Presentation
Introduction
H. MORLEY SWINGLE: I am delighted to see such a crowd, my daughter’s with me tonight and coming up Veronica said “Well, how many people you think will be there?” And I said “Oh, I have no idea.” Uh, sometimes you drive a long way and there’s only eight people there and it’s much more fun when there’s a crowd like this. So, thank you, each one of you, for taking the time to be here.
The Humor File
I’ve been a prosecutor for more than 20 years and when I first started, my first week as a prosecutor; I started what I call my humor file. And whatever your job is, I would encourage you if you haven’t started a humor file, you ought to start one. Because what I did, every time something funny would happen to one of my cases, I’d make a little note about it and I would stick it in the humor file. And I didn’t know for sure what I would do with that humor file, but I knew that someday I would do something with it. And so, I was reading a biography of Earl Warren and most of you here probably know of Earl Warren from being the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. And it’s sort of ironic that he gets castigated as the liberal Warren Court, when actually you look at the decisions the Warren Court wrote and they were full of common sense. And Earl Warren, most people don’t realize he was the district attorney of Oakland for 17 years before he became the Governor of California and then became Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court so, so, he wrote the decision that created uh, the Miranda Decision and created the Terry -- Terry Stops, so, all of his law enforcement decisions have withstood the test of time. So, I was reading a biography of Earl Warren a couple of years ago and I ran across a quote that he had given when he was a district attorney, where he was flabbergasted that no prosecutor had ever written a book, about what it’s like to be a prosecutor in America. And they’d written books about, one particular case they might have handled if it -- if it had been a big headline case, but no prosecutor had ever sat down and written a book, here’s what it’s like day-to-day to be a prosecutor in America. And I thought that’s what I’m going to do with the humor file. Because over the years I’d use stories from the humor files that -- to be intros when I’d give a talk to lions clubs or rotary clubs. So, I had 30 audience-tested, laugh-out-loud stories and I thought, I’ll work in important points about plea bargaining and uh, and about getting ready for trial, and about charging decisions, things that people don’t really think about a prosecutor doing and really make a book that would help educate as well as entertain. Now, several of the stories in the book uh, uh I like to tell over and over, and I, I, I thought I’d tell a few of them tonight.
The Case of a Dog on Death Row
Uh, one of them is one I call, “The Case of a Dog on Death Row”. And it for, for, one of the things I did when I wrote, when I wrote this book was I would think of a Perry Mason title, uh, for each of the stories, and so, “The Case of the Dog on Death Row” uh, is one where a man was put on probation by Judge Ben Lewis, in Cape Girardeau County, and I think his original crime was driving while intoxicated. So, he got the usual conditions of probation to drink no alcohol, uh, to obey the laws, and to do some community service hours and to get a -- get in an alcohol treatment program. Well, his community service hour ended up uh, he had to do eight hours of community service so, he thought well, that’s not too bad, I’ll probably end up picking up trash along the highway or I’ll probably go to the library and end up sweeping the floors. Well, he showed up for his community service and the assignment ended up being to go to the humane society. Well, he probably thought well, that probably won’t be too bad I -- I like dogs so, I won’t, I won’t have a hard time uh, doing this eight hours of community service.
Well, he got to the humane society and his assignment ended up being helping the vet euthanize dogs for that eight hours.
Well, it turned out that was a snafu, they weren’t supposed to use their community service people to help kill the dogs but uh, somebody didn’t get the memo and so, he ended up spending eight hours helping euthanize dogs.
Well, he got home from that awful, awful day and he thought about the cold beer in his refrigerator and of course another condition of probation was to consume no alcohol. Well, he got to thinking well, who’s going to know, I’ve had this awful day and he kept thinking, too, about the pit bull that he’d met. Because, at that time, the humane society in Cape Girardeau had a policy that if a pit bull was brought in, if the real owner did not come to adopt it, then it was, it was going to be killed, so, the pit bull was basically on death row. And, so, he, he’s, he starts hitting the beer at home, one beer led to another, led to another, as they often do and pretty soon in his alcohol-addled mind he came up with the plan to go back to the humane society after midnight, scale the wall, and set free all the dogs. (Laughter) So, that’s what he did, he went back to the humane society that night and he scaled their fence, he broke into the building, and he set free every single dog, and the pit bull he personally took home with him uh, for, for his own pet.
Well, as you can imagine, somebody who is highly inebriated, uh, leaves a few clues at the scene of the crime. And it wasn’t long before the Sheriff’s Department uh, a couple weeks later plopped on my desk a big fat police report, wanting him charged, number one with burglary, which is unlawfully entering a building with the intention of committing a crime and stealing. Because when you add the value of all of these animals together it was, it was enough to at that time -- it was $150 or more so, a felony stealing, so, you had the possibility of 14 years in prison for setting free these dogs. So, it lands on my desk uh, for the prosecutor to decide what to do.
Now, I often think that the general public thinks of the job of, as prosecutor sort of connect the dots, well you look and see well, what statute does this violate? Okay, I’m going to charge the maximum amount possible, but a lot more goes into it for a prosecutor. You look at all the factors uh, what, what would the public want you to do, how serious is the crime, does he need to go to prison, uh, what kind of message you need to send to other people. So, I’m thinking about all the different factors and then I applied, what I’ve come to call, the “Where’s the Beef Test” for a prosecutor. And a lot of you are old enough you remember the Wendy’s commercial, where the little old lady is opening up a burger that’s probably McDonald’s hamburger, and she looks at it and she goes, “Where’s the beef?”
Well, you remember then there was a debate and I think it was Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, where they were having a debate, and uh, and I think it was Mondale that went through all of his ideas for the country and Reagan looked at him and said, “Well, I heard my opponent’s ideas for the country and all I can say is, ‘Where’s the beef?’” Well, in the prosecutor context, Where’s the Beef Test is, I picture myself arguing that case to the jury and if I can’t see myself asking to put that person in prison or jail then maybe there’s a reason the public would not want me to file that charge, uh, uh, especially at, at the maximum level that it could be filed. So, I applied the Where’s the Beef Test, thought about it a long time and I ended up deciding to not charge him with a new crime, but rather by drinking that alcohol and by going to the humane society and committing this trespass he had violated his probation.
So, I wrote to the judge a letter pointing out, he had violated his probation and we should have a hearing to decide what should happen to him. The judge had the hearing the judge uh, found he’d violated probation. He decided to keep him on probation, but he gave him another 40 hours of community service, this time not at the humane society. (Laughter) So, uh, so, I felt like, I felt like justice was done in that case.
The Case of the Camera Shy Car Thief
Now, another one I put in there was one I call, “The Case of the Camera Shy Car Thief”. Uh, how many of you have OnStar or, on your, on your car? Now, I see a couple of hands. Uh, you may have heard the ads on the radio, or the TV where General Motors cars, uh, now come with OnStar, which is uh, it’s a global chip that’s in your car so if your car gets stolen, uh, all the police have to do uh, is get your permission to call OnStar and they can tell you exactly where, in the United States, that car is right at that moment.
So, to show you how warped a person becomes when you’re a prosecutor, as soon as I heard those OnStar commercials I started thinking, man I can hardly wait till somebody with OnStar gets their car stolen in Cape Girardeau. (Laughter)
And so, sure enough uh, one day a couple of years ago, I got the great news that uh, someone with OnStar, a Chevy Tahoe had been stolen. Uh, the uh, the parent’s Tahoe had been driven by a college student who had parked it outside an apartment in Cape, the thief had stolen it and taken off, the college kid came out in the morning, at nine in the morning and the Tahoe is gone. So, uh, the, the Cape police officer responded and the kid says, “Well, we have OnStar. I think all we have to do is call.” So, they called OnStar and OnStar said that Chevy Tahoe is now in Carter County Missouri, on Highway such and such X number of miles from Van Buren, right at mile marker so and so. So, we called Carter County and I got a hold or, they got a hold of the deputy named Chip Brewer, and Chip Brewer responded to that location and the thief had just gotten out of the Tahoe, and the Carter County Deputy Sheriff rolls up and the thief then says, “Oh, somebody else was driving and, and, and he ran off in the woods.” And a little old lady si -- sitting there says. “No, he was driving, he just got out.” So, the Deputy slaps on the cuffs and uh, brings him back to Cape Girardeau County for the preliminary hearing.
Now, a preliminary hearing in a, in a felony case, is when the prosecutor has to call enough witnesses to show that a crime probably happened, and this person probably did it. It’s really a probable cause test on the prosecutor to make sure that you’re not charging people with felonies that aren’t supported by the evidence. But it’s also the first time the news media gets to hear any witnesses testify in person.
So, I’d called the news media and I said, “We’ve had our first OnStar case, uh, where OnStar solved a crime, if you want to hear the preliminary hearing, were going to be having the witnesses testify,” and I told them when and where.
So, on the day of the preliminary hearing, I found out later from the defense lawyer, he is sitting next to his client uh, who is still in custody, he’s still in his orange jail outfit and the client sees the local TV reporter talking to uh, the judge about whether or not the cameras are going to be allowed in the courtroom. So, the defendant then says to his lawyer, “What’s, what’s that news -- what’s the TV reporter doing here?” And the lawyer says, “Well, apparently you’re the first person to be caught by OnStar and uh, they’re going to, they’re going to put you on TV.” And the thief goes, “I can’t be on TV, my grandmother doesn’t know I did this.” (Laughter) So, he waived his preliminary hearing, uh, specifically so he would not be on television and that meant I didn’t have to put on any witnesses, he just admitted there is probable cause, goes to the next level. Well, the TV reporter was really frustrated because they needed some pictures to go with their story, so, the TV cameraman lay in wait outside the courthouse, between the courthouse and the jail. So, sure enough a little bit later in the day out comes the defendant in his orange outfit and he’s walking next to the big burly Deputy Sheriff, and the cameraman gets in front of him with his camera and he’s backing up and he’s getting a picture of, of this guy’s face. And I later saw it on TV, it was some great camera work because you can see the dome of the courthouse right over this guy’s, right over this guy’s head. And so this fellow who did not want to be on television, who had waived his preliminary hearing, specifically so he would not be on television, looks right into the camera and says, “Don’t mess with OnStar.” (Laughter) What he said guaranteed he would not only be on TV, but he was their lead story. Uh, and so I videotaped the news that night and I sent it on to the President of OnStar, I got on Yahoo and found out where OnStar was in Detroit and who their president was. And I sent a copy of the tape and I said you all might get a kick out of this; you might want to play it at an office meeting. About, two weeks later I got a letter from the President of OnStar and he said, “I not only played it for office meeting, but I played it for every single employee of OnStar. Because as far as we know, this is the most public endorsement of our product by a criminal.” (Laughter) So, so, that was a fun one.
The Case of the Embarrassing Defense
Now, another case I put in there was one I call “The Case of the Embarrassing Defense”. And this was one where there was a lawyer in Cape Girardeau who was in his sixties and he and his wife were getting a divorce. And they decided to go about it the All-American way; each of them hired a private investigator to follow the other. And so, it turned out that her private investigator trumped his, really big time. Because her private investigator found out that he had become fixated on a, on a 20-something year old uh, waitress that lived across the alley from his house and he would be on the second story of his house in a window, he’d shine a light at her house till she would come to the window and then he would expose himself to her. And so, uh, once the, once the investigator found that out, the investigator contacted the police, the police set up a surveillance camera and they caught him in the act of uh, of exposing himself and toasting her with a, with a wine glass and other parts of his body. So, it was all captured on videotape. So, he was charged with indecent exposure and stalking, both of them were misdemeanors and the case was set for trial and I assigned it to one of my assistant prosecutors, a fellow named Ian Sutherland, who is just uh, really fantastic guy.
Ian had actually ba, won the Silver Star in Vietnam and the -- and had uh, had three tours of duty in Vietnam and he was just a fantastic human being.
So, anyway, Ian has this case set for trial and we had the videotape of it. And about two weeks before the trial I, I showed it was still on our calendar that it was going to trial and I said, “Why in the world is this case of this lawyer uh, not, not pleading out? We, you have the videotape of him, doing it.” And Ian said, “Well apparently they’ve hired an expert witness.” and I said, “Expert witness? (Laughter) What in the world is an expert witness going to say?” And he said, “Well, they’ve hired this expert witness of photography uh, this Robinson, from Robinson’s Creative Photography Studio and he’s going to say, that that police surveillance camera had a zoom lens and it was across the alley and but for the zoom lens the part of the body the lawyer was exposing, was too small to be seen.” (Laughter) And I said, “If that were my defense, I would just plead guilty.” (Laughter) And the, the poor guy went to trial and got found guilty and uh, and it turned out that uh, he had the worst of both worlds. He got convicted and still, still, still had the embarrassment and then he got uh, he gots, got his license to practice law taken away too. So, it was a, it was a sad ending for him, but it did make a really good story uh, for my book.
So, uh, so, I’ve had, I put a lot of stories like that in there. I put in uh, I put in some other stories too and so this was a really, really fun book to write.
Now, when I was in college, I was an English major and specifically, creative writing, because I knew I wanted to be a writer even before I knew I wanted to be a lawyer.
And so uh, so, when I first got out of law school, I started working on, on, on a book that uh, was going to be, I wanted to be the James Michener of Missouri. I wanted to write a book that would teach people Missouri’s history, while entertaining them with a story, in the same way that James Michener did with Hawaii and with the Centennial, where he told uh, the history of certain parts of the world, through an entertaining story.
The Gold of Cape Girardeau
So, I started working, I can even tell you the month and the year, it was February of 1981, when I started working on,The Gold of Cape Girardeau. And my plan was to, to take this, take the history of Missouri and turn it into a novel. And so the problem is, if you’re an English major and not a history major, you got to learn the history before you could write the book. (Laughter) So, I started reading Missouri history in February of 1981, I started with, Goodspeed’s History of Missouri and I read Louis Houck’s history of Missouri [History of Missouri from the Earliest Explorations and Settlements until the Admission]. And I, and I would just work through book after book and by 1983, I finally thought, well, I’ve been reading Missouri history for a long time now and I haven’t got a word of this book written yet, uh, but I’m feeling like I know Missouri history pretty well. And so I decided to sit down and count up the number of pages of Missouri history that I had read at that point and it was 20,000 pages of Missouri history. (Laughter) So, I thought well, I guess I’ve got the historical background now, now I need to think of a plot.
So, I thought and thought about a plot that could bring it all together, sort of like Michener’s done with his different books. The Source, was the one where he had different artifacts that each tied to certain area, a certain story that he had in his book. And I finally came up with the idea that a man is remodeling his 200-year-old house in Cape Girardeau, he’s digging out the dirt floor to uh, to increase the size of the basement, and he uncovers a chest of gold buried next to a skeleton with a bullet hole in the head.
So, right off the bat you have this mystery of, of, of how did this get there? And the one thing I remember from property law, you know a prosecutor doesn’t use property law very much. But one thing I remember from my first year of property law class was he who finds buried gold or silver, gets to keep it against anybody but the true owner or their descendants.
So, I thought, well, there’s, there’s my conflict that uh, the person who’s found this gold is now embroiled in a lawsuit over who’s going to get to keep it.
So, the book starts out with the fellow who found the gold sitting on a witness stand in uh, in a court room in Cape Girardeau, being cross-examined by Missouri’s best trial lawyer, who’s been hired by this prominent businessman saying, these, this is my ancestor’s gold and it’s a battle who, over who’s going to get to keep this $11 million worth of gold. Then you have a flashback to, to parts of Missouri history.
And when I first wrote this book, the manuscript when I finished it was 1600 pages long, double-spaced, and I kept having agents and publishers tell me, “You know, unless your last name really is Michener, nobody is going to pick up a book that fat.” And I was young and arrogant the first time that was said to me in 1987 and I thought by golly I want it published uh, the way I wrote it this first time. And so, I would send it, and send it, and send it to agents and uh, publishers and finally uh, in uh, in around the year 2000 when uh, SEMO [Southeast Missouri] University Press says, look, if you’ll, if you’ll shorten it uh, if you, if you’ll, if you’ll shorten it we’ll publish it, I finally decided well, everybody’s been saying the same thing to me all these years, they also said, “You know the parts that are cut out, you’ve got at least three sequels.” So, I thought well, you know, yeah that, that, that could work.
So we did, was we cut the original manuscript uh, had a historical section that dealt with the mound builders around the year 1000, had another section that dealt with DeSoto coming through Missouri around 1539 uh, had another section uh, dealing with Louis Lorimier uh, and, and uh, and setting up Cape Girardeau, around the time the New Madrid earthquake uh, around 1811. Also, Girardot the fur trader and then uh, then the steamboat era during the, in the 1850s and the Civil War in the 1860s. Well, all those historical parts were cut out except for the two, the steamboat era in the 1850s and the Civil War in the 1860s. Because, when you look at all of the history uh, the, the biggest time that there’s conflict (noise on tape) most dramatic time in Missouri history was during the Civil War.
And I read a great book about writing fiction, by a writer named Dean Koontz and he said, “The secret to writing good fiction is, you want to put your character in terrible trouble on the first page, and just keep piling that trouble on so the reader wants to keep turning the pages to see what’s going to happen next.” So, uh, for a novelist looking for a time, the person’s going to be in terrible trouble in Missouri, the Civil War was it.
And a, and Cape Girardeau ended up being a, a great place to set a novel, because when the war started, the, the Union came down immediately and set up forts in Cape Girardeau and occupied Cape Girardeau. And the interesting thing about Missouri itself is that, as you all know, when the war started, we were pretty well split 50/50 uh, in the sympathies, particularly in Cape Girardeau. The people who had come to Cape Girardeau originally uh, came from uh, states like uh, South Carolina and Virginia and were slave owners, every mayor of Cape Girardeau until the time the Civil War broke out had been a slave owner. But you had a lot of Germans move to Cape Girardeau in the 1830s and 40s and 50s, so by the time that the Civil War came, it really was a town that was split 50/50. So, when the Union came and occupied it, you had this odd situation where the men who were Southern sympathizers, left to go join the Missouri Militia which was Southerner sympathizers or to go down and join the Confederacy. But what did they do with their wives, their girlfriends, and their mothers? They were left in Cape Girardeau. So, you had the Union Army come in, basically baby-sitting the womenfolk of the men who had gone off to join the Army to fight against them.
And then martial law was enacted which actually made it a death penalty offense for, for people to smuggle mail. So, a lot of the women were involved in the smuggling mail uh, from their loved ones to other people in town and actually that was a death penalty offense and the trials for martial law violations in Missouri were so perfunctory uh, that you could have as many as 30 trials in one day. But, you didn’t have to mess with little things like uh, live witnesses testifying under oath, an affidavit was enough to get somebody convicted. Uh, and then they were hanging offenses and there was an account of a man riding up Themis Street in Cape Girardeau on top of his coffin, when he’d been found guilty by martial law, then he was hanged next to the courthouse in Cape Girardeau, the Common Pleas Courthouse on the hill in Cape Girardeau.
It was fascinating to read about uh, about the Civil War history and it gave me a chance to, to put some characters in terrible trouble.
But I also, had a section that dealt with the civil, with the steamboat era. You know, Mark Twain had such a great comment, about the steamboat era, he said, “It had a strangely short life for such a majestic creature.” Because steamboats weren’t invented till around 1810 or so and then, the steamboat era really began around 1820, but then it ended around 1870 for all intensive purposes. So, it had that short 50 year life in, life in, life that it endured from 1820 to 1870 and in its heyday, which was in the 50s, when you would go to uh, St. Louis there would be as many as 200 steamboats docked at any given time. Down in New Orleans there be as many as 400 or 500 steamboats. Because what had happened before, before the steamboat era if you had your, your goods here in Jefferson City that you were going to try to send in, in, to New York or Europe or somewhere uh, you would pack it up on a boat, uh, a flatboat, the flatboat would go from the Missouri River to, to St. Louis then down the, down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and once you unloaded your stuff, then you would, you would sell your boat for firewood and you would walk or get a horse and uh, and find a way to get back to Jefferson City, or Cape Girardeau or where you came from and one trip took about three months. Well, once they invented the steamboat, suddenly you could go up the river again and the round-trip from St. Louis down to New Orleans and back was about two weeks. So, you can see what that did to the economy uh, for the Midwest, cause suddenly we were connected to Europe and then to New York and, and these towns along the rivers just, just grew fantastically by leaps and bounds.
But for a novelist looking for a chance to put people in terrible trouble the steamboats were incredibly dangerous. Because these engines uh, would build up so much steam pressure and at the beginning they didn’t have fancy valves that could tell you when you’re getting at risk that it’s about to blow up and the engineer would do it by ear, where you only had a chance to make one mistake in your lifetime, when you’re doing it by ear. (Laughter) And the books I read said that when a steamboat would blow up in the Mississippi River you would often have bodies landing on the Illinois and the Missouri side because they were blown so high in the air. And then if you were blown in the air and weren’t killed by the scalding water that hit you uh, when you landed you might be killed if you land on the boat itself, instead of in the water, or if you land on the land, or if you land on another boat. And then of course unlike people in this room where 99 percent of us have had American Red Cross lifesaving swimming lessons when we were kids, uh, in those days people didn’t have swimming lessons so once you landed in the water you’re probably going to drown.
And uh, and how many here have heard of the steamboat Sultana? Whoa, a lot more hands than I usually see, when I asked that question. Uh, very, very literate historically interested group here tonight.
Uh, the Sultana was a steamboat that blew up in April of 1865 on the Mississippi River between Memphis and Cape Girardeau, and more people died when the Sultana blew up than died in the Titanic. And uh, that is staggering that we’ve all heard of the Titanic, but almost none of us have heard of the Sultana. What happened was that the Sultanahad the, the Civil War was just in the process of closing down uh, Andersonville prison had just emptied out and all these poor Union soldiers who had just finished months or years of being prisoners of war were packed like sardines on the Sultana. It was standing room only and then the explosion occurred at nighttime, about two in the morning. They were lying down all over the decks, on top of the cabins and uh, and then this, the boilers blew up and the, and the steamboat blew up and the, the surviving accounts, I’ve read a couple of good books about this. One guy said he was sleeping on top of the cabin uh, under the stars and suddenly he woke up and he was flying through the air, and this is April, you can imagine how cold the Mississippi River was -- the water -- and then he lands in the ice cold water and then he’s swimming for his life at that point and, and other people that landed on the boat said, when they looked out, it was like a mass of ants, all the people that were in the water frantically swimming and climbing on each other uh, trying to survive, but of course, none of them could swim. So, it was also noisy and terrifying for a period of uh, for a minute and all of a sudden they were all gone then, they were all gone. And uh, 2,000 people died when the Sultana blew up, where 1,500 died when the Titanic went down. And one reason that it didn’t get a lot of publicity is that Lincoln was assassinated within 10 days when the Sultana blew up. So, the, so of course the assassination of the President and the hunt for the conspirators and there ensuing trial, was getting all the national headlines uh, instead of the Sultana. So, uh, so, so it, so I was able to work uh, a good, a good story about steam boating in there uh and then of course the Civil War hits the family that owns the steamboat company and they have to survive the Civil War. So, so, The Gold of Cape Girardeau was a lot of fun to write.
Bootheel Man
Well, then the next one that, that I did was, Bootheel Man. And when I had done that first draft of The Gold of Cape Girardeau I had, I had researched the mound builders that were here a thousand years ago, because uh, because it’s, it’s fascinating to me uh, that, that, how many of you have been to Cahokia, right across the river from St. Louis? Oh, a lot of hands. Well, you know for those of you that haven’t, Cahokia uh, across the river from St. Louis has a mound called Monks Mound that is 10 stories tall and it was made by these American Indians who were carrying baskets of dirt, one basket at a time making this man-made mound. And by the year one, by the year 1100 uh, the population for Cahokia is estimated to have been 30,000 people. We didn’t have another city, in North America that big until Philadelphia hit that size around 18, around 1810. But you were talking about the year 1100 there was a city of 30,000 people and they know that by looking at the trash pits, they can, they can look at the trash pits and see uh, see the amount of food they were consuming and they’ve supported themselves uh, by these huge corn crops that they were growing along the Mississippi River in their cornfields and so they were an agriculture economy, 30,000 people. Yet, they had this trading network that, that, in their, at their site, they found copper, that would have come from the Great Lakes area, they found uh, shells, beads that were made from shells, that had come from the gulf. Uh, this was an empire that that went from the Great Lakes down to the gulf and Cahokia was one of its main centers.
One of the fascinating things, when I was reading all this history, looking for a good story to turn into a novel, I found out that at Cahokia when they found the grave of the man who must have been the chief, he was buried on a cape that was made of 20,000 little beads that were all bored with holes, so it was a cape that he was wearing all made out of these white beads, that were made out of the seashells from the gulf and it was shaped like a, like a falcon. And underneath him was another man who was buried face down. Of course, we’ll never know for sure what that was all about, but you think that must’ve been either a servant or a bodyguard, who’s buried face down on this man who must’ve been the chief. But the really fascinating thing was, in the pit nearby were 53 young women, all between the ages of 18 and 24 who were all executed the same time this man was killed, or same time this man died. And uh, and then it turned out that from their bones they can tell these women had, had grown up with different diets. So, they’d come from different places.
So, as I’m thinking for uh, a story uh, to explain this and to put a character in terrible trouble uh, I came up with the idea that a young woman who lives in the Cape Girardeau area, at a satellite village of the Cahokia empire has just received word from the local priest, that the main chief has died at Cahokia, and each village is supposed to send its most outstanding young woman to accompany him to the afterworld and lucky you, you’re it. (Laughter) Uh, and so, uh, the story, the story there is that she and her lover are trying to figure out a way to get out of this honor.
Uh, and uh, and so uh, so then I’d already used the idea though, of the man finding buried gold uh, in his basement and a lawsuit over something that had been buried in the ground. And I thought well, I need a different modern story to tie this uh, to tie this together and it took me a long time to come up with it. And then finally I ran across the fact there’s been a real legal battle going on uh, for, for the last 30 years between American Indians, on the one hand, and museums on the other.
Because for years archaeologist would, would dig in mounds and dig out uh, skeletons uh, of Indians and uh, take them and put them on display in museums uh, and, and think nothing about it. And I have to tell you, when I started my research my, my impression was, well, what’s the big deal to the, to the American Indians? You know, this, this happened uh, hundreds or if not you know, thousands of years ago, what’s the big deal? But, the more I did my research, the more you began to see the American Indian viewpoint, because uh, one Walter Eckel Hauck who uh, who’s uh, who’s a very active uh, American Indian in, in legal affairs, he said, “Well we look at it this way uh, if you, if you dig up a white man’s grave, you get prosecuted for grave robbery and you might go to prison. If you dig up an Indian’s grave, you get a Ph.D.” (Laughter) And I, and you think well, that, that does seem a little, a little, a little unfair.
And uh, and so uh, so Congress passed the Native American Graves Repatriation and Protection Act in 1990. And so, that says that uh, when you do uncover a human skeleton uh, then you have to take steps to, to try to involve the local authorities to find out then what Native American tribe might have a claim to it, to give them a chance to, to repatriate the body.
I was staggered to find out in my research that right now in the United States there are 300,000 skeletons of American Indians in museums across the United States.
The Smithsonian Institute, alone, has 18,000 skeletons of American Indians. And uh, and since the Native American Graves Repatriation Act was passed, the museums now have the duty to try to find out what tribes might be connected to these, give them the opportunity to see if they would like to rebury these, these remains or not.
So, the most interesting, true story I came across, is one called, Kennewick Man. I don’t know if any of you ever heard of him, but in 1996, in the state of Washington, our, uh, they, archeologists uh, found a, a skeleton that was 9,000 years old of an American Indian. And he had, he still had the arrowhead in him uh, from, from when he had been shot, and so, so immediately they start wanting to do DNA testing to try to find out uh, who he might have been, find out more about him uh, and because he had a lot of Caucasian type uh, features to his, to his skeleton. But the American Indians immediately said, “No, we don’t want this testing done”, and some of the tribes filed a lawsuit.
This case went through the appellate courts, all the way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where fin -- where eventually the archeologists won that round and, and the court ruled uh, we’ll allow a limited amount of testing for a year or two and then ultimately it will be reburied with dignity. But we are gonna allow some testing uh, uh, for scientific purposes first.
So, after I saw that, I started thinking, that’s what I can do uh, with Bootheel Man. Bootheel Man ends up being the skeleton of one of my characters uh, in that love story that’s set when the girl was picked uh, to be the, the sacrifice. Uh, he, he is now on display in a fictional museum in Cape Girardeau, where they put his skeleton up under glass uh, and uh, and are displaying him like a Disney World uh, attraction. I, I made it out to be Cape Girardeau’s biggest tourist attraction. And also there’s a loophole in the, in the, in the Native American Graves Repatriation and Protection Act. It only applies to museums that get federal money. If you don’t get federal money you can thumb your nose, you can say, “I don’t care who I offend”. So uh, so I created this fictional museum, that’s thumbing their nose, saying, “We don’t care who we offend”.
So, Bootheel Man begins with this uh, American Indian standing on the Mississippi River Bridge in Cape Girardeau, on the edge of the bridge, and he has just thrown one of these artifacts he’s stolen from the museum into the river. His plan is, he’s gonna repatriate these things himself on national TV, cause he’s called with his cell phone. He’s called the local TV station and then he’s gonna commit suicide in a big grand fashion uh, and make a big public issue out of repatriation of Indian remains. And he jumps in the river from the six, 60 feet of our bridge, but he lives, gets fished out and gets prosecuted for burglary of the museum. So, uh, so then, it turns into a murder mystery and so it’s a, it’s a, it’s a case where people get to learn about the Indians.
And a lot of you are probably already have heard of Osage Indians. But outside of Missouri, you know, everybody’s heard of Apaches, and everybody’s heard of Comanches, everybody’s heard of the Sioux, everybody’s heard of the Cheyenne, but very few people nationwide have heard of the Osage Indians. Uh, but yet, here in Missouri, we have an Osage Beach, we have an Osage River, in Cape Girardeau we have an Osage Center, uh, but even a lot of Missourians don’t know a lot about the Osage Indians.
But the Osage Indians dominated Missouri for hundreds and hundreds of years. Uh, they were here uh, before Lewis and Clark, uh, they were, they were here basically from the time of the mound builders. The, the experts believe that uh, whatever happened, and, and that’s a great historical mystery. What happened to that city of 30,000 people? Uh, well, you know what Missouri weather’s like. If you have a couple of really bad floods a couple of years in a row and your, your, your food is based on corn and those corn crops got wiped out, then you’re not gonna support a population of 30,000 people by hunting squirrels. Uh, so they would have had to spread out into separate littler groups to go, go fend. So that’s probably what happened, some catastrophic weather events uh, caused them to break into smaller groups. So the Osage are one of the tribes that are believed to have descended from the mound builders that were at Cahokia.
The Osage uh, they’ve been described as, as Hell’s Angels on horseback, because they were so fierce and uh, their men were typically uh, 6’6” uh, in height. Some of them were seven feet tall. They were -- they were very big men. Uh, they, they wore what would be similar to a Mohawk. Uh, where they would shave the sides of their heads and have their hair long on top and they were absolutely fierce, and when the other, when the other tribes would come in and would, would trespass in their area, uh, they would often behead the trespasser and put the head on a stake uh, to warn other trespassers, which was apparently pretty effective.
And, and a lot of the other Indians, a lot of names of other tribes derived from Osage words. The Kanza tribe uh, is actually a derogatory name uh, that the Osage came up uh, uh, Kanza meant basically, he who runs away, in, in the Osage language. And uh, and so when the French came through and, and befriended the Osage and were trading with them, a lot of these other tribes, uh, the, the Kanza got their name. That was the Osage name for them. Uh, the Apache never called themselves Apache. That was an Osage name uh, for the Apache, so a lot of the modern tribes, they’re actually the Osage names for them.
So when I, when I did this research and found out, well I’m going to have my character be an Osage Indian, who’s gonna be standing on that bridge. Uh, I thought, well, I wonder, I wonder how I’d go about uh, researching the Osage Indians. Got on the Internet and found out their reservation uh, is, is, is in Oklahoma, not too far North of Tulsa. And it turns out that in their heyday, the Osage controlled 100 million acres. The uh, the Missouri River was their Northern boundary, the Arkansas River cutting horizontally across Arkansas was their Southern boundary, the Mississippi River was their Eastern boundary, they had the bottom part of Kansas, the top part of Oklahoma. One hundred million acres they dominated and controlled.
And uh, and then by, the United States never beat them in battles. Unlike other Indians, uh, who, who were routed on the battlefield, uh, the Osage ended up getting taken advantage of at, at the treaty table uh, where, where they didn’t speak the English language and in fact, uh, when Paw-hus-ka, who was a, who was a chief uh, went for, to, to sign a treaty with the United States, his son was, was, was, was an, was an American. And uh, they didn’t let his son, who was completely bilingual, show up to be the interpreter. Instead they had Chouteau from St. Louis be the interpreter who didn’t speak Osage very well. And later Paw-hus-ka said for the rest of his life, “I didn’t realize I was signing away 50 million acres uh, when I signed that uh, when I signed that treaty”.
And so it turned out, but now uh, here in, in 2008, they still have 1.5 million acres, which is part of that original 100 million uh, it’s Osage County, Oklahoma. And it’s fascinating because Osage County is both a, an Oklahoma County, but it’s also the Osage Nation, which means, ya know, they can have gambling there if they want because uh, through treaties of the United States, they’re a nation as well as a County of Oklahoma.
So, I went down to Oklahoma to go to the museum and uh, and, and, and did some research at their museum. Uh, I met Katherine Redcorn, who is the head of the museum. While I was there I saw these beautiful prints uh, that uh, that had been done and, and so, I thought, boy it would be neat if I could get that artist to do the, to do a painting for the cover the book. And I asked Katherine Redcorn, “Do you think I could meet that artist?” She said, “Well I think that can be arranged, she’s my cousin”. So uh, so I met Gina Gray, the artist, and she ended up reading the manuscript and uh, then she ended up painting uh, that great picture that, that she put on the cover.
Uh, I see Mike Smith here in the audience. Uh, Mike would you raise your hand for a second? Um, Mike is one of the head honcho’s at the Missouri Water Patrol and uh, once these items were thrown in the Mississippi River, uh, it became important to my story if they could be fished out. And so I called Mike and he explained to me uh, how the Water Patrol would go about recovering something that was thrown into the channel of the Mississippi River. And so you uh, you get to see a little uh, little bird’s eye view of how the Missouri Water Patrol works as well in this book.
So, uh, when Gina Gray was reading it though, she called me at one point and she said, “I can’t believe you killed off so and so”, and she said the name of the, she said, “I just told my mother, Morley killed off this, I can’t believe he’d kill, I, he killed this character off”. And when she was also done, she uh, very tactfully said to me one time, she said, “You know, uh, where, where’d you get the name of this particular character”? And I told her where I had gotten the name and she said, “Well, that’s not really a believable Osage name uh, would you, would you be offended if uh, if my family would talk about it, it would uh, would give you some better names?” I said, “Oh, I’ll tell you what, I will use whatever names you, you come up with.” And so actually the, the name of my character Joy Redhorse, uh, was a name that her family came up with, saying this is, this is a believable Osage name. So, it uh, it was, it was neat for me that she did that.
Story from Scoundrels to the Hoosegow
I think I’ll, I think I’ll close with a, with a, another story out of Scoundrels to the Hoosegow. This sort of shows uh, shows the, the danger of combining the two careers that I’ve combined. Um, when, when The Gold of Cape Girardeau came out, it was in October of 2002, and uh, and, and the publisher had told me that the, the St. Louis Post Dispatch was going to be doing a review about it. And so, I was all excited, and I thought great. And uh, so everyday I’d get out and I’d get the Post Dispatch out of my yard, I’d open it up, and there’d be no review and I would, I would do that over and over again. October, November, December and Christmas came and went and still there was no review. And so I called the St. Louis Post Dispatch and I asked for the book editor, it turned out to be a lady named Jane Henderson. And I told her who I was and uh, and why I was calling and she said uh, “Well no, uh, that book hasn’t crossed my desk”. And I said, “Well the publisher said they gave it a reviewer named Harper Barnes.” And she said, “Well maybe they did, but I’m the book editor and unless a book crosses my desk, uh, it doesn’t get a review done of it.” And I said, “Well could I have them mail you another copy?” and she said, “Sure.” So, I called the University Press and they mailed her another copy and I began my morning vigil again, at getting out there and, and looking at the paper.
And, uh, so now we went through January, February, and March, still no review. So, I called Jane Henderson again, and uh, and this time she said, “Well, your book is here, it’s in a stack next to my desk, but you have to understand as the book editor at the St. Louis Post Dispatch, I get 200 books a week from publishers uh, wanting reviews of their books. So, statistically, it’s really unlikely we’ll be doing, doing a story about your book.”
So, I thought, oh well, and I, I got on with my day job uh, prosecuting criminals. And so uh, then, I got a call from her in May and she said, “Hey, I read your book. I loved it. We’re gonna do a front page story about it on the everyday section. I need to have your publisher e-mail a colored picture of you and a colored cover of the book.” And so I called the publisher and they, they did that immediately and Jane Henderson even told me, “The story is going to run next Wednesday”.
So, that Wednesday I got up at five in the morning, I ran out there and I got the paper. I opened it up, sure enough, uh, there’s the, there’s the story that has my, my picture with my name right under it and the cover of the book, and it was a real flattering story. And so, uh, I thought, well, I need a few extra copies to send relatives.
So, I went down to what used to be a 7-11 and ironically, it’s right at the site where the Battle of Cape Girardeau was fought in April of 1863, which is actually uh, featured in that book. So, I went in the 7-11 and I, I took those, uh, those newspapers about five or six of them. I plopped them on the counter. The guy behind the counter uh, looked at me and said, “Well, you look familiar”, and I tell you, I could feel my head swelling, because I thought, oh, he must have read the Post Dispatch this morning and he just hasn’t put two and two together yet. And uh, and I thought, well, I’m gonna have a little fun with this. So, I took, I opened up the paper to the everyday section and I pointed to my picture and said, “Funny you should say that on today of all days, there I am right there.” And he bent over, looked at the picture and my name, straightened up and said, “Morley Swingle? You’re the one who gave me my felony conviction.”
You know, that was not at all the reaction I was looking for, and then you know, put yourself in my shoes. What do you, what do you say at that point? And I finally said something lame, like, “Oh, well things seem to be going better for you now”, and then he goes, “You don’t remember me do you?” And I said, “Well, well, no I, I’m not remembering you”, and he said, “Well, don’t you remember, I had, I had beat up my girlfriend and I got put on felony probation, and then uh, then I wrote her threatening letters and it got revoked and I got sent to prison. You don’t remember that?” And I said, “Well my office prosecutes 2,500 people a year, maybe it’s a good thing the prosecutor doesn’t remember you personally.” And uh, and I, I paid for my newspapers and got out of there.
And I, when I got to the office I checked and I was pleased to see that one of my assistants had actually been the one that prosecuted him. I had just stood in one time on a court appearance, so, at least I, I wasn’t going senile, but then as the days went by I had became very humble. Because I kept waiting for people to come up to me and say, hey I saw that story in the Post Dispatch about your book. And it just wasn’t happening, and I came to realize that, that convicted felon was the only person in Cape Girardeau who saw that story.
Conclusion
Well, we, we have all three books here tonight and I’ll be glad to stay around and, and sign books afterwards, and before we officially close, uh, we do have time for any questions, if anybody has any questions, whatsoever about uh, about my writing or anything.
Well again, thank you so much for being here. I’m, I’m so pleased to have such a good audience.