XI.
WHEN FICTION IS STRANGER THAN TRUTH.
We are told that “fiction hath in it a higher end than fact,” which we may readily believe; and we may also concede that “truth is stranger than fiction,” at least in its occasional application. Nevertheless, in the course of his career as a writer Edwards has created two fictional fancies which so closely approximated truth as to make fiction stranger than truth; and, in one case, the net result of imagination was to coincide exactly with real facts of which the imagination could take no account. Perhaps each of these two instances is unique in its particular field; they are, in any event, so odd as to be worthy of note.
In the early 90’s, when a great deal of Edwards’ work was appearing, unsigned, in The Detroit Free Press, he wrote for that paper a brief sketch entitled, “The Fatal Hand.” The sketch was substantially as follows:
“The Northern Pacific Railroad had just been built into Helena, Montana, and I happened to be in the town one evening and stepped into a gambling hall. Burton, a friend of mine, was playing poker with a miner and two professional gamblers. I stopped beside the table and watched the game.
Cards had just been drawn. Burton, as soon as he had looked at his hand, calmly shoved the cards together, laid them face-downward in front of him, removed a notebook from his pocket and scribbled something on a blank leaf. ‘Read that,’ said he, ‘when you get back to your hotel tonight.’
The play proceeded. Presently the miner detected one of the professional gamblers in the act of cheating. Words were passed, the lie given. All the players leaped to their feet. Burton, in attempting to keep the miner from shooting, received the gambler’s bullet and fell dead upon the scattered cards.
An hour later, when I reached my hotel, I thought of the note Burton had handed me. It read: ‘I have drawn two red sevens. I now hold jacks full on red sevens. It is a fatal hand and I shall never leave this table alive. I have $6,000 in the First National Bank at Bismarck. Notify my mother, Mrs. Ezra J. Burton, Louisville, Kentucky.’”
This small product of the Fiction Factory was pure fiction from beginning to end. In the original it had the tang of point and counterpoint which caused it to be seized upon by other papers and widely copied. This gave extensive publicity to the “fatal hand” – the three jacks and two red sevens contrived by Edwards out of a small knowledge of poker and the cabala of cards.
Yet, what was the result?
A month later the Chicago papers published an account of a police raid on a gambling room. As the officers rushed into the place a man at one of the tables fell forward and breathed his last. “Heart disease,” was the verdict. But note: A police officer looked at the cards the dead man had held and found them to be three jacks and two red sevens.
A week later The New York Recorder gave space to a news story in which a man was slain at a gaming table in Texas. When the smoke of the shooting had blown away some one made the discovery that he had held the fatal hand.
From that time on for several months the fatal hand left a trail of superstition and gore all over the West. How many murders and hopeless attacks of heart failure it was responisble for Edwards had no means of knowing, but he could scarcely pick up a paper without finding an account of some of the ravages caused by his “jacks full on red sevens.”
Query: Were the reporters of the country romancing? If not, will some psychologist kindly rise and explain how a bit of fiction could be responsible for so much real tragedy?
In this instance, fancy established a precedent for fact; in the case that follows, the frankly fictitious paralleled the unknown truth in terms so exact that the story was recognized and appropriated by the son of the story’s hero.
While Edwards was in Arizona he was continually on the alert for story material. The sun, sand and solitude of the country “God forgot” produce types to be found nowhere else. He ran out many a trail that led from adobe-walled towns into waterless deserts and bleak, cacti-covered hills to end finally at some mine or cattle camp. It was on one of these excursions that he was told how a company of men had built a dam at a place called Walnut Grove. This dam backed up the waters of a river and formed a huge lake. Mining for gold by the hydraulic method was carried on profitably in the river below the dam. One night the dam “went out” and a number of laborers were drowned.
With this as the germ of the plot Edwards worked out a story. He called it “A Study in Red,” and it purported to show how a lazy Maricopa Indian, loping along on his pony in the gulch below Walnut Grove, gave up his mount to a white girl, daughter of the superintendent of the mining company, and while she raced on to safety he remained to die in the flood from the broken dam.
The story was published in Munsey’s Magazine. Six years later the author received a letter from the Maricopa Indian Reservation, sent to New York in care of the F.A. Munsey Company. The letter was from a young Maricopa.
“I have often read the account of my father’s bravery, and how he saved the life of the beautiful white girl when the Walnut Grove dam gave way. I have kept the magazine, and whenever I feel blue, or life does not go to please me, I get the story and read it and take heart to make the best of my lot and try to pattern after my father.
I have long wanted to write you, and now I have done so. I am back from the Indian School at Carlisle, on a visit to my people, and am impelled to send you this letter of appreciation and thanks for the story about my father.”
Now, pray, what is one to think of this? The letter bears all the earmarks of a bona fide performance and was written and mailed on the Reservation. Edwards’ fiction, it seems, had become sober fact for this young Maricopa Indian. Or did his father really die by giving up his pony to the “beautiful young white girl?” And was Edwards’ prescience doing subliminal stunts when he wrote the story?
John Peter, should this ever meet your eyes will you please communicate further with the author of “A Study in Red?” It has been some years now since a letter, sent to you at the Reservation, failed of a reply. And the letter has not been returned.
