My song “Burnout” (which most people just call “Martha”), tells the story of the night she burned down the barn of a man named Frank Clark who allegedly seduced two of her daughters, and fathered both of their first children before running away to Montana.

After my song had been floating around the internet for a while, I got some messages claiming that Frank Clark was a good man, and that none of these things were true. Good man or not, I wanted to find out how much of the story I could verify. It’s taken some time over the years, and I have to admit that most of the evidence I have has come from my dad’s even more extensive research. He emails me newspaper clippings or links to articles, websites, and other documents from time to time.

Of course, it’s hard to know the truth about stories from the old wild west when the law was always a step behind and record-keeping was often sparse, but here’s what I’m fairly certain of:

A man named Frank Clark was dating at least one of Martha’s daughters, got her pregnant, and fled town. Martha’s husband sued him for seducing his daughter, Rose Craw. Frank’s barn/ranch burned down in the middle of the night when no one was home. Two of Martha’s daughters’ first children were definitely conceived out of wedlock. One of those daughters named her son Frank. I’ll post the evidence here, and let my readers be the judge of what really happened, but in my opinion, you can only have so many suspicious coincidences before the little bits of evidence start to look a whole lot like proof. I think chances are pretty good that story went down just like Charles Leland Craw says it did (or at least pretty darn close).