How the Wickedest City in the American West Created Frontier Justice In Spite of Itself
Tom Clavin opens Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and the Wickedest Town in the American West with Masterston stepping off the train in Dodge City, expecting trouble. The scene is tense; Clavin deliberately evokes the images of lawlessness, and violence associated with the city’s name. (Not to mention similar images attached to Masterston himself.)
The uneasy relationship between that violence and the creation of a system of frontier justice lies at the heart of Dodge City. Clavin builds on the premise that most of the books and films about Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Doc Holiday and Dodge City itself are fiction, “including the ones published as nonfiction.” He sets up popular images, then carefully dissects them in search of a measure of historic truth. (Not an easy task. Legend and misinformation appeared almost immediately, thanks to the popular press, dime novels, and inconsistencies in the accounts of the characters involved.) He follows his main characters, their relatives, and an enormous cast of cowboys, outlaws, and lawmen through their travels in and out of Dodge City. More importantly, he sets “the wickedest town in the West” in its historical context of buffalo hunting, cattle drives, westward expansion of the railroads and a national sense of manifest destiny.
The result is a colorful and careful depiction of a city in transition. As Clavin presents it, Dodge City was violent, lawless, and complex. The dividing line between outlaw and lawman was fluid. And justice was a moving target.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
How the Trans-Saharan Trade Routes Work
In the eighth century CE, after camels were introduced into North Africa, Muslim merchants of North Africa began to organize regular camel caravans across the western Sahara. North African merchants carried luxury goods from across the Islamic world and salt purchased from the desert salt mines to the great trading cities of the Sudan: Timbuktu, Gao, and Djenne. (They also carried Islamic theology and learning, but that’s another story.) They traded for gold and slaves, and to a lesser degree tropical products such as ostrich feathers, ivory and kola nuts. Both sides benefited from the trade. At times a North African merchant could sell his salt for an equivalent weight in gold. According to fourteenth century Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, by the twelfth century caravans as large as 12,000 camels crossed the desert each year.
It was a dangerous three-month journey along routes that were little more than a string of oases separated by long stretches of featureless desert. But how did it work?
Caravans were temporary associations of merchants who joined together to make the difficult journey under the leadership of a hired caravan leader using camels rented from the nomadic Bedouin who lived in the desert. They often included one thousand to five thousand camels and hundreds of people. Typically, a third of the camels carried food and water for the caravan as a whole.
The success of a caravan depended on the caravan leader, who was typically a desert Bedouin. Paid either in cash or in shares of the merchants’ profit, a caravan leader was responsible for navigating the route from water place to watering place, managing relationships with the desert population–who could quickly turn from service providers to marauders–and supervise the daily work of loading, unloading, and feeding the camels. He had a paid team of laborers, scouts, healers and occasionally a Muslim clergyman to provide services, all generally members of the same Bedouin tribe as the leader.
Oases were the critical element. They were resting places where the caravan could find food, water, and fresh camels–the medieval equivalent of the truck stop. Some of the larger oases held regular markets during the caravan season, which typically ran from October to March in order to avoid the worst heat. The failure of a caravan to reach an oasis could mean disaster not only to the caravan but to those who lived at the oasis and depended on the trans-Saharan trade for their survival.
ADDENDUM: I’ve received several request for more details on where the different trade routes ran. This is too complicated to deal with in the scope of this blog post. I recommend The Golden Trade of the Moors by E. W. Bovill as a good starting point.
The Book Thieves
Ceremonial book burnings and the theft of precious art works are well-known elements of Nazi Germany’s rampage through Europe. In The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, Swedish journalist Anders Rydell tells the less familiar story of how two Nazi agencies—the intelligence wing of the Schutzstaffel (SS) under Heinrich Himmler and the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce headed by Alfred Rosenberg –competed to plunder Europe’s libraries until the regime’s fall in 1945.
The Nazis’ motivation for the theft and dismemberment of libraries was different from that which inspired the looting of precious artworks from museums and private homes. The stolen books were intended to supply Nazi “research” libraries with the raw material for an intellectual war between Nazism and its enemies. Jewish libraries, public and private, were the primary targets, but the agencies also attacked libraries dedicated to Freemasonry, socialism and the occult. Plunder was followed by destruction. Collections were divided up between different research institutes and warehouses. Books that were not deemed valuable, whether for their rarity or for research, were often destroyed.
The Book Thieves is written in the form of a quest. Rydell travels across Europe, visiting the remains of plundered libraries and the institutions that still hold many of the stolen books. He talks to librarians who are engaged in the overwhelming task of identifying stolen books and their owners, those attempting to rebuild lost collections, and those who mourn the libraries that are lost without a trace. In the process, he tells the story of how the collections were built and the heroic attempts to protect them, creating a vivid and heartbreaking picture of lost communities and lost knowledge.
A version of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.