Part one
It birthed an entire genre of music, film, television and writing. As a cliché, it has remained the most enduring image of America — its very invocation brings to mind whiskey-soaked bar tops, wind-swept plains and the rat-a-tat of gunfire under the blazing rays of a noon-day sun. It is the Wild West and America still can’t get enough of it.
It’s always easier to talk about the Wild West in these nostalgic terms, rather than try to contain it within historical parameters. Certainly Billy the Kid, Jesse James and their ilk existed as flesh and blood people — so too the lawmen who brought them to justice. But their significance lies not in their factual deeds, but the tall tales that they inspired. As a historical time period, the Wild West is tied up with America’s westward expansion. In this light, the period could be seen to have stretched from as early as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to as late as the turn of the century. Hollywood would rather have us think of the Wild West as a more compact time period starting at the close of the Civil War and ending sometime in the 1890s.
The period’s end is in some degrees more easily defined than its beginning. Not with a dramatic bang, but with a pathetic whimper did the Wild West come to a close. Appropriately, the harbinger of its demise was a young historian. Addressing a crowd of his peers assembled at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Frederick Jackson Turner proposed his thesis “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Nothing so thoroughly rips a subject out of its place in modern culture than a historian choosing to write about it. Thanks, Turner.
Turner argued that over the decades of the 1800s, like a knife continuously grinding against a whetstone, America met the untamed west and came away from the encounter with a keener edge. The west had forced Americans to develop a sense of “rugged individualism” that he argued had created a stronger democracy (don’t tell that to the Native Americans or other dispossessed corners of society, though). At the end of it Americans had a true grit that they didn’t have before. Turner concluded his thesis by stating: “The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” The doors had snapped shut and America found itself on one side, with the frontier and the Wild West on the other.
The closing of the frontier, as it has since been called, resulted in a sort of existential crisis for the nation. For so long America had relied on its ever-westward expansion as the cornerstone to its very identity. Nothing had said “American” quite like the image of the cowboy and the open prairies he roamed. But the cowboy had hung up his spurs and those prairies were fast being turned under the plow and girded by the iron expanse of the railroad.
As in most crises, people responded in different ways. Naturalists flocked to the cause of John Muir, who had been beating the conservation drum for decades. Now that they were told there were no more virgin landscapes to discover, some Americans rushed to protect what they did have. The high country around Yosemite Valley was made a National Park in 1890 and several others followed suit—the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, Sequoia. Photographers and other artists sought to capture a growingly romanticized version of this vanishing wilderness. They went farther afield to capture this nostalgic image and preserve what they thought would surely be gone tomorrow.
One of the most enduring responses to the closing of the frontier was propagated by newspapers and authors of the period. Rather than the wilderness itself, these men mourned the loss of the archetypes that had conquered it in the first place: the cowboy, the bandit, the lawman. Embellishment is a polite term for what in many cases were outright lies. Already throughout the 1880s Wild Bill Hitchcock had made his money bartering in these and dime novels had set them down in writing for all to read. The realization that the end of an era had dawned added fuel to the fire and the stories of outlaws and lawmen began to take on a life of their own.
Enter Lawrence Buchanan English—alias “Buck” English, or the less snappy “Clarence Pooler”. English was the Black Bart of Lake County — stage-coach robber, cattle thief, gun fighter extraordinaire. He had a sharp eye, an even sharper tongue and an uncanny memory. On one rare occasion when he actually went to church, English sat in the back for 40 minutes, only to saunter outside and recite the entire sermon from memory! And was he ever bold! While waiting to hold up a stage coach between Calistoga and Middletown, he hailed a passing freight wagon (gunny-sack mask on his head and shotgun in the crook of his arm) and called the driver by name, asking for some chewing tobacco. From his first stage robbery in 1876 near Lower Lake until his final robbery and capture in 1895, English terrorized the countryside in a series of felonies that escalated in their audacity.
These and many more are the stories that compose the image of Buck English. Over the course of the next few articles I will try to deconstruct this image, separating fact from fiction. I am able to do this partially in light of recent documents that have come to the attention of the museum staff. For the last several months we have been researching for an upcoming exhibit on the history of crime and punishment in Lake County. We have been sifting through thousands of documents—subpoenas, writ of attachments, indictments, jury selection ballots — from court cases dating back to the 1860s. We have gone from thinking we had just a handful of documents relating to English to now knowing we have dozens. In light of these recent discoveries, we are able to amend the record. I think (hope) that, at least in this case, fact is just as interesting as fiction.
To be continued.
Tony Pierucci is curator of Lake County Museums
