West of the Law

HISTORICAL NOTES

Detective Inspector Thomas Byrnes created the first New York Detective Bureau on May 25, 1882. Byrnes hired forty detective sergeants at an annual salary of one thousand dollars and ordered them to use their powers of deduction rather than brute force to solve crimes. Something of a Sherlock Holmes himself, Byrnes later became a major dime novel hero who handily outsold his closest rival, Theodore Roosevelt.

In the late 1860s and throughout the next fifteen or twenty years, ‘‘orphan trains’’ were dispatched west from Chicago, New York, Boston, St. Louis, Cleveland and Cincinnati. Funded by charities and religious organizations, the trains were packed with hundreds of children under the age of fifteen, removed from overcrowded city orphanages. In most cases this worked out well for all concerned, but many kids fell into the hands of pedophiles, pederasts and other perverts. Many were beaten to death by cruel adoptive parents or by people who posed as parents but were truly little more than task-masters.

Some readers, especially those familiar with film noir, might be surprised at the use of the word ‘‘sap’’—as in fool or simpleton—in an 1880s context. The word was widely used in its present meaning as early as 1815, and probably grew out of the earlier word ‘‘sapskull,’’ a thick or stupid person.

The railroad yard in the opening chapter of West of the Law is now the site of Grand Central Station.

Heroin was first synthesized from morphine (a derivative of opium) in England in 1874. By the mid-1870s it was being imported in fairly large quantities from Britain and Germany to the United States, where the drug was touted as a ‘‘safe, non-addictive substitute for morphine.’’ It was then that the heroin addict was born.

The hypodermic needle was invented in 1853 by Scottish doctor Alexander Wood. By the late years of the War Between the States the needles were in widespread use to administer morphine to wounded soldiers. Morphine had been used as early as the War of 1812, but was given orally. One result of battlefield morphine was that many soldiers went home with an addiction, taking their needles with them.

The author is convinced that heroin was being mainlined in the West in 1882, but had not yet replaced the easier to get laudanum. When he researched what heroin was called back then, he hit a brick wall. It could be that the soiled doves and other addicts of Deadwood and Tombstone called the drug ‘‘heroic’’ or ‘‘heroic medicine.’’ But it’s more likely that it was already called heroin and that’s the name that was later trademarked by the Bayer Company in the 1890s. Overall, the author feels comfortable portraying his Chinese doves shooting up heroin with hypodermics in 1882, and that they and their handlers call the drug by that name.