Wild West April 2022 by HistoryNet

THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

Largely forgotten today, John Baker Omohundro was central to Buffalo Bill Cody’s vision of the West.

frontier showman

texas jack he made it cool to be a cowboy

APRIL 2022 HISTORYNET.COM

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H daniel boone’s missouri days H gold rush gunfighter ben marshall H robust barkeeps keeping order

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APACHE WARS OF THE SOUTHWEST

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44 DANIEL BOONE… THE MISSOURIAN? By Tom Clavin After making his mark in Kentucky, the frontiersman crossed the Mississippi

62 BOXING,

GOLD RUSH GUNFIGHTER

BURLESQUE, BRIDLES AND BORDELLOS

By John Boessenecker In California sometime lawman Ben Marshall did as much shooting as digging

By Kevin Loren Carson Mollie Berdan broke all Victorian-era mores governing the behavior of women

56 PLEASE DON’T SHOOT THE BARTENDER By Richard F. Selcer In the world of the Western saloon bartending was busy, dangerous work 2

WILD WEST

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APRIL 2022

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D E PA R T M E N T S

‘TEXAS JACK’ TAKES AN ENCORE By Matthew Kerns John Baker Omohundro was the iconic cowboy of Buffalo Bill Cody’s measure

4 EDITOR’S LETTER 8 LETTERS 10 ROUNDUP 16 INTERVIEW By Candy Moulton Bill Markley pairs up the likes of Jesse and Billy, Geronimo and Sitting Bull

18 WESTERNERS

Tex Cooper put on a good show and transitioned to B Western performances

20 GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

By Chuck Zehnder Utah’s serene Nine Mile Canyon witnessed more than its share of shootings

22 PIONEERS & SETTLERS

By Aaron Robert Woodard Elinore Pruitt Stewart went from housekeeper to homesteader and popular author

24 WESTERN ENTERPRISE

By Jim Winnerman The bankrupt Northern Pacific raised money by selling land for ‘bonanza farms’

26 ART OF THE WEST

By Fred F. Poyner IV Nez Perce Chief Joseph rates monumental treatment from modern-era sculptors

28 INDIAN LIFE

By John Koster Crow craftswomen made stylish clothing that also impressed other tribes

30 STYLE

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

76 COLLECTIONS

By Linda Wommack The Hutchinson County Historical Museum has a handle on the Texas Panhandle

78 GUNS OF THE WEST

By Will Gorenfeld The U.S. Dragoons were pleased to rearm with the heavy Colt Dragoon revolver

80 GHOST TOWNS

By Terry Halden Fairbank, Arizona Territory, was once the closest rail stop to booming Tombstone

82 REVIEWS

68 CENTER STAGE IN VIRGINIA CITY By Carolyn Grattan Eichin John Piper operated an opera house in the boomtown’s golden age of theater

Wild West special contributor John Boessenecker picks worthwhile California Gold Rush books and films. Plus reviews of recent books about female bandit Pearl Hart, Nez Perce artifacts, mine owner George Hearst and black businesswoman Sarah Bickford, as well as the recent movie The Power of the Dog and the cable series prequel 1883

88 GO WEST

Buffalo Bill Cody took his rest at Scout’s Rest Ranch in North Platte, Nebraska ON THE COVER ‘Texas Jack’ Omohundro thrilled theatergoers with tales of wild stampedes and cattle rustling while whirling his lasso overhead, thus becoming the first true cowboy to rise to prominence in the American popular imagination. (Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyo.; photo colorization by Brian Walker)

APRIL 2022

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WILD WEST

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EDITOR’S LETTER

BARTENDERS BAR NONE A Wild West town without a saloon would be like a high-noon sky without a blazing sun. One with only one saloon would be like a night sky with but a single star—and not even a shooting one. In even the smallest, remotest of frontier settlements drinking establishments were integral to the landscape. When men, mostly young ones, consumed too much firewater, arguments, fisticuffs, gunplay and killings often ensued, either in the saloons themselves or on the dusty street just outside those swinging batwing doors. No doubt saloon shenanigans didn’t happen every week in the real West, as they did on most of those 1950s–60s TV Westerns. But towns from Deadwood to Tombstone, no matter how many ordinances officials passed or how much law they hired, couldn’t stop the vice or the violence. Consider the following well-documented shootings triggered at least in part by whiskey consumption. On July 17, 1870, at Paddy Welch’s saloon in Hays City, Kan., Ellis County Sheriff Wild Bill Hickok mortally wounded one 7th U.S. Cavalry trooper and wounded another who recovered. On Nov. 1, 1875, at Henri Lambert’s saloon (present-day St. James Hotel) in Cimarron, New Mexico Territory, Clay Allison fired three shots into Francisco “Pancho” Griego. On Aug. 2, 1876, at Nuttall & Mann’s Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, Jack McCall murdered Hickok. On April 5, 1879, in Dodge City’s Long Branch saloon, “Cockeyed Frank” Loving bested Levi Richardson in a gunfight. On Feb. 25, 1881, outside the Oriental Saloon in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, Luke Short killed Charlie Storms with a bullet to the heart. On Feb. 8, 1887, outside Fort Worth’s White Elephant saloon, Short was at it again, gunning down Jim Courtright. That list, of course, only touches on the saloon mayhem in the Old West. “A man with ready access to both liquor and guns could be a dangerous hombre,” writes Fort Worth author Richard F. Selcer. “If he had psychological problems to boot, he was a ticking time bomb.” Even the ubiquitous if overlooked men who poured drinks sometimes got in the middle of the saloon madness, notes Selcer, whose article “Please Don’t Shoot the Bartender” starts on P. 56. As an example, he points to Fort Worth saloon man William T. Grigsby, who on June 22, 1887, without saying a word, fatally shot a friend in his Unique saloon. Other friends of the usually quiet, gentlemanly bartender “passed off the episode as a case of temporary insanity brought on by bad whiskey.” Grigsby not only avoided jail but also, in 1907, was granted another saloon license. “One can’t keep a good bartender down,” writes Selcer. Pouring shots of whiskey was only part of a good frontier bartender’s job. The work could be dangerous, and he needed to be plenty tough, especially if he tended bar in one of the hole-in-the-wall saloons frequented by a rough clientele and lacking a bouncer. But he also needed to have a sympathetic ear, even in fancy saloons, for those customers looking for a confidant or mediator. The bartender, whether he owned the establishment or not, was always the man to see. A bad one was usually bad for business, a good one hard to replace. “The name ‘saloon’ was a badge of pride in the Old West,” Selcer says, “a beacon of light and a social center for thirsty gents of all stripes.” Certainly most 19th-century Westerners didn’t arrive at a saloon looking to fight or to shoot somebody. Patrons were typically shopkeepers, farmers, ranchers, railroad workers and miners who wanted to drink, gamble, talk, relax and perhaps stave off loneliness. Few of these frontier towns had community centers, and church services were usually held only on Sunday, so saloons served as social outlets. Not that a bartender was a social director, but he usually was a good source of information about what games of chance were open, who the players were and what was going on about town. When I think of bartenders, I see the faces of those character actors who have played them in so many Westerns. Foremost, I picture 6-foot-5, craggy-faced Glenn Strange who played bartender Sam Noonan on Gunsmoke, a soft-spoken man who had no problem working tirelessly for a woman (Miss Kitty, portrayed by Amanda Blake) but on occasion would raise a shotgun for the good of the Long Branch or Dodge City. He was nobody to mess with. In three 1940s Universal horror films Strange played Frankenstein’s monster.

A composed bartender poses with patrons at a fancy saloon in Chico, Calif., circa 1890.

‘THE NAME ‘‘SALOON’’

IN THE OLD WEST’

WILD WEST

Wild West editor Gregory Lalire’s historical novel The Call of McCall comes out in July 2022. His earlier novels include 2021’s Man From Montana, 2019’s Our Frontier Pastime: 1804–1815 and 2014’s Captured: From the Frontier Diary of Infant Danny Duly. His short story “Halfway to Hell” appears in the 2018 anthology The Trading Post and Other Frontier Stories.

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MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER

Georgia Bunn’s clay maquette for her Chief Joseph sculpture stands in her Medford, Ore., studio in 2012.

WildWestMag.com Evelyn Booth Took a Shot at Fame

As the wealthy young English sportsman traveled from New York to Chicago, Arkansas and, finally, New Orleans, writes Kellen Cutsforth, “he tumbled into his greatest adventure—a shooting match against William F. ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody before a crowd of 3,000 spectators. Although he failed to bag a trophy, his encounter with the king of American showmen presented Booth an opportunity to partner in one of the era’s most profitable and renowned Western enterprises.”

Extended Interview With Bill Markley

“The more I dug into Sitting Bull’s life, the more I grew to respect who he was and what he was trying to accomplish,” says the South Dakota author who wrote the 2021 dual biography Geronimo & Sitting Bull: Leaders of the Legendary West. “All he wanted was to continue the traditional Lakota way of life and try to keep them from losing what little land they had left. He was an honorable man.”

More on Public Sculptures of Nez Perce Chief Joseph

The prospect of new statuary of Chief Joseph continues to hold the public’s interest,” writes Seattle-based author Fred F. Poyner IV, who specializes in writing about the art and history of the Pacific Northwest. “In 2015 officials in both Oregon and Idaho expressed a desire to represent their respective states in the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., with sculptures of the Nez Perce chief.”

HISTORYNET 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

WILD WEST

APRIL 2022 / VOL. 34, NO. 6

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

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LETTERS

LONG WALKS [Re. “Revisiting the Santa Fe Trail,” by Diana West, October 2021:] A sentence in West’s sidebar “Roughing It,” regarding retired marshal Ralph L. Hooker [at right] hiking the Santa Fe Trail, caught my attention: “While their condition slowed his pace, he still managed to cover 30 to 55 miles a day.” This is a retired man carrying a 5-foot, 2-inch flintlock rifle, and he had “blistering, peeling and bleeding” feet. A few of the very fit can do 30 miles per day to a little over that on the Pacific Crest Trail, trying to be light as possible with modern gear. Hiking 55 miles per day carrying the rifle and whatever else, I don’t think so. You have to eat, sleep, etc. Even if he hiked 12 hours a day, he would have to average over 4.5 miles per hour to hike 55 miles.

T.J. Roumph Spanish Springs, Nev. Diana West responds: My source for that information was Ralph Hooker’s autobiography, Born Out of Season, where in Chapter IX he chronicled his walk on the Santa Fe Trail. On P. 53 he wrote, “Some days I didn’t walk as far as other days; sometimes it was because my feet were still tender and sometimes because of bad weather.” Later on that page he wrote, “I only trudged 30 miles this day because of the heat,” and then, “…arriving in Boise City, Oklahoma at 3 o’clock in the morning; this covered 55 miles in one stretch of walk.” These two passages are where I came up with the 30 to 55 miles per day. Since he specifically mentioned both these days, I took the 30 miles to be his low day and the 55 miles to be his high. Yes, he was carrying the rifle, but little else. He slept out in the open with no pillow or blanket. He only carried a canteen of water and some prunes to eat.

ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT Matthew Bernstein’s article “Murder Most Fowl,” in the August 2020 edition, was very interesting. The story was great, but unwittingly it demonstrated a parallel between the situation the officer found himself in and the situation some officers have found themselves in recently. In the story a man was shot to death because he simply failed to comply with and follow the commands of the officer. He wasn’t in the act of committing a serious felony or about to harm someone or attacking the officer. He simply was not compliant. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see the similarity between that death and the deaths of several individuals recently. After spending almost 30 years in law enforcement, I know all too well the feeling of frustration and anger that can result from such a confrontation. There is no justification for it, especially when the suspect could as easily have been arrested later via a warrant. When something like that happens, then as now, the officer will lose.

William Lewis McKinney, Texas 8

WILD WEST

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CIVIL RIGHTS Kudos to Wild West for having the courage and integrity to publish Gregory Michno’s article “‘Worse Than the Hostile Comanches’” in the October 2021 issue. Former Confederates and their descendants were so successful at promoting their “Lost Cause” propaganda that the American public doesn’t know the truth about the causes and consequences of the Civil War. Others have pointed out that neither 1863 nor 1865 are the benchmarks for blacks that we should be considering. Yes, slavery ended, but for the next 100 years whites could murder black men and rape black women and stood less than a 50-50 chance of being arrested, charged or indicted. And there was zero chance they would be convicted of any crime. The federal Civil Rights Act was only passed 57 years ago—less than a lifetime ago. That is the benchmark that matters. Defenders of Confederates like to point out the majority of the soldiers were fighting to defend hearth and home, not the institution of slavery. But that doesn’t change the fact they fought for state and national governments whose official position was to perpetuate slavery. It would be interesting to know how many Confederate veterans who never owned slaves terrorized blacks over subsequent decades.

Barry Isaacs Newville, Pa.

SPRINGFIELD CARBINE I enjoyed C. Rodney James’ Guns of the West article [“Trapdoor Evolution”] in the August 2021 issue. Not sure why the large photo of the Springfield carbine fitted with a modern scope was relevant. The article talked about the long, weak wrist (comb of the stock) and the poor sights of the early Model 1873 carbine. To help the reader visualize these things, it would have been nice to show that carbine and then show a photo of the later model with the new, stronger stock and improved Buffington sights. The article never explained why the new sights were better than the earlier model. The article also made it sound like the .45-70 cartridge used smokeless powder during the Spanish American War. That is incorrect. The Krag carbine and rifle used in the SAW used smokeless powder in its .30-40 cartridge. This was the first smokeless powder cartridge adopted by the U.S. military.

Scott Whitcome Waverly, Iowa C. Rodney James responds: The relevancy of the scoped carbine was in the caption for the photo, regarding current use (deer hunting) with handloads and their accuracy. This material was cut for space reasons. Yeah, it might have been an improvement to have side-by-side photos of the 1873 and ’77 carbines. I did not have access to the ’73. The ’77 is my gun. Regarding why later sights were better was covered in the reference to the Buffington sight. I included a photo of the Model 1877 sight (not used), pointing out that it lacked a peep aperture. Yes, there was some smokeless .45-70 ammunition available in 1898 from Frankford, and, later, contract ammo from UMC. Glad you liked the article.

QUANAH PARKER I really enjoyed “Picturing Quanah Parker,” by Richard F. Selcer and Clara Wallace Holmes, in the October 2021 issue. Some of the photos were new to me. Fort Parker is 50 miles from my home, and when I visit I always think of Cynthia Ann Parker and her capture. When I read about old Western towns in your publication, I usually get my road atlas and try to locate them. Your writers really do their research.

David Vardeman Waco, Texas Send letters by email to wildwest@historynet.com. Include your name and hometown.

APRIL 2022

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ROUNDUP

TOP 10 GUNFIGHTERS OF THE CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH

“Longhair Sam” Brown: This gambler from Texas murdered his first gold rush victim in a fandango house in 1850 and later killed two more men in shootings. In 1855, amid a gambling house quarrel in Calaveras County, Brown stabbed two Chilean miners to death, then shot and killed a third. On the Comstock Lode he killed three more men in knife and gunfights. Longhair Sam met his end in 1861 when a fed-up innkeeper dropped him with a fatal load of buckshot.

Billy Mulligan: Mulligan was one of many Tammany Hall brawlers from New York City who dominated politics in gold rush San Francisco. In 1851 he killed a gambler in a Sonora dance hall shootout and later that year was wounded twice, once in a formal duel and once in a gamblers’ gunfight. Run out of San Francisco in 1856 by the feared Committee of Vigilance, Mulligan later returned and in 1865 engaged in a violent gun battle, killing two men before being slain by a police sharpshooter.

Ben Marshall: One of the first of the gold rush gunmen, and among the last standing, Marshall took part in numerous bloody exploits, though he did sometimes operate on the right side of the law. Read more about his exploits on P. 50.

Daniel C. Gay: Gay proved himself one of the top lawmen during the gold rush. A Mexican War veteran, he served as a police detective

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in Sacramento where in 1854 he shot it out with the notorious outlaw “Tipperary Bill” Morris. He also worked for Wells Fargo, and in 1859–60 he killed three stage robbers in two separate holdup attempts. Beset by financial problems and alcoholism, Gay committed suicide in San Francisco in 1879.

Milton B. Duffield: West Virginia–born Duffield was well educated but notoriously ill tempered. In 1854, when attacked by three gunmen on the streets of Sonora, he shot down two and put the third to flight. Appointed the first U.S. marshal of Arizona Territory in 1863, he engaged in several knife and gunfights before being shot dead over a claim dispute in 1874. William C. “Billy” Getman: In 1856 this Los Angeles city marshal was wounded in a shootout with a rioting mob. A year later, after several more gunfights, Getman was elected Los Angeles County sheriff. He served scarcely a week before being slain in a shootout with a crazed desperado.

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CENTER: FEATUREFLASHARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Top: Though San Francisco’s feared Committee of Vigilance often just ran hard cases out of town, on May 22, 1856, as depicted in this etching, it publicly executed convicted killers James Casey and Charles Cora. Above: In 1854 Milton B. Duffield shot down two gunmen in self-defense in Sonora, Calif. Nine years later he was appointed the first U.S. marshal of Arizona Territory.

Henry J. Talbot: Better known as “Cherokee Bob,” Talbot was a gold rush gambler who took part in several knife and gunfights in the early 1850s. In 1854 he was shot and wounded during an attempted mass breakout from San Quentin State Prison. On Nevada’s Comstock Lode he survived more potentially lethal scrapes before fleeing to Washington Territory, where he shot and killed two soldiers in 1862. A year later Cherokee Bob and a cohort were gunned down amid a shootout in the mining camp of Florence, Idaho Territory.

TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ABOVE LEFT: ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

ROUNDUP

Jim Webster: This young desperado gained notoriety in 1855 when he shot and killed three miners amid a claim dispute in the gold camp of Timbuctoo. A year later during a row in Camp Washington (present-day Chinese Camp) he was shot in the mouth, losing two front teeth. On breaking out of San Quentin in 1857, he joined the “Rattlesnake Dick” Barter gang of highway robbers. Two years later along the Klamath River he was killed in a quarrel with a fellow outlaw.

John C. Boggs: A pioneer lawman in Placer County, Boggs took part in numerous gun battles with desperadoes. In 1856 he shot and killed Ned Conway of the notorious Tom Bell gang. Two years later he shot it out with “Rattlesnake Dick” Barter, who managed to escape. In 1859 the lawman and a posse engaged in a wild shootout with eight outlaws, Boggs gunning down ringleader Ned Whitney. After a quarter century as a lawman he retired to life as a fruit grower, mine owner and postmaster until his 1909 death at age 83.

CENTER: FEATUREFLASHARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ABOVE LEFT: ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Jonathan R. Davis: Another Mexican War veteran, Davis was perhaps the most remarkable of all gold rush gunfighters, although he engaged in only one shootout in California. On Dec. 19, 1854, after highway robbers ambushed and killed his two mining partners, Davis counterattacked with six-shooters and a bowie knife. When the smoke and dust cleared, 11 of the 13 outlaws lay dead. It was the most extraordinary feat of self-defense by an American civilian in the annals of frontier history. Davis lived the rest of his life peacefully and died at age 78 in Stockton in 1890. —John Boessenecker

LIPANS RECLAIM LAND The city and county of Presidio, Texas, have restored to the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas land its ancestors have used as a burial ground since the late 18th century. Known as the Cementerio del Barrio de los Lipanes, the burial mound littered with rock piles was at risk from surrounding development. Soon after emigrating from the Great Plains to Texas in the 1600s, the Lipan Apache people splintered into smaller bands. In the 1790s the Prairie Grass and Little Breechclout bands negotiated peace with Spanish colonial officials and settled near presentday Presidio. The city eventually spread to encompass the Lipan settlement and its burial ground. In recent years the tribe successfully petitioned the Texas Historical Commission to have the threatened cemetery designated a state antiquities landmark.

YELLOWSTONE PREQUEL Yellowstone, a popular Paramount Network cable series starring Kevin Costner as Montana ranching family patriarch John Dutton, is in its fourth season and has already spawned a prequel. Titled 1883 (see review, P. 87), the new series stars country music singers Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as the Dutton ancestors who venture to Montana Territory and settle the land that becomes the Dutton Ranch in Yellowstone. Lean and leathery Sam Elliott plays—what else?—a rugged frontiersman named Shea Brennan. Screen veteran Elliott’s past Western credits include The Sacketts (1979), The Shadow Riders (1982), Gone to Texas (1986), The Quick and the Dead (1987), Conagher (1991), Tombstone (1993) and Buffalo Girls (1995).

GREAT GUNS At Rock Island Auction’s latest Premier Firearms Auction, held last December at its Illinois facility and online [rockislandauction. com], bidders snapped up a solid silver framed L.D. Nimschke– engraved Model 1866 Winchester ($977,500, see detail of rifle in photo), a square-back Colt No. 5 Texas Paterson revolver ($431,250), a gold-plated “1 of 1,000” Model 1873 Winchester rifle ($431,250), a U.S. Army Colt Model 1877 “Bulldog” Gatling gun ($345,000), a Briggs patent Henry rifle ($184,000), a Gustave Young–engraved Colt Model 1849 pocket revolver ($119,025) and an engraved C. Sharps & Co. breechloading percussion pistol-rifle that belonged to Mormon leader Brigham Young ($86,500). Though impressive, those prices pale in comparison to the nearly $2.9 million one bidder paid for a collection of five engraved, relief-carved firearms and a gilt dress sword presented to Napoléon Bonaparte by the Directory of the French Republic in 1797. But that’s another country altogether.

WEST WORDS

‘The lips thin and sensitive, the jaw not too square, the cheekbones slightly prominent, a mass of fine dark hair falls below the neck to the shoulders. The eyes, now that you are in friendly intercourse, are as gentle as a woman’s. In truth, the woman nature seems prominent throughout, and you would not believe that you were looking into eyes that have pointed the way to death to hundreds of men’ —George Ward Nichols (see inset photo), a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, wrote this flattering description in an albeit exaggerated 1867 profile of Wild Bill Hickok.

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ROUNDUP

MARKER FOR A MARSHAL ▼

After graduating from college in 2010, I took a meandering road trip to historic Old West sites, including legendary lawman Bill Tilghman’s grave at Oak Park Cemetery in Chandler, Okla. While there I happened across a wooden plank affixed with a badge and simple lettering. The crude headstone marked the grave of Deputy U.S. Marshal Neal Brown, best

Rev. Eleazer Cady Thomas Jan. 16, 1814– Apr. 11, 1873 Killed during the Modoc War Jastrzembski’s next project is to secure

SEE YOU LATER...

BILL NEAL West Texas rancher, retired lawyer, historian and author William Overton “Bill” Neal IV, 85, died in Abilene on Dec. 23, 2001. Born in Quanah, Texas, on Jan. 31, 1936, Neal wrote such nonfiction books as Vengeance Is Mine: The Scandalous Love Triangle That Triggered the Boyce-Sneed Feud.

CLYDE BELLECOURT A co-founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and a prominent civil rights organizer, Bellecourt, 85, died on Jan. 11, 2022. AIM formed in Minnesota in 1968 and grew into a national movement that challenged government policy toward Indians.

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

‘GENTLEMEN, YOU’RE HANGING AN INNOCENT MAN’ —Milton Yarberry, the trigger-happy marshal of Albuquerque, said those words on Feb. 9, 1883, from atop the gallows outside the courthouse in that New Mexico Territory city. Moments later he was hanged for having shot down unarmed railroad carpenter Charles Campbell. For more see “Albuquerque’s ‘Innocent’ Marshal,” by Melody Groves, in the December 2021 Gunfighters & Lawmen. 12 WILD WEST

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TOP LEFT: COURTESY COMANCHE NATIONAL MUSEUM AND CULTURE CENTER; TOP RIGHT: PHOTO BY DARLA IBARROLA; BOTTOM RIGHT: NATIONAL TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION

An October 2021 Roundup item titled “Reverence at Long Last” highlighted a fundraising effort to place a headstone on the unmarked grave of the Rev. Eleazer Cady Thomas, who on April 11, 1873, was murdered alongside Brig. Gen. Edward R.S. Canby under a flag of truce during the Modoc War. Prompted by the item, Texan Thomas Canby (a distant cousin of General Canby) emailed Frank Jastrzembski (the man behind the fundraiser), offering to cover the entire expense of buying and installing the headstone. The epitaph will read:

a headstone for the unmarked grave of Deputy U.S. Marshal Neal Brown (see below).

Brown. Brown hunted buffalo with Tilghman before heading to Dodge City in 1879 to serve as an assistant city marshal to Jim Masterson. Brown later joined Tilghman in Oklahoma Territory, where he continued to serve as a lawman alongside his friend. After I made inquiries to the online cemetery database Findagrave.com, volunteer Jana McElyea sent me photos of Brown’s grave, which to my shock depicted the same sorry wooden marker I’d seen 11 years before. Resolving to honor Brown with a proper headstone, I reached out to the City of Chandler, which manages Oak Park Cemetery. City Clerk Stephanie Carmichael put me in touch with Chandler Memorial Works owner Philip Beloncik, who quoted me $1,020 to produce and install a flat granite headstone atop Brown’s grave. To contribute to this memorial effort, email me at fjastrzembski10@jcu. edu or message me on my Shrouded Veterans Facebook page [facebook.com/ shroudedvetgraves]. —Frank Jastrzembski

BELLECOURT PHOTO: STEVE SKJOLD/ALAMO SDTOCK PHOTO

HEADSTONE SUCCESS ▲

known as a member of the quasilegal “Dodge City Peace Commission,” famously photographed in that Kansas town in 1883 [see photo below; Brown is seated at far right on the bottom row]. Fast forward to 2021. While researching author Stuart N. Lake’s claim that dime novelist Ned Buntline had presented Colt Single Action Army revolvers with footlong barrels (“Buntline Specials”) to five Dodge City lawmen, I again stumbled across Brown’s name. In 1876 Buntline allegedly gave one each of these custommade Colts to Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Bill Tilghman, Charlie Bassett and Neal

ROUNDUP

TOP LEFT: COURTESY COMANCHE NATIONAL MUSEUM AND CULTURE CENTER; TOP RIGHT: PHOTO BY DARLA IBARROLA; BOTTOM RIGHT: NATIONAL TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION

BELLECOURT PHOTO: STEVE SKJOLD/ALAMO SDTOCK PHOTO

SAVING STAR HOUSE ▲

In 1890 Quanah Parker, last chief of the Comanches, built a grandiose house near Cache, Oklahoma Territory. Star House, a two-story, 10-room clapboard mansion featuring a red roof adorned with large painted white stars, was almost as famous as he was. Volumes of history were written beneath its flashy roof. When home to the chief and his large family, the house (above left) welcomed such celebrated visitors as President Theodore Roosevelt and Apache leader Geronimo, as well as Quanah’s cattle baron friends Samuel Burk Burnett and Charles Goodnight, both of whom helped finance the construction of Quanah’s dream house. Today, though Star House (above right) is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the nonprofit Preservation Oklahoma has listed the dilapidated mansion among the state’s most endangered historic places, citing flood

damage among other issues. The National Trust for Historic Preservation awarded a grant for an assessment and development plan for the house. Assessors estimate it will cost more than $1 million to fully restore Star House. In 2019 Parker family descendants and other preservation-minded individuals formed the nonprofit Star House Preservation to raise money toward purchasing and restoring the historic property. “We toured the house, ate in the old dining room, gave presentations and danced in the yard to the beat of drums,” Quanah’s greatgrandson Ron Parker, of Lawton, Okla., recalls of past family reunions at Star House. With help from the nonprofit, he and other descendants are hopeful Star House will shed its peeling paint and weather-beaten boards to shine for future generations. For information on how to contribute, visit SaveStarHouse.com. —Donna Close Murray

OLD WOUNDS

Last fall 17 Democratic members of Congress called on President Joe Biden to use his executive authority to revoke Medals of Honor awarded to twenty 7th U.S. Cavalry soldiers for their actions at Wounded Knee, S.D., on Dec. 29, 1890. Thirty-one soldiers and upward of 150 Lakota men, women and children were killed in the battle turned massacre. Signed by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley, Representative Kai Kahele and 14 other lawmakers, a bicameral letter reads in part: It has been over 130 years since the Wounded Knee Massacre, and yet the actions of the U.S. Army and the bestowment of 20 Medals of Honor upon the perpetrators of the massacre remain a persistent shame on the nation. For the families and descendants of those massacred the revocation of these 20 Medals of

Honor would have a profound and lasting impact— as has the federal government’s ongoing choice to allow these wrongly bestowed honors to stand. It is well past time to remove this stain from our nation’s history, and we call on you to do so. Earlier last year Warren, Merkley and Kahele reintroduced the Remove the Stain Act, which if passed would officially rescind the Wounded Knee medals.

CHACO LANDSCAPE ▼

The Chaco people, Ancestral Puebloan farmers known for their massive stone dwellings and extensive

road network, left a rich archaeological legacy in Chaco Canyon and the surrounding area of northwestern New Mexico. Unfortunately, Chacoan sites and roads on federal land outside present-day Chaco Culture National Historical Park face ongoing risks from human activities, including energy development. In 2011 the National Trust for Historic Preservation put the greater Chaco landscape on its list of 11 most endangered historic places. Last fall the Biden administration proposed a 20-year ban on any new leases for oil or gas drilling on federal lands within a 10-mile radius of the park. The ban would not affect existing leases or apply to minerals owned by private, state or tribal entities. Through April 6, 2022, the public may submit comments on the proposed ban to the Bureau of Land Management [eplanning.blm.gov/ eplanning-ui/project /2026892/510].

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ROUNDUP

Events of the west Center of the West

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo., welcomes back “What Lies Beneath: Exploring Yellowstone Lake’s Mysterious Vents,” featuring photos by Chris Linder of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, through May 1. Call 307587-4771 or visit centerofthewest.org.

Roads and Tattoos ▼

at the museum is the exhibition “Tattooing: Religion, Reality and Regret.” Call 405-4782250 or visit nationalcowboymuseum.org.

Texas Dressed ▲ “Texas Dressed,” an exhibition running

through April 30

The Oregon Trail, Chisholm Trail, transcontinental railroad, Lincoln Highway, Route 66 and other famous thoroughfares are the subject of “Mother Roads,” which runs through May 1 at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Visitors can explore these overland routes via photos, rare book illustrations, maps and related ephemera. Running concurrently

at the PanhandlePlains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, showcases the costumes and magic of the family-friendly outdoor musical Texas. Each summer the Pioneer Amphitheater in Palo Duro Canyon hosts the show, whose fictional characters bring to life the stories of early settlers in the Texas Panhandle. Call 806-651-2244 or visit panhandleplains.org.

Sitting Bull ▼

A long-term exhibit on the life of Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull is ongoing

at the MissouriYellowstone Confluence Interpretive Center, 20 miles southwest of Williston, N.D., and a half mile east of Fort Buford State Historic Site, where Bull surrendered on July 20, 1881. Call 701-5729034 or visit history. nd.gov/historicsites/mycic.

is the exhibition “The Silent West,” which features Westernthemed posters from the silent film era. While many such motion pictures from the 1910s and ’20s are lost, the posters reflect their creators’ experimentation with the new medium. Women and minorities served on silent film productions as writers, directors, stunt performers and in other roles in greater numbers than on later movies. Call 323-667-2000 or visit theautry.org.

Frontier Days

The Silent West ▲

Ongoing at the Autry Museum of the American West, in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park,

Wyoming’s 126th annual Cheyenne Frontier Days kicks up the dust July 22– 31. What started in 1897 as a local cowboy roundup that included bronc busting, steer roping and pony races has grown into a 10-day festival. The “Daddy of ’em All” features PRCA rodeo action at the world’s largest outdoor rodeo, concerts, a grand parade, a Western art show and sale, gunfight reenactments and other entertainment. Visit cheyenne. org/events/cheyennefrontier-days.

Jubilee Days

The weeklong Laramie Jubilee Days

celebrates the Western lifestyle in that Wyoming city July 2–10. The event began as a horse race in 1940 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of statehood (Wyoming was admitted to the Union on July 10, 1890). Today it offers everything from a PRCA rodeo to an art fest at the Laramie Plains Museum to a kid’s horse show. Visit laramiejubileedays.org.

WWA Convention

Western Writers of America heads to Montana for its next convention, June 22–25 in Great Falls. The WWA, founded in 1953 to promote literature pertaining to the American West, boasts more than 600 members who write both fiction and nonfiction articles and books. Visit westernwriters.org.

WWHA Convention

After a two-year pandemic-related break the Wild West History Association will hold its annual Roundup July 20–23 in South Dakota, with events in both Rapid City and Deadwood. Visit wildwesthistory.

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

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INTERVIEW

TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY SOUTH DAKOTA AUTHOR BILL MARKLEY FINDS SUCCESS WITH A DUAL-FACETED APPROACH TO WESTERN HISTORY BY CANDY MOULTON Bill Markley has worked in Antarctica and for the state of South Dakota, traveled the South Pacific and explored the American West. As an extra on the set of the 1990 film Dances With Wolves he “died” on the battlefield at Gettysburg and “lived” through the Indian wars. The Pierre-based adventurer now works as a freelance writer, applying his research skills in a dualsided approach to Western history. In Old West Showdown (2018) and Standoff at High Noon (2021) he and co-author Kellen Cutsforth take sides to relate controversial Old West stories. To date Markley’s Legendary West series of joint biographies has compared and contrasted three pairs of historical figures—Billy the Kid and Jesse James, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, and Geronimo and Sitting Bull. A contributor to Wild West, the award-winning author has also contributed to The Settlement of America: Encyclopedia of Westward Expansion From Jamestown to the Closing of the Frontier (2011) and the nonfiction anthology Why Cows Need Cowboys (2021). He recently spoke with Wild West about his approach to writing. Tell us about your first book. Dakota Epic is a cleaned-up version of the daily journal I kept during the filming of Dances With Wolves. I fixed spelling (which I admit I’m bad at), punctuation and sentence structure, but I did not add anything to it. I had been keeping a journal before becoming an extra on Dances With Wolves, so my writing about the day-to-day activities on the set just naturally flowed along for me. Dakota Epic launched my writing career. When I published the book, it was 10 years after the film had been released. No publishing houses wanted it, because it was old news, so I self-published, and it did well through my own sales efforts. I learned to persevere; nothing comes easy in writing for me, but I stick with it to the end and get the job done. Why the dual approach to iconic Western figures? The publisher TwoDot asked me to write about Old West characters by comparing them side by side—the lawmen Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, the outlaws Billy the Kid and Jesse James, and American Indian leaders Geronimo and Sitting Bull. It provides a different perspective as to what was happening in the country during the lives of these people. Most biographies cover the life of a single person, but when you compare two lives, it gives a broader picture of what was happening. For instance, we know the federal government treated American Indians terribly, but when you see it happening concurrently with two different tribes—in this case the Chiricahua Apaches and the Hunkpapa Lakotas—and being done by some of the same people in the government, it makes that mistreatment even more pronounced. 16 WILD WEST

Which figures have you enjoyed writing about the most? Sitting Bull, Butch Cassidy and Bat Masterson. The more I dug into Sitting Bull’s life, the more I grew to respect who he was and what he was trying to accomplish. All he wanted was to continue the traditional Lakota way of life and try to keep them from losing what little land they had left. He was an honorable man. Of the outlaws I’ve studied, I like Butch Cassidy the best. Even though he did commit robberies, all who knew him said he was a gentleman and likable fellow. He tried to not get anybody killed during the robberies he participated in. Bat Masterson is my all-time favorite. He had a zest for life and a great sense of humor. It would have been fun to buy him a drink and listen to his yarns. What approach do you take in the books co-written by Kellen Cutsforth? In Old West Showdown and Standoff at High Noon we take controversial stories from the Old West, and he tells one side of the story, and I tell the other side. For instance, with the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (or actually gunfight back behind the O.K. Corral) Kellen takes the Earp side, and I take the Clanton and McLaury side. I think research is the same no matter what you are delving into— there always seem to be at least two sides to every story. When I was researching Wyoming’s Johnson County War, I went to the library in Buffalo, Wyo. When I told the head librarian what I was up to, she asked which side I was researching. I said the rustler side, and she quipped, “Well, there were at least five sides.” How did you research Sitting Bull and Geronimo? I came at it from an attitude of respect for the tribes’ cultures and people, and the knowledge that I don’t know those cultures, but I’m willing to learn. I will never know the subtleties of those cultures, but I try to do the best I can. It’s also important to have people who are a part of those cultures or are intimate with them review what I write to make sure I get it as right as I can. How important is to visit the places you write about? I try to get “on the ground” as much as possible. I’ve been to many sites. It gives me a better feel for what might have happened at a location. For instance, American Indian friends took me to the location of Sitting Bull’s cabin on the Grand River in South Dakota. It’s a beautiful spot, and I can see why he wanted to live there. Author Doug Hocking took me to many sites associated with Geronimo, from the Chiricahua Mountains to the ruins of the old San Carlos Agency, and it gave me a better understanding of why Geronimo didn’t like San Carlos.

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Special Ops Air Force Crews Tackle High-Risk Missions

HOMEFRONT Hijacker D.B. Cooper jumps to infamy

Rushing the Hedgerows 1st Cav faces enemy death trap

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Brown water Navy blasts VC in the Mekong Delta

Union troopers hand John Mosby and his Rangers a rare setback

To Kill or Not to Kill

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One soldier’s agonizing decision

d.b. cooper mystery: what really happened NOVEMBER 2021 to the infamous hijacker?

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Known for their swashbuckling looks, Mosby and his Rangers wreaked havoc throughout Northern Virginia.

JANUARY 2022

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WESTERNERS

The eldest of a dozen children born to a strict Seventh-day Adventist farmer and his wife in Denton, Texas, on April 21, 1876, Judge Thomas Cooper ran away from home at age 16 to reinvent himself as a cowboy named “Tex.” Applying his skills as an entertainer, he performed as a sharpshooter, rider, stagecoach driver and announcer with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West and other traveling shows. Tex bore a resemblance to Buffalo Bill, dressed like him and even portrayed that greatest of all Western showmen after Cody’s 1917 death. Cooper’s striking appearance, as captured in this portrait from the Tony Sapienza Collection, opened doors for him in Hollywood. Tex first appeared as an uncredited extra in a 1916 silent film and made his big-screen debut as, ironically, a parson in the 1921 silent The Man Worth While. Over the next three decades he appeared (often uncredited) in more than 160 films— mostly Westerns, 116 of them in the sound era. Among other roles he portrayed a show spectator in Tumbling Tumbleweeds (1935), a vigilante in The Outcasts of Poker Flats (1937), a barfly in Frontier Marshal (1939), a townsman in My Darling Clementine (1946), a square dancer in Duel in the Sun (1946), a shooting contestant in Winchester ’73 (1950) and Buffalo Bill in King of the Bullwhip (1950). His last on-screen appearance, as a fire wagon bell ringer in Montana Belle (1952), came posthumously, as Cooper died in Los Angeles on March 29, 1951, at age 74. Tex was survived by his wife, Nona “Lady Dolly” Appleby (1875– 1953), a Maryland-born schoolteacher turned traveling performer who stood 3 feet 7 inches and is best known for having played one of the “Munchkins” in the 1939 musical fantasy The Wizard of Oz.

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TONY SAPIENZA COLLECTION

THEY CALLED HIM ‘TEX’

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TODAY IN HISTORY JANUARY 16, 2001 THEODORE ROOSEVELT BECAME THE ONLY U.S. PRESIDENT EVER TO RECEIVE THE MEDAL OF HONOR. PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON AWARDED THE MEDAL TO ROOSEVELT POSTHUMOUSLY FOR HIS SAN JUAN HILL BATTLE HEROICS. THEODORE ROOSEVELT JR. ALSO RECEIVED THE MEDAL OF HONOR AS THE OLDEST MAN AND ONLY GENERAL TO BE AMONG THE FIRST WAVE OF TROOPS THAT STORMED NORMANDY’S UTAH BEACH. For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

Playing poker in the Oasis saloon in Price, Utah, circa 1897 are (from left) Chub Milburn, Mark Braffet, Clarence L. “Gunplay” Maxwell and Pete Francis, who on Oct. 7, 1901, would be shot to death at his own saloon in Brock, Utah.

SHOOTING IN NINE MILE CANYON

ine Mile Canyon is a serene, beautiful place that draws curious locals and tourists alike to northeast Utah. It is best known for having been home to the pre-Columbian Fremont culture, which left scores of ruins and more than 10,000 rock art images on its walls. Archaeologists have pored over those sites, and National Geographic and Smithsonian have featured the canyon in their pages. Yet for a time in the Old West the canyon was better known as a den of violence. In 1886 soldiers improved a rough road through the canyon from Price (more than 40 tortuous miles to the southwest) to Fort Duchesne (some 50 miles to WILLIAM BROCK the northeast), and telegraph crews followed in their wake. At the heart of the gorge Gate Canyon enters from the north. In 1887 William Brock purchased a small ranch near that confluence and opened a saloon. Within a year the growing settlement merited a post office, and the namesake rancher was appointed postmaster of Brock, Utah Territory. In 1890, six years before Utah gained statehood, the population of the settlement stood at 50. By year’s end, however, Brock was no longer a resident. On March 9, 1889, Brock got into a heated quarrel with local Frank E. Foote at the saloon and shot the cowhand, as one newspaper bluntly put it, “square between the eyes.” At Brock’s September 1890 murder trial witnesses testified

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Foote had moved to pull his gun when a bystander forced it back into its holster and grappled with the cowhand. Fearing for his life, Brock had fired twice, his second shot killing Foote. The jury found Brock not guilty. In the interim he’d sold his place to Pete Francis and moved to safer environs in Price. Francis reportedly operated the ranch as a stage station, saloon, hotel and sometime outlaw hangout. A regular at the saloon was ne’er-do-well Clarence L. “Gunplay” Maxwell. In 1893 Maxwell was sent to the Wyoming State Prison in Laramie for cattle rustling and there met Butch Cassidy. After the two were sprung from prison a week apart in 1896, Maxwell reportedly sought to join Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, but the gang leader rejected him. In 1897 a deputy sheriff out of Price arrested Maxwell at Francis’ ranch in Nine Mile

TOP AND OPPOSITE MIDDLE: CHUCK ZEHNDER COLLECTION (2); ABOVE LEFT AND OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT: LEE LIBRARY, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY (2)

IN 1901 IRATE STAGE DRIVER DAVE RUSSELL KILLED PETE FRANCIS AT THE LATTER’S SALOON IN THIS NORTHEAST UTAH GORGE BY CHUCK ZEHNDER

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TOP: CHUCK ZEHNDER COLLECTION; ABOVE LEFT: LEE LIBRARY, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN on suspicion of having rustled 69 head of cattle from local rancher George Whitmore. (Ironically, that spring Maxwell had helped Whitmore track down a horse thief.) The officer decided to wait until morning to return to town with his prisoner. That turned out to be a bad idea, as Maxwell slipped away in the night. In 1909, after a decade spent alternately in jail or on the run, Maxwell was gunned down outside a Price saloon by off-duty Deputy Sheriff Ed Johnstone. On April 21, 1897, Cassidy and gang member Elzy Lay robbed the Pleasant Valley Coal Co. payroll at Castle Gate, north of Price. While two other Wild Bunch members—possibly Joe Walker and O.C. “Deaf Charley” Hanks—led lawmen on a chase south through Buckhorn Wash toward the gang’s Robbers Roost hideout, Cassidy and Lay are believed to have headed east through Nine Mile to Brown’s Hole (present-day Browns Park) on the Colorado border. The next night someone stole eight horses from Ed Lee’s stage station in the canyon, leaving eight played-out horses in their stead. Local ranchers surmised the horse thieves (or swappers) were Cassidy and Lay, en route to Brown’s Hole with the $7,000 in gold coin from the payroll. According to a report in the Oct. 26, 1901, Salt Lake Herald, an informant told Deputy U.S. Marshal Joe Bush that Cassidy had paid a return visit to Francis’ saloon that month. Butch hadn’t, of course, as history records that Cassidy, partner Harry “the Sundance Kid” Longabaugh and the latter’s girlfriend, Etta Place, had left for South America earlier that year. By the time the erroneous report appeared, Francis himself was no more, having been shot to death at his saloon that October 7. “Peter Francis, rancher, stockman and keeper of a stage station 42 miles out on the Vernal road, was shot and killed last Monday night about 10 o’clock,” reported Price’s Eastern Utah Advocate on Thursday, October 10. “The man who fired the two fatal shots is Dave Russell, a stage driver from here to the Francis place.” According to the report, the pair had had a falling-out, though no one knew its source. “Perhaps his brain was clouded by drink,” the Advocate suggested of Russell. “During the afternoon and evening there were some men in the house playing cards, poker,” the paper reported. “These were Jim Englefield, Joe Gurr, George Stewart and a stranger called ‘Tex.’ The first three were playing, while the latter was drunk behind the stove. There was a row between Englefield and one of the other men, when Englefield made a gunplay. This was settled by Francis disarming and at the same time abusing Englefield. The matter was settled by all drinking together and calling things off.” Between 7 and 8 p.m. the stagecoach from Price arrived, Russell driving. Englefield took the reins, driving the stage on toward Smith’s Wells, a station on the flats above Gate Canyon. Meanwhile, Russell came into the saloon and bought a round of drinks. Minutes later Francis accused Russell of not having paid for the drinks. Though bartender Charles Banning assured his boss he was mistaken, Francis yelled and cursed at Russell,

The Russell brothers (from left) James, Myron and Dave pose in Nine Mile Canyon (above). Dave Russell was a stagecoach driver whose falling out with saloon owner Francis led to a fatal shooting. “Perhaps [Russell’s] brain was clouded by drink,” wrote the Eastern Utah Advocate.

following that up with two or more blows to the stage driver’s face. The Advocate picks up the account: This was patched up, and Russell left the house. Francis retired to a cot near the door and close to the bar. Presently there was a noise at the door, and Francis directed his bartender (Banning) to let them in. It was Russell and a companion. The light had been in the meantime turned down low, Banning also getting ready to retire. There was a shot and then a second one. Banning says the light went out, and he fell to the floor, and the companion of Russell and another man jumped over the bar and fell down in like manner to protect themselves. Francis was shot twice in the face and fell back on the cot as though he had retired and was sleeping. Whether there were words after Russell came back, Banning does not remember.… It is told that bad blood has existed between the two men for quite a time, and it is also related that Francis had at various times abused and assaulted young Russell.

On Tuesday morning, October 8, Russell turned himself in to authorities in Price. The next day Francis’ body was brought to town. His ex-wife came down by train from Salt Lake City for the funeral and subsequent burial in the Price City Cemetery. “The Francis estate is estimated by the attorney of the widow at $9,400,” the newspaper reported. “There are two children— boys—aged 10 and 11.” In early 1902 widow Francis sold the property to Preston Nutter, who was building one of the largest cattle empires in Utah. Russell, meanwhile, was tried for murder, found not guilty and released. He lived out his days in his small ranch high in Nine Mile Canyon and in 1929 was also buried in the Price City Cemetery. In the wake of flash floods in recent years, present-day property owners Ben and Myrna Mead disassembled Brock’s original log saloon and moved it 15 miles upstream to their Nine Mile Ranch [9mileranch.com], just below the junction with Minnie Maud Creek. The Meads plan to reassemble the saloon amid the campground and other cabins on their guest ranch. APRIL 2022

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PIONEERS & SETTLERS

THE WYOMING WOMAN HOMESTEADER ELINORE PRUITT STEWART DREAMED OF OWNING HER OWN LAND, DID SO, WROTE ABOUT IT AND MADE HER MARK ON WESTERN HISTORY BY AARON ROBERT WOODARD

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in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Orphaned by age 18, she raised her younger siblings. In 1902 she married local boy Harry Rupert. When Harry was killed in a railroad accident a few years later, Elinore found herself in financial straits with a 2-year-old daughter to support. Leaving her bittersweet past behind, she moved to Denver and followed a traditional path for a widow, taking on laundry and housecleaning work. Unlike many women of the time, who were content (or at least pretended to be) with such manual labor, she resolved to take advantage of the Homestead Act and file a claim for herself. As she recalled in a letter from a collection of her Western correspondence, published in book form in 1914 as Letters of a Woman Homesteader, she decided it best to first learn the ropes.

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FROM LEFT: SUSANNE GEORGE BLOOMFIELD, FINDAGRAVE.COM

Above: Elinore Pruitt Stewart runs a horse-drawn mower on her Wyoming homestead in 1925. In 1914 she had published a collection of her frontier correspondence in book form as Letters of a Woman Homesteader, the basis for the starkly realistic 1979 movie Heartland.

TOP: SWEETWATER COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM

omen on the Western frontier are often stereotyped into two groups—the saloon girls and prostitutes featured in countless Western films and novels, and the good women who worked as teachers, seamstresses, laundresses and/or married hardworking homesteaders and ranchers. Most of these women, no matter what they did, are lost to history. Frontierswoman Calamity Jane and shooting star Annie Oakley, whose doings often made headlines, are among the exceptions. Certainly most female emigrants, more so even than their humble male counterparts, went unremembered, though they are generally respected as a group for having braved the inevitable trials and hardships of settling a harsh and untamed land. Among this intrepid group were female settlers and homesteaders willing to go it alone and tackle the myriad tasks and physical obstacles said to require a man’s strength. A rare standout among them was born Elinore Pruitt on June 3, 1876,

PIONEERS & SETTLERS

Thus her plan was “to get a position as a housekeeper for some rancher who would advise me about land and water rights.” In early 1909 widower Henry Clyde Stewart advertised in The Denver Post for a housekeeper to help on his homestead near Burntfork, Wyo., in Sweetwater County. Elinore applied for the position and was accepted, arriving in Wyoming in March. It proved a fortuitous move for the 33-year-old widow and mother, who was nearly eight years Clyde’s junior. Strictly a housekeeper in the beginning, Elinore transitioned into doing farm and ranch work. She was not a novice. In a letter to a friend she described how she came to know hard outdoor work: I don’t know that I ever told you, but my parents died within a year of each other and left six of us to shift for ourselves.…We refused to be raised on the halves and so arranged to stay at grandmother’s and keep together. Well, we had no money to hire men to do our work so had to learn to do it ourselves. Consequently, I learned to do many things which girls more fortunately situated don’t even know have to be done. Among the things I learned to do was the way to run the mowing machine…I almost forgot that I knew how until Mr. Stewart got into such a panic.…He just couldn’t get enough men. I was afraid to tell him I could mow for fear he would forbid me to do so. But one morning, when he was chasing a last hope of help, I went down to the barn, took out the horses and went to mowing. I had enough cut before he got back to show him I knew how, and as he came back manless, he was delighted as well as surprised.

That spring, on May 5, she married Clyde and became Mrs. Elinore Stewart. Had she settled into the simple existence of a Western farm wife, her letters may have come down to us as interesting historical tidbits filled with the usual tales of backbreaking frontier labor. But Elinore wanted something more. She decided to make her old dream come true by acquiring property of her own near her husband’s homestead, as related in another letter to a friend: It will be over two years before I can get a deed to it. The five years in which I am required to ‘prove up’ will have passed by then. I couldn’t have held my homestead if Clyde had also been proving up, but he had accomplished that years ago and has his deed, so I am allowed my homestead.…I should not have married if Clyde had not promised I should meet all my land difficulties unaided.

To me homesteading is the solution of all poverty’s problems.… Any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub will certainly succeed; will have independence, plenty to eat all the time and a home of her own in the end.

I have done most of my cooking at night, have milked seven cows every day and have done all the hay cutting, so you see I have been working. But I have found time to put up 30 pints of jelly and the same amount of jam for myself. I used wild fruits, gooseberries, currants, raspberries and cherries. I have almost 2 gallons of the cherry butter, and I think it is delicious. I wish I could get some of it to you. I am sure you would like it.

FROM LEFT: SUSANNE GEORGE BLOOMFIELD, FINDAGRAVE.COM

I wanted the fun and the experience. For that reason I want to earn every cent that goes into my own land and improvements myself. Sometimes I almost have a brainstorm wondering how I am going to do it, but I know I shall succeed; other women have succeeded. I know of several who are now where they can laugh at past trials.

Elinore was able to make good on her dream while also experiencing the highs and lows of frontier life, among the latter of which were the back-to-back deaths of daughter Helen, born prematurely, and infant son Jamie, from erysipelas, a streprelated infection. Despite their losses (“Our union is sealed by love and welded by a great sorrow,” she wrote of her marriage to Clyde), the couple had three more sons, and she later described herself to a friend as “one who is truly happy.” By the 1920s she’d become known across the nation as the “Woman Homesteader” and was using royalties from her popular writings to buy supplies for her homestead. Elinore Pruitt Stewart died at age 57 on Oct. 8, 1933, from a blood clot to the brain following gallbladder surgery and is buried in the Burntfork Cemetery. Sixty years after its publication Letters of a Woman Homesteader was the basis for the starkly realistic 1979 film Heartland, starring Conchata Ferrell as Elinore and Rip Torn as Clyde. In 1985 the Stewarts’ homestead, near McKinnon, Wyo., was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Having successfully pursued a dream of owning and working her own land while maintaining a largely positive attitude, Stewart continues to serve as an inspiration for anyone seeking an independent, self-sustaining lifestyle. As she wrote so long ago:

An indefatigable worker, Elinore proved a true asset to Stewart, as evinced in the following letter describing her typical work schedule:

TOP: SWEETWATER COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM

Elinore (at left) poses above in 1913 with husband Henry Clyde Stewart, their children, Henry Clyde Jr. and Calvin Emery (in wagon), and Jerrine, Elinore’s daughter by her late first husband. Elinore died in 1933 from a blood clot to the brain. Though eight years her senior, Clyde outlived her by 15 years.

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WESTERN ENTERPRISE On the Dalrymple bonanza farm, in the Red River Valley, the threshing of wheat in 1878 was done with steam power.

IN THE 1870S THE BANKRUPT NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD SWAPPED OUTSTANDING BONDS FOR VAST TRACTS ALONG ITS RAILS BY JIM WINNERMAN

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GEORGE WASHINGTON CASS

The $2.50 per acre price was certainly tempting; by the 1890s the same land sold for upward of $40 an acre. That said, such vast operations required a significant investment of start-up capital. Among those who snapped at the bond swap were Northern Pacific President George Washington Cass and Benjamin Pierce Cheney, a company director. Rounding out the investors were bankers, industrialists and others with deep pockets who put the land under professional management by companies that operated the farms much like factories. As the soil was ideal for wheat, which yielded two crops a year, a large farm

TOP: INSTITUTE FOR REGIONAL STUDIES, NDSU; ABOVE: MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

“bonanza” is defined as something valuable, profitable or rewarding. In references to the 19th-century American West the term appears most often in connection to mining. But growing pains experienced by the sprawling Northern Pacific Railroad Co. also spawned “bonanza farms.” When the Northern Pacific declared bankruptcy in 1875 due to mounting costs, poor bond sales, mismanagement, the failure of its banking house and the transatlantic financial Panic of 1873, its assets included 39 million acres of land, primarily in the Red River Valley along the line separating Minnesota and the part of Dakota Territory that would become North Dakota. Congress had granted the land to the company in 1864 as part of its charter to build a railroad across the northwest to the Pacific Ocean. At the time of the crash Northern Pacific bonds, which were to pay 7.3 percent interest, had declined in value from $100 to $20 per bond. To appease bondholders and raise desperately needed funds, the company offered $110 per bond if exchanged for land priced at $2.50 an acre. The plan was appealing in several regards. While the Red River Valley was known primarily as good grazeland, the terrain was flat, treeless and stone free, making it ideal for cultivation using the latest large farm machinery. As the land bordered the company tracks, shipment of crops to urban markets in the rapidly developing East would be efficient and economical. APRIL 2022

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TOP: HARPER & BROS., NEW YORK; ABOVE: STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF NORTH DAKOTA

THE BIRTH OF ‘BONANZA FARMS’

TOP: HARPER & BROS., NEW YORK; ABOVE: STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF NORTH DAKOTA

TOP: INSTITUTE FOR REGIONAL STUDIES, NDSU; ABOVE: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY\Y

WESTERN ENTERPRISE

could make a substantial amount of money in a short time, hence the phrase “bonanza farm.” There were at least 91 such enterprises, each encompassing more than 3,000 acres (the minimum to unofficially qualify a farm as a bonanza). Several were far larger. The Keystone farm, for example, covered 21,760 acres, while the Hill farm totaled 45,000 acres, or more than 70 square miles. The largest of all bonanza farms, the Cass-Cheney, near Fargo, Dakota Territory, eventually encompassed 70,000 acres, under the management of “Minnesota Wheat King” Oliver Dalrymple. All lay within 40 miles of the Red River. While the bonanza farms created wealth quickly when properly managed, plowing an immense swath of prairie sod was an enormous undertaking. Each spring, in the immediate wake of the last frost, farmers driving two- or four-horse teams broke up the soil with wooden-framed, spike-toothed harrows. They had to harrow the ground twice to render it fit for seeding, then three more times after the wheat was sown—once to cover the seeds and twice to kill weeds. To maximize the growing season, the planting had to be done quickly, yet each horse-drawn harrow could cover only about 40 acres a day. Thus the mammoth farms of thousands of acres had to invest heavily in machinery. The Cass-Cheney alone had 81 harrows in 1878 and 114 in 1880. To plant, tend and cull their crops the large farms had to hire virtual armies of seasonal laborers, numbering anywhere from 500 to 1,000 men per farm. Many arrived on trains from northern timber camps where they worked at logging all winter and would return in the fall. The large farms organized their land into workable divisions of 3,500 to 5,000 acres, each under a superintendent. Divisions were in turn broken into 640-acre units, each under a foreman supervising up to two dozen men. During the fall harvest a workday stretched 13 hours, starting at 6 a.m. after an early breakfast. The machines ran until dusk, after which supper was served. Between meals were served in the field—in themselves a herculean undertaking.

Once the crops were harvested, the farms again employed the harrows to cross-plow the ground, readying it for spring. But harrows were just one element of the massive investment in machinery. In 1878 the Cass-Cheney farm also had on inventory 84 plows, 67 wagons, 45 binders (to tie the wheat for shipment), 30 seeders and eight threshing rigs. As with all bonanzas, this one wouldn’t last. Over time a surplus of wheat caused a drop in prices, and new tax laws targeted the colossal operations, rendering the bonanza farms less profitable. Around the same time the supply of available workers diminished, and labor costs increased. Finally, some farms mismanaged the land and exhausted their soil. By 1920 the bonanza had run its course, ending a distinct phase of frontier agriculture that had spread across the continent. Some bonanzas were subdivided and sold or rented to small-scale farmers. Few holdings remain intact. In Richland County, N.D., a nearly 15-acre parcel of the Frederick A. and Sophia Bagg bonanza farm (which once spanned some 7,000 acres) has been preserved as a museum, highlighting the bonanza farm period in American history. Designated a national historic landmark in 2005, the site centers on the 21-bedroom main house, the foreman’s house, and several barns and outbuildings, all of which hold period artifacts and exhibits. Some things never change, though, as farmland stretches to the horizon in all directions.

Top: It took many men driving horse teams to break up the soil with wooden-framed, spiketoothed harrows. Above: “Minnesota Wheat King” Oliver Dalrymple ran the 70,000-acre CassCheney bonanza farm.

FOLKLORE IN THE FURROWS The sheer size of bonanza farms inevitably spawned exaggerated stories, and with each retelling the spreads grew a thousand acres larger, the furrows a mile longer. One tale told of a man with a harrow and a four-horse team who, accompanied by his foreman, plowed a furrow more than 40 miles long. When the foreman asked the man at the reins whether the furrow was long enough, the man replied, “I hope

you don’t go any farther, or we may never get back.” And that, the tale concludes, is how the town of Hope, N.D., near the turnaround point of the legendary furrow, got its name. A similar story from the 1880s tells of a man on a bonanza farm who started plowing one straight furrow in spring and didn’t stop till fall. Then he simply turned around and harvested the crop as he returned. —J.W. APRIL 2022

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ART OF THE WEST

A LOOK AT THE WORKS OF THREE SCULPTORS WHO HAVE DEPICTED THE FAMED NEZ PERCE CHIEF BY FRED F. POYNER IV

hief Joseph (1840–1904) of the Nez Perce remains among the most celebrated American Indians of the 19th century, thanks to period photographs, books, magazine articles, paintings and public sculptures. Sculptors Dennis Burt, Doug Hyde and Georgia Bunn have each depicted the famed chief, known in his own language as Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain). There are similarities in their striking works, of course, but notable differences set them apart from other sculptural efforts, including Alonzo Victor

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TOP LEFT AND TOP RIGHT: FRED F. POYNER IV; MIDDLE: EVELINE DE BRUIN/PIXABAY; ABOVE: COURTESY DOUG HYDE AND NMAI

JOSEPH IN BRONZE

Lewis’ half dozen portrait heads of the warbonneted chief (placed in 1928 at key battlegrounds of the 1877 Nez Perce War), or Virgil “Smoker” Marchand’s expressionistic rusted steel depiction of the chief (installed in 2010 in Nespelem, Wash., home to the Nez Perce reservation and Joseph’s grave). In 1985 Burt, of Enterprise, Ore., produced a life-size bronze of Chief Joseph after encouragement by a descendant of Nez Perce war leader Looking Glass and other tribal members. The modeling took about six weeks to complete before Valley Bronze foundry, in nearby Joseph, Ore., cast the figure. Enterprise businessman Thomas R. Warde purchased the work for installation in a namesake park the businessman donated to the city in 1995. This first public monument in Wallowa County offers a direct tie to the Nez Perces, as the surrounding Wallowa Valley is their traditional homeland. Hyde, an Oregon-born sculptor of Nez Perce, Chippewa and Assiniboine ancestry, studied at both the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, N.M., and the San Francisco Institute of Art before enlisting in the U.S. Army. On his second tour of duty in Vietnam he was seriously wounded by a grenade. Returning stateside to recuperate, he resumed sculpting, ultimately opening his own studio in Prescott, Ariz.

ABOVE LEFT: FRED F. POYNER IV; ABOVE: SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON LIBRARIES

Above: Lee Morehouse’s 1901 photograph of Chief Joseph posing in a blanket informed sculptor Georgia Bunn when modeling her statue of the famed Nez Perce. Left: Bunn’s Chief Joseph was dedicated in 2012 and stands in Joseph, Ore.

ART OF THE WEST

TOP LEFT AND TOP RIGHT: FRED F. POYNER IV; MIDDLE: EVELINE DE BRUIN/PIXABAY; ABOVE: COURTESY DOUG HYDE AND NMAI

ABOVE LEFT: FRED F. POYNER IV; ABOVE: SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON LIBRARIES

Clockwise from far left: Dennis Burt’s 1985 bronze Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain), in Enterprise, Ore.; Doug Hyde’s 1998 bronze Chief Joseph, at the Native American Student & Community Center at Portland State University; Virgil “Smoker” Marchand’s rusted steel depiction of the Nez Perce legend at the Chief Joseph Rest Area in Nespelem, Wash.; and another casting of Hyde’s Chief Joseph, this one at the National Museum of the American Indian Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md.

In 1998 Hyde completed his life-size bronze of the Nez Perce legend. Standing resolute and proud, his Chief Joseph holds a Winchester lever-action rifle, the barrel in his right hand, its butt resting on the ground. The artist initially made two castings—the first going to Portland State University for display outside its Native American Student & Community Center, the second donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian for display at the museum’s Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md. In 2007 the

Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, Ariz., installed a third casting of Hyde’s statue at the entrance to the hotel. Six years later a fourth casting found a home in the lobby of the Clearwater River Casino & Lodge, in Lewiston, Idaho, a property owned and operated by the Nez Perce tribe. Oregon-based sculptor Georgia Bunn started modeling her larger-than-life statue of Joseph after consultation with members of the Nez Perce tribe, who wanted the chief to be depicted as a diplomat, ambassador and negotiator rather than a war leader. She referenced a 1901 portrait of Joseph for her model, first rendered as a maquette, then as a full-size, 12-foot figure in her Medford studio. “As an Anglo-Saxon artist, my hands are yours,” she told the Nez Perces, who voiced their approval at several stages in the modeling process before Valley Bronze cast the figure. The oldest living member of the tribe at the time attended the July 27, 2012, dedication of Bunn’s statue in Joseph, Ore. The prospect of new statuary of Chief Joseph continues to hold the public’s interest. In 2015 officials in both Oregon and Idaho expressed a desire to represent their respective states in the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., with sculptures of the Nez Perce chief. While no new statues of the chief have been added to the hall, seven states have among their representative statues figures of seven American Indians and one Polynesian Islander (Oklahoma boasting two such statues).

members of the nez perce tribe wanted the chief to be depicted as a diplomat

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INDIAN LIFE

WOMEN OF THE WARRIOR TRIBE MADE STYLISH CLOTHING FOR THEIR OWN AND SOLD SOME TO OTHER PLAINS INDIANS BY JOHN KOSTER

ig men from a rather small Plains tribe, Crow warriors inherently understood the idiom “clothes make the man” and were famed for their elegance. Edwin Thompson Denig, a mid–19th century fur trader and ethnographer, said a Crow camp on the march “presents a gay and lively appearance, more so perhaps than any other [tribe].” Fellow fur trader Charles Larpenteur concurred and offered a roundabout reason for their resplendence. A moderate drinker whose first two wives were Assiniboine, Larpenteur cited the Crows’ abstention from alcohol in pre-reservation days as one reason for his marital preference. “As they do not drink,” he added, “their trade was all in substantial goods, which kept them well dressed and extremely rich in horses; 28 WILD WEST

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FROM LEFT: DISTINCTLYMONTANA.COM, ; SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

FINE-FEATHERED CROWS

so it was really a beautiful sight to see that tribe on the move.” While sobriety undoubtedly helped explain Crow pride of appearance, location also played a role. Denig noted the abundance of the Crow hunting grounds east of the Bighorn Mountains, deeming it “perhaps the best game country in the world.” Immense herds of buffalo grazed on grasslands from the Bighorns northeast to the mouth of the Yellowstone River. Crow women used elk hides to craft dresses with a minimum of rough-cut tailoring. As on most Plains dresses, two matching tanned hides were stitched upside down, the tails themselves flipped down to create the neckline. Men’s shirts were similarly made of deer, elk or antelope hides, with a third hide halved to make the sleeves. The hides of black-tailed and white-tailed deer, which were plentiful in the river bottoms, were also used for children’s clothing and accessories. Hides of grizzly bears and bighorn sheep provided the ultimate material for luxury clothing. Hunters generally didn’t kill porcupines, except as an emergency food. But when someone did kill a porcupine, found one’s body or acquired quills through trade, craftswomen put them to a decorative purpose. Quill work was tedious, however. By the time Québécois François-Antoine Larocque began trading along the upper Missouri River in 1805—pausing from his labors to dine with passing Corps of Discovery co-captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—he found the Crows were already using “small blue glass beads that they [got] from the Spaniards, but by the second and third man.” The Shoshones were their intermediaries. Larocque found the Crows so fond of such beads, they would trade a horse for 100 of them. The entrepreneur cultivated sources and was soon trading beads for beaver pelts. Even before Lewis and Clark ventured west, the Crows were turning buffalo hides tanned by skilled craftswomen into robes and sometimes whole tepees. They made elk hides into shirts and antelope hides into leggings for trade with the Mandans and Hidatsas, who farmed along the Missouri. One oddity of Crow clothing in earlier times was that they made actual trousers—

DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

The Crows in this circa 1880 portrait wear their tribe’s distinctive decorative clothing, including moccasins, leggings, blankets, necklaces and fringed, patterned shirts.

FROM LEFT: DISTINCTLY MONTANA; NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (2)

DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

INDIAN LIFE

or at least leggings so ample they covered the loins and eliminated the need for a breechclout, elsewhere the athletic supporter of the male Indian. A Plains warrior traditionally tucked this smooth rectangle of hide under his crotch and secured it with a belt, one end flipped over the front of the belt, the other over the back. Suspended by leather thongs on either side of the same belt were leggings, worn as protection against cold temperatures or intense sun. Such leggings could be removed almost instantly as need arose. Around the turn of the 19th century, however, Larocque noted Crows seldom wore breechclouts, “Except when they do not put on their leggins [sic], as their leggins are so made that if they had a waistband, they might be called trousers.” Writing a century later, photographer and ethnologist Edward S. Curtis, confirmed that Crow tradition. “In the old time they had no loincloth,” he noted. “Indeed, as late as 75 years ago some of the old men had not yet adopted that article of dress.” In 1832 Swiss-French artist Karl Bodmer, who depicted his Crow subjects in such breechclouts and leggings, embarked up the Missouri with ethnologist Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied. No fashion slouch himself, Maximilian cited the Crows and Hidatsas as the two best-dressed tribes, noting that shirts worn by the Hidatsa men had been obtained in trade from the Crows. “Crow women are very skillful in various kinds of work, and their shirts and dresses of bighorn leather, embroidered and ornamented with dyed porcupine quills, are particularly handsome,” the prince recalled. Twenty years later Denig observed that Crow women wore simple dresses of buffalo cowhide when doing everyday chores, though for special occasions they favored dresses of bighorn sheep hide “trimmed

with scarlet and velvet and ornamented with porcupine quills.” In trade such a dress could fetch three buffalo robes— roughly $9 in 1850 dollars, when $1 represented a day’s wages farther east. By then the women were using trade cloth to fashion summer dresses worth about $6, but a fancy summer dress, “a fine white bighorn cotillion adorned with 300 elk teeth,” could command 25 buffalo robes, or $75 in cash. Materials were more costly than labor. Journeying up the Missouri in 1852, Swiss painter and adventurer Rudolph Friedrich Kurz reported that 100 elk teeth—only the two lower incisors were used—were worth $20 in cash or a good packhorse. The Crows were true artisans but also pragmatists. Their export items began to shrug off laborious porcupine quillwork in favor of beadwork. But they used wet sinews and short stitches, so their beadwork, once the sinews dried, was strikingly smooth to the touch. When the Singer sewing machine came in as the buffalo went out, the Singer became a musthave item among tribal craftswomen. Frontier photographer L.A. Huffman told of one Crow woman who used her wagon-mounted, treadlepowered Singer to run off clothing—for sale to Indians or whites with money, free to friends and relatives. Her skill and generosity were legend. When she died, mourners installed the sewing machine beside her grave as a dual tribute to Crow fashion and a life well lived.

Top left: Four well-dressed Crow girls pose in a circa 1910 studio portrait. Top: This two-hide “deer tail” dress, with the tail ends of each hide sewn across shoulders, was collected circa 1908–09. Above: These beaded moccasins date from the 1880s.

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PHOTO CREDIT

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Victory Dance, Little Big Horn, 1876, 32-by-21-inch signed limited-edition giclée on canvas, by Z.S. Liang

PHOTO CREDIT

STYLE

We marvel at the detailed figurative paintings of artist Z. S. Liang and check out one-of-a-kind artifacts at Cisco’s Gallery in Idaho

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STYLE

ART

Pride of the Lakota,

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PHOTO COURTESY Z.S. LIANG

Z.S. Liang [liangstudio. com] earned a bachelor of fine arts in painting at Massachusetts College of Art in 1986 and a master of fine arts in painting at Boston University in 1989. His passion for American Indians was sparked while studying the Wampanoag culture at Massachusetts’ Plimoth Patuxet Museums. Over the years Liang cultivated friendships among tribes from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains. An emphasis on historical accuracy distinguishes his works. Among Liang’s many notable awards are the 2011 Masters of the American West Purchase Award and the 2009 David P. Usher Patrons’ Choice Award at the Autry Museum of the American West; the 2005 President’s Award of Excellence from the Oil Painters of America; and the 1998 Best of Show Award and People’s Choice Award from the American Society of Portrait Artists. His works are in the permanent collections of the Autry, the National Portrait Gallery, the Briscoe Western Art Museum, Harvard University and the West Point Museum of the U.S. Military Academy. Liang’s work is available through Greenwich Workshop [greenwichworkshop.com].

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IMAGES: COURTESY THE GREENWICH WORKSHOP

Tribal Truth

STYLE White Buffalo War Shield,

IMAGES: COURTESY THE GREENWICH WORKSHOP

PHOTO COURTESY Z.S. LIANG

32-by-42-inch limited-edition canvas

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limited-edition canvas 36”x 24” watercolor 34 WILD WEST

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PHOTOS: COURTESY CISCO’S GALLERY

High Vantage Point, 28-by-40-inch “River Life”

IMAGE: COURTESY THE GREENWICH WORKSHOP

STYLE

Native American Ring A size 8.5 man’s Navajo ring with bezel-set turquoise, $450

ARTIFACTS

Own History In 1989 newlyweds Sam and Denise Kennedy founded Cisco’s Gallery [ciscosgallery.com], which today is filled with oneof-a-kind items from the Old West, including historical artifacts, American Indian handicrafts, home decor, jewelry and more. You’ll find Cisco’s at 220 N. 4th St., in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Visit the website for a virtual tour or call 208-769-7575 for more information.

Miner’s Tinware Lunchbox

Two pieces, 5 by 8 by 8 inches, $150

Civil War–Era Hitching Post

Santa Clara Blackware Jar

Circa 1860 castiron hitching post with baseplate and original ring, 32 inches tall, $2,200

Black-on-black jar with stylized serpentine design, 4 by 2 1/2 inches, signed “H S Santa Clara P,” $350

Cavalry Saddlebags

Marked U.S. Cavalry with original liners, straps and buckles, 13 by 20 inches, $750

Mortar and Pestle

7-by-7-inch cast-iron mortar and 9-inch matching pestle used for gold samples in Helena, Mont., $550

Gold Rush Nugget Bag

A circa 1880s sack from the Daly Bank & Trust Co. in Butte, Mont., 5 by 8 1/2 inches, $400

PHOTOS: COURTESY CISCO’S GALLERY

IMAGE: COURTESY THE GREENWICH WORKSHOP

Vintage Horse Race Gambling Wheel

1850s Gold Pan

Nine carved horses mounted on a 5-foot wooden wheel gilded with brass and mounted atop a 7-foot-2-inch tripod, $12,000

A 13-1/2-by-3-1/2-inch soldered pan, one of six found beneath an old shack in Grass Valley, north of Sacramento, $750 WILD WEST

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‘TEXAS JACK’ TAKES AN ENCORE

Buffalo Bill Cody’s vision of the Wild West centered on the heroic cowboy, and John Baker Omohundro proved he was just that before his untimely death

OPPOSITE: BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF THE WEST; THIS PAGE, TOP: COWAN’S AUCTIONS; BOTTOM: HERITAGE AUCTIONS

By Matthew Kerns

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The Cowboy Star

OPPOSITE: BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF THE WEST; THIS PAGE, TOP: COWAN’S AUCTIONS; BOTTOM: HERITAGE AUCTIONS

he Wild West. It is the fundamental mythology of the United States of America, the iconography and imagery we have chosen to tell the story of who we are as a people and as a country. It is a mythology so enduring that depictions of it stretch from the yellowed pages of dime novels written while the West was still being won to the controllers and keyboards of gamers playing Red Dead Redemption 2. On film, from Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery in 1903 through Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall in 2021, the splendor and danger of the American West has captivated the imagination of generations. The iconic figures of the American West are just as familiar. There are such stalwart lawmen as Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp and the outlaws they faced, like Jesse James and Billy the Kid. There are gamblers like Doc Holliday, scouts like Buffalo Bill Cody, and warriors like Crazy Horse (Tasunke Witko) and Geronimo (Goyahkla). Such names—such men— have become more than historical figures, as fiction trumped fact and their legends were superimposed over their lives. Each was a real man, but in the telling and retelling of their tales they have taken on the status of folk heroes, as much Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill as William Frederick Cody or James Butler Hickok. Yet when we take a step back from the individuals and the individual stories woven into the tapestry of the American West, a curious theme emerges. Picture a meeting of these great Western men. Standing there are the scout Buffalo Bill, the lawman Wild Bill, the gambler Doc Holliday and the outlaw Jesse James. How are they dressed? Is Wild Bill wearing a marshal’s hat? Does Jesse James have on outlaw boots? Of course not. The wide-brimmed Stetson shading their eyes from the sun is a cowboy hat, and on their feet are tall leather cowboy boots. If the great men of the American West weren’t cowboys, how did the cowboy become the single most iconic figure of the American Western? The truth is there was a famous cowboy who stood beside these men in real life and whose legacy is just as enduring, though his name has been all but forgotten by the casual student of American history. In 1873, when Buffalo Bill convinced Wild Bill to join a traveling stage show called Scouts of the Plains, their co-star was a real-life cowboy named John Baker Omohundro. Friends called him “Texas Jack.” Born

Opposite: “Texas Jack” Omohundro performs with his wife, “The Peerless” dancer Giuseppina Morlacchi. Left: Texas Jack poses between Wild Bill Hickok (left) and Buffalo Bill Cody. Bottom: Omohundro co-starred in Scouts of the Prairie.

on July 27, 1846 in Fluvanna County, Va., Jack served as a Confederate courier and scout during the Civil War, for a time under vaunted cavalryman Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, before drifting west to Texas and the life of an open-range cowboy. Onstage Cody and Hickok impressed crowds with tales of buffalo hunting on horseback and gunslinging in frontier towns, while in his baritone Virginia drawl Texas Jack thrilled with stories of wild stampedes and cattle rustlers. He entertained packed halls, auditoriums and theaters as he whirled his lasso overhead, the first to turn that tool of the cowboy trade into an object of entertainment for fascinated audiences. Texas Jack was the first cowboy to rise to prominence in the American popular imagination, and his stage persona provided the foundation on which the cowboy trope in literature and film would be built. To understand the impact of Texas Jack, and just how unlikely it was the openrange cowboy should achieve such status and permanence in American pop culture, we should reflect on the history of the cowboy, both the word and the profession. For much of American history it was an insult to call a man a “cowboy.” During the American Revolution the term referred to British Loyalists who stole livestock from local farmers and delivered them to British troops. On Jan. 22, 1779, New Yorkers hanged Claudius Smith, alias “Cowboy of the Ramapos,” for his guerrilla raids after Governor George Clinton posted a $1,200 reward for his capture. The word cowboy remained unflattering as late as 1881, when San Francisco’s Daily Exchange deemed cowboys “the most reckless class of outlaws in that wild country…infinitely worse than the ordinary robber.” The editors were referring to the infamous Cowboys of Cochise County, an especially ruthless band of rustlers and outlaws then operating near Tombstone, Arizona Territory, whose criminal activities were curtailed by the Oct. 26, 1881, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and subsequent Earp Vendetta Ride. The passage of time and other factors have shaped our present-day view of the cowboy. The mid-1880s saw the expansion of the cattle industry from Texas across the entire West. American businessmen and wealthy European investors built vast ranches, bought cattle and hired cowboys, leading to one of the biggest economic booms in history. Their investments provided a APRIL 2022

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Frontier Celebrities and Fellow Hunters

Top (from left): Elijah Greene, Wild Bill, Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack and Eugene Overton pose in 1874. Left: In this 1873 portrait, Texas Jack and Wild Bill sit in front, while Greene, James Scott and Overton stand at back.

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into the late 20th century. Westerns dominated movie house screens following World War II, and cowboy stories dominated Westerns. Leading actors across multiple generations starred in Westerns, from William S. Hart and Tom Mix to John Wayne and James Stewart, Burt Lancaster and Clint Eastwood to Idris Elba and Benedict Cumberbatch. After the devastating loss of both his mother and wife to illness on Valentine’s Day 1884, Theodore Roosevelt escaped west to start a cattle ranch north of Medora in what would soon become North Dakota. He was indelibly shaped by Western ranch life and the cowboys he befriended. Returning to Medora by train in 1900 on a campaign swing for incumbent President William McKinley, the vice presidential candidate told locals, “I had studied a lot about men and things before I saw you fellows, but it was only when I came here that I began to know anything or to measure men right.” It was Roosevelt’s time out West that would shape and refine the New York City boy into the “Cowboy President.” He wouldn’t be the last politician to exploit the cowboy image of rugged independence to improve his standing with American voters. Film stars, authors and politicians aside, nobody has had more of an influence on the popu-

TOP: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY; LEFT: BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF THE WEST

foundation for U.S. dominance of the world economy while simultaneously funding the development of cities and infrastructure across the West. Books like Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian began to mythologize the cowboy, and literary giants from Zane Grey to Louis L’Amour followed suit. Hollywood gravitated to the cowboy and Western locations from its earliest films well

Texas Jack rode into Buffalo Bill’s life as a cowboy in 1869. Cody had been placed in charge of the government’s livestock at Fort McPherson, Neb., kept on the payroll between scouting assignments, when Omohundro rode into nearby North Platte trailing a few thousand head of Longhorns. The men were soon inseparable. They hunted together. They drank together. They scouted together. They even hung wallpaper in Cody’s North Platte home together. When Buffalo Bill spent long weeks away scouting for the 3rd U.S. Cavalry, Texas Jack stayed in a spare room at the Cody house to ensure the safety of Bill’s wife, Louisa, and their children. “Pards of the Plains for life” is how Cody defined their relationship. On April 25, 1872, Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack set out from Fort McPherson in pursuit of Minneconjou raiders who the night before had stolen seven horses from nearby McPherson Station, on the Union Pacific Railroad. Guiding 46 troopers and an Army surgeon under the command of 3rd Cavalry Captain Charles Meinhold, they Star of Print and Stage

Below left: Texas Jack appeared in many novels. Below: In 1877 his combination played Cleveland’s Globe Theater.

RIGHT: BEADLE’S POCKET LIBRARY; FAR RIGHT: BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF THE WEST

TOP: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY; LEFT: BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF THE WEST

lar perception of the cowboy than one man—Buffalo Bill Cody. From its May 1883 inception as Cody & Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition (a short-lived partnership with sharpshooter William Frank “Doc” Carver) until Cody’s 1917 death, no entertainment was as prevalent or as successful as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The imagery and iconography of Buffalo Bill are indelibly tied to the profession of the cowboy, the rare occupation Cody—messenger, scout, soldier, teamster, buffalo hunter, showman, town planner and hotel proprietor—never held. “Cody plowed his theatrical profits into ranching,” author Louis Warren explains in Buffalo Bill’s America, “but like most ranch owners, he was an absentee owner who was never a cowboy.” Yet central to Cody’s vision of the Wild West, indeed the defining icon of the Western man, was the cowboy. For more than two decades the culminating act of the show was listed in the program as “Attack on a Settler’s Cabin by Hostile Indians. Repulse by Cow-boys, Under the Leadership of Buffalo Bill,” or similar wording. With civilization at stake and the fate of the emblematic family of white settlers on the line, the group of heroes riding to the rescue did not comprise professional soldiers but cowboys, of course led by Buffalo Bill. When Cody, who scouted for the military well before taking to the stage, rode into actual engagements with hostile Sioux or Cheyennes on the Great Plains and Dakota Territory hills, he did so in the company of trained soldiers, never cowboys. Why then did Cody present the cowboy as the savior of the settler—of civilization itself—from the threat of savagery? The answer is the man Buffalo Bill would eulogize as “one of my dearest and most intimate friends”—Texas Jack Omohundro.

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A Great Act

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Minneconjou raiders, “the remainder of the command, hearing the fire, came up at full jump—‘Texas Jack’ at the head.…[He] immediately let drive and brought his Indian down.…Beside enjoying the reputation of a ‘dead shot,’ he is well skilled in the ways of the red man, and we are glad to know that his services have been retained by the government.” Cody also described the fight in his autobiography. “Two mounted warriors closed in on me and were shooting at short range,” he wrote. “I returned their fire and had the satisfaction of seeing one of them fall from his horse. At this moment I felt blood trickling down my forehead, and hastily running my hand through my hair I discovered that I had received a scalp wound.” Another paper picked up the action with rhetorical flourish. “[To Texas Jack] was Buffalo Bill indebted for his life,” it noted. “The red thieves were pursued and overtaken by Bill and Jack, who each killed an Indian. A third redskin had just drawn a bead on Bill, when Jack’s quick eye caught the gleam of the shining barrel, and the next instant ‘the noble red’ was on his way to the happy hunting ground, his passage from this sublunary sphere being expedited by a bullet from Jack’s rifle at a distance of 125 yards.” If the latter account is to be believed, Texas Jack quite literally saved Buffalo Bill’s life that April afternoon. What is certain is that Omohundro was his best friend, the first man Cody telegrammed when the latter’s 5-year-old son, Kit Carson, died on April 20, 1876. For three years on the Nebraska prairie Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack rode, hunted, scouted

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tracked the horse thieves. The next afternoon, after a brief skirmish on the Loupe Fork of the Platte River in which Buffalo Bill was injured and three warriors were killed, the party recovered two horses, while the surviving raiders escaped. In his after-action report Meinhold singled out four men for mention. The first were Sergeant John H. Foley, who “charged into the Indian camp without knowing how many enemies he might encounter,” and 1st Sgt. Leroy H. Vokes, “who bravely closed in upon an Indian while he was fired at several times and wounded him.” Next was Cody, whose “reputation for bravery and skill as a guide is so well established that I need not say anything else than but he acted in his usual manner.” The last was Omohundro, “a very good trailer and a brave man who knows the country well, and I respectfully recommend his employment as a guide should the service of one in addition to Mr. Cody be needed.” Cody, Foley and Vokes each received the Medal of Honor for “gallantry in action.” It is uncertain why Texas Jack did not, though his past service to the Confederacy might have given Meinhold pause. Clippings from local papers expand on the day’s events. A reporter for the North Platte Democrat wrote that after Cody began firing at the

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PETER NEWARK AMERICAN PICTURES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; COWAN’S AUCTIONS; OLD WEST EVENTS

Above left: Omohundro was one of four billed stars in the stage show Scouts of the Plains. Above middle: Texas Jack wears the Lone Star of Texas on his stage costume. Right: The cowboy tradition continued with Texas Jack Jr. (c. 1860–1905), who as a young orphan was rescued by Omohundro and later ran his own Wild West show.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PETER NEWARK AMERICAN PICTURES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; COWAN’S AUCTIONS; OLD WEST EVENTS

and camped together. For four years on theatrical stages from Maine to Texas they appeared together in more than 550 performances, not counting matinees. Onstage Texas Jack was the picture of the cowboy. His costume included the ever-present Stetson, tall black cavalry boots and a fringed buckskin jacket worn open to reveal the Lone Star of Texas emblazoned on his shirt. He carried a lasso, rifle, revolver and bowie knife, prepared for any danger that might come his way. More often than not that danger took the form of hostile Indian warriors. These captivating stage encounters—Texas Jack locked in deadly combat against a tomahawk-wielding brave—were the genesis of “cowboys and Indians” backyard games for generations to come. The concept of cowboys fighting Indians on the outskirts of civilization is so firmly ingrained in the collective consciousness as to seem clichéd, but the reality of the cowboy stands in stark contrast with such romantic depictions in print and on-screen. By the time of the big Texas cattle drives of the late 1860s herders meticulously avoided conflict with Indians. After all, ranch owners entrusted them with the care of their valuable stock. Ensuring the safe conduct of their charges during transportation made cowboys more akin to present-day truck drivers than buckskin-clad knights. The era of cattle drives along the Chisholm Trail, GoodnightLoving Trail and countless others lasted from 1866 until the 1890s when the expansion of rail lines and laying of hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fence rendered the job of open-range cowboy obsolete. During those scant 30 years of cowboy primacy, swift streams swollen by rain, lightning strikes, falls from horseback and disease accounted for the majority of cowboy deaths. A cowboy was more likely to draw his gun on a farmer than a card sharp across a town square at high noon, and more likely to fire his rifle at a coyote than a Comanche raider. Dust and tedium were the rule of a cowboy’s work, as was enduring the worst of conditions to ensure top dollar for beef. Unlike the fiction, the real cowboy’s life was far from romantic. “By all rights,” Lonn Taylor wrote in The American Cowboy, “he should have joined the hunters of Kentucky, the whalers, the flatboatmen, the plainsmen and all of the other American types who briefly caught the popular imagination, were popularized on the stage and in song, and were then forgotten. But the open-range cowboy was never forgotten.” The reason the cowboy endured while all those other professions were forgotten is that after the death of his cowboy friend Texas Jack, Buffalo Bill Cody refused to let the public forget. Once, a lone cowboy rode with Buffalo Bill across the prairies of Nebraska. Now, hundreds of cowboys followed his lead in the spectacle of the Wild West. Where once a single cowboy stood onstage and twirled his lasso, now a legion of men demonstrated cowboy skills for audiences worldwide. Buffalo Bill enshrined Texas Jack’s experience as a cowboy in show programs handed out

JOHN BAKER ‘TEXAS JACK’ OMOHUNDRO

to millions of men, women, and children visiting the Wild West at stops in cities across the United States and throughout Europe. From the inaugural performance in 1883 and in long stands at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1886– 87, Queen Victoria’s 1887 Golden Jubilee in London and the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Wild West programs contained a section titled simply “The Cow-Boy,” written by Texas Jack in the spring of 1877. “The cow-boy!” began the piece that introduced the profession to so many eager spectators. “How often spoken of, how falsely imagined, how greatly despised (where not known), how little understood? I’ve been there considerable.” With descriptions of stampedes and storms, cowboys singing to restless steers at night and “cow sense,” Omohundro outlines a profession APRIL 2022

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In searching for an archetype of the kind of man Buffalo Bill—soldier, scout and buffalo hunter —would elevate above all other professions in his simulacrum of the real West, presented as absolute historical truth to huge audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, one need look no further than John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro, cowboy. Perhaps the breadth of cowboy adventures in literature and on film can also be attributed to the well-publicized exploits of Texas Jack. Years before Lakota warriors traveled with the 42 WILD WEST

Wild West, Omohundro led the Pawnees on their 1872 penultimate summer buffalo hunt in Nebraska. Before Cody defiantly erected his tents opposite the exclusive 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Texas Jack set up a Western-themed hotel, saloon and shooting gallery opposite the 1876 Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. Before Cody and Doc Carver launched the Wild West extravaganza in 1883, Omohundro and Carver displayed their skills with rifle, pistol, and bow and arrow at a series of exhibitions in 1878. If the life of the average cowboy was trail dust and tedium, Texas Jack’s was never short on excitement, adventure and romance. In 1873 he married his beautiful co-star “The Peerless” Giuseppina Morlacchi, an Italian-born prima ballerina who was among the most famous dancers of the era, having introduced the can-can to the American stage in 1868. In 1874 Texas Jack guided Anglo-Irish noble and adventurer the Earl of Dunraven through newly established Yellowstone National Park. Three years later he blazed a new trail into the park from the southeast and rescued tourists from marauding Nez Perces as the latter fled Army troops through the park. Jack led Western hunts for such aristocrats as Dunraven, Sir John Reid and Count Otto Franc, all significant figures in the coming boom of the American cattle industry. He scouted for Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry in pursuit of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake) in the aftermath of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s June 25, 1876, defeat at the Little Bighorn (Greasy Grass). One night in 1878 Texas Jack surprised Thomas Edison in a Wyoming hotel, shooting a weather vane atop a

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CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE RIGHT: COSMOS MARINER/HISTORICAL MARKER DATABASE; PETER GREEENBERG, CC BY-SA 4.0; BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF WEST

How many, though, never finish, but mark the trail with their silent graves, no one can tell. But when Gabriel toots his horn, the “Chisholm Trail” will swarm with cow-boys. “Howsomever, we’ll all be thar,” let’s hope, for a happy trip when we say to this planet, adios!

Four for the Stage

Rifle-carrying performers Edward Zane Carroll Judson (aka Ned Buntline), Cody and Omohundro pose with Morlacchi (1836–86), the Italian-born dancer and actress who married Texas Jack in 1873.

BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF THE WEST

requiring the patience of Job and peopled by ambitious, adventurous and rebellious young men, “taught at school to admire the deceased little Georgie [Washington] in his exploring adventures, though not equaling him in the ‘cherry-tree goodness.’” Signing with a flourish as both J.B. Omohundro and Texas Jack, the author concludes on a wistful note:

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE RIGHT: COSMOS MARINER/HISTORICAL MARKER DATABASE; PETER GREEENBERG, CC BY-SA 4.0; BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF WEST

BUFFALO BILL CENTER OF THE WEST

freight depot from the window of Edison’s room to prove he was “the boss pistol-shot of the West.” It is little wonder it took scores of cowboys to replace this one man in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

cans forgot, but Buffalo Bill remembered. And because Buffalo Bill remembered Texas Jack, the world remembers the American cowboy.

“William Cody seldom spoke of death or of people who had died,” biographer Warren notes. “In all his correspondence there is barely a mention of any deceased friends or acquaintances. He wrote no poignant words about Wild Bill Hickok, Sitting Bull or [Wild West manager] Nate Salsbury. No matter how tragic their deaths, he seldom spoke of the loss.” But Buffalo Bill did write multiple dime novels about his late cowboy friend Texas Jack. Omohundro, stricken with pneumonia, died in the high Rocky Mountain town of Leadville, Colo., on June 28, 1880, a month shy of his 34th birthday. On Sept. 5, 1908, almost three decades after Texas Jack’s death, Cody gathered the cast and crew of the Wild West around Omohundro’s grave in Leadville’s Evergreen Cemetery. There he delivered an impassioned eulogy for the man he called “one of my dearest and most intimate friends…one of the original Texas cowboys, when life on the plains was a hardship and a trying duty.” Buffalo Bill purchased the permanent gravestone that marks the Texas Jack’s final resting place. Nearly a decade later, on Jan. 6, 1917, an ailing Cody rode through Leadville for the final time on a return visit from Glenwood Springs to Denver. Too weak to leave his train car, he sat up in bed when told he was in Leadville, telling his daughter about the grave of Texas Jack, his friend and partner. Four days later Buffalo Bill was dead. Few men are truly remembered in the way the world remembers Buffalo Bill. Yet Americans largely forgot about Texas Jack Omohundro, the cowboy who first popularized the profession and introduced the lasso to the stage, and whose description of his life on the open range spoke to millions of spectators from programs handed out at each stop of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Americans recall the names of the legendary lawmen and outlaws, of the braves and bandits, the soldiers and the scouts, but we forgot the name of our most important open-range cowboy. Ameri-

Matthew Kerns, who writes from Chattanooga, Tenn., is a historian, web developer and digital archivist who manages the Texas Jack Omohundro Facebook page [facebook.com/jbomohundro] and has written many articles about Texas Jack. His 2021 book Texas Jack: America’s First Cowboy Star (see review online at Historynet.com) is recommended for further reading, along with Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, by Louis S. Warren, and The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal and the Creation of Buffalo Bill, by Julia Bricklin.

Remembering Texas Jack

Above: Omohundro’s grave in Leadville’s Evergreen Cemetery. Top: This historical marker about the cowboy turned actor is on North Poplar Street in Leadville. Left: In his eulogy for Texas Jack, Buffalo Bill Cody called him “one of my dearest and most intimate friends...one of the original Texas cowboys, when life on the plains was a hardship and a trying duty.”

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DANIEL BOONE… THE MISSOURIAN? The iconic frontiersman’s connections with Kentucky run deep, but he spent his last decades west of the Mississippi By Tom Clavin

Keep Going West, Young Man

Daniel Boone stands tall in an Appalachian setting in this 1952 oil by John Swientochowski, but the frontiersman lived out his life in what a year after his death became the state of Missouri.

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OPPOSITE: UNIQUES & ANTIQUES, ASTON, PA.; THIS PAGE: KEMPER ART MUSEUM, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

aniel Boone is most often associated with Kentucky, and rightly so. Beginning in the late 1760s the famed frontiersman led parties of hunters and settlers through the Cumberland Gap into the beautiful country beyond, and there with fellow emigrants he constructed Fort Boonesborough, which would play a crucial role in the American Revolution. Yet he also developed deep ties to Missouri—6 feet deep after his 1820 death, for Boone began his eternal rest in Missouri soil. Unhappy Kentuckians vowed to avenge the slight. The man who would become one of the legendary figures of the American frontier was born on Nov. 2, 1734, the sixth of 11 children raised by Quaker parents in what today is Berks County, Pa. After a falling-out with the local community of Quakers, father Squire Boone moved his family south to the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. There Daniel cultivated an enduring love of the wilderness, spending long days exploring the relatively unspoiled forests and mountains of the Piedmont region. He was an indifferent student who never learned to write more than a crude sentence or two, often rife with misspellings. Instead, Boone honed his skills as a woodsman, marksman and hunter— abilities that would serve him well in his venturesome adulthood in the East and the West. Never one to stay put long, Boone made ever longer and more ambitious journeys into the wilds of western North Carolina in the 1750s and ’60s. “It was on the 1st of May in the year 1769,” he later told biographer John Filson, “that I resigned my domestic happiness for a time and left my family and peaceable habitation on the Yadkin River in North Carolina to wander through the wilderness of America in quest of the country of Kentucky.” Accompanied by five other “long hunters,” Boone crossed over the Cumberland Gap to explore along the south fork of the Kentucky River. Impressed by the abundant game and fertile soil, Boone resolved to return. He did so four years later with wife Rebecca, their eight young children and some 50 others, aiming to establish a settlement. The resident American Indians had different ideas and killed several of the party, including the Boones’ eldest son, James, so the expedition turned back. But in 1775 the Boones and other settlers returned, having blazed a trail that became known as Boone’s Trace, or the Wilderness Road. To defend themselves from attack, the settlers built Fort Boonesborough, on the west bank of the Kentucky River. During the American Revolution it—along with Harrodsburg and Logan’s Fort (present-day Stanford), settlements west of the Dix River—was repeatedly targeted by the British and their Indian allies. The survival of these settlements denied the British victory in the Western theater, and in the postwar period Boonesborough became a key gateway for settlers bound for the trans-Appalachian West.

As the years passed Americans came to regard Boone as a symbol of the Western pioneering spirit, and Kentucky remained his home—until it wasn’t. Boone may have wandered into what is now Missouri during one of his long hunts, but not until a new century loomed did he eye the territory seriously. By then, in his estimation, Kentucky had become too crowded—though its 40,000 square miles held scarcely 200,000 people. The more sparsely populated region beyond the Mississippi was not even in the United States but a part of Spanish Louisiana. Though Boone had fought for his country more than once, he chose to leave it. Why? In a word, finances. While he had no peer in navigating the woodlands, when it came to business matters, Boone was often lost. Bill collectors routinely hounded him, and he was forced to sell off his Kentucky land holdings to pay mounting debts, taxes and legal fees. Ultimately, Boone fell back on a familiar solution to his troubles—pack up some necessities and move farther west. Thus in 1799 the 64-year-old pathfinder began a new chapter of his life west of the Mississippi. For centuries men of European descent had explored the river valley and points west. In 1541 the gold-seeking Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto, at the head of some 600 soldiers and a handful of priests, hacked his way north from the Florida Panhandle to the banks of the Mississippi near the site of present-day Memphis, Tenn. There he had his men construct flatboats, crossed over and became the first European to thoroughly explore the valley. Boots of Spanish leather trod soil as far south as present-day Louisiana and as far north as present-day Missouri in de Soto’s quest for treasure and heathen souls to convert or enslave.

Boone the Legend

The spotless frontiersman leads the way in George Caleb Bingham’s circa 1850–51 oil Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap.

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TOP: STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI; RIGHT: PORTRAIT BY CHESTER HARDING, NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES

In 1673 French Jesuit missionary Jacques Mar- proved attractive to American slaveholders, as the 1787 act that created the quette and French-Canadian trader Louis Jol- Northwest Territory (spanning all or parts of present-day Ohio, Indiana, liet paddled and portaged west from the Great Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin) had left the status of slavery uncertain. Lakes, then ventured down the Mississippi in Spanish officials permitted slavery, and by the late 1790s enslaved blacks canoes as far as the Arkansas River. During the represented an estimated one-fifth of the non-Indian population in what late 1680s and ’90s the French pursued the colo- would become Missouri. By the turn of the century settlement in Upper Louisiana was concennization of central North America, not only to promote the burgeoning fur trade but also to trated along the Mississippi, with Indians in control of the rest. Travel thwart English ambitions on the continent. The was done largely by the river, and agriculture was the economic driver. Mississippi-Missouri system served as the main Farmers sold any surplus meat and produce to merchants for shipment to means of communication and transportation settlements farther downriver. Fur trading, lead mining and salt making rounded out economic activities in the region. in the region. Through the first half of the 18th century fur traders and representatives of the French gov- Throughout his life Boone exhibited a strong and affectionate attachernment continued to explore and establish forts, ment to family. So it was that as he and Rebecca emigrated west in the fall trading posts and settlements along the Missis- of 1799, they were joined by sons Daniel Morgan and Nathan, daughters sippi watershed in the Louisiana district of New Susannah (“Suzy”) and Jemima, and sons-in-law Will Hays and Flanders France. A major change in French fortunes be- Callaway. At the last moment Daniel’s younger brother Squire decided gan in 1754 with the outbreak of what came to to join the entourage of 15 or so families herding their cattle, horses and be called the French and Indian War (a side- hogs to yet another future American frontier. Here it is certain Boone was not setting foot in the region for the first show of the broader Seven Years’ War in Europe). The British prevailed, and France lost all time. Two years earlier son Daniel Morgan had crossed the Mississippi and identified good bottomland with ample game some 50 miles up its holdings in North America, ceding conthe Missouri along a creek named Femme Osage. Wasting no time, trol of Louisiana west of the Mississippi he approached Lt. Gov. Zénon Trudeau with a crucial question: to ally Spain as a concession for having If Daniel Boone and family were to immigrate to Upper Louisilost Florida to Britain. The period of ana, would they have to convert to Catholicism? While the Spanish dominion over European official answer was yes, Trudeau assured the younger Boone he settlements in Louisiana saw popuwould waive the requirement for the celebrated frontiersman lation growth in what would become and any of his kin. Thus reassured, Daniel Morgan quickly Missouri, notably in St. Louis and built a cabin on the promising bottomland along Femme Ste. Genevieve. Six years after the Osage Creek. war, in 1769, a third major settlement NATHAN BOONE Having established residency, the younger Boone went to took root with the construction of a fetch his father. In the fall of 1798 the venerable pathfinder, trading post on the northwest bank of about to turn 64, gazed out from his son’s cabin and was equally the Missouri River, which grew into the impressed with the surroundings. As biographer John Mack Faragher town of St. Charles. During the American Revolutionary War the put it, “Boone was surely pulled by Missouri as much as he was pushed government in Madrid, after some dithering, by Kentucky.” The time had come to leave the seemingly ungrateful joined France in support of the colonists. At “Bluegrass State” behind. The following spring Boone and son Nathan chopped down a large war’s end, in 1783, the participating nations signed a set of treaties known as the Peace of poplar and began crafting its trunk into a pirogue upward of 50 feet long, Paris. The Spanish, who retained Louisiana, large enough to transport the collective family members, household goods, were left to contend with an ever increasing tools and supplies across the Mississippi. On finishing its preparations that flood of American immigrants across the Mis- September, the latest westbound Boone expedition set off. Much like his older brother, Squire Boone had led a peripatetic life souri. Rather than stifling the Protestant influx, however, Spanish diplomats encouraged settle- since the end of the American Revolution. Hobbled by wounds suffered ment in its ongoing efforts to create an econom- in the defense of Boonesborough, Squire had attempted to settle in Missisically viable province. In time Daniel Boone sippi Territory, New Orleans and Spanish Florida, and had even returned would become one of those prospective settlers. to Pennsylvania to live with relatives for several years. Like his brother By the late 1790s officials in Louisiana were before him, however, he proved unsophisticated in the world of business, offering American settlers free land, no taxes and by the turn of the century he too found himself hounded by creditors and religious freedom, though the Spanish ver- and tax collectors to such a degree he was once reduced to stealing food sion of religious freedom was the privilege of from a slave to feed his family. During his travels Squire had become being or becoming Catholic. The region also immersed in the Baptist faith and served as a lay circuit preacher.

TOP: STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI; RIGHT: PORTRAIT BY CHESTER HARDING, NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES

Exhausted from their many moves, Squire’s wife, Jane, declined to cross the Mississippi with him, though he was certain she would relent once he’d established a homestead. Alas, the Louisiana frontier proved not as alluring as Squire had hoped, and five years later he’d return east to settle with Jane, their four sons and brother Samuel’s two surviving sons in what would become Harrison County, Indiana Territory, just north of the Ohio River opposite Louisville, Ky. There, on the site of present-day Boone Township, Squire acquired a large tract of land on which he built a stone house and mill, operated a thriving quarry and gunsmith business, and founded one of the territory’s first churches. By 1808 he was serving as justice of the peace. As for brother Daniel, he would spend the rest of his days west of the Mississippi. But soon after crossing over, the Boone family suffered another tragedy. Daniel and Rebecca had already lost sons James and Israel to violence. This time they lost a daughter to disease. During the final leg of their journey along the north bank of the Missouri 39-year-old Suzy Boone contracted what was then known as “bilious fever” (most likely malaria). On Oct. 19, 1800, only days after the family finally reached their bottomland on Femme Osage Creek, she died. While the Boones would never recover from the demise of their eldest daughter, who left behind a husband and 10 children, Daniel seemed rejuvenated by his new surroundings. He spent his time hunting and trapping the backwoods and Missouri tributaries with his sons and sons-in-law. As in the old days in Kentucky, he took the lead when attempting to reconcile disputes between the pioneers and Indians naturally suspicious of intruders settling on what they considered their lands. The very month of the Boones’ arrival on Femme Osage Creek authorities in Madrid transferred ownership of Spanish Louisiana to the French Republic under Napoléon Bonaparte. However, the transfer remained secret, and Spanish officials continued to govern the European settlements on the west bank of the Mississippi. That somewhat awkward relationship ended in the spring of 1803, when Napoléon, feeling the weight of huge military debts, sold the 828,000 square miles of land to the United States for $15 million in what became known as the Louisiana Purchase. Effective July 4, 1805, the region was established as Louisiana Territory. Governance of the new territory occasioned one of the more interesting coincidences in American history. In 1807 Meriwether Lewis of Corps of Discovery fame was appointed second governor of Louisiana Territory. He died in office two years later, reportedly by his own hand. In 1813 William Clark, who’d accompanied Lewis to the Pacific Ocean and back, was appointed fourth governor of newly renamed Missouri Territory. He served until September 1820, when the territory was on the cusp of statehood. Boone was a big noise in his adopted Spanish territory, having been commissioned syndic (de facto judge, jury and military commandant) of the Femme Osage District. But in 1805, when Louisiana became a U.S. territory, a familiar problem arose: As his Spanish grant had been largely based on oral agreements, and Boone had made no improvements to the claim, he lost his land for the second time in his life. In 1809 he petitioned Congress to restore his claim, which it eventually did. But Boone’s victory proved bittersweet, as he then had to sell off most of that land to repay lingering Kentucky debts. When the War of 1812 prompted Indian unrest in Missouri Territory, Boone’s sons Daniel Morgan and Nathan patrolled and fought on the frontier, but by that time their father, though willing, was too old for militia duty.

BOONE THE AGING FRONTIERSMAN

For the aging and by then famed frontiersman the remaining years in Missouri Territory were mostly happy ones spent largely in the bosom of his sprawling family. Boone especially delighted in recounting adventure stories of yesteryear to his scores of grandchildren. These included sonin-law Will Hays’ 10 kids and the eight children son-in-law Joseph Scholl brought from Kentucky after the untimely death of his 36-year-old wife, Levina (the Boones’ third daughter). Both the Boone family and the Bryan clan, on Rebecca’s side, expanded in Missouri. In 1809, around Boone’s 75th birthday, Daniel’s old friend Simon Kenton paid a long visit to Femme Osage. Boone, ever the optimist, carved a new powder horn, polished his rifle and expressed hope he could negotiate the steps from his rocking chair to the woods for one more adventure with the man who had saved his life

BOONE THE ELDER STATESMAN

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From left: Daniel and Rebecca’s memorial in Frankfort, Ky.; the couple’s original burial site in Marthasville, Mo.; son Daniel Morgan’s grave marker in Kansas City, Mo.

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FROM TOP: U.S. MINT (2); NATIONAL POSTAL MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; KBH3RD, CC BY-SA 3.0

Memorializing the Boones

TOP: DRAWING BY BERNARDA BRYSON SHAHN, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; BOTTOM, FROM LEFT: RUSSELL AND SYDNEY POORE; DOUGLAS KERR, CC BY-SA 2.0; B. HUGH, CC BY-SA 4.0

He may have preferred the woods by then, as there during the 1778 Siege of Booneswas an empty chair at home. On March 18, 1813, after borough. It was not to be, although a brief illness, Rebecca Boone had died at age 74 in he and Kenton spent several weeks daughter Jemima Boone Callaway’s home outside reliving old times. Charette (near present-day Marthasville, Mo.). She Kenton may also have been was buried at the family cemetery her Bryan kin had considering a move to Missouri, established, overlooking the Missouri River. as his travails had been equal to those of Boone. Having survived Boone’s last year coincided with the adoption of capture and torture by the Shawfederal legislation known as the Missouri Compromise. nees amid the revolution, Kenton BOONE THE OCTOGENARIAN In 1818 the territorial legislature had petitioned Congress later lost vast land holdings in Kenfor statehood. What would otherwise have been a routine tucky and Ohio to mismanagement and admission, however, soon became mired in the national debate had ended up in a debtor’s prison. It was only through the largesse of his children that over the future of slavery, the battle lines having been drawn between he’d not died behind bars. Following his visit North and South. The “Missouri Crisis” was resolved (at least for the to Boone, Kenton returned to Ohio, where he time being) in 1820 when Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, clearing the way for the territory’s transition as a slave state. On Aug. 10, would die in poverty at age 81 in 1836. Boone continued to hunt and trap as health 1821, Missouri was admitted to the Union as the first state entirely west permitted, on one noteworthy occasion falling of the Mississippi. Like most frontiersmen who’d spent their lives wandering cold, damp afoul of Osages who confiscated his traps and furs. In 1810 the 76-year-old joined a party on forests, the elderly Boone suffered from bouts of near disabling rheumaa six-month hunt for beaver up the Missouri, tism that often curtailed his hunts. Yet despite the fact his thinning hair reportedly to the mouth of the Yellowstone River had turned badger gray, and his patchy white skin highlighted red-rimmed —a round trip of more than 2,000 miles. Though eyes, those eyes never lost their light. Credit all those grandchildren—as the distance seems improbable, a mountain man the Boones and Bryans did their best to populate Missouri—with keeping who crossed paths with Boone after his return re- him reasonably spry. Boone at times visited the Charette home of Jemima and Flanders called, “The old man was still erect in form, strong Callaway. “During the whole summer of 1820 he was at the Callaways,” in limb and unflinching in spirit.” In 1816 the 81-year-old frontiersman em- Nathan Boone told biographer Lyman C. Draper, who interviewed the barked on a last long beaver hunt up the Mis- frontiersman’s son in 1851. Nathan recalled his father’s inevitable decline souri. Joining him were a hired woodsman and that fall at home on Femme Osage Creek. “He had an attack of fever, son Daniel Morgan’s slave Derry Coburn, a not severe, and while recovering was exceedingly anxious to be taken kindred spirit who enjoyed the outdoors as much to my house.” A few weeks later Nathan obeyed his father’s wishes and as Boone and often joined him on such excur- brought him west by carriage to his own substantial stone house, preserved sions. They reached Fort Osage, just east of as a historic site in present-day Defiance, Mo. Biographer Faragher recounted Boone’s arrival: present-day Kansas City, that April. “We have been honored by a visit from Colonel Boone,” an officer recalled in a published letter. “He has There was a good deal of anticipation that this might be his last visit, and family, taken part in all the wars of America, from Bradfriends and neighbors all gathered to greet him. One man remembered “the deep dock’s war to the present hour…[but] he prefers feeling” that pervaded the crowd, the people jostling one another, craning their the woods, where you see him in the dress of necks and leaning forward to see him.…He spent that afternoon and evening the roughest, poorest hunter.” among the children, sampling their little gifts of cakes and nuts.

Tom Clavin of Sag Harbor, N.Y., is the author of the popular Western histories Wild Bill: True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter; Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and the Wickedest Town in the American West; and Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday and the Vendetta Ride From Hell. He is co-author with Bob Drury of Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America’s First Frontier, which is suggested for further reading, along with Boone: A Biography, by Robert Morgan, and Finding Daniel Boone: His Last Days in Missouri & the Strange Fate of His Remains, by Ted Franklin Belue. Boone on Coin and Stamp

The U.S. Mint issued the Boone bicentennial half dollar in 1934, while the U.S. Post Office printed the 6-cent stamp below in his honor in 1968.

FINDING

FROM TOP: U.S. MINT (2); NATIONAL POSTAL MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; KBH3RD, CC BY-SA 3.0

TOP: DRAWING BY BERNARDA BRYSON SHAHN, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; BOTTOM, FROM LEFT: RUSSELL AND SYDNEY POORE; DOUGLAS KERR, CC BY-SA 2.0; B. HUGH, CC BY-SA 4.0

Boone lingered for two weeks. The night before he died, he asked Jemima, who had come to see him one last time, to cut his hair. She did so, preserving his locks, while Nathan’s daughter Delinda gently brushed his teeth. Just after dawn on Sept. 26, 1820, he told those around his bed, “I am going—my time has come.” Then, with Nathan and Jemima on either side of him and holding his hands, Boone died. He was six weeks’ shy of his 86th birthday. He was buried beside Rebecca and presumably would still be there today—except Kentucky was not done with Daniel Boone. Not until the mid-1830s did members of the Bryan family mark the graves with two stones simply inscribed Daniel and Rebecca. Those stones proved insufficiently heavy, however, to permanently weigh down the remains. In April 1845 the Kentucky Legislature resolved the Boones should be reinterred in the state capital of Frankfort. Missouri officials reacted by appropriating $500 to erect a proper monument over the graves. But they didn’t move fast enough. Kentucky emissaries campaigned hard to persuade Boone family members, particularly surviving son Nathan, for permission to reinter the remains. Contending this had been granted, Kentucky sent three men—including the frontiersman’s nephew William Linville Boone—on a wagon to Missouri to effect the removal as hurriedly and unobtrusively as possible. By then, of course, two decades of decomposition had set in, but hired diggers excavated what they could and shoveled the remains into two fresh pine boxes. (For weeks afterward local scavengers turned up teeth and bits of bone and clothing.) On Saturday, Sept. 13, 1845, with great public fanfare, Daniel and Rebecca Boone were reburied in the central Frankfort Cemetery. Much to Missouri’s chagrin, they’re still there today.

A visitor can keep quite busy going from one Boone-related site to another in Missouri. Here’s a sampling of the more popular ones: The Historic Daniel Boone Home: This stone house in Defiance (at right) was built by Boone’s youngest son, Nathan. “In the summer of 1800 I erected a good substantial log house, and several years after that I replaced it with a commodious stone building,” he recalled. “My father, Daniel Boone, built himself a shop and had a set of tools, and when at home he would make and repair traps and guns. In fact, he did all the needed smithwork for the family and sometimes for neighbors.” Daniel and wife made it their primary residence from 1804 until Rebecca’s 1813 death, while Daniel spent

much of his time here from late 1816 till his 1820 death. In 1837 Nathan and family moved to a newly built house on the site of present-day Ash Grove. Nathan and Olive Boone Homestead State Historic Site: Two miles north of Ash Grove, this state-owned property preserves the stone house Boone’s son and wife moved to in 1837. Boone’s Lick State Historic Site: Four miles east of Arrow Rock, this park centers on one of the saltwater springs used by brothers Nathan and Daniel Morgan Boone in the early 19th century. The Daniel Boone Judgment Tree Memorial: Just off Highway 94 in

Matson, 2 miles south of Defiance, this impressive elm on farmland in the Missouri River bottoms represents a tree beneath which Daniel Boone reportedly held court from 1800 to ’04 when serving as Spanish syndic for the Femme Osage District. —T.C. APRIL 2022

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GOLD RUSH GUNFIGHTER

Ben Marshall, among the most notorious gunmen in early California, got his start on the right side of the law in Murphy’s Camp in 1850

By John Boessenecker and the 1851 Navy Model. These cap-and-ball firearms were affordable, reliable, easily carried on one’s person and ideal for self-defense. Each model held five to six rounds and was a vast improvement over traditional single-shot handguns. Prospectors brought Colt revolvers to California by the thousands. California’s gold camps were plagued by astronomical rates of violent crime and murder. The reasons were many. As news of the strike at Sutter’s Mill spread, wanderers and adventurers from around the globe flocked to the mother lode country in the Sierra Nevada foothills. A polyglot society of diverse races and religions sprang up and with it a veritable cauldron of social unrest. Most Forty-Niners were young, hard-drinking males separated for the first time from

CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY; OPPOSITE: CALAVERAS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

he era of the Western gunfighter began at the close of the Civil War. This falsehood has been repeated so many times that it has become accepted as dogma by many historians and Western enthusiasts. Several writers of the 1930s created the myth through their obsessive focus on such post–Civil War gunfighters as Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Billy the Kid and the like. Plainly they had never heard of the many gunfighters of California Gold Rush days. The era of the Western gunfighter truly began in 1848 when the discovery of gold in California set off one of mankind’s greatest mass migrations. That pivotal event coincided with Samuel Colt’s development of revolving firearms, notably the 1848 First Model Dragoon, the 1849 Pocket Model

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CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY; OPPOSITE: CALAVERAS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

tucky Cavalry for service in the Mexican War. the stabilizing influences of home, family and Marshall’s company of 78 enlisted men and women. Their rowdy, oft-illegal behavior— officers left Louisville that July. Transported including open fighting, drinking, gambling down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to and whoring—would never have been tolerMemphis, Tenn., by steamboat, they rode ated back home. Men of that era also underhorseback more than 600 miles across Arstood they were responsible for their own kansas and Texas, arriving that September safety and for solving their own problems. at Port Lavaca on the Gulf of Mexico. There Government was minimal, and in the early they embarked on ships bound for Maj. Gen. years of the rush California had few jails, Zachary Taylor’s headquarters along the Rio no state prison and only minimal police and BENJAMIN FRANKLIN MARSHALL Grande in Camargo, Mexico. The 1st Kentucky fire protection. Almost all prospectors carried Cavalry had its baptism of fire at the Battle of guns and knives for protection against bullies, Buena Vista in northern Mexico on Feb. 22–23, 1847. desperadoes and bandits. Violence became commonplace as young men resorted to Although the Mexicans left the field to the Americans, the six-shooters and bowie knives, sometimes in drunken quarrels, battle was inconclusive. Four months later, at the expiraother times in justifiable self-defense. Those with surpassing tion of his 12-month enlistment, Marshall returned home courage and skill with Colt revolvers achieved notoriety as with the rest of the regiment. His experience in the Mexican “man-killers.” Their ranks included such notorious gunmen War left him with a taste for adventure and a willingness— as Billy Mulligan, Will Hicks Graham, Bill Byrnes, Milt Duf- even an eagerness—to fight. By late 1848 news of the California gold strike had reached field, “Longhair Sam” Brown and “Cherokee Bob” Talbot. Equal to any of them was Ben Marshall, one of the very first Kentucky, and Marshall quickly joined the rush for riches. He and a party of like-minded young men followed the trail California Gold Rush gunfighters. he knew through Texas and northern Mexico into CaliBenjamin Franklin Marshall was born around 1820, fornia. In Los Angeles Ben struck up a relationship with probably in Kentucky, to Irish parents. Little is known of 23-year-old widow Nicolasa Carriaga, a Californio (Spanishhis early life, but in June 1846 he traveled to Louisville and speaking native), who accompanied him north to the goldwas mustered in as a private in Company E of the 1st Ken- fields. They settled in Murphy’s Camp (present-day Murphys),

Murphy’s Camp, California, 1857

Forty-Niner Ben Marshall built a log cabin in this rough settlement in what became Calaveras County.

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Chose a Badge Over Gold

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TOP LEFT: CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY; TOP RIGHT: SOCIETY OF CALIFORNIA PIONEERS; RIGHT: NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

quick tempered. In April 1850 the county’s first sheriff appointed Marshall as a deputy, and a month later Ben was elected the first constable of Murphy’s. Noyes was among those who didn’t like the new lawman. “Ben Marshall had always been a terror to Murphy’s Camp,” he recalled. “He had a [pistol] ball NICOLASA CARRIAGA hole in every house in the place. If he disliked a man, MARSHALL he would shoot into his house at night when he was asleep. Ben Marshall was one of the most disagreeable persons I ever met, especially when drunk. He was continually bullying around with his pistol. He had credit of being brave when drunk.” One street was half a mile long, lined on both sides Noyes, who later became a San Francisco police detective, was not with cloth houses with an occasional house built of exaggerating. Marshall recorded his first gunfight just five months after splits. Gambling there was no limit to. Every store becoming constable. On that day in early October 1850 Ben quarreled had its game.…Every night the gambling houses with a three-card monte dealer named Thompson and another man, Jim were in full blast, and generally shooting done by Lee. The pair went for their guns, but Marshall was faster, shooting down one or more men each night. Thompson, Lee and two other men. Referring to Marshall as “a notorious Marshall soon gained a reputation in Cala- character,” a San Francisco newspaper reported, “Thompson is not exveras County. While many liked him, others did pected to survive, but the others may recover.” Apparently, Marshall’s not, for he was hard drinking, opinionated and peers considered the shooting justified, as he faced no charges.

a rough mining town in what soon became Calaveras County. Marshall built a log cabin on Murphy’s main street, where he and Nicolasa started a family of two sons and a daughter. They never formally wed, but instead had a commonlaw marriage. Pioneer settler Leonard W. Noyes left a vivid description of the lively camp:

TOP: STOCK MONTAGE/GETTY IMAGES; CALAVERAS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Marshall joined the rush for riches, like this party of Forty-Niners, but then was elected first constable of Calaveras County. He proved a bully, said to be “brave when drunk.”

TOP LEFT: CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY; TOP RIGHT: SOCIETY OF CALIFORNIA PIONEERS; RIGHT: NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

TOP: STOCK MONTAGE/GETTY IMAGES; CALAVERAS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

STOCKTON, CIRCA 1852

MOKELUMNE HILL,CIRCA 1860s

Marshall seemed to relish such fights, and he became embroiled in every kind of controversy imaginable, from personal to religious to political. Despite his quarrelsome nature, he remained largely popular and in June 1851 was elected county sheriff. He performed his duties with exemplary courage. In early February 1852 an Italian prospector rushed into Murphys to complain that five Basque miners had jumped his claim. A local judge sent the interlopers a notice in French ordering them to move on or appear in court and prove their right to the claim. The Basques ignored the judge’s order and defied a deputy sheriff’s attempt to serve it on them. Sheriff Marshall promptly raised a five-man posse and headed for the disputed claim. Weighing the odds, the Basques wisely agreed to return with Marshall to camp and appear before the judge. En route the sheriff discovered all of the Basques were carrying concealed revolvers and ordered them to hand over the guns. Several did so, but one refused, and Marshall drew down on the man with his rifle. Suddenly, two of the Basques jumped the sheriff. As Marshall struggled with them, his rifle accidentally discharged, dropping one of the Basques with a fatal bullet wound. The others pressed their attack, and the sheriff tried to fend them off by swinging his rifle like a club. Finally, as a last resort, Marshall jerked his six-shooter and shot down the leader of the band. At that the other Basques fled. Marshall soon arrived in Murphy’s with his two wounded captives. The first man he shot died the next day; the second recovered. Two months later Marshall made a visit to Stockton, an important supply hub and farming town in the San Joaquin Valley, 60 miles west of Murphy’s Camp. There on the night of April 14 he was drinking in the El Dorado saloon when he encountered Brown Smith, a political enemy who had previously lived in Calaveras County. Marshall accused Smith of having made false statements about him during the 1851 sheriff’s election. Hot words led to a struggle in which Smith seized Marshall by the arms and shoved the sheriff against a wall to keep him from drawing his six-shooter. Bystanders separated the pair, and Smith promptly left the saloon. But

Marshall ran after him, six-gun in hand, and fired three times, one ball striking Smith in the leg. The sheriff immediately rode out of town and was never punished for the shooting. Marshall’s contentious nature lost him his party’s nomination for re-election as sheriff in 1853. To make ends meet, he ran a cattle ranch and a butcher shop in Murphy’s Camp and supplied beef to miners. On March 25, 1855, Marshall rode into Mokelumne Hill, the Calaveras County seat. There he ran into William L. Dudley, a lawyer who had recently argued a successful civil lawsuit against him. An argument broke out between the pair, and the hot-headed exlawman jerked his pistol. Before he could trigger a shot, the county sheriff intervened, seizing Ben and disarming him. Marshall was enraged, and that night he challenged Dudley to a formal duel. At the time dueling was almost as common in California as it was in the Deep South. But it was also illegal, and Dudley refused Marshall’s challenge. The affair of honor never took place. A year later, in March 1856, Marshall had a run-in with Noyes at the post office in Murphy’s and upbraided the latter for having challenged votes in the most recent election. The tiff quickly escalated, as Noyes recalled: He hit me with his fist while I was standing talking with the postmaster. He had an idea that I would run, and then he would shoot me, as he had two revolvers by him at the time, but it is out of my line to run when I am imposed on. So I returned the compliment with a little better effect than he did, for [I] hit him in the eye with my fist and floored him. Then, fearing his pistols, I jumped for a pick handle and should have knocked his brains out with it had not others interfered.

According to Noyes, Marshall engaged in several more shooting scrapes in Murphy’s. On one occasion he burst into a gambling tent, flourishing his pistol, and threatened to shoot a ruffian Gold Rush–Era Miners’ Ball

Fun could be had in the mining camps, but Marshall, a lawman prone to violence, could be a party pooper.

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named Harry Browning. The latter ran outside, picked up a rifle and fired at Marshall. Fortunately for Ben, the bullet only creased his necktie. Browning later robbed a stagecoach. Caught and convicted, he was sent to San Quentin, where in 1857 a prison guard shot him dead. In another incident a pair of shopkeepers angered Marshall, who pulled his pistol and shot up their storefront. Noyes also described Marshall’s quarrel with miner Joe Schaffer at a local horse race. Ben was drunk when he rode up to Joe, drew his six-shooter and fired point-blank at the miner. Miraculously, the revolver misfired. Marshall recorded a final gunfight in Murphy’s on June 20, 1856. He was drinking in Sperry’s saloon when he encountered his nemesis, Joe Schaffer, and Joe’s brother, Fred. The Schaffers were of German descent, from Pennsylvania. Noyes walked in on the scene and recalled what happened next: Ben Marshall was leaning against the counter, half drunk, talking at Joe and Fred Schaffer, who were then playing billiards. Ben was cursing [them as] flat-footed Pennsylvania Dutch sons of bitches. Joe Schaffer took me to one side and asked if my gun [rifle] was handy. I had loaned it to someone and could not get it but told Joe that [I] had a pistol and would stay by him. But Joe said, ‘You go up to bed— the less here the better.’

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It affords me pleasure to be in a condition to contradict the report. Neither Wilson nor myself has ever had any difficulty with Marshall, and I suppose Marshall will be as much surprised to see the report as I was.

Two years later Ben became a police officer in the central Nevada mining town of Austin. By all accounts he performed his duties diligently, making dozens of arrests for everything from fighting and carrying firearms to child molestation. In June 1867 he and the city marshal tracked down and captured horse thief and murderer S.B. Vail, though within weeks a lynch mob seized Vail and hanged him. Marshall himself was soon back in trouble. On Sept. 6, 1867, he and a fellow policeman were drinking in Austin’s Pony saloon when R.M. Waterhouse, proprietor of another local saloon, stepped inside for a drink.

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TOP: NATIONAL GALLERY; RIGHT: OLD TIMERS MUSEUM, MURPHYS, CALIF.

BEN MARSHALL (SEATED) AND SON FRANK, CIRCA 1870

Noyes complied. Minutes later he heard gunfire in the street. Armed with a shotgun and a pistol, the Schaffers had left the saloon and opened fire when Marshall followed them. Ben yanked his six-gun and returned the shots before dropping with a load of bird shot in his back and a wrist. Marshall later told a reporter the shooting “was commenced by several of his enemies, who commenced firing at his back from alleyways and behind corners.” Noyes wryly added that Nicolasa, “a Spanish woman with whom Ben Marshall lived, spent the day picking fine shot from Ben’s backsides. Schaffer’s gun having been loaned and loaded with bird shot, this took the conceit out of Ben, who was never known to do shooting about Murphy’s after.” Despite his growing reputation for violence, Marshall was elected to the state legislature in 1857. Two years later he lost his home in Murphy’s to a fire and some of his property due to business reverses. Likely due to his heavy drinking and violent temper, Ben’s relationship with Nicolasa deteriorated, and in late 1862 he left Murphy’s and crossed the mountains into Nevada Territory. There he engaged in mining, having little contact with his family. Not even pleading letters from his young daughter were enough to entice him back home. In January 1864 newspapers reported on yet another shooting by Marshall, this time in Nevada’s Carson Valley. The affray stemmed from a dispute with Sam Wilson and son-in-law B.T. Bradley, both former politicians from Calaveras County. According to the papers, Marshall shot and killed Bradley, was arrested and promptly posted bail. He then tracked down Wilson, who’d testified against him, and put a bullet through his head. But this time, at least, the report was untrue. Ben had not shot anyone. Bradley was alive and well in Austin, Nev., and on receiving word of his untimely demise, he responded in print:

LEFT: CALAVERAS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY; RIGHT: BANCROFT LIBRARY, U.C. BERKELEY

SPERRY’S HOTEL AT MURPHY’S CAMP

According to onlookers, the officers got into an argument with Waterhouse, and Marshall struck him over the head with a cane. Waterhouse then pulled a derringer. The officers were trying to wrest it from him when the derringer suddenly discharged, the heavy ball tearing through Waterhouse’s hand. A bystander said he offered to fetch a doctor, but the policemen “called him a son of a bitch and threatened [him] with a hole in the head.” Marshall told a different story. He claimed Waterhouse had shot himself in the hand while drawing the derringer, and when the officers attempted to arrest the saloon man, Waterhouse then struck him in the eye with the handgun. In the end Marshall was the one charged with assault, though a jury found him not guilty. Marshall continued working in various law enforcement capacities and in 1871 served briefly as captain of the guard at the Nevada State Prison, in Carson City. He took an active part in state politics and the next year he made an unsuccessful run for the Legislature. Within a few years he drifted east to the mining camp of Ruby Hill in eastern Nevada, where he again found work as a police officer. On June 13, 1877, amid a heated argument over religion with mine superintendent J. Fleming, Marshall yanked his pistol and fired twice. One shot missed, but the other grazed Fleming’s abdomen and struck his left arm. Ben was arrested for assault to kill, but a grand jury refused to indict him. Marshall spent the ensuing years prospecting, mining and serving as a guard in the Ruby Hill Mining District. On June 24, 1884, the 64-year-old was on guard duty at the Albion Mine when he warned off several laborers found cutting timber on the mine property. Learning they’d been sent by lumber dealer Moses Roberts, Marshall rode to Roberts’ nearby camp to confront him. The two were exchanging curses when Moses snatched up a pick and advanced on Ben. That was a mistake. Marshall later told a reporter he “fired one shot, low down, to stop his assailant without any danger of killing him, and that he fired a second shot into the air.” The first

RUBY HILL, NEV., CIRCA 1870

shot tore a hole in Roberts’ leg. This time a grand jury indicted him for assault to kill, but the case was apparently dropped. That was Marshall’s last recorded shooting scrape. Two years later he suddenly took ill and within a few days died in his Ruby Hill cabin, on Oct. 31, 1886. Friends found $1,000 in gold coins secreted in the cabin. Ben was survived by his estranged wife, Nicolasa, and son Frank. He retains his rightful place in state history as one of the first, and last surviving, of the California Gold Rush gunfighters. San Francisco-based author John Boessenecker is a special contributor to Wild West and the author of award-winning books about the American West. His Gold Dust and Gunsmoke: Tales of Gold Rush Outlaws, Gunfighters, Lawmen and Vigilantes is recommended for further reading, as is William B. Secrest’s California Badmen: Mean Men With Guns.

TOP: NATIONAL GALLERY; RIGHT: OLD TIMERS MUSEUM, MURPHYS, CALIF.

LEFT: CALAVERAS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY; RIGHT: BANCROFT LIBRARY, U.C. BERKELEY

MURRIETA or A marshall? In the 1920s and ’30s Ben Marshall’s son Frank, by then an elderly man, shared many tales about his father’s adventures and misadventures in California Gold Rush country. One of his favorites recalled a friendship between his father and a young Mexican miner named Joaquín Murrieta. So the story goes, Murrieta, having been driven off his claim, opened up a game in a gambling tent in Murphy’s. When Anglo ruffians broke up the game and tried to drive the enterprising gambler from camp, Marshall interceded on the latter’s behalf, protecting Murrieta from the band. In 1851, as a token of gratitude, Joaquín presented Ben with a photograph of himself. Murrieta went on to become the most notorious Hispanic outlaw in the West and met his death at the hands of the California Rangers in 1853. In the 1950s Marshall’s descendants produced a plate image of a young Hispanic man, identifying it as the very photo Joaquín presented to Ben. The image was subsequently

published in numerous books and magazine articles as an authenticated photo of the notorious Murrieta—that is until advances in the study of antique images called into question its authenticity. The original image, in the collection of the Old Timers Museum in Murphys, Calif., is a tintype, a type of photography that didn’t exist in North America at the time of Murrieta’s 1853 death. Taken in the early 1870s, the image in fact depicts Marshall’s half-Californio son Frank (compare photos above and opposite left). Likely in jest, the storyteller had passed off his own photo as one of Joaquín Murrieta. —J.B. APRIL 2022

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Stick and Carrot

The fellow in Olaf Carl Seltzer’s 1928 watercolor Barkeep looks tough enough to handle rowdy patrons. Opposite: Fort Worth, Texas, saloon man William H. “Bill” Ward drew patrons with tokens like this for free drinks.

PLEASE DON’T SHOOT THE BARTENDER

The men who poured drinks in Old West saloons also served as bouncers, arbitrators, stakeholders and trusted confidants

GILCREASE MUSEUM; OPPOSITE: RICHARD F. SELCER COLLECTION

By Richard F. Selcer

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lease don ’ t shoot the pianist ; he

GILCREASE MUSEUM; OPPOSITE: RICHARD F. SELCER COLLECTION

is doing his best.

That saying entered Western lore from an unlikely source— Oscar Wilde. The celebrated Irish poet and playwright did a lecture tour of the United States in 1882 that took him to Western mining camps. While declaiming in a saloon in Leadville, Colorado, he read those words on a sign over the piano. The plea might also apply to bartenders, who, like their piano-playing colleagues, tried to do their best in often trying circumstances. Tending bar in the Old West could be dangerous work, and a good saloon man was not easily replaced, as he was far more than a simple drink pourer. Reflecting in 1931 on his own pre-Prohibition saloon visits, writer Travis Hoke described the ideal old-time barkeep as “a counselor in all the ways of life, recipient of confidences, disburser of advice, arbiter of disputes [and] authority on every subject.” A bartender was not necessarily the barkeep (or saloon proprietor) and vice versa, though newspapers on the frontier used the terms interchangeably. Like every other business owner, a saloon man had to be willing to roll up his sleeves and go to work. That meant getting behind the bar. One too proud to tend bar was not likely to be successful. In 1885 saloon man John T. Leer of Fort Worth, Texas, bought out his partners in the Theatre Comique, and most nights he tended bar. To lure patrons from rival saloons, Leer shrewdly slashed the price of drinks, knowing most men weren’t there for the variety show. There were no qualifications for being a bartender. In the early years few even knew how to mix the specialty drinks that came to be known as cocktails. Patrons could order either beer or whiskey. It was a bartender’s option whether to serve the good stuff or the “Who Hit John.” An absolute no-no was dipping into an employer’s stock. That could get a man fired as quickly as dipping into the till. Unfortunately, one of the temptations of working behind a bar was access to an endless supply of booze. For one inclined to alcoholism that could prove fatal one way or another. If a bartender with the habit didn’t drink himself to death, he might get into a drunken brawl with a customer and die of “lead poisoning.” A man with ready access to both liquor and guns could be a dangerous hombre. If he had psychological problems to boot, he was a ticking time bomb. On Aug. 6, 1886, saloon man John W. Vaden got drunk, armed himself with a Winchester and shot out the lamps in his own establishment in Ballinger, Texas. He then barged

into the neighboring Palace saloon, spoiling for a fight with bartender Frank Borman. City Marshal Tom Hill responded to the fracas, and amid a three-way struggle for the rifle he was shot through the left foot. A doctor had to amputate, infection set in, and Hill died two days later. Skipping town, Vaden repeated his performance that October 7 at Mayer’s saloon in Fort McKavett, Texas, smashing up the place and threatening bartender Ben Daniels with a hooked pole until the latter, who doubled as a deputy sheriff, shot Vaden dead. On June 22, 1887, Fort Worth saloon man William T. Grigsby was tending bar and reportedly sampling the whiskey at his Unique saloon. Around 1 p.m. he asked the bartender to hand him his pistol from beneath the counter and a bottle to take home. Instead of leaving, however, he began pacing the floor, muttering darkly to himself. Among those present was friend Mike Haggerty. Seeing that his pal was troubled, Haggerty approached Grigsby, asking for the gun. Without a word Grigsby drew down and shot his friend dead. The saloon man then began raving and sobbing incoherently. It took several policemen to subdue and haul Grigsby off to jail. “He had the reputation of being a quiet, gentlemanly and clever man,” noted the Fort Worth Gazette, “who had not an enemy on earth.” Something that day sent him over the edge. The paper noted Grigsby had been drinking heavily and stewing about a recent local debate over prohibition. When he came to his senses in jail, officials released him on a bond posted by friends who passed off the episode as a case of temporary insanity brought on by bad whiskey. Grigsby was indicted for murder, but his lawyers dragged out the case for nearly two years before it went to trial. By that time the prosecution had no witnesses and thus no case, and a jury acquitted him. Proving one can’t keep a good bartender down, in 1907 Grigsby, then living in North Fort Worth, was granted another saloon license. As a rule, however, it was a reputation for sterling character that made a bartender a trusted member of the fraternal community. Sporting men who would bet on anything frequently asked a barkeep to hold the stakes. In October 1880 Fort Worth marshal turned gunfighter Thomas Isaiah “Longhair Jim” Courtright and gambler John C. Morris agreed to settle their differences with knife duel, each man putting up his gold watch as collateral he would show on the appointed date. Whom did they trust to hold the stakes? A friendly bartender, of course. The fight never came off, and each man reclaimed his watch. Barkeeps themselves typically refrained from gambling while on duty. It was better not to APRIL 2022

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Bar None

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down to pull the drunk to his feet. Just then one of the man’s friends stabbed the bartender in the back, perforating a lung. The two men fled the scene, while Seidl headed to a hospital. Ironically, he had recently resigned from the Fort Worth Fire Department to take up bartending, as the latter profession was reputedly less dangerous and offered better hours. Indeed, most scuffles between bartenders and customers resulted in little damage to the combatants or the establishment and were quickly forgotten. Seldom did anyone hold a grudge. If police inquired about any brawls between customers, bartenders were inclined to keep mum, as a saloon man with loose lips might lose business or be targeted by the accused’s friends. It was better to see and hear nothing while working behind the bar. Bartender D.S. Randall of Fort Worth’s Blue Light saloon was the sort who kept order with a light hand, though he was no pushover. Ben Tutt, a regular known to have a foul temper when in his cups, was already well lubricated when he entered the Blue Light on the evening of April 9, 1877. Bellying up to the bar, Tutt demanded a free drink, and Randall poured it. After downing his whiskey, Tutt pulled a pistol and shot wildly, grazing Randall in the shoulder. Ducking behind the bar, Randall came up hurling bottles at his assailant before pulling a six-shooter and opening fire. Fleeing from the saloon without a scratch, Tutt toddled off down the street. Police soon arrested him, but Randall refused to press charges, as Tutt was a loyal patron and the incident just another night manning the bar. Inebriated bravos demanding free drinks was not unusual. Bartenders handled it differently depending on the situation and the customer. On Dec. 30, 1894, Jim Rushing was barhopping in Fort Worth with friend Bob Miller when they entered city alderman Martin McGrath’s saloon and sauntered up to the rail. Miller pulled his pistol, laid it on the bar and demanded drinks. Though he didn’t utter any threats, McGrath’s bartender got the message and poured drinks for the pair. Miller had pulled the same stunt in at least one other saloon that night, but the difference this time was proprietor McGrath. When a scuffle broke out between the Rushing party and other patrons, McGrath descended from an upstairs room with pistol in hand and opened fire. When the smoke cleared, Rush-

BANCROFT LIBRARY, U.C. BERKELEY

get involved beyond holding the stakes and sometimes the bankrolls of players. An important part of the job was knowing how to handle both the inebriated customer and the garrulous fellow who wanted to buy the bartender a drink. The former had to be cut off without causing offense, the latter politely refused. A barkeep also had to be able to ride herd over rowdier patrons without hurting business. It helped to have a tough guy reputation. Saloon man “Rowdy Joe” Lowe, who bounced among the Kansas cow towns before moving to Fort Worth, was quite capable of corralling his patrons. “I keep good order in my house,” he bragged, and by all accounts he was able to back up the boast. “If any man becomes disorderly, and there is no officer of the law present, I am very apt to take the law into my own hands.” Whether he was the proprietor or just tending bar, a saloon man was expected to keep a rough kind of order. “Bouncer” was part of the job description for a job that might pay $2 for a weeknight shift or $3 for a weekend shift. Being an enforcer could be dangerous. On March 1, 1872, an inebriated “Cherokee Dan” Hicks entered Harry Lovett’s Side Track saloon in Newton, Kan., and began taking potshots at the mirrors and pictures on the wall. When the rowdy refused to holster his gun, Lovett whipped out his own six-shooter and dropped Hicks with three slugs to the body and one to the head. No charges were forthcoming. Such violence was not limited to the frontier. On Sept. 13, 1913, Fort Worth bartender Harry Seidl decked an intoxicated customer who was being obnoxious. Seidl had nothing against the man personally and leaned APRIL 2022

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TOP AND BELOW RIGHT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY (3); MIDDLE RIGHT: AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING; BOTTOM: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY

A bartender serves a couple of Chinese patrons in an elaborate California bar where Spaniards, American frontiersmen, dogs and a town drunk also seem welcome.

TOP AND BELOW RIGHT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY (3); MIDDLE RIGHT: AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING; BOTTOM: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY

BANCROFT LIBRARY, U.C. BERKELEY

ing lay dead on the floor. The bartender on the night of the shooting had been a new hire, called in to handle the coming New Year’s Eve rush. “I didn’t do nothing at all,” he testified of his actions that night. “I just stood right there. Never moved.” After the body had been removed, McGrath directed his bartender to lock the doors of the empty saloon. Convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to nine years in prison, McGrath later escaped and was never heard from again. When not defending themselves or their saloons, bartenders tried to be hospitable. They were, after all, the “face” of the establishment. They had to walk a thin line between letting the boys blow off steam and keeping a lid on things. That meant being tough when they had to be tough and remaining congenial the rest of the time. Little surprise then that many bartenders were former lawmen or outlaws and thus no strangers to violence. Between stints at the bar some returned to lawlessness. Others were working lawmen, looking to pick up extra cash while passing the time in congenial surroundings. In the words of Western writer and historian Walter Noble Burns, the best bartenders “dispensed good fellowship as well as good liquor.” Every now and then, though, the job proved dangerous or even fatal. One never knew when death might push through the batwing doors. Bob Ford, the notorious assassin of outlaw Jesse James, was working as a bartender in Creede, Colo., on June 8, 1892, when ne’er-do-well Edward “Red” O’Kelley strolled in with a shotgun, called out, “Hello, Bob,” and shot down Ford in cold blood. O’Kelley thought killing the man who killed James would make him a hero. Ford himself could have told his murderer it didn’t work that way. Frontier-era papers are chock-full of stories about men ROBERT FORD who walked into saloons and opened fire for no apparent reason. Perhaps some had fallen into bad whiskey, or maybe they were on the prod. Others were seemingly psychotic. According to

Saloon Scenes

Clockwise from top left: A bartender and patrons pose at the Toll Gate saloon in Black Hawk, Colo., in 1897; four bartenders stand ready at Hyman’s saloon in 1880s Leadville, Colo.; a barman makes a point at Oscar Waller’s saloon in Rambler, Wyo., in the early 1900s; the bartender wears a waistcoat and apron at this Central City, Colorado Territory, saloon, circa 1870.

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court testimony, Frank Fossett, one murderous habitué of saloons, reportedly once said he would “like to have a saloon out in the country…so he could kill a bartender every week or two.” Sometimes a bartender was in the wrong place at the wrong time. On Jan. 14, 1877, inebriated Fort Worth saloon man John Leer, future proprietor of the Theatre Comique, rode his horse through the doors and up to the bar of a competitor’s saloon, pulled a pistol and ordered a drink. After serving Leer, the bartender promptly summoned police, who came and arrested the drunken saloon man. Tendering bail, Leer promptly returned to the competitor’s place and fired five shots through its glass door, wounding proprietors John Stewart and Henry McCristle. The still-inebriated Leer spent the night in jail and paid a fine, but his victims were apparently unwilling to file charges. On Sept. 1, 1893, when a gun battle erupted between the Doolin-Dalton Gang and lawmen on the streets of Ingalls, Oklahoma Territory, among the casualties was a barkeep and patrons of saloons in which the gang holed up. Walter James, bartender and co-owner of Fort Worth’s Board of Trade saloon, likely expected trouble when Walker Hargrove strode up to his bar around 5 p.m. on May 20, 1908. A mean drunk whom James had ordered out a week earlier, Hargrove had vowed vengeance. Declining the latter’s offer to share a drink, James Mud in Your Eye

A bartender watches cowboys quench their thirst in one of the Old West’s wildest towns, Tascosa, Texas, which earned the apropos nicknames “Hell Town of the Texas Panhandle” and “Cowboy Capital of the Panhandle.”

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served Hargrove a shot of whiskey, then turned to serve other customers. After tossing back his drink, Hargrove smashed the empty glass on the bar. James then consented to share a drink with Hargrove, but the bully wasn’t satisfied. Cursing James, he grabbed for the gun at his hip and started around the bar. Reaching beneath the counter, James pulled his own pistol and plugged his would-be assailant three times, the last a kill shot to Hargrove’s head. A jury acquitted James of all charges. It was in trail towns that bartending was most perilous. Cowboys looking to blow off steam after days spent castrating steers or trailing herds could be mercilessly hard on the man behind the bar. Hands from the LS Ranch outside Tascosa, Texas, enjoyed taunting bartender Lem Woodruff of the Dunn & Jenkins saloon. Former Texas Ranger Ed King was especially galling, calling Woodruff “Pretty Lem” and ultimately stealing away his girlfriend. In the early hours of March 21, 1886, Woodruff and cohorts got their revenge, gunning down King and two other LS hands. Woodruff and a cohort were wounded, while bystander Jesse Sheets was killed in what was recorded as the bloodiest gun battle in Tascosa history. It wasn’t just rowdy cowboys who posed a threat to life and limb. Western gunslingers thinned the bartenders’ ranks, some by accident or misfortune, others with cool deliberation. On April 16, 1881, Bat Masterson, in defense of brother Jim, went gunning for Dodge City saloon man A.J. Peacock and bartender Al Updegraff of the Lady Gay. Peacock fled, while Updegraff was wounded. A few years later, on Aug. 19, 1884, Doc Holli-

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LEFT: MUSEUM OF VENTURA COUNTY, CA; RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS (2)

Above: A bartender and two patrons pose with a wiseacre waving a six-shooter and a cigar at the White Dog saloon, thought to be in Colorado. Above right: A burro poses with patrons at the White House saloon in Cripple Creek, Colo.

TOP: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY (2); LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Photobombing Frontier-Style

Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

LEFT: MUSEUM OF VENTURA COUNTY, CA; RIGHT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS (2)

TOP: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY (2); LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A bartender in 1890s Ventura County, Calif., keeps customers happy at the Santa Paula saloon. Below: Patrons at the Long Branch, in Dodge City, Kan., and a saloon in Tombstone, Ariz., used these drink tokens.

day shot and wounded Monarch saloon bartender Billy Allen in Leadville, Colo., after the latter threatened the notorious gambler over unpaid debts. The victims recovered, and neither shooter faced serious consequences. To persevere as a bartender, a man had to be as tough as his customers. On the afternoon of June 21, 1880, Billy Thompson, younger brother of gunman Ben Thompson, got into a dispute with barkeep Bill Tucker of Ogallala, Neb., over the affections of a local prostitute and stormed out of the saloon. Returning with a gun, Thompson snapped a few shots at Tucker, who at the time was “in the act of passing [a patron] a glass of whiskey with his left hand.” One bullet took off Tucker’s thumb and three fingers on that hand. Thompson turned and coolly strolled out, while the saloon man crumpled in a bloody mess. But his assailant had walked only a few yards when Tucker came charging out from behind the bar with double-barrel shotgun. From the door the saloon man steadied the gun across his maimed hand and emptied it into Thompson’s backside. Patrons tended to Tucker’s injuries and manhandled the wounded Thompson over to the Ogallala House Hotel to recover before trial. With help from Bat Masterson, Thompson managed to flee the state and swallow what remained of his pride. It is unclear whether Tucker continued to tend bar with a mangled left hand. If he did return to work as a one-handed saloon man, he would not have been the first or last crippled bartender. Indeed, many Old West barkeeps would have been eligible for protection under the provisions of the present-day Americans With Disabilities Act, as a surprising number of them were missing various limbs and appendages. Fortunately, the job did not require ten fingers, let alone both arms or legs, and it was wellpaying, unskilled labor, making it a viable retirement option for battered outlaws and lawmen who’d hung up their guns. Still, as Garry Radison reminds readers in his book Last Words: Dying in the Old West, bartending was one of the truly “dangerous occupations” in the West. Of course, barkeeps were not always the victims, and those who shot rowdy customers were seldom prosecuted. On the rare occasion when a case went to trial, the all-male jury, often comprising patrons of the very establishment the accused tended, often chose to acquit. Race was seldom a factor in saloon shootings, as in most jurisdictions blacks weren’t permitted to enter white-owned establishments. That said, the chances of conviction, or even prosecution, were slim indeed if the bartender was white and his victim was black. In 1911 barkeep F.E. St. John of Fort Worth’s Phoenix saloon shot black co-worker Buzz

Childers, the saloon’s porter. St. John, who’d tended bar for 19 years and had a clean record, claimed Childers had threatened him with a knife, though he gave no reason. No charges were filed. Race did enter the equation if officers were summoned to a blackowned bar, as the all-white police forces in towns like Fort Worth were hostile to any black who failed to show what was considered “proper deference.” In 1909, for example, Fort Worth officers were summoned to a police shooting at a bar owned by George C. Cosey. As detective Lee Tignor wrote in his report, he was interrogating the black proprietor, trying to “gather information on a matter under investigation,” when Cosey “began to abuse me in a shameful manner.” Things went downhill quickly, and both men pulled guns. Tignor emptied his revolver at Cosey, mortally wounding the saloon man. The detective’s report ended the matter as far as a grand jury was concerned. Ultimately, like the Old West itself, bartending became more civilized. In 1885 one El Paso bar owner explained to a reporter how his profession had evolved. “When I first opened here,” he said, “it was the fashion to shoot bartenders on the slightest provocation. I had to employ men who would shoot back—nervy devils who knew their lives were at stake.” As the town grew up, however, the saloon began to attract a better class of customers. At that point the proprietor had to replace his old scrappy barkeeps with more gregarious fellows. Then, as cocktails became increasingly popular, he had to hire “mixologists.” By then, he told the reporter, he was employing men “with the dignity of a judge and the polish of a gentleman.” His only concern was keeping patrons happy, as that kept the cash register ringing—and a happy customer was less likely to plug the bartender. Richard Selcer of Fort Worth, Texas, is a frequent contributor to Wild West and the author of such well-received books as Hell’s Half Acre: The Life and Legend of a Red-Light District and Fort Worth Characters. Selcer is also the editor and compiler of Legendary Watering Holes: The Saloons That Made Texas Famous. APRIL 2022

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Putting the Star in Lone Star

San Antonio boasts a rich history, but the 1836 Battle of the Alamo remains forever at the forefront, as does defender David Crockett in this illustration by Ed Vebell.

BOXING, BURLESQUE, BRIDLES AND BORDELLOS A look at the life and times of Mollie Berdan, who in early 1880s Idaho Territory was a popular soiled dove known as Mollie B’Damn

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

She hadn’t started life with the name Mollie he 1883–84 gold rush to northern Berdan. She was born Margaret (“Maggie”) Hall Idaho Territory attracted a variin England. On March 30, 1851, according to ety of men and women willing the British census, Maggie was 3 months old to travel far in search of the priceless metal. and living with her Irish-born parents in DarAmong them were well-known Western figures. AUTHOR’S SCULPTURE wen, Lancashire (though some sources say she Wyatt Earp and wife Sadie (aka “Josie”) venOF MOLLIE BERDAN was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1853). Her father, tured to the Coeur d’Alene goldfields along with Thomas, worked as a tailor, while her mother, also brother James Earp and wife Nellie (aka “Bessie”). Margaret, cared for Maggie and older sisters Mary and BridMartha Jane “Calamity Jane” Cannary also made an appearance. Among these Western icons was a woman remarkable get. She apparently spent her teen years in England before in her own right—Mollie Berdan. Ignoring the conventional immigrating to the United States on her own. Although she mores of the Victorian era, Mollie broke all the rules that was educated, good jobs were hard to find. The June 14, 1870, city and county census for New York indicates Margoverned the behavior of women.

TOP: WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; SCULPTURE BY KEVIN LOREN CARSON

By Kevin Loren Carson

Female Fistic Warfare

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

TOP: WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; SCULPTURE BY KEVIN LOREN CARSON

Women learn to box (and fence) in this 19th-century drawing. There are no known photographs of Mollie Berdan, who toured a while as a traveling prizefighter.

Red-handed Mike then guided the reporter to Mollie’s apartment in an alley off California Street. The writer left the only known description of Berdan:

garet Hall was 20 years old and working as a domestic in a New York City household. Soon after she met a dashing man with the surname Berdan (sometimes seen as Burdan), She is a blonde of a pronounced type with hair and they married. almost flaxen. Her features are regular and have Her husband is the villain in stories about been handsome. Her hands are small, white and Maggie, which claim he was a no-account well formed. Her air was mild and quiet. whose father drove the couple into poverty by stopping his allowance, thus forcing Maggie Mollie gave her weight as 116 pounds and MARTHA JANE “CALAMITY JANE” into prostitution in order to support them. It was her height as 5 feet 3 inches. She answered the CANNARY Berdan who urged her name change to “Mollie,” reporter’s questions with “a broad Lancashire perhaps for a measure of anonymity. dialect, omitting her H’s.” She asked him to lie A news bit in the Nov. 22, 1875, Brooklyn Daily Eagle about her age. “Call me 23,” she said. suggests her line of work: “Patrick Costello, of 435 W. 17th St., “Are you married?” turned his wife and child out of doors last night, and when an “I am and ’ave three children,” Mollie replied. “My ’usband officer was sent to their assistance, Costello was found enter- lives ’ere in San Francisco, and my children are supported taining Margaret Hall, a recently freed convict.” The crime by me in New York.” that had landed her behind bars is unknown. “Have you seen a prizefight between women?” Mollie was almost certainly aware of the scandal of the “Not a reg’lar one.” day—Nell Saunders and Rose Harland going nose to nose “What one have you seen?” in a benefit boxing match at New York’s Hill’s Theater on “I ’ad to put on the gloves with a woman in Virginia, and March 16, 1876. The event was newsworthy, as it was the first I whipped her and didn’t ’alf try.” Mollie said word of that boxing match in the United States featuring female fighters. fight had gotten her the boxing gig. Saunders won in a decision over Harland and took home “Are you anxious about the result of the fight?” a silver butter dish. Sometime after the bout it appears Mollie “Not very. I would not be so anxious to whip that other sought better luck out West, as three years later her name woman only if she wasn’t so anxious to whip me.” popped up in San Francisco newspapers. Her husband had Mollie did express concern that Lewis was 3 inches taller, joined her, though they left their three children with rela- had longer arms and outweighed her by nearly 20 pounds. tives in New York. The details came out in news accounts of The interview was interrupted when a trio of policeman shufanother women’s bout in which Mollie took part. fled into her small apartment and insisted on watching as At the close of 1878 boxing promoters touted a much- she donned her gloves. The reporter scribbled as Mollie then hyped bare-knuckle rematch in San Francisco between began using the tallest of the officers as a human punching middleweights “Professor” Mike Donovan and William Mc- bag, with blows to his breadbasket and nose. Clellan. When the venue shifted to New York City in the The reporter also interviewed Jessie Lewis and trainer. “She new year, promoters tapped into fans’ disappointment and is a decided brunette, with sparkling eyes peeking out from quickly arranged a “glove contest” in San Francisco featuring under a tangled fringe of jet-black hair,” he wrote of Mollie’s California native Jessie Lewis and “Lancashire lass” Mollie opponent. Casting the larger woman as the villain, the reBerdan, to be held at the city’s Horticultural Hall on Feb. 24, porter deemed her “belligerent and slightly vicious,” her 1879. Spectators would pay $2 to watch the women go at it, speech “snappy and energetic.” and the purse was set at $250. Newspapers worldwide picked up the Chronicle story, “The sporting world are excited at the prospect of a glove sparking an outcry in polite circles. The New Zealand Tablet, contest between two women,” wrote the San Francisco Chroni- a Catholic paper, weighed in on moral grounds, arguing cle on January 26. “Both candidates for the honors of the ring that were a woman to emulate men in such “lower pursuits are as yet untried in fistic warfare. They will, however, be …[it] must plainly be seen to sink her beneath the level of given the requisite discipline by competent trainers.” the brutes.” A Chronicle reporter interviewed Mollie’s trainer, “Redhanded Mike” O’Connor, a former lightweight boxer turned In the end, all of the training and foofaraw came barber. The reporter first asked whether Mollie had been to naught, as the San Francisco police showed up in force long in training. “No,” O’Connor replied while shaving and called off the bout. While no law on the book prohibited a customer, “I have hardly commenced with her…but she prizefighting, officers cited city ordinances that prohibited begins already to handle her bunch of fives with a good bit the women from appearing in their boxing attire. But Jessie of dexterity.” and Mollie remained game. They joined a traveling troupe, APRIL 2022

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Mollie the Jockey

Mademoiselle Henrie’s Burlesque, and took their boxing matches on the road from Oregon to Indiana. On April 6 The Daily Appeal in Carson City, Nev., touted an upcoming performance by the troupe at the opera house. “Among the number are Mollie Berdan and Jessie Lewis, two female boxers, who strike out like real men,” the blurb read. “Go and see them.” Perhaps inevitably, the female boxing craze ebbed, and Mollie soon found herself out of work and in trouble. On Oct. 29, 1880, she and two cohorts were called before a Sacramento police court on charges of disturbing the peace and indecency. Mollie also faced a charge of grand larceny. “Mollie Berdan, Blonde Mollie, Mollie the boxer, the ex–female pugilist…had the charge of grand larceny against her continued for a week,” one local newspaper reported. On the day of the trio’s hearing the judge continued the session into the evening. “The case was so filthy and foul,” the paper wrote, “that his honor, rather than contaminate the public morals, ordered an examination with closed doors.” Found guilty, Mollie and friends each paid a fine and were released. That December her name was linked to a shoot-

Unsporting Tactics in Idaho Territory

In rough mining towns like Eagle City and Murray men might use brass knuckles, but Mollie used her charms.

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ing affray at a poker game (see sidebar, P. 67), prompting Mollie to again seek greener pastures. Relocating to Astoria, Ore., she soon found a new and lucrative side venture—horse racing. On July 23, 1881, a literal dark horse named Trade Dollar stunned the West Coast racing crowd by running a dead heat with champion thoroughbred Caddie R. at the state fairgrounds in Salem. Mollie either heard about or watched the race in person, and by 1882 she’d acquired Trade Dollar. Promoting purse races against all comers, Mollie herself rode the sorrel mare, whom she deceptively referred to as her “nag.” Whether her ploy worked or not, wanderlust eventually got the best of her, and by year’s end she sold Trade Dollar. Perhaps the sale money provided Mollie with her train ticket to the Idaho Territory goldfields. In any case, that’s where she headed next, as did other rough women with such handles as “Bronco Liz” and “Terrible Edith.” Northern Pacific Railroad circulars promised riches too good to be true, triggering a rush to the panhandle in 1883. Among those making their way to the primitive camps along the Coeur d’Alene River was 22-year-old Charlie Munson. He made his way over the narrow trail through the Bitterroot Mountains to the isolated tent camp of Eagle City, where he first laid eyes on Mollie. He left a written record of her life in Idaho. The Earp couples soon settled in at Eagle City, pursuing their customary mix of mining claims, gambling and justice on their own terms. Calamity Jane also ventured to the camp. “The only genuine and original Calamity Jane of Black Hills fame arrived in town last Wednesday night,” Eagle City’s Coeur d’Alene Nugget noted on April 9, 1884. “She was penniless, not even able to pay for her lodging, but began work as a restaurant cook next morning.” Within a few weeks Calamity decamped for Spokane, Washington Territory, though she soon returned with a group of “hostesses.” Mollie, diminutive, vivacious and strong, had far better luck. Putting her feminine charms and business acumen into action, she extracted gold dust from the pockets of willing miners in exchange for her favors. William Tecumseh Stoll, an attorney in Eagle City and Murrayville (present-day Murray), said of her, “Here was a medley of contradictions: Her blue eyes would one moment melt with tenderness and sympathy, and in the same instant her feminine poise would be submerged in the basest and most profane vulgarity.” Despite her talent for swearing, conceded Stoll, Mollie was a beauty in spirit as well as form, possessing an “uncommonly ravishing personality.” When Mollie rode into Eagle City in February 1884, the first man drawn to her charms was Phil O’Rourke, who would emerge as a key

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TOP LEFT: ICONICIDAHO.COM; TOP RIGHT: KEVIN LOREN CARSON COLLECTION (2); RIGHT: BARNARD-STOCKBRIDGE PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO LIBRARY

Titled “The Sex’s Progress,” this cartoon mocks female boxing. Berdan and Jessie Lewis were pugilists with a traveling troupe.

Berdan ran this purse race ad in the Seattle Daily Post Intelligencer in July 1882, but by year’s end she’d sold her “nag” and moved to Idaho Territory.

TOP LEFT: PAUL POPPER/GETTY IMAGES; TOP RIGHT: KEVIN LOREN CARSON COLLECTION; LEFT: MURRAY CITY MUSEUM

Women in the Ring

‘Mollie B’Damn’

TOP LEFT: ICONICIDAHO.COM; TOP RIGHT: KEVIN LOREN CARSON COLLECTION (2); RIGHT: BARNARD-STOCKBRIDGE PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO LIBRARY

TOP LEFT: PAUL POPPER/GETTY IMAGES; TOP RIGHT: KEVIN LOREN CARSON COLLECTION; LEFT: MURRAY CITY MUSEUM

Berdan most likely earned her moniker in Eagle (above) for often uttering, “I’ll be damned.” Right: She owned four lots on Gold Street in Murray. Top right: One of that town’s original buildings houses the Sprag Pole Inn and Museum.

figure in the discovery of the lucrative Bunker Hill Mine in nearby Kellogg. It was around this time Mollie Berdan became “Mollie B’Damn.” The most common explanation given for Mollie’s new name is that her Lancashire upbringing to Irish parents had left her with an accent too thick to understand, thus O’Rourke mistook her surname as another salty nickname. According to Munson, however, in conversation Mollie habitually dropped the expression, “I’ll be damned.” Such a phrase would resonate with miners and seems the more likely origin of her moniker. There were few amenities in the boisterous mining town. Munson described a festive evening soon after Mollie’s arrival: The sky pilot sang his quivering hymn and ‘Blacky’ softly strummed on his banjo. The air was heavy with smoke and steaming body odors mixed with the fumes of liquor. The fiddlers started and the red calico curtains parted on Calamity Jane and her eight hostesses for the evening. There was a rush for partners, the dance began, and the night was on.

Before long the enterprising Mollie invested in mining claims and put other soiled doves to work for her. According to news reports, she was also an accomplished pickpocket. That August the Morning Astorian, in Mollie’s onetime Oregon hometown, reported she had stolen $185 in greenbacks on a visit to Coeur d’Alene and tried to swallow the bills to avoid arrest. Mollie was creative in the way she plied her wares. The most novel of her promotions in the Idaho goldfields were her aptly named “cleanup baths.” In the wake of big strikes or payday at the mines Mollie would cordon off the lane (known as “Paradise Alley”) behind her cabin, set out her tin washtub and wait for a crowd to gather. Men paid the price of admission to watch her bathe by pouring gold dust into the tub. When the ore was sufficiently deep, Mollie would disrobe and enter the water. Of course, the honor of soaping her back cost extra, and more gold dust was required before she would emerge from the tub in all her golden glory. Lonely men were her diggings, and relieving them of their gold was her labor. “With one hand she would rob the unwary,” wrote Stoll. “With the other she would give liberally to charity or nurse the sick.”

“She was quite a character,” Munson wrote, “carrying herself like a real queen, with a disdain for the lesser mortals around her.” In the tales that grew around her, Mollie also carried a sense of obligation for her “subjects,” being ever willing to step down from her throne and lend a hand to those less fortunate. One such unfortunate was a miner named “Lightnin’,” who’d been rolled and lost his purse of gold dust. When Lightnin’ fell ill with typhoid fever, Mollie had several pack mules loaded with food and medicine, then set out for his cabin. So the story goes, Lightnin’s partner tried to dissuade her out of concern she might also get sick. Mollie replied she’d be damned if she’d “let him lay there and go to hell without any help or comfort.” Moving into the miner’s tent, she fed him and tended to his fever, but Lightnin’ died. When the gold ran out in Eagle City, Mollie moved operations 3 miles east to Murray, where Mercy in Murray

Mollie and her soiled doves became temporary nurses here when disease struck the area in 1886.

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TOP LEFT: MIKE BOTAN; TOP RIGHT: UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO LIBRARY; RIGHT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

At some point in her travels Mollie contracted tuberculosis, the number one cause of death in Idaho through territorial days and into early statehood. Mollie’s illness worsened, and she died at dawn on Jan. 17, 1888, with the townswomen who had The Murray Hotel in 1885 A year later, thanks to Mollie’s initiative, this hotel tended her at her bedside. It is uncertain how old she was, as she’d been served as a makeshift hospital for sick citizens. evasive about her age since her pugilistic days in San Francisco. Her obituary in Murray’s Coeur d’Alene Sun said she was 34, though she would she filed a claim in 1885. Selling her holdings have been a few years older than that. “A collection was taken up, and a coffin was hewed from a log,” Munson in Eagle City, Mollie purchased four lots on 1st Street and another block on Gold Street. The wrote, noting deep snow had fallen, and the ground was frozen. “ExperiEarps soon followed suit, abandoning their claims enced miners dug the frigid earth with mining tools to make her resting in Eagle City for new ones in Murray. There is place. The trail to the grave was too narrow…so they fastened a pole on no record of Mollie having dealings with any each side, and in that way the pallbearers walked single file, three in front of the Earps in either camp, which isn’t surpris- and three behind.” It was a sober affair. All were quiet. Though a Cathing. Stoll claimed Murray’s population swelled olic, she’d been refused absolution, so her service fell to a Methodist into thousands at the peak of the gold rush. When minister, who took off his hat and recited the Lord’s Prayer. “The coffin disease swept through Murray in 1886, Mollie was lowered, and willing hands filled the grave,” Munson recalled. “An rallied townspeople, who turned the tent sa- observer spoke out, ‘That was the damnedest and the saddest funeral loons into hospitals. Fortunately, some two dozen I ever attended.’” The Sun bordered her obituary in black. In the files of an Idaho archive physicians and druggists lived in Eagle City and Murray. The doctors applied their skills, while is a bill of sale with Mollie’s name in bold at the top and the sad note, Mollie and her soiled doves reportedly became “Maggie Hall (Mollie Berdan), buried at request of J.N. Russell.” Russell ran a saloon in Murray and paid $3 for the burial plot. Her obituary is temporary nurses, to tame the contagion. In a 1979 interview Idaho panhandle old-timer attached to the ledger. “Of her wayward course, it is needless to speak,” Maidell Clemets claimed accounts of Mollie had begins the passage about her Idaho days. Some have suggested Mollie Berdan was one of the first women of easy been “stretched.” Growing up in Kellogg in the early 20th century, Clemets learned about Mollie virtue given the moniker “hooker with a heart of gold.” Cynics doubt that romanticized notion even applied to her. Yet the argument can be made saints can rise from sinners. Other women in Mollie’s trade justly earned reputations as angels with slightly tarnished wings. Calamity Jane, for one, nursed sick patients without regard to her own safety during an 1876 smallpox outbreak in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Regardless of where one comes down on the matter, Mollie was certainly memorable. Years after her death Mollie appeared as a principal literary character in a Western novel set in the town of Walla Walla, Wash. The plot involves a confidence scheme to win big with a “nag” racehorse, and since then many a thoroughbred has borne her name. In 1912 homegrown cowboy singer Charles A. Meyers wrote “My Mollyo From Idaho,” which begins, “My pretty Mollyo WYATT EARP JAMES EARP way out in Idaho, I’ve come to tell you I love you so / No

TOP: NORTHWEST HISTORICAL POSTCARDS COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO LIBRARY; FAR LEFT: IAN DAGNALL COMPUTING/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LEFT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

from those who’d known her, and she shared those recollections. “Oh, they have all kinds of goof stories,” Clemets said. “She was a girl from a convent, or nurse, or something like that. She’s an angel of mercy, you know, and she wouldn’t slip you a Mickey Finn, or hit you over the head, or roll you if you had a dime in your pocket.…Which of course, people like to hear. The story grows, you know.”

No, Not Her

TOP LEFT: MIKE BOTAN; TOP RIGHT: UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO LIBRARY; RIGHT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

TOP; NORTHWEST HISTORICAL POSTCARDS COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO LIBRARY; FAR LEFT: IAN DAGNALL COMPUTING/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LEFT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

Above: This widely distributed photo has oft been misidentified as Mollie Berdan/Maggie Hall. Left: This re-creation of Mollie’s bedroom includes some of her personal property and, eerily enough, her original grave marker. The room lies within Murray’s Sprag Pole Museum.

girl that’s just so sweet I’ve ever chanced to meet—you’ve got me at your feet.” In 1931 Hollywood screenwriter Charles A. Menges published a four-act melodrama around her titled Mollie B’Dam, or, The Cross of Gold. More recently, the 1973 Western comedy The Brothers O’Toole was set in the fictional Colorado mining town of Molybdenum (ironically mispronounced “Mollie B’Damn” by locals). Among the most personal remembrances is the annual Molly B’Damn Days, held each August along the North Fork Coeur d’Alene River in Murray. The keystone event is the Molly B’Damn Queen contest, in which contestants dress like their namesake to raise money for local businesses. Their risqué outfits must leave visitors pondering the question of whether Mollie was a saint or a sinner. Perhaps the last word rests in these verses from Mollie’s own obituary:

Kevin Loren Carson is the author of The Long Journey of the Nez Perce, which recounts the tragic 1877 conflict between the U.S. Army and the Nez Perces. For further reading he suggests Silver Strike, by William T. Stoll, as told to H.W. Whicker; Westward to Paradise, by Charles J. Munson; Beyond Molly B’Damn: Prostitution in the Coeur d’Alenes, 1880 to 1911, by Cynthia S. Powell; and Wyatt Earp and Coeur d’Alene Gold: Stampede to the Idaho Territory, by Jerry Dolph and Arthur Randall.

When exposure laid many men low, she was a ministering angel to the sick and suffering. Neither wind nor weather kept her from the unfortunate’s bedside, and these kind acts have been recorded in the Book of Books in her behalf.

INCIDENT AT A POKER GAME On Dec. 14, 1880, San Francisco’s Daily Examiner reported on a shooting incident amid a private poker game at an exclusive San Francisco address during which a courtesan was present to entertain the gentlemen. The Examiner identified her as none other than “Miss Mollie Berdan, the whilom female ‘slogger’ [at left in drawing], but who now occupies offices on one of the most distinctively nocturnal thoroughfares of the city.” When discovered cheating, the wounded cardsharp (a well-known rancher and sporting man who chose to remain anonymous) apparently shot himself in the thigh while pulling his own pistol. Unable to keep her own name out of the sordid affair, Mollie fled town after telling a next-door neighbor with the florid name Mademoiselle Gypsey de Courteny St. Arlington she “would be everlastingly asterisked if she would stay in the city and give any man away to the fearfully asterisked cops.” —K.L.C. APRIL 2022

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CENTER STAGE IN VIRGINIA CITY In the Nevada mining boomtown Piper’s Opera House offered an entertainment experience like no other By Carolyn Grattan Eichin

It Happened on D Street

BANCROFT LIBRARY, U.C. BERKELEY

The second building on the right, captured here in 1865, soon became the first Piper’s Opera House. An orchestra played on the balcony before performances. The Great Fire of 1875 claimed the building.

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Photo Caption Here

Place photo caption for this art here, photo caption for this photograph to be placed here, place photo caption here.

Second Piper’s Opera House

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theaters, eventually facilitating a Western theater circuit. Maguire had journeyed west during the California Gold Rush and in San Francisco on Oct. 30, 1850, opened the Jenny Lind Theater, named for a popular Swedish opera singer of the era, though Lind never appeared there, and Maguire’s place was upstairs from a saloon. When back-to-back fires in 1851 destroyed that building and its replacement, he rebuilt the Jenny Lind in the grand style of the leading New York City theaters, opening to an eager public on Oct. 4, 1851. Exploiting a thirst for entertainment among the bustling gold rush population, Maguire owned or operated more than a dozen Western theaters before retiring in 1882, earning him a reputation as the “Napoléon” of San Francisco theater managers. Maguire’s Virginia City theater was not his most successful, and local reporters derided his productions after he ceased issuing free press passes. A contentious lawsuit between Maguire and his business partner ultimately put the theater building into receivership. Maguire rented the building to fireman and sometime saloonkeeper Tom Peasley and a local blacksmith, but that partnership failed after a few months. On Feb. 2, 1866, Peasley was shot and killed in a saloon in Carson

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER, OCT. 13, 1877; CAROLYN GRATTAN EICHIN COLLECTION; CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, SAN FRANCISCO

“A

strange opera house is this one in Virginia City. I peep out its back windows and see the desert.” So mused American humorist Charles Farrar Browne, better known by the nom de plume Artemus Ward, prior to a speaking engagement at one of the best known Victorian-era theaters outside of San Francisco—Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, Nevada. In the Western boomtowns of the 19th-century the theater was a place where hooting, hollering, clapping and foot-stomping miners met fallen women who would exchange sex for money, as financial constraints often forced theater owners to take drastic measures to protect their investments, preserve order and make customers happy. It made for strange theater indeed and left a staggering imprint on the history of the region. After the 1859 discovery of rich silver deposits in the Comstock Lode, Virginia City became Nevada’s foremost boomtown. Four years later Irish-born Thomas Maguire built the city’s first opera house, on D Street between Union and Taylor. Seating some 700 patrons, his namesake “temple of the muses” hosted touring companies from San Francisco

BANCROFT LIBRARY, U.C. BERKELEY

Completed in 1878, it stood at B and Union streets on the spot where the Piper brothers had been operating a saloon since 1861. The playbill touts Frank Mayo as Davy Crockett. An 1883 fire destroyed the building.

Interior of a Victorian-era Theater

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER, OCT. 13, 1877; CAROLYN GRATTAN EICHIN COLLECTION; CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, SAN FRANCISCO

BANCROFT LIBRARY, U.C. BERKELEY

Piper’s Virginia City theater was one of the more elaborate of its day. Among its varied acts were precocious, talented children, like those at right.

City. As he lay dying, Peasley pulled his own weapon and killed his assailant, leaving the court to rule the shooting affray mutual self-defense. A year later Maguire sold his theater to German immigrant John Piper, who went on to dominate Nevada’s theatrical landscape. Like Maguire had in San Francisco, Piper would twice rebuild his Virginia City opera house after ruinous fires, and he ultimately operated theaters in Nevada for 30 years.

JOHN PIPER

Piper’s Opera House attained prominence during the post–Civil War decade, operating at a time of transition in the Victorian theater. Acting styles became more realistic, while the celebrity status of stars increasingly secured audience participation from even respectable Victorians. In some respects it was a golden era. Stock company actors—the backup players at each theater—developed extensive repertoires, including musical and comedic specialties. A typical evening’s entertainment featured a four- or five-act melodrama followed by an afterpiece, a short farce. To hold the audience’s attention while the stage was re-set between acts, the cast might perform song and dance routines before the drop curtain. Piper approached the theater business with a three-pronged strategy— to buy competing theaters (mostly saloon-based melodeons devoted to APRIL 2022

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FANNY HANKS

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CAROLYN GRATTAN EICHIN COLLECTION (3)

ADAH ISAACS MENKEN

TOP AND BOTTOM: UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO (2); MIDDLE: CAROLYN GRATTAN EICHIN COLLECTION

HENRY PIPER

minstrelsy and musical variety shows), provide diverse theatricals and groom good stock company talent. As plays changed nightly and legitimate theatrical engagements were interspersed with variety acts, audiences could anticipate something different every night of the week. A good stock company could draw star performers or mount productions themselves based on a large repertoire of contemporary melodramas and recognized classics. When a production required additional actors, the company often recruited black bootblacks from the theater lobby. Such strategies played out well, and Piper’s theatrical supremacy after the Civil War provided for a rich, dynamic theater of the masses. The theater business demanded innovation to appease its audience base of single male miners, most of whom were immigrants. The presence of working women turned many a theater into a meeting place for sexual trysts. Such theaters seated demimondes in the boxes festooned along the outer walls of the theater proper. During runs of legitimate, respectable dramatic productions, theater owners reduced box occupancy and discouraged working women. But during minstrelsy and variety entertainment, “pretty waiter girls” worked the heavily curtained boxes, keeping occupants supplied with alcohol, cigars and other temptations. On at least one known occasion a heartfelt showing of Camille prompted a poor working girl to collapse on realizing her inability to secure redemption from her “sad life” as portrayed onstage. Patrons of Piper’s Opera House were directed to enter the building through a ground-floor saloon in a blatant attempt to augment ticket sales with liquor purchases. A separate entrance for soiled doves carried them directly to the upstairs boxes, while a second saloon helped maintain separation of the classes, thus sustaining Victorian notions of decorum. John Piper’s youngest brother, Henry, assisted in the management of the theater as a “box herder,” charged with keeping order among the drunk and often disorderly box occupants. Good managers were innovative problem solvers, rising to the challenge to meet audience needs and expectations while protecting their significant investment. When arsonists struck homes and businesses in Virginia City in 1871, Piper struck back as chairman of the local vigilante committee, according to the memoirs of one of his supporting actors. Such committees, often comprising small businessmen whose livelihoods were threatened, maintained strict secrecy with regard to their identities and extralegal activities. One local reporter described Virginia City’s vigilantes as “several hundred of the most popular and responsible citizens organized for the summary punishment or banishment of the evildoers.” On March 14, 1871, unruly theatergoer William Willis, whom Piper had ejected earlier that evening, set fire to Piper’s Opera House and was subsequently jailed for arson. The next evening masked vigilantes forced their way into the jail and grabbed Willis. Taking him to the basement of the opera house, they slipped a noose around his neck, tossed the working end of the rope over a ceiling beam and gave it a firm tug. Sufficiently intimidated, Willis named his accomplices, and the mob returned him unharmed to the city jail. While Willis ultimately served out his sentence, fellow arsonist Arthur Perkins, already in jail for murder, was similarly spirited from behind bars and strung up from an outbuilding at the Ophir Mine on the outskirts of town. Dealing decisively with such threats was paramount to financial success (see “601 Reasons Not to Set Fires” in the October 2020 Wild West). Piper’s other strategies included maintaining or establishing relationships with San Francisco theaters to have leading performers there also

CAROLYN GRATTAN EICHIN COLLECTION (3)

TOP AND BOTTOM: UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO (2); MIDDLE: CAROLYN GRATTAN EICHIN COLLECTION

appear in Virginia City. The opera house certainly benefited from Virginia City’s location on a spur line south of the transcontinental railroad, offering performers en route to or from San Francisco an additional performance venue. By 1870 the Figaro newspaper observed John Piper had “gotten” Virginia City, meaning his strategies had secured the opera house as the region’s preeminent theater. San Francisco, as the leading theatrical center on the West Coast, had houses devoted to the classics and legitimate melodramas, as well as numerous BARRETT IN melodeon theaters, primarily in its notorious Barbary Coast JULIUS CAESAR district. Piper drew from both genres. Lesser performers were soon plying the harrowing train and stagecoach route over the Sierras to perform as stars on Piper’s stage. The Great Fire of 1875 eventually claimed the first of Piper’s three opera houses. The owner built his second on B and Union streets, where he and his brothers had been operating a saloon since 1861. An 1883 fire cost him that building. The third Piper’s Opera House, still standing at the same location as the second, dates to 1885. For legitimate actors Virginia City became a training ground where they could practice before challenging audiences. Among the foremost actors to use Piper’s as a training ground was handsome, genial John McCullough. Irish-born McCullough first journeyed west in 1866 and the following year secured a six-week engagement at Piper’s Opera House. There he perfected roles that were to become the cornerstone in his repertoire of heroic classics. He first performed Virginius, King Lear and Richelieu in the mining town. McCullough repeatedly returned to become a local favorite, eventually parlaying his Western successes to become one the most admired 19th-century American tragedians. In 1869 McCullough and the even more brilliant tragedian Lawrence Barrett built their own San Francisco theater, the California, which supplied Piper’s Opera House with talented touring actors. Theater owners’ constant quest for talent to fill the stage, coupled with actors’ need to practice and refine their craft, created a reciprocity between Virginia City —as something of a dress rehearsal—with the larger legitimate Bay Area theaters. San Francisco, in turn, supplied New York with actors well practiced on Western stages. Barrett, whom critics regarded as second only to actor Edwin Booth (older brother of infamous Abraham Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth) in the hierarchy of Victorian-era tragedians, helped bring the California Theater to eminence while also touring the West, including engagements at the original Piper’s Opera House in 1868, ’70, ’72 and ’75. McCullough and Barrett frequently exchanged the roles of Othello and Iago in Shakespeare’s classic, while the intellectual Cassius from the bard’s Julius Caesar was often considered Barrett’s best role. He, too, became one of the most beloved actors on the Western theater circuit. Legitimate productions drew from the classics and Shakespeare, while the plots of more modern melodramas adhered to the social order and rewarded virtuous, hardworking behavior. Contemporary audiences particularly enjoyed melodramas that perpetuated respectability and heroic actions. Draped on often predictable plots, themes centered on such virtues as “doing the right thing” or “living the virtuous life.” Theatrical plays with particular appeal to the Irish constituted a legitimate oeuvre for Western audiences. Dublin-born actor and playwright

LAWRENCE BARRETT

Dion Boucicault’s works are most often associated with the Victorian-era Western stage. As working-class Irish immigrants faced discrimination in their new homeland, such Boucicault productions as The Colleen Bawn, Arrah-na-pogue, The Shaughraun and Daddy O’Dowd presented proud Irish characters. Such plays and those who performed them—Boucicault acted in his own works at Piper’s in 1874—became role models for the Irish and helped promote tolerance

JOHN McCULLOUGH

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Nevada’s Busiest Boomtown

LOTTA CRABTREE

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risqué female minstrel show appeared for eight weeks in 1872, the longest engagement in the theater’s history. Other variety performers included singers, musicians, magicians, funambulists, minstrels, strongmen and strongwomen, child prodigies, animal acts, gymnasts (from as far away as Japan), contortionists and lecturers. Variety shows were dominated by solo and family groups, while lecturers crossed the line into entertainment when speaking in theaters. Lecturing increased during depressed economic times, as did gimmicky presentations. For example, a one-legged tightrope walker flipped pancakes on a woodstove tied to his back while precariously balanced over the audience. Séance performances and magicians claiming to contact the afterlife appealed to audience members dealing with grief, while the addition of door prizes—household goods and canned food— drew audiences of women and children grappling with financial straits. As an entertainment venue Piper’s Opera House strove to be all things to all people. In 1871 Piper began renting out the theater to local promoters, bringing bull and bear and wildcat and dog fights to the opera house. In the West theaters also functioned as event centers, fostering a sense of community among a mining town’s diverse population. Western miner Dwight Bartlett, whose letters are curated at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., wrote his family in anticipation of the “real bull” and bear fight, noting that he had the opportunity to see “all the celebrities” and “star actors” who “come to the coast.” At times microeconomic factors put Piper under pressure. During the mini recession of 1869–73, for example, the theater owner cut costs by booking more variety presentations and casting the resident stock company temporarily adrift. In the wake of the discovery of the “Big Bonanza” silver ore chamber in late 1873, however, Piper rededicated the opera house stage to legitimate theater performed by a large, talented stock company of international players. During the 1874–75 season every major legitimate actor performing at Piper’s Opera House appeared in conjunction with performances at the California Theater. By then Piper’s had earned its rating as one of the top American theaters. Stars playing Virginia City added performances in Carson City, Dayton, Washoe City and Reno, supported by Piper’s stock company. The opera house hosted

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FROM TOP: CAROLYN GRATTAN EICHIN COLLECTION; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; VIVAVERDI, CC BY-SA 3.0 PHOTO CREDIT

and understanding among fellow Americans of other backgrounds. Melodramas included over-the-top “sensation scenes” that sat audience members on the edge of their seats. One newspaperman had nothing but praise for the “very best” fire portrayed onstage in Boucicault’s The Streets of New York, with live horse-drawn fire pumpers, smoke and live fire jets attached to wooden structures. The leading man lay prostrated by smoke over the windowsill of a tenement building facing destruction in a scene far too real for the mining town inhabitants. Piper’s Opera House offered more nights of variety entertainment than legitimate plays. A

TOP: BANCROFT LIBRARY, U.C. BERKELEY; LEFT: CAROLYN GRATTAN EICHIN COLLECTION

This bird’s-eye view of Virginia City was made in 1861, a couple of years after the discovery of rich silver deposits in the Comstock Lode.

Crabtree had performed at Piper’s first opera some of the 19th-century’s most celebrated theatrihouse in 1874, then returned to the stage of his cal talents—including Lotta Crabtree, Frank Mayo, third opera house in 1889 (four years after its Mrs. D.P. Bowers, Charles Wheatleigh, and completion) on her last national tour. Though Agnes and Junius Booth Jr.—but only because in her 40s by then, the protean star enchanted its foresighted owner had cultivated relationrugged miners by giggling and mugging, twirlships with San Francisco’s finest theaters. ing her finger in her dimple and flashing her In 1878 Virginia City’s population began to stockinged legs in mischievous flirtations only decline due to mining losses and the failure loosely tied to a plotline. Bringing out her banjo, of technology to overcome heat and water at FRANK MAYO she also played nostalgic tunes that harked back depth. Both John and brother Henry Piper filed to her best years as a child star on Western stages. for bankruptcy that year. By the late 1880s the town’s Though the miners proved an appreciative audipopulation had declined to less than half its peak of 25,000 souls. Piper remained in business by rebuilding after ence, by then the golden age of theater in Virginia City the two devastating fires, but when much of the populace had passed. moved on, the theater business was doomed. During the last two decades of the century traveling combination compa- Carolyn Grattan Eichin writes from California. She adapted nies based in other cities dominated Virginia City’s stage this article from her 2020 book From San Francisco Eastward: with theatricalities appealing to the last handful of miners Victorian Theater in the American West, which is recomleft on the Comstock. One of these companies starred Lotta mended for further reading along with Margaret Watson’s Crabtree, among the most popular female Western per- 1964 book Silver Theatre: Amusements of Nevada’s formers of the era. Mining Frontier, 1850 to 1864.

Back in Show Business

Right: John Piper’s third Opera House, completed in 1885, was run down by the 1930s. Below right: Piper’s Opera House serves as a performing arts venue, event center, museum and wedding site.

FROM TOP: CAROLYN GRATTAN EICHIN COLLECTION; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; VIVAVERDI, CC BY-SA 3.0 PHOTO CREDIT

TOP: BANCROFT LIBRARY, U.C. BERKELEY; LEFT: CAROLYN GRATTAN EICHIN COLLECTION

THE PIPER TODAY By the time John Piper died in 1897, he’d already passed ownership and management of Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City to his children. In the early 1900s the family converted the theater into a silent movie house. Condemned in 1920, the building reopened in 1940 as a museum before a great-granddaughter restored and reopened it as a theater in the 1970s. In 1997 Piper’s descendants sold the theater to a nonprofit, which renovated the building with funding from the state of Nevada and the National Park Service and reopened it as a museum. The Old Corner Bar, on the southeast corner of the building, reopened in 2009. In 2017 Storey County purchased Piper’s Opera House [pipersoperahouse.com], which is managed by the Virginia City Tourism Commission as a performing arts venue for music and plays. It also hosts weddings, conventions and other events. Though self-guided tours are available for a small fee, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted certain restrictions. Call 775-8470433 for updates before visiting. —C.G.E.

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COLLECTIONS Texas Panhandle artist Richard Hogue painted this domestic scene of a day in the life of an Antelope Creek family. Below: Hogue depicts Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s encounter with natives in what would become Hutchinson County.

PRESENTING THE PANHANDLE

t the heart of the Texas Panhandle is Hutchinson County, rich in legend and lore as big as the Lone Star State itself. The county’s largest city is Borger (population 22,150), and at the heart of town is the Hutchinson County Historical Museum. Its collection covers lots of chronological ground, from the era of the ancient Antelope Creek people through that of succeeding southern Plains Indians, trappers, traders, buffalo hunters, the Battles of Adobe Walls and the 1921 discovery of oil on Samuel Burk Burnett’s 6666 (“Four Sixes”) Ranch. The Antelope Creek people lived along watercourses spanning the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles roughly between 1150 and 1450. Though archaeologists initially believed them to be related to New Mexico’s Pueblo Indians, evidence suggests they were more likely an offshoot of Eastern Woodlands tribes. Over their 300-year history in the region these people dug hundreds of Alibates flint quarries along the Canadian River. Using 76 WILD WEST

crude digging tools carved from bison bone, they excavated 4 to 6 feet belowground to access the multihued flint, which they in turn used to craft sturdier tools out of stone. The Antelope Creek people were also one of two cultures in the Plains Village period (900–1850) to use stone masonry in the construction of their homes. Today nearly 1,400 acres of quarries along the river at Lake Meredith are protected as the Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument. In time, traveling afoot with dog-drawn travois hauling supplies, the Antelope Creek people traded their flint-made tools with other Plains tribes, including the Apache, Comanche, Arapaho, Kiowa and Cheyenne. Around 1450, due either to persistent drought conditions, disease, attacks by hostile Apaches or a combination of all three, the Antelope Creek people left panhandle country to blend in among tribes that spoke similar languages, such as the Pawnees and Wichitas.

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IMAGES: HUTCHINSON COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM

TEXAS’ HUTCHINSON COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM CHRONICLES ALL FROM THE ANTELOPE CREEK PEOPLE TO THE OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY BY LINDA WOMMACK

IMAGES: HUTCHINSON COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM

COLLECTIONS

What is certain is that they were long gone by 1541 when Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led an expedition onto the Plains in search of the mythical “Seven Cities of Gold,” hoping to enrich the Spanish empire and no doubt himself. Needless to say, he was unsuccessful. A half century later conquistador Juan de Oñate passed through on his 1601 expedition as far north as Kansas. The museum features wonderful paintings and panoramas of this time period. Not until 1820 did the first Anglo-American expedition venture through, led by Stephen H. Long, who mistook the Canadian for the Red River. Buffalo hunters soon plied the Plains for the hides of the shaggy beasts. In 1843 brothers Charles and William Bent and Ceran St. Vrain built a log trading post just north of the Canadian in what today is northeast Hutchinson County. Two years later, with the help of Mexican adobe craftsmen, the partners built an improved post with 9-foot walls dubbed Fort Adobe. Due to continued Indian depredations, Bent ended trade in the panhandle in 1849 and blew up the fort. Its ruins became known as Adobe Walls. On Nov. 25, 1864, U.S. Army soldiers and Plains Indians fought the First Battle of Adobe Walls on the site of the abandoned fort. The clash came after General James H. Carleton sent Colonel Kit Carson into the area to punish the southern Plains Indians for having repeatedly attacked wagon trains farther north on the Santa Fe Trail. Though Carson and his 400 soldiers and scouts were vastly outnumbered by the allied Kiowas, Comanches and Plains Apaches, they managed to repel several attacks before running low on ammunition and retreating. The Second Battle of Adobe Walls came in the summer of 1874 after a group of buffalo hunters and merchants started a new settlement amid the ruins. Angered at the decimation of the buffalo herds, the allied Comanches, Cheyennes, Kiowas and Arapahos correctly perceived the revitalized hunters’ camp as a threat to their way of life. In late June that year Quanah Parker, last of the Comanche war chiefs, led a series of raids on the fort, but sharpshooting buffalo hunters managed to keep them at bay. On June 30 William “Billy” Dixon killed a mounted Comanche warrior with a long-range shot

from a borrowed .50–90-caliber Sharps rifle. His 1,538-yard shot stands as the 14th longest recorded sniper kill in history. That bad omen was enough to compel the attackers to withdraw. The museum covers each battle with exhibits and detailed dioramas. Though established in 1876, Hutchinson County wasn’t officially organized until 1901, when residents held their first election. Dixon served as the first county sheriff and also operated the first post office, at Adobe Walls on the Turkey Track Ranch. In the 20th century oil and gas became the region’s economic lifeline. The first gas well in panhandle country was drilled in September 1918. The first oil well, drilled on Burnett’s 6666 Ranch in 1921, proved of poor quality. But railroads started making tracks through the county within a few years, and the discovery of a more successful oil well in 1926 led to a panhandle oil boom and the founding of Borger, named for town builder Asa P. “Ace” Borger. In 1927 Phillips Petroleum opened its first refinery, 3 miles northeast of Borger, to produce gasoline for cars as well as other petroleum products. As the company developed, so did the adjacent town of Phillips, which peaked in 1947 with a population of 4,250 before losing population to Borger and eventually becoming a ghost town. Hutchinson County remains the center of oil, gas, petrochemical and synthetic-rubber production in the panhandle, boasting one of the world’s largest pump stations for natural gas, which supplies metropolitan areas west to Denver and east to Indianapolis. Outdoor exhibits at the museum showcase the storied history of the boom times with machinery, tools and other artifacts from the oil fields, while indoors is a re-created gas station and period automobiles. The Hutchinson County Historical Museum is at 618 N. Main St. in downtown Borger. For more information call 806-273-0130 or visit hutchinsoncountymuseum.org.

Clockwise from top left: Joe Grandee’s depiction of the 1874 Second Battle of Adobe Walls; the First Battle of Adobe Walls, in which Kit Carson took part, came a decade earlier; Borger, Texas, was named for this man, town builder Asa “Ace” Phillip Borger. He also helped develop the panhandle towns of Stinnett and Gruver. “The secret of success to townbuilding is being ahead of the crowd a few hours or a few days,” he said.

the museum coverS both battles of adobe walls with exhibits and detailed dioramas

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GUNS OF THE WEST

1859 Colt produced more than 10,000 Third Model Dragoon revolvers, including this one (Serial No. 18248), which was likely used in the Civil War. Below: An unidentified Union cavalryman rests one hand on a brace of Colt Dragoons in his belt and the other on his sword.

DRAGOONS FOR DRAGOONS

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authorized the testing of new firearms and updates to existing weapons, he couldn’t autonomously purchase large numbers of new weapons for the troops. While the science of military technology was rapidly advancing, Congress, in its parsimonious appropriations, imposed a constraint on its own military’s ability to keep up with the times. In 1847, a year into the Mexican War, the government purchased limited stocks of a revolver that would ultimately morph into the Colt Dragoon. Called the Walker (in honor of the late Texas Ranger Captain Sam Walker, who collaborated with Sam Colt on its design), the .44-caliber beast was patterned after Colt’s revolutionary .36-caliber Paterson (the first commercially viable revolver). The company made only 1,100 Walkers—1,000 for the military, the other 100 for private sales and promotional use. The government bought it specifically to arm those Ranger companies mustered into federal service and re-arm the newly formed Regiment of Mounted Riflemen, a progenitor of the modern-day mechanized infantry. At the outset of the war the latter had been armed with an oversized horse pistol and the single-shot Model 1841 muzzle-loading rifle. Wartime demand for better firearms boosted the fortunes of a then struggling Colt.

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IMFDB

persistent myth concerning the vaunted U.S. Army Dragoons, founded in 1833 as an elite mounted regiment, is that its troopers were always equipped with the most modern firearms of their period. In reality—a reality that would persist through the 1850s—the Dragoons who served out West were for the most part armed with inferior weapons. That’s not to say any of their firearms were out of date. Rather, their weapons were what the War Department, controlled by a penny-pinching Congress, could afford to issue. In the wake of the 1846–48 Mexican War federal arsenals were filled with surplus weapons and immense inventories of ammunition. Acquisition of the latest model pistols and carbines would not only render obsolete those firearms on hand but also require a costly procurement of new ammunition. Congress, having to pay for an expensive war, was not about to authorize funds for such lavish purchases. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis—a West Point graduate, former dragoon and wartime colonel of Mississippi Volunteers— was well apprised of the need for better firearms but limited by the power of his office in what he was able to do. While he

TOP: PHOTO BY WILL GORENFELD; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

BY THE ONSET OF THE CIVIL WAR MOST U.S. MOUNTED TROOPS WERE TOTING OVERSIZED COLT DRAGOON REVOLVERS BY WILL GORENFELD

COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

TOP: PHOTO BY WILL GORENFELD; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

GUNS OF THE WEST

During the war the company devised several variants of its formidable .44-caliber six-shot revolver. The Walker and its Dragoon cousins were intended mainly for use by mounted troops. Not needing to reload after every shot was a significant innovation, as one needed two hands to load a typical single-shot pistol, leaving a horseman shy one hand to control his mount. An individual trooper or Ranger could carry a pair of revolvers (offering 12 shots) in twin holsters draped over his saddle pommel. The Walker was especially large and powerful. The revolver was 16 inches long, with a 9-inch barrel, and weighed nearly 5 pounds. Each of its chambers held 60 grains of black powder (comparable to a rifle charge of the period). One early design flaw was that its cylinder wasn’t robust enough to withstand such forceful charges and on occasion would rupture. The government returned 300 of its original order of 1,000 Walkers to Colt for related repairs. Later Dragoon models boasted thicker cylinder walls, and each chamber held a slightly smaller charge of 50 grains. In 1851 Colt rolled out what it considered a perfected Third Model Dragoon, shortened to 14.75 inches, with a 7.5-inch barrel. Improvements included frame cuts for detachable shoulder stocks, horizontal loading lever latches, folding leaf sights and fully rounded trigger guards. The War Department had delivered two dozen or so pairs of the First Model to each Dragoon company for testing, and debate raged within the officer ranks over its efficacy. Despite the modifications, the revolver remained far too heavy to be carried in a belt holster. Captain James Carleton quipped the Dragoon was fit only for teamsters who had a wagon in which to carry it. Many officers favored the lighter .36caliber Colt 1851 Navy “belt revolver.” Officers aside, through the 1850s the primary sidearm of the two Dragoon regiments remained the Aston Model 1842 single-shot pistol (see Wayne R. Austerman’s February 2008 Guns of the West). Many officers chafed at the notion that a lowly enlisted man, often an immigrant, might be entrusted with the pricey Dragoon revolvers, each of which cost between $25 and $50 (upward of $900 in today’s dollars). What’s more, the financial responsibility of arming each company ultimately resided with its senior officer, and any lost revolvers could be charged against his monthly pay.

Worse yet, Colts proved popular on the black market. Deserters in Gold Rush California were able to fetch more than $400 each for their Dragoons. In late 1856 the Army issued 25 Second Model Dragoons to Company A of the First Regiment of Dragoons at Fort Tejon, Calif. Within weeks of their delivery three troopers deserted, each absconding with his revolver. The sale of stolen Colt revolvers of all models became such a problem that on Aug. 16, 1859, the Army issued General Order No. 19, decreeing that any trooper who “lost” his Colt would have to reimburse the Army $40. By 1860 Colt had manufactured more than 10,000 Third Model Dragoons. Government records list an order for 8,390 of these revolvers for Dragoon and Mounted Rifle regiments. The Dragoons marched off to fight in the Civil War armed with Colt Dragoon revolvers and Sharps carbines. In 1861, however, the regiments were redesignated as “cavalry” and supplied with much lighter .44caliber Colt Model 1860 Army revolvers. The heavy Colt Dragoons live on in modern lore. They remain popular with collectors, prices ranging from $5,000 to $30,000. Hollywood has also taken a shine to them. In the 1969 classic Western True Grit Mattie Ross (played by Kim Darby) dutifully uses her late father’s Colt Dragoon to wound and then kill his murderer (at least in the script, though Darby in fact uses a Walker on-screen). In 2010’s True Grit Mattie Ross (reprised by Hailee Steinfeld) correctly carries a Dragoon. This time around, though, Deputy U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn (played by Jeff Bridges) carries a pair of Second Model Dragoons mistakenly referred to in the script as “Navy sixes.” In the 1989 TV miniseries Lonesome Dove Texas Ranger Captain Augustus “Gus” McCrae (memorably portrayed by Robert Duvall) appropriately takes care of business with a Model 1847 Colt Walker.

the dragoons marched off to fight in the civil war armed with colT Dragoons and Sharps carbines

Mattie Ross, portrayed by Hailee Steinfeld, aims a Colt Dragoon in the 2010 version of True Grit. In the 1969 film Mattie, played by Kim Darby, uses an earlier Walker instead of a Dragoon.

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GHOST TOWNS

This cabin is one of the few remaining structures in Fairbank, which is now part of the 57,000-acre San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area. Below: Fairbank as it appeared in 1890, the year the river flooded, causing widespread damage.

FAIRBANK, ARIZONA

espite being the smallest of the satellite cities— Charleston, Contention City and Millville were the others—to sprout up around the mining boomtown of Tombstone, Arizona Territory, Fairbank lasted the longest. Founded when Tombstone started to boom, Fairbank was sited on the north end of an old Mexican land grant, the San Juan de las Boquillas y Nogales, which was granted to Tubac presidio commander Captain Ygnacio Elías González and business partner Juan Nepomuceno Félix back in 1833. The grant, which followed the San Pedro River south to Charleston, was recognized by the United States in 1854 on finalization of the Gadsden Purchase. In 1880 George Hearst and partner George Hill Howard purchased the grant from descendants, had the land surveyed and began selling off parcels for townsites, ranches, farms and a railroad. Three years earlier Ed Schieffelin had discovered a rich vein of silver amid scrubland east of the grant and named his claim Tombstone. Getting wind of the discovery, San Pedro Valley homesteader William Henry Harrison Drew anticipated the coming stampede and resolved to establish a ranch and stage station. Realizing stagecoaches or wagons could travel up to 15 miles before horses or mules had to be rested or replaced, he 80 WILD WEST

chose a site along the San Pedro River 15 miles north of Schieffelin’s claim and about the same distance south of an existing old Overland Mail stage station on Billy Ohnesorgen’s ranch at Tres Alamos (8 miles north of present-day Benson). In August 1878 officials in Pima County (Cochise County was not formed until 1881) requested bids to blaze a rough road up through the San Pedro Valley. Partners Drew, Robert Mason and H.F. Lawrence submitted the winning bid of $650. Of course, the route they chose crossed both Drew’s and Mason’s ranches. In 1880 the Southern Pacific Railroad, then laying tracks westward, established Benson, which became a supply point for Tombstone. Drew’s Station was ideally situated as a rest stop for southbound wagons and stages. But in 1881 the New Mexico & Arizona Railroad (N.M. & A.) laid tracks south from Benson past Drew’s ranch to the mills at Contention, effectively putting the relay station out of business. Drew himself had died two years earlier of typhoid fever. A few miles south of Contention the tracks terminated at triangular “wye” junction with switches for turning locomotives around. After surveying the area around the new terminus, speculators William Hall and Harry McKinney sold lots for $50 and $150 in

PRESENT-DAY PHOTOS: TERRY HALDEN; ABOVE LEFT: GHOST TOWNS OF ARIZONA, BY JAMES E. AND BARBARA H. SHERMAN

FIRST SETTLED IN 1881, THE RAIL HUB THRIVED BECAUSE IT WAS THE CLOSEST STOP TO BOOMING TOMBSTONE, 7 MILES TO THE EAST BY TERRY HALDEN

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PRESENT-DAY PHOTOS: TERRY HALDEN; ABOVE LEFT: GHOST TOWNS OF ARIZONA, BY JAMES E. AND BARBARA H. SHERMAN

GHOST TOWNS a town that by March 1882 comprised little more than a store, a blacksmith’s shop, a saloon and several houses. First named Junction City, the town was renamed Kendall (after civil engineer J.G. Kendall, who had oversight of the rail line) and then Fairbank (after Nathaniel Kellogg Fairbank, a primary investor in both the railroad and the Grand Central Mining Co., which had interests in the Tombstone mines). By year’s end the N.M. & A. had extended to Nogales, linking up at the Mexican border with a rail line to the mines in Guaymas, Sonora. For a time ore, supplies and miners bound to and from Mexico, Tombstone and other boomtowns passed through Fairbank. A post office opened on May 16, 1883, and within a few years the town boasted a Wells Fargo office, a stagecoach station, a steam quartz mill, four stores, five saloons, three restaurants, a hotel, a schoolhouse and a jail. Around the same time the Tombstone mines faltered, having experienced devastating fires and hit ground water that flooded the shafts too quickly for pumps to keep up. Neighboring Fairbank went into decline. In 1887, adding injury to insult, a severe earthquake struck town, damaging buildings and bending track sections. Things looked up again when Phelps, Dodge & Co. formed the Arizona & Southeastern Railroad and in 1889 laid tracks to town from Bisbee, home of its lucrative Copper Queen Mine. In September 1890 the San Pedro River flooded Fairbank, causing significant property damage. No lives were lost, though, and residents weathered that disaster. As in countless boomtowns before it, Fairbank also experienced its share of crime. On April 28, 1898, a stranger entered the N.M. & A. depot and at gunpoint ordered the agent to open the safe. The robber took $250 cash and rode south for the Mexican border, though he was kind enough to leave behind a second horse and spare saddle blankets. On the night of Feb. 15, 1900, five men were hanging around the depot waiting for the northbound train from Sonora. The loiterers were lawman turned outlaw Burt Alvord and gang. As the train rolled into the station, gang members moved to rob the express car, but substitute Wells Fargo messenger Jeff Milton barred the way. The badmen opened fire, dropping Milton with a shoulder wound. He in turn grabbed a shotgun and fired back, mortally wounding “Three-fingered Jack” Dunlop and peppering “Bravo Juan” Yoas in the buttocks. The outlaws fled empty-handed, and a few miles outside Fairbank they ditched the dying Dunlop. By the time the posse found him, Jack was ready to tell all and fingered cohorts before dying. In 1901 the Boquillas Land & Cattle Co. bought the remainder of the namesake grant from the

Hearst family and immediately issued eviction notices to the “squatting” homesteaders and most residents of Fairbank, though it extended leases to the commercial enterprises and enough homes for their employees. Some of the irate evictees torched their homes before leaving the area. Those who remained worked for the railroad, the few businesses left in town or the cattle company itself. Despite this setback, the population of Fairbank in 1910 had scarcely dipped beneath its peak of 300 souls. When the schoolhouse burned down in 1920, the stalwart residents built a new one that remains standing. But Fairbank’s fortunes continued to decline. To accommodate the widening of Highway 82 in 1941, construction crews demolished the 1889 Montezuma Hotel. Three years later the town’s school district consolidated with that of Tombstone. In 1962 train service to Patagonia ended, and four years later the Southern Pacific, which had long ago purchased the rail line through town, closed and razed the depot. Finally, in 1973 the mercantile store and post office closed, and Fairbank became a ghost town. In 1986 the Bureau of Land Management acquired the Boquillas grant and established the 57,000-acre San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area. The bureau has since stabilized and preserved the few remaining buildings on the ranch and in Fairbank, making them safe for visitors. The restored schoolhouse serves as the town’s visitor center.

Top: The restored Fairbank schoolhouse today houses the town's visitor center. Above: The remains of the water tower that served the railroad into the 1960s.

finally, in 1973 the mercanTile store and post office closed, and fairbank became a ghost town

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REVIEWS

MUST SEE, MUST READ JOHN BOESSENECKER PICKS CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH BOOKS AND FILMS The Legend of Joaquín Murrieta: California’s Gold Rush Bandit (1995, by James F. Varley): This wellresearched book contains a trove of previously unpublished information about America’s most infamous Hispanic outlaw. Unlike many authors, dating back to the 1930s, Varley avoids myths and unreliable oral history and sticks to the facts he uncovered through exhaustive research into primary sources on Murrieta.

The Man From the Rio Grande: A Biography of Harry Love, Leader of the California Rangers Who Tracked Down Joaquin Murrieta (2005, by William B. Secrest): The best extant account of a gold rush lawman, Secrest’s book starts with Love’s early life, from his service in the Mexican War to scouting and exploring expeditions along the Rio Grande. The narrative centers on his leadership of the California Rangers during their epic 1853 manhunt for bandit Murrieta and cohorts and ends with Love’s own 1868 death in the wake of a gunfight.

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Let Justice Be Done: Crime and Politics in Early San Francisco (1989, by Kevin J. Mullen): This is the most comprehensive history of vigilantism in gold rush–era San Francisco. Author Mullen was a former deputy police chief of San Francisco. He and Bill Secrest (see review at left) were the foremost historians of crime, law enforcement and vigilantism in frontier California. Devil on Horseback: A Biography of the Notorious Jack Powers (1975, by Dudley T. Ross): This well-researched book relates the life of one of the most notable outlaws of the gold rush era. Author and former Associated Press reporter Ross, the father of Western actress Katherine Ross, produced the only biography of gambler, horseman, bandit and murderer Powers. Gold Dust & Gunsmoke: Tales of Gold Rush Outlaws, Gunfighters, Lawmen and Vigilantes (1999, by John Boessenecker): This is my contribution. It remains the only published general history of violence during the California Gold Rush, dealing with everything from Joaquín Murrieta to lynchings to bull-and-bear fighting, the most popular—and most violent—gold rush sport. “Boessenecker has done as much as anyone to change and illuminate California’s Wild West image,” wrote Leon Metz in a review of the book for Wild West (see historynet.com).

MOvIES

The Barbary Coast (1935, on DVD): Titled after San Francisco’s red-light district, this romantic adventure set during the gold rush stars Joel McCrea, Miriam Hopkins and Edward G. Robinson. Directed by Howard Hawks, the film was based on a bestselling 1933 book of the same name by Herbert Asbury, who also wrote The Gangs of New York (1927). Though Asbury wrote fiction, his books are remarkably accurate relative to the loose standards of the era in which he wrote. Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936, on DVD): Warner Baxter is the title character in a wildly fictionalized account of bandit Joaquín Murrieta. This William Wellman film was based on Walter Noble Burns’ eponymous 1932 book. Contrary to both the book and film, the real Murrieta was no Robin Hood. He and his gang killed more than 40 men, most of them inoffensive Chinese miners. How the West Was Won (1962, on DVD and Bluray): This starstudded classic was filmed in five parts by directors Henry Hathaway, John Ford and George Marshall. Part 2, titled “The Plains,” features the adventures of the heroine (portrayed by Debbie Reynolds) on the overland trip to the California goldfields and, finally, in San Francisco. One of the finest Westerns ever made, this sweeping epic spans the opening of the frontier, the Civil War, the expansion

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REVIEWS of the railroads and the closing of the frontier. It remains captivating from first scene to last. In Old California (1942, on DVD and Blu-ray): John Wayne stars as, of all things, a Boston pharmacist who joins the gold rush and settles in Sacramento. An overheated potboiler, this film nonetheless remains one of few set during the period and filmed in gold rush country. Paint Your Wagon (1969, on DVD and Blu-ray): This entertaining Western musical is set in a gold rush mining camp aptly dubbed No Name City. It was hilariously miscast with Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg. As Marvin couldn’t sing a note and Eastwood not very well, the producers had to bring in actor-singer Harve Presnell to perform the film’s central ballad, “They Call the Wind Maria.”

BOOKS Wildcat: The Untold Story of Pearl Hart, the Wild West’s Most Notorious Woman Bandit, by John Boessenecker, Hanover Square Press, New York, 2021, $28.99 Perhaps no other historical Western figure has been obscured by as much misinformation and myth as Pearl Hart.

But as the title of this biography suggests, award-winning author and Wild West special contributor John Boessenecker has uncovered the onetime stagecoach robber’s true story—and it is more fascinating than the legend. One fact the many accounts of Hart’s life do get right is that on May 30, 1899, she and a man who called himself Joe Boot held up a stage in Arizona Territory, disarmed all aboard and stole their money, bizarrely returning four silver dollars to each of the passengers. “Americans,” writes Boessenecker “were simultaneously shocked and thrilled by the concept of a real woman bandit.” That one crime, he says, made her the most infamous woman in America near the turn of the 20th century. Hart was a rarity on the Western frontier, a notorious woman who was actually a bandit. As Boessenecker points out, Annie Oakley was a sharpshooter, Calamity Jane a prostitute and camp follower, Belle

Starr a consort of outlaws, and Ellen “Cattle Kate” Watson a homesteader hanged for alleged cattle rustling. But Pearl was not the first female stage robber. “In 1874 teenaged Lizzie Keith, with her lover Fred Wilson, held up a stagecoach in the Coast Range sound of Hollister, California,” the author notes. Another myth is that Pearl and her paramour committed the last stage robbery in Arizona; there were five more over the next seven years. While the stage holdup made her famous, Hart’s story otherwise remains compelling. “Pearl Hart,” Boessenecker writes, “broke all the taboos and then some. She swore, smoked, drank, robbed, rode hard, broke jail and used men with abandon. The Old West never saw another woman like her.” Well, Calamity came close. But thanks to the author’s efforts to reveal Hart’s true backstory and later life story (like Jane, Pearl provided plenty of misinformation to the curious), Pearl Hart can justly claim the title of “Most Interesting Notorious Woman of the Old West.” For starters, Boessenecker discovered that Hart’s real name was Lillie Naomi Davy. She was born

in Lindsay, Canada, on April 19, 1871, the third child of an illiterate, albeit kind, mother, Anna, and a wretch of a father, Albert, who was prone to alcoholism, violence, abuse and neglect. Through their upbringing in grinding poverty with plenty of trauma, Lillie and her many brothers and sisters supported each other, and it continued that way through their mostly long lives while they, for the most part, hid their true identities. The fourth Davy child, Catherine Amelia (“Katy”), and Lillie were almost inseparable through the years, and Katy would have, as the author details, “a wild career, rivaled only by that of her older sister and best friend.” The sisters were both attractive, both at times dressed in male clothing and rode freight trains, both were involved in burglaries and prostitution, both had relationships with disreputable men, both served prison sentences (Yuma Territorial Prison for Pearl and the Illinois State Penitentiary for Katy), and both were daring and resilient. In her early 20s Katy was a pioneer balloonist and skydiver and twice broke a husband out of jail, in Oklahoma and Texas. She

later wrote The Arizona Female Bandit, a play about the misadventures of her favorite sister and a few of her own misdeeds, and later became an actress and author. Yet today Katy Davy is completely forgotten, while Lillie Davy remains known far and wide as Pearl Hart. Boessenecker suggests Katy “would have had far more success as an author had she written a factual autobiography of her incredible life.” We’ll have to settle for this fascinating new look at Pearl and fresh look at Lillie and the rest of the dysfunctional but dynamic Davy family. —Editor

Coming Home to Nez Perce Country: The Nimíipuu Campaign to Repatriate Their Exploited Heritage, by Trevor J. Bond, Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2021, $24.95 When missionary Henry Spalding settled with wife Eliza among the Nez Perces, or Nimíipuu (“the people”), on the Columbia Plateau

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REVIEWS (near present-day Lewiston, Idaho) in 1836, he believed it his divinely appointed duty to not only convert the “heathens” to Christianity but also encourage them to embrace sedentary farming and abandon every vestige of their traditionally nomadic culture. Over the course of his stay through 1847 Spalding accumulated a sizable trove of saddles, clothing and other artifacts, which he shipped east to friend and supporter Dr. Dudley Allen in Ohio. The artifacts went into storage at Oberlin College, where they might go on display as quaint remnants of a vanished culture whose practitioners had been remade as “good Indians” by the march of American progress and Manifest Destiny. Over the next century and a half the Nez Perces faced war and betrayal at the hands of the soyapo (whites), notably in the Nez Perce War of 1877, but their culture survived. Moreover, they made it clear that their conversion to Christianity and the retention of their traditions were not mutually exclusive. Equally important, they resolved to reclaim the culturally integral artifacts collectors like Spalding had gathered. 84 WILD WEST

In Coming Home to Nez Perce Country author Trevor Bond —co-director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation and associate dean for digital initiatives and special collections at the Washington State University Libraries —tracks one of the longest campaigns launched by American Indians, one involving not warriors and horse soldiers, but historians, lawyers, park officials, anthropologists and all manner of other experts in a quest to rediscover and settle the ultimate fate of the SpaldingAllen Collection. Though in time the attitudes of most Americans turned in the Nimíipuu’s favor, by 1992 it had approached a curious climax. As Richard Ellenwood of the Nez Perce Heritage Quest Alliance described the offer as it then stood: “We have to buy our land back. Now we have to buy our regalia back.” Undaunted, the NPHQA launched a fund-raising campaign that met the appraised value of $608,100 within six months and successfully won custodianship of the tribe’s artifacts. “This belongs to us,” said Ellenwood “and it belongs to the future of our grandchildren.” Bond presents the multiple aspects of this unusual “culture war”

along with a hoard of photos showing and describing the artifacts in question. Some may find the book a mite on the “Mild West” side, but those with an interest in the continuity of American Indian heritage may find Coming Home to Nez Perce Country an intriguing drama. —Jon Guttman

George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age, by Matthew Bernstein, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2021, $55 Americans that do recognize his name likely recall George Hearst as the father of infamous newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, in no small part because Orson Welles related the younger Hearst’s quasi-biographical story in the 1941 drama Citizen Kane. But father Hearst was himself a self-made, larger-than-life figure who, as author Matthew Bernstein notes in this first-rate biography, “filled the bill as the quintessential American prospector,

full of piss and vinegar and with a nose for gold.” In the 21st century Hearst also claimed a share of film fame, as a character in the HBO series Deadwood— but not the kind of attention he would have wanted. As portrayed by Gerald McRaney, George was a vicious sociopath who would stop at nothing to gain control of the largest gold mine in the Black Hills. The real Hearst was hardly bloodthirsty, though he did make a killing in Deadwood. Indeed, he very cleverly gained control of the valuable Homestake Mine by first shutting it down to give the false impression it was a bust. “Hearst,” writes Bernstein, “demonstrated for good and all that in the great game of pay dirt he was second to none.” The Missouri-born Hearst ventured west from his native state in 1850 to join the California Gold Rush and had little initial luck at placer mining and locating quartz veins, earning him the nickname “Quartz George.” In 1859, however, he hit it big silver mining in what was then western Utah Territory but would become Nevada’s Comstock Lode. “I got to the Comstock and in six months made half a million dollars,” he bragged. He later

mined silver in the Tough Nut Lode outside Tombstone, Arizona Territory, owned the prosperous Ontario Mine near Salt Lake City and operated the Anaconda Mine in Montana Territory. He was a risk-taker in an endless quest to increase his holdings, and he didn’t limit himself to mining. He engaged in cattle ranching in California, New Mexico and Mexico, owned a thoroughbred horse racing stable and entered the political arena with mixed success. In 1882 he ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic candidate for governor of California but twice served as a U.S. senator (appointed the first time to fill a vacancy due to a death, but elected the second time, serving from March 4, 1887, until his own death at age 70 on Feb. 28, 1891, in Washington, D.C.). While making and losing fortunes and then making them again, Hearst was happy to wear worn clothes and eat unpretentious meals, although his much younger wife, Phoebe, liked to give parties, live in style and travel the world with their beloved and somewhat rambunctious son, William Randolph, who in 1887 would take over management

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! t u O t i k c e Ch

THIS WEEK IN

HISTORY

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REVIEWS of his father’s newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner. While Phoebe championed such progressive notions as women’s rights and education reform, George had a record of voting against emancipation, Chinese emigration and women’s suffrage. “Such torpid beliefs stemming from an active mind are understandable when one considers that Hearst’s focus had been mainly in acquiring capital, not in spending it,” the author suggests. “He would leave that part of the Hearst saga to his wife and son.” One thing is clear from this first-fulllength biography of George Hearst, the man had his share of human flaws and was complex. He certainly had the energy to keep pushing to succeed. Bernstein does his research and writes well, although a reader might have trouble trying to keep track of George’s wheeling and dealing across the American West. The author is a regular contributor to Wild West, and he adapted sections of the book for the feature articles “Murder in the Black Hills” (December 2018) and “The Playwright Who Captured Geronimo” (December 2019). —Editor 86 WILD WEST

Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford, the Montana Vigilantes and the Tourism of Decline, 1870–1930, by Laura J. Arata, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2020, $24.95 When it comes to Montana Vigilantes, nothing is ever clearcut. They have been both lionized and condemned for hanging (or “lynching”) road agent after road agent in such 1860s gold rush towns as Bannack and Virginia City. These executions (20 in January 1864 alone) had nothing to do with race, or very little (one early “innocent” victim was a Mexican, José Pizanthia); unlike the lynching going on in the South, no victim was black. Of course, Montana Territory had few resident black men and women then, and it’s still that way today (0.6 percent of the population). One Virginia City black woman, the fascinating Sarah Bickford, is the focus of this book, a Western Writers of America 2021 Spur Award finalist for best biography. One might think Bickford, who was born into slavery and arrived in Virginia City in January 1871, would have condemned the extralegal executions in the territory. Well, maybe she did (she

never said so one way or another and was never physically present for these deadly events), but she came to run the city water company, and while headquartered in the Hangman’s Building she became an early proponent of vigilante tourism. Perhaps the fact she was a shrewd businesswoman had something to do with her choosing for her headquarters the very site where on Jan. 14, 1864, vigilantes lynched five road agents, including “Clubfoot” George Lane, side by side from a central beam. Sarah kept the hangman’s beam exposed, preserving and promoting the space. One resident said Sarah “did not miss he opportunity to collect a few dimes from curious visitors wishing to see the hangman’s beam.” As to why Bickford (1852–1931) did it, author Laura Arata, an assistant professor of history at Oklahoma State University who specializes in the history of race and gender in the American West, offers

this educated opinion: “In taking over the water company and a site of vigilante history, Sarah appropriated that legend as something of a shield, creating a unique niche for herself that enabled her to sidestep the pitfalls of refusing to occupy a standard social space while appropriating certain economic and social privileges not often available to black women.” Of course, Sarah Bickford’s connection to the Montana vigilantes is only one aspect of her story. In the first two chapters Arata covers Sarah’s youth in Tennessee and her first marriage, to Irish immigrant John Brown (“If slavery had been its own kind of hell, being united in wedlock to John Brown was not much of an improvement”) and the loss of three children. Chapter 3 focuses on race in Virginia City and the West (including how the Chinese community was viewed), while Chapter 4 looks at Sarah’s second interracial marriage, to Stephen Eben Bickford, who died in 1900 and willed her and their three children his shares in the Virginia City Water Co. Chapters 5 and 6 detail her time running the water com-

pany, of which she became sole owner in 1917, making her the only black female public utilities owner in the nation. The pioneering activities of 19th-century black residents of Montana and most everywhere else have received little coverage through the years. One exception in the “Treasure State” is Bickford’s contemporary Mary Fields (aka “Black Mary,” “Colored Mary,” “Stagecoach Mary,” etc.) a rough and tough hard-drinking, gun-carrying starroute mail carrier. Bickford was none of those things, yet she was a lot more— a brave black pioneer who, as the author suggests, defied convention in a white man’s world “in such a way that her femininity and respectability remained unimpeachable.” Her association with vigilante tourism in a town that was the capital of the territory when she got there but needed “Wild West history” to survive in the 20th century and beyond might be what draws readers to this book. But it was her association with the Virginia City Water Co. and the way she embodied racial pride and awareness (and instilled it in her children) that should most impress readers. —Editor

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REVIEWS

MOvIE

Tv SERIES

The Power of the Dog, Netflix, 128 minutes, 2021, R Though filmed in the sweeping, jagged hills of New Zealand, The Power of the Dog— a Western from noted Kiwi director Jane Campion—does not get caught up in the sprawling beauty of the landscape. Based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name, it is a slow-burning interior character piece. Starting out as a film about how to deal with a troublesome housemate, it turns inward from there, unraveling into a tense drama about masculinity and the burdens shouldered by cowboys who try to stuff their emotions beneath their hats. The year is 1925, and well-to-do Montana cattlemen and brothers Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George Burbank ( Jesse Plemons) are marking a quarter century since their first drive together. But quiet, well-mannered George is hardly in the mood to celebrate, having reached his limit with Phil’s boisterous and mean antics, especially after Phil hounds the waiter and customers at a local restaurant. Anyway, George would rather spend his time with local widow Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst), and the two are soon betrothed. When

1883, Paramount Network, 10 episodes, 60 minutes each While fans of the modern ranching drama Yellowstone eagerly anticipate a fifth season for the popular Paramount Network series, which revolves around fictional Montana cattle rancher John Dutton (played by Kevin Costner) and family, they don’t have to limit themselves to reruns. This prequel series, from Yellowstone co-creator Taylor Sheridan, delivers all the trials, tribulations, tension and superlative scenery of Yellowstone with the bonus of covered wagons, Indian attacks, gunfights, steam trains and smallpox—enduring staples of the Old West. The Duttons featured in 1883 are James and Margaret, a married couple emigrating from Tennessee’s pine country, portrayed in natural fashion by Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, the country music power couple who married in real life in 1996. The action in Episode 1 unfolds far from Montana. James is riding alone in his wagon, headed for Fort Worth, Texas, where he’ll meet up with Margaret, their eldest daughter, Elsa (Isabel May), and other family members. Beset by bandits on horseback, James has no trouble shooting down these moving targets in a

Rose and son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a skeletal and effeminate medical student, move into the Burbank family ranch, Phil is instantly standoffish, accusatory and overprotective. The film wavers comfortably— perhaps a little too waywardly, at first— between these four major players. But when it digs in its spurs and focuses squarely on the uneasy relationship between Phil (a rough man who at one point rips the testicles off a bull with his bare hands) and the very un-cowboylike teenager Peter, the film takes off. The fantastic final act—including a Hitchcockian twist—will reward patient viewers, though genre fans expecting loads of flying lead will be disappointed. The closest thing to a gunfight in The Power of the Dog is a musical standoff, with one character plucking a banjo, the other struggling at a piano. While it may not be for everyone, The Power of the Dog knows the tune it’s playing and plays it well. —Louis Lalire

performance unmatched in classic Westerns by either John Wayne or Randolph Scott. Unlike those other two screen heroes, the Dutton patriarch vomits when finished killing in selfdefense. In dangerous Fort Worth one character tells the Dutton patriarch that neighboring Dallas would be a far safer place for his family, while someone else warns that if you pull your pistol in Fort Worth, you had better know how to use it. Of course, by that point the viewer already knows how readily James can dispatch badmen, but we get affirmation when he shoots down two pickpockets in the middle of the street. While James arranges accommodations at the Hotel Calhoun, the only decent place to stay in Fort Worth, the rest of his family rolls in by train. Narration is provided over transitional scenes by the venturesome Elsa, who at one point says, “The whole world felt possible, and I was ready for it.” As it turns out, she isn’t quite ready for the

drunken man who stumbles into her Hotel Calhoun bedroom loaded with evil intent, and no doubt she will be further tested by the perils of the frontier in future episodes. Another no-nonsense main character is Captain Shea Brennan, portrayed by screen legend Sam Elliott, who fits most moviegoers’ impression of a real cowboy. We first meet him doing something most “reel” cowboys never do— sobbing uncontrollably. Smallpox has taken his entire family, so he burns down his prairie homestead with late family inside and then contemplates suicide by bullet before his levelheaded partner, Thomas (LaMonica Garrett), gets him back on his feet. Shea and Thomas head to Fort Worth, where they’ll lead a wagon train full of peaceful, unwary German immigrants and, as fate and the script have it, the Duttons, too. But it is still a long way to Montana Territory, and in Episode 2 more action unfolds in Fort Worth, where we see Billy Bob Thornton, portraying real-life City Marshal Jim Courtright. For those into genealogy, 1883’s Margaret and James Dutton are the greatgrandparents of Yellowstone’s John Dutton. The Dutton dynasty continues. —Editor

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SCOUT’S REST RANCH, NORTH PLATTE, NEBRASKA

illiam Frederick Cody started his ranch on the North Platte River in 1878 with 160 acres and an ambition. That parcel and the nearly 4,000 additional acres he purchased lay along the tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad. Thanks to brother-in-law Al Goodman and hired hands, the ranch thrived, though Buffalo Bill’s own success as a Wild West showman kept him away much of the time. The undated photo above captures one get-together, with Cody front and center. Present-day Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park [outdoornebraska.gov/buffalobillranch] encompasses the restored 1886 house (inset) and 1887 barn, the latter’s roof emblazoned with Cody’s hopeful moniker Scout’s Rest Ranch. The 25-acre site is open to self-guided tours from late spring through early fall. 88 WILD WEST

DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY; INSET: GLENN NAGEL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Cody’s brother-in-law Al Goodman (the bearded fellow standing by the large elk antlers at lower right) had this two-story house built and managed the ranch in the showman’s absence. Cody’s sister Julia Goodman stands to Buffalo Bill’s left, helping him heft a bison skull. Family and friends round out the group.

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