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Willie Boy: How A Manhunt Became Myth

posted 3 years ago by Satan2016 (23509)
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Most recent scholarly article I found. Compares previous sources and books by Lawson and Sandos/Burgess. Movie is very revisionist. Both books have problems, but the Desert Magazine article is certainly incorrect.

https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/willie-boy-how-a-manhunt-became-myth

Reading through the many “non-fiction” accounts of the Willie Boy story, one wonders what inspired and influenced them. Most were seeking a good yarn, a piece of Western lore. As with Westerns in the golden era of John Wayne, Willie Boy was the story of another stereotyped “bad Indian.” Talking to Native Americans, you get a different side of the story.

“The posse never got him, you know,” Chemehuevi elder Alberta Van Fleet would tell Sandos and Burgess years later. Though it sounds absurd, it’s not much of a stretch: The body they found was bloated and unidentifiable—and they didn’t get a coroner to examine it on site. The Chemehuevi/Cahuilla tracker Segundo Chino had told his relatives that Willie had gotten away but that posse members had “threatened Chino, telling him not to divulge the fact that they never found Willie’s body.”[26]

Even white men knew Willie’s physical prowess. After all, he had just traversed 600 miles on foot during the posse chase. What they wouldn’t know was that Willie Boy was a Chemehuevi runner, a spiritual man trained to travel long distances in the desert.[27] As a child, he may have been influenced by the Ghost Dance, a nineteenth-century Native American religious movement led by the prophet Wovoka, who encouraged tribal people to remain separate from encroaching American influences and keep to spiritual principles.[28]

Chemehuevi elders Mary Lou Brown and Alberta Van Fleet, Cahuilla elder Katherine Siva Saubel, Willie’s mother, Mary Snyder and many others have long maintained that Willie Boy fled on foot after the Ruby Mountain posse ambush—possibly first to Twentynine Palms and then into the open desert. These stories suggest that Willie Boy made his way across the Mojave Desert where he came to live among the Southern Paiute of Pahrump of Nevada, until tuberculosis took his life sometime between 1927 and 1935.[29] Given the lack of conclusive evidence on Willie Boy’s body, this Indian version of the story is just as likely to be true as Ben de Crevecoeur’s—but just as hard to substantiate. In any case, they invite us to think beyond Lawton’s version and know that Willie probably got away.

[–] Satan2016 (23509) 3 years ago

More https://www.palmspringslife.com/a-legend-undone/

The Coachella Valley lays claim to an iconic Western tale, a saga so exceptional it has been called “the last great manhunt of the West.” The athletic antihero, an Indian named Willie Boy, outran a mounted posse of white men over 500 miles of boulder-strewn mountains and bajadas on the fringes of the valley in 1909.

Debbie Gray, forensic anthropologist for the Riverside County Coroner, knows a lot about bodies found in the desert, having examined them under a variety of circumstances. Examining the photo, Gray notes the body was “articulated” — meaning the arms and legs were still attached. He hadn’t fallen apart or been pulled apart by animals. There was no “insect activity.” And his shirt was way too clean.

While the official story says Willie Boy lay dead atop Ruby Mountain for a week before the posse returned, Gray says in her opinion the corpse in the photo had been dead less than 24 hours. Her conclusion rocks the foundations of our iconic tale.

Consider that the posse had good reason to fake a denouement. Its members were exhausted from chasing around the desert for 10 days, and the national spotlight on their ineptitude embarrassed them. The constable who led the posse, Ben de Crevecoeur, was known as a taleteller, according to his great-granddaughter, Zoë Erickson. “Ben did like to tell a story, and I imagine the fish did get a little bigger,” she says.