Glenn Boyer facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Glenn G. Boyer
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Glenn Boyer
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| Born | January 5, 1924 |
| Died | February 14, 2013 (aged 89) |
| Occupation | Air Force officer; western author |
| Known for | Author of numerous books and articles on the Earp family |
Glenn G. Boyer (January 5, 1924 – February 14, 2013) was a controversial author who published three books and a number of articles about Wyatt Earp and related figures in the American Old West. He was the first person to reveal the existence of Wyatt Earp's second wife, Mattie Blaylock. His publications were for many years regarded as the authoritative source on Wyatt Earp's life. However, when other experts began to seek evidence supporting Boyer's work, he would or could not prove the existence of documents that he said he owned and had cited as essential sources. In one case, an individual he cited as a key source was exposed as a complete fabrication. His reputation and the authenticity of his work was seriously damaged. Although he retained many supporters, his work became surrounded by controversy. At least one critic wrote that all of Boyer's later work was "riddled with bogus material".
One of his books, I Married Wyatt Earp, sold more than 35,000 copies and was the second-best selling book about Wyatt Earp. After many disagreements with University of Arizona press, who initially published the book, Boyer regained rights to the book and had it published by Longmeadow Press as a non-fiction autobiography. Boyer published over more than 30 years a number of books and articles. He was responsible for publishing the memoirs of Doc Holliday's common-law wife Big Nose Kate, as well as the long-sought "Flood Manuscript" which had been written with Wyatt Earp's direct input.
Contents
Personal life
Boyer, a native of Wisconsin, joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1943 and served in the U.S. Air Force until his retirement as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1965. During his time in the Air Force he conducted a statistical analysis of F-100 aircraft to help determine the cause of a high accident rate; the analysis found that the planes were being overused and recommended more downtime.
Boyer married author Jane Candia Coleman in 1980. He died on February 14, 2013, at age 89, in Tucson, Arizona. He was survived by his wife Jane, two sons and three grandchildren.
Boyer collection
During his later years as an officer in the USAF, Boyer spent much of his personal time meeting with and interviewing surviving members of the Earp family. He interviewed a number of Wyatt’s relations including the Cason family, who had known Wyatt's common-law wife Josephine Earp as "Aunt Josie" in the 1930s. While serving in the U.S. Air Force in Ajo, Arizona, he met Albert Price Behan, Johnny Behan's son. Boyer accumulated 32 boxes of correspondence with the Earp family, family pictures, hand-written notes, audio recordings, weapons, and memorabilia, along with manuscripts that he used as source material for several books, including the memoir I Married Wyatt Earp, supposedly written by Wyatt Earp's wife, Josephine Earp.
Along with hundreds of letters and personal writings, the Earp family also gave Boyer "trunks full of personal items" and several firearms belonging to the Earp brothers and their father. On April 17, 2014, Glenn Boyer's family put much of his Earp collection and many artifacts up for auction. Among the 32 boxes of documentation, files, pictures and memorabilia for sale was a Colt .45 caliber said by Earp descendants to have been owned by Wyatt Earp. Also included in the auction was a Winchester lever-action shotgun belonging to Wyatt Earp.
The Wyatt revolver from Boyer's estate was expected to fetch from $100,000 to $150,000. On the day of the auction, more than 6,400 online bidders and over 400 collectors from 49 countries took part in the auction. The revolver attributed to Wyatt Earp was sold to an unnamed phone bidder from New Mexico for $225,000. The Winchester lever-action shotgun also said to be Wyatt Earp's sold for $50,000, below the high value estimate of $125,000.
In 2009, Boyer arranged with Legendary Publishing of Edmond, Oklahoma, the publishers of what would be his final book, Where the Heart Was, to have his VHS tapes converted to DVDs, and to have his research scanned and digitized, but no publication date was announced.
Cason manuscript
The facts about when Josephine Earp first arrived in the Arizona Territory, her life before and while living in Tombstone, and when she first began a relationship with Earp, have been obscured by her legal and personal efforts to keep that period private. After Earp's death, Josephine collaborated with two of her husband's cousins, Mabel Earp Cason and her sister Vinolia Earp Ackerman, to document her life.
The cousins recorded events in her later life, but they found Josephine was extremely evasive. In her conversations with the Earp cousins, Josephine was imprecise about the timing and nature of events during her early life in the Arizona Territory and Tombstone. Josephine apparently wanted to keep her and Wyatt's tarnished history during the Tombstone period private and to sanitize their life story of anything that could be seen negatively.
Wyatt's cousins pressed her for details about her personal life in Tombstone. She finally volunteered that she had returned to the Arizona Territory in 1881 and joined Johnny Behan in Tombstone because he had promised to marry her. She was disappointed and disillusioned when he repeatedly delayed the wedding. She was ready to leave him, but Behan persuaded her to remain. In her version of events, she said years later that she lived with a lawyer while working as a housekeeper for Behan and his ten-year-old son, Albert.
Boyer argued that she actually lived with Behan. Boyer warns readers of "her ‘little-old-lady’ attempts to tell only the decorous and proper." Along with her own past, Josephine was sensitive about what others might think if they learned about Wyatt's common-law wife, Mattie Blaylock. Blaylock suffered from severe headaches and was addicted to laudanum, an opiate-based pain reliever in common use at the time. After the Earp Vendetta Ride, she joined the rest of the Earp family in Colton, California where she expected Earp to call for her, but Wyatt failed to contact her. Wyatt may have still been living with Blaylock when Josephine and Wyatt began their relationship.
Cason says she and her sister "finally abandoned work on the manuscript because she [Josie] would not clear up the Tombstone sequence where it pertained to her and Wyatt." Other writers and researchers reported that Josephine was often "difficult" to interview.
After the publication of Boyer's book, An Illustrated Life of Doc Holliday in 1966, Wyatt Earp's grandniece Estelle Josephine Miller and her husband Bill Miller contacted Boyer. They were looking for a writer to write a book with a more balanced story about their uncle. Estelle Miller remembered Earp well. She said he "wasn't like them writers say."
Seeking more information, Boyer contacted Virgil Earp's granddaughter Mable Earp Cason only to learn she had died. Her daughter Jeanne Cason Laing cooperated with Boyer and sent Boyer a stack of material "almost a foot high", the result of three attempts by her mother and aunt to write a biography of Josephine Earp. This included material from the 1930s that Jeanne called the "Cason manuscript." Boyer interviewed her and other family members, gleaning details of Josephine's life, and received additional documents and photographs.
Clum manuscript
In addition to the Cason manuscript Josephine prepared with the help of the Earp cousins, Boyer claimed to possess the so-called Clum manuscript. He said it contained details of Wyatt and Josephine's life in Tombstone that were missing from the story she wrote with the Earp cousins. Boyer said that the Clum manuscript had been written by The Tombstone Epitaph publisher John Clum based on conversations with Josephine.
Boyer wrote in the epilogue to the 1976 edition of his book I Married Wyatt Earp, "The first Josephine Earp manuscript, the one prepared with the assistance of Parsons and Clum, had been made available to me earlier by Mrs. Charles [Esther] Colyn, an Earp researcher, collector and genealogist of the first magnitude. Upon her death in 1973, this Earp relative by marriage bequeathed me her whole research collection to perpetuate. Without her generous assistance over the years, I would not have attempted to construct this book. The Cason manuscript alone simply lacked the necessary detail on Tombstone; it was essential to couple it with the earlier, more frank manuscript, before a complete narrative could be achieved."
Esther Colyn wrote Glenn Boyer on December 9, 1965, as reprinted in The Suppressed Murder of Wyatt Earp published in 1976… "I never had a real manuscript which could be called such."
A year after I Married Wyatt Earp was published in 1977, Boyer published a pamphlet, Trailing an American Myth, in which he stated that the Clum manuscript was actually written by several authors. He wrote that their work formed "the basis of the Tombstone years in I Married Wyatt Earp and "the Ten Eyck Papers in Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta."
Also in 1977, Boyer wrote and published another pamphlet, "Who Killed John Ringo?" It stated that fiction writers Dashiell Hammett, Wilson Mizner, Rex Beach and Walt Coburn had written a portion of the manuscript documenting Josephine' Tombstone years.
When questioned about the origins of the Clum manuscript during the early 1980s, Boyer changed his story to say that he did not receive the Clum manuscript from Colyn after all, instead it was given to him by one of Earp's nieces, Jeanne Cason Laing. When asked if these were all the same manuscript, Boyer replied, "Some of them are a manuscript. Some are only a mishmash, as a matter of fact... The earlier ones of those guys all lean heavily on Clum and Parsons for insights, which is one of the reasons they got in trouble with Josephine Earp... This is a broad way when I say I refer to a Clum manuscript, for example. It is a broad way of referring to something when really this is nobody's business in a way." He said the documents contributed "to the overall fabric of Josie's story were undoubtedly made by former Tombstone mayor and Earp friend John Clum," but that "some Earp researchers got hung up on this 'manuscript' business."
Boyer said that the Clum manuscript could be found in the University of Arizona archives but they could not produce it. Boyer finally admitted that he no longer had the Clum manuscript and could not locate it. When asked by a reporter in 1998 if the Clum manuscript was real, Boyer replied, "Why am I compelled to tell the truth about a manuscript like that that is worth a lot of money?" Boyer continues. "I may have it and I may not. That's none of your business." When asked if the Clum manuscript was a compilation of sources, he said, "The Clum manuscript is a generic term and I've said it over and over."
Student-reporter Ryan Gabrielson from the University of Arizona Wildcat interviewed Boyer. He told Gabrielson, "The Clum manuscript is a generic term." "This—in addition (to other source materials)—was supported by literally hundreds, maybe thousands of letters and documents." Reporter Tony Ortega concluded that Boyer's varied descriptions of the manuscript, its origins, and its eventual disposition are "so contradictory that they aren't credible."
Support and criticism
Boyer inspired both extremely loyal supporters and a number of critics. Ben Traywick, author of Chronicles of Tombstone, John Henry—The Doc Holliday Story, and other works, and formerly Tombstone, Arizona's official volunteer Town Historian, said “Boyer was a giant in the field of Earp history, nobody could touch him.” He was described by others as "opinionated, cantankerous, interesting and funny as hell."
Boyer was very choosy about who he allowed to view his library and files, occasionally providing authors like Ben Traywick and Lee Silva with access. He also invited Scott Dyke, a retired Wall Street broker, businessman, banker, and researcher who moved to southern Arizona, to help organize his materials. Dyke spent nine years and thousands of hours collating and organizing Boyer's files. He said Boyer's "collection of files, pictures and tapes, both audio and visual, is staggering in volume." Boyer collected a large portion of his documentation from Earp family members, many of whom he personally knew.
Dyke said the records documented Boyer's ongoing contact with Earp relatives and genealogists for more than 60 years. Among his files was a mass of papers given to Boyer by Esther Colyn, a genealogist who had researched the Earp family. The records included the recollections of the Miller family who also gave Boyer a number of Wyatt's personal effects. Dyke said that Boyer gave him permission to view both the Flood manuscript, dictated by Wyatt Earp, and Josie's story as told to the Earp cousins, known as the Cason manuscript. Dyke learned that Boyer had gained an oral history from Earp relatives who had known Wyatt, which Boyer relied in part for some of his work. But Boyer limited what Dyke could say about the collection, and Dyke said that Boyer told him that parts of his collection "grew legs and took a hike." Although Dyke is more familiar with Boyer's archive than anyone, he wouldn't characterize Boyer's books as accurate, factual accounts of Earp's life. "Maybe he wrote his opinion in his books and stretched reality, but he didn't make up the research."
Boyer donated copies of the Flood and Cason manuscripts and other documents to the Ford County Historical Society, including an original journal kept by Josephine Earp, Wyatt's wife, with the condition that he would approve who could see the documents.
Refuses access to critics
In the 1990s, other authors and academics began to ask questions about his sources. Despite the wealth of information contained in his archives, Boyer uniformly declined to allow critics access to his repository. He promised Gary Roberts and Casey Tefertiller, two vocal critics of Boyer's work, access to his archives, but when they visited him in person, he reneged on his agreement.
Condemns critics
Boyer was often contemptuous of his critics, calling them "fanatics and their puppets", among other things. He teased that he wouldn't reveal his sources just because he didn't like the individuals who questioned his truthfulness.
Effect on research
Jack Burrows, who wrote John Ringo, The Gunfighter Who Never Was, said, “How can he just take a stack of material and give it a name that has nothing to do with what’s included? You can take a cowpie and call it filet mignon, but somebody’s going to catch on during dinner. This is just gobbledygook.”
Gary Roberts, Professor Emeritus of History of Abraham Baldwin College in Tifton, Georgia, and the author of seventy-five articles on Western history, said, "By passing off his opinions and interpretations as primary sources, he has poisoned the record in a way that may take decades to clear." He said that Boyer's work "poisons the debate about Wyatt Earp, and until Boyer's sources can be authenticated, the interpretations based on them cannot even be addressed." Roberts commented, "The tragedy is that even if [Glenn Boyer] has found the truth, it is so buried in a crazy quilt of obfuscation and deceit that serious researchers will not believe it... He has succeeded in becoming a part of the Earp saga that cannot be ignored. But at what cost to history?"
Estate sale
On April 17, 2014, Boyer's family put much of his Earp collection and many artifacts up for auction. Among the 32 boxes of documentation, files, pictures and memorabilia for sale were three pistols and a Winchester lever-action shotgun. One of the pistols is a Colt revolver once owned by Virgil Earp, a Remington Ball and Cap Revolver owned by Earp's grandfather, and a Colt .45-caliber Earp descendants said had been owned by Wyatt Earp. The shotgun was also reported to be Wyatt Earp's. Personal items of Josephine Earp's in the auction include her riding crop, opera glasses and jewelry.
The history of the items is controversial because they belonged to Boyer. John Boessenecker, an author of numerous articles on the American Old West and a collector of American Old West guns and memorabilia, said that it would be "impossible to separate the authenticity of the auction items from Boyer's own troubled history." This is particularly true because the provenance of the weapons is based on letters written by or given to Boyer.
Bill Miller, a nephew by marriage to Wyatt Earp, wrote in a letter to Boyer that he received two of the pistols and the shotgun from Allie Earp, Virgil's wife. Casey Tefertiller, a long-time critic of Boyer's work, commented on the auction. "How do you trust material you're buying from somebody caught fabricating evidence? He was the most charismatic, charming person I have ever met. But people wound up paying for it by buying into a hoax."
The revolver, said to have been carried by Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, has had the grips, barrel, and cylinder replaced. Only the frame is original, and it is missing a serial number. But X-ray testing revealed an original serial number that matched records confirming Earp had owned the gun. Before his death, Boyer completed a sworn affidavit attesting that the Colt .45 belonged to Earp. The affidavit is included with the revolver along with other expert findings. LeRoy Merz is the owner of Merz Antique Firearms, the nation's largest dealer in antique Winchesters in the United States. Despite Boyer's affidavit, he said the missing serial number is a "kiss of death," he says. "No serious collector will want that."
Prior to the auction, the Wyatt revolver was expected to fetch from $100,000 and $150,000. On the day of the auction, more than 6,400 online bidders and over 400 collectors from 49 countries took part in the auction. The revolver attributed to Wyatt Earp was sold to an unnamed phone bidder from New Mexico for $225,000. The Winchester lever-action shotgun also said to be Wyatt Earp's sold for $50,000, below the high value estimate of $125,000, and the Colt revolver that belonged to Virgil Earp sold for $37,500. John Anderson, a local businessman, was the winning bidder at $160,000 of the pistol owned by Virgil and his grandfather, the shotgun owned by Wyatt, and the 32 boxes of historical research. He refused to bid on the Colt that was reported to belong to Wyatt Earp. “Was it the one from the O.K. Corral? I don’t believe it was …,” he said. Anderson said he is looking for an accredited museum to house the weapons, and that he would donate the research to the University of Arizona. Boyer's widow, Jane Coleman, said, "Glenn would hate that."
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