Wild West February 2021

THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

mystery solved!

WHO KILLED PAT GARRETT? recently discovered details provide a definitive answer

H BONES OF THE ALAMO H TOM HORN’S YOUNG SCHOOLMARM H UTE INDIAN ATTACK H BLACK PIONEERS IN kansas

Pat Garrett, who shot and killed Billy the Kid in 1881, was gunned down on Feb. 29, 1908.

FEBRUARY 2021 HISTORYNET.COM

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46 SKELETONS IN BUCKSKIN

By Ron J. Jackson Jr. Make no bones about it—the fate of the Alamo dead remains murky

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64 WHERE

TOM HORN’S SMOOTH SCHOOLMARM

FREEDOM RANG

By Linda Wommack The Wyoming newcomer soon paired off with the notorious paid assassin

By Jim Winnerman Nicodemus, Kansas, was a haven for freed slaves turned homesteaders

58 INNOCENTS LOST

By Jeff Broome Earlier murders of Utes by a dozen cowboys triggered a Ute attack on a Colorado family

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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 Johnny D. Boggs Robert Utley, dean of Western historians, revisits legendary Lakota leader Sitting Bull

18 WESTERNERS

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Black Hills pioneer ‘Grasshopper Jim’ counted Sitting Bull among his friends

20 GUNFIGHTERS AND LAWMEN

By Kent Frates Lawman Heck Thomas once shot it out with Cherokee outlaw Ned Christie

22 PIONEERS AND SETTLERS

By Ramon Vasconcellos In 1818 Argentine privateers raided coastal settlements in Spanish California

24 WESTERN ENTERPRISE

By David McCormick Beveridge’s Montana Wildest West hired Crees to battle Buffalo Bill Cody

26 ART OF THE WEST

38

HE SHOT THE SHERIFF

By David G. Thomas Wayne Brazel told the truth when he said he killed Pat Garrett in self-defense

By Johnny D. Boggs Texas native Don Yena has rendered the most accurate Alamo painting

28 INDIAN LIFE

By Jeff Broome Depredation claims provide missing information about 19th-century Indian raids

30 STYLE

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

76 COLLECTIONS

By Linda Wommack Oklahoma’s Ben Johnson Cowboy Museum honors the real ‘reel cowboy’

78 GUNS OF THE WEST

By George Layman This engraved Colt Model 1878 belonged to an Arizona Ranger captain

80 GHOST TOWNS

By Les Kruger The farm settlement of Osco, Neb., grew without a railroad—but never too big

82 REVIEWS

Indian wars historian Jeff Broome picks Central Plains–related books and films. Plus, reviews of recent books about Ned Buntline, Sitting Bull, Indian raids, the Earps and women’s suffrage

70 MOTHER ROAD TO THE FAR WEST

By Douglas L. Gifford Sons of Daniel Boone forged Missouri’s Boonslick Road, gateway to the West

88 GO WEST

Lewis and Clark’s route to the Pacific took them over the Lolo Trail

ON THE COVER Patrick Floyd Jarvis Garrett poses with a shotgun (not the Burgess folding model he carried at the time of his death) in a circa 1878 tintype that once belonged to Pat’s youngest child, Jarvis, and has seldom appeared in print.

(Courtesy Sally Kading and Karla Steen, who bought the tintype at the 2017 Old Fort Sumner Museum Online Auction; photo illustration: Brian Walker)

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EDITOR’S LETTER

NO ‘PAT’ STORY

If young rebel Billy the Kid forever rides into the sunset in my mind, the New Mexico sheriff who killed him and was himself shot down in even less dignified fashion 27 years later remains grounded in my head like a despairing morning that never reaches high noon.

It was midmorning on Feb. 29, 1908, that Pat Garrett took a bullet to the back of the head, supposedly as he stopped to urinate on a lonely stretch of road 5 miles shy of Las Cruces, New Mexico Territory. His assassination continues to fascinate outlaw and lawmen aficionados, as it remains somewhat of an unsolved mystery and has triggered more than a few conspiracy theories. Of course, it isn’t as dramatic (just ask Hollywood) as Garrett’s shooting of the Kid in Fort Sumner on the moonlit night of July 14, 1881—an event that has also attracted generations of conspiracy theorists who contend Billy survived the night.

But for me the Kid killing doesn’t hold a candle to the Garrett assassination for sustaining interest.

For one, Garrett was the Lincoln County sheriff in the summer of 1881 and simply doing his sworn duty when he hunted down and pulled the trigger on the fugitive Kid. Far greater mystery surrounds the 1908 shooting of Garrett, even though goatherd Wayne Brazel confessed to having killed the onetime sheriff in a tale of self-defense that might seem unbelievable today but was apparently credible to a jury, which on May 4, 1909, took only 15 minutes to return a verdict of not guilty.

In the August 2018 Wild West we ran Jerry Lobdill’s feature “How Jim Miller Killed Pat Garrett,” which earned its author the Wild West History Association’s 2019 Six-Shooter Award for best general Western article. Lobdill suggested how paid assassin Miller did the dirty deed as part of a conspiracy involving such Garrett enemies as William W. Cox, Oliver Lee and Carl Adamson. Perhaps his arguments swayed some readers, but David G. Thomas was not among them. Chapter 13 of his 2020 book Killing Pat Garrett, the Wild West’s Most Famous Lawman—Murder or Self-Defense? is titled “Debunking the Conspiracy Theories,” while his cover story in this issue of Wild West is titled “He Shot the Sheriff” (the “he” referring to Brazel, not Miller).

“Deacon Jim” Miller certainly had a killer résumé, having been tried for murder twice and the prime suspect in a score of unsolved killings and attempted murders. What’s more, at the time of his murder Garrett was about to sell his two Doña Ana County ranches to Miller and Adamson, who’d agreed to pay $3,000 for them. But first they were supposed to buy the goats Brazel was grazing on one of the ranches.

On that fateful February 29 Garrett and Adamson were traveling by buggy to Las Cruces to meet Miller and Brazel when they encountered the latter on horseback. Brazel got Garrett’s goat (figuratively speaking), and Garrett threatened him before the shooting, according to Adamson, though Adamson was not subpoenaed for Brazel’s trial the following year. Miller, argues Thomas, was waiting at a Las Cruces hotel at the hour Garrett was killed. Thomas provides plenty of details (including previously undiscovered information) to support his argument Brazel shot Garrett in self-defense (not premeditated murder).

Among other aspects, Thomas calls into question the many accounts claiming Garrett had exited the buggy to urinate and was found with his trousers unbuttoned. According to Adamson, urination was involved in the deadly story, but it was he, not Garrett, who’d stopped the buggy in order to relieve himself. More important is Thomas’ revelation that the Fornoff Report, a supposed summary of territorial Mounted Police Captain Fred Fornoff’s investigation into the murder, cannot be examined because it doesn’t exist. Thomas has plenty of answers but not all of them, in part because there’s also no surviving copy of the Brazel trial transcript. If you’ll excuse a little vulgar slang, the story of Garrett’s killing is, more than ever, a real pisser.

In 1908 local rancher Will Isaacks placed a stone bearing a carved cross at the site where Pat Garrett was killed.

In the 1960s the Doña Ana County Historical Society installed the present-day marker.

BRAZEL SHOT

GARRETT IN

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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.

THE FRIENDS OF PAT GARRETT

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

FEBRUARY 2021 / VOL. 33, NO. 5

Visit our WEBSITE FOR ONLINE EXTRAS WildWestMag.com Allensworth: California’s First Black Community

“The 1912–1915 period marked the apex of Allensworth as a thriving community,” writes author B. Gordon Wheeler. “AfricanAmerican newspapers throughout the nation noticed the tiny hamlet: The New York Age chronicled its growth; the Washington Bee congratulated all involved with the enterprise; and the California Eagle gleefully exclaimed that there is not a single white person having anything to do with the affairs of the colony.”

More About Don Yena

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

STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR PAUL FISHER ART DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY ALEX GRIFFITH PHOTO EDITOR

CORPORATE ROB WILKINS DIRECTOR OF PARTNERSHIP MARKETING TOM GRIFFITHS CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT GRAYDON SHEINBERG CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT SHAWN BYERS VP AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT JAMIE ELLIOTT PRODUCTION DIRECTOR

ADVERTISING

“I think the actual story of the American West is so fascinating,” says the Texas artist, who loves the challenges of doing large oil paintings of big subjects, such as the Alamo.

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MORTON GREENBERG SVP ADVERTISING SALES mgreenberg@mco.com RICK GOWER REGIONAL SALES MANAGER Rick@rickgower.com TERRY JENKINS REGIONAL SALES MANAGER tjenkins@historynet.com

Extended Interview With Robert Utley

NANCY FORMAN / MEDIA PEOPLE 212-779-7172 EXT. 224 nforman@mediapeople.com

“After retirement in 1980 I sought something to make money,” says the 91-year-old former chief historian for the National Park Service, whom peers consider the dean of Western historians. “After a visit to Lincoln [New Mexico] I thought the Lincoln County War would make money. It didn’t, but the outgrowth, Billy the Kid, did.

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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SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION: 800-435-0715 OR SHOP.HISTORYNET.COM WILD WEST (ISSN 1046-4638) is published bimonthly by HISTORYNET, LLC, 901 N. Glebe Rd., 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 Periodical postage paid at Tysons, Va., and additional mailing offices.

POSTMASTER, send address changes to: WILD WEST, P.O. Box 422224, Palm Coast, FL 32142-2224 List Rental Inquiries: Belkys Reyes, Lake Group Media, Inc. 914-925-2406; belkys.reyes@lakegroupmedia.com Canada Publications Mail Agreement No. 41342519 Canadian GST No. 821371408RT0001 The contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in whole or part without the written consent of HISTORYNET, LLC. PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA

PHOTO BY JOHN GOODSPEED

Texas artist Don Yena renders another of his Western masterworks.

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LETTERS

From the editor: A number of readers have commented favorably about the colorful image of Billy the Kid we used in the December 2020 issue as the lead for James B. Mills’ feature “They Called Him Bilito.” The man behind the colorization of that celebrated tintype is Englishman Stuart Humphryes. “I live in London,” Humphryes told us, “and I’m predominantly a film colorizer, although I do colorize photos, too. I chose the photograph of Billy the Kid because it was in such a degraded state, and I wanted to see how restoration and digital enhancement could transform something of such low resolution. I’ve been using some AI (artificial intelligence) restoration and upscaling software and was on the lookout for a suitable candidate. My Twitter feed, BabelColour [twitter.com/StuartHumphryes] has quite a following and pretty much exclusively deals with historical photographs, so my interest in restoration/colorization and history all came together to bring a little life and character back into the face of Billy the Kid! The dark spots under his eyes were entirely a decision of the artificial intelligence program, which interprets the geometry of the face and decides what pixels are eyes, eyebrows, cheekbones, etc. It decided the dark pixels were most probably bruises, as a consequence of a couple of black eyes from some altercation no doubt, and knowing Billy the Kid, that interpretation was probably quite right!”

BENTEEN’S WORDS Soooo…[Captain Frederick] Benteen’s men at the Washita “had again an opportunity of showing their mettle.” Seriously? Soooo…did [Colonel John] Chivington’s men show “mettle” at Sand Creek, and [Major Eugene] Baker’s men at the Marias? How about the U.S. Army men at Wounded Knee? I’m repulsed by that sentence C. Lee Noyes wrote in his June 2020 Pioneers and Settlers article “Galloping to Their Doom?”

Ann Barnett Staunton, Va. Editor responds: Benteen is the one who said those words.

Author Noyes was quoting him.

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TRANSCONTINENTAL? On P. 76 of the June 2020 issue [“Tracking Omaha’s Past,” Collections, by Linda Wommack] it is incorrect for the author to state that the Union Pacific Railroad was “the world’s first transcontinental railroad.” That statement truly goes to the American-financed, -built and -operated Panama Railroad across the Isthmus of Panama. Completed in 1855, it was helping to transport Americans to the goldfields of California 14 years before the Union Pacific/Central Pacific railroad was finished. The Panama Railroad may have only been about 50 miles long, but it was truly transcontinental, in that it went from ocean to ocean, whereas the Union Pacific, Central Pacific and others were not truly transcontinental, in that they only extended part way, from midcontinent to the Pacific.

Lance Terrell Austin, Texas

DAKOTA JUSTICE In the December 2019 Letters Colonel John E. Kosobucki asks if the prosecutor at Jack McCall’s trial, Oliver Shannon, and the judge, Peter C. Shannon, were related? I researched this long ago and concluded they were not. An interesting aspect is that Judge Shannon, trier in the original court, also heard the same case as appealed to the Dakota Territorial Supreme Court. Justice Shannon was one of three territorial justices. The other two, Gideon Moody and Thomas Jefferson Kidder, were too busy trying to nullify the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, making the Black Hills sovereign and separate to the Lakota Nation. Moody was in San Francisco hobnobbing with George Hearst, urging him to invest in the hills. He did, and it became the Homestake Mine. Justice Kidder had no love of the Lakotas, as he had lost a son, Lieutenant Lyman Kidder of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, to Indian depredations when the young officer was riding with dispatches for Lt. Col. George A. Custer.

Robert Rybolt Randallstown, Md.

PRINT IT Hiding out in the forest near Mount Lassen in northern California, absent the Internet, I wanted to tell you how wonderful it is to receive your ongoing print edition of Wild West. What you do is an enduring national treasure, and I thank you. Not sure when you’ll get this note in the mail. Pony Express, anybody?

Daphne Dunn Wilson Shingletown, Calif.

HORSE VALUE I wish to compliment author Aaron Woodard on his August 2020 article “Deadly Horseplay in the Dakotas,” detailing the role, value and interplay of horses in the life and commerce in the 19th-century West. Without horses, what progress would have been measured and achieved in these hard, rugged places? Woodard has clearly described a horse thief in those days got off far worse than a car thief today. I have also enjoyed reading his excellent book The Revenger: The Life and Times of Wild Bill Hickok.

Dr. Bob Funk Tegucigalpa, Honduras Send letters by email to wildwest@historynet.com. Include your name and hometown.

TOP: STUART HUMPHRYES

THE KID IN COLOR

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ROUNDUP

TOP 10 CENTRAL PLAINS INDIAN RAIDS AND MASSACRES August 1862 Minnesota Uprising: Dakota Sioux killed 644 settlers in the region south of the Platte River and north of the Arkansas, many later drifting south to smoke the pipe with Lakota Sioux, Arapahos and other Central Plains tribes. War broke out a year later.

Top: Charles Schreyvogel’s The Summit Springs Rescue places scout William F. Cody at the center of action on July 11, 1869. Cheyenne captive Maria Weichell survived her wounds that day, but Susanna Alderdice did not. Above: Captured

by Cheyennes during the Plum Creek massacre on Aug. 8, 1864, Mrs. Nancy Morton was later rescued.

10 WILD WEST

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May 30, 1869, Spillman Creek raid, Kansas: Eleven settlers were killed, including a pregnant Susanna Alderdice, slain amid a rescue attempt July 11 at Summit Springs, Colo. Three of her children were killed, but her wounded 4-year-old boy survived. Then unknown scout William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody found the village the 5th U.S. Cavalry captured, ending further Dog Soldier raids.

3

1868 Saline and Solomon river raids, Kansas: Cheyenne Dog Soldiers raided homesteads August 10–15 and October 13, capturing Sarah White on August 13 and Mrs. Anna Morgan two months later. In March 1869 Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led the rescue of both captives. Captured in Colorado between these raids was Mrs. Clara Blinn and toddler son Willie, both of whom Cheyennes killed amid the Washita fight that fall.

4

June 11, 1864, Hungate family massacre, Colorado Territory: Unknown warriors burned this family out of their cabin and killed them the morning after 29-year-old Nathan Hungate shot an Indian stealing stock. He, wife Ellen and their two small daughters were slain. Their mutilated bodies were displayed in Denver, causing fear and inciting revenge.

5

Aug. 7–9, 1864, Little Blue River raid, Nebraska Territory: Confederated Central Plains warriors slaughtered nearly 40 unsuspecting settlers along a stretch of the Overland Trail. Among the dead were nine members of the extended Eubanks family. A westbound stage discovered victims lying dead in the road. When word hit Denver, Colorado Territory Governor John Evans formed the 3rd Colorado Cavalry, which reciprocated that fall with the equally shameful Sand Creek massacre.

6

Aug. 8, 1864, Plum Creek massacre, Nebraska Territory: Ninety miles east of the Little Blue Cheyenne warriors descended on a Denver-bound train of a dozen wagons, killing 13 men and capturing Mrs. Nancy Morton and 9-year-old Danny Marble. Both were later rescued,

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WYATT, HART & BEACH

though Danny died in Denver of typhoid fever, likely caught during his captivity.

7

July 31, 1865, Fletcher sisters, Nebraska Territory: Cheyenne warriors from Black Kettle’s village captured 17-year-old Mary and 2year old Lizzie, killed their mother and wounded their father near the site of present-day Laramie, Wyo. Mary was rescued months later, but Lizzie vanished.

Decades later Mary learned her sister was living on the Wind River Reservation, and in 1902 she sought to bring her home. Lizzie, however, rejected her white roots, saying she had no memories of her family and would remain an Arapaho.

8

July 1867 Campbell/Ulbrich raids, Nebraska: Cheyenne Dog Soldiers captured five young settlers in two raids 90 miles apart in south-central Nebraska. They remained in captivity for weeks until Chief Turkey Leg agreed to release them in exchange for captives taken from his tribe in a recent fight. In a later affidavit Veronica Ulbrich, who was 13 when taken, told of having been repeatedly raped during her captivity.

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9

July 23, 1863, Wiseman family massacre, Nebraska Territory: Yankton and Santee Sioux descended on the Wiseman cabin and found five children alone. None would survive.

Three were found dead, two wounded.

Hannah, 14, had been raped, her mouth disfigured by an exploding cartridge and an arrow shot “through her birth and out at the top of each hip.” She lived five days.

Brother Loren, 4, lingered three days, only saying “the Indians scared him.”

10

Aug. 19, 1864, Martin brothers, Nebraska Territory: Nat, 15, and Robert, 11, were haying the family fields, some 30 miles east of Fort Kearny, when Sioux and Cheyenne raiders struck.

As the brothers broke for the cabin, riding double on a mare, an arrow went through both boys’ backs, pinning them together. Tumbling to the ground, they feigned death and survived. The arrow is on display at Nebraska’s Hastings Museum, along with a life-size bronze of the wounded boys astride their horse.

—Jeff Broome

Through the 1920s legendary frontier lawman Wyatt Earp met and corresponded with William S. Hart (pictured at left), foremost Western star of the silent era, hoping the latter would depict him on-screen.

Hart never did, but he was a pallbearer at Earp’s funeral in January 1929. Neither may have realized a tie already existed between them.

In 1908 novelist Rex Beach published The Barrier.

The setting for this potboiler is a gold rush town in the Yukon, the plot dealing with prospectors, fur traders, a U.S. Army officer, saloonkeepers, gamblers and a beautiful half-blood gal. The “heavy” in the saga is Ben Stark, a ne’er-do-well saloonman and gambler, who of course “gets it” near the end. Earp’s widow, Josie, later claimed Stark bore some of Wyatt’s characteristics. An Alaskan writer for the Bureau of Land Management agreed but suggested famed boxing promoter Tex Rickard may also have inspired the Stark persona. Tex and Wyatt both lived and kept bar in Rampart, Alaska, in 1898. Among their neighbors was 19-year-old woodcutter Beach, who knew both men and even rented a cabin to Wyatt and Josie. Beach, whose 1906 novel The Spoilers was among the best sellers of the era, went on to literary and show business fame. When The Barrier was presented as a play in New York City in 1908, none other than Hart played the role of Stark (aka Earp/Rickard).

—Don Chaput

CUSTER FILM Filmed on location at Montana’s Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the feature documentary Custer’s Strategy of Defeat—which relates the June 25, 1876, clash between Lt. Col. George Custer’s 7th U.S. Cavalry and Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors—is set to premiere in January 2021 at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and will be released elsewhere in February. Produced by Aviation Pictures, the film [strategyofdefeat.com] was written by director Chris Hoffert and researcher Frederic C. Wagner III and is based on Wagner’s 2014 book The Strategy of Defeat at the Little Big Horn: A Military and Timing Analysis of the Battle. Gary Stewart portrays Custer, while Jeff Reno, a great-grandnephew of Custer’s second-incommand, Marcus Reno, portrays the maligned major.

WEST WORDS

‘His entire trouble was brought on by trying to get money for me to reach mother.

We took an oath at parting never to serve out a term in the penitentiary, but rather to find that rest a tired soul seeks. It is, of course, public that I tried to kill myself the day they separated me from Joe at Florence, and today I am sorry I didn’t succeed’ —In a jailhouse interview with Cosmopolitan, Pearl Hart said this about paramour Joe Boot, with whom she had robbed an Arizona Territory stagecoach on May 30, 1899.

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RINGO KID?

A University of Cambridge–led research team studied personality types across the United States and found that residents of mountainous regions are more likely to have the psychological traits— individualism, selfreliance, toughness, emotional stability, openness to experience—ascribed to pioneers in the American West. The psychologists analyzed links between an online personality test completed by 3.3 million Americans and the topography of more than 37,000 ZIP codes, publishing their findings last fall in the scholarly journal Nature Human Behaviour.

While mountains prove a predictor of personality types, those living in the Appalachians and other Eastern ranges are more agreeable and outgoing, while residents of the Rockies and other Western ranges are more willing to uproot their lives in search of opportunity.

The researchers point to lingering sociocultural effects (stories, attitudes and education) in the onetime Wild West as the most powerful personality shapers.

Collectors often write us to check the authenticity of vintage photographs (the likes of Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp) purchased at auction or a flea market. In every instance, auctioneers, historians and other experts we’ve consulted have shot down such claims, mainly due to lack of provenance.

That hasn’t stopped some collectors from trying to sell their finds.

The Wall Street Journal recently chimed in on the controversy with the article “Wyatt Earp

or Ringo Starr? Facial Recognition Meets Its Match With Old West Photos,” which quotes Dan Buck and other experts. Buck, the article notes, once tried to use digital facematching technology with less than illuminating results. “It confused Wyatt Earp, George Custer, Pat Garrett and Ringo Starr,” he said. Test yourself above: Is that Wyatt Earp in 1864 or Ringo Starr in 1964?

SEE YOU LATER...

Leon Metz

Sean Connery

Acclaimed Western writer Leon Claire Metz, 90, died on Nov. 15, 2020, in El Paso, Texas, where he spent most of his life. His 1983 book Pat Garrett: The Story of a Western Lawman is still considered the best biography of the New Mexico Territory sheriff who killed Billy the Kid in July 1881. At age 14 he’d read Walter Noble Burns’ 1926 classic The Saga of Billy the Kid. “It spawned my interest in gunfighters,” he recalled. “I would have gagged if someone suggested that I would later write a book about Pat Garrett, the man who killed Billy the Kid.” In all Metz penned 17 books, including John Selman, Gunfighter (1989), Dallas Stoudenmire: El Paso Marshal (1993) and John Wesley Hardin: Dark Angel of Texas (1998), and also wrote articles for Wild West.

Sean Connery, 90, the Scottish actor best known for starring as 007 in seven James Bond spy films between 1962 and 1983, died at his home in the Bahamas on Oct. 31, 2020. In the 1968 Western Shalako Connery starred with another unlikely frontier figure—French sex kitten Brigitte Bardot. Moses Zebulon “Shalako” Carlin (Connery) is a former U.S. Cavalry officer who tries to escort a hunting party of European aristocrats, including French countess Irina Lazaar (Bardot), off Apache land. Co-stars included Stephen Boyd (The Bravados) and Woody Strode (Sergeant Rutledge, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). Connery’s only traditional Western, the film was based on the namesake 1962 novel

by Louis L’Amour.

Rhonda Flemming Actress/singer Rhonda Fleming, 97, died on Oct. 14, 2020, in Santa Monica, Calif. In 1957 Fleming played the female lead (as gambler Laura Denbow) in the Western classic Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, starring Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday.

Born Marilyn Louis in Hollywood on Aug. 10, 1923, the photogenic redhead went on to act in more than 40 films, earning the nickname “Queen of Technicolor.” Among her other big-screen Westerns were The Redhead and the Cowboy (1951), Pony Express (1953), Gun Glory (1957), Bullwhip (1958) and Alias Jesse James (1959).

She also appeared in such Western TV series as Wagon Train, The Virginian and Death Valley Days.

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

‘I can’t go. I have not yet finished my work’ —Ezra Meeker, who had traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852 and several times thereafter before founding the Oregon Trail Memorial Association in 1922, was just 26 days short of his 98th birthday when he whispered these words to daughter Ella Templeton on Dec. 3, 1928.

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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.

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

Suffrage & Spiro Mounds t

The exhibit “Blazing a Trail,” which runs through May 16 at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, explores why women in Western

states realized suffrage years before the rest of the nation.

Also at the museum, through May 9, is “Spiro and the Art of the Mississippian World,” highlighting the Spiro Mounds of southeast Oklahoma and a highly developed, if forgotten, civilization. The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the Caddo and Wichita Indians and affiliated tribes. Call 405-4782250 or visit nationalcowboy-museum.org.

Powerful Art “Powerful Women: Contemporary Art from the Eiteljorg Collection” runs through March 21 at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis.

Native artists are well represented.

Call 317-636-9378 or visit eiteljorg.org.

Historical Tours Indian wars expert Neil Mangum will lead two planned Wood-

bury 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. The “Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War” tour will loop through that New Mexico battleground Aug. 4–8. For more information about these and other tours visit whtours.org.

Old West Show & Auction Brian Lebel’s Cody Old West Show & Auction is set for June 25-27 in Santa Fe, N.M. Both the show and the live auction are open to the public at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. Catalogs are available for sale. Visit oldwestevents.com.

Contemporary Art & the Legacy of Elaine Horwitch” continues through April 25.

Call 770-387-1300 or visit boothmuseum.org.

WWHA Roundup The annual Wild West History Association Roundup (canceled in 2020 due to COVID-19) will convene in Fort Smith, Ark., where “Hanging Judge” Isaac Charles Parker (1838–96) once presided, July 14– 17. Watch for more details at wildwesthistory.org, also the place for Old West fans 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 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.

Western Wear

Vaqueros & Southwest Pop Photos celebrating the charros of Mexico, the paniolos of Hawaii, Indian relay races and rodeos, and black rodeos highlight “Vaquero Legacies & Diverse Descendants,” which runs Feb. 13– July 11 at the Booth Museum in Cartersville, Ga. Centered on Southwest pop art, “Southwest Rising:

Western riders with an eye to creating iconic silver gelatin prints.

In the photo below he captures trick rider Janna Copley at the Riata Ranch in Exeter, Calif., in 1995. Call 307-587-4771 or visit centerofthewest.org.

Photogenic ▲ Horses “The Equestrian West: Photographs by William Shepley” is on show at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo., through April 11. Since the 1980s Shepley has been photographing

“Dress Codes” will be coming soon to the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.

The exhibition is organized around six enduring icons of Western style—blue jeans, plaid shirts, fringed jackets, aloha shirts, China Poblana dress and the cowboy boot. The 150 objects include clothing, art, photographs and historical artifacts. Call 323-667-2000 or visit theautry.org.

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

SITTING BULL REVISITED IN HIS NEW BOOK ABOUT THE LAKOTA LEADER AND HIS PEOPLE ROBERT UTLEY CONTINUES TO PLUMB THE DEPTHS OF WESTERN HISTORY

BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS

Which is the favorite of the books you’ve written?

By all odds my biography of Sitting Bull, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull [1993]. It is my favorite because I think it is a very good book, both for the scholar and the general reader. Other factors: It made a great deal of money and still does; it was my first handled by a literary agent, Carl Brandt, who died in 2013; and it spawned The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull and the Resistance of the Free Lakotas.

What more have you learned about Sitting Bull?

I did not examine many new sources because of my inability to travel to libraries and archives. But I retained all my notes in my computer. Calling them up and printing them chronologically, I gave them fresh study based on 30 years of professional maturity.

What draws you to Sitting Bull and his people?

I believe Sitting Bull resonates with the reading public now more than ever before. A host of excellent studies of the Little Bighorn have been published in the past 30 years, giving Sitting Bull’s stature even greater public recognition. This is inherent throughout Pekka Hämäläinen’s groundbreaking Lakota America. Moreover, I have always been enamored by the North-West Mounted Police, and their relationship with Sitting Bull was crucial. After 24 books, searching for what to work on next, I settled on Sitting Bull, as truly, of all the great chiefs, he was indeed “The Last Sovereign.”

Will you continue writing books?

Yes, I am going to continue. Like The Last Sovereigns, however, they have to flow out of work I have done in the past, since I am confined at home in a wheelchair. The next one, in progress, is about 16 WILD WEST

selected Indian battles and how the Army performed. Emphasis will be on controversy they inspired, especially the women and children killed and whether that could have been prevented.

How did your work with the National Park Service affect your career path?

I became wedded to the Park Service at Custer Battlefield. After four years in the Army I returned in permanent status as historian of the Southwest Region, Santa Fe. During my six years there I did historical work on proposed units of the [National Park Service] system. My research and recommendations played a crucial role in bringing into the system Fort Bowie, Fort Davis, Hubbell Trading Post, Golden Spike and Chamizal. As chief historian in Washington, D.C., of course, I was concerned with all units of the system.

To backtrack, my master’s thesis at Indiana University was what is now Custer and the Great Controversy. After the Army I intended to return to Indiana University for a doctorate, and the dissertation topic was what later became Yale’s Last Days of the Sioux Nation.

Most of the research for that was done while I was a historian for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon; in the evenings, still in uniform, I worked in the National Archives. I chose to return to the Park Service rather than get a doctorate. As my work broadened out into the whole West, I worked on books in the evenings and on weekends, but never on taxpayers’ time.

How did you choose the topics for your books?

Some of the topics picked me. The frontier Army was part of Macmillan’s Wars of the United States series. Lou Morton was general editor. He picked me to do the frontier Army, which turned into two volumes. After those, Ray Billington asked me to do The Indian Frontier for his Histories of the American Frontier series. After retirement in 1980 I sought something to make money. After a visit to Lincoln I thought the Lincoln County War would make money.

It didn’t, but the outgrowth, Billy the Kid, did. [The University of Oklahoma Press] was launching a series of brief biographies and asked me to do Custer as a guide for the series. The most successful book, the biography of Sitting Bull, was my own idea, and its success was partly because literary agent, Brandt, called me and suggested we get together; he sold Sitting Bull to Henry Holt. When Melody became superintendent of the LBJ National Historical Park in Texas, the proximity of sources for the Texas Rangers prompted that subject. The mountain men blended nicely with Melody’s assignment to Grand Teton National Park.

Sitting Bull suggested Geronimo. And so it went.

COURTESY BOB UTLEY AND MELODY WEBB

Robert M. Utley turned 91 last Halloween, but the man many consider the dean of Western historians has no plans to retire. His latest book, The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull and the Resistance of the Free Lakotas, was published to rave reviews in 2020 by the University of Nebraska Press, which has reissued five of Utley’s books—Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life; Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848–1865; Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891; After Lewis & Clark: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific; and Custer and the Great Controversy: The Origin and Development of a Legend. Utley, who lives with wife Melody Webb in Scottsdale, Ariz., is already at work on his next book. He took time to speak with Wild West about writing and his long career.

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WESTERNERS

Better known in the Black Hills pioneer days as “Grasshopper Jim,” John Frederick was a contemporary of Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and Poker Alice and a friend of Lakota leader Sitting Bull. In 1876 Frederick and partner Pat Murray started a Dakota Territory ranch, forting up in the rocks some 6 miles northeast of where Sturgis soon sprang into being. From that fortlike refuge a year later the pair reportedly broke up an Indian ambush of a mule train. But Frederick harbored no ill will. In 1927 he proposed the creation of a park centered on nearby 4,426-foot Bear Butte (Mato Paha, or “Bear Mountain,” to the Lakotas) in honor of Sitting Bull, who, Frederick argued, “made the last great courageous stand for the rights of the Indians and won a hot battle with one of the best Indian fighters of all time, Custer.”

“My proposal is that Bear Butte, which I own, become a memorial,” he told The Deadwood Daily Pioneer-Times. “It is of historical importance by reason of the use the Indians put it to very often—the sending of signals. Near Bear Butte are the council grounds which Sitting Bull and his braves often used.” Sacred to the Plains Indians and prized by South Dakotans of every stripe, the mountain was protected as a state park in 1961 and added to the National Register of Historic Landmarks in 1981. Jim was long gone by then.

On April 23, 1930, Frederick wounded two people with a shotgun, and the next day Meade County, S.D., health officials pronounced him insane and sent him to the state mental hospital in Yankton for a time.

On Jan. 20, 1933, he died at home in Sturgis at age 79. In an August 1938 interview with The Rapid City Daily Journal Frederick’s widow, Clara Belle, dismissed the legend he’d received his nickname after eating grasshoppers while hiding in a cave from Indians. “The name of ‘Grasshopper Jim’ was given to my husband when he was a scout with General George A. Custer,” she stated.

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TONY SAPIENZA COLLECTION

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GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

HECK THOMAS WAS AMONG THE DEPUTY U.S. MARSHALS WHO BATTLED NED CHRISTIE, THE CHEROKEE FUGITIVE WANTED FOR MURDER

BY KENT FRATES

T

wo legendary figures in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) shot it out in September 1889 in the Going Snake District of the Cherokee Nation. Deputy U.S. Marshal Henry Andrew “Heck” Thomas (1850– 1912) led a five-man posse determined to capture Cherokee outlaw Nede Wade “Ned” Christie (1852–92). Christie refused to surrender, and the ensuing gun battle left both him and Deputy U.S. Marshal Levi Paschal “L.P.” Isbell critically wounded.

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FROM LEFT: CAROL BARRINGTON/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; NORTHEASTERN STATE UNIVERSITY, TAHLEQUAH, OKLA.

SHOOTOUT AT RABBIT TRAP

Christie had been implicated in the killing of Deputy U.S. Marshal Dan Maples, who was shot from ambush just outside the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah and died on May 5, 1887. That July a grand jury indicted Christie and three other Cherokees for murder.

Authorities soon apprehended the others, but Christie professed his innocence and chose to run rather than submit to “white man’s justice” as handed down at Fort Smith

by Isaac Charles Parker, the “Hanging Judge” of the Western District of Arkansas. Christie was willing to face trial in Cherokee tribal court, but as the case involved the killing of a deputy U.S. marshal, Parker insisted on a federal trial and sent marshals to enforce the warrant he’d issued for Christie’s arrest.

A gunsmith, blacksmith and respected tribal member who served on the Cherokee National Council, Christie was an unlikely suspect. He’d even been elected to the threemember Executive Council, which closely advised the principal chief. On the other hand, Christie was known to have a temper and had previously been charged with manslaughter in the killing of fellow Cherokee William Palone, though a tribal court jury had found him not guilty. All things considered, however, it seems improbable Christie would have shot a lawman from ambush.

For his part, Thomas was a highly respected law officer, having served as a railroad express messenger and detective in Texas, where he received due credit for thwarting a robbery attempt by the Sam Bass Gang and killing the murderous Lee brothers, Jim and Pink. Operating as a deputy U.S. marshal in Indian Territory since 1886, Heck had recorded scores of arrests. He later achieved legendary status as part of a trio of deputy U.S. marshals known as the “Three Guardsmen.” With fellow guardsmen Bill Tilghman and Chris Madsen, Thomas captured or killed the members of the Doolin Gang and brought law and order to Oklahoma Territory.

Some accounts place Christie at a council meeting in Tahlequah the evening Maples was shot. Other sources suggest the meeting had been the prior evening. Regardless, the morning after the murder he immediately returned to his rural home at Rabbit Trap in the Going Snake District, some 15 miles east of Tahlequah.

GRANGER

Deputy U.S. Marshal Heck Thomas, seated at left, poses with a fellow lawman, a pair of Osage scouts and two court officers.

FROM LEFT: CAROL BARRINGTON/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; NORTHEASTERN STATE UNIVERSITY, TAHLEQUAH, OKLA.

GRANGER

GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

Over the next two years federal marshals made multiple attempts to apprehend Christie. But each time Cherokees who believed in his innocence warned Christie of the posses’ approach, and the fugitive would either disappear or drive off the lawmen with gunfire. Rumor had it he killed several of the marshals, but no evidence of any such killings exists.

In May 1889 Jacob Yoes was appointed U.S. marshal for the Western District of Arkansas. Resolving to capture or kill the Cherokee fugitive, Yoes ordered Thomas to go after Christie. Accompanying Heck were Isbell and three other deputy marshals. A $500 reward for Christie’s capture provided added incentive.

Thomas and posse approached Christie’s cabin in the predawn hours of September 26. Leaving their horses some distance away, they crept through the woods afoot, intending to surround the cabin and take their quarry by surprise. Their plan was thwarted around daybreak when Christie’s alert dogs began to bark.

Hollering out, Thomas identified himself and demanded the fugitive surrender. Christie instead climbed into his loft, knocked a board from the gable and opened fire on the marshals with his .44-caliber Winchester rifle. The marshals returned fire, and the fight was on.

After the initial exchange Thomas advised Christie to send out any women or children, and Christie’s wife, Nancy, promptly fled the cabin.

The battle raged on until Thomas decided to burn out Christie and set fire to an adjacent outbuilding. The blaze soon spread to the cabin.

A teen boy soon ran from the burning building and was hit twice by gunshots from the posse. Managing to reach the surrounding woods, the badly wounded teen made good his escape. Though widely identified as Christie’s son, James, the boy was in fact 15-year-old Arch Wolfe, the son of Ned’s cousin Betsy.

As the fight resumed, Isbell foolishly leaned from behind a tree he was using for cover and took a bullet to the shoulder. Christie was also seriously wounded, though the extent of his injuries is un-

clear. Some accounts claim he’d been shot through the nose and blinded in his right eye. Other accounts had the bullet penetrating his scalp and circling his skull to lodge at the back of his head. Those claiming he had been “disfigured” were disproven by subsequent photographs. Still other sources claim the injury embittered Christie, who swore never to speak English again.

Though Christie was temporarily disabled by his wound, the marshals were oblivious to his condition and failed to take advantage. Not that they could have, as Isbell was bleeding profusely, forcing the posse to withdraw and seek medical treatment. Handling their wounded compatriot with care, the marshals took seven hours to reach Tahlequah. While Isbell survived, his crippling shoulder wound bothered him the rest of his life.

Christie and Arch Wolfe received treatment from Ned’s brother Goback, a traditional healer, as well as Dr. Nicholas Bitting, who owned the mill at nearby Bitting Spring. Each made a full recovery.

While Thomas went on to fame as a legendary lawman, Christie continued to resist arrest. Not far from the site of his scorched cabin he built a doublewalled log fort. For three more years he remained at large, holding off successive attempts by marshals to bring him in, while being blamed for every violent crime committed in Indian Territory, whether guilty or not. Finally, on Nov. 3, 1892, a posse of 22 men armed with a cannon and dynamite drove Christie from his fort and shot him to death, thus ending the saga of a man who may have been an outlaw or may have been unjustly accused.

Ned Christie (above) was seriously wounded in the fight at his Rabbit Trap cabin, which might have looked something like this reconstructed log cabin (top left) or this other 1889 Indian Territory cabin (top right).

After the initial exchange Thomas advised Christie to send out any women or children

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PIONEERS & SETTLERS

FRENCH-BORN PRIVATEER HIPPOLYTE BOUCHARD RAIDED THE COAST OF ALTA CALIFORNIA IN 1818 WITH AN EYE TOWARD REVOLUTION

BY RAMON VASCONCELLOS

B

efore the United States annexed it from Mexico in 1848, California flew under the flags of several nations. In 1579 Sir Francis Drake of England came ashore north of San Francisco (at present-day Point Reyes National Seashore) and claimed the region on behalf of Queen Elizabeth. On its independence from Spain, Mexico hoisted over California in turn the flags of the empire (1822–23) and ensuing republic (1824–47). Between 1812 and ’42 Russia unfurled two ensigns—first when Ivan Kuskov established Fort Ross (a derivation of Rus’, or Russia), and later on behalf of the otter-hunting RussianAmerican Co. that operated out of Fort Ross and Bodega Bay. Often forgotten is Argentina’s 1818 naval campaign in Alta California. That November, amid an ongoing war of independence from Spain, its ships captured Monterey and plundered Spanish settlements as far south as San Juan Capistrano.

What Argentina viewed as a means to prompt liberation throughout the Spanish empire, however, Madrid considered an act of piracy. The latter argument had some merit, as leading the campaign was Hippolyte Bouchard), a French-born 22 WILD WEST

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E. BIGGERI

ATTACK OF THE ARGENTINES

privateer sanctioned by the revolutionary government in Buenos Aires. Bouchard’s coastal raids resulted in significant property damage but, curiously, no loss of life to either civilians or enemy military personnel.

The initial revolt against Spanish rule in May 1810 led to the formation of several independent Argentine states, including the United Provinces of Río de la Plata, which some revolutionaries referred to as Argentina (although the name at first referred specifically to the Buenos Aires province). The government at Buenos Aires supported the ideals of freedom and independence throughout New Spain. As the wars for liberation in Argentina and other Spanish holdings in the hemisphere coincided with Mexico’s insurgency, Bouchard may have believed a naval campaign against coastal ports and garrisons in Alta California would strengthen the rebels’ position. By 1817 colonial officials in Alta California were voicing concern to the Spanish Crown regarding their vulnerability to privateers, though none had yet appeared.

Hippolyte Bouchard, born in France in 1780 and a veteran of the French Revolution, joined the Argentine fleet in 1809. For his heroics in battle under Lt. Col. José San Martín at the 1813 Battle of San Lorenzo (a victory over a royalist force), Bouchard was granted Argentine citizenship. By 1818, at the helm of a captured Spanish frigate renamed La Argentina, he was serving as a privateer with orders to prey on Spanish commerce.

After besieging Manila and harassing Spanish shipping in the western Pacific Ocean, Bouchard sailed north to resupply in the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawaii).

Captain Henry Gyzelaar, an American fur trader and sometime smuggler, encountered Bouchard at Kealakekua Bay and in early October informed the Spanish garrison in Santa Barbara the Argentine privateer was preparing to attack Alta California. José de La Guerra y Noriega, commander of the Santa Barbara presidio, immediately sent a dispatch to all of the Spanish missions, warning them to be on their guard. Describing the readiness of California’s coastal defenses in his memoir, Guerra boasted he would “destroy all such villains as may have the rashness to set foot upon this soil.”

STEFANO BIANCHETTI/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

A veteran of the French Revolution, Hippolyte Bouchard became an Argentine privateer and in the fall of 1818 attacked Spanish California.

E. BIGGERI

STEFANO BIANCHETTI/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

PIONEERS & SETTLERS

After weeks of preparation and nervous anticipation, on those possessions belonging to Spanish inhabitants, Solá inNovember 20 lookouts at Point Pinos, on the southern tip of formed Viceroy Apodaca the insurgents “stole whatever they Monterey Bay, reported the approach of two Argentine ships. found useful,” torched the garrison and governor’s residence Bouchard’s force comprised the 38-gun La Argentina and the and carted away two cannons. Having fled to a nearby rancho, 26-gun corvette Santa Rosa Libertad, manned by international the exiled Solá alerted the presidios south of Monterey of an crews totaling 285 men. At his disposal Alta California Gover- impending attack. nor Pablo Vicente de Solá had but 40 men—25 cavalrymen, On November 27 Bouchard’s flotilla sailed south for Refugio 11 artillery militiamen and a four-man gun crew—under two Cove, a well-known smugglers’ port near Santa Barbara. Disensigns. Worse yet, most of the garrison had been assigned embarking on December 2 they marched on Rancho del Refuto protect nearby missions and guard supply depots, thus gio, a hacienda owned by the descendants of José Francisco leaving Solá with only a token force.

Ortega, founder of the Santa Barbara presidio. FindAccording to historian Hubert Howe ing neither would-be rebels nor townsfolk, the Bancroft the ensuing diplomatic dance party burned and looted the hacienda and between midnight and the following killed some cattle before sailing away. morning involved vague, oft misLocal militia dispatched by Guerra from understood demands in both EnSanta Barbara did arrive in time to capglish and Spanish. What appeared ture three of Bouchard’s crewmen. a peaceful overture on Bouchard’s Undeterred, Bouchard sailed to Santa part served more as a strategic deBarbara, where on December 6, under ception in hopes of placating the a flag of truce, he offered to exchange Spanish, for at dawn on November 21 a citizen taken at Monterey for the trio Santa Rosa Libertad commenced bomcaptured at Refugio. He further promised to La Argentina bardment of the shore defenses. The outcease further coastal raiding. A credulous Guerra numbered Spanish gunners gamely returned fire. agreed, and the exchange took place. Much to the chaBy all accounts Bouchard lost five men killed and several grin of the Santa Barbara commander, the exchanged civilian wounded during the artillery duel with no harm befalling mem- captive was a notorious town drunk of no particular military or bers of the garrison. Santa Rosa Libertad lowered its ensign and civilian value. His crew intact, Bouchard sailed off with no guarostensibly begged a truce even as its captain sent six boatloads antee other than a gentleman’s agreement to refrain from hostilof sailors over to La Argentina, standing farther offshore. Solá ities. That said, by then it must have been apparent to Bouchard demanded the Argentine commander come ashore. When told his insurgents were alone in their efforts to incite rebellion.

Bouchard was on the distant frigate, the governor ordered the When subsequent landings at San Pedro and San Juan Caphighest-ranking officer aboard the corvette to port, or he would istrano on December 13 and 16, respectively, again turned resume fire. Stalling for time, a second officer and two sailors up no willing rebels, it became manifest the expedition had duly rowed in. Realizing the men held no sway, Solá had them been ill-timed and geographically misplaced. Mexicans would thrown in the guardhouse. of course attain their independence, but under the field comMeanwhile, Bouchard brought La Argentina closer to port mand of royalist forces in central Mexico, not at the urging and soon dispatched a landing party with a flag of truce and of Alta California’s indigenous inhabitants, its settlers or Ara formal demand for the province’s surrender. His terms stated gentine insurgents. that “General” Hippolyte Bouchard of France represented Some believed Bouchard had been after little more than Buenos Aires, that Spain had conducted a bloody war against plunder, his force composed of, as one Franciscan padre put it, its colonies, and that Alta California should “throw off ” its “heretics, schismatics, excommunicated persons, heathen and allegiance to Ferdinand VII and unite in common defense. If a few Moors.” According to one source, though, when briefly not, Monterey would be destroyed and surrounding towns occupying Monterey, Bouchard had instructed crewmen to “reduced to ashes.” To buy time, Solá informed the landing mark the doors of Americans’ homes with a red cross to enparty he had no such authority to surrender. Writing later to sure only Spanish property was confiscated. The French-born Viceroy Juan Ruiz de Apodaca of New Spain, Solá claimed to privateer continued raiding Spanish targets along the Central have “looked with due scorn upon all that the said communi- and South American coasts through the following summer and cation contained” and warned Bouchard that “[Monterey’s] remained in the Argentine navy another decade. He later ran inhabitants were faithful servants of the king and would shed a sugar mill in Peru, until murdered by one of his servants the last drop of blood in his service.” in 1837. For Bouchard’s “patriotic” opposition to Spanish rule, Whatever the truth, Bouchard landed a large shore party Buenos Aires later named a street and other public spaces in his at daybreak on November 22, and within an hour his men had honor. Though his raiding expedition and endeavor to undercaptured the garrison and hoisted the Argentine flag over town. mine Spanish rule in northern Mexico may pale in comparison Civilian witnesses described how the insurgents spent the next to the successes of more notable South American revolutionfive days killing livestock and ransacking the presidio. They re- aries, Bouchard did, however briefly, hoist a flag of liberation portedly spared property and assets owned by foreigners. As for over Spanish California.

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WESTERN ENTERPRISE

Wabash Railroad officials had this car from Beveridge’s Montana Wildest West seized in July 1895 for nonpayment of services to the amount of $2,500.

BEVERIDGE’S MONTANA WILDEST WEST

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TOP AND BOTTOM: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

t was the morning of April 15, 1895, when venture, also had philanthropic intentions, hoping a Great Northern locomotive pulling two to aid the Crees and Métis. Mostly Canadian coaches and a dozen railcars chugged out refugees of the 1885 North-West Rebellion, from the depot at Havre, Mont. The train they were considered “landless Indians,” with carried some 150 Crees and Métis, as well as no reservation of their own and no standing a few dozen cowboys, various and sundry perwith the U.S. government. Beveridge’s travelformers and all the animals, accoutrements ing enterprise offered them a means of getting and provisions needed to bring Beveridge’s to Washington, D.C., in hopes of meeting PresMontana Wildest West to appreciative crowds ident Grover Cleveland, whom they believed CHARLES back East. The show was the brainchild of fatherwas sympathetic to their plight. Management BEVERIDGE son businessmen Leroy and Charles Beveridge and stood behind them, vowing to do all they could insurance salesman Don Davenport, all out of Helena. to get the government to address their dilemma.

Boasting a cast of characters with such colorful monikers Beveridge’s Montana Wildest West also meant show as “Rattlesnake Jack,” the “Montana Kid” and “Rocky Moun- business, as a classified ad in the March 2, 1895, edition of tain Kate,” the trio intended to compete head-to-head with The New York Clipper attested: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. To have any chance at success, though, they needed real Indians, and they’d found willing participants Wanted, for Beveridge’s Montana Wildest West, great special among the Crees and Métis. feature and troupe of Arabs for big show. Superior sideshow attracAside from offering entertainment to the masses, the show tions, high-class concert specialties, high-class cowboy band and offered singular opportunities to those involved. To director bosses in all departments. Address E.D. Colvin, manager, 76 PlymDavenport it offered adventure and financial promise. Charles outh Place, Chicago, Ill. Also, 50 experienced and reliable billBeveridge relished the chance to spread his wings as the show’s posters, lithographers and programmers, and bugle brigade. Apply sole proprietor. Father Leroy, who’d invested $100,000 in the to W.C. Boyd, general agent, 76 Plymouth Place, Chicago, Ill.

TOP: CIRCUS WORLD MUSEUM, BARABOO, WIS.; LEFT: COURTESY ED BEVERIDGE, SAN CLEMENTE, CALIF.

I

THIS WOULD-BE COMPETITOR OF BUFFALO BILL FEATURED ‘RATTLESNAKE JACK,’ THE ‘MONTANA KID’ AND ‘LANDLESS INDIANS’

BY DAVID McCORMICK

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TOP AND BOTTOM: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

WESTERN ENTERPRISE

On April 18, three days after leaving Havre, the Wildest but no longer. After a farewell performance at Greensburg, West rolled into Minneapolis. The next morning the troupe Ind., the troupe disbanded. pushed on to Joliet, Ill. There Charles Beveridge was met by On June 25 the weekly Palladium of Richmond, Ind., shared veteran show managers and billing agents William C. Boyd, the bad news: The Circus Not Coming. The June 29 New York E. Darwin Colvin and Whiting Allen, who’d brought with Clipper printed a gloomy letter signed by the mangers of them a number of new acts. On May 8 the expanded Wildest the show: West disembarked at Rock Island, Ill. The performers paraded through town to the show grounds at Ninth Avenue and Beveridge’s Montana Wildest West closed here today ( June 20) on 12th Street, electrifying curbside crowds on both sides of the account of bad business. The company did not pay one cent of wages. route. Cowboys, horse-driven chariot teams, champion Most of the men did not have enough money to get out of trap shooter Captain Adam Bogardus and sons, town.…The trouble is not yet settled. Most all the perTurkish horsemen and Crees in war paint and formers and band left for Chicago last night, but the headdresses drew hearty responses. working men are still here, waiting for their pay.

For the first six weeks of its 1895 tour the Wildest West visited 23 towns in six states, The Crees and Métis were in particular disat each stop erecting two enormous tents that tress, lacking both food and money. Happily, could hold 7,000 patrons. The parades from the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens granted the depots to the show grounds and free exhithem a six-week reprieve, permitting them to bitions served to whet the appetite of those who erect their tepees on the grounds in exchange would fill the seats of the afternoon and evening for regular performances.

LEROY performances. Also crucial was advertising, not Gone, however, were the high hopes that BeveBEVERIDGE to mention free billing in newspapers, one of which ridge’s Montana Wildest West would give Buffalo gushed, “[The show] is at once ethnologically, historiBill a run for his money. Charles Beveridge had cast the cally, individually and locally perfect…[providing] an enormous financial dice and come up with snake eyes. The enterprise quantity of the most novel, instructive, stirring and vividly had bankrupted him, and Davenport disappeared. As for the realistic and valuable entertainment.”

Crees and Métis, they never did get to Washington D.C., but On June 9 the Wildest West arrived in Cincinnati with plans the performances they delivered on the grounds of the Cinto put on a three-day extravaganza on the old ball grounds at cinnati zoo that summer earned them their train fare home the foot of Bank Street downtown. While there the troupe was to Montana, where they continued to perform. For years they treated to a tour of the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens. When were a mainstay of Butte’s Fourth of July observances and the Indians laid eyes on buffalo, fenced in on display, they Wild West shows at that city’s Columbia Gardens. After two were beside themselves with delight, as most of the woolly more decades of struggling and pleading, many got their beasts had long since disappeared from the Plains. sought-after land.

Unfortunately, it was also in Cincinnati where the wheels In 1916 Congress established Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservacame off the Wildest West. Although it had already visited a tion for Montana’s landless Chippewas (Ojibwes), Crees and number of cities, the enterprise was an expensive proposition, Métis. Today Crees outnumber Chippewas on the reserand rained-out performances had cut into its revenues. An vation, though their shared 171 square miles allow plenty infusion of cash had allowed the troupe to go on with the show, of elbow room.

TOP: CIRCUS WORLD MUSEUM, BARABOO, WIS.; LEFT: COURTESY ED BEVERIDGE, SAN CLEMENTE, CALIF.

Chief Little Bear stands out among his Cree brethren in Havre in 1896, a year after many had performed with Beveridge’s Wildest West.

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ART OF THE WEST

This detail from San Antonio artist Don Yena’s massive First Light, Gunsmoke, Bayonets and Texas History depicts the west wall of the Alamo at dawn on March 6, 1836.

AN ALAMO PAINTING TO REMEMBER cores of artists have depicted the Battle of the Alamo, but present-day historians and art patrons agree that none has rendered the legendary clash in San Antonio, Texas, with the historical accuracy Don Yena brings to First Light, Gunsmoke, Bayonets and Texas History, a 36-by-60-inch oil on canvas he completed in 2019. Painted from the attackers’ perspective, it depicts the northwest corner of the compound around dawn on March 6, 1836, just before Mexican forces under General Antonio López de Santa Anna breached the walls and put all of the 200-odd Texian defenders—including William Travis, Jim Bowie and David Crockett—to death.

Yena has rendered larger works, such as The Outfit, a 4-by-6-foot chuck wagon scene displayed in the lobby of the Texas Commu-

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nity Bank in Laredo, as well as some 4-by-8-foot canvases he painted while in the Navy. But he concedes this one consumed his time and thoughts.

“I don’t paint every minute of every day, but I think that painting took about four months,” he says. “But I thought about that painting for about eight years.”

The project finally got off the ground when Yena met Bruce Winders, longtime historian and curator of Alamo. “I had it between my ears,” the artist explains. “The thing was getting it down on canvas.” A breakthrough came when Winders and staff opened their archives to the artist. “I knew quite a bit [of Alamo history],” Yena says, “but when I got into it with Dr. Winders and his staff, it really brought to my mind the size of the compound

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN GOODSPEED (4)

S

TEXAS NATIVE DON YENA CAPTURES THE LANDMARK BATTLE WITH HIS SWEEPING, HISTORICALLY ACCURATE RENDERING

BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN GOODSPEED (4)

ART OF THE WEST

that so few were trying to defend. It was a lost cause before the first shot was fired.”

Born in 1933 and raised in Texas from age 3, Yena started drawing as a schoolkid. “I got in trouble in grade school, drawing on stuff instead of learning how to read and write good,” he quips.

“My mother had some artistic ability. I saw her sketch a ruin on the place we lived on in Medina County. I saw her sketch that old building, and I was really intrigued. And I still remember her

doing that. I could actually sketch that ruin by memory, even though it’s gone.”

After graduating from high school in San Antonio and serving in the Navy, Yena studied under watercolorist Warren Hunter and then worked as an illustrator and freelance artist. Western history has long been his passion, and he has collected a great number of guns and artifacts from the frontier period. Of late he’s been working on a series of paintings depicting Spanish colonial Texas, and he has no plans of slowing down. “I’ve got good eyes,” he says, “I’m 87 years old and painting much better than I ever have.”

Would he ever attempt another large work on the Alamo?

“Yeah,” he says. “But I’d think about it a hell of a long time.”

Top and above: Two more details from Yena’s 36-by-60-inch oil, which was painted from the attacking Mexicans’ perspective. Left: Yena poses with a six-shooter and knife from his large Western collection.

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INDIAN LIFE

This is the site of the Genthner cabin, which Utes torched during a June 1885 raid. At right is the first page of Margaret Genthner’s 31page depredation claim, which unlike most such claims was typed instead of handwritten.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

H

oused at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., Indian depredation claims relate details of long-forgotten raids seldom found in popular histories of the Indian wars. Unfortunately, the thousands of individual claims and related records, which date roughly from 1831 to 1918, are not on microfilm. The original records are only accessible in person, thus few historians are willing to spend the necessary time and cost. Those who are must identify claims relevant to their research, view the records in a special room and write or type down what they need to copy.

Retrieving just a handful of claims requires days of research, and many are interspersed through several different record group repositories. One group alone, RG 123, contains nearly 11,000 individual claims—more than half of them filed in the 1880s—and occupies nearly two football fields of storage space. It is the only record group with a separate index listing all claims alphabetically by name, most cross-referenced by which tribe was responsible for the attack.

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In 1796 Congress first enacted laws permitting American citizens to recover property losses from Indians whose tribe had signed treaties with the United States and received annuities. The treaty articles stated that if any Indian in amity (at peace) stole or destroyed property belonging to a U.S. citizen, the tribe would turn over the accused for legal prosecution. If the tribe refused (as was usually the case), the aggrieved citizen

ALL IMAGES: JEFF BROOME COLLECTION

STATEMENTS IN DEPREDATION CLAIMS PROVIDE IMPORTANT, OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE INFORMATION ABOUT INDIAN RAIDS

BY JEFF BROOME

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ALL IMAGES: JEFF BROOME COLLECTION

INDIAN LIFE was to be compensated for his property losses, the money deducted from the tribal annuities. Congress thought such laws would both teach Indians to respect Americans’ private property and prevent citizens from retaliating. Indians were also permitted to claim property losses attributable to citizens’ actions. While some did just that, the overwhelming majority of depredation claims were filed against Indians.

Through 1920 Congress introduced and tweaked laws regarding depredation claims. While grounded in good intentions, however, the effort proved largely a failure. Citizens often exaggerated their property losses, which spawned reams of “legalese,” as attorneys piggybacked on depredation claims, often agreeing to a percentage of funds received.

Likewise, government attorneys waded into the legal mire to challenge claims, most often by contending the raids had occurred during wartime, rendering any related claims inadmissible. In the end, the government rejected as many as 40 percent of all claims, while those it did compensate were reduced by at least 30 percent.

Fraud regarding the value of losses was rampant.

At one time in the 1880s the government employed a handful of full-time agents who spent weeks at the scenes of Indian depredations, collecting testimony from witnesses as well as those familiar with the character of the claimant. The laws made no provision for lost wages, ruined crops, injury, captivity or deaths stemming from raids. Embittered settlers thus pressured lawmakers to amend the statutes or introduce special legislation allowing compensation outside of property losses. Many rescued captives appealed to Congress for such compensation.

The usual compensation for cruelties endured in captivity was about $5,000. Peter Ulbrich asked for that amount on behalf of his daughter, Veronica, who was captured at age 13 in a Cheyenne raid near Fairbury, Neb., on July 24, 1867, and repeatedly raped during her five-week ordeal. But some claims were compensated at far larger amounts. It is a researcher’s nightmare to find and identify these special cases, as they lie hidden in Congressional actions years after the event.

What makes the original Indian depredation claims so valuable to researchers is that a claimant was required to provide a sworn statement as to the facts of the attack. Take, for example, the Genthner depredation claim (No. 5756, Record Group 123). It relates a June 20, 1885, Ute raid against a family farm in southwest Colorado’s Dolores Valley, during which Margaret A. Genthner was wounded, her husband was killed and their house and barns were burned (see related story, P. 58). Without the sworn testimony of Mrs. Genth-

ner and those who attended to her wounds and buried her husband, one is left with only spotty newspaper accounts, a brief military report or oral history passed down decades later.

Even Southern Ute Agent Charles F. Stollsteimer, when writing at the time about events leading up to the Ute outbreak, failed to mention the Genthners’ ordeal, which might lead a researcher to conclude the outbreak had ended peaceably.

Margaret Genthner provided her sworn testimony on Oct. 6, 1885, just 108 days after the attack and the day before she was to travel to VERONICA ULBRICH relatives in California able to care for her and her children. Lorenzo D. Montgomery, the special agent who evaluated the claim, submitted his final statement on Feb. 6, 1890, some five years after the attack. The level of detail in the claim is invaluable.

Everything the Genthner family owned was lost in the June 20 fire. When found on the prairie, Margaret and her children were barefoot and wearing only their bedclothes. She sought $3,448.40 for the loss of the cabin and family possessions and an additional $25,000 for her husband’s death and the cost she would incur raising four children on her own. Of course, claims did not cover death or future care, but agent Montgomery recommended $5,385.50 be paid those who took in the survivors and treated Genthner’s wounds, an unusual request in such claims cases. While he specifically disallowed Margaret’s request for $25,000, the agent suggested it be taken up “in a special relief bill by Congress.” He did recommend compensation of $3,212.90—about $92,000 in present-day dollars, perhaps enough to maintain a family for two years.

The sworn statements in the Genthner depredation claim exemplify just how important such original documents are toward a fuller understanding of the Indian wars period. A good researcher will compare such firsthand statements to all other available source documents. When information conflicts, one must apply critical thinking skills to determine which sources are more likely to be accurate. Statements in the depredation claims certainly help flesh out events related in other contemporary sources, making this trove in the National Archives a hidden gem for serious historical research.

For further reading see Indian Depredation Claims, 1796–1920, by Larry C. Skogen.

When found on the prairie, Margaret and her children were barefoot and wearing only their bedclothes

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28-by-30-inch oil on canvas,

by Don Oelze

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PHOTO CREDIT

PHOTO CREDIT

Bitter Cold,

PHOTO CREDIT

PHOTO CREDIT

STYLE

We admire Don Oelze’s stirring paintings, browse turquoise jewelry, travel to Fort Worth, Texas, and visit Oregon’s Crater Lake—albeit virtually

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STYLE

ART

An Indian at Art When New Zealand– born artist Don Oelze [donoelzeart.com] was 6 years old, his American grandmother sent him an Indian outfit. That gift fueled his desire and love for their customs and history. One of his earliest school-age memories was the time an elementary school teacher called him on the carpet for drawing Indians instead of studying New Zealand history. When he was 8 years old, his American missionary parents moved back to the United States. Oelze continued to draw and paint through high school and college. In 1994 he moved to Japan, refining his art skills before returning stateside in 2004 with his wife, Utako.

They make their home in Montana, but his artwork is available in galleries across the West, including Settlers West [520299-2607, settlerswest. com] in Tucson, Ariz.

Son of the Plains, 30-by-34-inch oil on canvas

River Find,

34-by-46-inch oil on canvas

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Desert Patrol, 30-by-48-inch oil on canvas

The Days of Thunder, 36-by-52- inch oil on canvas

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STYLE TECHNOLOGY

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COURTESY THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL ASSOCIATION

Do a 360!

Concerned about hitting the road amid the pandemic? The National Park Foundation and National Park Service offer a solution. Through your mobile device take virtual 360-degree tours of some of our treasured landmarks, such as Crater Lake, the United States’ deepest.

In that tour, hosted by multi-platinum singersongwriter Dierks Bentley, you can catch the sunrise over Garfield Peak and get a close-up view of the Phantom Ship rock formation. Or perhaps tour California’s Channel Islands National Park, where you can delve underwater via the park’s live ocean webcam. Yellowstone National Park boasts nine webcams (one streaming live, eight static). The Geyser Basin overview takes in that park’s major spouters, including Lone Star, Castle and, of course, Old Faithful geysers. To join these or other exciting tours, visit nationalparks. org/connect/blog/ take-virtual-visitnational-park.

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STYLE TRAVEL

Apart From the Herd

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COURTESY SMITHSONIANSTORE.COM

COURTESY HOTEL DROVER

At the heart of the 130year-old Fort Worth Stockyards National Historic District, Hotel Drover [hoteldrover. com] offers Texas-style hospitality. Enter the dramatic two-story lobby and belly up to the Western-style bar, which serves late-night libations.

The 200 guest rooms and suites and a fifthfloor presidential suite boast Western decor and provide Los Poblanos artisan lavender products, boot jacks and King Ranch items. The Drover lays claim to the Lucchese Custom Collection, a bespoke retail shop offering custom and made-to-fit boots.

The hotel staff is well trained on CDC guidelines regarding the pandemic and have their temperatures checked daily.

STYLE GOODS

Museum Pieces The Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education and research complex, offers a well-curated online shop [smithsonianstore.com] with unique gift items, like these Navajo turquoise earrings and Indian necklace or the Pendleton wrap below.

Navajo turquoise drop earrings, $125

Navajo beaded loop earrings with turquoise, $110

COURTESY SMITHSONIANSTORE.COM

COURTESY HOTEL DROVER

Navajo triplestone turquoise earrings, $210

Native American sterling silver and turquoise pendant necklace, $390

Navajo turquoise rectangle earrings, $230

Pendleton Mills is well known for traditional blankets and shawls like this Journey West bright wrap. Inspired by a blanket discovered in a 19th-century European mill, it features a modern American Indian motif ($145).

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Killing Billy the Kid in 1881

Don Crowley’s Pat Garrett: The Making of a Legend depicts the former sheriff reflecting on his main claim to fame. Twenty-seven years later Wayne Brazel (opposite) shot Garrett.

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OPPOSITE PAGE: COURTESY GREENWICH WORKSHOP; THIS PAGE: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

“

HE SHOT THE SHERIFF Though some still dispute who killed Pat Garrett on the road to Las Cruces, New Mexico Territory, new information reveals his murder really is no mystery

OPPOSITE PAGE: COURTESY GREENWICH WORKSHOP; THIS PAGE: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

“W

By David G. Thomas

ell, damn you, if I can’t get you off that way, I will another, and I will do it now!” Pat Garrett reportedly spoke those words to a tenant rancher midmorning on leap day, Feb. 29, 1908, on the road some 5 miles northeast of Las Cruces in New Mexico Territory’s Doña Ana County. According to later court testimony, the response to Garrett’s ominous threat was a soft-nosed .45-caliber bullet to the back of the famed former sheriff’s head. Thus died the man who’d shot Billy the Kid. One widely accepted explanation of Garrett’s murder, put forward in numerous magazine articles and books, fingers James Brown “Deacon Jim” Miller as the killer. According to proponents of this theory, Miller sneaked into the county on February 28, camped out overnight along the road between Garrett’s home ranch and Las Cruces, and shot him from ambush the next morning (see “How Jim Miller Killed Pat Garrett,” by Jerry Lobdill, in the August 2018 issue of Wild West, also posted to WildWestMag.com as “The Real Killer of the Sheriff Who Shot Billy the Kid”).

Miller was a onetime lawman and Texas Ranger with a reputation as a killer for hire. The prime suspect in a score of unsolved killings and attempted murders, he’d been tried for murder twice and acquitted. His nickname, “Deacon Jim,” stemmed from his habit of faithfully attending church, though apparently not out of repentance.

In its grandest form, the “Miller done it” theory proposes that conspirators William W. Cox, Oliver Lee, Albert B. Fall, Archie Prentice “Print” Rhode, Carl Adamson, Miller and others met at the St. Regis Hotel in El Paso, Texas, in the fall of 1907 to plan Garrett’s assassination. Their purported

motive was to enable the covetous Cox to obtain neighbor Garrett’s home ranch.

Miller was paid anywhere between $1,500 and $10,000, most proponents of the theory settling on $5,000. Their supporting evidence centers on a mystical “Fornoff Report” and an unreliable statement in Territorial Attorney General James M. Hervey’s memoirs.

To get at the truth of Garrett’s killing, let’s take a closer look at the facts, many previously unknown.

On Dec. 10, 1897, then Doña Ana County Sheriff Garrett bought from Cox what he always called his “home ranch.” Two years later, on May 24, 1899, he bought a second ranch, known as the Rock House Ranch, from David Wood. Fortune did not smile on the would-be rancher.

On May 25, 1906, at 6:30 a.m., Doña Ana County Sheriff José Lucero rode up to Garrett’s home ranch with an execution order from the county court to seize all property.

The order was issued on behalf of the Albuquerque Bank of Commerce, which had won a lawsuit against the rancher for failure to repay a loan made to George Curry in 1890 and co-signed by Garrett. The debt owed was $1,733.18.

Following the property seizure, the court appointed independent appraisers who valued Garrett’s home ranch at $225 and his spring at $250. Garrett was able to reclaim his home ranch with a court-issued writ of replevin for wrongful seizure and his Rock House Ranch by asserting it was owned by his eldest son, Poe Garrett.

On March 11, 1907, Poe, with his father’s consent, leased the Rock House Ranch to Jesse Wayne Brazel, who went by his middle name. The lease term was five years, the annual FEBRUARY 2021

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COLOR PHOTOS: DAVID G. THOMAS; ABOVE RIGHT: LEON METZ PAPERS, UTEP

FROM TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS; HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

marked his first meeting with Garrett, while Miller had encountered the former sheriff on numerous occasions. At that meeting Miller and Adamson resolved to buy Garrett’s two ranches. But there was an obstacle to the sale—the men did not want the goats Brazel was grazing on the Rock House Ranch.

On or around February 22 Garrett hopped a train with Brazel to meet Miller and Adamson at their hotel in El Paso.

The parties reached a deal in which Miller and Adamson agreed to buy Brazel’s goats for $3.50 a head. At the time the partners (and presumably Brazel) believed the number of goats on the ranch to be 1,200, a figure specified in the contract. Once the goats were off the land, Garrett would be free to sell his ranches, for which Miller and Adamson agreed to pay $3,000. As part of the deal Garrett was to go to Mexico for the cattle, drive them to the ranches and tend them through November 1 for $1 a head.

The February 22 meeting in El Paso marked the first time Brazel met Miller and Adamson. Garrett had set up the meeting, showing it was he who was pushing the deal. A Las Cruces newspaper reported on the details.

On February 28 Adamson traveled by train from El Paso to Las Cruces. Renting a twohorse top buggy from the livery stable, he drove out to Garrett’s home ranch. AdamPAT GARRETT son would have recalled the route from his earlier visit. He arrived around 5 p.m., and at Garrett’s invitation he spent the night. payment 10 calves and one mare, implyTo ensure Brazel would be waiting for ing Brazel planned to run cattle and horses them in Las Cruces the next morning, Garon the ranch. He instead brought in goats. rett had a ranch hand deliver a note to the An infuriated Garrett swore out a comCox ranch, where Brazel was working. Arplaint with Justice of the Peace Charles WILLIAM W. COX riving at the Cox spread, Garrett’s dispatch M. Anthony, in nearby Organ, to nullirider handed the note to Brazel’s fiancée, fy the lease, but Anthony declined Olive Boyd. She carried it out to the blackto intervene. smith shed, where Brazel was helping to shoe horses.

Sometime in early February Message delivered 1908 Miller and brother-in-law On Saturday, February 29, at 8:30 a.m., Garrett and Carl Isaac Adamson traveled Adamson climbed into the rented buggy for the ride to Las Cruces from El Paso. to Las Cruces, where they’d meet Miller and Brazel The purpose of their trip, to “fix up the papers.” Adamson was driving, seated according to the El Paso Heron the “whip end [right] seat of the buggy.” Miller ald, was to buy John Leathhad arrived in town the day before by train and was erman’s Bear Canyon ranch, registered at the Park Hotel, across the street from the 4 miles east of Garrett’s Rock county courthouse, where the parties would file any House Ranch. The pair told papers they signed.

Leatherman they intended to JIM MILLER In the buggy Garrett brought along an unusual 12-gauge buy Mexican cattle for resale in folding shotgun manufactured by the Burgess Gun Co. of Buffathe United States and were looking lo, N.Y. With a quick motion its owner could grab the butt of the for land on which to graze the cattle through shotgun—as one would a pistol grip—and flip up the barrel, locking it in late fall.

Miller and Adamson were unable to ink a deal place, ready to fire. The gun did not require assembly, as some sources with Leatherman, but while in Las Cruces they have alleged.

The following description of the events that morning is from Adamlearned Garrett was interested in selling his ranches. On February 6 the pair rode out to the son’s sworn testimony at a preliminary hearing to determine whether latter’s home ranch. Adamson later testified that there was sufficient evidence to hold Brazel for Garrett’s murder.

Land for Sale—Goats Not Optional

COLOR PHOTOS: DAVID G. THOMAS; ABOVE RIGHT: LEON METZ PAPERS, UTEP

FROM TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS; HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

In 1908 Garrett contracted to sell his Rock House Ranch (above, on which Brazel kept goats) and his home ranch (see site at right), both in Doña Ana County. At a February 22 meeting Miller and Adamson told Garrett they would also purchase Brazel’s 1,200 goats.

Adamson and Garrett had just passed through the town of Organ when they spotted Brazel riding toward town ahead of them, a Winchester rifle in his saddle holster. Unbeknown to them, Brazel was also carrying a .45 revolver, concealed in the “waistband of his breeches.”

As the buggy came alongside the rider, Brazel asked Adamson what time he should meet them in Las Cruces. “I supposed that we would get there about the same time,” came the answer.

Adamson and Garrett soon pulled ahead of Brazel. “When I struck a sandy place in the road,” Adamson recalled, “I would drive slow, and he [Brazel] would catch up with us.” The parties continued in this manner, Brazel catching up to the buggy and then CARL ADAMSON dropping behind, for “over 5 or 6 miles— something like that.”

About 5 miles from town Brazel had again caught up with the buggy when the men began to discuss their pending deal. “The conversation came up about a deal I had made with the defendant for 1,200 goats,” Adamson testified, “and Mr. Brazel told me that there were something over 1,800.” Asked how that question came up, Adamson replied, “I don’t remember exactly, but I think it was Mr. Garrett asked Brazel how it come that he signed a contract with me for 1,200 goats when he had 1,800 goats, and Mr. Brazel answered that he didn’t know that he had more than 1,200 goats until he counted them.”

Adamson recalled balking at the revised number of goats. “I didn’t know whether I wanted the 1,800 goats or not, and that this might break up the

deal with me,” he said. “The fact is I didn’t want the 1,200, but I bought them in order to get possession of the ranch that Mr. Garrett had leased to Mr. Brazel. Well, Brazel says, ‘If I don’t sell the whole bunch, I won’t sell none,’ or he says, ‘I will either not sell the 1,200, or I will keep the 600 and keep possession of the ranch,’ or something like that.”

At that point Garrett and Brazel had words.

“He and Mr. Garrett went on talking that way,” Adamson testified, “and Mr. Garrett said, ‘Well, I don’t care whether you give up possession of the ranch or not.’ He says, ‘I can get you off there anyway.’ I think Brazel said, ‘I don’t know whether you can or not.’

“About then I stopped the buggy to get out to urinate, and when I got out of the buggy, Mr. Garrett reached over and took the lines, and while I was standing there, why I heard Mr. Garrett said, ‘Well damn you, if I can’t get you off that way, I will another, and I will do it now!”

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As Adamson testified, Garrett had explicitly threatened Brazel. “I will do it now!” the famed former sheriff had growled at the goat herder.

Here’s what happened next, according to testimony from Adamson under examination by Territorial Attorney General Hervey:

HERVEY: Were they facing each other?

ADAMSON: Well, I rather think Brazel was kind of sideways.

HERVEY: Had Garrett commenced to stagger as you looked around?

ADAMSON: Yes, sir.

HERVEY: Where were they with respect to you?

ADAMSON: They were to my back.

HERVEY: You say that Garrett was in the buggy when he made this remark?

ADAMSON: I think he was.

HERVEY: Did you turn your face to them at any time?

ADAMSON: After these words passed, I heard a racket, and I just turned my head like that, and when I turned it, Garrett was on the ground.

The “racket” was the sound of Garrett jumping from the buggy, and by “on the ground,” Adamson meant Garrett was standing beside the buggy.

HERVEY: How close to the buggy?

ADAMSON: About 2 feet.

HERVEY: To the side or the front or the back?

ADAMSON: To the side.

HERVEY: How soon after you heard this remark was it that you looked around?

ADAMSON: It was just three or four seconds, a very short time.

HERVEY: What else happened?

ADAMSON: I heard a shot fired.

HERVEY: Was the shot fired before or after you turned around?

ADAMSON: Just about when I turned around.

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HERVEY: Who shot?

ADAMSON: I should judge Brazel.

HERVEY: What makes you think so?

ADAM SON: Well, I didn’t see him, but I judge he was the one that done the shooting.

H E RVEY: What was the defendant [Brazel] doing? What was his attitude?

ADAMSON: When I first seen the defendant, he was sitting on the horse with a six-shooter in his hand.

HERVEY: Any other shot?

ADAMSON: Yes, another.

HERVEY: How soon after the first one?

ADAMSON: Well, as quick as a man can cock a pistol.

HERVEY: Who shot it?

ADAMSON: Brazel.

HERVEY: Did you see him?

ADAMSON: Yes, sir.

HERVEY: In what direction was that shot fired?

ADAMSON: In the direction of Garrett.

HERVEY: When you first turned around at this first shot, what did Garrett do?

ADAMSON: After the first shot Garrett kind of staggered, and staggered back and fell.

HERVEY: So you didn’t see him standing upright at all?

ADAMSON: No, sir. I think when I seen Garrett, the first shot had been fired, and he was staggering.

HERVEY: What did you do after this second shot was fired?

ADAMSON: One of my horses started to run, and I grabbed the lines and wrapped them as quickly as I could around the hub of the wheel and went back to where the defendant and Mr. Garrett was.

HERVEY: Where was Garrett?

ADAMSON: Lying on the ground.

HERVEY: Was he dead?

ADAM SON: Well, he never spoke a word. When I got to him, he was just stretching out, kind of this way, and grunted a little, that is all.

HERVEY: Did he die?

ADAMSON: Yes, sir.

Adamson provided the same details when cross-examined by Brazel’s defense attorney, Herbert B. Holt. The critical points to understand are that Garrett had verbally threatened Brazel and then abruptly jumped from the buggy. In the aftermath of the shooting Brazel, with Adamson trailing in the buggy, rode into Las Cruces and voluntarily surrendered to Doña Ana County Sheriff Felipe Lucero.

Sheriff Lucero organized a coroner’s jury and brought its members out to the scene of the killing, accompanied

by Adamson and Dr. William C. Field.

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TOP: NITA STEWART HALEY MEMORIAL LIBRARY, J. EVETTTS HALEY HISTORY CENTER; RIGHT: CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

JAMES HERVEY

PALACE OF GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVE

HERVEY: Where were these people with respect to you—on the front or to the side of you or behind you—at the time you heard the remark?

ADAM SON: Mr. Garrett was in the buggy, and Brazel was on the horse.

HERVEY: What was the attitude of Garrett, his position with respect to the defendant [Brazel]?

ADAMSON: When I looked, he was facing him.

Got Garrett’s Goat

TOP: NITA STEWART HALEY MEMORIAL LIBRARY, J. EVETTTS HALEY HISTORY CENTER; RIGHT: CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

PALACE OF GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVE

Brazel tends to horses here, but while leasing land from Garrett in 1908, he infuriated the former sheriff by running goats instead of cattle and horses.

There, Adamson first related his account of what happened. Garrett’s body lay where it fell, so if any evidence at the scene contradicted Adamson’s account, it would be obvious.

Lucero described the death scene as follows: I found Pat in the spot Wayne had described, laying flat on his back in the sand, one leg drawn up, his gun HERBERT HOLT lying near him. We could plainly see the wheel tracks of the buggy and the impression of the horses’ hooves in the sand, the depressions they’d made when they’d plunged at the sound of the shots. I trailed the tracks back for about 2 miles and saw where the horse Wayne had been riding joined the buggy at the old chalk hill.

It was plain to see the team and the horse had been walked side by side, the men apparently talking together as they rode.

Dr. Field conducted the autopsy. Here are the findings as he recalled them in a 1939 newspaper interview: Later at the undertaking parlor I made an autopsy on Pat. He’d been shot twice by soft-nosed bullets from a .45, one shot hitting him in the back of the head and emerging just over the right eye. The second shot was fired when Pat was nearly on the ground, the bullet striking in the region of the stomach and ranging upward. I cut this bullet out behind the shoulder.

I was sure he’d been shot in the back of the head, because when I examined the hole, I noticed it [the hair] was driven inward toward the wound.

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Simultaneously with the arrival of Governor Curry, ranger J.A. Beal also arrived from Deming. He was in this section in January and says the dispute between Garrett and Brazel was in progress at that time, and he made a report on it to the governor.

Following the shooting Governor Curry wired him to come to Las Cruces at once, and his evidence will be used. He will also cooperate with the local authorities if needed in preserving order.

Curry ordered Adamson up to his hotel room to recount what happened. Adamson did as he was told, relating his account of the killing for the second time. Later that day he testified at Brazel’s preliminary hearing, marking the third time he gave his account. After the hearing Curry, Hervey, Dr. Field and Adamson visited the site of the shooting, where Adamson shared what he’d seen for the fourth time.

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In his 1953 memoirs Hervey wrote that while poring over the murder site he found a “new Winchester rifle shell on the ground” about 30 or 40 feet from where Garrett was killed. This, of course, does not prove Garrett had been assassinated by a rifle from a distance, although many writers have offered it as evidence of such. But what is of evidentiary value is that Hervey made no mention of the rifle shell in a long interview about the killing he gave attorney and author William A. Keleher in 1938.

Originally scheduled for October 1908, Brazel’s trial was postponed to May 3, 1909. The prosecution issued subpoenas for five men, including Dr. Field and Adamson. Oddly enough, Adamson’s name was crossed out

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NEWMEXICOHISTIORICALMARKERS.BLOGSPOT.COM

The first bullet was never found.

On March 4 New Mexico Territory Governor George Curry arrived in Las Cruces to look into the killing. Accompanying him was territorial Mounted Policeman John A. Beal, whom Curry and Hervey each later mistakenly referred to as Fred Fornoff. The El Paso Herald reported on their arrival:

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS; CENTER OF SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

DR. WILLIAM C. FIELD

On April 3 Adamson returned to Las Cruces to testify before the grand jury investigating Garrett’s murder. That marked the fifth time he’d given his account, the second under oath.

Those who propose Garrett’s killing was a premeditated assassination cite as their primary evidence the Fornoff Report, a purported summary by Mounted Police Captain Fred Fornoff of his investigation into the murder. Proponents of the theory assert Fornoff had learned from sources in El Paso of the elaboFRED FORNOFF rately planned conspiracy to kill Garrett.

They also assert he’d learned both the names of the conspirators and details of the plot (so much for conspiratorial confidentiality).

But there’s a catch: One cannot examine the Fornoff Report.

It doesn’t exist.

As the story goes, Mounted Police office clerk Page Otero composed and typed up the report using notes supplied to him by Fornoff. Decades later author Chuck Hornung, who was researching the Mounted Police for a book, interviewed Fred Lambert, who had served on the force with Fornoff. On April 13, 1968, Hornung sat down with Lambert to discuss the Garrett murder. During that interview Lambert, who would die three years later, told Hornung that back in 1911 he’d viewed Fornoff’s report on the murder. He then recounted the details he could recall, the essence of which was that Garrett had been assassinated.

This oft-cited evidence of a conspiracy to kill GEORGE CURRY Garrett is thirdhand, not to mention dated by decades. To recap, Lambert reportedly read Fornoff’s notes in 1911, told Hornung what was in those notes 57 years later, and Hornung published those details in 1996—88 years after the actual murder.

Curry only muddied the waters in his autobiography. “With Hervey and Fred Fornoff, captain of the territorial Mounted Police and a highly efficient officer, I went to Las Cruces,” the governor wrote. But it was Beal who had traveled to Las Cruces with Curry and later submitted a report to the governor about the conflict between Garrett and Brazel.

It was Beal who went on to testify in Brazel’s defense at trial.

NEWMEXICOHISTIORICALMARKERS.BLOGSPOT.COM

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS; CENTER OF SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

before the subpoenas were given to the sheriff to serve.

A question since asked by Garrett researchers is, Why did Adamson not testify at Brazel’s trial?

The conclusion many reached is that he was in jail at the time. This was not true. He was out on bond and could have been compelled to testify. The actual answer is that the prosecution simply decided not to subpoena Adamson for the May trial.

Also subpoenaed by the prosecution were all telegraphs sent and received by Brazel, Adamson, Miller and Cox. Conspiracy theorists have asserted those telegrams revealed a murder plot.

They did not.

The defense opened its case by calling Brazel to the stand. There is no surviving trial transcript, so it is impossible to know Brazel’s actual words. He’d pleaded self-defense, so his testimony would have supported that argument. He would have claimed Garrett made an explicit threat against him, followed by a threatening action that made him fear for his life. Brazel had a perfect case of self-defense.

Officer Beal’s testimony of the long-running conflict between the deceased and the defendant proved the determining corroboration of Brazel’s defense. After just 15 minutes of deliberation the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

Various accounts assert Garrett had exited the buggy to urinate, and his body had been found with his trousers unbuttoned. If Adamson’s testimony and the on-site evidence recorded by Sheriff Lucero are true, then the urination story was a fabrication. There’s no hint, either in period newspapers or the recorded words of jurors and attorneys, that Adamson’s oft-retold account was untrue.

Following is how Albert Fall, Brazel’s prominent trial lawyer, summed up the facts of the case:

That the defendant was coming from his ranch into the town of Las Cruces at the written invitation of Patrick F. Garrett and his associate, one Adamson, for the purpose of making a trade between the defendant, Adamson and one J.B. Miller for the purchase of defendant’s goats and the release by him of a five-year lease upon a certain spring claimed to be owned by Mr. Garrett; That J.B. Miller was in the town of Las Cruces in a hotel awaiting the arrival of the deceased, Adamson and the defendant, Brazel; That Brazel had never met Miller until introduced to the latter by the deceased, Garrett; That Miller in turn had introduced the defendant to Adamson, Garrett’s companion; That within about 5 miles of Las Cruces some controversy arose between the defendant and the deceased; That the deceased seized from his buggy a sawed-off repeating shotgun loaded with buckshot, and the defendant fired and killed him.

The material facts of the infamous murder case—that Garrett had bought his home ranch from Cox; that Miller and Adamson had initially wanted to buy John Leatherman’s ranch; that they had visited Garrett at his ranch on February 6; that Garrett had taken Brazel to El Paso to meet Miller and Adamson; that Beal had submitted a “Beal Report” to Curry on the Garrett-Brazel conflict; that Miller had been at a hotel in Las Cruces when Garrett was killed; that a grand jury had investigated the matter; that Beal had testified in Brazel’s defense at his trial; and that Adamson had shared his account of the killing five times—were all unknown until revealed by this author in the 2019 book Killing Pat Garrett, the Wild West’s Most Famous Lawman—Murder or Self-Defense?

David G. Thomas is a historian, filmmaker, producer, actor, screenwriter and travel writer and the co-founder of the Pat Garrett Western Heritage Festival and the Friends of Pat Garrett. A review of Thomas’ Killing Pat Garrett, the Wild West’s Most Famous Lawman—Murder or SelfDefense? (part of the Mesilla Valley History Series) appears in the April 2020 Wild West and online at wildwestmag.com.

The Brazel case for the killing of Mr. Garrett occupied the court one whole day in the selection of a jury, examining witnesses, etc. The plea of self-defense and the evidence adduced showed a personal conflict between the deceased and the defendant; Sign of the Murder

This marker stands along Highway 70 some 2 miles east of Las Cruces. Out in the scrub is the murder site, which the Friends of Pat Garrett seek to preserve.

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SKELETONS IN BUCKSKIN

The murky fate of the Alamo dead grows murkier after human remains turn up inside the famed mission chapel

By Ron J. Jackson Jr.

LEAD ART

Burned Into Memory

Flames consume the defenders’ remains in The Funeral Pyre After the Fall of the Alamo, a 1923 painting by José Arpa (1858–1952).

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ALAMO COLLECTION, SAN ANTONIO; OPPOSITE: CENTER FOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT SAN ANTONIO

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Fallen Defender?

Unearthed near the Alamo in 1979 by archaeologists Anne Fox and Jake Ivey, this partial skull bears likely slash marks.

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n the collective memory of the Alamo’s last stand saga there is perhaps no image more poignant or powerful than that of the Texian dead being consumed on March 6, 1836, by massive funeral pyres. Plumes of black smoke spiraled from the pyres as flames leapt skyward in symphony with the crackling of branches and kindling.

The lifeless bodies of David Crockett, James Bowie, William Barret Travis and the other Alamo defenders were stacked between layers of wood before being set ablaze. “Fragments of flesh, bones and charred wood and ashes revealed it in all of its terrible truth,” recalled Pablo Diaz, who as a young man had been forced to gather wood that day. “Grease that had exuded from the bodies saturated the earth for several feet beyond the ashes and smoldering mesquite fagots. The odor was more sickening than that from the corpses in the river. I turned my head aside and left the place in shame.”

Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna had ordered the enemy dead burned and left unburied.

Regarded by Texian rebels as sacrilege, his ruthless action only served to highlight the sacrifice the Alamo defenders had made toward the revolutionary cause, ensuring their martyrdom. Angered and inspired, Texians vowed to remember.

So would the nation.

In the aftermath of the Texas Revolution travelers to San Antonio were drawn to the site of the celebrated Battle of the Alamo. Amid the ruins local guides would point out the spot where Crockett supposedly fell or the room where Mexican soldiers slew Bowie in his sickbed. Some luridly claimed Bowie’s bloodstains remained visible on the wall. Invariably, visitors asked about the final resting place of the Alamo dead, and locals would motion toward a peach orchard a few hundred yards from the mission

fort. There, nearly a year after the battle, local authorities had the ashes of the Texian defenders scooped into a lone coffin and interred with military honors. In 1868 Reuben M. Potter, whose retrospective article “The Fall of the Alamo” was published in that year’s Texas Almanac, noted the burial site “is now densely built over, and its identity is irrevocably lost.

This is too sad for comment.”

In truth, the fate of the cremated remains is far sadder. In February 1837 Colonel Juan N. Seguín of the Army of the Republic of Texas, who’d left the Alamo amid the siege as a courier, led the procession to inter the ashes of his comrades. In 1889 he recalled having had the ashes buried within San Antonio’s San Fernando Cathedral, “in front of the altar railings, but very near the altar steps.” José María Rodriguez, who witnessed the storming of the Alamo as a child, later expressed doubt the ashes had been buried inside the sanctuary without the common knowledge of his fellow parishioners, though a marble sarcophagus just inside the entrance of the present-day cathedral supposedly holds those ashes. Finally, there is a 1906 account from city clerk August Biesenbach, who told San Antonio Express reporter Charles Merritt Barnes that years after the battle “some of the fragments of heads, skulls, arms and hands had been removed and buried” at the Odd Fellows Cemetery, about a mile east of the Alamo.

Thus the true resting place of the Alamo dead may forever be shrouded in mystery. For starters, not all of the defenders’ remains wound up in Santa Anna’s funeral pyres—a fact generally unknown beyond a small circle of Alamo scholars and enthusiasts. The discovery of various skeletons, skulls and bone fragments over the intervening 185 years indicate the disposal of the Texian dead wasn’t as neat and tidy as history books generally portray. In a March 6, 1836, victory dispatch Santa Anna noted, “More than 600 FEBRUARY 2021

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In Joseph Musso’s painting victorious Mexican soldiers face having to deal with bodies from both sides.

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That any of the remains may be those of an Alamo defender is hardly far-fetched. In 1846, with the Mexican War raging, Captain James Harvey Ralston moved to transform the ruins of the chapel and adjacent long barrack into a depot for the U.S. Army Quartermaster Department. The assistant quartermaster’s staff included young Sergeant Edward Everett, to whom Ralston had extended a clerkship while Everett recovered from a pistol wound. A talented artist and draftsman, Everett was assigned to collect information on the history and customs of the area, during which he rendered brilliant watercolors of the San Antonio missions that are on display at Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Everett’s Alamo watercolors represent some of the earliest artistic depictions of the battle-scarred chapel, including a rear view of its roofless interior with rocks strewn about the dirt floor and weeds growing atop its walls. He left an equally important written account of what he observed at the Alamo in a 1906 manuscript titled “A Narrative

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TOP AND MIDDLE: RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION (2); RIGHT: WYLIE EATON; BOTTOM: AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, FORT WORTH

Alamo Aftermath

Davy Died That Day

A captured David Crockett is brought before Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna (depicted at left). Historians still debate whether the frontiersman went down fighting or was executed after having surrendered.

ABOVE: RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION (2); LEFT: JOSEPH MUSSO

corpses of the foreigners were buried in the ditches and entrenchments”—his bloated estimate of Texian dead as absurd as his burial claim. No such mass grave has ever been found. Yet the suggestion fatigued Mexican soldiers may have rolled some defenders’ bodies into ditches and hastily covered them with dirt is not absurd. Further complicating the search for answers is the fact that some of the remains unearthed on the battleground date from the earlier Spanish mission period.

More recent discoveries of human remains at the Alamo extend hope for a more complete accounting of those buried there, perhaps even revealing defenders whose corpses were spared the flames. The discoveries are tied to a $450 million renovation of Alamo Plaza, and the details are tantalizing. In an internal email dated Dec. 4, 2019, archaeologist Kristi Miller Nichols noted the discovery of the remains of three people during excavation work within the Alamo chapel. Among the remains were two femur bones between stained ground amid “an alignment of nails” and wood fragments. “We may have uncovered remnants of a possible coffin,” Nichols wrote. A follow-up email from the archaeologist, dated Jan. 23, 2020, revealed her team had unearthed “a concentration of human bones” during a separate exploratory dig inside the chapel.

Researchers are unclear whose remains they are or when they perished, and the Texas General Land Office—the presentday caretaker of the historic site—has yet to approve DNA testing. The issue is controversial. The Alamo Defenders Descendants Association filed a lawsuit in state district court, demanding the remains be tested to determine whether the bones belong to members of the Alamo garrison. The group has even started a DNA database of its members. But other cultural groups are opposed to DNA testing on religious grounds.

Which begs the question, What happened to the skeletal remains Everett mentioned?

Dead Men Don’t Talk

TOP AND MIDDLE: RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION (2); RIGHT: WYLIE EATON; BOTTOM: AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, FORT WORTH

ABOVE: RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION (2); LEFT: JOSEPH MUSSO

San Antonio resident Eulalia Yorba, pressed into service to tend wounded Mexican soldiers, checks on a fallen Texian. Right: This post-fight sketch of the Alamo ran in the London News in 1844.

of Military Experience in Several Capacities.”

“The church seemed to have been the last stronghold,” Everett wrote, “and amidst the debris of its stone roof, when subsequently cleared away, were found parts of skeletons, copper balls and other articles, mementos of the siege.” The artist noted the reverence with which he and fellow soldiers regarded the Alamo.

“We respected it as a historical relic—and as such its characteristics were not marred by us.”

Everett’s renderings of the Alamo ruins support eyewitness accounts of the battle and its aftermath. For example, San Antonio resident Eulalia Yorba recalled being pressed Shrouded in Mystery Despite this marker and others into service to tend to wounded Mexican like it, no one knows for sure soldiers. “The stones in the church wall what remains of the remains. were spotted with blood,” she said, “the doors were splintered and battered in.” On entering the chapel, she maneuvered around pools of blood and heaps of dead Texians, one of whom seemed to stare at her wildly with open eyes. “The woodwork all about us was riddled and splintered by lead balls, and what was left of the old altar at the rear of the church was cut and slashed by cannon ball and bullets.”

In a journal entry dated May 24, 1836, Dr. J.H. Bernard, a Texian captive who’d been spared execution at Goliad, documented the Mexican army’s departure from San Antonio.

The doctor said the soldiers first fired the chapel interior, dominated by a large, wooden artillery platform extending from the great front doors to the top of the rear wall. The fire consumed all but the exterior masonry walls, burying any Texian dead beneath a blanket of blackened debris.

The Alamo sat in ruins until Captain Ralston’s intervention in 1846. By then the presence of defenders’ skeletal remains within the chapel was common knowledge in San Antonio. In his 1890 book San Antonio de Béxar: A Guide and History author William Corner recalled one specific discovery of remains that echoes the descriptions of Everett and Bernard. “Deep down in the debris,” Corner wrote, “were found two or three skeletons that had evidently been hastily covered with rubbish after the fall, for with them were found fur caps and buckskin trappings, undoubted relics of the ever memorable last stand.”

Edward Everett’s Watercolors

In the mid-1840s, the young sergeant depicted the Alamo ruins from the front and rear (right).

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an 1836-era defensive trench they unearthed the partial skull He dates the discovery to the 1849– of a possible male of unknown ethnicity between the ages 54 tenure of Major Edwin Burr of 17 and 23. Marking it were four cuts possibly inflicted Babbitt of the Quartermaster by a knife or saber. “As far as we can tell,” Fox and Ivey Corps, who oversaw the conconcluded, “the skull is that of a participant in the Battle struction of a wooden roof on of the Alamo.” the chapel, as well as a second The skull resides at the Center for Archaeological Refloor and the iconic hump atop search on the University of Texas’ San Antonio campus. the Alamo facade.

It has yet to undergo DNA testing. In March 2014 Amanda Whether Corner was noting Danning, a noted forensic sculptor who performs facial a separate discovery of skeletal reconstructions on historic skulls, received special perremains by Babbitt or mistakmission to study the Alamo skull. The artist is convinced she enly referring to Everett’s earlier EDWIN BURR BABBITT found at least one other clue as to the identity of the deceased. find is unknown. Regardless, what “In the first place, the eyebrows, the nose and the cheekbones became of those Alamo skeletons in are all broken off,” Danning notes, “so what you’re looking at is the buckskin? In all probability the military buried them out of respect. If so, were they overall shape of the cranial bowl and the thickness of the skull. The overall buried inside the chapel where found? Were markers and indicators suggest that it was European. I didn’t see any kind they among the remains unearthed by archae- of indicators that it was Native American or Mexican, but I’m only looking ologists in December 2019 and January 2020? at the back of the skull.” If Danning’s analysis is correct, that would rule out any Mexican soldiers or Indian converts from the mission period.

DNA tests may provide the answers.

Among those buried in the mission compound before or during the Meanwhile, further evidence strongly suggests other Alamo defenders may have escaped 13-day siege may be men who succumbed to wounds suffered during Santa Anna’s funeral pyres. In March 1979 ar- the December 1835 Siege of Béxar. A number of Texians known to have chaeologists James Ivey and Anne Fox led a died at the Alamo are listed among the wounded on a muster roll after dig where the compound’s north wall once that December engagement. Several are labeled as “severely wounded,” stood. Amid what they identified as the fill of while defender James Nowlan is listed as “dangerously wounded.” Whether

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one wished to leave, they could do so freely. “No, I will stay and die fighting,” Gregorio answered.

And he did.

Esparza’s story features one other footnote: He was long thought to be the only Alamo defender given a Christian burial, although previously unknown evidence now casts doubt on that legend.

The San Antonio Light first reported on Esparza’s burial in 1901 after Alamo preservationist Adina De Zavala happened across 73-year-old Enrique in town and persuaded him to share his family story. “[My father] picked up his arms and went into the fight,” he recalled of the March 6, 1836, final assault.

“I never saw him again.” Enrique said that in the aftermath of the battle his uncle Francisco Esparza, a member of a local presidial company, received permission to search for his brother’s body, which he found at his artillery station on the wall. Francisco confirmed as much under oath in an 1859 deposition for the Texas Court of Claims, noting Gregorio had “received a ball in the chest and sword wound in the side.” Francisco had his brother interred in the campo santo

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TOP: ROBERT ALEXANDER/GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: DOLPH BRISCOE CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Alamo defender Gregorio Esparza’s story has been rightfully cherished by generations of Texans. By 1836 the 27-yearold native of San Antonio de Béxar was an ardent patriot in the cause for Texian independence, as well as a fiercely protective husband and father of four.

Esparza (depicted at right) had planned to remove his family from San Antonio and the dangers associated with the Texas Revolution. Everyone recognized the Mexican army would inevitably return to reclaim the garrison, but no one knew when. The answer arrived with stunning swiftness that February 23 when a scout spotted an advance unit of Mexican cavalry 2 miles outside town.

Panic and confusion reigned. Facing a gut-wrenching decision regarding the safety of his family, Esparza resolved their best chance of survival would be to shelter within their small adobe house. “Well, I’m going to the fort,” he told wife Ana. “Well, if you go, I’m going along, and the whole family too,” came the reply. Her words were final.

At some point during the siege Esparza’s eldest son, 8-yearold Enrique, recalled James Bowie announcing that if any-

TOP: RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION; LEFT: PAINTING BY CECIL CASEBIER, (1922-96), ALAMO COLLECTION, SAN ANTONIO

AN ALAMO LEGEND EXHUMED

Ashes to Ashes

This marble sarcophagus at San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio reportedly holds the immolated remains of some defenders.

TOP: ROBERT ALEXANDER/GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: DOLPH BRISCOE CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

TOP: RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION; LEFT: PAINTING BY CECIL CASEBIER, (1922-96), ALAMO COLLECTION, SAN ANTONIO

any of these men survived until the March 6, 1836, final assault is unknown. The odds were certainly not in their favor. In a February 13 letter to Texas Governor Henry Smith, Alamo surgeon Amos Pollard spelled out the garrison’s dire medical situation: “It is my duty to inform you that my department is nearly destitute of medicine, and in the event of a siege I can be of very little use to the sick.”

Twenty-two days later Pollard perished with the rest of the garrison. Chances are his lifeless body—like those of most of his fellow defenders—was consigned to the flames of a funeral pyre. And while the hallowed grounds of the Alamo may continue to yield archaeological clues, the fates of many who died in its defense 185 years ago will assuredly remain a mystery.

Regardless, there will always be the terrible glory of sacrifice to remember in those flames.

“Death united in one place both friends and enemies,” recalled Mexican Colonel José Enrique de la Peña of that hellish day, adding,

“within a few hours a funeral pyre rendered into ashes those men who moments before had been so brave that in a blind fury they had unselfishly offered their lives and had met their ends in combat.”

Even their enemies would remember.

Ron J. Jackson Jr. is a regular Wild West contributor and the award-winning author of Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend (co-authored by Lee Spencer White), Alamo Survivors (also co-authored by Lee Spencer White) and Alamo Legacy: Alamo Descendants Remember the Alamo. For further reading he also recommends The Alamo Reader, edited by Todd Hansen, and Alamo Defenders, by Bill Groneman.

Strangely, Enrique never spoke of visiting his (“holy field”) of nearby San Fernando Cathedral— father’s grave. Instead, the impoverished Texan where Gregorio had been baptized and married. mentioned “pilgrimages” to the state Capitol Enrique graciously gave several more interin Austin, where a monument to the Alamo views before his death at age 89 in 1917. As dead includes his father’s inscribed name. is reasonable to expect, he changed some In 1975 Bexar County archivist John details while sifting through the memories Ogden Leal painstakingly translated the of long ago. decaying original records of more than 2,800 In a 1907 interview, for instance, he told burials in the campo santo of San Fernando San Antonio Express reporter Charles Merritt Cathedral. He published the results in CampoBarnes, “The last I saw of my father’s corpse santo: An Ancient Burial Ground of San Antonio, was when one of them [Santa Anna’s men] held ENRIQUE ESPARZA Texas, 1808–1860. Gregorio Esparza’s burial is his lantern above it and over the dead who lay among those listed. about the cannon he tended.” In a follow-up interview So, was the legend true? Texas preservationist Lee with Barnes four years later he gave a conflicting account White (co-author with this writer of Joe, the Slave Who Became of the body’s fate, stating his mother arrived too late to claim an Alamo Legend) sought to confirm the story once and for all in the body and could only look on as Mexican soldiers ignited the two funeral pyres. “My mother placed her mantilla before 1993 by reviewing the very burial records Leal had transcribed.

Accompanied by Alamo historian Kevin Young, White found her face and ran screaming from the scene,” Enrique recalled, no such record of Esparza’s burial. “dragging me by the hand with her.” The account smacked of Why, then, had Leal listed Esparza among those buried in the sort of trauma a child would not forget.

San Fernando’s campo santo? Was the archivist trying to preIf true, one may reasonably surmise money might have moserve a cherished local legend? tivated Francisco during his 1859 deposition, prompting him “The Catholic Church is famously meticulous about recordto embellish the story of his brother’s burial. Or perhaps Franing baptisms and deaths,” White said. “So, why was Gregorio cisco had found his brother’s body but failed to receive perEsparza not listed? I think it’s because he isn’t there.” —R.J.J. mission for a burial. Regardless, the oral tradition persisted.

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OPPOSITE AND THIS PAGE: AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING

G Tooting His Own Horn

Schoolmarm Glendolene Kimmell enjoyed hearing the colorful adventures of Tom Horn, whom she viewed as the frontiersman of her romantic ideal. Here, she chats with the gunman in L.D. Edgar’s Iron Mountain Morning.

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TOM HORN’S SMOOTH SCHOOLMARM

Glendolene Kimmell paired off with the paid assassin, and to the abrupt end of his life and beyond she contended he was innocent in the killing of young Willie Nickell

By Linda Wommack

OPPOSITE AND THIS PAGE: AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING

G

lendolene Myrtle Kimmell experience the sort of romantic adventure long remains an enigmatic soul, associated with the American West. This is despite being a central figborne out in a passage from a 1904 remiure in one of the West’s niscence. “I have been most strongly atmost infamous murder trials—that of tracted by the frontier type,” she recalled, gun for hire Tom Horn. “so when I went to the Iron Mountain On the morning of July 18, 1901, at the country, I was happy in the belief that I base of Iron Mountain in southeastern would meet with the embodiment of that Wyoming, shots rang out, and two rifle type in its natural environment.” slugs struck 14-year-old Willie Nickell Kimmell arrived in Cheyenne in early beneath the left arm as he went to open January 1901, soon traveling north to Iron the gate to his family ranch. Collapsing, Mountain to meet her students and their he soon bled out. parents. The Laramie County School Board After a countywide search for the killer or would cover her $50-a-month salary, though GLENDOLENE killers, an ambitious Cheyenne lawman pinned the next term would not begin until July. In MYRTLE KIMMELL the murder on Horn. His supposed confession, the meantime, she boarded with the family of arrest, escape attempt, conviction and hanging raised local cattleman Jim Miller. The Iron Mountain School hard questions that remain in debate. In the midst of it all occupied a one-room log cabin about 3 miles from the Miller was Glendolene Kimmell. ranch. Her students included the Miller’s school-age children, several of sheepman Kels Nickell’s nine kids and a handful Like Horn, Kimmell was a native of Missouri. Elijah of others from neighboring homesteads.

In a story common to the region and that era, the Nickells and Frances (née Pierce) Kimmell were an influential couple in Hannibal, Mo., when their third child, Glendolene Myrtle, and Millers had long been squabbling over the intermingling was born on June 21, 1879. In childhood Frances and siblings of Nickell’s sheep with Miller’s cattle. The men and boys of had been playmates of neighbor Samuel Clemens, who under both families had exchanged charges and countercharges, the pseudonym Mark Twain wrote about some of their shared traded insults and even engaged in physical violence. Miller pranks and adventures. Glendolene’s sister had died in infancy alerted Kimmell to the lingering feud when she arrived in in 1872, and in 1881 she lost both her father and brother. Re- Iron Mountain, but she clearly didn’t grasp the gravity of the settling with mother Frances in the Pierce family home in situation, as she later remarked the turmoil would allow her Hannibal, Glendolene received her formal education and to “enhance her study of human nature.” graduated high school. On earning a teaching certificate, she To that end Kimmell regularly took long walks and visited the neighbors. She also may have been looking for the fronworked one semester in Hannibal before journeying west.

In late 1900 young Kimmell accepted a teaching position at tiersman of her romantic ideal, for she later noted local cowa community school in faraway Wyoming, in part hoping to boys and cattlemen looked and acted like “the hired hands FEBRUARY 2021

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The next few mornings were fairly routine for the schoolteacher.

That is until Kels Nickell burst into the JIM AND DORA MILLER schoolhouse midmorning on Friday, July 19. Stating he needed to speak privately, Nickell led Kimmell outdoors where in the presence of neighbor Joseph Reed he questioned her about the movements of Jim Miller and sons Gus and Victor the previous day. Loath to get in the middle of another spat between the families, Glendolene refused to answer. “She [Kimmell] never did tell who ate breakfast,” Nickell later testified. “She told me that neither [ Jim] Miller [n]or Gussie ate breakfast with her. She hummed around a whole lot and didn’t want to tell.”

It was then Nickell told Kimmell he’d just discovered the body of his son Willie. On that news Glendolene had a change of heart and told Nickell what she could remember regarding the whereabouts of Miller and his boys that Thursday morning, the time of the murder.

News of the killing spread fast through the Iron Mountain community. Most folks assumed it was tied to the ongoing feud. Kimmell said as much under oath at a subsequent coroner’s inquest, convened in Cheyenne on July 22. Horn met her at the train depot, and the two were seen leaving arm in arm. In her testimony Kimmell equanimously described Nickell as “hotheaded” and Miller as “obstinate,” stating the pair had been “thrown together nearest neighbors to each other whose natures were respectively such they could not get along.” She later recalled that on August 3, more than two weeks after the murder, she’d been out riding with The Miller Ranch

Kimmell boarded here with the family of cattleman Jim Miller and taught his school-age children.

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KELS NICKELL

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FROM TOP: AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING; HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; WYOMING STATE ARCHIVES; JULIA BRICKLIN

back home.” Her disappointment would dispel about the time she began her first teaching term.

Just after dawn on July 15, a Tuesday morning, Tom Horn arrived at the Miller ranch and sauntered into the life of young schoolmarm Glendolene Kimmell. Jim Miller introduced the pair and invited Horn to share a few tales from his decidedly colorful life. Kimmell later described the storyteller as a “tall and broadshouldered man with excellent features.” The teacher also praised him for the “best English usage.” Glendolene noted Tom rode a dark horse, adding he “told stories of his adventures in the Apache and Spanish American wars and discussed in very general terms the nature of detective work, while avoiding much comment on his present employment.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; WYOMING STATE ARCHIVES (2); HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

TOM HORN

Later that day the two shared a walk, and Horn told Kimmell of his rodeo past as a bronc buster and work as a Pinkerton agent. The enamored schoolmarm recalled him as “the embodiment of the characteristics, the experiences and the code of the old frontiersman.”

Horn agreed to stay the night with the Millers. He and Jim then went fishing as Glendolene helped Jim’s wife, Dora, prepare the evening meal.

The next morning the four took breakfast together, Tom leaving the homestead when Glendolene went off to the schoolhouse. Following that first meeting Horn made a point to stop by the Miller place, ostensibly to see Jim or take target practice with the Miller boys. But his visits always seemed to include time spent with Kimmell. “We quickly paired ourselves off,” Horn later wrote of their relationship.

The 22-year-old schoolmarm was clearly smitten with the 40-year-old frontiersman. “Without an ounce of superfluous flesh upon him and with muscles of steel,” she recalled, “he could perform feats of strength which were the admiration and despair of other men.” While it would be a short-lived liaison for Horn, the romantic notion remained with Kimmell for quite some time, perhaps to her dying day.

The Killing of Willie Nickell

FROM TOP: AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING; HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; WYOMING STATE ARCHIVES; JULIA BRICKLIN

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; WYOMING STATE ARCHIVES (2); HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

From ambush behind these rocks (No. 1) the killer shot the boy as he opened this gate (No. 2). Willie collapsed here (No. 3). Horn hanged for this crime.

soon landed a job as a stenographer in Kansas City, Mo. LeFors harbored his own suspicions about who’d killed Willie Nickell. Early on Jan. 12, 1902, a Sunday morning, the marshal invited a hungover Horn to his Cheyenne office, ostensibly for a friendly chat, during Jim Miller when they discovered sheep grazing in the which the deputy U.S. marshal cofamily pasture. Spotting one of Nickell’s hired hands on erced a supposed confession from a hill overlooking the pasture, Miller thrice ordered the his guest regarding the killing of man to remove the sheep. The man raised his rifle in Willie Nickell. During their conacknowledgment but did not leave his post. Miller and versation Horn mentioned having Kimmell concealed themselves behind a rock, watching received a letter from Kimmell “as the man and his sheep until sundown. long as the governor’s message.” In When pressed, Kimmell ultimately blamed Nickell for it, he told LeFors, she shared all of the death of his own son, as the rancher had WALTER STOLL the testimony she’d provided at the repeatedly allowed his sheep to graze on Millcoroner’s inquiry and cautioned Horn to er’s land. “I can say that if I owned it [the land] beware the marshal, as “he is trying to find legally and had paid for it and some man drove out something.” Referring to Kimmell as his sheep or other stock on it and I ordered him “smooth people,” Horn told LeFors in seemthree times to take it off,” she said, “I would ing self-incrimination, “I wouldn’t tell an use force, because out there if you wait for the individual like her anything.” officers to come, you will wait several days, The day after LeFors secured his prime or many hours at any rate.” suspect’s “confession,” Laramie County SherOn August 4, the day after Miller and Kimiff Ed Smalley arrested Horn for murder. mell encountered the sheepherder on the hill, JOE LeFORS When Kimmell learned of the arrest, she someone shot and wounded Kels Nickell from began corresponding with Horn’s employer ambush. The rancher later found upward of 60 of his sheep shot or bludgeoned to death. Two of the Nickell girls and benefactor, John C. Coble. testified that on the day of the shooting they’d seen two male riders—one on a gray horse, the other on a bay. Miller was known to own horses In advance of Horn’s murder trial, set to begin on October 10, Stoll reached out to of that description.

On August 6 Deputy U.S. Marshal Joe LeFors, Laramie County Deputy Kimmell as a potential witness for the state.

Sheriff Peter Warlaumont and two special deputies arrived in Iron Moun- When newspapers learned Horn’s onetime partain. They soon arrested Jim Miller and sons Victor and Gus on suspi- amour might testify against him, they had a field day. Under the banner headline Will Tom cion of murder.

Over the coming months Kimmell dissolved her ties with the com- Horn’s Sweetheart Turn State’s Evidence? the munity. After resigning her position at the Iron Mountain School that fall, she returned to Cheyenne on October 10 to visit Elizabeth Hawes, superintendent of Laramie County schools. Hawes then accompanied Kimmell to the office of Walter R. Stoll, Laramie County prosecuting attorney, to whom the former schoolmarm gave more testimony. Hawes then walked Kimmell to the depot, where she boarded an eastbound train. Kimmell Of a Broken Heart?

Kimmell died at age 70 nearly a half century after Horn and is interred in the Westminster (California) Memorial Park.

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It is the opinion of everyone who has followed the case, and especially those who have seen the woman, that it was a bad move of Horn’s attorney’s when they presented Miss Gwendolene [sic ] Kimmell in person to plead for Horn’s life. To use a common expression, the little schoolteacher “does not look good” to those who have seen her, and it is doubtful if she has made a favorable impression.

October 13 Cheyenne Leader reported breathlessly that Kimmell was ready to tell all. “The greatest sensation of the case,” the paper teased, “will be sprung when the petite little schoolteacher is placed Regardless, the defense team presented the affidavit to FENIMORE on the stand.” both prosecuting attorney Stoll and Governor Chatterton.

CHATTERTON In a pull-no-punches editorial in Far from being swayed, Stoll on November 10 filed perjury the Budget of Douglas, Wyo., Bill Barlow charges against Kimmell, citing her own conflicting past testiwrote, “Gentle dalliance with a schoolmarm mony. She was arrested and briefly confined in the Laramie County Jail, appears in the evidence, and as the gentleman albeit in a separate cell from Horn. Coble footed her bail, but she rehimself volunteers the information that she was mained under house arrest at the Inter-Ocean Hotel. Stoll and Chatterton ‘sure smooth people,’ it is presumed that she subsequently met with the respective Millers, who under oath categorically was affording an agreeable diversion, doubt- denied all of Kimmell’s assertions. less, from his arduous duties of pulling his pop Four days later the governor handed down his decision. “If the Kimmell on cowardly cattle thieves and shooting little affidavit is true,” Chatterton wrote, “it is all that is required, and Tom Horn boys in the back.” should be pardoned.” Like Stoll, however, the governor remained unIn fact, Kimmell was playing prosecutor Stoll, convinced. “I do not believe the statements in the Kimmell affidavit. I am all the while working with Horn’s defense team. led to believe that Miss Kimmell is at this stage of the proceedings willing In the end, however, neither side elected to call to present ‘theories’ to save Horn.…For these reasons, and with more her as a witness. On October 24 the jury found regret than I can express, I do not believe that law and justice would be Horn guilty of murder, and days later Judge served by the interposition of executive clemency.”

Richard H. Scott sentenced him to death by And with that blunt rejection, Horn’s fate was sealed. On Friday, Nov. 20, hanging. By year’s end the defense team had 1903, he stepped on the trapdoor of Wyoming architect James P. Julian’s petitioned the Wyoming Supreme Court for a water-operated gallows and moments later dropped into eternity. Days later stay of execution and new trial, this time calling The Laramie Boomerang reported Kimmell as being overcome with “nervous on Kimmell, who provided them with an affi- prostration” in her room at the Inter-Ocean, “directly due to the execudavit. “I, Glendolene Myrtle Kimmell, being tion of her lover and the great load of dishonor and disgrace which she is first duly sworn upon my oath, depose and say compelled to bear.” that I now have positive knowledge as to who On November 25 Stoll dropped the perjury charges against Kimmell. killed William Nickell, and that he was not killed But she was not ready to drop the affair. In April 1904 she sent Coble 56 WILD WEST

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FROM TOP: WYOMING STATE ARCHIVES; DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY; PHOTO COURTESY JESSICA ABEL FELD

Laramie County Prosecuting Attorney Walter Stoll questions Kels Nickell, in a court sketch made during Horn’s trial.

FROM TOP: AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING; WYOMING STATE ARCHIVES

Witness for the Prosecution

by Tom Horn,” she alleged. Over the following months Kimmell sent out letters of appeal to anyone she thought would listen, including the defense team, prosecutors, Coble, even Wyoming Governor Fenimore Chatterton.

Despite Kimmell’s best efforts, the defense team lost its appeal.

On Oct. 3, 1903, the state Supreme Court affirmed the decision of the district court, which set November 20 as Horn’s new execution date. “Now that matters have reached their present plight,” Kimmell wrote Coble on October 7, “I strongly hope that you will have faith in me to let me put some of my ‘theories’ to the test.”

That statement and other letters she’d sent would come back to haunt her.

In the meantime, Horn’s defense team seemingly consented to a last-ditch effort by Kimmell, whom they summoned to Cheyenne. On October 13 she swore out another incredible affidavit, in which she fingered Victor Miller as Willie Nickell’s killer, going so far as to assert Victor had at one point personally confessed his guilt to her.

The press again had a field day, exemplified by a dispatch in the November 4 Denver Post:

a statement of vindication of Horn and herself in which she mentions the letters Stoll and Chatterton had requested and used to impugn her credibility: I have been accused of presenting theories as evidence. Would it be too far-fetched a theory to advance that the governor had now found time to consider the evidence, although his decision had already been made; or did he have the deputy take those letters across the street to the prosecuting attorney so that the latter might make copies of them? It is a fact that after Horn was dead, the prosecuting attorney had copies made of his farewell letters to his mother and his sisters. I learned upon unimpeachable authority that while Stoll’s stenographer was typewriting these farewell letters, her eyes filled with tears so that she could hardly write. Stoll, coming into the room, took in the situation and jeered at her. The state’s case was ended, so it is evident that his sole purpose was to acquire souvenirs—of what? Of work well done!

The hanging of an innocent man!

FROM TOP: WYOMING STATE ARCHIVES; DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY; PHOTO COURTESY JESSICA ABEL FELD

FROM TOP: AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING; WYOMING STATE ARCHIVES

During his time in jail Horn had scribbled out his larger-thanlife autobiography. Coble gathered the handwritten pages and sent them to Kimmell. In a last loving tribute to her “tall and broad-shouldered man” she wrangled Horn’s words into a manuscript Coble had published in 1904 as Life of Tom Horn: Government Scout and Interpreter. Kimmell’s vindication letter is among the supplemental articles, while Coble offers the closing word, in which he hammers the “inferior, unscrupulous space-fillers” of the media. Seems little has changed.

In the aftermath of Horn’s execution in Cheyenne on the day before his 43rd birthday, Kimmell moved to Denver, perhaps to be within visiting distance of his grave in Boulder. Within a few years she returned to hometown Hannibal, Mo., rejoining her grandparents and mother Frances at the Pierce family home while working as a stenographer. In 1915 Frances moved to California’s Central Coast, having invested her life savings in the utopian planned community of Rancho Atascadero, just north of San Luis Obispo. Joining her mother soon afterward, Glendolene cleaned neighbors’ houses to make ends meet. On Frances’ death from a heart attack in 1930, Glendolene fell into financial trouble. In a letter to Uncle Horace Dakin she appealed for help. “Mother passed away,” she wrote. “She wished for burial in Hannibal, and I agree.

I lack money. Will you advance transportation charges for her?” After accompanying her mother’s body to Hannibal Buried in Boulder, Colo. for burial, Glendolene returned west.

Brother Charles Horn A year later, at the outset of the Great Dehad Tom’s body interred pression, Kimmell lost title to her Atascadero in Columbia Cemetery.

Last Weeks, Last Rites

Left: Newspapers nationwide covered Horn’s trial and announced the guilty verdict, which came on Oct. 24, 1902.

Above: Tom had his last ride in this hearse; his brother Charles is at right.

home over unpaid back taxes. She remained on the California relief rolls from then on. Though the state owned title to the house, she continued to live there until 1946 when admitted to the Sun Flower Haven Rest Home in Long Beach. On Sept. 12, 1949, Glendolene Myrtle Kimmell died in bed at age 70. She’d never married and took her secrets with her to the grave. Blissfully absent from the newspapers was any sort of intrusive obituary.

Linda Wommack writes the Collections department and other articles for Wild West. For further reading she suggests Life of Tom Horn, Government Scout & Interpreter, Written by Himself (1904, compiled and edited by Glendolene Kimmell); The Trial of Tom Horn, by John W. Davis; and Tom Horn in Life and Legend, by Larry D. Ball.

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Utes on the Move

Warriors cross a stream while scouting their land in James Ayers’ painting Realm of the Ute Warriors.

JAMES AYERS STUDIOS, JAMESAYERS.COM, © 2020

INNOCENTS LOST In a matter of hours in June 1885 murderous cowboys killed peaceful Utes, and vengeful Ute raiders struck the Genthner homestead

By Jeff Broome

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JAMES AYERS STUDIOS, JAMESAYERS.COM, © 2020

J

ohn Austin “Jack” Genthner, anticipating his 47th birthday in nine days, and 40-year-old wife Margaret were settling into bed at their southwestern Colorado cabin on the night of June 20, 1885. Two years earlier the couple had claimed their Montezuma Valley homestead (4 miles east of present-day Cortez).

Jack hailed from Maine, Margaret from Tennessee. They had married in central Tennessee’s Bedford County on Dec. 27, 1871, and now had four children—Artell, 12; Madge, 7; Gertrude, 5; and 2-month-old Mortimer. The couple was soon sleeping soundly, as were their children. But at 11 p.m. the glare and roar of flames from outside the cabin roused all the Genthners.

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Weeks later in an affidavit Margaret recalled that frightful night:

JACK GENTHNER

My one son, Douglas E. Woolley, had been driven from my own farm on the same day, June 20, 1885, by six Southern Ute Indians, who threatened his life. He remained in the sagebrush all night and towards morning discovered Mrs. Genthner, wounded and bleeding, with her four young children, wandering in the sagebrush, and conducted them to a neighbor’s house—Mr. Louis Simon. My son informed me that these Indians, on leaving my premises, went towards the Genthner place. We afterwards followed their trail to the Genthner dwelling.

The July 4 Dolores News related Doug Woolley’s story.

Around sundown he was milking the cows when six mounted Utes approached. Two rode up to him:

Arriving at the scorched Genthner home the next morning, fellow settlers discovered Jack’s remains, “the body partially burned [with] five bullet wounds upon it.”

Though Margaret had survived the horrifying ordeal, she would lose her right arm, and when she died on Aug. 7, 1898, at age 53, her obituary in the Hanford (Calif.) Daily Journal noted the aftereffects of the Indian raid. “By the death of Mrs. Genthner,” it concluded, “the world loses a noble woman, whose death was the result of a wound received while saving her husband’s body from Indians who murdered her husband, set her house on fire and sought the lives of herself and children.”

Dr. William Winters, who had attended Margaret’s wounds in Colorado, testified that infant Mortimer, “a babe at breast then, has never fully recovered from that night’s exposure.” The special agent who oversaw a depredation claim filed by the baby’s mother noted the doctor’s grim prognosis in his summary. Mortimer would not survive the year.

It was, of course, a devastating tragedy for the young family, and it may seem surprising such an Indian raid could happen in Colorado as late as 1885. But it did. In searching for the catalyst, however, history points to the shameful actions of a dozen white “cowboys” who at dawn that same day had attacked a group of Utes asleep in their tepees. The raid on the innocent Genthner family had been in retaliation for that murderous assault.

Trouble between the Southern Utes and settlers had been brewing for some time. Four years earlier the Denver & Standing Tall With His Rifle

Artell Genthner, the oldest of Jack and Margaret’s four children, was 12 in 1885 when Utes raided his home and killed his father.

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TOP: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY; RIGHT: JEFF BROOME (2)

MARGARET GENTHNER

One drew a large knife and was about to take hold of him when he made a sudden spring and in a short run hid himself in the bushes and by so doing got away from them.

The Indians then went into the store and stole everything that they wanted, destroyed many things and broke the windows and left. From the tracks of their ponies it is seen that they went direct to Genthner’s, but they made no attack until after 11 o’clock.

JEFF BROOME COLLECTION (3)

My husband arose at once and went outside of the house to see what was the matter.

I followed as soon as possible. When I got to the door, I found the house on fire. My husband rushed to the burning place, but only got a few steps from the doorway when a volley was fired at him, and he fell in front of me, crying, “I am shot!” I ran to him and plainly saw a number of Ute Indians (we had never before seen any Indians, nor held any communication with any of the tribe), who came up quite close to me and fired a second shot, shooting me through the shoulder.

My husband cried, “I am dying; go save the children from the Indians!” I ran back into the house, aroused all the children and with them passed out at the back door into the open prairie.

I wandered around the sagebrush most of the night with my little infant and three young children. We suffered intensely, all of us being in our nightclothes. My wound was serious; being in the right shoulder, my arm was rendered useless for the time; the loss of blood was so great, I was scarcely able to travel. Towards morning I fortunately came upon a boy by the name of [Douglas] Woolley, hiding in the sagebrush. With his assistance we made our way to a house occupied by a man named [Louis] Simon; this same day I was removed to the Dolores River. Dr. W.R. [William] Winters, of Durango, some 50 miles distant, was summoned. He attended me, performing the necessary surgical operations—a resection of the humerus near the shoulder was made. I was confined to my bed over a month and am yet under medical treatment. My infant child has suffered permanent injury from exposure on that terrible night and requires medical treatment.

William Woolley testified about his son:

TOP: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY; RIGHT: JEFF BROOME (2)

JEFF BROOME COLLECTION (3)

Rio Grande Railroad had completed a line that bordered the eastern end of the Southern Ute Indian Reservation and made it easier for the Genthners and other families to take advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862. As whites poured in, including cattlemen with their large herds, the Utes’ traditional game disappeared and along with it their ability to hunt for sustenance. Thus by 1885 the tribe was on the brink of starvation. A year earlier someone had shot and killed a Ute spotted riding a branded horse, and a pair of Utes had killed two white men in revenge.

At the time of the deadly June 1885 raid the reservation was 15 miles north to south and ran just over 100 miles along the New Mexico Territory line. The 983 resident Southern Utes formed three distinct bands—Muaches, Capotes and Weeminuches. According to Ute Indian agent Christian Stollsteimer, the Weeminuches were the strongest of the three and “the least civilized and most warlike of the entire Ute nation.” In his 1885 annual report the agent noted each Ute received a paltry weekly ration of less than 2 pounds of beef, the same amount of flour and “a little baking powder, salt and soup—not enough to keep them from starving.”

By then game on the reservation was almost nonexistent. “It is hard to see how they will manage to exist,” the agent concluded.

In his report Stollsteimer wrote scathingly of the “white scoundrels” who had murdered the Utes that June, though he failed to mention the retaliatory murder of Jack Genthner:

clearly proved that they had been atIndian Side of the Story Chief Ignacio, posing in shirtsleeves tacked and killed while asleep and with a badge years after the raid, could have given no provocation for said the killing of a Ute family of six the atrocious crime. The perpetrahad prompted the Genthner attack. tors of this foul murder have not been discovered, and even if they were known, I doubt whether the state authorities would take steps to arrest and punish them. An Indian is hardly considered a human being by a certain class of the whites with which this part of the country is disgraced. There can be no excuse for this foul crime, and it will always be a foul blot upon the reputation of this country.

Stollsteimer was correct—authorities never did bring the Utes’ murderers to justice. Though later accounts of the unwarranted attack named the suspected killers, locals kept mum. One account noted that an escaping “squaw” was shot to the ground several times but kept rising to her feet and running. Her assailants finally stopped shooting, believing she could not possibly survive her many wounds. But survive Only Memories Remain

Left: An earlier house on this site is where a wounded Margaret and her kids were taken. Below: Jack is buried in an unmarked grave near this tree (which grew later).

The Genthner home was adjacent.

On the morning of the 19th day of June a cruel outrage was perpetrated on a party of these Indians who were peaceably hunting some distance from the reservation. An entire family of six persons, consisting of men, women and children, were murdered by some white scoundrels while asleep in their tepees. News of this was brought to me by Indian runners on the 21st day of June. I immediately proceeded to the scene of the massacre, accompanied by a number of chiefs, part of my police force and two companies of United States cavalry. We were guided to the spot where the murders were committed by a squaw who had escaped from the massacre. On arriving there, we found the bodies of six Indians in a condition which

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Margaret Genthner’s Indian depredation claim includes a report by Stollsteimer with details about the murdered Utes. The agent had interviewed Ignacio, head chief of the Southern Utes:

she did, as the heavy robes she wore had flattened the bullets, leaving her severely bruised but otherwise unwounded. Her escape came at an almost unbearable price, though. According to the same account and Ute oral tradition, the young woman had been carrying a babe in arms. While in hiding from her assailants, she sought to muffle her child’s cries and accidentally smothered the baby.

The whites responsible for the Ute killings were said to be “cowboys,” later identified as Sam Todd, Newt Moreland, Bob Dunham, Matt Hammond, Adam Lewey and seven others with the first name Jim—Nash, Lavender, Mair, Moore, Belmear, Morrison and Trimble. That morning they’d fired their opening volley at an older male Indian, who somehow managed to duck into a tepee without being hit. He soon emerged, holding a baby aloft to demonstrate the band’s peaceful intentions. The cowboys shot him anyway and continued to fire at all Utes, regardless of sex or age, who showed themselves. An elderly woman was the last to emerge and ran screaming from the tepee. Jim Nash convinced the others to hold fire and let her go. As the assailants rode off, the old woman encountered the wounded couple and their crying baby. It was at that point the mother, fearing the cowboys would return to finish them off, inadvertently smothered her baby. Leaving the wounded, grieving couple hidden in the brush, the old woman went to the reservation for help.

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Ignacio told Stollsteimer how word of the murders had incensed some of the Ute men, prompting them to mount a retaliatory raid: Such Indians as escaped were incensed that their fathers and mothers and brothers should be murdered while asleep in their tents, inasmuch as they had committed no outrage of whatsoever kind. And while the Utes killed Mr. Genthner and wounded his wife in the Montezuma Valley, they were not sleeping more soundly than my Indians were in their tents on Beaver Creek.

Ignacio objected to Margaret Genthner’s depredation claim, knowing that any resulting payment would be deducted from Ute annuities.

The Ute loss, he explained, “is much more than that of the white woman, for the white men who murdered them [the Utes] took all of their horses, and we never heard of them since.” (The account that named the suspected killers did not mention their having stolen the Utes’ horses.)

But the Genthners had also suffered material losses. According to a report in the June 23 Janesville (Wis.) Daily Gazette, the revenge-minded Utes who had killed Jack and wounded Margaret had burned not only the family home but also the barn and haystacks.

The newspaper noted Stollsteimer’s efforts to keep the peace. On hearing of the cowboy ambush from one of the surviving Utes, some 250 warriors had confronted the agent, demanding justice. “Agent Stollsteimer,” the Gazette wrote, “pacified them by agreeing to go with 25 of their number to Fort Lewis [west of Durango], there got an escort of soldiers, then IGNACIO proceeded to the scene of the trouble

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NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY/GETTY IMAGES

Armed Utes pose for an outdoor portrait, probably in Colorado Springs, at least five years before a Southern Ute raiding party hit the Genthners in southwestern Colorado.

TOP: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTIONS; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Ready for Anything

Ignacio says that he has talked with all of the heads of tribes composing his people, that on the night of June 18th last two families of Minnemuches [Weeminuches] were going peaceably north from the agency for the purpose of hunting, there being a scarcity of meat at the agency; that they encamped that night on what is known as Plateau or Beaver Creek; that on the morning of the 20th [in his annual report Stollsteimer said it was the morning of the 19th], about daylight, when all of his people were asleep in their tents, some whites made an attack, firing with rifles from cliffs or rocks nearby; that six of the Indians were killed—being three men, two squaws and one child—two others were wounded and three got away unhurt; that he is unable to state who did the shooting; that he does not know why the white men should desire to kill his followers, especially as they were not committing depredations, nor had the intention of interfering with white settlers in any manner whatever, but that they were off their reservation for the purpose of hunting, and that they had reserved such right by treaty stipulation; that the meat and flour ration issued them by the government was not sufficient to supply the demands of life, and in consequence thereof they had gone on the ceded lands to hunt in order that they might not starve.

NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY/GETTY IMAGES

TOP: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTIONS; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

to investigate the whole matter and bring back the bodies of their dead comrades.” According to the Gazette, the cowboys claimed the Indians had started the trouble, while Stollsteimer said the cowboys had threatened to kill any Indians found off the reservation. Rumors abounded of a forthcoming massacre of settlers, but those proved false.

In fact, Jack Genthner was the only settler killed by Utes in the Montezuma Valley in June 1885, though a 1942 article in Colorado Magazine, the state historical society journal, falsely claimed that whites had killed 11 Indians, and that Utes had killed “several settlers” in revenge. In the wake of Genthner’s murder some settlers did demand military protection. The July 9 edition of The Fairplay Flume printed a signed petition calling on the governor to place a militia company in the valley. Others countered that area merchants and farmers only wanted soldiers around to buy their goods. The petition went unanswered, and settlers’ fears eventually subsided, though the killing of six Utes and Jack Genthner left ugly scars.

Meanwhile, settlers in Rico, in the mountains to the north between Dolores and Telluride, took up a collection for Margaret Genthner and children, who’d been left destitute. The widow received $164.15, and the gesture greatly moved her. On July 25 the Dolores News published her thanks. “Now, after I have had time to think calmly over the whole thing,” she said, “I cannot realize that were it not for the kindness of my many friends, I would almost, if not altogether, break down under the weight.…

I cannot thank each of you separately, but I want each one of you to receive this as coming from the depth of my heart to each and every one.”

As Margaret had noted in her depredation claim, during the Ute raid she and her children had run from the house barefoot in their nightclothes. The next day friends had taken them to the large home of prominent merchant George W. Morton, 9 miles north on the Dolores River (site of the present-day town of Dolores). “They were entirely destitute,” Morton recalled, “no clothing or property, absolutely nothing. The woman’s feet were cut, bruised and full of cactus thorns.”

On June 22 Dr. Winters arrived from Durango—the first of three trips he would make to tend to Margaret’s wounds. On that first trip he noted she’d been shot through the right breast, the bullet passing into her right shoulder, “causing compound fracture of the right humerus at surgical neck…by ball of large caliber, probably No. 45.” He couldn’t operate, however, as she had lost too much blood and remained weak. All he could do was dress the wound, insert draining tubes and administer medication. Returning on June 26, he operated on Margaret, performing a “resection of humerus (arm bone).” Ten days later Dr. Winters went home, but he paid his patient another visit on July 10 and stayed a week.

By then Margaret was well enough to be transported by wagon to Durango, where she remained hospitalized until October 5. She and baby Mortimer then traveled by train to Hanford, Calif., where her daughters and eldest son had gone to live with relatives. Having never rallied from the terrible night of June 20, Mortimer soon died, and Margaret ultimately lost her right arm.

On Feb. 21, 1886, The New York Times reported that agent Stollsteimer, Ignacio and other Southern Utes had started for Washington, D.C., in hopes of selling the reservation to the government so the tribe might clear out of Colorado. Two years later they approved a bill that would relocate them to San Juan County, Utah, but Congress failed to pass it. Finally, in 1895 federal authorities and the Southern Utes reached a mutually acceptable

‘Not Enough to Keep Them From Starving’

Utes await annuity rations in 1874. A decade later Southern Ute Indian Reservation agent Christian Stollsteimer reported game was scarce and his wards were receiving paltry rations.

compromise, the tribe abandoning the loathed reservation in exchange for 160-acre allotments to each family head.

Meanwhile, the Genthners apparently held on to their homestead. On Oct. 3, 1912, the Cortez Montezuma Journal reported that 39-yearold Artell had returned to the family ranch east of town after a four-year absence. “His father was killed by the Utes 25 years ago on the same ranch,” the paper noted. He never married.

Sister Madge also remained single, dying in 1905 at age 27 from kidney disease. However, younger sister Gertrude did marry and lived a long life, dying in 1965 at age 85. Her descendants are to thank for surviving pictures of the Genthners, thus putting faces to a long-ago Colorado tragedy.

Frequent Wild West contributor Jeff Broome, a retired philosophy professor who has long studied and written about the Indian wars, is based in Beulah, Colo. His latest book is Indian Raids and Massacres: Essays on the Central Plains Indian Wars (2020). Toward this article he researched period Indian depredation claims in the National Archives and the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1885, published by the Government Printing Office; Great Sage Plain to Timberline: ‘Our Pioneer History,’ Vol. 1, published by the Montezuma County Historical Society; and A History of Montezuma County, Colorado, by Ira S. Freeman.

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WHERE FREEDOM RANG For more than 50 years the town of Nicodemus, Kansas, beat the odds and its harsh surroundings to provide opportunity for former slaves and their descendants

By Jim Winnerman

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y the late 1870s the black population of the South was dismayed. The Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery with passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865 had not brought the equality or improved living conditions for which they had long hoped. Certainly, their freedom under the law was immensely significant, yet blacks remained oppressed and impoverished. Land was available for lease or purchase, but at inflated prices, and the withdrawal of Union forces left blacks unprotected from Southerners who had violently opposed emancipation. Furthermore, as most former slaves possessed few skills other than farming, the sharecropping system that arose virtually re-enslaved them as tenant farmers.

After the dozen years of Reconstruction (1865–77) a means of escaping economic bondage presented itself to Southern blacks.

The new opportunity came in the form of a budding all-black community in the Midwest, where they would be able to own land under the Homestead Act of 1862, prosper and put their past behind them.

The promised land was in Kansas, the prewar free state, vital link in the Underground Railroad and adopted home of abolitionist John Brown. More important to would-be settlers, it was readily accessible by train and boat via the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. The utopian townsite was the brainchild of an unlikely duo.

In 1877 white land speculator W.R. Hill traveled to black churches in the backwoods of Kentucky to speak of a haven in Kansas for black families. Hill told of a sparsely settled territory with abundant wild game, wild horses that could be tamed and, of course, the opportunity to own land through the homesteading process.

Adding credibility to the endeavor was Hill’s partner, black Tennessean homesteader W.H. Smith, who would become president of the Nicodemus Town Co. Among the other founders was Nashvillian Benjamin “Pap” Singleton (see sidebar, P. 67), the colony’s most active promoter. While the colony was ostensibly named for the biblical figure Nicodemus—a Pharisee who sought out Jesus and later provided the embalming fluids for his burial—it is probable the name also commemorated an eponymous black folk legend who came to America as a slave and later purchased his freedom (see sidebar, P. 68).

Posted in 1877, the earliest promotional handbill portrayed the nascent The Journey and the Place

Far left: Exodusters, mostly afoot, make the long trek to Kansas. Left: Colonists from the South homesteaded Nicodemus.

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colony as a place for blacks to establish a community of self-government complete with its own militia to keep the peace.

Nicodemus, it proclaimed, would be “The Largest Colored Colony in America.”

Another recruitment poster extended a further enticement: All Colored People that want to

GO TO KANSAS, On September 5, 1877, Can do so for $5.00

The $5 covered transportation, while $1 bought one membership in the colony. On arrival one could purchase a Nicodemus Town Co. membership certificate and a lot within Hill’s 160-acre townsite for an additional $5 or arrange to settle on homestead land for a nominal fee. For many black Southerners the offer was too good to refuse.

The first wave of settlers to reach Nicodemus, on Sept. 17, 1877, totaled 350 men, women and children from the vicinity of Lexington, Ky. Disappointment lay in store. First, the transportation for which they’d paid had not delivered as expected. A train had dropped the settlers at the closest rail stop, Ellis, 35 miles south of the townsite, leaving them to walk and drive their livestock to Nicodemus.

“Instead of jubilation, many blacks were immediately disillusioned, and rightfully so,” says Angela Bates, founder and past president of the Nico-

TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: GRANGER

It cost little to get there (see poster at right), but members of the Nicodemus colony faced further expenses (the general store stands beside the church above), including the cost to build one’s home (above right).

TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); CENTER: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY; BOTTOM: SARIN IMAGES/GRANGER

Now, to Make a Living

By Land and by River

In this colorized 1879 engraving Southern black families get a big send-off at the wharf in Vicksburg, Miss., as they venture up the Mississippi by riverboat bound for Kansas and other points north and west.

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NICODEMUS IN 1953

TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); CENTER: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY; BOTTOM: SARIN IMAGES/GRANGER

demus Historical Society and a descendant of those original settlers.

“The contrast of the parched Kansas plain was stark compared to the green hills and rich farmland of the South. There was nothing there, just a barren, stark landscape. You could see 10 miles in any direction.”

“When we got in sight of Nicodemus,” recalled follow-on settler Willina Hickman in the spring of 1878, “the men shouted, ‘There is Nicodemus!’

Being very sick, I hailed this news with gladness. I looked with all the eyes I had. I said, ‘Where is Nicodemus? I don’t see it.’ My husband pointed out various smokes coming out of the ground and said, ‘That is Nicodemus.’ The families lived in dugouts.…The scenery was not at all inviting, and I began to cry.”

Several dozen would-be pioneers returned to dim prospects in the green hills of Kentucky rather than live in such sod-roofed dugouts, constructed either by digging straight down into the bare earth or by hollowing out bluffs along the Solomon River. “Living as prairie dogs,” recalled one early settler. Many more toughed it out, despite lacking appropriate tools, clothing, food, seed and money. Some survived by selling buffalo bones found on the prairie to the fertilizer industry for $6 a ton, while others worked for the railroad in Ellis. Still others managed only with the assis-

tance of empathetic Osages, who provided food, firewood and staples.

Bates’ maternal and paternal grandparents were among those who remained, and her family has since maintained a presence in Nicodemus. At least 65 of her family members are buried in the town cemetery, and she moved back in 1989 to organize the historical society.

In the spring of 1878 Nicodemus welcomed another 150 settlers, part of an 1878–79 mass exodus of Southern blacks. Referred to as “Exodusters,” most settled in Missouri, Illinois and Kansas.

In 1870 the black population in Kansas stood at around 16,000. By 1880 it exceeded 43,000.

Despite the challenging living conditions, Willina and husband the Rev. Daniel Hickman remained, soon organizing the Mount Olive Baptist Church. Another early settler, Zachary Fletcher, became the first entrepreneur in Nicodemus, establishing a general store in 1877 and, later, the St. Francis Hotel and a livery stable. He was the town’s first postmaster, while wife Jenny served as its first postmistress and schoolteacher.

By 1880 Nicodemus had grown into a proper town, with a bank, two hotels, three churches, a drug store and three general stores ringed by a dozen square miles of cultivated land. Within a few years residents had their choice of two newspapers, the Western Cyclone or the Nicodemus Enterprise. At the time published statistics for Nicodemus Township listed 275 black citizens, 83 whites, 31 horses and 10 mules. The average homestead had 12 acres in cultivation.

TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: GRANGER

‘MOSES OF THE COLORED EXODUS’ When founded in 1877, Nicodemus predated the mass migration of blacks to Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Illinois that began in earnest a year later. Leading the Kansan “Exodusters” was Benjamin “Pap” Singleton (see photo at right).

Born a slave in Nashville, Tenn., in 1809, Singleton successfully fled to freedom in Canada in 1846 after 37 years of bondage and three unsuccessful escape attempts. A year later he migrated south to Detroit, where he operated a secret boardinghouse for fugitive slaves. In 1862, amid the Civil War, he returned to Union-occupied Tennessee, and in the immediate postwar period he increasingly encouraged and personally led freed blacks to resettle in the Midwest. Singleton brought thousands of fellow black settlers to Kansas, many to a section of Topeka known as Tennessee Town, others to the Dunlap Colony near present-day Emporia. His efforts earned him the affectionate nickname “Moses of the Colored Exodus.”

Between 1879 and ’80 black emigrants were arriving in Kansas by the hundreds each day. As the Exodusters had little or no

money, they posed a burden to many Kansas communities.

Singleton aided the Kansas Freedman’s Relief Association, founded in 1879, in raising money for their support.

In 1880 Singleton testified about the Exodusters to a Senate committee convened at the behest of white Southerners desperate to stop the loss of cheap labor fleeing the South. The committee met for three months before disbanding over partisan differences.

After a half century of activism on behalf of freedmen and their descendants, Pap Singleton died on Feb. 17, 1900, in Kansas City, Mo. —J.W. FEBRUARY 2021

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Livestock numbered 43 head of cattle and 75 hogs, while crops included 997 acres of corn, 98 acres of millet, 50 acres of sorghum and 50 acres of rice corn.

Townspeople were justly proud of the settlement they had built quite literally from the ground up. In 1887, hoping to ensure Nicodemus’ continued growth and economic viability, voters had approved the issuance of $16,000 in bonds to lure the Missouri Pacific Railroad to town. A Missouri Pacific representative had asked the township to pay for a section of line through Nicodemus, a standard arrangement between railroad companies and frontier towns.

The Cyclone was ecstatic. Boom! Boom!! Boom!!! Boom!!!!

Boom!!!!! read its headline that March 24. “Last Tuesday was a day long to be remembered in Nicodemus,” the editorial read, “for that day the people decided by an overwhelming majority that we would be a crossroads post office no longer, but that ere another year should pass, that we should develop into a town.…The boom is on. Not a mere blow, but a boom that will roll on indefinitely.” In anticipation of the coming

railroad line and depot, land sales boomed and many new businesses opened in Nicodemus.

Despite the bond issue and subsequent arrival of Missouri Pacific surveyors, however, the railroad hedged its bets and ultimately withdrew its offer to extend a line to Nicodemus. Meanwhile, the Union Pacific Railroad laid down tracks 4 miles to the southwest through a construction camp that soon took root as the town of Bogue.

‘WAKE, NICODEMUS’ The 1864 ballad “Wake, Nicodemus,” by abolitionist Henry Clay Work, likely inspired the name of Nicodemus, Kansas.

Popular in minstrel shows after the Civil War, it relates the tale of a man who was brought to America on a slave ship and later purchased his freedom. Among those who recorded the lyrics were American folk singer and actor Burl Ives and English actor and singer Tim Curry. Lyrics differ among the various versions, but here’s a representative example:

He was known as a prophet—at least was as wise, For he told of the battles to come; And we trembled with dread when he roll’d up his eyes, And we heeded the shake of his thumb.

Though he clothed us with fear, yet the garments he wore Were in patches at elbow and knee; And he still wears the suit that he used to of yore As he sleeps in the old hollow tree.

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’Twas a long weary night—we were almost in fear That the future was more than he knew; ’Twas a long weary night—but the morning is near, And the words of our prophet are true.

There are signs in the sky that the darkness is gone— There are tokens in endless array; While the storm which had seemingly banished the dawn Only hastens the advent of day.

—J.W.

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JIM WEST/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

(Chorus) The “Good Coming” is almost here!

It was long, long, long on the way!

Now run and tell Elijah to hurry up, Pomp And meet up at the gum tree down in the swamp, To wake Nicodemus today.

Nicodemus was never the sport of the lash, Though the bullet has oft cross’d his path; There were none of his masters so bold or so rash As to face such a man in his wrath.

Yet his great heart with kindness was filled to the brim— He obeyed who was born to command; And he long’d for the morning which then was so dim— For the morning which now is at hand.

DETROIT PUBLIC LIBRARY

Nicodemus, the slave, was of African birth And was bought for a bagful of gold; He was reckoned as part of the salt of the earth, But he died years ago, very old. ’Twas his last sad request—so we laid him to rest In the trunk of an old hollow tree; “Wake me up!” was his charge, “at the first break of day— Wake me up for the great jubilee.”

JIM WEST/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

DETROIT PUBLIC LIBRARY

Almost immediately, most of Nicodemus’ merchants moved their operations trackside, some taking their buildings with them.

While the loss of the railroad was a difficult blow for residents to absorb, Nicodemus soldiered on as a viable community until 1929 when the Great Depression brought economic hardship.

As prices for crops plummeted, people fled town in droves.

Further devastation followed when the Dust Bowl struck the region in the mid- to late 1930s. Overplowing of the virgin topsoil had eliminated the native prairie grasses that kept the earth moist and anchored down. Amid a recurring drought, strong prevailing winds churned up the resulting dust in huge clouds known as “black blizzards” or “black rollers.”

Centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and adjacent sections of New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas, the Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families, including those hanging on in Nicodemus, to abandon their farms, as they were unable to grow crops and pay bills. By 1935 the town that had held so much promise had shrunk to a population of just 76 clinging to a church, a community hall and a single store.

By 1950 Nicodemus had dwindled to just 16 residents. The post office closed in 1953, the lone school in 1960. In the intervening decades most of the homestead land has been sold, and there is scant evidence this was the location freed blacks settled in 1877 with the idea of attaining true freedom and self-government. Still, of the more than half dozen black settlements that sprang up in Kansas after Reconstruction, Nicodemus is the only one to survive, with a present-day population hovering around 20.

The townsite was designated a national historic landmark in 1976. Twenty years later, on Nov. 12, 1996, Congress designated Nicodemus a national historic site [nps.gov/nico]. With help from the National Park Service, Bates and other community members have committed to the preservation of Nicodemus’ historic structures and interpretation of its history. Some 5,000 annual visitors tour the townsite, about an hour’s drive northwest of Hays.

Descendants of the original settlers are often on hand at the visitor center to answer questions.

“Nicodemus is an iconic symbol for African Americans, in that it represents how blacks helped settle the American frontier long before most people realize,” Bates says. “Having an important role in American history, the townsite and remaining buildings symbolize the pioneering spirit of those ex-slaves who fled the war-torn South in search of ‘real’ freedom and a chance to restart their lives. It was also an important stepping-stone in African American migration farther west.”

Since 1878 Nicodemus residents have held an annual emancipation celebration known as “Homecoming” [nicodemushomecoming.org].

“After more than 142 years, every summer the town is crowded with as many as 500 people who return and are very proud of their heritage,” Bates explains. Come what may, Nicodemus’ next “Homecoming” is scheduled for July 29–Aug. 1, 2021.

Missouri-based freelancer Jim Winnerman is the author of more than 1,000 articles on history, art and architecture and is a frequent contributor to Wild West. For further reading he suggests Nicodemus: Post-Reconstruction Politics and Racial Justice in Western Kansas, by Charlotte Hinger; The Black Towns, by Norman I. Crockett; and “ ‘Pap’ Singleton, the Moses of the Colored Exodus,” by Walter L. Fleming, from the July 1901 issue of the American Journal of Sociology.

NICODEMUS TODAY The Nicodemus National Historic Site occupies a largely treeless Kansas plain. The only remaining structures at the old townsite are a scattering of homes, a BBQ café, a new Baptist sanctuary, a senior center and the following historic buildings: • St. Francis Hotel/Switzer Residence: Dating from 1881, this modest story-and-ahalf building served as a hotel, the town’s first post office, its first schoolhouse and a stagecoach station. It was also the home of Zach and Jenny Fletcher and family, listed among the earliest residents of Nicodemus in the 1880 federal census.

• Old First Baptist Church: This 1907 limestone church must have been a welcome addition for a congregation that had begun worship in a crude dugout in 1877 before “moving up” to a prairie sod church.

• African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church: The congregation worshipped at another site from 1878 until 1897, when it acquired the present building from the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church.

• School District No. 1: Dating from 1918, this one-room frame building (see photo above) replaced the first freestanding schoolhouse, built in 1887.

• Township Hall: Built in 1939 of locally quarried limestone, with the help of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, the hall served as both a community center and the seat of local government.

Today it houses the Nicodemus National Historic Site Visitor Center, featuring an interpretive film and local history exhibits.

—J.W. FEBRUARY 2021

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OPPOSITE PAGE: DOUGLAS L. GIFFORD; RIGHT: JOAN PENNINGTON MAP; DOUGLAS L.

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Road Less Traveled

This gravel road in Boone County, Mo., traces the route of the Boonslick Road.

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MOTHER ROAD TO THE FAR WEST To reach the jumping-off points for the great westward trails, emigrants first set out on the Boonslick Road

By Douglas L. Gifford

OPPOSITE PAGE: DOUGLAS L. GIFFORD; RIGHT: JOAN PENNINGTON MAP; DOUGLAS L.

become central Missouri. It took just 250 gallons of water to produce a bushel of salt, which in the days before refrigeration people used primarily to preserve food. Tracing some of the existing Indian trails, the Boone brothers pioneered an overland route between the saltworks and their family settlement (in present-day southern St. Charles County). The saltworks became known as Boone’s Lick, a name settlers eventually applied to the broader region, the heart of which includes the present-day central Missouri counties of Howard, Cooper, Boone, Callaway and Saline.

The Boonslick Trail—referred to as the Boonslick Road once wagons began to traverse it—initially began at the brothers’ settlement. (According to contemporary historians, the road was styled Boonslick, the salt lick and region Boone’s Lick.) Its starting point later shifted east to the bank of the Missouri on South Main Street in St. Charles— the westernmost settlement of any size in Missouri country.

From South Main Street the road followed Blanchette Creek uphill to the St. Charles commons. There it met farm roads leading east to the Cottleville and Dardenne Creek settle-

Before the settlement of Missouri country a patchwork of Indian trails traversed the region, some running hundreds of miles. One such trail network followed high ground between the headwaters of streams draining north and east to the Mississippi River and south to the Missouri River. Future settlers would use such trails when traveling from population centers out to their isolated farmsteads.

In the late 18th century entrepreneurs near the village of St. Charles, just west of the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi in SpanBoonslick Road ish Louisiana, began erecting mills to grind grain into flour and cornmeal.

Roads developed over time as millAr ers hauled their products overland to ck ro Howard Li ri River w Missou ’s Ro e market. By 1803 a well-defined road ck to Fort Osage Boone on Bo ran from St. Charles to the settlement Callaway Saline Fr Co an of Cottleville, the mills on Dardenne l kl um Fu in bi lto Creek and points farther west. This road, a n M or series of roads, would become the I eastern section of the Boonslick.

S S In 1805 Nathan Boone and Daniel O Early Route U Altered Route Morgan Boone—sons of famed frontiersman Daniel Boone—began making 0 25 50 100 miles salt at a saline spring in what would

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otorists crossing Missouri east to west on I-70 largely follow the path of the Boonslick Road. For a half century adventurous Americans set out from the Missouri River port of St. Charles along that pioneer route, once described as “the trunk from which branched the great trails to the Far West.” In the early 19th century the Boonslick opened interior Missouri to settlement. Later traders and emigrants bound for the Santa Fe, Oregon and California trails first traveled the Boonslick to jumping-off points in western Missouri—making it the mother road of westward expansion.

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TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ABOVE RIGHT: CHESTER HARDING PAINTING

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JERRYE & ROY KOTZ MD; THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI; NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; DOUGLAS L. GIFFORD; STCWALKINGTOUR.COM

ernment sought to control the flow of settlers into the region.

All travelers were required to check in at the federal customs house on South Main Street in St. Charles. There officials inspected vehicles to ensure they were serviceable. If not, an on-site blacksmith shop could repair a wagon at the ownSalt of the Earth er’s expense. Travelers intending to take the Boonslick Road Nathan and Daniel Morgan farther than 12 miles west of St. Charles also required a govBoone extracted the mineral ernment-issued pass. As emigration picked up after the War preservative from this saline spring in central Missouri. of 1812, customs officials resigned themselves to counting the number of travelers passing through St. Charles, rather than trying to stem the unstoppable flow of westbound settlers.

In 1808 Benjamin Cooper looked to settle west of Boone’s ments before merging with the route to the salt lick established Lick near Arrow Rock. As his homestead was technically in by the Boones.

In 1808 Nathan Boone guided a military expedition led by Osage country, however, Louisiana Territory Governor Meriwether Lewis ordered him back closer to the settlements.

William Clark—recently appointed a Louisiana TerriTwo years later Cooper and family returned to his tory brigadier and U.S. agent of Indian Affairs—to original farmstead, making them the first Ameriestablish a trading post in Osage country. Setcans to settle permanently at the western end ting out from St. Charles, Boone guided the solof the Boonslick Trail. Cooper and the intrepid diers along the route pioneered by the brothers. souls who followed him improved the existing Passing through Boone’s Lick, the expedition route, transforming the old Indian trails into continued west some 150 miles, crossing the the beginnings of a road. In 1810–11 hundreds Missouri at Arrow Rock, site of a future town. of settlers entered Boone’s Lick country along Boone then led the party some 70 miles farther the new highway to the West. Soon nearly 1,000 west to the site of present-day Sibley, Mo., where NATHAN BOONE settlers called Boone’s Lick home.

Clark established the Fort Osage trading post.

In the spring of 1812 less accommodating Sauk In his journal of the expedition Clark noted few and Fox warriors killed two settlers, prompting retalipeople living in the Missouri interior. Over the next ation. As violence erupted across the region, trafseveral years the migration rate remained slow, fic on the Boonslick Road came to a halt. While as the government had yet to sell public land some settlers returned east to the safety of the in the region. Such land remained cheaply settlements, most chose to brave the danger available in Indiana and Illinois territories, and remain. areas from which the feds had already reWith the coming of the War of 1812, the moved local tribes. Complicating the sale of settlers began “forting up” to defend against land in Missouri country was the fact the govexpected attacks by British-allied warriors. Alernment had yet to though the federal government established sevresolve issues regardGateway to the West WILLIAM CLARK Below: All travelers first eral volunteer Ranger companies to protect the ing land grants made checked in at the federal pioneers, there were not nearly enough soldiers to by the Spanish in the late customs house on South shield all of newly declared Missouri Territory from Indi1700s and early 1800s, before Main Street in St. Charles.

Below right: Fort Osage an attacks. Most of the frontier posts were settler forts, built the Louisiana Purchase. (rebuilt in recent decades) From the period of Spanish do- by neighboring locals for mutual protection. On the more was the proper western minion to territorial days the gov- settled eastern end of the Boonslick Trail residents built terminus of the Boonslick.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JERRYE & ROY KOTZ MD; THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI; NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; DOUGLAS L. GIFFORD; STCWALKINGTOUR.COM

St. Charles, Missouri

Depicted in an 1869 bird’s-eye view, this St. Charles County burg anchored the eastern end of the Boonslick Road.

the presence of foreign investors, scouting the region for a possible settlement.

Traffic on the Boonslick Road brought immediate prosperity to Franklin, which in 1817 became the seat of newly established Howard County. By the time Missouri was admitted to the Union in 1821, Franklin boasted a population of some 1,500 people, makIn the summer of 1815 leaders from most of the Indian ing it the second-largest city in nations in Missouri country and the upper Mississippi Valthe state. Meanwhile, the populaley traveled to Portage des Sioux, just upstream from tion of the broader Boone’s Lick St. Louis, to sign a treaty with the U.S. government. Terms region reached 20,000. Where of the agreement called for the removal of Indians from there had been only wilderness five most of Missouri Territory. With the coming of peace, settlers MARY SIBLEY years before, by statehood the area swarmed into the Boone’s Lick country, traveling west from accounted for one in every three resiSt. Charles along the Boonslick Road. As traffic increased, inns dents living in Missouri. and taverns sprang up to provide food, drink, lodging and other In 1818 the federal government established services to travelers. Settlements often grew up around such businesses.

In other cases entrepreneurs purchased prime land along the Boonslick a land office in Franklin and began to settle and platted towns. The commercial advantages were manifest. While claims and sell government parcels in Boone’s delivering a steady supply of westbound customers, the road afforded easy Lick. By the early 1820s many of the original transportation to markets in the more settled eastern reaches of Missouri. settlers used the right of pre-emption to purAt the time Franklin was the westernmost settlement in the territory. chase the land on which they’d been “squatIn a February 1816 letter to her father, Mary Sibley—wife of George ting.” Another 300 settlers up north from New Sibley, the factor at Fort Osage—deemed the Boone’s Lick region “one of Madrid used general land claims issued in the the most promising settlements in the Western country.” (George Sibley aftermath of a series of 1811–12 earthquakes to later surveyed the Santa Fe Trail, which originally began in Franklin, for obtain land in Boone’s Lick. The region filled the U.S. government.) A Baptist minister traveling the region in 1816 up fast.

In the spring of 1820 Major Stephen Harriman concurred, writing, “No town west of St. Louis gave better promise for rapid growth than Franklin.” That summer Boone’s Lick residents noted Long led a team of soldiers and scientists into the

TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ABOVE RIGHT: CHESTER HARDING PAINTING

Forts Pond, Zumwalt, Kennedy, Coontz and Journey, among others.

On the sparsely settled western end of the Boonslick they built Forts Cooper, Hempstead and Kinkead. Cooper’s Fort, nearest the saltworks, was the largest and most important post in the region, housing 20 families and many single men during the war. An Indian attack on the fort in 1814 represented the westernmost military action during the War of 1812.

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West. Setting out from St. Louis, the party traveled along the Boonslick Road to Franklin. From there they explored the headwaters of the Platte River, then ventured south into what would become Colorado. Their exploration of the Great Plains— which Long termed the “Great American Desert” —and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains added greatly to the knowledge of geography, zoology and natural resources of the region.

The role of the Boonslick Road in westward expansion entered a new phase in 1821 when Franklin resident William Becknell, facing significant debt, organized an 1821 caravan of packhorses to transport trade goods to Santa Fe.

Not Forgotten

The Daughters of the American Revolution placed many markers along the Boonslick.

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As the Boone’s Lick country became settled, the path of the Boonslick Road altered course to run through the various settlements

DOUGLAS L. GIFFORD

This building may have served as the original legislative hall in St. Charles, which from 1821 to ‘26 was Missouri’s first state capital.

DOUGLAS L. GIFFORD (2)

Onetime Capital City

Bucknell’s caravan proved a great success. The traders returned flush with furs, blankets, mules and Mexican silver, reaping a twentyfold profit. The following year Becknell organized a second convoy using ox-drawn covered wagons packed with 10 times as many trade goods. Other traders soon followed Becknell’s route, which became known as the Santa Fe Trail (marking its 200th anniversary this year).

Through the 1820s many of the trade wagons destined for Santa Fe passed through Franklin.

Although the Boonslick Road technically ended in Franklin, westbound travelers had been using the onward Missouri stretch of Becknell’s route since the Clark party passed through in 1808.

By 1815 a ferry at Arrow Rock was already carrying travelers across the river into the western half of the territory. For all practical purposes, then, the Boonslick’s proper western terminus was actually Fort Osage, some 200 miles west of St. Charles.

The first steamboat to reach Franklin arrived on May 28, 1819, bringing sugar, whiskey, flour and iron castings from St. Louis. Although the residents of Boone’s Lick were hopeful, a full decade would pass before there was regular steamboat traffic on the Missouri River. In the interim most of the settlers, traders and freight bound for the Far West plied the Boonslick Road.

While pioneers on the western end of the Boonslick were settling the country and striking out on ambitious trading enterprises, residents on its crowded eastern end sought to convince Missouri officials to declare the route a state road. Almost annually from 1816 residents of St. Charles County had petitioned the court to have their favorite route at least declared a county road. As historian Kate Gregg described the situation, “Farmers on any road leading directly or indirectly from St. Charles toward the west desired exceedingly to have their own particular road declared the official road for westward immigration.”

Every year or two the St. Charles County court established a new commission to survey an official route for the Boonslick Road. While some years these commissions failed to conduct a survey, even when they did, locals were disappointed with their half-hearted efforts. Finally, in 1827 Missouri officials designated the Boonslick a state road. Perhaps feeling the pressure, that same year a county-appointed survey established the official route of the Boonslick through St. Charles County— a course corresponding closely to the earliest track through the county.

In early 1831 Mormon missionaries traveled the Boonslick Road en route to establish Indian missions in what today is Kansas. Later that year prophet Joseph Smith walked the length of the Boonslick from St. Louis to visit the site of future Kansas City. Smith returned the next year, trailed by a wave of Mormon migration that persisted through decade’s end.

The earliest emigrants bound for the Northwest on the Oregon Trail left Independence, Mo., in 1836. In 1841 the Bartleson-Bidwell emigrant party branched off the Oregon to journey south along the California Trail. By then steamboats provided service upriver from St. Louis to Independence, Kansas City, Leavenworth and other jumping-off points. Even so, many drove their wagons into Missouri from points East, while others purchased wagons in St. Louis and set out overland along the Boonslick Road headed for the Santa Fe, Oregon and California trails.

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DOUGLAS L. GIFFORD DOUGLAS L. GIFFORD (2)

that popped up. The road in turn stimulated the transformation of such settlements as Columbia and Fulton into regionally important towns.

By 1821 settlers had tamed the Boonslick well enough to enable stagecoach service to Franklin, though initially there was not enough business to keep it going. Stagecoach traffic resumed in 1823, providing transport between St. Louis and Franklin. A one-way fare cost $10.50—quite a sizable sum for those days. Business continued to lag, and several stagecoach companies went bust in the 1820s. Service gradually improved, and by 1850 there was regular service along the Boonslick between St. Louis and western Missouri. By stagecoach it took three days to travel the 125 miles to Columbia—the largest town in the Boone’s Lick country.

By the end of the Civil War those bound for the Far West seldom started out on the Boonslick Road. But local stage, wagon and buggy traffic continued to use the route into the 20th century. The earliest automobile roads also traced portions of the Boonslick. In 1925 the federal government began surveying routes for a national highway system. That chosen for U.S. Highway 40—the nation’s first truly transcontinental roadway— began in Atlantic City, N.J., and ended in San Francisco. As it passed through Missouri, the highway traced the old Boonslick Road. Construction of Highway 40 actually began in St. Charles, just yards from the historic road. Since replacing the highway through much of the state is I-70—the first such route to receive funding as part of the Interstate Highway System of 1956. Today the interstate continues the legacy of the original Boonslick, enabling the westbound flow of commerce and travelers.

In the early 20th century the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a series of granite markers at sites of historic importance along the remaining sections of the Boonslick Road. Today the nonprofit Boone’s

Lick Road Association continues to preserve the history of the mother trail into the American West. Its members are working to have the route declared a national historic trail, equaling in status the Santa Fe, Oregon and California trails, each of which the Boonslick birthed.

Although the Boone brothers were the first Anglo Americans to blaze the trail that became the Boonslick Road, no single person or company promoted its ongoing development. The route developed over time in response to the needs of pioneers and settlers, soldiers, farmers and merchants, creating what historian Stanley Kimball proclaimed the “granddad of all trans-Mississippi trails to the Far West.”

Retired Major Douglas L. Gifford is an Army-trained military historian who writes about American history.

He lives in Missouri not far from the Boonslick Road.

For further reading he recommends Mapping the Boone’s Lick Road, by David P. Sapp; Along the Boone’s Lick Road: Missouri’s Contribution to Our First Transcontinental Route—U.S. Highway 40, by Dan A. Rothwell; and Westward With Dragoons: The Journal of William Clark on His Expedition to Fort Osage, August 25 to September 22, 1808, by Kate Gregg.

Road Well Traveled

These ruts in Callaway County, Mo., also trace the onetime route of the Boonslick Road.

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COLLECTIONS

Best known for his roles in such Westerns as The Train Robbers (1973), Ben Johnson appeared in more than 300 films all told.

THE REAL ‘REEL COWBOY’ THE BEN JOHNSON COWBOY MUSEUM IN PAWHUSKA CELEBRATES THE OKLAHOMA RANCH HAND, RODEO PERFORMER AND HOLLYWOOD STAR

BY LINDA WOMMACK

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f the thousands of actors who The son of Osage County ranchers Ben and played cowboys in 20th-cenOllie Johnson, Francis Benjamin Johnson Jr. was tury films, few gave a more born on June 13, 1918, in Foraker, Okla., on the accurate portrayal than Ben Osage Indian Reservation. Ben enjoyed ranching Johnson, who worked steadily in Hollywood and, even more, rodeoing alongside his father, from the late 1930s right up until his death a steer-roping legend. He may have followed the from a heart attack at age 77 on April 8, 1996. rodeo circuit as a career had it not been for a In 2019 a museum that does his memory chance encounter in 1939 with horse buyers sent justice opened in Johnson’s hometown of

by Howard Hughes, who was preparing to film Pawhuska, in the heart of Oklahoma’s Osage the Western The Outlaw. Johnson, a $30-a-month BEN JOHNSON County, which is definitely cowboy and cowhand on the ranch that sold Hughes the horses, girl country. The Ben Johnson Cowboy Muwas offered $300 to deliver them to the studio staseum honors its namesake with entertaining exhibits and mem- bles in Hollywood. Taking a shine to the wrangler, Hughes offered orabilia and also presents items of local interest. According to Johnson $175 a week to train the horses and tend them on locathe museum, Johnson is the only person to have won both an tion in Arizona. While waiting for filming on The Outlaw to begin, Academy Award (best supporting actor in 1971 for his role as Sam Johnson did stunt work for the 1939 Western The Fighting Gringo. the Lion in The Last Picture Show) and a Professional Rodeo Cow“They decided I rode a horse pretty good,” he recalled, “so boys Association world championship (in team roping in 1953). they put me in the Screen Actors Guild, and I went to work as a

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BEN JOHNSON COWBOY MUSEUM (5)

COLLECTIONS

wrangler, stuntman and as a double for actors like John Wayne, Joel McCrea and Jimmy Stewart.”

Johnson remained in Hollywood, doing stunts, wrangling horses and doubling actors through the 1940s. His break came when famed director John Ford hired him for stunt work and to double Henry Fonda in the 1948 Western Fort Apache, costarring John Wayne. On location in Monument Valley, Arizona, horses pulling a wagon carrying three stuntmen stampeded, and a quick-thinking Johnson rode in to stop the runaways. Recognizing talent and wanting to reward the wrangler for his heroism, Ford offered Johnson a seven-year, $5,000-a-week contract. Johnson signed it on the spot. The director soon cast him in the other two pictures of Ford’s “Cavalry Trilogy”—She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), also featuring Wayne. Those films confirmed Johnson’s riding ability. In the 1950 Ford film Wagon Master he and co-star Harry Carey Jr. did their own stunts and riding, but Johnson also debuted his trademark naturalistic acting style.

Hollywood stardom aside, Johnson still had rodeoing in his blood. In 1949 he’d set a record at Pendleton, Ore., when he roped and tied a calf in 12.5 seconds with a 60-foot score. “I really thought I was something,” Johnson said. “I got in a position where I could afford to travel, so I decided to see just what I could do.” In 1953 he took a year off from filmmaking to join the rodeo circuit, joining pals Buckshot Sorrells and Andy Jauregui in the team-roping event. “That was the year everybody else had hard luck,” he recalled. “I beat them out and won the world. I came home with a championship, and I didn’t have $3. All I had was a wore-out automobile and a mad wife. Fortunately, they let me back in the picture business.”

Did they ever. Johnson appeared in more than 300 movies overall, the highlight being his per-

formance in The Last Picture Show, a coming-of-age Western set in the 1950s and based on a Larry McMurtry novel of the same name. “The Academy Award changed my whole life,” Johnson recalled. “You win one of those Oscars, and all at once people think you know something. You don’t know any more than you did before, but they think you do. And the studios offer you more jobs for a lot more money.”

Johnson was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in 1982 was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Just over 100 years after his birth the Ben Johnson Cowboy Museum opened its doors. The 10,000-square-foot exhibit space pays tribute not only to Ben and his father, a topnotch rodeo performer in his own right, but also to other world champion cowboys and cowgirls from Pawhuska country. Cowboy artists and craftsmen also have a place in the museum, which displays a wide array of cowpuncher clothing, saddles, tack, belt buckles, ropes and spurs. Fans of Hollywood Westerns will delight in the photos of Johnson with such fellow screen legends as Wayne, Fonda and Tom Selleck.

Johnson is buried beside his parents, sister and other family members at the Pawhuska City Cemetery. The town is home to the Ben Johnson Monument, local sculptor John D. Free’s 14-foot-tall (1 ¼-size) bronze of Johnson on horseback roping a steer. Pawhuska also hosts the annual Ben Johnson Memorial Steer Roping event and the International Roundup Cavalcade, the world’s largest amateur rodeo. For more info about the museum visit benjohnsoncowboymuseum.com or call 918-287-9922.

Top left: The museum displays many saddles inscribed with Johnson’s name. Top right: The museum holds a smaller version of John D. Free’s bronze of the rodeo star on horseback roping a steer. Above: Johnson wore this hat in 1953 when he took a year off from filmmaking and became a world champ in team roping.

Ford offered Johnson a sevenyear, $5,000a-week contract.

Johnson signed it on the spot

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GUNS OF THE WEST

1878 Arizona Ranger Captain Burton C. Mossman’s Colt Model 1878 is a double-action revolver with gutta-percha grips and his name engraved on the backstrap.

A COLT FROM OLD ARIZONA BURTON C. MOSSMAN, FIRST CAPTAIN OF THE RE-ESTABLISHED ARIZONA RANGERS, ONCE OWNED THIS ENGRAVED MODEL 1878

BY GEORGE LAYMAN

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the organization received enough funds to mong the stampede of TV Westsupply each Ranger with adequate firearms erns in the late 1950s was the forand other supplies. It initially comprised a gotten series 26 Men, which starred captain (paid $120 a month), a sergeant ($75 Tristram Coffin as the real-life Capa month) and a dozen privates ($55 a month tain Thomas H. Rynning and ran 78 episodes, each). The first captain was not Rynning (he from October 1957 to June 1959. The show was was the second) but Burton C. Mossman, who based on the case files of the Arizona Rangers, assumed command that August 30. lawmen who operated in the first decade of the Governor Murphy knew he could rely on 20th century and were known as the “Arizona Mossman, who had gained a reputation for 26,” as the Legislature limited the group’s active BURTON C. MOSSMAN battling outlaws and hardcore cattle rustlers. membership to 26 men.

Born on April 30, 1867, near Aurora, Ill., There were earlier iterations of the Arizona Rangers. In 1860 the provisional government formed the Ari- Mossman moved with his family to Missouri in 1873, then on to zona Territorial Rangers, mostly to protect citizens against New Mexico Territory in 1882. Two years later he signed on raiding Apaches. They disbanded in 1862 when Arizona be- with Arizona Territory’s Aztec Land & Cattle Co., aka the “Hash came a Confederate territory, though that year Governor John Knife Outfit,” working his way up to ranch foreman by age 20 Baylor formed Company A, Arizona Rangers, the first of three and superintendent in 1897. Not one to remain idle, Mossman such companies to serve the Confederacy. In April 1882 Gov- operated a stagecoach line with a partner, and in 1898 he was ernor Frederick Tritle sought to check lawlessness in the terri- elected sheriff of Navajo County.

That March the sheriff and a deputy were out stalking a gang tory by forming a company of Arizona Rangers in Tombstone, but they never received funding, were largely ineffectual and of rustlers when three men opened fire from ambush, one bullet grazing Mossman’s nose, two others striking his saddle horn and soon faded from history.

In March 1901 the territory authorized a new iteration of cutting his reins. But he didn’t back down. In June he arrested the Arizona Rangers (that depicted in the 1950s TV show), rustler Rufus Nephew—a wiry bandit known as “Climax Jim” as rampant lawlessness was thwarting Arizona’s statehood am- because he favored Climax Chewing Tobacco—and jailed him bitions. This time Governor Nathan Oakes Murphy saw to it in St. Johns, the Apache County seat. Alas, it was all for naught, FEBRUARY 2021

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GUNS OF THE WEST

as that very night Climax Jim, the “Houdini of the Old West,” picked the lock on his cell and made good his escape.

On accepting his 1901 appointment as captain of the Arizona Rangers, Mossman made his headquarters in Bisbee. There he assembled a group of tough lawmen who operated under the military code of Arizona Territory, similar to a militia. His most notable exploit was a 1902 expedition into Mexico, during which, with a mercenary assist from train robber Burt Alvord, he captured Augustine Chacon, the ruthless leader of a murderous band of outlaws that raided on both sides of the border. Mossman managed to make it back to Arizona with Chacon, whose bloody career ended atop a hangman’s scaffold in Solomonville that November 21.

Mossman’s Rangers carried the latest in firearms, including such reliable long arms as the Winchester Model 1894 in .30-30 Winchester caliber and both the Marlin Model 1895 and Winchester Model 1895 in .30-40 Krag, the U.S. Army’s standard caliber at the time. Mossman is believed to have preferred the Winchester Model 1895, while his favorite sidearm was a fully engraved .45-caliber Colt Single Action Army that sported pearl grips and a 5½-inch barrel.

In the summer of 1902 Murphy stepped down amid allegations of fraud so President Theodore Roosevelt could appoint their mutual friend and fellow Rough Rider Alexander Oswald Brodie territorial governor. Mossman also expected to be replaced. That didn’t happen, but Mossman hadn’t intended to make a career of the Arizona Rangers, so in July he resigned.

Rynning, who had served in the Army at the tail end of the Indian wars and again as another of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders against the Spanish in 1898, took over the post. In March 1903 the territory authorized the Rangers to up their complement to 26 men. Meanwhile, Mossman entered business in Bisbee and later bought the Diamond A Ranch near Roswell, N.M. where he died with his boots off at age 89 on Sept. 5, 1956. While Captain Rynning was the star of 26 Men, Captain Mossman was portrayed by Rory Calhoun in the 1963 Death

Valley Days episode “The Measure of a Man,” which related the capture of Chacon.

While the Single Action Army was Mossman’s favorite sidearm, he also owned a Colt Model 1878 double-action revolver, now part of a collection.

Engraved on the backstrap is Captain B.C. Mossman , so he may have obtained it during his time with the Arizona Rangers, which disbanded in 1909 after having employed 107 men over its sevenplus-year existence. The force may have presented the Colt to Mossman in appreciation for his year of service.

The revolver was officially known as the Model 1878 D.A. “Frontier.” Between 1878 and 1905 Colt made 51,210 of them in five standard calibers (.3220, .38-40, .41 Colt, .44-40 Winchester and .45 Colt), as well as the .476 Eley and .44 Russian, which were popular in Europe. The Mexican government bought 500 Model 1878s in 1890, and in the 1910s and ’20s the Western Costume Co., a Hollywood theatrical and prop company, bought a number of them for use in silent-era Westerns.

The present-day owner of Mossman’s doubleaction Colt is Larry Zeug, a noted antique gun collector and armorer for several Western TV and film productions. He keeps the revolver stored with replacement pearl grips, as the original guttapercha (hard rubber) grips became brittle over time and are stored separately to better preserve them.

Its new owner has yet to solve the riddle of when, where and how Mossman received this beautifully engraved Model 1878, but it is well preserved and, of course, Zeug is delighted to have it.

While the Single Action Army was Mossman’s favorite sidearm, he also owned a Colt Model 1878 doubleaction revolver

As this detail shows, Captain Mossman’s Model 1878 remains beautifully engraved.

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GHOST TOWNS

OSCO, NEBRASKA

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xcept in the minds of most locals, Osco never was a town, but rather a rural community. Danish Baptist settlers were among the first to arrive in southern Kearney County in the 1870s. By 1882 church services had graduated from neighbors’ homes to the Rev. Carl Jensen’s place. His 40 congregants helped build the First Danish Baptist Church in 1892, where services and religious events were held in Danish until 1918.

Civil War veterans also factored large in Osco’s founding.

Illinois-born Corporal Lewis T. Meyer, who joined the Union Army at age 17 in 1861, arrived in the area in 1873, built a sod house and planted 7 acres of corn, only to watch helplessly as locusts devoured that first crop. For meat he and his family relied on buffalo and antelope. Meyer held on to become a postmaster and county supervisor. Another Illinois-born veteran, Dan McCurdy, returned to farming after being wounded in battle. Tragically, on May 24, 1903, he, his brother, his eldest daughter and two neighbors were killed by a passing tornado.

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At top is Osco’s old Baptist church, which was moved to Minden, Neb., and became a private residence. Above is the schoolhouse in 1995.

British-born veteran Isaac Fountain mustered out of the Union Army in 1865 and homesteaded in Osco in 1874. He later served as postmaster, founding director of the school board and first chairman of the cemetery association.

In 1875 those early pioneers bought a 5-acre tract from the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad for $25. That same year they opened both a school and a post office along the busy Lowell-Riverton road. When residents petitioned for postal status, they suggested the name Roscoe, but as that was taken, they settled for dropping the first and last letters, hence Osco.

E.M. Wells was the first postmaster. When he died two years later, sheep rancher Robert H. Chambers took over the mail.

The school, Osco District No. 6, opened in a sod structure, soon replaced by a proper one-room frame schoolhouse. In 1885 the teacher was 17-year-old Mary Jayne, barely older than her charges. An addition in 1891 nearly doubled the size of the building. The schoolhouse erected in 1937 is the only building left in Osco today.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF LES KRUGER (4)

DESPITE NOT GETTING THE RAILROAD OR EVER BECOMING A ‘GROWING CITY,’ THIS FARM COMMUNITY THRIVED FOR A TIME

BY LES KRUGER

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GHOST TOWNS

The school, Osco District No. 6, opened in a sod structure, soon replaced by a proper one-room frame schoolhouse

Neighbors congregate at the Osco schoolhouse on Decoration Day 1907.

Its 1937 replacement is the last surviving building.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF LES KRUGER (4)

three brothers, all of whom were Osco Cemetery, still in use, killed by horses. was established in 1876 when the Osco does have one claim to school district deeded 2 acres for fame—or rather, two claims to a burial ground. Among the first infamy. It was the mailing adinterments was that of 4-yeardress of homesteaders David old Frankie Chambers, the postand Susan Maxwell, parents of master’s daughter. Plots sold for two of the most wanted killers in $1.50. Within 20 years the price the Midwest—brothers Edward had risen to $8, and by 1959 they and Alonzo, alias the Williams went for $20. In 1995 the Osco GEORGE MAXWELL brothers. In two separate inciCemetery Association erected a dents in 1881 they killed three monument to honor local veterans and published a book to commemorate Osco’s lawmen—Pepin County Sheriff Charles Coleman and his brother, Dunn County Deputy Sheriff pioneer soldiers.

Under the guise of a “growing city” (as post- Milton Coleman, in Durand, Wis., on July 10; master Meyer put it), Osco sought to persuade and Sheriff John Lammy of Calhoun County, Ill., the railroad to come through. While the idea ulti- on September 25. The Maxwells had made their mately failed, the effort drew local families closer, way back to Nebraska that November 12 when Ed and the farming community grew. In addition was captured, near Grand Island, and extradited to the Baptist church and the school, it had a grist to Wisconsin. A week later a Durand lynch mob mill and a blacksmith’s shop, not to mention a strung him up. Lon vanished and is lost to history. busy bricklayer, a notary public and an attorney. Their parents are (presumably not) at rest in the Three doctors are known to have practiced in Osco Cemetery.

Another Maxwell brother made headlines with Osco, each suffering sorrowful fates. In 1878 Dr. John W. Hollenbeck, a specialist in “female dis- a gun in a far more positive light. George Maxwell eases,” advertised his willingness to attend all was a renowned trapshooter. In his first year of calls day or night. A heavy drinker, he died in competition he won the 1903 Midwest champion1884 from “an epileptic fit.” Hollenbeck’s one- ship, and he went on to win dozens of local, state time medical student, Dr. Moses E. McCray, ar- and national accolades. What makes his success rived in 1880 and served residents until an un- all the more remarkable is that George had lost specified eye disease partially blinded him. Dr. John his left arm in an 1898 hunting accident. In 2006 P. Gilman, who treated both humans and ani- he was inducted into the Trapshooting Hall of mals, served the community until kicked to death Fame. Curiously, none of the three brothers are in 1884 by an equine patient. He was the last of mentioned in the Osco Cemetery records.

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REVIEWS

MUST SEE, MUST READ JEFF BROOME PICKS CENTRAL PLAINS–RELATED BOOKS AND FILMS

Life of George Bent: Written From His Letters (1968, edited by Savoie Lottinville): More than a century ago Bent wrote these letters to historian George E. Hyde. They languished in the archives of the Denver Public Library until Lottinville discovered them and had them published.

The mixed-blood son of trader William Bent, George was first married to the daughter of Black Kettle’s wife, Medicine Woman Later. Wounded at Sand Creek, he participated in many Indian raids over the ensuing five years.

While Bent shares much on the Central Plains war, he writes as much fiction as fact, leaving the reader to dig deeper for the truth.

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“Sand Creek: Tragedy and Symbol” (1984, by Gary L. Roberts): One cannot study the Central Plains Indian war without a thorough knowledge of the Nov. 29, 1864, Sand Creek massacre.

Roberts’ unpublished doctoral dissertation, available to researchers through the academic portal ProQuest [proquest. com/umi], remains the most thorough presentation of primary source documents related to the Colorado Territory massacre of Cheyennes and Arapahos. Reading alongside the three government investigations brought on by the indiscriminate murder of scores of women and children by a handful of volunteer soldiers, one gains a good understanding of why war persisted on the Central Plains for five years after Sand Creek. The government documents are in Sand Creek Massacre: A Documentary History (1973, compiled by John M. Carroll).

The Military Conquest of the Southern Plains (1963, by William H. Leckie): This book establishes the ties between southern tribes (Kiowa and Comanche) and Central Plains tribes (Cheyenne, Arapaho and southern Lakota). Leckie admirably wades through primary source documents in presenting the Central Plains Indian war with a focus on the military response to Indian raids.

The Southern Cheyennes (1963, by Donald J. Berhtrong): A fine complement to Leckie’s book, Berhtrong’s study is a comprehensive presentation of Cheyenne history from its known roots up through the tribe’s last big fight in Texas, at Adobe Walls on June 27, 1874.

Washita Memories: Eyewitness Views of Custer’s Attack on Black Kettle’s Village (2006, by Richard G. Hardorff): The Central Plains Indian war cannot ignore

Lt. Col. George Custer’s Nov. 27, 1868, attack on Black Kettle’s village, in which the Southern Cheyenne chief and more than 100 of his warriors were slain. While Hardorff references most of the original documents related to the clash, he does leave out a key report by Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan as well as relevant Indian depredation claims that counter his introduction, in which he condemns the military strike against Black Kettle.

MOVIES Hostiles (2017, on DVD and Blu-ray, Entertainment Studios): Christian Bale stars as Joseph Blocker, a captain with orders to return Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), a terminally ill Cheyenne chief he fought in the Central Plains Indian war, to Montana to die in peace. The film is set a decade too late (1892), and the plot is complete fiction.

Regardless, each episode in their journey touches on metaphorical truths related to the Indian wars of the 1860s– 70s. Included are attacks on innocent settlers, and a survivor having to endure a twisted Eastern view of “Lo, the poor Indian” from a commanding officer’s ignorant wife. Soldiers and Indians confront their own respective bitterness over a long and cruel war. The enduring hatred of affected ranchers, animus of one Indian tribe for another, the senseless loss of life on both sides—all transport the viewer from one perplexing and painful scene to the next.

The Searchers (1956, on DVD and Blu-ray, Warner Bros.): John Wayne’s favorite Western, and arguably the best from director John Ford, The Searchers centers on an uncle’s relentless efforts

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to rescue his niece from her Indian captors. The raiders are identified as Comanches, and the plot unfolds in Texas. That said, Dan LeMay, son of the author on whose book the film is based, believes father Alan was inspired by stories a grandmother had recounted of Cheyenne raids in north-central Kansas in 1868 and ’69 (see Dan LeMay’s Alan LeMay: A Biography of the Author of The Searchers).

While fictional, the film authentically portrays the treacherous tactics of Indian raiders, as well as the dark fate that often befell captive females.

The Missing (2003, on DVD and Blu-ray, Sony Pictures): Ron Howard directs this fictional thriller centered on a grueling journey to rescue a girl from her Indian captors. Cate Blanchett plays Maggie, a frontier mother singlehandedly raising two daughters in 1880s New Mexico Territory. When her daughter is taken, she is forced to seek help from her estranged father (Tommy Lee Jones), who’d left his own wife and family to live with Indians. Howard does a good job of showing the cruelty of Indian captivity, while Blanchett and Jones turn in powerful performances.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007, on DVD, HBO Films): While this film is not directly related to the Central Plains Indian

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war, covering events affecting the northern Lakotas, it does powerfully convey the violence of the American Indian wars and the devastating loss of tribal culture.

Last of the Dogmen (1995, on DVD, Savoy Pictures): Opening with the modern-day discovery of an old-fashioned Cheyenne arrow, this film weaves the fictional tale of a band of Dog Soldiers that escaped the Sand Creek massacre and survived the intervening decades undiscovered in the backcountry of the Rocky Mountains.

This film is pure fantasy and has nothing to do with the Central Plains Indian war, but it is an absorbing story with credible performances from Tom Berenger and Barbara Hershey.

BOOK REVIEWS The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal and the Creation of Buffalo Bill, by Julia Bricklin, TwoDot, Helena, Mont., and Guilford, Conn., 2020, $26.95 In 1844 Edward Zane Carroll Judson took the

pseudonym Ned Buntline (a buntline is a rope for securing the foot of a square-rigger’s unfurled sail), and he went on to become a larger-than-life figure, even as he did the same for William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody.

No, Buntline didn’t invent the moniker “Buffalo Bill,” but he did help elevate the Western scout to national fame with his 1869 serial novel Buffalo Bill, the King of the BorderMen, and in 1872 he convinced Cody to come east and perform in a play he’d written (The Scouts of the Prairie, and Red Deviltry As It Is). “Buffalo Bill, one of America’s brightest stars,” writes Julia Bricklin in her introduction, “came from one of its darkest minds.”

His association with Cody is Buntline’s greatest claim to fame, but only four of his countless dime novels are about the onetime scout.

“Judson’s Westerns were a small part of his output, but they were the most enduring,” writes Bricklin, whose feature article “The Many Wives of Ned Buntline” ran in the February 2019 Wild West.

Yes, Bricklin has much more to say about Buntline’s many wives (at least eight) in this well-written biography. Buntline lived the last 15 years of his life in the Catskills with last wife Anna Fuller Judson, who was 30 years his junior, but when he died, two more women surfaced claiming to have been married to him.

While Buntline special-

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ized in adventure fiction, in his personal life he sought out real adventures.

He fought Seminole Indians in Florida, served in the Union Army during the Civil War, helped instigate the bloody 1849 Astor Place Riot in New York City, became a leader of the KnowNothing party and lectured against alcohol, though he was known to go on drinking binges.

Buntline was one of the most popular American fiction writers of the 19th century. “While his works did not display the literary artistry of Mark Twain or Nathaniel Hawthorne,” writes Bricklin. “they certainly rivaled or even beat Twain or Hawthorne in terms of contemporary readership.”

Historian and writer Clay Reynolds deemed Buntline’s pulp fiction “utterly horrid,” but Bricklin suggests the so-called “King of the Dime Novel” paved the way for popular writers Owen Wister and Zane Grey, who proved major forces in shaping the myths of the Old West. If nothing else Buntline was a bundle of contradictions. In Bricklin’s estimation he was a philanthropist, bibliophile, naturalist, proponent of law and order and supporter of civic institutions as 84 WILD WEST

well as a bigamist, slanderer, blackmailer, liar, deadbeat, philander, murderer and fugitive from justice. He was, she concludes, “the human embodiment of America’s complicated past and its struggles with racism, its treatment of native peoples and women, and its efforts to both tame and conserve natural resources.”

How much Buntline helped “create” Buffalo Bill Cody, the most legendary Westerner of them all, is debatable, but there’s no doubt Buntline himself was a remarkable, albeit highly flawed, figure in his own right—if he didn’t say so himself.

—Editor

The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull and the Resistance of the Free Lakotas,

by Robert M. Utley, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2020, $24.49 “The Sioux chief Sitting Bull,” Robert Utley writes in the preface to The Last Sovereigns, “is arguably the greatest Indian

chief of all the tribes that roamed the American West in the 19th century.” This isn’t new ground for the writer considered the dean of Western historians. Utley’s best-selling The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (Henry Holt & Co., 1993) was a History Book Club main selection, earned a rave review from The New York Times and received a Spur Award from Western Writers of America.

In The Last Sovereigns, however, Utley focuses on events after the June 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, in which Lakota and Cheyenne warriors wiped out the main command of George Armstrong Custer’s 7th U.S. Cavalry. At the time white Americans reviled Sitting Bull as the man who killed Custer and demanded the Army bring him to justice.

That’s what prompted him and roughly 1,000 of his followers to flee to Canada, where they remained at peace before surrendering to U.S. authorities in 1881 and returning to their Dakota Territory homeland. Sitting Bull was ultimately killed by his own people on South Dakota’s Standing Rock Reservation on Dec. 15, 1990.

Utley details the complex relationships between Sitting Bull

and James Morrow Walsh, a major in Canada’s North-West Mounted Police who befriended the Lakota leader, and Jean Louis Legaré, Walsh’s replacement, who pressured Sitting Bull to return to the United States.

This is a nonfiction work from an academic publisher, but Utley writes with conviction about human beings. A slim book (166 pages, including notes, bibliography and index), The Last Sovereigns is an informative and enlightening narrative told by a master (for more about Utley see the interview with him on P. 16).

—Johnny D. Boggs Indian Raids and Massacres: Essays on the Central Plains Indian War,

by Jeff Broome, Caxton Press, Caldwell, Idaho, 2020, $34.95 All 13 chapters in this well-researched 506-page book deal with unpleasant and painful events on the frontier, as the title makes manifest. The victims are pioneers and soldiers. The perpetrators are American Indians.

In his preface Jeff Broome acknowledges there is another side—the Indian side—to the five-year (beginning in early August 1864) Cheyenne war he calls the Central Plains Indian war. “The painful

events [Indians] endured is no less great than what was experienced on the other side,” writes Broome, who has been published in Wild West and other magazines and also wrote the wellreceived history Dog Solder Justice: The Ordeal of Susanna Alderdice in the Kansas Indian War. The Indians could see their eventual doom, he notes, as white settlers had nothing to offer the natives except cultural loss. “Conflict was inevitable,” Broome concludes.

The rest of his book relates war stories in chronological order from the perspective of white Americans.

Each chapter was originally published elsewhere, but Broome has updated them all with findings from recent scholarship.

In the first chapter he provides new information on the June 1864 Hungate massacre in Elbert County, Colorado Territory. For this and accounts that follow he draws on Indian depredation claims preserved at the

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National Archives in Washington, D.C. Historians have cited the Hungate massacre as the catalyst that drove Governor John Evans to create the 3rd Colorado Cavalry, the force that exacted bloody vengeance at Sand Creek that November 29. But as Broome points out, Evans acted only after a series of Indian raids against ranchers along Nebraska Territory’s Little Blue River and Plum Creek August 7–9. The author spends two chapters relating those devastating raids, following up with chapters about Sand Creek, the captive Fletcher sisters, Lt. Col. George Custer’s summer campaign of

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1867 and the “massacre” of 2nd Lt. Lyman S. Kidder, 10 men of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry and their guide.

“Custer’s discovery of the dead soldiers’ remains,” writes Broome, “may have provided an important psychological motivation in his decision shortly thereafter to leave his command and visit his wife, a decision that resulted in his court-martial.”

Chapter 7 is titled “Military Reports and the August 1868 Raid in North-Central Kansas: Prelude to the Washita Fight.”

But Broome, who has a background in philosophy, has more than that to convey.

He also shares a lesson

in historiography, which he says is “about epistemology, focusing on how something is determined to be fact and not fiction.” This chapter, he writes, “is first and foremost about confronting modern historians who have demonstrated weak epistemological skills when examining original documents pertaining to the Central Plains Indian war.” He specifically scolds Indian wars historians and frequent Wild West contributors John Monnett and Louis Kraft, in what he calls “an objective attack upon the supposition that original documents have more interpretive significance than they warrant.”

After that come chapters addressing two of the biggest names in Wild West history—Buffalo Bill Cody, regarding his role in the Summit Springs fight of July 11, 1869 (the last clash in Colorado Territory between Cheyenne warriors and the U.S. military), and Wild Bill Hickok, regarding the soldier who almost killed him during a 1870 brawl in Hays City, Kan. Overall, Broome, whose great-greatuncle was with the 3rd Colorado Cavalry at Sand Creek, provides plenty of interesting material for anyone interested in the Indian wars—perhaps even Monnett and Kraft.

—Editor

The Earps Invade Southern California: Bootlegging Los Angeles, Santa Monica and the Old Soldiers’ Home, by Don Chaput and David D. de Haas, University of North Texas Press, Denton, 2020, $24.95 While the 1950s TV Western The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp portrayed the famed lawman as a lone crusader for

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REVIEWS justice, a more accurate portrayal of his life would have been something more akin to the small-screen family saga Bonanza. For during the actual Old West days, Wyatt Earp, his father and brothers often moved as one to seize opportunity (see Don Chaput’s “Clusters of Earps,” in the October 2020 Wild West), personifying the unspoken Cartwright philosophy, “The family that holds together fills their billfolds together.”

Taking a welcome break from the gunplay of the 1880s, Don Chaput, curator emeritus of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and Earp aficionado David D. de Haas recount the clan’s last get-together in The Earps Invade Southern California. The book opens in the early 1900s on the Soldiers’ Home in Sawtelle, between Los Angeles and Santa Monica, whose residents include Wyatt’s father Nick and half-brother Newton. In spite of all efforts to direct their interests elsewhere, the old soldiers seem most inclined to spend their pension money on alcohol, a pastime the local “blind pigs” (better known in the 1920s as “speakeasies”) are more than happy to accommodate.

Among the more 86 WILD WEST

prominent operators along North Fourth Street is James, eldest of the Earp brothers and in all histories overshadowed by at least three of his brothers. By 1905 Virgil and Wyatt had arrived to investigate this latest potential “bonanza.”

The narrative centers on the physical and moral health of the veterans at the hands of authorities seeking to limit, control or eradicate their often bootleg potations.

In the process we follow the cities’ busy efforts to develop their assets and establish their identities.

Chaput and de Haas are hard-pressed to keep their famed protagonists front and center, given the numerous other colorful characters, many of whom had previously crossed paths with the Earps.

Indeed, the authors themselves conclude the Earps were not so much drivers of Western development as opportunists, the Soldiers’ Home scheme ranking among their least successful. Still and all, The Earps Invade Southern California fills a gap in the Earp saga and will fascinate anyone interested in the transitional time when Los Angeles and neighboring cities were striving to define themselves.

—Jon Guttman

No Place for a Woman: The Struggle for Suffrage in the Wild West,

by Chris Enss, TwoDot, Helena, Mont., and Guilford, Conn., 2020, $26.95 A century has passed since the 19th Amendment guaranteed voting rights to women throughout the United States. It had taken a prolonged, determined effort to make that breakthrough, advancing and retreating in a series of fits and starts (women were among the “all free inhabitants” who could vote in New Jersey in 1790, only to see that right revoked in 1807).

Among the many names with whom posterity is familiar are Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and Carrie Chapman Catt, storming the male ramparts in New York and Washington. Some of the most significant progress, however, was made west of the Mississippi in the late 1890s as one Western state after another adopted

women’s suffrage within its borders.

In No Place for a Woman Chris Enss focuses on the West’s special contribution, state by state, toward the ultimate, belated realization of the Declaration of Independence’s ideal of all men (and women) being created equal.

From the days of the earliest pioneers the American frontier offered a promise of renewal and new possibilities, sought through shared dangers and hardships.

The peculiar circumstances of the developing West encouraged the acceptance of women in an expanded array of professions and activities beyond the restraints of the kitchen—including politics. That included, most famously, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, personified by the fervent Carrie Nation, whose religiously inspired social reforms were intermingled with a call for more political influence. Enss’ book covers a lot more ground than that, including the heroines who laid the groundwork across the Great Plains, not to mention the sympathetic “suffragents” who joined their cause.

In 1869 Wyoming Territory granted women full suffrage as part of its new territorial constitution. In 1870 Utah Territory granted

women’s suffrage (that lasted until 1887).

In 1872 Dakota Territory a suffrage bill before the Legislature lost by just one vote.

In 1883 women in Washington Territory were granted full suffrage, but the territorial Supreme Court overturned the law four years later. When Wyoming became a state in 1890, its women’s suffrage provisions stayed in place. Eleven Western states adopted women’s suffrage before World War I, including Montana and Nevada in 1914. Two years later Montana’s Jeannette Rankin was elected the first woman to sit in the U.S. House of Representatives.

One caveat regarding the editing, though: A number of sidebars are inserted without any shading to differentiate them from the main text, so be ready to find the continuity of the main narrative change without warning. Once you get the hang of that, however, No Place for a Woman might offer a new perspective on an oft-overlooked facet of the Spirit of the West and its influence on the nation. This 183-page book by the prolific Enss certainly came out in timely fashion, as 2020 saw women and the majority of men celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.

—Jon Guttman

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AUDIOBOOK

On September 11, 1857, a wagon Wildest of the Wild West: train of 120 men, women, and True Tales of a Frontier Town children from Arkansas were massacred under a white flag on the Santa Fe Trail, by Howard

by Utah Mormons in one of the Bryan, narrated by Jim Terr, 5 hours, most horrifying crimes in 39 minutes, HookintoHistory.com, 2019 American history. Through the New Mexico actual testimony of a young girl who survived, interviews with journalist Howdescendants and forensic ard Bryan (1920– investigations, this compelling 2011) was perfilm breaks through decades of cover-up to expose a story kept haps best known out of the history books. for his Albuquerque Tribune history column “Off the Beaten Path.”

He was also the author of whg-wiw-100007740patrickfilms-display-marketplace-6757.indd 1 6/15/15 seven books, including Incredible Elfego Baca: Good Man, Bad Man of the Old West (recipient of a 1993 Spur Award from Western Writers of America) and this rousing 1986 work, Wildest of the Wild West, which is as fine a listen as it is a read. The subject is Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, which to this day remains in the shadow of such Wild West towns as Tombstone, Arizona Territory; Deadwood, Dakota Territory; and Dodge City, Kan. Bryan’s 1986 book did give a historical boost to this Las Vegas (its celebrated Nevada namesake wasn’t - 1945 officially a city until 1905), and this reading of the book by actor/singer/video - 1947 producer and native son Jim Terr should - 1950 serve as a booster shot.

- 1974 Some of the best-known characters For more,search visitDAILY QUIZ For more, of the frontier played a part in the story WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ at HistoryNet.com. of Las Vegas, a settlement established by MAGAZINES/QUIZ a Mexican land grand in 1835. Among other figures, the list includes Kit Carson, HistoryNet.com Stephen Kearny, Billy the Kid, Jesse James WW-210200-012 Brian Patrick Burying The Past.indd 1 1974. PRIVATE TERUO NAKAMURA, A TAIWANESE ANSWER: NATIONAL,27.

ENLISTED IN THE JAPANESE ARMY IN 1943.

ANSWER: THE CURRENT DESIGN HAS BEEN IN HE and Mysterious Dave Mather. The railroad HELD OUT ON 1960 MORTAI IN INDONESIA HE WAS CAPTURED PLACE SINCE WHEN THE FLAGUNTIL WAS MODIFIED IN DECEMBER 1974. EARLIER THAT YEAR, HIRO ONODA, WHO TO INCLUDE THE 50thFINALLY STATE. SURRENDERED. HELD OUT INHAWAII, THE PHILLIPINES, reached Las Vegas in 1879, bringing with it murderers, robbers, tramps, prostitutes and, most noticeably, the Dodge City Gang (a group of gamblers and gunfighters who came from Kansas to both enforce and break laws in Las Vegas). That in turn triggered the rise of vigilantes fond of throwing “necktie parties” (making use of a windmill in the town plaza). This audiobook would be ideal for any Wild West fan on a long car trip—for example, Sign up for our free monthly E-NEWSLETTER at covering more than half the driving time from Las Vegas, Nev., to Las Vegas, N.M. historynet.com/newsletters —Editor

4:20 PM

THE LAST JAPANESE HOW MANY TIMES SOLDIER HAS THEFROM DESIGN WORLD OF THE WAR U.S.IIFLAG SURRENDERED CHANGED? IN THIS YEAR 27, 31, 36 or 40?

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1

GO WEST

C

rossing 16 states on its 4,900-mile meandering path to the Pacific Ocean, this scenic route [nps.gov/lecl] roughly traces that taken by the 1803–06 Corps of Discovery, led by Captain Meriwether Lewis and 2nd Lt. William Clark. Largely tamed is the land that took the explorers more than three years to traverse by boat, foot and horseback.

A present-day traveler can cover much of the route by car in as little as a month. Those wanting to linger might hike the Lolo Trail (above) up into the Bitterroot Range of Montana and Idaho. In September 1805 Lewis and Clark set out on this rough stretch guided by a local Shoshone. Had they not brought along as an interpreter Sacagawea (inset, depicted in a 1933 print based on a needlepoint design), the expedition might have ended here.

88 WILD WEST

GRAYCARD (GETTY IMAGES); INSET: GRAPHICAARTIS (GETTY)

LEWIS AND CLARK NATIONAL HISTORIC TRAIL

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TODAY IN HISTORY DECEMBER 18, 1934 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT VISITED BEAR RUN IN SOUTHWESTERN PENNSYLVANIA AND REQUESTED A SURVEY OF THE AREA AROUND A PARTICULAR WATERFALL. PITTSBURGH BUSINESSMAN EDGAR J. KAUFMANN HAD COMMISSIONED WRIGHT TO BUILD A COUNTRY HOME WITH A VIEW OF THE WATERFALL. THE FAMOUS ARCHITECT SURPRISED HIS CLIENT

BY INSTEAD DESIGNING THE HOME OVER THE WATERFALL. FALLINGWATER COST $155,000 TO COMPLETE IN 1941. THE HOME WAS MADE AVAILABLE TO VISITORS IN 1964.

For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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