American Mythmaker: Walter Noble Burns and the Legends of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Joaquín Murrieta

Description

Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Joaquín Murrieta are fixed in the American imagination as towering legends of the Old West. But that has not always been the case. There was a time when these men were largely forgotten relics of a bygone era. Then, in the early twentieth century, an obscure Chicago newspaperman changed all that. Walter Noble Burns (1872–1932) served with the First Kentucky Infantry during the Spanish-American War and covered General John J. Pershing’s pursuit of Pancho Villa in Mexico as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. However history-making these forays may seem, they were only the beginning. In the last six years of his life, Burns wrote three books that propelled New Mexico outlaw Billy the Kid, Tombstone marshal Wyatt Earp, and California bandit Joaquín Murrieta into the realm of legend. Despite Burns’s remarkable command of his subjects—based on exhaustive research and interviews—he has been largely ignored by scholars because of the popular, even occasionally fictional, approach he employed. In American Mythmaker, the first literary biography of Burns, Mark J. Dworkin brings Burns out of the shadows. Through careful analysis of The Saga of Billy the Kid (1926), Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest (1927), and The Robin Hood of Eldorado: The Saga of Joaquín Murrieta (1932) and their reception, Dworkin shows how Burns used his journalistic training to introduce the history of the American West to his era’s general readership. In the process, Burns made his subjects household names. Are Burns’s books fact or fiction? Was he a historian or a novelist? Dworkin considers these questions as he uncovers the story behind Burns’s mythmaking works. A long-overdue biography of a writer who shaped our idea of western history, American Mythmaker documents in fascinating detail the fashioning of some of the greatest American legends. Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Author’s Note Part I. The Making of a Writer Chapter 1. Early Years Part II. The Saga of Billy the Kid Chapter 2. The Story of Billy the Kid Chapter 3. The Research and the Creation of Characters Chapter 4. The Critics Chapter 5. The Saga of Billy the Kid in Folklore and the Arts Part III. Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest Chapter 6. The Story and the Sources Chapter 7. The Writer and the Angry Old Lion Chapter 8. Creating Legends Chapter 9. The Critics Part IV. Final Works Chapter 10. The Robin Hood of El Dorado: The Saga of Joaquín Murrieta, Famous Outlaw of California’s Age of Gold Chapter 11. The Legacy of The Robin Hood of El Dorado Chapter 12. Later Years Epilogue. The Legacy of Walter Noble Burns Appendix A. John Gilchriese and the Walter Noble Burns Papers Appendix B. Unpublished Fragment from the Walter Noble Burns Papers about Bear River Tom Smith Appendix C. Selected Writings by Walter Noble Burns Notes Bibliography Index