Black Hills (9781101559116) (50 page)

She is said to have worked as a dishwasher, cook, waitress, dance-hall girl, nurse, ox-team driver, scout, Indian fighter, occasional prostitute, and trick-shot artist in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Although fictitious, this meeting with Cormac Lynch is time and situation appropriate and could have been possible.

Cole Younger, known to have ridden with Quantrill's Raiders in the Civil War and later, as an outlaw, with his two brothers, Jim and Bob, along with Jesse James, was referred to by Shank Williams in
The Black Hills
as having taken eleven bullets and lived to be sentenced to life in prison.

In actuality, it was reported in an article published by
Return to St. Louis Civil War
that he was interviewed while in prison November 7, 1880. In the article, Cole Younger was quoted as saying, “I have been wounded altogether twenty times, eleven of these wounds were received at Northfield. Jim was wounded four times at Northfield, and six times in all. Bob was never wounded until the pursuit in Minnesota, where he was struck three times.”

The Sweet River used in
The Black Hills
is a fictitious river located approximately thirty miles northeast of the Cache La Poudre River in Larimer County, northwest of Fort Collins, Colorado, an area which impressed me greatly with its beauty when I traveled through as a teenager.

The Lynch farm was fictitiously located on the Red Stone Creek, which is about fifty miles northeast of Pierre, South Dakota, my birthplace; about two hundred miles east of the Black Hills, the stomping grounds of Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and Crazy Horse; and just a few miles northwest of Highmore, South Dakota, where I lived for a time on a farm, shot at my first rabbit at seven years old—missed—went to a country school, and watched a prairie fire burn many thousands of acres and very nearly myself, a friend, and his mother before being heroically rescued by my father, Earl C. Thompson, who drove fearlessly through a blazing wall of fire.