Friday Factoid is a blog feature where I’ll be sharing a little bit of background behind something from one of my books: ideas, characters, environments, pieces of research, you name it, it’s all fair game for the Friday Factoids! If you have a specific question, feel free to leave it in the comments or email me at jrfrontera@gmail.com! What will be featured this week? Read on to find out…
About the rather short careers of most outlaws!
If there’s one thing much of our western fiction (in all mediums) does, it’s to paint the Old West outlaw in a rather romantic light. Even if the outlaw baddie in any given western tale is a truly terrible person (instead of the protagonist themselves, which sometimes happens) … at least they are portrayed as being very successful at being a truly terrible person, thus prompting our hero to have to step in to stop them, of course.
But what I’ve found during my historical research over the last two years for my Legacy of Lucky Logan series is that actually, the life of Old West outlaws was almost always incredibly … disappointing.
At least if you’re going to compare them to the outlaws of our novels and screens! (Luckily for the law-abiding folk of the time, though, right!?)
I usually run across the stories of these outlaws when I’m searching for a character name. I like to Google real outlaws and lawmen and gunfighters to help get a sense for common names of the time, and I use those for inspiration when naming my own characters. (Even though my series is NOT a historical series…)
Sometimes a name will particularly interest me, so I’ll click through to their Wikipedia article or some other such source and read all about them. Usually, yes, that will give me more ideas for things to include in my series.
But when it comes to outlaws, I started to notice a pattern.
They really never seemed to live very long. Nor did they ever really seem to accomplish much in the way of murdering and thieving. Most times their robberies failed entirely, even. Not very exciting, from a story standpoint.
But I thought that was very interesting, to see such a disconnect between what is the norm in our fiction vs historical norms. I suppose fiction writers wanted to make it more of a big deal when their heroes vanquished the bad guys. If your bad guy isn’t a very competent bad guy … well, it’s not a very big deal when the hero beats him, is it?
Or, if the outlaw is the protagonist, well, it’s even more important that they become competent and engaging, isn’t it? (And also, you know, live long enough to create a whole story around.) (Ben Wade from 3:10 to Yuma comes to mind — though he’s not the protagonist, he’s most definitely a more classic fiction outlaw who is easy to “like” even as the bad guy.)
However, the other day, whilst browsing for names as per usual, one caught my eye, as happens. One fella named Brack Cornett. So I looked him up and read more about him.
And lo and behold … this guy actually pulled off SEVERAL successful robberies. HOLY MOLEY! Color me impressed. He was still eventually shot and killed, but he hit a bank and several trains before that point and made off with quite a haul of money and valuables before his end, making his reign of terror about a year long.
Not too shabby compared to many of his contemporaries.
And bonus, you can even read some of the 1888 newspaper articles about some of his robberies online! Wow! Talk about novel research GOLD! One of the articles even mentions how, during one train robbery, Cornett is walking around demanding people’s money with his pistol in one hand and a lollipop in the other. Now that’s something that sounds right out of fiction…
If you’re interested, go have a read about him, yourself.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue writing about outlaws who are a great deal more successful than their historical counterparts. It may not be entirely realistic, but hey … it sure makes for a good story!
Stay tuned for more … and in the meantime, let me know in the comments: who is your favorite fictional outlaw? (Or historical, I won’t judge!)
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