‘Lottie Deno’ lively subject of historical fiction

“Lottie Deno,” the chief pseudonym of a woman born Carlotta Thompkins in Kentucky in 1844, properly belongs to what cultural critic Greil Marcus has called “the old, weird America”— the backdrop to the sanitized textbook-ready story of our republic, a shadowlands harboring tricksters and cowards, carnies and preachers and confidence people of all stripes.

In our Western folklore, Lottie Deno is a lady gambler, the “Queen of the Pasteboards,” “Mystic Maud” and “The Angel of San Antonio.”

In his 1909 book “The Quirt and the Spur,” Edgar Rye wrote that she “always appeared well-dressed and walked with the air of a perfect lady. And strange to relate, she was present during many a roughhouse, saw the flash of deadly six-shooters and heard the oaths of the men in desperate conflict, but it did not drive her from the scene, though when the smoke cleared away, there were dead men lying in pools of blood near the card tables.”

You may have heard she was the inspiration for Amanda Blake’s Miss Kitty on “Gunsmoke.” In John Sturges’ 1957 film “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” Rhonda Fleming plays a character named Laura Denbow, a virtuous lady gambler who wins the affection of Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster).

“Laura Denbo” was one of the other aliases Thompkins affected, and while there’s no evidence she ever had a dalliance with Earp, it’s widely accepted that she did run into Doc Holliday — who is said to have lost $3,000 to her at the gambling table — during her time in a rough town called The Flat just below Fort Griffin in north Texas.

Frank Thurmond, a University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor and Arkansas writer of varied experience — he has played lute for the Queen of England, served as education policy adviser to Wesley Clark’s 2004 presidential campaign, and written one of the best unproduced screenplays I’ve ever read (which he eventually turned into the novella “Ring of Five”), along with an affecting memoir and a book of poetry — has mortared in the gaps between some of the verifiable data points of Thompkins’ life to produce a highly enjoyable and thoroughly plausible historical novel about her called “Lottie Deno: A Novel of the Civil War and the American Southwest” (Parkhurst Brothers

publishers, $17.95 paper).

Thurmond came to his subject in a circular way. After he became aware of a Western figure called “Cherokee” Frank Thurmond, he decided to research his namesake — who turned out to be an ancestor — and discovered he was the legendary gambler’s partner, paramour and eventual husband.

There was a lot more material to work with on “Lottie” — whose most famous alias was allegedly derived from a drunken cowpoke’s observation that she call herself “Lotsa Dinero” for the pots she won — so the author turned his attention to crafting a story based on her myth-misted life, not too far different from what Forth Worth writer Sidney Thompson did for a certain Fort Smith-based lawman with his “Bass Reeves Trilogy” (the first two books of which were adapted into Taylor Sheridan’s “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” miniseries).

What’s known — or generally accepted — about Lottie Deno’s life is that she was the daughter of a prominent Kentucky planter and was sent north to live with relatives in Detroit and find a husband after her Confederate officer father was killed in the early days of the Civil War.

Or perhaps she was sent off after a flirtation — or something more — with Johnny Golden (another historical figure) who worked for her father as a jockey, later enlisted in the Confederate cause, and was considered an unacceptable match for the propertied young lady.

The author adds a layer by making Golden Jewish — as some sources suggest he was — but characterizes the romance as fairly chaste. Someone with a more jaundiced view of human nature might have suggested something more sordid between Lottie and Johnny, but here he’s simply infatuated with Lottie, who promises to meet up with him after the war if he survives.

Lottie was apparently accompanied by a formidable enslaved woman, Mary Poindexter, often described as being 7 feet tall, who served as her nanny, confidant and bodyguard. While the adventures the future Lottie and Mary have on the river — their journeys in some ways echoing those of Huck Finn and Jim — might strain credulity, there is evidence that they are at least based in fact. Apparently the real Mary did lose a finger to a snakebite suffered while protecting her charge, and the story of her throwing an unruly Rebel soldier into the Mississippi River is not an invention of the author. It’s all true in the sense that these were the sort of stories that surround the historical Lottie Deno — the author’s chief invention seemed to be the narrative voice.

The story is told in Lottie’s voice in a way that both echoes and honors Charles Portis’ Mattie Ross, the narrator and heroine of “True Grit.” (Thurmond knew Portis and considers him both hero and mentor.) And one of the keys to both books is to understand that the narrator is looking back on the events in question, from the perspective of an older person. (Lottie lived to be 89; she passed away in 1934.)

And so we might expect her to evince slightly different attitudes about slavery than her younger self might have held, and to be cognizant of her own legend and willing to embroider for the sake of the story. Even if by objective standards her beloved Cherokee Frank may have been a murderer and a card cheat (some historians will argue that every professional gambler in the Old West cheated to some extent or another; they were like professional cyclists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries), he was virtuous in her eyes.

Lottie and Mary make their way downriver to New Orleans, where she expects to find success in the casinos. From there they move on to San Antonio where, convinced that Johnny has perished in the war, she falls under the spell of the Stetson-hatted Cherokee Frank and takes a job dealing cards at the University Club. When Frank kills a man with his Bowie knife while defending her honor, he lights out for the territory. She follows a few days later, traveling under an alias, with only the barest notion where Frank has gone.

And Johnny, who has survived the war, chases after her.

Thurmond — the author — has an unfussy way of moving the story along, while credibly ventriloquizing Lottie as storyteller. The relatively brief novel — fewer than 250 pages — speeds by with cinematic breeziness. It’s not a criticism to say the book reads like a movie, and the various stops in Texas

provide us with convenient episodic markers.

Eventually she catches up with Cherokee Frank — who has now adopted the alias Mike Fogarty — in The Flat, a rough frontier community at the crossroads of two major cattle trails below a bluff where Fort Griffin was established. (Fort Griffin is where, in Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” the kid meets the judge for one final time. It was one of the rowdiest and most dangerous towns in the Old West, with a reputation for having “a man for breakfast every morning.” Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, John Wesley Hardin, Billy the Kid, Sheriff Pat Garrett and Bat Masterson all spent time in The Flat.)

That’s where Lottie becomes legend, dealing cards and running a faro game at the Bee Hive Saloon where “Fogarty” works as a bartender. They’d be together for the next 40 years or so, eventually attaining respectability, with Frank succeeding in mining ventures and eventually becoming vice president of a New Mexico bank. She became an upstanding member of the Episcopal Church, although the legend holds the church was founded with $40,000 she’d won in a poker game years before.

While “Lottie Deno” is most assuredly a novel, and as such is entitled to take certain liberties with the historical figures and events it presents, there’s nothing reckless about it: While the appearance, fairly early on, of the folk song “In the Pines” might strike readers who know it from the Kurt Cobain (or Leadbelly or Louvin Brothers) versions as anachronistic, the song in fact dates at least to the 1870s and probably a few years before that. Here it appears in the early days of the Civil War. So maybe that’s a mistake.

Of maybe it’s the wishful and unreliable memory of a woman looking back over 70 years of adventure. In any case, it’s not history. It’s a ripping story.