In the last article, I related the famous story of Buck English’s final showdown with sheriff’s deputies in 1895. When the dust finally settled, English was nearly dead. At first, no one outside of Napa and Lake Counties knew who English was and the initial articles about the gun battle simply identified him as “the tall” gunman. Journalists quickly flocked to Napa County to dig up information on the identity of this desperado. Locals were all too eager to relate to the big city journalists stories of a young man named Buck English, who once lived in the area in the 1870s.
He committed his first crime at the ripe age of 22 when he robbed a stage coach near Lower Lake. He openly flaunted his gun-fighting prowess by sauntering around Middletown with a six-shooter strapped to his hip. After being released from San Quentin for stealing cattle, he murdered a man at a skating rink in town and got away with it. No, he only wounded that man, and it happened BEFORE he was sent to prison. He got in a gun fight with a man named John Good and walked away without a scratch. No, that’s not right; he walked away with a gunshot wound to his leg. No, I’m telling you, it was Good who got licked, not English.
With an apparent lack of editorial oversight, the newspapers of the day ran versions of these stories for several weeks, ignoring the occasional contradiction in favor of the dramatic image that began to emerge. English’s attempted jailbreak during the ensuing trial only added fuel to the fire. Here, thought reporters, was a man cut from the same cloth as Billy the Kid and Jesse James. This was fertile journalistic grounds. The stories practically wrote themselves and for all the misinformation the reporters included in them, it seems that’s just what they did.
English was soon found guilty and sentenced to life in prison for the stage robbery. Rather than fade into the background, though, the stories of English’s early career of crime had a life of their own and remained imbedded in the public memory even as the man himself wasted away behind bars. But memory is a fickle thing. Even immediately after the gun fight in 1895 when reporters first sought to fill out the biography of English, they should have had a hard time finding people who clearly remembered the man. You see, before the robbery and fight with deputies, people in Lake and Napa Counties hadn’t seen hide or hair of Buck English since he left the area in 1882/3. And yet, the crimes and exploits from that time that people “remembered” seemed as fresh as if they had just happened the week before.
Why the apparent disconnect between these stories and reality?
For decades oral historians have known the pitfalls of human memory. One thing that has been determined over years of research on the subject is that one’s memory of any particular event is greatly affected by what follows AFTER the event itself. For instance, how a wide receiver remembers a single touch-down pass in the 2nd quarter of a playoff game will depend in large measure on the outcome of the game itself. Will he remember it years later as his role in getting his team to the Super Bowl or, if they lose the game, as just one more vaguely-defined completed pass that added to his career record?
The same is true for everyday people. For better or worse, the memory of the criminal career of Buck English was immediately defined by its ending — its spectacular, Hollywood-esque, gun-blazing, glorious ending. I can’t emphasize enough the impact this event had on the public imagination. The young District Attorney, Theodore Bell, who fired the final shot that took English down, rode the wave of public interest all the way to a seat in the United States Congress. Even a decade later, when he was running for another public office, he was sure to remind his constituents of his role in capturing English.
The story of Buck English grew so powerful that its very romanticism granted English himself an early parole in 1912, after serving only 17 years of his life sentence. The case for his parole was presented to the prison by a young man who grew up hearing stories of English’s escapades and had befriended him through letters and visits while the bandit was behind bars.
The confluence of circumstances, with the recent national fret over the closing of the western frontier and the loss of the Wild West identity and the spectacular nature of the battle itself, transformed English from a regional ne’er-do-well to an American (or at least Californian) folklore hero. Because of the particular nature of human memory, when asked about his early career of crime locals unintentionally edited their memories of him to fit the image of the desperado he had become.
Coupled with this adaptation of memory, people increasingly started to exaggerate their own roles in Buck English’s life. Bill Spiers was the owner of the major stage coach company that brought people and freight from Napa into Lake County. While visiting Los Angeles in 1906, Spiers was interviewed by the Los Angeles Herald about his career, with particular focus on his relationship with Buck English. The title that ran above the article in the paper was “’Red Hot’ Bill Spiers Talks of Early Days, Recalls Buck English’s Career, General Review of Experiences During the Time that Men Fingered Triggers Daily and Shot their Enemies on Sight.” Needless to say, Spiers’ memories appear just as exaggerated as the title of the article itself. According to Spiers, he drove a stage team with English “for many years” and got to know him pretty well.
The reality is this was simply not possible. Between being in prison or jail and then living in Canada and Oregon, English would have had no time to pick up the career of stage driver. Or, if he did, it would have only lasted a few months to a year or so at most.
Regardless, this was the reality that people chose to remember, with themselves playing some small part in the great western saga of Buck English. Thankfully, we no longer have to rely entirely on the somewhat faulty basis of human memory. In my next article I will try to set the record straight.
Tony Pierucci serves as curator of Lake County Museums
