Legends of the Old West - NED BUNTLINE 5 | Julia Bricklin Interview

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

Julia Bricklin wrote this series and she is the author of “The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal, and the Creation of Buffalo Bill.” She discusses several aspects of Buntline’s life, which was often dark but always adventurous. She talks about chapters of his life that were not in the series, and assesses his impact on the mythology of the American West. Thanks RAYCON! Get 15% off your order at buyraycon.com/oldwest Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I talked to Julia Bricklin, the writer of this series, and the author of a new book about the notorious Ned Buntline. Buntline was a fascinating and unique character, and you'll hear more about his crazy escapades and his impact on the mythology of the West. Here's my conversation with Julia Bricklin. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But we also sell merch. And organizing that was made both possible and easy with Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell and grow at every stage of your business.

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Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash realm, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash r-e-a-l-m now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash Realm. So I want to start with a little bit of backstory for our listeners. So we're going to go back. We're recording this right now in July 2020

through the magic of Zoom, as most people are doing in these days because of the coronavirus pandemic. For those of you who might be listening to this long in the future. So I want to go back about six months, seven months to January of 2020. I was doing a presentation at the Museum of the West in Scottsdale, Arizona. And this is why I, another reason why I really wanted to do the story of Ned Buntline, because I had one of these moments that are the scariest moments for me, especially when I do these live presentations. And part of what I had talked about in the presentation was the role of the media creating certain, almost turning people from the Old West into these mythological characters that we now think of them today. So like Jesse James and Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp and how the media wrote about them differently

and how they interacted with the media differently and went through very, very quickly those three characters and a couple others. And so we get to the question and answer ceremony, ceremony, we get to the question and answer session and a gentleman toward the back of the auditorium says, well, how did Ned Buntline affect that whole process of the media and writing about these people?

And at that time, I had to candidly answer and say, well, I hate to say this, but I'm simply not quite sure. I know of Ned Buntline. I know the name. I know he was a writer. And I know he's associated with this controversial aspect of a gun with a really long barrel. That's about all I know of Ned Buntline right now. And I had to just admit, I don't know that much about it.

So luckily, we are now telling that story and I know a hell of a lot more now than I did back then. So you have just written a book about Ned Buntline. So you have just written a book about Ned Buntline. So let's start there and we'll work our way towards some of the other crazy aspects of his life and maybe touch on the Buntline special. But I want to start with how you became interested in this story. Because like I said, I knew very little about it. I knew roughly who the guy was.

But how did you get interested to want to put in the time to write the book? I became interested in Ned Buntline when I wrote my first book called America's Best Female Sharpshooter. It's about a woman named Lillian Smith, who was a real rival to Annie Oakley and really so much more. Oakley and Smith got in a huge feud

at Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show in Europe in 1886. This was the year Ned Buntline passed away. I had to do some research about Cody's interest in creating a huge traveling show because I knew he was somewhat shy when he was younger and I wanted to know what spurred him to go on the road and create these huge extravaganzas. Soon enough, I came across the story about Buntline meeting Cody in North Platte in 1869. Men like John Burke and Nate Salisbury made Cody an international star, but it was Buntline who discovered Cody in the first place and who created Buffalo Bill. And so it was through that telling of the first story that you read about this guy,

Ned Buntline, and then something about him piqued your interest. So you started diving into that. Yeah, I really didn't know much about Buntline at all before I started my research. I knew his name from a class I took on 19th century pop culture a long time ago, but that was about it. I immediately read Jay Monaghan's landmark biography about him, which was published in 1951. And no disrespect to Monaghan, he did a great job with what resources he had. But it was really clear to me that Monaghan had rose-tinted glasses on when he wrote about Buntline. And when I really started digging into the resources, I found that for every person who adoringly called Buntline a genius or a rascal or a patriot, there was at

least one person who called him a criminal or a bigamist or a bigot or all three of those. And I wanted to know where all of these labels intersected. And so it really does seem like scoundrel is an appropriate description. And that was one of the things that I was totally unprepared for when I started reading your scripts, when you started writing them. I thought, oh my God, I had no idea how scoundrelly this guy was. And so I assume you probably had the same experience when you started researching. It was probably the case, it sounds like. Yeah, I don't even know if scoundrel or rascal is even the worst thing that people called him.

I mean, I know they weren't. I've never come across anyone in history that has caused so much polarizing, you know, criticisms from the newspapers or public figures or even just general citizens everywhere he went. He was either, like I said, a genius or a true patriot or an illustrious writer who's telling us things that we need to know, or he was considered a blight upon a town. You know, you'd have people meeting him at the train station either to welcome them, try to get him into their homes to stay, or to run him out of town. I mean, there really didn't seem to be any in between. People loved him or they hated him. And it depended again on the city, its political leanings, and when during the various decades it was. But I've never seen anything like it. Yeah, it's incredible. I would love to know how many people in the history of the world

can lay claim to starting at minimum two riots and maybe more. That's just a stat that you don't find very often. You single-handedly instigated at least two riots, one of which was extremely violent. So that certainly is a statistic that virtually I don't know anybody else who could lay claim to. When I was writing this, I thought, my God, when does this man ever sleep? I mean, forget sleeping off a drunk here and there. He was always in the thick of something. And if he wasn't in the thick of something, he was planning something or he was writing about what he had just done. So this guy's energy level had to be tops, right? Yeah, that was another side of this, that not only was he directly involved in so many crazy things and started so many crazy

things and just had all kinds of wild adventures, he wrote like a madman. And I thought I worked a lot, but this guy produced, I wouldn't even, is it even possible to total up how many things he actually wrote? Would we even be able to get an accurate count? I don't know if we can get an accurate count of how many stories Buntline wrote. There's a couple of historians that have done an amazing job collating all these tales that he wrote from his, you know, late teens until really the day before he died in 1886, he was still working on something. And I think we can all agree that Buntline created 200 or so unique tales and then probably spun off about 150 to 200 more. So 400 is a conservative guess of different unique stories with different characters, even if some of the plot lines look the same. It's hard to know because so many people ripped him off. I mean,

they used his name without permission. They used names that sounded similar to his. Publishers weren't above doing that just to sell newspapers. And, you know, Buntline, too, also used a lot of gnome de plume. So, you know, there were some stories that he wanted to give the impression a female had written, so he gave himself a female name. There were others where he just wanted to get paid again, so he might have taken a story that he had written for, say, the New York Mercury and sold it to another paper with a different name. So it's probably something that we're never going to know for sure. But 200 is a conservative estimate for unique stories, and I think we can estimate that it was probably as high as 400. It's the best deal, the highest cash back, the most savings on your shopping.

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I've been holding off until I got to the very end of the production process. Now we're here. So now I'm actually going to dive in and start reading some stuff. So as we move through our interview here, as we've talked about various things that Ned participated in, the riots and so forth, what are some of the abbreviated versions of some of the things we did not put in the series? Can you tease the audience with some of the other crazy things he did that they can find in your book? One major thing I didn't get into in the podcast series was Buntline's lifelong, shall we say, fascination with women. Really, it was this neurotic dependence on all kinds of romance and all kinds of women. He took nine women to an altar of some sort, and he married them. He took nine women to an altar of some sort, and he married them.

And the thing is, while he treated most of them incredibly poorly, at least at some point in their relationship, he did find artistic muse in every single one of them. And he was most definitely infatuated, if not downright in love with most of them. Yeah, personally, I can say that I definitely lost track of how many times the guy got married. I thought it was at least five, maybe that I counted. But I just thought this is I've never heard of anything like this either. Speaking of maybe world record holder for number of riots started single handedly. He's up there in terms of the number of wives. And it was just another aspect of the story that I was not not prepared for. So that's great. So you find a lot of wives. And it was just another aspect of the story that I was not prepared for.

So that's great. So you found a lot of that in the National Archives, at least the battle that we talk about a little bit in the final episode of his last three wives. I think at least one of which he married twice. Did he marry one of them a second time? Did he remarry one of those three, I think? Yeah, he married a woman named LaVanche

at least twice and possibly three times. He married her twice in a church with witnesses and so forth, and then possibly a third time in a private household. Right. It's just incredible. So, yeah, I mean, I will never be able to answer this question, but yeah, on her end of things, what would be the reason for marrying him a second time and maybe a third? You know, the relationship between LaVanche and Ned is such a strange one. In some ways, I think they enabled each other. I think that Ned, you know, there were rumors going around that LaVanche was actually at one time the madam at a house of prostitution, which she may well have been, if only to find the money to raise her son. But she was also a very bright, articulate woman.

And there are some pieces of his writings that purportedly were written by LaVanche. And I think they had a lot of mutual regard for each other. I think that she was intellectually stimulating. I think that in him, she found somebody that she could talk about literature with and maybe feel like she was a higher station in life without actually being so. I think that Ned at some point told her that he would help raise her son by her first husband who died early. So again, I think there's a lot of enabling going on here, but I do think they had mutual regard for one another. I know that LaVanche thought that she could fix him or cure his alcoholism at times, so it may have been a challenge on her part too, but he always seemed to loop around to her again. And I just think there must have

been some spark there that really kept them together off and on over the years. So let's get to, let's wrap up with, oh, sorry, maybe I haven't, I didn't want to cut you off. Are there anything else that we've talked about? We want to talk about the wives. What other little things do we want to tease the audience with for craziness that was in the book? Well, so much of what Buntline wrote about himself is total bunk. But I have to give credit where it's due. He did fight very competently in the Second Seminole War in the late 1830s, early 1840s down in the Florida Keys. And he not only fought fairly bravely, but he also wrote about things that he

saw. And these are also corroborated by other people, as are his actions in battle. And some of this has to do with the way that indigenous people were treated in the Florida Keys by by Spaniards, by Americans. And he's pretty even about his criticism. And he gives criticism to Americans who subjugated some of these Native peoples. And I thought that was pretty brave for him to do at the time. And it also gives us some really interesting history in the the time. It also gives us some really interesting history in the South Florida region. I'm also really glad that I got a chance to write about Ned Buntline's very sincere wilderness conservation efforts. You know, even before he moved to the Adirondacks and later the Catskills, he worked with local governments to protect streams and rivers from being overfished. He worked really hard to keep people from introducing non-native species.

You know, back then he even knew that that was something bad for the region. And the same goes for game animals. The irony, of course, is that he made a star out of a man who was initially well-known for slaughtering buffalo. But Buntline did do a lot for conservation in upstate New York, and he did this all the way up until his death. That's interesting, too. Again, another thing I would not have expected. Now that I've heard what I've heard about him, I would not have expected either of those last two. So as we, you just kind

of touched on the creation of Buffalo Bill and turning this scout into a celebrity who then turned himself into an even bigger celebrity. How much can we say, how much did his writings, did Ned Buntline's writings in general help the mythological image of the American West? As people from our age look back on the West in general, how much can we potentially associate Ned's writings for having shaped how we view it now? I don't think we can understate just how much Ned Buntline helped create the mythological

image of the American West. I love how one prominent historian phrased it. He said there was the intrepid Kit Carson, and then there's Owen Wister's steel-jawed cowboy in his book, The Virginian. And Buntline's 25 dime novel Westerns filled in that gap. And what he meant was, as much as the American public had loved its stories about Kit Carson and Natty Bumpo in the 1830s and the 1840s, these woodsman adventure types with the pioneer spirit, it was really looking for a different

kind of hero after the Civil War, one that could subdue the plains of the prairies in the 1870s. And yeah, 25 dime novel westerns is a small output, even though I would put that closer to 35 once you fold in Ned's California stories. But look at what he wrote. He created Buffalo Bill Cody, the ultimate hero of the West. And in addition to Buffalo Bill, he created Texas Jack, a character embodied by the very real John Omohundro. And he also exploited the growing popularity of Wild Bill Hickok, writing a dime novel about the real-life Scout and Gunman and incorporating his character into his play that featured Cody. He was close friends with Captain Jack Crawford, the so-called cowboy poet, and Crawford actually went west and helped create the Black Hills Rangers in Dakota Territory because he was inspired by Buntline's earlier dime novels. And in turn, of course, Buntline wrote stories about Captain Jack.

People ask me all the time how Ned Buntline seems to have tapped into that pre-spaghetti Western spirit. I get into this detail in my book, but he was always fascinated by the West, and he was inspired by the published work of Lewis and Clark and the exploits of John Fremont and a lot of others. After the Civil War, like so many other people, Buntline became entranced by the wild, wild west. He was even close friends and neighbors with Horace Greeley, who penned that phrase, go west, young man, in 1865. Buntline really seemed to understand at that early point in

Western entertainment history that the genre had switched from man versus nature to man versus man. It certainly seems like it. Yeah. From, from again, from what I've read from your scripts, and now I can't wait to go read his Texas Rangers stories, especially, I know I've done a series and a half basically now on the Texas Rangers. So I'm really curious to see how he wrote about the Texas Rangers specifically. And then of course, to read about how he portrayed Wild Bill Hickok and of course, Buffalo Bill and some of these others who have become huge names in the American West. So it's again, I feel as we, as we wrap up the interview, I feel even more ashamed that I didn't know as much about him as I should have, considering he helped build up so many of these guys who are just household names now, at least for those of us who really enjoy the Old West.

So this has been fascinating. So I guess I'll give you the last word here. Was there anything else you wanted to toss out about the book or Ned Bundline himself as we wrap up our interview? I would just tell people to take a look around them and the television and books that they're watching or reading and think about Ned Buntline and how this idea of of taking what you see around you and incorporating it into story is something that is not new at all. And realize that Ned Buntline perfected a lot of the tropes that we see in things that we consider Westerns today. Very well said.

And with that, we'll wrap up. Thank you very much, Julie. I appreciate it. And we know we'll be working together in the future, but this was a really fun series to do. Thank you very much. Next time on Legends of the Old West, we're going to go back to some of the classic names of Western lore. It's simultaneously a sequel and a prequel. We're going to tell the story of

Bat Masterson and Dodge City, which of course includes Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday and a host of other characters. That season begins September 9th, 2020 for the general public, and Black Barrel Plus members receive the entire season one week earlier, September 2nd, and members receive an exclusive bonus episode about this series. It's a great one about one of the most controversial aspects of Ned Buntline's life, the pistol known as the Buntline Special. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. And if you want to know the whole story of Ned Buntline, you can grab Julia's book at any major bookseller in hardcover or in audiobook form.

bookseller in hardcover or in audiobook form. This season was written by Julia Bricklin, author of The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline, A Tale of Murder, Betrayal, and the Creation of Buffalo Bill. Audio editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Check out our website, blackbarrelmedia.com for more details and join us on social media. We're at Old West Podcast on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Thanks for listening.