“It will be innerestin to match my knives against your guns… Maybe if Mr Carson is lucky hell

catch me on his moshun picture camera.”

-Attributed to Jack the Ripper, to Buffalo Bill Cody, September 30, 1888

“Whilst we conventional Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation and

organization, some independent genius has taken the matter in hand…”

-George Bernard Shaw, letter to The Star September 24, 1888

1922Buffalo Bill bursts from the London fog like a rawhide cannonball, .45s blazing, his horse’s

hooves striking sparks on the cobblestones. Along with yours truly, on either side of him is Chief Sitting Bull, both hero and villain of the Little Big Horn, Annie Oakley and Frank Butler and Arthur Conan-Doyle. Looking down on this vivid milieu from some metaphorical coign of vantage is the man who redefined Humankind’s inner universe, Dr. Sigmund Freud.

Of course, it was rarely if ever actually that romantic. I will leave such dramatic imagery to any publisher of dime store novels and penny dreadfuls what may find this account worthy to be put between covers.

However, it’s only human nature to apply the patina of nostalgia layer by layer over our actual memories of quotidian events what, for better or worse, alter the largely capricious trajectory of our lives. Bill and Sitting Bull, sadly, are now no more. The once pretty and sprightly Annie Oakley has never been quite the same since her train accident (Though her legendary aim, I am happy to report, is actually sharper than ever.). Frank Butler and Conan-Doyle are now stiffly-moving old men and Freud’s not doing so well himself these days.

Yet as parents persist in thinking upon their children at their most adorable and vulnerable, so I tend to imperfectly recall my old, dear friends at the height of their powers and during the first of several defining times of our mutual amities. I see them still, God save me, certain characteristics, phrases or looks etched in sharp relief as with a coroner’s scalpel or Jack the Ripper’s knife, a forgivably, I will hope, intrusive palimpsest superimposed over a factual history.

The fall of 1888 was such a time, one of palimpsests and faulty revisions of the hideous actual, an age of false narratives, illusions, delusions, lies, prejudices and subterfuge. And while Bill, Annie, Frank and I had at least one other subsequent adventure together what could be termed grand, our relationship in London during the last of the Whitechapel murders was taken at times beyond the breaking point just as surely as Saucy Jack had successfully tested 8000 London policemen.

Ours was an ad hoc investigatory body what would forever change law enforcement throughout the English-speaking world and perhaps beyond that. It was brought about because our unsuspecting, more innocent world had never seen anything like the Ripper killings, or, as Freud had written to Conan-Doyle, “the Caesarian birth of a new pathology setting latter-day psychology on its bloodied ear.”

Ergo, please permit me my persistent romantic recollections of a singular event of multiple murders what had taken place across five weeks in the autumn of ‘88. As long as my memories

endure within this failing brain, I will always think of Buffalo Bill, his gold and silver hair flying behind him as he barrels through London fog atop his steed Isham, Annie “Little Sure Shot” Oakley at one side, her infallible rifle tucked into her shoulder, Sitting Bull on the other side, bow and arrow at the ready, both taking aim at an elusive evil what even now, with the benefit of decades of hindsight, cannot be adequately explained or even defined.

However much you may choose to believe or disbelieve, this is how these great people detoured from their path to posterity to pursue and vanquish an evil rendering redundant the necessity of embellishment or dramatization.

Prologue(Hollywood, California, May 22, 1922)

The handsome, chiseled face of Tom Mix is ruined with makeup. Still in the prime of life, he already looks like a ghost, almost comically so. No one laughs at him, though, certainly not at the Tom Mix, since heavy makeup is essential in motion pictures today and likely will be forever. Everyone wears makeup, even Will Rogers, who claims to never use it.

The aging movie actor takes off his ten gallon white hat and sits across from me at the picnic table where the cast and crew eat and relax. He gently waves the trademark floppy hat at a real or imagined gnat and sits down with a satisfied sigh. Mix pulls a bandanna from somewhere and wipes his sweaty brow, taking some of the makeup off with the sweat. He’s on his third wife and the set of his 151st film.

“Whoo-ee! Sure is a scorcher today, ain’t it?”I silently nod in agreement. I’m filming the newest movie he’s in, Fight or Flight, and we’re

between scenes. I don’t speak to him but not because I’m intimidated by his presence. This is

already the 11th movie I’ve shot with Mix and I’ve worked with other actors like Chaplin, Clara Bow, Francis X. Bushman, Douglas Fairbanks and, yes, Will Rogers.

I hardly talk to Mix or anyone else because I keep to myself. Someone with a little college education once called me an “introvert” but I cannot help the way I am. I’m 55 years-old, set in my ways and I’m not much for blabbing on all day like some flapper on her fourth cup of coffee.

“Ya don’t talk much, do ya?”“No, guess not,” I murmur. I know I’m not the most popular guy but my reputation precedes me.

If I so choose, I’ll have a job in the moving picture business for life. I shyly look up at Mix again and relieved he’s not fixing me with that handsome stare what made him a millionaire and one of the world’s most famous men. I don’t like being studied as if I was some pickled oddity in a jar at a PT Barnum sideshow. The way I look at it, I’m supposed to study them. Behind the camera, I can see nuances in body language what would elude the naked eye of most people. Mix is curious about me but he looks as if he actually wants to talk and not gawk, talk to me, but doesn’t quite know how to start out.

“They say you’re the guy who invented moving pictures. That true, Scott?”Pardon my manners. I forgot to introduce myself. My name’s Scott Carson and, yes, I’m the guy

who actually created moving pictures in 1887, although the official credit for that goes to guys like Léon-Alexandre Cànular, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince and even Edison. Getting the record straight on that is one of the few things on which I’ll readily expound. So, kindly disregard those shitty little two-second films what were shot in Leeds, England in ’88. I pioneered moving pictures the year before and I’ll defend that distinction on my deathbed. More forcefully this time, I answer, “That’s correct. And I appreciate you getting that right.”

“Seems to me, if you’re the guy who invented motion pictures,” he continues, a little more emboldened by my relatively lengthy monologue. “you’d have your own studio right now, making real money. Like Edison.” Mr. Mix has many admirable qualities. Diplomacy is not among them, not that I can afford to talk.

Despite having pioneered the use of moving pictures with my own innovative techniques (and having done so less than three years removed from high school), I’m perfectly happy working as a cameraman for whatever studio will hire me. I’ve always been more fascinated by humanity from behind a camera than before it. Annie Oakley once said many years ago that it was a way for me “to observe life while establishing some remove from it, a part of the world yet apart from it.” I’m still not altogether sure if she meant that in strictly clinical terms or as a jibe but either way it suited me just fine because it still strikes me as the most dead-on appraisal of me that anyone’s ever ventured. Maybe Freud would’ve come up with something more spot-on had he been permitted to join us nearly 34 years ago instead of settling for the occasional dispatch by cable or letter. Perhaps Conan Doyle could have, too, if I’d interested him in the slightest. Sherlock Holmes’ creator made well-known his views on the emerging technology of the late 19th-early 20th century and they weren’t very flattering. I suspect his indifference or silent hostility toward me was a natural extension of his repugnance of the ceaseless march of technology of which I, despite my tender age, was at the vanguard.

“I just like being a cameraman,” I shrug, looking down at the rough wooden table. “I was never much concerned with making piles of money like some people I can think of.” I mean Edison and I’m sure Mix knows who I’m talking about. There’s nothing that man won’t commercialize if he thinks he can make a quick buck off it. Nearly 20 years ago, the son of a bitch once electrocuted some poor elephant named Topsy, for crissake, just to advertise how much more dangerous and unstable Tesla’s AC power was than his God Almighty DC power.

“You know, I heard me a rumor somewhere that you personally knew Buffalo Bill Cody. Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, too.” I sigh. A man could fall in the deepest hole on earth and pop out on the other side in China and his reputation, his past, will eventually catch up to him.

“Yeah, I was friends with Buffalo Bill. I was there with him when he died in Denver over five years ago. I’m still friends with Annie Oakley, although her husband Frank’s not too crazy about me. Sitting Bull’s another story.” I think some more, not to find the right words but to remember the Great Stoic Man, as I’d always privately called him, someone whose own stoicism surpassed my own. “I’d only spent a few months with him in London back in ’87 and ’88. He died a little over two years later when he went back to the Standing Rock Agency in the Dakotas.”

Mix nods. Many of us had heard the story of how the great Lakota Sioux chief had been shot in the head by Indian agents after it had been rumored he was going to run off with the dreaded Ghost Dancers. Yet even had I met him or just glimpsed him once, I never would have forgotten him for his calm and impenetrable dignity, a personal dignity what extended to his own people and all people in general. Those just meeting him thought he was aloof and distant but the fact is while the man made a lot of money charging those same people for his autograph, he died penniless because he gave away almost all of that money to those less fortunate than him.

I still miss Sitting Bull and always will.“I also heard another rumor…” Mix says and I know exactly where he’s headed. I already begin

nodding. “I heard another rumor that you, Buffalo Bill, Annie and a few other people actually hunted for Jack the Ripper back in ’88.”

Actually, we’d caught the Ripper (although some would say the Ripper had caught us) and there were several other people involved, including myself. I nod a few more times, avoiding Mix’s eyes.

“That’s right. There was Bill, Annie, her husband Frank Butler, Sitting Bull, Sigmund Freud and Arthur Conan Doyle.”

“Who?”“Arthur Conan Doyle. You know, Sherlock Holmes?”“Oh, yeah. Sherlock Holmes I heard of. Don’t know the other feller. Anyway, how come this

story exists only as a rumor? How come no one’s ever written a book about this l’il team of yours?”I rather resent the term “l’il team of yours” because #1 it seems to minimize the impact we’d

made on London society and perhaps on the world and #2, it wasn’t my team. Frederick Abberline, the English detective, may have officially been the leader of our ad hoc “l’il team” but it was Bill’s team. It was always Bill’s team. It couldn’t have possibly gone any other way. If Bill couldn’t be in charge he wanted no part of anything, regardless of the nobility of the motive.

“Well, did you ever get him?” Mix persists.Two things and two things only make me blab uncontrollably. My craft, cinematography, and

a singular investigation what changed not only law enforcement forever but the lives of each and every person who’d taken part in it. I look into Tom Mix’s eyes and under uncertain shade begin telling my story in the hot California sun.