June 15, 2007
Getting Inside the Greatest Gunfights: An Interview with Bob Boze Bell Posted by Allen Barra at 07:20 PM EST Bob Boze Bell is a failed professional baseball player, former radio talk-show host, author, artist, cartoonist, Old West historian, and, currently executive editor of True West, which, founded in 1953, is the oldest continuing publication on the legend and lore of the American frontier. From today (June 15) to June 24 he will be emcee at the Single Action Shooting Society’s (SASS) End of Trail event at Founder’s Ranch, New Mexico. SASS members will reenact famous gunfights of the Old West, which include such legendary names as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Wild Bill Hickok, and Billy the Kid. The reenactments are based on Bell’s “Classic Gunfights,” which appear regularly in True West. The End of The Trail also marks the publication of Bell’s book Classic Gunfights III. From June 22–24 Bell’s artwork will be exhibited, featuring 16 original gouache and scratchboard paintings from his Classic Gunfights series. For more details on End of Trail, see the Single Action Shooting Society’s website. For more information on Bob Boze Bell’s work, check out his blog. (The June 6 and June 11 entries relate details on how he recreates a classic gunfight.) Bell answered these questions from True West’s office in Cave Creek, Arizona, when he should have been working. You've been studying this subject for decades now. Tell us how you got interested in legendary gunfights. This is hard for even me to believe, but I have had an interest in gunfights for 50 years! A half century. It was in 1957, when I starting reading True West magazine and learning the truth behind the many TV Westerns that I loved. I went through a couple of phases that distracted me (the three B’s: baseball, the Beatles, and babes), but I kept coming back to gunfights and the West. I got real serious on Christmas Day, 1989. My mother sent me The Saga of Billy the Kid by Walter Noble Burns as a present that Christmas and I read it in one sitting. At about two in the morning I set the book down, and that was it. I knew what I had to do. Not long after this a comic book company from Chicago called me. They were interested in reviving Classic Illustrated Comics and had heard that I did a comic strip called Honkytonk Sue, and would I be interested in doing something in the Classic Illustrated style on the West. They seemed kind of hard up, like they couldn't find anyone interested in the subject. I jumped at the idea and said I wanted to do the Walter Noble Burns Kid book, and the guy on the phone hesitated. He said he didn't know if they were going to do biographies. They never called me back, but at that moment, I knew exactly how to proceed. What is your Old West Classic Gunfight series, and how have you gone about reenacting some of them with the Single Action Shooters End of Trail event? I started developing a graphic novel on Billy the Kid. I took an excerpt idea to Arizona Highways, and, after some hesitation there as well, I got a cover gig to do Billy in Arizona. My painting of Billy graced the August 1991 cover, and at that point I figured I had it made as far as getting a book deal. I sent out a query letter and a copy of the magazine to 26 publishers, and all 26 turned it down, including True West (I have the letter I sent to them framed and in my office). Even my alma mater, the University of Arizona Press, turned me down, saying, “Just what the world needs, another book on Billy the Kid.” So I went to my father, borrowed $5,000, and got my Billy the Kid book printed for $20,000. I was in the book business. One of the things I have always enjoyed doing is illustrating fight scenes. I used to do this after school at my father’s gas station on Route 66. I love seeing action in movie terms: wide shot, POVs, crane shot, eye socket shot, you name it. More than one critic has said the action sequences in the Billy book are the best part. When two crazy friends and I bought True West magazine in 1999, I immediately proposed a regular feature on Classic Gunfights, taking apart a gunfight and using the best maps, photos, and illustrations to put the reader in the scene with the best research and a no-nonsense narrative, warts and all. The first gunfight appeared in 2000, and I have since published over 75 fights that appear in three Classic Gunfight books (approximately 25 gunfights per book). What sources have been used for historical accuracy? The trick is to find the best researcher on each fight, and invariably there is one person who has dedicated decades to ferreting out the minute details about each second of a particular fight. In the case of the Northfield Bank robbery by Jesse James and the Youngers, it’s Jack Koblas, who lives in Minnesota. He knows every second of that fight. Frederick Nolan, of Chalfont Saint Giles, England, is the absolute Billy the Kid expert. For train robbery and the subsequent Silver City shootout, it’s Texas author Bob Alexander. If I’m doing anything on Tombstone I always contact Neil Carmony in Tucson to get the straight skinny. Of course, I have many friends in the Earp field, along with a few enemies, so I don’t suffer from sources in that arena, but Neil is the go-to guy for me. What gunfight are you currently working on? Currently I'm doing the Battle of Big Dry Wash for the August issue of True West. I Googled it, got the historical website for Camp Verde, contacted them, and they recommended Dr. Sam Palmer of Paradise Valley. Last Thursday I drove up to the Mogollon Rim, and Dr. Sam gave me a personal tour of the site. He has been studying this fight for 25 years, camps out on the actual site often, has found 4,000 artifacts, and knows every soldier’s name and history on both sides of the fight. This may sound odd to the outsider, but there is virtually a person like Sam for every fight I have done. I shoot about 50 photos on the site, then I start researching Apache photos and U.S. Army gear, cribbing shamelessly from Frederic Remington and others, and trying to blend the gear, the men and the location shots into an accurate portrayal of the event. Sometimes I can't get it all down like it is in my head, but I usually try to do at least six illustrations per fight. My goal is to get it right, make it concise, and make it fun and exciting to read. One of my pet peeves is reading about a fight and not being able to figure out where they are standing, who is where, how did the room look? That’s why I use Gus Walker, the Mapinator, who I have worked with for seven years. He is a great mapmaker, can take a very complicated posse chase and fight and break it down so you know exactly where everyone is. When we did the battle of Northfield, Gus broke it down to four phases, and shows where Jesse, Cole, Frank, and all the townsmen were at each stage of the fight, plus where they were shot, etc. Then Gus and I tracked Jesse and Frank’s run all the way from Minnesota back to Missouri, utilizing all of the newspaper reports of sightings. We backed all of this up by showing each item to Jack Koblas. To my knowledge, no one has ever done this before. I am very proud of our efforts in this area. The members of the Single Action Shooting Society that are going to the reenactments have practiced drawing and shooting hours on end. How do you think they’d fare against Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid, and John Wesley Hardin? The short answer is not very well. It’s one thing to shoot against stationary targets or in a controlled environment, but to get an idea how different it would be, imagine going into a biker bar, jumping up on a pool table and yelling out, “Only homos ride Harleys!” Then try to defend yourself. That is the closest modern equivalent I can think of to the world of Hickok, the Kid, and Hardin. It’s a whole ’nother deal. In the movies nearly every gunfighter favors the standard Colt Peacemaker, but real-life gunfighters such as Wild Bill, Jesse James, Doc Holliday, and Billy the Kid often preferred different weapons. What were some of the other choices they had and the reasons they might have preferred them? There were dozens of choices for weaponry and an almost unlimited variety within those choices. Long barrels, short barrels, six-shot, seven-shot, single-shot. That’s one of the things I think the movies have not played with enough, and that’s the wide variety of weapon styles on the frontier. It would be like a movie showing everyone driving Fords. Frank James preferred a Remington pistol, Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid were known to carry a Lightning, or Thunderer, self-cocking, or double-action pistols. Hickok was partial to his .36 caliber Navy Colt. So what was the term that most of these men were known by? Gunfighters? Pistoleers? Shootists? What were the most popular terms for them in their own time? The term gunfighter is pretty much a modern (1950s) term, although I hesitate to say they never used it, because I am constantly amazed by terms that show up in the newspapers of the 1880s. For example, it is now widely believed that being “quick on the draw” is a modern invention of Hollywood, and although low-slung, metal-clipped holsters were basically invented in the 1950s for quicker times in competitions, I can show you newspaper accounts of Ben Thompson’s killing in San Antonio where the paper claimed he was fast on the draw. And I can also show you low-slung, buscadero-style rigs from the 1880s. Now, they were rare, and that is the key, but you can get yourself in trouble by saying, “They never did that,” or “They never wore that.” You’d be surprised at what they had. Fighting men on the American frontier were called pistoleers, man killers, shootists, gunmen, and a slew of other handles. This may sound like an odd choice of words, but do you have a favorite gunfight? In terms of drama and the personalities involved, if you could go back in time to see just one fight, which would it be? In terms of sheer firepower and the bravery of one guy, I think the Ingalls gunfight when two wagon-loads of lawmen (24) took on the outlaws (7) of Ingalls, Oklahoma, and one guy (Arkansas Tom) dominated the lawmen and kept them pinned down until his comrades could escape. That is an amazing fight It’s in Classic Gunfights I. Put yourself back in the Old West, just before what could erupt into a deadly confrontation. You can carry one sidearm. What do you choose? And how would you carry it? In the pocket of your coat like Wyatt Earp before the OK Corral, or perhaps in the waistband of your pants like many did? In a holster? If so, what kind? Cross-draw? Shoulder holster, perhaps? A sawed-off shotgun under the coat still beats everything. It scared everyone, was quite intimidating, and, this is the key part, at close range you didn’t have to be a good shot. Beyond that I’d want a Walker Colt, because it looks like a cannon. You can pick two men in all of Old West history to accompany you into this possible confrontation. Who do you want on your left, and who on your right? I want Billy the Kid on my right, laughing, smiling, and deadly. And I want Wild Bill Hickok on my left, with the butt handles of those two hoglegs daring anyone to mess with the editor of True West magazine. Come to think of it, I wish I had those two when I have to deal with my creditors.
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