"IT'S ALWAYS ABOUT THE PEOPLE": BLOODY NEWTON'S JOHNNY D. BOGGS

Johnny D. Boggs combines an infamous real life gunfight and three fictional characters, a Texas trail boss, a reporter, and a restaurater to looking at the growth of a western town in Bloody Newton. Full of humor, action, and humanity and told with an authentic feel, it made The Hard Word's Top Five Westerns List westerns of 2024. Mr. Boggs took a lot of time and care to answer several questions I had about the book and writing in the western genre.

SCOTT MONTGOMERY: What drew you to the Newton Shoot Out for an incident to tell a story around?

JOHNNY D. BOGGS: The last couple of cattle-drive novels I'd written, Return to Red River and A Thousand Texas Longhorns, sold well enough that my editor at Kensington at the time, Gary Goldstein, asked if I could give him two more. The first was Longhorns East, about Tom Ponting's 1854 drive from Texas to New York City, and the second in the two-book deal was this one. All I had to say was 'Bloody Newton' and Gary was in. It's one of the violent events in Old West history that isn't as well known as, say, the O.K. Corral. Well, what is?

But I also wanted to examine how a cattle town comes to be, and how and why a cattle town comes NOT to be a cowtown. And tell it from the viewpoints of not just trail bosses and cowhands and ranching family members but from how residents of the cattle town saw things, which led to Denise Beeber and Cindy Bagwell.

I should point out that I borrowed the names of Gary Hardee and his sons Taylor and Evan as well as Denise and Cindy. I worked with Gary, Denise and Cindy at newspapers years ago. Yes, I asked first. And they are still speaking to me.

S.M.: While Gary and his sons are a great story, the women really feel like the backbone of this story. Can you tell us how you created Denise and Cindy?

J.D.B.: I wanted Denise and Cindy to be the moral compass. Or, as you've pointed out, the backbone. Both, especially Denise, are in Newton -- Denise from the start; Cindy because she's sent there by her boss -- so they witness the growth of Newton. And they have a stake in the town. Much more than the cowboys who arrive in Newton almost by accident. So I read what I could on women business owners in the West and women journalists of the time. And then I pulled out my grandmothers, my mother, my two sisters, an aunt or two, some women friends -- including Cindy and Denise -- and sprinkled in others and let them take control.

S.M.: Cindy has the job you held as a reporter. What difference did the two time periods have on the profession?

J.D.B.: Nineteenth century journalism is a long way from what newspaper journalism was like when I was in the business, roughly 1981-1998. We were trained to be, first and foremost, accurate and fair, to get as many sides of the story as possible and save the editorializing for the columnists and editorial writers. That wasn't often the case in the 1800s. Papers were hardly ever impartial. Cindy's boss in Wichita is the epitome of what a lot of newspaper editors were like back then. And Cindy is traveling from the South to take a job in Wichita, only to learn that her editor/publisher has been shot dead because of something he had published. That happened quite a bit in those days. Now, as a newspaper journalist, I was yelled at, called names, cussed out, and mildly threatened, but no one ever took a shot at me. Newspaper journalism was also a vibrant business in the 1800s. People read them, passed them around, talked about them. Sadly, that's rare today.

S.M.: We follow Denise as she establishes a restaurant in Newton. How did you research that?

J.D.B.: I have accounts with Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchive.com and just searched for articles and advertisements to see what was being served, what restaurants were like, prices, things like that. I also went through other historical archives doing the same thing. Cattle towns often had excellent restaurants -- that's another reason they lured in cattlemen and cattle buyers. By the way, I've always been amazed that so many cowboys loved oysters -- real oysters, not prairie oysters -- and you could get oysters in Kansas, shipped by train. Well, even today, I'm not eating oysters in Kansas. Of course, I'm not a big fan of oysters.

S.M.: How did the choice to quote a newspaper article of the period come about?

J.D.B.: It just struck me as a good way to keep the mood, and history, in the novel, especially since one of the main characters is working for a newspaper. 

S.M.: My favorite passage in the book is when Cindy walks through Tuttle's after the gunfight. I can't think of many westerns that examine the after effects of a soot out and found it haunting. How did you approach that part?

J.D.B.: I didn't want to glorify the violence, and having read and researched so much on Newton's 'General Massacre,' there isn't anything to glorify. Too many Western novels just make the violence matter-of-fact, or good guys versus bad guys, but a gunfight rarely affects just the living and the dead. It often sticks with many others. I doubt if anyone felt good after the gunfight in that dance hall. It was senseless, anything but a right-versus-wrong thing. I've been among the first-on-scene at two horrendous wrecks involving fatalities and multiple vehicles, just missing being caught up in them myself. You do what you have to do, but that's something you never forget. Haunting. Yeah. That's a good word.

S.M.: You're last two books concern in lesser known tales in the wild west. Do you found there are still many stories from that period to discover?

J.D.B.: There's a reason people write about -- and read -- the old tried-and-true stories of the West, or any time in our history. Name recognition. Popularity. Those are certainly selling points. And I've written about the Little Big Horn and other historical events and historical figures. But what I really enjoy telling are the forgotten or lesser known events. Like I do in Longhorns East and Bloody Newton. Besides, unless you're writing alternative history, most readers have a good idea of what's going to happen at the end of a story about the Coffeyville, Kansas, bank robbery, the Alamo, Little Big Horn, Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood. And there are lots of stories from our history that I think should be told. Heck, I'm still finding more cattle drives that haven't been written about. So ... if any editor at a publishing house is reading ....

Anyway, to me, it's always about the people, not the historical event itself. That's what pulls me into a novel I'm reading. And it's what keeps me writing. It's always the characters.