Wild West Autumn 2022

THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

tales of BILLY THE KID HIS FRIENDS, LOVERS, MOTHER MURDER TRIAL

H TO DIE like a CHEYENNE MAN H FROM ROBBERY TO ROPE WITH THE RUGGLES brothers H THE WILD AND WOOLLY town OF WHITE OAKS

AUTUMN 2022 HISTORYNET.COM

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History. Heritage. Craft CULTURE. The Great Outdoors.

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seasons in which to get WYO’d. If you’re a skijoring savant, you’ll want to check out the Winter Rodeo in February 2022. July features the 92nd edition of the beloved WYO Rodeo. Spring and fall are the perfect time to chase cool mountain streams or epic backcountry lines.

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7/1/22 11:02 PM

38 THE KID’S MOM

By Melody Groves Catherine McCarty Antrim did all she could for both her sons—Billy and Joe

46 THE TRIAL OF BILLY THE KID

By David G. Thomas Did Billy kill Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady? A jury in Mesilla said, ‘Guilty’

52 WHITE OAKS’ DARK ROOTS

By Josh Slatten The Kid and other outlaws blackened the name of the New Mexico Territory town

66 THE NIGHT

THE RUGGLES BROTHERS MET ‘JUDGE LYNCH’

By Matthew Bernstein The California stagecoach robbers reunited in jail and then faced a ‘necktie party’

58 ‘I WILL DIE LIKE A MAN’

By Dennis Hagen The charge by Cheyenne warriors Head Chief and Young Mule was heroic—and suicidal

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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 W. Michael Farmer’s deep research leads him to write histories and novels

18 WESTERNERS

10

Wisconsinite John Deitz’s long fight for property rights made him a folk hero

20 GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

By Brandon Dickson Exactly where Billy the Kid victim Bob Olinger is buried remains a mystery

22 PIONEERS & SETTLERS

By Ramon Vasconcellos Caribbean-born William Leidesdorff made his mark in pre–Gold Rush California

24 WESTERN ENTERPRISE

By Jim Winnerman James Eads lived along the Mississippi River as a boy and bridged it as an adult

26 ART OF THE WEST

32 RECOLLECTIONS OF THE KID

By Mark Iacampo In the 1930s old-timers shared memories of Billy the Kid that may surprise you

By Johnny D. Boggs Author and illustrator S.D. Nelson spotlights Lakota culture in his books for kids

30 INDIAN LIFE

By Mike Coppock Cahokia and other Mississippian cities rose and fell before Columbus landed

76 COLLECTIONS

By Linda Wommack An engaging museum in Fort Worth recalls American film icon John Wayne

78 GUNS OF THE WEST

By George Layman The first hammerless lever-action rifle, the Savage 99 was prized by hunters

80 GHOST TOWNS

By Tom Straka and Doug Page Piedmont, Wyoming, owes its legacy in part to charcoal-producing beehive kilns

82 REVIEWS

Author Melody Groves picks her favorite New Mexico–related books and films.

Plus reviews of recent books, including 1876, the Year of the Gun and Yellowstone National Park: The First 150 Years

72 DUKE’S SON REMEMBERS

By Dave Lauterborn Ethan Wayne strives to honor the legacy of his father, Western star John Wayne

88 GO WEST

Billy the Kid is finally behind bars in New Mexico’s Old Fort Sumner Cemetery

ON THE COVER This issue features articles about Billy the Kid’s mother, Catherine McCarty Antrim; tales from people who knew—or claimed to have known—the Kid; Billy’s murder trial in Mesilla, New Mexico Territory; and his grave in Fort Sumner.

This colorized version of the only authenticated photo of the Kid is framed by the picturesque Organ Mountains, the southern New Mexico range so named

by Spanish travelers who thought its peaks resembled a pipe organ. (HistoryNet Archives, iStock Photo/Robert Waltman, photo illustration by Brian Walker)

AUTUMN 2022

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EDITOR’S LETTER

A CLASSICAL OUTLAW In The American Songbag, his 1927 anthology of American folksongs, poet Carl Sandburg wrote, “Jesse James is the only American bandit who is classical, who is to this country what Robin Hood or Dick Turpin is to England, whose exploits are so close to the mythical and apocryphal.” Sandburg was about half right. There is one other American outlaw from roughly the same period as Jesse James who also rates as classical—Billy the Kid. Not that the Kid was much of a bandit (mostly he stole cattle) compared to Jesse.

But if we call Jesse James the American Robin Hood (yes, a mighty big stretch) or the American Dick Turpin (the English highwayman who himself was no Robin Hood–like figure), then we could conceivably call Billy the Kid the American Oliver Twist (yes, Oliver stole a few things in London, but he was basically a good kid) or the American Jean Valjean (the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables who suffered so much injustice in Paris).

On the other hand, we might simply view Jesse and Billy as two all-American bad boys who more than 140 years after their deaths are still the Old West outlaws who fascinate us most. “They personify the rebellious spirit against authority,” Bill Markley wrote in the feature “Billy & Jesse,” in the December 2021 Wild West. “Though the two were inarguably criminals and killed people, many Americans still overlook their crimes, only seeing the romance of the rebel.” In the current issue, among other articles related to Billy, we hear in “Recollections of the Kid” (P. 32) from a few people who knew him and did see the romance of the rebel. “He was very fond of children,” one woman said, who also recalled Billy had a little dog that “would jump up on the Kid until he would laughingly pull his gun and begin firing into the ground” causing the dog to “playfully follow every puff of dust, yelping joyfully.” Another woman recalled, “I never saw anything ugly about him or in his manners.” Still another judged, “The Kid had been led into evil paths and, through kindness and friendliness of hospitality, might be led back into the straight and narrow way.”

In the spring of 1881 in Mesilla, New Mexico Territory, though, Billy the Kid was deemed anything but a well-mannered, child-friendly, dog-loving, misguided young fellow. That April 9 a jury convicted him of the murder of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady, and four days later Judge Warren Henry Bristol sentenced him to hang “by the neck until his body be dead.” While most people know Billy later escaped, only to be shot down by Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett, on July 14, 1881, few know the details of his trial. Las Cruces, N.M., historian David G. Thomas provides those in “The Trial of Billy the Kid” (P. 46). Yes, the Kid was involved in the killing of Sheriff Brady during the Lincoln County War, but Thomas suggests what occurred in Judge Bristol’s courtroom in Mesilla could be “viewed today as a mockery of justice.”

Also in this issue we have an article about Catherine McCarty Antrim (see P. 38). It is a fact that every outlaw had a mother. The mother of Frank and Jesse James, forceful, hard-nosed Zerelda Samuel (Dr. Reuben Samuel was her third husband), had part of her right arm blown off in 1875 during a Pinkerton National Detective Agency raid on the James/Samuel farm in Missouri. She defended her sons to the end of her days, dying in 1911, 29 years after Jesse and four years before Frank. Billy’s mother, who married William Antrim in Santa Fe on March 1, 1873, was of a different sort, whose “charity and goodness of heart were proverbial.” Apparently without much help from her husband, Catherine raised Billy (called Henry at that time) and his brother Joe in Silver City, New Mexico Territory. She died of tuberculosis on Sept. 16, 1874.

Billy didn’t seem to be a bad kid (or student), but he ran afoul of the law for petty theft in September 1875, shimmied up a chimney to escape the Silver City jail and took off for Arizona Territory, where he killed his first man on Aug. 17, 1877. Billy then fled back to New Mexico Territory, where he became a cowboy and a rustler and a legend in Lincoln, Fort Sumner and other locales such as the outlaw hangout White Oaks (see P. 52). By the way, the fictional Jean Valjean died relatively content as an old man.

Not so the real Billy the Kid.

‘HE WAS VERY FOND

In the spring of 1881 Judge Warren Henry Bristol sentenced Billy the Kid to death after a murder trial in Mesilla, New Mexico Territory.

But it took Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett to end the escaped Kid’s killing days once and for all.

ONE WOMAN SAID

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WILD WEST

Wild West editor Gregory Lalire’s historical novel The Call of McCall is due out in July 2022. His earlier novels include 2021’s Man From Montana, 2019’s Our Frontier Pastime: 1804–1815 and 2014’s Captured: From the Frontier Diary of Infant Danny Duly.

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

TOP: MARK THOMPSON, MINNESOTA LEGISLATIVE REFERENCE LIBRARY

OF CHILDREN,’

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MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER

Artist/author S.D. Nelson draws inspiration from his mother and grandmother, both hailing from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

Visit our WEBSITE FOR ONLINE EXTRAS

AUTUMN 2022 / VOL. 35, NO. 2

WildWestMag.com

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

While countless purported photos of Billy the Kid have surfaced over the years, there remains only one authenticated image of the young man who rode to everlasting infamy in New Mexico Territory’s Lincoln County. In this online feature author Richard Weddle imagines how that fascinating tintype of the most infamous outlaw in the American West came to be.

Extended Interview With W. Michael Farmer

“I’m often asked where the fiction ends in my novels and the history begins,” author W. Michael Farmer says. “I believe historical novel story lines should follow the history as closely as possible, because historical fiction hooks and helps hold the reader’s interest into what happened and helps them ask good questions about the history. I put out the nonfiction book [tied to a novel] so the reader can understand where the history begins and the fiction ends and has a clear understanding of the novel’s background.”

More about S.D. Nelson

“As a boy,” says S.D. Nelson, a Standing Rock Sioux Tribe member who paints, illustrates and writes books for young people, “I discovered that the prairies of Dakota are only earth and sky. All is buffalo grass and clouds, forever.

It is a land of brutal beauty, where terrible battles were fought—hand to hand—and where at twilight the song of Sister Meadowlark will make your heart cry.”

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

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WILD WEST

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SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION: 800-435-0715 OR SHOP.HISTORYNET.COM WILD WEST (ISSN 1046-4638) is published quarterly by HistoryNet, LLC, 901 North Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 Periodical postage paid at Tysons, Va., and additional mailing offices. postmaster, send address changes to WILD WEST, P.O. Box 900, Lincolnshire, IL 60069-0900 List Rental Inquiries: Belkys Reyes, Lake Group Media, Inc. 914-925-2406; belkys.reyes@lakegroupmedia.com Canada Publications Mail Agreement No. 41342519 Canadian GST No. 821371408RT0001 The contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written consent of HistoryNet, LLC PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA

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AUTUMN 2022

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LETTERS

THE KID An ‘OUTLAW’?

Your informative magazine has lots of stories about incidents that are not well known, but boy, oh boy, you got it wrong with your December 2021 cover that calls Jesse James and Billy the Kid I con ic Outlaws. As far as Billy is concerned, that’s 180 degrees from the truth. Carefully analyze Billy’s life, please. From a teenager, having to kill Windy Cahill in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory, to avenging the murder of his employer John Tunstall in Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, his actions were about bringing justice where there was none.

The Santa Fe Ring decided who was guilty and who went free. Sheriff William Brady, James Dolan and Lawrence Murphy were all corrupt and in cahoots to take advantage of the populace. Then you have Lt. Col. Nathan Dudley assisting these three corrupt individuals, in spite of the fact the military was forbidden to interfere in civilian matters. Billy’s trial in Mesilla wasn’t fair. The jury consisted of some men who spoke Spanish and no English.

Judge Warren Bristol gave his instructions in English, and of five possible indictments he allowed the jury to consider only one. The judge told the jury that just the fact Billy was there when Sheriff William Brady was killed was enough to find him guilty. Never mind there were several others involved. And then Governor Lew Wallace reneged on his word to pardon Billy. I do not consider Billy the Kid to have been an outlaw. He just happened to have found himself fighting against an organized cabal of corrupt persons.

Humberto C. Martinez Chaparral, N.M. The editor responds: You are right about the corruptness of the Santa Fe Ring, and also about Billy’s murder trial (see related story, P. 46). But even though he didn’t rob banks and trains like Jesse James, and even though he wasn’t such a badman in many respects (and was hardly the worst participant in the Lincoln County War), Billy the Kid did rustle cattle and kill Deputies Jim Bell and Bob Olinger, among other crimes. As author Bill Markley writes of the two cover boys in “Billie & Jessie,” his December 2021 cover article, “Though the two were inarguably criminals and killed people, many Americans still overlook their crimes, only seeing the romance of the rebel.”

More KID STUFF Born a Midwesterner in the 1950s, I grew up watching Gunsmoke and The Lone Ranger. Now I’m enjoying my 25th year as a Westerner. As a longtime subscriber to Wild West, I appreciate learning where wild Westerners lived and died. Every once in a while you bump into a descendant. Moving to New Mexico in 1997, I boarded a plane and happened to sit next to 82-year-old Louise (née Coe) Runnels. She spoke of fellow Coes who rode

8

WILD WEST

with Billy the Kid as Regulators during the Lincoln County War. In 1878 cousins Frank and George Coe were at Blazer’s Mill and the shootout with Buckshot Roberts. George lost a finger. I shook a hand that shook that hand.

We are that close to those who rode into the sunset. I live in Las Cruces near the Butterfield Overland Mail Trail and one of its stagecoach stops —now the renowned Mexican-American restaurant La Posta in old Mesilla. I often see another Butterfield site, on Overland Avenue in downtown El Paso. In 2021 near Organ, N.M., I met and chatted with a man named Butterfield. Yes, related.

As a kid reading the book Buffalo Soldier, by William Heuman, I never imagined I would live near Fort Selden, one of their posts. The adobe walls still stand. And this is where Douglas MacArthur ”learned to ride and shoot” long before World War II. I know an old Westerner whose great-grandfather had a farm at Hondo, near Lincoln, N.M. One night Billy the Kid knocked on the door and asked if he could stay in the barn overnight with a wounded friend. In the morning Billy knocked again, said thanks and handed the farmer a silver dollar. Years later the farmer asked his family to bury him with that coin. In the old gold mining town of White Oaks, in its old school, I met two docents who attended the school in the 1920s. Back then they knew a woman called the “Cattle Queen of New Mexico”—Susan McSween of Lincoln County War fame. She and her husband lodged Billy and other Regulators in their house. I shook a hand that shook her hand.

Yes, we are that close to the history we read about in Wild West.

Gold miner George Hearst mined at Pinos Altos, N.M., where his widow funded construction of the Hearst Church. Long story short, the horse-drawn hearse that carried Sheriff Pat Garrett to his grave in Las Cruces was eventually displayed in the old Hearst Church for years. The hearse has returned to Las Cruces (now at the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum), and the sheriff’s descendants return here too.

At a recent Pat Garrett Western Heritage Festival I was privileged to meet a “DNA twin” descendant of the tall, lanky sheriff who was also known as “a man of few words.” For example, one night in Fort Sumner in 1881, when Billy the Kid walked into a dark room and asked the identity of a visitor, the visitor didn’t say a word. Billy had recently killed two lawmen, so Garrett knew he could be No. 3. His gun did speak. With a great-grandson of the famous lawman I enjoyed a day trip to Garrett family sites around Alto. We happened to meet a lady related to a man who went to the scene of the abovementioned shooting. As I’m aware of debates over the Kid’s death, I asked this lady how her relative was certain the dead man was Billy. With casual candor she said, “He knew him.”

Mike Jackoboice Las Cruces, N.M. dear wild west readers Beginning with this issue, Wild West is moving to a quarterly publication schedule.

But worry not: We will extend existing subscriptions, so you’ll get all the issues for which you paid. We’ve made exciting improvements, with other surprises in the works—all in the aim of giving our valued readers even more than before: • We’ve redesigned our website to make it more compelling, active and easier to search. Two million users visit every month. Check us out at Historynet.com.

• And we’re offering a subscribers-only Wild West email newsletter that includes fresh material not available elsewhere. Soon subscribers will also have exclusive access to special online content with the insight, excitement and quality you expect from Wild West.

• Lastly, we’re going to digitize all back issues of Wild West going back to our debut issue in 1988. This unprecedented resource will soon be available to subscribers.

We’ll keep you up to date.

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ROUNDUP

On April 26, 1901, Thomas Edward Ketchum, later known as “Black Jack,” is fitted for a rope atop the gallows in Clayton, New Mexico Territory. The clumsy execution was successful, but Ketchum lost his head in the process.

10 MOST INTERESTING CHARACTERS IN NEW MEXICO TERRITORY

Davy Crockett: No, not that Davy Crockett. A reputed bully in Cimarron, this Davy—either a grandson or grandnephew of the Alamo legend—gained infamy for having murdered three U.S. 9th Cavalry buffalo soldiers at the bar of the St. James Hotel in 1876. Acquitted, but fined $50 for having carried a gun in town, he rampaged through Cimarron, often riding his horse into saloons and firing into the ceiling. Townspeople soon tired of his antics. On Sept. 30, 1876, Sheriff Isaiah Rinehart and posse shot and killed Crockett after the bully refused to surrender.

2

Billy the Kid: Orphaned at 13, William Henry McCarty struggled to live in the adult world. Slight in stature, he compensated with his pleasing personality, charming wit and, when pushed, his gun. A natural leader, he hung around Lincoln and became a Regulator. The Kid’s short life ended on July 14, 1881, when shot by Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett..

3

Clay Allison: Known for extreme violence, and implicated in many vigilante jail break-ins and lynchings, the notorious gunman reportedly once rode through Mobeetie, Texas, wearing 10 WILD WEST

nothing but his six-shooter and gun belt.

Allison homesteaded near Cimarron, where on Nov. 1, 1875, he prevailed in a shootout at the St. James Hotel, killing Francisco “Pancho” Griego.

4

Black Jack Ketchum: Outlaw Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum partnered with older brother Sam, robbing businesses and trains. The brothers later joined the notorious Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. In 1899 Tom foolishly attempted to rob the same train at the same spot brother Sam had held it up weeks earlier (to Sam’s demise). This time the engineer recognized Tom and shot him from his horse. Captured and convicted, Black Jack went to the gallows on April 26, 1901, in Clayton, which had never hanged anyone before. The rope proved too long, and as Ketchum had gained weight in prison, his head snapped off when his body dropped through the trap. All of him is buried in Clayton’s cemetery.

5

Pat Garrett: Best known as the Lincoln County sheriff who killed Billy the Kid, Garrett was also a buffalo hunter, bartender, Texas Ranger captain, promoter of irrigation schemes near Roswell and U.S. customs inspector. Appointed Doña Ana

County sheriff in 1896, he was tasked with tracking down the murderers of Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain and his 8-year-old son, who’d gone missing earlier that year.

He never did—officially, anyway. Garrett himself was murdered en route to Las Cruces on Feb. 29, 1908. His killer(s) were never brought to justice.

6

Lew Wallace: Author of the bestselling 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Wallace was also the governor of New Mexico Territory (1878–81) who promised Billy the Kid a pardon and then reneged. Wallace then served (1881– 85) as U.S. minister to the Ottoman empire.

The only fond memories he had of New Mexico, he admitted, was the time he devoted to painting landscapes in an alley behind the Palace of the Governors when not busy writing.

7

Doña Tules: A woman of refinement and fashion, María Gertrudis Barceló was a prominent saloon owner and professional gambler in Santa Fe. Known as Madame La Tules, she was charming with a sharp business acumen and became an influential member of society during the Santa Fe Trail heyday. Tules reportedly

HERITAGE AUCTIONS

1

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ROUNDUP contributed freely to families in need, the Catholic Church, charities and the government. She still died with a fortune on Jan. 17, 1852.

WOMMACK WINS SIX-SHOOTER

Colonel Albert Fountain: An attorney in Mesilla, Fountain was perhaps best known for having represented Billy the Kid in 1881—though he lost, and the Kid was convicted of murder. Following a stint in the Union Army during the Civil War, Fountain settled in Texas where he served in the state Senate and as lieutenant governor.

In 1873 he moved to Mesilla, where he served as a lawyer, probate judge and court clerk. He founded the Mesilla Valley Independent newspaper and the Mesilla Valley Opera House, known today as the Fountain Theater. On Feb. 1, 1896, he and son Henry disappeared near White Sands. They had been ambushed, but their bodies were never found, and no one ever paid for the crime.

Linda Wommack writes the Collections department in each issue of Wild West and sometimes contributes feature articles. One of those, “Tom Horn’s Smooth Schoolmarm,” which ran in the February 2021 issue, has captured the Wild West History Association’s 2022 SixShooter Award for best general Western history article. The schoolmarm of the title is Missouri-born Glendolene Kimmel, who came to Wyoming to teach and at age 22 became smitten with 40-year-old frontiersman turned paid assassin Tom Horn. “While it would be a short-lived liaison for Horn,” writes Wommack, “the romantic notion remained with Kimmell for quite some time, perhaps to her dying day.” After Horn was convicted in Cheyenne for murder, Kimmel claimed he was innocent and did all she could to save him from execution, but he went to the gallows on Nov. 20, 1903.

Colorado-based Wommack previously earned a Six-Shooter in the same category for her article “Confidentially Told in Browns Park,” which appeared in the June 2019 Wild West.

Another name familiar to Wild West readers, special contributor John Boessenecker, also received a Six-Shooter this year, for his book Wildcat: The Untold Story of Pearl Heart, the Wild West’s Most Notorious Woman. It comes on the heels of two WWHA awards he received in 2021—for best book (Ride the Devil’s Herd: Wyatt Earp’s Epic Battle Against the West’s Biggest Outlaw Gang) and best general Western history article (“They Shoot Cowboys, Don’t They?” adapted from Ride the Devil’s Herd and published in the October 2020 Wild West).

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Juan Maria (Giovanni) Agostini-Justiniani: This eccentric son of Italian nobility left home in his late teens to wander France and Spain and later trekked all over South, Central and North America.

At age 62 he walked with a wagon train from Kansas to Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, and then south to Mesilla. Considered a mystic by many, El Ermitaño (“The Hermit”) reportedly healed people and prophesied. Living in a cave in the nearby Organ Mountains, he promised Mesilla residents he would light a fire every Friday evening to signal he was fine. On April 17, 1869, not seeing the fire, investigating villagers discovered he’d been killed.

His murder also remains unsolved.

HERITAGE AUCTIONS

10

Sadie Orchard: Strongwilled Sarah Jane “Sadie” Creech Orchard (1859–1943) wore many hats in the gold and silver mining camp of Kingston in the 1880s. Flamboyant Sadie established a brothel on ironically named Virtue Street, owned and drove a stagecoach line, ran a hotel and restaurant, and rode horses as well as any man. A philanthropist, she helped build a church and aided those stricken during a smallpox epidemic.

—Melody Groves

NEW KID BOOK Australian historian and writer James B. Mills has spent much of his career researching the American West. His special focus has been on infamous outlaw William Henry McCarty, who became best known as Billy the Kid and was gunned down at age 21. In the December 2020 Wild West Mills wrote two articles about Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War—“They Called Him Bilito” and “Hombres Valientes in the Lincoln County War.” Mills’ focus in the first was on how Hispanos (Southwesterners of Spanish descent) viewed the Kid; many considered him a good-hearted loyal friend rather than a ruthless outlaw. In the second Mills tells us how Nuevoméxicanos played key roles in that 1878 factional war in New Mexico Territory. Mills expands on those themes in his new book Billy the Kid: El Bandido Simpático, due out August 15 from the University of North Texas Press.

WEST WORDS

‘I found Lincoln County convulsing by an internal war.

I inquired the cause. Someone was responsible for the bloodshed in that county.

I found two parties in the field— one headed by [Lawrence] Murphy, [James] Dolan and [John] Riley, the other by [Alexander] McSween. Both had done many things contrary to law—both were violating the law.

McSween I firmly believe acted conscientiously— Murphy, Dolan and Riley for revenge and personal gain’ —Special Agent Frank W. Angel wrote this in his Oct. 3, 1878, final report on the death of John Henry Tunstall and the violence in New Mexico Territory’s Lincoln County.

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SEE YOU LATER...

WESTERN HERITAGE AWARDS ▲

Burt Reynolds (1936– 2018), Neil Oliver “Bing” Russell (1926– 2003) and Bing’s son Kurt Russell were inducted into the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum’s Hall of Great Western Performers during the Oklahoma City museum’s Western Heritage Awards last April. Reynolds starred in TV Westerns, notably Gunsmoke (1962–65), as well as such Hollywood Westerns as Navajo Joe (1966), 100 Rifles (1969) and Sam Whiskey (1969). Bing Russell had a recurring role as Deputy Clem Foster on Bonanza and appeared in virtually every Western TV series of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Kurt Russell co-starred with Tim Matheson in the 1976 Western TV series The Quest, portrayed Wyatt Earp in

BING RUSSELL

BURT REYNOLDS

Tombstone (1993) and has appeared in other Western films, including The Hateful Eight and Bone Tomahawk (both 2015).

This year’s inductees into the Hall of Great Westerners were Frank Boardman “Pistol Pete” Eaton (1860–1958), a lawman, scout and settler who inspired the mascots at Oklahoma State University, New Mexico State University and the University of Wyoming; and rancher Gerald Timmerman, who with his brothers owned and operated ranches in South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Texas and Oregon. Wrangler Award winners included Tracey Hanshew, whose “Here She Comes, Wearin’ Them Britches!” (in the Winter 2020 issue of Montana: The Magazine of Western History) was chosen as best magazine article; Cameron Blevins, whose Paper Trails:

The U.S. Post and the Making of the American West was deemed best nonfiction book; Power of the Dog, directed

by Jane Campion, for best theatrical motion picture; and 1883, created and directed

by Taylor Sheridan, for best fictional drama.

For the full list of honorees visit nationalcowboymuseum.org.

CHIRICAHUA PASS ▲

In an effort sponsored by the Cochise County Historical Society (CCHS), Arizonans (including Chiricahua Apache Joe Saenz, above) gathered last spring to dedicate a bronze plaque

BOB UTLEY

Robert Marshal “Bob” Utley, 92—among the foremost Western authors and historians, perhaps best known for his works on the frontier Army and his biographies of George Armstrong Custer, Billy the Kid, Sitting Bull and Geronimo—died on June 7, 2022, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Born in Bauxite, Ark., on Oct. 31, 1929, he was raised in Pennsylvania and Indiana. For six summers (1947–52) he worked as a “historical aide” for the National Park Service (NPS) in Montana at what was then called Custer Battlefield National Monument (present-day Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument). He went on to a career in the NPS, serving from 1957 to ’64 in Santa Fe as historian of the Southwest region and then as chief historian in Washington, D.C., until retiring in 1980. Utley played a role in the development of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. After re-

FREDERICK NOLAN

Historian and author Frederick William “Fred” Nolan, 91, died on June 15, 2022, in Chalfont St. Giles, England. Born in Liverpool on March 7, 1931, Nolan began researching the American West at age 21 and in 1954 co-founded the English Westerners’ Society.

The West of Billy the Kid (1998) is perhaps the best-known of his works, which include The Billy the Kid Reader (2007) and The Lincoln County War (2009). His article “The Hunting of Billy the Kid” ran in the June 2003 Wild West and is available online at Historynet.com.

OPPOSITE BOTTOM: CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY

KURT RUSSELL

tiring from the NPS, he devoted himself to writing books (more than 20), including 2020’s The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull and the Resistance of the Free Lakotas. (For a list of all his books visit robertutley.net.) In 2015 Utley was inducted into the Western Writers of America Hall of Fame.

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

‘I am going—my time has come’ —Just after dawn on Sept. 26, 1820, Daniel Boone, 85, spoke these words to those gathered around his bed at son Nathan’s house in what would become Defiance, Mo. Then, with Nathan and Daniel’s daughter Jemima holding his hands, the famed frontiersman died.

12 WILD WEST

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7/5/22 8:10 AM

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ROUNDUP

commemorating the 1869 Battle of Chiricahua Pass.

That October 20 clash pitted Captain Reuben F. Bernard and 61 soldiers out of Fort Bowie, Arizona Territory, against Chiricahua Apache Chief Cochise and about 100 of his warriors atop a rocky mesa near Rucker Canyon in southeast Arizona’s rugged Chiricahua Mountains.

Two soldiers and about 10 Apache warriors died in the fighting.

Though the five-hour battle remains relatively obscure and ended in a draw, more Medals of Honor (33) were issued to participating soldiers in that clash than to participants in any other oneday battle in the history of the U.S. Army.

The plaque stands on the grounds of the Chiricahua Desert Museum, on State Route 80 north of Rodeo, N.M., along the Arizona border. CCHS President Bill Cavaliere emceed the dedication ceremony, which drew some 200 onlookers and included such guest speakers as state Senator David M. Gowan, state Representative Candie Sweetser, Chiricahua Apache Nation Attorney General Bill Tooahyaysay Bradford, former Chiricahua Apache Nation President Saenz and Medal of Honor historian Michael C. Eberhardt.

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INDIAN ASSIMILATION ▲

In the 19th and 20th centuries the U.S. government separated American Indian children from their families, sent them to more than 400 boarding schools nationwide and worked to assimilate them into Anglo American society. At such boarding schools students were compelled to wear uniforms and cut their hair, encouraged to abandon their Indian names, languages and religious practices and, according to a 2022 Interior Department report, subjected to “systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies.” The report reveals that between 1819 and 1969 there were 408 such federal schools in 37 states, including 76 in Oklahoma (formerly Indian Territory), 47 in Arizona and 43 in New Mexico (both of which became states in 1912). The study determined that upward of 500 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died while attending the schools.

More than 50 marked or unmarked burial sites have been identified to date. “Each of those children is a missing family member, a person who was not able to live out their purpose on this Earth because they lost their lives as part of this terrible system,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (above left).

In Episode 2 his mother, Kathleen (Catherine in real life; see related feature, P. 38), and sons Billy and Joe reach Santa Fe. There she marries William Antrim and, as depicted in Episode 3, the family relocates to Silver City. In succeeding episodes Billy meets a character named Alias, a Mexican friend named Segura, Pat Garrett (the man who as sheriff killed the Kid) and many other familiar characters, for and against him, from the 1878 Lincoln County War.

RUSSIAN INVASION t THE KID ON TV ▲ Can’t get enough of Billy the Kid? Want to actually see the Kid instead of just reading about him? Well, you’re in luck if you have access to the Epix TV network. Its series Billy the Kid, which premiered last April, was created by Michael Hirst and stars Tom Blyth in the title role. While details of Billy’s childhood remain sketchy, most historians believe he was a kid from the streets of New York City, and the first of the series’ eight firstseason episodes, “The Immigrants,” imagines his life in New York and the beginning of his journey to infamy in New Mexico Territory.

While Spain was busy trying to convert California Indians to Christianity in the latter half of the 19th century, imperial Russia founded its first colony in Alaska in 1784, though its interest was purely commercial.

Then, in 1812, wanting to develop an agricultural base from which to supply its Alaskan concerns, the Russians began building Fort Ross in what would

become California’s Sonoma County.

Though dedicated that fall, the post wasn’t completed until 1814. While trade in otter furs did well for about three years (see “Missions, Sea Otters and California Indians,” by Daniel J. Demers, in the October 2012 Wild West or online at Historynet.com), farming was largely unsuccessful. In 1833 the Russian-American Co. opened a new agricultural center, Slavianka, near the mouth of the Russian River, midway between Fort Ross and the Russian port at Bodega Bay. Its success at farming proved uneven, though stock raising did better. On abandoning Fort Ross in 1842, the Russians sold their holdings for $30,000 to Swiss immigrant John Sutter, best known for his role in the California Gold Rush six years later. Named a California State Historic Park in 1909, Fort Ross [fortross.org] centers on a reproduction of the Russian-era fort of 200 years ago.

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INTERVIEW

FACT MEETS LEGEND IN THE OLD WEST AUTHOR W. MICHAEL FARMER’S DEEP RESEARCH SOMETIMES LEADS HIM TO WRITE BOTH A HISTORY AND A NOVEL ABOUT THE SUBJECT AT HAND

BY CANDY MOULTON Author W. Michael Farmer believes the story lines of his historical novels should adhere to known facts, as such an approach “helps hold the reader’s interest into what happened and helps them ask good questions about the history.” At times that belief has led him to write companion books—a history and a novel—on the same topic. Farmer based his first novel, Hombrecito’s War, on the unsolved 1896 murders of New Mexico Territory legislator and attorney Albert Jennings Fountain and his 8-year-old son, Henry. To that historical plotline, however, the author added a fictional Apache character. More recently, Farmer published his history Geronimo: Prisoner of Lies, Twenty-Three Years as a Prisoner of War, 1886–1909 (2019), followed by his novel The Odyssey of Geronimo (2020), and he is working on other books focused on Apache stories both historical and fictional.

What prompted you to research and write about Apaches?

When I wrote my first novel, about the Fountain murders, I used a Mescalero tribal policeman character, Yellow Boy, as the practically invisible man who saved the child [Henry Fountain], became his mentor and taught him much about the world.

To develop Yellow Boy’s character, I started researching the culture and history of the Mescaleros. It was an eye-opening experience, especially when I realized how different Apache culture is from that of the Plains Indians. The deeper I got into researching the Apaches, the more I wanted to know. In the process I discovered that if you want to understand Apache history, you must first understand their culture.

What intrigued you about the Fountain murders?

What happened to the Fountains is a great mystery, and like most folks in New Mexico, I was curious about their disappearance. In the introduction to [his 1958 novel] Warlock Oakley Hall said that the business of fiction is to find the truth, not the facts. I decided to write a fictional story about the murders that might give me some insight into who the murderers were after I read [C.L.] Sonnichsen’s [1960] book Tularosa, which gave [suspect] Oliver Lee the benefit of the doubt, whereas Leon Metz, in his biography of Pat Garrett, claimed Lee was guilty.

I never intended to write a novel, just a story of maybe 10,000– 20,000 words for my own benefit that might give me a good idea of who the murderers were. I started writing and researching. When I finished the story, it was 18,000 words, and I had learned how much I enjoyed writing.

16 WILD WEST

How did you approach writing from Geronimo’s point of view?

I put in hours of research into Apache culture and history. I read what George Wratten, the famous interpreter for the Army with Apaches in captivity, had Geronimo saying in English to, for example, Generals George Crook and Nelson Miles, Teddy Roosevelt and artist Elbridge Ayer Burbank and at church services when he decided to become a Christian. I learned what a terrifically complex and fascinating character Geronimo was. I wanted my readers to understand his humanity, why he thought the way he did, and to see things as he saw them. To tell his story from his point of view was the most straightforward way to convey his humanity, warts and all, and I wanted the history in the story to be accurate.

How do you rate Geronimo as a tactician?

Geronimo was a brilliant and fearless tactician, but he sometimes made very bad judgment calls. For example, when he and Juh (chief of the Nednhi Chiricahuas, with strongholds in northern Mexico) left San Carlos in September 1881, they had over 375 people with them and crossed the border with the loss of two men, two women and three children while being chased by hundreds of cavalry and Apache scouts from San Carlos. Six months later Geronimo led the warriors who forced about 350 of Loco’s people out of San Carlos and got them to the border while again being chased by hundreds of cavalry and Apache scouts, and again he lost no more than five or six people. After they crossed the border, he let them stop and rest, against the advice of Chato, Naiche and Kaytennae. Geronimo assumed the cavalry wouldn’t cross the border (legally they couldn’t), but the cavalry crossed the border anyway and two days later attacked them in a seven-hour fight that killed 14 warriors and several women. The next day the Apaches were ambushed by Mexican soldiers waiting for them at Aliso Creek.

Most of the Apaches escaped after another long day of fighting between two parallel arroyos—one filled with Apaches, the other with Mexicans. But Loco lost nearly 40 percent of his people— most of them women and children—in the two days of fighting.

In 1886, after Geronimo and Naiche broke away from those who surrendered to General Crook in late March, they had 18 men and 22 women and children. The army under General Miles chased them across southern Arizona and northern Sonora for five months with 5,000 soldiers. The Mexican military chased them with 3,000 soldiers in Sonora and Chihuahua, and there were numerous civilian posses on both sides of the border. The Apaches didn’t lose a single warrior captured or killed during the five months before Geronimo and his warriors surrendered.

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John Wayne: American Icon

Illuminating Cuckoo Clock Enjoy Duke at his heroic best, riding tall in the saddle and standing his ground, on the first John Wayne cuckoo clock from The Bradford Exchange.

A Handcrafted Illuminated Treasure The two-foot high, wood encased clock is designed like an Old West clapboard building with a projecting illuminated porch crafted of artist’s resin.

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WESTERNERS

Born in Winneconne, Wis., on April 3, 1861, John F. Deitz (or Dietz) is remembered alternately as an outlaw or folk hero in state lore due to his yearslong land rights dispute with the Chippewa Lumber & Boom Co. In 1904 he began demanding a toll for logs sluiced down the Thornapple River through the existing Cameron Dam, which abutted his property southeast of Winter, in northwest Wisconsin. Contesting his ownership claim to the dam, the lumber company sicced the law on Deitz. The landowner successfully resisted arrest for six years, fending off lawmen and company men alike at gunpoint, though a deputy and two of Deitz’s own children were wounded during various confrontations. The press largely portrayed Deitz as a common man fighting corporate greed, while others saw him as little more than a triggerhappy lawbreaker. Things came to a head on Oct. 8, 1910, when a sheriff’s posse surrounded the family home, and a gun battle ensued. Deputy Oscar Harp was killed before Deitz surrendered.

“John seems very self-assured, even though behind bars,” says Tony Sapienza, who bought this undated real photo postcard several years ago. “I found the little girl (his daughter?) interesting.

Also note that part of the pinkie on his right hand is gone, and his left hand appears to be in a cast.”

Charged with murder, Deitz was tried, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1921 Wisconsin Governor John J. Blaine, bowing to public pressure, pardoned the “Defender of Cameron Dam.” Deitz died in Milwaukee three years later. The family farmstead and dam have long since disappeared.

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TONY SAPIENZA COLLECTION

DAM DEFENDER DEITZ

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GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

BOB OLINGER, THE TORMENTING DEPUTY SHERIFF SHOT DOWN BY BILLY THE KID IN 1881, LIES IN AN UNMARKED NEW MEXICO GRAVE

BY BRANDON DICKSON

B

ob Olinger is the bully we all love to hate. A favorite recurring scene in big-screen Hollywood Westerns depicts the contemptible deputy getting his just desserts from the muzzle of a shotgun wielded by Billy the Kid in Lincoln, New Mexico Territory, in 1881.

Such depictions invariably focus on the lawman’s personality flaws. It’s worth noting, however, he had managed to win the undying love of one Lily Casey, to whom he was reportedly engaged at the time of his murder. An early resident of Lincoln, Casey (married name Lily Klasner) fondly recalled their romance in her posthumously published 1972 memoir My Girlhood Among Outlaws, a veritable trove 20 WILD WEST

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TOP: BRANDON DICKSON; ABOVE: DANIEL MAYER, CC BY-SA 3.0

NO REST FOR ‘BULLY BOB’

of information about Lincoln County War figures she knew personally. The Kid’s life story had another chapter after he killed Deputies Olinger and James W. Bell while escaping from the Lincoln County Courthouse on April 28, 1881. Not so Olinger. His body was reportedly taken to Fort Stanton and there interred without ceremony. Popular belief, old photos, magazine articles and local legend all suggest he is buried at the back of the old Fort Stanton Cemetery. If there ever was a marker on the slain deputy’s grave, it has long since disappeared.

Ameredith Robert B. Olinger was probably born in 1850 (other sources say 1841) in Carroll County, Ind. By 1856 his family had migrated west to Delaware, Polk County, Iowa, moving again in 1858 to Mound City, Linn County, Kansas Territory. After that came moves to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), Texas and, in 1876, New Mexico Territory. While serving a stint as marshal of the rough-and-tumble Lincoln County town of Seven Rivers, Bob killed two men in gambling disputes on separate occasions. Olinger participated in the 1878 Lincoln County War as a member of the Lawrence Murphy–James Dolan faction. (Billy fought for the opposing faction headed by John Tunstall, Alexander McSween and John Chisum.) Months later Olinger gunned down one Bob Jones amid a rivalry stemming from another gambling dispute, though county authorities dismissed a murder charge against him in October 1879.

That same month Pat Garrett was elected Lincoln County sheriff and appointed Bob one of his deputies. Olinger’s reputation as a “bully with a badge” mostly stems from his nasty treatment of the Kid while Billy was Garrett’s prisoner in Lincoln. Billy got his revenge that fateful day in April 1881 when he blasted Bob with his own shotgun, killing him instantly. The deputy faded into history, as did the whereabouts of his grave. His end is where my curiosity began.

After reading about Olinger’s probable burial location, I went on a hunt in Fort Stanton. Alert to my old enemies, snakes, I examined existing headstones in the old post cemetery. While nothing definitive popped up, two distinctly different graves toward the

ROBERT G. McCUBBIN COLLECTION/OLD WEST EVENTS

Bob Olinger poses beside a seated James Dolan, whose faction he sided with amid the 1878 Lincoln County War. In 1879 Sheriff Pat Garrett appointed Olinger one of his deputies.

Two years later Billy the Kid killed the deputy.

TOP: BRANDON DICKSON; ABOVE: DANIEL MAYER, CC BY-SA 3.0

ROBERT G. McCUBBIN COLLECTION/OLD WEST EVENTS

GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN back of the burial ground stood out. They matched the scant available information, so I thought it would be an easy search. Little did I imagine it would turn into a monthslong investigation.

Along the way I crossed paths with several interesting people. At present-day Fort Stanton Historic Site, managed by the state, I spoke with Ranger Javier Trost about Olinger’s grave. He in turn put me in contact with Kenneth Walter of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, whose knowledge of Fort Stanton history is unmatched.

Walter has researched burial records, autopsy records, maps, surveys, patient rolls, soldier deaths, military burial removals, cemetery records and just about everything else on paper about the site and its history. He’s also mapped and photographed almost every inch of the fort and surrounding grounds.

While playing phone tag with Walter, I got a text from Steve Sederwall, a former federal officer and onetime mayor of Capitan, N.M., who has long been interested in the Billy the Kid story.

(He once tried to prove the Kid had not been killed in Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory, on July 14, 1881.)

It turned out Sederwall was also interested in pinpointing Olinger’s grave.

Agreeing that any lawman killed in the line of duty deserves a grave marker and should not be forgotten, we arranged to meet with Walter together.

To that meeting Walter brought not only books, surveys, letters and reports with burial details but also documents specifying who was buried where in the cemetery. Complicating matters was the fact that in 1896 the Army had moved soldiers’ graves from recently deactivated Fort Stanton to Santa Fe National Cemetery, and records of that reinterment effort are spotty or nonexistent. Sederwall and I had noted widespread disturbance on the grounds of the post cemetery, but had Olinger’s remains also been moved?

According to a map of the old Fort Stanton Cemetery, Olinger rests in Plot No. 69. But period records indicate an Army colonel was buried in that plot until reinterred in Santa Fe. Neighboring Plot No. 71 holds the remains of Murphy-Dolan gunman Charlie “Lallacooler” Crawford, who was shot on July 17, 1878, amid the five-day Battle of Lincoln (the climactic event of the war) and died a week later at the Fort Stanton hospital. But his grave, too, lacks a marker. Other records are contradictory and incomplete, and distances between graves do not match those shown on maps. Most likely the Army did not disturb Bob’s grave, and

he remains buried at Fort Stanton. But where if not in Plot No. 69? Walter offered another possibility.

Within a half mile of Fort Stanton are several long-forgotten historic sites Walter has since rediscovered and documented. Among them is a cemetery in use around the time Olinger was buried in spring 1881. Today only scattered stones remain to mark its boundaries. It is a lonesome place, with a beautiful view of the distant Sierra Blanca. Though records are lacking, it’s possible Olinger was instead buried there. If so, his body lies alongside dozens of others in unmarked, untended graves.

Trying to find and identify his remains in that ghost cemetery would take far more extensive research and plenty of luck. Perhaps somewhere (in someone’s attic or a storage bin at Fort Stanton) there is a record book, report or survey that lists the internees and their respective locations.

Meanwhile, the mystery of where Bob Olinger lies remains unsolved. No matter where old Bob rests—the old Fort Stanton Cemetery, the abandoned cemetery discovered by Walter or another location—it is undoubtedly an unmarked grave.

I hope to one day discover and mark the spot, for no matter his faults, the slain deputy deserves more than his legacy of meanness.

Left: This slab marks the spot outside the Lincoln County Courthouse, in Lincoln, N.M., where Olinger (misspelled on the marker) fell after the Kid shot the deputy with his own shotgun. Above: While it has long been thought Olinger is buried in the old Fort Stanton Cemetery, a half mile from the fort is this abandoned cemetery. Might Olinger be buried here instead?

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PIONEERS & SETTLERS In 1841 St. Croix native William Leidesdorff arrived in Yerba Buena (the town renamed San Francisco on Jan. 30, 1847) as captain of the merchant schooner Julia Ann. When his employer sold the ship, Leidesdorff himself became a merchant in the Mexican settlement.

A SURPRISING FATHER OF SAN FRANCISCO

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(which would be renamed San Francisco on Jan. 30, 1847), a recently declared citizen of Mexico and local businessman who in 1845, with Polk’s authority, was made sub-consul for that port city. Leidesdorff would prove an indispensable liaison in the near term.

The appointment was unique on two fronts. First, the State Department had never granted such a title, though Larkin believed he had the right to do so. Second, Leidesdorff, though light-skinned, was of Danish-African descent. Despite his reputation as both a respected citizen and business owner, disclosure of his ethnicity likely would have derailed his nomination or, once appointed, compelled him to forfeit his position.

Leidesdorff’s unblemished, short-term ascendancy to prominence in pre–Gold Rush California began when he arrived in the port city of Yerba Buena in 1841. A native of the island of St. Croix, in the Danish West Indies (present-day U.S. Virgin Islands), born out of wedlock on Oct. 23, 1810, to a Danish father and mulatto mother, he benefited from prevailing legal custom that demanded mixed-race offspring be afforded prop-

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BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY

resident James K. Polk’s journal entry of Jan. 20, 1849, describes how during a Cabinet meeting earlier that day members read dispatches sent east

by U.S. officials in the unorganized territory of California. “Several communications represent the increased richness of the gold region recently discovered in California,” the president noted. One dispatch Polk mentions came from a “Mr. Larkin, formerly U.S. consul at Monterey.” When acting as U.S. consul to Mexico prior to the Mexican War, Thomas O. Larkin had instructions from the Polk administration to support insurrection against the Mexican government but not provoke any such activity.

Prior to the war the president had made manifest the United States intended to acquire California. Furthermore, many Californians supported annexation. If hostilities did arise, however, Larkin understood he would need to have established formal communications with prominent officials, either in government or business, in proximity to the capital at Monterey. Among those he contacted was William Leidesdorff of Yerba Buena

BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY

P

WILLIAM LEIDESDORFF, OF DUTCH AND AFRICAN ANCESTRY, CAME TO PROMINENCE BEFORE THE CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH

BY RAMON VASCONCELLOS

BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY

BANCROFT LIBRARY, UC BERKELEY

PIONEERS & SETTLERS

erty and education through the father. It appears his father, manager of a sugar plantation, adhered to such social conventions, for when the grown son arrived in New Orleans, he proved quite book-learned and highly literate.

By 1834 Leidesdorff had filed naturalization papers in Louisiana and found work in New Orleans as captain of a commercial vessel. His route took him from New Orleans to New York, then back south, with an overland portage through Panama, to Hawaii (then known as the Sandwich Islands) and on to California. On Leidesdorff’s arrival in Yerba Buena on the schooner Julia Ann in 1841, his employer sold the ship. Fishing about for an occupation, Leidesdorff became a merchant in the settlement.

He was quick to prosper. Proceeds of tallow and hide sales generated by Leidesdorff’s mercantile business enabled him to purchase land for speculation and development. On being granted Mexican citizenship in 1844, he received a 35,000-acre grant on the American River near Sutter’s Fort he named Rancho Río de los Americanos after the river.

Leidesdorff and German-born neighbor Captain Johann August “John” Sutter became commercial associates. So significant was the volume of their business that in partial payment of a $2,198 debt owed to Leidesdorff in 1846 Sutter offered “selected Indians…which will be of some service to you.” Indian slavery was customary at the time in parts of Mexican California, though it is unclear whether Leidesdorff accepted the bondspersons in lieu of payment.

By the mid-1840s Leidesdorff’s property holdings in Yerba Buena had grown to 360 lots. Among his more noteworthy real estate developments was the settlement’s first luxury lodging, the City Hotel, built in 1846 at the corner of Clay and Kearny streets. The hotel hosted prominent clientele as well as the city’s first recorded celebration of Thanksgiving, in 1847, in what was at the time unofficially U.S. territory.

That same year Leidesdorff purchased from the Russian American Co. a vessel with which he hoped to provide the first steamship transportation between Yerba Buena and the Sacramento River Valley. No one had yet utilized steamships for commercial purposes in California, let alone sailed one on San Francisco Bay. Unfortunately, a test run showed that Leidesdorff’s boat, the 37-foot11-inch Sitka (reportedly named after the Russian

settlement in Alaska, one of his ports of call when he captained the Julia Ann), was too slow for round-the-clock shipping. The would-be entrepreneur scrapped the idea.

During the Mexican War Leidesdorff played a pivotal role in foreign policy. In June 1846, as fighting broke out between Mexico and the United States, he provided key intelligence to the United States about the Bear Flag insurgents in Sonoma.

Through Leidesdorff, Larkin was informed of Major John C. Frémont’s return to California and the success of the Bear Flaggers in capturing Sonoma. Believing Mexico City intended to drive Americans out of all Mexico, the rebels captured Governor Mariano Vallejo and proclaimed the short-lived California Republic. “[The rebels],” Leidesdorff reported, “have 300 stand of arms, including rifles, muskets, carbines and pistols in their garrison of Sonoma…[and] will use them with terrible effect.” In a confidential June 17 letter he also cautioned Larkin that some in the revolt might be considered enemies of the United States and should be replaced.

Leidesdorff seemed impressed with the gains made by the insurgents and noted the detail and significance of the ensign they carried. “Their banner,” he wrote Larkin, “is a white field with a red border, a large star and a grisly [sic ] bear.”

The components he dubbed the “Flag of Young California” were later incorporated into the state flag. In his memoirs Larkin reflected how important Leidesdorff’s correspondences were toward keeping him apprised of events in northern Mexico at the outset of the war.

In the same 1849 journal entry mentioning Larkin, President Polk remarked how the discovery of gold had fostered a “state of anarchy and confusion” in California, and that in the absence of government there was “no security for life, liberty or property.” Sadly, Leidesdorff, whose ranch bordered Sutter’s Mill, would not live to reap the financial awards stemming from this “anarchy,” for he died of typhoid fever on May 18, 1848. In 1998, on the sesquicentennial of his death, San Francisco officials memorialized him with a plaque recognizing his service as a city councilman and treasurer and for having co-founded the city’s first public school. A stretch of U.S. 50 bordering the site of his former 35,000-acre ranch is named the William Alexander Leidesdorff Jr. Memorial Highway.

Leidesdorff was born out of wedlock on Oct. 23, 1810, to a Danish father and mulatto mother. He became a commercial success in pre–Gold Rush California and during the Mexican War played a key role in foreign policy.

On being granted mexican citizenship in 1844, he received a 35,000acre grant on the american river near sutter’s fort

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WESTERN ENTERPRISE

ACROSS THE WIDE MISSISSIPPI JAMES BUCHANAN EADS SPENT HIS LIFE ON THE MIGHTY RIVER, AND HIS GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT WAS TO BRIDGE IT

BY JIM WINNERMAN

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TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; LEFT: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY

A

s westward migration through not to mention dilute the dependence of commerce St. Louis resumed in earnest after on their steamboats. Meanwhile, Chicago interests the Civil War, the Mississippi River were lobbying for railroads to branch north through became an increasingly vexatious their city, required easements on the Illinois side impediment to the transport of people, wagons, of the river appeared prohibitive, and proposals animals and supplies to the expanding settlefor federal funding failed. ments beyond. The manpower required to unThe practical challenges of constructing a bridge load a train on the east bank, transfer cargo to a across “Old Man River” particularly intrigued selfferryboat for the crossing and then load the cargo taught civil engineer James Buchanan Eads. Born in JAMES BUCHANAN EADS onto a westbound train was time consuming and Lawrenceburg, Ind., on May 23, 1820, and named expensive. Furthermore, the river was impassfor his mother’s cousin James Buchanan, the future able when the water was low or frozen, sometimes delaying U.S. president, Eads grew up in St. Louis and had spent his life the transport of supplies for weeks. on the river. Before the war he had invented salvage boats with Since 1839 various entities had floated the idea of spanning which to recover cargo from sunken steamboats, and during the the river with a bridge at St. Louis. That discussion intensified war he’d designed a class of ironclad riverboats for the Union. when the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad (later absorbed by the In 1867, under the auspices of the newly formed Illinois & St. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad) reached East St. Louis in 1857 and Louis Bridge Co., Eads applied his book knowledge and experitracks fanned out from both banks of the river. Then the Civil ence to draw up plans. His proposal called for a bridge with three War intervened. The idea resurfaced in its wake, but planners graceful spans, each supported by four ribbed arches more than faced several obstacles. Riverboatmen were vociferous in their 500 feet long—twice the length of any complete bridge yet conconcern a bridge would impede safe passage on the Mississippi, structed. Furthermore, he proposed the first use of alloy steel in AUTUMN 2022

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WESTERN ENTERPRISE

TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; LEFT: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY

James Eads (1820–87) spent his early life on the Mississippi and in adulthood bridged the mighty river. On July 4, 1874, after a tireless seven-year construction project, officials and residents of St. Louis gathered to dedicate the landmark span in this Currier & Ives lithograph.

a major construction project and insisted on sinking the bridge foundations into bedrock. It would also be among the first large spans built using the cantilever principle. That construction approach extends the deck of a bridge horizontally over the river while supported at only one end, allowing river traffic to pass beneath even as the bridge was being built.

In 1868 Eads presented company directors with a detailed report intended to quell any skepticism.

In it he delved into existing theories of stress and strain, materials and building methods, explaining in depth the innovative concepts in his proposal.

The report met with widespread approval from engineers and scientific journals worldwide, and Eads earned the necessary approval from Congress to begin work.

At the height of the project two dozen boats and some 1,500 men were employed to build the bridge. Eads hit his first benchmark in early February 1870 when the first caisson reached bedrock some 95 feet underwater, an accomplishment signaled with cannon fire and steamboat whistles.

After seven years of construction the 6,442-foot landmark span was dedicated on July 4, 1874, the 98th anniversary of American Independence. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch trumpeted the ceremony in banner headlines:

Fifteen Miles of Marching Men, Prancing Horses and Decorated Wagons Have Delighted Two Hundred Thousand Spectators The bridge, the paper gushed, had been “christened the scientific feat of the country…baptized with water from the four quarters of the republic.”

The editors slavishly lavished praise on readers, proclaiming, “The genius and money of [St. Louis’] citizens have built a bridge the like of which the world of capital and science never before dreamed of.” Eads’ name is conspicuously absent from the report.

In retrospect, the self-taught engineer was the obvious choice of a man to build the bridge. His love of and respect for the Mississippi was reportedly kindled during an 1833 steamboat passage with his family. While the vessel made its way upriver, the young teen roamed from pilothouse to paddle wheel, enamored with everything he saw. As it arrived in St. Louis, however, the steamboat caught fire and sank, losing it valuable cargo, including the Eads family possessions. James was forced to leave school and earn a living. Six years later, while working as a clerk aboard the steamboat Knickerbocker, Eads was forced to scramble to safety again as a snag ripped open the bow, claiming that unlucky vessel and its cargo of lead.

Recognizing there was money to be made salvaging lost cargo from such sunken vessels, Eads began mulling ways to do it. By the tender age of 22, with the help of investors, he had designed and built salvage boats and specialized diving equipment he personally used to recover cargo from the fast-flowing river, a risky endeavor that brought financial success. In time he developed vessels and equipment with which to raise entire boats from the river bottom.

During the Civil War President Abraham Lincoln enlisted Eads to design a class of ironclad warships for riverine combat. Eads’ seven gunboats proved decisive in several battles along the Mississippi and Tennessee rivers, including the pivotal Vicksburg campaign.

Concurrent to his ambitious project to span the Mississippi, Eads worked on a plan to open the shipping channel at the mouth of the river south of New Orleans. As the broad river emptied into the Gulf of New Mexico, deposited silt continually choked the passage. Eads designed a system of jetties that narrowed the main outlet, enabling the fast-moving current to cut deep enough to grant vessels reliable year-round access to the river. That project had a monumental positive impact on trade in New Orleans with benefits realized to this day. In gratitude Louisiana authorities named the spit of land at the southernmost extent of the river Port Eads, today marked by a lighthouse and little else.

One idea Eads had that never materialized was an alternative to the hazardous passage of ships around the tip of South America at Cape Horn.

His innovative proposal was to transport ships by railway across Mexico’s 120-mile-wide Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The plans called for sliding a 350-footlong flatbed car—with adjusting rams that formed a cradle to accommodate any hull—beneath a waiting ship in a 450-foot-long dry dock. Once the vessel was secured to the flatbed, powerful locomotives on three parallel sets of tracks would pull the ship onto dry land and across the isthmus. Through the mid-1880s Eads pressed both Congress and the Mexican government for approval to no avail. (The 1914 opening of the Panama Canal finally addressed the problem.) But the inventor remained undeterred. By the time of his death on March 8, 1887, Eads had filed more than 50 patents.

In 1949, after 75 years of service, engineers used modern electromagnetic strain gauges to test the strength of the Eads Bridge. They determined that its designer’s estimated allowable load of 3,000 pounds per foot could be raised to 5,000 pounds per foot, and the graceful span over the Mississippi has remained in daily use ever since. Present-day St. Louis may be known as the “Gateway to the West,” but it was Eads who built a lasting bridge to the West.

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ART OF THE WEST

AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR S.D. NELSON EDUCATES AND ENTERTAINS YOUNG READERS WITH HIS COLORFUL PAINTINGS AND NARRATIVE STYLE

BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS

W

riter, illustrator and former public school art teacher S.D. Nelson has devoted his talents to teaching young people about Lakota history, culture and traditions through such award-winning children’s books as Sitting Bull: Lakota Warrior and Defender of His People, Red Cloud: A Lakota Story of War and Surrender and the Lakota Story series, including Black Elk’s Vision, Gift Horse and The Star People (Abrams Publishers). His latest offering is the 2021 double biography Crazy Horse and Custer: Born Enemies.

Nelson draws inspiration from his own family heritage. His grandmother and mother were born and raised on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which straddles the central border of North and South Dakota. An enrolled member of

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the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Nelson has lived most of his life off the reservation and works out of a home studio in Flagstaff, Ariz. But, as the author puts it, “My blood roots run deep.” He learned about Lakota traditions from his mother’s family.

“As a boy I discovered that the prairies of Dakota are only earth and sky,” Nelson says. “All is buffalo grass and clouds, forever. It is a land of brutal beauty, where terri-

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TOP RIGHT: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; RIGHT: S.D. NELSON

BRINGING LAKOTA CULTURE TO LIFE

TOP: CRAZY HORSE MEMORIAL, THE INDIAN MUSEUM OF NORTH AMERICA; LEFT: COURTESY S.D. NELSON

S.D. Nelson (below, putting up meat the traditional way), an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, painted the acrylic-on-Masonite Hanbleceya— The Vision in 2021. It appears in Crazy Horse and Custer: Born Enemies (Abrams), his dual biography for young adult readers.

TOP RIGHT: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; RIGHT: S.D. NELSON

TOP: CRAZY HORSE MEMORIAL, THE INDIAN MUSEUM OF NORTH AMERICA; LEFT: COURTESY S.D. NELSON

ART OF THE WEST

Above: In his acrylicon-board Sundancers —Wiwanyang Wacipi Nelson depicts a traditional Sun Dance ceremony. This illustration also appears in Crazy Horse and Custer: Born Enemies. Left: Nelson’s great-grandfather William Presley Zahn poses with his wife, Kezewin (Nelson’s great-grandmother), and their children at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation circa 1899. The girl at far right is Nelson’s grandmother Josephine Zahn Pleets.

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ble battles were fought—hand to hand—and where at twilight the song of Sister Meadowlark will make your heart cry. My mother, Christine (Elk Tooth Woman) told me coyote stories about the Trickster.

I learned that the stars were the spirits of my ancestors, that my great-great-grandfather Mahpiya Kiny’An (Flying Cloud) still rode his snorting horse along the White Road of the Milky Way. “If I looked carefully, Mom said, I would see the Great Bear and the Star That Does Not Turn (the North Star). She told me the Life Force, or the Great Mystery, is named Wakan Tanka, that all of creation—the four-legged beings, the tall standing trees, even the wind—has a spirit and is alive.”

Western Writers of America and other organizations have recognized his beautifully illustrated and narrated books with multiple awards. Long before he discovered writing, however, Nelson 28 WILD WEST

S.D. NELSON (2)

Above: In Victory at the Little Bighorn triumphant Plains Indians sport some of the spoils of their June 1876 defeat of Lt. Col. George Custer and the 7th U.S. Cavalry, including horses, the uniform jackets of dead bluecoats and a regimental guidon. Left: Nelson depicts The End of Custer. The artist’s greatgrandfather Zahn (see P. 27) was a foot soldier for Custer during the 1874 Black Hills Expedition.

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TOP LEFT: GALLUP CULTURAL CENTER; ABOVE AND RIGHT: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (2)

ART OF THE WEST

TOP LEFT: GALLUP CULTURAL CENTER; ABOVE AND RIGHT: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (2)

S.D. NELSON (2)

ART OF THE WEST

loved art. He traces that passion back to 1957–58, when his mother took private oil-painting lessons from a German artist.

“I was a 7-year-old kid with a front-row seat to the whole process of easel painting,” Nelson recalls.

“I watched with fascination as she mixed colors on an artist’s palette and spread paint on a blank canvas, turning a flat surface into the illusion of cloudfilled skies, mountains, pine forests reflected in lakes and still lifes of fruit and flowers. The magical process of illustration inspired this young boy.”

That led in turn to an art degree from Minnesota State University Moorhead, followed by a career

teaching art at public schools in North Dakota and Arizona.

These days Nelson, who relies on personal experience and research before tackling a subject, doesn’t just illustrate books. His original works grace the collections of Montana’s Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., the North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum in Bismarck, among other museums and galleries.

His illustrations have appeared in magazines and other writers’ books, and he provided the cover illustration for the Black Lodge Singers’ Grammynominated CD More Kids’ Pow-Wow Songs.

Traditional Lakota ledger art informs Nelson’s artistic style. He renders most of his illustrations with acrylic paint on primed rigid particle board.

“I brush, splatter, spray, drip and sponge,” he explains. When does he know a painting is finished?

Hopefully, that’s when his schoolteacher training kicks in.

“I can tell you it is easier for an art teacher to see when his student’s painting is finished,” Nelson admits. “I have often told students, ‘Stop. Your painting is finished. Don’t overwork it.’ Artists must be mindful of when their brushstrokes have completed their work. Knowing when to stop is a challenge. The process of writing helps the artist become a better illustrator, and illustrating improves one’s writing. I believe one should not overstate their message. When you have crossed the finish line, stop running.”

Clockwise from top left: There Is a Pipe That Is Sacred (featured artist print, 1997 Inter-Tribal Pow Wow, Gallup, N.M.); an illustration of the horse dance ceremony from his 2010 Abrams book Black Elk’s Vision: A Lakota Story; and Manifest Destiny—Smallpox, a ledger drawing (on paper, ink, Prismacolor, pastel, acrylic) used as an illustration in Crazy Horse and Custer­: Born Enemies.

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INDIAN LIFE

Fourteen-acre Monks Mound anchors the site of Cahokia, the largest Mississippian culture city, east of present-day St. Louis.

Below: This effigy pipe of a male figure known as Resting Warrior or Big Boy is from Spiro Mounds, in eastern Oklahoma.

THE MOUND BUILDERS

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basic religious tenets, such as their concept of a sun god.

They also indulged in high-stakes gaming and gambling.

Their cities became the springboards for familial dynastic ambitions.

The largest of these cities was Cahokia, with an estimated peak population approaching 20,000.

Sprawling across 6 square miles on the east bank of the Mississippi River immediately opposite present-day St. Louis, Mo., the city encompassed some 120 earthen mounds. Today 2,200-acre Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site centers on the largest surviving Mississippian earthwork, Monks Mound, which stands 100 feet high and occupies 14 acres. Its size is all the more remarkable when one considers the millions of cubic feet of earth brought to the site basketful by basketful. It was atop such mounds residents held religious ceremonies, proffered offerings and human sacrifices and interred the bodies of deceased nobles. Farmers, tradesmen and commoners alike built their homes—simple thatched huts— adjacent to these ceremonial mounds, while secondary plazas on the fringes of each settlement served as farmers markets.

Cahokia manufactured ornaments and other trade objects crafted from stone, shell, bone and copper, as well as daggers, maces and other weapons renowned across the Mississippian

TOP: MATTHEW GUSH/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LEFT: UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS MUSEUM

T

iming was everything for Christopher Columbus and the handful of Europeans who initially followed in his wake after the Italian explorer “sailed the ocean blue in 1492.”

Had such bold men crossed the Atlantic a scant seven decades earlier, they would have encountered, instead of scattered, primitive tribes, a civilization more than capable of halting their European intrusion into the New World.

For more than a millennium the interconnected peoples of the Mississippian culture built cities, warred and traded across the trail systems and rivers lacing what today is the eastern half of the United States. The loose confederation comprised upward of 3 million people from some 60 different tribes speaking more than 30 languages and spanned from Virginia to the Rockies and the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. The civilization dominated the region from roughly 700 to 1420.

Mississippians initially settled along the major rivers in the Midwest and Southeast, where they developed fortified settlements with protective palisades, broad plazas and large earthen mounds. Though primarily farmers, they were also exceptional potters and metalworkers, primarily in copper. Warfare among the disparate tribes was continual, but they did share certain

HERB ROE

CAHOKIA AND OTHER IMPRESSIVE CITIES OF THE MISSISSIPPIAN CULTURE ROSE AND FELL BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

BY MIKE COPPOCK

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HERB ROE

INDIAN LIFE world. Such were must-have items among the nobility of other cities, including Spiro and Natchez, for the Cahokians were trendsetters. Their goods spread across North America, speaking to a robust trade system that returned to these cities hoes of stone and bison bone from the Great Plains, copper from Lake Superior and shells from the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet, by the mid-14th century Cahokia had collapsed. There is no evidence of an attack at the site, let alone conquest by another people. Many researchers believe the city simply could not sustain itself at the size it had reached, so its people scattered. The broader Mississippian culture hung on another century or so.

From its 10th century origins Spiro, along the present-day Oklahoma-Arkansas border, evolved into an important religious and political center of the Mississippian culture. Primarily traders, the Spiroans established outposts along the great rivers at which they exchanged pipes and pottery for buffalo hides, meat and shoulder bones they used as plows. The Spiroans and surrounding peoples sustained themselves with harvests of corn, beans and squash from the rich soil of alluvial floodplains. One distinguishing characteristic of the Spiroans was the deliberate deformation of their skulls. Shortly after giving birth, mothers would tightly wrap animal skins around their babies’ heads, gradually transforming their skulls into conical, oblong shapes unmistakable by other tribes even at a distance. It is thought they did so to mark their status in society and familial or clan membership.

While Spiro’s population peaked at about 10,000 people, the winter and summer solstices drew thousands more for three days of religious ceremonies. In Spiro’s Temple Plaza anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 men could be found paying homage to their sun god, who spoke through the priests, telling them when to plant their crops, how to conduct their ceremonies and other details of religious and everyday life. In preparation for such ceremonies, worshipers smoked sacred tobacco, drank a highly caffeinated purgative tea brewed from yaupon holly leaves they called the “black drink” and then promptly vomited up the contents. After three days without food, water

or sleep, they would dance, sing and wait for planting instructions from the priests.

Around the turn of the 15th century crop yields began to decrease in Spiro and other cities across the Mississippian world.

The Little Ice Age, which gripped Europe in cold, also took a toll in North America. At first Spiro traded for food with the cities in warmer climes to the Southeast, until those cities also began to feel the pinch from a changing climate. The alarmed priests ultimately had Spiro evacuated, remaining behind in order to perform religious rites in hopes of appeasing their god. Fleeing residents migrated west and south to settle in neighboring communities, much like modern-day exoduses from major cities to suburban enclaves.

Researchers believe that around 1420 the Spiroan priests, their efforts having failed to stem crop losses or stave off hunger, decided to make a final grand spiritual appeal to their sun god.

After having everything deemed religious brought to Spiro and ceremonially buried in the sacred mounds, the priests resumed their religious rites for more than a year.

But there was no turning back to better times. Crop failures became endemic, and the consequent drop in food supply made it impossible to sustain large, concentrated populations. Out of options, the Spiroans and other city-dwelling Mississippians dispersed into the surrounding countryside, forming smaller groups and doing their best to survive. The collapse in many respects echoed the fall of the Roman empire.

For the first time in centuries the disparate peoples of North America returned to their tribal and seminomadic roots even as Spanish and French explorers began penetrating the continent.

Much of our knowledge of Mississippian culture derives from observations of the Grand Village of the Natchez, in the lower Mississippi Valley, which survived well into the period of European colonization. While the people of Natchez resisted French incursion, by 1731 they had been defeated and dispersed, some seeking refuge and blending into such well known tribes as the Chickasaws, Cherokees and Muscogees (Creeks). Their bloodline survives, if not in name.

TOP: MATTHEW GUSH/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LEFT: UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS MUSEUM

An artist’s conception of Spiro, once home to 10,000 people who harvested corn, beans and squash from rich soil deposited by annual Arkansas River floods.

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A Killer and a Lover

OPPOSITE: GARY ERNEST SMITH/MEDICINE MAN GALLERY, TUCSON, ARIZ.; THIS PAGE: JOE CICCARONE

The date is April 28, 1881. Billy the Kid has killed Deputies James Bell and Bob Olinger in Lincoln, New Mexico Territory, and with cool deliberation rides away in Gary Ernest Smith’s oil painting Billy Leaves Town. Opposite: One of the Kid’s reputed lovers was Paulita Maxwell, and Joe Ciccarone depicts them as a couple in his black-andwhite portrait Billy the Kid and Paulita.

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RECOLLECTIONS OF THE KID

In the 1930s the Federal Writers’ Project recorded anecdotes about Billy the Kid—some undoubtedly spurious, others bearing the ring of truth

OPPOSITE: GARY ERNEST SMITH/MEDICINE MAN GALLERY, TUCSON, ARIZ.; THIS PAGE: JOE CICCARONE

W

By Mark Iacampo

ith smoking six-guns Billy the Kid blazed a path across American folklore as wide as the Chisholm Trail. Fact and fiction meld inscrutably in the tales of the young desperado in a tradition rumored to have been started by Billy himself when he claimed to have gunned down 21 men, “One for every year of my life.”

Countless books, articles and big- and small-screen productions have made the highlights of his brief life common knowledge to even the most passive Western aficionado. Young Billy first broke jail in Silver City, New Mexico Territory, in September 1875, killed a reputed bully in Arizona Territory in August 1877, then returned to his adoptive territory. By that November he was riding for English businessman/rancher John Tunstall in turbulent Lincoln County. When Tunstall was shot down in February 1878, the Kid and the other self-proclaimed Regulators sought revenge against his killers, setting off the Lincoln County War. Things heated up on April 1 when Regulators gunned down the county’s corrupt sheriff, William Brady, then boiled over in July amid a five-day fight between the competing factions that culminated with the burning of the McSween house and killing of businessman Alexander McSween. After the war the fugitive Kid, who had supported McSween, elected to remain in the county. That unwise decision led to Billy’s capture at Stinking Springs in December 1880, followed by a busy April 1881 marked by the Kid’s conviction for Brady’s murder at trial in Mesilla (see related story, P. 46) and his bold escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse, during which he killed two of Sheriff Pat Garrett’s deputies. Swearing never to be caught alive

again, the Kid got his wish when shot down by the relentless Garrett on July 14, 1881, in friend Pete Maxwell’s bedroom at the latter’s family ranch in Fort Sumner (see P. 88).

Stories of the Kid’s romances have also made the rounds. Paulita Maxwell, a daughter of prominent rancher Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell and sister to Pete, was popularly believed to have been one of Billy’s lovers.

Some even allege she was pregnant with Billy’s baby at the time Garrett gunned down the fugitive Kid in her older brother’s bedroom. Another rumored lover of the man known as William Bonney was Sallie Lucy Chisum, a niece of cattle baron John Chisum, although it is far more likely they were just friends (see “Much Misunderstood Miss Chisum,” by David S. Turk with Sallie Lynn Chisum Robert, in the February 2018 Wild West).

But other stories rarely make it into the history books, tales of horse races, knife play, poker games and dances. Though less dramatic than such events as the public shooting of Sheriff Brady or the ambush killing of Deputy Bob Olinger from a second-story window of the Lincoln County Courthouse or Billy’s alleged romances with Paulita and Sallie, such anecdotes paint a more complete picture of the daring youth who captured the imagination of so many American readers.

As part of the federal Works Projects Administration (WPA), which between 1935 and ’43 put some 8.5 million people to work to alleviate unemployment amid the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) sent hundreds of writers nationwide to record the life stories of a broad swath of Americans. The resulting documents offer a unique glimpse into the past, recording diverse facets of interviewees’ lives, from their occupations and religious practices to their political AUTUMN 2022

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views and even their favorite meals. Amid the fascinating tales of those who settled the West, alongside thrilling accounts of Indian raids and cattle rustling, is the occasional offhand reference to Billy the Kid. Not all such recollections should be accepted at face value, of course. “One of the perils of a Kid/Lincoln County War historian,” explains one such historian, James Mills, “is having to differentiate between the realistic recollection of old-timers and where they got a little carried away or their memory muddled in some cases.”

Case in point is a tale told by Francisco Gomez, who was 83 years old when interviewed in 1938. Gomez had worked for the McSweens and claimed to have ridden with the Kid against a pair of rowdies who shot up Lincoln. “[Civil War veteran] Captain [Saturnino] Baca was sheriff then,” Gomez said, “and some tough outlaws came to Lincoln and rode up and down the streets and shot out window lights in the houses and terrorized people.” At Baca’s request, the old-timer alleged, Billy led Gomez, José Chavez y Chavez and two other men on a hunt for the badmen. “The outlaws went to the upper Ruidoso, and we followed them. We caught up with them and shot it out with them. One of the out34 WILD WEST

laws was killed, and the other ran away.

None of us were hurt.”

In all fairness, decades had passed between the time of the alleged events and when Gomez related his story. As hisSATURNINO BACA torian Mills notes, however, Baca had finished his term as sheriff before Billy ever arrived in Lincoln County. “The incident may well have occurred while Baca was sheriff, but Billy wouldn’t have been involved,” Mills said.

So, was Gomez mistaken about the Kid’s involvement or wrong about who was sheriff at the time? Either seems feasible. But Gomez had other clear recollections of Billy. “He used to practice target shooting a lot,” the old-timer recounted. “He would throw up a can and would twirl his six-gun on his finger, and he could hit the can six times before it hit the ground.”

Interviewed by the FWP at age 82 in 1937, Annie E. Lesnett was married to a local storekeeper and hotelier and was the mother of two young children at the time of the Lincoln County War. Acquainted with Billy, she corroborated his skill with firearms. “The Kid was one of the quickest, most accurate shots in the Southwest,” she recalled. “He often said, however, that he wished he were as accurate with a six-gun as he was with a rifle. He was good with a pistol but excellent with a rifle.”

According to Jack Robert Grigsby, who was born in Tyler, Texas, in 1854, orphaned as a boy and moved to Lincoln County when he was 16, Billy was just as adept with a knife. In a cattle camp near Hackberry, Texas, Grigsby looked on as the Kid got into a fight with a fellow hand that quickly turned violent. “Billy cut the Negro across the side of the face and down the back with a long butcher knife,” Grigsby recalled. The victim fled, then collapsed. As the wounded man pleaded for his life, the Kid snapped, “Oh, shut your damn mouth! I have already done all to you that I want to.” Billy’s reaction, as reported by Grigsby, coincides with other accounts of the Kid’s cool detachment. “Billy stood there and wiped

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LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

In the 1930s Elbert Croslin, who was born four years after Billy was slain, related a story in which he was in Portales, New Mexico Territory, and nearly crossed guns with a poker player a hotel proprietor warned him was the notorious Kid (second from left in this painting).

TOP: SARA BLOODWOLF; ABOVE: ROBERT G. McCUBBIN COLLECTION/OLD WEST EVENTS

Among the Tall Tales

LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

TOP: SARA BLOODWOLF; ABOVE: ROBERT G. McCUBBIN COLLECTION/OLD WEST EVENTS

the blood off of the knife with his hands…as unconcerned as if he hadn’t done a thing. But he left after that. He was afraid the officers would hear of this and would get him for other things he was wanted for.”

The Kid certainly had a fearsome reputation. George Bede, who arrived in New Mexico Territory in 1877 and worked on Chisum’s Jinglebob Ranch near Roswell for five years, had regular interactions with Billy. “Whenever I met him, he acted mighty decent,” Bede recalled, “and ’twas generally said about him that ALEXANDER McSWEEN JOHN CHISUM he never turned a fellow down that was up against it and called for a little help. But, also, For every story that paints Billy as a steely gunthe folks ’lowed he would shoot a man just to see the fellow give the dying kick. ’Twas said he got a powerful lot of amusement out of watch- man, just as many describe an amiable young man many called friend. Gomez remembered ing a fellow that he didn’t like twist and groan.”

Apocryphal or not, such tales stood the Kid in good stead at times. the Kid’s big roan horse. “Billy would go to the Take, for example, an anecdote from Ambrosio Chavez, whose cousin gate and whistle, and the horse would come Martín was a friend of Billy’s. Chavez recalled a prize match between up to the gate to him. That horse would follow Martín’s mare and a fast horse owned by a group of passing Texans. The Billy and mind him like a dog.” Lesnett also bet was three fat beeves. But when Martín’s mare won the race by a wide had benign recollections of the Kid. “He was margin, the Texans cried foul and angrily refused to honor the wager. very fond of children,” she said. “He called my Shortly thereafter the Kid arrived at Martín’s for a visit, and on hearing the little boy [Irvin] ‘Pardie’ and always wanted story, he determined to visit the Texans and set the matter straight. “The to hold the baby [ Jennie Mae].…He also had women at Martín’s ranch just begged Billy not to go to collect the bet,” a little dog…[that] would jump up on the Kid Chavez said, “as they were afraid that there would be trouble over it, and until he would laughingly pull his gun and bethat Billy might get killed. But Billy just laughed at them.” Armed with two gin firing into the ground. The dog would playpistols and two cartridge belts, the Kid rode into the Texans’ cattle herd fully follow every puff of dust, yelping joyfully.” and shot down three of their best animals. He then told Martín to have Billy also frequented local dances. According to the Texans deliver the meat. “The Texans were so scared when they found Ella (née Bolton) Davidson, who shared a memorable spin around the floor with the Kid, many out that he was Billy the Kid that they broke camp and left right away.”

Another tale that cast the Kid in a heroic light came from Pedro M. a local hostess believed “the Kid had been led Rodriguez, who was born in Lincoln County in 1874. His 1938 interview into evil paths and, through kindness and friendcenters on Indian fighting, specifically his father’s service in then Captain liness of hospitality, might be led back into the (and future Lincoln County sheriff) William Brady’s 1st Regiment New straight and narrow way.”

Many people spoke of the polite young outlaw Mexico Volunteer Calvary, headquartered at Fort Stanton. “In those days,” Rodriguez said, “the Indians roamed all over Lincoln County and were with overt fondness. Berta (née Ballard) Manning always killing people and stealing cattle and horses.” When Indians threat- was 10 years old in 1879 when she settled with ened the family cattle herd, Pedro’s grandfather gathered a posse of cow- her family in Fort Sumner. “Yes, I remember boys, the Kid among them, to ride into Turkey Canyon and drive the Billy the Kid real well,” she recalled. “He was not cattle down to the Ruidoso. Halfway up the canyon some two dozen rough looking and was very quiet and friendly.

Mescalero Apaches, led by Chief Kamisa, intercepted the wranglers. I never saw anything ugly about him or in his Amid a parley the Indians subtly moved in to surround the cowboys. manners.…He was kind and could be a good Keeping a cool head, the Kid instructed his fellow hands in Spanish to friend. But I am sure we should not make a hero tighten up their horses’ cinches and follow him. “Billy mounted his horse, of Billy, for after all he was a bandit and a killer.” with a six-gun in each hand, and started hollering and shooting as he rode Berta’s brother, Charles Ballard, had a simitoward the Indians. The rest of the men followed, shooting as they went. lar impression of the Kid. “I remember good They broke through the line of Indians, and not a one of the men were times I had with Billy the Kid,” he recalled. hurt.” The cowboys then rounded up the cattle and returned them to “He was not an outlaw in manners—was quiet Rodriguez’s corral. “The next morning Kamisa and a band of Indians but good company, always doing something incame to my grandfather’s house.” A deal was struck, and for the paltry teresting. That was why he had so many friends. price of three beeves the Apaches vowed to leave Rodriguez’s herd alone. We often raced horses together.” Charles also touched on the Kid’s reputation as an outlaw.

“The Indians kept their promise and never stole any more cattle.”

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Recollections of the Kid in the FWP interviews paint a picture of a young man seemingly caught up in circumstances beyond his control. But however congenial a friend he may have been, he was indisputably an outlaw. J.H. “Jake” Byler spent his adult life punching cows and shared hair-raising tales about stampedes, gunfights and cattle rustling. “I ran cattle all over west Texas, from Tom Green to the Pecos and from there to New Mexico,” he recalled.

While working as a hand for Tularosa Basin rancher Pat Coghlan, who had a government contract to furnish beef to reservation Indians, Byler learned not to question where the cattle came from. “A new hand knew better than to ask questions,” he said. “If he had any sense at all, he kept his mouth shut and stuck to duty.

If he didn’t, he didn’t last long.

“Billy the Kid was doing his part of the stealing [of cattle] on the Pecos and selling to Coghlan,” Byler said. “I’ve slept many a night right

by Billy and never asked a question, just got up next morning and took the cattle he had brought in up to the reservation without a word.” But rustling wasn’t the Kid’s only source of illicit income. According to Byler, Billy worked a side deal with local stage drivers. At a prearranged 36 WILD WEST

I am sure father and I heard the last words the two men said on the subject of the Kid’s surrender.…The Kid was mounted and ready to leave, and Pat said to him, “Billy, you can see it my way, I guess?”

“No, Pat,” the Kid said.

“Well, you understand I have to either resign or kill you, and I am not going to resign.”

“You mean that you’ll try to kill me’, the Kid answered while laughing; and then he rode off, saying, “So long, pardner.” It was some spell after that last call of the Kid’s when Pat killed the fellow.

Not all old-timers, though, accepted the fact of the legendary outlaw’s death. “There seems to be evidence that Billy the Kid was not killed by Garrett but that he lived to be an old man down near Marfa, Texas,” said Dr. John Randolph Carver, who was interviewed in Fort Sumner at age 67 in 1937. Carver cited three reasons so many people refused to believe the Kid had died that night in Maxwell’s bedroom. “One is that his sister came out to see him and then did not go to his grave but went directly east. That his horse was never seen again is another reason. Third is that Pete Maxwell and Pat Garrett were his friends, and that a Mexican was buried instead of Billy the Kid.” As with Elvis, Amelia Earhart and others, tales of the Kid’s survival and rumored sightings abound. Take a story told by Elbert Croslin, who made a living as a rodeo performer and claimed to have run afoul of Billy during a poker game. For the record, Croslin was born in 1885, four years after Garrett killed the Kid. Croslin’s undated interview centered on bronco-busting and other wild adventures out West. He related one particularly punishing series of rides in Bonham, Texas. “I took so many falls that it hurt my pride quite a bit,” he said. “I didn’t even want to stay around, so I caught some freight trains and went to New Mexico.” While in Portales the broke, recovering rider

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LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: NEW YORK CITY MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES

“Billy was credited with more killings than he ever did. However, there were plenty that could be counted against him. It was reported he was the one who killed [McSween attorney Huston] Chapman when Chapman refused to dance when ordered, but Billy had nothing at all to do with that shooting.”

PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM

PAT GARRETT

point the Kid would meet a stage, take the driver’s gun, make off with the strongbox and then split the take with the driver. To thwart the young outlaw’s depredations, the stage company outfitted one Sam Perry with fast horses and his pick of possemen and set him off in pursuit of the Kid. “Sam was a crook too,” Byler asserted. “He came by where Tress Underwood and I were working and tried to get us to go with him. He said Billy the Kid’s hideout was on the border, that he knew where it was, and that we could sell out to him and split, then get us an old pack jack, trudge back and tell that the Kid and his gang overpowered us and took everything we had.” Byler and Underwood declined the offer, but some weeks later Perry returned “just as he had planned, leading the old jack and loaded down with money. He took us into Silver City, and we all got drunk.”

Obviously, the Kid was not the only rustler to ride the range. Rumor had it even Garrett had ridden and rustled beeves with Billy. “Pat had been a partner of Bill’s before Pat went to farming and ranching,” Bede claimed. “Under some sort of an arrangement Pat surrendered and was not sent to prison.” Bede lived for a time on Garrett’s ranch and claimed the Kid came by frequently at the rancher’s invitation. “When Pat became a lawman, he sent for Billy.” According to Bede, who “heard some of the chinning,” Garrett tried to persuade the Kid to give up his desperado lifestyle, but Billy would have none of it. “I guess the Kid hankered for his amusement of watching shot men kick and groan.” In support of his allegation, Bede offered another anecdote:

LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: NEW YORK CITY MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES

PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM

found himself spectating at a poker game, drawn to it by the pistols and heaps of gold coins stacked on the table before each player. “I’d seen money like that in banks before,” Croslin recalled, “but not out in public.”

He proceeded to “sweat the game,” skulking along the fringes to study poker hands and learn each player’s style. When one of the men made a foolish play, Croslin grunted in derision. Bad move. “He jumped around so quick that I never realized he was moving till he was facing me, and, Lawd!

Lawd! he had his six-shooter pointed at my biscuits.” Noting Croslin was a mere lad, the player grabbed him by the shirt collar, dumped him outside on the boardwalk and returned to the game without uttering a word.

Angered and humiliated, Croslin decided to seek revenge. “I thought I was some pumpkins, and I also thought that since they didn’t know me, I could get away with tough stuff, and they’d just think I was sure tough.…I finally made up my mind to get [my] pistol and go kill the man.” As Croslin returned to the hotel lobby with gun drawn, the white-faced proprietor snatched the gun from his hand. “You wouldn’t have a chance with that man,” he explained. “Why, he’s Billy the Kid, one of the best and fastest pistol toters the world has ever seen.” Sobered by the warning, Croslin left his six-gun behind and caught the first homeward-bound freight train.

Further down in his interview he mentions having later joined a party of drovers trailing a herd past Stinking Springs, a known hangout of the Kid. “I took it up for another chance to see Billy,” he said. “I was disappointed, though, because a fellow named of Pat Carret [sic ] had already killed him somewhere. I think that’s the way it was. Anyway, I never saw him.”

“After I got back home,” he recalled, “I had quite a few tales to tell about the cowpunchers, and did I tell about Billy the Kid. Of course, it goes without saying that I never told what really happened between him and me. The tale I told had a different ending!”

One may assume Croslin was simply relating a tall tale to his interviewer. “I always was kind of a hand to brag on anything,” he admitted.

It’s likely the well-meaning barkeep simply told the cowhand his intended “victim” was Billy the Kid to spare the youngster trouble. Still, it appears Croslin believed the claim, or he wouldn’t have joined a cattle drive past one of the Kid’s hangouts. Or, perhaps in the same way present generations still idolize Elvis, folks who grew up in Billy’s shadow may have earnestly believed the Kid still roamed the West. Either way, stories like Croslin’s undoubtedly fueled the popular notion Billy had survived and may ultimately explain why so many people embraced the claims of such impostors as “Brushy Bill” Roberts, who insisted he was the Kid right up until his death on Dec. 27, 1950.

Federals Writers’ Project

Above left: Journalist and writer Henry Alsberg (1881– 1970) was founding director of this New Deal program that employed some 10,000 out-of-work Americans during the Great Depression. Its writers, including those above from New York, interviewed people of all stripes, including some who claimed to have known Billy the Kid.

While the credibility of Billy the Kid encounters in many of the FWP interviews remains in question, that doesn’t make them any less interesting or entertaining. Aside from tales about the Kid, the interviews contain plenty to hold one’s interest. Charles Ballard, for instance, served as a Rough Rider during the Spanish-American War and rode in the honor guard amid Theodore Roosevelt’s second inaugural parade in 1905. In his interview Byler held forth on Indian raids, knife fights and barroom brawls around the poker table. His story of Billy the cattle thief and stage robber was but one anecdote from his own long life of adventure.

Whether or not we believe such tales of the legendary Billy the Kid, the FWP interviews in the archives of the Library of Congress represent a valuable collection of American folklore and Western heritage. While they may not stand up to historical scrutiny, they sound mighty fine when shared around a campfire.

Mark Iacampo, who once performed stunts as a Rough Rider at the Rawhide Western Town in Scottsdale, Ariz., is a freelance writer for publications on three continents. For further reading he recommends Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride,

by Michael Wallis; The Real Billy the Kid,

by Miguel Antonio Otero Jr.; and the Library of Congress collection American Life Histories: Manuscripts From the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940, searchable online at loc.gov/ collections/federal-writers-project.

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A Boy and His Mother

Opposite: Gary Ernest Smith’s Billy the Kid depicts the young outlaw in profile. There is no known photograph of Billy’s mother, Catherine McCarty Antrim. The images below are often presented as picturing the Kid’s mother, but neither has been authenticated.

THE KID’S MOM

By Melody Groves

I think of the morn when I sailed away from thee / I said, ‘Pray to God for me, pray to God for me’

C

atherine McCarty sang along to the popular tune “La Paloma” and twirled around the wooden dance floor, her 12-year-old son’s hands in hers. Surely the tune resonated with other women like her who’d left Ireland long ago.

Words to the two-step jig, in Spanish and English, flowed together this day in 1873 in the Southwestern town of Silver City, New Mexico Territory.

The music, courtesy of a squeezebox, fiddle and guitar, reached a crescendo and then ended. Billy bowed to his mom, and she curtsied to him. She and Billy often sang and danced together, making quite the pair. The crowd clapped enthusiastically as Catherine laughed, her smile infectious, her love of music and dancing shared by her son.

While little is known about Catherine’s early life, a few facts have emerged, thanks to relentless researchers. She appears to have left Ireland aboard the steamship Devonshire during the Great Famine of the mid- to late 1840s and arrived in New York City in 1846. Born around 1829 (a fairly reliable guess, as her 1874 obituary lists her age as 45), she was around 17 when she stepped foot on American soil. Prior to 1855 immigrants would have disembarked on the docks on the east side of Manhattan, where little processing took place. (Through 1890 people were welcomed at 38 WILD WEST

the Emigrant Landing Depot, popularly known as Castle Garden, in Battery Park, while the famed Ellis Island didn’t open until 1892.) Passenger records list Catherine’s occupation as “servant.”

Common in that era, indentured servants typically worked for wealthy families up to seven years before earning the freedom to make their own way, as Catherine did.

After arriving in America, immigrants of many nations, particularly the Irish, chose to band together in close-knit communities. Catherine likely did too, at least for a while. As she listed her occupation on arrival, she likely already had work lined up.

It’s not known where she was first employed, but records indicate that by 1860 she was living in Utica, N.Y., where she worked for the John Munn family. Around 1861 she gave birth to William Henry McCarty, who lives on in infamy as Billy the Kid. That said, despite much research by many people, exactly when and where the Kid was born is not a settled matter. The identity of his father is also anyone’s guess, though in an 1868 census in Indianapolis, where Catherine lived for several years, she listed herself as the widow of one Michael McCarty.

OPPOSITE: GARY ERNEST SMITH/MEDICINE MAN GALLERY, TUCSON, ARIZ.; TOP: WICHITA-SEDGWICK COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM; RIGHT: HALEY MEMORIAL LIBRARY & HISTORY CENTER, MIDLAND, TEXAS

Catherine McCarty Antrim did all she could to protect and raise both of her sons—Billy, the future outlaw, and Joe, the future forgotten brother

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OPPOSITE: GARY ERNEST SMITH/MEDICINE MAN GALLERY, TUCSON, ARIZ.; TOP: WICHITA-SEDGWICK COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM; RIGHT: HALEY MEMORIAL LIBRARY & HISTORY CENTER, MIDLAND, TEXAS

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A Boyhood in Motion

may have set her up financially, buying her silence.

In any case, Catherine was no average woman of the 1860s. Although she claimed the title of widow, she was not the undereducated, “poor widow woman” of Irish immigrant stereotype. Catherine was smart, likable and educated and had a good eye for business. By all accounts, she was also a good mom, protecting her sons and doing whatever necessary to see they succeeded in life.

By 1868 she had moved to Indianapolis, the exact reason open to speculation. What we do know is in that year’s census she listed herself as the widow of Michael McCarty. Why did she identify herself as such? Likely because she was.

Moreover, society of the day would have shunned a woman who admitted to having birthed one (or both) of her children out of wedlock. It was far more respectable to claim widowhood, a status all too common after the Civil War. Life must have been difficult in booming Indianapolis. In order to support her boys,

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LEFT: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM; RIGHT: ROSWELL DAILY RECORD

Top: A sketch of Indianapolis’ original Union Depot. Catherine and her two boys lived in Indiana’s state capital in the 1860s. Left: Billy looks especially kidlike in this cartoonish depiction.

TOP: JEFFERSON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, MADISON, IND.; LEFT: DARKLITRIA

Most historians believe William Henry (aka “Billy”) to be Catherine McCarty’s older son. Though many give his birth year as 1859, Billy himself claimed to have been born around 1861, and many intriguing hints point that way. Joseph (aka “Josie” or “Joe”) Bonney McCarty was born some two years after Billy and cited 1863 as his birth year in census forms. Question is, how did Joe acquire the middle name Bonney, and why did Billy later adopt it as an alias?

A theory that makes sense of the Bonney connection suggests that while living in Utica and working for the Munn family, Catherine engaged in a tryst with a neighbor. In the 1860 census we find that eight doors up the street (according to the 1858/59 city directory) lived brothers John J. and Edward Finch Bonney, who were older and younger than Catherine, respectively. Rumors flew of a liaison, but with which brother is unclear. Was Billy and Joe’s father a Bonney? Is that why Catherine gave Joe the middle name of Bonney and how Billy lit on it as an alias?

In that place and time, had 30-something indentured servant Catherine and one of the Bonney brothers produced offspring, what would have happened? The Bonney family probably would have chafed at the potential tarnishing of their upper-class reputation. After all, Catherine was probably Irish Catholic, while they were likely of English Protestant ancestry, a combination akin to fire and gasoline. What then to do with the love child/children? Why not send them and their mother as far west as possible? By then trains ran clear to Indianapolis. That is the probable sequence of events for Catherine and her young sons, for they soon traveled to the edge of the frontier. Though speculation, the Bonneys

The Stepfather and the Ghostwriter

LEFT: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM; RIGHT: ROSWELL DAILY RECORD

TOP: JEFFERSON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, MADISON, IND.; LEFT: DARKLITRIA

Above: William Antrim, who married Catherine in Santa Fe in 1873 but didn’t commit to raising her boys and rarely spoke of them, lived to age 80. Above right: Ash Upton, ghostwriter of Pat Garrett’s The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, noted Catherine’s “charity and goodness of heart.”

Catherine operated a laundry and sold baked goods. She may have taken in boarders, another common occupation, as many soldiers had mustered out of service and needed a place to ground themselves while reacclimating to civilian life.

More is known about William Henry Harrison Antrim, the man who became Catherine’s husband and her boys’ stepfather, than is known about the McCarty clan. Born in Huntsville, Ind., in 1842 (making him a dozen years Catherine’s junior), Bill was the fifth of seven siblings.

His father, Levi, was a merchant and proprietor of a hotel in nearby Anderson. While in school Bill and siblings washed dishes, hauled wood and waited tables at the hotel.

In June 1862 the 20-year-old Antrim enlisted for three months in the Union Army, mustering in as a private with the 54th Regiment of the Indiana Infantry. After marching the 42 miles to Indianapolis with fellow volunteers, Antrim spent three months on guard duty at Camp Morton before mustering out of service. Remaining in the city, he moved to 58 Cherry St. and became a driver and clerk at Merchants Union Express Co., within a few blocks of the McCarty residence on North East Street.

Housing the steam locomotives bringing goods and people to and from the West, Indianapolis was abuzz with commerce. Coal powered the economic boom. Darkening the sky, the resulting coal smoke made eyes and noses water and breathing difficult. Little thought was given to what effects such particulates in the air would do to people’s health. Progress was at hand, and nothing would stop commercial growth.

Was this where Catherine contacted tuberculosis, then known as consumption? In 1870, whether for clearer air or the excitement of moving to a growing frontier town, she and her boys (Billy, around 9, and Josie, 7) shrugged off the gray skies and cold, wet winters and headed west for Wichita, Kan. Bill Antrim joined them.

In 1869 the government opened the Osage Indian trust lands in Kansas to the general public for homesteading. Requirements? Move onto a 160-acre quarter section of land and within five years perform certain improvements. Catherine’s tuberculosis must have been a driving factor in their decision. Doctors knew her only hope—no cure, just hope— was a move to a drier climate with clear air. Wichita had both.

Aware of the potential stigma of cohabiting as unmarried adults, Catherine and Bill took up separate residences. Bill bought a small plot of land 6 miles northeast of town, on which he built a cabin and worked as a farmer, while Catherine and the boys moved into a building on North Main Street, living above the room out of which she ran a laundry service.

In the heart of Wichita’s growing business district, her City Laundry attracted a steady stream of customers from the day she opened. Her business did well enough to merit mention in the March 15, 1871, inaugural edition of The Wichita Tribune: City Laundry The city laundry is kept by Mrs. McCarty, to whom we recommend those who wish to have their linen made clean.

Her hands were in hot, sudsy water from dawn to dusk, drawing from mounds of used sheets from the various brothels and the shirts and trousers of cowhands and businessmen alike.

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Next Stops—Wichita and Denver

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TOP: WICHITA-SEDGWICK COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM; LEFT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

Since the only school, an abandoned army dugout, had literally fallen in on itself, Catherine set aside time to teach her boys reading, writing and ciphering. Billy became an avid reader and later wrote captivating letters, including several inquiries to New Mexico Territory Governor Lew Wallace about a possible pardon for murders committed during the Lincoln County War. Bucking convention, Catherine also involved herself in local politics. Out of 124 leading citizens to sign a petition for the town’s incorporation, she was the only woman. She even attended the board of trustees meeting. The town officially incorporated on July 21, 1870.

Wichita boomed after incorporation, soon boasting the third largest population of any Kansas town. Unfortunately, the bad elements multiplied right alongside the good. Wanting better for her sons, Catherine sought to shelter them from the influences of town rowdies. Turns out, avoidance proved impossible.

In the spring of 1871, just down the street from the City Laundry, a deputy U.S. marshal engaged in a shootout with a fugitive that left the marshal wounded and the wanted man dead. No doubt the boys heard the gunfire, and they may have witnessed the shooting. Within days Catherine moved herself and the boys out of town and into Antrim’s cabin. Public opinion be damned—she wanted her sons safe.

As Catherine’s laundry business prospered, she invested in land. Among other parcels, she acquired a vacant lot downtown and a quarter section adjacent to Antrim’s property. Bill, meanwhile, bought the property on which the laundry sat, as well as an adjacent plot. He deeded both to Catherine.

In a sworn deposition from the period Antrim noted the McCarty family had moved out of the city and been living on the quarter section adjacent to his since March 4, 1871. For it Catherine had paid $1.25 per acre, or a total of $200 cash (more than $4,600 in today’s dollars), and she paid in full. With help from the boys Bill had built the family a cabin “12 by 14 feet, one story high, board roof, one door and two windows.”

That summer Catherine and sons, likely with help from Bill, cultivated 7 acres and set out 57 fruit trees. Fencing off one section with split rails, they put in long rows of Osage orange trees. In late summer Billy and Josie picked sand plums along the creek and riverbanks, while Catherine and Bill enjoyed the pleasure of elderberry wine.

Life was certainly sweet for the blended family.

Historians have debated how Billy came to be known on period documents as Henry McCarty, but it makes logical sense. When Catherine teamed up with Bill Antrim, that made one too many “Bills” in the household. Thus, to avoid confusion, she may have taken to calling her son by his middle name, Henry. Childhood friends in Silver City later confirmed the Kid’s given name was William. Those friends added that while he never liked being referred to by his middle name, he would answer to both Billy and Henry.

Just when things were looking up, Catherine’s tuberculosis returned with a vengeance.

A stifling hot laundry is far from an ideal workplace for someone battling the disease. There she sat day after day laboring among tubs of dirty clothing boiling in soapy water and a tub of cold water into which she could plunge her hands to prevent scalded flesh. Amid that humid, closed-in environment her tuberculosis took hold, and her health plummeted.

Hospitals were a rarity on the frontier, leaving the sick few options but bed rest, though those suffering from tuberculosis might opt to move to a healthier climate. Such was Catherine’s choice.

RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; BELOW: SILVER CITY MUSEUM

Left: This photo captures Main Street Wichita, Kan., in the 1870s. Catherine and boys moved there from Indianapolis. Below left: Denverites gather in June 1872 to lay the cornerstone for the first school. Catherine, Antrim and the boys lived there briefly later that year.

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hustling town. After the discovery of gold at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River in 1858, the camp had grown into a sprawling settlement almost overnight. While mining remained the biggest attraction, people afflicted with tuberculosis and other maladies also flocked to Colorado, drawn by the clear, dry air. Springing up across the region, luxurious resorts for consumptives offered hot baths and other restorative treatments. Catherine, though likely priced out of such exorbitant resorts, was able to partake of the dry, sunny climate and fresh, invigorating mountain air.

She Lived Here the Rest of Her Life

When Billy was about 13 the newly minted Antrim family moved to Silver City, New Mexico Territory, and lived in a small log house on Main Street. The initial plan for the town, founded in the summer of 1870, was based on a grid pattern (see period map at right). Catherine opened a laundry, sold baked goods and took in boarders. Her husband’s heart was in mining, and he wasn’t home much.

TOP: WICHITA-SEDGWICK COUNTY HISTORICAL MUSEUM; LEFT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; BELOW: SILVER CITY MUSEUM

In August 1872 Catherine sold her Wichita holdings and made ready to move to Denver.

Though members of Antrim’s family had recently relocated to Wichita, he followed Catherine and her boys west. Frontier travel in the 1870s was rough. There were no rest areas with toilets, running water and vending machines, no fast-food joints to fill a hungry belly, no overhead lights at night under which to sleep. Far from averaging 60 miles per hour, like today’s vehicles, horse- or ox-drawn wagons might make 20 miles a day. Travelers like the McCartys and Antrim had to rely on their own wits and knowhow to survive the journey. Although rare, Indian attacks remained a concern, as Cheyennes, Sioux, Kiowas, Comanches and Kaws still roamed the Great Plains and were not welcoming of migrants. In the wake of the Army’s 1868–69 winter campaign against the Plains Indians, the worst of the violence was over, and things were relatively calm on the Kansas fronter. But scattered incidents were a reality. As there was safety in numbers, the McCartys and Antrim did not travel alone.

The four stayed awhile in Denver, Bill likely working a stint as a teamster for Wells Fargo.

In 1872 the “Mile-High City” was a bustling,

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For reasons unknown within months the McCartys and Antrim left Denver, heading south on the Santa Fe Trail over Raton Pass.

By year’s end 1872 they landed in Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico Territory, amid the aspen-laden Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Beyond its outermost dwellings cornfields hemmed in the city from the west, south and east, while prairie bordered it on the west. Spanish conquistadors had dubbed the city La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis (The Royal City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi), a mouthful of a name later residents had reduced to Santa Fe. Catherine must have enjoyed the life in the dry and dusty Southwestern capital. Horse racing was a big draw, and sporting folk had laid out a course along the road to the mining district of Cerillos. Footraces in town along Lincoln Avenue also drew crowds, promising purses of $100 or more. Some citizens objected to holding such footraces on Sundays, though they didn’t seem to mind if it were a race of the four-legged kind.

Hispanic residents held fandangos and bailes almost every night. As more Americans arrived in town, they brought their own homegrown dances, including masked balls and a social 44 WILD WEST

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FROM TOP: STEVE LOEFFLER; PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM

Above: Catherine McCarty married Bill Antrim at the First Presbyterian Church on March 1, 1873, with Billy (then called Henry) and Joe in attendance. Above right: Bill Antrim lived on this site through 1875. The original cabin was torn down in 1894. The 1870s-style cabin pictured was built for the set of Ron Howard’s 2003 Western The Missing and later presented to Silver City.

LEFT: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM; RIGHT: STEVE HAMBLIN (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

Santa Fe Church and Silver City Homesite

“hop” at Fort Marcy. But Billy was immediately, inexorably drawn to the bailes, as an adult often traveling miles to attend one. With music provided by violins, guitarróns, vihuelas and sometimes harps and coronets, the bailes also proved irresistible to his spirited Irish mother.

It was here Catherine married Bill Antrim on March 1, 1873, at the First Presbyterian Church. Her boys signed the register as witnesses.

In search of the perfect place to call home, the newly minted family left Santa Fe, soon landing in the south-central New Mexico Territory burg of Silver City. In it Catherine saw an established town that offered her boys a stable life. Amid a productive district pockmarked by silver mines, Silver City boasted numerous businesses, including a bowling alley, dance hall, apothecary, post office and various commercial stores.

Stagecoaches, freight wagons, prairie schooners, wagons and buggies crisscrossed the valley.

Fortunate to find an available small cabin downtown (most families had to settle for tent living), Catherine opened a laundry, sold baked goods and took in boarders. Her charity and largesse were legendary.

“Many a hungry ‘tenderfoot’ has had cause to bless the fortune which led him to her door,” wrote ghostwriter Ash Upson in Pat Garrett’s The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid. “In all her deportment she exhibited the unmistakable characteristics of a lady—a lady by instinct and education.”

Antrim found work at Richard Knight’s butcher shop, but his heart and soul were in mining. The region around Silver City on into eastern Arizona Territory was rife with diggings and men searching for the elusive ore. An obsessed Antrim spent more and more time away from Catherine and her boys. When he wasn’t off mining either in Arizona Territory or Mogollon, New Mexico Territory, he frequented the gambling houses in Silver City, often losing at the faro and poker tables any money he’d earned through his labors.

Meanwhile, Catherine and 12-year-old Billy spent many happy hours at the festive bailes. “Mrs. Antrim could dance the Highland Fling as well as the best of the dancers,” recalled Louis Abraham, Billy’s best friend.

Neighbors remembered Catherine as a jolly Irish lady, her blue eyes sparkling, full of life and mischief. Despite her illness, they recalled, she showed fortitude and good cheer, traits also evident in Billy. Always the doting mom, Catherine baked after-school treats for her sons and friends, who loved their visits to the Antrim home. “She always welcomed the boys with a smile and a joke,” Abraham said. “The cookie jar was never empty.”

“To those who knew [Billy the Kid’s] mother, his courteous, kindly and benevolent spirit was no mystery,” wrote Upson. “She was evidently of Irish descent. Her husband called her Kathleen. She was about the medium height, straight and graceful in form, with regular

FROM TOP: STEVE LOEFFLER; PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM

LEFT: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM; RIGHT: NEWMEXICONOMAD.COM

features, light blue eyes and luxuriant golden hair. She was not a beauty but what the world calls a fine-looking woman. She kept boarders in Silver City, and her charity and goodness of heart were proverbial.”

Despite outward appearances, the stress of physical labor and emotional strain of her illness continued to take a toll on Catherine’s health.

Those suffering from tuberculosis are not only plagued with hacking coughs and chest pains but also severe fatigue, making rest and a stress-free lifestyle essential.

But Catherine was not getting that. Her husband was often absent, and she had two boys to support.

As the disease ate away at Catherine’s sturdy frame, those halcyon days in Silver City ended far too soon. “She was a sweet, gentle little lady,” a friend recalled, “as fond of her boys as any mother should be.” Toward the end Catherine asked best friend Clara Truesdell to care for her sons when she was gone. Clara agreed. Within a week of their conversation, on Sept. 16, 1874, Catherine, 45, finally succumbed.

As usual, husband Bill Antrim was away mining, which left funeral details to Catherine’s friends and her boys. Abraham’s father hammered together her coffin, and a stream of neighbors walked with Billy and Joseph behind the casket-laden wagon. Catherine is buried in Silver City’s Memory Lane Cemetery.

Set adrift, Billy, 13, and Joe, 11, stayed with the Truesdell family until Antrim found his way home. He placed the boys with Knight the butcher.

Then, figuring he was done raising kids, he again skipped town. By late 1874 Henry and Joe had become separated. Knight sent Billy to live with the Truesdells. Surely, Billy clung to that family—people he knew and who had liked his ma—as a lifeline. The family had recently bought the Star Hotel on Hudson Street, renovated the business and renamed it the Exchange (a popular hotel name out West).

Joe was sent to live with Joe Dyer, a proprietor of the New Orleans Club, where the 12-year-old worked for his keep cleaning, serving liquor and running errands. Unfortunately, growing up in such an environment without any parental supervision or guidance, Joe also gambled and drank. He was even spotted by a childhood friend smoking at a Chinese opium den. Within a couple of years Joe was thoroughly submerged in that vice-ridden world.

Unlike Billy, Joe retained Antrim’s last name throughout his life.

A drifter, opium fiend and alcoholic, Joe worked stints as a card dealer, gambler, miner, room clerk and day laborer. On one occasion, either in Trinidad, Colo., or Albuquerque, he met Pat Garrett, the onetime sheriff of Lincoln County, N.M., who killed brother Billy on July 14, 1881. After a long conversation that went unrecorded, they shook hands and went their separate ways. In 1883 Joe was working as a cook in an Albuquerque

Misremembering Mom

Above: Catherine Antrim’s first name is misspelled on this marker, which was erected in 1950 over her gravesite at Silver City’s Memory Lane Cemetery.

That marker replaced the worn, wooden slab at left.

After Catherine died at age 45 on Sept. 16, 1874, best friend Clara Truesdell cared for Billy and Joe, until Bill Antrim made other arrangements for them.

hotel, which would have been a convenient place to meet Garrett. He later worked as a bartender in El Paso before wandering back north to Denver. Along the way he fathered a child and then married.

If Joe had any success gambling, he didn’t hold onto his money long. He died penniless in Denver on Nov. 25, 1930. His unclaimed body was donated to the Colorado Medical School.

Stepfather Bill Antrim’s life continued to center on mining. After living mostly in eastern Arizona and south-central New Mexico, he spent winters in El Paso and eventually moved to Adelaide, Calif., living out his later years with a niece. In the wake of Billy’s death Antrim is not known to have spoken about his stepsons.

He died at age 80 in 1922.

Catherine’s death had left 13-year-old Billy adrift without guidance and security. Had she lived, William Henry McCarty might never have become Billy the Kid. Award-winning author and New Mexico native Melody Groves writes what she loves most—Westerns, both fiction and nonfiction. For further reading she recommends The Illustrated Life and Times of Billy the Kid: The Final Word, by Bob Boze Bell; Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride, by Michael Wallis; and Antrim Is My Stepfather’s Name: The Boyhood of Billy the Kid, by Jerry Weddle.

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While the Kid’s activities during and after the Lincoln County War are well known, details of his murder trial in Mesilla, New Mexico Territory, have been overlooked

By David G. Thomas

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JOSEPH E. LOPEZ AND DAVID THOMAS; RIGHT: COURTESY OF BETH WILSON AND SID GARDNER

THE TRIAL OF BILLY THE KID

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O

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Bristol and Billy

JOSEPH E. LOPEZ AND DAVID THOMAS; RIGHT: COURTESY OF BETH WILSON AND SID GARDNER

Judge Warren Bristol presided over Billy the Kid’s April 1881 trial in Mesilla, New Mexico Territory, for the murder of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady three years earlier.

O

n Monday, March 28, 1881, Billy the Kid and Billy Wilson were escorted from their jail cells in Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory, to the train depot by Deputy U.S. Marshal Tony Neis and Police Chief Frank Chavez. Accompanying the lawmen and their handcuffed prisoners was attorney Ira E. Leonard. Though they were being transported to Mesilla, nearly 300 miles to the south, to face trial for serious crimes—the Kid for having killed Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady and Andrew L. “Buckshot” Roberts, Wilson for counterfeiting—the pair must have been elated at their relative freedom. They had been locked up in the Santa Fe jail for 91 days.

The southbound train went only as far as Rincon, some 30 miles shy of Mesilla. As the party disembarked, they were confronted by a mob of “roughs” who intended to wrest Billy from his escorts. Marshal Neis was able to shepherd the Kid and Wilson to a saloon across the street where he and Chief Chavez barricaded themselves and their prisoners in a back room.

IRA E. LEONARD

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Facing Trial in Mesilla, New Mexico Territory

was a small clearance where the lawyers came to make their pleas.

The jurors sat in the first two rows of benches. During deliberations they were cloistered in Joshua Sledd’s Casino Hotel, one block south of the plaza. Witnesses were also isolated there prior to their testimony. The court paid Sledd $2 a day for the use of his hotel, one of three in Mesilla at the time.

The Third District Court, in which the Kid and Wilson were to be tried, had jurisdiction over both federal and territorial cases. Court regulations required it to address federal business before territorial business, so each morning the court would open in federal session. After the federal business wrapped up, that session would adjourn, and the territorial session would open. The district magistrate, in this case Judge Warren Henry Bristol, presided over both sessions. Territorial lawyers sometimes served as prosecutor in federal cases and as defense lawyer in territorial cases, or vice versa. The court met six days a week, resting on Sundays.

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Of course, the Kid was not free to simply walk out of the courthouse. After granting a dismissal in the Roberts murder case, Judge Bristol remanded Billy to the custody of Sheriff Southwick to be held for trial in the killing of Sheriff Brady.

The next day, in federal session, Billy Wilson’s counterfeiting trial opened. Defense attorney Sidney Barnes (Leonard could not represent Wilson, as he had been subpoenaed as a witness against him) immediately requested a change of venue to Santa Fe, a motion opposed by Newcomb. Bristol agreed to send the case to Santa Fe. On April 8, in territorial session, the Kid appeared before Judge Bristol to answer for the

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TOP: CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO (4); BOTTOM: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM

The Kid appeared before Judge Bristol first thing on March 30 to face charges of murder and accessory to murder in the killing of Buckshot Roberts, who’d been mortally wounded on April 4, 1878, amid the Lincoln County War. The case was being pursued in federal court, as the site of the killing, Blazer’s Mill, was on the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation. Jurisdiction over reservations was limited to the federal government.

The Kid pleaded destitution, and Bristol appointed Leonard as his attorney. Leonard then asked the court for time to prepare Billy’s defense, and Neis, not knowing whether the mob intended to the court granted the motion. The next free or to lynch Billy, advised his prisoners that if the day, March 31, the Kid appeared bedoor were breached, his first action would be to “turn fore Judge Bristol and pleaded not guilty his guns loose” on them. Disinterested men on the to Roberts’ murder. outside eventually convinced the roughs to disperse.

On April 6 Billy’s trial for the murder The next morning the party took the stagecoach of Roberts opened. At the suggestion to Mesilla, passing through Las Cruces. Hostile of attorney Albert Jennings Fountain, crowds were waiting at both places. On reaching WARREN BRISTOL Leonard moved Billy’s not guilty plea their destination, Neis and Chavez turned over the be withdrawn and the case dismissed, Kid and Wilson to Doña Ana County Sheriff James W. Southwick, who placed the pair in the two-cell Mesilla jail, which as the federal government lacked jurisdiction. already held 14 prisoners. The jail was within a high-walled placita. Leonard argued that although Blazer’s Mill, the Forming one wall of the placita was the Mesilla Courthouse, which served site of Robert’s killing, sat amid reservation land, as a primary school when court wasn’t in session. Katherine Stoes, a the mill itself was on private land. Thus, the site fell under territorial jurisdiction. student the year Billy was tried, described the courtroom: Acting Attorney General Simon Bolivar Newcomb filed a demurrer, arguing while it was true At the back end of the room is a small platform on which are a table and chair for the federal government lacked jurisdiction, that the judge. On either side of the platform is a small table with two chairs. In one fact was irrelevant to the case. Judge Bristol overcorner of the back wall is a large bookcase with the glass missing from one door. ruled Newcomb’s demurrer, quashed the indictAt the other corner is a stove in front of the fireplace. There is no other furniture ment and ordered Billy “go hence without delay.” in the room except 16 or 18 wooden benches without backs. In front of the desk

FROM LEFT: ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY; COURTESY BETH WILSON AND SID GARDNER; PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM

Billy the Kid became well acquainted with The Doña Ana County Courthouse, the second building on the right, on the southeast corner of the Mesilla Plaza.

Inside, besides the courtroom where he was tried, were the office of the sheriff, the office and residence of the head jailer and the cell in which Billy was held.

TOP: CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO (4); BOTTOM: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM

FROM LEFT: ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY; COURTESY BETH WILSON AND SID GARDNER; PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM

JAMES W. SOUTHWICK

WILLIAM BRADY

killing of Brady. He again pleaded destitution.

Newcomb represented the territory, while the court assigned Fountain and John D. Bail as Billy’s lawyers. They pleaded not guilty on behalf of their client.

Jury selection followed. The opposing sides went through the jury pool and three dozen talesmen before finding 12 mutually acceptable jurors. Almost all the potential jurors were Hispanic. An analysis of Fountain’s strategy shows he rejected the only four Anglos in the jury pool, suggesting he believed his client had a better chance with an all-Hispanic jury. The prosecution logged only six objections and found all four Anglos acceptable.

Census data gives us a picture of the jurors.

They ranged in age from 27 to 56. All were married, except one widower. Six were farmers, and two were freighters. Five could not read or write.

Territorial law required jurors to be male citizens, heads of families and between 21 and 60 years of age.

The Kid’s trial began the next day. The prosecution called four witnesses to testify against him—Jacob B. Mathews, Saturnino Baca, Boni-

SIMON BOLIVAR NEWCOMB

ALBERT JENNINGS FOUNTAIN

facio Baca and Isaac Ellis. Because no known transcript survives, it is necessary to reconstruct their testimony.

Mathews was one of four deputies walking down Lincoln’s main street with Brady on April 1, 1878, when the sheriff was killed. He would have testified about having suddenly come under fire and Brady getting hit, then sprinting to shelter and returning fire on the ambushers. Mathews would have identified the source of the firing as the corral of the late English rancher John Tunstall, who’d been murdered on Feb. 18, 1878.

He would have recounted having seen the Kid and Jim French dash out from behind the corral and seemingly attempt to recover something from Brady’s body.

Saturnino Baca had been teaching school in the torreón, a fortress built in the 1850s for protection against Apache raiders, when Brady was killed.

Bonnie Baca, Saturnino’s oldest son, had been in the street when the killing occurred. Both would have testified to having seen Brady fall and then the Kid and French run to the body. Ellis also would have testified to having seen Brady fall, as he was outside when Brady was shot.

No witnesses spoke in Billy’s defense.

The critical question is whether any of these witnesses had seen who fired the fatal shots. The answer is no. They knew the shooting came from behind Tunstall’s 10-foot-high corral wall (or gate in some accounts), but none was in a position to see the gunmen.

Behind the corral wall at the time of the shooting were eight men— Billy, French, John Middleton, Henry Brown, Fred Waite, Frank McNab, Robert Widenmann and Sam Corbet. Yet, strikingly, a grand jury

Rough Stop in Rincon

After spending 91 days in the Santa Fe jail, Billy was transported south for trial in Mesilla. The train only went as far as Rincon (station pictured). There a mob either wanted to free or lynch the Kid. But the next morning Billy and guards were able to continue by stagecoach.

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Regarding the requirement they be certain the defendant had killed Brady, Bristol told the jury that even if they did not believe the Kid had fired the fatal shot, they could still find Billy guilty for having encouraged, incited, aided in, abetted, advised or commanded the killing. As none of those actions could be proved without the testimony of a participant in conversations preceding the shooting, that part of Bristol’s instructions was irrelevant, its purpose seemingly to confuse the jury.

Regarding intention, Bristol instructed the jury this way: As to this premeditated design, I charge you that to render a design to kill premeditated, it is not necessary that such design to kill should exist in the mind for any considerable length of time before the killing.

If the design to kill is completely formed in the mind but for a moment before inflicting the fatal wound, it would be premeditated, and in law the effect would be the same as though the design to kill had existed for a long time.

In effect Bristol asserted the intention to kill need exist for only a “moment” to qualify as premeditation. Such a definition of intention would qualify almost every crime as premeditated.

Bristol had his complex instructions read to the jury in English and then given to them in written

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LOU GRIVE/GAMMA-RAPHO/GETTY IMAGES

Territorial law required that to convict a defendant of firstdegree murder, the jury must be certain beyond a reasonable doubt the defendant did it and equally certain the act was intentional.

Fountain prepared instructions to the jury that explained and emphasized these two requirements. Bristol rejected those instructions. Instead, he presented the jury with three pages of dense instructions of his own, instructions that, as far as the author has been able to determine, were longer than any presented to a jury by Bristol during his judgeship.

SATURNINO BACA

ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY

had indicted only the Kid, Middleton and Brown for Brady’s murder.

French, though spotted running from the corral with Billy to search the sheriff’s body, was not indicted. Did the grand jury have an evidentiary basis for selecting the trio, or did they just not know who else was behind the wall?

Many researchers have wondered whether Billy testified in his own defense. He did not.

The history of testifying in one’s own defense is surprising. Being able to tell one’s side of events when accused of a crime would seem a fundamental right. Yet it is a relatively recent legal right of a defendant.

Under English common law a defendant had no right to testify in his own defense, as he was presumed an incompetent witness due to selfinterest. This was true for both civil and criminal cases.

As English common law formed the basis for U.S. law, defendants in the United States also had no right to testify in their own defense—at least initially. In the 1860s American legal scholars started to advocate for such a right. The first state to permit a defendant to testify in his own defense, in civil cases, was Maine, in 1864. Massachusetts followed suit in 1866, then Connecticut in 1867. Legal reformers then argued that defendants in criminal cases should be able to testify in their own defense. In 1869 New York became the first state to permit the practice in such cases.

In February 1880 the New Mexico Territorial Legislature passed a law permitting a defendant to testify in his own defense. Thus, Billy had the right to relate his side of the shooting to the jury. Why did he not?

Perhaps Fountain was so unfamiliar with the novel practice of having a defendant testify on his own behalf that he didn’t consider the option.

The author has been unable to find any case prior to the Kid’s in which Fountain put a defendant on the stand to testify in his own defense.

Or maybe Billy simply refused to plead on his own behalf—he had done it, Brady had deserved it, and he was not going to lie about it.

The latter explanation seems unlikely. At the time of Brady’s killing Fountain, founding editor of The Mesilla Valley Independent, had interviewed one of the men behind the corral wall (likely the Kid) and reported, “One of the murderers subsequently stated that Brady was killed by accident; that it was their intention only to kill [George] Hindman, as one of the murderers of Tunstall; and that one of the shots intended for Hindman took effect on Brady.”

With that statement Fountain had grounds to argue the killing of Brady had been unintentional. He could have called defense witnesses to bolster the argument. Corbet, among those behind the corral wall when Brady was shot, was in Mesilla during Billy’s trial. Why had Fountain not called him as a witness?

Following the witnesses’ testimonies and respective attorneys’ arguments, Judge Bristol presented the jury instructions for their deliberation.

This was the decisive moment of the trial.

Court Is No Longer in Session

The 1850 building on the Mesilla Plaza that once served as the Doña Ana County Courthouse and jail now houses the Billy the Kid Gift Shop. After the county seat was moved 5 miles north to Las Cruces in 1882, the county sold the building to the town.

English for use in their deliberations at the Casino Hotel. Yet few of the jurors (perhaps none) spoke English. The editor of Newman’s Semi-Weekly, a short-lived Las Cruces–based newspaper, addressed a similar oversight regarding the conviction of Frank C. Clark for first-degree murder in the same court session:

LOU GRIVE/GAMMA-RAPHO/GETTY IMAGES

ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY

We desire to call the attention of the court and bar to the manner in which trials are conducted in this county through the medium of interpreters.…We on Thursday watched for several hours the progress of the trial of Clark for murder. Here was a man being tried for the highest crime known to the law; his life hung in the balance, and he was certainly entitled to all the protection and all the guaranties which the court and the laws of his country could throw around him. He was entitled to an impartial trial; and in this term “impartial” is embraced the right of his attorneys to advance and explain any theory of the case which they might consider would relieve him of the terrible suspicion resting upon him. If their theory is not thoroughly and lucidly explained, and the abstract principles and ideas advanced by them are not interpreted to the jurors in a manner to be perfectly understood by them, then it appears to us that Clark has just ground of complaint that a fair trial has been denied him. We maintain that this was not done; and any Spanish scholar who watched the proceedings will bear us out.

There is reason to believe such obstacles to a fair trial were also a factor in the Kid’s trial. If such obstacles did exist, his trial would be viewed today as a mockery of justice. On April 9, 1881, the jury found Billy guilty of Brady’s murder.

Almost every author who has written about the Kid and the Lincoln County War has questioned why there is no surviving transcript of Billy’s trial. Most have speculated that either no transcript was made or else the transcript was lost or stolen.

In fact, the court clerk would have made a transcript, as territorial law mandated the transcription of trial proceedings. But another rule of the court was that if attorneys did not appeal a case, the court would not pay a clerk to make a formal copy for the case file, as that would have been considered an unnecessary expense.

On April 13 Billy returned to court to learn his fate. Judge Bristol sentenced him to hang “by the neck until his body be dead,” on May 13, “between the hours of 9 of the clock in the forenoon and 3 of the clock in the afternoon.”

Billy had several grounds on which to appeal his conviction. One was that Bristol had given the jury its instructions in English, though none of the jurors could read or necessarily speak English. Another was that Bristol had instructed the jurors they could only consider first-degree murder or acquittal. Territorial law recognized five degrees of murder, and had the jury been permitted to consider all options, they likely would have convicted Billy of a lesser charge. Over the next 18 months defendants convicted of firstdegree murder would appeal their convictions on both of these grounds.

Fountain filed no appeal for the Kid, however, as Billy lacked the money to pay for one. Territorial law required the state to pay for a destitute defendant’s legal representation in a trial, but not for an appeal.

On April 16, three days after his sentencing, an escort of six men—Bob Olinger, David Wood, Daniel Reade, Tom Williams, Billy Mathews and John Kinney—loaded the Kid into an ambulance (wagon) for transport to Lincoln. “[Billy] was handcuffed and shackled and chained to the back seat of the ambulance,” reported Newman’s Semi-Weekly. “Kinney sat beside him; Olinger on the seat facing him. Mathews faced Kinney...and Reade, Wood and Williams [were] riding along on horseback on each side and armed to the teeth.”

They were transporting the Kid to Lincoln to hang because territorial law mandated a defendant sentenced to death be hanged in the county in which the crime was committed. On April 21 Billy’s escort delivered him into the custody of Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett.

Seven days later the Kid escaped from jail at the Lincoln County Courthouse, killing Deputies Olinger and James Bell in the process.

On July 14, at about midnight, Sheriff Garrett fatally shot the Kid in friend Pete Maxwell’s bedroom at the latter’s family ranch in Fort Sumner —62 days after Billy would have died by hanging.

Based in Las Cruces, N.M., David G. Thomas is a historian, filmmaker, producer, actor, screenwriter and travel writer. Thomas wrote the feature “He Shot the Sheriff,” about the killing of Pat Garrett, in the February 2021 Wild West. He adapted this article from his 2021 book The Trial of Billy the Kid, part of his Mesilla Valley History Series.

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1. Dr. James Tomlinson Home 2. Log Cabin 3. Adobe Home 4. White Oaks House 5. Harry Doerges Blacksmith 6. Dr. Alexander Lane Home and Office 7. John Brothers Home 8. Peter Mackel Home 9. Robson and Young Merchants 10. McGraw’s Livery Stable and General Trading Post 11. Brinkman and Sweet General Store 12. West & Dedrick Livery Stable

13. The Pioneer Saloon 14. Peter Mackel Boots and Shoes 15. Moses Burk & Chase Starr Restaurant 16 Post Office 17. Pioneer Store and Corral 18. J.A. Tomlinson Drugstore 19. Dunning & Miller General Store 20. Frank Lea Grocery & Trade 21. A.M. Janes Groceries 22. James Reynolds Butcher Shop 23. White Oaks Golden Era Office 24. W.J. Littell Stable

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The New Mexico Territory town had a violent beginning, as Billy the Kid and other outlaws came here to sell stolen livestock, drink, shoot and otherwise blow off steam

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WHITE OAKS’ DARK ROOTS

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T MAP BY LARRY GOSSER

By Josh Slatten

he year was 1879, and while the Lincoln County War was over, central New Mexico Territory still bore scars from the violence of that factional conflict.

No longer welcome in the embattled county seat of Lincoln, hard cases like Billy the Kid, pals Tom O’Folliard and Billy Wilson, and latecomer “Dirty Dave” Rudabaugh had to find new haunts in which to hang their hats. While several shady locales appealed to such fugitives, perhaps none checked the boxes as thoroughly as the mining camp of White Oaks.

That fall partners John Wilson, Jack Winters and George Baxter were prospecting for gold in the Jicarilla Mountains little over a mile west of where White Oaks would soon sprout. As the story goes, Wilson was out for a stroll after supper when he happened across an outcrop containing gold. Some say Wilson himself was a fugitive at the time of his lucky strike. That AUTUMN 2022

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would certainly account for his decision to sell out to his partners that very afternoon for $40, a pony and a bottle of whiskey. Wilson’s North Homestake claim ended up being worth a half million dollars.

With the discovery of gold in what became known as Baxter Gulch, miners rushed in by the hundreds, intent on finding easy riches.

Residents named the tent city that sprang up after white oaks that thrived on the brim of a local spring. In his memoirs White Oaks pioneer Morris B. Parker, who arrived in camp in 1880, recalled the nascent settlement: These were the embryonic days of White Oaks, and they were no doubt full of fun, tragedy and disappointment—local history in the making.…

I was too young to be greatly impressed by such matters. Nevertheless, the mixed character and culture of the residents, both mobile and fixed,

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was evident. They ranged from ignorant nomads—cowboys and prospectors— to college graduates. They included good men and bad, gold-hungry adventurers and people who just came to look around.

Within two years more than a dozen gold mines were in operation.

The most profitable and enduring were the North and South Homestake and the Old Abe. By the turn of the century gold production at the White Oaks District totaled $3 million.

Unlike the ephemeral tides of fortune, however, White Oaks’ founders intended for their town to endure and from its inception envisioned a community offering the finer things. Thus it grew rapidly in the 1880s, attracting a civilized Eastern population as had no other town in the Southwest. In October 1882 surveyors plotted the townsite, on an 80-acre rectangular patch of land, and the U.S. Land Office signed off in May 1883. Its cornerstones remain firmly embedded in the hard earth. By 1888 White Oaks boasted 1,000 residents who availed themselves of everything from a private educational academy to an opera house. Its first newspaper, the White Oaks Golden Era, fired up its presses in December 1880, while the Lincoln County Leader put out its first edition on Oct. 21, 1882, and published weekly until Dec 2, 1893. They were the largest papers in the region outside of The Las Vegas Gazette, published nearly 130 miles to the north.

As the founders of White Oaks took the time to have their town properly surveyed and plotted, much of its structure and design was recorded through extant tax and property records. Still, a clear picture of its early years has been lacking. For one, while the mining camp may have experienced a formal upbringing, it had a rough and violent start. Between 1879 and ’84 it was not a place for the faint of heart.

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TOP: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM; RIGHT: WITOLD SKRYPCZAK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Above: Tom O’Folliard, like pal Billy the Kid, was a Lincoln County War “Regulator” (supporter of John Tunstall and Alexander McSween) who spent time in White Oaks. Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett killed them both. Above right: Miners pose along a mine tramway near White Oaks. Bottom: Gold brought prospectors to town, pictured here in the late 1880s.

LEFT AND BOTTOM: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM (2); RIGHT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

White Oaks Drew Regulators and Miners

They Are Buried in White Oaks

TOP: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM; RIGHT: WITOLD SKRYPCZAK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

LEFT AND BOTTOM: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM; RIGHT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

Right: Susan McSween Barber, the widow of Lincoln County War victim Alexander McSween, poses in front of her White Oaks house, where she lived until her death at age 85 in 1931. She is buried in Cedarvale Cemetery south of town. Below right: Also buried in that cemetery is Lincoln County Deputy Sheriff James W. Bell, who was killed by Billy the Kid. Bell’s grave was unmarked until this headstone was erected in 2003, though perhaps not on his actual gravesite.

Not just any town could attract the likes of Billy the Kid, yet he and his gang became familiar figures in White Oaks as they hurrahed about its dusty streets. The West & Dedrick livery stable provided them a place to sell livestock stolen from ranches as far south as Tularosa and north to Puerto de Luna. The stable also served as a haven of sorts when things got too hot.

Its half dozen saloons welcomed Billy and his outlaw pals with their gambling tables and women of ill repute. Of note was the Pioneer, a showplace at the heart of the town. George Curry (who later served a term as territorial governor of New Mexico) recalled it as “a palace of lights, mirrors, and boasting a long mahogany bar.” A tongue-in-cheek retrospective article in The Albuquerque Tribune stated, “Proprietors of the Pioneer saloon sold three different grades of whiskey at three different prices—all of it taken from the same barrel.” The Pioneer was likely where attorney Ira Leonard stayed in 1880 while representing Billy the Kid, perhaps sharing a beer with the Kid while ironing out the details of the pardon Billy felt Territorial Governor Lew Wallace owed him. Leonard was one of the attorneys who later defended the Kid at the latter’s murder trial in Mesilla, New Mexico Territory (see related story, P. 46).

On the evening of Nov. 23, 1880, Lincoln County Deputy Sheriff Jim Redman, a part owner in the Pioneer, was sitting on the saloon’s front porch when the Kid, Billy Wilson and Rudabaugh rode by, and Billy took a potshot at him. Redman happened to be a friend of the Kid’s pal O’Folliard, so it is likely Billy only fired the shot as a warning. The prior evening the outlaw trio had gotten into a shootout at Coyote Spring, north of town, with a posse joined by Redman and led by his saloon partner and fellow deputy Will Hudgens. It was also at the Pioneer—two months after the Kid’s infamous April 28, 1881, escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse—someone tipped off Deputy John W. Poe that Billy was laying low in Fort Sumner. Weeks later, on July 14, Sheriff Pat Garrett would gun down the Kid. The Pioneer was hardly the only lively spot at “the Oaks,” as residents nicknamed the town. Its abundance of tent saloons, dance halls, gambling houses and billiard halls attracted a range of Westerners, from honest citizens looking for a bit of fun to hard cases looking to blow off steam.

Given the prevalence of ranches in and around Lincoln County, the Oaks became a gathering point for cattle rustlers. It was also the site of a counterfeit ring run simultaneously out of the West & Dedrick stable

by William H. “Harvey” West and brothers Sam, Dan and Mose Dedrick.

That double duty would be the undoing of the partners in crime.

In early 1880 West and partner Sam Dedrick passed $400 in counterfeit bills to purchase the stables from Kid cohort Billy Wilson. Unaware the bills were counterfeit, Wilson put them into circulation, soon attracting the attention of the feds. When the Secret Service appointed Special Operative Azariah Wild to investigate the matter, the Dedrick brothers wisely fled.

That December at Stinking Springs, far to the northwest, Garrett and posse would catch up to Wilson. Ultimately convicted in March 1882 of passing counterfeit bills, he was sentenced to seven years in prison. However,

Wilson escaped the Santa Fe jail before he could be transported to a federal prison in Missouri.

There was too much opportunity and money to be made legally in White Oaks for the town to have remained unruly long. Among the leading citizens who had high hopes for the growing community were Dr. Alexander G. Lane and Judge Franklin Houston “Frank” Lea. Dr. Lane arrived in White Oaks in May 1880 to open a drugstore and soon took up mining, an interest he pursued for the remainder of his life. He served as the town’s first treasurer and built an impressive two-story home that doubled as his office. Before a school was set up in White Oaks, the doctor taught local children in the living room of his house.

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for EP&NE executives to pay their inflated prices. No extant period documentation supports this claim. To the contrary, in December 1892 the Lincoln County Leader reported that townspeople stood ready to pay a subscription fee of $50,000 in the form of bonds payable to the railroad’s principal financier, James Gould. Twenty-one leading citizens had contributed $24,500 and were confident they could raise the balance, thus ensuring the arrival of the railroad and survival of White Oaks, whose population had peaked at more than 2,000 souls.

In the meantime, cruel fate intervened. On December 2, amid negotiations, word reached White Oaks that Gould had died at home of tuberculosis. Eight days later Lincoln County Leader editor William Caffrey wrote a less than flattering farewell to the magnate: Jay Gould Dead

and trade store on the west side of town. Though he had ridden with William Quantrill’s pro-Confederate bushwhackers during the Civil War, Lea served respectably as justice of the peace in the Oaks’ early years.

Among the notorious defendants to appear before Judge Lea was “Whiskey Jim” Greathouse, who owned a large ranch a few miles north of White Oaks and often bought stolen livestock from Billy the Kid and cohorts. On Nov. 27, 1880, four days after having taken a potshot at Deputy Redman in White Oaks, Billy holed up with Wilson and Rudabaugh at the Greathouse ranch. When a posse tried to flush them out, Deputy Jimmy Carlyle was killed in the crossfire. In March 1881 Lea arraigned Greathouse as an accessory to murder. Though he escaped prosecution on that charge and started a successful freighting business, the rancher maintained a sideline buying and selling butchered beef from rustlers.

Despite White Oaks’ increasing prosperity and influential citizenry, its potential for growth had limits. In that era few towns of any size could survive independent of a railroad, and White Oaks proved no exception. As production at the mines slowed in the late 1880s, the need to lure a railroad to town took on increased urgency. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. According to oft-repeated rumors, the approaching El Paso & Northeastern Railroad bypassed White Oaks due to the greed of town fathers who had supposedly hiked land prices and then smugly waited 56 WILD WEST

In the wake of these disparaging remarks the town of White Oaks died with Gould. Prior to the financier’s death the route survey had been completed and secured, the land for the depot held, and the right of way secured. But in the wake of Gould’s death the EP&NE bypassed White Oaks for the whistle stop of Carrizozo, 12 miles to the southwest. Whether Caffrey’s callous comments had triggered the reversal is uncertain.

District mines continued production into the early 1900s, but by then White Oaks’ promising shimmer had faded and the population plummeted.

By mid-century only a handful of holdouts remained. Among them was Susan McSween Barber, the widow of Lincoln County War victim Alexander McSween, who’d rebounded to become the “Cattle Queen of New Mexico.” She lived in a small house on the north side of town until her death at age 85 in 1931.

In 1970 the National Register of Historic Places recognized White Oaks as a historic district. Today it’s home to a handful of residents, scattered period buildings, a volunteer fire department, a Vietnam memorial and a few businesses, including the No Scum Allowed Saloon. South of town is Cedarvale Cemetery, whose internees include McSween Barber and James W. Bell, the younger of two Lincoln County deputies (the other being Bob Olinger) slain by Billy the Kid during the latter’s infamous April 28, 1881, jailbreak from the county courthouse in Lincoln. Such men and women deserve to be remembered, as does White Oaks.

Joshua Slatten, based in Amarillo, Texas, is board director of Billy the Kid’s Historical Coalition [billythekidshistoricalcoalition.com]. He thanks Steve Watt and Rob DiPardo of the White Oaks New Mexico Goldrush website [whiteoaksnmgoldrush.com] for help in his research. For further reading Slatten recommends Gold-Mining Boomtown: People of White Oaks, Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, by Roberta Key Haldane; The ‘Dirty’ on Billy the Kid, by Steven M. Sederwall; and In the Shadows of Billy the Kid: Susan McSween and the Lincoln County War, by Kathleen P. Chamberlain.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; OPPOSITE: MAP BY LARRY GOSSER

JAY GOULD

On Friday of last week the name of Jay Gould was expunged from off of the page of life, and his soul went out to meet the Maker of rich and poor.

For many years the “Little Wizard” has been recognized as the Napoléon of finance in this country.…However much men may have envied him in the past, the present holds no one who’d care to share his couch. His name, here, is now no more talismanic than that of a pauper. He has gone where there are no class distinctions, where all are clothed alike and titles are unknown.

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MAPPING WHITE OAKS There are several extant maps of the White Oaks townsite, including two laudable efforts by Don Bufkin and Brad Cooper. Both focus on its latter years, however, and neglect the contributions of early settlers. The map presented here uses the earliest known information to re-create White Oaks’ appearance when Billy the Kid and pals were hurrahing its streets. Building locations are based on newspaper findings, as well as tax and property records of the day. Further research will hopefully allow a more complete portrait of White Oaks. —J.S. 1.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; OPPOSITE: MAP BY LARRY GOSSER

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Dr. James Tomlinson Home: This Indiana native settled in White Oaks in early 1880, building the first house in the nascent mining camp and opening a drugstore. He served as a Lincoln County probate judge and organized the coroner’s jury inquest for slain Deputies Bell and Olinger following Billy the Kid’s 1881 escape from the county courthouse in Lincoln.

Log Cabin: Referenced in an 1889 article in the Lincoln County Leader, this small structure was occupied by Bob Brookshire in 1881.

Adobe Home: Also referenced in an article in the Lincoln County Leader, this residence stood just west of the White Oaks House.

White Oaks House: Opening its doors in November 1880, White Oaks House served as the town’s first hotel. The last newspaper mention of it appeared in 1886.

Blacksmith Shop: Mentioned in the October 1880 Las Vegas Morning Gazette, this shop was owned and operated by Harry Doerges.

Dr. Alexander Lane Home and Office: This two-story home saw triple duty as Lane’s home, office and drugstore. The doctor also held classes for local children in his living room prior to the construction of a school.

John Brothers Home: Civil War veteran Brothers migrated from Kansas to White Oaks in 1880. His was the first stone residence in town.

Peter Mackel Home: Mackel ran a nearby shoe store.

Robson and Young Merchants: This mercantile store provided a range of goods including groceries, chewing tobacco and hardware.

McGraw’s Livery Stable and General Trading Post: Patrick McGraw ran the stable until selling out to Paul Mayers in 1883. The structure was later converted into an opera house.

Brinkman and Sweet General Store: In 1880 The Las Vegas Gazette complimented the store’s large and well supplied stock of dry goods and groceries.

West & Dedrick Livery Stable: A convenient place for rustlers to sell their stolen livestock, the stable also served as a haven for Billy the Kid and cohorts.

The Pioneer: Opened in the spring of 1880 by Jim Redman and Will Hudgens, the Pioneer was the first and certainly liveliest saloon in town.

14. Peter Mackel Boots and Shoes: Opened in 1881, Mackel’s business and the adjoining block burned down in an 1890 fire. At the rear of the building was a private residence.

15. Moses Burk & Chase Starr Restaurant: First mentioned in an October 1880 edition of The Las Vegas Gazette, Burk and Starr came to dominate the restaurant business in White Oaks.

16. Post Office: This was the location of the original, pre1897 post office. John H. McCotcher was postmaster around the time Billy the Kid frequented the town.

17. Pioneer Store and Corral: Owned and operated by Marcus Whiteman, the Pioneer was one of the first stores in town, its corral serving as a popular hangout for local miners and hard cases.

18. J.A. Tomlinson Drugstore: Listed in the 1882 business directory, the drugstore likely closed in 1884 when Dr. Tomlinson relocated to Lincoln to open a medical practice.

19. Dunning & Miller General Store: Established by brothersin-law in the fall of 1880, the store did a brisk business for seven years.

20. Frank Lea Grocery & Trade: “Frank Lea has a well filled grocery and a splendid trade,” The Las Vegas Gazette reported in 1880 of the popular judge’s side venture.

“Mr. Lea can’t help but do well, as he is a careful businessman.” True or not, Lea relocated to Roswell in 1884.

21. A.M. Janes Groceries: Janes ran grocery stores in White Oaks and Las Vegas until the untimely deaths of his wife and child. This store isn’t listed in the 1882 business directory.

22. James Reynolds Butcher Shop: Reynolds operated one of two butcher shops in town in the early 1880s. The property remained in his name until 1891.

23. White Oaks Golden Era Office: Jacob A. Wise established the town’s first newspaper in 1880. After a period of rapid staff turnover, the paper ceased publication in July 1884.

24. W.J. Littell Stable: The first mention of this stable pops up an 1880 letter written by Jim Redman, co-owner of the adjacent Pioneer Saloon. Sometime miner Will Littell purchased the lot in 1885, and it’s possible he worked the stable before taking ownership of it.

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‘I WILL DIE LIKE A MAN’

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After his father berated Head Chief for not living like a man, the bitter young Cheyenne showed him how to die like one

By Dennis Hagen

o a casual observer the biweekly distribution of government rations at southeastern Montana’s Tongue River Indian Reservation, amid the rolling hills of Lame Deer Valley, seemed to have proceeded smoothly. As the sun edged slowly toward its zenith that day in September 1890, many women had already completed their chores, shaving meager slabs of the white man’s “spotted buffalo” into thin strips and carefully arranging them on poles to dry under the brilliant, cloudless sky. Men idled, eating their noonday meals and perhaps recalling happier times before stringy beef had supplanted fat bison. Outwardly, the Northern Cheyennes appeared to have adapted to the bewildering changes reservation life entailed.

Those adjustments had, of course, come at a terrible cost.

Fourteen short years earlier, in June 1876, Northern Cheyenne warriors had reveled in the wake of the successful alliance with the Lakotas that had destroyed Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th U.S. Cavalry command at the Little Bighorn. But that was before Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie’s

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devastating attack on Chief Dull Knife’s village that November and the Northern Cheyennes’ humiliating exile to the reservation of their Southern Cheyenne cousins in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) the following year. Many died during the brutal trek, still more on arrival, and in September 1878 the Northern Cheyennes set out on a grueling exodus north under Dull Knife and Little Wolf, bound for their northern homeland. Dull Knife’s followers eventually surrendered near Fort Robinson, but Little Wolf’s band made it to Montana Territory and was allowed to remain there on the Tongue River Indian Reservation (the presentday Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation), established in 1884 by presidential executive order.

By 1890 the buffalo had vanished, leaving the Cheyennes wholly dependent on the inadequate and often substandard rations doled out through the agency’s butcher barn and commissary. Thus they congregated on Lame Deer Creek this Friday, Sept. 12, 1890, as they had every two weeks, to receive their rations.

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Headlong to Their Deaths

Mounted Northern Cheyenne warrior Head Chief rashly charges soldiers on Squaw Hill (renamed the Head Chief and Young Mule Memorial Site in 1993), on southeastern Montana’s Lame Deer Creek, while Young Mule follows afoot, in a 1969 painting by Northern Cheyenne artist Denver Horn.

DENVER HORN SR./BILL BRIGGS/DULL KNIFE MEMORIAL COLLEGE, LAME DEER, MONT.

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LEFT AND BELOW: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2); TOP RIGHT: MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON

Though the pastoral scene appeared calm, a grim foreboding blanketed the camp. Women refrained from the banter that usually attended food preparation. Men appeared unusually sullen.

For one, there were too many soldiers. While the Cheyennes had accepted their nominal presence, bluecoats still provoked chilling memories of Sand Creek, Washita and Powder River. Five months earlier, in response to frenzied demands by local settlers, an insignificant outpost named Camp Crook had sprouted about a mile below the Cheyenne village. It housed three troops of the 1st U.S. Cavalry, and that afternoon two of the three suddenly appeared.

As 1st Lt. Samuel C. Robertson disposed his Troop G, the Cheyennes began shuffling somberly out of their tepees to gather on the surrounding hills. “They now stood upon the ridges above the valley in dense groups of brilliant barbaric color,” Robertson later recalled. Rife with apprehension, the people watched and waited, anticipating one of the strangest applications of capital punishment ever administered.

Clockwise from above: Northern Cheyenne leaders Two Moons (left) and American Horse, who sanctioned the proposed duel; 1st Lt. Samuel C. Robertson of the 1st Cavalry’s Troop G; and 1st Lt. Edward W. “Ned” Casey of Troop A.

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Mutual resentment and suspicion flared between Cheyennes and neighboring whites in May 1890 following the disappearance of local rancher Bob Ferguson. Like many encroaching whites, Ferguson, his brother and their sister ranched on the fringes of the Tongue River Indian Reservation, to the southwest near Kirby.

Last seen searching for stray horses on the evening of May 6, Ferguson had simply vanished.

On May 29 a search party found his corpse in a dry wash in the Little Wolf Mountains, north-

FROM LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

Supporting Players

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The Lame Deer Episode of 1890 to

Troop G Final Positions

Squaw Hill

rt Fo r st e Cu

Troop E Skirmish Line

Tongue River Agency

1

2

Dry Creek Bed

N

Lame Deer Creek

3

LEFT AND BELOW: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2); TOP RIGHT: MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON

gue R

iver

l

i Tra

1 Spot where Cheyennes were first sighted

2 Spot where Young Mule was killed 3 Spot where Head Chief was killed

Camp Crook to Fort

to Ton

Cheyenne Village

Custe

r

M O N TA N A

west of the agency. Ferguson’s killers had wrapped his body in his black saddle blanket, wound the rancher’s coat about his head and covered him over with sand. Moccasin tracks and the butchered carcasses of steers at the scene of the crime suggested he had interrupted Indian rustlers and been shot from ambush.

Cheyenne Agent Robert L. Upshaw, who resigned weeks later, blamed Ferguson’s murder indirectly on the government’s failure to provide sufficient beef rations and directly on the fact reservation Indians remained armed. Meanwhile

Scale shown is approximate.

Distances shown on the Army’s original 1890 map were approximate in both the north-south and east-west directions.

0

400

Lame Deer

800 yards

lurid newspaper accounts whipped local settlers into a frenzy. On slim evidence the Indian police arrested three Cheyennes. Held for several weeks, they were finally released, much to settlers’ anger and dismay. The trio had served honorably under 1st Lt. Edward W. “Ned” Casey in Troop A, Department of Dakota, an experimental contingent of Cheyenne scouts serving with the U.S. Cavalry. Casey vehemently denounced their arrests as a “put-up plan” by big ranchers seeking access to Cheyenne lands.

Ferguson’s murder was never solved, a fact that kept tensions at a low boil.

Tongue River Indian Reservation

FROM LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

The agency at Lame Deer Creek on the Tongue River Indian Reservation is pictured here in a 1904 photograph by L.A. Huffman (1854–1931). Top left: In 1901, 11 years after the suicidal two-man charge, Huffman photographed these daughters of Chief American Horse. Head Chief had sought to prove himself to an older sister of theirs named Goa.

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By late summer an uneasy calm had returned. On September 5 a 25-year-old Cheyenne named Head Chief rode into Chief American Horse’s village to resume his courtship of the chief’s young daughter Goa. Years later tribal historian John Stands in Timber recounted the Cheyenne version of events to historian Margot Liberty. Offering coffee and fry bread, Goa wistfully apologized for her inadequate hospitality, explaining that her family had eaten little else for a long time. Few Cheyenne families could stretch their skimpy rations to cover a full two weeks.

Accepting Goa’s meager offering, Head Chief boasted he would soon bring her more than enough meat to provide a decent meal.

Known for his arrogance, Head Chief led a small group of young, dissident warriors. Many in the tribe considered him a troublemaker. Psychologically scarred by an overbearing father, Head Chief carried a terrible chip on his shoulder. Seemingly oblivious to the realities of reservation life, his father had repeatedly shamed Head Chief by mocking his son’s failure to achieve the since banned war honors that had once defined manhood.

By then Head Chief had attracted a shadow, a 13-year-old orphan who followed him everywhere. Young Mule had briefly attended the Ashland School and acquired a smattering of English. He had also cut his hair and accepted the given name “John.” Caught between two worlds, Young Mule had come to idolize the bombastic Head Chief.

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On September 6 Head Chief set out on horseback with Young Mule to fulfill his pledge to Goa. The two hunters searched fruitlessly until evening when they chanced on milk cows belonging to local rancher Hugh Gaffney.

Young Mule urged caution, warning these were white man’s animals. But Head Chief dismissively argued that white men had driven away the buffalo, thus killing a lone cow constituted little more than a poor trade.

While returning to American Horse’s village, they encountered a mounted Hugh Boyle, a tubercular 21-year-old from Champaign, Ill., who was recuperating on his Uncle Gaffney’s ranch for the summer. Noting the packhorse burdened with fresh meat, Boyle sneered, “I see that a hungry dog has snapped up one of my cows.”

Head Chief sensed Boyle’s hostility without comprehending his words. “What does he say?”

“He calls us dogs,” Young Mule answered.

Erupting with rage at the insult, Head Chief jerked a rifle from beneath the meat packs as Boyle turned his horse to flee. The brief contest ended before it began when a .45-70 slug slammed into Boyle’s chest, knocking him to the ground. From horseback Head Chief fired again at his prone victim, the bullet disintegrating Boyle’s skull. Dismounting, Head Chief examined the young man’s conspicuous red cap, gory with brain tissue, and pitched it into a clump of bushes.

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ABOVE: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

Above left: Northern Cheyenne women line up for rations at Lame Deer circa 1910. Ration day on Sept. 12, 1890, was far more somber.

Left: A warbonneted rider poses outside trader A.C. Stohr’s post at Lame Deer around the turn of the 19th century. Above: Lieutenant Robertson and Troop G were ordered to the Tongue River Indian Reservation to confront Head Chief and Young Mule, an encounter Robertson chronicled.

TOP LEFT: MANSFIELD LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA; ABOVE LEFT: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; TOP: 947-230, LEGACY PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY RESEARCH CENTER, ARCHIVES

Peaceful Moments on Lame Deer Creek

Above: Chief Two Moons and his family were living in this tepee in 1896 when Huffman was capturing reservation life. During negotiations over the fate of Head Chief, Two Moons reiterated that the confessed murderer of 21-year-old Hugh Boyle refused to be hanged. What followed instead was Head Chief’s proposed duel. Above right: In 1901 Huffman took this photo of Lame Deer Valley in southeastern Montana.

ABOVE: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

TOP LEFT: MANSFIELD LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA; ABOVE LEFT: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; TOP: 947-230, LEGACY PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY RESEARCH CENTER, ARCHIVES

Home on the Montana Range

Head Chief and his young accomplice then unpacked and cached the meat, freeing their packhorse to transport Boyle’s body, which they carried several miles into the hills. Before depositing the body in a shallow grave, Head Chief draped the young man’s handkerchief over his bloody visage, sarcastically explaining to Young Mule, “So he won’t get his face dirty.”

After dark Gaffney’s cows ambled home unescorted. Worried for his missing nephew, the rancher rode up to the Cheyenne agency for help.

Boyle’s white horse returned the following morning, its saddle bearing bloodstains. That was enough to spur soldiers and the Indian police to form search parties and visit American Horse’s camp, where shouts and threats accompanied their fruitless ransack of the village. Having encamped in the hills overnight, Head Chief and Young Mule weren’t aware of the uproar. They arrived shortly after noon, stunned to discover the furor their actions had unleashed.

Responding to the village’s obvious panic, Head Chief defiantly acknowledged his guilt. While American Horse assured him no one in the village would betray him, he added gloomily that if Head Chief refused to surrender, the Cheyennes would be forced to defend him, an action that might prove ruinous.

Execution by hanging precluded a spiritual afterlife, and submitting to such an abhorrent death was out of the question for any Cheyenne, leading Head Chief to propose a stunning compromise: I don’t want the women and children to suffer on my account. Go down to the agency. Tell them I killed the boy. Tell them on the next ration day…I will be there.

Tell them to be ready, and I will play with the soldiers at that time. I will come in shooting—let them try to stop me. They will never hang me. I will die like a man.

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One Side of the Story

Three days after the duel The Helena Independent didn’t provide readers with any dramatic details of the deaths of “Chief-on-the-Head” and Young Mule, but the paper certainly seemed pleased 1st Cavalry troopers had killed the pair without much bother.

Having sealed his fate, the defiant Head Chief visited his parents camp near Ashland. Over a solemn dinner he urged his family not to grieve, but to sing a victory song for him when he was gone. Ironically, he ordered his father to act like a man.

Young Mule’s whereabouts over the next couple of days are uncertain. Head Chief, by contrast, basked in glory. Fellow members of 64 WILD WEST

A few hours before sunrise on September 12 more than a dozen close friends accompanied Head Chief and Young Mule to the summit of Squaw Hill, overlooking Lame Deer Valley, where they conducted final ceremonial preparations. Young Mule, though merely an accomplice and of little interest to the soldiers, expressed his melancholy desire to join his hero in death. “When you are dead, I will have nothing,” he said. “I will die too.” As the first traces of dawn streaked the horizon, village elders ordered the young men off the hill, fearing a reckless youthful outburst that could ignite a general massacre.

Later that morning at the reservation’s agency acting coroner and Justice of the Peace Harold Brown convened a coroner’s jury to deliberate over Boyle’s murder. American Horse’s testimony secured Head Chief’s swift indictment.

Passionate eleventh hour negotiations followed, continuing up to the last moment, with Head Chief’s father begging for clemency. Tribal leaders offered 30 horses as compensation to Boyle’s family, a staggering amount of wealth for the impoverished Cheyennes. Agent James A. Cooper patiently explained that, despite Cheyenne custom, property settlements could not atone for murder. Under white law Head Chief must forfeit his life. Negotiations collapsed when Chief Two Moons reiterated Head Chief’s refusal to be hanged.

Cooper had initially balked at Head Chief’s proposed duel. But the bloody consequences that would ensue if the Cheyennes intervened to prevent a hanging forced him to relent and authorize the unconventional compromise. So, at 3 p.m. 1st Cavalry Major Henry Carroll, the commander of Camp Crook, dispatched Lieutenant Robertson and Troop G to the agency. Troop E, under 1st Lt. John Pitcher, would follow in reserve. Their combined force numbered just shy of 90 men. Troop D, under 2nd Lt. Henry A. Barber, remained in camp as a guard.

Even as Robertson arrived at the agency and deployed his men, he regarded the whole affair “a fool’s errand.” A duel pitting two boys against two U.S. Cavalry troops seemed “too grotesque to be entertained.”

Chief Brave Wolf quickly disabused him of the notion, assuring him the coming fight would be a deadly serious affair.

Within minutes the two warriors made their entrance, emerging from a stand of trees some 800 yards across the valley. Through his field glasses Robertson watched as they rode into view, well mounted, well armed and clad in full war regalia. Head Chief displayed a magnificent trailing warbonnet. The warriors raced their horses up a rocky ridge on the north end of the valley, singing their death songs and circling ostentatiously in full

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DENNIS HAGEN

the Elk Society formed an honor guard to protect their hero, assuring he would not be arrested.

Following Head Chief’s confession, American Horse led searchers to Boyle’s burial site in the hills. Walter Shirlaw, a census worker on the reservation, accompanied the group that recovered the body, following what he called a “toilsome” ascent. Lieutenant Robertson concurred in describing an “arduous search.”

Many young Cheyennes passed the night prior to ration day feasting and sharing stories, and Head Chief paid his last visit to Goa. During the nightlong vigil, he boasted of having killed two other white men.

Later speculation pointed to the Ferguson murder. No hard proof ever surfaced, but in an eerie echo of that earlier killing, those who discovered Boyle’s body found the young man’s coat wrapped about his head.

DENNIS HAGEN

view of the throngs watching from the hills. Continuing to circle, the pair triggered their rifles to draw the soldiers’ fire.

Minutes later, having been outflanked and driven from their rocky aerie, Head Chief and Young Mule raced down a steep decline directly toward Pitcher’s arriving Troop E. They closed to within some 200 yards before the troopers opened up on them. Head Chief angled toward the left end of the soldier line before swerving sharply right to make a defiant run across their front. Though a bullet shattered one of his arms, he managed to charge back up the steep hill. Young Mule was less fortunate.

As he sought to follow Head Chief’s example, his pony received a crippling wound, pitching the young warrior headlong to the ground.

Head Chief paused to adjust the warbonnet he’d received from his grandfather before again bolting down to engage the soldiers, most of whom had dismounted and stood ready to meet him in a firing line.

Twenty deputized members of the Indian police stood shoulder to shoulder with the waiting soldiers.

Head Chief had boasted to his Elk Society brothers that he would ride straight through the soldier’s line, and he did. Though suffering several fatal wounds, he somehow remained upright in the saddle, making good on his vow by penetrating some 20 yards before toppling to the ground dead behind the astonished soldiers.

Meanwhile, Young Mule abandoned his crippled mount and raced toward the soldiers afoot, zigzagging downslope to dodge their fire.

He pulled up in a shallow gully to shoot, then scampered into some brush. Intermittent firing continued from Young Mule’s position for 15 or 20 minutes before the soldiers managed to flank him. They found his lifeless body.

Silence descended on the valley. The affair had lasted fully an hour.

The bodies lay briefly in state at American Horse’s camp, Cheyennes lining up to see them. They were later buried high above the village on the hill where they died. Robertson praised the Indian police and tribal leaders for having behaved “most admirably,” noting, “To them is most probably due the remarkable sight of scores of Cheyenne braves—many of them fierce warriors of other days—witnessing, not unmoved but without interference, the killing by troops of two of their tribe.” The killing of two Cheyennes for the death of one white man went against tribal custom,

All Downhill From Here

Not long after Head Chief rode down what was then called Squaw Hill, Cheyennes placed rocks along the path his horse took before the rains and wind could erase its hoofprints. As this recent photograph shows, a trail of large white rocks mark Head Chief’s charge.

Tongue River, established in 1884, has since been renamed the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation.

but the Cheyennes accepted the outcome, as it had reflected Head Chief’s will.

Robertson provided a fitting epitaph to a charge in which two Indian deaths was the only possible outcome: “The audacity they displayed in this desperate attack upon two troops of cavalry was probably never surpassed in the records of Indian bravery.”

Tribal tradition has it that during the final charge a feather broke free from Head Chief’s warbonnet, fluttering to the ground near the spot where he was killed. Someone tied it to a stone, and there it remained many years. Today a trail of rocks marks Head Chief’s final charge.

It is said that Cheyenne onlookers had distributed the markers along the path his horse had taken through the grass before the rains and wind could erase it.

Dennis Hagen retired from the Denver Public Library’s Western History/Genealogy Department as an archivist and special collections librarian and continues to work there as a volunteer. For further reading he suggests: Cheyenne Memories, by John Stands in Timber and Margot Liberty; Fort Custer on the Big Horn, 1877–1898, edited by Richard Upton; and “I Will Play With the Soldiers,”

by Margot Liberty, in the Autumn 1964 issue of Montana: The Magazine of Western History.

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OPPOSITE: MERIAM LIBRARY, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, CHICO; RIGHT: CALIFORNIA DIGITAL NEWSPAPER COLLECTION

A

The Ruggles Brothers’ Last Struggle

On July 24, 1892, vigilantes lynched Charlie and John Ruggles, who had killed a man while robbing a stage.

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THE NIGHT THE RUGGLES BROTHERS MET ‘JUDGE LYNCH’

In the wake of a deadly 1892 stagecoach robbery vigilantes in Redding, California, took the law into their own hands

OPPOSITE: MERIAM LIBRARY, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, CHICO; RIGHT: CALIFORNIA DIGITAL NEWSPAPER COLLECTION

A

By Matthew Bernstein

Raising his scattergun, Montgomery aimed and fired. The round 5:15 on Saturday evening, May 14, 1892, Johnny Boyce crested the grade on blast caught the masked robber in the torso and face, dropping Middle Creek Road above the Sacramento him to his knees. Instinctively, the highwayman triggered his River in the heart of northern California, en route to Redding. shotgun. Although only one of the barrels fired, buckshot He’d just started downhill when out stepped a figure on the riddled both of Boyce’s thighs, while three slugs struck Suhr riverbank, wearing a red calico mask and drawing a bead on just below the knee. At almost the same moment a partner him with a double-barreled shotgun, both hammers cocked. in crime emerged from hiding in the brush a little behind As a stagecoach driver, Boyce was used to holdups. In fact, the stagecoach. Armed with a Colt .44 revolver, he fired at he’d been robbed four days earlier by a bandit who looked Montgomery, hitting the shotgun messenger twice in the back suspiciously similar to the man before him. But highwaymen —one bullet boring clean through his body, the other lodggenerally operated farther from civilization, not within 5 miles ing in his hip. As Montgomery crumpled, both robbers disof a town the size of Redding. Rather than risk being shot, appeared into the brush.

Panicked by the gunfire, the team of horses drawing the Boyce reined the four-horse team that was pulling the Redding stage bolted about a quarter mile down the road before Boyce and Weaverville Stage Line coach to a stop.

“Passenger, throw up your hands!” the masked man ordered managed to rein them in. Fearing the worst, the driver called lone passenger George Suhr, sitting to the left of Boyce on down to Montgomery, asking if he’d been shot.

“Great God, yes,” the shotgun messenger called back, the driver’s seat.

“Throw down the gold box,” the highwayman told Boyce. “and I am shot to die!”

Boyce resolved to get Montgomery to a The driver hopped to it, tossing down the doctor as soon as possible. As Boyce couldn’t smaller of two Wells, Fargo & Co. strongwork the foot brake in his condition, and boxes, then hefting the larger, 100-pound box Suhr couldn’t drive the four-horse team, over the side, which bounced off a coach driver and passenger swapped places. Boyce wheel before landing at the robber’s feet. slumped down into the boot to work the But Wells, Fargo shotgun messenger Amos reins while Suhr pumped the brake. As Buchanan “Buck” Montgomery, watching chance would have it, a mile down the road from inside the coach, had no intention of they met Dr. Benjamin E. Stevenson and letting someone ride off with the treasure wife Mary, in a northbound buggy drawn he’d sworn to protect. Standing over 6 feet by a double team of bays. While the doctor tall, tipping the scales at 200 pounds and tended Montgomery and Boyce, Mary Steknown as a crack shot, Montgomery had sent venson drove furiously back to Redding, several highwaymen to San Quentin State AMOS “BUCK” MONTGOMERY reaching town within a half hour, the four Prison. This one he planned to send to hell.

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The Redding and Weaverville Stage Line

This crowded four-horse stagecoach, waiting outside a building in Redding, looks ready to go. On May 14, 1892, the Ruggles boys held up a stage of the same line within 5 miles of that northern California town.

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CHARLIE RUGG

LES

Off the roadside, downslope from the scene of the robbery, Constable Behrns located the strongboxes. Broken open and emptied, they had held $3,375 in gold, most of that in bullion from the Weaverville and Brown Bear mines. Near them Behrns found two discarded red calico handkerchiefs cut with eyeholes. One was bloodstained and bore several buckshot holes. The constable tracked the fugitives’ blood trail for nearly a mile before darkness fell and the storm burst, washing away the markings. Behrns then returned to Shasta and wired his findings to Undersheriff Sylvester Hull in Redding. Based on the amount of blood spilled, the constable expressed confidence the wounded highwayman would soon be a corpse.

With Redding in an uproar about the robbery and murder, Undersheriff Hull had little trouble raising a citizens posse the next morning. Word spread quickly, and around 2 p.m. three teenagers from nearby Shasta— Harry Paige, Lloyd Carter and Nick Cusick—following a ditch about a half mile southwest of the robbery, spied a badly wounded man struggling to climb a steep slope. Gamely, they called for his surrender, and the

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MERIAM LIBRARY, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, CHICO

capture both. Only, the two men weren’t the highwaymen but fellow soldiers. Having wounded guardsman George Holseworth in the shoulder, and with storm clouds moving in, the company returned to Redding.

Constable Charles Behrns, responding from Shasta, showed more grit.

TOP: CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY; ABOVE: CALIFORNIA DIGITAL NEWSPAPER COLLECTION (2)

bays panting and foaming with the exertion.

Outside the post office she related to gathering townspeople that the stage had been held up and men injured. While California National Guard Major T.W.H. “Tall Sycamore” Shanahan mustered 20 members of his Company E as a posse, Mary located local Dr. Olin J. Lawry at his residence, bade him enter the buggy and drove back up Middle Creek Road at a gallop.

Meanwhile, Dr. Stevenson had not been idle.

Directing Suhr to enter the coach and provide Montgomery what little comfort he could, the doctor climbed up into the driver’s seat and took the reins from Boyce. Two miles down the road the stage carrying Dr. Stevenson, Boyce, Suhr and Montgomery reached the hotel at Middle Cut stage station. They were soon joined

by Mary Stevenson, Dr. Lawry, Montgomery’s pregnant wife, Jennie, and their two young sons.

Sadly, the shotgun messenger’s wounds were beyond any doctor’s power, and shortly after 7 p.m.

Buck breathed his last. He was 35 years old.

By the time Shanahan and posse reached the scene of the crime, it was near dusk, and the guardsmen wanted blood—a dangerous combination. Spotting two shadowy figures lurking in the roadside brush, Shanahan demanded their surrender, waited two minutes, then ordered his men to open fire. When the pair bolted, the major himself shot at the suspects with his Winchester. He managed to hit one of the pair and

MERIAM LIBRARY, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, CHICO

TOP: CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY; ABOVE: CALIFORNIA DIGITAL NEWSPAPER COLLECTION (2)

bandit obliged. The teens turned the man over to Constable Behrns, who again wired Hull.

The undersheriff soon arrived to transport the prisoner to Redding.

A few minutes after 6 p.m. Hull deposited his prisoner on a cot in a cell of the Shasta County Courthouse in Redding. The highwayman, who gave his name as Lee Howard and his age as 22 years old, had suffered 11 buckshot wounds: four in his left breast and one each to his right breastbone, his right side below the elbow, his right forearm, the back of his right hand, the outer corner of his right eye, on the bridge of his nose and to his upper lip. Posse members had recovered his own cheap muzzle-loading shotgun, only one barrel of which was functional. While readily admitting to having robbed the stage, he refused to give up the name of his partner.

While Hull encouraged his prisoner to talk, he didn’t believe much of what was said. For one, the undersheriff was certain Lee Howard was an alias. The next day his suspicions were corroborated by veteran Wells, Fargo & Co. detectives James B. Hume and John N. Thacker, who between them had an encyclopedic knowledge of California criminals. Within a week the detectives identified the prisoner as Charlie Ruggles, whose partner was almost certainly brother John, about 10 years Charlie’s senior.

The elder Ruggles brother had served a stretch in the penitentiary for having held up a man in San Joaquin. He’d since bought farmland south of Fresno, but the detectives soon dug up a witness who’d seen John leading horses from a pasture outside Redding a couple weeks before the robbery.

While Charlie Ruggles languished in a cell in Redding, the search continued for John Ruggles, justly considered armed and dangerous.

As later revealed in a confessional letter he’d written on the event of his death, John had indeed fatally shot Montgomery. After the team bolted with the stagecoach, he’d run downhill for an ax he’d left in the roadside gulch. A wounded Charlie followed close behind, carrying his shotgun with his uninjured left hand. John could see his younger brother was in bad shape. As Charlie clawed the calico mask from his bloody face, he pointed back up toward the strongboxes, mumbled, “Go,” and said he was “done for.”

John rushed back upslope to the road to grab the loot. As he lugged the strongboxes downhill to Charlie, John watched as his younger brother reeled, dropped the shotgun, stumbled and rolled face-first into shallow Middle Creek. Rushing to Charlie’s side, John lifted his brother from the water and rolled him onto his back.

“Oh, what an awful sight,” John recalled in the letter, “his head literally shot full of holes, and the blood just running all over his clothes and making puddles around him.”

When John asked if there was anything he could do, Charlie pointed to the creek and said, “Water.” John paused to give his brother a drink and clean the blood from his face before using the ax to break open the strongboxes. Inside were coins and a fortune in gold dust, which the elder Ruggles scooped into a large flour sack. John realized that Charlie, his “lifeblood running from a dozen holes in his poor frame,” stood little chance of surviving his wounds. Selfishly, he saw a silver lining in his brother’s condition.

Shasta County Courthouse, Redding

After a trio of teenagers captured the badly wounded Charlie Ruggles (who gave his name as Lee Howard), authorities locked up the stage robbery suspect in this courthouse. Arrested a month later, John Ruggles was reunited here with his brother. A month after that a mob took the boys from the courthouse and lynched them.

I must take all my evidence in his pockets away, John told himself, and as the holes in his face will swell, he will never be recognized, and I will go back to Tulare and keep my secret and say he has gone to Montana.

Methodically combing through Charlie’s pockets, John removed all personal possessions save for a small knife, adding them to the flour sack.

The shotgun he tossed beneath a bush. John then shook his brother’s good hand farewell.

“Goodbye, darling brother Charles,” he said.

“I’ll have an awful revenge for this.” Then, with the bulging sack slung over his left shoulder and his right hand clutching a cocked .44, John headed west into the hills.

When the downpour struck, John lost his way.

Around 3:40 in the morning he emerged on private property in Shasta, a few miles west of the robbery site. There he sought shelter in a washout made by the high-pressure pumps and nozzles of a hydraulic mining operation.

Problem was, something else had had the same idea—“a good-sized bear,” John recalled. “He was about 8 feet long and perhaps weighed 500 pounds. I dropped the gold in the sack, kerplunk, on the ground and drew my other .44 with my left hand. The bear had not seen me and had run 30 feet from his nest [sic ] and stopped… looking to the left and right, but not behind him, where I was standing with both guns dead in line on him.”

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from the trail. He had no doubt they were watching for him.

By then John was tired of running. Over the past 12 hours he’d robbed a stagecoach, killed a man, left his brother for dead, hiked through a rainstorm and narrowly avoided a bear attack.

Two men with shotguns weren’t about to scare him off. Balancing the sack across his shoulders, John drew both guns and strode down the trail directly toward the pair. Perhaps recognizing their shotguns would be little match against his .44s, the armed men slunk off.

John Ruggles wouldn’t reappear for more than a month.

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Days after his arrest John Ruggles was transported to Redding and reunited with brother Charlie. They immediately began planning their defense. While they faced jail time for the robbery, they would almost certainly hang for Montgomery’s murder. Thus, they sought to paint the slain shotgun messenger as a villain rather than a martyr, claiming Buck had in fact set up the robbery.

While the sensational allegation infuriated much of the populace, several local women sympathized with the wounded brothers and seemingly found the dangerous duo scintillatingly attractive. Though the Ruggles boys were manifestly guilty of highway robbery, the women argued, John had been justified in shooting Montgomery because the latter had shot poor little brother Charlie. Outraged by the affections such women heaped

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BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT

Top: In a photo taken years after vigilantes strung up John and Charlie Ruggles, townspeople in horse-drawn vehicles go about their business. Above: Former jailer George Albro opens the door to a cell where one of the brothers was kept. Charlie surrendered to the mob without a struggle. Not so John, who used a table leg to bludgeon to the floor the first vigilante to enter his cell.

COURTESY OF THE SHASTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

Redding Outlived the Ruggles Boys

On the evening of Sunday, June 19, Deputy Sheriff David H. Wyckoff of Yolo County —150 miles south of Redding—got a tip that someone matching John Ruggles’ description had been spotted in Woodland, the county seat.

The fugitive had stopped by the home of his uncle, T.J. Dexter, on the corner of Second Street and Oak Avenue, then moved on after learning Dexter was away. Wyckoff, who had gone to school with Ruggles, immediately went to the Dexter home, staking it out till nearly 9 p.m. before returning to the office and informing Sheriff N.M. Weaver the stagecoach robber was likely in town.

The sheriff and his deputy received another break when local policemen A.S. Armstrong and L.G. Rhodes reported having spotted the fugitive at the Opera restaurant, a quarter mile north of the Dexter home.

Rallying the lawmen, Weaver resolved to capture Ruggles. Wyckoff would take point.

As the deputy sheriff strode into the Opera, he spotted his quarry eating supper at a table near the back of the restaurant. Taking a seat not 6 feet away, Wyckoff ordered coffee. Ruggles raised a newspaper to block his face, but Wyckoff wasn’t fooled. Standing, he drew his pistol and confronted the fugitive. “John, I know you,” Wyckoff said. “Surrender!”

Another man might have, but not John Ruggles. The fugitive stood and had one of his .44s halfway out of the holster before Wyckoff squeezed off a shot, hitting John in the neck. As Wyckoff grappled for Ruggles’ revolver, Weaver, Armstrong and Rhodes stormed through the door and quickly overpowered the fugitive. After having doctors examine their prisoner and dress his wound, the officers placed Ruggles in the county jail.

From his money belt they retrieved several hundred dollars in coin, indicating he had hidden the gold dust. They also found the confessional letter in which John had foolishly detailed the stagecoach robbery and gloated over the murder of Montgomery.

“Montgomery’s soul, if he had any, is in hell, and I put him there and am glad of it,” Ruggles had written. “I am glad he suffered—hope he suffered the pangs of eternal hell.”

Seeing to it the letter was published in its entirety in the next day’s edition of the Woodland Daily Democrat, which wired the details to newspapers statewide, the officers must have thought they’d cemented the prosecution’s case. Surely, no jury would sympathize with such a blackhearted villain. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

on the emboldened rogues, Redding’s leading men were unable to keep the embarrassing development from the headlines.

By mid-July newspapers were decrying the undue attention shown the Ruggles brothers. “Look at the part of which certain fool women of Redding and vicinity are playing,” the Stockton Evening Mail opined.

“These women, forgetful of self-respect in the plenitude of their drooling idiocy, are making heroes of the red-handed murderers. They are burying them in flowers and feeding them with cake.”

That an atmosphere of hybristophilia (sexual interest in a criminal— or in this case two criminals) had swept Shasta County was simply too much for its red-blooded men to bear. They remained certain the Ruggles brothers would be judged guilty, but in the meantime their women were making fools of themselves and fellow citizens. It was time to put a stop to their humiliation. It was time for “Judge Lynch.”

Matthew Bernstein teaches at Matrix for Success Academy and Los Angeles City College and is the author of George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age. For further reading he recommends Stagecoach Robberies in California: A Complete Record: 1856–1913, by R. Michael Wilson; Shotguns and Stagecoaches: The Brave Men Who Rode for Wells Fargo in the Wild West, by John Boessenecker; and “The Struggles of the Ruggles,” by Harold L. Edwards, in the August 1995 Wild West.

LOST TREASURE BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT

COURTESY OF THE SHASTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2)

Around 1 o’clock in the morning on Sunday, July 24, jailer George Albro was asleep on the third floor of the Shasta County Courthouse when a noise roused him. He woke to the sight of armed masked men carrying torches.

“I thought at first the 10 men were a gang coming to release the Ruggles brothers,” Albro recalled. “They asked me where the keys were, and I told them in the safe.” But the jailer didn’t have the combination.

Using drills, black powder and sledgehammers, the masked men made short work of the safe. On retrieving the keys, members of the mob ordered Albro to take them to the Ruggles boys. As the group passed the cell of a Whiskeytown man imprisoned for having beaten his wife, Albro gestured through the bars for the man to hide. The jailer opened Charlie’s cell first, the young man surrendering without a struggle. Not so John. As Albro opened the door to his cell, the elder brother rushed the first man to enter, bludgeoning him to the floor with a table leg he’d somehow managed to secure. Crowding into the cell, the rest of the vigilantes quickly overwhelmed John.

“Gentlemen, be lenient with my brother,” John pleaded. “He is innocent of this crime.”

His plea fell on deaf ears. After locking Albro in the sheriff’s office, the mob led John and Charlie from the courthouse. Waiting in the street were some 30 other men. The vigilantes marched the Ruggles boys east through an alley, then a couple more blocks to Etter’s blacksmith shop, near the train tracks, where they’d suspended a crossbeam between two pine trees with block and tackle. Working with grim purpose, the vigilantes fitted nooses around the brothers’ necks, bound their legs together, tied their hands behind their backs and secured the rope ends to iron rings on either end of the crossbeam.

Asked where he’d hidden the money, John replied, “Spare Charlie, and I will tell you.”

“Never mind the treasure,” one impatient man responded. “Tell us if you want to. If not, say what you want to say quick.”

John had nothing more to say. To ensure he wouldn’t cry out, the mob fastened a rope gag in his mouth. On a signal from the vigilante leader, someone cranked a windlass, tensioning the rope leading up and over the block to the crossbeam and hoisting the Ruggles brothers 4 feet off the ground. There John and Charlie, swinging within a handshake’s reach of one another, slowly strangled to death. The bodies hung there until 9 in the morning, when county coroner H.L. Moody had them cut down.

Having little sympathy for the dead highwaymen, and seeing no profit in revealing the identities of the lynch mob, lawmen never mounted an investigation. Doubtless several damsels of Shasta County shed soft tears over the late Ruggles brothers.

The next day Buck Montgomery’s brother Thomas, who lived 100 miles south in Ukiah, heard about the hangings. “Were they to lynch the Ruggles [sic] a hundred times,” he lamented, “it would not return to us our brother.” True, but to Judge Lynch, who had superseded the courts while meting out punishment frontier style, the scales of justice had been balanced.

Although no one dug into the identities of those who lynched stage robbers John and Charlie Ruggles, the search for the stolen gold bullion is another matter. Treasure hunters continue to comb the countryside for the Ruggles boys’ cache, hoping—like John and Charlie—to strike it rich. Meanwhile, in 2015 the Bureau of Land Management unveiled a historical plaque on Shasta County’s Middle Creek Trail to mark the spot of the fatal robbery. —M.B. AUTUMN 2022

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Big Jake and the Rest of the Family

In that 1971 film the McCandles family confronts a ruthless gang led by John Fain (Richard Boone) that has kidnapped grandson Little Jake (John Wayne’s youngest son, Ethan). John and Ethan pose at top with Maureen O’Hara, who portrays Big Jake’s wife, Martha. Seated are Big Jake’s sons (from left): Patrick Wayne (the senior Wayne’s second son), Bobby Vinton and Christopher Mitchum (actor Robert Mitchum’s second son).

Up front is Big Jake’s faithful collie, Dog (Laddie in real life).

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DUKE’S SON REMEMBERS

Ethan Wayne, the youngest son of legendary Western film star John Wayne, remains in the saddle as head of the family enterprises

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By Dave Lauterborn

orn on Feb. 22, 1962, John Ethan Morrison (known professionally as Ethan Wayne) is the youngest son of the late Western film icon John Wayne (birth name Marion Robert Morrison and known to friends as “Duke”) and wife Pilar Pallete. Memorably, as a boy Ethan appeared on-screen with his father and older brother Patrick in Big Jake (1971).

In the wake of his dad’s death from stomach cancer at age 72 on June 11, 1979, young Wayne turned a stint doing stunt work, then returned to acting on both the big and small screen, including a co-starring role in the police drama The New Adam-12. When older brother Michael Wayne died in 2003, Ethan took the reins as president of the family-run John Wayne Enterprises [johnwayne.com] and director of the John Wayne Cancer Foundation [johnwayne.org]. Wild West recently caught up with Ethan to discuss the various Wayne family endeavors, including the new museum, John Wayne: An American Experience (see P. 76), in Fort Worth, Texas.

What was the genesis of the new museum?

In the last few years the team at John Wayne Enterprises and I hosted a series of successful interactive pop-up exhibits in both Nashville and Las Vegas. After seeing the impact my father still has, our family decided we wanted a more permanent location. Through my good friend Patrick Gottsch I was introduced to Craig Cavileer of Majestic Realty, and they brought me down to the stockyards in Fort Worth. Once we saw Cavileer’s vision for the stockyards, we knew it was the right place for John Wayne.

What undiscovered treasures did you turn up in the family storage facility?

When they packed up my father’s house, it looks like they emptied the contents of every drawer and just wrapped the whole thing up in brown packing paper. While unwrapping all of it, we stumbled on everything from unread mail to his Oscar he won for True Grit. We also found some really good old whiskey, which is what inspired our collaboration with Duke Spirits. It really was like a step back in time.

What are your favorite aspects of the museum and items on display?

For me personally it’s the wardrobe display in the “Life on Screen” section. All the costumes he wore in the most iconic films, set up on mannequins exactly how they appear onscreen. It’s very impactful.

How does it feel to be named for both a Western film icon and arguably his greatest character role (Ethan Edwards of The Searchers)?

It’s a great legacy. I’m proud to carry that moniker.

What was life with your dad like, at home, on the set and aboard his converted World War II minesweeper Wild Goose?

My dad was happiest out on the water or on location; he loved projects and stories. On set, he was all business—very focused on the project. At home, he was warm, but consistently busy with the day-to-day, as you could imagine. On AUTUMN 2022

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Wild Goose, though…he really was in his element with friends, family and lots of laughter and adventure.

When were you first aware of your dad’s celebrity?

It was always there—I don’t really have a specific story to point to on that. I suppose as a teenager I understood his influence a little more, but truth be told, I’m still absorbing the impact he had on the world.

What other celebrities were in your family’s orbit? Did you have any favorites?

I was a little too young to really know them, but I have fond memories of Dean Martin and Maureen O’Hara. Those two stick out as favorites.

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What do recall about your debut speaking role in Big Jake , in which you played Jacob “Little Jake” McCandles, the kidnapped grandson of your father’s title character, Jacob McCandles?

Growing up, I was on location all the time, but really wasn’t a part of the team. On Big Jake I was on the team. I loved the whole cast, and it was an amazing experience.

Do you have favorites among your father’s films, Westerns or otherwise?

Right now, The Cowboys. The Wil Andersen character is probably the most similar to how my father was with me in real life. Watching it now, it makes me feel very nostalgic.

How did you get into stunt work?

After my dad died, Gary ”Whiz Kid” McLarty hired me to do stunt work on The Blues Brothers and gave me some direction at a rudderless time in my life.

What were your most memorable moments as an actor and stuntman?

Meeting John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. That was amazing as a young man just starting out. I also really enjoyed working on The New Adam-12, because it was a pretty fast-paced production. I had a terrific co-star [Peter Parros] and really enjoyed the experience.

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TOP: SCREENPROD/PHOTONONSTOP/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; RIGHT: EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

John and son Ethan Wayne appear on-screen as Jacob and namesake grandson “Little Jake” McCandles, who find themselves in a tough spot by film’s end. Ethan recalled that while he was often on location with his father, he didn’t feel like he truly belonged until he had his debut speaking role in this family Western.

TCD/POROD.DB/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Little Jake’s Big Break

A Man and His Boys

In 1972 Wayne starred in The Cowboys as rancher Wil Anderson, who employs schoolboys as drovers on a cattle drive.

Ethan (posing below right with his dad in 1974) didn’t get a role in that coming-ofage film, but it remains one of his favorites.

Did you have any qualms on inheriting older brother Michael’s mantle as head of the family enterprises and the cancer foundation?

Yes, Michael was very smart and a great businessman. Though I wish we had had time to discuss the business a little more before he passed, I was excited by the challenge and the privilege of the position.

TOP: SCREENPROD/PHOTONONSTOP/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; RIGHT: EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

TCD/POROD.DB/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

What do you hope to accomplish through John Wayne Enterprises?

The main objective is to keep John Wayne’s name and essence alive. We’re hard at work on the John Wayne: An American Experience exhibit in Texas, fine tuning a retail line and creating partnerships with other companies that live his values. I think our job to share his positive influence with the country again.

So, basically, trying to bring his core values and character back to the people.

What are your goals for the John Wayne Cancer Foundation?

When my father was dying, he asked us to use his name to help doctors find a cure, so that’s the big one. We’re working toward that by raising money for cancer research, funding a kids skin care program called Block the Blaze and creating John Wayne Fellowship Programs at a couple of great universities—the University of California, Irvine, and Texas Tech—so doctors can continue their surgical oncology education. There is actually a whole room dedicated to this work at John Wayne: An American Experience that I would encourage people to check out.

Do you have a favorite personal keepsake of your father’s?

Of course I do. But if I told you, it wouldn’t be personal anymore.

What lessons did he teach you that stay with you?

The first thing that comes to mind is “red, right, returning.” I’ve always been fascinated by anything I could drive, so I especially loved learning about Wild Goose and how it worked. Any fellow watermen reading this will know about that rule.

What is your last clear memory of your dad?

I was right there with him at the last part of his life, and I’ve got to say, he showed a lot of courage. The man had grit all the way to the end.

How would you like him to be remembered?

Well, he said himself how he’d like to be remembered: “Feo, fuerte y formal,” which translates to “ugly, strong and dignified.”

What is John Wayne’s greatest legacy?

There is no arguing that his film career was one of the greatest of all time, but I’d have to say the greatest legacy is the work we’re doing at

the John Wayne Cancer Foundation. He’d be very proud of the strides we’re taking in the fight against cancer.

Dave Lauterborn, based in historic Harpers Ferry, W.Va., has been the managing editor of Wild West since 2008. For further reading he suggests John Wayne: The Life and Legend, by Scott Eyman, and Duke in His Own Words, with an introduction by Ethan Wayne.

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COLLECTIONS

JOHN WAYNE, BIG AS LIFE

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very aficionado of Hollywood Westerns produced from the 1930s to the ’70s has experienced the commanding screen presence of American actor John Wayne (May 26, 1907—June 11, 1979).

His innumerable fans miss him, of course. Now, in addition to watching small-screen airings of such classic Wayne films as Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), The Searchers (1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and The Shootist (1976), they can revel in memories of him at John Wayne: An American Experience, a 10,000-square-foot exhibit space that opened in Fort Worth, Texas, on May 26, 2021, the 114th anniversary of his birth. Wayne’s youngest son, Ethan (see related interview, P. 72), founded the museum, which provides an intimate look at the life of the man born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, who became celebrated worldwide as “Duke” (a nickname inspired by a beloved Airedale terrier Wayne had as a child).

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Visitors begin their experience with an introductory video at the in-house theater, enjoying clips from Duke’s many films while narrator Ethan maps out the museum.

Spanning nine rooms, the exhibit delves into Wayne’s career and personal life and features more than 400 artifacts, making it the largest collection of the actor’s memorabilia on public display.

Wayne grew up in Southern California. Discovered by director John Ford while working as a prop boy in Hollywood, Duke was doing stunts and appearing in bit parts by his early 20s. Lining either side of the main exhibit space are eight larger-than-life lighted monoliths depicting Wayne in various films, from his first starring appearance in The Big Trail (1930) to The Shootist, his final role before his 1979 death. On the reverse of each is background information about his various roles. Monitors attached to four monoliths and along an adjacent wall

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JOHN WAYNE: AN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, FORT WORTH, TEXAS (6)

FANS OF THE ICONIC WESTERN FILM STAR HAPPILY BURN DAYLIGHT AT FORT WORTH’S JOHN WAYNE: AN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

BY LINDA WOMMACK

JOHN WAYNE: AN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, FORT WORTH, TEXAS (6)

COLLECTIONS

show iconic moments from his scores of films.

Wayne appeared in upward of 140 films, including 80 Westerns. He took his craft seriously and later produced and directed films in which he and other leading Western actors starred. One panel deals with his approach to acting. Myriad artifacts, including scripts, props and costumes, will please the fans of a man who once said, “Nobody should come to the movies unless he believes in heroes.”

Wayne, who stood a strapping 6-foot-4 and spoke with an unmistakable drawl, certainly played the hero while defining the role of the American cowboy. He upholds law and order in such films as Rio Bravo (1959) and its reprise, El Dorado (1966), both directed by Howard Hawks. Wayne serves his country in uniform in Ford’s “cavalry trilogy”— Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950). In his 1960 directorial debut, The Alamo, he plays frontier legend Davy Crockett.

In several notable instances Wayne’s heroic character shows his flaws—in The Searchers he evinces a hatred for Indians, while in Red River he descends into paranoid mania during a cattle drive and nearly kills his adopted son, played by Montgomery Clift.

Even as U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969)—the role that finally earned him a best actor Oscar, which holds a place of honor in the exhibit —he is ornery, drinks too much and seems all too eager to pull the trigger on badmen.

Wayne wore many hats on-screen, and 16 of them, from Stetsons to fedoras, are on display in the interactive “Step Into My Shoes” gallery, which allows visitors to “co-star” with him in three scenes.

The “Walk the Walk, Talk the Talk” gallery captures Duke at the height of his stardom as both a fullfledged American hero and an international film star. Featured footage includes praise of Wayne

from some of film and television’s greatest stars. A video cabinet presents 38 pop culture clips, including cartoons and comic strips, that reference the screen legend.

Another gallery celebrates him as “A Man of the People,” one who interacted warmly with fans, service members and presidents alike. The most personal display centers on the Wayne family, which chose photos and correspondence that further illumine the Western icon.

Open seven days a week, John Wayne: An American Experience is at the heart of the Fort Worth Stockyards, in the Historic Exhibits Building near the corner of Rodeo Plaza and East Exchange Avenue. For more information call 628-224-0956 or visit johnwayne.com/experience.

Opposite page: Eight larger-than-life lighted monoliths of John Wayne movie scenes line either side of the main exhibit space. At bottom is the best actor Oscar Wayne received for his role in 1969’s True Grit. This page: Another exhibit features outfits Wayne wore in films, including these familiar cowboy duds (top left) and 16 different hats (top right) including this sharplooking Stetson (above).

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GUNS OF THE WEST

THE NOvEL SAvAGE

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tion of the Model 1899. The latter boasted many improvements over the earlier model and was made in the hundreds of thousands until discontinued in 1998. For a $5 fee Savage would convert an existing Model 1895 rifle or carbine to the Model 1899 configuration. The Model 99 featured not only a springloaded rotary spool magazine but also an indicator window on the left side of the receiver with a brass counter displaying the number of cartridges remaining in the magazine. It, too, initially used the .303 Savage cartridge, though after the turn of the century it was chambered for other calibers, including the perennial favorite .30-30 Winchester and the Winchester smokeless powder line (.25-35, .32-40, .38-55). Between 1912 and ’20 Savage produced cartridges by famed arms inventor Charles Newton in three additional calibers—the high-velocity .22 Savage Hi-Power (1912), the .250 Savage (1915) and the .300

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RIGHT: JAY PAUL/GETTY IMAGES

he 1890s were truly an influential time in the history of firearms development, witnessing the introduction of everything from smokeless powder to semiautomatic shooting irons. The period also saw the debut of the hammerless lever-action rifle. On July 25, 1893, the U.S. Patent Office issued Patent No. 502,018, for a “magazine gun,” to Arthur William Savage. Born a British subject in Kingston, Jamaica, on May 19, 1857. Savage was an astute businessman, an ardent explorer and a multitalented inventor. In addition to his namesake lever-action rotary magazine rifle, Savage is known worldwide for another lasting invention—the radial tire, which remains the standard for virtually all automotive tires.

A.W., as he was known to friends and associates, started designing firearms with son John in the late 1880s. After receiving the patent for his hammerless lever-action rifle, Savage fished about for a factory space from which to begin production. His first rifle, the Model 1895, was manufactured under contract in New Haven, Conn., by the Marlin Repeating Arms Co., which rolled out 5,650 of them. The rifle came in its own caliber, .303 Savage, which was wholly different from the .303 British military cartridge but similar to the Winchester .30-30, though they weren’t interchangeable, and the .303 slightly surpassed the .30-30 in performance. Stamped at the Marlin factory with the initials JM (for company founder John Marlin), those early cartridges are extremely rare.

In 1894 A.W. organized the Savage Arms Co. in Utica, N.Y., which continued to produce the Model 1895 until the introduc-

JUDE STEELE COLLECTION (2)

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FIRST OF THE HAMMERLESS LEVER-ACTION RIFLES, THE SAVAGE BECAME A PERENNIAL FAVORITE OF HUNTERS

BY GEORGE LAYMAN

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GUNS OF THE WEST

1899

RIGHT: JAY PAUL/GETTY IMAGES

JUDE STEELE COLLECTION (2)

The hammerless lever-action Savage Model 1899 (above and on opposite page) was used at the tail end of the Wild West era. It earned the acclaim of big-game hunters and proved popular with Texas Rangers and Mexican rurales. Arthur William “A.W.” Savage’s namesake rifle, which features a springloaded rotary spool magazine, was made in the hundreds of thousands until finally discontinued in 1998. The Model 99 pictured has a peep sight.

Savage (1920). The last became the standard for the Savage 99.

The Wild West era had begun to wind down by the time the Model 99 gained its spurs. The rifle initially came with a 26-inch round, octagon or half octagon barrel. The company later introduced a saddle ring carbine version with a 20-inch round barrel. The Savage proved stiff competition for the Winchester Models 1894 and 1895, though lawmen leaned toward the latter with their exposed hammers. That said, two period photographs show legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (the man who tracked down Bonnie and Clyde) posing with a Model 99, most likely a .303 Savage carbine. Western hunters appreciated the rifle’s sturdy mechanics, though Winchesters continued to overshadow the Savage. In the 1972 Western Joe Kidd, which made use of many period-correct firearms, Robert Duvall’s character, scheming landowner Frank Harlan, carries an intricately engraved Savage 99.

Famed African hunter W.D.M. “Karamojo” Bell (1880–1954) is known to have used a Savage 99, chambered in .22 Savage Hi-Power, to down in quick succession 23 cape buffalo, a very dangerous animal when cornered. American explorer and adventurer Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960), whose exploits may have inspired the film character Indiana Jones, and missionary and fellow explorer the Rev. Harry R. Caldwell (1876–1970), author of Blue Tiger (1924), hunted tigers in South China, both using the Model 99 chambered in .22 Savage Hi-Power. In company

brochures Savage particularly played up hunting stories and photos from Caldwell. In later writings Andrews expressed his preference for the .250 Savage. By then A.W. Savage had long since moved west to pursue other ventures. On Sept. 22, 1938, he died at age 81 in San Diego, Calif.

In 1967 I went down to Sonora, Mexico, with Hal Varney, a regular customer at my father’s hobby shop in Connecticut, to purchase five WhitneyKennedy lever-action rifles from a Mexican gentleman who also had two .303 Savage saddle ring carbines. Each of the latter bore a number on the left side of the receiver and were said to have been owned by rurales, the federal mounted police. No, we didn’t buy the pair, a decision I came to regret.

Collector Rudolfo Mendez told us the Savage 99 was popular with lawmen and bandidos alike in Mexico in the 1910–’20s and could use spitzer rounds (pointed, jacketed bullets), as the nose of a following cartridge did not rest on the primer of the one before it, as occurs in rifles with tube magazines, like the Winchester 1894. The Winchester Model 1895 could use pointed projectiles in its single-stack box magazine, but working the action proved too noisy for covert police work. The Savage 99, on the other hand, had sleek, smooth and largely silent mechanics.

The Savage Model 99 wove an adventurous history, making its mark with Rangers in Texas, rurales in Mexico and tiger hunters in China. At the turn of the 19th century Savage led the lever-action pack in innovation and performance, and for the rest of the century the Model 99 remained among the world’s most popular hunting rifles.

The Wild West era had begun to wind down by the time the Model 99 gained its spurs

The Savage Arms Co., organized in Utica, N.Y., in 1894, ran this ad for its Model 99 when it debuted.

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GHOST TOWNS

A few period structures remain standing in Piedmont, which dates from the late 1860s railroad boom. By 1896, however, the Salt Lake Daily Tribune was calling it a once "lively little town" whose "big beehive-shaped charcoal kilns are all that remain to point to the past."

PIEDMONT, WYOMING

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Wood was scarce along much of the Union Pacific line through Wyoming Territory, which had formed on July 25, 1868. But south of Piedmont, just across the Utah state line, stretch the Uinta Mountains. Thus within 20 miles of town was a reliable source of timber to render into charcoal and supply lumber for construction and railroad ties.

Byrne was not alone in recognizing the need. Fourteen miles west of town lay the company town of Hilliard, which boasted some 30 charcoal kilns, a sawmill and a 30-mile-long flume down which to float timber down from the Uintas. Farther west still was Evanston, home to two charcoal companies and a dozen more kilns, whose lumbermen sent logs down the Bear River from the Uintas each spring. Only the Piedmont kilns remain intact and readily accessible.

By 1896 the Salt Lake Daily Tribune was reflecting on the town’s waning fortunes: Piedmont, Wyo., in the early days of the Union Pacific was a lively little town where stores, saloons and gambling rooms thrived and money was plentiful with the denizens and its hundreds of woodchoppers, lumber and timber men and scores of coal burners. Today there remain but a few of the log houses, while the big beehive-shaped charcoal kilns are all that remain to point to the past flush times of the town. When charcoal gave way to

DOUG PAGE

P

iedmont, Wyo., is known less as a ghost town and more as a state historic site centered on a trio of large beehive-shaped charcoal kilns. The town, such as it is, lies a half mile to the southwest, partly on private cattle range. Accessible by two-wheel drive on the firm dirt County Road 173 (aka Piedmont Road), scarcely 7 miles south of Exit 24 off I-80, Piedmont offers ghost town aficionados the well-preserved kilns, a half dozen derelict structures and slices of Mormon, transcontinental railroad and charcoal-making history.

Around 1867 English-born Mormon emigrant Moses Byrne— a polygamist, father of nearly two dozen children and serial entrepreneur—established a water- and wood-refueling station here in anticipation of the approaching Union Pacific. The proud pioneer first dubbed the town Byrne, but confusion with the existing trackside town of Bryan, farther east, required the name change to Piedmont, the home region of his two Italian wives. Soon after railroad crews laid track through in late 1868, Byrne built six kilns—one to produce lime for mortar, five to supply charcoal to iron smelters farther west in Salt Lake City and the blacksmith back up the line in Fort Bridger. Piedmont soon turned into a growing concern. Besides the Union Pacific depot, roundhouse and water tank, it boasted a telegraph office, post office, general store, schoolhouse, three-story hotel, newspaper, the requisite saloons, a smattering of homes and several family cemeteries.

TOP: DOUG PAGE; BOTTOM: FEDERAL HIGHWAY PROJECT

IN 1869 MORMON PIONEER MOSES BYRNE BUILT SIX BIG BEEHIVE KILNS ALONG THE WESTERING LINE OF THE UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD

BY TOM STRAKA AND DOUG PAGE

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GHOST TOWNS

What finally sounded the death knell for Piedmont was the Union Pacific’s decision to reroute its tracks farther to the north in 1901, bypassing town.

The last store closed in 1940.

Among other interesting historical connections, Piedmont factored into the May 10, 1869, golden spike ceremony, when the Central Pacific and Union Pacific linked up at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, to complete the transcontinental railroad. Originally scheduled for May 7, the ceremony was delayed when Union Pacific road crews seeking back pay blocked the train carrying company dignitaries at Piedmont. It proceeded to Utah only after Union Pacific Vice President Thomas Durant wired for the money and paid off the irate crews. Rumor has it infamous outlaw Butch Cassidy frequented the area and reportedly buried the loot from one of his bank robberies near Piedmont. Treasure hunters still seek it. Calamity Jane also spent time in Piedmont as a teen orphan, taking whatever jobs she could to support her five younger siblings. Soldiers from Fort Bridger partied in town, and Jane soon became a notorious camp follower.

What proves most interesting to modern-day visitors are the charcoal kilns. Built of native sandstone stacked and layered with lime-sand mortar, each stands 30 feet high and 30 feet in diameter with walls some 2 feet thick. Facing east at ground level, away from the road, are 6-by-5-foot arched doors through which to load firewood and unload charcoal. Facing west near the peak of each kiln, visible from the road, are other small openings

through which to load wood. Ventilation was provided by offset rows of intake holes around the bottom few feet.

Just how did the kilns work? Charcoal is the black carbon residue of wood burned under high temperatures in limited oxygen. Once each kiln had been loaded to the top with wood and fully fired, the loading doors were sealed off to create that nearly airless environment. A local newspaper described the process:

Above: This trio of intact 30-foot-high charcoal kilns and the remains of a fourth stand a half mile northeast of the townsite.

Below: The company town of Hilliard, 14 miles west of Piedmont, boasted some 30 kilns, a sawmill and a 30-mile flume down which lumbermen floated timber from the Uinta Mountains.

Each [kiln] held 35 cords, 4-foot length, all the local woods—lodgepole pine, aspen and spruce—being used. The ovens were filled from a door at the base and one near the apex, fired from the former and then both doors sealed shut. A series of vent holes around the base furnished the only air and thus drew downward the fire, which first shot to the top of the kiln. As flames appeared at each of the vent holes, it was closed with a brick until it was smothered. After a week the kiln had cooled and was emptied and recharged.

The three intact kilns, the remains of a fourth, a nearby cemetery and a handful of tumbledown homes off the right side of the road draw mainly those interested in ghost towns and our railroad past. It is well worth the detour to hear the wind whispering history through the ruins.

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TOP: DOUG PAGE; BOTTOM: FEDERAL HIGHWAY PROJECT

coke in the smelting furnaces, wood became a thing of the past for use in locomotives and the lumber market had its bottom knocked out by importations from Oregon, Washington and California, there was nothing left in business in these lines, and citizens turned their attention to railroad ties and mine props.

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REVIEWS

MUST SEE, MUST READ MELODY GROVES PICKS FAVORITE NEW MEXICO BOOKS AND FILMS

Mariana’s Knight (2017, by W. Michael Farmer): Beautifully written and based on a real-life murder mystery, this novel follows the February 1896 disappearance of well-known New Mexico attorney Albert Jennings Fountain and his 8-yearold son, Henry. Ambushed on Chalk Hill near White Sands, father and son vanished, leaving nothing behind but a bloodsoaked buckboard wagon. Author Farmer takes speculation one step further—what if Henry survived?

Other novels in his Legends of the Desert series include Knight of the Tiger and Blood-Soaked Earth.

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Spider Woman’s Daughter (2013, Anne Hillerman): This first Leaphorn & Chee mystery novel, written by the late Tony Hillerman’s daughter, Anne, derives its title from American Indian legends. The story is set in the Four Corners, where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado meet, an area encompassing 500 Indian tribes on 318 reservations. The novel won a 2014 Spur Award from Western Writers of America and landed on The New York Times Best Seller list. Spider Woman’s Daughter, a reviewer wrote in the online New York Journal of Books, “continues the Hillerman tradition, providing likable heroes against despicable villains coming together in unusual and intriguing situations in a glorious, littleunderstood world.”

starring Woody Harrelson, Billy Crudup and Patricia Arquette.

Blood and Thunder (2006, by Hampton Sides): In Sides’ retelling trapper, scout and soldier Kit Carson understands and respects the Western Indian tribes better than most, yet he must follow orders and participate in the final devastation of the Navajo nation. Richly detailed and spanning more than 30 years of history, the narrative captures the West as it really was. The dusty town of Santa Fe is the epicenter around which swirl politicians, government officials and military. Sides sweeps the reader along, telling stories with intimacy and immediacy. It reads as if he were there.

Young Guns (1988, Morgan Creek Productions, on DVD and Blu-ray): Considered one of the more historically accurate of all Billy the Kid films, it retells the misadventures of the infamous New Mexico outlaw. Filmed in and around the state, the star-studded movie brings a youthful energy to the tales of Billy and his compadres. Featuring Emilio Estevez (as the Kid), Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Philips and Charlie Sheen, along with veteran Western stars, this action-packed film has plenty of authenticity and verve.

The Hi-Lo Country (1961, by Max Evans): Evans considered northeastern New Mexico, where it borders Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas, Hi-Lo Country. Growing up in that area as a young artist, Evans used the land as the setting for his best-known writings. At the center of this tale set after World War II is the story of friendship between two men, their mutual love of a woman and their commitment to the harsh, dry high-desert grassland. The Hi-Lo Country was adapted into a 1998 film

The Milagro Beanfield War (1974,

by John Nichols): The first volume of a New Mexico trilogy, this novel is set in the early 1970s in fictitious Milagro, N.M. Recurring themes of water rights and developer vs. small farmer lead this story. Milagro farmer Joe Mondragon sets off the conflict when he illegally irrigates his beanfield. “I learned so much about New Mexico,” says one recent “Land of Enchantment” transplant of reading the novel. The writer’s sense of humor and love for northern New Mexico are manifest. A film based on the novel and directed by Robert Redford was released in 1988.

MOVIES

Appaloosa (2008, New Line Cinema and Axiom Films, on DVD and Blu-ray): Based on a Robert B. Parker novel, this film was co-written by director Ed Harris and Robert Knott and stars Harris, Viggo Mortensen and Renée Zellweger.

Terrorized by a local rancher, the townspeople of Appaloosa, New Mexico Territory, hire lawman Virgil Cole

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REVIEWS (Harris) and his deputy, Everett Hitch (Mortensen), to protect and regain control.

Filmed in New Mexico, it was deemed by one reviewer “a well-made, satisfying, traditionalist Western with some odd quirks and turns.”

High Noon (1952, Stanley Kramer Productions, on DVD and Blu-ray): This iconic Western based on author John W. Cunningham’s 1947 short story “The Tin Star” is set in the fictional town of Hadleyville, New Mexico Territory. Gary Cooper stars as Marshal Will Kane, the quintessential lawman going toe to toe with badmen on Main Street at, yes, high noon. First though, the newlywed marshal must decide whether to face the four revenge-minded badmen—played

by Ian MacDonald, Sheb Wooley, Robert J. Wilke and Lee Van Cleef—or leave town with Quaker wife Amy (Grace Kelly).

Despite getting no help from townsfolk (Lloyd Bridges, Lon Chaney Jr., Thomas Mitchell et al.), Kane does his duty. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, it won four.

Chisum (1970, Batjac Productions, Warner Brothers, on DVD and Blu-ray): Set in New Mexico Territory, this Western is loosely based on events and

characters of the 1878 Lincoln County War. Presenting such historical figures as Billy the Kid (Geoffrey Deuel), John Chisum ( John Wayne) and John Henry Tunstall (Patric Knowles), writer Andrew J. Fenady and director Andrew V. McLaglen brought to film the iconic American story of powerful landowners vs. powerful businessmen.

The Missing (2003, Revolution Studios, Imagine Entertainment, on DVD and Blu-ray): Directed by Ron Howard, this spooky film is based on author Thomas Eidson’s 1996 novel The Last Ride.

Set in 1885 New Mexico Territory and filmed in the state, the film is especially notable for its authentic use of the Apache language.

Father and daughter Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) and Maggie Gilkeson (Cate Blanchett) battle not only each other but also the elements and attackers. Well received among American Indian populations, The Missing sparked cultural pride with its authenticity.

BOOK ReviewS

1876, Year of the Gun: The Year Bat, Wyatt, Custer, Jesse and the Two Bills (Buffalo and Wild) Created the Wild West, and Why It’s Still With Us, by Steve

Wiegand, Bancroft Press, Baltimore, 2022, $33 Yes, 1876, when the United States marked its centennial, was a pretty big year. In 1976 (the bicentennial year) Gore Vidal published his historical novel 1876, whose secondary characters include Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain and Samuel J. Tilden. Well, those fellows all feature in this entertaining nonfiction work by Steve Wiegand, as does the Centennial International Exposition, whose opening in Philadelphia on May 10 drew President Grant and 186,271 others. The Democrat Tilden gets his due in Chapter 9, which covers that year’s disputed presidential election, which ultimately saw Republican Rutherford B. Hayes victorious.

Mark Twain was back East that year, putting the finishing touches on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (his semiautobiographical Western travel book, Roughing It, having been published four years earlier).

All of the above has little to do with the Wild West and even

less to do with guns, but it does make for interesting interludes in the narrative and also puts into context what was going on in the rest of the country while guns were going off west of the Mississippi. The names of most of the principal real-life characters in 1876 appear in the book’s subtitle (no full names necessary). It was in January that young buffalo hunter Bat Masterson shot it out with Corporal Melvin King at Sweetwater, in the Texas Panhandle, and ended up with a lifelong limp.

Bat returned home to Wichita to recuperate, but in a matter of months he was patrolling the streets of Dodge City, Kan., alongside Wyatt Earp, another young peace officer destined to become a legendary Westerner. That year in Dodge neither Masterson nor Earp killed a man, though Wyatt became adept at using the barrel of his gun to “buffalo” miscreants.

Summer brought news of far more serious gunplay out in Montana Territory, where on June 25 Plains Indians wiped out 7th U.S. Cavalry Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his immediate command on the Little Bighorn River. As Wiegand points out, that same day at almost the same time some 1,900 miles to the east 29-year-old

Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his “electric speech machine” to a panel of judges at the Centennial International Exposition. On July 17, a few weeks after Custer’s shocking defeat, Army scout William F. Cody killed and scalped a Cheyenne warrior at Warbonnet Creek, in northwestern Nebraska, and later that year “Buffalo Bill” entertained Eastern audiences by exhibiting this “first scalp for Custer.”

On August 2 the soon-to-be-infamous Jack McCall committed one of the most egregious assassinations in the chronicles of the Wild West, shooting former lawman Wild Bill Hickok ( James Butler Hickok) from behind during a poker came in Deadwood (in present-day South Dakota). That was followed on September 7 by one of the most infamous attempted bank robberies in Western lore, when the JamesYounger Gang rode into Northfield, Minn., to rob the First National Bank. In the fierce shootout that followed, bank employee Joseph Lee Heywood and townsman Nicolaus Gustafson were shot down, as were gang members Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell. During the subsequent massive manhunt Charlie Pitts was killed; the

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REVIEWS wounded Cole, Jim and Bob Younger were all captured; and Frank and Jesse James escaped to rob another day.

When dealing with these legends, Wiegand doesn’t limit himself to what they did in 1876 alone.

He does a good job of covering what they were up to—shootouts, robberies, showbiz, etc.—before and after the centennial year, at times evoking (intentionally) a smile or a chuckle or two.

Of course, little of this will be new to Wild West aficionados, but it is nice to have it all packed into a single volume with 44 pages of photographs.

“By the end of 1876,” writes Wiegand, “Masterson, Earp, Custer, Cody, Hickok and the James-Younger Gang had all planted seeds that would sprout into legends or participated in events that would elevate them from already well-known figures to American icons.”

Likely, the whole wild bunch will still be remembered in 2076.

—Editor Yellowstone National Park: The First 150 Years, by Jeff Henry, Lyons Press, Lanham, Md., 2022, $39.95 Way to go, Yellowstone—still looking good after 150 years!

That is, 150 years as a national park, estab84 WILD WEST

lished on March 1, 1872. Yellowstone, as author Jeff Henry writes in his introduction to this fine sesquicentennial retrospective, made the transition “from an undeveloped wilderness in 1872 to a pleasuring ground for tourists just a few years later.” Of course, the region recorded far more history prior to that date, and the author devotes the first five of his 10 chapters to the pre-park years, under the headings “Geographic History,” “Native Americans,” “Early Explorers and Mountain Men,” “Prospecting Era” and “Official Explorers.”

“Geologically,” writes Henry, who has lived and worked in and around the park for 40 years, “the most immediately dramatic expressions in Yellowstone are the park’s famous geysers, hot springs, mud pots and fumaroles, most of which are located within the boundaries of the caldera.” Such geological wonders, not to mention the spectacular Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, inspired

the push to preserve Yellowstone as the first national park in the nation and perhaps the world. American Indians had long been familiar with the area, the author dismissing as myth the notion they were superstitiously afraid of its thermal features.

Neither Meriwether Lewis nor William Clark entered the park during their epic 1804–06 expedition to and from the Pacific Ocean. During the return journey, on July 15, 1806, Clark and his party got within 50 miles of it when passing through to the site of present-day Livingston, Mont. In 1807 John Colter, a veteran of the Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, became the first Anglo-American known to have entered what became Yellowstone National Park.

Following in Colter’s footsteps were such fellow trappers as Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Joe Meek and Osborne Russell (the last of whom kept a journal). Next came the prospectors, who ventured south from the Montana Territory goldfields in the early 1860s. The first official party to explore the future park was the 1859–60 (William F.) Raynolds Expedition, which included geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden, who returned to lead a geological survey of

Yellowstone in the summer of 1871. It was the Hayden survey, documented by photographer William Henry Jackson and artist Thomas Moran, that played the preeminent role in prompting Congress to establish the national park.

In 1872 that new park remained a wilderness in which Indians could still pursue their old ways of living. The Nez Perces passed through Yellowstone during their noted flight from U.S. troops in 1877, the Bannocks doing the same, albeit to less notice, a year later. For its first 14 years the park had no budget and almost no one to protect its geological wonders or wildlife from two-legged tourists.

Poaching was a huge problem. That changed to a degree under the watch of the U.S. Army, which administered Yellowstone from 1886 to 1916. Hotels, such as the iconic Old Faithful Inn and the Canyon Hotel, and businesses, including general stores and service stations, sprang up during those years.

By 1920 the park had a network of roads, and motorized vehicles had replaced horses and wagons on those roads. The author then relates the different approaches park officials used to manage wildlife (bear feed-

ing was encouraged up until the beginning of World War II; wolves were wiped out and later reintroduced; bison were ranched; and elk were subject to herd reduction measures) and the surge of visitors after World War II (visitation topped 1 million for the first time in 1948). “A situation that might seem overcrowded to one person might not seem that way at all to someone who has spent his or her life in a major metropolis,” writes Henry.

Accompanying the fine text are a wealth of historic photos and paintings, complete with detailed captions, that make Yellowstone National Park: The First 150 Years the next best thing to being there.

—Editor

The Lady and the Mountain Man: Isabella Bird, Rocky Mountain Jim and Their Unlikely Friendship, by Chris Enss, TwoDot, Guilford, Conn., and Helena, Mont., 2021, $19.95 From 1993 to ’98 the TV series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman served

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REVIEWS up a politically semicorrect American West, along with an ongoing romance between Dr. Quinn ( Jane Seymour) and burly but sensitive mountain man Byron Sully ( Joe Lando).

Similar in principle was Hawkeye, a 1994 series set on the eve of the French and Indian War, in which Lynda Carter gradually falls for the near invincible but sensitive namesake woodland scout played

by Lee Horsley. Men watching either series tend to snort with skepticism that either of these too-good-to-betrue romances could be anything but the fantasies of a female screenwriter raised on summertime novels.

Well, not so fast there, partners. In The Lady and the Mountain Man prolific author Chris Enss documents an actual travelogue of 1870s Colorado with its share of adventure and, yes, unlikely romance, providing yet another kernel of truth behind the fiction. Oh, and Jane Seymour fans, the lady in this true-to-life tale was also British.

Born in Boroughbridge, Yorkshire, in 1831, Isabella Bird was the daughter of a clergyman. She suffered throughout her youth from back problems but parlayed a childhood talent for writing into a highly successful career (the 1879 memoir A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Moun86 WILD WEST

tains is her best-known work), which also allowed her to travel the world. It was during one of those treks, in the summer of 1873, Isabella came to Estes Park, Colorado Territory, hoping the air and environs would improve her health— which, remarkably, it did. While there she impressed all she met with her fearless adaptability to the wilderness. She also learned that a fellow Britisher, Windham Thomas WyndhamQuin, 4th Earl of Dunraven, owned practically all of Estes Park—all save a patch of property whose owner, a locally infamous trapper, former Army scout and desperado named James “Rocky Mountain Jim” Nugent, absolutely refused to sell (sounds like the kind of scenario that added drama to old Westerns).

And then she met Nugent himself, who would guide her up the territory’s ultimate Rocky Mountain high: Longs Peak. Although he’d lost his right eye while slaying a bear and confessed to an exceptionally violent life, Jim turned out to be a perfect gentleman, albeit one addicted to drink and tormented by his wilder past.

This still being the Wild West, there is some feuding and gunplay in the book, but The Lady and

the Mountain Man centers primarily on how an unlikely couple became soul mates (think Wuthering Heights, with Heathcliff trading the moors for the Great Divide).

Keep in mind throughout this page-turner, though, that, too-goodto-be-true happenings sometimes do occur in real life.

—Jon Guttman

The Frank W. Angel Report on the Death of John H. Tunstall, by David G. Thomas, Doc45 Publishing, Las Cruces, N.M., 2022, $34.95 For those harboring any doubts about what started the Lincoln County War, or that the Lawrence Murphy/James Dolan faction was largely to blame, read this book, Vol. 9 of the Mesilla Valley History Series.

The month after a posse on the MurphyDolan side murdered John Henry Tunstall in New Mexico Territory’s Lincoln County on Feb. 18, 1878, U.S. Attorney General Charles Devens appointed Special Agent Frank Warner Angel to investigate that killing,

the violence in Lincoln County, alleged land fraud in Colfax County and alleged corruption by such territorial officials as Governor Samuel Beach Axtell and U.S. Attorney Thomas Catron. Author David Thomas’ focus here is on that part of the 395-page “Angel Report” that covers his investigation of Tunstall’s killing and the subsequent cover-up and other lawless activities of the brazen Axtell and Catron.

The highlight of this 237-page book is Chapter 4—the publication for the first time of the Angel Report, along with Thomas’ bracketed annotations and additional information. The report includes 40 sworn witness statements from an interesting cast of characters, including William H. Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid; Canadian attorney Alexander A. McSween, who had sided with Tunstall; Robert Widenmann, whose appointment as a deputy U.S. marshal was revoked by Governor Axtell; the powerhouse Irish duo of Murphy and Dolan; and Captain George A. Purington, the commander of Fort Stanton in 1877.

In Appendix A the author provides short bios of these men and other people (71 in all) who appear in the Angel Report.

Other chapters cover the 31 formal questions, or interrogatories, Angel demanded Axtel answer (which he did, belatedly), the 12 formal charges Angel made against the governor, relevant letters included with the report and the attempt to destroy the report by Catron and Stephen Elkins, who served as territorial delegate from New Mexico to the U.S. Congress between 1872 and ’77. Rounding out this thorough presentation is Appendix B, a helpful timeline of events related to the report.

On Oct. 3, 1878, Angel submitted his report to Devens. Later that month Angel received an appointment as an assistant U.S. attorney at Brooklyn. He died at age 61 in Jersey City, N.J. As for his report, it has been cited before, but here it takes on new life, thanks to Thomas.

—Editor Notorious Women of the Wild West,

by Carole Nielson, Nielson Publishing (nubertr@ aol.com), Shady Cove, Ore., 2021, $20 Asked why she never married and settled down, Irish-born entrepreneur, prospector and explorer Nellie Cashman spoke for a number of women who survived and even thrived in the American West: “Why,

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REVIEWS

child, I haven’t had time for marriage.

Men are a nuisance anyhow, now aren’t they? They’re just boys grown up.”

Notorious Women of the Wild West is an omnibus of 13 women who made their mark on the wild frontier, where “notoriety” was not necessarily regarded as a bad thing, as long as it was a claim to fame.

Author Carole Nielson has covered her share of Western women, and Wild West readers will probably recognize at least half the names in her table of contents. For those familiar with the film personas of the likes of Belle Starr, Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley but largely oblivious to their actual lives, Nielson keeps her short entries in this 167-page book focused on actual events and deeds, with occasional references to reports considered debatable or just plain “fake news.”

Whichever side of the law they trod, Nielson’s subjects all faced an environment replete with natural hazards and

the additional handicap of navigating in “a man’s world.”

Regardless, the West offered opportunities for a hardy woman that were lacking back East, not the least of which was a right to vote at local and state levels. It may have taken extra fortitude for these women to prevail in their chosen avocations, but some certainly did—with “Stagecoach Mary” Fields overcoming added obstacles toward becoming the first black mail carrier in the United States. For Sarah “The Great Western” Bowman the battlefields of the Mexican War were as good a venue as any. Even age could be surmounted if the young’uns in question were outlaws Anna Emmaline McDoulet and Jennie Stevenson, alias “Cattle Annie” and “Little Britches.”

Although the breadth of their fame varies widely, Notorious Women of the Wild West should have something new to offer any reader.

—Jon Guttman Standoff at High Noon: Another Battle Over the Truth in the Mythic Wild West,

by Bill Markley and Kellen Cutsforth, TwoDot, Guilford, Conn., and Helena, Mt., 2021, $24.95 The stories here aren’t new, but that’s the

point—or at least part of the point. Bill Markley and Kellen Cutsforth debate familiar Western subjects replete with mystery, myth and controversy that have sparked the interest of Old West aficionados for generations. The authors previously teamed up to write the 2018 book Old West Showdown: Two Authors Wrangle Over the Truth About the Mythic Old West. That was solid entertain-

ment, and our reviewer wondered aloud then about a Showdown, Vol. II, which seemed as inevitable as Hollywood filming a sequel to the 1960 Western classic The Magnificent Seven.

Well, the former has happened. Like its predecessor, Standoff at High Noon presents 10 stories told from the authors’ opposing viewpoints, though it is arguably a better book.

The “duelist” approach taken by friends Markley and Cutsforth —both Wild West contributors and members of Western Writers of America—lends a fresh take to the familiar stories. Each chapter

comprises a story divided into three parts —the facts as generally agreed on by most historians, then one author’s side of the story and, finally, the other author’s perspective. Just how much Markley and Cutsforth actually disagree is debatable; good debaters both, they could probably make strong arguments on either side.

In Chapter 1, “The Many Deaths of Davy Crockett,” Markley takes the traditional (and the 1954–55 Disney miniseries) view that this most famous of Alamo defenders went down swinging his flintlock, “Old Betsy,” while Cutsforth argues Crockett was captured and executed. For those lacking a strong opinion either way, it’s no easy task to choose a side. It’s even harder to weigh a few questions Cutsforth asks: “What does it matter if Davy was captured and executed or not? Does it make him any less of a patriot and symbol of the Texas Revolution?

Does is make him any less a defender of the Alamo than Travis, Bowie or any of the other men who perished in the face of those insurmountable odds?”

Both the first book and sequel include chapters that plumb causes of the military disaster at the Little Bighorn in June 1876.

Old West Showdown

dealt specifically with Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, who led his command into defeat and has proved “Colonel Controversy” ever since. Standoff at High Noon asks whether Custer and the 7th U.S. Cavalry met their doom because of an officer who neglected to advance promptly on the Little Bighorn—namely Brig.

Gen. George Crook.

Notwithstanding the solid arguments presented by Markley and Cutsforth, the blame game about Custer, Crook and others will undoubtedly continue, perhaps as long as the river known to Lakotas as the Greasy Grass flows.

The other Standoff stories in this volume debate the date of Sacagawea’s death, Donner Party cannibalism, Jack McCall’s reason for killing Wild Bill Hickok, the assassination of Jesse James

by Bob Ford, Sitting Bull’s two graves, the Lost Dutchman Mine, whether Tom Horn killed Willie Nickell, and if Butch Cassidy died in Bolivia. “If you don’t like our conclusions,” the authors suggest, “we hope you’ll conduct you own research and come to your own conclusions.” Very good, and we can only hope someone will publish a third volume. Suggested title: Wild West Wrangles.

—Editor

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FORT SUMNER, NEW MEXICO

P

ity, praise or despise him—William Henry McCarty (aka Billy the Kid) has long been beyond caring. On July 14, 1881, Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett shot down the fugitive killer in friend Pete Maxwell’s bedroom at the latter’s family ranch in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The Maxwell ranch house (see inset) is itself long gone, having been swept away in 1937 when the nearby Pecos River flooded its banks.

In life Billy proved quite the escape artist, breaking jail at least twice and murdering two of Garrett’s deputies on the second occasion. Ironically, his headstone at the Old Fort Sumner Cemetery—placed by an admirer in 1940 and since twice stolen and recovered—now lies shackled in an iron frame within a cell-like cage. That hasn’t stopped other admirers from placing coins, stones, whiskey bottles, cigarettes and even bullets at the foot of his marker in tribute. The Kid lives on in legend.

88 WILD WEST

DANITA DELMONT (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO); INSET: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM

GO WEST

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