Wild West August 2021

THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

GERONIMO AND CHIEF NAICHE

THEIR SURRENDER at SKELETON CANYON brought peace but made them pows

H decision time for the APACHes H HORSE THieVES ON THE PLAINS H QUINN THE INDIAN AGENT

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42 THE PARTING

By Ron J. Jackson Jr. The Chiricahuas were given a choice— stay in Oklahoma or move to New Mexico

50

62 ‘THIS

THE HERO OF LITTLE COON CREEK

WHOLESALE SYSTEM OF ROBBERY’

By Jeff Broome A courageous corporal in Kansas risked all to save comrades under Indian attack

56 THE END

By Gregory Michno White marauders on the central Plains more than matched the atrocities of raiding Indians

OF HIS ROPE

By Robert Rybolt Charlie Reed reached it after teaming up with Doc Middleton’s horse thieves 2

WILD WEST

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D E PA R T M E N T S

4 EDITOR’S LETTER 8 LETTERS 10 ROUNDUP 16 INTERVIEW

By Candy Moulton Melody Groves’ latest book profiles men who walked on both sides of the law

18 WESTERNERS

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This Chippewa lives on in name at Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation in Montana

20 GUNFIGHTERS AND LAWMEN

By John Koster Residents of Rapid City, S.D., slept well at night, thanks to Hooky Jack and Rags

22 PIONEERS AND SETTLERS

By John Koster A pioneering woman and daughter built a lasting home in Wyoming’s Star Valley

24 WESTERN ENTERPRISE

By Lazelle Jones The Salazar family has deep agricultural roots in Colorado’s San Luis Valley

36

GERONIMO’S FINAL SURRENDER

By Bill Cavaliere He and Naiche, hereditary chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, called it quits in 1886

26 ART OF THE WEST

By Johnny D. Boggs Painter Harley Brown has rendered `life on paper’ from Moose Jaw to Tucson

28 INDIAN LIFE

By Garry Radison In killing a onetime ally, Cree leader Wandering Spirit made war on Canada

30 STYLE

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

76 COLLECTIONS

By Linda Wommack Old Trail Town safeguards a slice of the Old West in the heart of Cody, Wyo.

78 GUNS OF THE WEST

C. Rodney James Improved Springfield carbines and rifles lived on after Custer’s Last Stand

80 GHOST TOWNS

By Jim Pettengill A gold strike brought Independence to Colorado, but the ore petered out fast

82 REVIEWS

70 AN UNWITTING AGENT OF WAR

By Garry Radison Thomas Trueman Quinn accommodated Canadian Crees up till the point of death

Bill Cavaliere checks out Apache–related books and movies. Plus, reviews of Cavaliere’s The Chiricahua Apaches: A Concise History and recent books about Pat Garrett and his biographer, Billy the Kid’s hanging trial in New Mexico Territory, early efforts to map the U.S.–Mexico border and some of the Old West lawmen who turned bad

88 GO WEST

Nebraska’s Chimney Rock helped point the way on the 1,300-mile Mormon Trail ON THE COVER This composite image captures the Chiricahua Apaches whose 1886 surrender to Brig. Gen. Nelson Miles in Arizona Territory’s Skeleton Canyon ended the Apache wars. Geronimo poses at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and Chief Naiche poses in an 1886 photo by A. Frank Randall. (Geronimo: Library of Congress/Getty Images; Naiche: Granger; photo illustration by Brian Walker)

AUGUST 2021

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EDITOR’S LETTER

GERONIMO & NAICHE The last of the Apache wars, the final surrender of the Chiricahuas in September 1886 and their long captivity—all these dramatic events remain as closely associated with Geronimo as his people once were with the rugged ranges of what became southeastern Arizona. Geronimo got the headlines then and continues to get them today. He was frequently photographed, including several March 1886 shots in the field by C.S. Fly, and while a prisoner of war at the turn of the 20th century he sold photos of himself for as much as $2. By contrast there are no fully accepted photos of other such famous Chiricahuas as Cochise (who died of natural causes on June 8, 1874) or Victorio (slain in battle in Mexico on Oct. 14, 1880). Apache plundering and raiding continued after Victorio’s death, and Geronimo definitely earned his reputation as a cold-blooded killer. But Geronimo was never a chief, and the last Apache wars in the 1880s also involved other Chiricahua leaders, such as Nana, Juh, Chatto, Ulzana, Chihuahua and Naiche.

Geronimo is well remembered for having surrendered twice, six months apart, in 1886.

But both occasions also encompassed the technically more significant surrenders of Naiche, a son of Cochise and the last hereditary chief of the Chiricahuas. In the first instance, Brig. Gen. George Crook accepted their surrenders on March 27 at Cañon de los Embudos in Sonora, Mexico. “It was Naiche who negotiated surrender terms in March 1886 at Embudos Canyon for what is mistakenly known as ‘Geronimo’s band,’” writes Alicia Delgadillo in her 2013 book From Fort Marion to Fort Sill.

Crook was first to leave the canyon, and once back at Fort Bowie in Arizona Territory he telegraphed news of the surrender to his superiors. Only trouble was, in his absence the two Apache leaders drank up a storm and remained south of the border instead of returning to the States.

That great intoxicated escape led to another long, hard search for Naiche, Geronimo and their followers, this time under the direction of Brig. Gen. Nelson Miles (see “Geronimo’s Final Surrender,” by Bill Cavaliere, P. 36).

On September 3, at Skeleton Canyon in southeast Arizona Territory, the loud and boisterous Geronimo surrendered to Miles. But the general knew only the surrender of the quiet and stoic Naiche would make the capitulation of the Chiricahua holdouts official. That happened the next day, ending the Apache wars. When a cautious Miles left for Fort Bowie on the 5th, he traveled with the sober Naiche and Geronimo, and they didn’t dawdle, making the journey in just 11 hours.

What followed is also well documented but far more controversial. The Apache POWs were first sent from Bowie Station to imprisonment in Florida. So too were the loyal Apache scouts who had served Crook and Miles and helped corral Geronimo and Naiche, as were the peaceful Chiricahuas rounded up at the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona Territory. “It remains today a national betrayal and an egregious disgrace unworthy of a country founded on the democratic ideals of liberty, equality and justice for all,” wrote the Apache wars expert Edwin R. Sweeney. Florida turned out to be an unhealthy place for many of the Chiricahuas, as were the Mount Vernon Barracks near Mobile, Ala., to which they were relocated in 1887–88. According to Sweeney, by October 1894 the Chiricahuas had lost half their numbers to sickness. Next stop was Fort Sill in Oklahoma Territory, where Geronimo gained notoriety as a celebrity rather than a murderer. Yes, Naiche was there, too, though the public hardly noticed.

On Feb. 17, 1909, the 79-year-old Geronimo died of pneumonia while still in captivity at Fort Sill.

The surviving Chiricahuas, perhaps paying for the past sins of Geronimo, remained prisoners of war until 1913. Upon release, all 257 of them were given a choice of where to settle, though a return to Arizona wasn’t among the options. It was either stay at Fort Sill (67 elected to do that) or move to the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation in south-central New Mexico (190 chose that option). For more see Ron J. Jackson Jr.’s “The Parting” (P. 42). Naiche, who had converted to Christianity while at Fort Sill, was among the former POWs who opted to move to Mescalero, where he fell ill and died on March 16, 1919, at about age 63. After 27 years of imprisonment Naiche was at least able to enjoy a half dozen more years as a free man. Said to have been levelheaded and honest like his father, he probably deserves more recognition. Regardless, as you can see, he doesn’t stand alone on our cover. Geronimo still rules.

Naiche, unlike Geronimo, was an actual chief. The youngest son of Cochise, he was the last hereditary chief of the Chiricahua Apaches. Like Geronimo, he surrendered to U.S. generals twice in 1886.

GERONIMO WAS NEVER A CHIEF

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WILD WEST

ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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

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

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

Artist Harley Brown has tackled many subjects, including himself, above.

WildWestMag.com Geronimo and Chatto

The most infamous Chiricahua Apache leader, Geronimo, surrendered at Arizona Territory’s Skeleton Canyon in September 1886. Chatto, a subchief who had scouted for the U.S. Army in 1885 in hopes of ending the Apache wars, was all for Geronimo’s capitulation. Trouble was, both Chiricahua leaders ended up as prisoners of war, as detailed in this article by the late great Apache expert Edwin R. Sweeney.

More About Artist Harley Brown

The Canadian started painting First Nations people in Calgary in the early 1960s. “We lived just a few blocks from a reserve,” he says. “I went there as much as possible because they were grand to be with. And my drawing passion was always there when they wore their traditional dress. This went on for many years, including going to many other reserves in Alberta and Montana.”

Extended Interview With Melody Groves

“My favorite form of research is going where the story is set,” says the New Mexico author of both fiction and nonfiction. “This may sound odd, but I find touching a building or simply standing on an historic spot allows me to connect with the past. I’ve learned a great deal just by running my hand down an adobe wall. I can see the history that way.

Other research includes newspaper archives, other written work and talking to historians.”

Love history? Sign up for our free monthly e-newsletter at: historynet.com/newsletters Let’s Connect Like Wild West on Facebook

AUGUST 2021 / VOL. 34, NO. 2 GREGORY J. LALIRE EDITOR DAVID LAUTERBORN MANAGING EDITOR GREGORY F. MICHNO SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR JOHNNY D. BOGGS SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR JOHN KOSTER SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR JOHN BOESSENECKER SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR

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

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LETTERS

GUN CONTROL I’m a fan of this magazine and of John Boessenecker. His article “Damage Control,” in the April 2021 issue, missed the opportunity to quote from the Tombstone Daily Nugget.

The following editorial appeared on Oct. 23, 1881, the Sunday morning prior to the gunfight on Fremont Street near the O.K. Corral.

Paul Lee Johnson New York, N.Y. Editor responds: Johnson wrote the 2012 book The McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona: An O.K. Corral Obituary and the article “The Will of McLaury,” in the October 2013 Wild West and online at Historynet.com. Here’s the Nugget editorial:

public has arrived at the conclusion that a hanging is a necessity. But when it is over, the public stand aghast, and if nobody says anything, everybody is thinking that it is pretty rough treatment after all.

We have no doubt that if the law was strictly enforced it would do much to stay this flood of crime. Men are not anxious to throw away their lives. But a better plan is to put forth greater and more systematic efforts to prevent the carrying of weapons. The arming of oneself in a peaceful community, as every wellorganized community is supposed to be, and walking about like a moving arsenal, is highly ridiculous and, as events demonstrate, exceedingly dangerous. Boys and men of all ages and conditions are armed, and at the first flash of anger the pistol is drawn and somebody shot down. It is sometimes necessary for certain people to go armed, but the practice should never be allowed without a license. Considering the importance with which the recklessness of firearms has invested this subject, the general government should assume the entire charge of the manufacture of guns and pistols and should permit them to be sold only by licensed dealers under necessary restrictions. This would do something toward remedying a great evil.

CARRYING DEADLY WEAPONS The increase of murders in this territory and other states is an alarming state of things which calls for an immediate remedy. We do not know how many murderers are confined in the different county jails, but the number is large and is being augmented almost daily. The newspapers are inquiring the cause and demanding a remedy, but murders continue to be committed with a boldness and recklessness that are terrifying to the quiet citizen who goes peacefully about his business and never thinks of shooting anybody. Usually the matter is attributed to the law’s delay or to the imperfection of their execution, and no doubt this has much to do with it. With our large stock of murderers on hand, it is only now and then that one is tried, and then the felon manages to go scot free or gets a light sentence in the penitentiary at most. The people encourage this state of things by their virtual opposition to capital punishment. The masses do not believe in capital punishment, and this is true even in states which would vote by a heavy majority to retain it in criminal jurisprudence. They seem to think that it is a good thing to have on the statute books, but they hesitate to put it in operation.

Occasionally matters get so bad that it is deemed advisable to hang somebody, and then it does not matter much who the victim is. It is almost invariably the fact that the man who is selected for the sacrifice is really less guilty than some who have escaped. But the victim is selected, and without the least difficulty in the world he is unceremoniously fired out of this life. The jury convicts promptly, the court refuses a new trial, the Supreme Court is unable to see anything irregular in the proceedings, and the governor declines to interfere. The

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I am very disappointed in Wild West’s obvious endorsement of gun control.

Though I do not doubt the facts of the article, including the existence of town ordinances to hinder the carrying of firearms, it would seem, as the article pointed out, that many people—some good, and more to the point, some bad—carried and used firearms. What I object to is this passage from the sidebar in the article: Westerners recognized that towns of a certain size inevitably attracted saloons, gambling houses, dance halls and the like filled with hard drinking, heavily armed men—a recipe for disaster. A commonsense solution was to ban the carrying of guns in such towns and cities. Enacted out of transient necessity, such laws were considered compatible with Americans’ broader right to keep and bear arms, as enshrined in the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

Having read the Second Amendment, I disagree. Instead of outlawing the carrying of firearms, leaving the law-abiding unprotected against the non—law-abiding criminal element, maybe we should pass commonsense laws against murder and other crimes of violence. Oh yeah, we already do that. Boessenecker took a factual, entertaining article and turned it into his obvious political agenda. Please don’t bother to deny.

Roy Erwin Shiner, Texas John Boessenecker responds: I’m afraid I don’t see any political agenda in my account of frontier gun control laws. As I point out, guns were widely carried on the frontier.

One of my favorite photos depicts the William H. Brewer party, which surveyed California in 1864. Two of the four scientists are heavily armed with rifle, revolver and bowie knife. The reason: Frontier areas were extremely dangerous, with little law enforcement, and these weapons were necessary for self-protection. But there was no such need to carry firearms in well-policed towns and cities. Citizens recognized that fact and banned the carrying of firearms in many Old West communities. Your complaint should actually be with those pioneers who introduced this early form of gun control almost a century and a half ago.

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

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ROUNDUP

10 NOTABLE CHIRICAHUA APACHES

Geronimo was a prisoner of war when he posed for this portrait. Top: The Bedonkohe leader (at far right) poses with son Chappo (at far left) and two other followers in this March 1886 photo

by C.S. Fly of Tombstone, Arizona Territory.

Cochise: Historians have variously described the great Apache chief of the Chokonen band as honest, cruel, intelligent, feared, dignified and truthful. Exhibiting near total control over his people, he epitomized everything an Apache chief should be. Though he’d demonstrated fearlessness in battle against both U.S. and Mexican troops, his 1872 peace treaty with Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard was a commitment he took to his grave, even instructing his sons, Taza and Naiche, from his deathbed to always live at peace with the whites.

2

Geronimo: Though the Bedonkohe leader remains a household name 112 years after his death, his life remains shrouded in controversy and legend. Historians debate whether he was primarily an Apache freedom fighter or a lying opportunist. He features in scores of films, and publishers regularly release biographies about him, yet the public still largely believes he was a chief (he wasn’t). While Geronimo rode in Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 inaugural parade, he remained a prisoner of war at his death in 1909.

3

Mangas Coloradas: A chief of the Mimbreño (Chihenne) band, he projected such power that Apaches of other bands willingly followed his lead. While the average Chiricahua man stood around 5-foot-5, Mangas was well over 6 feet tall.

He frequently aligned himself in battle with son-inlaw Cochise, with devastating results to the enemy.

Recognizing the futility of resisting the flood of

10 WILD WEST

whites into his homeland, Mangas walked into Fort McLane, New Mexico Territory, on Jan. 18, 1863, seeking peace. Instead, he was murdered by soldiers, who decapitated his corpse and sent it to a New York phrenologist for study.

4

Victorio: Another Mimbreño (Chihenne) chief, he outfought the U.S. Army with his guerrilla warfare tactics. Settling on New Mexico Territory’s Ojo Caliente Indian Reservation from 1874 until its 1877 closure, Victorio and his people reluctantly moved to the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona Territory, which they hated and soon fled. The government’s refusal to allow them back at Ojo Caliente prompted Victorio to wage a namesake 1879–80 war. His April 1880 battle at Hembrillo Canyon, New Mexico Territory, proved an epic victory, but he lost a clash that October at Tres Castillos, Mexico, and was killed in the process.

5

Naiche: The youngest of Cochise’s two sons, Naiche became Chokonen chief in 1876 after older brother Taza died of pneumonia while on a visit to Washington D.C. The quiet and stoic chief was often in the company of Geronimo, whose loud and boisterous spirit overshadowed that of Naiche in the history books. The latter also had to bear the humility of surrendering his people in September 1886, an act that ended the Indian wars in the United States. Naiche, the last hereditary chief of the Chiricahuas, died in 1919.

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Nana: In 1881 this Mimbreño (Chihenne) chief, though in his 70s, led his warriors on a two-month, 2,000-mile series of raids, mostly in New Mexico Territory. Nana’s warriors encountered and fought the U.S. cavalry seven times, killed upward of 30 Americans, attacked at least a dozen towns and ranches, took several prisoners and stole hundreds horses and cattle before heading south into the relative sanctuary of Mexico. In 1896, approaching age 90, Nana died a prisoner of war in Indian Territory.

7

Loco: Mimbreño (Chihenne) Chief Jlin-tayi-tith (Stops His Horse), known to Americans and Mexicans alike as Loco, was the least likely of all Chiricahua leaders to resist settlement on a reservation. Though a fearless fighter when he had to be, Loco was farsighted enough to realize the Apaches could resist neither the oncoming tide of white settlers nor their technology. Thus through the 1880s until he died a prisoner of war in 1905, he remained a proponent of peace

8

Fun: Yahe-chul (Smoke Comes Out), or Fun, was a young Bedonkohe who proved a fierce warrior during an 1882 fight on Alisos Creek, Mexico, dodging soldiers’ bullets in a singlehanded charge while picking off the enemy with his Springfield rifle. Period photographs of Fun show a swarthy, muscular warrior. In 1892, while a prisoner of war at Fort Pickens, Fla., he shot and wounded his wife in a jealous rage. Believing her dead, he then put the gun to his own head and committed suicide.

9

Kaetenae: This Mimbreño (Chihenne) warrior was considered a dangerous troublemaker at both the San Carlos and Fort Apache reservations in Arizona Territory. Accused in 1884 of having induced his fellow Apaches to go on the warpath, Kaetenae was arrested, convicted and sentenced to three years at California’s Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. Brigadier General George Crook eased the conditions of his confinement and had him released early in hopes the warrior would assist in securing the surrenders of Naiche and Geronimo. Ever grateful to the general, Kaetenae did exactly that.

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Atelnietze: A cousin to Naiche, he was initially present at the Chiricahua’s final 1886 surrender at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona Territory. But the warrior had a change of heart and escaped to Mexico with a half dozen others under cover of darkness. The small group formed the nucleus of the “bronco Apaches,” who continued raiding the borderlands through the 1930s.

Atelnietze himself was killed in Sonora in 1896 by a U.S. Army punitive expedition.

—Bill Cavaliere

KERNELS OF HISTORY

Corn, or maize, was first domesticated in the Americas some 10,000 years ago.

Indians used ground cornmeal, or masa, in many food items (including tamales and flatbread) and parts of the plant for other purposes (e.g., in mattresses and as containers and toys).

Most tribes cultivated the crop, while those who didn’t often traded for it. “Every Plains tribe, except perhaps the Blackfeet, had some agricultural tradition,” John Koster wrote in his February 2011 Wild West article “Plains Tribes Had Roots in Agriculture” (online at Historynet. com). When driven out on the Plains, though, the Sioux, Cheyennes and Arapahos adopted the horse and turned to hunting for subsistence.

Lacking sufficient rain and proper irrigation, their new Western range proved unsuitable for growing corn and other crops. Even when the reservations were established, few Plains Indians became self-sufficient farmers.

Most depictions of 19th-century Plains Indians show the men on horseback, usually hunting buffalo, scouting or fighting. Thus it’s no wonder that White Man’s Corn Tipis (above), a 1993 painting by Tom Lovell (1909–97), stands out. The 14¼-by-12-inch oil on board brought $27,700 at the recent Sotheby’s auction Majestic America: Property From an Important Western Collector, Part II. “Corn was the settler’s first crop,” Lovell wrote about the work. “Here, two Cheyennes on a fall evening in the 1860s see corn stocks in the distance. They are intrigued by the resemblance to tipis and ride through the field for a closer look.

Having thought about Indians these many years, I feel that I can put myself in their place and experience this same reaction to this quiet scene.”

Even so, Lovell’s “corn tipis” didn’t harvest the high bid at the auction, though he and another artist did share top honors. Lovell’s oil on canvas The Friendly Willows, which depicts an Indian and his son hiding in the brush from four passing mounted warriors, fetched $138,600, as did Injuns, Injuns, an oil on Masonite by John F. Clymer (1907–89), which portrays two white hunters loaded down with hides and fleeing from Plains Indians. Clymer’s Up River sold for $81,900.

WEST WORDS

‘Natchez (Naiche), who had done little talking, here intervened to say that whether they continued the war or not, my party would be safe as long as we started no trouble. We had come as friends, he said, and would be allowed to depart in peace. His words greatly reassured me’ —U.S. Army Lieutenant Charles B. Gatewood said this about his Aug. 25, 1886, meeting in Mexico with Chiricahua Apache leaders Naiche and Geronimo, during which they discussed surrender terms.

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Stephen F. Austin is widely known as the “Father of Texas” for having established the first Anglo settlement in the Mexican province of Tejas—a namesake colony on the lower Colorado and Brazos rivers. Not as well known is that 200 years ago Stephen’s father, Moses Austin (see portrait above), took the first steps toward establishing an Anglo colony in the region. In December 1820 the Spanish government in Mexico City approved a land grant permitting Moses to settle 300 American families on 200,000 acres in San Antonio.

Before he could realize his plans, however, the 59-year-old pioneer died of pneumonia, on June 10, 1821. That left it to son Stephen to establish the Austin colony, and in January 1822 he settled the “Old Three Hundred”

THE MAN WHO MADE PAT GARRETT ▲ New Mexicans well remember Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, of course, both of whom boast impressive markers at their

burial sites in Fort Sumner and Las Cruces, respectively. Well, finally, so does Marshall Ashmun “Ash” Upson, the ghostwriter of Garrett’s 1882 book The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. After dying of influenza in Texas on Oct. 6, 1894, Upson was buried in unmarked grave in the Uvalde Cemetery.

Last April, nearly 130 years after the author’s death, members of the Wild West History Association, in cooperation with Uvalde’s El Progreso Memorial Library, dedicated a marker engraved with a depiction of Upson at his gravesite.

Earlier this year the WWHA put up a marker for SuttonTaylor feud victim Dr. Phillip H. Brassell at Yorktown, Texas, and another for Texas Ranger Jefferson Davis Mynatt at Palestine, Texas. The organization also plans to place a marker for Wild Bunch member and SuttonTaylor participant O.C. “Deaf Charlie” Hanks.

The memorial events are part of an ongoing WWHA project in partnership with Arizona’s Tombstone Epitaph.

“The WWHA grave marking and tombstone repair project

is especially for outlaw, lawman and frontier character graves,” WWHA Vice President Roy B. Young explains. “It is an effort to remember these men and women whose ‘end,’ in many cases, has been forgotten or neglected.

We welcome additional reports of unmarked graves or those that need attention.” Visit wildwesthistory.org for more information and to contact Young.

NOT THE SAME BAT CHANNEL ▲ Legendary Western lawman turned Eastern sportswriter Bat Masterson is the principal player in Wild West Chronicles, a 15-episode historical docudrama that debuted this spring on INSP, a cable network specializing in such Western programming as reruns of Gunsmoke and The

SEE YOU LATER...

Johnny Crawford Best known for his role as New Mexico Territory rancher Lucas McCain’s son, Mark, in the classic ABC-TV Western series The Rifleman (1958–63), actor John Ernest Crawford, 75, died April 29, 2021, in his hometown of Los Angeles. Born on March 26, 1946, Crawford was nominated at age 13 for a best supporting actor Emmy for his work on The Rifleman. The touching father-son depiction by Chuck Connors and Crawford was unparalleled in a Western series, though there was plenty of shooting. The actors appeared together again in a 1965 episode of the Western Branded.

Crawford made his TV debut at age 9 in 1955 as an original member of the Mouseketeers on The Mickey Mouse Club.

FAR LEFT: STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI; TOP RIGHT: WENN RIGHTS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

FATHERS OF TEXAS ▲

in Texas. The road proved bumpy, as by then Mexico had declared its independence from Spain. Austin had mixed success as an intermediary between his colonists and the new government, which imprisoned him in Mexico City for much of 1834. But he lived to see Texas win its war of independence from Mexico and briefly served as the republic’s first secretary of state before dying, like his father of pneumonia, on Dec. 27, 1836. So while it is fitting to remember Stephen Austin, let’s also honor the “Father of the Father of Texas” on the 200th anniversary of Moses Austin’s death.

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

‘I came not here to talk but to die.

Proceed with the killing business’ —Convicted of the murder of a jailer during a July 26, 1895, breakout attempt at Fort Smith, Ark., Crawford “Cherokee Bill” Goldsby spoke these words from the Fort Smith gallows on March 17, 1896, his execution day. (See “The Short, Violent Life of Cherokee Bill,” by Art T. Burton, in the June 2021 Wild West.)

12 WILD WEST

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ROUNDUP Virginian. Chronicles is built around the fanciful notion that Masterson traveled the frontier interviewing eyewitnesses to events involving such legendary figures as Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Butch Cassidy, Bass Reeves and Annie Oakley.

Actor Jack Elliott portrays Masterson, who befriended Wyatt Earp (not featured here) in the real West before moving to New York in 1902. On Oct. 25, 1921, 67-year-old Bat dropped dead of a

heart attack at his desk while typing what would be his final sports column for The Morning Telegraph. For more on his late-life career see “Bat Masterson,” by Robert DeArment, originally published in the June 2001 Wild West and available online at Historynet.com.

NOT THE LAST DANCE

J.H. Dance & Bros. revolvers (the subject of our June 2021 Guns of the West) are much in

ROCK OF AGES

demand by firearm collectors. Indeed, last year Heritage Auctions sold one for $45,000.

That example of the percussion-era Confederate single-action six-shooter (above) was carried during the Civil War by Horace G. Young of the 5th Texas Cavalry and bears his scratched initials on the

underside of the grip strap. At the May 1864 Battle of Yellow Bayou, La., the young private was severely wounded by canister shot, losing his left arm and left eye. But he survived, returning to Falls County, Texas, to marry and raise a family. Though his Dance has scattered surface rust and broken and missing parts, Heritage described the rare collectible as being in good condition.

More than 1,000 years ago, Cherokees in what would become north Georgia chipped more than 100 petroglyphs on soapstone boulders at what is today’s 52acre Track Rock Gap, in the Chattahoochee National Forest. This spring the Forest Service reported the site had been vandalized, five boulders receiving deep scratches, two others marred with paint. The service is exploring ways to restore the site.

Events of the west number of daily visitors is limited, and visitors must preregister for free time-entry passes. Visit americanindian.si.edu or call 800-242-6624.

Black Citizenship

Indian Veterans Memorial ▲

On November 11, Veterans Day, the National Museum of the American Indian will dedicate the National Native American Veterans Memorial (a work by Cheyenne/ Arapaho artist Harvey Pratt titled Warriors’ Circle of Honor) on its grounds in Washing-

ton, D.C. Opened to the public last Veterans Day, the memorial recognizes the sacrifices of all who have served in the U.S. armed forces, though specifically that of American Indians, native Hawaiians and Alaska natives. Following a long shutdown due to the coronavirus, the museum reopened on May 21, though the

“Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow,” a traveling exhibition of the New-York Historical Society, visits the Bullock Museum in Austin, Texas, through Nov. 18.

The exhibition explores the struggle for full citizenship and racial equality in the half century after the Civil War. Visit thestoryoftexas.com.

Wranglers

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage

Museum in Oklahoma City will present its prestigious Wrangler Awards at the Western Heritage Awards banquet Sept. 17– 18. Visit nationalcowboymuseum.org.

miles southwest of Williston, N.D., and a half mile east of Fort Buford State Historic Site, where Bull surrendered on July 20, 1881. At left is a detail of a circa-1885 studio portrait of Sitting Bull with hand-painted accents by H.A. Plane.

Visit history.nd.gov/ historicsites/mycic or call 701-572-9034.

WWHA Roundup

Sitting Bull ▲

A long-term exhibit on the life of Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull is coming in June to the Missouri-Yellowstone Confluence Interpretive Center, 20

The annual Wild West History Association Roundup will convene in Fort Smith, Ark., Sept. 1–4, a few months after its originally scheduled date.

Watch for more details on WWHA’s Facebook page and at wildwesthistory.org, also the place to join the organization.

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

14 WILD WEST

TOP: HERITAGE AUCTIONS; LEFT: MICHAEL PERRIN, CC BY-SA 4.0

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INTERVIEW

WE DON’T NEED NO BADGES THE LATEST HISTORY FROM AUTHOR MELODY GROVES PROFILES OLD WEST LAWMEN TURNED LAWBREAKERS

BY CANDY MOULTON Albuquerque, N.M., writer Melody Groves knows firsthand what it feels like to face down an opponent, as she’s both an active gunfight reenactor and a onetime bull rider. The multitasking writer has published Western novels and history books and writes for magazines. In her “downtime” she plays rhythm guitar. Groves’ novels include Border Ambush, Sonoran Rage, Arizona War, Kansas Bleeds, Black Range Revenge, She Was Sheriff and the forthcoming Lady of the Law: The Maud Overstreet Saga (2022). Her nonfiction books include Ropes, Reins and Rawhide: All About Rodeo, Butterfield’s Byway: America’s First Overland Mail Route Across the West and Hoist a Cold One! Historic Bars of the Southwest. Her latest, When Outlaws Wore Badges (2021), profiles Old West lawmen who broke the law.

How would you characterize Milton Yarberry, who became town marshal of Albuquerque?

He was probably always a bad guy, since as a teenager he killed a man. But he managed to do a few good things along the way. Characters like him, I believe, are what made the Wild West wild.

What about Henry Plummer, the sheriff hanged by vigilantes in Montana Territory?

Plummer truly walked both sides, but I think he was an opportunist. And I think he was probably the opposite of mainly bad Yarberry. Plummer had good intentions and generally followed the law, but his ego took control, and he saw the opportunity to get rich and took it, which didn’t work out so well for him.

How about Arizona Territory’s Burt Alvord, once a respectable lawman?

Alvord was a schemer, which made him smarter than the average outlaw. It takes a lot of planning and bravado to get your friends together to play poker, rob a train and then rush back to the poker table pretending you’ve all been there all along.

Yep, he was no dummy.

How could the likes of Plummer and Alvord work both sides of the law?

They possessed fearlessness and the willingness to either enforce the law or commit a crime. Men like that were often hired as lawmen because they had the gumption to rob a train or hunt down a criminal. It takes a certain type of person to either stand behind the badge or stand in front of it.

16 WILD WEST

Which of the lawmen/outlaws interested you most?

Frankly, they’re all intriguing. But Burt Alvord’s robbing a train while a lawman, then appointing all the other robbers as deputies and riding out to catch the outlaws is hilarious. For a while he got away with lots of money. It takes a ton of ego to pull that off.

What motivated some of these men to turn to crime rather than maintain law and order?

There wasn’t much money associated with being a lawman. At times there was no salary at all, other times not enough to live on.

Many were paid by receiving a percentage of the taxes they collected and/or the bounty on a criminal’s head. For those men who could go either way, I think they chose the more profitable.

They probably didn’t consider being caught as a possibility.

Were there others who didn’t make your book?

The men I wrote about all had some sort of bizarre event or connection I found interesting—first town marshal…rode with Billy …mysteriously disappeared, etc. I thought long and hard about including Billy the Kid. He was a [Lincoln County, N.M.] Regulator for a bit, and while it felt like he was on the side of the law, his being a Regulator wasn’t legal action such as being a deputy.

Does participating in gunfight reenactments give you empathy for the subject?

From gunfighting I know what it’s like to stare down the barrel of a .44 (thankfully, we always use blanks—but they can still hurt), and I know the adrenaline it takes to be in a gunfight. I’ve learned so much from being a gunfighter, especially from the inside. And as a gunfighter, I’ve been involved in reenactments such as the killing of Billy the Kid, walking inside the store where he ate his last Christmas dinner. I know what holding a gun and pointing it at someone feels like. I’m familiar with the emotions associated with gunfighting—being afraid, confident, concern for fellow “bad guys” or “good guys,” trying to figure out the opponent’s moves. Because of those reenactments I feel as if I know what I’m writing about.

How has bull riding shaped you?

While I never expected to be professional at the sport (I was too old when I started), the gumption, tenacity and sheer singlemindedness it takes to stay on (at least it did for me) is something I apply to everything I do, including writing.

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Green Berets Dramatic scenes of Special Forces in combat FIRST IN A FOUR-PART SERIES

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WESTERNERS

LANDLESS ROCKY BOY

TONY SAPIENZA COLLECTION

Born circa 1851, Chippewa/Ojibwe leader Asiniiwin (translated as “Rocky Boy” or, more accurately, “Stone Child”) advocated for his landless Montana people from the turn of the 20th century till his 1916 death. Leading a band of 130 men, women and children, he continually strove to maintain the Chippewas’ tribal identity.

With the death of the influential Chief Little Shell in 1901, Asiniiwin picked up negotiations with the United States for a reservation for the landless Chippewas, as well as those seeking to relocate from Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation and Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation.

In 1909 he and federal negotiators reached an agreement to permit landless Chippewas and Crees to share the Blackfeet Nation in northwestern Montana. Asiniiwin died on April 18, 1916, his dream of a Chippewa reservation unrealized. Less than five months later, on September 7, Congress established Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation in the Bears Paw Mountains of north-central Montana.

The 171-square-mile reserve spans the border of Hill and Chouteau counties about 40 miles south of the Canadian border.

Established for landless Chippewas, it also became home to landless Crees and Métis. Though Stone Child is the correct translation of Asiniiwin, Rocky Boy lives on in name at the reservation nearly 3,800 Indians call home.

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Because each Perfect Sleep Chair is a made-to-order bedding product it cannot be returned, but if it arrives damaged or defective, at our option we will repair it or replace it. © 2021 firstSTREET for Boomers and Beyond, Inc.

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Footrest may vary by model

5/14/21 4:15 PM

GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN John H. “Hooky Jack” Leary is the closest of the two men posing atop the rear of the Deadwood— Spearfish stage in Dakota Territory in the 1880s.

Below: Rapid City watchman Leary poses with his faithful partner, Rags, a mixed-breed terrier.

HOOKY JACK & RAGS

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the Gold Hill mines near Virginia City, Nev. In 1874 he and three fellow armed prospectors illegally slipped into the Black Hills of Dakota Territory after a U.S. Army expedition under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer put out word of gold “to the grass roots.” One night Leary returned to camp to find his three companions had been murdered and their provisions stolen. He stopped just long enough to bury them before fleeing Indian country.

In the wake of the Great Sioux War of 1876, after the eviction of the Indians, Jack settled just north of the Black Hills in Myersville, where he met Alvina, the blonde, blue-eyed sister of friends Billy and Henry Myers. The camp took its name from the family of German origins. One of Alvina’s eyes was blue glass, as in childhood she’d been deeply hooked in the eye socket by an ox she was feeding. Alvina and Jack were married in 1880. The next spring the couple had twin girls and named them Abbie Amanda and Amanda Abbie. “They were so much alike that to tell them apart Alvina tied a blue ribbon to one and a pink

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JOURNEY MUSEUM, RAPID CITY, S.D.

rom the days of hard-rock mining in the wake of the 1876 Black Hills gold rush through early Prohibition-era South Dakota the streets of Rapid City’s saloon, business and warehouse districts were patrolled at night by onetime gold prospector Jack Leary. For a time his most faithful companion was a scrappy mixed-breed terrier named Rags. “Hooky Jack,” as Leary was known, never carried a gun, only a lantern suspended from one of the hooks attached to the stumps of either arm. The energetic Rags would trot at Leary’s heels as they roamed the streets to break up any alcohol-fueled arguments and ensure thieves hadn’t broken into any businesses or warehouses.

“He is the night watch and performs his duties faithfully and acceptably to merchants and warehousemen,” a contemporary article in the Hill City Prospector noted. “So accustomed has he become to greeting people abroad early in the morning that his salutation always is, ‘Good morning,’ regardless of the hour of night or day.”

John Henry Leary was born of Irish parentage in Newburgh, N.Y., in 1849. At age 16 he left home to seek his fortune at

TOP: ADAMS MUSEUM COLLECTION/DEADWOOD HISTORY; LEFT: RAPID CITY JOURNAL

F

THE NIGHT WATCHMAN IN RAPID CITY, SOUTH DAKOTA, PATROLLED WITH TWO HOOKS, FOUR PAWS AND NO GUNS

BY JOHN KOSTER

JOURNEY MUSEUM, RAPID CITY, S.D.

TOP: ADAMS MUSEUM COLLECTION/DEADWOOD HISTORY; LEFT: RAPID CITY JOURNAL

GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

ribbon on the other,” Leary’s granddaughter told South Dakota Magazine some years ago.

The new family had hard luck. Amanda died in infancy. Sometime later the family cabin caught fire, and Jack rushed back inside the burning home to save Abbie. She’d already been rescued by other miners, and Jack escaped without serious harm.

But on March 17, 1882, just after the conflagration of his cabin, Leary—by then an experienced hard-rock miner—had an accident that changed his life. That morning he and friend Jim Scott were at the Grand Junction Mine, 7 miles northwest of Custer City. The two were rolling sticks of dynamite between their hands near an open fire, as cold dynamite often failed to detonate. Unfortunately for them, one of the sticks detonated. The blast hurled Leary 40 feet in the air, blew off both hands above the wrists, sent bone fragments into his side and damaged one eye. Scott was knocked sprawling with a shattered arm. Called to the scene, a weeping Alvina Leary dabbed the men’s wounds with cold water until a physician arrived. The Custer County board of commissioners covered the cost of both men’s amputations, and citizens held fundraisers for their families. Doctors were certain Jack would die.

But after eight months as a convalescent Leary, though near blind in one eye and near deaf in one ear, decided to return to work—though not with dynamite. Henry Molle, an inventive friend, had designed a pair of hinged double hooks affixed to wooden posts that fit snugly over the stumps of Jack’s amputated arms. A shoulder harness held them in place, while a backstrap connected to the hooks gave Jack the ability to clasp objects by rounding his shoulders. Alvina helped him into his harness and to do up his buttons. By year’s end he’d

adopted the moniker Hooky Jack and was serving as Rapid City’s night watchman. In 1884 he signed a mortgage for a house, having learned to write by tracing the outline of his opposite hook with a pen.

The unwritten “Code of the West” governed behavior in growing Rapid City, whose population hovered around 1,000 in the 1880s. As there was no glory in roughing up a man with no hands and no gun, Jack dissuaded drunks from fighting simply by showing up.

“Maybe the belligerent cowpokes and prospectors and nesters would eventually get around to a battle somewhere out on the prairie,” Black Hills historian Robert Casey wrote, “but for years violence on Main Street was attended by one inviolable rule of conduct: You don’t annoy Hooky Jack because he can’t annoy you.”

Apparently someone was annoyed with Leary in 1889, as he was accused of helping a local thief pilfer a wad of cash from a drunk Jack had helped home from a saloon. Thankfully, a grand jury exonerated the watchman, and he kept his job for life.

It’s uncertain when Rags first joined him on night watch, but it must have been some years later, as the faithful dog didn’t die until 1919.

While most residents respected their dedicated night watchman, there were exceptions. For instance, one night a crowd of mischievous students— locals disagree whether they were from the high school or the South Dakota School of Mines—kidnapped Leary and hung him from a fence by his hooks while Rags barked in frantic protest. Cowboys from the Ed Stenger Ranch near Hermosa, who had ridden into town with perhaps less chivalrous ambitions, rescued Hooky Jack. The next day, for retribution and a bit of fun, they rounded up the student ringleaders, lined them up in front of the Harney Hotel and had them “drop trou” for an equally humiliating public spanking.

Though Jack and Alvina lost a second set of twins in 1893, they raised eight children to adulthood, all self-supporters as gardeners or peddlers of fresh vegetables. Their daughter Alma served as Pennington County superintendent of schools.

Sadly, in 1906 Alvina was committed to the state asylum in Yankton with mental issues perhaps arising from her childhood goring. Then came the night in 1919 when Rags, half-blind and halfdeaf like his master, lost track of Hooky while on their beat and was killed by a car while running to catch up. Oddly enough, seven years later Leary himself was struck by a car. He died in Rapid City to universal mourning on Nov. 6, 1926. Two years later Alvina died in Yankton after 22 years in the asylum. She and Jack lay side by side in Rapid City’s Mountain View Cemetery.

Leary was Rapid City’s night watchman from 1882 until 1926, when he died in the line of duty—struck down by a car (as had happened to his pal Rags in 1919).

as there was no glory in roughing up a man with no hands and no gun, jack dissuaded drunks from fighting simply by showing up

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PIONEERS & SETTLERS

The Baker Cabin is testimony to the fine work done in 1889 by Anna Baker and 12-year-old daughter May. Below: Anna and husband Alonzo pose that year with their children (from left: Sarah LaVinna, William Alonzo (“Lonnie,” in front of his mother), Anna Eliza, baby John Lorenzo, Harriet May (“May”) and Elcie Cameila).

A CABIN OF HER OWN

T

he Baker Cabin, on the west side of U.S. Highway 89 in Etna, Wyoming, was raised by a pioneer who was atypical for a home builder of the era. The 32year-old mother of seven, one a newborn, was assisted in her labors by her 12-yearold daughter while her husband and 10year-old son were off working for wages.

Mother and daughter clearly did fine work, as the cabin is the oldest surviving house in the Star Valley. It was also the first known residence in the region to have a shingled roof and wood floors.

The circumstances of its construction are even more remarkable.

In 1812 Scottish-born fur trader and explorer Robert Stuart and men, employees of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Co., were among the first whites to visit the valley. Mountain men 22 WILD WEST

like Jim Bridger and Jedediah Smith also trapped the region in the frontier era. While the Lander Cutoff of the Oregon and California trails was in regular use by the late 1860s, most emigrants veered off west through Crow Creek Canyon to settle in what became Idaho.

Settlement of the Star Valley didn’t begin in earnest until the late-1870s arrival of Mormon families from Utah Territory.

Among the Latter-day pioneers was one Anna Eliza (née Telford) Baker, born in Bountiful, Davis County, Utah Territory, on Aug. 7, 1856, to John Dodds Telford and Sarah Matilda Coltrin. On Jan. 29, 1876, 19-year-old Anna married Alonzo Baker, the 21-year-old son of English-born Mormons. The couple’s first six children—Harriet May (who went by “May”), William Alonzo (“Lonnie”), Anna Eliza, Sarah LaVinna, Elcie Cameila and John Lorenzo—were born in Richmond, Cache County, Utah.

STAR VALLEY HISTORICAL SOCIETY (3)

IN 1889 A DETERMINED YOUNG WIFE AND MOTHER IN STAR VALLEY, WYOMING, BUILT A CABIN THAT HAS SURVIVED THE TEST OF TIME

BY JOHN KOSTER

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STAR VALLEY HISTORICAL SOCIETY (3)

PIONEERS & SETTLERS

In the spring of 1888 the large and still growing family moved to the Star Valley, where son George Tyler was born that September. With limited means, the family spent that winter huddled in a tent, their overturned wagon to one side as a windbreak. While they all survived the ordeal, Anna Eliza swore not to spend another Wyoming winter in a tent.

With the coming of spring Alonzo jumped at a chance to earn wages building a railway roadbed south of Deer Lodge, Mont., and took along 10-year-old Lonnie as a helper. A number of other homesteaders joined the summer work crew.

Anna remained on the homestead with 12-yearold May and her five younger siblings. As there were no crops to tend, mother Baker turned her attention to raising a cabin. Anna had acquired the know-how from observing her late father, a carpenter by trade. Though pioneers often claimed they could get by with little more than an ax and a large knife, she must have brought along a store of her father’s tools from Utah.

Anna and May felled trees for logs from the eastern foothills of Prater Canyon and used the remaining horses to haul them home. The cabin Anna envisioned would measure 30 feet by 16 feet.

After hewing the logs flat on four sides, mother and daughter cut them to measure. To link the corners, Anna fashioned dovetail joints, comprising tenons (tonguelike notches) on the ends of the front and back logs and slightly larger mortises (grooves) on the ends of the side logs. As iron nails were a luxury on the frontier, she relied on the dovetails, notching and gravity to hold the cabin together. Gaps were packed with clay as she and May set the logs in place. Inside were two rooms—one for the boys, the other for the girls. Windows on either side of the door and at both ends of the house allowed sunlight and warm-weather breezes into the interior.

Anna herself crafted the plank wood floor. Fortunately, the Turner family had recently opened a shingle mill on nearby Willow Creek. After hauling home a fresh-hewn load, she and May installed the first shingled roof in the region. Sod roofs— squares of cut prairie grass laid atop layers of bark and boards—had been the heavy, soggy standard before that.

Returning that fall to a real home, Alonzo started a family business in dairy farming and cheesemaking. Within days of his homecoming May, her mother’s only full-time assistant, was sent back to Utah to attend boarding school in Logan. After contracting diphtheria, she died there on Jan. 19, 1891, shy of her 14th birthday.

The original Baker homestead lay just south of Etna. In 1890 the hard-working family acquired

more acreage, hitched up six teams of horses and dragged their cabin nearly 2 miles to the new property. That the hewn-log structure, though assembled without a single nail, held together speaks to what a solid construction job mother and daughter had done.

Anna gave birth to three more daughters and two sons. She died on March 25, 1899, just two days after delivering her twelfth child, James Telford. Heartbroken at the double loss of his redoubtable wife and stalwart eldest daughter, Alonzo lost himself in work and caring for their 11 surviving children. Doubtless needing a helper, he remarried in 1902. Alonzo continued to live in the house Anna Eliza built until 1912, when he, wife Luisa and the younger children moved to California.

By the onset of World War II the Baker Cabin was being used as a combination granary and chicken coop. A half century later, in 1991, the extended Baker clan, many of whom still lived in the vicinity, managed to buy back the longneglected structure. Lonnie Baker’s son Wayne had the historic family cabin carefully jacked up off its foundation, and local trucker J.P. Robinson transported it without cost to property owned by Wayne’s eldest brother, Lloyd.

With donations of money and labor, family and friends restored the Baker Cabin to its original appearance, and in 1993 the Bakers deeded it to the Star Valley Historical Society for nomination to the National Registry of Historical Places. Today it honors the vow of a hardy frontier wife and mother never to spend another Wyoming winter in a lean-to —a dream realized, thanks to her own carpentry skills and the help of a daughter.

May died in 1891 and Anna in 1899.

Alonzo remarried in 1902 and continued to live in the Star Valley cabin until he moved to California in 1912.

Anna and may felled trees for logs from the eastern foothills of prater canyon

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WESTERN ENTERPRISE

This was the 1800s Los Rincones home of a Salazar family ancestor.

Right: Emma and Henry Salazar (seated, third and fourth from left) pose with their eight children.

SINCE ARRIVING IN THE SAN LUIS VALLEY IN THE 19th CENTURY THE FAMILY HAS FARMED, RANCHED AND SERVED IN PUBLIC OFFICE

BY LAZELLE JONES

T

he farming and ranching families of Salazars in the San Luis Valley of Colorado trace their roots back to the 1700s. Just ask the current generation of Salazars, who know their lineage, including the birthdates of distant ancestors. The name Salazar (“Old Hall” in Castilian and Basque) originates from the Basque region of northern Spain and southwestern France. Salazars have been in the Americas since the mid-1500s. Spanish explorer Juan de Salazar de Espinosa (1508–1560) founded Asunción, the present-day capital of Paraguay, in 1537.

Before the Pilgrims disembarked from the Mayf lower at Plymouth Rock in 1620, Salazars had made their way to South America and then north into what became New Mexico. The mother of conquistador Juan de Oñate (1550–1626), who 24 WILD WEST

founded Santa Fe in 1598, was a Salazar. Ancestors of the present-day Salazars of south-central Colorado were farming near Española in what became New Mexico Territory after the 1846–48 Mexican War. In the latter half of the 19th century the Salazars made their final push north to farm and ranch in the San Luis Valley.

After the February 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Mexico ceded all of its territory between Texas and the west coast of the United States, land ownership issues remained to be settled—some fairly, some not—in the U.S. court system. As newly minted American citizens the Salazars took advantage of the 1862 Homestead Act to become legal landowners in the San Luis Valley. In the mid- to late 1800s the hardworking family grazed sheep and grew subsistence crops in the valley.

Today fifth-generation Salazars still farm some of the original holdings. The families of Enrique (Henry) and Emma (née

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PHOTOS COURTESY SALAZAR FARM AND RANCH (4)

THE SALAZAR LEGACY IN COLORADO

PHOTOS COURTESY SALAZAR FARM AND RANCH (4)

WESTERN ENTERPRISE

Montoya) Salazar each survived the Great Depression by selling livestock and crops, an experience that motivated them to ensure their eight children got college educations. Tragically, their eldest, Leandro, died in a 1992 farming accident. Four of the siblings today farm or ranch full or part time in the San Luis Valley. Brothers LeRoy and John still live with their families on one of the original parcels in a community named Los Rincones (the Corners), 4 miles southeast of Manassa (birthplace of world heavyweight champion boxer Jack Dempsey). The family pastures are all organic, and their successful agricultural businesses yield such products as organic alfalfa.

Other conventional crops are potatoes, barley and quinoa. They rely on surface and deep-well irrigation granted by some of the oldest water rights in the state.

LeRoy Salazar manages the farm (crops) end of the Salazar Farm and Ranch near Los Rincones, while brother John and his son, Esteban, manage the ranch. Brother Elliott also ranches in the San Luis Valley, while brother Ken is a lawyer and part-time rancher. The family tradition will continue with Esteban, as well as LeRoy’s son, Lucas, the owner of Salazar Meats in Los Rincones. Young members of a seventh generation of Salazars are already vowing to do their share of farming and ranching when they come of age.

“My parents instilled the importance of faith, family and service to our community and our country as guiding principles for everything we do in life,” says LeRoy. “They also installed an unbelievably strong work ethic in each one of us.

We woke up early every morning to milk cows or to do any number of farm chores before going to school. Dad [Henry] at 85 was out feeding cattle, cutting wood and feeding my daughter’s horse on the day he had the massive heart attack that took his life. He believed so strongly in our duty to country that he insisted on being buried in his World War II uniform.”

At 7,500 feet, the Salazar Farm and Ranch enjoys cool temperatures and abundant sunshine, just right for growing the seed potatoes the enterprise distributes as far away as California and Florida. Malt barley is grown under contract with Miller-Coors Brewing Co. The family continues to embrace new technologies and crops, the latest being the nourishing seeds of the quinoa plant, which unlike other crops f lourishes despite the limited water resources in this high-altitude valley. Grazing rights in the nearby mountains and prairies provide the Salazars’ grass-fed cattle with good summer pas-

ture, while meadows on the valley floor provide winter feed.

Henry and Emma’s belief in education has paid off. Salazars are known not only as farmers and ranchers but also as statesmen, entrepreneurs, teachers and community leaders. Their son Ken was Colorado’s attorney general, a U.S. senator and served as the 50th U.S. secretary of the Interior (2009–13) in President Barack Obama’s administration. Ken’s older brother John served six years as a U.S. congressman from Colorado and then four years as commissioner of the Colorado Department of Agriculture before returning to ranching. LeRoy is an agricultural engineer who ran a successful engineering and consulting company before returning to manage Salazar Farms. Elliott is a retired federal agent. As for their sisters, Elaine owns an art supply manufacturing business near Austin, Texas, and Margaret and June are mathematicians. Yes, education does mix with farming and ranching.

Top: As the sign says, seed potatoes are part of the Salazar family’s successful agricultural business. Above: This vintage potato harvester remains a conversation piece down on the farm.

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ART OF THE WEST In Harley Brown’s Mother and Daughter, First Nations women work together on a basket.

“As what happens with much of my art,” says Brown, “when I look at this pastel, my thoughts go back to that time with them.

This is my existence—observing life and a continual need to draw what I see and feel.”

FROM MOOSE JAW TO THE MASTERS

H

arley Brown was 7 years old when his father shared drawings he had rendered, including a profile of actor Ronald Coleman. “He drew it for my mother when they were courting,” Brown recalls. “That particular piece inspired my future evermore.”

That future would take the kid from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, on a meandering path through the art world, from academia to practical application and top honors. After studies at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary and London’s Camberwell College of Arts, as well as sessions with Gustav Rehberger at the Art Students League of New York, Brown took to portraiture

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and selling his work door to door. “Yes, actually door to door,” he sheepishly admits. But acclaim lay in store for the developing artist, including notice in the Prix de West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City and in the Masters of the American West at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles. Since establishing his name, Brown has given workshops and demonstrations around the world, illustrated magazine covers and published books, including the aptly titled Confessions of a Starving Artist and Harley Brown’s Inspiration for Every Artist.

He has also earned entry into both the National Academy of Western Art and the Cowboy Artists of America.

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COURTESY HARLEY BROWN (4)

INSPIRED BY HIS FATHER, CANADIAN HARLEY BROWN HAS PAINTED EVERYTHING FROM AMERICAN INDIANS TO HOLLYWOOD CELEBS

BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS

COURTESY HARLEY BROWN (4)

ART OF THE WEST

“I was obsessed with creating life on paper,” Brown says of his life’s path. “All I did was draw, even in school classes. A great part was that teachers understood my love of art and gave me a bit of leeway with my studies. That obsession has carried on without letup to this day.”

In the early 1960s he started painting First Nations people in Calgary. “We lived just a few blocks from a reserve,” he recalls. “I went there as much as possible because they were grand to be with. And my drawing passion was always there when they

wore their traditional dress. This went on for many years, including going to many other reserves in Alberta and Montana.”

In 1995, having done a summer-winter split between Alberta and Arizona for a decade, Brown [harleybrown.ca] permanently moved to Tucson, home to his studio and many art world friends and colleagues. It doesn’t hurt that Arizona abuts Mexico, where he’s found many favorite subjects.

While Brown is known for painting American Indians in traditional garb, he’s tackled everything from buildings and boats to Hollywood characters, Though he admits, “I’ve never painted a landscape.”

He works mostly in pastels these days.

What’s next for the 82-year-old?

“What’s next will probably be a surprise,” Brown says. “Much has been built upon unexpected coincidences and me jumping into unknown territory. In other words, I’m ready for whatever may come my way. Whatever it is, I’m ready, of course considering I’m older than the good ol’ days.”

The picture his father drew all those years ago still points the way. “It’s now placed in my studio,” Brown says.

Other Brown pastels include (clockwise from top left): Chief Dan George (1899– 1981) of the TsleilWaututh Nation, a noted actor; Walking Buffalo (1870–1967), a Stoney-Nakoda chief; and Sitting Eagle (1874–1970), another Stoney-Nakoda chief.

‘i was obsessed with creating life on paper’

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INDIAN LIFE

THOUGH A FRIEND TO HUDSON’S BAY EMPLOYEES, THE CREE WAR CHIEF MADE AN ENEMY OF THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT

BY GARRY RADISON

O

n Nov. 27, 1885, at Fort Battleford, on the North Saskatchewan River, Canadian authorities hanged Plains Cree war chief Wandering Spirit, who had ostensibly declared war against the government that April 2 by killing Indian Agent Tom Quinn upriver at the Frog Lake settlement (see related feature, P. 70). Though vilified by historians, Wandering Spirit maintains a measure of regard among the Crees for having defended his people when soldiers came west to enforce Canadian law over the objections of rebelling Métis and disaffected First Nations tribes.

In his memoir Blood Red the Sun Saskatchewan pioneer William Bleasdell Cameron, who clerked for the Hudson’s Bay Co. at Frog Lake, described Wandering 28 WILD WEST

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TOP: SASK HISTORY ONLINE; BOTTOM: SASKG, CC BY-SA 4.0

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A WANDERING SPIRIT

Spirit. “His nose was long and straight, his mouth wide and lips thin and cruel,” he wrote.

“He had a prominent chin, deep sunken cheeks and features darkly bronzed and seamed about the eyes and mouth with sharply cut lines.” Cameron also noted the war chief was “tall, lithe, active” with “dark, piercing eyes” and long black hair that “stood out about his head in thick curls,” a feature that distinguished him among the mostly straighthaired Crees.

Kahpaypamahchakwayo (Wandering Spirit) was born in 1845 among the Crees who traded at Fort Carlton, and he had relatives among the Willow/Parklands Crees at Duck Lake. Many Cree families included children fathered by Anglo employees of the Hudson’s Bay Co. Wandering Spirit’s father or grandfather may have been one of them, the genetic inheritance revealing itself in his light complexion and curly hair.

Wandering Spirit grew to manhood in the 1860s when the Crees were at war with the Blackfoot. In a short article entitled “Apistatim’s War Party” Cameron records an incident from Wandering Spirit’s youth, perhaps his first coup. The warrior and fellow Crees were chasing a lone Blackfoot hunter when Wandering Spirit, an exceptional runner, outdistanced the others. Catching up to the Blackfoot, he ran abreast of his enemy until a shot from behind brought down the hunter to await his death.

Wandering Spirit developed a fighting style that served him well and may have been the source of his name. Using trees as cover, he would intermittently yell as he ran, giving the eerie impression he was in more than one spot at the same time. Canadian soldier Joseph Hicks, a participant in the 1885 clash at Loon Lake, referred to the war chief as a “splendid ventriloquist,” his voice seemingly coming from different directions as he shouted orders on the run. “When he spoke in council,” Cameron said of his voice, “it rose gradually until it rang through the camp.”

Through the 1860s Wandering Spirit honed his fighting skills and revealed his ambition to be a head warrior. “He was never much to steal horses,” Four Sky Thunder recalled of him. “His greatest pleasure was in fighting, and he has killed more Blackfeet [sic ] than

GARRY RADISON

Wandering Spirit was never photographed.

His name and those of the seven other Crees hanged in 1885 are on this marker near Fort Battleford, on the North Saskatchewan River.

TOP: SASK HISTORY ONLINE; BOTTOM: SASKG, CC BY-SA 4.0

GARRY RADISON

INDIAN LIFE However, Wandering Spirit any warrior among us.” Wanwas friendly with those Scotsdering Spirit himself claimed men and Englishmen em13 Blackfoot coups. ployed by Hudson’s Bay. Two By the mid-1870s he was a centuries of friendship becouncillor with Chief Ocipitween the company’s employwayan’s band of Plains Crees. ees and the Crees—not to menWhen the Canadian governtion the matter of Wandering ment proffered treaties to the Spirit’s parentage—had forged Western tribes in 1876, Wanstrong bonds. During the aforedering Spirit followed his chief mentioned 1884 standoff bein signing Treaty 6 and took tween the Crees and mounted the pledge seriously. Though police Hudson’s Bay man Wilhe confronted surveyors on reliam McKay stood between the serve land in 1878, he refrained warriors and police, urging caufrom violence. Nor would he WILLIAM McKAY tion. Wandering Spirit grabbed allow his warriors to fire on McKay’s wrist with the intent North-West Mounted Police during an 1884 confrontation on Chief Pound- of taking him to safety behind the warriors. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed that day, and amid maker’s reserve.

When Ocipiwayan’s band dispersed after the the violence of 1885 not one Hudson’s Bay emchief ’s death in 1877, Wandering Spirit joined ployee was harmed.

In the wake of the March 26, 1885, Battle of Big Bear’s band of Plains Crees. He became head warrior of the Prairie Chicken Lodge and as such Duck Lake between the rebelling Métis and Cawas responsible for keeping the peace both in nadian police and soldiers, Wandering Spirit was camp and on the hunt. When Big Bear’s band tasked simply with protecting the Crees. He’d never came under pursuit by U.S. troops in Montana felt constrained by Canadian law. Instead, he Territory in 1882, Wandering Spirit evaded them brought to the conflict the mentality of an 1860s by leading his people through the badlands, prompt- warrior who knew that in a crisis friends were ing an American journalist to mock the soldiers protected and enemies, armed or unarmed, were destroyed. At Frog Lake, with its mixture of Crees, for their ineptitude.

When acting as war chief in rituals or times of Métis, Hudson’s Bay employees, settlers and priests, crisis, Wandering Spirit donned a lynx skin war- Wandering Spirit, anticipating a rumored attack bonnet from which hung five broad white eagle by soldiers, sought friends and allies. When Agent feathers, the highest symbol of respect. He had Quinn refused the sanctuary of the Cree camp, he the authority of a police chief in times of peace crossed over from friend to enemy. Wandering and that of a general in times of crisis. The roles Spirit had little choice but to follow Cree tradition had been defined over generations and were the and act in a manner befitting his position. By killing Quinn, however, he took his people to war basis of good order and safety.

Once bestowed, the position of war chief could and signed his own death warrant. not be refused, the consequences being ostracism and disdain from one’s peers. A war chief could be replaced only by someone with a more impressive coup count, and as the North-West Mounted Police had begun to enforce laws against violence, there would be no one to whom Wandering Spirit could relinquish the position. A victim of circumstance, he was reluctantly drawn into the crisis of 1885.

Wandering Spirit was a contemporary of the Oglala Sioux war leader Crazy Horse, who was Wandering Spirit’s counterpart south of the border.

Bound by cultural tradition, each bore a responsibility to safeguard his people. Both avoided white society, which knew them only by their formidable reputations. Only reluctantly would they enter a fort, and neither allowed his photograph to be taken.

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by killing quinn he took his people to war And signed his own death warrant

Wandering Spirit’s name is the first listed on the “Battlefield Eight” marker, commemorating the largest mass hanging in Canadian history.

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STYLE

PHOTO CREDIT

We go glamping within sight of magnificent Mount Rushmore National Memorial, try our hand at fly-fishing, appreciate the inspired works of impressionist painter Jerry Jordan and more

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PHOTO CREDIT

Attracting more than 2 million annual visitors, Mount Rushmore National Memorial features the 60-foot-tall visages of Presidents George Washington (1732–99), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) and Abraham Lincoln (1809–65). Their faces are carved into the very granite face of Mount Rushmore, or Thunkasila Sakpe (“Six Grandfathers” in Lakota), in the Black Hills near Keystone, S.D. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum designed and oversaw the project from 1927 until his death in 1941, when his son, Lincoln, took over and saw it through to completion. Visitors can now “glamp” beneath the monumental work.

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TRAVEL

Presidential Canvas

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IMAGES: COURTESY PENDLETON AND ORVIS

The Stargazer camping accommodations at Under Canvas Mount Rushmore feature a private deck, an en suite bathroom with shower, a wood-burning stove and a window above the king-sized bed for a view of the starry night sky.

IMAGES: COURTESY UNDER CANVAS

Travel is opening up again, and Under Canvas [undercanvas. com], with glamping sites near our national parks, is taking reservations. Recognized by Condé Nast Traveler as a “Top 10 Resort in the United States,” Under Canvas Mount Rushmore occupies the site of an old mining settlement less than 4 miles from that South Dakota memorial. Tucked amid ponderosa pines and common juniper, it offers upscale accommodations and sweeping views of the Black Hills—a one-of-a-kind home base for those seeking to explore those storied hills or nearby Custer State Park.

STYLE

GOODS

Out of the Park

The Pendleton [pendleton-usa.com] heritage of excellence in woven goods began when British weaver Thomas Kay’s grandsons opened Oregonbased Pendleton Woolen Mills in the early 1900s. The company has long honored America’s national parks with a collection of distinctive blankets.

The washable wool blankets are still woven in the company’s Pacific Northwest mills, just as they were nearly a century ago.

Yellowstone coffee mug, $19.50; queensized Pendleton Yellowstone Park blanket, $319; Yellowstone hat, $29.50; Grand Canyon heritage T-shirt, $29.50

GOODS

Gone Fishing

Orvis Clearwater Wader with external storage pocket and kangaroo-style hand warmer pocket, $298

In 1856 Charles F. Orvis founded the Orvis Co. [orvis.com]. Offering superior fly-fishing equipment, Orvis prided himself on customer satisfaction and service—a legacy that continues today.

IMAGES: COURTESY PENDLETON AND ORVIS

IMAGES: COURTESY UNDER CANVAS

Orvis Pro BOA wading boots with industryfirst Michelin Outdoor Extreme outsoles for wet rubber traction and quick-drying Clarino microfiber uppers for maximum strength-to-weight ratio, $279

The Orvis Encounter four-piece fly rod outfit with a large arbor reel offers smooth, crisp performance for younger anglers, $169–$298 AUGUST 2021

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STYLE

When the Final Color Is Laid, 30-by-24-inch oil on canvas

ART

Spirit of Taos

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PHOTO CREDIT

The Door’s Open, 24-by-24-inch oil on canvas

IMAGES; COURTESY JERRY JORDAN

For nearly six decades Texas-born impressionist painter Jerry Jordan [jerryjordantaos.com] has drawn inspiration from the landscapes, unique architecture and Ancestral Pueblo culture of Taos, New Mexico.

A deeply spiritual artist, he regards the act of painting as prayer and feels color creates sound—almost like musical notes—helping him tap into the divine. Jordan signs each painting with the acronym t.a.o.s.

(Together Always Our Spirits). Jordan is also a successful recording artist, his comedy monologue “A Phone Call From God” having reached the top of the Billboard charts in June 1975. “Jerry Jordan is one of my living heroes in art,” writes award-winning Taos artist Roseta Santiago. “His dedication and generosity of knowledge is a sign of the incredible talent and artistic voice. He has lived among the people of Taos and has been loyal to the imagery. Hence, viewers and collectors know they are looking at recorded history that has not changed in Taos Pueblo, the oldest inhabited pueblo in the United States.”

STYLE

Each Dawn Brings A New Day, 12-by-16-inch oil on canvas

PHOTO CREDIT

IMAGES; COURTESY JERRY JORDAN

In the Quiet Hour Can You Hear the Sound of Color?

50-by-96-inch oil on canvas

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Surrender Site

To mark the Sept. 3–4, 1886, surrender of Chiricahua Apaches Geronimo and Chief Naiche in Arizona Territory’s Skeleton Canyon, Captain Henry Ware had his men erect a rough stone monument (below in 2016 and opposite in 1941 with property owners Ross and Zola Sloan).

ABOVE: BILL CAVALIERE; TOP RIGHT: ARMY HISTORICAL FOUNDATION; RIGHT: BETTY WOODS; FAR RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

GERONIMO’S FINAL SURRENDER

Learning from a retracted surrender earlier in 1886, Brigadier General Nelson Miles wasn’t taking any chances that September in Arizona Territory’s Skeleton Canyon

By Bill Cavaliere

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O

ABOVE: BILL CAVALIERE; TOP RIGHT: ARMY HISTORICAL FOUNDATION; RIGHT: BETTY WOODS; FAR RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

n a late summer evening in 1886 U.S. Army officers and soldiers, a handful of civilians, several Chiricahua Apache warriors, their wives and their hereditary chief all gathered at the western mouth of Skeleton Canyon in Arizona Territory. There they anxiously awaited the arrival of one man, Brig. Gen. Nelson Appleton Miles.

It was September 2, and the free-roaming Chiricahuas had arrived at this prearranged location under military escort with the intent of finally and formally surrendering to General Miles. Leading the band were Chief Naiche and Geronimo, the latter of whom was particularly well known to citizens of southern Arizona and New Mexico territories for his reputation as a cold-blooded killer.

In late March these same Apaches had surrendered to Brig. Gen. George Crook at Cañon de los Embudos, some 25 miles south of Douglas, Ariz., in the far northern recesses of the Sierra Madre of Sonora, Mexico. Unfortunately, an unscrupulous government beef contractor named Charles Tribolet, who made a living on the side following the Army and peddling whiskey and mescal to soldiers and Indians alike, had sold 15 gallons of whiskey to the Chiricahuas.

Hoping to prolong the Apache wars for his own financial benefit, Tribolet then lied to the besotted Indians, convincing them the Army actually planned to hang them once they crossed the border into the United States. Perpetually on guard for any treachery, the alarmed Apaches reneged on their surrender and resumed raiding and killing in Mexico. The fiasco proved humiliating to Crook, who asked to be relieved of his command. Superiors transferred him to the Department of the Platte. Replacing him in the Department of Arizona was Miles.

Immediately following his appointment General Miles sent an CHARLES B. GATEWOOD expedition into Mexico under Captain Henry Ware Lawton to subdue the fleeing Chiricahuas. Although Miles permitted Lawton to bring Apache scouts with him, he instructed the captain to use them only as trackers, unlike Crook’s scouts, who had engaged their Chiricahua brethren in combat.

In July, having come up empty-handed after four difficult months, Miles sent First Lt. Charles B. Gatewood, guided by Apache scouts Kayitah and Martine, to help Lawton and his men locate the Chiricahuas. Miles’ use of the two armed scouts represented an embarrassing admission on his part. He firmly believed, as did his superiors U.S. Army commander Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan and President Grover Cleveland, that white troops were vastly superior to Apache scouts and that Crook had relied on the scouts far too much.

In truth, the Army never would have gotten close to the fugitives without the use of Apache scouts.

In all instances in which they were present, the scouts remained far in advance of soldiers and typically joined battle with the hostiles long before the troops caught up to them. Moreover, the scouts proved loyal and reliable, quickly earning the respect of most officers who oversaw them. A number of standout Apache scouts even received the Medal of Honor. None of that mattered to the gloryseeking Miles, however.

Forever seeking promotion, he worked hard at trying to personally impress SheriHENRY WARE dan and Cleveland.

LAWTON Thanks to the efforts of Kayitah and Martine, it was AUGUST 2021

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NELSON APPLETON MILES

Making a cursory search, the cowboys found the soldiers’ camp and met with Lawton, who advised them to remain in camp rather than chance staying at their cabin. While the trio was chatting, Geronimo himself rode in on a dun horse with a blaze and white stockings. Through an interpreter he queried Lawton about the strangers. His curiosity satisfied, Geronimo turned back for his camp in the hills. Melton and Prewitt rashly followed him.

Melton tried to speak with Geronimo, but neither could understand the other’s language. As Melton later recalled, neither he nor Prewitt saw any weapons on Geronimo. They were almost certainly mistaken, as officers present at the time were of the unanimous opinion Geronimo remained highly suspicious of soldiers and always wore a gun. Indeed, he refused to part with it right up to the moment the Army disarmed the Apaches at Fort Bowie, Arizona Territory, just prior to loading them on the train that took them east into captivity.

As the cowboys rode away from camp with the Chiricahua leader, Prewitt considered shooting Geronimo, openly telling Melton he could easily kill him with just one shot. Melton wisely objected to the idea and was able to talk Prewitt out of it. All the while Geronimo rode along unconcernedly between the cowboys, never knowing how close he’d come to meeting his end—or they had come to meeting theirs. A half mile out from Lawton’s camp Geronimo turned to the pair, saluted and said, “Adios, señores!” then continued alone into the hills.

FROM TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; NATIONAL ARCHIVES; HERITAGE AUCTIONS; BOTTOM RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

B e careful, G eronimo is nearby and has not yet surrendered. —Capt. Lawton

TOP LEFT : NATIONAL ARCHIVES; TOP RIGHT: BILL CAVALIERE; ABOVE RIGHT: PAUL FRANKE; BELOW: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Gatewood, a former “Crook man,” who in late August found the Chiricahua camp deep in the Sierra Madre. On meeting with the lieutenant, Naiche and Geronimo expressed their willingness to discuss terms of surrender with Miles. Wasting no time, the parties joined up with Lawton’s command and set out north across the border to Skeleton Canyon in the Peloncillo Mountains of southeast Arizona Territory.

Also present in the canyon on the day the entourage arrived were W.T. Melton and J.D. Prewitt, line riders with the San Simon Cattle Co. That afternoon both noticed fresh Indian sign winding through the canyon. On reaching their cabin they found a note affixed to the door:

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PHOTO CREDIT

General Miles accepted the final surrender of Geronimo and Naiche (posing at right as POWs at Fort Sill, Oklahoma Territory, and above in March 1886, when they “surrendered” to Brig. Gen. George Crook).

Above middle: Apache scouts Kayitah (left) and Martine pose in late life.

PHOTO CREDIT

Pursuit of the Elusive Chiricahuas

TOP LEFT : NATIONAL ARCHIVES; TOP RIGHT: BILL CAVALIERE; ABOVE RIGHT: PAUL FRANKE; BELOW: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Apache prisoners, including Naiche and Geronimo (first row, third and fourth from left), pose while en route to Florida by train. Right: The 1934 Geronimo Surrender Monument (some 8 miles from the actual surrender site) took a lightning strike in the 1940s.

Below: The legendary Apache poses at Fort Sill.

PHOTO CREDIT

FROM TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; NATIONAL ARCHIVES; HERITAGE AUCTIONS; BOTTOM RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES PHOTO CREDIT

After the Surrender

GERONIMO

WIWP-210800-GERONIMO SURRENDER.indd 39

Miles finally arrived late the next afternoon, September 3. The Chiricahuas had been restless during the wait. In fact, they had suspected danger and deceit from the time they first spoke with Gatewood in Mexico. Noting the general’s arrival, Geronimo promptly rode down into Lawton’s camp, dismounted, approached Miles and shook his hand.

After the customary introductions, the two began discussing terms. Their personalities seemed to click, and Geronimo soon agreed to surrender.

Miles, however, knew the surrender was not yet official. Geronimo was not chief and never had been one. Naiche was the hereditary chief of the Chiricahuas. If he refused the terms, the surrender was off. And Naiche remained encamped in the hills above Skeleton Canyon.

The next day, September 4, Gatewood, Geronimo and an interpreter rode up to Naiche’s camp. The chief explained his absence by informing the men he was awaiting his “brother,” who had returned to Mexico to fetch a favorite horse. As Naiche had no living brother (his older brother, Taza, had died a decade earlier of pneumonia while on a visit to Washington, D.C.), he may have been referring to his wife’s half-brother or perhaps the warrior Atelnietze, another close relative. Apaches used the term “brother” freely, often applying it to close male relations, family or not. Gatewood countered that COCHISE Miles had come a long way to meet Naiche, and it would be rude to keep him waiting. The chief agreed and soon came down to meet the general.

Miles again explained the terms. Finally, Naiche, youngest son of the great Cochise and last hereditary chief of the Chiricahuas, agreed to surrender.

“It was Naiche who negotiated surrender terms in March 1886 at Embudos Canyon for what is mistakenly known as ‘Geronimo’s band,’” historian Alicia Delgadillo noted in From Fort Marion to Fort Sill. As at Cañon de los Embudos, Naiche’s approval was mandatory for the surrender in Skeleton Canyon. Regardless, Geronimo, with his fierce reputation and boisterous personality, would forever overshadow the laconic and stoic Naiche. Thus the affair has been incorrectly known to this day as “Geronimo’s final surrender.”

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Recalling the Surrender

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BILL CAVALIERE

As every other American Indian tribe had been defeated or was living on reservations by 1886, the Chiricahuas’ surrender to the U.S. Army in Skeleton Canyon that September day forever ended the Indian wars in the United States. Captain Lawton, realizing the historic significance of the event, had his men erect a monument commemorating the surrender.

According to line rider Melton, who was present during its construction, the monument comprised rough stones stacked some 10 feet across and 6 feet high on the spot where the treaty was made. During a roundup the following year, Melton recalled, cowboys disassembled the rock pile to see if it contained anything. They found a bottle containing a piece of paper on which was written the names of the officers who’d ridden with Lawton. Melton didn’t mention who kept the historically significant document, and unfortunately its fate remains unknown.

Early the next morning Miles had Naiche, Geronimo, three warriors and a woman loaded into his personal wagon and left for Fort Bowie, arriving by that evening. Escorted by Lawton and his men, the remaining prisoners traveled afoot, arriving at the fort on September 8. As the last of the soldiers and their wards left Skeleton Canyon, Melton and Prewitt scoured the site of the Apache camp, presumably for souvenirs, and turned up $150.25 in pesos hidden in a pack rat’s nest.

The moment the last of the Chiricahuas reached Fort Bowie, soldiers loaded them onto a train at Bowie Station to begin their journey east to imprisonment in Florida. In what remains one of the most shameful episodes in the nation’s military history, Miles also had all of the loyal Apache scouts—including Kayitah and Martine, the very men who had

facilitated the surrender of Naiche and Geronimo —arrested and shipped off by train to Florida as prisoners. President Cleveland and General Sheridan distrusted the Apaches and had no use for them. Crook, to his credit, was mortified by his superiors’ callous actions.

Unlike Crook, who had allowed Tombstone photographer C.S. Fly to accompany him to Cañon de los Embudos and capture the March surrender negotiations, Miles had brought no photographer with him to Skeleton Canyon, much to the dismay of historians. All that survives as evidence of the surrender are photographs of the monument Lawton’s men erected.

One of the earliest such photos, dating from 1921, shows the monument in a view looking east, the Peloncillos in the background. It is obvious the rock pile is nowhere near 6 feet high, doubtless in part due to the cowboys’ tampering back in 1887, though Melton was not far off in his estimate of its length at 10 feet.

Another photo captures the monument in a view looking west. Two cowboys stand off to the left, and the Chiricahua Mountains are just visible on the horizon. Though undated, its improved clarity suggests it was taken after the 1921 shot, perhaps sometime in the 1930s.

While the length of the monument remains unchanged, the rock pile appears higher than in the 1921 photo, speaking to efforts by concerned parties to restore it to its original dimensions. In fact, the photographer likely took the image to record its restoration, as the cowboy standing nearest the monument has a rock in hand and is seemingly in the act of tossing it back atop the pile.

In 1914 rancher Ross Sloan purchased the land at Skeleton Canyon once owned by the San Simon Cattle Co. In 1941 he and wife Zola posed beside the monument for a portrait look-

TOP LEFT: NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; BELOW: ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; TOP RIGHT: BILL CAVALIERE

Left: Naiche and Geronimo pose at Fort Bowie, Arizona Territory, after their capture. Above: A 1921 photo captures the stacked stone monument soldiers erected at the Skeleton Canyon surrender site, the Peloncillo Mountains in the background. Below left: In a later image of the site a cowboy appears about to toss a rock atop the seemingly restored stack.

ing north. The rock pile stands even higher than in previous photos, its peak about level with Zola’s shoulder. It’s possible the Sloans added to the stack, seeking to restore it to its original height.

Unfortunately, neither the Sloans nor the subsequent owner of the property seem to have controlled access to the site, as it appears visitors made off with rocks as souvenirs. Not until the 1990s into the early 2000s were organized tours arranged, and by then the rock pile had shrunk alarmingly. Today the monument is but a fraction of its original dimensions, and a couple of large mesquite bushes have sprouted up in its midst.

Straddling the border of southeast Arizona and southwest New Mexico, Skeleton Canyon runs west-east approximately 8 miles.

The monument stands atop a knoll near its western mouth.

With a commanding view in all directions, the spot was likely chosen and insisted upon by the ever-alert Apaches to ensure a quick escape route in the event of an ambush.

Chiricahuas were well known and admired for their military tactics. As it turned out, none were needed at Skeleton Canyon that day in 1886.

Bill Cavaliere is the president of the Cochise County Historical Society and sits on the board of directors of the Arizona Historical Society’s southern chapter.

He is the author of the 2020 book The Chiricahua Apaches: A Concise History (see P. 86). For further reading he suggests Seventy Years in the Saddle, by A.B. Melton; They Plowed up Hell in Old Cochise, by Paul Franke; Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place, by Angie Debo; and From Fort Marion to Fort Sill, by Alicia Delgadillo.

Today the rock pile marking the site of the September 1886 Apache surrender stands behind locked gates on private property. The next best thing accessible to interested parties is the Geronimo Surrender Monument, in a wayside off Highway 80 just north of the crossroads town of Apache, Ariz. It was back in 1934 that civic-minded citizens of Douglas, some 40 miles to the south, erected the stone pillar as an accessible option to visiting the original surrender monument, which entailed a long drive on a rough dirt road that was either chokingly dusty or hazardously muddy, depending on the weather. The new monument was built using federal Civil Works Administration funds. No lesser a figure than seven-term Arizona Governor George W.P. Hunt presided over its dedication ceremony.

Standing some 20 feet high, the pillar comprises large rocks interspersed with metates (grindstones Indian women use to pulverize corn, nuts and acorns into flour). A flagpole initially topped the monument, but in the mid-1940s a bolt of lightning knocked it down and shattered the upper quarter of the pillar.

The workers that restored the monument wisely left off the flagpole. Careful observers will notice a slightly different tint to the mortar used to resecure the topmost stones.

Affixed to the monument is a bronze plaque inscribed with the following: N ear

Nachite S ept. 6th, 1886, to G eneral N elson A. M iles. U.S. Army Lieutenant C has B. Gatewood with K ieta and Martine, Apache S couts, risked here

G eronimo,

last

Apache

chieftain, and

with their followers surrendered on

their lives to enter the camp of the hostiles to present BILL CAVALIERE

TOP LEFT: NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; BELOW: ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; TOP RIGHT: BILL CAVALIERE

NEW MONUMENT

terms of surrender offered to them by

After

two days

G eronimo

and

Gatewood

Nachite

G eneral M iles.

received the consent of

to surrender.

The

surrender of

G eronimo

S keleton Canyon on I ndian warfare in the

in

that historic day forever ended

U nited States.

Some Western history buffs take exception to the assertion the surrender “forever ended Indian warfare in the United States.” They cite the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota in 1890, four years after Skeleton Canyon.

However, what happened at Wounded Knee involved Lakotas who had already surrendered and been escorted back to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Apache names involve many spelling variations, which explains the different renderings of Naiche and Kayitah’s names on the plaque. The designation of Geronimo as the “last Apache chieftain” is excusable, as his fame often prompts this common mistake. However, flubbing the all-important date (September 4) of the final surrender of the last free American Indian tribe is a regrettable error.

Over the years vandals have graffitied the Geronimo Surrender Monument, often with politically correct expressions—for example, the word Liars! which someone sprayed over the phrase “entered the camp of the hostiles.”

The Arizona Department of Transportation stands at the ready to honor history and restore the plaque. —B.C. AUGUST 2021

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Not All Died in Captivity

Geronimo proudly poses up front at Fort Sill, Oklahoma Territory, where the Army moved Apache POWs in 1894. Geronimo died in captivity, but in 1913 others were free to choose between staying in Oklahoma or moving to a New Mexico reservation. Opposite: Mildred Cleghorn was a tot at the time of “the Parting.”

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THE PARTING

In 1913 the freed Apache prisoners of ‘Geronimo’s band’ had to choose whether to remain in Oklahoma or move to a reservation in New Mexico

By Ron J. Jackson Jr.

A

OPPOSITE: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: RON J. JACKSON JR. COLLECTION

regal, silver-haired Mildred Cleghorn warmly greeted a newspaper reporter at her Apache, Oklahoma, home in September 1996 to discuss her storied life.

Cleghorn, then 85, spoke with grace and candor as she reminisced about her 18-year reign as chairwoman of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe, as well as her family’s unique history.

Cleghorn specifically recalled one of her earliest memories, at age 3 in 1914, riding in the family’s horse-drawn wagon from the Fort Sill Military Reservation to their 40-acre government allotment near Apache. Only later would she learn those were among her first moments of freedom. She’d been born a prisoner of war at Fort Sill on Dec. 11, 1910.

For the Chiricahua Apaches of Cleghorn’s generation—a people branded “Geronimo’s band,” for better or worse—her story was hardly uncommon. Their collective journey through captivity began in September 1886 with Geronimo’s surrender to U.S. troops (see related story, P. 36) and ended in 1913 after an Act of Congress. By then the absurdity of their continued imprisonment had already been revealed in Washington, D.C., and beyond.

“Their few survivors and their much more numerous descendants—their children and their children’s children—are still ‘prisoners of war,’” argued one humanitarian activist in a 1912 article for The North American Review literary magazine. “There are among the band men and women of full age who were born into that condition and have grown to maturity without knowing any other lot.”

The full gravity of those 27 years of captivity hit home for the Chiricahuas on April 2, 1913, a bittersweet day in their history known as “the Parting.”

Tears of joy and pain flowed simultaneously that spring afternoon with the numbing realization that while the Apaches were no longer prisoners of war, their freedom had arrived at a tragic price. Over nearly three decades of imprisonment their population had dwindled from 506 souls to the final tally of 257 (138 males and 119 females) enumerated by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. The steep decline reflected the disease and hardship that had shadowed them from mosquito-infested prison camps in Florida and Alabama before their October 1894 arrival at Fort Sill on the southwest Oklahoma prairie.

Yet one last heart-wrenching act stood between the Chiricahuas and freedom as they gathered that day in early April 1913 at the Rock Island Railroad yard.

Of the remaining 257 prisoners, 190 had chosen to return to a portion of their ancestral homeland in New Mexico, where they aspired to begin new lives among “cousins” on the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation. That fateful decision also meant they would have to bid farewell AUGUST 2021

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A 36-Hour Train Ride to Uncertainty

Tucumcari Santa Rosa

OKLAHOMA

d or rf e th ea nton W Hi r Binge Anadarko

Amarillo Re

d

Ri

ver

Carrizozo

San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation

Tularosa

Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation

NEW MEXICO

A

P A C H E R I Ancestral homeland of Apaches

CHIEF NAICHE

44 WILD WEST

125

de ran

0

TEXAS oG Ri

Though Geronimo had died in 1909, surviving Chiricahua Apaches remained in captivity at Fort Sill Military Reservation until April 1913, when they were formally released—not, however, to return to Arizona. Instead, they had to choose between remaining in Oklahoma or traveling by train to the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation in New Mexico. The heart-wrenching separation became known as “the Parting.”

A

250

500 miles

to the 67 other Chiricahuas who chose to remain at Fort Sill and await promised allotments.

For a people accustomed to harsh existence and anguish, the Parting still hit like an anvil. “The day of separation was a great day of sorrow,” said Raymond Loco, grandson of Chief Loco and another designated a POW at birth. “There was weeping and wailing.…When they were on the train [to New Mexico], they were in a sense of puzzlement. What’s going to happen to us?” Loco noted his fellow Apaches “were not happy—they were disturbed.” Blossom Haozous, the half-blood daughter of Chiricahua interpreter and loyalist George Wratten, defined the moment as “one of extreme emotion.” She added, “The Mescalero-bound Apaches were leaving behind relatives and friends and once again faced an uncertain future.”

They also left behind their dead, perhaps the most painful parting of all.

Naiche, the Chiricahuas’ last hereditary chief, buried two wives and eight children at Fort Sill’s Apache prisoner of war cemetery on Beef Creek.

The chief himself died of influenza on March 16, 1919, six years after his arrival in Mescalero, and was buried there more than 400 miles from his loved ones. Eugene Chihuahua—son of Chief Chihuahua, who died in captivity in 1901—and his wife were also in the party bound for New Mexico. They left the graves of six children at Fort Sill.

The cemetery haunted every Apache family in those final hours. “Hardest of all was forsaking our beloved dead,” recalled Asa Daklugie, then about

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OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

U ME .S. XIC O

Fort Sill Military Reservation

MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON; LEFT: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Fort Apache (White Mountain) Indian Reservation

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GERONIMO AND ASA DAKLUGIE

of the Chiricahuas to their state. Though Geronimo himself had died in 1909, his notoriety as a savage warrior still evoked fear in the region, and detractors relentlessly played to those fears.

On Aug. 19, 1912, U.S. Senator Thomas B. Cantron of New Mexico declared to colleagues his vehement opposition to the Apache resettlement.

“Those Indians have been the worst band of Indians that have ever existed upon the American continent,” he said. “They have been the most warlike; they have been the most desperate, the most bloodthirsty and murdering that has ever existed.” Five days later, over such objections, Congress approved the Indian Appropriation Act, sanctioning the release and relocation of the Chiricahua prisoners.

Albert B. Fall, Cantron’s fellow senator from New Mexico, was even more outspoken about the Apache relocation. Five days before their formal release he rose in the Senate chamber to deliver one last fiery speech on the issue. In it Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

At the April 2, 1913, Parting 190 Chiricahuas left Oklahoma for New Mexico’s Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation, while 67 of the freed prisoners elected to stay put and await promised allotments.

OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON; LEFT: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

40 years old and among those who had championed the move to New Mexico. “Quietly we visited the resting places of our people for a last farewell. We knew that they were in the Happy Place, awaiting our coming.

We knew that they understood and that they approved our leaving.”

Five passenger cars, eight stock cars and two baggage cars awaited the 190 departing Apaches, along with many of their beloved dogs. Authorities told the freed prisoners pets would be strictly forbidden on the 36-hour trip to the Mescalero reservation, but the Rock Island crew showed mercy and looked the other way. On the train’s arrival in New Mexico one bystander watched with amusement as dogs “simply ‘boiled out’ of the cars.”

Intrigue trailed the Chiricahuas on their journey west, especially among New Mexicans braced for an uprising by Geronimo’s band. In Tucumcari the local newspaper reported how a group of schoolteachers appeared at the railroad station with their students to gawk at the “wild Injuns.”

They were disappointed to find a quiet and somewhat weary band of travelers, including a few elderly women “munching away on big quids of Star Plug.” The reporter summed up the visit tongue in cheek: “The Apaches did not appear half so fierce as they are depicted in the dime novel. In fact, some of them looked to be quite respectable citizens.”

Inflamed rhetoric by New Mexican politicians and prominent cattlemen over the preceding months had heightened fears over the removal

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he shamelessly revived old fears, relating his initial arrival to New Mexico Territory decades earlier at Silver City, where he stepped from a train to see “an American holding in his hand the bleeding scalp of a woman who had been killed by one of these Fort Sill Apaches.” Fall then theatrically asked, “Is it possible there is not sufficient land in all these great United States to which these Indians can be taken and where they can be kept without forcing them back to live among the people whose relatives they murdered?”

Fall failed to reveal an ulterior motive for not wanting the Chiricahua Apaches to settle on the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation. Months earlier J.W. Prude, a Tularosa, N.M., merchant who ran a trading business at Mescalero, publicly called out Fall on the issue. Prude said he was unaware of any such white descendants of Apache victims living in the area, as so “graphi-

Some Remained, Others Went West

Geronimo poses with family in a melon patch at Fort Sill, where he died and was buried. Right: On that bittersweet day in April 1913, recently released Chiricahuas wait to board a train to New Mexico.

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TOP: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; BOTTOM: FORT SILL APACHE TRIBE

GERONIMO ON TOUR

Guilty or not, the Chiricahuas of Fall’s rhetoric were largely a memory by 1913. For starters, the fearsome Geronimo was no more. On Feb. 17, 1909, after having fallen drunk from his horse and lain in a puddle overnight, he died at age 79 of pneumonia. Prior to the release of the surviving prisoners Secretary of War Stimson had compiled a list for the Senate that revealed another reality. Only 30 men on the list had been involved in hostilities decades earlier, and all but one of them were in their mid-40s or older. Only six of the warriors who had surrendered with Geronimo in 1886 remained alive.

Incarceration had ushered in a starkly different kind of life for the Apaches from the nomadic existence of their forefathers. Foremost among the changes was their transition to a cash economy through the sale of cattle, surplus crops, hay and contracts for drilling wells—the proceeds of which were deposited into a trust for the benefit of all. By 1913 they had become successful cattlemen, amassing nearly 6,000 high-grade Herefords, which they sold to a Texas buyer for $228,800 and divvied the profits.

The Chiricahuas excelled in numerous aspects of modern life and even fielded a standout baseball team. Geronimo capitalized on his notoriety, accepting invitations to attend the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis and ride horseback in President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 inaugural parade in Washington, D.C. In St. Louis Geronimo charged 10 cents for his autograph and as much as $2 for a photo, prompting one customer to famously exclaim, “The old gentleman is pretty high priced, but then he is the only Geronimo.”

But Geronimo’s reputation as a merciless warrior continued to shadow his people like an eclipse—even in death. Stories of the Chiricahuas’ fighting prowess also persisted over their nearly three decades of incarceration.

Dime novels and yellow journalism helped breathe life into the old reputation for a new generation of Americans, though the Apaches themselves had to admit aspects of the fantastical stories were rooted in truth.

TOP LEFT AND BOTTOM RIGHT: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2); BOTTOM LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

cally” described by the senator. He further stated that anyone who uttered “such rot” did so “for a cold-blooded selfish motive,” and he insinuated Fall had one. The merchant claimed Fall leased large swaths of grazing land on the reservation for his sheep herds and didn’t want anyone infringing on his lucrative business. For his part, Prude admitted his trading business at Mescalero would benefit from the Apache relocation.

TOP: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; BOTTOM: FORT SILL APACHE TRIBE

TOP LEFT AND BOTTOM RIGHT: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2); BOTTOM LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Warm Springs Apache elder Sam Haozous shed light on that violent past weeks before his death in 1957 when he sat down before a tape recorder to preserve his remembrances for his family. Haozous, 88, recalled his band’s forced removal from their New Mexico home of Ojo Caliente—their sacred Warm Springs—to the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona Territory when he was 8. Haozous and the others arrived at San Carlos on May 20, 1877, with a shackled Geronimo and other imprisoned leaders in tow.

By the next spring Geronimo had bolted the reservation for Mexico, triggering nine years of broken promises, breakouts and deadly resistance.

Young Haozous experienced those harrowing times firsthand when his family also fled San Carlos. They left due to harsh conditions and the conviction they’d been unjustly ripped from their beloved Ojo Caliente.

Housed in the University of Oklahoma’s Western History Collection, Haozous’ 1957 recording offers a graphic account of the hardships and bloodshed his family experienced as fugitives alongside Geronimo.

The elderly Haozous described an apocalyptic world in which death was always a heartbeat away. He recounted one startling incident in 1882 when Mexican soldiers attacked their party near a dry creek bed on the Janos Plains. During the fight he watched a mother strangle her baby to death, defiantly proclaiming, “I don’t want my baby to be a slave to these Mexicans.”

Haozous and other young Apaches contributed to their survival by running ammunition to the warriors during battles. He marveled at how a lone Apache warrior could fend off as many as 150 of the enemy by dodging among various mountain fastnesses. He also recalled how the band staved off starvation by eating rats or boiling animal bones for the marrow to make broth.

Geronimo fostered a merciless mindset. “No wonder they call him a famous warrior,” Haozous said of the ruthless leader. “I seen what he do.

He kill the people…but he don’t care—woman, or white woman, or Mexican woman—he killed everybody. It don’t make no difference. Even baby.

When the war started, he given his men order, he said, ‘Don’t save any of them. Don’t save even a baby. Just kill them all.’” Modern-era historians refer to such no-holds-barred combat as total war.

In the end Geronimo’s greatest fight became the one for his freedom.

For decades after his surrender he lobbied authorities to be freed and

returned to the home of his birth on the upper Gila River in Arizona Territory. He finally secured a council with President Roosevelt on March 9, 1905, four days after having ridden in his inaugural parade. Overwhelmed by the emotions of the moment, Geronimo spoke with a rare eloquence: “Great Father, my hands are tied as with rope. My heart is no longer bad.

I will tell my people to obey no chief but the Great White Chief. I pray you to cut the ropes and make me free. Let me die in my own country, an old man who has been punished enough and is free.”

Roosevelt sympathetically told Geronimo that Arizona’s white settlers still harbored great anger toward the Chiricahuas, and he feared their return to that territory would only result in “more war and more bloodshed.” New Mexican leaders would use the same reasoning in their subsequent attempt to block the relocation of the former prisoners to their state (see sidebar, P. 49). By then Geronimo had died in captivity at Fort Sill.

One bitter chapter after another marked the Apaches’ time in captivity, but the push for freedom only gathered steam. In 1913 the Rev. Walter C. Roe, who helped establish a mission for the prisoners, wrote an impassioned appeal on their behalf. “It will be literally true that the iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation if this thing goes on much longer,” he wrote.

“Shall innocent babies be born prisoners and harmless, laughing children grow up in captivity because their grandfathers fought against or possibly for—think of it, possibly for—the United States government?”

To the Land of Enchantment

Chiricahuas pose at Fort Sill before the Parting.

Top: Those who ventured west to the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation in New Mexico lived in tents on their initial arrival at their new home.

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FROM LEFT: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; BONHAMS; LARRY SMITH, CC BY-SA 2.0

Roe’s words could have been aimed at the woeful tale of Chatto, who once fought alongside Geronimo only to become an Apache scout for the Army.

Geronimo—man and myth—has long cast a In March 1886 Chatto assisted shadow of controversy over the Chiricahua Brig. Gen. George Crook with Apache people and the landscape of American his pursuit of Geronimo in Western history. In life and death he was both Mexico’s Sierra Madre—a deed celebrated and vilified. that forever branded the scout Perhaps both reactions a traitor among the Geroniwere warranted. mo loyalists of his tribe. Four One fact remained true months later Chatto joined an in his lifetime: GeroniApache delegation to Washingmo’s fame received mixed ton, D.C., beseeching authorireactions from members ties to allow them to remain on of his own tribe. By all the reservation at Fort Apache, accounts they respected Arizona Territory. Secretary him as a fierce warrior and of the Interior L.Q.C. Lamar tactical leader in battle, CHATTO presented Chatto with a silbut many also viewed his GERONIver medal, while Secretary of defiant resistance as selfish.

MO O War William Endicott gave him an elaborate certificate and Detractors ultimately blamed GERONIM led the delegates to believe their request had been granted. him for the U.S. government’s It hadn’t. persecution of the Apaches On the return journey soldiers at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., detained and their 27 years of captivity. On the day Chatto and party. Abruptly placed under arrest, the hapless delegates of his funeral in February 1909 an elderly were shipped to Florida to join their Apache brethren as prisoners of war.

Chiricahua woman memorably cried out: Four years later Crook visited the prisoners at Alabama’s Mount Vernon “Everybody hated you: white men hated you, Barracks. During the general’s visit Chatto removed the silver medal Mexicans hated you, Apaches hated you; from his breast and proffered it to Crook. “Why did they give me that, all of them hated you. You [have] been good to wear in the guardhouse?” he asked. “I thought something good would to us. We love you, we hate to see you go.” come to me when they gave me that, but I have been in confinement Sam Haozous, who’d witnessed Geronimo ever since I have had it.” in battle as a child, shared a bitterly candid Chatto, unlike Geronimo, lived to see his freedom. On the day of the recollection with biographer Angie Debo in Parting, he chose to join those traveling to New Mexico, although he 1955. “We were innocent and should not have remained an outcast in many circles. Daklugie, who held Geronimo’s been driven from our homes,” he said. “We hand at his deathbed, was relieved when Chatto opted to settle at Apache were not to blame for what Geronimo did.”

Summit, some 10 miles east of the main encampment. “He knew he was Were the Apaches punished for the sins unwelcome with us,” Daklugie coolly stated. of Geronimo? Had the government even Chatto lived with the bitterness of his turncoat label until his death in considered their release prior to his death?

1934. The end arrived when his Ford Model T veered off a reservation “We were punished for his sake, but we road and flipped near Whitetail, N.M. He died at the scene—perhaps truly knew why Geronimo was punished,” said free at last.

Asa Daklugie, whom the Chiricahua leader Fifty-two years later, on the September 1986 centennial of Geronimo’s regarded as a son. “He was unwilling to give surrender, Cleghorn and other tribal members made a pilgrimage to their up, and he offered to die fighting for what ancestral home in Arizona. Haozous, Cleghorn’s uncle, once told her of was his by right—his country. I don’t blame cave paintings he’d seen there as a child. The group found the paintings him for it.…Geronimo always said he wished just as Haozous had described. he had never given up, that it would have Each of them stared in awe. Then they wept. been better to die fighting.”

Mildred Cleghorn, born into captivity in 1910, was forever thankful he hadn’t. “Because Ron J. Jackson Jr. is an award-winning author from Rocky, Okla., and a Geronimo surrendered, we are living today,” regular contributor to Wild West. For further reading he recommends Indeh, she once stated. “He said that if he kept fighting an Apache Odyssey, by Eve Ball; The Chiricahua Apache Prisoners of there would be no more Chiricahuas, that we War, by John Anthony Turcheneske Jr.; Survival of the Spirit, by H. Henrietta would be wiped off the face of the earth.” —R.J.J. Stockel; and Geronimo, by Angie Debo.

OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

FOR THE SINS OF GERONIMO?

Parting With the Dearly Departed

Far left: Those freed Apaches who chose to leave Fort Sill were heartbroken at having to leave behind the remains of deceased loved ones in the POW cemetery on Beef Creek. Left: Edward S. Curtis took this portrait of Geronimo in 1905, four years before the famed Chiricahua’s death.

Below: Geronimo’s grave at Fort Sill is well marked.

FROM LEFT: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; BONHAMS; LARRY SMITH, CC BY-SA 2.0

OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

THE RELOCATION DILEMMA No one really wanted freed Chiricahua Apache prisoners relocated to their state, certainly not government officials in Arizona and New Mexico, where white settlers reportedly feared another deadly uprising. Land in those territories (which became states in 1912) encompassed a large swath of Apacheria—the ancestral homeland of the Apache —which at its height spanned eastern Arizona, New Mexico, northern Mexico, west Texas and southern Colorado.

Few cared.

Geronimo, who was born near the headwaters of the Gila River in what was then Mexico and later part of Arizona Territory, pleaded for decades to be returned to his home ground. In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt told Geronimo a return to Arizona Territory would not be possible for fear of “more war and more bloodshed.” Roosevelt echoed the beliefs expressed by Brig. Gen, George Crook after a January 1890 visit with Apache prisoners at Alabama’s Mount Vernon Barracks. Crook advised against a relocation to Arizona, citing the enmity that remained toward the Apaches and suggesting another outbreak would render it “utterly impossible ever to get them to surrender again.”

Though Geronimo died a prisoner of war in Oklahoma, his death apparently expedited the release of his people. By 1911 the War Department was demanding an answer to the question of relocation, and authorities sought input from the Apaches regarding their preferred place to live, although the availability of land would inform any final decision.

Government officials met with several leaders that September 21 at Fort Sill. Elders such as Rogers Toclanny

and Talbot Gooday argued for settlement on New Mexico’s Warm Springs Apache Indian Reservation—site of their sacred Ojo Caliente. “Ojo Caliente has always been my home,” Gooday proclaimed. “All of my people, as far as I can remember, have lived there.…If the government will put us back at Ojo Caliente, we will stay there and be happy.”

Asa Daklugie, a graduate of Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, represented an even larger faction pressing to live on New Mexico’s Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation, whose namesake residents expressed a willingness to welcome their Chiricahua brethren. Still others wanted to remain in familiar surroundings near Fort Sill, where they had prospered and felt at home. By then Arizona and Ojo Caliente must have been off the table. No one spoke of the former as an option, while Ojo Caliente was already being opened to the public.

The War Department returned with a decision that surprised everyone. Those who wished to move to New Mexico would be allowed to do so, while those choosing to remain in Oklahoma would be given the “dead Indian allotments” of the Kiowas and Comanches near Fort Sill —a frustrating process that wouldn’t conclude until 1914.

Mildred Cleghorn, late chairwoman of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe, always contended the choice was a mirage.

“Many more wanted to live in Oklahoma,” she claimed, “but were sent to Mescalero because the powers that be believed they couldn’t cope with the outside world and live among non-Indians.”

Cleghorn cared. —R.J.J. AUGUST 2021

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HOWARD COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ST. PAUL, NEB.

The Young and the Brave

Leander T. “Lee” Herron was just 16 in 1863 when he enlisted to fight for the Union in the Civil War. In 1868 as a corporal in Kansas he displayed extraordinary courage.

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THE HERO OF LITTLE COON CREEK For coming to the aid of fellow soldiers under Cheyenne attack on Sept. 2, 1868, Corporal Leander Herron received the Medal of Honor

By Jeff Broome

I

n a report dated Oct. 1, 1868, Major General Philip Sheridan issued General Field Orders No. 2 to all officers under his command in the military Department of the Missouri. The orders were to be read aloud at every post. In them Sheridan lauded five recent actions between troopers and mostly Southern Cheyenne Indians, including a valiant nine-day defense on the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River that began September 17 and was later celebrated as the Battle of Beecher Island. But it was Sheridan’s mention of a little-known September 2 fight on Little Coon Creek, some 11 miles northeast of Fort Dodge, Kansas, that bears retelling. For it was there 3rd U.S. Infantry Corporal Leander Herron happened on besieged comrades and saved them—an act of bravery for which he received the Medal of Honor. General Sheridan wrote the following about the Battle of Little Coon Creek, a fight seldom mentioned in historical narratives of the Indian wars in Kansas:

HOWARD COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ST. PAUL, NEB.

The major general commanding calls the attention of the officers and soldiers of his command to the following.…The defense made, after three of their number had been severely wounded, by Corporal James Goodwin, Troop B, 7th Cavalry, [and] Privates John O’Donnell, Company A, Charles Hartman, Company H, and C. Tolan, Company F, 3rd Infantry, against 50 Indians on Little Coon Creek, Kansas, and the voluntary assistance given by Corporals Patrick Boyle, Troop B, 7th Cavalry, and Leander Herron, Company A, 3rd Infantry, mail carriers who happened to be passing.

In the fall of 1868 Kansas was in the midst of another Cheyenne outbreak after yet another failed treaty. “War is surely upon us,” wrote Superintendent of Indian Affairs Colonel Thomas Murphy from his Atchison headquarters on August 22. His dire pronouncement followed an attack by more than 200 Southern Cheyennes against unsuspecting settlers working new homesteads along the Saline and Solomon river valleys of north-central Kansas.

War it was, one notable consequence of which was 7th U.S. Cavalry Lt. Col. George A. Custer’s November 27 ostensible victory on the Washita River in Indian Territory (presentday Oklahoma). Custer reported having killed Southern Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle and 102 other warriors. Histori-

ans have since sought to limit the death toll to the 13 Cheyennes half-blood interpreter George Bent insisted had been killed that day. However, in a December 5 letter to his father 7th Cavalry 1st Lt. William Winer Cooke confirmed 103 warriors had been slain, the majority by sharpshooters under his command. The lieutenant enumerated the Cheyenne dead: When our deadly work was finally completed, by actual count we laid out 103 freshly minted “good Indians” on the field of battle, and I am sure that a great many more are en route to the “happy hunting grounds.” My sharpshooters accounted for 56 of the murderers, 19 in one small space. Sergeant Fy and Private Rogers are credited with eight each. Aside from their two big chiefs, Black Kettle and Little Rock, we killed and accounted for 16 of the most prominent chiefs and headmen of the tribe. We also took 53 prisoners, all women and children.

A year earlier, in October 1867, central Plains Indians had met with government commissioners in a final treaty council near the confluence of the Medicine Lodge River and Elm Creek in south-central Kansas. It appeared the Medicine Lodge Treaty might finally bring peace to the Plains. Skeptical eyewitnesses feared otherwise. Among them was 7th Cavalry Major Joel Elliott, who brought 500 troopers to the proceedings. He later described the Cheyennes in attendance as “insolent,” preferring war to peace, loath to settle on any reservation and insisting they would not give up their hunting grounds between the Arkansas River to the south and the Platte River to the north—in other words, virtually all of Kansas. Their only concession was to allow the railroad to pass through their country. In Elliott’s view the Eastern commissioners wanted the Indians to state for the record that Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock’s expedition earlier that year had been the root of all the troubles. Elliott claimed to have heard one commissioner say the Cheyennes “did right in making war, and that he was only sorry that they had not killed more whites.”

Lieutenant General William T. Sherman, commander of the Military Division of the Missouri and a member of the commission, made his annual report to Congress on Nov. 1, 1868. In it he revealed interesting insights about that AUGUST 2021

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Fort Dodge to Fort Larned

On the night of Sept. 1, 1868, Corporal Herron, accompanied

by Corporal Paddy Boyle, was carrying dispatches between the Kansas forts when he heard shots near Little Coon Creek.

FORT DODGE

year’s conflicts on the central Plains. He noted the difficulty of determining why Indians go to war, as they “never give notice beforehand of a warlike intention.” In the case of the violence in Kansas, which began on August 10, Sherman felt it stemmed from issues regarding the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie with the Lakotas under Red Cloud in the Powder River country (in present-day Wyoming, Montana, and North and South Dakota). There the Plains Indians demanded the closing of three forts erected in 1866 to protect travelers along the Bozeman Trail, the main thoroughfare to the Montana goldfields.

Prior to treaty negotiations the government had already resolved to abandon the forts along the trail, as the approaching Union Pacific Railroad, to the north, made for easier freighting and passage to the gold camps. The seeming concession to close the forts gave Red Cloud and his warriors the false impression they had forced the government’s hand. Unfortunately, that led overconfident northern warriors to smoke the

Dry Route

Dog Soldiers. Boyle rode back to Fort Dodge for help, while Herron directed the defense until the cavalry came to the rescue.

Sod Outpost (Fort Coon)

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Herron and Boyle were traveling on the “dry route”—the shorter but more exposed of the two roads between Forts Dodge and Larned— when they heard gunfire and rode toward the sound of the fighting.

25

50 miles

It was amid these dangerous times Corporal Leander T. “Lee” Herron volunteered to carry dispatches between the Kansas forts. Born on Dec. 29, 1846, in far eastern Bucks County, Pa., Herron was but 16 when in 1863, amid the Civil War, he enlisted in the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry. Though standing just 5 feet 1 inches tall and weighing scarcely 100 pounds, he fought in the Battles of the Wilderness,

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TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: DODGE CITY DAILY GLOBE

war pipe with the central Plains Cheyennes and Arapahos, who believed if they made war along the Smoky Hill road through Kansas—as had Red Cloud along the Bozeman—the government would close the southern forts and concede the territory to the Cheyennes. Sherman noted the Smoky Hill road “passes through the very heart of the buffalo region, the best hunting grounds of America.” He believed the northern warriors had encouraged the Southern Cheyennes to mount their deadly raids in Kansas that August.

By month’s end warriors were raiding from the Platte down to the Arkansas across Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado Territory. Kansas Governor Samuel J. Crawford reported as many as 40 settlers killed, while in Colorado acting Governor Frank Hall reported 21 killed. It seemed as if bands of raiding Indians could appear anywhere on any road or settlement through the Heroism at Little Coon Creek central Plains all the way to Denver. Any communications between Forts Larned K A N S A S The night of Sept. 2, 1868, 3rd Infantry Pawnee Rock and Dodge had to be carried by mounted Corporal Leander Herron, accompanied by Fort 7th Cavalry Corporal Paddy Boyle, was Pawnee River couriers, who were compelled to travel the Larned carrying dispatches from Fort Dodge to Fort Larned, Kansas, when the pair came 60-odd miles between the posts at night.

Larned upon a firewood wagon and its four-soldier escort under attack by some 50 Cheyenne It was simply too hazardous otherwise.

TOP: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY; BELOW: ROBISON LIBRARY; MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON

FORT LARNED

He Was a Teenage Private

TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: DODGE CITY DAILY GLOBE

TOP: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY; BELOW: ROBISON LIBRARY; MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON

Herron identified himself as the slight, knapsack-wearing private in this 1864 photo, taken when he was a member of the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry.

Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg and was present at Appomattox when the war ended in April 1865. Herron returned to Pennsylvania for a couple of years, but he couldn’t sit still. In 1867 he enlisted in the 3rd Infantry and was sent to Fort Dodge, then later Fort Larned. He soon earned promotion to corporal in Company A. On the night of Sept. 1, 1868, Herron set out on an all-night ride from Fort Larned to Fort Dodge. En route he encountered a detail of four soldiers escorting a mule-drawn Army wagon filled with firewood. They were bound from Fort Dodge to an outpost midway between the forts known as the Sod Outpost, or Fort Coon. At the confluence of Coon Creek and Little Coon Creek (near present-day Kinsley), the fortified structure housed 10 men and a sergeant. As the garrison had little more than buffalo chips as ready fuel for cooking and warmth, soldiers would periodically bring a wagonload of wood. Stopping beneath the full moon to speak with the firewood detail, he warned them to remain at the outpost until a patrol happened by, or at least to wait until the moon went down before returning to the fort.

After a brief chat Herron continued south, arriving at Fort Dodge at sunrise. The exhausted courier slept until late afternoon, when told to report to post commander Brevet Brig. Gen. Alfred Sully, who tasked Herron with delivering dispatches to Fort Larned that night. Permitted to select a man to accompany him, Herron chose his friend Corporal Patrick “Paddy” Boyle of Company B, 7th Cavalry, who was known to have the fastest horse in the outfit.

At dusk the corporals set out on what was known as the “dry route.”

Between the forts ran two roads, roughly parallel to one another. The lower route, which skirted the Arkansas, was marshy in places and thus called the “wet route.” The dry route stuck to the open plains and was shorter by 10 miles. As it was more exposed, however, it was also more dangerous. Hence the need to travel at night.

As they neared Little Coon Creek the corporals heard war cries and shooting up ahead. After checking their pistols, Herron and Boyle rode toward the sound of the fighting. They had approached within 100 yards of the commotion when under the nearly full moon they made out a wagon under attack by about 50 Indians. Approaching from behind the

warriors, the corporals broke through their ranks, firing their pistols as they charged past.

Before the Indians had time to react, the bold pair had reached the shelter of the wagon unscathed. It was then Herron discovered the besieged men were the firewood detail he had warned the night before not to return from the Coon Creek outpost without an escort. Having ignored his advice and set out for Fort Dodge that afternoon, they were paying the price. Several of the men were wounded, and their mules were dead, as were two pet prairie dogs they kept in the wagon box. Within minutes the Dog Soldiers made another charge, but the six men repulsed them.

The corporals recognized the situation was hopeless, short of rescue. After conferring, they decided Boyle, with the faster horse, should attempt to break the siege and return to Fort Dodge for help. Soon after Paddy’s mount plunged down a ravine into the night, however, the soldiers heard a series of shots, followed by silence, and were convinced Boyle had been killed. Herron then reassessed their exposed position on the prairie. Noting a nearby buffalo wallow, he

Heroic Herron

After reaching a besieged Army wagon, Boyle rode back to Fort Dodge for help while Herron orchestrated a valiant defense against the Indians.

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Top right: Herron in later life proudly wears the medal of honor (shown in the close-up above) he finally received in 1917 for his 1868 heroics at Little Coon Creek. Top left: He got this certificate nearly a decade after having received the medal.

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By the time the cavalry arrived, Herron and his four companions were down to just a dozen rounds of ammunition between them.

Corporal Goodwin had sustained multiple wounds from arrows and bullets, while Private O’Donnell had been struck in the head with a

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Medal of Honor

The Indians kept rushing us on their horses, hanging on the far side of the mounts, so that we had only a leg and an arm to shoot at. Soon we began to suffer casualties. One of our men was tomahawked in hand-to-hand combat with a husky brave. Bullets and arrows disabled the others, so that two of us had to bear the brunt of the defense. Then our ammunition began to run low. The Indians were making smaller and smaller circles around us, and it looked like the end had arrived. Then, just as they seemed to be preparing for the final rush, a body of horsemen in white appeared. At first we thought they were Indians in disguise, but we called out in English, and when the leader galloped up, it was Boyle, at the head of a squadron from the 7th United States Cavalry.

tomahawk. Private Tolan had suffered arrow and bullet wounds to the right arm, the bullet having shattered the bone. Several times during the fight Herron had loaded a service revolver for Tolan, who fired with his left hand. Private Hartman had been wounded near the end of the fight, but not seriously. Only Herron remained unscathed. As dawn approached, the soldiers had resolved to save their last bullets for themselves, to avoid being captured and tortured. It was at that desperate moment the Indians had withdrawn, having spotted the relief column approaching from the south.

The besieged troopers at first thought the white-clad arrivals were Indian reinforcements.

As the ghostly column rode up within a few hundred feet of the wagon, the weary soldiers heard someone shout, “Don’t shoot!” Suspecting the Dog Soldiers might be trying a ploy, Herron and the others prepared to fire. Finally, a lone rider approached, holding his carbine high in the air with both hands as a sign of peace. As the man drew close to the wagon, a relieved Herron recognized Paddy Boyle. His fellow corporal had made it through after all. When a befuddled Herron asked why the troopers were dressed in white, Boyle chuckled. “Well, the boys were asleep when I reached the post, and they didn’t

HOWARD COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ST. PAUL, NEB. (3)

helped the other four soldiers manhandle the wagon into position over it. Protected overhead by the wagon, they could fire over the lip of the depression on all sides. Encouraged, the men felt they could fight off the warriors until a passing patrol found them— provided their ammunition held up. Meanwhile, the Indians charged again and again.

Herron later recalled their predicament:

take time to dress,” he explained. “They ain’t got on anything but their underclothes.”

Within an hour an infantry column arrived, escorting an ambulance wagon as well as the post surgeon, who dressed the injured soldiers’ wounds and oversaw their transport back to Fort Dodge. The column also returned with the firewood wagon, which had sustained hundreds of arrow and bullet hits. “Arrows were sticking out like quills on the back of a porcupine,” Herron recalled, “and the sideboards and ends of the wagon were perforated with bullets.”

Before leaving Fort Dodge the prior evening, the corporals had filled their canteens with whiskey, with which to counter any rattlesnake bites they might receive (a common treatment in the frontier Army). After joining the besieged firewood detail and before making his run back to the fort, Boyle had proffered his canteen of whiskey to the others, telling them they’d need it more than he did. Taking a chug from the canteen, off he’d gone. Herron said the whiskey had proven a relief during the siege, giving the men “liquid courage” to fight off the repeated attacks and providing some relief to the wounded.

On finishing his enlistment in 1870, Herron returned home to Pennsylvania, but he still had itchy feet. Four years later he ventured to Nebraska.

After working there for three years, he bounced back to Pennsylvania. Seven years later he returned to Nebraska for keeps, settling in St. Paul until his death at age 90 on April 5, 1937. He is buried there in Elmwood Cemetery.

How he ended up receiving the Medal of Honor is itself an interesting story. When Herron applied for a recently enacted pension increase in 1916, he read in the paperwork that MOH recipients would receive an additional $10 a month. That sparked a memory. Recalling the written praise General Sheridan had given his defense on Little Coon Creek, Herron also remembered he’d been recommended for the MOH after the fight, but the paperwork hadn’t been finalized by the end of his enlistment. He mentioned that oversight in his pension application, and that got the ball rolling. A year later, nearly a half century after the clash on Little Coon Creek, he finally received his medal and the following citation:

TOP: HOWARD COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY. ST. PAUL, NEB..; BOTTOM: JEFF BROOME

HOWARD COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ST. PAUL, NEB. (3)

While detailed as mail courier from the fort [Dodge], voluntarily went to the assistance of a party of four enlisted men, who were attacked by about 50 Indians at some distance from the fort, and remained with them until the party was relieved.

Boyle was dead by 1917 and at that time the MOH was not generally bestowed on dead persons. On Nov. 11, 1921, Herron, proudly wearing his

A Hero Interviews a Hero

Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, an American flying ace and MOH recipient in World War I, interviews Herron in November 1930 on Rickenbacker’s weekly Chevrolet Chronicles half-hour radio broadcast.

medal, attended the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery as an official mourner. Coincidentally, select members of the 3rd Infantry (aka “The Old Guard”)—the very regiment in which he served—have stood sentinel at the memorial every minute of every day since Herron attended the dedication ceremony a century ago.

In November 1930 Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, famed World War I American flying ace and a fellow Medal of Honor recipient, invited 83-year-old Herron to be a guest on Rickenbacker’s weekly Chevrolet Chronicles half-hour radio broadcast. Over eight gripping minutes the Indian wars veteran recounted in detail for listeners his 1868 fight with Cheyenne Dog Soldiers. Herron received a copy of the broadcast on a period 78 rpm shellac record, which his family preserved.

Since digitized, the historic recording is available for listening at Historynet.com/herron.htm.

Based in Beulah, Colo., Jeff Broome is a retired philosophy professor who has long studied and written about the Indian wars. His latest book is Indian Raids and Massacres: Essays on the Central Plains Indian War. His sources for this article include Robert M. Wright’s rare 1913 book Dodge City: The Cowboy Capital; pictures and family documents in the possession of Jacqui Kilgren, of Spokane, Wash.; documents from the Howard County Historical Society museum in St. Paul, Neb.; and correspondence with the Medal of Honor Historical Society of the United States.

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THE END OF HIS ROPE

Charlie Reed reached it soon after teaming up with Doc Middleton and his gang of organized horse thieves in Nebraska

By Robert Rybolt

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Called to Account

Charlie Reed drove cattle north from Texas before falling in with thieves led by David C. “Doc” Middleton. On May 10, 1879, vigilantes in Sidney, Neb., hanged Reed from a telegraph pole (depicted opposite in a period Police Gazette woodcut) after he’d gunned down a local young man.

OPPOSITE: ROBERT RYBOLT COLLECTION; RIGHT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

O

n the 19th-century frontier some men lived for justice, others died for it. Charlie Reed was among DOC MIDDLETON the latter, and thereon hangs a tale.

Little is known about Charlie’s past, aside from his reputed claim to have hailed from San Antonio, Texas. The 1870 census reveals a 30-year-old Irish-born soldier named Charles Reed serving at nearby Fort Concho. That Reed was honorably discharged from the 11th U.S. Infantry as a corporal in 1872 and was noted to be of good character. He could be our Charlie.

After his discharge Reed made his way to Fort Griffin and took up the trade of a cowboy, specifically as a drover pushing large cattle herds north to Kansas and Nebraska shipping points.

He worked and lived northeast of town at the sprawling Millett Ranch, an outfit that prided itself on hiring tough hombres. Among them were future lawman John Selman, remembered as the man who killed gunman John Wesley Hardin, and an escaped convict calling himself Jack Lyons.

Lyons’ birth name was James Riley, and he’d twice escaped from prison. In 1876 he’d shake the dust of Texas from his chaps and, under the alias David C. Middleton, join a cattle drive north.

“Doc” Middleton would become an outlaw legend in Nebraska, where he and Reed would renew their acquaintance.

Meantime, Reed befriended William E. “Billy” Bland, a top hand who organized trail drives north to markets more lucrative than those in Reconstruction-era Texas. Charlie popped up at Fort McPherson, Neb., in the mid-1870s. In The Trail Drivers of Texas, a 1924 compilation of cowpunchers’ recollections, Millett hand L.B. Anderson recalled a stampede through that military garrison, which once stood on the south bank of the Platte River some 30 miles east of the rail town of North Platte. Reed was among those working the cattle. Bland was certainly in Nebraska at the time, as the Cheyenne Daily Leader reported his killing of Ed McGivern, near Ogallala, some 50 miles west of North Platte, though the paper was scant on details. In his memoirs Dakota cattleman Ed Lemmon recalled that in 1874 or ’75 Bland and Reed were involved in a shootout at a saloon in Fort Scott, Kan., and Bland was killed. Though Lemmon was correct in the basics, he was off by a couple of years and had confused Fort Scott with Fort Griffin. It is in the latter town Reed first comes into historical focus.

On Jan. 17, 1877, Reed and Bland went out for a night on the town. The civilian community below Fort Griffin, on bottomland along the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, had no formal charter and was simply called “the Flat.” According to contemporary news accounts the drunken pair had been whooping it up on the Flat, racing their horses and firing their six-guns, when they decided to visit Owen Donnelly and Pat Carroll’s Beehive, a long narrow saloon with a bar AUGUST 2021

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DR. VALENTINE T. McGILLYCUDDY

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Settling in the Cornhusker State, Reed soon ingratiated himself to Cheyenne County Sheriff Cornelius M. “Con” McCarty. McCarty was a 28-year-old New Yorker who probably came west with the Union Pacific construction crews. By 1873 he’d settled in Sidney and later made a successful bid for county coroner.

Under the Nebraska Constitution, coroners were required to hold inquests over bodies to determine if any criminality was involved. Then— and only then—could law enforcement begin a homicide investigation.

That was a lot of power in a town as violent as Sidney. McCarty leveraged that authority for personal profit. In January 1874 he held an inquest over the body of Clay Nash, an undercover Union Pacific detective. Witnesses said Nash had been shooting pool when the front door to Moore’s Saloon swung open, and Sheriff John J. Ellis fired several shots into the deceased.

Though no witnesses came forward, McCarty found Ellis responsible for Nash’s demise. He had the sheriff arrested and transported to Grand Island, where authorities eventually released him for lack of evidence. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Sheriff Ellis took a job in Nevada. McCarty later assumed his vacant office, thus consolidating his power over the county.

McCarty also pursued various business interests, investing in saloons and freighting firms and becoming a silent partner in Joe Lane’s Dance Hall. Of relevance to Reed’s story, McCarty also ranched near Julesburg, Colo., some 40 miles southeast of Sidney, where he ranged more than 500 head of cattle under the “IS” brand.

Like his partner McCarty, Lane had a shady side. He’d learned the saloon/dance hall business in Ellsworth, Kan., under the able tutelage of “Rowdy Joe” Lowe and wife “Rowdy Kate.” Selling out his interest to Lowe in 1868, he answered Major George “Sandy” Forsythe’s call for 50 scouts to pursue Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors then raiding out of Indian Territory. On September 17 a party of Cheyennes under the war leader Roman Nose attacked the scouts just inside the eastern border of Colorado Territory, driving them to the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River. They holed up on a sandbar, soon to be named Beecher Island in honor of Lieutenant Frederick H. Beecher, who was killed early in the subsequent battle. The surviving scouts held out for nine days, subsisting on river water and horsemeat, until relieved. The Battle of Beecher Island has taken on legendary status.

Lane was a survivor but did not acquit himself well in the battle. According to fellow scouts he cowered in his firing pit for much of the fight.

The following year at Fort Wallace, Kan., Lane was arrested for stealing horses. En route to the guardhouse he managed to slip away from his minders. Grabbing the first available horse, he left Kansas in the dust.

One likely apocryphal account claimed the horse was Forsythe’s, and a day later the mount found its way back to the garrison. Lane first took a government job at Fort Sedgwick, Colorado Territory, not far from the McCarty Ranch. By 1874 he’d surfaced in Sidney as proprietor of the Centennial, more popularly known as Joe Lane’s Dance Hall.

Employing dance hall girls and booking variety entertainers, the establishment occupied a long and narrow two-story wooden building with a stage at one end and a bar at the other. The upper story held cubicles, or cribs, where soiled doves plied a more basic trade. Every night soldiers, mule skinners and other frontier riffraff crowded into Lane’s to spend their hard-earned cash as quickly as they earned it. Joe placed benches along the edge of the dance floor, where gamblers plied their flim-flam games while saloon girls flirted with customers. Lane and McCarty’s profits must have been substantial.

Doc Middleton, on the lam from Texas, had found a home in Sidney under the protection of Sheriff McCarty. He worked for the freighting outfit of Pratt & Ferris. On the night of Jan. 13, 1877, Lane was celebrating military payday by giving soldiers at nearby Fort Sidney first choice of the upstairs girls. So the story goes, Middleton took a shine to a particularly

1881 COURTHOUSE MUSEUM, CUSTER, S.D.

up front and a dance hall in a back room. On entering, Reed and Bland took potshots at the lamps, drawing the attention of Shackleford County Deputy Sheriffs Bill Cruger and John Bogart, followed closely by county prosecutor Bob Jeffress. As Cruger came through the door, Bland took a shot at him, sparking a wild exchange of gunfire. When the smoke cleared, newlywed Dan Barron and Army lieutenant turned popular local lawyer J.W. Myers lay dead.

Bland had been gut-shot in the exchange and died in agony. Cruger was wounded, as was Jeffress. Reed fled without a scratch.

Back at the Millett Ranch, Reed spun a tale for fellow hands that Cruger had gunned down Bland in cold blood, while he’d barely escaped the saloon with his life. Realizing that even in rough-and-tumble Texas authorities frowned on shooting up saloons and elected officials, he wisely elected to make himself scarce. Reed may have signed onto a trail drive headed north, as he next turned up in Nebraska.

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1881 COURTHOUSE MUSEUM, CUSTER, S.D.

comely lass, much to the chagrin of 5th U.S. Cavalry Private James Keith.

Words and threats led to fisticuffs, with Middleton coming out second best.

So Doc pulled his .44 and put a bullet through the soldier, killing him.

Keith’s understandably upset comrades went to the fort, returned with weapons and shot up the facade of the dance hall, though no one was injured. Middleton fled north of the Platte.

McCarty, Middleton, Reed and others Sidney ne’er-do-wells eventually took to raiding Sioux horse herds out of reach of the law. At the time everything in the panhandle south of the Platte was Cheyenne County, whereas today the region encompasses seven counties. The area north of the Platte to the Dakota line was “unceded Indian territory,” absent either government or laws. Just who had jurisdiction remained in question. McCarty was the sole authority over some 7,000 square miles of Nebraska, but Indian lands were beyond the pale of white law.

Working through McCarty and Reed, Middleton’s “Pony Boys” sold their stolen Indian stock to local ranches, the military and unwitting travelers on the South Platte Trail. Meanwhile, the Sioux simmered in anger. Appointed the Indian agent at Pine Ridge, Dakota Territory, in 1879, Dr. Valentine T. McGillycuddy knew if the rustling weren’t checked, a major uprising was in the offing. Rampant banditry tied to the Black Hills gold strike was also a growing problem. With a stake in the game, stage lines, railroads and stock growers’ associations all banded together behind McGillycuddy’s authority as a U.S. court commissioner to address the crime spree. The loose organization fielded some of the finest six-gun talent to be had. Top among them were Scott Davis, chief of security for the stage lines; his right-hand man, Boone May; and James L. “Whispering” Smith, a former New Orleans detective turned Union Pacific operative. Dubbed the “Shotgun Brigade,” the fraternity of detectives was led by William H.H. Llewellyn, an agent for the U.S. Department of Justice. Joining them in the hunt for Middleton and cohorts were posses from Nebraska and Wyoming.

Reed was the first one captured. In early February two of Llewellyn’s men followed Charlie and fellow wanted Texan David Melisky into North Platte, just east of the panhandle, where the pair stopped for supper at a local café. Each outlaw was armed with a Springfield trapdoor rifle and a brace of six-shooters. On entering they set their long guns in a corner by the door. Before Reed and Melisky could take their seats, the detectives entered and leveled their own revolvers at the pair. The prisoners were transported in shackles to Omaha.

SCOTT DAVIS

No doubt eager to get their hands on the posted $2,000 reward for the fugitives’ arrest, the Nebraska lawmen immediately wired Texas authorities they had the pair in custody. Texas Governor Oran Milo Roberts wired back with the extraordinary news his state lacked funds for their extradition. Newspapers claimed that Llewellyn, having no recourse, released the men on a writ of habeas corpus. In truth, he may have withheld information about the botched extradition and struck a deal with Reed: Walk free in return for a promise to betray Middleton and the others. This is pure guesswork but makes sense in view of what happened later that spring.

In April 1879 the Cheyenne Daily Leader reported the Shotgun Brigade had cut the trail of organized horse thieves returning south from the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation. The trail led to North Platte. The band reportedly included Middleton, Charles Fugate (likely an alias used by Doc’s half-brother, William, up from Texas for the fun), Joe Smith (another relative of Middleton’s) and Jack Nolan. The latter was a former soldier with an unholy thirst and a hate for any race other than his own. Liquored up at Lane’s one night that January, he’d killed a Mexican vaquero, though by spring he’d managed to break out of jail. A Nebraska posse trailed the gang to North Platte, where the outlaws encamped just west of town.

Lawlessness and Lynchings

Reed was one of the ne’er-do-wells who made Sidney, Neb., wild, with more than 50 reported murders and several extralegal hangings between 1876 and ‘81.

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In the alley behind Lane’s Reed abruptly dismounted, jerking Smith’s revolver in the process.

Almost immediately a hail of bullets knocked Smith from the saddle. Bystanders carried the mortally wounded man into the dance hall and laid him out on a billiard table. There, looking Reed in the eye, he uttered his last words: “Why, you son of a bitch!” No truer words were spoken.

Some accounts place Middleton in town at the time of the shooting. Whether true or not, the gang got wind of Reed’s treachery and vanished.

Reed remained in Sidney, pimping out the soiled doves for Lane and generally making himself obnoxious. On Friday, May 9, a young man named Hank Loomis was strolling by Lane’s when accosted by one of the dance hall girls.

Loomis was not as polite as he should have Bird’s-Eye View of Sidney been, so Reed ran him down and shot him through the thigh with a The Fort Sidney barracks are at upper left in this 1870s drawing by Lieutenant J.E. Foster. Doc Middleton killed .44. Bystanders took Loomis to the post hospital at Fort Sidney, where a 5th Cavalry private from the fort on Jan. 13, 1877. surgeons amputated his shattered leg. By the next afternoon he was dead.

Though Reed fled town, a posse soon caught the fugitive and returned No sooner had they settled in when Reed him to jail in Sidney.

Fed-up locals weren’t about to wait on McCarty for justice. On Saturstrolled into camp. It must have given the gang some comfort to find their saddle partner no day night, within hours of Loomis’ death, a mob of vigilantes numbering worse for wear. But Middleton wasn’t buying the in the hundreds stormed the jail and forced the sheriff to surrender the story Reed was selling about having been set free. keys to Reed’s cell. Dragging him to a telegraph pole along the tracks, Doc was all the more suspicious when Charlie they threw a rope over the crossbar and set a ladder against the pole. The suggested they all ride in to Lane’s to celebrate condemned man was given the choice of jumping or having the ladder their reunion. Despite Middleton’s misgivings, pulled out from under him. Whatever Reed may have been in life, he Smith thought it a grand idea. “Shucks, Doc,” he died game. Saying goodbye to the crowd, he leaped into eternity.

That summer Llewellyn got word to Middleton a pardon had been reportedly replied, “we all knew him in Texas.”

Mounted double—Reed behind Smith—the pair arranged were he to surrender peaceably. The promise proved false. At a prearranged meeting on July 20 Llewellyn sprang an ambush in which rode the 2 miles into Sidney.

Sidney’s Front Street

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UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

PHOTO CREDIT

A vigilante mob strung Reed from a telegraph pole in town—legend has it this pole. The condemned bid the mob farewell before leaping into eternity.

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

PHOTO CREDIT

NEBRASKA STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

Doc was wounded in the side and all parties scattered. Llewellyn raced up to Fort Hartsuff, a one company garrison in north-central Nebraska, to fetch Whispering Smith. With a posse of infantrymen in tow, the pair returned to the ambush site and tracked Middleton to his hideout on Wymore Creek, where the wounded gang leader soon surrendered. Convicted of horse theft at trial in Cheyenne, Middleton was sentenced to five years in the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln.

In October soldiers near Fort Sisseton, in eastern Dakota Territory, got word Nolan and sometime Middleton associate “Little Joe” Johnson were camped nearby. Sallying out from the fort, the troops slapped the pair in irons. They were reportedly too drunk to offer much resistance. Returned to Nebraska, both were convicted of larceny and sentenced to three and a half years in the penitentiary.

On his release Nolan reportedly made a beeline to the nearest brothel, where he tried to bully the wrong fellow. He didn’t survive the encounter.

Fugate (Doc’s half-brother) was convicted of horse theft and also sent to the Nebraska penitentiary. It must have made for quite a reunion.

On his release he made his living as a paid assassin. In 1885 he tried to murder Archie Riordan, the city marshal at Buffalo Gap, S.D. Like Nolan, Fugate didn’t survive his encounter.

In March 1880 McCarty was implicated in the theft of bullion worth upward of $120,000 (more than $3 million in today’s dollars) from the Union Pacific express office in Sidney. Called in on the case, Whispering Smith undoubtedly relished the chance to convict the crooked sheriff. Local vigilantes beat him to the punch. They started the ball in July by torching the abandoned dance hall, Lane having long before skipped town for his health. Finally, in April 1881, having had their fill, they took back Sidney. After lynching the worst offender, the mob horsewhipped McCarty and ran him and more than a dozen others out of town. The disgraced sheriff took up mining in Boise, Idaho, where he reportedly died of natural causes in 1894.

Ten years later Lane died a morphine addict in Deer Lodge, Mont.

The onetime Army scout was buried by the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans’ organization.

As for Reed, the story does not end with his hanging. In 1922 the U.S. Army mandated the removal of soldiers’ remains from Sidney’s dilapidated municipal cemetery—appropriately named Boot Hill—for reinterment at Fort McPherson. In their search for the soldiers, work crews exhumed some 200 civilian remains. Among them were two noteworthy corpses. One bore evidence of a botched leg amputation, complete with rotten bandages. Could it have been Reed’s final victim, Hank Loomis? The other was that of a presumed cowboy, with hightop boots and a corroded Starr revolver. The gun was loaded, with two empty chambers. Cinched around the skeleton’s neck was a noose.

Charlie Reed had indeed reached the end of his rope.

Robert Rybolt once lived in Sidney, Neb., and is a Cornhusker at heart.

He retired from federal civil service after 22 years as a historian for the National Park Service and the Department of Defense. For further reading Rybolt recommends Doc Middleton: The Life and Legends of the Notorious Plains Outlaw, by Harold Hutton; McGillycuddy, Agent, by Julia B. McGillycuddy; and Whispering Smith, The Life and Misadventures, by Alan P. Bristow.

FATE OF THE SHOTGUN BRIGADE In 1881, following the convictions of Doc Middleton and cohorts, William H.H. Llewellyn (at left) picked a political plum and was appointed agent for the Jicarilla and Mescalero Apaches in southcentral New Mexico Territory. He took Boone May and James “Whispering” Smith with him to help establish an Indian police force. The “Shotgun Brigade” finally split up in 1883.

A year later Smith returned to the Nebraska/ Wyoming area as an enforcer for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. By 1888 he’d moved to Denver and returned to work as a railroad detective. A decade later Captain Smith served in the Spanish American War as a naval officer, as he had during the Civil War. But civilian life proved more of a struggle. On Aug. 26, 1914, after years spent battling alcoholism, a penniless Smith committed suicide in Denver, Colo.

He rests beneath a military marker in that city’s Riverside Cemetery. “If all the stories are to be believed,” one obituary read, “Captain Smith must have been half octopus and half vampire; bloodthirsty and tenacious.”

May moved on to Gunnison, Colo., where he disappeared from the historical record. Some say he went to South America and died of yellow fever, while others claim he returned and led a more settled life. It’s a mystery that has gnawed at historians and the May family to this day.

Llewellyn remained in New Mexico, became a political power and palled around with Theodore Roosevelt, under whom he served in the Spanish American War. Captain Llewellyn commanded a company of Rough Riders and fought at the Battle of San Juan Hill. He died in El Paso on June 11, 1927. He, too, rests beneath a military marker, in Las Cruces, N.M. After several more years as an Indian agent, Valentine McGillycuddy settled in Rapid City, S.D., where he helped found the South Dakota School of Mines, later serving as its dean. He also served as the state’s first surgeon general.

McGillycuddy died at the venerable age of 90 in Berkeley, Calif., on June 6, 1939. —R.R. AUGUST 2021

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‘THIS WHOLESALE SYSTEM OF ROBBERY’

HERITAGE AUCTIONS

Amid the turmoil of the Civil War unscrupulous white men, not Indians, were the most troublesome livestock thieves on the central Plains

By Gregory Michno

Marked Men

Ne’er-do-wells with a branding iron are caught in the act in The Brand Rustlers, an oil on canvas by American artist Olaf Carl Seltzer (1877–1957).

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n scenes familiar to Western filmgoers painted raiders on horseback swoop down from the hills in a cloud of dust to steal scores of horses and cattle from pioneers minding their own business. While American Indians did engage in such stock raiding, Hollywood has exaggerated its prevalence, making it part of the American frontier myth.

On the central Plains in the 1860s such raiders were more likely white men, their victims often Indians.

Examples abound from the earlier Indian removal era, when all manner of miscreants shadowed the departing bands.

Take for example what happened to a party of more than 600 Wyandots who sought to relocate from Ohio to Kansas in July 1843. Soon after setting out in their 100-wagon train to meet waiting steamboats in Cincinnati, they were accosted by petty thieves, charlatans and whiskey peddlers and compelled to circle up at night for protection. Regardless, at least one thief struck in the dark and made off with a Wyandot horse—the kind of event depicted in hundreds of films and novels but with pioneers in the wagons and hostile Indians doing the raiding. That same year some 1,000 emigrants ventured west on the Oregon Trail with no reported attacks by Indians.

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Fast Food on the Hoof

The public also expressed outrage—at least initially—when the victims were peaceful Indians.

As the war disrupted tribes in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), and Cherokees and Creeks split their loyalties between the North and South, thousands of refugees streamed north, either seeking to join the Union cause or escape from the turmoil. By 1862 some 9,000 Indians had gathered in southeast Kansas, eventually concentrating near Fort Scott. Brigadier General James G. Blunt hoped to muster some of them into federal service, but most wouldn’t agree unless the government assured their families adequate food, shelter and protection. Protection against whom? The answer soon followed, as bushwhackers made off with their livestock. So the Army gave its assurances, and Colonel William A. Phillips marched his newly recruited 3rd Regiment of the Indian Home Guard south to Indian Territory to repatriate refugees and reoccupy Fort Gibson and the Cherokee capital at Tahlequah. Justin Harlan, the Cherokee agent at Fort Gibson, welcomed the refugees and encouraged them to resettle the territory. But Confederate bushwhackers mounted repeated raids,

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TOP: GRANGER; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: MICHAEL SNELL/ALAMO STOCK PHOTO

Indians shoot and butcher cattle in Indian Territory, where brazen rustlers targeted reservation herds.

TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; LEFT: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA-CHAMPAIGN; BELOW: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

WILLIAM A. PHILLIPS

Rustling of Indian stock east of the Mississippi River, however, paled in comparison to the rampant livestock theft recorded on the Plains in the 1860s. As cross-border raiding between Kansas and Missouri border ruffians ramped up during the Civil War, stock theft reached epidemic proportions. Citizens were especially outraged when whites stole from whites. In April 1863 The Kansas Chief, on the northern border in White Cloud, complained that two Kansas horse thieves recently caught and jailed in neighboring Nebraska had been released on a writ of habeas corpus.

Why bother to arrest a thief, the paper asked, when vigilance committees stood ready with “a rope and the nearest tree”? “Habeas corpus can’t reach him then,” the editor dryly concluded. The paper later reported on the bungled lynching of the thieves. “Horse thieves have no right to live, but they should be dispatched in the speediest and quietest manner possible,” the paper suggested. “If they are to be tortured, burn them at the stake at once, after true savage style.” The widespread proscription on renegade whites stealing livestock from other whites continued well into the postwar period. When caught, they were to be immediately arrested and hanged without trial.

Wagon Trains Ripe for Attack

plaguing residents and leaving the region a no-man’s-land. “I committed an error in bringing them here,” Harlan wrote to his superiors in Washington, D.C. Back to Kansas the refugees went.

Congress appropriated funds, seed, plows, tents and provisions to help the Indians through a couple of tough winters—even so, some died from starvation. By May 1864 federal authorities were again pressuring the Indians to return south. That month a 300-wagon train left Fort Scott with some 5,000 refugees bound for Fort Gibson.

TOP: GRANGER; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: MICHAEL SNELL/ALAMO STOCK PHOTO

TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; LEFT: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA-CHAMPAIGN; BELOW: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Cherokees head west in Robert Lindneux’s painting The Trail of Tears, 1838. In 1864 a huge Indian refugee train traveling from Kansas to Oklahoma Territory drew many white predators.

It was joined en route by a military escort and government train that swelled the column to a staggering 600 wagons. By comparison, the typical emigrant train that traveled the Oregon Trail from 1841 to ’66 comprised anywhere from a

Fort Scott and Its Namesake Town

The Army built the post (above) in southeast Kansas in 1842 and the community of the same name (left) grew up around it in 1855. The 1864 wagon train left Fort Scott with some 5,000 Indian refugees.

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Fort Gibson and Its Reconstruction

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In September 1864 William G. Coffin, head of Indian Affairs’ Southern Superintendency, reported that Indians congregated around Fort Gibson were facing dire shortages of food and clothing. Among the last groups to move south were 1,900 Wichitas. While they managed to hold on to their property better than the other Indians, according to that year’s annual report of the commissioner of Indian Affairs, they too complained “loud and long, of the ravages of the vicious and lawless vagabonds of whites that have followed those Indians for the purpose of plunder and theft.”

When ranchers near Omaha, Neb., employed several Indians as herders, oblivious civilians assumed they were hostiles driving off hundreds of cattle and called for Army protection. About the same time The Border Sentinel of Mound City, Kan., reported on “another chapter in the depravity Emporia, Kansas

During the Civil War thieves from Kansas rustled stock belonging to the Cherokees.

When an Indian agent in Neosho Falls directed troops to recover stolen stock in 1865, an Emporia man threatened his life.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

few to 120 wagons, the number of emigrants averaging nearly 13,000 per year. The 1864 Indian refugee train may have been larger than any emigrant train that ever crossed the prairies. It and subsequent trains ultimately returned nearly 16,000 Indians to northeast Indian Territory.

The refugee wagon trains drew predators like ants to sugar. A correspondent to Kansas’ Emporia News wrote of having left Fort Scott on July 9 in a hodgepodge train “almost 7 miles long,” with a “considerable ‘sprinkle’ of sutlers’ wagons, government speculators, gamblers, jayhawkers…women of doubtful character… played-out politicians, Negroes and Indians.” Escorting them were “straggling soldiers…featherbed officers who had never been to the front,” 150 “d_ _ _ _d lousy Indian Home Guards” and 200 cavalrymen from various regiments. Despite the military presence, con men and whiskey peddlers swarmed in among such trains to snatch up all the Indian money or property they could, while brazen rustlers targeted their vast herds, allegedly wild and for the taking.

The cattle, the correspondent wrote, were “slaughtered and driven away promiscuously by both soldier and citizen.”

The Independent, of Oskaloosa, Kan., estimated some $600 million had been purloined in various schemes, half of it “filched under fraudulent contracts, and the other half stolen directly in the shape of stock.” The newspaper added that “some of the most unblushing depredations have been committed” across Kansas and into Indian Territory. “Men have made fortunes stealing cattle and other stock, principally from the Indians. The most unblushing rascality is practiced and winked at by those in military authority.” Many of the thieves, quipped The Kansas Chief, sported “remarkably red hair, and without the scalp lock.”

TOP: ILLUSTRATION BY J. WELLS CHAMPNEY; MIDDLE: PHIL KONSTANTIN; BELOW: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The outpost (depicted above in the 1870s) guarded the Indian Territory frontier from 1824 to ‘88. In the 1860s Indians gathered around the fort complained of the criminality of ”lawless vagabonds of whites.”

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

TOP: ILLUSTRATION BY J. WELLS CHAMPNEY; MIDDLE: PHIL KONSTANTIN; BELOW: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

of humankind,” as outlaw gangs swept through the Neosho Valley, driving cattle out of Indian Territory. The traffic, the paper wrote, was not new, but “the hideous criminality of the scheme” is of “a startling nature and let out some traits of character hitherto only found in the sinks of pollution and the dens of depravity.” Even men once considered respectable were deeply involved “in this wholesale system of robbery.” One such miscreant, identified as D.R. Anthony, with the help of Army officers paid bribes of $1,100 to grease the passage of stolen stock to buyers willing to look the other way.

Meanwhile, government contractors failed to deliver sufficient food to Fort Gibson, and the few supply trains that made it carried insufficient forage for their own animals. To feed the government stock, the Army, citing “military necessity,” confiscated some of the meager crops the Indians had managed to grow. Then came waves of sutlers and speculators who pretended to be government employees and swept in to take what they wanted. Cherokee Agent Harlan said such men often wrote out phony vouchers, promising to pay the Cherokees later, and the Indians, being “ignorant of who was and who was not authorized to appropriate their property, made no resistance.” The thieves promptly vanished, leaving the Cherokees with useless receipts.

Reduced to the point of starvation, the Indians grew desperate to feed their families. According to Wichita Agent Milo Gookins, whites coerced some of those remaining in Kansas to pilfer cattle belonging to neighboring Cherokees and Creeks, a scheme “assuming enormous proportions.”

The stock was mainly owned by Indians then fighting for the Union.

Gookins feared that when victims returned home, they would go to any length to get their cattle back, people would die, and the very whites who had engineered the depredations would indignantly cry for vengeance and lead gangs south to exterminate any and all Indians. Meanwhile, the Indians’ own livestock continued to vanish, some under the guise of military authority. Gookins reported having received from an officer out of Fort Smith, Ark., a “permit” to drive 2,000 head of cattle out of Indian Territory for sale in Kansas. “All mere sham,” the agent said. The Army even issued permits to so-called “entrepreneurs” to employ Indians in their rustling operations, with an understanding the tribesmen would receive a cut of the profits.

According to agent Harlan, Rebel soldiers and bushwhackers were not the Indians’ worst enemies, for while they had taken livestock and crops, “white men loyal [to the Union], or pretending to be so, have taken five times as much.” By December 1864 the families of those Indians in military service were nearly devoid of food or clothing, and Harlan expressed his hope Congress would approve a special appropriation of at least $250,000, to ensure both their survival and their continued fealty. The Indians, the agent lamented, are prey “to the rapacity of their loyal friends, the white men of the North.” George A. Cutler, the Creek agent at Fort Gibson, noted that the supply of Indian cattle once “deemed almost inexhaustible” was rapidly disappearing, as “large droves of cattle are being driven north by the cattle thieves continually.”

Supplies were scarce in Kansas by late 1864, and due to Confederate Maj. Gen. Sterling Price’s invasion of Missouri that fall there were not enough troops to spare for escort duty until mid-November. When heavy rain and snow struck the Leavenworth area in December, many civilian teamsters refused to travel. Superintendent Coffin could only get half the wagons he needed, and the escorts he provided looted the wagons.

That month The Emporia News opined there was a recent time when “respectable men” might steal cattle from the Cherokees with impunity,

RANDOLPH B. MARCY

but lately it seemed everyone was getting in on the act. Kansans who had never thought of committing such wrongs were engaging in horse and cattle theft in their own backyards. “Public sentiment has been aroused,” the paper warned.

“Men having no legitimate business here had better loaf in some other quarter, as we are inclined to believe this will be a warm climate for rogues.”

By January 1865 Colonel Phillips had had enough and complained to Interior Secretary John Palmer Usher of the uptick in crooked schemes. He accused Superintendent Coffin of working with the firm of McDonald & Fuller to buy corn with notes that were never paid. He also implicated the superintendent in a scheme to confiscate Indian cattle. “Black men and reckless characters,” the colonel alleged, had been employed to drive in cattle from Indian Territory as “rebel beef.” They turned over the “contraband” to McDonald & Fuller, which claimed it had purchased the stock from the Indians and then billed the government for its full value.

Phillips said Coffin had admitted to him that not one-eighth of the transactions were legitimate. The colonel further alleged that H.E. McKee, a trader licensed by Coffin and approved

by Indian Affairs Commissioner William P. Dole, had personally driven thousands of stolen cattle north from Indian Territory. Phillips wanted the lot of them arrested and tried by military commission. “The whole affair is so nefarious,” he wrote, “that I blush for our federal officials to write to you about it.”

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Weeks later Gookins reported that a recently appointed provost marshal had overtaken a herd of stolen stock being driven north, but “was bribed —bought off…and the cattle and drivers went on.” The agent deemed it “a fair sample of military operations in stopping this business.” That summer George A. Reynolds, the agent at Neosho Falls, alerted Sells to the tide of public sentiment against efforts to recover the purloined livestock. “[Kansans] have large herds of Indian stock and to a great extent sympathize with cattle thieves,” he explained. “They all fear their turn will come next in being deprived of their stolen stock, in accordance with your wholesome instructions.” Reynolds even claimed a man from Emporia had “publicly threatened to kill me on sight because the troops, acting under my orders, had taken a lot of cattle while in transitu from the Indian country.”

That summer U.S. Army Inspector General Randolph B. Marcy wrote to U.S. Senator James Rood Doolittle of Wisconsin, who was investigating the condition of the Western tribes and causes of the Indian wars. Marcy had traveled through Kansas and Indian Territory and concluded the biggest problem was “the demoralizing influences of unprincipled white men.” The resident Five Civilized Tribes were generally “better farmers and live more comfortably than the poor white people.” The Indians had successfully tilled the soil and raised large numbers of cattle and hogs, Marcy observed, but in recent years they’d been “robbed of large numbers of their cattle by people from Kansas. Indeed, so flagrant had been these outrages that during the last summer I found the entire country along Grand River for 150 miles totally depopulated.”

In his 1865 annual report Indian Affairs Commissioner Dennis N. Cooley said he was stunned by the rapacious avarice he saw in Kansas, “as if an obliquity of conscience had affected the whole community on the border.”

There was no use in trying to prosecute, an officer in the field told Cooley, “because they openly make their boasts that they can buy men enough to swear anything they want them to.” From the estimates of his agents and by his own calculations the commissioner figured that over the prior few years some 300,000 cattle, worth an estimated $4 million, had been taken from the Indians.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

the colonel. Phillips had provided the commissioner with a seemingly damning complaint against the superintendent, submitted and signed by a Creek. Dismissing the Indian as the colonel’s “supple tool,” Coffin alleged it was Phillips and his cronies, army sutlers D.H. Ross & Co., who were running crooked operations to drive out McDonald & Fuller. They had doctored boxes of supplies, the superintendent claimed, to make it appear he was providing shoddy goods to the Creeks. Phillips’ charges, Coffin sputtered in conclusion, were “a miserable abortion, a desperate and dastardly effort to retain his position, in which he has shown himself so utterly inefficient and worthless.”

It was apparently never determined who was or was not to blame. Perhaps all parties participated in the corruption. What did occur was that thousands of beeves driven north to Kansas were sold back to the government, which then drove them back south to provision the Indians—in other words, they ate their own cattle.

In March 1865 Congress passed an act stating that any persons who stole livestock from Indian Territory for purposes of trade or commerce would be guilty of a felony and subject to a fine of up to $5,000 and/or imprisonment for up to three years. When the Civil War ended that spring, Elijah Sells replaced Coffin as head of Indian Affairs’ Southern Superintendency. His superiors tasked Sells with investigating the claims of stolen cattle. But new superintendent or not, war or no war, law or no law, the thieves remained undeterred.

Rustlers on the Rampage

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NEBRASKA STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

PHOTO CREDIT

In 1865 Congress sought to curb such activity by passing an act that stated any persons who stole livestock from Indian Territory for purposes of trade or commerce would be guilty of a felony.

NEBRASKA STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PHOTO CREDIT

The losses were devastating. A year later Commissioner Cooley reported that settlers in Kansas continued to encroach on the 6,000 remaining Indians, taking their land, cutting their timber and running off their last few head of stock. The tribes, he wrote, were anxious to move to Indian Territory, “where white settlers cannot interfere with them.”

By then Indians in the Southern Superintendency were down to just 4,982 head of cattle—less than one per person.

With little Indian stock left to steal, but with a growing appetite for cattle, the central Plains states at first welcomed Texans, who saw the market opportunities and began driving their Longhorns north, cutting trails across Indian lands. Some of the Longhorns, however, were infected by babesiosis, aka “Texas fever,” a parasitic disease transmissible to humans, and by 1868 Indian and white farmers and ranchers alike had taken measures to prevent infected stock from crossing their property. To offset their losses the Indians tried to impose a tax for every head of Longhorn driven across their reserves. Armed drovers defiantly disregarded the levy, some attacking the Indians or driving off their cattle to compensate for their trouble.

The Indians sometimes stole Longhorns in retaliation. Open war was averted when both sides agreed to follow federal trade and intercourse laws and go through the depredation claims process. But whose claims were legitimate? Regardless, the side with the most lawyers often won.

The theft of Indian stock never fully ended. In 1877 the agent at Spotted Tail in Nebraska reported that rustlers operating out of the Black Hills had stolen 400 ponies from the Indians and said the chances of recovering any of them “amount to nothing.” That same year at the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency in Darlington, Indian Territory, rustlers—much as they had done a dozen years earlier—ran off 160 horses “through the regular channel via Dodge City.” The culprits were Kansans, whom the agent called “the common curse of this country…who kept up their depredations with great vigilance and success until the last Indian had left the Plains.” Some of the thieves were caught, arrested and sent to Fort Smith for trial, but witnesses proved unwilling either to travel that far or to speak against them. Little had changed. Agents continued to report the unremitting theft of Indian stock—fewer than in former years, but only “because of much smaller herds to steal from.”

By the mid-19th century the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and other Eastern tribes had largely turned to farming and stock raising.

Butchering Their Beef Issue

The theft of Indian stock on the central Plains continued into the 1870s. Some Indians raised their own herds, while others received cattle as “beef issues” from the U.S. government.

Those forced west during the removals of the 1830s and ’40s managed to bring some of their stock with them, while others sold their animals, relying on a government promise to indemnify them with replacement stock after they arrived in their new lands. Many had reestablished and increased their herds, and by the start of the Civil War the numbers did appear limitless— that is, until brazen thieves exploiting the chaos of the war and Reconstruction destroyed what little prosperity they’d regained.

No one wanted the Indians in Kansas, except perhaps government contractors, but no one could protect them in Indian Territory. So, like their stock, they were herded back and forth across the border. Seeing a golden opportunity, white “entrepreneurs” picked off their stock like a swarm of locusts in a wheat field.

Indeed, what occurred on the central Plains between 1864 and ’67 may represent the largest transfer of stolen livestock in American history. The frontier mythology of rapacious Indian raiders certainly merits adjustment. After all, had Indians really wanted to become master thieves, they should have taken lessons from some of their white neighbors.

Wild West special contributor Gregory Michno writes books and articles about Western history from his home in Colorado. His sources for this article included period newspaper articles and reports from the commissioner of Indian Affairs.

For further reading see his 2020 book The Frontiersmen Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

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He Would Not Be Moved

Agent Tom Quinn was the first man killed in the April 2, 1885, Frog Lake Massacre.

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PHOTO CREDIT

Thomas Trueman Quinn tried to accommodate the Plains Crees in Canada, but he couldn’t keep them from joining a doomed rebellion in 1885

By Garry Radison

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SASKATOON PUBLIC LIBRARY

AN UNWITTING AGENT OF WAR

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SASKATOON PUBLIC LIBRARY

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‘Kapwatamut nipahow!’ (‘I killed the Sioux speaker!’)

ith those words, recorded by Saskatchewan pioneer and author William Bleasdell Cameron, Plains Cree war chief Wandering Spirit informed fellow Indians gathered at Frog Lake on April 2, 1885, they were at war with the Canadian government. For the previous decade the Crees had cautiously cooperated with the constitutional monarchy, but in a matter of hours that relationship faltered when one man said, “No.” Kapwatamut—the Sioux speaker—was Thomas Trueman Quinn, the agent employed by Canada’s Indian Department to oversee the Crees on reserves near Frog Lake. His main concern had been to watch over Big Bear and his band, who were staying on Chief Unipouheos’ reserve until Big Bear chose a reserve of his own.

At the time of his death Quinn was 44. He had lived near Indians and dealt with them all his life. His father and the frontier society in which Quinn was reared had strongly informed his attitudes and ideas.

His father, Peter Quinn, was born in Ireland in 1787. Around 1802, while returning home from school in Dublin, Peter was seized by a press gang recruiting for the Royal Navy. After being forced to serve five years on a man-of-war, Peter obtained employment with the British fur trading firm Hudson’s Bay Co. In 1820 the company sent him to its trading post at Fort Garry (on the site of present-day Winnipeg, Manitoba).

By 1823 Peter was living at the Hudson’s Bay trading post in Pembina, just inside the American line 70 miles south of Fort Garry. In that rowdy community he met and married 25-year-old Mary Louise Finley, a Métis from the Red Lake region in what would become Minnesota. In 1824 the couple followed other Métis families to Camp Coldwater, a U.S. Army construction camp for workers building Fort Snelling, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers.

Peter landed a position as an Indian agent and interpreter at Camp Coldwater and the trading post at Leech Lake. He was present at the signing of treaties with the Ojibwes and Dakota Sioux in 1837. By 1840 the Quinns were living in St. Peter, Iowa Territory, a settlement some 70 miles up the Minnesota River from Fort Snelling. A year later Peter and Mary had their third son, Thomas Trueman Quinn.

Tom grew up on the Upper Mississippi frontier. Through his father’s work and his mother’s family he maintained close

contact with Indian culture. He learned several tribal languages including Sioux. In the 1850s his parents sent him north to the Red River Colony (which had grown up around Fort Garry) to be schooled by the Catholic priests at St. Boniface College, where he became proficient at reading, writing and speaking English and French. In the late 1850s Tom returned home.

In March 1857 Tom’s father accompanied the Army to Spirit Lake, Iowa Territory, where Dakota Sioux under Chief Inkpaduta had killed 34 settlers. In the wake of the signing of an 1858 treaty the Santee Sioux near the Yellow Medicine Agency west of Fort Snelling grew sullen, rebellious and insulting. When the Dakota Uprising broke out across the region in August 1862, Thomas’ father, despite his 75 years, proved useful to the Army as an interpreter. On August 18 he was attached to Company B of the 5th Minnesota Infantry when killed amid an attack on the column

by Chief Little Crow’s Santee Sioux at the Redwood Ferry crossing of the Minnesota.

The next morning, not yet aware of his father’s death, Tom Quinn, who was clerking in a trader’s store near the Yellow Medicine Agency, was directly affected by the uprising when Sioux attacked the store. His employer was killed, but young Quinn was saved when a Sioux friend helped conceal him beneath the counter among empty salt sacks.

In Quinn’s recounting of the event to Cameron he claimed he’d hidden “in an empty barrel and worked it under the counter with his fingers.” Later that night Quinn escaped.

After several days without food, traveling only in darkness, he reached a military post.

In the wake of the uprising, the Army hanged 38 of the Sioux warriors from a common gallows in Mankato on Dec. 26, 1862. Quinn may have attended the mass hanging.

After his frightening experience in the uprising, he developed a stronger, more confrontational approach toward the demoralized Sioux.

By 1878 Tom Quinn, 37, had almost 20 years of experience in dealing with Indians. He’d followed in his father’s footsteps, serving as an interpreter for the Army. His reputation and connections opened up an opportunity in Canada—employment with the North-West Mounted Police. Established five years earlier, the Canadian police force hired him as an AUGUST 2021

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interpreter to deal with the American Sioux who had fled north to Canada rather than surrender after the Great Sioux War of 1876–77.

Quinn eventually made his home in Battleford, Saskatchewan. His experience and intelligence soon brought him to the attention of M.G. Dickieson, the Indian agent at Battleford, who appointed Quinn to a clerkship in his office.

Dickieson had been warning superiors in Ottawa the Indians were likely to become violent due to the government’s failure to provide adequate supplies. Unfortunately for the Crees, Dickieson was an interim appointment and left the agency in 1879.

When lawyer Hayter Reed, a former militia major, took over the agency in March 1881, he imposed military discipline on his new office.

The government had tasked Reed with reducing expenditures. The agent’s repeated refusals to provide rations to the Crees unless they worked in return prompted them to call him “Iron Heart.” Supported by his superiors, Reed doubled down, believing leniency would only encourage the Indians to make ever more extravagant requests. Quinn adopted his methods without question.

Though generally good-natured, Quinn expected others to work as diligently as he did.

He did not tolerate insolence or insubordination. In 1883 he appeared in court in Battleford, charged with having assaulted D.L. Clink, an agency farm instructor. Quinn had slapped Clink for using abusive language and behaving impertinently toward him. Though fined 72 WILD WEST

$20 for the assault, Quinn apparently received no reprimand from the Indian Department.

In spring 1882 Big Bear’s Plains Crees, pressured by the U.S. military, returned to Canada after having wintered in Montana Territory. Due to the scarcity of buffalo they camped near Fort Walsh, where they hoped to receive food supplies from the North-West Mounted Police. The government was willing to provide rations, but only if Big Bear signed Treaty 6 and settled with his band above the North Saskatchewan River, where other bands had reserves. Big Bear refused, using the delay to pressure Ottawa for better terms. Finally, in May 1883 the government, to force the issue, dismantled and abandoned Fort Walsh and refused to issue further supplies. In December Big Bear reluctantly signed the treaty and agreed to move north.

By then Quinn was the Indian subagent at Fort Pitt, 100 miles up the North Saskatchewan from Battleford. He was under instructions to facilitate the band’s move to Frog Lake, 30 miles farther northwest. Quinn and his superiors hoped the docile Woods Crees, who had reserves in that area, would mollify the more belligerent Plains Crees.

Quinn arrived at Big Bear’s camp in mid-June 1883. He made a good first impression on the Crees, speaking their language and seeking to accommodate them. Because the government had provided six cartloads of supplies and a small herd of cattle for slaughtering on the journey, Quinn could be generous. To the Crees the gift of beef was a sign the government would honor the treaty. As reported in the Saskatchewan Herald, the band, 550 members strong, headed north on June 29 accompanied by Quinn and 15 mounted policemen.

But Big Bear did not go directly to Frog Lake. Still holding out for better treaty terms, he procrastinated and changed direction to meet with other chiefs. His band finally arrived at Fort Pitt in September, and the following month Quinn distributed their treaty payments.

That winter Big Bear, still at Fort Pitt, resolved to sponsor a “thirst dance” in the spring. In June 1884, when Quinn denied permission for the ceremony, Big Bear took his band 85 miles downriver to Plains Cree Chief Poundmaker’s reserve to hold the dance regardless. Soon after their arrival farm instructor John Craig of the nearby Little Pine reserve got in a scuffle with a Cree named Man Who Speaks Our Language and summoned the North-West Mounted Police. Warriors confronted newly appointed Inspector Leif Newry Fitzroy Crozier and his officers as they

TOP: SASKATOON PUBLIC LIBRARY; BELOW: SASK HISTORY ONLINE

Plains Cree leader Big Bear (standing fourth from left) took his time moving his band north in 1883, pausing first at Fort Pitt, where Indian Subagent Quinn made a first good impression.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA

Dawdling at Fort Pitt

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In 1884 Louis Riel, instigator of the 1869–70 Red River Rebellion, had returned to Saskatchewan from Montana Territory at the invitation of Métis leaders in Batoche, just east of Duck Lake. Though Riel had failed to secure the Metis’ rights to property and self-determination in 1870, he was again making demands on the government as their spokesman. As spring 1885 approached, everyone in the broader North-West Territories was aware another rebellion was possible. Many believed it was unavoidable. Métis messengers encouraged the Crees to support Riel if violence broke out.

On March 19 Riel declared the independent Provisional Government of Saskatchewan, based in Batoche, and called for the surrender of Fort Carlton, on the banks of the North Saskatchewan west of Duck Lake. The anticipated violence followed a week later when Inspector Crozier sent a force of mounted police and volunteers to secure supplies from Duck

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA

TOP: SASKATOON PUBLIC LIBRARY; BELOW: SASK HISTORY ONLINE

attempted to make the arrest. But cooler heads prevailed, neither side willing to initiate violence. News of the confrontation put Quinn under pressure to settle Big Bear on a reserve, where his men could be controlled.

Sometime that year Quinn took Owl Sitting, a member of Big Bear’s band, for his wife, and they soon had a daughter. The alliance should have strengthened his relationship with the Crees. But perhaps due to Reed’s influence Quinn had gained a reputation as a hard man known for his refusals. Under strict orders to economize, Quinn could no longer be the generous and accommodating man the Crees had anticipated.

That October the treaty payments did not go smoothly. Big Bear’s people wanted beef, but Quinn refused to issue anything other than flour and the usual slabs of bacon. Little Poplar, an outspoken hothead, wrested control of the meeting, sending everyone from the room so that none would accept Quinn’s humiliating offer. Hudson’s Bay factor Angus McKay defused the situation by proffering the Cree a slaughtered steer.

A month later Big Bear, renewing his promise to choose a reserve in the spring, moved his band to Chief Unipouheos’ reserve at Frog Lake.

Adjacent to the Woods Cree reserve at Frog Lake a small settlement had emerged, Canadian settlers having established a Catholic church, a Hudson’s Bay store and a police detachment. Nearing completion was a building that would serve as both home and office to Subagent Quinn.

The winter of 1884–85 was harsh and cold. Quinn expected the Crees to work for rations, their main employment being woodcutting, an activity that appeared pointless to them. The general feeling of unrest was inflamed by rumors of a brewing rebellion.

Horse Child and Cameron

Big Bear’s youngest son poses at age 12 in 1885 with William Bleasdell Cameron, then a scout for the Alberta Field Force.

Lake and encountered a rebel force. In the March 26 clash the police and militia lost a dozen men, the Métis five. The Cree bands awaited further developments before choosing sides.

Quinn received word of the Duck Lake fight at midnight on March 30, two days after the Crees received the news. The next morning he requested a meeting with Big Bear. He also sent,

by Cree runner, a message to the nearby Onion Lake agency that he would visit in two days. The Crees intercepted that message and received another one, probably from a Métis sympathizer, claiming that soldiers were en route to annihilate Big Bear’s band. Though they could not confirm the rumor, the Crees had little choice than to treat it seriously and plan a defense.

On the morning of April 1, at a meeting with Big Bear and his councilors, Quinn calmly sought to convince Big Bear the brewing rebellion did not concern the Crees. He remained oblivious of the Métis rumor. Quinn was also unaware the Crees had already developed a defensive plan, and nothing the agent said that morning assuaged their fears. Control of the band had silently passed from Big Bear to his war chief.

Unaware of Cree protocol, many historians claim After His Surrender

Big Bear, who turned himself in at Fort Carlton in Saskatchewan on July 2, 1885, poses in captivity at the Stony Mountain Penitentiary in Manitoba.

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Wandering Spirit usurped Big Bear’s authority. But the transition of power was legitimate according to Cree tradition, which required a chief relinquish power to his war chief until a crisis had passed.

Leaving Quinn in the dark about the rumor, Wandering Spirit urged him to convince the Canadians at Frog Lake to shelter at Fort Pitt, where they would be safe from the Métis. But Quinn refused to abandon his post, while the settlers felt no particular urgency to leave.

Quinn and the Canadians had no clue their refusal to leave placed Wandering Spirit in a difficult situation. Determined to protect his people from annihilation, he planned to move all Cree bands in a 60-mile radius into one large, defensible camp, a place of refuge for them and their allies, which included many Métis. Anyone left outside the camp would be in danger. For their own protection the Canadians would have to be brought into the camp as friends. To prompt such

LEFT: SASK HISTORY ONLINE (2); BOTTOM RIGHT: GRAPHER78, CC BY-SA 3.0

BIG BEAR

In the predawn darkness of April 2 Quinn and Owl Sitting woke to the sound of intruders, two Cree men who had entered the house through a window. They were challenged at gunpoint

by Owl Sitting’s relatives Lone Man and Sitting Horse, who had spent the night. When Wandering Spirit arrived, the relatives backed down in recognition of his authority. The war chief told Quinn not to leave Frog Lake that morning as he had planned.

Hours passed while Wandering Spirit waited for his new camp to coalesce about 2 miles north of the agency. At midmorning he and Quinn had a tense meeting in the agent’s office. Wandering Spirit wanted to deal with a higher authority. According to Cameron, who clerked for the Hudson’s Bay store at Frog Lake and was summoned to the meeting, Wandering Spirit shook his fist in Quinn’s face. “Who is at the head of the whites in this country?” the war chief asked. “Is it the governor, or the Hudson’s Bay Co., or who?”

Quinn laughed. “Sir John Macdonald, a man at Ottawa,” he replied. “He is chief of all the white men who deal with the Indians.” Somewhat taken aback, Wandering Spirit then demanded beef. Surprisingly, and to Wandering Spirit’s relief, Quinn acquiesced.

SASK HISTORY ONLINE (2)

a move, Wandering Spirit informed the settlers Métis marauders were in the area.

In order to avoid siding with either the Métis or the Canadian government, Wandering Spirit knew the Crees would eventually have to explain themselves. The only person who could authoritatively convey their neutral position to Ottawa was Quinn. He could not be allowed to leave Frog Lake unless the Canadians went with him.

Without Quinn’s cooperation the Crees would certainly be seen as aggressors taking hostages and siding with Riel.

Agency and Company Men at Fort Pitt

Quinn is at far left and Hudson’s Bay manager James Simpson in the middle in this 1884 photo.

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SASK HISTORY ONLINE (2)

Although he had signaled his willand said: ‘We want you to go with the other white people to camp. ingness to cooperate by providThey are just now leaving.’ The agent replied as he walked along: ing beef, Quinn made a decision ‘No, I am not going over. I will be staying at my house as before. that would prove fatal. Around I refuse to take orders from anybody here.’ Wandering Spirit again 11 a.m.—as the Crees escorted spoke: ‘My brother, I beg you to leave with the rest. It will save settlers from the church, where trouble for you and everybody here.’ they’d been holding Mass, toward the new camp—Quinn and interHis authority in the balance, Quinn crossed over the path preter John Pritchard walked to leading to the camp. But Wandering Spirit’s reputation was the house of Hudson’s Bay manager also at stake. His failure to defend the band would mean loss JOHN James K. Simpson to speak with Big of his position as war chief and perhaps ostracism. Quinn’s PRITCHARD Bear, who was calmly eating a meal refusal to accept the protection afforded by the Cree camp forced prepared by Simpson’s Cree wife.

Wandering Spirit’s hand. From his perspective there was only one The purpose of the visit was to seek Big Bear’s recourse. John Horse witnessed it: “The agent kept on walking and permission for Quinn and Pritchard to remain repeated that he was not going to any camp. ‘Die then,’ said Wandering in their homes rather than go into the camp. Spirit as he loaded his gun and shot the agent dead on the spot.”

Simpson’s wife recalled the exchange in testiThe plan to shelter the Canadians in the new camp collapsed with mony at Big Bear’s trial later that year. “Pritch- the death of Quinn. Wandering Spirit, having ostensibly declared war, ard did not say anything,” she stated, “but Tom shouted an order to “kill them all.” Within 10 minutes eight other men Quinn said this: ‘Big Bear, could I remain at lay dead. The warriors then rounded up Cameron, newly widowed my own house, and Pritchard the same, and Theresa Delaney and Theresa Gowanlock and some 70 other locals as this woman [Mrs. Simpson] also?’ ‘Oh, I suppose captives. Quinn’s nephew, Henry, managed to flee unnoticed and report you could,’ Big Bear said.” what had transpired.

When Mrs. Simpson said she would go to the Wandering Spirit’s war was short-lived. Unable to match the firepower camp, Quinn responded, “That will be all right, of the Canadian soldiers, he kept his band on the run. Big Bear’s son but as for me, I am going to stay right at my Imasees (Bad Child) and 130 followers fled to Montana Territory, where house.” On leaving the Simpson house, Quinn he took the name Little Bear and his band roamed the borderlands as vagaand Pritchard were followed, some Crees trailing bonds. Found guilty of treason and imprisoned for 18 months, Big Bear died Pritchard toward his home, others shadowing at age 62 on Jan. 17, 1888. Wandering Spirit and seven other Crees were Quinn, who cut cross-country toward his agency. tried for the murders at Frog Lake and two killings at Battleford, and Wandering Spirit intercepted Quinn. Eleven- on Nov. 27, 1885, Canadian authorities hanged them at Fort Battleford. year-old John Horse, the Cree son of Hudson’s Agent Tom Quinn had died promoting the government’s vision of a Bay employees, recalled what happened next: new Canadian West. Unfortunately for him and others, Big Bear’s Crees, bound by an older tradition that had served them for generations, did not share that vision.

The agent was making a shortcut and was a few feet

LEFT: SASK HISTORY ONLINE (2); BOTTOM RIGHT: GRAPHER78, CC BY-SA 3.0

off the trail when Wandering Spirit called to him

Garry Radison, who was born and raised in Saskatchewan and lives in Alberta, Canada, writes poetry and Western history books. For further reading he suggests his own Defending Frog Lake: An Analysis of the Frog Lake Massacre, 2 April 1885; Wandering Spirit: Cree Warrior; and Fine Day: Plains Cree Warrior, Shaman & Elder, as well as William Bleasdell Cameron’s Blood Red the Sun, the revised version of his 1926 book The War Trail of Big Bear.

Buried Where They Fell

IMASEES (AKA LITTLE BEAR)

This cairn, commemorating the April 2, 1885, massacre in which Wandering Spirit’s Plains Crees killed Quinn and eight others, stands in the Frog Lake Cemetery amid the graves of victims.

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COLLECTIONS The anachronistic array of historic buildings on the west side of Cody, Wyo., are what first draw visitors to Old Trail Town, though its founder also preserved period vehicles, memorabilia and artifacts.

A TOWN WITHIN FAMED CODY istoric locales nationwide recall the life and times of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, but none as proudly as the namesake town of Cody, Wyo., which he helped establish just east of Yellowstone National Park in 1896. Founded in the heart of town in 1917 (the year of his death), the Buffalo Bill Center of the West preserves the tales and trappings of the scout turned world-famous showman. But there’s plenty more to see in Cody, including Old Trail Town, which occupies the very spot where Buffalo Bill and friends platted the original townsite.

The founder of Old Trail Town was Wyoming native Bob Edgar (1939–2012), who developed a keen interest in regional history while working as an archaeologist for what was then known as the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. It prompted him to preserve the frontier buildings and artifacts he knew were in danger of vanishing. In the spring of 1967 he scoured the region to find period buildings in which he could house his growing collection. Once located, he had the buildings taken apart, moved and reassembled at the “townsite” on Cody’s west side. Old Trail Town boasts 26 buildings dating from 1879 to 1901, an extensive collection of frontier memorabilia and Indian artifacts, 100 horse-drawn vehicles and a cemetery.

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Two noteworthy structures claim ties to Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch (aka the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang). The first is an 1883 two-room log cabin built by gang cohort Alexander Ghent on Buffalo Creek in Wyoming’s Johnson County, a rendezvous point for Butch, the Sundance Kid and other area outlaws. The second, the Mud Spring Cabin, was reportedly used as a hideout by Sundance and Kid Curry in 1897 while planning to rob the bank in Red Lodge, Mont., though it appears they chose another target.

Another cabin with historic ties is Curley’s Cabin. A Crow scout with Lt. Col. George A. Custer’s 7th U.S. Cavalry, Curley (or Curly) survived the ill-fated June 25–26, 1876, Battle of the Little Bighorn and shared his version of events with a shocked nation. Branded as a hero by some and a coward by others, he lived in this cabin on south-central Montana’s Crow Indian Reservation from 1885 until his death from pneumonia in 1923.

Partners Oliver Hana and Jim White built the 1880 Buffalo Hunter’s Cabin on north-central Wyoming’s Shell Creek, a tributary of the Bighorn River. From 1884 to ’86 Luther Morrison, who brought some of the first sheep into central Wyoming in 1882, lived with wife Lucy in the Morrison Cabin at the foot of Copper Mountain, northeast of Shoshoni. Among the other

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PHOTOS COURTESY OLD TRAIL TOWN, WYO. (3)

H

WYOMING’S OLD TRAIL TOWN PRESERVES OLD WEST BUILDINGS AND MEMORIALIZES NOTABLE WESTERNERS

BY LINDA WOMMACK

PHOTOS COURTESY OLD TRAIL TOWN, WYO. (3)

COLLECTIONS structures on Old Trail Town’s Main Street are the 1899 Wood River Homestead Cabin, the 1884 Coffin School (also from the Wood River, in which a woodcutter died of gangrene after having hacked himself in the leg), the 1897 Carter Cabin (from the ranch of William Carter, who brought the first large cattle herd to the Big Horn Basin), the 1885 Trapper’s Cabin (from Cottonwood Creek south of Meeteetse) and the 1886 McNally Cabin (the first cabin in Meeteetse, built by Bill McNally).

One structure that didn’t have to be moved far was the home of Cody’s founding mayor, Frank L. Houx, who lived in town from 1897 to 1903.

Houx later served as Wyoming secretary of state (1911–19) and acting governor (1917–19).

Visitors may also want to wander the Old Trail Town cemetery, in which nearly a dozen Westerners of various repute were at some point reinterred from their original burial sites. Perhaps the best known figure buried here is mountain man John Jeremiah “Liver Eating” Johnston. Born in New Jersey in 1824, Johnston ventured to what would become Wyoming and Montana in the 1840s. After finding his Indian wife and unborn child murdered

by Crows, he engaged in a personal vendetta against the tribe that lasted nearly a dozen years. Legend has it he cut out and ate the liver of each Crow he killed in order to intimidate his sworn enemies.

During the Civil War he fought for the Union with the 2nd Colorado Cavalry, and he later became a Montana Territory lawman—as a deputy marshal in Coulson (a mile east of Billings), in 1882, and first town marshal of Red Lodge, in 1888. Johnston died in California in 1900 but was reburied at Old Trail Town in 1974 after a campaign by history-minded seventh graders from Cody.

Another notable Westerner at rest here is scout and hunter Simpson E. “Comanche Jack” Stillwell, born in Kansas in 1850. On Sept. 17, 1868, the 18-year-old was serving as one of Major George A. Forsyth’s Kansas scouts when they were besieged by Cheyenne and Sioux warriors in the Battle of Beecher Island. After the first day of fighting he volunteered to ride for help from Fort Wallace, 125 miles away. On September 25 the 10th U.S. Cavalry arrived, much to the relief of survivors on the sandbar amid the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River in what would become Colorado. The intrepid scout later served as a deputy U.S. marshal in Oklahoma Territory, befriended Buffalo Bill and started a small ranch on the South Fork of the Shoshone River near Cody. Stillwell died in Cody in 1903 and was reburied in Old Trail Town in 1984.

Sharing the cemetery with such good and bad men is notorious Belle Drewry (1867–97), who in

1890 popped up in Arland, Wyo., working as a saloon and dance hall girl and at a brothel on the outskirts of town. In the spring of 1894 she and cowboy Bill Wheaton were charged with the murder of Belle’s onetime paramour W.A. Gallagher, a ranch hand and sometime horse thief. While Wheaton spent eight years in the Wyoming State Prison at Laramie, Drewry remained free as a bird—well, “soiled dove,” anyway. Belle’s wild ways caught up with her in 1897, when she was shot dead by an unknown assailant. She was reburied here in 1986.

Other attractions at Old Trail Town include the 1888 River’s Saloon, an 1890 livery barn, an 1898 granary, a wagon barn, several stores and two 1898 blacksmith shops. Serving as the main entrance is one of a few cabins salvaged from the town of Marquette, Wyo., the site of which lies submerged behind the 1910 Buffalo Bill Dam. Beside the entrance stands a late 19th-century horse-drawn hearse, perhaps awaiting the next burial. For more information visit oldtrailtown.org or call 307-587-5302.

Top: The Crow scout Curley, who served with Lt. Col. George Custer and the 7th U.S. Cavalry at the June 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, lived in this cabin from 1885 until his death in 1923.

Above: Frontier figures once mixed at the 1888 River’s Saloon, moved here from the Wood River, west of presentday Meeteetse, Wyo.

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GUNS OF THE WEST

1877 This Model 1877 Springfield trapdoor carbine is equipped with a modern scope on a rail using the original tap holes.

TRAPDOOR EVOLUTION

T

he rifle designed by Connecticut gunsmith Erskine S. Allin (1809–79) and manufactured by the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts began as the cheapest means of converting Civil War muzzleloaders into a breechloaders. Allin’s first effort, the .58-caliber rimfire Model 1865, featured a hinged breechblock soldered to the barrel. Problem was, when the barrel heated up, the block often fell off. Improvements included a hinged block in a receiver and a rifled liner in the barrel to accommodate a .50-caliber centerfire cartridge.

Unfortunately, the liners had a habit of “starting” (i.e., creeping forward), and it was determined it would be cheaper to rifle a new barrel. While those in the know in the War Department were aware a .45-caliber bullet was more accurate and ballistically superior to the .50, the department didn’t adopt the .45 until 1872. It initially featured a 405-grain bullet—70 grains of black powder for the rifle, 55 for the carbine. The economics worked, as Springfield could keep much of its tooling and access a stockpile of surplus Civil War parts.

The .45-70–caliber Model 1873 carbine and rifle were better performers, but problems remained with these Springfield “trapdoors” (so named because their hinged breechblocks swung up and forward like trapdoors). Soldiers complained of its poor sights, while cavalrymen faulted the carbine’s long, weak wrist (rear hand grip), easily broken when, for example, a horse rolled on it. The baptism of fire for the carbine came at the Battle of the 78 WILD WEST

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Rosebud in Montana Territory on June 17, 1876. Widely considered a draw, the clash was noted for woeful marksmanship on the Army’s part, Brig. Gen. George Crook’s men expending some 10,000 rounds of ammunition yet killing only about 35 Sioux and Cheyennes. Crook reported 10 soldiers killed, 21 wounded.

A week later in Montana Territory the June 25–26 Battle of the Little Bighorn revealed a host of shortcomings with the Springfield. Cartridges jammed in hot, fouled barrels when the extractor tore through the soft copper alloy of the case heads.

Pocket knives broke in efforts to extract the jammed cases, leaving troopers to fight with their revolvers. Just how decisive the .45-70 Springfield trapdoors proved to the outcome of the two-day battle remains a subject of debate. Regardless, the defeat of Lt. Col. George Armstrong and the 7th U.S. Cavalry sent shock waves across the country. The technological failings were felt keenly at the Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia, where exhibitors included Springfield and the hometown Frankford Arsenal, which handed out awkwardly inappropriate souvenir cartridges.

But the Springfield trapdoor would not die with Custer. Further improvements resulted in the Model 1877 carbine. This version featured a stouter wrist, a better sight and, most important, a trap in the buttstock that held a three-piece jointed cleaning rod and a headless shell extractor. Springfield also included a takedown tool.

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C. RODNEY JAMES (2)

SPRINGFIELD CARBINES AND RIFLES LIVED ON IN IMPROVED VERSIONS AFTER LT. COL. GEORGE A. CUSTER’S DEFEAT AT THE LITTLE BIGHORN

BY C. RODNEY JAMES

C. RODNEY JAMES (2)

GUNS OF THE WEST

The company rolled out a number of cadet and experimental models in the 1870s and ’80s, mostly rifles with improved sights, parts and appendages.

The year 1879 brought the “great turn in” of Model 1873s, which had seen six years of hard field service, for refurbishment and upgrade. It also welcomed the long-range .45-70 rifle load—a 500 grain bullet with a muzzle velocity of 1,315 feet per second.

That joint effort with Frankford required Springfield to strengthen the breechblock and receiver.

The new cartridge proved something of a doubleedged sword. It was capable of five-shot groups under 2 inches at 200 yards and a hit near the center of a 6-foot target at 2,000 yards. The bullet also remained lethal out to its maximum range of 3,350 yards—nearly 2 miles. But the recoil was “like a hurled brick,” said journalist-soldier Charles Johnson Post in his Spanish-American War memoir.

These inch-and-a-quarter projectiles also had a habit of rolling or drifting to the right at greater distances owing to the clockwise twist of the rifling. Springfield ordnance expert Lt. Col. Adelbert Rinaldo Buffington corrected for the drift by developing a namesake rear sight graduated out to 2,000 yards.

The most sophisticated military sight of its day graced the Model 1884 and 1889 rifles and the Model 1884 and 1886 carbines.

Springfield and Frankford were aware of the shortcomings of the 405-grain bullet. Experiments led them to compress its 70-grain black powder charge into a nearly solid cake, the only means to fit it into the space behind the long bullet. A hotter, longer-burning primer produced less fouling than the 56 percent solids generated by loose-loaded powder. The bullet was of a soft, lead-tin alloy (16-1) and slightly undersized—.459 inches for the .462-inch bore. A heavy crimp at the case mouth allowed the bullet to upset, filling the bore as it came out of the case. As the deep-groove rifling (0.005 inches) gradually filled with fouling, each successive bullet expanded to fill the available space without raising pressures or causing leading to degrade accuracy, translating into a longer run than other rifles of the era.

The end was in sight for the trapdoor with the French introduction of the Lebel Model 1886 rifle, a repeater firing an 8 mm jacketed bullet propelled by smokeless powder at more than 2,000 feet per second. By 1890 every modern European nation was equipped with similar weapons. In the United States trapdoors sold at junk prices, though state guards used them into the 1920s. The last official issuance of trapdoors was for shore patrol in Oregon in 1942.

With its shorter length, the .45-70 cartridge made an easy transition to smokeless powder and was used in the Spanish-American War. Large black powder cases holding 100 grains or more became obsolete, however, as a full load of smokeless powder in any such case would wreck a gun. The .45-70 has been called the .30-06 of the 19th century.

Interestingly, the “ought-six” has faded in popularity (replaced by the .308, among other calibers), while the .45-70 has seen a resurgence with new guns, replicas and original Springfields for cowboy action shooting and long-range black powder competition. The .45-70-500 cartridge and its rifle represent a high-water mark in 19th-century firearm technology, and as Springfield made more than a half million trapdoors, it remains one of the few historical rifles most shooters can afford.

the Year 1879 brought the ‘great turn in’ of Model 1873s, which had seen six years of hard field service

The buttstock trap of the Model 1877 holds a three-piece cleaning rod and a shell extractor.

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GHOST TOWNS The timber frame from the 20-stamp 1881 Farwell Mill No. 2 is mostly intact.

Below: By 1941 few cabins and fewer people remained.

INDEPENDENCE, COLORADO

P

erched at 10,830 feet on the Continental Divide between Aspen and Leadville, Independence is an unusual ghost town. It was the first major mining camp in central Colorado west of the divide, yet its boom period lasted less than four years. Most of the surrounding camps that followed produced silver, but Independence was a gold camp. Although the town was generally referred to as Independence, its official names included Chipeta, Sparkill, Farwell, Monmouth (or Mammouth) and Mount Hope.

Gold seekers first scoured the region in 1859, but prospecting truly exploded in the mid-1870s with the discovery of rich silver deposits east of the divide. Leadville was founded in 1877 and by 1880 boasted more than 15,000 residents. Prospectors looked eagerly to the mountains to the west, which was Ute land by treaty. Regardless, in the summer of 1879 several parties crossed Hunter Pass (present-day Independence Pass) to explore the Roaring Fork Valley. It was on July 4 that Richard Irwin, Billy Belden and Charles Bennett happened across a rich gold deposit they naturally dubbed the Independence. Word of the discovery got out, and a tent city sprang up, followed by the first cabin, built 80 WILD WEST

by J.R. Connor. By September most of the good ground had been claimed.

On September 29 a group of disaffected Utes attacked and killed agent Nathan Meeker and his 10 employees at the White River Agency west of the divide and also struck a troop of 153 cavalrymen and 25 militiamen at nearby Mill Creek, killing 13 of them. As a result, the Army removed the Utes to reservations in Utah Territory and along Colorado’s shared border with New Mexico and Utah territories. That, in turn, opened much of western Colorado to prospecting and settlement. The Independence prospectors made themselves scarce until the following spring, partly for safety and partly because of the fierce winter weather, which would prove a continuing problem.

By the time the snow melted in 1880, several silver camps had sprung up, including Aspen and Ashcroft, while Independence rebounded to a population of about 300. A group of investors led by Frank Mason Brown soon acquired most of the best claims—including the Independence, the Last Dollar and the Legal Tender. Operating as the Farwell Consolidated Mining Co., they built a 10-stamp mill and blasted out the Brown Tunnel northward to improve access. The following year Farwell built

TOP: JIM PETTENGILL (3); LEFT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

IT HAD A SHORT RUN AS A GOLD CAMP BEFORE NEARBY SILVER CAMPS TOOK OVER

BY JIM PETTENGILL

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TOP: JIM PETTENGILL (3); LEFT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

GHOST TOWNS

a sawmill and a 20-stamp mill powered by steam and a Pelton wheel.

The firm was soon shipping concentrates to Leadville over a new toll road connecting to Aspen.

Sitting astride the road, Independence became a transportation hub, welcoming freight and stage lines and accommodations for travelers. Its population rose to 500, with room and board fetching $2 per night. The town had three post offices, though ironically none bore the name Independence.

Independence reached its zenith in 1882, its population peaking around 1,500. It comprised 90 buildings and hosted 47 businesses, including hotels and boardinghouses, restaurants, saloons, brothels, a newspaper, a bank, a clothing store, a general store, a barber shop, a bakery, a meat market and several liquor stores. Though a wild town, it was apparently not a violent one. Gold production had also peaked, the combined production in 1881–82 amounting to $190,000 (more than $5 million in present-day dollars).

Unfortunately, Farwell had exhausted the mines.

In 1883 the firm produced ore worth a mere $2,000 ($56,000 today), and by year’s end its mines and facilities were up for sale. While the mines scraped a living for the time being, and transportationrelated businesses flourished, farsighted residents moved downhill to Aspen for the better job market and milder climate. The following year W.L. Davis leased the Farwell property, operating it on a much smaller capacity through 1886, when he too was forced to close for lack of ore.

The transportation side of Independence’s business suffered a mortal blow in 1887 when the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad reached Aspen, followed in early 1888 by the Colorado Midland Railroad.

People no longer needed to travel the rugged 45 miles from Leadville over Hunter Pass. By the time the last post office closed in 1887, the population

had plummeted to fewer than 100. A mini revival in 1891 spelled work for a skeleton crew of six miners, but even that lasted less than a year.

With the economic Panic of 1893 and the subsequent drop in the price of silver, mining all but dried up. Things remained quiet until 1898, when yet another group sought its fortunes at Independence. Led by the discovery of decent ore by longtime resident David Nelson, the Hunter Pass Mining Co. reconditioned the Farwell mill, improved the dilapidated road to Aspen and opened for business. Alas, that winter the worst series of storms in Colorado’s history forced them to shut down.

Seven huge storms hit through early February 1899, paralyzing the region. Conditions were so bad that telephone poles leading to Independence were buried, and a single avalanche swept away a team of 16 draft horses. Supplies in town ran dangerously low. Deciding enough was enough, residents tore planks from the sides of their houses, fashioned makeshift cross-country skis and left en masse for Aspen. They kept up their spirits by designating the exodus the “Hunter Pass Tenderfoot Snowshoe Club Race,” with an entry fee of one ham sandwich. Those who couldn’t ski to Aspen were evacuated over the next few days. The company remained closed through late spring.

By summer residents had returned, the mill employing some 40 people. But the rebound was short-lived. By year’s end the mine had closed, and Independence lay deserted. Attempts were made to reopen in 1907–08, 1931–33 and 1940, but none discovered significant ore. In 1973 the town and mill scored entry on the National Register of Historic Places, and by 1980 the Aspen Historical Society and the U.S. Forest Service had launched preservation efforts. Nineteen structures remain in town, seven at the nearby Farwell mill site. From the parking lot off Highway 82, 16 miles east of Aspen, visitors can access hiking trails with interpretive signs. Guided tours are offered in the summer [aspenhistory.org], but severe winters still manage to close Independence Pass between late October and late May.

Independence still boasts, among other structures, a standing outhouse (left) and a building that likely housed a general store.

The town was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

Residents tore planks from the sides of their houses, fashioned makeshift crosscountry skis and left en masse for aspen

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REVIEWS

MUST SEE, MUST READ BILL CAVALIERE RECOMMENDS APACHE-RELATED BOOKS AND FILMS Chronicles of War: Apache & Yavapai Resistance in the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico, 1821–1937 (2014, by Berndt Kuhn): This amazing book records every known incident of Apache aggression against Americans or Mexicans, beginning with the first entry in 1821 and concluding with the final one in 1937. The encyclopedic entries are in chronological order. The resulting tome, which took 30 years to produce, comprises nearly 4,000 entries. At the risk of sounding cliché, this book is a must for every serious student of the Apaches.

From Cochise to Geronimo (2010, by Edwin R. Sweeney): Chiricahua Apache historian Edwin Sweeney wrote five Apacherelated books, edited a sixth and was widely accepted as the world’s foremost authority on Cochise.

This book, the fifth in his output, is far and away his magnum opus.

His meticulous research makes it the ultimate book on the Chiricahua Apaches, one that will be referenced for many years to come. It boasts minute details, never-before-published information and the most up-to-date facts concerning the 12-year period of 1874—86 (Sweeney covered the years prior in his earlier biographies Cochise and Mangas Coloradas). At 706 pages, this is the final word on the subject.

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From Fort Marion to Fort Sill (2013, by Alicia Delgadillo): While many books on the Chiricahua Apaches concentrate on their struggle to preserve ancestral homelands, this interesting book highlights their time as prisoners of war (hence the title). Painstakingly researched and lavishly illustrated with black-andwhite and color photographs, the book presents each letter of the alphabet as the chapter heading, with Apache POW names listed in their respective chapters.

This format makes the book an excellent resource for researchers of tribal history and culture.

An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre (1886, by John G. Bourke): Captain Bourke of the 3rd U.S. Cavalry wrote this small book after participating in Brig. Gen. George Crook’s 1883 expedition into Mexico’s Sierra Madre to recover a 6-year-old boy stolen by the Apaches and return the hostiles to the reservation. Bourke was also an ethnologist and a naturalist, as reflected in his writing. Drawing from his personal notes, the narrative is flush with vivid descriptions of Apache culture and regional flora and fauna, as well as violent warfare. A classic.

The Struggle for Apacheria (2001, by Peter Cozzens): A boon to researchers, this book shares most of the important documents related to the Apache wars, including many rare accounts. It is divided into six parts, Part 1 containing documents from 1865–72, Part 2 covering 1872–78, Part 3 covering 1878–83, etc., and ending with 1890.

MOVIES Broken Arrow (1950, on DVD and Blu-ray, 20th Century Fox): This classic Western was among the first to depict American Indians in a positive light.

Nearly all the actors portray real-life figures. The indefatigable James Stewart stars as Indian agent/Army scout Tom Jeffords, Brooklyn-born Jeff Chandler plays Cochise, Basil Ruysdael plays General Oliver O. Howard and the reliable Jay Silverheels, a Mohawk, portrays Geronimo. Teenage beauty Debra Paget makes her Fox debut as Jeffords’ fictionalized love interest, Sonseeahray. While the film conveys the basics of the remarkable relationship between Jeffords and Cochise, the plot is highly fictionalized. Still a lot of fun, and Chandler was nominated for best supporting actor for his portrayal of the great Apache leader.

Conquest of Cochise (1953, on DVD and Blu-ray, Columbia Pictures): Made just a few years after the hugely successful Broken Arrow, this B-movie rip-off presents a wholly fictional story line with only two characters, Cochise and Al Sieber, based on real-life figures.

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REVIEWS It is creakily directed

by William Castle, who went on to specialize in B-horror movies, and after one viewing of this film one can see why.

Castle eventually “graduated” to produce Rosemary’s Baby.

John Hodiak portrays Cochise with every stereotype he can muster, aided by a mannequinlike Robert Stack.

Joy Page plays Consuelo, a Mexican woman with whom—get ready for this—Cochise falls head over heels!

Apache (1954, on DVD and Blu-ray, United Artists): Apache is supposedly based on the true story of Massai, who jumped from the train carrying surrendered Chiricahuas to imprisonment in Florida. Alas, what sounds like a great concept once again falls victim to typical Hollywood studio meddling and fictionalization. Portraying Massai is blue-eyed Burt Lancaster in an ill-fitting wig, while his love interest, a fictional Apache named Nalinie, is played by blue-eyed Jean Peters in an equally ill-fitting wig.

Silent-era star Monte Blue has a cameo aboard the train as Geronimo. The film comes to a typical happy ending when Al Sieber ( John McIntire) resolves to stop hunting Massai after

both hear the crying of Nalinie’s newborn.

Ulzana’s Raid (1972, on DVD and Blu-ray, Universal Pictures): The opening scene of an idyllic baseball game on the grounds of Fort Lowell stands in stark contrast to the brutality yet to come. Loosely based on the actual 1885 raid led by Chokonen Apache war chief Ulzana, this movie garnered an R rating due to scenes of violence and rape. After the Apaches flee the reservation and leave a trail of blood in their path, the Army sends soldiers in pursuit.

Among them are grizzled scout John Macintosh (Burt Lancaster), an experienced sergeant (Richard Jaeckel), Apache scout Ke-Ni-Tay ( Jorge Luke) and shavetail Lieutenant Garnett DeBuin (Bruce Davison). Ulzana is menacingly portrayed by Joaquin Martinez, who speaks nary a word.

Geronimo: An American Legend (1993, on DVD and Blu-ray, Columbia Pictures): While this film fares better with historical facts, it too suffers from bouts of fiction—for example, real-life Apache scouts Martine and Kayitah are here combined as one named Chato (Steve Reevis); Geronimo (Wes Studi) is shown present at the

1881 Cibicue Creek ambush; and Al Sieber (Robert Duvall) is killed off in a gunfight in Mexico. In this case the large budget and all-star cast make up for such lapses. Jason Patric, starring as Lieutenant Charles Gatewood, is also supported by Gene Hackman as Brig. Gen. Crook, Matt Damon as 2nd Lt. Britton Davis and Kevin Tighe as Brig.

Gen. Nelson Miles.

BOOK REVIEWS

The Man Who Invented Billy the Kid: The Authentic Life of Ash Upson, by John LeMay with contributions by Robert J. Stahl, Bicep Books, Roswell, N.M., 2020, $29.99 The name Ash Upson is fairly well known among Wild West aficionados, but only for one reason: He was the ghostwriter of Pat Garrett’s 1882 book The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, published the year after Lincoln County Sheriff Garrett shot down Billy in Lincoln, New Mexico Territory,

and still in print today.

That book helped create the mythology surrounding the Kid, as it is full of falsehoods, some of which displeased Garrett himself. Upson was a longtime newspaperman, among other things, who definitely invented or embellished “facts,” but he also had a way with words and actually knew Billy. “I don’t intend to go down the same path as Ash by making up fantastic exploits of Ash’s life—though he may have liked that,” writes John LeMay, whose earlier books include Tall Tales & Half Truths of Billy the Kid (2015) and Tall Tales & Half Truths of Pat Garrett (2016). “I will stick to the facts. I will warn you, though, dear reader, that before he settled in New Mexico in the 1970s, the events in Ash’s life are very, very hard to pin down.”

Although Connecticut-born Upson’s life is shrouded in mystery, not unlike that of the Kid, LeMay does a good job of presenting the case that Ash deserves to be known for more than just ghostwriting the one book for his friend Garrett. Besides working for newspapers in New York, Cincinnati, Denver, Albuquerque and elsewhere, the itinerant journalist pub-

lished in local papers his reminiscences of the Lincoln County War and the origins of Roswell, N.M. “Had Ash not done this, the history of Southeastern New Mexico would be very lacking,” writes LeMay, a Roswell native and past president of the Historical Society for Southeast New Mexico, based in that New Mexico city. Upson lived for a time at Garrett’s ranch near Roswell, and he wrote favorably of the former sheriff’s ambitious 1880s plan to irrigate the Pecos Valley.

In an 1888 newspaper article about the “gigantic undertaking,” Ash wrote that Garrett, “in addition to being longheaded…is likewise long-legged, his full height being somewhat under 10 feet.”

In the previous decade Upson claimed to have met young Henry Antrim (the future William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid) at the Silver City boardinghouse run by the boy’s mother, Catherine Antrim. That might not be true, but the author confirms Upson “did meet Bonney in Roswell, the small hamlet which Ash had a hand in protecting during the Lincoln County War.” Upson wrote often colorful letters to his

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Connecticut relatives, particularly to nephew Frank Downs and favorite niece Florence “Hurricane” Downs Muzzy, who kept her uncle’s letters. Thus LeMay was able to “let Ash tell his story in his own words as much as possible”—a wise decision, as Upson had much to say about events in the Pecos Valley and elsewhere in Lincoln County. LeMay not only quotes liberally from those letters in the main text but also includes two appendices devoted to Upson’s letters and correspondence. At age 37 in 1866 Ash wrote sister Em about his wanderlust, saying, “It’s no use to recapitulate my life, but know, sister dear, if I had a fortune at command today, you might as well attempt to follow the gossamer in a gale as to keep track of me.”

Thanks to LeMay we can better keep track of a man who rubbed elbows with Garrett, knew the Kid and just might rate as the foremost literary figure in 1880s Lincoln County.

—Editor From Presidio to the Pecos River: Surveying the United States– Mexican Boundary 1852 and 1853,

by Orville B. Shelburne, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman Okla., 2020, $39.95 Once the ratification of the Treaty of Guada84 WILD WEST

lupe Hidalgo officially ended the Mexican War in 1848, it behooved the combatant countries to accurately delineate their borders. In From Presidio to the Pecos River Orville Shelburne, former manager of Mobil Oil’s worldwide exploration and production services in Dallas, describes how that demanding but necessary chore was carried out and how that international border has intermittently grabbed attention ever since. In 1852 Major William H. Emory of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers sent to the border an expedition led by civilian surveyor M.T.W. Chandler.

In the course of his research Shelburne discovered a journal kept by Dr. Charles C. Parry, surgeonbotanist and geologist for the 1852 survey, that proves Parry— and not Arthur Schott, as previously believed —did the geological drawings and sketches for the Chandler party.

While the author focuses most on Chandler’s expedition and

the third, led by Lieutenant Nathaniel Michler, he certainly does not ignore the failed second expedition under John Russell Bartlett and also covers the survey necessitated by the later Gadsden Treaty.

Those surveys were a mixture of scientific research (geological/ voltaic mapping) in a land where Comanche and Lipan Apache raids were common.

Chandler and Michler, whose survey completed the work in 1853, both managed to avoid conflict with the Indians by using a skillful combination of neutrality and diplomacy.

The Gadsden Treaty—ratified by Congress on April 25, 1854, and signed on June 8 by Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna and James Gadsden, the U.S. minister to Mexico—settled another border dispute and added another 29,670 square miles of territory in Arizona and New Mexico to the United States for $10 million. That was followed by two expeditions, moving from opposite directions under Michler and Emory, to map the new boundaries.

Before the launch of the various surveys, which used triangulation and other scientific methods, the United States did not know, among other

things, the exact coordinates of El Paso del Norte or whether rivers in the new territories were navigable. Readers interested in geography and history will find From Presidio to the Pecos River a fascinating look at an often overlooked but extremely important step toward the opening and future settlement of the American West.

—Thomas Zacharis

When Outlaws Wore Badges,

by Melody Groves, TwoDot, Helena, Mont., and Guilford, Conn., 2021, $18.95 Good guys in the real West weren’t always good. Sometimes they were as bad as the outlaws they pursued.

Among the most intriguing such characters in this book is Burt Alvord, who while serving as town marshal of Willcox, Arizona Territory, set up one of the most unique train robberies ever recorded. On the evening in question Alvord and accomplices sat down to play poker in the back room of Schwertner’s Saloon,

their game off limits to anyone but Schwertner’s waiter (who was obviously in on the deal). Almost when the door slammed shut Alvord and cohorts left their cards on the table and slipped out a window to rob a passing Southern Pacific train.

Before anyone missed them, they returned to their cards.

Soon enough the engineer backed his train into Willcox and blew a warning whistle to alert the town. The men drinking in the front of the saloon decided they had better disturb the sheriff’s game and report the holdup.

When they did, they found Alvord in his chair, holding a hand of cards and no doubt feigning surprise. The marshal quickly formed a posse of his fellow poker players—the very men who robbed the train! Alvord actually got away with that robbery and went on to pull several other successful heists before eventually landing in the pokey.

In these fast-paced 164 pages Melody Groves profiles Alvord and more than a dozen other lawmen who turned a trick or two on the other side of the law. Notable among them was Sheriff Henry Plummer of Bannack, Montana Territory, who was hanged by vigilantes for heading up a gang of road agents.

Other featured West-

JACKET DESIGN BY KATHY HEMING

REVIEWS

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LALIRE_M

Coming in April from Gregory Lalire, the editor of

MAGA Z INE

MAN FROM MONTANA

by Gregory J. Lalire

JACKET DESIGN BY KATHY HEMING

This historical novel follows adventurer Woodie Hart to the violent goldfields of what would become Montana Territory.

Woodie discovers the boomtowns of Virginia City, Bannack and Hell Gate and faces the twin terrors of road agents looking to get rich quick and vigilantes intent on dishing out cruel justice.

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PRICE: $25.95 / 370 PAGES HARDCOVER (5.5 X 8.5) / ISBN13: 9781432871178 TIFFANY.SCHOFIELD@CENGAGE.COM FACEBOOK & TWITTER: @FIVESTARCENGAGE

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REVIEWS erners who spent time both wearing badges and breaking the law include Milton Yarberry, Albuquerque’s first town marshal; two members of the infamous Dalton Gang; the Dodge City Gang of Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, which included the likes of Hoodoo Brown (born Hyman G. Neill), J.J. Webb and “Mysterious Dave” Mather; and Tom Horn, who was a Pinkerton man and a paid assassin.

Even renowned lawman Wyatt Earp stole horses and ran brothels. When Outlaws Wore Badges is a good primer of men who led double lives, wearing both the black hats of villains and the white ones of lawmen.

—Candy Moulton

The Trial of Billy the Kid,

by David G. Thomas, Mesilla Valley History Series, Vol. 7, Doc45 Publishing, Las Cruces, N.M. 2021, $19.95.

This latest offering in a well-researched and much-recommended series written by Las Cruces–based David Thomas centers on 86 WILD WEST

New Mexico’s unofficial state outlaw, Billy the Kid—hardly an untapped subject. But as the author notes in the introduction, “Billy’s trial is the least written about and, until this book, the least known event of Billy’s adult life.”

The best-known periods of the Kid’s life are probably his coming of age in Silver City, N.M. (including his mother’s death, his first arrest, his jailing and his escape); his fighting years in the Lincoln County War (in support of the John Tunstall/Alexander McSween faction); his April 28, 1881, escape from the courthouse in Lincoln (during which he killed two of Sheriff Pat Garrett’s deputies); and his July 14, 1881, shooting death by Garrett in Fort Sumner. Yet Thomas contends that Billy’s murder trial in Mesilla, which ended in a “hanging sentence,” was the pivotal event in the Kid’s life, as it doomed him to an early death.

There were actually two Billy trials in Mesilla. The first, for the killing of Andrew L. “Buckshot” Roberts, was thrown out on April 6, 1881, as the federal government lacked jurisdiction.

The second, for the killing of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady, began on April 8 with the selection of jurors. A day

later those jurors found Billy guilty of firstdegree murder, which meant a death sentence. Why the brief trial has received so little coverage (usually just time, place, names and result) is explainable in part by the fact there was no transcript. “The rule of the court,” Thomas explains, “was that if a case was not appealed, then the court did not pay the clerk to make a formal transcript for the case file.

That was an unnecessary expense for an unappealed case.”

On April 13 Judge Warren Bristol sentenced Billy to hang a month later in Lincoln. During the trail the Kid did not testify in his own defense; in fact, his attorney, Colonel Albert Fountain, called no witnesses. “Billy’s defense,” Thomas writes, “consisted only of what Colonel Fountain could tell the jury on his behalf. It appears that Colonel Fountain provided Billy with something less than the most vigorous defense.”

Further, the author adds, “Billy had several grounds for the appeal he never received.” Much of the trial information Thomas presents comes from Las Cruces–based Newman’s Semi-Weekly, a shortlived newspaper published between March and July 1881.

Despite the book’s title, Thomas covers far more here than just the trail (which would have made for an extremely short book).

The first seven chapters mostly detail the actions that led to the murder charges against Billy. Much of this material will be familiar to fans of the Kid, though Thomas presents it well, especially the way he demonstrates how New Mexico Territorial Governor Lew Wallace was guilty of a “pardon betrayal.” Wallace issued a blanket amnesty to men who committed crimes and misdemeanors during the Lincoln War, with the exception of Billy, with whom he later reneged on a pardon agreement. The trial action in Mesilla is limited to Chapter 8. The last two chapters of the 280-page book relate the post-trial story.

Thomas includes three appendices, including a helpful cast of characters mentioned in the book.

—Editor The Chiricahua Apaches: A Concise History, by Bill Cavaliere, ECO Herpetological Publishing & Distribution, Rodeo, N.M., 2020, $15.95 Concise can be nice.

This well-illustrated 139-page book is to the point and points to one thing—that while 19th-century Chiricahuas often led

hard, sad and violent lives, they wove a captivating history.

Author Bill Cavaliere, president of the Cochise County Historical Society, dedicates his book to the late Edwin R. Sweeney, whom he calls “the world’s foremost authority on Cochise, preeminent Apache historian, dear friend and one of the most generous men I have ever known, who passed away while I was writing this book.” Sweeney, also a longtime friend of Wild West, wrote such well-researched, informative books as Cochise (1995) and From Cochise to Geronimo (2010). Cavaliere would be the first to dub those the definitive works on the subject. What his Concise History offers for those familiar with the in-depth works of Sweeney (as well as the Apache writings of Dan Thrapp and Robert Watt) is a solid summary of the high and low points of Chiricahua history.

Others will appreciate Cavaliere’s compelling introduction to the action-packed

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world of Cochise, Geronimo, Naiche, UNCOVER A STORY YOU WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO KNOW! Nana, Chihuahua, Loco and the rest.

“The story of the Chiricahua A B R I A N PAT R ICK F I L M Apaches,” Cavaliere notes in his introduction, “is one of perseverance and tenacity, of courage and sorrow, and of triumph and tragedy. A fiction writer could not have come up with a more unbelievable story.” His first chapter relates the origins of the people who came to be called Apaches and formed seven distinct groups— Lipan, Jicarilla, Kiowa-Apache, Mescalero, Navajo, Western and Chiricahua.

The Chiricahua comprise four bands WINNER OF FILM AWARDS! —the Chokonen (Red Cliff People), SELECTED BY MORE THAN Chihenne (Red Paint People), Nednhi 20 FILM FESTIVALS! (Enemy People) and Bedonkohe (Earth They Own It People). “Like the NedOn September 11, 1857, a wagon train of 120 men, women, and children from Arkansas nhis,” writes Cavaliere, “there are no were massacred under a white flag by Utah Mormons in one of the most horrifying living full-blood Bedonkohes.” crimes in American history. Through the actual testimony of a young girl who survived, By far the best-known Bedonkohe interviews with descendants and forensic interrogations, this compelling film breaks was Geronimo, a complex fellow who, through the decades of cover-up to expose a story kept out of the history books. while never a chief, arguably remains DV D A N D V H S AVA I L A B L E history’s most recognizable American A M A ZON.COM / 1- 801- 554 - 8640 Indian. That in part explains why he receives the lion’s share of attention in Cavaliere’s book. Other reasons include Geronimo’s many escapes from reservation life, his elusiveness when pursued

by Generals George Crook and Nelson Miles, his various surrenders and his unexpected longevity (he died at age 79 in 1909). While some readers might be overfamiliar with Geronimo’s life, Cavaliere offers insight into the less spectacular Naiche, son of the great Cochise and the last hereditary chief of the Chiricahuas. Geronimo surrendered to General Miles at Skeleton Canyon, New Mexico Territory, on Sept. 3, 1886, but not until Naiche surrendered the next day were the Apache wars truly over. “Naiche was ultimately a tragic figure in several ways,” writes - 1945 the author. “In addition toBURYING being THE conPAST-PATRICK-3.indd 28 1947 stantly referenced as a weak leader, - 1950 he also bore the humility of having to - 1974 be the chief who surrendered his peoFor more,search visitDAILY QUIZ ple. However, like his father, he was For more, WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ at HistoryNet.com. known for being levelheaded and MAGAZINES/QUIZ honest.” In later life Naiche skillfully

BURYING THE PAST LEGACY OF THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE

11

$ 25.0 0

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

painted Apache scenes on deer hides and converted to Christianity, taking the name Christian Naiche.

—Editor

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HistoryNet.com ANSWER: 1974. PRIVATE TERUO NAKAMURA, A TAIWANESE NATIONAL,27.

ENLISTED IN THE JAPANESE ARMY IN 1943.

ANSWER: THE CURRENT DESIGN HAS BEEN IN HE HELD OUT ON 1960 MORTAI IN INDONESIA HE WAS CAPTURED PLACE SINCE WHEN THE FLAGUNTIL WAS MODIFIED IN DECEMBER 1974. EARLIER THAT YEAR, HIRO ONODA, WHO TO INCLUDE THE 50thFINALLY STATE. SURRENDERED. HELD OUT INHAWAII, THE PHILLIPINES,

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MORMON PIONEER NATIONAL HISTORIC TRAIL, NEBRASKA

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hat would compel thousands of men, women and children to leave their homes and spend months trudging some 1,300 miles across the Western frontier, driving wagons and pulling or pushing cumbersome handcarts (inset), while braving weather, illness and the threat of Indian attack? Religious freedom is one answer. The Mormons residing in Nauvoo, Ill., endured seven years of persecution from intolerant neighbors, including the 1844 lynching death of their leader, Joseph Smith. They were determined to find a refuge where they might exercise that most basic of God-given rights, as spelled out in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Another answer is that beyond the Mississippi lay rich soil and ample forage. When the Mormons set out in 1846, such monuments as 300foot Chimney Rock, above, pointed the way across Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming.

Beyond lay the new Mormon ‘‘Zion‘‘ on the shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

88 WILD WEST

DERRALD FARNSWORTH-LIVINGSTON, JOURNEYOFLIGHT.COM; INSET: NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

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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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