Glenn Boyer

Glenn G. Boyer (January 5, 1924 - February 14, 2013)^[1] was a controversial author who published three books and a number of articles about Wyatt Earp and related figures in the American Old West. 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 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.

One of his books, I Married Wyatt Earp, sold more than 35,000 copies and was the second-best selling book about Earp. Boyer published over the next 30 years a stream of apparently well-researched and provocatively reasoned papers. 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.^[2]

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 in 1965.^[3] 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.^[4]

Boyer sais that his father worked for the Earps as a janitor in Nome, Alaska, during 1901 when they owned a saloon there, and ran into them again in San Bernardino, when his dad worked for George Miller, a good friend of Earp's. He said that the Miller's son Bill married Estelle Edwards, the daughter of Adelia Earp Edwards, Wyatt Earp's sister, and that they became "a second set of parents to me."^[5]

Boyer married author Jane Candia Coleman. During the 1980s, he published several novels, including, Winchester Affidavit (Thorndike Press, 1997) set in New Mexico that fictionalized late 19th-century events there. Boyer died on February 14, 2013, in Tucson, Arizona.^[4] He was 89 years old.^[3]

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 Town Historian, said “Boyer was a giant in the field of Earp history, nobody could touch him.”^[1]

In the 1990s, other authors and academics began to ask questions about his sources. Boyer uniformly declined to share his source documentation with critics, although he occasionally shared it with friends like Scott Dyke, Ben Traywick and Lee Silva. Boyer said he game him his version of the Clum manuscript and they compared it with another, concluding that his was the original.^[5]

His critics interpreted his unwillingness to share his original manuscripts as an inability to produce the documents. meaning that he had invented what he wrote. 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."^[6]

Boyer was often contemptuous of his critics, calling them "homosexuals", "fanatics and their puppets", among other things.^[6] He teased that he wouldn't reveal his sources just because he didn't like the individuals who questioned his truthfulness. "I am sorry that I ever wrote a fucking word about Wyatt Earp," he told a reporter. "I will never do such a goddam act of generosity for the public again. They killed the goose that laid the golden egg."^[6] "I do not have to give a shit about young historians, middle-aged historians, old historians, dead historians or historians who are not yet born," says Boyer. "This is my fucking perspective. I happen to be a literary artist performing."^[6] He was described by others as "opinionated, cantankerous, interesting and funny as hell."^[7]

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?"^[8]

Publications

Boyer began researching Wyatt Earp after retiring from the Air Force in 1965.^[3] He developed a relationship with Jeanne Cason Laing, the granddaughter of Virgil Earp. She supplied him with source material for a considerable portion of what he wrote. His research resulted in three primary books: The Suppressed Murder of Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta, and I Married Wyatt Earp,^[4][9] and many other articles. His Earp publications came under increased scrutiny and criticism during after 1990, and he was the focus of considerable controversy.^[7][10]

Life of Doc Holliday

When questioned by a reader about the truthfulness of one of his first books, Life of Doc Holliday, Boyer told her that the book was a hoax and a satire he wrote to purposefully trap careless researchers.^[6]

Suppressed Murder of Wyatt Earp

This book was widely admired for the apparent volume of research that and specifically for Boyer's revelation about Earp's second wife, Mattie Blaylock.^[6]

I Married Wyatt Earp

Cover of the University of Arizona Press edition

His reputation was further tarnished when he could not prove the existence of a key source document, the so-called "Clum manuscript" supporting his primary work, I Married Wyatt Earp. The University of Arizona Press first published the book in 1976 under the title I Married Wyatt Earp: The Recollections of Josephine Sarah Marcus. The copyright was issued in her name and her name was given as the author.^[11][12] A book published by a university press usually must meet a high standard. When it is sold as non-fiction, academics consider the university's approval sacrosanct.^[9] He became recognized as an expert on Wyatt Earp,^[3]

Boyer's book gained wide acceptance as a memoir written by Josephine and an accurate portrayal of her life with Wyatt Earp. The book was immensely popular for many years, capturing the imagination of people with an interest in western history, studied in classrooms, cited by scholars, and relied upon as factual by filmmakers.^[13] It became the university's fourth all-time best-selling book with 12 printings totaling more than 35,000 copies.^[14] Boyer in turn received wide recognition as the foremost authority on Wyatt Earp.^[15]

Boyer was asked to produce a copy of the Clum manuscript, but he replied that the document had been lost and found and lost again. He concluded: "It is alive and well. In my head."^[6] He blamed the University of Arizona for his having invented the Clum manuscript. "They forced me to go back to something a little more nebulous in order to get published. I have never promoted myself as a historian. So I put words in Josephine's mouth. So what? Stuart Lake did it. I admit to making it interesting enough to be read, which it appears to be alleged is unethical."^[6]

When confronted with allegations that I Married Wyatt Earp was a hoax, Boyer said he had been misunderstood. "My work is beginning to be recognized by all but a few fanatics and their puppets as a classic example of the newly recognized genre 'creative non-fiction.'"^[16] The book has become an example of how supposedly factual works can trip up the public, researchers, and librarians. It was described by the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology in 2006 as a "creative exercise" and hoax.^[17]:489 Other authors agreed that the book cannot be relied on.^[18]:154

When the University of Arizona stopped publishing the book, Boyer found another publisher and continued to sell the book as an authentic description of Wyatt Earp's life in Tombstone.

Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta

Bob Palmquist, an attorney and avid Earp researcher, worked with Boyer for several years. In an interview with the Phoenix New Times, he said that he read a portion of Boyer's manuscript for Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta in 1977. "And at that time he [Boyer] was saying it was a novel in the style of George McDonald Frasers The Flashman Papers." "The idea was to write a novel in the style of a memoir as if somebody was actually telling the story, in this case Ted Ten Eyck," Palmquist says. In a 1977 letter to Earp researcher Robert Mullin, Boyer told a very different story about Ten Eyck. Boyer wrote that he had received a new manuscript from Earp family members, "allegedly by one Teodore [sic] Ten Eyck, a name I can find nowhere else in Earpiana." Boyer claimed that the manuscript was "clearly authentic" and that it contained "fascinating revelations (if they are true) and would make an ace movie."^[19]

Written in the form of a "non-fiction novel," according to the book's foreword, Boyer said he invented the false name Ten Eyck to protect the newsman's family, who asked that he not be identified.^[19] However, Boyer's description of Ten Eyck varied widely as critics grew more specific in their questions, challenging his work.

Boyer said the book was the memoirs of a journalist who was present in Tombstone while the Earps were lawmen. In the book, Ten Eyck said he worked for the New York Herald in 1881, but his name is not found in any of the paper's 1881-82 editions. While positioned by Boyer as a non-fiction novel, it contains errors that cannot be resolved if the author is a real person. Ten Eyck identified Budd Philpot's hometown as "Halistoga", which Boyer identified as a misprint. In a footnote, he noted that the town's actual name was "Calistoga". In the original story from The Tombstone Epitaph, Philpot's home is "Calistoga", although the 'C' is very faint. In 1951, Douglas Martin reprinted editions of the newspaper from that period, in which the indistinct 'C' is turned into 'H'. Boyer said Ten Eyck died in 1946, causing researchers to wonder how he could replicate this error before it had been made.^[2]

One critic described Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta, as "a book so bizarre it stands as emblematic of all that is troublesome in Earp literature."^[2][20] The doubts raised by Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta seriously damaged his credibility.^[2]

Later publications

He contributed articles over many years to several Western magazines, Arizona Highways, Popular Mechanics, Retired Officer and several scholarly journals. In later life Boyer wrote a series based around a fictional Old West character named Dorn. He also wrote a fiction book “Custer, Terry and Me.” about Gen. George Armstrong Custer. His last book, Where the Heart Was, was a fictional semi-autobiography about his childhood. It was published in 2009.^[4]

Published works

Boyer, Glenn G., ed. (1976). I Married Wyatt Earp: the Recollections of Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp (5th ed.). Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0816504849. 
Boyer, Glenn G., ed. (1994). Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta (Large print. ed.). Thorndike, Me.: G. K. Hall. ISBN 0816159599. 
Boyer, Glenn G. (1996). The Guns of Morgette. Great Britain: Chivers. ISBN 0745146899. 
Boyer, Glenn G. (2002). Winchester Affidavit (1st ed.). New York City: Dorchester Pub. Co. ISBN 0843950668. 
Boyer, Glenn G. (2002). Morgette and the Alaskan Bandit. New York City: Leisure Books. ISBN 0843950277. 
Boyer, Glenn G. (2003). Morgette and the Shadow Bomber (Center Point large print ed.). Waterville, MA.: Thorndike Press. ISBN 1585475203. 
Boyer, Glenn G., ed. (2004). Custer, Terry, and me: a Western Story (First ed.). Waterville, Me.: Five Star. ISBN 1594140316. 

References