and earlier her life and and she wrote a book that came out. Kind of rather late in her life, she lived into the 1940s, Josephine Marcus, I mean, she was she was quite elderly, and she was very close to one of the ERPs to ally ERP, Virgil’s widow. And they were very close, I think they’re actually buried next to each other, and so a long life. And so Josephine wrote a book that was a total whitewash you know, I married white herb where I was whiter twice up to like that was a pretty much a whitewash that portrayed her and and such as complimentary, like most of which was just made up. But having said that, it did seem to be a genuine romance there. And and once the whole Tuesday business was done, and why it went to fetch, Josephine Josie, who had been sort of sheltering in San Francisco. They were together for the next 40 something years now portrayed by Dana Delaney. I don’t blame him. Yeah,

 

Dan LeFebvre  16:47

I mean, there had to been something real there. I mean, it like you mentioned if she was friends with Virgil’s widow for even even beyond, you know, the brothers being there. You know, that’s, that’s not pretty. That’s not for show, you know, that’s not something that you’re just doing for whatever the benefits may be.

 

Tom Clavin  17:07

That’s you seems why it’s fourth wife. Now, okay. You know, it seems like he finally got it right. On the right. It wasn’t like she was four before and it was five and six and seven. You know, he had had these other relationships and then he Josie got together and that was it. But but for both of them for the next 40 something years. Wow.

 

Dan LeFebvre  17:24

It seems like in the movie, he talks about how he wanted to retire and settle down. It seems like that’s kind of what what he was going for.

 

Tom Clavin  17:29

He retired as a law man, but they did anything with settle down. They roamed for decades. I mean, literally, they they they roamed the West thing, and he ran a bar in Alaska. He sold real estate in San Diego, California, always moving around. They didn’t stay too long at one place until in a later two years. They were pretty much set in a cottage in Los Angeles. And he was getting some work as a advisor on silent film westerns.

 

Dan LeFebvre  17:54

Okay, I guess settling down is a metaphorical term for life relationship,

 

Tom Clavin  18:00

you get what gunfights

 

Dan LeFebvre  18:03

Well, speaking of gun fights, if we go back into the movie, there was a major turn of events. Currently, bill gets drunk one night and then just is shooting off his guns and middle of the road. The Marshal Fred white goes out to stop him. But then curly build shoots and kills the marshal. Since Sheriff B hand won’t do anything about it. Virgil Earp seems to feel bad for the people of Tombstone. And so Mayor Klum makes Virgil the new Marshal in town. And one of the first things that Virgil does is to post an ordinance prohibiting anyone from carrying a gun in town. Of course the Cowboys don’t follow this role then we find out Morgan has a badge too but why isn’t quite going back to being a law man yet was Marshall White being killed by curly Bill kind of the catalyst that the movie seems to imply for the herbs getting swept up into law enforcement in Tombstone?

 

Tom Clavin  18:56

It was it was it was a very important turning point because Marshall ye was a well regarded figure in Tombstone and it was pretty much the killing of of the of the martial was kind of like an accident. So it wasn’t like curly bills got drunk and said I’m gonna get rid of this martial because he’s bothering me. He was he was trying so like kidding around with the martial like, Okay, here’s my gun. A gives him the gun in the martial takes, grabs the barrel of the gun and the way he pulls it, curly Bill’s finger still on the trigger and near the trigger and the gun goes off. Okay, technically, it was an accident that the marshal got killed and that that one gunshot was enough to kill him too. But it did was it was like crossing a line in the sand. You killed the the well regarded law man. And there was a vacuum there. You know, usually after a marshal gets killed, it’s not a long line of applicants. And, but Virgil did feel a sense of responsibility. And he had a law enforcement experience, having worked as a law enforcement officer as deputies elsewhere and back in Prescott, I think he was a deputy Marshal in Prescott. Before they came in, he and his wife came to Tombstone. So he thought he would step into that vacuum and maybe, you know, calm things down a little bit, which, you know, he kind of did. And he’s good for the role in it. This is also where I think the casting of the films both this film tombstone, and the other wider, wider film called wider really helps because I mean, as much as people remember Val Kilmer from the movie Tombstone, you know, maybe next to that, or a second to next to that. I remember Sam Elliot, as Virgil or, you know, his presence in the movie as the older brother is really very powerful, even though he does have a lot to say. Real Life Virgil didn’t have a lot to say, but his presence was influential. And it’s also think I drew Sam Elliot as part of that, that that quadrate that trio of brothers.

 

Dan LeFebvre  21:01

Yeah, I think he did a great job of being that. He was the one that could kind of go to for, for whatever sort of insights they might want that you might get expect from an older brother, but also just kind of silently they’re letting you know what’s right and wrong.

 

Tom Clavin  21:20

Exactly. Yeah. Said he had that kind of gravitas. So he carried off very well.

 

Dan LeFebvre  21:25

If you head back into the movies, timelines, the tensions in Tombstone are continuing to rise with the herbs on one side of the law, cowboys on the other side. In particular, there’s a scene where we see things almost boil over when one of the Cowboys Ike Clanton is playing at the Orientals Pharaoh table with Doc Holliday. The movie mentions that Doc Holliday has been playing for like 36 hours straights, of course, they’ve both been drinking a lot. And I just gets more and more irate as Doc keeps winning. When the herbs sit down at the table, Virgil as the lawmen tries to calm it down, but he insists that the herbs are in with the cheating with Doc and it comes to blows when Virgil has to knock it out with the butt of his pistol takes him to jail to sleep adult sleep off the alcohol. But then the next day, I hasn’t forgotten about the events from the night before and Su rides off. He promises the herbs that a fight is coming. Can you give us a little more historical context around some of the tensions that were building in Tombstone just before the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral?

 

Tom Clavin  22:29

Well, the ARPs kind of unfairly was seen as there to clean up the town weren’t Yes. Okay. Virgil became the marshal. But he I think his idea was just like, Let’s keep it going, keep it calm, everybody. He was not a reformer, you know, he did have a mandate. This this great momentum to try and, you know, turn tombstone into into a different kind of place than what it was. But because of Virgil in his position there and he would, he would routinely deputized Morgan and or Wyatt when he had to go arrest somebody or do some other, you know, we need some money to help you. You know, what better person to have at your back then one of your brothers. So, they became the, this this, this symbol of a, a emerging Tombstone is more sophisticated kind of town. And it really was, I mean, in the short amount of time that the few years since the tombstone, founded, you had French restaurants who were building hotels had, you know, they had dancing troops with the touring dancing troops that would come to the like the like nightclubs, they are the entertainer, they had a theater. The Cowboys, and the rancher employers, like the clans and like them are McClary. So this is threatened, being they feel threatened by all this, because they, they started to see themselves as, as the old wave that was that was, you know, had already washed up against the shore was was receding. And so there was a resentment there, that their way of life was going to be was already was in jeopardy, and would be maybe even eradicated you had yet other tensions, like the first appearances like sheep farmers, the people putting fences up fencing off the land is, it was it was kind of like the same kind of issues that were plaguing and maybe they would do so a little ahead of its time, but playing areas of like Wyoming and Montana, where you had, you know, sheep farming coming in less grassland for the cows, the fun, that’s what would have been considered public land being fenced off by new settlers. So it was it was so the tension really was that the ranches it felt that they were in danger of becoming extinct. And they targeted. Eventually they targeted the herbs as the people who are the point of the spear so to speak.

 

Dan LeFebvre  24:54

Yeah, that makes sense. They’re kind of the what whether or not that that’s actually the case leads the way the movie implies it They’re the ones that are leading the charge since they kind of have law law behind them I get the impression that well with with a lot of old west things it’s okay the the law men are the only ones keeping things in check whether or not they actually are you know, they weren’t actually there for that but they sounds like they got roped into it

 

Tom Clavin  25:20

they did again the IRPs that they would have been perfectly happy not ever putting on a badge again and making money because they wired for this entire life had a hard time making money he just was was one of those people that never got lucky and every time he thought there was a chance he was gonna strike a race thing fell apart you know when he was either in Nevada Alaska or places like that. So here in Tombstone everything you know it looked very promising for the earth so you we got at least three of the brothers together and then Warren would join them to meet four brothers together and they had Jim herb and his his wife Bessie operating the latest bordello enterprise was in Tombstone it’s he had five brothers together and we will each have each other’s backs and their respective you know girlfriends slash wives with them in a booming town I mean this looks very promising and then unfortunately for them they got they just couldn’t stay out of it like hey you guys silly differences we have nothing against anybody we just want to make some money they got they got caught up swept up in this in the tension that was going on and and the day came when they made a stand about it. Yeah,

 

Dan LeFebvre  26:29

now speaking of that, we are at the point in the movie where the gunfight at the OK Corral happens which I call it that because that’s what everybody knows it as now even though the movie does kind of point out that the fight itself doesn’t happen at the okay corral. On one side we see Wyatt Virgil Morgan herb along with Doc Holliday holding a shotgun and then on the other side the movies camera makes it a little bit difficult to see everyone at a single time on frame but it looks like maybe there’s six cowboys there at first one of them runs away as soon as the three Epson Doc Holiday shows up. Leaving five I think there’s a two pairs of brothers. I can Billy Clanton was Tom and Frank Nick Lowry. And then based on the movie, it looks like the last cowboy is Billy Clairborne going Yeah,

 

Tom Clavin  27:13

yeah. The end up parties actually participating in the gunfight. Oh, okay. Okay. He didn’t I think he was persuaded or decided, wait a minute. I don’t like this. I’m just gonna slack off to the side here with nobody’s noticing, because I don’t think he ever drew his gun and participated in the fight. Okay, so Okay, so it was four and four really with the brothers and GUC holiday. You know, it’s kind of a funny scene, if you know anything about dark holiday, where he he sort of guilts Wyatt into letting him and Virgil to living and become one of these deputies. I mean, the last the last person, almost the last person that Virgil are born to deputize will be Doc Holliday. And because he never died, he said to loose cannon and probably drunk and he also Doc Holliday was a terrible marksman with a handgun. He couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn is there’s numerous examples certainly in my book tombstone, where he gets into gunfights and he can’t hit anybody.

 

Dan LeFebvre  28:11

Sidewinder given the shotgun teaches

 

Tom Clavin  28:14

that’s exactly why when you see that why, why does Virgil give doc the hot the shotgun? It’s because he figures maybe with a shotgun docket hit the body, hopefully one of them and not one of us.

 

Dan LeFebvre  28:26

That’s funny, because in the movie, you get the impression that dark holidays is the gunfighter amongst them like he’s the one he’s super fast and the draw and you can hit anything it seems. He

 

Tom Clavin  28:36

was a gunfighter because he got the gunfights he just had a hard time killing anybody.

 

Dan LeFebvre  28:41

In the movie, we see that it’s Doc Holliday kind of winks at Billy Clanton to get him to be the one to draw his pistol first it looks like wider my next will be the first one to shoot his pistol when he hits Billy Claiborne. But by the time the shooting stops, there’s three cowboys that are killed and Morgan Earp is injured. How well did the movie do actually showing Gunfight at the OK Corral.

 

Tom Clavin  29:06

It did a good job especially again, I mentioned before when you compare it to some of the other portrayals on screen just one one example at the top of my head there’s the the movie titled Gunfight at the OK Corral. In 1957, I think it was we had Burt Lancaster’s wider and again the of the of the strange casting of Kirk Douglas is Doc Holliday. I mean, Doc Holliday is supposed to be this rather feeble guy who’s barely staying alive. And incidentally, he’s been portrayed by Spartacus. So it doesn’t, it doesn’t make sense. But anyway, when he gets to the gunfight the Okay, well, it takes up the last 15 minutes of the movie. Because they’re there. They’re in the corral. They’re running around the corral. They’re running behind other buildings shooting at each other. They’re running behind horses. And the final event of that particular gunfight is Burt Lancaster chasing Billy klant, the youngest one Memory of the of the gunfight Billy Clanton up some stairs into a hotel where they had the file shoot out and he kills Billy clan who by the way is portrayed by a very young gun as hopper. And so the gunfight at the OK Corral, but some many people are surprised to learn was was 30 seconds there was 30 shots exchanged in 30 seconds. So it was a very intense fight that alley there was only like 15 feet across. So you’re talking about, you know, seven or eight guys in an alley within 15 feet of each other, firing 30 times in the course of the woman seconds. It’s a wonder anybody walked stuck gonna

 

Dan LeFebvre  30:35

say how did anybody has implemented everybody’s gets hit? Well, Wyatt

 

Tom Clavin  30:40

was the only one unscathed. Bad. Doc was was hitting the hip though, is a glancing shot. Virgil, I think was hitting the leg. And Morgan was hitting the shoulder. And of course the Lowery brothers were both killed and Billy clan was killed and by Clanton was survived mostly because when the shooting started, he made like a rabbit and bolted. So so the in the movie Tombstone, they do a good job because they don’t stretch out the gunfight into like a five minute or 10 minute affair. It is it is over pretty quick, quick. And it is that that explosion of violence as the editor did a good job of piecing that scene together those things together. Yeah,

 

Dan LeFebvre  31:22

definitely was short. And it makes sense, I guess, talking about a movie called the gunfight at the OK Corral. I could I can understand why a movie called that has to try to spread it out. But yet 30 seconds. That’s, that’s fast. I mean, that’s, I mean, I’m sure it didn’t seem like 30 seconds while you’re in the middle of it, but

 

Tom Clavin  31:38

it probably seemed like it was five hours you know, you know what, which bullet has my name on it, but but it was over. And I think what the real Gunfight at the OK Corral being that’s 30 shots in 30 seconds, the intensity of it. And the sheer violence of it was a almost like a cathartic event because all the tensions had built up between the two opposing sides that the men representing the majority of people in Tombstone, and you had the Cowboys representing the past couple of decades of ranchers and cowboys from Texas into Arizona. And it was like a lightning strike. You know, the things boil up to the point where they when they finally had a chance to go at it. They did so very intensely wasn’t like a couple of shots were fired. Say, Okay, let’s call this off. That was like a duel. Yeah, okay. I met I missed you, but at least they fired that satisfies my honor. No, we’re older we’re out to kill.

 

Dan LeFebvre  32:32

Is that kind of what kind of fights were like in the old west? Or is that there’s kind of a standout to this one that was different.

 

Tom Clavin  32:38

I think one thing that was very different about this one as hell it’s such an enclosed space. Now I don’t mean enclosed like there was a roof they were interior, but it was an alley. Not

 

Dan LeFebvre  32:49

in our industry like EC and your high noon.

 

Tom Clavin  32:52

Yeah, it was It wasn’t in the street. With the exception of Ike Clanton none of the participants tried to hide although there were a couple of horses in the alley that provided some cover. I think that there was it was in a small space with guns that were you know, six shooters that you could fire after your six gun. But many people at the time carried an extra gun. So it was and that the the game with the exception of I Clinton ran away. Nobody any point said, Okay, I surrender. You know, it was a fight really, it was a fight to the finish, which a lot of times in gunfights. It was like, somebody got wounded you just stop. And this

 

Dan LeFebvre  33:35

one, it seems like everybody knew it was a fight to the finish. Not just one person that that way, but it seems like everybody was

 

Tom Clavin  33:41

once that first shot was taken, it was just this this this tidal wave of gunfire.

 

Dan LeFebvre  33:47

Why in the movie in the wake of the big gun fight, we see things aren’t still done. We see some retaliation from the Cowboys. Both Virgil and Morgan Earp are shot in separate incidents. We don’t see Virgil getting shot in the movie but after leaving Wyatt and Morgan at the Oriental during a thunderstorm one night he wanders back in before collapsing on the floor. And according to the doctor verjus want to live but he’s going to lose the use of his left arm. And then at a different time we see Morgan playing polo at the Oriental when he shot through the window. Morgan’s wounds are much worse and he ends up dying and why its arms. Did those retaliations happen like we see in the movie?

 

Tom Clavin  34:29

The Hurt vendetta ride was was exaggerated in the in the movie, the circumstances leading up to it portrayed pretty accurately the one thing they mostly left out is that Wyatt and dark and Virgil and worgen were all arrested or charges were levied against the for them for murder. Because Morgan and Virgil were wounded and and recovering, they were sort of left alone. But Wyatt and Doc were actually arrested. And were put on trial trial less than a month. And as a lot of testimony, and in fact, one of the things I had the good fortune is that when I began working on my book tombstone, they just discovered in the bowels of the courthouse there in Tombstone, a transcript of some of the testimony given during that, that it was a sort of a trial into a court of inquiry, including white IRPs. Oh, you can get a lot of eyewitness really perspective from Wyatt, which is very helpful. And at the end of the this is the end of November, is a trial took up all 30 days of November. The presiding think his name was wells, the presiding judge found that there was not enough evidence to put the chains on Wyatt and and dock and haul them off to Tucson for a official murder trial. And that’s the anger the Cowboys a lot because from their point of view, the mug Lowery’s and Billy clan were murdered. That they that the herbs ganged up on him that was, it was true, but that’s the filter he grieved. And they held off trying to do anything for revenge because he said, Well, let’s let the court system find these guys guilty and string them up. And when that didn’t happen, that’s when they started to say, well, we got to do something got to take the matter into our own hands. And that’s what happened first with Virgil, it was very close to Christmas time, I think December 18, at one where he was bushwhacked in the streets of what was making his rounds is martial. And then of course, the mostly the or family circle the wagons and try and move they moved into a hotel, where they could better protect the the, with all lived together in his hotel where they could better protect each other. And it was really a Wesleyan restless Morgan and in March, mid March in 1882, that he had got to see a play and he he’s planning to be white afterwards, which he did and why he was like, Okay, let’s get back to the hotel at work. It’s like Oh, come I was so stuck in there I was I was supposed to shoot some pool. And so he persuaded Wyatt, which was here he would always regret to go to the pool hall. And like you mentioned when it was very well at the pool of the play pool that these bullets came through the window and then Morgan was shot in the back and when doc arrived the there’s this moment where after Morgan is pronounced dead, that y and Doc sort of look at each other and this understanding passes between them that we’re not going to wait for the court system to do anything about this. We’re going to we’re gonna we’re gonna go get these guys I suppose responsible going to track them down. So in Tombstone, ladies, they have Kurt Russell’s blaring out tell him I’m coming and I’m bringing hell with me. Which there’s some truth to that to that he made a declaration saying to the the the Cowboys get the word out, recover for you guys. And so he and Doc and Warren Earp, who was quite young, but he saddled up to some of their friends when I was with data right now in the movie it’s portrayed is taking place over a long period of time discounting tried chasing after these guys and tracking down a shooting of down a high body count but if I remember correctly I think there were three people killed now is still pretty impressive to track down and basically murder in cold blood three people but it was not the dozen or so as as portrayed in the movie there was this this bloodbath? Yeah,

 

Dan LeFebvre  38:38

the movie definitely makes it seem like I think it’s like a series of montage shots that you see them think it’s even some former cowboys they kind of throw down their red sash and masters Texas jackin Creek JOHNSON I think are their names that why deputizes

 

Tom Clavin  38:55

but where are the upside now are the good guys side note afterwards.

 

Dan LeFebvre  38:58

The impression I got then is that if it wasn’t personal before it definitely is personal now because they’re you know, killing Morgan shooting it at Virgil. Do you think that is a pretty fair interpretation of what it was actually like? Was it actually personal against him you said earlier it was almost like they felt like their their way which is kind of on the way out now after the gunfight at OK Corral. Did it almost seem personal at that point? They’re not just the ones that are the visionary leaders?

 

Tom Clavin  39:32

That’s a good question. Because they previously the tension against the earth was war with the earth represented. They had a bed a badges and they represented the law and order faction which was was the the growing majority and tombstone. But when you when you when the laneway to bushwhack Virgil and shot warrior in the back that was that was acts of violence directed specifically because they were IRPs. So it was it was personal because there are other law men in Tombstone Could have been attacked to make a statement against a law and order position but they care to their brothers and their brothers were in Tucson in the first place to watch each other’s backs and make money together. And he had things that deteriorated so badly that they’re getting ambushed. Speaking

 

Dan LeFebvre  40:14

of ambush in movie, we see an ambush with White Earth when he walked after that montage, he goes out and he finds curly bill and shoots him in the river was clearly bill actually the the leader of the Cowboys did. How was this kind of in the movie? It was almost kind of wrapping up the conflict between the herbs and the Cowboys when they kill currently Bill who’s the leader of the Cowboys? Did it kind of wrap up that way?

 

Tom Clavin  40:42

It did I mean, it was there’s always some it’s almost like the Cowboys had two leaders or they had curly Bill was there was more visible leader. But you had Johnny Ringo, who was almost like their spiritual leader. And, and so Johnny Ringo det that genuinely did not like Doc Holliday, the director did not like each other and they had had a confrontation that got diffused before it ended up being gunfight. But currently, Bill and his company have been had outlaws that set up a ambush for the ERP holiday vendetta ride troupe. So I don’t think it was I don’t think that why it new curly Bill was with this particular group I don’t think they they they didn’t expect a group there and wait for them when they wrote into it why was out front you know, they started the gunfight son got started shooting what had had was shotgun and he shot curly bill with the shotgun killed him. I don’t know if he died right away but he was it was effective enough. And here’s another example of like, why it had gone unscathed in this intense okay Corral gunfight also being visible and guns being pointed at him. And I think the only injury got was like a bullet bounced off the you got he got to the heel of his boot shot off at that at a saddlehorn got shut off. And they were bullets actually passing through the coat that he wore. But again, he escaped he killed curly bill and escaped but you know, back to where the other guys were there and without being hit. So it’s it’s you know that that’s part of one of the ingredients that led to the Legend of White Earth was that he was he was unkillable. He wasn’t

 

Dan LeFebvre  42:38

lucky with money, but man he was sure cheers lurcher. Lucky with bullets, they

 

Tom Clavin  42:42

want to I guess I guess the universe had the the plan for him to live a long time so he could figure out that he’s never going to make money.

 

Dan LeFebvre  42:52

Yeah, you mentioned Johnny Ringo. And we do see him in the movie as kind of that. After curly bill is killed then the big character to kill left is Johnny Ringo. And we see Doc holidays health is declined a lot. He’s coughing up blood. He ends up staying at Henry hookers ranch to play by Charlton Heston again, another nice little cameo there in the movie. But then Johnny Ringo calls out Wyatt for a one on one at the Oak Grove near Silver Springs Canyon. So why it goes to fight Ringo while Doc is back at hookers ranch. But it seems like Doc pretended to be worse than he was knowing that why it was losing a gunfight with Ringo. So doc shows up a little early, and then kills Ringo under a big oak tree. How much of that actually happened like we see in the movie?

 

Tom Clavin  43:37

Here’s where the film slips. Maybe it’s a B plus territory. Because we radically understand what they’re doing. But oh, by the way, it’s talking about cameos. There’s a very famous Hollywood actor, legendary Hollywood actor in the film, who you never see. Never if you know what I’m talking about. The narrator is Robert Mitchum.

 

Dan LeFebvre  43:57

Oh, yes, yes. No. Yes, actually, I think just watching it for this time I realized that yes, yes.

 

Tom Clavin  44:03

There’s another nice caveat to but he is weighs. A couple things that are about this that are definitely based. In fact, in his adult life, Doc Holliday was probably no healthier than he was when he lived in Tombstone. And the reason was because it was exactly the climate that his doctors back in Georgia has said to him, it’s going to be the best for you. If you find this kind of climate, it’ll extend your life. And here you live living in Tombstone, the southeast corner of Arizona. It’s not that there’s never any winter there, but it’s mostly dry your warm temperatures. And doc who is never going to be robust, but he was relatively healthy. So welcomers performance is absolutely fantastic. And you can’t keep your eyes off him when he’s on screen. But his performance show Doc is a much sicker man than he actually was in in Tucson. The other thing is Johnny Ringo and Wyatt never set an appointment with each other to go have this kind of a gunfight now, if anybody was going to go fight fight each other would have been doc and Johnny because they they had a couple of confrontations that were thwarted. But Johnny Ringo did not go to be wired up for a gunfight Doc Holliday did not kill Johnny Ringo doc Holly was nowhere near the where Johnny Ringo died. And the general consensus is that Johnny Ringo and for reasons that you know, doesn’t take up time going into but he killed himself. He was alone he was drunk he killed himself Johnny Ringo was a very complicated character manic depressive. And he got some fairly got drunk and depressed enough that one day by himself he said I this this world that is is being created around me this of law and order in a day of the Cowboys over I’m not I don’t live in that world anymore. And he killed himself in Doc Holliday was hundreds of miles away so dramatically it’s effective and the third thing is your Doc Holliday hitting somebody in a gunfight chances are he would want the if he was facing off with Johnny regular Paul does God the only damage would have been done to the tree beyond judgment

 

Dan LeFebvre  46:21

that’s so funny because that’s exactly like in the movie threat movie see with with Val Kilmer is Doc Holliday, you just get the impression he’s this like gunfighter that, you know is is so I just expect he’s going to have the best aim. But it’s Yeah, yeah. She’s not.

 

Tom Clavin  46:36

Well, again, what a reputation is a good fighter gunfight? You just didn’t do any damage? Yeah.

 

Dan LeFebvre  46:43

Yeah, I guess I’m just used to you know, the, the Old West movie sound like the gun, the gun fighter. He’s the best one best shot there is, you know, and so despite that he’s not. That’s pretty funny. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on to chat about tombstone. For listeners who want to learn more of the true story. I’ll make sure to include a link to your best selling book also called tombstone and the show notes for this episode. Before I let you go, though, I have a two part question.

 

Tom Clavin  47:10

I bet I have two answers. Okay, that’s

 

Dan LeFebvre  47:13

good. The first part is for listeners who have not gotten their own copy of Tombstone yet. Can you share one of your favorite stories from the book for someone who maybe has only seen the movie and wouldn’t know? And then the second part is listeners who have already read tombstone, can you share a peek of your latest book?

 

Tom Clavin  47:31

As far as the story is concerned? The the movie pretty much presents Johnny behead as a one dimensional character. He’s callow. He’s cowardly. He’s slimy. There’s some truth of Johnnie being really be like that. But he’s also more of a complicated character than that. He was a pretty effective he was the Sheriff of that county. He’s a pretty effective sheriff. He had been married, he had a he, his wife had a child who died. He and Josephine Marcus really did have a romance. And they actually live together at one point. And the, with his his son from his first marriage. And I think that there’s there’s more, there’s more of a humanity to the Johnny be in character that comes across in the movie. There’s only room for so many stories you could tell him we understand that. And ultimately, Johnny B had failed to do his job at the gunfight at the OK Corral. It could have been avoided completely. So it’s some said that some of that blood is on his hands. So if you read my book tombstone, also to give a shout out to less gunfight, but Jeff Gwynn, which is a very good book on the subject, too. And it’s very, very well researched. The Johnny being character is much more interesting. He’s portrayed on film, so it gets worse. And of course, the other story very quickly, is that how much the Kurt Russell direct tombstone? George Cosmatos is the director of record. But the there’s a fascinating story behind the making a tombstone that Kevin, Kevin Jr. had written a script and was the director and he actually started directing the picture, but very quickly got so far behind budget that he was fired. And George Cosmatos was just coming off directing Rambo to. He was available, they brought him in, but supposedly they brought him in as what’s called the ghost director. He was supposed to be the front director of record. And supposedly Kurt Russell was the actual director of the picture. And some of the other cast members will confirm that and have confirmed it that Kurt Russell did the actual behind the scenes directing. So so the story that you won’t know if you have seen only the movie and it’s an obviously did a very effective job because the movies still considered one of the top at least of the top 20 Best Westerns of all time, and I’m a top 10 For many people’s lists. My next book is coming out in May. It’s called throne of grace with my good friend Bob glory. We’ve done seven or eight books before, including the heart of everything that is and blood and treasure about Daniel Boone. New Book throne of grace is about the Explorer Jedediah Smith, who was followed in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark and exceeded them actually, in his explorations of the American West. But he’d be but he’s pretty much an unknown figure and he had a very adventurous life very exciting. really did a lot towards opening up the American West sue the the people back in the east and did nothing about what was out there. We don’t know fantastic creatures, monsters, we don’t know. And yet Smith was this intrepid heroic figure that made all these trips back to the West Coast is back to report on his findings. And so it’s the gold throne of grace will be out in May, and we think that people enjoy it.

 

Dan LeFebvre  50:51

I’ll make sure to add a link to that in the show notes for this episode. Thank you again, so much for your time today.

 

Tom Clavin  50:55

Thank you very much. I enjoyed it.

April 1st, 1934. Grapevine, Texas.

As our first movie of the week starts, on the screen we can see the entrance to a building. Its white stones are stained and discolored by years of farm use. Two cows stick their noses out of the open windows just as a man in overalls emerges from the open doorway. The windows don’t have any glass. Then again, the doorway doesn’t seem to have a door in it.

On the left side of the frame is a fenced-in pasture covered in mud and hoof prints. I’m guessing those were made by the cows watching the man who just left the building through its open doorway.

He’s wearing a well-used pair of blue overalls and sporting a beard with gray hair that’s sprinkled with white. He’s also carrying a white pail as he exits the building, going about what we can only assume are his morning chores.

As he walks further from the building, the camera pans around him and we can see there’s also a horse in the pasture behind the building. He walks past the building he just came out of, making his way to the pasture on the other side of it. There’s a lot more green grass on that side of the building.

The man stops in his tracks.

He seems to have noticed something that now we can see, too. On the dirt road in the distance, just beyond the pasture, he can see a car. It’s stopped. In front of the car, facing the opposite direction, are two motorcycles. No one is on the motorcycles, though, but there are two uniformed police officers walking from their parked motorcycles toward the stopped car.

The farmer watches from a distance as the door of the car opens.

We can hear one of the officers ask if the people in the car are all right.

Just then, gunfire erupts. Smoke can be seen in the distance as the farmer in the foreground of the camera angle instinctively ducks for cover. He drops the pail, spilling the milk inside, but he doesn’t run. He drops to his knees as he watches the event unfold in front of him.

The camera looks a little closer now and we can see two figures beside the parked car. One is a man dressed in a suit, the other a woman in a red dress.

On the ground between the car and the motorcycles are two bodies lying still—the police officers who were approaching the car. The woman in the red dress walks up to one of the policemen on the ground, points her shotgun at the man’s face and without hesitation, from the farmer’s perspective we can hear the sound and see the smoke from the gun blast.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie The Highwaymen

That’s a segment from the 2019’s The Highwaymen, and the event it’s depicting is a very real event that happened this week in history when the notorious outlaws Bonnie and Clyde murdered two Grapevine police officers on April 1st, 1934.

And even though the movie doesn’t show things from the perspective of Bonnie and Clyde, it does a pretty good job showing what happened that day. For example, it’s correctly showing the two officers were approaching a vehicle that was stopped on the road. It was also correct to show there was a witness, although the movie leaves out the farmer’s two daughters who were also there that Easter morning.

William Schieffer was doing his normal Sunday morning chores around the farm just like we see in the movie when he saw two people driving by in a car very slowly—they appeared to be looking at the grass as if they were searching for something. He recalled later it was a young man and a young woman, she had a white rabbit in her lap.

Schieffer’s daughters, Isabella Schieffer, and Elaine Adams, came outside to help their dad at about the same time as the sound of motorcycles were heard. There were two of them, and they stopped near the now parked car that the young couple had been driving.

They didn’t know it at the time, but looking at this from a historical lens most believe the two patrolmen thought the stopped Ford had broken down, so they were going to help out the young couple inside. After all, it was 1934, and it’s not like cell phones or even telephones, in general, were popular in rural Texas.

This all took place on Dove Road just off Highway 114 in what’s now Southlake, Texas.

While we only see one person watching in the movie, in truth it was three onlookers, the farmer and his daughters, who stood some 100 yards or so away as the two patrolmen walked up the car. Before they could get close, the sound of a gun rang and one of the patrolmen, Edward Wheeler, fell to the ground. He was killed instantly. The other, Holloway Murphy, wasn’t killed when the first shot hit him. He fell to his side on the ground.

And that’s when, just like we see in the movie, Bonnie walked up to the man and shot him at point-blank range.

Or maybe it was both Bonnie and Clyde who walked up, there are some conflicting reports of Schieffer and his daughters’ account, but most agree it was Bonnie who pulled the trigger killing the other patrolman.

We don’t see it in the movie, but there were other witnesses to the event as well. Although the Schieffers were the best witnesses since it was near their farm. But Jack Cook, another resident who lived nearby, happened to see the young couple just before the shootings. Then shortly after, another couple—Mr. and Mrs. Giggals—were on a Sunday morning drive on Highway 114 and had just passed Dove Road when they heard the shots. They turned around to see what happened and, according to them, the shooters saw them, got in their car and sped away.

In the aftermath of the event, Texas law enforcement reached out to Frank Hamer, a former Texas Ranger who, as it turned out, was already on the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde.

If you want to watch the event that happened this week in history, check out the 2019 movie The Highwaymen. The Grapevine killings are at about 45 minutes and 20 seconds into the film. And if you want to learn more about the true story behind the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde, check out episode #178 of Based on a True Story.

 

April 3rd, 1882. St. Joseph, Missouri.

On the screen in our next movie is a man operating a hand pump. There’s water splashing out into a bowl he has sitting beneath the pump. He looks up and sees another man who is just sitting there on the other side of tall grass.

“Mornin’,” the man at the pump calls out.

The other man looks up but doesn’t reply.

“Charley,” the man says again. Again, no reply, just a stern look.

The man at the hand pump is Casey Affleck’s character, Robert Ford, while the other man sitting behind the grass and not replying is Robert’s brother, Charley Ford, and he’s played by Sam Rockwell in the movie.

Robert splashes some water on his face.

The scene cuts to a father and son walking down a dirt road. As they get closer, Robert makes a comment to the father—asking him if it’s a good idea to go out like that so everyone can see his guns. In a defiant but wordless reply, the father tucks his jacket coat behind the gun so it’s even easier to see.

The two pass through a gate behind Robert and, after playing with his daughter who runs around the house to greet her father, the father and two children walk inside the house. Robert stays outside for a moment before going inside, too.

The father is Brad Pitt’s character in the movie, Jesse James.

Inside, Robert notices the headlines of a newspaper that Jesse threw on the sofa when he entered. Looking closer, we can see the words “The arrest and confession of Dick Liddil.”

Robert’s mouth opens slightly as he reads it. He glances to the other room where we can see Jesse going about getting ready for breakfast with his wife, Mary-Louise Parker’s character, Zee James.

She calls to Robert, saying everything is getting cold. We can see him putting on a gun belt in the other room. Then, in the next shot, we can see Robert sitting down at the kitchen table with Jesse, Charley, and Jesse’s son.

Jesse gets up for a moment to get the paper from the other room. Back at the table, Jesse stirs his coffee while reading the morning paper. He notices the headline about Dick Liddil.

Charley and Robert appear to be rather nervous as they chuckle, pretending not to know about it.

Robert gets up and goes into the other room. He seems to be sweating a little bit. His breath shakes, he’s obviously nervous. Charley enters the room and looks at his brother. Then, Jesse enters the room and asks if they’re both about ready. Charley says he will be by noon and looks out the front door.

Jesse is looking out at his daughter playing in the front yard. He seems to be lost in thought as he dryly says he’ll take his guns off so no one can see them, alluding to what Robert said earlier. Jesse lays his gun belt on the sofa. Then, he turns over and notices a photograph hanging on the wall. He comments something about how dusty the picture is, and gets on a chair to clean it.

Then, behind him, Robert stands up. Charley moves slightly, looking at his brother. Charley pulls out his pistol.

Even though Jesse is facing the wall, the camera makes it obvious that Jesse can see Robert’s reflection. He can see that Robert is holding his pistol now and pointing it at Jesse. He does nothing.

A single gunshot and Jesse’s head smashes against the picture frame before he falls to the ground.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

That portrayal comes from the 2007 movie called The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford…which, as you can probably guess, is exactly the event that happened this week in history: The assassination of Jesse James.

The way the movie portrays it happening is pretty accurate, although there’s one major thing to keep in mind: There were only three people in that room, and only two of them walked out. So, the story we know is based on the recollection of Charley and Robert Ford, the two people who killed Jesse James.

With that said, though, it’s not like the Ford brothers were trying to hide what they did. We know this because they told the authorities themselves what happened and then later, just like we see in the movie, Charley and Robert Ford would go on to re-enact the assassination for paying audiences who wanted to see how Jesse James was killed.

According to their version of the story, it was in the morning of April 3rd when Charley and Robert Ford sat down to breakfast with Jesse James—although he was going by the name Thomas Howard so no one would know his true identity.

But, of course, Charley and Robert Ford had helped the James gang with their safe houses for over a year—Robert Ford met Jesse James in 1880—so they knew his real identity.

The plan was for the brothers to help robbing the bank in Platte City, Missouri. That’s about 30 miles, or a little less than 50 kilometers, from Jesse James’ home in St. Joseph, Missouri. At least, that was the plan that Jesse James had in mind. The Ford brothers, however, had a different plan in mind.

To lay down a little historical context, the Ford brothers’ plan was to kill Jesse James and get the $10,000 reward being offered by the governor, Thomas Crittenden.

In the movie, Brad Pitt’s version of Jesse James reads the newspaper and notices a mention of Dick Liddil being arrested. He looks at Robert Ford and says that he must’ve been around when Liddil was arrested. Although Casey Affleck’s version of Robert Ford doesn’t admit to it in the movie, and for good reason, it is true that Robert Ford was there when Liddil was arrested. Actually, both Liddil and Ford surrendered to the sheriff because Liddil had killed Jesse James’ cousin, a man by the name of Wood Hite.

All these men were a part of the James gang, and the law knew it.

Robert Ford was allowed to go free on the condition that he kill Jesse James—something that Governor Crittenden said he’d pardon Ford for doing.

That’s why the Ford brothers had a different plan in mind than Jesse James did that April morning. After breakfast, they went into the living room to talk about the bank robbery plan. And just like we see in the movie, Jesse James went to go dust off a picture. That’s when Charley pulled out his gun, but it was Robert Ford who pulled the trigger first. James was hit in the back of the head, killing him immediately.

In the movie, we kind of get the idea that Jesse James might’ve known something was going on. Why would he take off his guns? Why would he dust a picture? We even see James looking at Robert Ford with his gun pulled in the picture’s reflection and he doesn’t do anything.

Did he know he was about to be killed?

That’s something historians have debated ever since that day. We’ll never really know for sure, but some have suggested that he knew his time was nearing an end. He also was wary of the Ford brothers, not quite trusting them fully, so he must’ve found it suspicious they didn’t mention the arrest of Dick Liddil.

How much Jesse James knew about the Fords’ plan died with him a few moments later.

If you want to watch the event that happened this week in history, check out the 2007 movie called The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The text letting us know it’s April 3rd, 1882, starts at about two hours, two minutes and 54 seconds into the movie.

We learned more about the real history on episode #166 of Based on a True Story.

 

April 6th, 1862. Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee.

Rows of white tents line either side of a small, dirt road that runs through a clearing. From inside the woods nearby, we can see a bunch of soldiers with guns sneaking by. The camera focuses on one soldier inside the woods. He’s wearing a gray uniform and slowly, he lifts a rifle and raises it to his eye. We can see who he’s aiming at; it’s another soldier—this one is wearing a blue uniform as he watches the woods from the clearing.

He seems to be part of a line guarding the camp from the woods, although it’s obvious he hasn’t seen the soldiers hiding in the woods yet.

That changes when the soldier in the woods fires a shot. Another soldier falls from just behind the soldier in focus.

Then, all hell breaks loose. Confederate soldiers in the woods fire on the Union soldiers who are now running away from the edge of the trees.

At first, reports come back that it’s just a skirmish, but it quickly becomes clear there’s something more to this fight. Calls to hold the line are made as more and more Confederate troops charge the defending soldiers.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the TV series Grant

This is just the start of a longer sequence that comes from the 2020 miniseries simply called Grant, and it’s depict something that happened this week in history: The Battle of Shiloh. It actually took place over the course of two days, April 6th and 7th, in 1862.

One of the first questions you may be asking yourself is why it’s called the Battle of Shiloh when I mentioned Pittsburg Landing at the beginning of the event. Sometimes it’s referred to as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing. But the more common name is the Battle of Shiloh because even though the battle took place near the town of Pittsburg Landing, the closest landmark was actually a church called, well, Shiloh Church.

Ironically, the word Shiloh in Hebrew means “peace” … and the Battle of Shiloh would turn out to be one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

In a nutshell, the battle started in the early morning hours of April 6th as the Confederate soldiers opened fire on Union soldiers camped in a cotton field. From there, the battle only grew in size as both sides started to realize this was more than just a little skirmish.

Basically, Confederate General Johnston was leading over 44,000 soldiers in an attempt to wipe out Union General Grant’s 49,000-strong army before Grant could team up with General Buell—who commanded another 17,000 or so Union soldiers.

It didn’t go according to the Confederate’s plans.

Throughout the first day of the battle, the fighting was intense but because the Union troops were the ones attacked, they first had to stop the Confederate offensive. Then, on the second day, the Union started their offensive. It was helped by those 17,000 soldiers under the command of General Buell.

As a little side note, that wasn’t the entirety of Buell’s armies, but those were just the ones who made it to the battle before it ended. Oh, and while I’m adding in some details, it was actually 17,918 soldiers from Buell’s Army of Ohio while Grant’s Army of Tennessee had 48,894 soldiers and the Confederates had 44,699 soldiers.

By the end of the second day, the battle was a decisive victory for the Union Army.

It was also the bloodiest battle on American soil up until that point with an estimated 23,746 casualties—a little over 10,000 on the Confederate side and a little over 13,000 on the Union side. Up until that point in 1862, it was the deadliest battle in the Civil War.

If you want to see the battle portrayed on screen, check out the docudrama series called Grant and the Battle of Shiloh starts at about an hour, one minute and 18 seconds into the first episode.

February 13th, 1917. Paris, France.

A well-dressed woman walks down the hospital stairs. It’s a military hospital, or at least there are a lot of soldiers there.

Behind her, a man’s heavy steps seem to worry her. She walks a little faster. He’s still right behind her. Noticing a couple soldiers chatting with each other as she’s walking down the steps, she interrupts their conversation to tell them that the man behind her has been molesting her. They immediately spring to attention, delaying the man to ask him what’s going on.

She uses this as an excuse to slip down and into a cab on the street. She tells the driver to take her to Paris immediately. Just then, she notices someone else is in the car with her.

It’s the head of the French spy bureau, a man named Dubois. He’s played by C. Henry Gordon in the film. He tells the woman that he has a warrant for her arrest, to which she smirks and says he’d better be careful or he’ll have to apologize again.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Mata Hari

This scene comes from an old film from the year 1931 called Mata Hari. The event it’s showing is when the Mata Hari was arrested, which took place this week in history on February 13th, 1917.

Except, the way the movie shows this happening…isn’t anything like what really happened at all.

About the only thing that is true about this depiction is that it was this week in history when Mata Hari was arrested in Paris, France.

And the movie is correct to hint at the idea of Mata Hari being arrested prior to this one, although not necessarily by the French like the movie implies. That arrest was in November of 1916 when the Scotland Yard arrested her and took her to London where she eventually admitted to working with the Deuxième Bureau, or the Second Bureau. That was the French intelligence service, kind of like England has Mi6 or the United States has the CIA.

Unknown to her, though, the Second Bureau was suspicious of Mata Hari that she might actually be working for the Germans.

Remember, all of this is happening during World War I.

The next month, in December of 1916, the French allowed Mata Hari to get the name of six spies that they also suspected as being double agents working for the Germans. When the French later decrypted communications from the Germans with those names and other activities that closely matched Mata Hari’s activities, they decided to arrest her.

But the arrest did not happen in the back of a car like we see in the movie.

On February 13th, 1917, Mata Hari was arrested at her hotel room in Paris.

She was put on trial and although the French and British both tried to offer evidence to prove she was a German spy, they didn’t have anything that was damning evidence.

Nevertheless, she was executed by a French firing squad on October 15th, 1917 at the age of 41. Since then, many people have put forward thoughts, opinions, documents, reports, and plenty more to suggest she was a scapegoat and that her lifestyle as an exotic dancer and mistress—while her seductive powers may have helped her as a spy—they didn’t help the intelligence services believe her innocence.

If you want to watch the depiction this week, the arrest happens at about an hour and 14 minutes into the 1931 movie simply called Mata Hari.

And if you want to learn more about the true story, we covered that movie on episode #74 of Based on a True Story.

February 14th, 1929. Chicago, Illinois.

The snow is coming down pretty hard outside.

We could see that in the scenes leading up to our event…but now the movie takes us inside a room with brick walls.

This isn’t a room that’s all warm and cozy while it’s snowing outside, no, this is a workshop.

Or perhaps calling it a warehouse or a garage would be better because as the camera changes angles we can see at least two cars, workbenches, and other various tools.

Two cops burst into the room with guns drawn.

We can also see there are multiple men in the room, not just the one man who was by the door when the cops came in. Although the movie makes it hard to tell exactly how many men there are in the room, but we can tell they’re all wearing the same overcoats they’d wear outside on a cold day like today.

Most of them are wearing the kind of hats you’d expect gangsters in the 1920s to be wearing.

The two cops with guns drawn order everyone in the room to line up against one of the walls.

The men talk back to the cops, but they begrudgingly do as they’re told.

Then one of the cops notices another guy on one of the cars. He tries to tell the cop he’s just a mechanic who works the cars there, he doesn’t have anything to do with the people here. The cop doesn’t care. He grabs the mechanic by the collar and pushes him to the wall with the rest of the men lined up.

Now we can see seven men, including the mechanic, lined up against the wall.

The cops tell the men to place their hands on the wall and lean on it.

Again, the seven men are reluctant but they do as they’re told.

One of the cops keeps his gun on the men while the other cop goes one-by-one to pat down the men leaning on the wall. One of them has a handgun, so the cop takes it. Another it looks like maybe he’s taking another handgun, or maybe it’s his wallet, the movements are too fast to really tell for sure.

As he nears the last guy, we can see the other cop in the room making his way to the door. He opens it and waves in two other men. These aren’t cops, or at least they’re not dressed in a uniform. They’re wearing long overcoats and hats like the men up against the wall. And the two men are carrying huge submachine guns with the round drum magazine.

The men are still facing the wall so they can’t see the men who just entered.

The cops put away their handguns and pull out shotguns, keeping them pointed at the men lined up against the wall.

Seven men in dark overcoats leaning up against the wall with both hands so they’re facing the wall. Behind them in the room are the now four men, two cops with shotguns and two other men with machine guns.

The four men look at each other.

Then, they all open fire. They keep shooting even after all the men are slumped over on the ground. It’s obvious they want to make sure no one is left alive.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

This scene comes from the 1967 film called The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. And now that you know the name of the movie, it’s probably no surprise to find out the event it’s depicting is what we now know as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which happened this week in history on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, 1929.

And while it is true that the event really did take place, the movie has its own dramatic license to fill in holes. The reason for that is simply because we don’t know the full story of exactly what happened inside that Lincoln Park neighborhood garage on Clark Street at 10:30 AM on the 14th.

You see, the true story of what we now know as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is something that involves organized crime and gangs. More specifically, the Chicago mob led by Al Capone.

Since there’s organized crime involved, we simply don’t know everything about it and we probably won’t ever know the entire story.

For a little historical context, this was during Prohibition so liquor was illegal in the United States. Organized crime leaders in cities like Chicago were making a lot of money off importing alcohol and one of those was the Chicago Outfit, a crime syndicate led by Al Capone.

And as a side note, we learned more about the inner workings of the Outfit from someone who was there for a lot of things the Outfit did over the years, a man named Scott Hoffman. That was on episode #286 of Based on a True Story…but this event in 1929 was way before Scott’s time, of course, but that episode will give you a much deeper look at how much the Outfit hid things from the public and, by extension, the records of history.

So even though we don’t know for sure if it was Al Capone who ordered the hit in 1929, most people assumed he was behind it because the victims were all a part of Bug Moran’s North Side Gang. They was a rival to Al Capone’s gang.

As the story goes, the North Side Gang had supposedly hijacked some of the Chicago Outfit’s whiskey. The massacre was retaliation as well as an attempt at killing Bugs Moran, the leader of the North Side Gang.

However, Bugs was running late.

We didn’t cover this in the depiction we just heard from the movie, but the movie does show a scene where three men are walking to the building when they see the cops pull up. They turn around to get some coffee.

That happened, too, when Bugs Moran saw a police car near the building they instead turned around and went to a nearby coffee shop.

And the movie also got some other things correct about the massacre, like how many people were involved.

From the police investigation into the evidence left behind and eyewitness accounts, we know there were four men who carried out the massacre. Just like we see in the movie, two of them were dressed as police officers—although we don’t really know if they were real police officers or not. Some have suggested the Chicago police were actually involved in retaliation for an officer’s child being killed earlier.

But we don’t know if that’s true or not.

We do know that the four men used two shotguns and two Thompson submachine guns just like we see in the movie, though. And they did keep shooting even after the seven men fell to the ground, but surprisingly one of the men survived.

That was an enforcer in the North Side Gang, Frank Gusenberg, but he refused to identify his killers before he died three hours later.

Oh—and in the movie, we see a dog in the room with them, and since Frank died a few hours later that left Highball, that was the dog’s name, as the only survivor of the massacre.

And I guess the wall itself, too.

You can see the blood-stained wall at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada.

If you want to watch the event this week, check out the 1967 movie called The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The policemen burst into the room at the end of the movie around an hour and 27 minutes.

February 18th, 1878. New Mexico.

It’s an overcast morning out in the open country.

The sun isn’t fully up yet, but in the dark of the morning, we can still make out seven figures making their way down the road. Six are on horseback, riding along with a man in a horse-drawn cart.

As they come over a slight hill, one of the men on horseback obviously notices something up ahead. Guns pulled, they’re on high alert now. They ride ahead of the man on the cart to check out a small grove of trees.

Then, more men on horseback appear from behind the man in the cart who is now alone on the horizon.

The camera focuses in on a close shot of Emilio Estevez’s character, William H. Bonney, as he notices the new men arriving behind the man in the cart. Then, there’s a brief closeup of the man in the cart…it’s Terence Stamps’ character, John Tunstall.

From afar, we can see the men fire on Tunstall, killing him in cold blood.

Then, the men who killed Tunstall chase after the six men on horseback, who are forced to run away.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Young Guns

This scene comes from the 1988 movie called Young Guns. The event it’s depicting is when John Tunstall was murdered and kicked off what we now know as the Lincoln County War.

And while that did happen, the movie’s depiction isn’t very accurate. There were seven men in the true story, but they weren’t just riding along the road. They were driving horses from Tunstall’s ranch.

The Lincoln Sheriff had organized a posse to connect Tunstall’s cattle onto a warrant against one of his business partners. But when the posse got to Tunstall’s ranch, they found he wasn’t there. His horses weren’t there either, so they tried to find him.

They caught up with them and the seven men were spread out quite a ways as they were driving the horses. Three of the deputies confronted Tunstall and, well, only the three deputies came out of it alive.

We don’t know the specifics of the confrontation. Was Tunstall being defiant? Did he surrender? Did the deputies fire upon him unprovoked like we see in the movie? We don’t know. What we do know is that Tunstall was shot twice, once in his chest and another in his head. He died instantly less than three weeks before his 25th birthday.

After his death, William Bonney would take up his own path to bring Tunstall’s killers to justice. Since they were lawmen, though, that proved to be easier said than done. Tunstall’s death was the start of what we now know as the Lincoln County war and led to Bonney leading a group of men called The Regulators as he took on his own nickname: Billy the Kid.

If you want to watch the event this week, it’s at about 23 minutes into the 1988 movie Young Guns.

And if you want to take a deeper dive into the true story, check out episode #146 of Based on a True Story where we cover the Young Guns movie.

November 27^th, 1868. Oklahoma.

Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie, Jack Crabb, emerges from his tepee holding his new baby boy. Outside, we can see white snow covers the grounds. Jack’s breath puffs in the cold air as he smiles down as his baby. His wife is smiling, too, as she stands next to him. Her name is Sunshine, and she’s played by Aimee Eccles in the movie.

Neither of them seems to be bothered by the cold as they’re focused on holding and looking at the new baby as it’s wrapped in cloth. Come to think of it, the cold doesn’t seem to bother the baby, either, because it’s not making any noises.

An older Jack Crabb is giving some voiceover saying that he could probably have spent the rest of his days like with his family. But that’s not how life goes.

Just then, we can hear some ponies neighing in the distance. The sound catches Jack’s attention. Something’s wrong. Probably wolves, he says out loud, and he hands the baby to Sunshine and rushes off in the direction of where they keep the ponies.

When he arrives, we can see a row of nine or so ponies against a wooden fence. It looks like there may be more beyond, but before we can count them all he turns around to his grandfather sitting there to ask what’s wrong. That’s when his grandfather points out a new noise in the distance.

More horses. But these aren’t the ones standing calmly by Jack. These are off in the distance and the sound of hoofbeats tells us they’re running. Fast.

Jack looks, but between the snowy ground and what looks to be either a foggy or just snowy atmospheric haze, it looks like one of those whiteouts where nothing is really visible. It’s not snowing or anything, it’s just impossible to see what horses are coming.

As he continues to stare, we can hear the sound of drums in the distance, too. Then, the camera cuts to a different angle and we can see a line of soldiers on horses trotting along the snowy ground. The drums are accompanied by flutes and we can see a few of the soldiers are walking along with the men on horses.

They’re a distance away on the open ground, but they seem to be speeding up as they get closer. Jack’s eyes start to tear up as he watches them come. By the time the soldiers reach the village of tepees, they’re at a full gallop with swords raised in what’s clearly an attack.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Little Big Man

That sequence comes from the 1970 film directed by Arthur Penn called Little Big Man. The event it’s depicting is what we now know as the Battle of the Washita River, also sometimes called the Washita Massacre, which happened this week in history on November 27^th, 1868 near the Washita River in Roger Mills County, Oklahoma. Today, that’s near the small town of Cheyenne in southwestern Oklahoma. I’ll add a link to the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site in the show notes if you want to see where it’s at exactly.

Something about this movie to keep in mind is that it’s intended to be a parody of sorts of Western films. It’s based on a novel, and overall, it’s not really trying to be entirely true to history.

With that said, it’s not really a surprise that the movie doesn’t do a great job depicting the Battle of the Washita River because it doesn’t really tell much of the true story at all.

To help us dig deeper into this, I had a chat with historian Gregory J.W. Urwin from Temple University about the way the Battle of the Washita River is depicted in Little Big Man, and here’s what he had to say:

[00:29:46] Gregory J.W. Urwin: One thing to keep in mind, this movie is released in 1970 at the height of the Vietnam War.

And Arthur Penn uses the Battle of the Washington as a thinly disguised way of condemning the U. S. Army for the atrocities it committed. in Vietnam. When you look at the Washita, you’re looking at the My Lai Massacre. Jack Krab’s wife, they cast an Asian actress to play her. She’s not a Native American.

The thing about these Indians living on land that was theirs for all eternity, as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers flow, et cetera. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge, which was concluded in 1867, the year before the Washita tragedy, it staked out a Cheyenne reservation, but the Washita area was not within those parameters.

The Indians didn’t like the land that the whites said, this is your new home. So in the wintertime as was their want, they would come together in large numbers to live off the pemmican, the dried buffalo meat that they had gathered during the warmer weather and just hole up. It was a time to socialize with friends.

The village that Jack Crabb inhabited, I won’t say it in the movie, but where it was headed by a chief named Black Kettle, was one of a series of villages of Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho in the Ouachita Valley. Now Black Kettle… Was reputed to be a peace chief, which I think was true. He had his own idea of what peace was.

As the movie conveys, the Indian society was not highly structured. It tolerated a great deal of individuality, and you could be a peace chief and tell your young men, do not war on the whites. And some of your young men would listen. And some of your young men would not. And there were raids going on in Western Kansas in the months preceding this battle.

In fact, Custer’s. Osage Scouts. These were Indians who were fighting on the side of the, on the side of the lights. One thing to remember is that Custer fought against Indians, but he also fought for Indians. Indians who had been oppressed by the Indians who were his target of the day. But the Osage Scouts traced the trail of a war party coming out of western Kansas to Black Kettle’s camp.

That’s what brought Custer’s 7th Cavalry to that area. Now, it wasn’t really a policy to kill Indian women and children. Males, even when it wasn’t said explicitly, no one expected you to bring back male prisoners. And this would include boys who were old enough to bear arms. But women and children, there was this vestige of Victorian.

Chivalry, but when you attack an urban area, as the American military has done as recently as Iraq, and bullets are flying through an urban area, a lot of non-combatants could be killed, especially if they’re living in buffalo skin lodges, which are not bulletproof. Also, you attack an urban area and this would be the same thing if Indians attacked a white settlement or a white homestead, some of the women and people we might consider kids would pick up weapons. in their own defense. So you go charging at this thing swirling through and bullets are flying and you see somebody moving and you’re not sure if they have a weapon or not.

Just like police today, we’re in their hot pursuit. You shoot first and you ask questions later. There was some, probably some cavalry troopers who acted with bad blood. They had seen friends who were killed and mutilated by the Indians, or they just shared the general prejudice of their society against.

Indians and felt the fewer Indians there are, the less problems there’ll be for us whites in the West. And then there are others who are either taking fire or afraid that they might. The Osage scouts were deliberately killing every Cheyenne they could get, they could cut, they could get their hands on, including women and children who obviously were, Custer will intervene and more than 55 shy and women and children will be spared. They’ll be carried back to his base. Custer will stop the promiscuous murder of non-competence, but a large number were killed.

Massacre? Yeah, there were certainly massacre moments in the Battle of the Washita, but like a lot of things that happened in history, the nuance gets lost when it’s put on show.

It’s good guy versus bad guy. One part of the Washita sequence that outraged a lot of white Americans when the movie first aired was Custer’s order to kill the Indian pony herd. A lot of animal lovers were upset by that. And I can understand that, but that was a sound military decision. The pony was an Indian man’s.

It was his source of wealth, his source of standing, but it also was his means of mobility for making war and also for gathering food, hunting buffalo. You take away the enemy’s ponies and they have no choice but to turn themselves in and live off white charity on their reservation. It made as much sense as destroying German tanks after battle.

It’s harsh. Not fun to look at. And if Custer tried to bring, herd those ponies back to camp supply his base in what is today, Oklahoma. Young Indian men, they would have stolen most of them back on the march. That was one of their major skills stealing horses from rival tribes and from whites.

So it made the most sense to just eliminate those ponies, except for the ones he used to mount Indian women and children for the return trip to his base. But again, you leave out certain facts and a different kind of picture emerges.

 

If you want to watch the way the movie portrays the event that happened this week in history, you’ll find it about an hour and a half into the 1970 film called Little Big Man. And if you want to hear the rest of my discussion with Professor Urwin about the true story behind that movie, scroll back to episode #268 of Based on a True Story.

 

November 27^th, 1934. Barrington, Illinois.

It’s nighttime. We’re in the woods, making it almost pitch black. The little bit of light we do have lets us see a few men in suits and fedoras. They’re all looking in the same direction and after a moment, the camera cuts to show us what they’re seeing: A building through the woods that almost looks like a lodge.

One of the men in the woods, Christian Bale’s character, Melvin Purvis, gives orders to the rest of the men. The man next to him warns Purvis that there’s too much to cover. We don’t have enough men. They’ll get away; we should wait for the others to get here. Purvis thinks on this for a brief moment, then he decides against it. He says he’s not going to let them slip past the Bureau again. He continues issuing orders to the agents before they start making their way quietly toward the lodge.

In the next shot, we’re inside as we see some men drinking at a bar. They seem to be oblivious to the men outside as they’re enjoying a relaxing evening. Stephen Graham’s character, a man cast in the movie as Baby Face Nelson, goes around to some of the other patrons of the lodge making jokes. A woman eating dinner with her husband don’t seem too amused by Nelson’s jokes.

Back outside, Purvis and his agents advance. A few men leave the lodge and get in a car, about to drive away. Purvis has a decision to make. He hesitates for a moment. Then, with his machine gun raised, he yells at the car to stop. It doesn’t. So, Purvis gives the order to open fire.

With a hail of bullets, the woods light up as agents hiding behind the trees are only seen by the muzzle blasts as they open fire. As the bullets riddle the car, it stops. It also lets everyone inside know what’s happening, and at least one of the men who was lying down on a bed inside jumps to the window to start shooting back.

When he manages to get closer to the car, Purvis notices the people inside. They’re dead. They’re also ordinary citizens. Not who he was after, which means that was a huge mistake and also the gangsters he was trying to catch are still inside.

Now, we can see even more men going to the windows of the lodge and shooting out with their own machine guns. This is a full-fledged shootout. Amidst the chaos, some of the gangsters sneak out of a window and make their way out of the lodge.

One of the agents yells to Purvis to let him know someone got out. Purvis yells back, “Is it Dillinger?” The agent replies, “I think so!”

Purvis gives orders to try and flank the escaping gangster. As they do, another shootout in the woods takes place. We can see a little better that there were two gangsters on the run. One of them is Johnny Depp’s character, John Dillinger, while the other is Jason Clarke’s character, Red Hamilton.

As they’re trying to escape through the darkness, it looks like Red might’ve gotten hit. But he’s not dead, so they continue on.

Somewhere else in the woods, Baby Face Nelson is alone when a car drives up on the road behind him. Nelson turns around and acts casual until the car stops to check on him. Then, without warning, he turns around and shoots the driver point blank. Amazingly the driver doesn’t seem to be dead. A moment later, we find out why as Nelson talks about how agents wear vests, so now he’s going to shoot to avoid hitting the vest. He’s going to kill the agent. Then, a moment later, he does.

Getting in the car, Nelson drives away just as another agent arrives at the man lying on the ground. He gets there just in time to for the man’s dying words to identify his killer: Nelson.

Now it’s a race with cars as we see agents pile into another car and speed off into the night after Nelson. Nelson happens upon two of his gangster friends on the road. With his gun raised, one of the gangsters is about to steal the car from Nelson when Nelson yells out to his fellow gangsters to get into the car. They do, and the three men drive off.

While the movie doesn’t identify them here, if we pause the movie, we can tell from the actors that the man with the gun who was about to hijack the car is Stephen Dorff’s character, Homer Van Meter. The other is Michael Vieau’s character, Ed Shouse.

In the next shot, we see Purvis and the Federal agent’s car catching up to the gangster’s car. Now it’s a shootout between the cars as Van Meter hangs out the window to shoot at the Fed’s car behind them. Purvis does the same, hanging out the side window of the car to shoot at the gangster’s car. Purvis seems to get a better shot because he hits one of the tires, causing Nelson to lose control of the car. It flips over a few times before landing off the road in a field.

But the gangster’s aren’t dead. Van Meter jumps out of the wrecked car and races away.

The Fed’s car stops and Purvis starts shooting at Van Meter, hitting him multiple times. Nelson is right behind, pulling out his machine gun to shoot at the Feds. He hits one of them, and then Purvis pulls out his pistol and takes aim. He hits Nelson, making him fall to the ground. Nelson gets back up quickly and starts shooting his machine gun wildly for a moment, but Purvis continues shooting Nelson until he lies motionless on the ground and the night finally falls silent.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Public Enemies

That sequence comes from the 2009 movie directed by Michael Mann called Public Enemies. The event it’s depicting is when notorious bank robber Baby Face Nelson was killed, which happened this week in history on November 27^th, 1934, in Barrington, Illinois.

Baby Face Nelson. Pretty Boy Floyd. They were a couple of the most popular gangsters in John Dillinger’s gang.

Obviously, those were nicknames. Pretty Boy Floyd’s real name was Charles Floyd. He’s played by Channing Tatum in the movie, although he’s not in the scene we talked about. But the movie was also correct to show other gangsters in our segment today: John “Red” Hamilton and Homer Van Meter.

But today’s segment focuses on the death of Baby Face Nelson. His real name was Lester Joseph Gillis, although he more commonly went by George Nelson.

Probably the biggest thing the movie got wrong about history is that John Dillinger was there at all. You see, as the leader of the gang, John Dillinger was Public Enemy Number One, according to the FBI. Hence the name of the movie.

But in the true story, John Dillinger was killed by the FBI in July of 1934. So, he wasn’t there in November when Nelson was killed like we see happening in the movie. Something else we see happening in the movie is Homer Van Meter being killed in the same shootout, but that also didn’t happen. In the true story, Van Meter was killed the month after Dillinger, in August of 1934. As a side note, even though we don’t talk about him in today’s segment, for historical purposes it’s important to note that Pretty Boy Floyd was killed in October.

What these deaths did, though, was to elevate one of the more notorious of the remaining in the gang, Baby Face Nelson, to be the new Public Enemy Number One.

But obviously, the movie changed quite a few things, even just in the segment we talked about today.

So, here’s what really happened this week in history.

On November 27^th, 1934, Nelson was driving south toward Chicago with a couple other people in his car. No, it wasn’t Van Meter and Ed Shouse like we see in the movie. As we learned, Van Meter was already dead at this point. Ed Shouse, on the other hand, really was part of the Dillinger Gang and he was alive in November of 1934—Shouse actually lived until 1959—he wasn’t in the car with Baby Face Nelson that November day.

The other two people in the car was Nelson’s right-hand guy, John Paul Chase, as well as Nelson’s wife, Helen.

So, anyway, Nelson and the two others are driving down the road on what is now U.S. Route 14—it was route 12 back then. Meanwhile, a couple FBI agents were driving north from Chicago to support other agents who had reported seeing Nelson just across the state border in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. That’s maybe 80 miles or so from Chicago. Roughly 130 kilometers.

Right around the town of Fox River Grove, Illinois, which is about 50 miles or 80 kilometers to the north of Chicago, Nelson’s car just happened to pass by the FBI agent’s car going the other way.

Since the agents knew there had been a sighting of Nelson, no doubt they were scanning every car they passed as they drove. And, of course, they were driving a standard issue federal sedan so not likely hard to spot for a criminal like Nelson.

As they passed each other, both sides identified the other almost immediately. The agent’s did a U-turn…but so did Nelson and it ended up with Nelson chasing after the agents. John Paul Chase, one of the passengers, opened fire on the agents. Neither of the agents were hit and they managed to speed away.

Their car, though, wasn’t as lucky. As it turns out, the water pump was hit so they couldn’t re-engage.

About that time, though, another FBI car joined the pursuit of Nelson’s car. Seeing a park nearby, Nelson swerved off the road and into it. That’s the Barrington Northside Park. His car didn’t wreck like we see in the movie, but he stopped the car and opened fire on the two agents inside the FBI car that chased them.

The two agents, Herman Hollis and Samuel Cowley, parked their car and then got out to use it as cover while they fired back. Nelson’s wife, Helen, quickly escaped into the park to hide while Nelson and Chase shot at the agents.

The guns used in this shootout between Nelson and Chase on one side Hollis and Cowley on the other were substantial. Three of them had automatic weapons, and the last a semi-automatic 12-gauge shotgun. And then, of course, various handguns. On top of that, Nelson was notorious for having a psychotic desire to kill federal agents.

This gunfight had to have been an intense hail of bullets.

Nelson was the first to get hit, but he didn’t go down. Instead, when his machine gun jammed, he didn’t bother to clear it, but instead swapped it out for a new one—that tells you they had extra weapons in the car—and moved toward the agents.

Agent Cowley was hit by Nelson and went down, after which Hollis hit Nelson with a blast from his shotgun. It hit his legs, so still not enough to take him down, but that was the last round Hollis had in his shotgun, so he dropped that and pulled out his pistol. Nelson shot Hollis in the head, killing him.

With the agents not moving anymore, Nelson limped to the agent’s car. He backed it up next to their car, which had been disabled at this point, and with Chase’s help loaded the weapons over. Helen hopped back into the car and the three drove off. Chase was driving because Nelson was wounded too badly.

In fact, at this point, he’d been hit a total of nine times. One from the machine gun in his abdomen and another eight pellets in his legs from the shotgun. They drove to a nearby safe house where, at about 7:35 PM, Baby Face Nelson succumbed to his wounds.

Agent Hollis was declared dead upon arriving at the hospital while Agent Cowley was mortally wounded. He died on the surgery table trying to remove a bullet from his abdomen.

If you want to watch the movie’s way of showing this event, even though it’s not very accurate to what really happened, you can see that in the 2009 film called Public Enemies. We started our segment today at about an hour and 23 minutes into the movie.

 

November 28^th, 1994. Portage, Wisconsin.

The cell door clicks as it unlocks. Opening it, the uniformed guard looks inside to see Evan Peters’ character, Jeffrey Dahmer, lying on his back reading a Bible on his bed. He tells Dahmer it’s time for work duty. Clearly annoyed by this, Dahmer lets the Bible fall to his chest as he sighs. Then, after a moment, he gets up and sets the Bible down on the mattress.

In the next shot, we can see him and another prisoner cleaning the weights in what looks like the prison gym. They’re talking about what they’re going to do with the 25 cents an hour they’re making. Dahmer says he’ll probably just give it to the church—the other inmate says that’s lame. After an awkward pause, he says he’s just joking, and they both laugh.

The camera cuts to another cell, now, and we’re looking through the bars at an inmate inside. The door unlocks as he looks up at who we can assume is the prison guard unlocking his cell door. The angle changes and we can see that, yes, it’s the same prison guard who unlocked Dahmer’s cell earlier. And he’s telling this inmate the same thing: Work duty.

We can tell from the actor this prisoner is Furly Mac’s character, Christopher Scarver. He gets up and walks out of the cell, then waits as the guard closes the door behind him.

We’re back in the gym now and Dahmer is mopping the floors. From the door behind him, the prison guard and Scarver walk in. The guard tells the two prisoners already cleaning up the gym that they’re going to get some help this morning.

Dahmer shrugs. Sure. The three prisoners get back to cleaning. After a brief moment, the other inmate tells Scarver they he’s going to clean the locker room and asks for help. Scarver agrees, and the two walk into another room. Meanwhile, the prison guard leaves the room, leaving Dahmer cleaning by the weights, alone in the gym.

It’s quiet. Dahmer is bent down and using a towel to wipe down what looks like a weight bench. From the locker room where the other two prisoners just went, we can hear a mop handle clatter to the floor followed by a loud thud. Dahmer stands up and looks in the direction of the locker room as we hear one of the inmates screaming amidst the sound of punches. It’s obvious the two other prisoners are fighting, but Dahmer doesn’t do anything other than listen.

After a moment, one of the prisoners emerges with a broken broom handle. It’s Scarver.

He stands for a while, holding the broom handle as blood drips from the end. Dahmer looks at him and asks what he did. Scarver replies by saying the other guy murdered his wife. No need to cry for him. Then he points the broom handle at Dahmer, but that’s nothing compared to what you’ve done.

He drops the broom handle on the floor and walks closer to Dahmer. Holding up what looks like a newspaper clipping, he asks if he really ate their flesh. Dahmer says he did. Scarver asks about the 14-year-old boy. Dahmer says yes. He asks Dahmer why he did it, and Dahmer’s response is simply that he was lost. He turned away from God. But now I’ve returned to God, he says. Scarver says he believes in God, too, but my God punishes evil. I’m his vessel, Scarver says. Dahmer just says, “Okay.”

Then, in a flash, Scarver punches Dahmer in the face and knocks him to the ground. Dahmer doesn’t try to get up. Grabbing a barbell bar, Scarver stands over Dahmer and asks how he killed the 14-year-old boy. Dahmer says he drugged him first so he wouldn’t feel anything.

Scarver pauses for a moment. Then, he says, Well, Dahmer, you’re about to feel every second of this.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the TV series Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

That sequence comes from the final episode of the first season in 2022’s Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. The event it’s depicting is when Jeffrey Dahmer was killed in prison, which happened this week in history on November 28^th, 1994, in the Columbia Correctional Institution located in Portage, Wisconsin.

And the series did a pretty good job showing what happened in the true story, although there were some slight differences.

On the morning of Monday, November 28^th, Dahmer went about his normal work duties. The other two inmates working with him in the prison gym were Jesse Anderson and Christopher Scarver. In the series, we see Scarver mention that Anderson—who isn’t named in that segment—had killed his wife. And that’s true.

That happened on April 21^st, 1992, when Jesse Anderson went on a date with his wife Barbara Anderson. They went to dinner and a movie. Then, after dinner, Jesse stabbed his wife five times in the face and head. He then proceeded to stab himself four times in the chest in an apparent murder-suicide. Barbara died of her wounds while Jesse did not.

The other guy we see in the series, Christopher Scarver, was also a convicted murderer to land him in prison. His murder happened on June 1^st, 1990, when he robbed the Wisconsin Conservation Corps at gunpoint. While he held one employee, a man named Steve Lohman, at gunpoint, he demanded money from the manager, John Feyen. Feyen gave Scarver $15, which made Scarver mad and he shot Lohman in the head. After this, Feyen wrote Scarver a check for $3,000 before managing to flee. Scarver was sentenced to life in 1992.

Back to the prison gym, though, it was these three who were cleaning the gym on the morning of November 28^th, 1994. Now, even though it happened in a prison, since it was in the gym and the adjoining restrooms, locker rooms, etc. there weren’t any cameras there. So, the only way we know the sequence of events is from the one man who survived. In other words, Christopher Scarver.

From his reports, though, Scarver didn’t jump on them right away like we see in the series. After the guard left the room, the three were cleaning for about 20 minutes before he got into a fight with both Anderson and Dahmer. He also didn’t attack Anderson first, like we see in the series.

Scarver said that after the altercation, he went into the gym’s weight room and grabbed a metal bar. Although later he admitted to hiding the bar in his clothing before the killings, suggesting that perhaps he had planned it all a little bit more than being the unplanned attack that he said it was right afterward.

In the series, we don’t see Dahmer fighting back. We also see Scarver telling Dahmer that he’s acting on God’s behalf. Both of those things are based in truth although, again, we have to take Scarver’s word for it because he was the only one who made it out of there alive.

Well, kind of. Dahmer didn’t die right away; he was taken to a hospital nearby and pronounced dead about an hour later. Anderson died of his wounds two days after the attack. Neither really talked about it before their death, though, so we only have Scarver’s version of events.

Scarver said that Dahmer didn’t make any noises at all while he was attacked, as if he was accepting it. So, that’s why we see that sort of thing happening in the series.

When Scarver got back to his prison cell after the attack, he told the guards that God told him to attack them. So, that’s why we see the religious side being brought into the series.

Something we don’t see in the series, though, that is worth pointing out is that Scarver had a history of, as the doctors called it, “messianic delusions,” along with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

And while we’re on the topic, something else we don’t see in the series is that Scarver’s attack wasn’t the first time Dahmer was attacked in prison. Speaking of the religious side, the series was correct to show that Dahmer was baptized.

It actually happened in the prison whirlpool, though, not in a tub like we see in the series, but, Dahmer did supposedly “find God,” at the end. That happened in May of 1994. Then, in July of 1994, another inmate tried to cut Dahmer’s throat while they were both in the prison chapel. Dahmer wasn’t seriously hurt in this attack, but he also didn’t seem to care if something happened to him. In fact, his mom later said that he regularly told her things like, “I don’t care if something happens to me.”

If you want to watch the event that happened this week in history as it’s shown in the series, though, check out episode ten of the Netflix series: Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. We started our segment today at about 31 minutes into that episode.

And if you want to dig deeper into the true story, we covered that whole series back on episode #217 of Based on a True Story.

October 23, 2001. Cupertino, California.

Our first movie this week opens with text on the screen to let us know we’re at the Apple Town Hall Staff Meeting in 2001.

The camera is following a man walking down some stairs. He’s being watched by a line of people along the stairs. There are some illuminated photographs framed along the staircase, too. The camera doesn’t really focus on them, but one of the photos looks like Gandhi. The photo at the end of the staircase is clearly visible as Albert Einstein. There are double doors open on the right side at the bottom of the staircase. There are a few people standing there, too, and they’re watching as the man reaches the bottom and turns right to go through the open doors.

The camera continues to follow him through the doors, and a stagehand pulls back the curtain just as the man walks through to the stage on the other side. There’s a room full of people watching as he walks onto the stage.

Then, the camera cuts to a view from the seats so we can see the full stage now. In the center of the frame is a huge Apple logo. For the first time, we can see the man’s face so we know this is Steve Jobs. He’s played by Ashton Kutcher in the movie.

As Jobs steps onto the stage wearing blue jeans and a black turtleneck with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, the audience stands and cheers. The clapping continues as Jobs stands in front of them, staring into the bright spotlight coming from the back of the room to illuminate him on stage.

After a moment, the audience stops clapping and sit down. Jobs starts to address the audience by saying he’s excited to be there because we have something really special to share with you today.

He goes on to tell the audience that they’ve sold over three million iMac and PowerBooks this year. The audience applauds this news, but Jobs raises his hands as if that’s just the start. “That’s it,” Jobs says, initiating a laugh from the audience as he smiles at his own joke. Raising his finger, Jobs says maybe there’s one more thing.

The smile lingers on his face as he continues to say he’s about to show something that no one else in the world has seen yet. He says that Jony, himself, and a small team have been working on a secret project. As he says this the camera cuts to a man in the audience, Giles Matthey’s version of Jonathan Ive.

Jobs goes on, saying the device he’s about to introduce will revolutionize an entire industry.

It’s a music playing device.

The camera cuts to members of the audience. They don’t make any noise at the announcement of a music playing device, but they’re listening intently.

Jobs says it’s a tool for the heart and, if I do say so myself, it’s insanely cool. Scattered laughter can be heard among the audience.

He says it’s a music player. It’s a thousand songs in your pocket. Then, he reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out a small, white device. As he does, he holds it up and tells the audience, “.”

At this, the audience stands and cheers even louder than before.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Jobs

That sequence comes from the 2013 biopic about Steve Jobs that is simply called Jobs. The event it’s depicting is when Apple first announced the iPod, which happened this week in history on October 23^rd, 2001.

While the movie’s version of the dialogue, audience reaction, and announcement overall is obviously dramatized, the basic gist is true.

There were also some little bits of truth in there, like when Ashton Kutcher’s version of Steve Jobs mentions the name Jony.

The real Jonathan Ive worked closely with Steve Jobs to design the iPod—and also the iMac, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and many more things, even the Apple Stores.

But, of course, there’s more to the story of the iPod than we see in the movie.

Let’s start by clarifying that the iPod was not the first digital music player. That was actually back in 1979 with a device called the IXI, which was created by a British inventor named Kane Kramer. That was probably too far ahead of its time, though, because it wasn’t really until the late 1990s that they started to get more popular. The MPMAN F10 in 1998 from Elger Labs, for example, as well as the Diamond Rio PMP300.

The PMP300 was what started to pick up the most traction for MP3 players, but neither of them had much storage—both at 32 or 64 MB.

That changed around the turn of the century when the Remote Solutions Personal Jukebox was introduced with a whopping 4.8 GB of space for a hefty $800. Soon after, the Creative Nomad Jukebox topped that with 6 GB for only $500.

While those were both technically portable, realistically, they weren’t very portable, haha! They were big and bulky. Other players entered the space, and for a while it became a balance of storage space vs cost and portability.

Then, in 2001, Apple launched the iPod. It came with 5 GB of space, cost $400, and was actually portable. So, while Apple may not have been the first MP3 player out there, the movie was still correct to suggest through Steve Jobs’ dialogue that the iPod was what revolutionized them.

In fact, it revolutionized more than the MP3 player devices themselves. The term “podcast” itself comes from the iPod even though, just like the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, the first time an audio file was published through an RSS feed—the basic concept of what we consider a podcast today—that happened before the iPod was launched.

According to an article from the podcast industry news service Podnews.net that tracks the history of the term podcasts, the first audio in an RSS feed was published by Dave Winer on January 20^th, 2001. So, obviously before the iPod was launched in October of 2001.

That was just a test, of course, but as the popularity of MP3 players increased thanks in large part to the iPod, more people started figuring out how to distribute audio files through RSS feeds that others could then download to play on their MP3 players—usually an iPod.

According to the same article on Podnews, the medium’s founders, Adam Curry and the aforementioned Dave Winer, have both attributed the term “podcast” to a listener named Dannie Gregoire. It was quickly picked up by Winer, Curry, and others who started to report about the new process of delivering audio along the internet for people to listen to on their iPods.

On May 10^th, 2022, Apple officially discontinued the iPod as its features have all been integrated into the iPhone.

If you want to watch the event that happened this week in history, that is how the 2013 movie Jobs starts. And if you want to learn more about the history of the term podcasting, I’ll include a link in the show notes for the article on Podnews that I mentioned.

 

October 24, 1942. Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands.

Our next show starts establishing the time and place. We just did that, but in the show, we can see a map to help with the geography of where Guadalcanal is located. Highlighted in red is Japan, and we can see the Japanese occupation is spreading far and wide, around much of the islands in the South Pacific.

The map zooms into the southern edge of the Japanese-occupied zone, near New Guinea, and just north of the Coral Sea—which, itself, is just north of Australia. As the map continues to get closer to the Solomon Islands, the name of one of the islands appears in red: Guadalcanal. On the northern edge of the island, we can see the name Henderson Field appear along with the month and year: October 1942.

Fast forward a few minutes into the show, and we can see American soldiers digging through the dirt. The night before, they endured a barrage of artillery fire that forced them into foxholes. Now, it’s daytime and the Marines are digging out their comrades from the debris and dirt that filled in some of the foxholes. We can see a couple of the Marines pulling someone out of a hole on a stretcher.

One of the Marines, Jacob Pitt’s character, Private Bill Smith—he goes by the nickname Hoosier—crawls out of his foxhole with a dog. Another Marine, Private Robert Leckie, catches eye contact with his friend. They don’t talk to each other, but the look between Leckie and Hoosier says they’re both happy to make it out alive.

Oh, and Leckie is played by James Badge Dale.

Not everyone was as fortunate as Leckie and Hoosier. The camera shifts to some other Marines who are looking down into another foxhole. Inside, there’s nothing but body parts where the Marines inside used to be.

The three Marines looking down on their fallen comrades are Sgt. Manuel Rodriguez, Sgt. J.P. Morgan, and Sgt. John Basilone. Rodriguez is played by Jon Bernthal in the series, while Morgan is played by Joshua Bitton, and Basilone is played by Jon Seda.

Sgt. Morgan whispers what everyone is thinking: “Direct hit.”

Just then, Adam Booth’s character, Sgt. Ralph Briggs, walks up to talk to the three men. As he gets closer, he looks down at the foxhole and pauses for a moment. Basilone has to break him out of the trance, asking Briggs what he wants. Still looking at the remains in the foxhole, Briggs tells the three NCOs that Lt. Col. Lewis Puller wants them at the command post. Puller’s nickname is “Chesty,” and he’s played by William Sadler.

The scene shifts now as Chesty is giving the NCOs the day’s mission. They’re to take a position south of the airfield. That must be Henderson Field we saw on the map earlier. Chesty goes on to say that, should the Japanese retake the airfield, their orders are to fall back into the jungle and turn to guerilla fighting. But, he insists, that’s not going to happen. The soldiers agree. Not if they can help it.

After the orders are given, Chesty asks Basilone and Rodriguez to stay behind while the other soldiers go about their work. Chesty says he needs a runner and asks Basilone if he can spare Rodriguez. Basilone jokes that his men are sick of Rodriguez anyway; the two good friends share a smile.

In the next shot, we see Basilone and other Marines digging in behind sandbags camouflaged with dead palm fronds they must’ve found lying around the jungle. The men are working to set up machine gun nests to defend their position. They’re also setting up phone lines. One of the Marines asks about it, and the reply is that Chesty wants all the gun-pits to be on a party line with someone listening at all times so they’re all in constant communication.

Behind one of the machine guns, Basilone checks the sights on the huge gun as Marines on the other side continuing to set up things like barbed wire and other traps meant to slow an enemy attack.

As nightfall seeps into the jungle, along come the rains. The camera cuts to Chesty, who takes a call from Henry Nixon’s character, 2^nd Lt. Hugh Corrigan. Corrigan informs Chesty the Japanese are headed his way. Since it’s a party line, everyone else can hear this, too, as Chesty gives orders to hold fire for as long as possible. But, he knows the attack is inevitable. He tells Sgt. Rodriguez to run as much ammo to the guns as he can, and Rodriguez rushes out of the tent to do exactly that.

The camera cuts to Basilone’s position just as he puts the phone down. He turns to the men around him to deliver the bad news: They’re coming right at us. Then, Basilone mans the machine gun while the other Marines ready their weapons for what’s about to happen.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the TV series The Pacific

That sequence comes from the 2010 miniseries from HBO called The Pacific. The event it’s depicting is the Battle for Henderson Field during the Pacific Theater of World War II, which started this week in history on October 23^rd, 1942.

We started our segment with the date of October 24^th, though, and there’s a specific reason for that. Simply put, during the night of the 24^th and early morning hours of the 25^th is when John Basilone and the men under his command managed to hold off the attack from about 3,000 Japanese soldiers. It was an action that would lead to Basilone receiving a Medal of Honor.

When we ended the show’s depiction, though, the attack hadn’t happened yet so I didn’t describe how the series shows what Basilone did. The reason for that is because a little while ago, I had a chat with historian Marty Morgan—who was involved in the production of The Pacific—about that series. So, here is a clip from episode #190 of Based on a True Story where I outlined basically the events that happened right after where we left off a moment ago.

 

Dan LeFebvre: There is a huge moment in episode number two. I want to ask you about, it gets repeated throughout pretty much the rest of the series and it’s why the episode is called Basilone, right? It happens, this vicious battle one night, John Basilone is a machine gunner, and he’s part of the Marines forming a line of defense against a Japanese attack.

They withstand the first wave of attack, then there’s another wave he decides they need to move to another part of the line, so he picks up his machine gun with bare hands, gets Third degree burns on his hands in the process, run through the jungle on the way he literally runs into some Japanese soldiers that he shoots with his now handheld machine gun before rescuing a couple other soldiers with him who are engaged in some hand to hand combat.

And then after moving, he continues pretty much doing whatever is necessary, running back and forth from Line to get ammo for machine guns. During one of those trips, he runs into another Marine named Manny Rodriguez actually knocks Barcelona down and then shoots a few Japanese soldiers behind him, saving his life, allowing him to continue delivering ammo to the line.

And in the end, the Marines are able to hold off the Japanese attack. Thanks in no small part to his actions and the next day he finds the body of his friend Rodriguez who seems like he was shot somewhere near where he saved that someone’s life. And according to the show, this event would ultimately lead to him being awarded the Medal of Honor and simultaneously being tormented with this guilt for being, getting this medal and being awarded this.

When his friend died, how well did the show do depicting this event?

Marty Morgan: It depicted it very well. And it depicted with, I think some excellent acting too. Basilone’s tormented, and I think the series explains it. I’m getting ahead of where we’re going in episode, but after becoming a recipient of the medal of honor, Basilone is taken back home. It’s depicted in these. We’re just talking about the first four episodes here. And so this is part of what we’re covering and I’m stepping ahead a little bit though, when I point out that when he goes home to provide a very useful function in the form of helping to raise money for the war loan.

Barcelona is tormented by the fact that. He has brother Marines who are out still in the fight and he’s not there. They will ultimately go on, 1st Marine Division will ultimately go on to participate in landings at Cape Gloucester the day after Christmas, 1943. And they’ll fight at Cape Gloucester in one of the, in a grueling battle for over three months.

In the meantime, has gone home. And he has become a face and a voice for the United States government in the war alone, where he is, where what he is doing is extremely important because this war was not simply just a mobilization of the American people. It required a mobilization of American industry.

And in order to mobilize American industry, you had to mobilize the American economy. And in order for us to be able to pay for everything, the government had to have money, and it had to have money from the people that came in the form of war bonds that were purchased by the people that were ultimately paid back in the aftermath of the war.

And in order to keep the money flowing, the United States government had to make this. The series of campaigns that became a number of different war loan initiatives, it was incredibly important for the government to reach people effectively. The people ended up knowing a lot about what happened to the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal during the period from August 7th until the division was ultimately relieved from, removed from the island in early December.

And it was, that was headline news. That was, everyone in the country knew about what the First Marine Division went through on Guadalcanal, and they ultimately would read about the heroism of the men who held off repeated Japanese attacks during the course of the First Marine Division’s time on the island.

And Basilone ultimately becomes one of the celebrities of the First Marine Division. I hate to use that word, but that is exactly what he was. He was a household name. And he could therefore contribute more importantly to the war loan. Then his contribution would be more valuable pressing the war loan than it would be if he was continuing to function as a machine gun section leader, because as machine gun section leader, he might just get himself killed, which is precisely what ends up happening to him.

And so bass alone staying in five star hotels being wined and dined back home. No one’s shooting at him He is never spending a night. Outside under the open sky. He’s never getting rained on. He’s never walking in the mud He’s living the it’s the ideal post in many ways and he’s completely miserable and it’s because he’s a warrior and his It’s not even just the fact that he’s a warrior that wants to be out there doing what he can It’s also because He understood he was living off of borrowed time and that borrowed time began when his life should have ended that night at the mouth of Alligator Creek.

On in August of 42 and his life was instead saved by another Marie who that very night ended up losing his life that weighs heavily on people that’s such a, an obvious statement. That’s the greatest understatement that could ever be made. But I was raised by someone that experienced the psychological disorder that’s called survivor’s deal.

My father was in Vietnam and my father had survived. A critical moment in Vietnam and to know him on just a social level, you would never have guessed that it was something that traumatized him and troubled him all the way through the end of his life. But it was only by being an intimate, being around him and being a family member that saw him constantly, it was only then that you could realize the extent to which it haunted him.

And. I believe that John Basilone in the very same way, John Basilone just couldn’t accept the fact that he was chosen for reasons known but to fate to be the one that gets to go and sell war bonds to the American people. And he was not okay with it. Because he wanted to be in the field. He wanted to be leading Marines in combat because he was good at it.

A point I find myself making all the time is that the American nation that fought the second world war is quite a bit different than the one that we have now, and that between today and 1942, a lot has happened and something that now characterizes us in a way that I don’t believe that it did, yeah, almost 80 years ago, is that cynicism, pessimism.

And disenchantment were no longer dominant ideas for us. They’re dominant ideas for us now, particularly pessimism and suspicion. And. It’s only when I think you can figure out what it’s only when you can create a mathematical way of removing pessimism, suspicion, cynicism, and you can remove those from your mind, you can only do that by doing a lot of reading and imagining a world where those things were, those forces were not as powerful to a national identity.

It’s only when you can do that you can imagine how I think John Basilone was haunted. Because there was a sense of duty, a sense of optimism, and a sense of courage that characterized what he did. And for him to have been removed from it and be back home had to have been torture. Because He was being called to the battlefield.

There’s been a great deal of writing recently, too, that has indicated the way that warriors experience combat and how they’re called on to engage something that’s in our animal side. Because we’re still just animals. We still have all of these animalistic behaviors, but then we also have this back here and this back here.

We have a lower cortex and we have a frontal cortex and that makes us different. We are thinking animals, but we’re still also animals. And there is a tribalism that can characterize the way that we interact in social settings. And humankind, we are social. We’re very social. And some of the most recent writing has indicated that men who experience combat with one another develop a bond that’s different than anything else that you can or will ever develop.

It’s different than the bond that you’ll develop with your wife. It’s different than the bond that you’ll develop with your father or your brother. And yet it is as powerful and although I haven’t experienced it I was raised by somebody who did, and I watched the way that 30 and 40 and 50 years later, he would interact with men he had served with, and it told me that this is something serious, and this is something extremely powerful.

This is John Basilone, who had been in the, and who had been in uniform for quite a long time up to this point. He had been in the army for years before he entered the Marine Corps, and Basilone had served with a lot of people, and he had served in uniform. And the Philippines, and now here he is wearing green uniform, and he’s in combat in the Pacific, in the Solomon Islands, and he experiences combat with people, and right toward the beginning of that combat and the moment that will ultimately make him a household name, the night right there at Alligator Creek, when he engages in the actions that will ultimately result in him being awarded the Medal of Honor, he also sees someone save his life, and then that person is immediately killed, and it traumatizes him.

Because that’s what trauma looks like. These people, what we asked them to go do during the course of that war was go out and dance with all of this complicated psychology, and he fascinates me. Bass alone fascinates me, because all he wanted was to get back. To his machine gun section, all he wanted to do was lead Marie to combat.

And that says something so fascinating. And it, that’s why I’m so glad that ultimately the series makes Bass alone and him a central character. Because he’s, first of all, he’s very tragic, but he’s also somebody that’s extremely admirable because he presents qualities to us. That I think we all want to imagine because what I think we want to imagine is that there’s a nobility inside of us and that we have a dedication to something and that dedication is to country and comrades, and that, although I don’t believe John Basilone was some Puritan, but his, the trajectory of his life sent him down a different path and that trajectory imbued him with This torture, this haunting of what happened to him that night, what happened to him in the nights that followed on Guadalcanal, the things that he survived, the friends that he saw lose their lives.

And it just, it wasn’t enough. He could not tolerate the idea of being the sociopath that separates himself from those men who are still out there fighting the enemy. He couldn’t individualize. And that fascinates me. He couldn’t just be like, too bad for you guys. He was a man who was capable of these complex feelings.

And that’s why I think he’s so amazing. Because he obviously had a deep feeling of love, which is ultimately expressed in his marriage, which we will ultimately learn more about as the series moves on. I’m mentioning it only because I want to call emphasis to the fact that there was a higher calling at work in John Bacillan’s mind and that higher calling, I think, was forged on Guadalcanal and it began from the landings and I feel like it was set in motion in the most powerful way of all during the Tenerife River battle on Alligator Creek on August 21st, 1942, when he’s almost, I don’t want to say single handedly, but his, certainly his leadership was instrumental in guaranteeing that that his company or his section would not be overrun, that 1 7 would hold the line and would prevent the enemy from overrunning the airfield and recapturing.

And It makes his story so much more compelling and that’s why I’ll, I don’t mean to rush into it, but eventually I’m involved in that, which comes out as a companion book to the series. And this represents a big departure from what ultimately happened in that there was a team that was researching it.

I was a part of that team when I was involved in the series. And then there was screenplay writing, people that were actually putting a TV series together. And we ultimately departed ways under not the most entirely positive circumstances, and they made decisions that I didn’t care for. And. We advocated for things and this book they ultimately chose not to follow and they did that in favor of, we, we weren’t following Basilone, we were following other people who had stories that were equally as compelling by the way but they went with Basilone and looking back on it now, I’m glad they did because I continue to be fascinated through my career With people were like back then, because understanding John Basilone has called me down this path of recognizing that Americans thought different back then.

That Americans felt senses of a duty of honor, of optimism. And I’m not saying that it’s entirely gone now because it’s definitely still there. It’s just that I think the background noise has been turned up. The volume of the background noise is much louder. It’s. It’s distracting us from the fact that it’s during it’s during times of trial that our survival instincts as animals kick into motion.

Those survival instincts will present themselves through human behavior as loyalty and dedication. They’re the, they’re things that make us love dogs endlessly. And there are things that make us love ourselves, because when you look at John Basilone and you see that loyalty, that this man who could have just sat back and lived an opulent life in uniform and the best possible assignment ever, a man who could have been content with the amount of sacrifice he had already made and he was not content with it.

He was discontented because he was capable of doing more. And he couldn’t do more, which is what ultimately compels him to go back to the field, ultimately brings him back to the fleet Marine force. So that he can lead Marines in combat. And that is ultimately what brings his life to an early end.

 

 

Obviously, Marty was talking about more than just the event this week in history, but also some of the aftermath of that as Basilone was pulled from combat for a war bonds tour in the United States.

If you want to hear the rest of my interview with Marty, that was a 3-part series where we covered all ten episodes in The Pacific. You can find them all at basedonatruestorypodcast.com/thepacific. The first episode of the series is where we cover the episode showing John Basilone’s Medal of Honor action that happened this week in history.

 

October 24, 3018.

Yes, you heard that year correctly: 3018.

This will be a quick one, but it was this week that Frodo recovered from his wounds at Elrond’s house in Rivendell after the Skirmish at Weathertop—that’s when five Nazgûl attacked Aragorn and the four hobbits on Weathertop Hill in Eriador.

And now that I’ve explained that, you probably have a good indicator why the year for the event is 3018. This is, of course, from the fictional story found in The Lord of the Rings.

So, that’s why we’re not doing the normal comparison, but I just had to point out that Frodo awoke from his injuries in Rivendell on October 24^th during a time known the Third Age. But, because the date of October 24^th is specifically mentioned, I’ll throw in the movie’s depiction of this into our movie recommendations this week.

You can see Gandalf telling Frodo the date at about an hour and 24 minutes into 2001’s The Fellowship of the Ring.

And if you do want more of a comparison with that, we actually covered the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in our own 3-part series that ran for three years in a row on April Fools Day. You can find that series over at basedonatruestorypodcast.com/thelordoftherings

 

October 26, 1881. Tombstone, Arizona.

The camera pans across a few men and women clad in outfits you’d expect for the late 1800s. We can only see a four or five people in the shot at any given time as the camera moves along where they’re standing on the front of the buildings, but we can see the women have on nice dresses and hats. The men, too, seem to be wearing nice clothes with suits, vests, and bowler hats.

Everyone seems to be looking at something off the frame.

When the camera cuts, we can see what they’re looking at. Four armed men are walking down the dusty road. Their long, black dusters are blowing in the wind. As they continue to walk, we can see a burning building behind them. They turn to look. After a brief moment, they continue on. Nothing can save that building.

Although we see someone run up and throw some water on the flames. That doesn’t help at all, but there are other people running this way and that—maybe they’re trying to keep the fire from spreading to other buildings in town.

With the burning building behind them, the four men continue walking toward the camera in a very cinematic moment.

The camera cuts to what looks like an empty lot between a couple of buildings. Five men are there, and it looks like one of them is tending to his horse. On the fence behind one of the men is a row of saddles.

Switching back to the four men, they continue walking. A little kid runs up to them. “Bang, bang!” he yells, pretending to shoot at the men. One of the guys jumps at the sound, but he recognizes there’s no threat as the kid runs off. A few people from building balconies overhead look down at the men continuing to walk down the street.

One of the men, Val Kilmer’s character, Doc Holliday, whistles softly and tips his hat to a bystander watching them walk by. In front of Holliday is Kurt Russell’s character, Wyatt Earp. Alongside him are his two brothers, Virgil and Morgan Earp. They’re played by Sam Elliot and Bill Paxton, respectively.

A man runs up to the four men, saying he’s disarmed them. The movie doesn’t mention his name, but we can tell by looking at him that this is Terry O’Quinn’s character, Mayor John Clum. Mayor Clum tells the men that he won’t allow for any trouble. At this, Wyatt Earp holsters his pistol. But they all keep walking, and the mayor makes his way into a nearby building. The camera cuts to inside the building where we can see someone taking a photograph. The mayor doesn’t pay attention to this, he looks out the window to continue watching the four men from the safety of indoors.

Now the four men are nearing their destination and Holliday raises up the shotgun he’s holding. The five men don’t seem to notice the four men at first. The camera shows the four men passing by the photography studio toward the open lot. Now the five men notice them—oh wait, now that the camera angle has changed we can see there are six men and not five.

All six men are walking toward the approaching Earp brothers, along with Holliday. After taking a few steps, the six men end up in a staggered line that basically amounts to four men up front and two in back.

Sam Elliot’s version of Virgil Earp speaks first, announcing to the six men that they’re there to disarm them. He orders them to throw up their hands.

The camera cuts close to a holstered pistol and we can see a hand grab it. Then, another cut to another pistol being grabbed. The camera is too close to see who it is, but the clothing is brightly colored and the four approaching men were all wearing black dusters so it must be a couple of the six men grabbing their pistols. No one is drawing their guns yet, just putting their hands on it.

Immediately, the Earps tense up and put their hands on their own pistols. Holliday raises his shotgun to eye level. Virgil yells out to hold on—that’s not what they want! Now we can see Holliday tossing off the black duster that was just thrown around his shoulders to free up his arms a little more.

One of the six men in the back stumbles back toward a gate in the fence, then he turns and runs away. The other guy in the back row seems to have run away, too, although the camera doesn’t really show that. He’s just not visible in the frame anymore.

The camera shifts to the three Earp brothers in a line, poised and waiting. Holliday has his shotgun pointed at the men. From behind one of the Earp brothers, I think it’s Wyatt, we can see his angle looking at a man with his hand on his pistol.

No one says anything, they’re just waiting to see what the other side does. It’s the kind of tension you can cut with a knife.

Wyatt is motionless as his eyes dart around to another man just to his left, then back to the man in front of him. It’s clear he’s trying to figure out what they’re going to do next.

The camera cuts from one man to the other. A smile cracks on Holliday’s face as he keeps his shotgun trained on one of the men opposite him. The camera cuts to that man’s face now, so we can see it’s Thomas Haden Church’s character, Billy Clanton. A closeup of another of the men and we can see it’s Stephen Lang’s character, Ike Clanton. Neither of the Clanton brothers are moving, seemingly frozen in place.

Identifying the other men from the actors playing them, we can see there’s also Frank McLaury, who is played by Robert Burke. There’s also Frank’s brother, Tom McLaury, who is played by John Philbin, as well as Billy Claiborne, who is played by Wyatt Earp.

No one is saying anything, the camera is just bouncing from one man’s face to another as they’re staring each other down.

Billy Clanton’s face looks panicked. Holliday winks at Billy, and Billy’s expression changes to a straight face. Wyatt Earp notices this and says, “Oh, my God!”

Then, all hell breaks loose into a hail of gunfire as the two sides start shooting at each other.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Tombstone

That sequence comes from the 1993 movie called Tombstone. The event it’s depicting is what we now know as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which took place this week in history on October 26^th, 1881.

And right away, I’ll point out that the name is a misnomer—probably one of the biggest in the history of the Old West. The gunfight didn’t happen at the O.K. Corral, but at a vacant lot near it. So, the movie was correct to show that because the photography studio we see in the movie really was the building next door. That was owned by a man named C.S. Fly, and his photography studio was on Fremont Street—that’s the name of the street we see the four men walking down in the movie. Next to it was a vacant lot; that’s where the gunfight took place.

The O.K. Corral was facing the other direction, on Allen Street, but what we’re seeing in the movie is the rear entrance to the O.K. Corral with horse stalls facing Fremont Street.

The people we see involved in the movie were correct, too. On one side were the three Earp brothers along with their friend, John Henry Holliday, who went by the nickname “Doc.” Although the part of the movie we talked about today doesn’t show it, Virgil Earp—that was Sam Elliot’s character—was the Marshal. His brothers Morgan and Wyatt were also lawmen in town, as was Doc Holliday.

On the other side were a group of outlaws known simply as the Cowboys. The movie correctly shows there being two sets of brothers, Ike and Billy Clanton, as well as Tom and Frank McLaury, along with Billy Claiborne.

Oh, and maybe you noticed that I mentioned that Billy Claiborne is played by Wyatt Earp in the movie. That wasn’t a mistake. According to an explanation by Marshall Trimble, who is Arizona’s official state historian, the actor who played Billy Claiborne in the movie was Wyatt Earp III, who is a descendant of Wyatt Earp’s older half-brother Newton. None of the Earps who took part in the gunfight had any sons, so the Earp name didn’t carry on through them. But, still, the actor is still related to the Wyatt Earp from history.

I’ll throw a link to Marshall’s article in the show notes for this episode if you want to check it out.

So, what about the gunfight itself?

To help us understand how well the movie portrayed what really happened, let’s go back to another episode of Based on a True Story, because I had a chat with Chris Wimmer about the movie Tombstone back on episode #142. Chris is the producer and host of two very popular podcasts, Legends of the Old West and Infamous America.

Here’s an excerpt from my chat with Chris to separate fact from fiction in Tombstone’s depiction of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral:

Dan LeFebvre: Since the gunfight at the O. K. Corral was, and probably is, one of the most popular gunfights in the Old West today, I thought it would be interesting to do a little bit of a quick fire fact check on it. I know you go into a lot more detail on your show, but just some of the overview of what happens in the movie.

I’ll explain what happens in the movie, and then if you could just let us know. If that really happened or not, and you can go into as much depth as you want to, I’ll leave that up to you if you just want to keep it surface level and kind of an overview of that. The first one here is, like you mentioned they, they walk down, down the streets of Tombstone, but then they, these, there’s these two sides, and there’s this, a tense calm in the air, some tension there, where you see two sides of armed men staring each other down.

And then the camera cuts in on Doc Holliday, and he winks at one of the cowboys. And that’s the initiation of, okay, we know that something’s going to happen. Do we know if it was a Doc Holliday wink or Doc Holliday at all that was the final straw, so to speak, of the actual gunfight itself?

Chris Wimmer: I don’t think anyone could probably say 100%, but I think the odds would be pretty strong against Doc Holliday winking. That seems to be much, much more of a Hollywood moment and a great moment for Val Kilmer playing the wonderful, his wonderful version of Doc Holliday. The rest of it is, though very similar.

Initially, before the gunfight, Doc Holliday did have this walking stick, this cane that he exchanged for a shotgun with Virgil Earp. That did happen. And, So Virgil Earp is carrying Doc’s cane, Doc does have a shotgun. When the four, when the three Earps and Doc Holliday arrive at the lot, they’re not in a, a straight line like that, actually, there’s a little more staggered to it and I won’t get into too much detail there, but Doc has the shotgun, he, in the movie, you will see Doc Holliday shrug off his coat and raise the shotgun, according to the reports, that part did happen, but we don’t, I think there’s probably very little evidence to show that he actually winked and that’s how it all began, but, Again, as you see in the movie, Virgil Earp raises up that black cane with the silver top on it that he had taken from Doc and he yells, something like, Hold, I don’t want that.

I don’t want, we’re not here for a shootout. And that part really did happen. That, that was basically the last moment before the shooting started.

Dan LeFebvre: Wow. All things considered, it sounds like they did a pretty decent job. Again, going back to, of course, it’s, at the end of the day, it’s entertainment.

So it’s not going to be 100 percent accurate, of course. The next shot that we see in the gunfight is really the first angle that we see where somebody pulls up a gun, you see a gun leaving its holster, and it’s a close up of a cowboy, that’s the one that Doc Holliday winked at. Do we know who drew their guns first?

Chris Wimmer: Yeah, again, you there’s varying reports. I think the common wisdom now, the most agreed upon version now is that Wyatt Earp and Frank McClowry pulled their guns at almost the same time. When the Earps and Doc Holliday arrive Billy Clanton and Tom McClowry the two Clantons, Billy and Ike, are in the lot.

And the two McClowys, Frank and Tom, are in the lot. I believe it’s Billy Clanton and Frank McClowy who start reaching for their guns as the Earps come up. So that’s, that starts to establish the tension. Then Virgil yells, hold, I don’t want that. And then almost right after that, Frank and Wyatt pull their guns at about the same time.

Wyatt shoots Frank McClowy in the stomach. Frank’s shot goes wide. And then the next gunshot comes from Billy Clanton, I believe. So frank and frank mclaury and wider pull and fire almost at the same time to start the whole thing off

Dan LeFebvre: Okay. Yeah, that was going to be one of my next questions because in the movie we see why it shoot first they’re drawing you see the cowboy drawing and then Why it as well, of course, is why it seems to be a faster, faster draw.

So he’s the one that actually shot first. So it seems like they got it pretty close there as far as that aspect of it is concerned. Yeah, it’s,

Chris Wimmer: it’s very similar in, in, in the milliseconds that were involved. It’s probably hard to tell who actually fired their gun first or maybe began to draw first.

It does. I think by Wyatt’s own, by Wyatt’s own account, he does draw and fire very early. So if not right before Frank McClowry, he pulls almost at the same time. Maybe with the second he sees Frank McClowry this thing is going to now escalate into a gunfight, Wyatt pulls and begins to fire. And as you probably have seen in the movie through Kurt Russell’s portrayal, from my understanding, Wyatt Earp in real life was a very cool customer.

And so it’s, he was, he was one of those guys who stayed calm during a crazy gunfight. And so part of maybe part of the idea that he might have drawn first, and I think he says he does, but either way. He lands the first shot because he’s unfazed by all of this stuff, and the cowboys are freaked out and firing more wildly than Wyatt.

So Wyatt scores a hit, if you want to say it that way, and so maybe that helps generate the idea that he actually drew and fired first.

Dan LeFebvre: Okay, that makes sense. Now, in the movie, it doesn’t take long once the shooting starts for two of the four cowboys to get shot and then a third is close behind after the horse that he was using for some cover moves and then Doc Holliday shoots him with a shotgun, but then a fourth cowboy raises his hands and pleads the Earps to stop shooting.

Did the cowboys actually try to stop the gunfight partway through?

Chris Wimmer: Yes and no. I think that there are, Ike Clanton who’s really is the instigator of a lot of this stuff, is the cowboy who throws up his hands and says, I got no gun don’t shoot me and runs toward Wyatt Earp. That did actually happen.

Ike Clanton throws up his hands and says, I’ve got no gun. I don’t remember his specific words, but he throws up his hands and shows that he does not want to be a part of this and he rushes toward Wyatt Earp. And collides with Wyatt Earp, and Wyatt Earp does say to him, get to fighting or get away, the fight is commenced, either fight or get out of here.

And Ike Clanton exits the fight, and we might get into exactly what he did afterwards, but that part did happen, he did run up to Wyatt. And then gets out of the way and is not part of the gunfight. The thing you referenced previously is that, yeah, I believe it’s Tom McClowry who is next to a horse and is using the horse for cover and then eventually gets shot by the shotgun.

Which which also happens in real life, that Doc Holliday did shoot Tom McClower with a shotgun after the horse got out of the way as well.

Dan LeFebvre: As you’re talking about this, just, it’s fascinating to me that this happened so long, it’s not like we have it on video that we can go back and reenact, know what happened, this is all coming from the milliseconds.

Between different things, the fact that we’re able to break this down in this much detail is, it’s impressive. It’s surprising. Yeah.

Chris Wimmer: And luckily, because, at least on the urban doc holiday side, everyone on that side of the equation survived. And Wyatt Earp wrote a very famous handwritten diagram of how it all went down.

And there were various other people. This happened right in the middle of town, more or less. There were two, two main streets going through Tombstone, and this happened right in one of them. And I can get into exactly how it ended, literally in the middle of the street. But it but this happened in full view of everyone.

There were other witnesses. So you have a lot of different people. So we didn’t have video evidence. We had a lot of different people’s testimony to try to. Verify things, but of course, in the heat of the moment, everybody gave conflicting statements. Even though we have a generally agreed upon sequence, no one will ever be 100 percent

Dan LeFebvre: Sure. And that makes, that makes sense. That’s the way a lot of history is. In the movie, though, we see that Virgil is shot in the leg and Morgan is shot in the chest. Were they actually injured in the gunfight?

Chris Wimmer: Yeah, and this is pretty accurate. Yes Virgil was absolutely shot in the leg.

Morgan’s injury was a little more visceral, actually, and it’s, I won’t get into too much graphic detail, but he was shot in the right shoulder, and the bullet actually travels across his back and exits out of his left shoulder, so it’s a very strange it’s like someone fired at him and he spun to the side at the last second.

And the bullet just traveled along his back. So he was technically injured in both shoulders. But yeah, like he, both guys were injured. Morgan’s was just a little different than is portrayed in the movie.

Dan LeFebvre: Now, going back to the movie here, we still have a couple of things I wanted to chat about there, as far as the actual fight itself, the man that in the building he, the guy who held up his gun, he went into a building nearby.

But then he ends up shooting from that building. And so almost instantly, it seems like all of a sudden the Yerps and Doc Holiday are it seems like they’re surrounded almost for a time where they have the Cowboys on one side and then this guy. We thought was out of the gunfight kind of reenters that where they actually shot at from a nearby building like that.

Chris Wimmer: No, this is a little bit of dramatic license that yes the, in the movie, that’s Ike Clanton again, who has rushed up to Wyatt Earp and said he has no gun and he’s supposed to run away from the fight in real life. He did run away from the fight. He was not, he was no longer involved in it.

In the movie, his character circles around into Fly’s boarding house slash Photoshop. And grabs a gun and begins firing through a window, and that’s just a little dramatic license for entertainment value.

Dan LeFebvre: Okay. Okay. Now I want to talk about the duration of it because I timed this, and in the movie, that scene lasts 1 minute and 29 seconds from that first shot until the last shot.

So how long was the actual gunfight at O.

Chris Wimmer: K. Corral? Yeah, here’s some great little nuggets about the fight. I love talking about these. So that’s not too far off. The actual gunfight, I believe the most common number you’ll see associated with it is it lasted about 27 seconds. Oh, wow. In that 27 seconds.

So yeah, the gunfight in the movie is only about a minute longer than it actually lasted in real life. Now, of course, that would have felt like an eternity, but… It’s less than 30 seconds in real life. And during that time period, there were somewhere around 30 shots fired. So almost, you’re talking about a ton of shooting and the most interesting thing that certainly if you’re, if your listeners haven’t done.

So I hope this spurs them to go check it out. You can find a photo online. If memory serves, that someone took of the vacant lot where the gunfight took place a couple years after the fact, before, the town changed and it was demolished. So you can see just how narrow this is. And so the mistaken, the biggest misnomer maybe in the history of the West is the gunfight at the OK Corral.

The gunfight did not actually happen at the OK Corral. It happened at a vacant lot. that backed up against the OK Corral so you could walk through this vacant lot and into the back of the OK Corral. So that’s how the sequence started. The cowboys were near the OK Corral and they just walked through this empty space in this town block and ended up at this vacant lot next to Fly’s boarding house.

And that’s where they were finally found and confronted by the Earps. So this lot is really narrow. If you’re listeners… Anyone has a two car garage, it’s about that wide. So if you picture four guys standing just outside the door of the garage with weapons drawn, and four guys inside the garage, one of those guys inside runs away, and now there’s seven guys firing at each other.

In this tiny space for 30 seconds with bullets flying everywhere, and one of them is Doc Holliday with a shotgun. So it was, it must have just been mayhem there for 30 seconds. That,

Dan LeFebvre: That, that really paints a picture, and it really makes me, in the movie at the end, we see Virgil and Morgan are injured, we talked about that, and then there’s three dead cowboys, and one escaped, but it, when you paint the picture like that, it really would surprise me that anybody would survive.

What was the actual end result of the gunfight?

Chris Wimmer: Yeah you got it right. And that’s, that was when I did the research on it, that was one of the startling revelations to me too. Cause I, I’d seen the movie tombstone and I loved it. And I assumed that was basically how it all worked. And for the most part it was.

So yes, three cowboys were killed. The three cowboys who stayed in the fight, Frank McClowry, Tom McClowry, and Billy Clinton all died. They didn’t necessarily die immediately in the gunfight. Billy and Tom. lingered a couple more hours before they died of their wounds, but all three men did die as a result of the gunfight.

Virgil and Morgan were injured, more or less the way in the movie. Doc Holliday had a ti like a minor scratch on his hip, a bullet grazed him, it cut through his coat. And he initially thought he was much more badly injured than he was when they finally looked at it, it was just a minor scratch.

And then the kind of miraculous part is that Wyatt Earp, who was right in the middle, right in the forefront, in the thick of the whole thing. He was never scratched. He never received a wound and that was the miracle of Wyatt Earp’s life in everything he did. He was never sustained an injury. He was never shot.

He’s never sustained any kind of severe blow of any, really any kind. So It’s, he was just one of those guys, just, the bullets seem to miss him every time.

Dan LeFebvre: It’s a guy to have on your side, that’s for sure.

Chris Wimmer: Yeah.

If you want to learn about the historical accuracy of the rest of the movie, you can find the full interview with Chris by scrolling back to episode #142 of Based on a True Story. Or if you want to watch the event as it’s shown in the 1993 movie Tombstone, we started our segment today about an hour and ten minutes into the movie.