Idaho Books

I've read a lot of self-published "research" books over the years, but this one takes the prize for sheer incompetency. Bad enough that the production values -- varied fonts that make each page look like a ransom note, wildly varying margins, duplicated/missing footnotes, timelines out of sequence -- would not meet the standards of a typical college essay, much less a professionally published book. Worse, the content is jaw-droppingly inept. One example, from page 103: "... [in 1846] the tyrannical reign of King George the Fifth ended suddenly and shamefully when he was beheaded by his peers." Funny, I could have sworn George V of England died in 1936 of natural causes. I began to wonder if this was actually a book written by Hunter S. Thompson in a moment of drug-fueled whimsy. But no, how can I dispute such diligent scholars, writers who boast more than once that most of their research "has been gleaned from many hours of research, much of which has been done on the Internet"? Of course we all know how infallible Internet research is.

I hoped that these errors were peripheral to the main theme of the book, which is alleged to be the sojourn of Wyatt Earp and his family in the Coeur d'Alene mining country in the late 1880s. However, I find it hard to take anything these authors write about Wyatt or anyone else seriously, when they cannot even do basic math. On page 29, they state that Wyatt's older brother James was married in 1873, and that he and his wife Bessie had a daughter Hattie, born in 1875. Seven pages later they state that Jim and Bessie arrived in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, in 1879 accompanied by their sixteen-year-old daughter Hattie, surely a prodigy in child development. Even worse, Hattie was actually no relation to James Earp. Had the authors of this book done even minimal research (even on the Internet), they would have discovered that the 1880 Arizona census for Tombstone shows Hattie B. Catchin as James Earp's stepdaughter. The Wyatt Earp material is a meandering scrapbook of unattested reminiscences, irrelevant digressions, and ill-conceived "recreated conversations" (i.e., dialogues they made up). Seventy five of the 246 pages of text consist only of reprints of city directories. Apart from these, I did not find one single piece of original research that can stand up to objective examination in this book.

When they do actually find a piece of 19th century evidence, Dolph and Randall don't have the context to judge its accuracy; in one passage, Dolph and Randall state that Wyatt Earp was shot while he was in Nome, Alaska. In fact, Wyatt Earp was never shot in his life. The New York Times erroneously reported that Wyatt had been shot when in fact it was his brother Warren who was gunned down in Arizona in 1900. This bizarre mistake, which was reported around the country, is an error well known to knowledgeable researchers in the field, but apparently a novelty to these two well-meaning amateurs, who are in way over their heads.

This book is a textbook example of the dangers of a "vanity publisher". Without the services of a competent proofreader, without a fact checker or peer review of any kind to catch egregious errors, without an experienced editor who can help the authors pull it into focus, "Wyatt Earp and Coeur d'Alene Gold!" is just an overpriced and underproduced mess.