In this case, the names weren’t changed to protect the innocent. Most of the names come straight off the Cowboys’ roster of 1886, but that’s about the only resemblance to the truth you’ll find. All right, Fatty Briody was fat, and Dave Rowe had a temper, and the story goes that Rowe actually shot at Briody—which might not be true, but it sure makes one heck of a story.
Silver King, who was born in St. Louis and did debut with the National League’s Cowboys in 1886 at age eighteen (not seventeen), would go on to pitch ten years with various professional baseball clubs, playing his last game with the Washington Senators in 1897. I don’t know if Silver’s mother knew anything about baseball, and while his father was a brick mason, I gave him the extra job of working at a packing house to make Silver’s introduction to Dan Dugdale more believable.
Dan Dugdale did play for Denver’s Mountain Lions and was picked up by the Cowboys that year, although he might have been released by Kansas City first and then signed by Denver. I doubt if he knew a thing about cowboying, but his story about the design of those early catcher’s mitts is pretty much in line with history.
As far as we know, baseball’s Charley Bassett was not related to Dodge City’s Charlie Bassett. Frank Ringo, however, might have been kin to gunfighter Johnny Ringo, and Frank definitely had substance-abuse problems that led to his death. Dave Rowe did spend time in Denver, and reportedly brought the Cowboys to Colorado for an exhibition in 1886. According to reports, Mox McQuery was killed in the line of duty as a police officer in Covington, Kentucky, in 1900.
Parts of the other key figures in this novel are true, but not too many. For instance, the Cowboys did forfeit three games in a final series against lowly Washington, which did finish below Kansas City in the standings. The reason for the forfeits? It probably had something to do with the fact that they were scheduled to play seven games over five days, with three consecutive doubleheaders.
Mert Hackett was not black, but I wanted a black player to show the racism—and Chicago’s Cap Anson was among the worst racists in baseball—at the time. The de facto agreement with major-league club owners began during this period and would exist, prohibiting many minority baseball players from competing in the big leagues until the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, who broke the major leagues’ color barrier in 1947.
If you’re interested in the true story of Kansas City’s National League team, I recommend that you track down H. L. Dellinger’s One Year in the National League: An Account of the 1886 Kansas City Cowboys (Two Rivers Press, 1977). I must warn you, it’s hard to find.
I’m grateful to Cheryl Lang and the wonderful staff at the Midwest Genealogy Center, a branch of the Mid-Continent Public Library in Independence, Missouri, for helping me with research and providing me with one of the rare copies of Harold “H. L.” Dellinger’s volume.
It was Harold who first introduced me to the story of the Kansas City Royals while we were attending a symposium on the James-Younger Gang in Missouri. I told him I was attending a Royals game after the event. We started chatting about baseball. He brought up the Cowboys, and the seed was planted for this novel. That was years ago.
Dellinger’s other Kansas City baseball titles worth pursing—though equally hard to find—are The 1884 Kansas City Unions: A History of Kansas City’s First Major League Baseball Team and From Dust to Dust: An Account of the 1885 Western League, both of which were also published by Two Rivers Press in 1977.
Other sources used in this novel include Unions to Royals: The Story of Professional Baseball in Kansas City, edited by Lloyd Johnson, Steve Garlick, and Jeff Magalif (the Society for American Baseball Research, 1996); The Western League: A Baseball History, 1885 through 1898, by W. C. Madden and Patrick J. Stewart (McFarland, 2002); When Baseball Was Young: The Good Old Days by Gerard S. Petrone (Musty Attic Archives, 1994); The Beer & Whiskey League: The Illustrated History of the American Association—Baseball’s Renegade Major League by David Nemec (the Lyons Press, 2004); Baseball by Robert Smith (Simon & Schuster, 1947); Baseball: The Early Years by Harold Seymour (Oxford University Press, 1985); Baseball in Denver by Matthew Kasper Repplinger II (Arcadia, 2013); Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1825–1908 by Dean A. Sullivan (University of Nebraska Press, 1997); A. G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball: The Promise of American Sport by Peter Levine (Oxford University Press, 1995); Nineteenth-Century Stars, edited by Robert L. Tiemann and Mark Rucker (the Society for American Baseball Research, 1989); The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Major Leauge Baseball, Second Edition by David Nemec (University of Alabama Press, 2006); Slide, Kelly, Slide: The Wild Life and Times of Mike King Kelly, Baseball’s First Superstar by Marty Appel (Scarecrow Press, 1999); Before They Were Cardinals: Major League Baseball in Nineteenth-Century St. Louis by Jon David Cash (University of Missouri, 2011); Turning the Black Sox White: The Misunderstood Legacy of Charles A. Comiskey by Tim Hornbaker (Sports Publishing, 2014); Comiskey: Remembrances of the Major League’s First 37 Years of Baseball, 1876–1913 by Charles Comiskey, an Amazon digital reprint from Pearson’s Magazine (Volume 31, Issue 6, Pearson Publishing Company, 1914); Occasional Glory: The History of the Philadelphia Phillies by David M. Jordan (McFarland, 2003); and Green Cathedrals: The Ultimate Celebrations of all 273 Major League and Negro League Ball Parks Past and Present by Philip J. Lowry (Addison-Wesley, 1993).
For Kansas City, I used Kansas City: An Illustrated Review of Its Progress and Importance (Enterprise Pub. Co., 1886) and At the River’s Bend: An Illustrated History of Kansas City, Independence, and Jackson County by Sherry Lamb Schirmer (Windsor, 1982).
For rules of the time, I turned to Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide, 1886, reprinted by Horton Publishing Company in 1987, and Playing Rules of the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs, 1886, courtesy of the University of Maryland’s R. Lee Hornbake Library archives in College Park, Maryland.
I’m also indebted to the Kansas City Public Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections; the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum of Kansas City, Missouri; the Society for American Baseball Research (I’ve been a member since 2014); the National Baseball Hall of Fame Museum of Cooperstown, New York; the Denver Post; Baseball-Reference.com; Baseball-Almanac.com; and the Vista Grande Public Library of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
I should acknowledge some former professional players for some tales that made their way into this narrative. Before I read Dan Dugdale’s recollections of the meat-in-the-glove story I had heard it from my father-in-law, Jack Smith, who was signed to a professional contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates by the legendary Rickey. As a minor-league player in Waco, Texas, Jack was the real catcher who slid flank steak into his mitt to protect a bruised palm. Yes, the steak idea was still around sixty-seven years after Harry Decker had tested the idea in Peoria, Illinois. “I must’ve rotted out two or three mitts that year,” Jack told me. Sadly, my father-in-law died while I was working on this novel.
Kent Anderson told me some lies—or maybe just slight exaggerations—over beers and moonshine while barbecuing during the Christmas holidays back in South Carolina. I think I remembered those stories right. Kent and I grew up together, and played Little League ball together. Except for some intramural softball activities in college and at the Dallas Times Herald, my baseball career ended there—at least until I started coaching and umpiring Little League games decades later. But Kent made it to “the Show,” playing two seasons with the California Angels. We grew up a mile from one another, went to grade school, high school (playing on the football team), and college together. I even tweaked a few stories Kent’s brothers told me to fit into this book. Butch played in the Philadelphia Phillies’ minor-league system, and Mike spent most of his major-league career with the Phillies and St. Louis Cardinals. Yes, the Andersons of the fictional Diamond Nine Ranch in this novel are based on this wonderful family. The patriarch, Mr. Bill, indeed commanded respect. He died of a
heart attack while Kent and I were attending college. As a newspaper reporter, I had a chance to write a lot about the Andersons. Because we’ve been friends forever, I won’t tell you what stories of theirs I’ve used here.
Other stories came from games I’ve attended over several years, or from interviews I conducted as a sportswriter in South Carolina and Texas.
Finally, I finished the last draft of this novel at the home of Jenny and Julian Goodman in Naperville, Illinois, during the annual baseball trip my son and I make each summer—after a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field … under the lights … in the bleachers (the Cubs won in the twelfth inning on a squeeze bunt, by the way). I coached Julian in Little League in Santa Fe. He and Jenny might even still remember the real bat-in-the-ribs story.
See you out West … or at the ball park.
Johnny D. Boggs
Santa Fe, New Mexico
About the Author
Johnny D. Boggs has worked cattle, shot rapids in a canoe, hiked across mountains and deserts, traipsed around ghost towns, and spent hours poring over microfilm in library archives—all in the name of finding a good story. He’s also one of the few Western writers to have won six Spur Awards from Western Writers of America (for his novels, Camp Ford in 2006, Doubtful Cañon in 2008, Hard Winter in 2010, and Legacy of a Lawman and West Texas Kill in 2012, and his short story “A Piano at Dead Man’s Crossing” in 2002) as well as the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (for his novel Spark on the Prairie: The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs in 2004).
A native of South Carolina, Boggs spent almost fifteen years in Texas as a journalist at the Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram before moving to New Mexico in 1998 to concentrate full time on his novels. Author of dozens of published short stories, he has also written for more than fifty newspapers and magazines, and is a frequent contributor to Boys’ Life and True West. His Western novels cover a wide range. The Lonesome Chisholm Trail (2000) is an authentic cattle-drive story, while Lonely Trumpet (2002) is a historical novel about the first black graduate of West Point. The Despoilers (2002) and Ghost Legion (2005) are set in the Carolina backcountry during the Revolutionary War. The Big Fifty (2003) chronicles the slaughter of buffalo on the southern plains in the 1870s, while East of the Border (2004) is a comedy about the theatrical offerings of Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack Omohundro, and Camp Ford (2005) tells about a Civil War baseball game between Union prisoners of war and Confederate guards.
Boggs lives with his wife, Lisa, and son, Jack, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His website is www.JohnnyDBoggs.com.
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