by Oakley Hall
Nor do I know what became of him. If anyone ever knew, genuinely, it has been a well-kept secret. Of course there have been many rumors, but never one to which I was able to give any credence. The most common has been that Blaisedell was half-blind when he left Warlock, and soon completely lost his sight. Consequently there were a number of tales, variously embroidered, concerning tall, fair, blind men represented as being Blaisedell.
There was at one time an old prospector living in the Dinosaurs, who claimed that Blaisedell had been murdered there by persons unknown, and for a fee he would lead the gullible to view the lonely grave where he swore he had buried Blaisedell’s body. Another story has it that Blaisedell changed his name to Blackburn and was town Marshal in Hyattsville, Oklahoma, where he was killed by a man named Petersen in a gun battle over a local belle. Blaisedell has enjoyed a number of sepultures.
Then there were the writings of Caleb Bane, which I suppose many fools have read as gospel. It was Bane, a fabricator of cheap Western fiction, who had given Blaisedell the gold-handled Colts in Fort James, and Bane (who seems to have felt that Blaisedell, because of that gift, belonged to him) continued to write tales about Blaisedell’s imaginary continued career long after the subject himself was lost from sight.
I notice in a recent volume of Western memoirs that Blaisedell is spoken of as more a semi-fictional hero than an actual man. But he was a man: I can attest to that, who have seen him eat and drink, and breathe and bleed. And despite the fictions of Bane and his ilk, there have not been many like him, nor like Morgan, nor McQuown, nor John Gannon.
But sometimes I feel as perhaps you may feel, looking back on the stories of these men I told you about when you were a “young ’un”—that I myself was a fictionalizer with an imagination as active as that of Bane, or that in my own mind (as old men will do!) I had gradually stylized and simplified those happenings, that I had fancifully glorified those people, and sought to give them superhuman stature.
I cry out in pain that it is not so, and at the same time come to doubt myself. But I kept a journal through those years, and although the ink is fading on the yellowing pages, it is all still legible. One of these days, if you are interested beyond merely seeking to bulwark your arguments with a classmate, those pages shall be yours.
Now that your letter has caused me to call to memory all those people and those years, I find myself wishing most intensely that I had left to me Time and the powers to flesh out my journals into a True History of Warlock, in all its ramifications, before the man who was Blaisedell, and the other men and women, and the town in which they lived, are totally obscured. . . .
[1] Gavin Sands, Goodpasture’s grandson.