Shiny hellbent people

Robert Nott |

5/1/2008 - 5/2/08

Eat, drink, and shoot up the town, for tomorrow we may die. That seems to be the motto of many of the characters who pop up between the pages of Outlaws & Desperados: A New Mexico Federal Writers' Project Book, edited by Ann Lacy and Anne Valley-Fox. The compilation, published by Santa Fe-based Sunstone Press, chronicles roughly 100 historical stories of frontier toughs as documented by authors in the program. At a book signing on Tuesday, May 6, at Collected Works Bookstore, Lacy and Valley-Fox are joined by cultural historian Jack Loeffler, who wrote the book's introduction.

The New Mexico Federal Writers Project was part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, designed to give Americans employment during the Great Depression. As Lacy and Valley-Fox point out in their preface, the state project started in August 1935 under the direction of poet and author Ina Sizer Cassidy. For more than seven years, writers in the program created stories, collected articles, and interviewed people to document New Mexico's history (each of the 48 states had its own Federal Writers Project).

The most famous contributor to this collection is probably N. Howard "Jack" Thorp, who wrote and collected traditional cowboy tunes, which he published in the pamphlet Songs of the Cowboys in 1908. Thorp later worked as a state cattle inspector, and his autobiography, Pardner of the Wind, was published in 1945 — five years after the author's death.

As for the rest of the authors, little is known, according to Lacy and Valley-Fox. "How these particular writers came into the project, I'm not sure," Lacy said. "There was an office on Canyon Road, and how they got work may be like it happens today: someone says to someone else, 'There's a writing project that looks interesting, and you can get paid.' So how did Mrs. [Frances] Totty become a writer, and how was her story different from Reyes N. Martinez? We don't know. There's not much information on them in the files."

Those files are the WPA papers in the state archives, Valley-Fox explained. The two editors were going through them while researching another project and came across this collection. Most of these stories were written or collected between 1936 and 1941. They languished, unpublished, in the state archives for decades, according to Valley-Fox.

While the stories covered many topics, Lacy and Valley-Fox focused on the lawless denizens of this state in their collection. "Many of these tales were still being told 50 years later," Valley-Fox said. "The shine was still on them, but the blood and gore and danger had faded."

These are tales handed down through the ages, perhaps with more than a touch of embellishment. "What's fun about this collection is that it's almost as if you're hearing someone tell the story," Lacy said. "And like any good story, it can change with every telling."

Thus, it's not surprising to find two or three different accounts of how Black Jack Ketchum failed in his one-man holdup of a train or a couple of different versions of his hanging in Clayton. Other well-known out-laws, including Clay Allison, the Dalton Gang, and Vicente Silva, pop up repeatedly as accounts of their bloody New Mexico deeds are related by interview subjects.

Sometimes the accounts are quite amusing, as in Thorp's "Clay Allison, 'Gunfighter,'" in which the author notes of the murderous outlaw, "He never killed anyone where death was not a benefit to the community in which they lied." Of the wild and woolly town of Seven Rivers, author Katherine Ragsdale writes, "Two old timers claim it was such a wild place you could almost read a newspaper at night by the gunfire." In Betty Reich's "The Gage Train Robbery," the details of a hanging are simplified to an economical, "Instantly ropes appeared, and soon necks were inside nooses."

The book includes advice on how to set up your gang to commit the ideal train robbery and a first-person account of a relatively civilized holdup of a drugstore in Farmington. Horrid murders, citizd lynch parties, and the failed efforts of inept criminals are all related in the book. Want to know how the town sheriff ended up as the first prisoner of Raton's first jail? Then read Kenneth Fordyce's history of the jail.

These works still resonate, Lacy said, because the protagonists display a hellbent-for-leather spirit that we still admire. Echoing her colleague's thoughts, Valley-Fox noted, "There is almost a dark humor that goes with this fascination with violence that is a couple of generations removed from us. And there's a courageousness there too. The good and the bad, they were all really ballsy."

details

Book signing with Outlaws & Desperados editors Ann Lacy & Anne Valley-Fox & cultural historian Jack Loeffler

5:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 6

Collected Works Bookstore, 208-B W. San Francisco St., 988-4226