Latest / Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott / Author Tom Clavin Discusses His New Book "The Last Outlaws"

Transcript

Author Tom Clavin Discusses His New Book "The Last Outlaws" · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:11
  Five minutes past the hour. It's the third hour of the Morning Show with
• 0:15
  Preston Scott. Good morning kids. Thanks for joining us wherever and however you
• 0:20
  are listening to the radio program. We do appreciate your time. We love
• 0:25
  keeping you company, and we thank you very much. It's show five forty
• 0:29
  four, Wednesday, November the eighth, Grant Allen running the radio program.
• 0:34
  And I am thrilled to have back on the show, Tom Claven. Tom
• 0:39
  has been with me many times over the years as we discuss the many books
• 0:44
  that he's been part of. We tend to meet when he's dealing with the
• 0:48
  West and the wild West. And Tom, good to have you back on
• 0:51
  the show. How are you. I'm fine, Thanks for having me back
• 0:54
  on the show. I couldn't wait. When I saw the book and I
• 0:58
  saw the title, I immediately reached out to Chuck and said, Okay,
• 1:02
  let's do this. The book was released yesterday and today here you are with
• 1:07
  us the last Outlaws. Before we dive into the subject matter specifically, you've
• 1:14
  done so many books about the wild West defined that for me? Is it
• 1:19
  defined by events? Or is it defined by time? Or is it defined
• 1:25
  by simply geography? Well, it's a combination of all three. I mean,
• 1:30
  the frontier kept moving after the Civil War, kept moving west. You
• 1:34
  know, before the Civil War the frontier was maybe Kansas and Nebraska, and
• 1:37
  then it became Colorado, that it became Utah and Arizona and New Mexico.
• 1:42
  So I think the wild West kept moving west and kept bringing the frontier with
• 1:47
  it. And it's also events because you have with the wild West, you're
• 1:52
  talking a lot about the cattle drives. You're talking about outlaw gangs and lawmen,
• 1:57
  and that that's sort of pretty much ended around eighteen ninety, so well
• 2:01
  it was, it's pretty much the end of the Civil War eighteen ninety.
• 2:05
  It's a prized possession in my library in my office, the Frontier Lawman Trilogy,
• 2:10
  Wild Bill, Dodge City, and Tombstone. I have to believe that
• 2:15
  in your writing of those books you had to file away some notes about the
• 2:22
  last outlaws. So before we define who they are and tell everybody, when
• 2:27
  did the idea for this book first come to your mind? Well, it's
• 2:31
  true when I was doing some research, and I can't exactly remember what I
• 2:36
  was looking for, but I read about Coffeeville, Kansas. On October fifth,
• 2:40
  eighteen ninety two, that there was this huge shootout involving a gang of
• 2:45
  outlaws and really the entire community based off against each other. And I thought
• 2:51
  there was such a remarkable event. I had not heard of it before.
• 2:53
  I figured, Okay, if I hadn't heard of it, there's probably readers
• 2:55
  that hadn't heard of it. So exactly as you said, I filed it
• 2:59
  away, and as soon as I had a chance to get some more research
• 3:01
  into it, I realized that there was a great story here that would end
• 3:05
  up with this climactic event in Coffeeville, Kansas. It's a mamillion mcmillion McMillan
• 3:09
  publisher's book. You can find it at all the book outlets. The Last
• 3:14
  Outlaws, the desperate final days of the Dalton Gang. Before we start picking
• 3:19
  at those days a little bit and tease it, just some who are the
• 3:23
  Daltons. Well, the Dalphins were a family of fifteen kids, and not
• 3:28
  unusual. I have large families in those days who grew up in Kansas and
• 3:31
  Oklahoma and Missouri, and they were mostly ranchers farmers, except that one of
• 3:38
  the Dalton brothers, Frank Dalton, became a lawman, a US Marshall and
• 3:42
  a very effective one and respected one, and he was trying to set an
• 3:46
  example for his younger brothers, and when he was killed, trying to make
• 3:51
  an arrest and set the wrong example. Because his younger brothers, like Bob
• 3:53
  Gratton Emmett Bill, they said, well, you know it's gonna end up
• 3:59
  being shot with a bullet anyway, you might as well do it having more
• 4:02
  fun than being a US Marshall. Polly paid us Marshall. Let's rob banks
• 4:05
  and rob trains. It's interesting to me that the family lineage is as it
• 4:11
  is. They have kin that are not unfamiliar names to many of us.
• 4:16
  The Younger Brothers, which is a gang that wrote they only rode by themselves,
• 4:21
  meaning they robbed banks and trains by themselves, but they teamed up with
• 4:25
  Frank and Jesse. James and some Western buffs might remember the great Northfield,
• 4:30
  Minnesota raid in eighteen seventy six, and that was the pivotal moment where the
• 4:33
  James gang and the Youngers went into this town. There was a huge fight.
• 4:38
  The James brothers got away, the Younger Brothers did not. They ended
• 4:41
  up in prison, and as it turns out, Missus Dalton. The mother
• 4:44
  of the Dalton Gang or a Dalton Boys, was a younger. She was
• 4:47
  part of that family. So there is this lineage. She has this outlaw
• 4:50
  lineage from one family down to the next. Let's just start with the presumption
• 4:55
  that he's right. Believe me, it works around here. This is The
• 5:00
  Morning Show with Preston Scott. Multi time New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin
• 5:11
  our guest. I love having authors on this time of year because I've always
• 5:16
  believed books make great Christmas gifts. I know you agree with me, Tom,
• 5:21
  I do, especially for people who enjoy stories of the American West.
• 5:26
  Yeah, and that leads me to the question, like always, I have
• 5:30
  to ask, where do you find information that you can reliably use to weave
• 5:36
  together the events the story of not just the Daltons, but as you kind
• 5:42
  of narrow into the desperate final days. You know. One of the thing
• 5:46
  that was a big advantage for me is that the Dalton Gang was pretty notorious
• 5:50
  at their time in the late eighteen eighties and early eighteen nineties, meaning that
• 5:55
  there were a lot of newspaper accounts of their adventures at Kansas City newspaperapers,
• 6:00
  the Oklahoma newspapers, even Texas, even the eastern newspapers as far as New
• 6:04
  York, recovering what the Dalton Gang was doing because they were, you know,
• 6:09
  they became a famous gang of outlaws. In fact, it got to
• 6:14
  the point where every time there was a bank robbery they blamed the Daltons,
• 6:15
  which we mean sometimes the Daltons had to be a two or three places at
• 6:18
  the same time. So there are newspaper accounts, a lot of accounts that
• 6:23
  were written at the time, specifically about the Coffeeville event. There's a lot
• 6:28
  written about that by newspapers, including Coffevil newspapers, Kansas, Kansas newspapers.
• 6:33
  So it's not exactly the most exciting kind of research to do, but to
• 6:36
  go through these old newspaper archives is really very very helpful because you have eyewitness
• 6:41
  accounts, people who participated in the events telling for the audience, oh,
• 6:46
  here's what I did or here's what I saw. How do you separate embellishments
• 6:50
  from facts. That's a challenge because you know, one way is that you
• 6:57
  see you have to have more than one account if you can and see how
• 7:00
  much they differ. The other thing is you just get an idea when you
• 7:03
  read. When you've been working in this genre of the American West and newspaper
• 7:08
  accounts and other journalistic accounts at the time, you get a pretty good sense
• 7:12
  of when somebody's making stuff up and when they're not. And there are sometimes
• 7:15
  that people read my books will understand this. I put it in my book.
• 7:18
  I'm not quite sure if this is true or not. Reader. I
• 7:21
  don't want to mislead you. I'm not quite sure. But here's what one
• 7:25
  account said, and here's what another account said. So I try to be
• 7:27
  as honest as possible with the readers. The title of the book, the
• 7:30
  Last Outlaws. You explain this early in the even before the book really officially
• 7:36
  starts, in the pages preceding it. But they were the last Outlaws.
• 7:41
  But they also weren't the outlaw last Outlaws Explain, well, they were the
• 7:46
  last. It's kind of splitting hairs a little bit, but they were the
• 7:48
  last of the brothers gangs of outlaws like the James Brothers and the Younger Brothers
• 7:54
  and the Reno Brothers and the Dalton brothers. One can make an argument that
• 7:58
  there was a last Outlaws. Could really be butchcasting in the Sundance Kid and
• 8:03
  that all in the wall group of Wild Bunch gangs in Montana and Wyoming in
• 8:07
  the late eighteen nineties. But as far as Middle America was concerned, and
• 8:11
  as far as we say the wild West was concerned, which was pretty much
• 8:15
  over by the eighteen nineties, the Dolphins were the last of those Brothers gangs
• 8:18
  that robbed and still as a family. I want to say the final segment
• 8:22
  to kind of go through what happened. You've mentioned Coffeeville in October of eighteen
• 8:28
  ninety two. Give us just a little build up into what led them there.
• 8:35
  The Dolphins were by this time in eighteen ninety two, they had all
• 8:37
  kinds of posses after them. Heck Thomas is one of the main characters of
• 8:41
  the book, and he's a lawman's lawman. He was like the model for
• 8:45
  Rooster Cogburn and true Grit. And they decided that they could make one more
• 8:50
  big score. They could take all their money and they could escape, maybe
• 8:52
  even leave the country. So they decided they chose Coffeeville, Kansas as the
• 8:56
  place they were going to go. They thought it would be kind of easy
• 8:58
  because that people didn't carry guns and cause you the Marshall of cluff. Fiel
• 9:01
  didn't carry guns, so they thought this was going to be an easy score,
• 9:05
  and they turned out to be INCORRECTSLA on your phone with the iHeart Radio
• 9:09
  app and on hundreds of devices like Alexa, Google Home, Xbox, and
• 9:13
  Sonos, says Chrisler, and Ihearts Radio station. Always one of my very
• 9:26
  favorite guests and absolutely a great author and one of my favorites because I have
• 9:33
  so many books in my collection. Tom claven the book is the last Outlaws.
• 9:37
  It is out now, it was released yesterday. You can order it.
• 9:41
  Get it to the Old History Buffs in the Family. Great Christmas gift,
• 9:46
  great collection of books available, including the Frontier Lawman trilogy. Tom,
• 9:54
  you kind of mark the times with these various books, and this particular era
• 9:58
  of the doll Alton Gang, we were seeing an end of bank robberies and
• 10:03
  train robberies. Why what was bringing that to a close. Well, I
• 10:09
  think there were a couple of reasons. One is you had a lot more
• 10:11
  in the way of law enforcement. You know, the Frontier used to be
• 10:15
  poorly paid part time sheriffs and marshalls. Now you had full time occupations of
• 10:18
  people who were marshals or deputy marshalls sheriffs a tinker to detective agency, for
• 10:24
  example. So it was a lot harder to escape if you pulled a bank
• 10:31
  robbery and a train robbery. And I think also the communications were better.
• 10:35
  I mean, if you robbed the bank in one town, somebody could not
• 10:37
  only telegraph the sheriff in the next town, but we're getting to the point
• 10:41
  where they could pick up the phone. You know, phone networks were being
• 10:43
  installed. So it just became more and more hard for a outlaw to practice
• 10:48
  his craft, so to speak, and get away with it. I'm curious
• 10:52
  did it provide any advantage at all that the Daltons had an older sibling that
• 10:58
  was a law man though he died. No, it didn't really help them
• 11:03
  as far as the law was concerned. In fact, it had the opposite
• 11:07
  effect in that made them kind of bitter when they think about their older brother
• 11:11
  Frank and what happened to him. So it had instead of being a helpful
• 11:15
  a connection to have to an older brother law man, it was actually something
• 11:18
  that made them. It really pushed them into being outlaws themselves. Who are
• 11:22
  the three guardsmen? Well, there's Thomas who I mentioned. It was like
• 11:28
  the Rooster Cogburn type. There was Bill Tillman, and there was Chris Madson,
• 11:31
  and they were all from different backgrounds, but they all became lawmen.
• 11:35
  And they became known as the Three Carsman of Oklahoma because they were really the
• 11:39
  most well known and effective of the of the deputy marshals, of the sheriffs
• 11:43
  of the marshalls that tracked down a lot of criminals. And Oklahoma at the
• 11:46
  time was also known as Indian Territory, and you had to be a pretty
• 11:50
  tough ombree to be traveling those those back roads and back trails and back hills
• 11:54
  and finding tracking down these crooks and bringing him in but without giving way.
• 12:00
  What I know will be a very pivotal ending moment in your book. Lead
• 12:05
  us through Coffeeville. Why Coffeeville and kind of the lead up to what happens
• 12:13
  there. Well, the geography of Coffeeville was that you had these two banks
• 12:16
  which right across the street from each other, and that plus the knowledge that
• 12:22
  people did not carry guns in Coffeeville. I mean, let's say the wild
• 12:26
  West had left Coffeeville behind years ago. It was a peaceful, quiet,
• 12:30
  Southeast and Kansas community. To the Daltons figure they could just waltz in.
• 12:35
  They would have guns. Of course, they would go into the bank,
• 12:37
  steal the money at the same time from broad daylight, get back in their
• 12:41
  horses and ride out. And what they did not anticipate is that when people
• 12:46
  saw that the banks were being robbed, instead of just hiding and saying,
• 12:48
  oh, no, the dolphins are in town, they didn't carry guns,
• 12:52
  but their hardware stores sold guns. So they were running into the hardware stores
• 12:56
  to get shotguns and rifles and pistols. And they you know, again,
• 13:00
  this is before FDIC. If your bank got robbed, you lost your money.
• 13:03
  So it was really personal for a lot of these citizens of Coffeeville that
• 13:07
  they stopped this bank robber from taking place and stopped the Daltons from getting away
• 13:09
  with the money. I'm curious did the geography the location of Coffeeville lend to
• 13:16
  its targeting definitely, because the Coffeeville was only like a mile or so away
• 13:20
  from the Oklahoma border, and the Dalton gang not only knew the back hills
• 13:26
  of Oklahoma and had the best hideout, but they had a lot of people
• 13:31
  who were actually friends of the Dultons in Oklahoma that would cover for them.
• 13:35
  Dulphins could sometimes be seen, I think erroneously as the robin hood kind who
• 13:39
  were robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Well, they robbed
• 13:41
  for the rich, like the railroad companies, but they did not give to
• 13:43
  the poor. The jurisdictions in that era were marshals limited by their jurisdiction,
• 13:50
  and so the only ones that could I guess track them would be a US
• 13:54
  marshal exactly. You know, if you were a marshall over town and when
• 14:00
  the town boundary did same thing for the sheriff of our county. But if
• 14:03
  you were a US marshal or a deputy US marshall, you pretty much said
• 14:07
  your jurisdiction was as far as you could travel. So those are the ones
• 14:09
  that were the most effective ones trying to co after outlaws like the Daltons.
• 14:13
  As you look back on all of the research that you did for this book,
• 14:18
  what are one or two things that really stand out and surprise you the
• 14:22
  most. I think what's one of the things that surprised me the most is
• 14:26
  that the Daltons were seen as these romantic figures by a lot of the press,
• 14:33
  even as far as New York and Boston would come, as I mentioned
• 14:35
  before, would cover their exploits, and they were seen as like the Last
• 14:39
  Outlaws. They were seen as this this this remnant of the wild West which
• 14:43
  was fading into history. What makes that romantic though? I think the idea
• 14:48
  of riding free, of the adventure, of robbing banks and trains, the
• 14:54
  idea of spitting in the eye of the rich railroad barons. I think that
• 14:58
  all combined to make them these these these exciting figures that were already receding into
• 15:03
  the past, even though they were still alive. Were they killers? They
• 15:09
  were at the end, they really weren't. They mostly robbers And you said
• 15:13
  that that I'm excusing that. But it was only towards the end when they
• 15:16
  were other law and were closing in that they were the desperate final days.
• 15:20
  They they were desperate to stay stay free and stay alive. Tom. Always
• 15:24
  a delight to have you on the program. Can't wait for the next book,
• 15:26
  whatever it may be. And uh and thanks for joining me this morning
• 15:31
  to talk about the Last Outlaws. Well, thank you. I really appreciate
• 15:33
  your time. Thank you, Tom claven He's a New York Times best selling
• 15:37
  author, and of course we've we've talked about the The Lawman trilogy, Dodge
• 15:43
  City, Wild Bill and Tombstone. And now we have The Last Outlaws,
• 15:48
  The Desperate Final Days of the Dalton Game author Tom Claven. And you can
• 15:56
  get the book at any of your book outlets. It was at least yesterday,
• 16:00
  so order it and you'll love it, trust me. Great great historian
• 16:06
  and author Tom Craven on the Morning Show with Preston Scott