Gunslingers Don't Sing or Dance by Mike Marino (any book recommendations txt) 📕

‘The gunfighter, Ned Tolliver, U.S. Marshall from Ft. Smith, Arkansas stood alone in the dusty Abilene street facing three armed Wyoming desperadoes who could at any moment launch a hail of lead leaving Ned dead face down ass up when the gunsmoke finally cleared. The townspeople had shuttered the storefronts, took cover under tables and left the streets deserted.  Only the cowhands fresh off the Chisholm trail in the Half Moon Saloon were ignoring safety fortified thanks to shots of rotgut whiskey and the promise of  a silver dollar romp in an upstairs room with one of Miss Sally’s fresh batch of soiled doves recently arrived from Kansas City.

The player piano cranked out a Camptown Do Dah Do Dah just as silver six guns began blazing away under the heat of a cowtown high noon. Ned Tolliver, tall and proud and handsome stood his ground, steely eyed, calm, focused. By the time the deadly haze created by the Navy Colts settled...three Wyoming desperadoes were ready to be taken to Boot Hill. Ned Tolliver walked tall in the saddle to the Half Moon where the cowboys bought him drinks and Miss Sally offered him the pick of the harem...on the house.  

Ned Tolliver...U.S. Marshall and King of the Gunfighters. Men feared him, he feared no man!!!’

(From the dime novel “Ned Tolliver: The Avenger of Abilene” By Baxter Dooley)

Written  by my grandfather, Baxter Dooley, who had written a whole collection of Ned Tolliver dime novels along with as much wild west pulp as he could  over the years for a reason. Baxter Dooley, retired U.S. Marshall and was sometimes a hired gun for the right money.  

He wrote the Ned Tolliver novels and kids in the 1800’s had grown up with.  Stories of his  own adventures in the old west. He was one of the body guards from the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C. assigned to protect President Abraham Lincoln the night he was assassinated at Ford’s Theater. They failed and that failure took it’s toll on him.

He  ended up leaving the force soon after, traveled west and signed on as a U.S. Marshall head quarted at Ft. Smith, Arkansas, was determined to make up for the D.C. disaster. He began writing dime novels based on his own adventures under the big sky and Indian territory.

Baxter started writing dime novels when The  American west was ablaze with tall tales of cowboys and indians, showdowns and shootouts, barroom brawls, and Custer’s Last Stand. It was an era of rifles and six guns blasting away in a hail of blazing gunfire between outlandish outlaw gangs and hot pursuit posse's. Outlaws and law dogs were colorful characters and their exploits filled the pages of dime novels and newspapers that in turn were devoured by a hungry populace along the the eastern seaboard and major cities of the young country that was fast becoming civilized and settled.

The Revolver... a Sam Colt weapon of High Noon destruction was the gun of choice for machismo and survival in a land of high plains drifters and grifters, hot headed gamblers, and deadheaded drunks who would rather kill or be killed than to suffer an insult. "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me" was not the way of the cowboy! Call a callous cowboy chickenshit and watch the hot lead fly.


It seems like every third cowboy in the west was named "Texas" something or other or "Montana" - no one to my knowledge was ever named the Pennsylvania Kid or Doc.

My name is Seth Dooley. Baxter’s great grandson. Cowboys and their adventures for obvious reasons have always fascinated me. It’s now the era of television. Television generates a plethora of small screen low grade high noon meet you on Main Street shoot outs, along with a placenta packed sack of singing cowboys with white hats galloping across the cathode ray tube high chaparral firing hot lead while in hot pursuit of bad guys wearing black hats.

The Godzilla of the TV western genre was "Gunsmoke" the show that kept the cowtown of Dodge City clean for over 20 television dog years with a cast of characters from Miss Kitty, she a madam of a second floor bordello of a saloon serving up watered down whiskey along with venereal disease from the soiled doves in the upstairs loft. I always wondered if Marshall Dillon ever dropped his gun belt once to have a go at Miss Kitty or was he just firing blanks?

Singing cowboys never shot the bad guy to kill..only wound and somehow blood never spilled. Plus the singing cowboy always serenaded the girl..but never took her to bed! I dunno, you spend all that time plunking a guitar and singing your plaintive heart out you should get something in return..something wild and wooly from south of her border when you drop your holster and load your chamber with live ammo!


I also never could grasp the sex on these shows nor in the old west itself...riding on a cattle drive for weeks...no bath, stinking like a sidewinder dead for three days..no change of underwear then they waltz into town Matilda and have beautiful bar girls sitting on their lap...let alone going to the upstairs rooms later now masking the scent of the cows and dung with the overpowering staggering smell of whiskey and cigars. Of course the doves were probably no better off in the hygiene department so was probably like two pigs wallowing in a mud hole…

Good Bad and Ugly...but I still have a special fondness for the romance of the tv western...ah..the romantic west..thank god for Opium dens and Asian prostitutes...now we're talking my kind of wild, wild west...fill that pipe, fire it up and away we go...bang bang my little Lotus Blossom!!!

So I began researching archives for the real story of  Baxter Dooley.  Relying on his personal collection of letters that were donated to the University of the Mexico at one time; excerpts from some of his more popular dime novel adventure stories, and most especially from reams of papers dictated by him in the first person  when he was interviewed by a British journalist just before he died in 1939.  

What I found out was something more incredible than found in any dime novel, proving Cowboy Machismo was a real six gun deal and the fact that real gunslingers don’t sing or dance...but the do get the girl!  

Researching the Library of Congress archives I ran across personal statements and testimony from the Metropolitan Police of Washington D.C. (including my great grandfather, Baxter Dooley) assigned to protect President Abraham Lincoln the night he was gunned down and eventually became a penny, a Hot Rod Lincoln rom Detroit, a city in Nebraska, a face imbedded on Mt. Rushmore, and a tunnel in New York. Conflicting testimony tied the investigation up for years as though it was a ball of tangled fishing line in a tackle, box but some facts are irrefutable and in agreement.

Lincoln was not shot at Ford’s Theater by a lone gunman named John Wilkes Booth. Pure fiction if truth be told, and photographs don’t lie. One picture is worth 1,000 words of Congressional Testimony.

Eyewitness accounts seem to back up the theory that while riding along with the First Lady on Pennsylvania Ave. in a surrey with the fringe on top a bullet ripped through the back of his head from a bullet fired from the second floor book depository of the Library of Congress. The weapon was determined to be an Italian Carcano bolt action rifle developed in 1860 utilizing brass cartridges once the alleged assassin was taken into custody after he fled the building and apprehended later that day in a peep show watching Libyan belly dancers gyrate their Tripoli’s to military marching music.

The man in custody turned out to be Robert E. Lee Harvey Oswald, an activist for a group known as Fair Play for Canada. He also had traveled to Czarist Russia seeking a life and wife, and ended up marrying a Ukraine dame, Anastasia Bulgaria Albania Romanoff and together began a life as counterfeiters producing knock offs of Faberge Eggs  to sell to tourists heading to Siberia.

While there he came under the influence of a group of comedians known as the Karl Marx Brothers from Karamozov and began doing PR work for their shows. “We wowed them in St. Petersburg!” he once wrote.

Later he left for America with his Russian bride settled into Richmond, Virginia. When the war broke out he fought with Bloody Bill Anderson in Missouri. When the war ended he said, “It never ended for me. The South surrendered...not me.” His hatred grew and culminated that fateful day on Pennsylvania Ave.

As he was being transferred from police headquarters in D.C. a gunman was waiting in the crowd who fired point blank and killed the accused assassin. The killer this time, a Union loyalist, Ulysses S. Ruby was the owner of a strip club called the Appomattox Pussy Cat Theater featuring dancers from the Underground Railroad Review originally from Sierra Leone.

The entire event was captured on film made from glass plates by a young amateur photographer, Matthew Brady Zapruder  who was in an ideal location at the time. Other witnesses claim there was a second shooter as gunfire was heard from Vice President Andrew Johnson’s home known as the Grassy Knoll.

The truth may never be known...conspiracy theories abound. Where was  Jefferson Davis at the time? Where was Lincoln’s mistress, Maryland Monroe? Lincoln’s best friend from Indonesia, Frank Sumatra? The only thing I know for sure is that my great grandfather was demoralized and left D. C. after failing to protect the life of Lincoln while Robert E. Lee Harvey Oswalds great grandson was accused of assassinating JFK in Dallas almost 100 years later. JFK was killed while riding not in a surrey but in a limo...a Lincoln by the way.