Foreword: History’s Mysteries
David Boop
September 11, 2018
History has a funny way of changing on us. Events our grandparents experienced, which had been imparted to our parents, are taught in our children’s history classes. I remember a time when the majority of my classmates were able to hold up their hands when asked if they had a family member who fought in World War II, Korea or Vietnam. How many of the youth of today remember Desert Storm? My son was a two-year-old when 9/11 happened. What will the next generation be taught about the causes and aftereffects of that era of history? More to the point… how accurately will the history be taught?
I remember distinctly my first college-level American history class. My professor was a southern gentleman from the “Great and Sovereign State of North Carolina.” He said his style of teaching tended to upset some of his students, as he would explain history from both points of view, not just the “winners.” I found this fascinating right up to the moment we hit the American Revolution.
“What do you mean the Founding Fathers weren’t best friends? What do you mean they hated each other, backstabbed one another, and even tried to kill each other?”
I still owned an elementary school, idealized version of the Founding Fathers being of one mind—united to stop oppression by the British rule and shape our great country. I had no concept of agendas, betrayal, political parties, and how our country nearly fell apart in those first years after the war.
That’s when history woke up in me. I came to recognize that my elementary and high school views of major events were no better than a Hollywood treatment of the topic. It only hit the highlights. Everyone is perfect. And the good guys always win. This is not how history played out, and it’s certainly not what happened in the era we call the Old West.
The Old West is one of the tricky times in history to write because it has become romanticized. We’re over a hundred years from what is classically referred to as the end of that era, 1910. (I’ve heard some historians go as late as the early twenties. As a recent researcher into my own family history, that’s a quite a few generations back.) Most peoples’ understanding about westward expansion is from movies like Far and Away, and television like Little House on the Prairie. They are so few people left to hand down those stories to their families that were handed down to them. For many modern audiences, a “Cowboy” is someone who “Bebops” in a spaceship with a corgi.
So, short of taking college history courses, how does one remove the glamorized picture of the Old West without diving down the rabbit hole into research hell? What responsibility do we as writers and editors have to explain the struggle between Manifest Destiny versus Native American rights? Or do readers need to know the rail baron wars were mostly fought by mercenaries, such as Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday? And what about the influx of elves, aliens, vampires, and wizards into a recently re-United States of America?
Okay, that last part might fall under an inaccurate teaching of history. We certainly don’t have any “proof” of these fantastical elements in the past. However, it makes for a better story than great-grandpa’s tale of when he went fishing one day and pulled up a mermaid, who he threw back because he was already in love with your great-grandmother (like we’d believe that). The combination of weird and west is exciting to explore, but it also carries a chance to view history in a new way.
My directive to all the authors in these anthologies were to give me the Old West the way it really was, where applicable. I wanted the history within to be accurate, the voices authentic. They will attest that I called them on anything I had doubts on, and they, in turn, backed their assertions with facts. They did an excellent job, in my humble opinion.
But I also asked them to give me, and you the readers, the world we wished to see: dragons flying overhead, or the ability to drink with dwarves, or hear how grandpappy fought off zombies in Deadwood. Fear of the unknown should play big, because that is a reality to the era. I wanted triumphs (or failures) over adversity, which forms the basis of every tall tale, and these authors rose to the occasion. Not every story has a happy ending, but they are real to the stories—the true stories—that inspired them.
For those of you who read Straight Outta Tombstone, this second anthology is my Empire Strikes Back. It’s darker, and includes a couple pieces that left me shaken afterward. I challenge you to read all the stories and let them infuse you with the images, smells (and, in some cases, the tastes) of the West. Don’t worry if you get scared easily, though. I have broken the narrative up with humor, victories over evil, and gunfights.
Lots of gunfights.
Which, if you’ve studied the Old West, did not happen as often, or in the way that’s been portrayed in the aforementioned popular media.
But then, it wouldn’t be a weird western anthology without them, would it?