The Devil in the Bottle
One bright July morning in 1901, Lou cooked breakfast for a stranger riding by. Not liking him much, Willy took his .22 rifle off the wall. He showed the stranger what a good gun it was and bragged that he could shoot the eye out of a jackrabbit at a hundred yards. Both he and Lou breathed easier when the stranger left. A few weeks later they learned they had entertained the Sundance Kid, Harry Longabaugh.
Willy, who grew up to be called Bill, was my father. Those two paragraphs combine the Western myth and Western history. The cowboy, the homesteader, the rancher, the outlaw, the lady — were the stuff of myth. They were also real people. Industrial workers like Steve in the stamp mill were real, too, though they didn’t capture anyone’s imagination like the cowboy and gunslinger myth.
Perhaps that’s because Steve worked in a confined space, while Bill and Sundance worked outside, under the limitless sky, free to move around.
Through Bill’s stories, Sundance became part of my own history. For me, Western history and Western myth meld into flesh and blood, and Western history becomes far more than an academic exercise. It is the story of people, my own ancestors, both men and women.
Writing about Jack Slade in my novel, The Devil in the Bottle, I became fascinated with him. The man was a mass of contradictions. He is at once historical and mythical. He was a gunslinger who became the subject of myth, a tragic figure whose flaw, alcoholism, destroyed his many gifts. The man who might have been an architect of the West became an uncontrollable drunk, whose contemporaries referred to him as a “demon.”
In the Western myth the cowboy and the outlaw are types. People, on the other hand, are incredibly complex even when they’re not Jack Slade. Their inherent contradictions – good and evil, strengths and weaknesses – reside in the same person. The real cowboy historically did and does a necessary, difficult, dirty job for 30 a month and found (board and room). Bill talked about herding cattle in a rainstorm, water seeping down the insides of his boots and puddling in his saddle, his hands numb, to drive animals away from a rising river. He dismounted to carry sheep out of buffalo wallows so they would not drown, and decades later his frustration with animals so stupid would surface in his face and his voice.
People who do that sort of work are heroic, and have no need of a gun to enhance their heroism.
But along with that heroism come the ordinary flaws of being human. Tempers rise, and frustration erupts against other people and animals.
Somehow, from this mix of heroism and anger and cruelty as well as kindness and love, people made a country.
Between history and myth, it seems to me, there is a space, and from that space my stories come. History melds with myth in the story of Slade, in the stories of people doing the best they can to survive in difficult situations.
