TF [Taylor Fogarty]: You obviously have a great love for 19th century American history. What sparked that interest?

DLW [Dale Walker]: I wish I could date my interest in it, but I'm not sure. I have been able to narrow it down some: my interest begins with the Wellington-Napoleon battles in Portugal and Spain in the first decade of the 19th century and ends abruptly at about 1918, the end of the First World War. So, about 110 years in all. My interest in American history, particularly Western American history is much shorter: I like the period from Lewis & Clark through the U.S.-Mexican War (only about 40 years) and have little interest in it after the California gold rush.

TF: You've said you prefer to write on subjects "underwritten."  Explain that, please.

DLW: Let's take that 40 years of Western history I prefer to write about. Except for the fur trade era, which only lasted about a generation for Americans, that era is underwritten-for reasons that escape me since it is the fabulous era of the West. On the other hand, the lawman-gunfighter books, the Indian war and Custer battle books, fill libraries. I don't object to this but I can't imagine I have anything to offeranything I could write that hasn't already been written.

TF: Most of your books seem to contain military historyTHE BOYS OF '98, BEAR FLAG RISING, BUCKEY O'NEILL, several of the episodes in LEGENDS AND LIES...

DLW: I started out some time in the dim past with a fascination for 19th century military history, particularly the British colonial wars, and can't turn loose of it. I wrote a lot of magazine work in the 60s and 70s and most of it was military. THE BOYS OF '98 gave me the chance to pay a debt to those grand old Rough Riders I knew.

TF: What's the story behind that?

DLW: In the mid-60s I got interested in Buckey O'Neill after a visit to Prescott, Arizona, his hometown. There is a majestic statue of him, the work of Solon Borglum, brother to Gutzon of Mount Rushmore fame, in front of the Yavapai County courthouse. I talked to the curator of the Sharlot Hall Museum there and learned that nothing much had been written about him, so I wrote some magazine pieces about him, and those grew into a book. [Reissued in 1997 by Bison Books / University of Nebraska Press]. In writing the book I located the three surviving members of the Rough Rider regimentthe First U.S. Volunteer Cavalryand talked to all three and kept in touch with them all through their deaths. THE BOYS OF '98, published in 1998 on the centennial of the regiment, is dedicated to them.

TF: History: exact science or mostly mystery?   

DLW: It's all mystery which is what makes writing it interesting. What I try to do is to introduce no new mysteries to what I write about. If I don't know the answer to some disputed historical matter, I say so, or find a way to work around it. I could never find out where Buckey O'Neill was born, for examplehe said Ireland on his commissioning papers but also said Washington, D.C., and I think mentioned St. Louis once or twice. So I gave all the "evidence," pro and con in the backmatter of the book. I'm probably hopelessly outdated in my attitude toward history, but I respect it and think there are certain rules in writing historical works that can't be broken. To me, they are elementary: for example, anytime a purported nonfiction historical book contains invented dialogue, the whole book is instantlyinstantlyfiction. This isn't just a purist's attitude. There is no reason whatsoever for a historical writer to invent anything. The historical record is rich beyond imagining. Invention is for novelists.   

TF: What do you think of the device Edmund Morris used in his Ronald Reagan book?

DLW: Why there is any hullabaloo over Morris's "biography" of Ronald Reagan escapes me. He created characters in the book, apparently to make it easier for him to explain certain episodes in Reagan's life, and certain features of Reagan's character. To hell with that. He wrote a magnificent book on Theodore Roosevelt without resorting to subterfuge. It is not an historian's perk to invent when the going gets rough. Every historical writer I ever heard of has had to "write around" things that are unknown and can never be known. Once Morris created those characters and put words in their mouths, he tainted everything in the book. DUTCH is a very long novel.

TF: In your introduction to LEGENDS AND LIES you argue that in the Old West, nobody ever died when history said they died. Why have so many myths been committed to the books as truths? Did early Americans have a special need to embellish the facts?

DLW: I don't think it is so much a need by early Americans as modern ones fixated on the idea that there are conspiracies lurking behind every shrub. It's a ludicrous proposition when you think about it. A conspiracy by definition must involve more than one person and when more than one person is involved in a secret, it is an unshakable rule of human nature that somebody is going to spill the beans. In LEGENDS AND LIES I gave over chapters to the legends about the Billy the Kid and Jesse James "claimants," old duffers who claimed these identities. I broke my own rule about never writing about gunfighters and badmen but these storiesand that is all they areare compelling in a strange way.

TF: I also like the story about Boston Corbett, the soldier who shot John Wilkes Booth.

DLW: Me, too. I did a lot of work on that episode. Corbett disappeared after escaping from a lunatic asylum in Kansas in-what was it1888 or thereabouts? Anyway, he was never seen again so the conspiracists have had a long walk in the park creating myths about him and Booth.

TF: Would you like give a few examples of some of the biggest lies youve challenged or uncovered?

DLW: I'm not sure I did much uncovering and whatever challenging I did in LEGENDS AND LIES was the product of laying out the historical record and letting the reader do the rest. For example, in the chapter on the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah in 1858, I couldn't add much to the record that wasn't already researched and written by Juanita Brooks, a wonderful Mormon researcher and writer who dug deep into the records. What I did was recount this seldom-told story in the framework of the mystery of it: Why did this happen?

TF: How would you describe yourself in terms of being an historian?

DLW: I'm not one except in the loosest sense, such as biographies jacket writers have to come up with. I write what is called "popular history." This is a publisher phrase and it means exactly what Stephen Ambrose meant when he said "The most important part of history is the last five letters of the word," or something to that effect. It is history as storywritten with the techniques of fiction but without, as Edmund Morris did, turning it into fiction. I think the academic historianGod love 'em one and allbreak new ground by exploring all the old documents, going to original sources, to to speak. I try to use as many sources as are available to give balance to my books, but I can't spend all my time researching, as some historians seem to do. I have to get to the writing quicker than the historians drawing salaries from their universities do.

TF: What fiction techniques do you use?

DLW: Characterization, for one. In my books I spend the most time trying to bring historical characters to life. I look at photographs, search for how contemporaries described the personage I'm writing about, to "recreate" the subject in prose. I have a strong belief that people will read historical books if the people in them move the story along. That's a fiction writer's technique. Dialogue is another. I use a lot of short, authentic quotes, to give the reader a sense of how a person sounded and thought by what heor shesaid, or what others said about himor her.

TF: Jack London has been a favorite study of yours for sometimeyouve written at least 5 books on him. What is it that you find most fascinating about the man?  What can we learn from him?

DLW: I discovered him as a kid in my hometown in Illinois. My grandfather had a couple of his books in a glassed-in bookcase along with a set of Lincoln's speeches, Stoddard's lectures, and books like THE GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST and BEAUTIFUL JOEa dog story I loved. I'm getting off the track here, but I read a lot when I was a pre-teen. I loved dog storiesJim Kjelgaard's BIG RED, Jack O'Brien's SILVER CHIEF, James Oliver Curwood's KAZAN, THE WOLF DOG, and BAREE, SON OF KAZAN. I wonder if anybody remembers these books today? Anyway, after struggling through my grandfather's copy of THE IRON HEELwhich was far too tough a socialistic message book than a 12-year-old could handle, and another one, I think MARTIN EDEN, a library directed me to THE CALL OF THE WILD and WHITE FANG, and from those I read his short stories. I still have the first Jack London book I ever owned, a gift from an aunt, and it was new when she gave it to mein 1948!  I just doted on his work and read it all over the yearsthat's fifty books, by the way22 novels, 200 short stories, a lot of journalism and non-fiction.

TF: I understand you knew his daughters?

DLW: Yes, Joan and Becky, both now deceased, both great ladies.

TF: Do you have any recent London works published.

DLW: The University of Nebraska Press reissued my collection of London's fantasy stories last year under the title , and Stanford University Press is bringing out a new and expanded edition of another of my books, . This one brings together London's works about the craft of writing.

TF: Interesting title.

DLW: "I have had no mentor but myself," is what London wrote in 1900 to his first book publisher in answer to a question about his educational background.

TF: What else is new with your work?

DLW: BEAR FLAG RISING: THE CONQUEST OF CALIFORNIA, 1846, came out in July from Forge.  I have a short story in the Martin Greenberg-Ed Gorman book, , published by Berkley. And I have just finished a big book for Forge that will be published in the fall of 2000.

TF:  What kind of a work schedule does it take to produce a book? Do you spend a lot of time traveling to the locations you write about?

DLW: When I am in the book-writing mode, I work seven days a week, about six hours a day, always in the mornings. I spent another two or three hours of the day reading and going over my research notes. I try for the old Jack London formula of a thousand words a day. But he was writing fiction and there are times when four pages a day is too much for a historical writer. As to travel, the books I have been writing the last five years or so require it. I traveled a lot before writing LEGENDS AND LIES. I needed to revisit the Superstition Mountains, Billy the Kid's stamping grounds in New Mexico, Sacajawea's grave, the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the place in the Natchez Trace where Meriwether Lewis died, and so on.

TF: And for the book you just finished, the Oregon Trail?

DLW: Right. A new Forge book, which has the working title PACIFIC DESTINY: THE THREE-CENTURY JOURNEY TO THE OREGON COUNTRY, ends with the Great Migration on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s. I followed the trail from St. Louis and Independence, Missouri, to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, approximating the journey made by Francis Parkman in 1846. I did it twice, in fact, getting more out of it the second time.

TF: What do you like most about writing? Whats the worst part of writing?

DLW: Writing is what I like most about writing. Sounds glib doesn't it? But what I mean is I like the creative aspect of it. Historical writing is almost never considered "creative" in academic writing programs. "Creative writing" in college courses means fiction and poetry. But it's a foolish idea. Good historical writing is very creativeor ought to be. In writing PACIFIC DESTINY, for example, I wanted to recreate life west of the Rocky Mountains after Lewis and Clark but before the railroads came west. I wanted to breathe life into the great historical figures of the Oregon country, and the minor onesthe often nameless thousands of overlanders who took hold of their destinies, loaded up their wagons, and pushed out into the wilderness from the Missouri frontier full of hope to start a new life. Too much historical writing is the knitting together of fact on fact. But the facts do not tell the story. The creativity lies in the story he fashions from the facts.

TF: What do you enjoy doing when not writing? Any special hobbies?

DLW: When I am not writing I am thinking of what I am going to write next. Actually, there is no time when I am not writing. I write a books column for the Rocky Mountain News, write reviews for several newspapers, write magazine work, do a lot of correspondence and e-mail, am a fiction editor for Tor/Forge in New York. I'm a writing fool. I can't help myself. My only hobby isguess what?reading.

TF: Of the 15 or so nonfiction books you have written, which is your personal favorite, and which was the most challenging for you to write?

DLW: My personal favorite, my best book, and my most challenging is the one that nobody wanted to publish, nobody wanted to buy after it was published, and nobody has heard of since. This is my biography of an Ohio-born war correspondent with the lovely Irish name of Januarius Aloysius MacGahan. He was an Ohio farm-boy and country teacher who went to France in 1869 to study the language, and was in the country when the Franco-Prussian war began. He got a job with the New York Herald to help cover the war and went on to other Herald assignmentsto Central Asia, to Spain for the Carlist War, on an arctic expedition searching for the Northwest Passage. In 1876 he went to Bulgaria to report on the slaughter of Bulgarian villagers by the Turks, stayed on to report the war between Russia and Turkey, and died of typhus in Constantinople in 1878 at the age of 38.

TF: How did you come across his story?   

DLW: It was suggested to me by a friend, my writing mentor, the late Richard O'Connor. In 1966, in the course of working with him on a biography of the American radical journalist John Reedthe man the movie "Reds" was based onI came across MacGahan's name as among the great 19th century war correspondents. O'Connor told me I ought to "look into" MacGahan's story. I did. It took 15 year of off and on work, to get it researched and written.

TF: Who published it?

DLW: The University of Ohio Press, in 1988. it was titled JANUARIUS MacGAHAN, THE LIFE AND CAMPAIGNS OF AN AMERICAN WAR CORRESPONDENT. There was a single small printing and it has been out of print for eight years or better.

TF: If a person could only afford to have 5 books on their bookshelf, what titles (other than your own) would you suggest they not live without?

DLW: "Titles" is the key because that means I could have books that appear in more than one volume. I'd want an old, say 1948, Britannica, the biggest Webster's or Oxford Dictionary, a King James Bible, a big scholarly edition of Moby Dick which I suspect is the greatest American novel, and I'm not sure of the 5th. Maybe the Baring-Gould Annotated Sherlock Holmes? Something light.

TF: Switching now to the western genre: are westerns slowly becoming extinct? Where do you think the genre went wrong?

DLW: The old formula western is becoming extinct, and none too soon. The word "Western," to describe a genre, needs to become extinct, right away, and the ones who need to extinguish it are publishers, who in their eternal search for "category" put very good books in limbo by labeling them "Western." As to where the genre went wrong, I'm not sure it went wrong. The old-timey Western novel has been criticized for decades as racist, anti- woman, overly violent, and perpetuating stereotypes, but I wonder why the mystery genre has escaped this criticism. Is there any form of fiction more racist, anti-woman, and violent than the mystery-private-eye-cop-thriller novel? How did the Western become the whipping boy of the P. C. police? What I have found is that the shrillest of the critics of Western fiction are small-bore journal writers who have not read the best of modern writers of the American West.

TF: What can be done to create a renewed interest in it?

DLW: Matt Braun has been asking this question of members of Western Writers of America lately, and I would subscribe to Richard Wheeler's answer: writers of the West need to write better books. It sounds glib, but it is an essential truth: if writers of the West produce better and better books, the books will rise above the Western "category" into the main stream of fiction.

TF: What advice, then, would you give to aspiring writers?

DLW: The main thing an aspiring writer needs to do is read, all the time, every spare moment, every jury call, dentist appointment, or overnight motel stay. Turn off the TV and read. And learn to read critically: grimace at what is bad, grin at what is good, and make mental notes, or physical ones, on what to avoid and what to borrow. Read to get ideas, to get educated, to expand vocabulary (look up every word you don't understand), to understand how a published work is organized, how fictional characters are drawn and how they move about in a story and how they talk and interact with other characters. For a writer, aspiring or professional, reading is never a waste of time. Never. There are other things aspiring writers should dostudy the markets, learn to write query letters, learn the mechanics of the business, do your homework, stuff like thatbut there is no such thing as a good writer who does not read.

TF: In closing, name the key ingredients that defines a good writer. What would you say is the main difference between a good writer and a great one?

DLW: Maybe enthusiasm? A willingness to take chances? A insistence on doing something new? The best books I have read, fiction and non-, are those in which I sense the writer is excited by his story and wants the reader to share it. Even old stories, those told time and again, can be readable if the writer brings some invention and enthusiasm to them. A quiet sense of humor is another thing I value, even in the most serious work. Too many writers are too humorless.

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