Famous Ledger "Rediscovered"

[Fox Creek Kid]

http://www.kansas.com/news/story/831005.html


"A valuable memento of the Old West has a better chance of returning to Kansas thanks to a yearlong investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Attorney's Office and the Ford County Sheriff's Department.

A Dodge City police docket book dating from the late 1870s and containing notes and signatures of lawmen Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson was recovered and authenticated in Columbus, Ohio, authorities said Thursday.

The ledger has an estimated auction value of $100,000 and gives details of court cases in Dodge City from 1878 to 1882, the heyday of the city's cowtown era.

The U.S. Attorney's Office has filed a civil forfeiture, the results of which will determine if the ledger can be returned to Dodge City.

According to an affidavit explaining the forfeiture request, authorities were tipped off to the ledger by a blog entry an expert on the Old West had written about the book.

In the affidavit, FBI Agent Robin Smith writes that in 2007 a Scottsdale, Ariz., collector arranged to buy the ledger from James Gaylord Collins of Ohio.

The collector, Brian Lebel, acquired the book and then sought the expertise of Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of True West magazine, for authentication.

"Bell believed the ledger book to be authentic and posted information about the ledger book in his blog," the affidavit said.

When the president of the Dodge City historical society read the blog entry, he recognized the ledger as a piece of Dodge City property that had gone missing years earlier, Smith wrote.

The historical society president, George Laughead, then contacted Lebel and told the Ford County Sheriff's Office about the book, according to the affidavit.

Lebel returned the book to Collins, "rather than become entangled in a legal battle for the item," Smith wrote.

In April, Smith and another investigator visited Collins and interviewed him in Ohio.

Collins confirmed that he had sent the ledger to Lebel and said he inherited the book after his father's death. It had been passed down by his grandfather, Collins told the FBI agents, but he did not know how it came into the family's possession.

The ledger was last documented in Dodge City's possession in the 1950s.

Smith's affidavit said several mentions of the ledger appear in a book about Dodge City history by Stanley Vestal.

"It appears that Vestal had used and reviewed the ledger book prior to the publication of Vestal's 1952 book," Smith wrote.

The afffidavit contains no information about what happened to the book in the next five decades, except to say it was "considered to have been removed from the custody of the City of Dodge City without authority by someone unknown."

The years documented in the ledger cover the period that Hollywood romanticized in movies and TV shows such as "Gunsmoke" and "Wyatt Earp."

It's also a period when signatures of some of the famous and most notorious characters of the Old West became collector's items.

Hollywood billed Wyatt Earp as a fast-shooting, peace-loving lawman who tamed the Wild West. He was first a police officer in Wichita before he was fired and moved on to Dodge City.

Earp is forever linked in Old West lore with the 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Ariz.

Bat Masterson, a friend of Earp, was the sheriff in Dodge City who turned in his badge to become a gambler and, much later, a sportswriter.

Masterson became most popular during the 1950s because of the television show named after him."

[Fiddler Green]

What a thing just to look at.

I remember, while I was in Washington D.C., going to the National Archive and seeing the police blotter from the night of the Lincoln assassination. It really reached out and touched me. Here, by some flickering light source, a Police Sergeant wrote his notes on the investigation he had just concluded. He wrote of being called to the Fords Theater to investigate a shooting and that, on his arrival, he was taken to the box where the shooting had taken place; he was informed that the victim had been removed. He noted that, as he turned to leave the box, he found on the floor, a tall felt hat, identified as belonging to the victim: "One Abraham Lincoln, of this city". Of the millions of words that have been written about the Lincoln assassination, none have had as much effect as his simple reference to the victim, late at night, in dark police station, in Washington, D.C.

History is often about the little things that make it personal and human. The Earps, the Mastersons and all the lawmen of Dodge City were real people. To see their everyday comments written down is to bring them back to life and to put their life in perspective.

Bruce