Since the people we write about and their contemporaries are no longer around to be interviewed, we wade through old records, newspapers, magazine articles and books and all too often find conflicting information. Names are spelled in an endless variety of ways. Stories about the same event disagree about times, places and participants. I long ago concluded if everyone who claimed to have been in the Deadwood saloon where Wild Bill was shot the place would have been as least as large as the Rapid City Civic Center. And there s been a long-standing controversy about the fifth card in the poker hand Bill was purportedly holding when Jack McCall shot him in the back of the head.
Lawyers have a field day with discrepancies when they get a witness on the stand.
A good attorney knows each eyewitness will recall different details. One man may have noticed the make and model of the car while his wife s focus was on the child in the backseat. If there are more than two witnesses, the story becomes even more convoluted. Each person has his own perspective of the same incident, having filtered it through a personal mind set or bias. With every issue of Deadwood Magazine I struggle with those conflicting perspectives.