Wild West December 2020

THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

BILLY THE KID the untold story of hispanO fighters who rode with him

H oklahoma SOONERS H L.A.’s DEADLIEST RIOT H THE FIRST WESTERN GUNFIGHTER?

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DECEMBER 2020 HISTORYNET.COM

10/16/20 2:00 PM

Live the stories.

Create your own.

You’ve heard the stories. Maybe you’ve seen the HBO series. But until you’ve been here, you haven’t experienced the legend of Deadwood. Create a story of your own in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where the west has been wild since 1876.

Deadwood.com // 1-800-344-8826 • TravelSouthDakota.com // 1-800-732-5682

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Live The History The Deadwood of 1876 isn’t enshrined in a single place or one museum — the entire town is a registered historic site. While the legends are everywhere, these storied spots should be at the top of your list.

HISTORIC MAIN STREET Deadwood’s lively main drag has everything it did during the gold rush: saloons, stagecoaches, table games and gunfights (though they’re now between re-enactors). Visit the brand-new Outlaw Square for family-friendly entertainment.

Mount Moriah Cemetery The gold rush of 1876 attracted some of the frontier’s most infamous figures. See some of the wildest — Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and Seth Bullock — at their final resting place, then head to the overlook for a birds-eye view of the town.

DAYS OF ‘76 MUSeUM What began as a depot for horse-drawn wagons, stagecoaches and carriages is now a state-of-the-art facility filled with dynamic exhibits. Dive into the story of the miners, madams and muleskinners who settled the Dakota Territory’s gold-flecked hills.

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HOMBRES VALIENTES IN THE LINCOLN COUNTY WAR

By James B. Mills Anglos weren’t the only ones to fight on both sides during the 1878 clash

52

64 SCOURGE OF

TROUBLE IN CHINATOWN

THE SOONERS

By Matthew Bernstein A schoolteacher turned sheriff stopped the killing in L.A.’s deadly 1871 race riot

By Ron J. Jackson Jr. Lawyer William Harn prosecuted early birds after the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush

58 FIRST WESTERN GUNFIGHTER?

By Mark T. Smokov Little-known Ferd Patterson may have been the Wild West’s first true shootist 2

WILD WEST

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D E PA R T M E N T S

4 EDITOR’S LETTER 8 LETTERS 10 ROUNDUP 16 INTERVIEW

By Candy Moulton Diana Kouris reveals the notorious ‘Queen Ann’ Bassett of Brown’s Park, Colo.

18 WESTERNERS

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‘I do not fear man or devil,’ boasted Colorado’s gun-toting gal ‘Captain Jack’

20 GUNFIGHTERS AND LAWMEN

By Don Chaput Did a U.S. marshal shoot down polygamist Ed Dalton simply for being Mormon?

22 PIONEERS AND SETTLERS

By Craig Springer Boomtown Kingston, New Mexico Territory, was never as big as advertised

24 WESTERN ENTERPRISE

By Jim Winnerman The Verkamp family had a rim-side store at the Grand Canyon for decades

26 ART OF THE WEST

38

THEY CALLED HIM BILITO

By James B. Mills Many Nuevoméxicano Hispanos found Billy the Kid to be fun-loving and brave

By Lazelle Jones Colorado artist Fred ‘Lightning Heart’ Haberlein rendered murals with spirit

28 INDIAN LIFE

By Kellie Wood A plot to spare Blackfeet leader Mountain Chief had unforeseen consequences

30 STYLE

Showcasing the great American West in art, film, fashion and more

76 COLLECTIONS

By Linda Wommack The Little Snake River Valley Museum showcases its secluded Wyoming home

78 GUNS OF THE WEST

By Jim Van Eldik Seven-shot Spencer carbines proved their worth in battle at Beecher Island

80 GHOST TOWNS

By Terry Halden The mines in Barker and Hughesville, Mont., saw plenty of ups and downs

82 REVIEWS

Historian James B. Mills recommends Billy the Kid–related books and videos.

Plus, reviews of two new books about the Kid and others about frontiersmen, Ann Bassett and the fighting in New Mexico during the Civil War

70 A VERY BRADY CHRISTMAS

By John H. Monnett Western author Cyrus Townsend Brady penned poignant holiday pioneer tales

88 GO WEST

‘Cowboy Kringle’ leaves his sleigh and rides a horse to New Braunfels, Texas

ON THE COVER In Andy Thomas’ 2013 oil on linen Billy the Kid and the Regulators the most infamous outlaw in New Mexico Territory history rides into action with gun-toting associates amid the 1878 Lincoln County War. Among the Regulators were such Hispano fighters as José Chávez y Chávez and Yginio Salazar. (© Andy Thomas)

DECEMBER 2020

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EDITOR’S LETTER

NEW MEXICO’S KID

The great racial divide in New Mexico Territory in the latter half of the 19th century was between Anglo newcomers and Hispanos (Southwesterners of Spanish descent). Anglos generally considered Hispanos inferior in mind, body, spirit, political thinking and social status, seldom treating them as true civil partners. Some Americans were skeptical of the Hispanos’ loyalties and thus considered New Mexico Territory a land apart, not deserving of statehood. “An unfortunate but instinctive distrust of New Mexico’s essentially foreign culture was the last and most durable brick added to the strong wall of opposition that prevented the territory from joining the Union until 1912,” wrote Robert W. Larson, author of New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 1846–1912. In part because Anglos migrated to New Mexico Territory in far smaller numbers than to states such as Texas and California, Hispano leaders continued to dominate territorial politics into the 20th century.

In 1870 Lincoln was a predominantly Hispano village of about 220 people living in 80-odd single-story adobe homes. But Texans were moving in, and in 1873 one of them exchanged shots with Deputy Sheriff Juan Martinez. The violence that followed sparked a race war known since as the Horrell War, pitting the namesake Texan brothers and outlaw friends against the Hispano community. The surviving “invaders” ultimately left the area, but other Anglos came to dominate Lincoln economically and politically, notably businessman Lawrence Murphy and rival Texas cattleman John Chisum. Hostilities and grudges between those two and their supporters led to the infamous Lincoln County War of 1878. The biggest name to come out of that bloody conflict was Billy the Kid. Despite the violence, Lincoln, according to the 1880 census, had 157 dwellings and 638 residents, still mostly Hispano.

Billy the Kid was an Anglo (probably born Henry McCarty in New York City in 1859), as were most of the other major figures in the Lincoln County War. Murphy and James Dolan, his partner in the criminal faction known as “the House,” were born in Ireland, competitor John Tunstall was born in England, and attorney Alexander McSween—who worked in turn for the House and then Tunstall—in Canada. But in this issue of Wild West Australian author James B. Mills reminds us in two feature articles that Hispanos played various roles in that brutal conflict, and that Billy the Kid (then calling himself William Bonney) endeared himself to much of the Hispano population, who called him Bilito or sometimes El Chivato (“the little goat” in the Nuevoméxicano dialect of Spanish).

During a five-day siege of the McSween house, the climactic event of the Lincoln County War, Hispanos fought on both sides. “While there is no shame in being overshadowed by the legend that became Billy the Kid, they were more than merely a collective backdrop,” writes Mills. “They were men, many with families, willing to risk their lives, some paying a bloody price for have been drawn into a predominantly Anglo conflict from which they ultimately gained nothing for their participation.”

José Chávez y Chávez and Yginio Salazar voluntarily took up arms and fought alongside Bilito as Regulators. Salazar remembered the Kid as the bravest man he ever knew, one who “did not know what fear meant.” He also noted that Billy “had the face of an angel, the soft voice of a woman and the mild blue eyes of a poet.” Others spoke of the Kid as being brave and loyal to his friends and kind and good to the poor. But as Mills notes, “Not all Hispanos in Lincoln County were fans of Billy and associates.” José Chávez y Baca, Manuel “Indian” Segovia and sharpshooter Lucio Montoya, for example, all took up arms for the House.

While the Lincoln County War remains one of the best-known events in Old West history, the involvement of Hispanos in that bloody conflict has been largely forgotten. Billy the Kid has a prominent place in the pantheon of legendary Wild West figures mainly because of his bloody exploits as a young, controversial Anglo outlaw. But according to Mills, he was more than that. Long after Bilito died young on July 14, 1881, Nuevoméxicanos remembered him as unos de los neustros (“one of ours”).

OTHERS SPOKE OF

THE KID AS BEING BRAVE AND LOYAL

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New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 1846­–1912 was published in 1968, the University of New Mexico Press releasing a second edition in 2013.

Author Robert W. Larson, a Denver native who got his doctorate at UNM, died at age 92 last May.

Wild West editor Gregory Lalire’s next historical novel, Man From Montana, comes out in April 2021. His earlier novels include 2019’s Our Frontier Pastime: 1804–1815 and 2014’s Captured: From the Frontier Diary of Infant Danny Duly.

His short story “Halfway to Hell” appears in the 2018 anthology The Trading Post and Other Frontier Stories.

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Fred Haberlein’s mural History of the San Luis Valley spans four silos in Antonito, Colo.

MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF

DECEMBER 2020 / VOL. 33, NO. 4

Visit our WEBSITE FOR ONLINE EXTRAS

GREGORY J. LALIRE EDITOR DAVID LAUTERBORN MANAGING EDITOR GREGORY F. MICHNO SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR JOHNNY D. BOGGS SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR JOHN KOSTER SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR JOHN BOESSENECKER SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR

WildWestMag.com Yes, Virginia City, there is a Santa Claus.

On Christmas Day 1863 in Virginia City, Nev., Mark Twain received “a ghastly, naked, porcelain doll baby.” In Virginia City, Montana Territory, “Christmas Day 1865 was a memorable day,” wrote Jesuit Father Francis X. Kuppens.

More About Fred Haberlein

“They felt my heart was like lightning, bright with love, ready to be shared wherever I went,” said the Colorado muralist about his relationship with the Pascau Yaqui people of Arizona and how he earned the nickname “Lightning Heart.”

Extended Interview With Diana Kouris

“Ann Bassett and I both received the providence of being the daughters of Brown’s Park cattle ranchers,” says the Colorado-based author of the award-winning biography Nighthawk Rising. “My family’s ranch house sat just across the Green River from the meadow on Willow Creek where Ann was born.

Although our ages were seven decades apart, we rode the same trails.”

Love history? Sign up for our free monthly e-newsletter at: historynet.com/newsletters Let’s Connect Like Wild West on Facebook Digital Subscription Wild West is available via Zinio and other digital subscription services

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LETTERS

Great article [“Dead Men for Breakfast,” by Ron Soodalter, August 2020] on wicked Wild West towns. One town that should be on any such list is Caldwell, Kan. (at right) In the five years of Caldwell’s cow town era (1879–84) 14 different men wore the town marshal badge. Before the end of that time half of these men would be dead. On Dec. 17, 1881, the Wichita Daily Times stated, “As we go to press, Hell is in session at Caldwell.” That pretty much sums it up.

Dennis Garstang Kansas City, Mo. I’m a native Kansan and lived for years in Chapman, where our major rival in high school was Abilene, 12 miles west. I’m taking up your offer to “pick my poison,” and the town I was a little surprised to find left out was Caldwell. Its reputation for wickedness is fairly well documented. It was the first town in which to get a drink after going through Indian Territory and the last place to get a drink before going through Indian Territory. Midnight and Noonday, by former lawman G.D. Freeman, tells about the wild days there and gives a good picture of how hard a job it was to be a lawman in those days.

Back to Abilene. Here is some trivia I picked up in the audio commentary for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West: The plans for the town being built when Claudia Cardinale gets off the train are a copy of the plans for the commercial district of Abilene. In seeing the skeletons of buildings, I recognized Abilene. It does not have one Main Street; the district is made of blocks.

Johnny Moore Sarasota, Fla. Look at Junction, Texas. It was so bad/corrupt that the visiting judge would not ride into town without law enforcement support. The Kendall County Historical Commission had an event in Center Point, and one speaker was a retired Texas Ranger. He confirmed Texas had a few towns run by corrupt law enforcement, and Junction was way up on that list. Our event was on the Texas Rangers, and Center Point has the honor of having the most Rangers buried in its cemetery.

Graham Littrell Boerne, Texas 8

WILD WEST

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ON REVIEW Jon Guttman makes two errors in his review of the book Arizona’s Deadliest Gunfight, by Heidi J. Osselaer, in the August 2019 issue . He states that Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon was never filmed as an American Western. That is not true.

In 1964 Martin Ritt directed The Outrage, starring Paul Newman, Claire Bloom, Laurence Harvey, Edward G. Robinson and a pre­– Star Trek William Shatner. Guttman also states the gunfight took place on the eve of America’s entry into World War I. The gunfight in question took place on Feb. 10, 1918. We declared war on April 6, 1917, and were deeply involved in combat by the time of the gunfight in Arizona.

Phillipp Phelan Muth Dogtown, Pa.

FRED DODGE Trying to find info on Fred J. Dodge, author of Under Cover for Wells Fargo. Great book, but we, the Kendall County Historical Commission, cannot document enough to get a historical marker for Dodge and his story. He retired to Boerne, Texas, and had a ranch in Kendall County. He is buried in the Boerne Cemetery, but we need more verified history. He is mentioned in J.R. Sanders’ “Train Robbery at Mound Valley,” in the April 2020 Wild West.

Graham Littrell Boerne, Texas Historian Casey Tefertiller responds: Fred Dodge is one of the most debated people of the Old West. When did he become a Wells Fargo agent? I have debated this at length with my friend John Boessenecker, who believes Dodge greatly inflated his memoirs. I tend to think Dodge was more accurate, within the range of normal memory inflation and loss. The big question is whether Dodge was affiliated with Wells Fargo during his time in Tombstone.

He was, of course, hired as a WF investigator shortly after. To me it seems he would not have gotten the WF job if he had not been affiliated with WF in Tombstone. In addition, he wrote letters to Wyatt Earp and John Clum, telling them he had been undercover for WF in Tombstone. It would be one thing to enhance a memoir and another to lie to your old friends—who seemed to already know of his role. There are no known real records to confirm Dodge’s role for WF. They could well have been lost in the 1906 fire in San Francisco.

However, there are a couple of brief newspaper mentions tying Dodge to WF. Dodge later swore on a statement he had been affiliated with WF for years, dating back to Tombstone.

BAT’S SALARY In Michael F. Blake’s “Roosevelt’s Posse” article, in the October 2019 issue, he states Bat Masterson was appointed deputy U.S. marshal for the Southern District of New York with a salary “not to exceed $2,000 per annum.” A couple of paragraphs below it states, “Regarding his duties as a deputy marshal, it seems all Masterson did was show up and collect his $2,000 monthly paycheck.”

Can you clarify what Masterson’s annual salary was?

David Paul Pineville, La. Editor responds: Good catch—our oversight. His annual (not monthly) salary was $2,000.

Send letters by email to wildwest@historynet.com. Include your name and hometown.

TOP LEFT: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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10/1/20 2:14 PM

ROUNDUP

TOP 10 REASONS BILLY WAS MORE ‘OUTLAW’ THAN JESSE The Name: Sure, “Jesse James” rolls off the tongue pretty easily, but it doesn’t have the same level of panache or commercial appeal as “Billy the Kid.”

2

The Jailbreak: It wasn’t Jesse who made the most dramatic and memorable jailbreak in American frontier history, on April 28, 1881, in Lincoln, New Mexico Territory.

Top: James Coburn (right) and Kris Kristofferson play the title characters in Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Kristofferson was 36 at the time of the filming. Above: Here’s the real Billy the Kid, who died in his early 20s.

3

Billy Embraced Another Culture: Bilingual (possibly trilingual) Billy’s ability to immerse himself in Hispano culture demonstrates a level of adaptation Jesse lacked.

4

The Prince of Box Office Pistoleers: Jesse has featured in his fair share of films, but Billy is ahead in the count.

5

He Didn’t Marry His First Cousin: Jesse did, and marrying one’s first cousin is illegal in present-day Missouri and 23 other states.

Billy had plenty of girlfriends, but none were blood relatives.

6 10 WILD WEST

Bad Company: Billy was no saint and sometimes kept rough company, but he didn’t ride

with the abhorrent likes of William Quantrill or “Bloody Bill” Anderson.

7

Rock ’n’ Roll Star: Billy remains the only frontier figure to have been the subject of a hit rock song—Jon Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory.” Where is Jesse’s foot-stomping, face-melting anthem?

8

Lived Fast, Died Young: Billy’s early death broke the hearts of many señoritas and friends, but it assured him a place in the pantheon of youthful rebels and cultural icons who left us too soon, such as James Dean, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain.

9

The Romeo and Juliet Factor: That Billy appears to have been killed at least in part due his reluctance to leave behind querida Paulita Maxwell just adds a little Shakespearean romance to his story, doesn’t it?

10

Killed by a Real Gunman: However one feels about Pat Garrett, he was a legitimate gunman and effective sheriff. Can the same be said for that dirty little coward Robert Ford?

—James B. Mills

TOP: TCD/PROD.DB/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; OPPOSITE MIDDLE: COURTESY BOB GAMBOA

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ROUNDUP

GUNSMOKE AT 65 The classic Western TV series Gunsmoke debuted on CBS on Sept. 10, 1955, and ran until March 31, 1975, airing 635 episodes in all, though some were adapted from the CBS radio series of the same name that first aired on April 26, 1952, and ended on June 18, 1961. Director Norman Macdonnell and writer John Meston created Gunsmoke. The main character on radio and TV is the fictional Marshal Matt Dillon of Dodge City, which in real life was a thriving Kansas cow town in the 1870s. William Conrad (1920–94) voiced Dillon on the radio, while James Arness (1923–2011) took the reins on-screen. To mark the 65 years of televised Gunsmoke, which remains popular in reruns, Book Street Press has re-released the 2005 book Gunsmoke: An American Institution, Celebrating 50 Years of Television’s Best Western, by Ben Costello. Included are detailed accounts of every episode during the 20-year run, biographical information, interviews with some of the actors and 16 pages of color images. The preface was written by Jon Voight, who as a young actor appeared in several episodes.

LAWMEN MUSEUM CLOSES The Historical Museum of Lawmen, which shared space with the Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Department on Motel Boulevard in Las Cruces, N.M., has closed for keeps, though not due to the coronavirus shutdown. Lieutenant West Gilbreath had founded the museum 30 years ago, but he retired from the department in 2001, and visitor numbers had dropped in recent years. The collection included artifacts tied to onetime Sheriff Pat Garrett—who killed Billy the Kid and is buried in the city’s Masonic Cemetery—as well as photos of past sheriffs, service badges and vintage weapons. The museum also featured a memorial to fallen officers. Gilbreath retrieved many items he’d donated, while county documents of historical value went to the New Mexico State University’s library archives and special collections. A horse-drawn hearse that most likely carried Garrett’s body to the cemetery in 1908 (see photo) was given to the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum in Las Cruces.

TOP: TCD/PROD.DB/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; OPPOSITE MIDDLE: COURTESY BOB GAMBOA

western killers As COVID-19 circled the globe in 2020, the pandemic invited comparisons to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed upward of 17 million people worldwide. That got us thinking about epidemics/ pandemics that swept the 19th-century United States, some of which disproportionately afflicted Westerners. In 1837, for example, a smallpox epidemic ravaged the Great Plains, killing more than 17,000 people. Yellow fever epidemics hit New Orleans and elsewhere in the South in 1841, ’47, ’53 and ’78. Amid the Civil War a typhoid fever epidemic killed some 80,000 Americans. In the 1870s a global cholera pandemic spread to Dakota Territory, Utah Territory, Texas and more than a dozen other states and territories. An 1875 report issued by Dr. John M. Woodworth, supervising surgeon of the U.S. (Merchant) Marine Hospital Service, noted more than 7,000 cases of cholera and hundreds of deaths. Woodworth emphasized the importance of hygiene in stopping the spread, stating, “What vaccination is to smallpox, disinfection is to cholera.” Cholera is very rare in the United States today, as modern water and sewage treatment systems have eliminated its water-related spread. As for smallpox, thanks to a worldwide immunization program, the World Health Assembly declared the global eradication of the disease in 1980.

WEST WORDS

‘‘This is not and never shall be a government either of a plutocracy or of a mob. It is, it has been and it will be a government of the people; including alike the people of great wealth and of moderate wealth, the people who employ others, the people who are employed, the wage-worker, the lawyer, the mechanic, the banker, the farmer, including them all, protecting each and every one if he acts decently and squarely, and discriminating against any one of them, no matter from what class he comes, if he does not act squarely and fairly, if he does not obey the law’ —President Theodore Roosevelt said this during a speech in Spokane, Wash., on May 26, 1903, while on his “Great Loop Tour” of the American West.

DECEMBER 2020

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ROUNDUP

SEE YOU LATER...

FRONTIER FIRES ▲

Wildfires raged along the West Coast in the summer of 2020, a particularly devastating blaze in small-town Detroit, Ore., razing most of its businesses and public buildings, including City Hall.

Destructive blazes are nothing new, of course.

Fire was a constant threat in the frontier West, where most buildings were made of wood. An 1851 fire in San Francisco burned down 2,000 buildings (three-quarters of the boomtown), and that city again suffered severely from four days of fires after the April 18, 1906, earthquake.

Tombstone, Arizona Territory, recorded a number of major blazes. The first, on June 22, 1881 (four months before the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral), consumed four city blocks and destroyed more than

60 businesses. Everything was rebuilt in six months, only to be swept by a worse fire on May 26, 1882 (seven months after the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday faced down the Clantons and McLaurys), that leveled most of the business district. The O.K. Corral burned to the ground, though its sign survived (see photo). Deadwood, Dakota Territory (the illegally settled town in which a gunman killed Wild Bill Hickok on Aug. 2, 1876), rose from the ashes of a major fire on Sept. 26, 1879, that destroyed some 300 buildings.

Outside of Western towns, travelers and homesteaders were plagued by windswept prairie fires, many sparked by lightning, some set by Indians and others started by the settlers themselves.

One of Josiah Gregg’s 1830s merchant cara-

vans on the Santa Fe Trail was chased by a prairie fire. “These conflagrations,” he wrote, “are enough to inspire terror and daunt the stoutest heart.” In the summer of 1910 the largest wildfire in U.S. history scorched more than 3 million acres of virgin forest, mainly in northern Idaho and western Montana (see “The Big Burn,” by Chuck Lyons, in the June 2020 Wild West and on Historynet. com). That and subsequent fires finally prompted the U.S. Forest Service to better manage woodlands by battling certain fires and allowing others to burn. “Fire is neither good nor bad,” said Jack Ward Thomas, chief of the Forest Service from 1993 to ’96. “It just is.” When lives and property are lost, however, that point is lost on those affected, whether in the Old West or today.

George Robert Snead

Andrew “A.J.” Fenady

Longtime El Paso artist Bob Snead, 84, who specialized in painting buffalo soldiers, died on July 11, 2020, in Prosper, Texas.

A highly decorated combat aviator who served four tours of duty in Vietnam, Snead created a 167-piece art collection entitled “100 Years Ago: The Buffalo Soldier Revisited,” which toured worldwide. He is an inductee in both the El Paso Artists’ Hall of Fame and El Paso Aviation Association Hall of Fame. In 1983 Snead debuted his one-man, one-act play “Held in Trust: The Life and Times of Lt. Henry Ossian Flipper,” which relates the story of the first black graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Screenwriter, producer and novelist A.J. Fenady, 91, died in Los Angeles on April 16, 2020. A native of Toledo, Ohio, Fenady ventured to Hollywood in the 1950s. He and actor Nick Adams wrote and produced the TV series The Rebel (1959– 61), which follows aspiring writer Johnny Yuma on his post—Civil War adventures. Fenady then produced two other series—Branded (1965–66), starring Chuck Connors as a disgraced cavalry officer, and the shortlived Hondo (1967), based on the 1953 John Wayne film of the same name. Fenady also wrote novels, and in 2006 Western Writers of America honored Fenady with its Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to Western literature.

FA M O U S L A S T WO RD S

Wilford Brimley

—Convicted murderer Bill Longley said these words on the gallows in Giddings, Texas, on Oct. 11, 1878, after executioner Lee County Sheriff James Madison Brown asked, “Where’s my hatchet?” Brown wanted the hatchet to cut the rope holding the trapdoor. And, yes, Brown did cut the rope, and Longley did plummet through the opening. His feet hit the ground, though, so the lawman had to haul him back up till dangling, and not until 11 minutes later was Longley pronounced dead.

12 WILD WEST

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ROUNDUP

Events of the west Note: Due to the coronavirus shutdown, some events may be canceled or delayed

Santa Fe 200th ▲ The bicentennial of the founding of the Santa Fe Trail falls in 2021, as does the 35th anniversary of the Santa Fe Trail Association (SFTA).

The Bent’s Fort Chapter of the SFTA will host the Santa Fe Trail Bicentennial Symposium at sites in and around La Junta, Colo., and nearby Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site Sept. 22–26, 2021.

For more information visit 2021sfts.com and santafetrail.org.

American Cowboy t

In “West: The American Cowboy” French photographer Anouk Masson Krantz revisits the ranching and small rodeo communities in the heartland of the

American West. The traveling exhibition will be at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City Oct. 17–Dec. 13. (Her book of the same title was released last year.)

Call 405-478-2250 or visit nationalcowboymuseum.org.

Cowboy Gallery The renovated Cowboy Gallery at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles celebrates the evolution of the cowboy from the open range era with new videos, infographics and handson activity stations.

Call 323-667-2000 or visit theautry.org.

WWHA Convention

The annual Wild West History Association Roundup (canceled in 2020 due to COVID-19) will convene in Fort Smith, Ark., July 14–17, 2021. For details visit wildwesthistory. org, also the place to join the WWHA.

WWA Convention

The annual Western Writers of America convention (canceled

in 2020 due to the pandemic) will convene June 16–19, 2021, in Loveland, Colo. Boasting more than 700 members worldwide, WWA is open to any published writer whose subject matter deals with the American West. Visit westernwriters.org.

Historical Tours

Indian wars expert Neil Mangum will lead two planned Woodbury Historical Tours out West next year.

To mark the bicentennial of the Santa Fe Trail, the “Santa Fe Trail (200 Years)” tour will roam from Kansas City to Santa Fe May 22–31, 2021.

The “Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War” tour will loop through that New Mexico battleground Aug. 4–8, 2021.

For more information about these and other tours visit whtours.org.

Palace View

The long-term exhibit “Palace Seen and Unseen,” which relates the 400-year history of Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors, opened April 19 at the New Mexico History Museum. The museum’s Santa Fe campus includes the Palace of the Governors, the

Fray Angélico Chávez History Library and the Pete V. Domenici Building. The exhibit examines the adobe building itself (designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960) and showcases related documents, photos, maps and excavated objects.

The Spanish built the Palace of the Governors in the early 17th century. Call 505-476-5200 or visit nmhistorymuseum.org.

Suffrage ▲

This year marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted American women the right to vote. The exhibit “Blazing a Trail,” at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City Nov. 21, 2020–May 16, 2021, explores why women in Western states realized suffrage years before the rest of the nation.

Call 405-478-2250 or

visit nationalcowboymuseum.org. An exhibit running through January 2021 at the Mormon Church History Museum at Temple Square in Salt Lake City celebrates 150 years since Utah women became the first in the nation to vote under an equal suffrage law. Call 801-240-3310 or visit templesquare.com.

Old West Show

The 31st annual Mesa Old West Show & Auction, presented by Brian Lebel’s Old West Events, comes to Mesa, Ariz., in the new year—the auction Jan. 23 at the Delta Phoenix Marriott Mesa, and the show (with more than 180 vendors of Western art, antiques, collectibles, cowboy gear, antique firearms, books, etc.)

Jan. 23–24 at the Mesa Convention Center. Featured is the Montana history collection of Jerry “Buzz” Nyhart, including items related to John X. Beidler and other controversial Montana vigilantes. Also look for authentic costumes and accessories worn by film legend John Wayne. Visit oldwestevents.com.

Send upcoming event notices by email to wildwest@historynet.com. Submit at least four months in advance.

14 WILD WEST

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INTERVIEW

SHE KNOWS BROWN’S PARK DIANA KOURIS GREW UP IN THE COLORADO MOUNTAIN VALLEY AND HAS WRITTEN A BIOGRAPHY OF LOCAL RANCHER ‘QUEEN ANN’ BASSETT

BY CANDY MOULTON

What inspired you to write about Bassett?

I knew that so much written about Bassett was not based in fact and didn’t resemble the “Queen Ann” who became my grandmother’s friend when both women were in their 20s. The decades of parodies of Ann did not mesh with the complex and gracious cattlewoman my elderly uncle said he loved and admired from the time he first saw her when he was 5 years old. I stood in front of my writing desk one morning, looking at historical photos of Brown’s Park, when from another place and time Bassett’s whispers compelled me to write her story. I deeply recognized the moment had come for me to devote all I could muster into seeking her truth and writing it as a work of merit.

What makes your book unique?

I believe there is a factual history to be uncovered and told as well as an emotional history to be brought forward. I had a unique perspective while writing this book, not only because of a family connection with Bassett but also because I grew up absorbing the enchantment of her valley, Brown’s Park. I was from birth enfolded in the valley’s history as it encircled me and my cattle ranching family. I therefore wrote many details from personal knowledge. This book is filled with rare photographs and a trove of new material and unique details, such as how she came to be called “Queen Ann.” It lays out the truth of the men Isam Dart and Mat Rash, long maligned and written about as common cattle rustlers. Another unique element is the revelation 16 WILD WEST

of Bassett’s never before published handwritten menu and full description of the 1893 “Wild Bunch Dinner” (aka “Outlaw Thanksgiving”).

I also discovered new findings to clear up and thoroughly explain events surrounding some of the incidents found in Ann’s published memoir, including the killing of Jack Rollas and the Ute skirmish that caused Ann and her best friend to make a frightful ride for home in the dark.

How is she tied to the Wild Bunch?

A few of the young men destined be part of the gang that came to be known as the Wild Bunch were well known to Ann and the Brown’s Park community. When they were teenagers and before they were wanted by the law, the young men worked in Brown’s Park as ranch hands. Elzy Lay was hired on by Ann’s parents and lived at the Bassett Ranch for about a year. Butch Cassidy worked for the Brown’s Park Livestock Ranch (the ranch where I grew up). The young men were included in social events, and all the young people became friends. According to Ann, the Sundance Kid was present along with Cassidy and Lay during the Thanksgiving celebration she called the “Wild Bunch Dinner.” As time passed, both Cassidy and his partner and close friend Lay occasionally stopped by the Bassett Ranch to sit with the family for a meal and have a brief visit. Although their friendship with Ann remained, neither Ann nor her older sister, Josie, were ever romantically involved with them and played no part in Butch and Elzy’s infamous activities and life of crime.

Her connections to Dart, Rash and Tom Horn?

Throughout Ann’s journey to adulthood her valley became a magnet to men of all sorts. Most held a gut desire to make a living out of cowboying and ranching. Foremost in that group was Rash, with whom Ann fell in love, and also Dart, a tall and talented top hand cowboy. Both men were ever loyal to the Bassett family and were highly regarded in Brown’s Park. However, they rode in a tumultuous time when complex truths and falsehoods blended to form a toxic brew on the rangeland and in the courts, pitting cattle barons against small ranchers. By 1900 Rash was Bassett’s fiancé, president of the Brown’s Park Cattle Association and the most prominent rancher in the valley. Nonetheless, both he and Dart were riding along the edge of their lives. The insidious tendrils of a range war had delivered into their midst the outlaw hunter, stock detective and hired assassin Tom Horn. Horn infiltrated Bassett’s world, killed Mat and Isam, and shattered the young cowgirl’s life.

DIANA KOURIS

An old adage counsels, “Write what you know.”

Well, Diana Kouris certainly knows the history of Brown’s Park, Colorado, and she relates an intimate story of the valley in Nighthawk Rising: A Biography of Accused Cattle Rustler Queen Ann Bassett of Brown’s Park. Bassett and Kouris’ grandmother were friends, and Kouris grew up on a ranch adjoining the Bassett ranch. She rode the same trails Ann had decades earlier, and she listened to the stories passed down

by Brown’s Park families. Moving beyond the legend, Kouris painstakingly dug into the archives, gleaned details long buried within existing documents and unearthed new sources. Nighthawk Rising reads like a novel, but every story in it is verifiable history. Western Writers of America honored Kouris with its 2020 Spur Award for best biography.

The High Plains Book Awards and Colorado Book Awards have also recognized the book. Kouris also wrote The Romantic and Notorious History of Brown’s Park and Riding the Edge of an Era: Growing Up Cowboy on the Outlaw Trail.

DECEMBER 2020

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WESTERNERS

Ellen (née Elliott) Jack was born in England on Nov. 4, 1842, and arrived in the United States with her American husband, mariner Charles E. Jack, on the eve of the Civil War. Charles later joined the Navy, served as a ship’s master under Rear Adm. David Farragut and survived the war, only to die of heart failure in 1872.

Three of their four children died of scarlet fever. After putting her surviving daughter in the care of her sisterin-law, the widow moved to Colorado, where she took to calling herself “Mrs. Captain Jack,” then just “Captain Jack.”

She ran a boardinghouse in Gunnison for a time but was soon wandering about the state, mining for gold, silver and coal while, as she told the tale, toting a gun and battling bandits.

She did well enough to buy a partner’s stake in Gilpin County’s profitable Black Queen silver mine and later ran another boardinghouse in Cripple Creek. In 1903 Captain Jack settled in Colorado Springs, living on High Drive with pet burros, parrots, cats and other critters. There she rented cabins to tourists, operated a curio shop and led burro rides and tours. She enjoyed spinning tales and posing for photos, such as this one on a turn-of-the-century postcard. In 1910 Captain Jack published her fanciful autobiography, The Fate of a Fairy.

“I do not fear man or devil,” she wrote of the frontier life. “It is not in my blood, and if they can shoot any straighter or quicker than I, let them try it, for a .44 equalizes frail women and brute men, and all women ought to be able to protect themselves against such ruffians.” Succumbing to heart failure like her husband, Captain Jack died at age 78 on June 16, 1921, and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, facing her old home on High Drive.

18 WILD WEST

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GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

These Mormon prisoners were not exactly hardened criminals, having been convicted under federal anti-polygamy statutes. Ed Dalton never made it to prison, as he was shot down while fleeing to avoid capture.

HANDS UP! DON’T SHOOT! DID DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL WILLIAM THOMPSON JR. GUN DOWN A UTAH TERRITORY FUGITIVE BECAUSE HE WAS A MORMON?

BY DON CHAPUT

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UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

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belief superior to the law of the land,” wrote Chief tatehood petitions in 1849, 1856, 1862, Justice Morrison Waite.

1872 and 1882 hadn’t led to the deIn 1884 federal authorities arrested Dalton sired result in Utah Territory, mainly for having violated the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy because of hostility in Washington, Act, passed by Congress two years earlier. He D.C., toward the Mormon Church and its pracwas an acknowledged “cohab,” the term given tice of polygamy. Congress had created Utah to Mormons who either had more than one Territory in 1850, three years after Brigham wife or lived with several women. To avoid Young’s initial emigrant company arrived in jail time, he fled to Arizona Territory, where the Great Salt Lake Valley, but becoming a state for two years he worked on a cattle farm in the was a far greater challenge. There remained a EDWARD DALTON Gila Valley. In December 1886 the homesick fugicultural divide between resident members of the tive returned to Parowan, Utah Territory, to visit his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and nonmother and other relatives. Under the law of the land Dalton Mormons. In mid-December 1886, when Deputy U.S. Marshal William Thompson shot and killed a fugitive named Ed Dalton, was a criminal at large.

William Thompson Jr. was born in England in 1841 and immisome even questioned whether the lawman had pulled the trigger grated with his family to the United States with a company of simply because Dalton was a Mormon.

Edward Meeks Dalton, of English heritage, lived and farmed Mormons in 1853. His parents and other family members rewith his family in Iron County, in southwest Utah Territory. Like mained lifelong Mormons, but William gradually extracted himmost of his neighbors, he believed in and practiced polygamy, self from the church. During the 1865–72 Black Hawk War in in violation of federal law. In 1879 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled southern Utah Territory he and a brother served in a cavalry unit against a Utah resident who called plural marriage his religious of the Utah Territorial Militia (aka Nauvoo Legion). He later duty and claimed protection under the First Amendment. “To worked as a bailiff and special deputy for the district court in permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious Beaver, and in 1885 he was appointed a deputy U.S. marshal.

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UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN Thompson would spend more than 50 years in Beaver County, mostly farming and mining.

In mid-December 1886 Deputy Thompson followed a lead to Parowan and the home of Daniel Page, a fellow lapsed Mormon.

Though Thompson had a description of Dalton, he’d brought along deputized bailiff William O. Orton, as Orton could identify the fugitive from his prior arrest. It was known Dalton had a good horse and was armed. Orton was carrying a pistol, but Thompson was unarmed. The bailiff proposed borrowing a rifle from his son-in-law John J. Wilcock, who happened to be a neighbor of Page. At Thompson’s request, Page crossed the street to retrieve Wilcock’s .38-caliber Marlin.

After breakfast on December 15 Page’s son spotted two riders on bareback horses driving a herd of cattle down the road to winter pasture. Orton identified the older of the pair as Ed Dalton; the other rider was Dalton’s 14-year-old son, Robert.

Thompson loaded the Marlin and strolled out to the roadside fence for a closer look. “Ed Dalton, halt!” the lawman called out.

Dalton reined in, steered his son’s mount off to the right and spurred his horse into a loping gait. Thompson yelled a few more times before raising his rifle. When Dalton was about 16 yards away, the Marlin, known to have a hair trigger, went off.

As Dalton dropped to the ground, Thompson, according to his account of the shooting, called out to Orton: “Bill, I’ve shot him.

I did not intend to. I meant to shoot over him.”

Thompson and the others carried the unconscious Dalton into the house. Before long the wounded man opened his eyes and said, “Go away, you goddamned son of a bitch, or I’ll kill you!”

Dr. Frederick King arrived, but there was little he could do.

The bullet had perforated Dalton’s left kidney and shattered his spine. He died about 45 minutes after being shot.

Thompson went to the telegraph office to report what had happened. By the time he returned to the Page house, Iron County Sheriff Hugh Adams had arrived. The sheriff arrested Thompson and Orton and escorted them to a justice of the peace, where they waived examination. That evening Adams took the pair to Beaver, where a prosecuting attorney questioned them.

There were a few witnesses to the shooting, and some details seemed contradictory. Did Thompson fire a rifle or a pistol?

Did he fire when Dalton was 16 or 25 yards away? Did he yell out for Dalton to halt one time or four times? Those were among the questions raised. The main points, though, were not controversial. A lawman had spotted a fugitive and sought to apprehend him. The fugitive had tried to flee, and the lawman had fired, killing him.

The Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act listed plural marriage as a felony and unlawful cohabitation as a misdemeanor. Under Utah territorial statutes an officer was justified in shooting a fugitive in flight seeking to avoid arrest. Regardless, Frank H. Dyer, the U.S. Marshal for Utah Territory, immediately revoked Thompson’s commission as a deputy. The Deseret News made much of that, claiming even Thompson’s superior knew he was in the wrong. Yet the Mormon press was in for disappointment a few weeks later.

On Jan. 6, 1887, Thompson stood trial for manslaughter at the district court in Beaver. He testified in his own defense. Witnesses

from Parowan also testified. Leading the prosecution was U.S. Attorney Charles S. Varian, assisted by Charles W. Zane, son of Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles S. Zane. The jury members were non-Mormons. (Given their beliefs in polygamy and cohabitation, Mormons were ineligible for jury service.) The atmosphere in the courtroom was decidedly anti-Mormon. After a two-day trial Thompson was found not guilty and released.

The details of the killing were not in dispute, but public debate swirled over whether Thompson had been justified in taking such drastic action. The Deseret News protested the verdict, referring to Thompson as “a wretch to whom it would be a compliment to designate as a dog…wholly unfit to be associated with honest men.” On January 19 the paper editorialized that Varian, “supposed to represent the prosecution, took the floor and made an argument for the defense.” The News was so vicious when writing about Thompson that the acquitted man brought a $25,000 libel suit against it. The newspaper, in seeming acknowledgment of having gone too far, settled out of court.

The Mormon Church hierarchy protested the court’s decision to the U.S. Department of Justice and exerted pressure on senators and representatives, but nothing came of it. Prominent Utah Supreme Court Justice Robert N. Baskin later wrote, “The startling and strange conception that the government of the United States was powerless to make arrests through its officers of persons charged with violations of its laws by using force if necessary received no recognition at Washington.” Baskin, in his Reminiscences of Early Utah, seemed to stretch law and history quite a bit, suggesting that at least in Utah Territory the distinctions between felony and misdemeanor were blurred.

Mormonism was under considerable federal pressure, and the results of the trial widened the gulf between Mormons and non-Mormons in the territory. The former saw every reason for Thompson to be quivering in his boots in Beaver. One account mentioned him “living in fear of being killed by someone from Parowan for what he had done.”

In fact, after a jury of his peers acquitted Thompson, U.S. Marshal Dyer reappointed him a deputy. Thompson served in that capacity for several years and found success in other areas.

He operated a substantial farm near Beaver and became a leading truck gardener. He also owned and operated several gold mines near Beaver and was considered an authority on assaying.

In 1890 Mormon Church President Wilford Woodruff disavowed the practice of plural marriage, and six years later, on Jan. 4, 1896, President Grover Cleveland proclaimed Utah the 45th state. From 1892 until his death at age 71 in Beaver on May 22, 1912, Thompson served as chief bailiff of the district court in Beaver. His home in that Utah community is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

To this day Thompson gets bad press in Mormon accounts, while Ed Dalton has been referred to “the only Mormon polygamist killed for being one.” The latter’s headstone in Parowan City Cemetery reads, He was shot and killed...in cold blood by a deputy United States marshal while under indictment for a misdemeanor under the Edmund’s Anti-Polygamy Law. In truth Dalton was killed by an officer of the law, possibly by accident, because he was a fugitive in flight.

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PIONEERS & SETTLERS

Townsfolk pose along the main street of Kingston around 1890, when the population was 1,449 —a long way from the alleged 7,000 residents in later accounts.

ALWAYS BIGGER IN THE RETELLING

K

ingston, New Mexico (population 32, according to the 2010 U.S. census), is a shadow of its former self. Once upon a time it was a busy place, an 1880s boomtown that went bust little more than a decade later. The town and its adjacent mines peaked around 1890 with perhaps 1,500 residents. But Kingston’s population grew postmortem. That’s how legends are made. It’s also the difference between heritage and history—the latter is what happened; the former is how we wish it to be. That Kingston was once the largest town in New Mexico Territory, boasting some 7,000 residents, has become our heritage—with no basis in truth.

Kingston traces its origin to the discovery of silver. In 1882 prospectors from nearby Hillsboro and Georgetown scratched dirt here and hit the jackpot. That October civil engineer James Porter Parker—known primarily for having been George Armstrong Custer’s roommate at West Point—platted the townsite.

Parker, whose parents hailed from Mississippi, had parted with Custer and West Point at the onset of the Civil War and served in the Confederate army. After the war he’d wended his way west, 22 WILD WEST

landing in Sierra County, New Mexico Territory, where he was later elected the first county assessor.

On Nov. 18, 1882, a year after making its own headlines, the Tombstone (Arizona) Weekly Epitaph reported on rapidly growing Kingston, noting 50 frame buildings, 20 log and adobe houses and nearly 100 tents. The Mines of Kingston, a prospectus published in March 1883 by unabashed capitalist Charles W. Greene, editor and publisher of the Kingston Tribune, documented a great deal of activity. “People came pouring in till not less, probably, than 3,000 had come to view the promised land,” he wrote. Far fewer of the “viewers” stayed. Greene himself pulled up stakes by year’s end, moving his newspaper to Deming. The 1885 territorial census tallied 329 people in Kingston and the nearby Danville camp combined. In a lament published in the Oct. 7, 1886, edition of the St. Johns (Arizona) Herald a Kingston resident corroborated a population numbering in the hundreds: “We blush to admit that Kingston, a town of several hundred inhabitants, has no school, no church, no young men’s Christian association and no public institutions of any kind in which we can place our children for moral and intellectual training.”

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BLACK RANGE MUSEUM, HILLSBORO, N.M. (3)

THE EPHEMERAL SILVER CAMP OF KINGSTON WAS NEVER THE ‘LARGEST TOWN IN NEW MEXICO TERRITORY’

BY CRAIG SPRINGER

BLACK RANGE MUSEUM, HILLSBORO, N.M. (3)

PIONEERS & SETTLERS

As the population of Sierra County ticked upward, crusading Methodists sought to rectify the shocking dearth of morals. The Gospel in All Lands, published in 1888 by the Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society, cited ongoing efforts to build a church to serve Kingston’s 1,000 residents. The need was apparently great. “If I could take the reader along the main street on our way to a schoolhouse for evening service,” wrote the Rev. Samuel W. Thornton, “he would see the typical mining town in all its wickedness.”

Two years later the 1890 U.S. census counted 1,449 residents in Kingston.

That year’s census recorded 3,785 peoThe town platted in 1882 by James Porter ple living in Albuquerque, more than Parker certainly boomed, thanks to its mines, Sierra County’s total population. One but it never became the territory’s largest. might wonder whether minorities were undercounted, which is to ask, in effect, annual a circulation of 500, while Kingston’s popudid the Kingston enumerator overlook lation had dropped to 633.

5,551 minorities while counting only Why, then, do countless travel guides and state the 1,449 white folks? Not likely. First, tourism brochures, and even books and academic the 1890 census parsed minorities down papers by respected historians, state with conviction to the county level; for example, 37 Chithat Kingston once exceeded 7,000 residents and nese lived in Sierra County. Moreover, was the largest town in New Mexico Territory? Forest JAMES PORTER PARKER minorities were counted in Kingston Service information signs at Emory Pass, 8 miles in 1885 and recorded in other censuses west of town, repeat the myth. For comparison’s before and after 1890. sake, present-day Truth or Consequences has 1,000 In 1894 the territorial Bureau of Immigration reported on fewer residents, and the population of Sierra County is 11,000. the condition and prospects of New Mexico, stating of Kingston, The earliest inflated estimate of Kingston’s population may be “The town itself is well situated, has a public water service, from an account in The Log of a Timber Cruiser, published in 1915, churches and schools, two good hotels and a pushing, go-ahead two decades after the miners left town. Its author, forest ranger population of about 1,000 persons.” But the report was late. William Pinkney Lawson, camped outside town one night en Prospects had already changed. Silver prices had plummeted route to assess timber in the Black Range. “We found Kingsamid the economic Panic of 1893, and Kingston was in free fall. ton a melancholy collection of deserted buildings,” he wrote, The July 15, 1893, Mohave County Miner shared a dispatch from “although in its day [it] had been a thriving mining camp of the district: “Less than a hundred miners are employed in the 5,000 souls.” He cited no source for that fantastic statistic. mines at Kingston, New Mexico, where there were hundreds In August 1936 Works Progress Administration writer Clay at work a few years ago. The mines at Kingston are all silver W. Vaden interviewed Sadie Orchard, a former Kingston soiled producers, and the low price of silver has made it necessary dove who’d married the owner of a stage route. She told Vaden to suspend operations on most of the mines in the camp.” Note the town had thronged with 5,000 residents in 1886. In 1895 the correspondent refers to the reputed largest town in New a passing Chicago mining investor and booster speculated the Mexico Territory as a “camp.” population of neighboring Hillsboro would grow to 7,000. PerThe myth of 7,000 souls walks hand in hand with another haps later writers conflated Kingston for its thriving neighbor. fiction—that three newspapers kept shop in Kingston, competing Indeed, in 1936 Sierra County pioneer James “Uncle Jimmie” for its scores of readers and advertisers. That too is bogus. While McKenna, looking back through the haze of 50 years, reportthe town hosted 11 newspapers between 1883 and ’93, most edly did place Kingston’s population at 7,000 in his apocryphal were short-lived, some lasting only weeks. During Kingston’s Black Range Tales. It’s been gospel since. purported 1885–86 peak the town lacked a newspaper al“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” said together, while over that same period Albuquerque supported the oft-quoted newspaperman from the classic Western film two dozen newspapers, according to The Territorial Press of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. So it’s been for the quaint New Mexico, 1834–1912, by Porter A. Stratton.

Sierra County town. The myth of 7,000 springs from a longing The 1890 edition of N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper for what might have been but never was. Romantics read beAnnual includes a report from Clarence T. Barr, editor of the tween the lines rather than the words themselves. That said, Weekly Shaft (the only Kingston paper listed). Serving a county Kingston’s story is a beautiful precinct in American history, of 3,635, Barr reported a circulation of 1,235. Kingston’s popu- made by regular folks who made a go at what they knew best, lation stood at 700. Three years later Barr reported to the same and it’s a story worth knowing.

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WESTERN ENTERPRISE

John Verkamp’s permanent store was completed by year’s end 1905. Below: The arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad helped business.

RIM SIDE WITH THE VERKAMPS n 1898, long before President Woodrow Wilson designated the Grand Canyon a national park in 1919, John George Verkamp was already at the rim selling American Indian curios. Most early tourists were wealthy, willing to foot the bill for a train to Williams, Ariz., and an onward stage for the arduous 60-mile ride to the south rim of the mammoth gorge.

Born on Feb. 22, 1877, in Cincinnati, Ohio, John George Verkamp followed his neighbors the five Babbitt brothers (David, George, William, Charles and Edward) to Flagstaff, Arizona Territory.

There in 1886 they’d established the CO-Bar cattle ranch and the Babbitt Brothers Trading Co., purveyors of manufactured goods. As few locals had spare cash, the Babbitts frequently bartered for Indian blankets, pottery, baskets, rugs and silver jewelry. To turn a profit, they resolved to resell their curios at the Grand Canyon, which had begun to welcome tourists. Verkamp was their sales agent. ( John’s brother Leo would later serve as Flagstaff mayor, while three sisters married Babbitt brothers.)

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Verkamp set up his tent store near the south rim stagecoach stop, hoping to lure would-be buyers with his Indian goods and other souvenirs. But in 1898 the relative trickle of tourists was disappointing, and after only a few weeks the salesman folded his tent and retreated to Flagstaff.

By 1905 circumstances at the canyon had changed dramatically. Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Theodore Roosevelt in turn had designated the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve and Grand Canyon Game Preserve, the Santa Fe Railroad had reached the rim, the first-class El Tovar (a Harvey House hotel) had opened, and tourists were arriving in droves. While the mile-deep canyon itself remained off the beaten track for most visitors, Verkamp speculated busier days were ahead, and mementos would prove popular. In March 1905 he secured land-use rights along the rim and a building permit from the U.S. Forest Service, the overseeing agency at the time, then had lumber delivered to construct a permanent store. John’s German-born father, Gerhard, a successful merchant back in

THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE TOP: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE (3); OPPOSITE BOTTOM: JEREMY THOMPSON, CC BY-SA 2.0

I

JOHN GEORGE VERKAMP’S GRAND CANYON CURIO STORE WAS THE OLDEST PRIVATELY LICENSED VENTURE IN A NATIONAL PARK

BY JIM WINNERMAN

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THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE TOP: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE (3); OPPOSITE BOTTOM: JEREMY THOMPSON, CC BY-SA 2.0

WESTERN ENTERPRISE

Cincinnati, helped bankroll the startup. Completed by year’s end, Verkamp’s sat a few hundred feet east of the El Tovar.

Judging from a surviving ledger, the business was an immediate success. On his first day the store owner recorded this entry: January 31, 1906 $4.98 A good day. A family business, Verkamp’s would remain open more than a century, becoming the oldest privately licensed venture in a national park.

The Verkamps strove to stock the shelves with quality, authentic Indian goods. They cultivated direct relationships with artisans, silversmiths, weavers and potters, trading with tribes as far away as Washington state. Some relationships endured for a half century. They also sold souvenirs such as postcards and trinkets anyone could afford. Believing an informed customer would more likely be a happy buyer, the Verkamps trained employees to explain the history of the merchandise they sold.

For the first quarter century John Verkamp hired managers to oversee day-to-day operations, while he focused on more lucrative ventures in mining, farming and ranching. As those ventures faltered amid the Great Depression, the store became his main source of income. He’d built living quarters above the sales floor, and in 1936 he moved wife Catherine (whom he’d met and married in Flagstaff in 1912) and their four children to the canyon rim to live and help him operate the business.

Verkamp remained at the helm until he died of a stroke at age 67 on April 4, 1944. In the wake of World War II business picked back up, as middle-class families were increasingly able to buy cars and take vacations. Two more generations of the family managed the store until 1995, when the Verkamps hired outside managers to handle operations.

As visitation at the Grand Canyon steadily increased, the National Park Service hoped to one day wrest control of the site and remove the building, which was built in a “modified Mission” style that didn’t blend well with other structures or the natural environs. But the Verkamps repeatedly convinced park personnel to renew their permit, and officials eventually recognized the historic value of the structure. In 1974 the store was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The family’s denouement at the canyon was prompted by Congress, which in 1998 passed a law that raised concession-

aire fees and ended preferential treatment of established contract holders at the national parks. In 2008 the Verkamps, g iving in to what they described as “bureaucratic process fatigue,” did not reapply for a concession contract and closed their business, ending the oldest family-owned concession in the National Park System.

The National Park Service purchased the building for $3.2 million and converted it into Verkamp’s Visitor Center, an information station and museum that relates the pioneer history of Grand Canyon Village. Included, of course, is the story of John Verkamp and his family. Mainstays of the community, they actively supported local organizations and were instrumental in creating the Grand Canyon School (for the children of Park Service employees) and the Shrine of the Ages interfaith chapel.

More than 120 years after John Verkamp ventured to the canyon to sell curios to tourists, the National Park Service has erected a replica of the tent he pitched. It occupies a corner of his 1906 store turned museum, which today welcomes some 6 million annual visitors.

In 1898 Verkamp first tried selling souvenirs to canyon visitors from a borrowed rim-side tent.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! When the Verkamp store was in business, two permanent displays gained a following of their own. For nearly a century a 535-pound iron-nickel fragment of the plane-sized meteorite that blasted out nearby Meteor Crater some 50,000 years ago was on view in the store. Most likely Verkamp, in a bid to draw more customers, had persuaded a Flagstaff acquaintance to give him the geologic curiosity. When the store closed in 2008, descendants donated the piece to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff for permanent display in the lobby of the observatory’s Steele Visitor Center.

The other leading attraction in Verkamp’s store was Evening—Grand Canyon (1907), among the largest paintings ever rendered by renowned Western artist Louis Benton Akin. It depicts the south rim of the canyon, a sliver of the Colorado River visible far below (see photo). The artist was unable to sell the painting before his untimely Jan. 2, 1913, death at age 44 from pneumonia. Verkamp purchased the 6-by-9-foot oil from Akin’s estate after New York’s National Academy of Art reportedly turned it down due to its size.

When the store closed, the family sold the National Park Service the painting. It hangs in present-day Verkamp’s Visitor Center. —J.W. DECEMBER 2020

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ART OF THE WEST

Fred “Lightning Heart” Haberlein is best known for his murals, but he also rendered many other colorful works, such as this landscape.

THE MURAL ART OF ‘LIGHTNING HEART’ Colo. Fred received his formal education from a hrough his public murals Colorado artcommunity of Benedictine nuns in the small Hisist Fred “Lightning Heart” Haberlein panic community of Antonito, received a degree related stories unique to the locales in sculpture and anthropology from Colorado State in which he painted, including La Jara, University and studied printmaking in graduate Manassa, Alamosa, Antonito, Glenwood Springs school at Arizona State. and Carbondale. The greatest concentration of With the counterculture of the 1960s in full his 140 murals are in the San Luis Valley of southswing, Haberlein joined a group of “right-brained” central Colorado, though aficionados of his work kindred spirits in the desert near Oracle in Arican search out others in Arizona, New York and zona’s Pinal County where they converted an abanOregon and as far away as Quito, Ecuador.

FRED HABERLEIN doned guest ranch into an art colony. There for Haberlein, who succumbed to esophageal canthe next 11 years Haberlein explored all genres cer on April 16, 2018, was born in Tulsa, Okla., on Dec. 7, 1944, and grew up in the San Luis Valley in the 1950s of art, his passion for painting murals slowly emerging. In 1977 after his petroleum engineer father left the west Texas oil fields to he painted his first mural, Desert Night, on the side of Mother open a hunting lodge named Conejos Ranch in Conejos County, Cody’s Café in Oracle.

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OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF TERESA PLATT (2); THIS PAGE: LAZELLE JONES (3)

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FRED HABERLEIN PRODUCED 140 MURALS, SOME HISTORICAL AND SOME RELIGIOUS, OVER HIS SIX-DECADE CAREER

BY LAZELLE JONES

OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF TERESA PLATT (2); THIS PAGE: LAZELLE JONES (3)

ART OF THE WEST

While living in southern Arizona he connected with the Pascau Yaqui Indians, who recognized his strong spirituality and embraced him. Invited to join in their 1972 Easter ceremony (a mix of traditional Yaqui and Catholic traditions), Haberlein scaled the Yaquis’ sacred Baboquivari Peak and earned the name Lightning Heart. “They felt my heart was like lightning, bright with love, ready to be shared wherever I went,” Haberlein once said. He often signed his art “Lightning Heart,” and to the front of his pickup truck he attached a rendering of a heart struck by a bolt of lightning. In 1984 he returned to Conejos Ranch to live and create more murals, but he returned every year to participate in the Yaqui Easter ceremony, the last time just two weeks before his death.

Haberlein’s widow, Teresa Platt, recently told Wild West that Fred preferred working in oils and for 18 years also taught acrylics and watercolors at the Colorado Mountain College campuses in Glenwood Springs and Aspen. By the time the couple moved to Glenwood Springs in 1988, Fred had completed 80 murals in the San Luis Valley. Perhaps the most ethereal is one of the valley he painted in 1985 inside the Alamosa post office. “It literally takes your breath away,” Teresa says. The 4-by-48-foot mural wraps around and above the post office boxes, stretching the full length and width of the room.

You can feel the chill of the wind portrayed in the mural as it sweeps from the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan mountains out onto the valley floor, where it washes through chico (greasewood) and rabbitbrush and across the white blotches of alkali.

On the south edge of La Jara, along Highway 285, Haberlein paid homage to mustangs in his mural

The Wild Horses, which covers the west-facing wall of the La Jara Trading Post. On an adjacent building stands his mural The Rams, a nod to the sheep ranchers who first settled the area in the early 1820s.

Gracing a brick silo farther south on Highway 285 is Haberlein’s Whooping Crane, forever passing over the San Luis Valley along a major flyway.

Antonio is home to some two-dozen of its native son’s murals. Spanning four big silos is History of the San Luis Valley, a tribute to the successive cultures who dwelled here. Among Haberlein’s more ambitious creations, History of the Conejos River Region stretches along a building adjacent to the Railroad Hotel on Main Street; he painted it for the 1984 Summer Olympics torch relay. Also on Main Street is his 2016 mural depicting Our Lady of Guadalupe (aka Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe ), a Catholic icon and national symbol of Mexico. It suggests the lasting impact those Benedictine nuns had on the young artist back in 1950s Antonito.

Standouts among Haberlein’s murals include (clockwise from top left) The Wild Horses, The Rams and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Catholic icon and national symbol of Mexico.

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INDIAN LIFE

SAVING MOUNTAIN CHIEF A PLOT TO SPARE THE BLACKFEET CHIEF AND INNOCENT FOLLOWERS FROM ATTACK WORKED, BUT AT GREAT COST TO ANOTHER BLACKFEET CAMP

BY KELLIE WOOD

M

y great-great-grandfather Joseph Cobell, an inductee in the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, immigrated to the United States from Italy in 1848. He married Mary Owl Child, a daughter of the Pikuni Blackfeet Owl Child. In 1867 Joseph and Mary Cobell built the Rock Creek stagecoach station in Montana Territory’s Prickly Pear Valley (near present-day Wolf Creek, Mont.). It straddled the Mullan Road, which ran west from Fort Benton to Fort Walla Walla, in Washington Territory. Their main customers were the military. Mary’s sister, Spear Woman, married Mountain Chief, a leader of the Pikuni (or Piegan) band. According to Blackfeet accounts, white settlers harassed 28 WILD WEST

the band because they coveted the gold in Mountain Chief’s vast territory. Owl Child’s other daughter, Kohkokina, married Ebert “Malcolm” Clarke, who’d been expelled from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point after two separate altercations in violation of its code of conduct. Clarke later engaged in fur trading with the Blackfeet and owned what became the Seiban Ranch, near the Mullan Road north of Helena, where he is buried.

In 1869 Malcolm Clarke and son Horace were at odds with cousin Pete Owl Child over stolen horses, and Owl Child soon learned Malcolm had raped his wife. That August 17 hundreds of Blackfeet warriors, including Pete Owl Child, sought revenge against Malcolm. Mountain Chief’s son Black Weasel was there to try to stop the warriors, according to Malcolm’s daughter, Helen, who had grown up with Black Weasel. Regardless, her father was killed, and brother Horace wounded. The settlers, seeing an opportunity to make a private matter look like a war declared by Mountain Chief against them, sought the “protection” of the U.S. Army.

Behind the request was the settlers’ wish to see the Blackfeet wiped out so they could confiscate their land. Alexander Culbertson, the bourgeois (manager) of the Fort Benton post, adamantly defended the Blackfeet.

“There is no Indian war,” he said. “We can blame some of the trouble on just a few young Indian rabble-rousers.”

Historians claim that when Owl Child fled north to join Mountain Chief’s band, William T. Sherman, commanding general of the Army, sent a 2nd Cavalry squadron led

by Major Eugene Baker to track down and punish these “hostiles” who weren’t hostile at all. Sherman and Malcolm had been classmates and friends at West Point. When the general ordered the extermination of Mountain Chief, he likely wanted both to avenge Malcolm’s death and to have an excuse to be rid of Blackfeet occupying the land settlers coveted. On learning of the orders, Joseph and Mary Cobell were determined to save Mountain Chief. To make that happen, Joseph plotted with Indian interpreters Joe Kipp and Jerry Potts to divert the cavalrymen. Little did the military know Joseph’s beloved brotherin-law was none other than Mountain Chief.

LEFT AND OPPOSITE BOTTOM: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (2); OPPOSITE TOP: OVERHOLSER HISTORICAL RESEARCH CENTER, FORT BENTON, MONT.

There are no photos of his father (who died in 1872), but Black Weasel (aka Frank Mountain Chief, 1848–1942) sat for this 1898 portrait in Omaha, Neb.

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LEFT AND OPPOSITE BOTTOM: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (2); OPPOSITE TOP: OVERHOLSER HISTORICAL RESEARCH CENTER, FORT BENTON, MONT.

INDIAN LIFE shouted. “Don’t let him go. I don’t care Scouts Cobell and Kipp duly whose camp it is. We’re here to kill Inguided the cavalry away from the dians, and that’s what we’re gonna do!”

Blackfeet camp to give Potts time to Two guards arrested Kipp, who strugwarn Mountain Chief. Horace and gled but couldn’t get away. When Heavy Nathan Clarke joined up with BakRunner ran toward the soldiers shouter’s band on a pretense of seeking ing and waving a paper that granted revenge for the death of their father, him safe conduct, Joseph Cobell shot Malcolm. These two nephews-inhim dead. After that the rest of Baker’s law of Mountain Chief loved their JOSEPH AND MARY COBELL command opened up with their Sharps Aunt Spear Woman and actively carbines and powerful .50-caliber Springparticipated in the plot to save her field rifles. and husband Mountain Chief.

Cobell believed he had to kill Heavy Runner to keep him While they despised their father’s killer—actually a warrior named Crowfoot, not Pete Owl Child, according to the later testimoni- from revealing the location of Mountain Chief’s camp, 8 miles als of siblings Horace and Helen Clarke—they realized Mountain downstream. With that information Baker likely would have Chief’s 1,500 followers were innocent. As a result of the successful spared Heavy Runner’s camp and moved on to attack Mountain diversion plot, Major Baker’s command struck a different camp Chief’s camp. Cobell, though, was shocked to see what his gunof Blackfeet—that of Chief Heavy Runner, who had unwittingly shot had triggered—the cavalry’s massacre of 217 of Heavy Runmoved to the spot along the river where Mountain Chief’s camp ner’s defenseless followers, including 50 children, while most of had been. The attack on Jan. 23, 1870, resulted in the Marias the warriors were out hunting for food. The 140 or so people who Massacre, in which the soldiers slaughtered 217 Indians, mostly escaped (according to Baker’s estimate) faced another challenge that would take many of their lives—40-below-zero temperatures women, children and elderly men suffering from smallpox.

It turned out Heavy Runner had another name, Bear Chief, and a horrific blizzard, without robes, horses or food.

Mountain Chief, who’d been warned earlier by Jerry Potts, that he had not revealed to Brevet Brig. Gen. Alfred Sully, who was investigating the murder of Malcolm Clarke. Sully had got word of the killings and knew he must leave his safe and a bench warrant for the arrest of five Blackfeet—Pete Owl Child, warm winter haven on the Marias. He and his people headed Bear Chief, Eagle Ribs, Black Bear and Black Weasel (aka Frank for the safety of Canada. But they, too, suffered deaths fleeing Mountain Chief, who went by Mountain Chief after his father from the soldiers while their camp was afflicted with smallpox died in 1872). The general unwittingly gave Heavy Runner/ and then encountering the blizzard. As many as 500 Blackfeet Bear Chief a peace paper, promising him military protection from the two camps died on Jan. 23, 1870, and in the immein exchange for a promise to reveal the location of Mountain diate aftermath of arguably the worst mass shooting of Indians Chief’s camp. Heavy Runner, though, had no intention of turn- in American history. ing in his fellow chief. While Heavy Runner and Pete Owl Child had participated in the murder raid against Malcolm Clarke, Kellie Wood is the author of the book Mountain Chief: The Murder it was Crowfoot who had shot and killed him, though Crow- of 50 Blackfeet Children, available on Amazon.com. Wood says that foot’s name was not listed on Sully’s warrant. Only after Mal- Bear Head, who was 10 at the time he witnessed the massacre and later colm was dead did Owl Child cleave his forehead with a tom- interviewed by James W. Schultz, revealed that Heavy Runner’s other ahawk as a gesture of revenge against the man who two years name was Bear Chief (confirmed in two documents). At the Montana prior had raped his wife (an act that resulted in a blue-eyed State University Library the author discovered a map of the massacre blond-haired infant). site drawn by a soldier in 1890, and she professionally filmed aerial When Baker, widely believed to be drunk at the time, ordered images of the lost site at the Devon Recreation Area, where she believes his predawn attack, he knew from Joe Kipp the camp belonged some 68,000 bullets rest along bluffs on both sides of Lake Elwell, to Heavy Runner and not Mountain Chief. “Arrest him!” Baker created when the Tiber Dam flooded the valley in the 1950s.

Pikuni Blackfeet travel leisurely in Montana in 1912. Mountain Chief went on a far more trying journey with his followers in January 1870.

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PHOTO CREDIT

36-by-48-inch oil on canvas,

by Teresa Elliott

DECEMBER 2020

10/22/20 11:17 AM

PHOTO CREDIT

Coffee Flats,

We marvel at Teresa Elliott’s realistic paintings of iconic Western livestock and the prized pottery at Scottsdale’s King Gallery

PHOTO CREDIT

PHOTO CREDIT

STYLE

ARTWORK COURTESY TERESA ELLIOTT

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STYLE

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ART

Stock Market “I grew up with a fascination for livestock,” Teresa Elliott [teresaelliott.com] recalls from her studio in the Big Bend region of West Texas. “As a child, I remember sitting on this fence and watching this one bull for hours. It led me to the subject of most of my paintings.”

The award-winning artist, whose work hangs in museums and galleries nationwide, began her art career as a graphic designer and illustrator. In 2006 her first fine art show sold out, and she hasn’t looked back.

Today she is best known for portraits of steers and figurative paintings immersed in the rural Southwest landscape. Fortunately for Teresa, her oils sell almost as quickly as the paint dries. “I’m blessed to have the collectors who allow me to do what I love for a living.”

Free Mare,

30-by-36-inch oil on canvas

ARTWORK COURTESY TERESA ELLIOTT

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Longhorn,

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ARTWORK COURTESY COLEMAN STUDIOS ARTWORK COURTESYJOHN TERESA ELLIOTT

Courtesy TheCOURTESY Greenwich TERESA WorkshopELLIOTT ARTWORK

STYLE STYLE

ARTWORK COURTESY COLEMAN STUDIOS ARTWORK COURTESYJOHN TERESA ELLIOTT

Courtesy TheCOURTESY Greenwich TERESA WorkshopELLIOTT ARTWORK

STYLE

Hill Country Longhorn, 60-by-36-inch oil on canvas

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STYLE SCULPTURE

Pueblo Pottery

Clockwise from top left: Frederica Antonio, Acoma, 10-inch-wide water jar, $4,400; Russell Sanchez, San Ildefonso, 8-inchlong bear, $8,800, and Nancy Youngblood, Santa Clara, 7-inch-high jar, $9,000; Juan de la Cruz, Santa Clara, 11.5-inch plate, $2,600, and Tammy Garcia, Santa Clara, 6-inch-wide jar, $9,500; Robert Patricio, Acoma, 10-inch-wide water jar, $1,600, and Rainy Naha, Hopi-Tewa, 8.5-inch wide jar, $2,200.

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PHOTO CREDIT

King Galleries [kinggalleries.com] opened in 1996 in Scottsdale, Ariz., with a focus on contemporary and historic Pueblo and Western art. Owner Charles King has since written several books on American Indian pottery, including Born of Fire: The Life and Pottery of Margaret Tafoya, The Art and Life of Tony Da and Spoken Through Clay. The gallery has locations in both Scottsdale (7077 E. Main St., No. 20) and Santa Fe (130 Lincoln Ave., Suite D).

For more information call 480-481-0187.

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!

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This was great for silver buyers, and really great for collectors. Here’s why:

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5,000,000

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2016-S

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GovMint.com • 14101 Southcross Dr. W., Suite 175, Dept. EPE244-01 • Burnsville, MN 55337 GovMint.com® is a retail distributor of coin and currency issues and is not affiliated with the U.S. government. The collectible coin market is unregulated, highly speculative and involves risk. GovMint.com reserves the right to decline to consummate any sale, within its discretion, including due to pricing errors. Prices, facts, figures and populations deemed accurate as of the date of publication but may change significantly over time. All purchases are expressly conditioned upon your acceptance of GovMint.com’s Terms and Conditions (www.govmint.com/terms-conditions or call 1-800-721-0320); to decline, return your purchase pursuant to GovMint.com’s Return Policy. © 2020 GovMint.com. All rights reserved.

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THEY CALLED HIM BILITO To the Hispanos who knew him best, Billy the Kid was a brave, fun-loving young man loyal to his friends

By James B. Mills

In Living Color

Billy the Kid, depicted in a full-resolution restoration and colorization of his only universally recognized photograph, was a compadre to many Hispano residents of Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory.

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he young man that Miguel Antonio Otero Jr. observed in the plaza in Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, appeared a cheerful beardless youth, not a desperate outlaw.

MIGUEL ANTONIO He wore a sombrero tilted back atop a mop of OTERO JR. light brown hair above sharp blue eyes, an aquiline nose and a thin upper lip that accentuated protruding front teeth and an often ready smile. Standing about 5 feet 9 inches tall with a slender frame, the youth was hardly imposing. Only the shackles linking him to fellow prisoner Dave Rudabaugh hinted at his status as a desperado who had wreaked havoc during the violent Lincoln County War two years earlier.

The date was Dec. 27, 1880, and the young man Otero had encountered was Billy the Kid (as newspapers had recently christened him). Having been captured by a posse led by recently elected Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett, the Kid awaited transport by train to Santa Fe, the territorial capital. So intrigued by the young outlaw was 21-year-old Otero that he would make the same train journey, along with older brother Page and father Miguel, during which he would befriend Bilito, as many Hispanos (Southwesterners of Spanish descent) affectionately called the Kid. The younger Otero visited Billy in the Santa Fe jail, taking him cigarette papers, tobacco, chewing gum, candy, pies and nuts. “He was very fond of sweets and asked us to bring him all we could,” Otero recalled. “He was always in a pleasant humor when I saw him—laughing, sprightly and good natured.” Authorities soon transported Billy south to Mesilla for trial. In the months that followed he was sentenced to death by hanging, made an infamous jailbreak in Lincoln and, on July 14, 1881, met his end when surprised by Sheriff Garrett in Fort Sumner.

While Billy the Kid entered the annals of infamy, Miguel Antonio Otero Jr. created his own legacy. The well-educated son of a Hispano father and Anglo mother, he was elected New Mexico Territory governor in 1897 and held office until 1906. He never forgot the affable young outlaw he had befriended and whom he considered “a man more sinned against than sinning.”

In 1926 Otero, with an eye toward a book, began interviewing other Hispanos who had been fond of Billy. While some may dismiss them as unabashed Kid lovers, their recollections and feelings about Billy are worth noting, which is just what Otero did in his 1936 book The Real Billy the Kid: With New Light on the Lincoln County War. While the book contains its share of since-proven inaccuracies, it is a more grounded study of the Kid’s life than either Garrett’s The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid (1882, written in collaboration with Ash Upson) or Walter Noble Burns’ The Saga of Billy the Kid (1926). What’s more, Otero’s work offers a unique take on his subject DECEMBER 2020

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Billy the Kid Country

War Zone Close-up

dalgo (ending the Mexican War) and the 1854 Gadsden Purchase, though Fort Stanton San Rio B o n i t o Brewer many Hispanos of the region continPatricio Ranch R io H i o n d ued to regard the takeover as heavyR o o R io R u i d os Tunstall Picacho N E W M E X I C O T E R R I T O R Y Ruidoso handed colonialism. During the subKilling sequent wave of Anglo-American miSanta Fe Blazer’s Las Vegas gration, the Hispano population was Mill Mescalero steadily dispossessed of much of its Indian Ceboletta Agency Albuquerque lands, often by means of squatting, Tunstall (now Seboyeta) Ranch a tactic hastened by the Homestead Puerta de Luna 0 20 miles Act of 1862. Soon reigning supreme Manzano over the territory was the Santa Fe Ring, a cabal Fort Sumner of influential attorneys and ruthless speculators Magdalena who sold many Hispanos’ lands out from under Lincoln County, 1878 them to new arrivals.

White Oaks The ring’s grip was felt throughout the town of Fort Stanton Lincoln Roswell Lincoln—or La Placita del Rio Bonito (“The Little VilPicacho Ruidoso Chisum Ranch lage of the Pretty River”) to Hispanos—courtesy of Tularosa a faction known locally as “the House” that excelled at beef contracting, mercantile operations, banking, Silver City Seven Rivers racketeering and co-opting land grants. The likes Pe co Las Cruces of Lawrence G. Murphy, James J. Dolan, Emil Fritz Mesilla and John H. Riley made themselves vastly wealthy and lorded over much of Lincoln County with a El Paso U.S. ruthless efficiency somewhat akin to a Mafia family.

MEXICO TEXAS In May 1877 Dolan shot down employee Hi0 50 100 200 miles lario Jaramillo—ostensibly so fellow House member George Peppin could acquire his widow—then from the Hispano perspective—a perspective escaped punishment by successfully pleading self-defense. While some seldom revisited since. “Governor Otero’s writ- Anglos took Nuevoméxicano wives, Hispanos were generally viewed as ings about the Kid and his period of history second-class citizens to be exploited and intimidated. Only a handful remain an important source of a viewpoint that of the latter—including Juan Patrón, José Montaño and Saturnino Baca— warrants closer scrutiny,” says Michael Wallis, succeeded as merchants and community figures.

In the fall of 1877 William H. Bonney, as author of Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride (2007). teenage Billy was then calling himself, rode “Otero and the voices of other Hispanic into a Lincoln County saturated with corcontemporaries help define the image of ruption, greed, dispossession, racism and Billy the Kid more clearly.” indignation. He briefly rode with a gang of rustlers known as “the Boys,” before findThe United States acquired New Mexing work as a ranch hand for English-born ico with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Himerchant John Henry Tunstall, who had partnered with former House attorney Alexander McSween in opposition to the Murphy-Dolan faction. After Tunstall’s murder on Feb. 18, 1878, the Kid and the other self-proclaimed “Regulators” went to war against the very men the impoverished Hispanos despised most—the Santa Fe Ring.

Hispanos played various roles during the brutal Lincoln County War. Some, Here’s Looking at You, Kid like Regulators José Chávez y Chávez Pat Garrett’s An Authentic Life of Billy the Kid came and Yginio Salazar, voluntarily took up first, but Otero’s The Real arms. Some were strong-armed into reBilly the Kid provides luctant service for either side. Others, Hispano perspectives. ri at nP

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Lincoln

r ive

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO; JAMES B. MILLS COLLECTION; PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO

sR

PREVIOUS SPREAD: COURTESY STUART HUMPHREYS; THIS PAGE: ABOVE RIGHT: JAMES B. MILLS COLLECTION THIS PAGE: MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON; FAR LEFT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

cio

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO; JAMES B. MILLS COLLECTION; PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO

MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON; FAR LEFT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

JUAN PATRÓN, PETE MAXWELL AND A.P. “PACO” ANAYA

JESÚS SILVA

like Lorencita Miranda and husband José, managed to remain neutral.

“My husband and I were living on our farm just above Lincoln, New Mexico, all during the Lincoln County War,” Lorencita remembered.

“We liked both factions, so we never took any part in the war.…Billy the Kid came to our house several times and drank coffee with us. We liked him, for he was always nice to the Spanish people, and they all liked him.”

Meanwhile, the Regulators did battle. On March 9 in Agua Negra Canyon they killed Bill Morton and Frank Baker, members of the posse that had murdered Tunstall, and on April 1 they gunned down Houseaffiliated Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady and Deputy George Hindman on the main street of Lincoln. The Regulators in turn lost both of their initial leaders—Dick Brewer, killed by Andrew L. Roberts at Blazer’s Mill on April 4, and successor Frank MacNab, shot from ambush by House partisans on April 29.

Amid the bloodshed William Bonney (called “Kid Antrim” by many Anglos) endeared himself to much of the Hispano populace. He spoke Nuevoméxicano Spanish fluently, likely having picked it up as a schoolboy in Silver City. On at least one occasion the Kid’s fluency in Spanish irritated fellow Regulator Charlie Bowdre, as Billy could converse far better than Charlie with Bowdre’s young Mexican wife, Manuela.

Billy was known to Hispanos as Bilito (“little Billy”) and, less frequently, El Chivato (“the little goat” or “kid” in the Nuevoméxicano dialect). “He was a light-complexion boy that was always smiling,” Carlota Baca Brent recalled. “He was brave and loyal to his friends.”

Lincoln County resident José Montoya was 11 when he knew El Chivato.

“Billy would let me ride his horse,” he said. “He was a nice fellow and well liked by the natives. He was awful good to the Mexican people and stayed with them most of the time.” The Kid enjoyed the meals they served him, including corn tortillas, beans and rice, pine nuts and Nuevoméxicano chili.

“He was an awfully nice young fellow,” McSween associate Francisco Gómez recalled. “He always dressed very neatly.” Gómez remembered Billy’s frequent target practice and impressive shooting skills, which proved valuable during the Lincoln County War. Although the Kid was not a designated leader of the Regu-

CHARLIE AND MANUELA BOWDRE

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Dolan-Riley cattle camp in Agua Negra Canyon. On July 12 Sheriff Brady’s distressed Hispano widow, María Bonifacia Chávez, reported to Colonel Nathan Dudley, the commander of Fort Stanton, that Regulator Doc Scurlock and two unidentified companions had recently fired shots at her eldest son in a canyon about a half mile from his home.

Earlier that month a posse led by Dolan and recently appointed Lincoln County Sheriff George Peppin had been frustrated in its efforts to locate McSween. On July 3 the vengeful posse robbed and terrorized Hispanos in San Patricio, among the Kid’s favorite hangouts.

The war climaxed with the five-day Battle of Lincoln, a siege of McSween’s house that began on July 15 and became known as the “Big Killing.”

Bilito Murió Aquí

A leading citizen of Picacho and friend of the Kid’s named Martín Chávez led some two dozen armed Hispanos in support of the Regulators, seizing the chance to strike a blow against the House, primarily led by Dolan with support from Colonel Dudley and his soldiers out of Fort Stanton.

On July 19 Chávez and comrades, faced with howitzer and Gatling gun fire, exchanged shots with the Dolan-Peppin supporters before riding off into the mountains. Later that night the Kid led an escape from the besieged and burning McSween house. McSween himself fell mortally wounded by five bullets from the guns of the victorious House crowd.

DELUVINA MAXWELL

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The Kid emerged from the ashes of the Lincoln County War as leader of the surviving Regulators, with whom he rustled horses and cattle until most had drifted out of the territory. Billy eventually holed up in Fort Sumner at the Bosque Redondo Indian Agency. The Kid’s short life may have been even shorter had he not found refuge among the sympathetic Hispanos, many of whom had practically adopted Billy. Though indisputably an outlaw, he was their outlaw. In addition to taking the fight to the crooked House and Santa Fe Ring, he had treated Hispanos with respect, kindness and appreciation, always ready with that familiar toothy grin when riding by as they herded sheep or plowed. Having crossed the cultural divide to become one of la gente (“the people”), the Kid had taken to wearing sombreros and beaded moccasins. The orphaned onetime street urchin found happiness among New Mexico Territory’s salt of the earth.

The Kid clearly held no prejudice toward people sometimes labeled “greasers,” nor did Hispanos disparage him as a “gringo.” Of Irish Catholic ancestry, he may have experienced prejudice himself at times, particu-

FROM TOP: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO; HALEY MEMORIAL LIBRARY; CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

lators, he was present at every major skirmish.

“Billy the Kid was the bravest man I ever knew,” remembered Yginio Salazar. “He did not know what fear meant.”

Not all Hispanos in Lincoln County were fans of Billy and associates. Businessman Juan Patrón —who sided with McSween and the Regulators but refrained from violence—was reportedly lukewarm toward the young pistolero. Saturnino Baca and family sided with the House, while José Chávez y Baca, Manuel “Indian” Segovia and sharpshooter Lucio Montoya took up arms for the House. The Regulators killed Segovia on May 14 while rustling horses and steers from the

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TOP LEFT: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO; TOP RIGHT: CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO; RIGHT: ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL, NEWSPAPERS.COM

Sheriff Pat Garrett shot and killed the Kid at Pete Maxwell’s house in Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881.

Paco Anaya With Kid Photo

TOP LEFT: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO; TOP RIGHT: CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO; RIGHT: ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL, NEWSPAPERS.COM

FROM TOP: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO; HALEY MEMORIAL LIBRARY; CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

“Billy liked better to be with Hispanics than with Americans,” said the friend who helped bury Bilito.

larly when still using his birth name, Henry McCarty. In Lincoln County he had been able to assimilate into Hispano culture with remarkable ease. Area Hispanos especially recalled his penchant for formality, his considerable dancing skills at the frequently held bailes and his keen sense of humor. “He was kind and good to poor people,” recalled Yginio Salazar, “and he was always a gentleman, no matter where he was.”

Hispano families were known for being fiercely protective of their daughters. But the Kid’s keen eye for señoritas did not prove a hindrance, as his reported charm and impeccable politeness offset any suspicions. Paulita Maxwell, who was one-quarter Hispano and became the last of an untold number of women who enjoyed Billy’s company, later proclaimed, “In every placita in the Pecos some little señorita was proud to be known as his querida [sweetheart].” While in later life Maxwell repeatedly denied ever having been Bilito’s querida, in 1926 former Governor Otero recalled Paulita telling him during a trip to the Kid’s gravesite, “I might have married him—had he asked me.”

Although Billy derided Martín Chávez for not having rallied his Hispano gunmen in the aftermath of the five-day siege, the two remained buenos amigos. Chávez recalled a time the Kid and pal Tom Folliard rode up to his small ranch after rustlers had stolen all his stock except for one old plow horse. Without hesitation Bilito and Tom moved the gear from their packhorse to their own ponies, then rode off, leaving the packhorse for Chávez. “Billy was one of the kindest and best boys I ever knew,” Chávez declared.

“All the wrongs have been charged to Billy, yet we who really knew him know that he was good and had fine qualities. We have not put our impressions of him into print, and our silence has been the cause of great injustice to the Kid.”

PETE MAXWELL (SEATED) WITH FRIEND HENRY LEIS

Martín’s young cousin Ambrosio Chávez, who had moved to Lincoln County from Manzano at age 13 in 1879, recalled that Billy was a frequent visitor to Martín’s ranch in Picacho.

On one occasion a party of passing Texans lost a horse race but failed to turn over the three head of cattle they had wagered. Learning of the snub, the Kid sauntered out to the Texans’ camp, rode into their herd of cattle and shot three of their best beeves to provide Martín the beef. Several years before his 1931 death Martín spoke about the Kid with former Governor Otero. “[Billy] never killed a native citizen of New Mexico, which was one of the reasons we were all so fond of him,” Chávez said. “He was not bloodthirsty; he was forced into killing in defense of his own life.” Many other Hispanos went to their graves defending Bilito’s memory.

In a preserved letter the Kid himself recalled having recovered stolen livestock for Puerta de

VICENTE OTERO

DECEMBER 2020

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Right: Paulita Maxwell and husband José Jaramillo pose in 1882. Below: Yginio Salazar poses with wife Isabel and two of their four grandchildren.

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TOP: MPI/GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: BOB PARDUE - SOUTHWEST/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Bilito’s Compadres

When Wallace failed to deliver on his promise, the Kid made his way back to Sumner and resumed rustling with various cohorts. It is doubtful many Hispano farmers and sheepherders begrudged Bilito for rustling livestock from such wealthy cattleman as John Chisum or the landgrabbing gringos of the House. “Billy was a real friend of the Spanish people and of all the oppressed,” Jesús Silva proclaimed—somewhat of an overstatement, considering the Kid’s ignoble rustling of livestock from the Mescalero Indian Agency. Whether Billy intended it or not, however, he became for many Nuevoméxicano Hispanos a symbol of resistance against Anglo expansion and predatory capitalism.

On April 28, 1881, having been convicted of murder in his Mesilla trial and transported to Lincoln for execution, the Kid killed two of Sheriff Garrett’s deputies (the amiable James W. Bell, reluctantly, and the nefarious Bob Olinger, eagerly) and made good his escape. He stopped at Las Tablas to visit Yginio Salazar. “I told him to leave this place and go to Old Mexico,” Salazar recalled. “Kid said he was going to Bosque Redondo [Fort Sumner].”

Billy’s devotion to Paulita Maxwell and his reluctance to leave Hispano friends and familiar stamping grounds were what kept him in the territory.

Deluvina, a Navajo servant in the Maxwell household who became part of the family, was particularly fond of the Kid. “Pete Maxwell had told Billy he had better go, as Pat Garrett was coming after him,” Deluvina recalled. “Billy said he did not care; he was not afraid of Pat Garrett.” The only chance El Chivato had to start over, with or without Paulita, was to leave New Mexico Territory pronto. But on July 14 Sheriff Garrett caught up with him at Fort Sumner, one of his bullets propelling both the life from Billy’s body and subsequent tears and outrage from Fort Sumner residents. Onetime freighter and sheepherder Vicente Otero, a local friend, helped dig the Kid’s grave and served as a pallbearer.

Otero kept Billy’s memory alive until his own death in 1958.

“Billy had been very popular at Fort Sumner and had a great many friends, all of whom were indignant toward Pat Garrett,” resident Francisco “Frank” Lovato said. “If a leader had been

CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO (2)

Luna resident Pablo Anaya. “Billy liked better to be with Hispanics than with Americans,” recalled A.P. “Paco”Anaya (no known relation to Pablo), who helped bury the Kid. “He was on the friendliest of terms with the native element of the country,” Otero concurred. “He had protected and helped them in every possible way.”

On March 17, 1879, the Kid met in Lincoln with Governor Lew Wallace and agreed to testify in court against Dolan and crony Bill Campbell for the murder of attorney Huston Chapman in exchange for amnesty.

After testifying, the Kid remained at Juan Patrón’s store in Lincoln for three months, waiting for a pardon that never came. Wallace later wrote condescendingly of having observed Hispano minstrels serenading El Chivato outside his window one night. “Like practically everyone else since, Wallace completely missed the significance of that serenade,” historian Frederick Nolan wrote. “The people singing outside his window were the Kid’s people now.…To Billy they were warm, real, the only family he had ever had.”

Dead and Buried

TOP: MPI/GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: BOB PARDUE - SOUTHWEST/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO (2)

Garrett is quicker on the draw than Billy in this fanciful 1881 woodcut from Beadle’s Half Dime Library.

The Kid’s gravesite in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, is well protected.

present, Garrett and his two officers would have received the same fate they dealt Billy.”

Martín Chávez was among those outraged by the killing. “They had to sneak up on him in the dead of night to murder him,” Chávez said. “The Keed [sic] was gone, but many Spanish girls mourned for him,” Carlota Baca Brent lamented. Some of those Fort Sumner señoritas held a candlelight wake for the Kid that night, grieving and praying over his body.

“Most of the [Hispanos] who lived in town went to his funeral,” remembered Deluvina, who placed flowers on Billy’s grave for years afterward. She was perhaps the most fiercely loyal friend the Kid had had in Fort Sumner, affectionately referring to him as “my little boy.” Even into old age in the 1920s she spoke venomously of Garrett and cohorts. “I hated those men and am glad that I have lived long enough to see them all dead and buried.” Decades after his death Billy remained Deluvina’s chiquito and was fondly recalled by many His-

panos as unos de los nuestros (“one of ours”). Bilito wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Australian historian and published writer James B. Mills has spent much of his life researching the American West. He dedicates this article to Billy the Kid expert Frederick Nolan, “whose considerable patience and stern advice helped put me on the right track years ago.” Also see Mills’ article “Hombres valientes in the Lincoln County War,” on P. 46. For further reading he suggests Nolan’s The West of Billy the Kid and The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History, Robert M. Utley’s Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life and Miguel Antonio Otero Jr.’s The Real Billy the Kid: With New Light on the Lincoln County War. DECEMBER 2020

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HOMBRES VALIENTES IN THE LINCOLN COUNTY WAR

Long overshadowed by such Anglo notables as Billy the Kid, Nuevoméxicanos played key roles in the 1878 factional war

By James B. Mills

LEAD ART

Hot Time in Lincoln, New Mexico Territory

In Peter Rogers’ Escape From McSween’s House, Billy the Kid and other Regulators, including José Chávez y Chávez, break out of the blazing Alexander McSween home on July 19, 1878, after a five-day siege by “House” partisans.

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n Sunday evening July 14, 1878, attorney Alexander McSween and more than 50 armed partisans rode into the town of Lincoln, New Mexico Territory, and took up positions in preparation for a climactic confrontation. It was a showdown months in the making, the February 18 murder of McSween’s business partner, John Henry Tunstall, having triggered a series of revenge killings, skirmishes, raids and assorted mayhem across Lincoln County. Backing McSween were the ALEXANDER McSWEEN “Regulators,” who had avenged Tunstall’s murder with their own brand of vigilante justice. Opposing them was “the House,” a cabal of ruthless Irish businessmen centered on the L.G. Murphy & Co. enterprise, primarily run by James Dolan. With the backing of the corrupt Santa Fe Ring, they had a roughly equivalent force of hardened gunmen at their disposal.

Lost in the historical background are the majority of Hispanos (Southwesterners of Spanish descent) who fought on both sides in the subsequent five-day siege, the boiling-over point of the Lincoln County War. While there is no shame in being overshadowed by the legend that became Billy

the Kid, they were more than merely a collective backdrop. They were men, many with families, willing to risk their lives, some paying a bloody price for having been drawn into a predominantly Anglo conflict from which they ultimately gained nothing for their participation.

Before riding into Lincoln, McSween and the Regulators had significantly bolstered their numbers with the help of Picacho resident Martín Chávez, who had rallied some two dozen armed Hispanos to join the fight against the House. “We knew him to be one of our sympathizers, although he had never entered actively into an engagement,” recalled Regulator George Coe. “He was a deputy sheriff, a conservative, and was not satisfied with conditions as they existed.” With a disdain for the House and what they stood for, Chávez and his armed Hispanos set out to change those conditions por la fuerza (by force).

Having positioned men throughout town, McSween forted up in his adobe house with a handful of Regulators and Hispanos, including Chávez’s uncle-in-law Vicente Romero.

Born on April 20, 1846, in Sevilleta, Nuevo México, José Vicente Romero was the seventh of eight children born to L.G. MURPHY

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TOP: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO; RIGHT: COURTESY BUCKEYE BLAKE

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with the House. Two months later an armed Vicente found himself taking up position in the attorney’s home alongside such hard cases as William Bonney (aka Billy the Kid).

Also present in the McSween home was 20-year-old Florencio Chávez, who had initially refused to take part in the conflict. His father, José, was killed when Florencio was a boy, after JOSÉ CHÁVEZ Y CHÁVEZ which he lived in San Patricio with his mother and sister. Young Chávez worked on Dick Brewer’s ranch and was a hand on cattleman Tunstall’s spread at the time of the Englishman’s murder. “Brewer was crying and told me, ‘Chávez, they killed the best friend you got in Lincoln County,’” Florencio recalled.

But he refused to join the Regulators, telling them, “No, I got my sister and mother.” He was not alone in his thinking. Most of the Hispano community wanted no part of the war, considering it a pelea gringo (foreigners’ fight). Shortly after the Regulators’ failed attempted to strong-arm him into service, Chávez was in Tularosa when he received word House-affiliated IGNACIO GONZÁL ES gunmen had stormed his family home in San Patricio and stolen $30 he had given his mother. “That was how I got into the war,” he recalled. Involved in a skirmish in San Patricio in the intervening months, Chávez now took his position in the McSween home alongside Regulator and amigo José Chávez y Chávez.

Chávez y Chávez was a San Patricio constable with a personality tailormade for hostilities. Born in 1851 in Ceboletta (present-day Seboyeta), in Cibola County, he’d joined the Regulators early in the conflict and proven himself a pistolero. Alongside him was Yginio Salazar, at just 15 the youngest Regulator, who had formed a bond with fellow teenager Bonney, admiring his fearlessness. Also taking up positions in the McSween home were the enigmatic José María Sánchez, Ignacio Gonzáles and herder Francisco Zamora.

On the opposite side of Lincoln’s lone street, toward the east end of town, Martín Chávez and more than a dozen Hispanos occupied José Montaño’s JOHN HENRY TUNSTALL store, while others took up position next door in Juan Patrón’s store.

José Martín Chávez was likely born on Dec. 11, 1852, though other Ygnacio Romero and María Rafaela Lueras. sources list May 31, 1849. Orphaned as a child, he was taken in and Named after his grandfather, he grew up mostly raised by Padre José Sambrano Tafoya, a Catholic priest in Manzano in Manzano. During the Civil War he served as who later became a missionary to the Mescalero Apaches. Chávez grew a bugler in the 1st New Mexico Militia and 1st up around Vicente Romero and his large family in Manzano and accomNew Mexico Cavalry. After the war he married panied them when they moved to Picacho. Appalled by the Horrell María Gonzáles, and the couple had three chil- brothers’ racially motivated spate of violence in Lincoln County in 1873, dren. As a laborer, Vicente moved the family Chávez was likely the gunman who later ambushed and killed Horrell around a lot, residing in turn in Lincoln, Ruidoso crony Ben Turner on Jan. 21, 1874.

On Aug. 16, 1875, Martín married Juanita “Juana” Romero in the chapel and, finally, Picacho, where he worked a farm.

On April 8, 1878, he sat on a grand jury that of Nuestra Señora de los Dolóres (Our Lady of Sorrows) in Manzano, her heard testimony against McSween for alleged Uncle Vicente and Aunt María serving as witnesses. Among Martín’s embezzlement of insurance funds from the estate brothers-in-law was future Lincoln County Sheriff George Kimbrell, who of the late Emil Fritz—a catalyst of the conflict in June 1864 had married Juana’s older sister Pablita. Brave, intelligent FLORENCIO CHÁVEZ

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and highly respected, Chávez had become a leading community figure in Picacho by the time he led his Hispano followers on the warpath into Lincoln.

Also present in the Montaño Store was Fernando Herrera. Red-haired, blue-eyed and freckled, he did not much resemble a Hispano. Born José Fernando de Herrera on July 2, 1836, in Santa Cruz de la Cañada, Nuevo México, he became a successful farmer, married María Juliana Martínez in 1856 and had 11 children. Two of his daughters, María Antonia Miguela and Manuelita, married Regulators Josiah “Doc” Scurlock and Charlie Bowdre, respectively. Having joined their cause, the 42-year-old Herrera came armed with a large rifle, a notoriously fierce temper and a reputation as a marksman.

Alongside Chávez and Herrera were other armed Hispanos whose identities are lost to time.

Meanwhile, Herrera’s sons-in-law Scurlock and Bowdre took up position with 10 others in Isaac Ellis’ store, on the east end of town.

As men throughout Lincoln gripped their firearms in nervous tension, the standoff began with all but one certainty—there would be blood.

Holed up in the Wortley Hotel, Lincoln County Sheriff George Peppin realized his men were vastly outnumbered and quickly sent for the House partisans still out scouring the region for Regulators. Alongside Peppin was nephewin-law Lucio Montoya. Born José Lucio Montoya in Manzano in 1854, the 24-year-old held a reputation as a sharpshooter.

After the War

The following day, Monday the 15th, a rift opened between McSween and Saturnino Baca. McSween demanded Baca and family vacate the home they were renting from him, as they had provided food and water to House partisans trapped in the torreón (fortress tower) on the property. Baca had remained neutral in the conflict up to that point, but he now appealed for assistance from Fort Stanton commander Colonel Nathan Dudley. A Civil War veteran and former county sheriff, Capitán Baca was known to many as the “Father of Lincoln County.”

Among the reinforcements Dolan and Peppin received later that afternoon was Baca’s brother-in-law José Chávez y Baca (the capitán had married José’s eldest sister, María Juana, in the mid-1850s when the girl was just 11). A father of three young daughters at the time, 31-year-old Chávez y Baca had been sworn in as a deputy by Peppin the previous month in a likely attempt to garner favor with the Hispano populace.

On July 3 José had led a small posse against Regulators in San Patricio, only to be driven off. He now took his place alongside the likes of gang leader John Kinney and his Rio Grande posse and outlaw members of the Seven Rivers Warriors, ready to wage war against the “Modocs,” as Dolan partisans disparagingly referred to the McSween faction.

Over the first two days of the siege both sides exchanged sparing and ineffective gunfire while seeking to serve warrants on opposing combat-

Citizens pose outside L.G. Murphy’s onetime “Big House/ Store,” which local officials purchased in 1880 for use as the county courthouse.

Escape From Lincoln

The Kid hightails it on a “borrowed” horse after his jailbreak on April 28, 1881, in Buckeye Blake’s Riding Collie Out of Town.

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PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO

TOP LEFT: DANIEL MAYER, CC BY-S.A. 3.0; TOP RIGHT: JAMES B. MILLS COLLECTION

adobe. Shortly after 9 p.m., as the house burned down around them, young Bonney led an escape attempt, making a break for the Tunstall store with José Chávez y Chávez, Tom Folliard, Jim French and McSween’s consumptive law student, Harvey Morris. Soon spotted in the light of the blaze, they came under fire from House Choosing Sides In support of McSween a dozen Hispanos, partisans and three soldiers, who shot down including Martín Chávez (see at right), took Morris.

The Regulators returned fire, Bonup position in José Montaño’s store (above).

MARTÍN CHÁVEZ ney shooting off Kinney’s mustache and (AT LEFT) WITH RANC HER AU grazing his lip, before fleeing for the bank ants. The first casualty came on the GUST KLINE of the Rio Bonito. In the commotion Florthird day, Wednesday the 17th. Sherencio Chávez, José María Sánchez and Igiff Peppin sent Lucio Montoya, Charlie “Lallacooler” Crawford and three others nacio Gonzáles also managed to escape, Gonzáles suffering a bullet to occupy a corn-planted hill overlooking the wound to the arm.

Having hesitated too long, Alexander McSween, Vicente Romero and Montaño Store from south of town. Spotting the men from the store, Herrera took steady Francisco Zamora were left to their own devices. Romero and Zamora aim with his large rifle and squeezed the trig- took cover in the chicken house while McSween stepped into the yard ger, sending a bullet more than 500 yards to to confront the House crowd, supposedly declaring a willingness to rip into Crawford’s side, pierce his spinal cord surrender before abruptly proclaiming the opposite. A barrage of shots and leave him prostrate and paralyzed. The rang out. Hit five times, McSween dropped dead.

In the exchange of fire that followed, Deputy Bob Beckwith was killed others dashed down the hill for cover, leaving the mortally wounded Crawford to suffer all instantly by a bullet through the right eye, fired by either Romero or day in the blistering heat. Eventually recovered Zamora, who were themselves then shot and killed. When the gunfire by soldiers from Fort Stanton, the wounded man stopped, young Yginio Salazar lay motionless nearby with two slugs in his body. Seven Rivers gunman Andy Boyle checked the bodies and was died a week later in the post hospital.

Sporadic fighting continued through Thursday about to fire another shot into the teen when advised not to waste another the 18th. By midday on Friday the 19th Colonel bullet on the dead “greaser.” As the bodies of the three Regulators lay Dudley had arrived with 35 soldiers. His sympa- bleeding out in the yard, the victorious House crowd drank and celebrated. thies were with the House. Facing the prospect In fact Salazar had feigned death. After slowly crawling to the riverbank of howitzer and Gatling gun fire, Martín Chávez under cover of darkness, he managed to reach his sister-in-law’s house. and compañeros in the Montaño Store lit out the back door, draping themselves in blankets to The following morning McSween’s wife and friends retrieved conceal their identities as they made their way his body for burial. Relatives also came to claim the bodies of Romero to the Ellis Store. By the time Dudley’s men re- and Zamora, though unlike McSween their gravesites bear no markers. positioned the howitzer, Chávez had already Francisco and Juan Romero took brother Vicente’s body back to Picacho saddled up to lead a breakout. Exchanging gun- for burial. With young children to raise, his widow, María, would remarry fire with Sheriff Peppin and the House parti- twice. While his descendants doubtless honored his memory, historically sans, they wounded John Jones before escaping speaking he and Zamora remain little more than two men with Hispanic names who died alongside Alexander McSween. into the mountains.

In the wake of the siege Martín Chávez refused to carry on the fight Focusing his attention on the McSween house, Dudley trained his howitzer on the front door against the House, as he felt McSween’s death had ended the war. and issued an ultimatum. After failed negotia- He was also mourning the death of Vicente Romero, his wife’s beloved tion attempts by her husband, Susan McSween uncle. Many Hispanos followed Chávez’s example. Exceptions included famously marched from the house to confront Fernando Herrera and Ignacio Gonzáles, among a group of rustlers Dudley and Sheriff Peppin, her fiery protests who on August 5 shot down bookkeeper Morris Bernstein at the Meshaving little effect. Years later Chávez recalled calero Indian Agency, a killing for decades wrongly attributed to Billy that he and his men returned that night to assist the Kid. In 1879 Martín Chávez, Fernando Herrera, Florencio Chávez, Yginio the holdouts, first by attacking the MurphyDolan store and then trying to approach the Salazar, José Chávez y Chávez and Jose María Sánchez joined territorial McSween house itself. But they were unable to Governor Lew Wallace’s Lincoln County Riflemen, an organized militia captained by Juan Patrón. In its brief existence the militia carried out a get close enough to be of any assistance.

That afternoon House partisans set fire to mandate to “assist the civil authorities in repressing violence and restoring lumber they’d stacked against the McSween order.” The subsequent fates of Gonzáles and Sanchez remain a mystery.

PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO

TOP LEFT: DANIEL MAYER, CC BY-S.A. 3.0; TOP RIGHT: JAMES B. MILLS COLLECTION

Lucio Montoya married María Inez Miranda on once-esteemed patriarch who fired Oct. 12, 1881, and they would have five children. the greatest long shot of the LinMartín Chávez and Montoya became friendly in coln County War. later years, Martín recalling many shared laughs Martín Chávez fared somewith his onetime enemy. Working as a laborer and what better. Returning to his farmer, Lucio lived peacefully until his death in Picacho ranch in the aftermath Lincoln on June 17, 1927. of the war, he welcomed frequent Montoya’s fellow House partisan José Chávez y visits from friend Bonney, whom Baca married three times, losing his first two wives Martín always recalled with great to early deaths and fathering 11 children in all. fondness. Martín and wife Juanita Unlike brother-in-law Saturnino Baca, who remained adopted David Billescas, born in in Lincoln until his death on March 7, 1925, José and 1882, and went on to have eight chilSUSAN McSWEEN his large family eventually moved northwest to Socorro dren of their own. A politically active County. There, just outside Magdalena, they established Democrat, Chávez served on the Board a prosperous ranch—so prosperous it drew unwanted attention of County Commissioners and negotiated the that almost cost José his life. sale of large shipments of wool back East. In 1907 On Aug. 9, 1906, Tom Craig and Richard Queen stopped by the Governor Curry appointed him a delegate to Chávez y Baca Ranch and scored a dinner invitation. While enjoying the Farmers’ National Congress in Oklahoma supper they cased the joint, having heard tell of a stash of money or City along with former Lincoln County Sheriff buried gold on the premises. In the robbery attempt that followed, Craig Pat Garrett and other prominent New Mexicans. repeatedly walloped José over the head with a revolver until son-in-law By 1926 Chávez and family had left Picacho for Juan Montoya y Castillo saved the old man’s life by shooting Craig dead. Santa Fe, where former Governor Miguel AntoGrazed over one eye, Queen fled, only to be arrested two days later. nio Otero Jr. often visited him to glean Martín’s He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. José eventually valuable recollections of the Lincoln County recovered from his head wounds and lived another 36 years. The former War. Chávez died peacefully on Dec. 8, 1931, Lincoln deputy died on Sept. 24, 1942. He was 89. The devoted family and wife Juanita on April 21, 1947. As they had man’s headstone in Magdalena Cemetery is inscribed, Recuerdo de Sus shared their lives, they share a marker in Santa Fe’s Rosario Cemetery. Como debería ser.

Nietos (Remembrance of His Grandchildren).

Martín Chávez had voluntarily led his fellow In something of an irony, Regulator Florencio Chávez would marry Teodora Brady, eldest daughter of the late House-affiliated Sheriff Hispanos into the midst of hostilities during the William Brady (shot by a posse of Regulators that included Bonney). most infamous county war in frontier history.

Remaining in Lincoln County the rest of his days, Florencio worked as Some have been critical of their effectiveness, a jailer and deputy sheriff. He died on Feb. 21, 1933, and was buried as the threat of Colonel Dudley’s superior firepower and their subsequent withdrawal played in Lincoln Cemetery.

Florencio’s old amigo José Chávez y Chávez led anything but a peace- a factor in the outcome. Yet without their interful postwar life. Becoming an outlaw member of both the Sociedad de vention the five-day siege would have ended Bandidos and Las Gorras Blancas (The White Caps), he was later convicted far sooner. McSween and the Regulators needed of murder and served nearly a dozen years in the territorial penitentiary, them, and they threw in with vigor. That these until pardoned by Governor George Curry on Jan. 11, 1909. Chávez unsung compañeros were willing to ride into a y Chávez died in Milagro on July 17, 1923. Only in death did he gain bloody conflict with little preparation, knownotoriety as the most famous Hispano gunman of the Lincoln County ing full well the dangers of such a venture, is a War, thanks to actor Lou Diamond Phillips’ portrayal of him (though testament to their valor. They stand as examples of hombres valientes amid the desperate times in inaccurately as a half-Navajo) in the 1988 Western Young Guns.

Having narrowly escaped death during the five-day siege, Yginio Sala- which they lived. zar lived a largely peaceful life. On Nov. 29, 1898, he married widow Isabel Paniague, and they had a daughter. Yginio remained a farmer until his Australian historian and writer James B. Mills has death on Jan. 7. 1936. His headstone simply reads, Pal of Billy the Kid. spent much of his life researching the American West.

After wife María’s death, Fernando Herrera married Marta Rodríguez, He dedicates this article to fellow historian Richard around 1885, and they raised the younger Herrera children, several adopted W. Etulain, “un hombre amable y generoso.” children and grandchildren. However, his financial misdealing alienated For further reading Mills suggests Robert M. Utley’s members of his large family, some of whom took him to court for mis- High Noon in Lincoln: Violence on the Westappropriation of funds. Fernando was ultimately swindled out of his ern Frontier, Philip J. Rasch’s Gunsmoke in Linproperty, leaving him penniless and forced to live with a daughter in coln County, Nora True Henn’s Lincoln County Alamogordo. There he died from heart complications on Dec. 14, 1915, and Its Wars and Daniel Flores’ José Chávez y and was buried in an unmarked grave—an ignominious end for the Chávez: The Outlaw Who Died of Old Age. DECEMBER 2020

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TROUBLE IN CHINATOWN

When rioters began killing Chinese Los Angelenos, teacher turned sheriff James Franklin Burns acted to stop the carnage

By Matthew Bernstein

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Forty-five dusty miles down the trail they reached Provo, just east of Utah Lake, where Burns married Burdick’s 24-year-old daughter, Lucretia. Two hundred and fifty miles farther south, along the New Mexico Territory border, the wagon train was rolling through the Santa Clara River canyon when the captain of the party, Ransom M. Viall, rode back to warn the others that Ute Indians were ahead and had absconded with some of the party’s horses and cattle. After forting up the wagons and placing the women and children under guard, the remaining men took up arms and went forward to confront the Ute raiders.

Born in Clifton Springs, New York, SAN GABRIEL MISSION “Marching up the canyon, we enon September 27, 1831, James Franklin countered the Indians, about 400 Burns spent his teen years in Kalamazoo and Coldwater, Mich. A promising student, he attended strong,” Burns recalled, “on the rocks and in the roadway effectively barring us from reaching our stock. Fortunately, an academy in Jackson County, then taught public school in Michigan and Pennsylvania for a few years. But the booming we had with us a dissenting Mormon who could speak the Indian idiom.”

West beckoned, and in February 1853 he set out for CaliUsing the Mormon as interpreter, Captain Viall called for fornia. As Burns made his way up the Missouri River, the a parley with the Ute chief. When the chief appeared, Viall paddle-wheel steamer he was aboard grounded near St. Joshowed him a pocket watch to communicate the Utes had seph, delaying him a few days, long enough to witness a slave auction. A committed abolitionist, he noted in his journal 15 minutes to return the horses and cattle or suffer the consequences. With a loud whoop the chief ordered the stolen the spectacle “made an impression that has never left me.” animals returned. Despite being badly outnumbered, Viall— In May he joined Mormon Bishop Thomas Burdick’s through a mixture of theatrics and force of will—recovered California-bound wagon train in Kanesville, Iowa (presentday Council Bluffs), a party that grew to 119 travelers. Burns the party’s property, sparing both the pioneers and Indians from bloodshed. It was a lesson Burns took to heart. described the 1,000-mile stretch along the Mormon Trail On December 10 the wagon train reached Los Angeles, to Salt Lake City as “comparatively easy, without special where Burns resumed his vocation as a schoolteacher, iniincident.” Their luck was about to change. Delayed by sicktially at the San Gabriel Mission (see above). In 1857 his ness, the party knew snowfall would soon make the Sierra career got a boost when he was elected the first superintendent Nevada impassable, so they instead headed southwest to of Los Angeles County public schools. In 1860 he pursued pick up the Old Spanish Trail to Los Angeles.

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n the evening of October 24, 1871, Los Angeles County Sheriff J.F. Burns was a few miles south of the city when word reached him there was trouble in Chinatown. Reaching Calle de los Negros an hour later, Burns found in place all the makings of a massacre—a popular rancher shot in the chest, Chinese assassins hiding among innocent Chinese citizens, a city marshal with tenuous control of his officers, and an armed mob of vigilantes. Although Burns had failed to prevent the deadliest riot yet in Los Angeles history, the former schoolteacher employed hard-earned life lessons to end the killings.

LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY; OPPOSITE: NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

JAMES FRANKLIN BURNS

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Where the Massacre Began

Though rather short in stature, the fiery Burns proved a diligent and effective sheriff, whether escorting convicts to San Quentin State Prison or taking on bandits. “Sheriff Burns is making it rather troublesome for horse thieves under his jurisdiction,” the San Francisco Daily Examiner reported in October 1868. Nor did he shy from his duty when dealing with killers.

On the morning of Jan. 14, 1871, lumberjacks Henry and Oscar Bilderbeck, brothers from Ohio, were in the midst of chopping wood in Little Tujunga Canyon up in the San Gabriel Mountains when confronted by rival firewood supplier Alanson Gardner. Gardner had previously tried to scare the brothers out of the canyon. This time he brought along hard cases Al Henry and Buckskin Bill, whose real name no one seemed to know. Gardner had borrowed a Henry rifle.

A slight, shifty sort who rarely looked anyone in the eyes, Henry sported black hair and whiskers, a hangdog look and a slouch hat with a bullet hole through the crown. Worse still was Buckskin Bill, who

Little Tujunga Canyon

It was here firewood supplier Alanson Gardner and accomplices Al Henry and Buckskin Bill cut down lumberjack brothers Henry and Oscar Bilderbeck.

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TOP: FROM LOS ANGELES TIMES, MAY 21, 1916; RIGHT: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES

another avenue of public service, securing appointment as a U.S. marshal.

Three years later, running for city treasurer as a Republican, he defeated his Democratic opponent. In 1867, returning to law enforcement, Burns was elected to the job for which he would best be remembered: Los Angeles County sheriff.

already was rumored to have killed several men. In his late 30s, Bill also had dark hair but stood around 6 feet tall. He had a distinctive scar on his left cheek and often wore buckskins, hence his nickname. He was also known as “Six-toed Pete,” on account of a deformed fourth toe on his left foot that curled back in a half circle, obliging Bill to cut holes in the toe boxes of his left shoes. Bill ran with one Sarah Jane Stevenson, an Indian woman from Oregon Territory’s Kern River, who was pregnant with their son.

With Henry and Buckskin Bill backing him, Gardner threatened the Bilderbecks and again told them to leave the canyon. Not waiting for a reply, one of the men fired five shots, cold-bloodedly killing the brothers. George Goodhue, another of Gardner’s woodchoppers, had watched his boss and the other two men head toward the Bilderbecks’ camp and heard the shots.

In the aftermath Gardner bribed Goodhue to forget what he knew and leave, never to return. Goodhue did neither. After spending a few weeks 40 miles south in Wilmington, his conscience eating at him, he returned to alert authorities. On Goodhue’s word they arrested Gardner, but by then Henry and Buckskin Bill had vanished. Then, on February 3, Deputy U.S. Marshal Jonathan Dunlap unearthed the Bilderbeck brothers’ bodies, wrapped in their own blankets and buried near their camp. One had been shot through the heart; the other bore four bullet wounds. Their killers had stove in their skulls for good measure.

The hunt was on for fugitives Al Henry and Buckskin Bill.

Following up on a sighting of the fugitives at Louis Wolf ’s store in Temecula, Burns traced them to a campsite in the nearby mountains. No luck. For a price an informer from Fort Yuma told the lawman Bill and Sarah Jane had fled south into Mexico. Then the sheriff received a letter from the San Rafael mining camp in Baja, claiming Bill had been seen hanging around.

Wasting no time, Burns secured a warrant

TOP: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES; LEFT: PHOTO BY LITA FICE

A stagecoach rests in Chinatown near the adobe Coronel Building, from which Chinese gunmen shot down rancher Robert Thompson on Oct. 24, 1871.

Badman Killed in Baja

Mortally wounded, the fugitive known as Buckskin Bill or Six-toed Pete confessed before breathing his last.

TOP: FROM LOS ANGELES TIMES, MAY 21, 1916; RIGHT: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES

TOP: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES; LEFT: PHOTO BY LITA FICE

and requisition papers from Judge Ygnácio Sepúlveda of Los Angeles County and made a beeline south. Days later he and San Diego County Undersheriff Philip Crossthwaite crossed into Baja.

near a spring frequented by the Cucapá Indians, they caught sight of a buckskin-clad man on a mule leading a woman with a swaddled infant on a gray horse. The posse was 500 yards from the pair, but there could be no mistake—they’d caught up to Buckskin Bill and Sarah Jane Stevenson.

The pair soon spotted the posse.

As the outlaw and his woman fled, Chávez split the five-man posse in three. Two men galloped to the left, two to the right. Going up the middle, Quirrino Endelacio reached Buckskin Bill first. But as he was using both hands to level his Spencer, he was unable to check his mount, and horse met mule in a violent collision. Having dropped his own Henry rifle, a desperate Bill grasped at the muzzle of Endelacio’s Spencer, seeking to wrest it away. As he did so, the gun fired, the round tearing though Bill’s hand and into his left side, shattering his spine. A terrified Sarah Jane promptly surrendered.

Realizing he’d been mortally wounded, the outlaw made a number of confessions. First, his real name was Stephen Samsbury. He admitted to having put five men belowground, but he insisted Gardner had shot the Bilderbecks. He and Henry had only helped to bury the brothers.

Finally, looking on the “bright side,” he expressed relief at having been shot rather than hanged. Two hours later Buckskin Bill breathed his last.

Sarah Jane confirmed her lover was a badman who’d “killed a heap of Americans.” According to her, while encamped in Temecula he and Henry had gone hunting, but Bill had returned alone. He’d told Sarah Jane that Henry had made for San Diego, but authorities believed he’d killed Henry to cover his trail.

Rifling through his pockets, the possemen secured $8 in coin, tobacco and a rough journal that outlined his flight from justice. They also took Bill’s rifle and stripped him of his clothing. Then, after cutting off his deformed left foot at the ankle, they buried the naked corpse on the spot.

Preserving the grizzly trophy in a metal tin filled with mescal, Burns returned to Los Angeles. Though technically a Rurale had shot and killed Buckskin Bill, the sheriff collected the $4,732.82 in bounty money, thanks to the proof he’d brought back in a tinful of mescal.

Respite from his duties proved elusive, for four months later the sheriff was caught up in the Chinese Massacre of 1871.

Baja proved tough, inhospitable country, described by Burns as “one of the most trying of my life.” He and Crossthwaite arrived in the San Rafael Valley on June 14, but Buckskin Bill easily slipped away from the teeming gold camp. In desperation Burns sent his papers to Governor Don Manuel Clemente Rojo, in Mesa Redonda, requesting local help.

Rojo delivered.

On June 18 a posse of Mexican Rurales and Indian guides set out, led by Chief Justo Chávez.

Their destination lay east, on the Colorado Desert side of the mountains, Buckskin Bill’s last known whereabouts. Days later, crossing a ridge Massacre Aftermath

The blanketed corpses of 19 Chinese men and boys lie in rows in the Los Angeles jail yard the morning after the massacre.

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Calle de los Negros

On the south end of this Chinatown street officer Jésus Bilderrain found tong gunmen engaged in a shootout.

Big Trouble in Little China

According to the 1870 U.S. Census the California city of 5,728 souls had only 172 Chinese, roughly 3 percent of the population.

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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES

Before coming to a boil on the evening of Oct. 24, 1871, trouble had been brewing in Chinatown between the Nin Yung and Hong Chow companies—rival secret societies, or tongs—over which had control of Chinese prostitute Ya Hit. As prostitution in Chinatown was big business, netting $30,000 to $40,000 a year, neither tong was willing to back down.

Yo Hing, leader of the Hong Chow, initially gained the upper hand when he directed Ya Hit to marry a member of his tong. Seeking payback, Sam Yuen, a prominent Nin Yung merchant, hired Ah Choy and Yu Tak, Chinese assassins, aka “highbinders,” from San Francisco. On October 23 the pair waited for Yo Hing outside an apartment on the north side of Calle de los Negros. As their quarry stepped outside, the highbinders opened fire.

“They fired at me,” a fortunate Yo Hing later told the Los Angeles Star.

“Ah Choy’s pistol got out of order—I think a cap caught in the cylinder— and that saved my life. One ball passed through my shirt and coat.”

Yo Hing made it back inside.

Waiting till the coast was clear, he then went to his attorney, Jack King, who swore out a warrant. Ah Choy and Yu Tak were arrested that same day. The next morning Sam Yuen posted their bail. The day passed quietly. Around 5 o’clock Ah Choy had just sat down to dinner in a house on Calle de los Negros when he heard a commotion out front.

He opened the door to find several Hong Chow toughs, one of whom

A half hour after Ah Choy’s murder the crack of gunfire reached the ears of Policeman Jésus Bilderrain, enjoying downtime at Christopher Higby’s saloon. In a flash Bilderrain mounted his horse, summoned fellow officer Esteban Sanchez to follow him and made for Chinatown. Reaching the south end of Calle de los Negros first, Bilderrain found tong gunmen engaged in a middle-of-the-street shootout. He charged his horse straight into them, ordering the men to stop. As the startled tong members scattered, the officer hopped down, arrested one gunman and asked bystander Adolfo Celis to escort him to jail. Dodging bullets, Bilderrain then chased another tong member into the Wing Chung store, a Nin Yung stronghold in the Coronel Building. Just inside the dimly lit store his quarry suddenly turned and pressed a pistol into the officer’s chest. Bilderrain grabbed for the gun, and when the man pulled the trigger, it came down on the officer’s thumb.

It was then Bilderrain noticed the building was “plum full of Chinamen.” Realizing his predicament, he bolted for the corral at the back of the dimly lit store when a bullet from that direction caught him in the right shoulder. Wheeling, Bilderrain knocked over furniture as he bulled his way back out to the street, where Celis still stood with the arrestee.

“Keep out, Celis, or they will shoot you!”

Bilderrain shouted.

From within the building Nin Yung gunslingers fired wildly at Bilderrain and newly arrived Officer Sanchez, and an errant shot struck teenager Juan José Mendibles just below his right knee. At that everyday Angelenos—Hispanic and Anglo—pulled their six-shooters and began firing indiscriminately at the Coronel Building.

Having heard the shots, Robert Thompson, a popular rancher and former saloonkeeper, came running.

“What’s the matter?” Thompson asked Celis.

TOP: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: LEFT: GRANGER

opened fire. Shot in the neck, Ah Choy collapsed. Within minutes word spread among the Nin Yung that Hong Chow assassins had killed Ah Choy. All hell was about to break loose.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES

TOP: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: LEFT: GRANGER

“The Chinamen have shot Bilderrain,” Celis answered.

Drawing his six-shooter, Thompson moved to the gallery left of the entrance to the Wing Chung store, while Sanchez covered the right. Peering around the corner, Celis spied several gunman, pistols at the ready. Jumping back, he warned Thompson, “Don’t go there or they’ll shoot you.”

Ignoring the warning, Thompson stepped fully into the doorway. Nothing happened. He then fired into the shadows. This time there was return fire, and Thompson stumbled backward, a bullet lodged just above his heart. “I am killed,” he gasped to Celis.

By the time Sheriff Burns reached Chinatown around 6 o’clock, City Marshal Frank Baker had set up a police cordon around the Coronel Building, which was riddled with bullets.

Swelling the ranks of officers was a mob of angry Los Angeles citizens, many of whom had poured from local saloons and bordellos on the news that Thompson had been shot by “Celestials” and lay dying in agony in Wollweber’s drugstore.

Unlike Baker, however, Burns was more concerned with the trigger-happy crowd than the Chinese trapped within the Coronel Building.

The sheriff’s instincts were correct, as by the time Baker had arrived, the tong members had largely fled. Most of those remaining inside were wholly innocent, including pillar of the community Dr. Gene Tong. Burns urged the mob to remain calm and initially believed they were listening. Fifteen minutes later Ah Wing, an employee of the Pico House, sprinted in panic from the adjacent Beaudry Building, presumably trying to reach the safety of the hotel a block away. The mob went in pursuit. Burns assumed Baker and his officers would arrest the man. It wasn’t till the sheriff overheard one of the returning men comment, “That fellow didn’t kick over five seconds,” he realized they’d lynched him.

Before the hour was up Thompson died, and a rumor spread Bilderrain had too. That double dose of bad news prompted a bloodlust only an orgy of killing could slake. Thus when a pair of Chinese women emerged from the Wing Chung store to surrender, they were met with a hail of bullets. When Burns tried to form a posse to protect the innocents, he was greeted with a storm of abuse. “Damn the sheriff! Shoot him! Hang him!”

At 8:45 the mob stormed the Coronel Building.

“A multitude of citizens,” Burns recalled, “commenced shooting, hanging, and killing Chinamen as fast as found.” Amid vulgar cries of, “Carajo

Junction of Main, Spring and Temple

From atop a dry goods box at this corner Sheriff Burns implored the rioters to desist.

la Chino!” (“F--- the Chinese!”) the slaughter continued. A Chinese boy of no more than 12 was hanged; he knew not a word of English. Dr. Tong was more eloquent. In English and Spanish he pleaded for his life. Journalist Patrick S. Dorney was present and may have participated in the riot. Years later he recalled what happened to the doctor: He might as well have pleaded with wolves. At last he attempted to bribe those who were hurrying him to his death. He offered $1,000—$2,000—$3,000— $5,000—$10,000—$15,000! But to no purpose. He was hanged—and his $15,000 was spirited away nonetheless. At his death the old man wore a valuable diamond ring upon his left index finger, but when his corpse was cut down, it was found…[the] finger and ring were gone.

Unable to stop more than a dozen murders, Burns inspired at least one rescue. As a party of rioters dragged a man up Commercial Street to a waiting noose, Burns called for volunteers. Judge Robert Widney and James Goldsworthy answered the call. Rushing into the crowd, the trio wrested the Chinaman from the mob and turned him over to the sheriff’s helpers, who spirited the man to safety in the county jail.

Emboldened, Burns mounted a dry goods box at the corner of Temple and Spring and “commenced a tirade, imploring the rioters to desist.”

As Captain Viall had called the Utes’ bluff along the Santa Clara River, Burns had hit on the right combination of theatrics and force of will.

As the mob finally and mercifully dispersed, the sheriff and District Attorney Cameron E. Thom ordered two dozen deputies to gather the dead and guard Chinatown. “The following morning,” Burns lamented, “we had 19 Chinamen corpses in the jail yard.”

In the wake of the massacre Burns tracked down the ringleaders. Ultimately, eight rioters were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to prison. The longest sentence was six years. In the end, however, the California Supreme Court overturned the convictions, and on June 10, 1873, all eight were released from San Quentin, having served just over a year.

In 1874 Burns participated in the ongoing manhunt for notorious Californio bandit Tiburcio Vásquez before moving to Nebraska to care for his ailing mother. Returning to Los Angeles, he was appointed chief of police in 1889. Burns died there on Jan. 5, 1921, at the venerable age of 89. He is buried at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery. Burns Avenue, running east from the campus of Los Angeles City College, is named in his memory.

Matthew Bernstein, a frequent contributor to Wild West, teaches writing at Los Angeles City College and Matrix for Success Academy. For further reading he recommends The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871, by Scott Zesch, and Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, by John Mack Faragher.

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GRANGER; OPPOSITE: IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

FIRST WESTERN GUNFIGHTER? Accounts of the violent life of Ferd Patterson are piecemeal, but he appears a rival of Cullen Baker for that dubious honor

By Mark T. Smokov

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H

GRANGER; OPPOSITE: IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

is name was J. Ferdinand Patterson (we have late author Glenn Shirley’s unsupported word the J stood for “Jason”), and he is perhaps the least known and most underrated gunfighter in Western history.

Ferd Patterson was a contemporary of the infamous Cullen Montgomery Baker, the latter referred to, rightly or wrongly, by many writers and historians as the “first gunfighter.” But you won’t find Patterson in most standard encyclopedias of gunfighters, and someone has yet to pen his biography. Extant accounts of his life are scattered and conflicting and must be carefully scrutinized to get at the truth.

What little is known of Patterson’s early life appears more legend than provable fact. Most available sources, mainly secondary, place his birth in Tennessee in about 1820 or 1821. Baker was also born in that state, in 1835, his family moving to Texas in 1839. Although Shirley claimed Patterson moved to Texas that same year, in his late teens, contemporary sources suggest he moved there with his parents in boyhood. By all accounts young Patterson was educated and from a good family, his father a man of social standing.

According to author and frontier vigilante Nathaniel P. Langford, Patterson “[grew] to manhood among the desperate and bloody men of that border state. His character, tastes and pursuits were formed by early association with them.” Under their tutelage he became a gunman and professional gambler. He also developed a propensity for hard liquor.

In the verbose writing style of his era Langford described Patterson’s behavior under the influence of drink: “He remembered on these occasions every person who had ever offended him and sought the one nearest to him to engage him in quarrel. His whole bearing was aggressive and belligerent, and his best friends always avoided him until he became sober.”

In short, he was a mean drunk with a bad and sometimes lethal temper.

While in Texas, Shirley claimed, Patterson “disposed of” three men amid such drinking sprees. “Two were rather unworthy and useless characters,” he wrote. “The third was a prominent San Antonio saloonkeeper who had made the mistake of refusing to serve Ferd a drink after he had sold him half a dozen.” Patterson reportedly killed the saloonkeeper with one shot and was promptly thrown into the San Antonio jail. Early the next morning he escaped with the help of “some pretty young harlot.” Leaving his “sweetheart” behind, he fled west.

Patterson arrived in California around 1850, not long after the discovery of gold. He tried his hand at mining and also pursued gambling. Existing physical descriptions of him date from the latter part of his decade-long sojourn in California, when he was around 40 years old.

Slow on the Draw

Frederic Remington sketched A Fight in the Street in the late 19th century, long after Ferd Patterson first shot someone in the 1850s.

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William John McConnell, leader of the Payette Valley (Idaho) Vigilantes and a future Idaho governor and U.S. senator, gave perhaps the fullest description of Patterson in his 1913 Early History of Idaho:

that Ferd’s first fight came at Yreka, Calif., in 1856. Prospector Herman Francis Reinhart recollected the incident in his memoir The Golden Frontier.

The affray began when PatterHe was in height above 6 feet, with a well-knit muscular frame, son and fellow gamblers Hough weighing over 200 pounds.…He had sandy or red hair and a florid Tate and Bill Terry, the captain of complexion, which bore marks of dissipation; heavy, bushy eyea company of volunteers, got into brows partially concealed a pair of restless blue eyes.…He wore a pair WILLIAM a three-way quarrel as they emerged of high-heeled boots…a pair of plaid trousers…a cassimere [cashmere] McCONNELL from a Yreka saloon. Tate got the betshirt, a fancy silk vest, across the front of which dangled a heavy gold chain ter of the other two, slightly wounding made from specimens of native California gold. A long frock coat of heavy both men. Reinhart claimed that in a later scrape pilot-beaver cloth trimmed with the fur of the sea otter completed a wardrobe Terry shot Patterson in the forehead and, thinktypical of the man who wore it. ing him killed, fled town. It turned out Ferd According to McConnell, Patterson also wore, “without attempt at had only been stunned and was up and around concealment, a large ivory-handled revolver and a formidable bowie town next morning.

Patterson soon ventured north over the Sisknife to match.” Langford noted his “light hair [was] streaked with gray,” kiyou Mountains to the goldfields in southern a detail confirmed by the only known photograph of him.

McConnell asserted Patterson shot down opponents without giving Oregon, he and a few others locating claims them a chance to defend themselves, though at least one historian has on Sucker Creek. But Ferd reportedly burned dismissed the Idaho writer’s accounts as emotional and biased. Most other through his earnings gambling with miners and sources, including contemporary newspapers, give a more balanced view. associating with loose women in the rough minAlthough he was admittedly a killer, they suggest, Patterson more often ing town of Waldo. According to Reinhart and other sources, he got into a gunfight there with than not allowed the other guy to draw his gun.

Some sources claim that during his early years in San Francisco and either a gambler named Fraser River George, the Sierra Nevada gold camps Patterson engaged in several street fights over a “fancy woman,” or constable and saloonwith gun and knife. (That would give him the edge over Baker, who keeper George Wells (a former Texas Ranger), reportedly had his first gunfight in 1854.) But in his 1890 History of amid an ongoing dispute. It is possible the two Washington, Idaho and Montana, 1845–1889 Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote Georges were the same man; similarities in the Hair-raising Time in Portland

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IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

TOP: IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

It was here Patterson “scalped” his mistress, perhaps unintentionally while trying to snip a lock of her hair.

defense. There was fearful excitement, but the Rebels were quite strong [while the state was pro-Union, many Portlanders were successionists], and the sheriff and city authorities upheld Ferd Patterson, and he stayed right there to spite them.”

In fact Patterson was released on a heavy bond and later tried and SUMNER acquitted of murder, the sympathetic PINKHAM jury deciding he’d acted in self-defense.

He does appear to have remained in town In 1860 Patterson returned to San Francisco by way of Sacramento. In early October 1861, however, probably due to declining yields in awhile to gamble, as some months later he was the California goldfields, he hopped aboard a steamer bound for Portland, again arrested, this time for allegedly scalping, Ore. A gold strike in northern Idaho a year earlier had prompted a steady or threatening to scalp, his mistress from the steamer. Some sources alleged he suspected her stream of prospectors into the region.

According to McConnell, Patterson boarded the steamer with an attrac- of infidelity. Patterson himself claimed he’d untive demimonde and a party of “sporting” men and women. Once the intentionally knicked her scalp while trying to ship was at sea, the group took over the saloon and card room, becoming snip a lock of her hair with his Bowie knife, boisterous and profane. When other passengers complained to Captain hoping for a souvenir in view of his impending George W. Staples, the skipper courteously asked the sporting fraternity departure for Idaho. He was released on a $500 to retire. Patterson replied with an insult, at which point Staples threat- bond to await the action of a grand jury. He ened to put him in irons. As the party dispersed, Patterson said he would instead booked passage up the Columbia River en route to the Idaho mines. see the captain after the ship landed in Portland.

According to McConnell, once ashore Patterson followed Staples to the Pioneer Hotel and shot the captain from ambush as he descended the Patterson arrived in Idaho City, some stairs from the second-floor parlor to the lobby. Reinhart’s memory of the 20 miles northeast of Boise City, Idaho Terriincident, which concurs with contemporary newspaper accounts, appears tory, in 1863 (the territory was officially organized that March 3). A year earlier prospectors far closer to the truth.

On Friday, October 11, Captain Staples was drinking in the hotel bar had discovered gold in the Boise Basin, and with “Unionist” friends, when Patterson passed through the room. Knowing Ferd was a “successionist,” the captain prodded him to drink a toast to “Old Abe” Lincoln and the Union. Patterson said he would instead drink to Jeff Davis. After a heated exchange of words, Ferd left the bar. As he ascended the lobby stairs to his second-floor room, Staples and the other Unionists followed.

Though Ferd warned them not to come up after him, they started up the stairs, the captain in the lead. One reporter said Staples was undoubtedly threatening Patterson’s life when Ferd drew his revolver and shot the captain. Staples fell back into the arms of his companions, mortally wounded. His friends took him to his room, where he lingered three days before dying.

“The crowd tried to get ahold of Patterson, but he gave himself up to the authorities,” Reinhart wrote. “He had an examination before a justice, and he was discharged, for he acted in self-

IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

TOP: IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

gunshot wounds inflicted in each reported version of the incident suggest it was the same gunfight.

The two men were exchanging hot words outside Wells’ saloon when suddenly both went for their pistols. Patterson was struck several times, including a nasty wound to his side that splintered two or three ribs. In turn he emptied his revolver, though only one shot scored, shattering a bone in Wells’ arm. Believing he’d been mortally wounded, Ferd requested someone remove his boots. In time, however, he made a full recovery, while George’s arm wound proved disabling.

Ferd Finder

The slain Pinkham’s former deputy, Orlando “Rube” Robbins (seated in middle at right), tracked down the fugitive Patterson and arrested him without incident.

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Idaho City had sprouted up by fall. Patterson found that his fellow miners were largely Southerners who voted Democratic, and they’d heard about his defense to the death of the Southern cause in a Portland hotel.

So had Boise County Sheriff Sumner Pinkham, a Republican and radical Unionist, with whom Patterson soon came in conflict. Born in Maine in 1820, Pinkham was raised in Wisconsin. Physically similar to Patterson, he stood 6 feet 2 inches and topped 200 pounds. His skill with firearms had earned him his badge. Langford described him as “a bold, outspoken, truthful, self-reliant man,” easily aroused and dangerous at such times. To enemies, author Russell Blankenship wrote, “He was a large, strong bully with a treacherous temper, a gambler and, on the whole, a most undesirable citizen.” One striking feature about him was his prematurely white hair, making him appear much older, though he and Patterson were the same age.

Pinkham, like Patterson, had moved on to Idaho after having joined the California Gold Rush.

They had their first run-in after the intoxicated Ferd and Southern friends took unlawful possession of an Idaho City brewery. The aggrieved owner called on Sheriff Pinkham, who was also a deputy U.S. marshal, and he arrested Patterson after a brief struggle.

The men clashed again in October 1864 after Pinkham lost re-election as Boise County sheriff to Democrat A.O. Bowen, whom Bancroft derided as “a tool of bad characters.” When Patterson heard the results, he began celebrating on Idaho City’s main street. Pinkham happened to be passing by. Enraged, he struck his nemesis a smashing blow to the jaw that knocked Ferd into the gutter. Friends somehow persuaded Patterson not to go after his assailant half-cocked.

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FROM TOP: OREGON HISTORICAL SOCIETY; IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY; UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON LIBRARIES

On Independence Day 1865 ex-Rebel Patterson and Unionist Pinkham scuffled in the Idaho town, sparking a predictable showdown later that July.

IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Fourth of July Parade in Idaho City

Two versions survive of their next confrontation, on July 4, 1865, not long after the end of the Civil War. Pinkham had organized an Independence Day celebration centered on a parade. Marching at the head of the procession, he waved Old Glory and sang both patriotic and anti-Confederate songs. In one version of events Patterson and other ex-Rebels heckled Pinkham and his Unionist friends, Ferd yelling that if the parade marshal didn’t shut his mouth, he’d shut it for him.

Pinkham invited him to try. In the brief scuffle that followed, the flag fell into the dust of the street. Some witnesses swore Ferd spat on the flag. Others heard Pinkham vow to kill Patterson for having done so.

The other version claims “Old Pink” was too hyped up and dangerous to tangle with during the procession. After the parade, however, in a saloon patronized by Confederate sympathizers an impaired Pinkham foolishly demanded everyone toast Lincoln and the glory of the Union. “I don’t drink with no damned abolitionist!” hollered Patterson, as the Southern contingent braced for a free-for-all. Recognizing they were outnumbered and in enemy territory, Pinkham’s friends discreetly dragged him from the premises.

A showdown between the men was inevitable. It came on Sunday, July 23, 1865, at Warm Springs, a resort just outside Idaho City. Some sources claim Pinkham wasn’t given a chance to draw, while others say he and Patterson drew at the same time. McConnell predictably stated in his two histories of the region that Patterson shot Pinkham as the latter turned toward his adversary. “Each party went prepared for the other, ever since they were separated in a collision some months ago,” the September 16 Idaho World wrote. “Both expected a conflict, and when they accidentally met, they fought it out.”

The pair met on the resort’s front veranda, just outside the bar. Witnesses later testified Patterson asked, “Will you draw?” or “Draw, will you?”

McConnell claimed Ferd added, “You abolitionist son of a bitch!” Pinkham reportedly agreed with an oath, something like, “Yes, by damn, I will!”

Each then went for his gun. Patterson was faster, his first bullet hitting Pinkham in the shoulder of his gun arm and spoiling his aim, his bullet passing over Ferd’s head into the porch roof. Before Pinkham could cock his pistol, Patterson fired a second shot, striking his adversary in the chest.

The mortally wounded Pinkham tumbled down the porch steps and landed flat on his face, dead.

With the help of friends, Patterson secured a saddled horse and fled down the road to Boise City. Within the hour Pinkham’s former deputy, Orlando “Rube” Robbins, went in pursuit of the fugitive. Idaho City Sheriff Bowen, who had beaten out Pinkham for the badge, rounded up a posse and followed Robbins’ lead. Patterson didn’t get far. Rube overtook him several miles down the trail, capturing him without incident, and Bowen transported him to the Boise County jail. Oddly enough, Bowen then abruptly resigned his commission.

Meanwhile, a vigilance committee of several hundred Unionists had hurriedly formed. Incensed at Pinkham’s death, the men resolved to drag Patterson from jail and hang him. Appointed to replace Bowen, Sheriff James Crutcher rose to the occasion, gathering an equally large opposing force of “defenders of law and order,” all Democrats and Patterson supporters. Cooler heads prevailed, as Sheriff Crutcher and Deputy John Gorman met with vigilance committee representatives Robbins and McConnell, who agreed to let justice take its course.

Front Street in 1850s Portland

FROM TOP: OREGON HISTORICAL SOCIETY; IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY; UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON LIBRARIES

IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The regular August session of the grand jury failed to indict Patterson, but given the indignation of the Unionists, Crutcher kept the accused in jail to await the action of the October grand jury. It indicted Patterson on October 26, the judge setting his trial for October 30. In a proceeding that stretched six days, defense attorney Frank Ganahl successfully argued his client had acted in self-defense, the jury returning within 90 minutes to find the defendant not guilty.

Successionist Patterson went to the Oregon town in October 1861 and mortally wounded Unionist Captain George W. Staples.

After his acquittal, realizing his life was in danger, Patterwas buried on this afternoon at 1 o’clock,” the Friday eveson left Idaho City for Walla Walla, ning edition of the Statesman noted. “The funeral cortege Washington Territory, where he was very large, and everything passed off quietly and creditplied his gambling trade through ably. Thus ends the last chapter in the history of a man who the winter of 1865–66. In the new FRANK GANAHL certainly led a stormy life.” year he encountered a night watchWhen Donahue’s murder trial ended in a hung jury, authoriman named Tom Donahue, who’d been ties returned him to jail to await retrial. But with the help of a jailer a policeman in Portland when Patterson was charged with scalping his girlfriend. Accord- he escaped. He fled to San Francisco, where he was arrested and later ing to the Walla Walla Statesman, Donahue had released on a writ of habeas corpus. Last anyone heard of him, he was been “very active in endeavoring to effect his living in Portland. He was never convicted of the killing.

J. Ferdinand Patterson is hardly a household name. But whether he’d [Patterson’s] arrest,” for which Ferd reportedly “harbored malice” and threatened to kill Dona- been faster to the trigger or more prone to violence, he certainly rivaled hue. On Valentine’s Day, with no love for his Cullen Baker for the dubious distinction of “first gunfighter.” adversary, he repeated the threat, after which “Donahue armed himself and determined to Seattle-based Mark T. Smokov writes often about outlaws and gunfighters shoot Patterson on sight.” of the West, including the 2012 book He Rode with Butch and SunThe next morning Patterson went to Rich- dance: The Story of Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan. For further reading ard Bogle’s barber shop to get a shave. The he suggests And There Were Men, by Russell Blankenship; Vigilante barber had finished and was dressing Ferd’s Days and Ways, by Nathaniel Pitt Langford; The Golden Frontier: The hair when Donahue entered from a back room Recollections of Herman Francis Reinhart, 1851–1869, by Herman and advanced on the chair with a revolver. Francis Reinhart; Basin of Gold: Life in Boise Basin, 1862–1890, by “Patterson, you must kill me, or I’ll kill you!” Arthur A. Hart; and Outlaw Tales of Idaho: True Stories of the Gem he growled. Varying accounts indicate Ferd State’s Infamous Crooks, Culprits and Cutthroats, by Randy Stapilus. had either hung up his pistol and coat prior to his shave or left them next door in Welch’s saloon. Regardless, Donahue opened fire, striking Patterson in the right cheek. “Oh, my God!” Ferd exclaimed, springing from the chair toward the door. Donahue fired again, the bullet hitting his quarry in the throat. Patterson somehow made it next door into Welch’s saloon, where he collapsed. Donahue followed, cold-bloodedly pumping two more bullets into the chest of the prostrate man. Within minutes Ferd bled out.

Authorities immediately arrested Donahue and locked him up in the county jail. “Patterson Death in Walla Walla

A night watchman ambushed Patterson in a barber shop in this Washington Territory town.

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SCOURGE OF THE SOONERS

S

hortly after noon on April 22, 1889, Edward W. Osburn stood atop a wagon along a ridge in Oklahoma Country to behold a surreal spectacle on the vast prairie below. The Kansas farmer saw “probably 2,000 wagons—trains 5 to 8 miles in length” and “hundreds of horsemen in a dead run.” He documented the historic moment in his journal, later hastily adding in pencil, “Carts, buggies, light wagons. Everything at breakneck speed.”

Osburn was among the estimated 50,000 people who joined the epic race that day in hopes of staking a 160-acre claim.

A month earlier, on March 23, President Benjamin Harrison had signed a proclamation that opened 2 million acres of Oklahoma Country known officially as the Unassigned Lands to non-Indian settlement. Homesteaders had long considered the acreage among the richest unoccupied sections of public land in the United States, and the proclamation had formally carved it away from Indian Territory.

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It also sparked a land rush of unprecedented proportions.

From penniless farmers and restless cowboys to tradesmen and carpetbaggers, tens of thousands of Americans from across the nation flooded the four corners of Oklahoma Country for the designated opening at high noon on April 22. Homesteader Mary Patton of Kansas recalled the madness, noting how the road to Oklahoma was littered with “broken vehicles and scattered household goods, abandoned horses and farm implements that had retarded the progress of their owners.”

Everyone seemed smitten by the fever of free land, if not the enticing grand adventure presented by “Harrison’s Hoss Race.” Osburn noted the celebratory atmosphere on the eve of the run. His Cherokee Outlet camp on the northern line comprised more than a dozen men and one girl. They sang until midnight. The next day they raced fearlessly for land, oftentimes, as Osburn noted, in air “fogged with dirt.”

Osburn and a companion soon broke from the pack. In just under two hours they drove their wagon 18 miles over

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Attorney William F. Harn doggedly pursued the notorious claim jumpers in the aftermath of the 1889 Oklahoma land rush

By Ron J. Jackson Jr.

DECEMBER 2020

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The history of this one day will forever be memorable in frontier annals and will leave behind a heritage of litigation which will be fruitful to land sharks and claim attorneys but be destructive to the claims of poor and honest settlers —The St. Louis Republic, April 23, 1889

Others Beat the Rush

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Those entering legally traveled by many means, as depicted in the mural The Oklahoma Land Rush, April 22, 1889, by John Steuart Curry.

rugged, rolling prairie until finally arriving at fertile land, only to watch hidden “cowboys” suddenly appear from the brush to stake claims. A few boldly swore they’d made the trip in 15 or 20 minutes. One man was found on a claim with a wagon, a colt, and a cow and calf and was already preparing to plant corn. Osburn noted in his journal the man’s outlandish claim to have “made the trip in 20 minutes from the line.”

Osburn, who did ultimately stake a claim, had encountered a shady element of would-be homesteaders dubbed “Sooners”—men and women who illegally entered Oklahoma Country before the designated noon hour. Sooners infested the countryside, honest settlers reporting their presence throughout the new territory. While hunting for a claim, Kansan Martin Winters and party happened across rich, river-bottom land when they suddenly found themselves staring “into the barrels of Winchesters and shotguns” held by Sooners prepared for a shootout. Wanting

no trouble, Winters and the others settled for another claim on a nearby creek.

Disputes began from the start. In Guthrie, a patch of prairie with a railroad station, an entire town sprang up within hours on April 22. By sundown an estimated 10,000 people called it home, and tensions ran high. Earlier that day a Dallas Morning News correspondent witnessed one man confront another who had already staked and surveyed his township claim. “I have come this distance from the line in 40 minutes by rail since noon,” the challenger said, “and I know you could not have gotten here any sooner after that hour in any other way, and I now claim this tract which you have located and will contest it.” Such accusations of “Soonerism” were common. Two days later the newspaper noted how “the contending factions at Guthrie have not called a truce.”

Nor would they.

Sooner cases inundated the U.S. Land Offices in Guthrie and Kingfisher in the immediate aftermath of the run and DECEMBER 2020

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After the Land Rush

On May 14, 1889, settlers and American Indians pose in the new town of Guthrie.

Unwanted in Oklahoma

In 1889 U.S. troops escort claim jumpers from the new territory, in a contemporary newspaper drawing.

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FROM TOP: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION

swamped the Oklahoma For Land’s Sake City Land Office after its Sooner cases kept the Oklahoma land 1890 establishment. John offices busy in the H. Burford, registrar of aftermath of the rush. the Oklahoma City Land Office, described the appalling state of affairs in a Nov. 22, 1890, letter to U.S. Interior Secretary John Willock Noble—an administrator who often served as the final arbiter on land disputes during the territory’s infancy. “Fully one-third of the men holding homestead entries in this land

On New Year’s Day 1891 an Eastern attorney stepped off a train at the Oklahoma City station with no fanfare and a monumental task before him. Special agent William Fremont Harn— an unheralded political appointee of President Harrison—arrived at the Oklahoma City Land Office with explicit instructions to investigate the scores of land disputes and prosecute those who’d broken the law. Harn’s prior reputation was confined to his native Ohio, where he’d established a lucrative law practice and co-published The Mansfield Herald. The newspaper’s editorial views were influential within Republican circles, thus placing Harn in line for political favor.

That said, Harn may have surprised even those familiar with both his legal and editorial work. With a relentless aggression he tackled the land dispute morass, soon becoming the scourge of Sooners throughout the territory. Thousands of letters, affidavits, notes and court documents from his land office files—now archived at the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City—bear testament to a man on a crusade for justice.

FROM TOP: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER

district are violators of the law,” Burford wrote, noting that more than 2,000 cases were pending trial, with new ones being filed daily.

“But our powers are too limited to furnish the remedy,” the frustrated Burford admitted. “Many persons who know facts that are of value to honest men refuse to appear and testify for fear of gaining the ill will and enmity of the Sooners who are banded together for their own protection and defense.” Burford’s analysis led him to one chilling conclusion: The Sooners would protect one another not only through widespread perjury and intimidation but also, if need be, WILLIAM F. HARN outright murder.

In short, Oklahoma Territory needed a miracle to restore justice. Law-abiding homesteaders were losing hope.

Not Folding This Tent

This woman has staked her claim to a town lot in soon-to-boom Guthrie.

FROM TOP: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION

FROM TOP: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER

After his first week on the job he fired off a detailed letter to federal superiors at the General Land Office in Washington, D.C. He informed them of efforts by Oklahoma defense attorneys to oust U.S. Third District Judge John G. Clark, whose court was beset by a backlog of land dispute cases. Harn claimed the band of unscrupulous attorneys, a number of whom had themselves been charged with perjury, had circulated a petition to force Clark’s resignation. Harn then named names. Clark remained on the bench.

The ensuing hunt for truth proved epic.

Harn’s search for evidence carried him down many rabbit holes. Shortly after his arrival he contacted Earnest C. Hamill, a 21-year-old commercial photographer who’d traveled to the Unassigned Lands in February 1889. Hamill had photographed a number of Sooners, including

A Place to Settle Down

What would become part of Oklahoma Territory was known as Oklahoma Country when the rushers gathered in April 1889.

a party illegally crossing a sandbar on the South Canadian River. He became a key witness for the government in several perjury cases. Harn’s notes indicate Hamill successfully identified 20 Sooners he’d photographed at the Guthrie depot between March 23 and April 22.

In another case Harn reached out to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad office in Arkansas City, Kan., for its train logs into Oklahoma City on March 25, 1889. He sought to verify

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whether a suspected Sooner—a man travAt the Starting Gun A cannon sounded the start eling from Chicago with five horses—was of the 1889 land run, sending on a train that had arrived in Oklahoma scores of frenzied settlers into City on the day in question. The railroad Oklahoma after prized claims. supplied the requested time sheets, confirming the attorney’s suspicion the man had likely remained in the territory illegally prior to the run. Early in his investigation Harn either obtained or compiled a list of 105 such Sooners—some with families— spotted in Oklahoma Country prior to the run. The list grew substantially as he separated honest claimants from liars.

Harn soon presented evidence to a grand jury and secured 75 indictments. He later concluded Burford’s alarming November letter to Secretary Noble “was in no way an exaggeration of the facts, but rather understated the deplorable state of affairs that exists in this territory.”

The deeper Harn dug, the more clearly defined his mission became.

He later spoke sympathetically of those settlers who had ridden their horses or driven their wagons and buggies “like mad” across streams and ravines and open prairie, only to lose a claim to someone afoot. He despised the notion that any honest homesteader would be cheated by a claimant who seemed to have “sprung from the ground or dropped from the skies.”

In Harn’s view Sooners were a menace to society. The feeling was mutual.

In land dispute cases throughout Oklahoma Territory loyalties were divided, and Harn became a target of scorn in certain circles. In one March 1892 editorial headlined Tyranny, the author described Harn as a “little specimen of Ohio manhood” who abused his power by prosecuting innocent men “who had no political influence.” Another newspaper reported that indicted perjurers and their friends planned to hire a Pinkerton agent to investigate Harn, whom they accused of accepting bribes to

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Above: One of the threats against Harn featured a hangman’s noose.

Right: This mock hanging of a “Sooner” came before the rush.

prosecute several cases. While such claims gained no traction, the attacks against Harn multiplied in number and intensity.

In a Feb. 28, 1892, private letter to friend and U.S. Senator John Sherman of Ohio, Harn revealed he had been the target of dozens of death threats in his first 14 months on the job. “But I want to stay in Oklahoma City to see if I cannot get a foothold,” the attorney added dutifully. One such threat came in the form of a crude sketch, found among Harn’s papers. It depicted a hangman’s noose dangling from a tree limb, a coffin, and a skull and crossbones. Five scrawled words above the artwork punctuated the menacing message: We Sooners are after you . He may have saved the sketch as potential evidence, or perhaps as a reminder of what was at stake.

Harn posed the greatest threat to secret organizations that had conspired to infiltrate the territory prior to the run and grab the most desirable claims. Finding strength in numbers, they held secret meetings and drilled one another to corroborate testimony in various cases. Above all

FROM TOP: RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION; OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

At Rope’s End

they applied force and intimidation, often threatening rival claimants or witnesses to refrain from appearing in court.

Celebrated Cuban writer José Martí noted this undesirable element when he reported on the land run for various Latin American newspapers. Martí described shady characters with “bronzed faces of dark and sinister eye” who shake hands in the shadows, “vowing aid to one another and death to their rivals.” One such gang, the Crutcho Organization, even typed up bylaws in May 1889 so members clearly understood the consequences of disloyalty. One section of its bylaws obtained by Harn read, “Any person found guilty of violating any of the rules of this organization or of carrying news to the enemy shall be dealt with according to a two-thirds vote of the members present.”

Leaders of such secret outfits ruled by fear. Yet in Harn they encountered a man who appeared never to flinch in the face of danger. One by one these organizations cracked under the heft of his investigations. In one case alone Harn helped secure 86 witnesses. As convictions mounted, defendants either fled the territory or lined up for plea agreements.

One notable perjury conviction was handed down on Nov. 5, 1892, to Grant Stanley, a defense attorney for the thuggish Woodruff Outfit.

While the territorial Supreme Court later reversed Stanley’s conviction, that November nine of his clients entered guilty pleas in exchange for leniency. Among those who pleaded guilty was H.L. McCullough. He had little choice, as Harn had enticed fellow Sooner R.J. Walk of Kansas to testify having witnessed McCullough and others occupy claims prior to April 22. Walk further stated he thought McCullough planned to kill him —a common theme in Sooner cases.

Arguably the best known Sooner convicted under Harn’s watch was one Anton Caha. Witnesses testified Caha boldly led fellow Czech immigrants (aka Bohemians) across the line of entry between the North and South Canadian rivers early on the morning of April 22. Caha initially Sidesaddle Up

RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION

Women freely and fully participated in the rush to the “Land of the Fair God.”

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RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION

FROM TOP: RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION; OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

argued the crossing itself had been legal, as none of his party occupied claims prior to noon.

The Bohemians were among the first Sooners arrested, in June 1889. They were ultimately convicted of perjury in a U.S. District Court in Kansas after colluding to claim they hadn’t crossed into the territory early after all. Caha and 13 other defendants received sentences ranging from a year and a day to four years in the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth.

In 1893 the incoming Democratic administration of President Grover Cleveland unceremoniously and unsurprisingly fired Harn. He left with a stellar résumé. An estimated 150 Sooners had been indicted during his time as special agent, leading to some 100 convictions and zero acquittals. Noble later praised Harn privately, writing, “I think that the future of that territory will be greatly improved by your efforts to see that law and justice were enforced.”

Sadly, few Oklahomans ever learned of the dangers Harn and other officers of the court had faced. While prosecuting the Woodruff Outfit cases, for example, Harn had uncovered a plot to kill U.S. District Judge Clark, U.S. Attorney Horace Speed, two government witnesses and himself. The would-be assassins had planned to dynamite the courthouse. On another occasion someone tossed a bomb beneath Harn’s house, only to have its fuse extinguished when it hit some bushes. Harn also may have narrowly escaped death when Deputy U.S. Marshal Frank Cochran—known mostly for his capture of Cherokee outlaw Blue Duck—intercepted a defendant’s relative in a courtroom as he moved to plunge a knife into Harn’s back.

Harn never left the state. In 1897 he bought a 160-acre farm just outside Oklahoma City, where he continued to practice law. Bedridden for the last six years of his life, he died at home on Dec. 15, 1944. He was 85. By then residents of his adopted state knew him mostly as the man who in 1911 had donated 40 acres of his farm for the site of the Oklahoma Capitol. His monumental legal battles with the Sooners were but a footnote in his obit.

In the end William Harn left as quietly as he had arrived.

Ron J. Jackson Jr. is an award-winning author from Rocky, Okla., and a regular contributor to Wild West. For further reading he recommends The Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889,

by Stan Hoig, and Oklahoma, the Beautiful Land, by the 89ers Association.

SOME DAISEY! Nannita R.H. Daisey, popularly known as “Kentucky Daisey,” was arguably the most celebrated homesteader to have emerged from the April 22, 1889, land rush into the Unassigned Lands of Oklahoma.

She gained a reputation as an energetic, adventurous spirit whose pluck symbolized the Western frontier for those who read of her exploits.

Daisey’s real-life adventures certainly provided good copy for period publications. After all, she partici‘Kentucky Daisey’ pated in three Oklahoma land runs, survived This fanciful statue to homesteader Nannita being shot by a claim jumper and narrowly Daisey stands in the avoided death during the 1891 run near town of Edmond, Okla.

Chandler when thrown from a galloping horse. She also worked as a schoolmarm, a political activist and a correspondent when the newspaper industry was dominated by men.

Daisey’s public persona, like those of most celebrities, was a blend of true-life experiences and embellished reports. In the fall of 1891, for instance, The New York Times reported Daisey’s tragic death in Chandler, while The National Police Gazette ran a dramatic full-page sketch of the fallen heroine being trampled by frenzied land run riders. It turned out to be fake news. She’d only been dazed in the fall from her horse.

Daisey first gained national fame in 1889 as a territorial correspondent for The Dallas Morning News. On the first train to steam north into newly opened Oklahoma Country, its cars packed with reporters, she boasted about how she would stake a claim along the line, then backed up her bravado. A Dallas colleague reported how Daisey—“that energetic specimen of animated femininity”—boldly jumped from the platform near the front of the slow-moving train, “ran across the ditch into the property she coveted, stuck up a pole over which she threw her cloak, fired a couple of shots into the air and, hustling back, caught the rear end of the train.”

The colleague helped hoist Daisey back aboard amid a chorus of cheers from passengers. To the agape reporters she proudly boasted, “What do you think of that for nerve?”

Editors and readers clearly loved the story, perhaps the most unvarnished account of Daisey’s countless published adventures.

Articles about her soon filled newspaper columns from Oklahoma Territory to Utica, N.Y. Most were either romanticized or whole-cloth fiction. By Daisey’s 1903 death her celebrated leap for land had even fallen victim to exaggeration. One obit reported she had leaped from the train’s cowcatcher, a spurious claim unsupported by contemporary accounts. Regardless, in 2007 the town of Edmond, Okla., forever cemented the image into legend with a commissioned statute of Daisey leaping from a cowcatcher (see photo above). The artwork is as fascinating as our need for myth.

A Chicago reporter who knew Daisey may have served her legacy best in 1892 when he wrote, “Instead of writing dime novels, as Miss Daisey is perfectly competent to do, she prefers to live them.”

Truth can also be fascinating. —R.J.J. DECEMBER 2020

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A VERY BRADY CHRISTMAS Itinerant reverend and Western author Cyrus Townsend Brady related Christmas tales not necessarily for children

By John H. Monnett

D

eath was often a close companion on the high plains of the 19th-century West. Christmastime could be an especially dangerous time for travelers, as storms unexpectedly blew down from the Rocky Mountains across the short grass prairies in deadly ground blizzards that blinded man and beast alike. Such was the case for a lone Nebraska cowboy sometime during the 1880s.

As the cold orange globe of the winter sun ascended over the rolling plains, a two-horse sleigh glided atop the snow on Christmas Day following a fierce blizzard the night before.

A small family had left their home to visit ranching friends east of an unnamed town. Sighting an incongruous speck of color on the stark white prairie, the driver reined in the horses and halted the sleigh. Stepping down, he trudged through drifts to a gully in which he discovered the frozen

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corpses of a young Nebraska cowboy and his Appaloosa.

Apparently, the young man had been heading east toward home. Tightly clasped in his frozen arms was a burlap sack containing a few Christmas packages, the bright tissue paper wrappings torn by the victorious wind. Lashed across the saddle horn atop the horse’s corpse was a miserable branch of a scrub pine tree.

This melancholy tale is one of several Christmas stories written by prolific Western author the Rev. Cyrus Townsend Brady, an itinerant missionary on the high plains of Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas during the last two decades of the 19th century. Brady published more than 100 books on a score of subjects, but he is best known to Old West aficionados as the author of Indian Fights and Fighters, still in print.

Brady is undoubtedly the writer who coined the famous ironic misquote of ill-fated U.S. Army Captain William J. Fetterman

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Yuletide on the Frontier

C.M. Russell’s painting Christmas Meat depicts a happy holiday story. Author Cyrus Townsend Brady wrote scores of Christmas tales, some not as merry.

MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Brady Bunch

The author poses with his mother, grandmother and eldest son, likely at Christmastime 1887.

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LEFT: PROJECT GUTENBERG; RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

in 1866—“Give me 80 men, and I will ride through the Sioux nation”—published in Indian Fights and Fighters and in serial form in Pearson’s Magazine in 1904, four decades after Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors wiped out Fetterman’s 80-man command outside Wyoming’s Fort Phil Kearny.

Garrison commander Colonel Henry B. Carrington spent several months with the author, relating his often biased recollections of the Fetterman Fight (aka Fetterman Massacre).

Brady was born on Dec. 20, 1861, in Allegheny, Pa., the son of an affluent banker. From childhood he showed a strong interest in military history, as many of his later books reflect. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1883, but for reasons unknown he left the service three years later. In the late 1880s he moved west with wife Clarissa to Omaha, where he worked on the Missouri Pacific and Union Pacific railroads.

While in Nebraska Brady befriended several veterans of the Plains Indian wars, and he framed Indian Fights and Fighters around his interviews of their firsthand experiences. Soon after his arrival in Omaha he connected

Brady embraced the literary device of nostalgia for the pathos of Western myth popular with readers at the turn of the 20th century. His sentimental stories are evocative, if not quite melodramatic, of his concept of the “pioneer spirit.”

One poignant tale set in the 1860s relates the saga of young couple just trying to survive on the Nebraska grasslands.

Two days before Christmas the family lost a small infant boy. “They buried him on Christmas Eve on the brow of the hill, looking over the ocean of open country,” Brady wrote. “They had clothed him in the simple dress she [his mother] had made for his Baptism, now grown quite too small for him. Of all the flowers, there was left in the house but a single rose, white; they laid that beneath the tiny hands.”

Whether the episode was based on fact or is historical fiction is unknown, but the itinerant missionary author wrote with empathy and candor how the grieving mother questioned the existence of God that Christmas.

After burying their child, the husband had to make an unavoidable trip to the govern-

LEFT: DEANDRA ALLEYAN; RIGHT: PROJECT GUTENBERG

with an Episcopal church and began studying for the priesthood. Brady became a deacon in 1889 and a priest in 1890. That spring Clarissa died, leaving Cyrus a grief-stricken widower with three young children. He looked to the church for solace. In 1898 Brady returned to Philadelphia, where he met and married Mary Barrett, with whom he had three more children. He remained in the East till his death in 1920.

His time as an itinerant missionary had taken him on exhausting travels across the high plains grasslands, often at the height of dangerous winters. Those experiences made a lasting impression on him and informed his writing. His recollections of struggling young homesteader families at Christmastime became cherished subjects among readers of his articles in Pearson’s and the Ladies’ Home Journal. They also featured in several of his books. His best-selling 1900 book Recollections of a Missionary in the Great West presented several such Christmas stories. “I traveled over 91,000 miles by railroad, wagon and horseback,” he wrote, “preaching or delivering addresses upward of 11,000 times.” Other books incorporating Christmas tales included A Christmas When the West Was Young (1913) and A Baby of the Frontier (1915).

LEFT: PROJECT GUTENBERG; RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

LEFT: DEANDRA ALLEYAN; RIGHT: PROJECT GUTENBERG

ment land office in an unnamed town. Saddling his horse, he left his wife, vowing to return home on Christmas Day. Rousting the land office superintendent and freighting company agent from a saloon, he related his sad story and bought the necessary time to conduct his business.

Halfway home the next morning the young homesteader happened on a smoldering Conestoga wagon in a rocky ravine. The horses, shot to death, lay dead in their traces. Scattered nearby were the bodies of three Indian warriors. Slumped over in the seat of the wagon was the body of a white woman. Her husband lay dying on ground, propped up against one of the wagon wheels. Before he succumbed, the man gasped to the young homesteader, “The—baby—!” In the bed of the wagon the young homesteader who had so recently lost his own son found an infant wrapped in a blanket and barely alive. As he stepped from the wagon, it burst into flames. He could not bury the parents in the rocky ravine, nor could he tote their bodies with him. So he did the next best thing. After searching in vain for any clue to their identities, he placed the bodies in the burning wagon for cremation.

After cutting leather straps from the wagon harness, the man secured the bundled child and draped the straps around his neck in such a way he could hold the bundle tightly in his free hand. “Then he mounted his horse,” Brady wrote, “watched the flaming wagon for a moment or two, breathed a prayer and rode on.”

Soon an unearthly whiteness blocked the scant landmarks ahead, the air turned deathly cold, and the greatest blizzard he had experienced in his life broke around him. But on he plowed through the tempest, clinging to the precious bundle now enfolded inside his coat and inspired by the grieving wife who awaited his return. Through sheer intuition he tried to sense the way home, riding on until the horse could no longer carry its rider. Dismounting, the man grabbed the bridle and pushed ahead on foot toward a dim light just beyond the angry gray haze. He later had no recollection of stumbling through the doorway of a house with the horse in tow. It was his house. As his wailing wife revived him, he suddenly recalled. “The baby, there!” he shouted, pointing to the bundle on their bed. “It has no mother,” he told his wife, “and it is so hungry.” Brady wrote how her soul quivered and breast throbbed with mixed emotions.

But then the baby boy opened its eyes—blue eyes, like those of her dead child. His hair was the same golden shade. “Her hands fumbled at the bosom of her dress, slowly at first, but finally with a passionate movement, she tore the remaining fastenings away, and even as He of the manger had done, the child drank.”

Brady ended his tale befitting the faith and moral compassion of his position as a Christian missionary: The man watched her. He forgot his pain. He saw her eyes brim, he saw the tears sparkle, he saw them silently as a rain of mercy down her face. They could hear the scream of the wind outside. Within was peace and some of the joy of Christmas Day, for unto them had a child been given.

In 1913 Brady published the tale as A Christmas When the West Was Young, destined to become a best-selling children’s and young adult book.

Dressed to Preach

The Rev. Brady, wearing his clerical robes and mortarboard, was around 50 when he posed for this portrait.

One Christmas morning, possibly in eastern Wyoming at the time of the great winters that destroyed the open range cattle empires, Brady hired a two-horse sleigh and started out in deep snow to deliver a requested sermon at a little brick church perched well out on the prairie. It was cold and drafty, so Brady performed the service in his buffalo overcoat, fur cap and gloves. Swirls of snow crept in through the window and doorframes to settle on the altar. Evergreens were absent, so members had decorated the sanctuary with sagebrush. “[The service] was short,” he recalled, “and the sermon was shorter.” Only a dozen people had braved the cold and snow to attend. After church the clergyman accepted a dinner invitation at a parishioner’s nearby farmhouse. The fare was meager. “There was no turkey, and they did not have even a chicken.” On the menu was ham, cornbread and a handful of potatoes.

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Telling Tales

Brady dictates one of his stories in his home library around the turn of the 20th century.

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THE PICTURE ART COLLECTION/ ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

railroad. The two-car “plug” was running in the teeth of a Christmas Eve blizzard that brought the train to a standstill in a cut. The train comprised a smoker/ baggage car and a coach. Sharing the coach with Brady were a drummer (traveling salesman), a cattleman, a ranch hand and a young widow with two small children. All were trying to get home for the holiday.

One of the crew immediately set out on foot for the nearest station to request an engine fitted with a plow, but it was obvious the train would remain stranded overnight. The downcast passengers gathered around an iron woodstove at the front of the car to commiserate. The men soon learned the widow had tried to make ends meet doing odd jobs but had given up and was returning home with her young ones to live with her mother. “The poor little threadbare children,” Brady wrote, “had cherished anticipations of a joyous Christmas with their grandmother. From their talk we could hear that a Christmas tree had been promised them and all sorts of things. They were intensely disappointed at the blockade. They cried and sobbed and would not be comforted.”

Tipping two seats sideways, the men stacked their overcoats to make beds for the little ones. They had reconvened around the stove when the drummer uttered, “Say, Parson, we’ve got to give those children some Christmas.” The others agreed. The cattleman produced a new pair of wool socks as stockings, but the men struggled to find appropriate gifts.

“You all come along with me to the baggage car,” the drummer finally said. “So off we trooped,” Brady recalled. “He opened his trunks and spread before us such a glittering array of trash and trinkets as almost took our breath away.” The drummer told the others to pick out the best from the lot, and he’d donate them all. “No, you don’t,” said the cowboy.

The others agreed, and the men happily paid the drummer for all the items they chose. They soon returned to the coach with “such a load of stuff as you ever saw before.” Two of them then trudged off onto the snow-blanketed prairie to find an acceptable stand-in for a Christmas tree, quickly returning with a large sagebrush. The widow decorated it with tissue paper from the drummer’s trunk, and the crew hung train lanterns around it. “Great goodness!” Brady remembered years later.

“Those children never did have, and probably never will have, such a Christmas again. And to see the thin face of that mother flush with unusual color when we handed her one of those monstrous red plush albums which we had purchased jointly, and in which we had all written our names in lieu of our photographs, and between the leaves of which the cattleman had generously slipped a hundred-dollar bill, was worth being blockaded for a dozen Christmases. Her eyes filled with tears, and she fairly sobbed before us.”

After the children emptied their stockings, the Rev. Brady conducted a brief Christmas morn-

PROJECT GUTENBERG (2)

of 6 and a boy of 5,” he wrote.

“They were glad enough to get the ham.” From the lunch his wife had packed, Brady produced a mince pie turnover, which he presented to the girl and boy. “Such a glistening of eyes and smacking of small lips you never saw!”

Brady’s heart went out to the children. After dinner he excused himself and returned to the church. Selecting the best of the wicker collection baskets, he decorated it with a ribbon borrowed from his emergency sewing kit. (“I am, like most ex sailors, something of a needleman myself,” he explained.)

In the basket he placed the scissors, thimble, needles and thread, pincushion, buttons and other notions. He then hurried back to the house.

“To the boy I gave my penknife,” Brady recalled, “which happened to be nearly new, and to the girl the church basket with the sewing things for a work basket. The joy of those children was one of the finest things I have ever witnessed,” he wrote. “The face of the little girl was positively filled with awe as she lifted from the basket, one by one, the pretty and useful articles…and when I added the small box of candy that my children had provided me, they looked at me with feelings of reverence, as a visible incarnation of Santa Claus. They were the cheapest and most effective Christmas presents it was ever my pleasure to bestow. I hope to be forgiven for putting the church furniture to such a secular use.”

Perhaps Brady’s favorite Christmas experience found him on a small spur run of a Western

THE PICTURE ART COLLECTION/ ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

PROJECT GUTENBERG (2)

ing service. By early afternoon the crewman who had gone for help returned aboard the plow engine. More important, he brought with him a whole cooked turkey. “So the children had turkey, a Christmas tree and Santa Claus to their heart’s content,” Brady wrote. “I did not get home until the day after Christmas. But, after all, what a Christmas I had enjoyed!”

The Rev. Brady recalled more than a few holiday seasons of great privation on the plains. One Christmas he helped unpack two wooden barrels filled with clothing and other necessities for destitute homesteaders at a little mission. A ladies’ aid society back East had packed and sent them. As Brady opened the second barrel, one little boy sniffling to himself in a corner remarked, “Ain’t there no real Chris’mus gif’s in there for us little fellers, too?” Recalling his own childhood Christmases when relatives plied him with nothing but clothing, Brady rooted through the second box “with a great longing, though but little hope. Heaven bless the woman who had packed that box, for in addition to the usual necessary articles, there were dolls, knives, books, games galore, so the small fry had some ‘real Chris’mus gif’s’ as well as the others.”

Snippets of other Christmases past appear in Brady’s writings. Some were sorrowful, as when he presided over funerals on Christmas Day. Some were more joyful, including abundant feasts at community celebrations. Others were mixed. Brady recalled one particular reception after a funeral. “The Christmas dinners were all late on account of the funeral,” he wrote, “but they were bountiful and good nevertheless, and I much enjoyed mine.”

To be certain, Brady was no proto-Hemmingway. Most of his books have long since disappeared from print, notably his scores of seafaring stories. Publishers have recently revived a few of his works, both nonfiction and fiction.

Some produced by Leopold Classic Library and Wentworth Press appear in photocopy form online. But Indian Fights and Fighters has endured in print to the present with the University of Nebraska Press.

Brady was particularly enchanted with the Indian wars recollections of frontier Army veterans, though like most writers of his time he shied away from Indian reminiscences. As such, Indian Fights and Fighters is a strictly one-sided history of the conflicts. He tried to be fair to Indians and address their motives, but his lack of knowledge and intimacy with them is mani-

Holiday Cheer

fest in abbreviated accounts that by A cowboy toasts the season in a Christmas card by C.M. Russell. modern standards are somewhat conBrady wrote about settlers at descending. Aside from passages in yuletide on the Great Plains.

A Christmas When the West Was Young, his Christmas stories lack any Indians.

Brady’s affinity for the frontier Army certainly informed the descriptions of pioneers’ struggles he wove into his Christmas tales. After all, he firmly believed the Army had productively cleared the Great Plains, making it safe for settlement. Readers interested in learning more about the author’s mindset and frontier holiday traditions can still find his Christmas stories online and in print. Before his death in Yonkers, N.Y., from pneumonia at age 58 on Jan. 24, 1920, Brady wrote, “I trust that in thus striving to preserve the records of those stirring times I have done history and posterity a service.” Indeed, his surviving books remain a gift to succeeding generations.

Kansas native John Monnett has written many books and articles about the Indian wars. He relates Christmas stories from Cyrus Townsend Brady and many others in his 1999 book Rocky Mountain Christmas: Yuletide Stories of the West. For further reading Monnett recommends Brady’s 1904 book Indian Fights and Fighters and the 2017 edition of And Thus He Came: A Christmas Fantasy, first published in 1916.

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COLLECTIONS

A STOP IN A SECLUDED VALLEY

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Foremost among those moved to the museum grounds is the Jim Baker Cabin, built in 1873 at the base of Savery Hill, just a few miles away. Its namesake was born in 1818 in St. Clair County, Ill., and went on to become one of the last great mountain men of the fur trade era. At the time he built the cabin it was one of few permanent structures on Shoshone land dotted with tepees. A compatriot of Jim Bridger and Kit Carson, Baker had a rapport with various tribes, but especially the Shoshones. His first marriage was to Marina, a Shoshone girl he rescued from the Blackfeet, and he went on to marry two more Shoshones and father some 14 children. Baker operated the cabin as a trading post of sorts. He later opened it to settlers as a fort, adding a third story to serve as a lookout.

Baker died at home at age 80 in 1898, and 20 years later state officials relocated his cabin to Frontier Park in Cheyenne. It remained there until Baker’s great-grandson Paul McAllister directed its reconstruction and donated it to the Little Snake River Museum. Jim, Marina and many other family members are buried

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PHOTO CREDIT

he Little Snake Valley, one of Wyoming’s best-kept secrets, may be on the road to nowhere but is well worth a stop, in no small part because of the Little Snake River Museum, in Savery.

American Indians, explorers, trappers, miners and cattlemen all passed through the valley over the past 150 years. A few intrepid settlers made their homes here, while outlaws appreciated its remoteness. The aptly named river sidewinds its way along the Colorado border past ancient volcanic peaks and through lush grazeland before dipping southwest into a drier locale loaded with outlaw history— namely Brown’s Park.

The museum’s main building once housed the Savery School, which encompassed all grades. Five of its retired classrooms showcase artifacts, images and stories that relate the rich history of the secluded valley and explain how residents made the most of its resources. The grounds host more than a dozen other historic buildings and structures.

PHOTOS COURTESY LITTLE SNAKE RIVER VALLEY MUSEUM (5)

T

THE LITTLE SNAKE RIVER VALLEY MUSEUM, IN SAVERY, WYOMING, MAKES VISITORS FEEL AT HOME

BY LINDA WOMMACK

COLLECTIONS

Their descendants donated the cabin and many of its contents to the museum.

In the early 20th century Tom Vernon, a notable Baggs resident and sometime fiddler for visiting Wild Bunch member Butch Cassidy, built what came to be known as the Brown House. Thora Morgan, a popular seamstress who worked for Vernon, was one of the first residents. Music filled the house once again when Edgar Requa and family moved in, as he gave music lessons to local children and made fiddles for them out of fruit crates and cigar boxes. In the early 1950s the Cow Creek Sheep Co. made its headquarters here.

Owners Jim and Mildred Marshall later donated the storied house to the museum.

Next door is the Dutch Joe Schoolhouse. In 1900 townspeople built a log frame building to serve first- through eighth-grade students. That schoolhouse burned down in 1932. The stick-built replacement on museum grounds served as Savery’s one-room school until 1942. In 1993 the Cobb family donated the building and had it moved.

The latest additions to the grounds include the Homesteader House, styled after a 1930s homestead and featuring interactive displays, and the Focus Cabin, relating the history of area guest ranches. For more info visit littlesnakerivermuseum. com or call 307-383-7262.

Opposite: The Stobridge House—at top as it looks today at the museum and below as it looked in the late 1880s—was once the grandest home in the Little Snake Valley. This page, clockwise from top left: This distinctive cerulean stove graces the kitchen of the Stobridge House; the 1873 Jim Baker Cabin is on the National Register of Historic Places; the Focus Cabin (at left) sits beside the Madeline House, built in 1905 for Baker’s daughter.

PHOTO CREDIT

PHOTOS COURTESY LITTLE SNAKE RIVER VALLEY MUSEUM (5)

in nearby Baker Cemetery. Among the latter is Jim and Marina’s daughter Madeline Baker Adams, whose namesake house was moved to the museum grounds in recent years. Madeline’s husband died in a water dispute in 1896, and she had the house built in 1905 with money she made freighting between Baggs and Rawlins. Two of her four children, Bill and Johnny, lived with her until her death at age 80 in 1948. McCallister and family donated the Madeline House to the museum in 2010.

Two years before Jim Baker settled down in the valley, miners Bill Slater and John “Bibleback Brown” Brockmeyer built the Stonewall Cabin for Noah Reader and family, the first permanent residents of the valley. Noah’s wife, Roshanna, was self-trained in the use of herbs and other remedies and treated both fellow settlers and local Indians, who called her “Medicine Woman.” McCallister also donated this cabin and had it moved to the museum grounds in 2010. Its sod-roofed log frame construction represents a typical late 19th-century trapper’s home.

The Blair Cabin was built between Baggs and Dixon and moved to the grounds in 1987. In 1888 John “Frenchie” and Emma Blair used a broadax to shape logs for the house, where they lived for the next 62 years and where their children, grandchildren and one great-grandchild were all born.

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GUNS OF THE WEST

1860 A former Colt employee invented the .56-caliber Spencer carbine, which allowed a man to get off up to 14 shots per minute.

SPENCERS PROVE THEIR WORTH n the summer and fall of 1868 Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors on the Great Plains kept busy raiding and plundering their traditional foes, the Crows and Pawnees, but also westbound emigrants. The latter looked to the Army for help, but when confronted, the Indian raiders melted into the prairie. Major General Philip Sheridan, commander of the Department of the Missouri, sought advice from his aide and inspector general, George Forsyth. One of the young fire-eaters to emerge during the Civil War, Forsyth naturally suggested a combat command of his own. Sheridan and Forsyth set about creating one suited to Plains warfare.

As the Army’s traditional slush fund, the quartermaster budget, authorized the hiring of civilian scouts, Sheridan and Forsyth exploited that loophole by enlisting in Kansas 30 good men from Fort Harker and 20 from Fort Hays along with their horses ($1 per day for each man/35 cents per day for his horse). Each scout was issued a Spencer carbine as a force multiplier.

Invented in 1860 by former Colt employee Christopher Spencer, the carbine was a leap forward in firearm technology. Prior carbines required a user to chamber a single cartridge and then add a primer cap or load less-reliable primer tape. The .56-caliber Spencer utilized self-contained rimfire cartridges fed through a seven-round, spring-loaded magazine in the stock. The magazine could be refilled in seconds from preloaded tubes. Whereas a cavalryman might get off three shots per minute with a rifled musket, a man with a Spencer could get off up to 14. Each of 78 WILD WEST

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Forsyth’s scouts was issued 140 rounds of ammunition for his Spencer and 30 pistol rounds for his Colt Army Model 1860 revolver. Four pack mules carried an additional 4,000 rounds.

On August 29 Forsyth’s small force set off from Fort Hays into the heart of Indian country, ostensibly like a covey of clay pigeons. The fight they reaped was the celebrated Battle of Beecher Island, named after Forsyth’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Fred Beecher, one of just six scouts killed in battle against several hundred warriors.

While chasing a Sioux raiding party in northeastern Colorado, Forsyth’s command encountered a broad Indian trail. Some men recommended turning back. Believing his command could at least cripple the raiders, Forsyth plunged on. Enemy scouts soon reported their presence to their respective Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders. The puny force presented a tempting target, especially to Cheyenne Chief Roman Nose. Forsyth counted on exactly that reaction.

At dawn on September 17 warriors dashed through Forsyth’s camp on the Republican River (the present-day Arikaree) and ran off a few mules. They likely hoped the major would pursue and expose his scouts to an ambush. Instead, Forsyth moved his men to a defensible sandbar on the river. There he had them stake out the horses in a circle and then employ knives and mess plates (the stampeded mules had carried off their shovels) to dig in. Scores of Indians soon milled about the island, shooting at the entrenched soldiers. Their fire ultimately killed all the

TOP: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; OPPOSITE: JIM VAN ELDIK (2)

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IN 1868 MAJOR GEORGE FORSYTH’S SCOUTS AVOIDED DISASTER AT BEECHER ISLAND, THANKS TO THESE SEVEN-SHOT CARBINES

BY JIM VAN ELDIK

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GUNS OF THE WEST

horses, the defenders using their corpses as a breastwork. The combatants engaged in long-range sniping until a frustrated Roman Nose opted for a massive charge to settle things.

The Indians doubtless assumed once the frontiersmen had fired their initial volley, they would be busy reloading, thus enabling the warriors to ride in and finish them off. That wasn’t how things played out.

Forsyth, who’d been wounded in the right thigh and left shinbone during the sniping, saw the Indians massing and ordered each man to load all six rounds in the magazine of his Spencer and a round at the ready in the breech. He instructed them to do the same with the carbines of men killed or wounded, then to hold fire until Forsyth gave the order.

With a 60-warrior front several lines deep, Roman Nose led the fierce attack. Forsyth’s men responded with a blizzard of .56-caliber bullets, each firing his Spencer as fast as he could. They downed many Indians, including Roman Nose, who tumbled from

his horse mortally wounded, bringing the attack to a halt.

The chastised warriors tried a couple of ride-by attacks, with no better results, before returning to sporadic sniping. On the second day Forsyth sent two men for help to Fort Wallace, Kan., 70 miles to the south, and two days later he sent two more men, in case the first didn’t get through. A relief force finally arrived on September 25. Forsyth survived his wounds and in 1900 published Thrilling Days in Army Life, a detailed account of the battle.

Despite the impressive performance of Spencer carbines at Beecher Island, the Army later adopted the powerful but slow-firing Springfield Model 1873 “Trapdoor,” the carbine carried by the 7th Cavalry at the June 1876 Little Bighorn disaster. Meanwhile, surplus Spencers drifted into the hands of civilians. They proved plenty tough, and many are still around.

They downed many Indians, including Roman Nose, who tumbled from his horse mortally wounded

TOP: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; OPPOSITE: JIM VAN ELDIK (2)

SETTLER’S SPENCER In the late 1970s I purchased a Spencer for the bargain price of $140. Direct from the Dakota prairie, it had deficiencies—a missing magazine tube and cover; a shortened bullet guide and missing bullet guide spring; a modified loop lever, to ape a Winchester; a badly rusted interior barrel; its front sight worn down to a nub. Additional wear hinted at a previous owner’s frustrated efforts to properly open and close the breech. Based on the lever modification, this Spencer was likely owned by a settler.

Dixie Gun Works, of Union City, Tenn., provided most of the replacement parts to return the gun to its original configuration. The .56 rimfire cartridges hadn’t been made for many years, but Dixie offered a unique substitute cartridge case that employed a .22 blank as primer. By loading the cartridge with the .22 at the 3 o’clock position, exactly where the firing bar strikes the cartridge base, one could fire the gun. After my initial order, however, Dixie informed me such cases were no longer available. Necessity being the mother of invention, the late Dave Ferguson and I produced our own version that Ferguson Manufacturing, of Spirit Lake, Iowa, and I made for Dixie for the next 49 years. I later The Transformation Top: The author’s Spencer carbine as purchased a new centerfire breechblock for the carbine, and a barrel reline job originally purchased. Above: The same

by Bobby Hoyt, of Fairfield, Pa., restored the Spencer’s accuracy.

Spencer with replacement parts installed.

Such proven manufacturers as Armi Sport, Chiappa and Taylors & Co. make working Spencer replicas using the centerfire breechblock design. As the cartridges align end to end in the magazine tube, the nose of a following cartridge resting directly on its predecessor’s primer, flat-nose bullets are required for safe use. The guns are a joy to shoot, though unlike Winchesters they are a bit clunky to use in repeater mode, as one must work the lever and cock the hammer separately. Regardless, the Spencer is truly one of America’s classic Old West guns. —J.V.E DECEMBER 2020

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GHOST TOWNS

The remains of a miner’s cabin at Hughesville, created in 1881 by the merger of Hughes and Meagher.

BARKER AND HUGHESVILLE, MONTANA he Barker Mining District was the only such district in Montana to have been discovered in one county, come to fruition in another and left two ghost towns in a third. It dates from 1879, when partners Patrick H. Hughes and Elias A. “Buck” Barker ventured north from the mining town of Yogo in search of gold. That October 20 the partners camped along Galena Creek on the upper reaches of Dry Fork Belt Creek in the Little Belt Mountains. The next day, on finding silver-bearing rocks, Hughes traced the source to a rich outcrop of lead and silver ore. The partners immediately staked two claims, the Barker and the Grey Eagle.

Word of their find predictably prompted an influx of miners, who established three camps—Hughes City, neighboring Galena City and Leadville across the creek. The latter two combined to form Meagher City, which in 1881 merged with Hughes City to form Hughesville. The resulting Barker Mining District was in Meagher County.

It was economically feasible to freight the rich ore to Fort Benton, on the upper Missouri River, and then ship it to Swansea, Wales, for smelting. As the quality of ore subsided, however, the need for a local smelting operation became manifest. To the rescue came Colonel George Clendenin, who in spring 1881 formed the Clendenin Mining & Smelting Co. and with help from Boston and Chicago investors built a four-story brick mill.

The machinery alone weighed 208,805 pounds. It arrived at 80 WILD WEST

Fort Benton aboard two steamboats and was muscled to the site by a bull team. Impressively, the mill was up and running by year’s end. Clendenin didn’t enjoy the fruits of his industry long, however, as during a February 1882 inspection tour of one of the mines he was crushed by falling rock and died.

Hughes’ fate is uncertain, but by October 1881 Barker had sold his interests for $13,000 and retired to his hometown of Odessa, Mo. While the town of Barker, 2 miles south of Hughesville, took his name, grateful miners who first applied for a post office in 1881 had wanted to call the town Clendenin.

With the death of Clendenin himself, investors grew nervous, and the Clendenin Mining & Smelting Co. shut down. In 1890 creditors sold off the machinery, and five years later arsonists torched the empty buildings. The remoteness of the district, poor roads and a decline in the quality of ore all combined to stall development. The next census recorded fewer than 40 residents.

Not until September 1891, when the Great Northern Railroad completed a spur line from Monarch to Barker, did prospects improve. The Barker and Grey Eagle took on new workers, and several smaller mines reopened. Overnight Hughesville’s population soared to 500, and the town hosted 15 saloons (a good barometer of growth in mining country). But things went bust nearly as fast after the 1893 silver crash. As operations elsewhere could mine higher-grade ore more economically, the Barker Mining District was hit particularly hard. A few mines hung on,

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TERRY HALDEN (3)

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THESE TWIN TOWNS IN THE BARKER MINING DISTRICT SAW PLENTY OF UPS AND DOWNS OVER THE DECADES

BY TERRY HALDEN

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GHOST TOWNS

None of it was meant to be.

That year’s stock market crash dealt a severe blow to the mining industry at large, and by year’s end 1930 the district mines had closed down, throwing 350 men out of work. The owners pulled the pumps from the Barker Mine, flooding its lower levels. Subsequent attempts to restart the mines failed due to a lack of manpower and the onset of World War II. By war’s end all businesses had left Barker and Hughesville, and in 1953 the lone school closed, as just one pupil remained in the district. The towns were well on their way to becoming ghosts, and tailings from the Grey Eagle were contaminating Dry Fork Belt Creek. In 2012, Montana’s aggressive Department of Environmental Quality, despite assurances to preservationists, tore down the fine St. Joseph mill and every other mine structure and paved over the site. The empty miner’s cabins still stand, about a dozen miles east of Monarch.

For further reading Terry Halden recommends So Be It: A History of the Barker Mining District, Hughesville and Barker, Montana, by Donna Wahlberg, Barker’s last resident.

Above: Not much is left of the town of Barker.

Below: A mist drifts by the St. Joseph mill in a photo taken before Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality tore down the structure.

the 1929 stock market crash dealt a severe blow to the mining industry at large

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TERRY HALDEN (3)

but miners drifted away, businesses closed and trains stopped at Barker less often—from daily to three times a week and then only once. By 1905 the trains had stopped coming, the Great Northern had pulled up its tracks, the Barker post office had closed and just one family each lived in Barker and Hughesville. No one cared when Cascade County annexed the district.

In 1907 the Gunn Thompson Co., of New York, quietly acquired several of the mines, installed new equipment and reopened them, prompting a rebirth of the district. In 1910 T.C. Power & Bros., of Fort Benton, purchased the assets and started freighting ore by wagon over the old railbed to Monarch for train shipment to smelters in Great Falls and East Helena. After copper was discovered at the 400-foot mark of the Barker Mine, a post office returned to Hughesville in 1912. The district population fluctuated between 200 and 400 over the next decade. In 1920 the district transferred to newly created Judith Basin County.

In 1927 the St. Joseph Lead Co. purchased the district mines and over the next year spent $1.5 million upgrading or installing equipment, including a new 400-ton flotation mill, a 10,250-foot aerial tram with 54 buckets (each holding ¾ ton of ore) and a two-story boardinghouse equipped with steam heat, showers, electricity, refrigeration and room for more than 100 miners. The new owners also contracted out the rebuilding of the railroad spur to Monarch, and trains were soon arriving twice a week—albeit not carrying passengers or freight but empty hopper cars for loading. By 1929 the district was Montana’s largest producer of lead, and a four-bed hospital with a resident doctor and nurses was all set to open.

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REVIEWS

MUST SEE, MUST READ JAMES B. MILLS RECOMMENDS BILLY THE KID–RELATED BOOKS AND VIDEOS

books Merchants, Guns and Money: The Story of Lincoln County and Its Wars (1987,

by John P. Wilson): This scholarly and dispassionate study details important events before, during and after the Lincoln County War. Covering the economic affairs, various political conflicts and many violent episodes of Lincoln, N.M., from its initial settlement up to its loss of the county seat in 1913, this is a trove of information that deserves wider publication.

The Real Billy the Kid: With New Light on the Lincoln County War (1998, by Miguel Antonio Otero Jr.): Originally published in 1936 and written by the other New Mexico governor in Billy’s life, it contains its share of historical errors but also offers valuable insights and distinctly Hispano perspectives rarely found elsewhere. It features a unique series of recollections and opinions from a number of Billy’s contemporaries and contains the only published reminiscences of the long overlooked but important Lincoln County War figure Martín Chávez. This edition features an insightful introduction from John-Michael Rivera.

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Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans (1967, by George I. Sánchez,): An insightful examination of the lengthy hardships endured by the Hispano people of New Mexico in the wake of the Treaty of Guadalupe and subsequent American colonialism for which the largely illiterate and impoverished population (who became Billy’s people) were wholly unprepared and therefore often ripe for exploitation. A testament to a people’s resilience amid sweeping social and economic upheaval beyond their control on the harsh frontier and their journey into the 20th century.

Billy the Kid: A Reader’s Guide (2020,

by Richard W. Etulain): A herculean compilation and appraisal of a whopping number of books, articles, essays, manuscripts, newspaper articles, novels and films either centered on or related to Billy the Kid. Featuring the typical astuteness one expects from a former English professor who seldom holds back in offering his perspective or criticisms, this immense work belongs on the shelves of every Billy aficionado.

The Outlaw Statesman: The Life and Times of Fred Tecumseh Waite (by Mike Tower, 2007): An enjoyable and revelatory biography of Billy’s welleducated part-Chickasaw friend, one-

time potential ranching partner and fellow Regulator Fred Waite. While Tower misfires in describing Billy as “sociopathic,” his examination of the politically minded Waite’s interesting life prior to and after the Lincoln County War deserves strong praise.

It serves as a refreshing and inspiring study that brings into focus one of Wild West’s lesser-known characters, who devoted the later years of his life to the Chickasaw Nation, receiving fair treatment from Washington, D.C.

VIDEOS Young Guns (20th Century Fox, 1988): Intended to appeal to a younger generation of filmgoers, it succeeded in a variety of ways, more so than some old-timers from the John Wayne era would care to admit. Screenwriter John Fusco clearly did his research, presenting a wealth of historical characters and references. The film has its glaring inaccuracies but remains the most detailed and accurate portrayal of the Lincoln County War. While the climatic slow-motion break from the burning McSween house may be over-the-top action hero stuff, the film features a strong sense of comradery and never fails to get the blood pumping. Reportedly depressed over his breakup with actress Demi Moore just prior to filming, Emilio Estevez hurled himself into the role of a hellbent-on-vengeance William H. Bonney, and while his portrayal may not ring historically true in aspects, it contributes to an entertaining, witty and highly quotable ride in what remains the Billy movie for younger generations. Who can forget that laugh?

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REVIEWS Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1973): Possessing a level of grittiness absent in many Westerns, it succeeds in portraying the coarseness of the Southwestern frontier, with admirable instances of historical accuracy sprinkled among the many fictional occurrences.

While he couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag in his supporting role, Bob Dylan excels in what he does best by providing a fantastic soundtrack. Younger Billy enthusiasts may be put off by the sight of a much too old Kris Kristofferson (sporting a noticeable paunch) in the role, yet he portrays the Kid’s youthful, defiant and reckless spirit pretty well all the same. Regardless of the inaccuracies, this remains one of the best Westerns ever made.

The Kid (Lionsgate Films, 2019): Despite the beautiful cinematography, this film fails to hold up against the many great Westerns past and came and went with little fanfare in an age when the genre struggles to garner much attention.

However, amid the heavy doses of fiction, Dane DeHaan delivers the most historically accurate portrayal of Billy Bonney ever committed to the silver screen by any actor to date. For that alone this is a must see.

American Experience: Billy the Kid (PBS, 2012): This remains the most well put together documentary about the Kid, featuring valuable insights from Frederick Nolan, Paul Andrew Hutton, Mark Lee Gardner, Drew Gomber, Michael Wallis and others.

It admirably devotes time to Billy’s relationship with the Hispano population and the reasons for their support of him, while featuring Gary Lionelli’s fine soundtrack.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Orion Pictures, 1989): Who says history can’t be fun? In this comedy two teenage dimwits must use a phone booth time machine in order to pass their high-school history report. Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) decide to kidnap a bunch of historical figures and bring them back to modern times, and Billy (Dan Shor) is one of the first figures they bag. What would Billy do in such a situation? The Kid adapts to time travel rather well, pals around with Socrates, flirts with Joan of Arc, attempts to pick up girls in a shopping mall, calls Sigmund Freud an “egghead,” gets thrown in jail, shoots a stage light when a highschool audience is inattentive and learns the meaning of “Party on, dudes!” Sounds about right.

BOOK REVIEWS The Frontiersmen Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight: The Army vs. the Pioneers, 1815–1845,

by Gregory Michno, Caxton Press, Caldwell, Idaho, 2020, $18.95 Traditional frontier heroes have no place in this book by Wild West special contributor Gregory Michno, an independent researcher who has long written about Western history, in particular the Indian wars. His February 2020 article “Half Horse, Half Gator and All Hogwash,” in which Michno asserts David Crockett and Daniel Boone epitomize the myth of the heroic frontiersmen, created more than its share of controversy. Those two fellows, viewed as American heroes in most circles, get their due (or “undue”) in this book. Michno is intent on deglamorizing, if not disparaging, the frontiersmen who operated (and sometimes ran amok) usually east of the Mississippi River but also in designated Indian lands to the west from the end of the War of 1812 to the start of the Mexican War. While the author’s research should impress anyone, many readers won’t like or appreciate the distasteful facts and contemporary quotes he presents, not to

mention his pull-nopunches commentary.

Even readers who find merit in his arguments will be disturbed by what they read. In short, Michno wants to turn American exceptionalism on its head and expose the widespread racism, bigotry and xenophobia he contends plagued the frontier in the first half of the 19th century.

The author makes no bones about it, stating in the introduction his concentration on the negative.

“A prime reason,” he writes, “is because the contrary positive image is the one fully incorporated into the American myth. Thus, to swing the pendulum back toward the middle, the unflattering and scandalous need exposure. For debunking to have value, however, it needs to do more than replace one prejudice with another—it needs to drive out the fallacious beliefs.”

For example, Michno posits, many Americans believe the Army’s main purpose on the frontier was to protect settlers and

emigrants. In the time period covered here, though, the Army, more than anything else, was trying to regulate white encroachment against the persons and property of Indians. In fact, he contends, the Army was often at odds with the many dishonest and greedy contractors, land speculators and other citizens who magnified the danger of Indian attack or property losses to Indians.

What’s more, Regular Army officers were finding out that, as Michno puts it, “Militia and volunteers were not worth the cost of the gunpowder to blow them to smithereens.”

He provides many examples of citizen armies at their worst, pointing out how their willingness to do battle stemmed largely from frontiersmen’s greed for land and loot. For instance, in the 1820s U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Edmund P. Gaines wrote that white Georgians trespassing on Indian lands were “certain to produce acts of violence upon the persons or property of unoffending Indians, whom we are bound to protect.”

The story of Indian removal (Cherokees, Creeks, Trail of Tears, etc.) from the South is well known, but Michno reminds us some Southerners wanted the Indians

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to stay in order to cheat and rob them and sell them liquor. In the end, though, nearly as many Indians would migrate west (often on foot) as white settlers did in their iconic covered wagons on the Oregon Trail.

“The Indian migration was fully as encompassing and extraordinary as the later white migration,” Michno writes.

“And the Indian exodus was fraught with more menace from thieving whites than the Oregon Trail emigrants were at risk from the Western tribes.”

The Frontiersmen Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight won’t sit well with any reader proud to be an American or about anything his or her ancestors might have done to make America great. “If the 18th century emphasized progress of the human race, the 19th century emphasized distinction of the races and inequalities,” Michno writes in a section fittingly entitled “Civilizing the White Frontier.” Among the few heroes of the time, he notes, were the officer corps, “a comparative bastion of integrity, civility, discretion and fairness.” But presentday Americans, he argues, should be reading actual history instead of believing “Hollywood history.” It may not be as entertaining, of course, but Michno hopes it will lead more of us to challenge our “origin myth of self-glorification.”

—Editor

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The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West,

by Megan Kate Nelson, Scribner, New York, 2020, $28 Megan Kate Nelson focuses on Confederate Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley’s invasion of New Mexico Territory and the Civil War–era campaigns against the Apaches and Navajos— a “three-cornered war,” as one soldier called it, involving Yankee and Rebel soldiers as well as American Indians.

These subjects have been well-chronicled: Mangas Coloradas and Cochise in Edwin R. Sweeney’s Mangas Coloradas: Chief of the Chiricahua Apaches (1998) and Cochise: Chiricahua Apache Chief (1991); Glorieta Pass in Don E. Alberts’ The Battle of Glorieta: Union Victory in the West (1998); the Apache wars in Paul Andrew Hutton’s The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History (2016); and the Navajo campaigns in Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (2006).

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But Nelson combines the topics into one easy-to-read volume that provides good information about the fighting in the Southwest as well as such individuals as Mangas Coloradas, the celebrated Apache leader; John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who established the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Union officer James Henry Carleton, who campaigned against Navajos and Apaches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union actions against her people; and Bill Davidson, who fought for the Confederacy in New Mexico.

Nelson’s smooth narrative style brings the characters to life and makes the story easily accessible for casual readers, while her intensive research should please serious history buffs.

—Johnny D. Boggs Nighthawk Rising: A Biography of Accused Cattle Rustler Queen Ann Bassett of Brown’s Park,

by Diana Allen Kouris, High Plains Press, Glendo, Wyo., 2019, $19.95 Diana Kouris again takes on a subject tied to Brown’s Park, Colo., where she was reared, this time profiling one of the state’s best-known women—“Queen Ann” Bassett. Much has been written about Bassett, but Kouris mined the archival documents, many never before used, to write this sympathetic but honest portrayal.

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Bassett, often romantically linked to the Sundance Kid, was a rancher’s daughter, heavily influenced by her strong mother. She grew up cowboying in remote Brown’s Park, learning to rope and ride as well as the men who frequented the region. She was friends with Elzy Lay and Isam Dart, and had feeling for Mat Rash (the two had planned to marry). But the 1900 murders of Rash and Dart tore asunder Bassett’s world, fueling a lifelong hatred of cattleman Ora Haley, suspected of ordering the killings.

Kouris readily admits her interest in writing about Bassett grew from stories her own grandmother shared.

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As neighboring ranchers, the two older women were friends. But Kouris avoided the trap of writing from recollection, instead seeking out primary documents to frame Bassett as she was, not as legend has portrayed her.

Among the sources are firsthand accounts, like Sam Bassett’s letter to J.M. Blansit regarding the murder of Rash, Joe Davenport’s detailed depiction of Dart,

Jess Taylor’s explanation of his relationship with and insight into the Bassett family, and Minnie Crouse Rasmussen’s account of the events surrounding the suspicious death of Bassett’s sister Josie’s fourth husband. Kouris also drew from a collection of Bassett’s personal letters and unpublished writings that convey her character. While the focus of Nighthawk Rising is clearly on Bassett, the book includes plenty of detail about her father, mother, brother Eb and sister Josie, offering a rounded perspective of those who were closest to Ann and helped shape her character.

—Candy Moulton

Thunder in the West: The Life and Legends of Billy the Kid, by Richard W. Etulain, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2020, $29.95 A professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico who began writing and researching about Billy the Kid in the 1980s, Dick Etulain has produced two books this year about the most famous and most controversial outlaw in New Mexico Territory. Thunder in the West covers “The Life” in Part I and “The Legends” in Part II, while his companion work, Billy the Kid: A Reader’s Guide, provides readers (as well as film watchers) with the essential on-paper

and on-screen portrayals of the Kid. In Thunder in the West the author notes that most of the writings about the Kid portrayed him as a violent desperado, until Walter Nobles Burns’ sympathetic 1926 biography The Saga of Billy the Kid, after which more positive accounts showed up.

Etulain takes the middle ground, describing the “bifurcated Billy,” one who was part rash desperado and part loyal hero. He, of course, is not the first author to present such a balanced approach; see in particular Frederick Nolan’s The West of Billy the Kid (1998) and Robert M. Utley’s Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life (1989). What

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REVIEWS

Etulain adds to the mix is a thorough examination of the “multiple legends that have taken root, sprouted, flowered and matured in the nearly 140 years since his death in 1881.” The author insists he isn’t waffling when it comes to his view of Billy, but that “complexity, not the simplicity of villain or hero, is central to a more probing view of the Kid.” The chapter “Billy From 1995 to the Present” shows that interest in the outlaw remains strong not only among fans of the Wild West but also with the general public. Along with providing kudos to authors Nolan and Utley, Etulain sings the praises of other contributors to the story of Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War such as Jerry (Richard) Weddle (Antrim Is My Stepfather’s Name: The Boyhood of Billy the Kid, 1993), Kathleen Chamberlain (In the Shadow of Billy the Kid: Susan McSween and the Lincoln County War, 2013) and Mark Lee Gardner (To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West, 2010). He also questions the approaches of the prolific Gale Cooper, who despite extensive research rejects the notion of a bifurcated Billy (insisting he is a major 86 WILD WEST

hero), and W.C. Jameson, who believes Garrett did not kill the outlaw and that the real Billy the Kid is “Brushy Bill” Roberts.

Thunder in the West has no footnotes, but at the end the author provides an “Essay on Sources.” Also consider his other valuable volume, Billy the Kid: A Reader’s Guide (reviewed below).

—Editor Billy the Kid: A Reader’s Guide,

by Richard W. Etulain, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2020, $34.95 In 242 pages Dick Etulain can’t possibly guide readers to all the written and filmed works about Billy the Kid. But he certainly covers the essential ones, not only listing but also assessing some 80 books, 85 essays, 35 novels, 75 newspaper articles and 25 films about a man who ranks right up there with Lt. Col. George Custer and outlaw Jesse James as most writtenabout Old West character.

He points out the historical contributions made on paper and on-screen but also the factual inaccuracies.

It all starts with the 1882 book The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, written by Pat Garrett (with significant help from ghostwriter Ash Upson) less than a year after the death of Billy the Kid in Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory. “The early chapters seem a mix of dime-novel sensation, journalistic hyperbole and false facts,” writes Etulain.

“Very little of that beginning section can be proven, but leading Kid specialists are divided on the worth of the second half of the

book, rumored to come from Garrett.” Etulain calls Robert M. Utley’s “smoothly written and rigorously researched” 1989 biography Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life the leading account of the Kid’s life. His top mark when it comes to historical novels about the Southwest outlaw goes to the 2016 Ron Hansen offering, The Kid, for its “careful, inviting combination of historical accuracy, skillful scene setting and plausible interpretation of Billy.”

On the big screen Etulain says Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), directed

by Sam Peckinpah and starring James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson in the title roles, “remains the strongest of the Billy films, revealing and convincingly dramatizing the persisting legends of a bifurcated Billy.” He suggests that despite its historical inaccuracies (for instance, Billy was right-handed), The Left Handed Gun (1958), with Paul Newman as the Kid, was most likely the best Billy the Kid film released before 1960. For more on the subject Etulain recommends Johnny D. Boggs’ 2013 book Billy the Kid on Film, 1911–2012.

—Editor

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (required by Act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code). 1. Wild West 2. (ISSN: 1046-4638) 3. Filing date: 10/1/20. 4. Issue frequency: Bi Monthly. 5. Number of issues published annually: 6. 6. The annual subscription price is $39.95. 7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182. Contact person: Kolin Rankin. 8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182. 9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor. Publisher, Michael A. Reinstein, HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182, Editor, Gregory J Lalire, HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182 , Editor in Chief, Alex Neil , HistoryNet, 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182. 10. Owner: HistoryNet; 1919 Gallows Rd. Suite 400, Vienna, VA 22182.

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Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date; 26,167. D. Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside mail). 1. Free or nominal Outside-County. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 2. Free or nominal rate in-county copies. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Free or nominal rate copies mailed at other Classes through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 4. Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 522. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 369.

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GO WEST

O

n December 5 and 6, 2020, crowds will descend on the Gruene Historic District of New Braunfels, Texas, to browse some 100 vendors’ booths during the annual Christmas Market Days and to pose for photos with Cowboy Kringle—though sitting on his lap while on horseback is strictly verboten, mask or no mask. Unfortunately, this year the COVID-19 pandemic has put the nix on two holiday traditions in Gruene— the reading of a Christmas missive from the governor by a “Pony Express rider,” and the lighting of the district at the flip of a switch by the saddled Santa. Kringle will be on hand for photos the last two weekends in November and first three weekends in December, though only by online reservation [cowboykringle.com]. District namesake Ernst Gruene was among the first in a wave of German immigrants to settle along the Guadalupe River. In 1845 he and two sons started the settlement, which thrived as a stop along the stagecoach route between Austin and San Antonio. At its heart, the 1878 Gruene Hall (inset) bills itself as the oldest continually run dance hall in Texas and welcomes regular music acts [gruenehall.com].

88 WILD WEST

ERIC W. POHL, EPOHL.COM; INSET: TEXAS HISTORICAL COMMISSION

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