Jeffrey Burton, (A Palomino Book, 2008)
340 pp., softcover, notes, maps, 18 illustrations. $30.00
Despite its unfortunate and non-descriptive title, Jeff Burton's Western Story is an extraordinarily detailed and exhaustively researched contribution to southwestern history. While many authors have concentrated on books about frontier Arizona's military, its Apaches, scouts, miners, and especially its Earp brothers and their friends and enemies, fewer have bothered to write about the territory's lesser known incidents of violence. Burton, an England based historian and writer, has put Arizona's historians to shame with his latest effort.
In 1887-1888, four train robberies took place on the Southern Pacific route between Tucson and El Paso. The bandits were a shady and obscure lot. Jack "Kid" Smith and John "Dick" Maier, former railroad men, were involved in two holdups near Tucson and a third, bloody and final, near El Paso. A pair of tough cowboys, Larry Sheehan and Dick Johnson, was arrested on suspicion of one of the Arizona train robberies, but both were soon released for lack of evidence. They then vowed to "rob one for luck," and did so indeed.
The manhunts for the desperadoes involved many of the most noted lawmen of the Southwest: Virgil Earp, Fred Dodge, William K. Meade, Charlie Shibell, SP detectives Bob Paul, Will Smith, Len Harris, and Fred Burke, and Wells Fargo detectives Jim Hume and John Thacker. Meade's posse ended up in a Mexican jail, and Bob Paul's posse engaged the Larry Sheehan band in a classic gun duel high in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Chihuahua.
Fred Dodge, as a constable in Cochise County, played a minor role in the manhunt. His account, set forth in his posthumous memoir, Undercover for Wells Fargo, is disputed in minute detail by Burton. Those who believe that Fred Dodge was a truthful chronicler should read Western Story as well as Burton's Constable Dodge and the Pantano Train Robbers (2006). Burton shows plainly that Dodge either had a very bad memory or a very vivid imagination.
This reviewer was fascinated with the extraordinary level of detail - minutiae, even - that Burton packs into his narrative. But not all will agree. For the general reader this is not an easy read. In the author's dogged determination to include every bit of his research, his western story bogs down. He weighs his sources in the narrative instead of relegating such discussions to the endnotes. He repeatedly interrupts the narrative by engaging in detailed analysis of the most mundane and trivial events. The author's tongue-in-cheek writing style often confuses rather than illuminates the text. But most unfortunate of all is that this valuable, authoritative volume was issued in only 100 copies for the U.S. market.
Hopefully a second edition will soon appear, properly edited, with a larger press run and a descriptive title to give the book the wide audience it so richly deserves.
- John Boessenecker
