Walter Noble Burns

Walter Noble Burns (October 24, 1866 – April 15, 1932) was a writer of Western history. He was notable for his books, especially his best-selling, The Saga of Billy the Kid. Burns' books helped create the legends and perpetuate the fame of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Joaquin Murietta. Biographer Dworkin called him "America's premier romantic outlaw lawman mythmaker." in Lebanon, Kentucky. He was the son of Thomas E. Burns (1837–1908), a colonel in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Walter's mother, Mary Crisella Noble (1847–1871), died when he was four years old. He and his father, Thomas E. Burns, were recorded as resident with his mother's parents, Lorenzo H. Noble (1819–1899) and Alice Ann Noble (1823–1899), during the 1870 and 1880 Federal Censuses in Marion County, Kentucky. Noble was an attorney from Maine, who had migrated to Kentucky, and became a prominent attorney & judge.

His father has financial problems and was unable to send Walter to college. Burns worked as a newspaper reporter for the Louisville Post from 1887 to 1890. He moved west to San Francisco in 1890 and spent a year working on a whaling ship. While living in California, he became a reporter for several eastern newspapers. In 1898 he served with the 1st Kentucky Infantry during the Spanish American War. Settling in Chicago in 1900, Burns resumed his journalism career, becoming a prominent literary critic and crime reporter. He married Rose Marie Hoke on November 10, 1902.

In 1900, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, and resumed his career as a journalist, literary critic, and crime reporter. After World War I, Burns retired as a reporter and began researching and writing about Western American legends. In 1927, he was diagnosed with cancer, and died of the disease in 1932. Burns also spent many hours reading old newspaper accounts and examining records in county courthouses. Burns' book brought Billy, the outlaw and gunfighter, back into an enduring fame. One scholar counted fifty-two movies featuring Billy the Kid between 1911 and 1999.

Burns followed the same procedure in writing Tombstone: An Iliad of the West (1927) as he had Billy the Kid. He interviewed survivors and researched old newspaper accounts and court house records of the silver-mining town of Tombstone, Arizona from its founding in 1879 to the mid-1880s. Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the OK Corral feature prominently in the book. In 1926, Burns interviewed Earp, but Earp declined to help him, saying he had written a book about himself. Earp later changed his mind, but Burns refused Earp's help because he had finished writing Tombstone and it was ready for publication. Earp's account of himself was never published. He was unhappy with the Burns book.

The Robin Hood of Eldorado tells the story of Joaquin Murrieta, a California bandit portrayed favorably by Burns. Published only weeks before Burns' death, his choice of an Hispanic as a hero fighting against Anglos was unusual in the United States at the time. Historians differ on whether Murietta was only a bandit or also a Mexican patriot. Burns' Murietta is a Robin Hood. Burns said of himself that "he didn't write history but stories based on history." Of The Saga of Billy the Kid, he said, "The foregoing tales may be regarded, as you please, as the apocryphal cantos of the saga of Billy the Kid. They are not fully authenticated, though possibly they are, in the main, true." Not the least of his accomplishments was to interview Hispanics and incorporate their views and their words into his books.

Filmography Billy the Kid, 1930 Robin Hood of El Dorado, 1936 Billy the Kid, 1941 Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die, 1942

Biography Mark J. Dworkin (1946–2012) compiled a biography about Walter Noble Burns, entitled American Mythmaker: Walter Noble Burns and the Legends of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Joaquín Murrieta. Dworkin died in 2012, prior to the completion of this book, which was published in 2015 by the University of Oklahoma Press.