Wild West December 2021

THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

JESSE & The KID

sizing up the old west’s two most iconic outlaws

Billy the Kid (left) and Jesse James

H cheyenne dog men

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44 A GRAVE LEGACY

By Ron J. Jackson Jr. Such late legends as Geronimo and Wild Bill Hickok haven’t rested in peace

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62 NANA’S

THE WESTERN BELLE WHO NEVER WAS

VENGEANCE RIDE

By Jim Motavalli Belle Siddons lived a colorful life out West under several assumed names—or did she?

By Bob Hagan The aged Apache warrior led a five-week terror raid across New Mexico Territory

56 WATCHDOGS OF THE CHEYENNE

By John H. Monnett The Dog Men, protectors of their people, were greatly feared by their enemies 2

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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 Having been raised on the Jicarilla Apache Nation Reservation, author Doug Hocking knows the Apaches about whom he writes

18 WESTERNERS

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Showman ‘Pawnee Bill’ Lillie sent Yuletide greetings from the ‘Two Bills’

20 GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

By Melody Groves Milton Yarberry, Albuquerque’s first marshal, was a badge-wearing badman

22 PIONEERS & SETTLERS

By Michael F. Blake In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt stopped his train for chuck in Hugo, Colo.

24 WESTERN ENTERPRISE

By Lazelle Jones Colorado’s historic Medano-Zapata Ranch welcomes guests and still runs stock

26 ART OF THE WEST

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BILLY & JESSE

By Bill Markley We take a closer look at the most infamous outlaws in the 19th-century American West

By Johnny D. Boggs Modernist Theodore Waddell credits his career to the cows for which he’s cared

28 INDIAN LIFE

By Lynda A. Sánchez The justly feared Western rattlesnake has long played a role in Apache culture

30 STYLE

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

76 COLLECTIONS

By Linda Wommack Wyoming’s Grand Encampment Museum boasts a bevy of historic buildings

78 GUNS OF THE WEST

By George Layman ‘Mexican Cossack’ Emilio Kosterlitzky favored the Remington rolling-block

80 GHOST TOWNS

By Jim Winnerman The railroad drew people to Montoya, N.M., until the highway took them away

82 REVIEWS

68 BRIDGER IN BRONZE

By Fred F. Poyner IV Two modern sculptors have captured the renowned 19th-century mountain man

Wild West contributor Candy Moulton explores books and films about her native Wyoming. Plus recent reviews of books about Geronimo and Sitting Bull, Kit Carson and the Jicarilla Apaches, the Battle of Beecher Island, entertainer ‘Texas Jack’ Omohundro and the iconic bison

88 GO WEST

‘Snail mail’ was left in the dust along the Pony Express National Historic Trail ON THE COVER Outlaws Jesse James of Missouri and Billy the Kid of New Mexico Territory followed different paths to national infamy, but they may have crossed paths once during their short lives before meeting violent ends. (Billy the Kid: Historynet Archives; Jesse James: Library of Congress; photo illustration by Brian Walker)

DECEMBER 2021

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EDITOR’S LETTER

BILLY & JESSE

What would be the state of New Mexico today without Billy the Kid, the forever young outlaw who died there at about age 21 in 1881? I asked myself that question the other day while perusing our December 2021 lineup, which includes Bill Markley’s cover story comparing the Kid and Jesse James, the two best-known outlaws of the Wild West. No New Mexico desperado comes close to matching Billy’s notoriety, though the likes of John Kinney, Jesse Evans, “Dirty Dave” Rudabaugh, Clay Allison and two “Black Jacks” (Christian and Ketchum) operated for a while in the “Land of Enchantment.” James became a nationwide legend in his lifetime but made his biggest mark in his native Missouri, which had enough lawbreakers (brother Frank, the Younger brothers, Belle Starr and “Bloody Bill” Anderson come to mind) in the 19th century to be labeled the “Outlaw State.”

New Mexicans from Santa Fe to Mesilla recall the Kid—sometimes fondly, often not.

Santa Fe—where Billy’s widowed mother remarried in 1873, and where Billy later did time in jail—is probably the place people think of first when New Mexico is mentioned, especially this year amid events commemorating the bicentennial of the Santa Fe Trail (see the October 2021 Wild West ). Other towns sharing the limelight include the state’s largest, Albuquerque; one of the prettiest, Taos; the happiest (at least according to a 2018 survey), Las Cruces; the “alien/UFO city,” Roswell; the “Cavern City” or “Pearl on the Pecos,” Carlsbad; and the oil-rich heart of eastern New Mexico (aka “Little Texas”), Hobbs. Billy has personal associations with, among other locales, Silver City (school days), Lincoln (ground zero of the Lincoln County War) and Fort Sumner (site of his death). As one who has spent time in all those places, I must say New Mexico needs tourist-friendly Kid locations and the irrepressible Billy himself, both to ensure its national identity and persuade people the state is no longer part of Mexico (remember the 1846–48 Mexican War and 1854 Gadsden Purchase).

The same bias (a love for New Mexico) that leads me to favor the Santa Fe Trail over the Oregon Trail (and all others) also accounts for me favoring Billy the Kid over Jesse James when sizing up outlaws. To help you make your own comparison between the two bad boys, see Markley’s article “Billy & Jesse” (P. 36).

The Kid’s family soon moved from Santa Fe to Silver City, but after the Lincoln County War and his December 1880 capture by Sheriff Pat Garrett at Stinking Springs, Billy was back in Santa Fe—in irons. During his three-month stay in the capital city Billy sent Territorial Governor Lew Wallace four letters in which he sought clemency, but Wallace refused to intervene. So, Billy went to trial in Mesilla in April 1881. Convicted of murder, he would avoid the hangman’s noose with a bloody escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse, only to be gunned down by Garrett at Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881. Meanwhile, Jesse James was still doing his thing in Missouri (although his robberies were by no means confined to his home state), but not for much longer. On April 3, 1882, in the James family home in St. Joseph, Mo., gang member Bob Ford fired a fatal round into the back of Jesse’s head. Markley points out one of the biggest differences between the two outlaws: “Billy became a small-time cattle rustler and horse thief, while Jesse, brother Frank and gang robbed banks in broad daylight and held up trains—the most powerful machines of the age.”

One thing they had in common was their loyalty to friends.

James has strong connections to states outside Missouri, including Minnesota (site of the botched Northfield Raid), Iowa (where the gang robbed a bank and a train) and Tennessee (he lived in the Nashville area for a time). His connection with New Mexico Territory, though, is slight. As Markley mentions in his article, James may have met Billy the Kid in July 1879 at the hot springs northwest of Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory. A tall tale? Perhaps. But it’s nice to think Jesse had a hankering to head to the Southwest for a taste of green chile.

Though Billy the Kid and Jesse James have often been romanticized in print and film as daring robbers and dashing killers, some documentaries, such as this 2012 offering from PBS, look beyond the myths and get most things right.

BOB FORD FIRED

A FATAL ROUND

JESSE’S HEAD

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

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

PBS

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Visit our WEBSITE FOR ONLINE EXTRAS

DECEMBER 2021 / VOL. 34, NO. 4

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

Billy the Kid: The Great Escape

In Western frontier history you might call it the “Great Escape.” In the late 1870s New Mexico Territory’s Lincoln County War boosted Billy the Kid into the national spotlight, but as Barbara Tucker Peterson and Louis Hart write, “It wasn’t until his dramatic escape from the courthouse in April 1881 that he secured his place near the top of the all-time badmen heap.”

Extended Interview With Doug Hocking

“I’ve been researching Cochise, [Tom] Jeffords and the Jicarillas since I was a child,” says the Tucson-based author, who grew up on the Jicarilla Apache Nation Reservation in New Mexico. “I had questions about the Jicarillas. Here was a large tribe that very few people have heard of. I wondered why.”

More on Theodore Waddell

“When you are looking at your herd or a field of alfalfa, there is always something that requires your attention and demands a solution,” says the rancher turned artist whose illustrated memoir of central Montana, Cheatgrass Dreams, was published in 2020. “When standing in front of a canvas, there are also problems to solve —color, composition, subject matter, the dryness of the medium, etc.”

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

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SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION: 800-435-0715 OR SHOP.HISTORYNET.COM WILD WEST (ISSN 1046-4638) is published bimonthly by HistoryNet, LLC, 901 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 31058, Boone, IA 50037-0058 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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Artist Theodore Waddell works on Monida Angus, the cover illustration for his 2020 nonfiction book Cheatgrass Dreams.

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LETTERS

COSTLY PURSUIT [Re. “Westward, Christian Soldier,” by Mike Coppock, in the June 2021 issue:] I have a problem with General O.O. Howard.

I applaud his Christian treatment of Cochise and the Apaches. It is sad that Howard’s own government did not support his efforts in the treatment of the Nez Perces. The problem I have is with the pursuit of Chief Joseph. If you add up U.S. losses in the pursuit of the Nez Perces, more soldiers were lost than Lt. Col. George A. Custer lost at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. How does this make Howard “one of the top Army commanders out West,” according to the author of the article? Does Howard rank ahead of or behind Custer on a Top 10 list?

Kent Napralla Montello, Wis. Editor responds: Mike Coppock says he placed Howard among the top Army field commanders “simply due to his activity in the West” and because “from a military point of view he was a major player.” In 2008 Indian wars expert and Wild West special contributor Gregory Michno gave us his list of the Top 10 commanders in the Indian wars. Neither Howard nor Custer made his list. Michno’s Top 10: 1, Nelson A. Miles; 2, Ranald S. Mackenzie; 3, George Crook; 4, James H. Carleton; 5, Christopher “Kit” Carson; 6, George Wright; 7, Alfred Sully; 8, Patrick Connor; 9, Albert J. Myer; 10, Eugene Carr. Late Indian wars expert Charles M. Robinson III ranked Crook at the top yet listed Howard at No. 9 and Custer at No. 10. Of Howard he noted, “Negotiated peace with Cochise; though his high-handedness led to Nez Perce outbreak in 1877, his response was adequate.”

for space reasons. Our mistake. Here is what Broome originally wrote as No. 1 on his Top 10:

1. August 1862 Minnesota Sioux Massacre: Technically not a massacre of the Central Plains (the area south of the Platte River and north of the Arkansas River), but within months after 644 settlers were killed, responsible warriors came south and smoked the war pipe with the southern Sioux, Arapahos and Cheyennes. The Central Plains war started a year later.

Broome’s research does indicate Central Plains tribes were involved. “There are no less than three reports to Governor John Evans, beginning in 1863, that the Minnesota Sioux have come down to the agencies in the Central Plains and were smoking the war pipe with the Cheyennes and Platte River Sioux,” the author notes. “They are in Evans’ reports in his annual letter to the commissioner of Indian Affairs for the years 1863 and 1864.”

HIGHWAYS WEST The February 2021 Wild West was another great read. Living near Boulder, Colo., I often visit Tom Horn’s gravesite (pictured on P. 57 of that issue) for a little Western vibe in our rapidly modernizing region. Just a point on Douglas L. Gifford’s piece [“Mother Road to the Far West”] on the Boonslick Road: It’s truly a wonderful piece, but I question his assertion that U.S. Highway 40 is the nation’s first truly transcontinental roadway. In terms of serving as a gateway to many of the roads pioneers followed, it cannot be contested. The Boonslick Road was an integral conduit that served for almost a century. U.S. 40 paralleled much of its path when originally surveyed in 1925 and did indeed eventually stretch from New Jersey to San Francisco.

However, the Lincoln Highway was dedicated on Oct. 31, 1913, and spanned from San Francisco’s Lincoln Park to New York City’s Times Square, beating the federally funded road by more than 12 years. This makes the Lincoln Highway the true “Mother Road,” no matter what Route 66 enthusiasts claim otherwise.

Thanks for the stories and the history!

Joseph D. Breithart Estes Park, Colo.

Douglas Gifford responds: Technically this reader is correct. U.S. Highway 40 was the first planned, numbered federal highway completed. However, the Lincoln Highway—which was created primarily from a series of existing roads—was indeed the first planned transcontinental highway route. Interestingly, when the federal government began numbering roads in the 1920s, a section of the Lincoln Highway became part of U.S. 40.

FINDING MINNESOTA Jeff Broome’s “Top 10 Central Plains Indian Raids and Massacres” [February 2021] contains major errors in geography and history. The August 1862 Minnesota Uprising is today referred to as the U.S.–Dakota War. It took place in southern Minnesota, not, as you state, “in the region south of the Platte River and north of the Arkansas.” The Dakotas involved fled to Canada and Dakota Territory or were imprisoned (at Fort Snelling and in Iowa) or tried in Mankato for war crimes. The Arapahos and “other Central Plains tribes” were not involved at all. Check your maps next time and your facts.

Steve Potts Hibbing, Minn.

The editor responds: Jeff Broome, author of that list, had opened the Minnesota Uprising item with an explanation of why it headed his list, but his qualifier was unfortunately edited out 8

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SIGN OF THE TIMES Re. the August 2021 Letters: The “Carrying Deadly Weapons” editorial from the Oct. 23, 1881, Tombstone Daily Epitaph called to mind a rare sign [at right] that I’ve had in my collection for 35 years. In 1898 it hung in the Knights of Pythias Lodge in Bodie, Calif. (now the Bodie State Historic Park). The sign, which was made and printed in England, is composed of a type of celluloid (used in early film) over tin and cardboard, with the celluloid showing many cracks and shrinkage from long exposure to the elements. Signs such as this—Hats , C oats & Revolvers M ust B e C hecked— suggest that carrying firearms was widely known in Bodie.

Don Yena San Antonio, Texas Send letters by email to wildwest@historynet.com. Include your name and hometown.

DECEMBER 2021

9/20/21 12:26 PM

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ROUNDUP

10 NOTABLE 19th-CENTURY WYOMINGITES

Above: Jim Bridger (1804–81) tops the list of legendary mountain men. Top: William de la Montagne Cary painted the oil on canvas Jim Bridger With Sir William Drummond Stewart in 1872. Stewart (1795– 1871) was a Scottish adventurer who traveled the American West.

2

Jim Bridger: Venturing west with William Henry Ashley’s “Hundred” fur trappers in the early 1820s, Bridger trapped, traded and opened a post to serve travelers on the overland trails. He is arguably the best-known mountain man of the era with Wyoming ties.

3

Thomas Fitzpatrick: Mountain man and treaty negotiator “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick was a key figure in the history of the territory and relations between its Anglo and Indian residents.

4

Red Cloud: The Oglala Lakota chief led Indian resistance along the Bozeman Trail and won his war against the frontier military, forcing closure of forts and abandonment of the trail.

5

Pierre-Jean De Smet: The Belgian-born Jesuit priest led the first Catholic Mass in Wyoming, given on a hilltop overlooking the Green River Valley (near present-day Daniel) in 1840.

6

Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding: These missionary women arrived at the rendezvous in the Green River Valley in 1836,

10 WILD WEST

traveling the route that would become the Oregon Trail and proving women could make the trip. Their journey opened the way for overland emigration.

7

Esther Hobart Morris: The nation’s first female justice of the peace—appointed in South Pass City, Wyo., in 1870—Morris had led efforts that secured voting rights for women in Wyoming Territory in 1869, a half century before passage of the 19th Amendment.

8

Ellen Watson: The first woman lynched in Wyoming, Watson (aka “Cattle Kate”) went down in history as a prostitute and cattle rustler.

In reality, she and her husband were spunky small ranchers in the sights of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association in 1889.

9

Willie Nickell: Likely mistaken for his father, the 14-year-old sheepherder’s son was gunned down in 1901, his death leading to the hanging of stock detective Tom Horn (who in this writer’s opinion was a braggart but not Nickell’s killer).

10

Lora Nichols: While less well-known than others on this list, Nichols (1883– 1962) nevertheless made a lasting impact. As a teen she began keeping a diary and taking photographs, eventually building a collection of more than 20,000 negatives that document the homesteading and mining history of the Grand Encampment Mining District in Carbon County, Wyo. —Candy Moulton

DECEMBER 2021

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TOP RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: COURTESY WILD WEST HISTORY ASSOCIATION

Washakie: Chief of the Eastern Shoshone tribe, Washakie adeptly steered his people through a century of change during which mountain men, missionaries, American soldiers and emigrants on the overland trails moved across and onto their lands. In 1868 he negotiated a treaty that kept the Eastern Shoshones on their home ground in what that year became Wyoming Territory.

TOP: JOSLYN ART MUSEUM; LEFT: NORTH WIN PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

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GARRETT GUN FETCHES MORE THAN $6 MILLION The Colt “Peacemaker” revolver Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett used to kill notorious outlaw Billy the Kid on July 14, 1881, in Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory, hammered down for $6,030,312 at Bonhams’ recent “The Early West: The Collection of Jim and Theresa Earle” auction in Los Angeles.

The .44-40-caliber, 7½-inch barreled Colt Single Action Army (Serial No. 55093) once belonged to Kid cohort Billy Wilson (real name David Lawrence Anderson), but after arresting Wilson in 1880, Garrett kept the gun. The selling price was more than double the $2–3 million presale estimate and set a world record auction price for any firearm. The anonymous buyer is believed to be Floridabased billionaire Bill Koch, an avid collector of Western artifacts who at a 2011 auction bought the tintype of Billy the Kid (the only authenticated photo of the outlaw) for $2.3 million.

Garrett’s six-shooter was the most historically significant gun in the Western firearms collection amassed over a half century by Jim Earle. A book publisher, comic strip artist and longtime engineering professor at Texas A&M University, Earle died at age 86 on Feb. 4, 2019. According to the late Guns of the West columnist Lee Silva, the collector shunned the limelight but “spent his lifetime ‘rescuing’ these priceless historic firearms from oblivion in the hands of the unknowing, the anti-gun faction and even the scrap heap.” In the April 2013 Wild West article “Jim Earle’s Priceless Historic Gun Collection” (online at Historynet.com) Silva cited the provenance of the Garrett gun: The history of this Colt is airtight: In April 1906 Pat Garrett either gave, loaned or sold it to a man named Tom Powers, who owned the Coney Island Saloon in El Paso. In 1933 Garrett’s widow, Apolinaria (Pauline), sued the Powers estate for ownership of the gun. She won the case, and the gun remained in the Garrett family until Garrett’s son Jarvis sold it in 1976 to Texas-based collector Calvin Moerbe, who, in turn, sold it to Jim Earle in 1983.

TOP RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: COURTESY WILD WEST HISTORY ASSOCIATION

TOP: JOSLYN ART MUSEUM; LEFT: NORTH WIN PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Bonhams’ Aug. 27, 2021, auction of Earle’s collection comprised 265 lots, including welldocumented firearms owned by the likes of John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Hickok and Bat Masterson. Other big sellers include the Whitney double-barreled shotgun ($978,312) the Kid used to shoot Deputy Bob Olinger while escaping from the Lincoln County Courthouse on April 28, 1881, as well as a Winchester Model 1873 rifle ($375,312) Billy stole from the courthouse; the Colt Single Action Army revolver ($858,312) John Selman used on Aug. 19, 1895, to kill John Wesley Hardin at the Acme Saloon in El Paso, as well as the Smith & Wesson double-action Frontier revolver ($625,312) Hardin was carrying when killed; the Springfield Trapdoor rifle ($475,312) initially buried by Hickok’s side at Deadwood, Dakota Territory, on Aug. 3, 1876; and the Colt Single Action Army revolver ($362,812) that was in Johnny Ringo’s hand when found dead (having committed suicide or been shot) in West Turkey Creek Canyon, Arizona Territory, on July 14, 1882.

A MARKER FOR MRS. GARRETT At press time a memorial marker for Juanita (née Martinez) Garrett (1860–79), first wife of noted Old West lawman Pat Garrett, was scheduled to be placed near her unmarked grave at the Old Fort Sumner Cemetery in that New Mexico town. The Wild West History Association, in cooperation with family descendants, arranged for the permanent marker for Juanita, who died at age 19 of unknown causes scarcely two weeks after their marriage. The exact location of her grave is unknown. Garrett was best known as the Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, sheriff who shot Billy the Kid in Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881.

According to a WWHA press release, during the couple’s 1879 civil ceremony the candles blew out, and Juanita took it as a bad omen. She believed their marriage was not recognized in the eyes of God since they were married by a justice of the peace instead of a Catholic priest (her family was Catholic, but Garrett was not).

WEST WORDS

‘My only darling boy is dead. He was too good for this world.

We loved him too dearly—he could not stay.

And now his place is vacant and can never be filled, for he has gone to be a beautiful angel in that better world, where he will wait for us’ —William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was of course a world famous showman. He was also a father of four, and in April 1887 he wrote the heartbreaking words above in a telegram to fellow scout and actor “Texas Jack” Omohundro after learning his 5-year-old son, Kit Carson Cody (Nov. 26, 1870–April 20, 1876), had died of scarlet fever.

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SIX-SHOOTERS▲ FOR BOESSENECKER Wild West special contributor John Boessenecker has garnered two more to his growing collection of “Six-Shooters” —the annual awards bestowed by the Wild West History Association [wildwesthistory. org]. The California author’s 2020 nonfiction title Ride the Devil’s Herd: Wyatt Earp’s Epic Battle Against the West’s Biggest Outlaw Gang grabbed the WWHA Six-Shooter for best Western book, while his October 2020 Wild West article “They Shoot Cowboys Don’t They” (adapted from that book) won the Six-Shooter for best general Western history article. Wild West contributor Jeff Broome claimed the winning entry in the scholarly article category for

“Cody and Summit Springs,” published by the Denver Posse of Westerners. The Six-Shooter for best WWHA Journal article went to Peter Brand for “Ben Sippy: Tombstone City Marshal/Career Criminal.” The WWHA also recognized Western author and collector Kurt House (whose resume includes two Guns of the West articles in Wild West) with its lifetime achievement award. For the second straight year the WWHA was unable to hand out awards in person, as the board canceled the organization’s annual Roundup conference due to the Delta variant of COVID.

OLINGER BURIAL SITE ▲

The burial site of Lincoln County Deputy Sheriff Robert Ameridth “Pecos Bob” Olinger —who was slain by Billy the Kid during

the latter’s April 28, 1881, escape from the county courthouse in Lincoln, New Mexico Territory—has long been a mystery. One oft-repeated account suggests the lawman was buried at nearby Fort Stanton, though there is no verifying documentation in either county records or Fort Stanton military records in the National Archives. In spring 2021 historian Bob Stahl, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, and Delaware-based Charles “Butch” Sanders, a longtime chronicler of New Mexico characters and events, sifted through archived 1881 newspapers for clues.

One article they found in the May 3, 1881, Santa Fe New Mexican states, “Through the courtesy of the commanding officer at Fort Stanton a coffin and the post ambulance was sent for Bob’s remains, and they will be buried in the cemetery there to-morrow.” If true, Stahl and Sanders note that Olinger’s exact burial plot at the Fort Stanton Cemetery

remains unknown.

“Until ground-penetrating radar is used, we doubt the location of his plot will ever be verified and that his grave marker will ever be found,” the pair says. “Given the number of large buckshot that remained in his head and upper torso, it will be easy to confirm any body found as being him or not him. We add that no private citizen or Olinger family member is known to have recorded seeing his marked grave or grave marker, commenting on its location or taking a photo of the original marker.”

RANDOLPH ▲ SCOTT PAINTING Canadian artist Harley Brown (featured in Art of the West, by Johnny D. Boggs, in the August 2021 Wild West and online at Historynet. com) was a member of the National Academy

SEE YOU LATER...

THOM HATCH Thomas Raymond “Thom” Hatch, 75— the author of 13 books, including The Custer Companion (2002), The Last Outlaws: The Lives and Legends of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (2013) and the Western Writers of America Spur Award–winning biography Black Kettle: The Cheyenne Chief Who Sought Peace But Found War (2004)— died on July 29, 2021, in Colorado Springs, Colo. Born in Erie, Pa., on July 28, 1946, Hatch was a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War. In 1975 he moved to Colorado Springs, where he ran an ad agency and wrote books about the American West and the American Civil War.

‘You have killed as brave a man as there is in the South’ —On April 5, 1869, the plucky citizens of Alvarado, Texas, shot down Ben Bickerstaff and fellow ex-Rebel Josiah Thomson when the outlaws rode boldly into town with evil intent. Thomson died instantly. Bickerstaff lingered another two hours, and as he breathed his last, he allegedly said these words to his assailants.

To learn more, see “‘Worse Than the Hostile Comanches,’” by Gregory Michno, in the October 2021 Wild West.

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

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of Western Art in the late 1980s when he painted this portrait of iconic Western actor Randolph Scott (1898– 1987). In 1975 Scott was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, while Brown’s oil on canvas was unveiled during the museum’s 1989 Western Heritage Awards banquet. “It was especially commissioned by the hall,” the artist says. “When I did such commissioned works, I’d put them aside for a few days and get back to them with a fresh look. It’s based on a photo from one of his films, but I’m not sure which one.” Of Scott’s 100-plus film appearances, more than 60 were in Westerns, from The Virginian (1929) to Ride the High Country (1962). Scott’s brilliant swan song rates as a favorite of Brown. “Ride the High Country is an absolutely great film,” he says, “from first scene to last.”

accounts of the June 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, including stories from his grandmother’s brother White Man Runs Him, who was a scout for 7th U.S. Cavalry Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer. According to the respected chief, the essence of Plains Indian warfare was courage, not booty, territory or conquest. He wrote that a warrior had to complete four acts of bravery to become a chief: 1) Touch or strike (aka “count coup” on) the first enemy fallen, whether alive or dead; 2) Wrestle a weapon away from an enemy warrior; 3) Enter an enemy camp at night and steal a horse; and 4) Command a war party successfully (only after meeting the first three requirements). While it’s uncertain whether he accomplished those specific tasks on the battlefield, Medicine Crow did receive a Bronze Star and the French Légion d’honneur.

RIGHT: XINHUA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

HOW TO BECOME A PLAINS CHIEF

The last war chief of his tribe, Joseph Medicine Crow (1913–2016) was a World War II combat veteran, a founding member of the Custer Battlefield Historical & Museum Association and author of the 1992 book From the Heart of the Crow Country: The Crow Indians’ Own Stories. Medicine Crow, or “High Bird” in the Crow language, was perhaps the last person to have heard firsthand oral

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the wake of the 1848– 55 California Gold Rush, an era townspeople recalled in July during their annual Gold Digger Days parade and celebration.

Weeks later, though, there was nothing but heartbreak in the historic community of 1,129 residents.

It wasn’t the first wildfire to hit Greenville. “A catastrophic fire in [April] 1881 destroyed most of the buildings on the north side of Main Street and damaged many of those on the south side,” according to the Indian Valley Chamber of Commerce website [indianvalleychamber.snappages .com]. “It was the most destructive of several fires that scorched Greenville.

The town was quickly rebuilt, and by 1882 it had a population of 500.”

The losses became a distant memory. “Only a few buildings in downtown Greenville today are less than a half century old,” the chamber notes.

“Several date from just after the major fires, and a number were built during the 1930s.” Sadly, it is time to rebuild again.

WHEN DID BILLY DIE? UP IN SMOKE ▲

History has repeated itself in a devastating way in Greenville, Calif. On Aug. 4, 2021, the Dixie Fire—the second-largest wildfire in state history— roared through the Plumas County town, destroying more than 75 percent of its buildings. Settlers were first drawn to the area in

It has long been accepted as fact that Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett shot and killed Billy the Kid on the night of July 14, 1881, at Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory.

But Garrett actually fired the fatal shot after midnight—on July 15.

At least that’s what 9th U.S. Cavalry buffalo soldier George Miller told New Mexico Territory’s

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Las Vegas Daily Optic.

Eight days earlier Miller had been discharged from the Army for medical reasons and left Fort Stanton bound for Fort Sumner. On July 18 the paper related Miller’s account of the shooting:

from the house of Pete Maxwell, distant about 25 yards, and soon the startling information, ‘Billy the kid [sic] is killed,’ was the theme of every tongue.

In surviving documents Garrett and Deputy John W. Poe estimated the time they approached Maxwell’s bedroom at “around midnight” or “before midnight” on July 14.

Miller’s paraphrased statement of “about 12:30” implies he

On Thursday night, July 14, [Miller] stopped at the hotel in Fort Sumner, and about 12:30 o’clock that night his peaceful slumber was disturbed by two pistol shots fired in rapid succession. The sounds proceeded

checked his watch after having been awakened by gunfire. At very least his account begs further investigation by historians.

—Robert Stahl, Nance Stahl and Marilyn Stahl Fischer

BEHIND THE CURTAIN

The 1879 Tabor Opera House—built in Leadville, Colo., by mining magnate Horace Austin Warner “Haw” Tabor—remains a vibrant cultural and community center.

Deemed a “national

treasure” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the elegant building has endured nearly a half century of long winters at 10,152 feet (Leadville boasts the highest elevation of any city in the United States). Fortunately for theatergoers, a $15 million multiyear rehabilitation is underway. While examining the attic of the theater a few years ago, Wendy WaszutBarrett, a specialist in period theatrical painting, rediscovered

stage scenery dating from 1879 to 1902— perhaps the finest such collection in the country.

“The foundation,” says Jenny Buddenborg, president of the nonprofit Tabor Opera House Preservation Foundation, “is exploring the best way to preserve these priceless artifacts and share them with the public, just as we are preserving the history of the Tabor itself through a careful rehabilitation that celebrates the historic integrity of the 142-year-old building.”

Events of the west Missouri Bicentennial

Art in St. Petersburg, Fla., include “Warhol’s West”

Two hundred years ago (Aug. 10, 1821, to be exact) Missouri was the 24th state admitted to the Union.

Its 114 counties and the independent city of St. Louis are commemorating the history of the “Show Me State” with ongoing events. For more information visit missouri2021.org.

through Jan. 9,

2022 (Andy Warhol depicted Annie Oakley, Geronimo, George Armstrong Custer and other Western figures), and “Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories” Jan. 28–March 16, 2022. Call 727-892-

4200 or visit jamesmuseum.org.

The 101 Ranch

At the James ▲ ▲ Exhibitions at the James Museum of Western & Wildlife

The Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Wild West Show of the early 1900s included performing cowgirls, and those galloping gals will be well represented at the 101 Ranch Collectors Western Memorabilia Show Nov. 19–20

at the Kay County Fairgrounds Event Center in Blackwell, Okla. Presented by the 101 Ranch Collectors Association, the show will also feature original cowboy gear, firearms, assorted antiques, rare photos and ephemera for viewing and/or sale. Call 918-440-9172 or visit facebook.com/101ranchcollectors.

Yellowstone and Glacier

The Booth Museum in Cartersville, Ga., offers a double treat with “Waterfalls in Yellowstone,” by M.C. Poulsen, and “Mammals in Glacier,” by Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey, through Feb. 27, 2022. Artist Poulsen

captures remote cascades in Yellowstone National Park few visitors get to experience, while Cawdrey showcases some two dozen silk paintings of all the major animals in Glacier National Park.

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

Center of the West

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo., showcases “Eight Seconds: Black Cowboys in America,” featuring the photos of Ivan B. McClellan, through Jan. 7, 2022. The center also welcomes back “What Lies Beneath: Exploring Yellowstone Lake’s Mysterious

Vents,” featuring photos

by Chris Linder of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, through May 1, 2022. Call 307-587-

4771 or visit centerofthewest.org.

Tattoo Tales

While tattoos may be commonplace today, traditionally men and women used them to express tribal affiliation, war honors, and social and religious affiliation. Learn more in the exhibition “Tatooing: Religion, Reality and Regret,” through May 8, 2022, at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Call 405-4782250 or visit nationalcowboymuseum.org.

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

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INTERVIEW

INSIDE APACHERIA DOUG HOCKING GREW UP ON A RESERVATION AND WRITES BOOKS IN WHICH JICARILLAS AND CHIRICAHUAS PLAY CENTRAL ROLES

BY CANDY MOULTON Having grown up on the Jicarilla Apache Nation Reservation in New Mexico, Doug Hocking writes histories and historical fiction rooted in Apache culture. His nonfiction works include Tom Jeffords: Friend of Cochise (2017), The Black Legend: George Bascom, Cochise and the Start of the Apache Wars (2018), and Terror on the Santa Fe Trail: Kit Carson and the Jicarilla Apache (2019). With a background in archaeology and military intelligence, he regards his subjects with the eyes and mind of an analyst. Western Writers of America has recognized Hocking as a Spur Award finalist, and he received the 2020 Will Rogers Medallion for best Western fiction for Terror on the Santa Fe Trail. The author lives in Tucson, where he delves into the state and local archives and visits the sites where his subjects once lived and fought. Hocking recently took time from his busy writing and speaking schedule to speak with Wild West about his life and work.

What drew you to write about the Apache people?

I grew up on the Jicarilla reservation in New Mexico. My parents were missionaries. I’ve known people since they were children and were still open about their beliefs and feelings. My first turn in graduate school was in social anthropology, and that deeply affected the organization of my thinking.

What distinguishes your approach when writing either fiction or nonfiction?

History takes more work, especially when you’re bucking popular notions of what happened—as I often am—and have to document every word. Novels have a wider potential audience and are much easier to write. Writing novels has affected how I write history. I do my best to bring events to life where I can justify it.

How did you research the myth-enshrouded Tom Jeffords?

I got very lucky. In the Arizona Historical Society archives I found the work of four scholars who had started work on a biography of Jeffords but never quite finished. It helps to have the courage, or lack of common sense, to commit to writing knowing that some bits are missing. Starting with the leads I mentioned, I was able to dig out a lot of material. Folks at the Arizona State Library and New Mexico State Library were also very helpful. Living where he lived has been wonderful, as I was able to visit the sites of his life and dig into the Pima County archives, where I found the records of his mining claims. Understanding how the government, the Army, the courts and businesses keep records and where they keep them is crucial. When 16 WILD WEST

I was 19, I was put in charge of a classified records library. Terrified of losing anything or misplacing it, I read the whole manual on how the Army keeps records. It has stood me in good stead.

Your books on Jeffords and Carson came two years apart, yet the Apache history overlaps. Did you research them simultaneously?

I’ve been researching Cochise, Jeffords and the Jicarillas since I was a child. I’ve been reading about them and exploring their haunts and reading about the cavalry—the background of everything I write. Terror on the Santa Fe Trail was the book I always wanted to see published. I had questions about the Jicarillas. Here was large tribe that very few people have heard of. I wondered why. The [March 30, 1854] Battle of Cieneguilla was for its time as major a victory for them as the Little Bighorn was for the Sioux. Records for the Jicarillas are in Santa Fe and Las Vegas, while those for Jeffords are in Cochise County and Tucson, so research excursions were discrete.

How does your background in archaeology inform your research?

I’ve been making things from leather, beads and wood, much of it Indian paraphernalia, all my life. My father had been a contractor, and from him I got a fascination with how things worked. That carries over into trying to understand how systems of commerce, transportation and war work. Picking up broken bits of broken things at a site, I can often see when, where and how they were made and how they were used and when a site was occupied and by whom.

How do you incorporate Apache oral history/tradition?

Oral history has to be checked against other sources. It’s more often than not like playing a game of telephone, in which the message is totally garbled at the end. Oral history in my family has me descended from Francis Drake. Problem is, he didn’t have any children. However, other evidence points to us being related through his brother. As an old cavalry soldier I tend to see heroes on both sides, brave men fighting for their families on both sides. There were Indian victories, and I’m happy to praise them as such. There are some things I won’t write out of being a gentleman and out of keeping promises, but don’t try to tell me what I can’t write or how I have to tell the story. I recall one person saying we have to be cognizant that Indian culture is different from our own, and they have knowledge restricted by sex and membership in special groups, and we don’t have an equivalent. I guess he’s never heard of the Freemasons.

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TONY SAPIENZA COLLECTION

Wild West showman Gordon William “Pawnee Bill” Lillie (1860–1941) signed this undated Christmas card, which features his profile (in background) and that of the most famous Western showman of all time, William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1846– 1917). Illinois-born Lillie worked for the Pawnee Indian Agency in Indian Territory (presentday Oklahoma), was a Pawnee interpreter for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and toured with his own Wild West shows before teaming up in 1908 with Cody to create an extravaganza called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Pawnee Bill’s Great Far East. Sometimes referred to as the “Two Bills Show,” the production included traditional frontier acts along with such exotic attractions as belly dancers, camels and elephants. The pair also partnered in a motion picture company. Plagued by debt and poor investments, Cody declared bankruptcy and retired from show business in 1915, two years before his death at age 70 on Jan. 10, 1917, in Denver. Lillie went on to invest in oil, real estate and banking before his death at age 81 on Feb. 3, 1942, in Pawnee, Okla. “I suspect in the late 1920s or early 1930s, after the Two Bills Show and Cody’s death, Pawnee Bill had these cards printed and sent them to friends,” suggests the card’s owner, Tony Sapienza. “His signature got a little shakier as he aged. Not many of these cards have survived.” Though Pawnee Bill’s wife, May—who performed as a mounted sharpshooter in her husband’s shows—died in 1936, that doesn’t mean the greetings, only signed by him, came after that date. “I have other ephemera/correspondence without her signature,” says Sapienza. “As a matter of fact, she rarely signed items with him.”

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9/7/21 5:22 PM

ALBUQUERQUE’S ‘INNOCENT’ MARSHAL THE DISREPUTABLE MILTON YARBERRY SOMEHOW SCORED A BADGE, BUT HIS DAYS ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE LAW WERE NUMBERED

BY MELODY GROVES

“G

entlemen, you’re hanging an innocent man.” With those words, Milton Yarberry left the gallows platform—headed upward on a new contraption. Whether his soul went the same direction is debatable. Yarberry was many things, but innocent was not one of them.

Yarberry, Albuquerque’s first town marshal, was an Old West character straight from Hollywood central casting. It is believed he started life in 1849 as John Armstrong in Walnut Ridge, Ark. Though born into a respectable family, he soon turned bad. As a teenager he killed a man over a land dispute. On the run, he changed his name for the first time—so as not to bring shame on his family, he later claimed. By all accounts he was neither handsome nor very bright. Lanky and

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TIOP: GRANGER; RIGHT: ANDY GREGG, COURTESY ALBUQUERQUE POLICE MUSEUM

MILTON YARBERRY

slightly stooped, he stood 6-foot-3 in stocking feet and walked with a loose-jointed, shuffling gait. A reporter who interviewed him concluded Yarberry lacked the mental acuity to distinguish between a legal and illegal act.

In the early 1870s he teamed up with outlaws “Dirty Dave” Rudabaugh (who later rode with Billy the Kid) and “Mysterious Dave” Mather. Operating mostly in northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, the trio formed a cattle-rustling outfit that engaged in several robberies. Implicated in the 1873 murder of a well-known Arkansas rancher, the three hightailed it to Texas and scattered.

Yarberry landed in Texarkana, only to move on after killing a fellow he suspected of being a bounty hunter. The victim turned out to be an “inoffensive traveler.”

Still on the dodge, Yarberry joined the Texas Rangers, serving in Company B of the Frontier Battalion in Jack County. Had he gone straight? Not likely. According to sketchy records, he served honorably, but for only about a month. Relocating to Decatur, Texas, he opened a saloon and billiard parlor under the alias John Johnson. Then one day a passing bounty hunter asked after the Arkansas fugitive. Yarberry immediately sold out to his partner and left Decatur. Rumor had it townspeople later discovered the bounty hunter’s bullet-riddled body.

The fugitive popped up briefly in Dodge City. By early 1878 he’d moved on to Cañon City, Colo., where under the alias Milton J. Yarberry he partnered in a saloon/variety theater. In March 1879 the bartender of a rival saloon shot and seriously wounded Milt’s partner, Tony Preston. Yarberry shot back but missed, then joined a posse in pursuit of the bartender, who later surrendered. On returning to Cañon City, Milt sold out to the recovering Preston and again hit the road. Joining the hell-on-wheels crowd following Santa Fe Railroad section crews south through New Mexico Territory, Yarberry operated brothels in a succession of work camps.

Lighting for a time in East Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, he opened a brothel that catered to railroad workers and fell in with a loose-knit brotherhood of gunfighters and gamblers known as the Dodge City Gang.

Members included Rudabaugh, Mather, Justice of the Peace Hyman G. Neill (aka “Hoodoo Brown”) and other ne’er-do-wells.

Though suspected of having robbed and murdered a freighter, Yarberry was never

MELODY GROVES COLLECTION

GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

TIOP: GRANGER; RIGHT: ANDY GREGG, COURTESY ALBUQUERQUE POLICE MUSEUM

MELODY GROVES COLLECTION

GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN charged, his connections serving to keep him out of jail.

Selling his share of the brothel, he meandered south to San Marcial, where former partner Preston was living. On arrival he resumed an affair with Preston’s wife, Sadie.

When Yarberry left San Marcial in 1880, he took Sadie and the couple’s 4-year-old daughter with him. They relocated to the booming rail town of Albuquerque.

The recent arrival of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe had brought a tide of newcomers and spiraling crime to Albuquerque. Yarberry somehow managed to befriend Bernalillo County Sheriff Perfecto Armijo, who appointed Milt the town’s first marshal—a position funded by merchants. The illiterate drunkard, loudmouth and bully proved a poor fit for the job, a fact he soon demonstrated by killing two men under arrest.

In 1881 Yarberry seemingly met his match when Harry Brown, a member of a prominent Tennessee family (his father and uncle had each served as governor), drifted into town, claiming to be a gunman. He, too, soon gained a reputation as a heavy drinker with a temper and a habit of pulling his gun with little provocation. Apparently drawn to “bad boys,” the fickle Sadie shifted her romantic attentions to Brown. In March 1881 Yarberry happened across the pair downtown as they arrived in a hack at Girard’s Restaurant. The rivals had taken their argument to a nearby vacant lot when Sadie came to the doorway of the restaurant and called out for her new lover. At that moment Brown struck Yarberry in the face, drew his pistol and fired once, creasing Milt’s hand. Drawing his own weapon, Yarberry shot Brown twice in the chest, killing him.

A grand jury acquitted the spurned marshal on the grounds of self-defense.

Three months later Yarberry was relaxing on a bench outside a friend’s house when he heard a gunshot. As he went to investigate, a bystander pointed to a man walking down the street. Yarberry ordered the man to halt, but the stranger kept walking, so the marshal fired several times, killing the man. The victim was railroad carpenter Charles Campbell. Yarberry again claimed selfdefense, but Campbell had no weapon on him when gunned down.

Sheriff Armijo reluctantly arrested the marshal, transporting him to jail in Santa Fe to forestall a lynching, and in May 1882 a grand jury indicted Yarberry for murder. Timing, as they say, is everything, and the indictment came at a bad time for the marshal. Territorial newspapers had been filled with the exploits of the late Billy the Kid and other

outlaws, and to discourage further violence, Governor Lionel Allen Sheldon resolved to make an example of Yarberry. After a three-day trial in Santa Fe, a jury convicted the trigger-happy marshal, and the judge sentenced him to hang. All appeals were denied, and it didn’t help when Yarberry made a failed escape attempt. During a jailhouse interview a reporter told the condemned he looked pale. “Maybe,” Yarberry replied. “But I ain’t sick, and I ain’t scared, either.”

On Feb. 9, 1883, New Mexico militiamen marched Yarberry to the gallows outside the Albuquerque jail/courthouse. More than 1,500 people were in attendance, many having paid a dollar for the privilege. It was as Sheriff Armijo moved to pull the lever the marshal proclaimed his innocence.

Yarberry was hanged by means of an innovative contraption that yanked the condemned upward instead of dropping him through a trapdoor to break his neck. The Las Vegas Daily Optic ran the alliterative headline Yarberry Y anked, and the execution may have spawned the oftrepeated phrase “jerked to Jesus.” The unconventional hanging also prompted controversy, for as Yarberry soared skyward, his head struck a crossbeam. Had he succumbed to blunt force trauma or a good neck stretching? Regardless, New Mexico Territory authorities never again used that method of execution.

Milt Yarberry, 33, was buried in Albuquerque’s Santa Barbara Cemetery (present-day Mount Cavalry Cemetery), noose still cinched around his neck. His tombstone—with surname misspelled— has since gone missing.

Top: A look at the intersection of First Street and Railroad Street (present-day Central Avenue) in Albuquerque circa 1882—about the time Milton Yarberry’s time ran out. Above: Yarberry’s surname is spelled wrong on his headstone, which went missing, was found in a church basement in the 1950s and then went missing again.

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PIONEERS & SETTLERS Theodore Roosevelt hangs on to his hat in Denver during his 1903 “Great Loop Tour,” which stopped for steak from a chuck wagon in Hugo, Colo.

ONE BULLY BREAKFAST THOUGH PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S 1903 TOUR SCHEDULE WAS TIGHT, HE COULDN’T RESIST A T-BONE FROM A COLORADO CHUCK WAGON

BY MICHAEL F. BLAKE

22 WILD WEST

a couple of dozen “rawhides” from Denver.

“The way those people ate and ate and came back for more,” Keppel said afterward, “convinced me that John and I could do the big stunt as well as anybody.”

In the early morning hours of Monday, May 4, the pair rousted out of their blankets well before dawn to begin preparing breakfast for the president of the United States.

Making up his fire, Keppel put on the beans.

He and Heyman then brewed 12 gallons of coffee in three big pots and readied a batch of fried potatoes. It was Keppel’s job to make the all-important biscuits. “I made eight dozen of these and patted them out round and smooth,” he said. “It’s quite a job to make

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

In Hugo cook Jack Keppel’s helper, John Heyman, poses opposite Roosevelt at the chuck wagon while the president’s entourage mixes with local cowboys.

TOP: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; ABOVE: MICHAEL F. BLAKE COLLECTION-

S

ince dubbed the “Great Loop Tour,” Theodore Roosevelt’s 1903 twomonth trip through 21 states and two territories (New Mexico and Arizona) gave Americans a chance to see their president up close. Scores of cities and towns along the route competed for the privilege of being on his itinerary, if only for a few minutes. The hamlet of Hugo, Colo., invited the president to stop for breakfast when his train pulled into the station to meet Colorado Governor James Hamilton Peabody and Adjutant General Sherman Bell (who had served under the colonel in the Rough Riders). Citing his tight schedule, Roosevelt regretfully declined. Undeterred, the townspeople turned to their ace in the hole: cowboys.

The Holt Live Stock Co. was about to start its spring roundup, and citizens convinced ranch foreman S.G. Sherman to set up the outfit’s chuck wagon right beside the depot. Sherman and his cowhands were only too happy to help. To prepare the meal the Lincoln County Growers Association chose Jack Keppel, a veteran cook of many cattle drives turned rancher himself. Though “quite proud” to have been tapped for the honor, Keppel admittedly hadn’t done any cooking in five years and “was a little shaky about the job I had ahead of me.” For help he turned to John Heyman, “as good a camp man that ever drew a breath.”

On Friday, May 1, Keppel and Heyman arrived in Hugo to “get everything shipshape.” In a trial run that Sunday the pair cooked dinner for 150 locals and

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

TOP: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; ABOVE: MICHAEL F. BLAKE COLLECTION-

PIONEERS & SETTLERS

good biscuits, and you bet I was particular with these.” To nail down his timing, Keppel strolled over to the depot and asked the telegraph operator when Roosevelt’s train would arrive.

As the train rolled into sight and the excitement built, Keppel signaled Heyman to drop the potatoes into a pan and a big T-bone steak onto the searing surface of their Dutch oven. “By this time,” the cook recalled, “the biscuits were done to a turn and everything was ready.” Though Keppel had heard the president wouldn’t be in Hugo long enough to disembark, he had a strategy. “If I could once get him in range of that breakfast, where he could get a whiff of that steak,” he said, “he would have to stay and eat.”

When the train pulled into the station, Roosevelt greeted Governor Peabody, General Bell and local dignitaries. He then addressed the townspeople and cowboys crowded around the rear platform of his railcar, once again expressing his regret at not being able to stop for breakfast.

Just then one of the mounted cowboys spoke up.

“The chuck wagon is waiting, Mr. President,” he said, “and breakfast is ready.”

From the platform Roosevelt could plainly see the chuck wagon and smell the aroma of coffee, beans and steak in the air. The combination proved irresistible. “Now I’ll just have to go and eat something,” he said to the dignitaries as he stepped from the train. In his typical lively gait he soon outstripped even his Secret Service detail. The cowboys hurried after him, throwing their hats in the air and yelling their approval, while the president’s entourage tried to catch up.

As Roosevelt approached the wagon, he broke into a broad grin, like that of a child regarding presents beneath the family Christmas tree. “By George, Dutch ovens!” he exclaimed. Memories of roundups past as a Dakota Territory rancher doubtless came flooding back.

Reaching across the fire, the president heartily shook hands with Keppel and Heyman. Without being told, Roosevelt then strode to the folding shelf at the back of the chuck wagon, picked up a plate and fork, and helped himself to beans, biscuits and the sizzling T-bone. Keppel then handed him a steaming cup of hot coffee. As he paused to wash down his first few bites of steak, Roosevelt regarded the men gathered around the wagon. “This is bully!” he cheerfully blurted as he carved another slice from the steak. “I would not have missed this for anything. It seems like old times. I have been here before, boys—this is great!”

Between mouthfuls the president shook hands with the cowboys and said how genuinely pleased he was to meet each man. This wasn’t political

hyperbole; Roosevelt spoke from his heart. He had first visited Dakota Territory to hunt bison in 1883, built a cattle ranch north of Medora the next year and eventually earned the respect of authentic cowboys. Having lived and ridden with their ilk, he felt connected to these Westerners. Like them he had chewed dust, endured stampedes, watched seasons change and taken meals from a chuck wagon. Despite wearing a frock coat and silk top hat, he remained a cowboy on the inside.

Finishing up his meal, Roosevelt said he wished he could “drop off here and ride the line for a day or two with you boys.” One cowboy offered to loan him a horse, but he reluctantly declined. Turning to Sherman, the president shook hands and thanked the foreman. “This has been a real treat—I thank you heartily,” he said. He then thanked Keppel and Heyman for the meal, chortling at their invitation to “come again.” As the president made his way to the train, many a cowboy followed, extending an eager hand, which Roosevelt happily shook.

Standing on the rear platform of his car as the train pulled out, the president waved farewell to the crowd. Several dozen mounted cowboys hollered and waved their hats as they raced the departing train. Beaming with delight, Roosevelt waved and watched them until the train pulled away, making up for lost time.

“Well, I have cooked many a steak,” Keppel recalled, “but I was certainly more proud of that one than of any I ever turned out. It was a regular ‘beaut,’ and when Teddy cut into it and munched the first mouthful, and I saw the tickled expression of his face, I was so proud—well, I just had to swing my hat and holler.”

No other president could boast of having had a finer meal—from the back of a chuck wagon, no less.

Top: The president spoke from his heart in Hugo, where his breakfast included beans, biscuits and a sizzling steak. Above: Roosevelt visited Colorado seven times during the early 1900s. Here he sits his mount near Glenwood Springs, where he spent six weeks hunting in 1905.

‘now i’ll just have to go and eat something,’ he said as he stepped from the train

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WESTERN ENTERPRISE Bottom: The Linger family acquired the Medano-Zapata Ranch in 1911 and owned it until 1947. Bison roam free on the Medano side of the ranch.

WHERE THE CATTLE AND THE BUFFALO ROAM

24 WILD WEST

1590s they tried to herd and handle buffalo as they had cattle, losing men and horses in the fruitless effort. After enduring nearly a century of indentured servitude, the Indians forced the Spanish settlers out of the valley around the same time as the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Pushed back into Mexico for a decade, the Spaniards returned north of the Rio Grande but were unable to reestablish the same level of authority over the Indians.

By the early 1800s Mexican shepherds were pushing their flocks into the valley, a migration that intensified following the 1810–21 Mexican War of Independence.

After the 1846–48 Mexican War adjudication of land ownership and water rights issues shifted to the U.S. courts. From the early 1870s to 1882 brothers William and Valentine Dickey ran cattle in the valley, obtaining vast tracts of grazeland in the north end of the valley. The Medano Ranch was their headquarters, and in 1889 Mormons f leeing Indian troubles in

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LAZELLE JONES

n central southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley, where jagged canyons sweep down west from the 14,000-plus-foot Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Mountains to the valley f loor, sits the 103,000 -acre Medano-Zapata Ranch. Bordering Great Sand Dunes National Park to the north, this raw but beautiful landscape is carpeted with greasewood (chico) and rabbitbrush, though in spring the runoff from snowmelt fills Medano and Sand creeks on either side of the dune field.

The ranch hosts several archaeological sites, and digs have uncovered the bones of buffalo slain by hunters more than 11,000 years ago. Spaniards were the first Europeans to settle the San Luis Valley amid their search for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold. Bordering on starvation, the explorers helped themselves to corn grown by the indigenous Utes, thus alienating the tribe when they were in desperate need of help. The Spaniards did find plenty of meat on the hoof. As early as the

TOP: LAZELLE JONES; ABOVE LEFT: COURTESY LINGER FAMILY

I

THE HISTORIC MEDANO-ZAPATA RANCH, IN COLORADO’S SAN LUIS VALLEY, STILL RUNS STOCK AND WELCOMES GUESTS

BY LAZELLE JONES

LAZELLE JONES

TOP: LAZELLE JONES; ABOVE LEFT: COURTESY LINGER FAMILY

WESTERN ENTERPRISE

Utah purchased sections of the Dickeys’ neighboring Zapata Ranch. Through the turn of the 20th century the Anglo cattlemen and Hispano sheepherders increasingly wrangled for space.

The conflict turned violent in 1902, when cattlemen burned sheepherder Teofilo Trujillo’s ranch house to the ground and killed his stock, driving him to sell his land to the owners of the adjacent Medano Ranch. In 1911 cattleman George Washington Linger acquired both ranches.

The Linger family initially had difficulty moving beeves from their Medano-Zapata Ranch to the railhead at Fort Garland. Eventually, though, they expanded the property to 25,000 deeded acres and more than 100,000 acres of leased land, operating one of the largest and most profitable cattle operations in southern Colorado. The ranch remained in the family until 1947. In 1988 a Japanese investment group, calling itself Rocky Mountain Bison, bought the property and laid plans for a high-end resort, restaurant and golf course on the Zapata spread. The company also managed a herd of 2,800 buffalo on the Medano side of the property. In 1999 the Nature Conservancy bought the ranch, closed the restaurant and allowed the golf course to return to natural grassland. They partnered with Ranchlands to continue managing cattle, horses and a herd of bison on the property. Both ranches are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

As a steward of land in a region where water is often more precious than gold, the Nature Conservancy is acutely aware of conservation issues.

In the San Luis Valley the water from creeks and springs drains into the precious few ponds, lakes and reservoirs or seeps into the latticework of aquifers crisscrossing the valley floor. The conservancy also monitors the local flora and fauna, especially as they relate to livestock management, and shares its findings with local ranchers. Ranchlands and the conservancy have gone to great lengths to restore the genetic purity of their bison to levels approaching those prior to the introduction of cattle to the gene pool, back when bison numbers were critically low.

Ranch hands annually corral the bison in order to check their overall health, administer a brucellosis vaccination to calves, microchip the animals and harvest the herd in order to maintain a competitive bull-to-cow ratio. Ranchlands employs the low-stress techniques developed by noted animal behaviorist Temple Grandin. When examining the bison, for example, hands direct each animal into a hydraulic-powered “hug machine” that holds it in a reassuring manner so it doesn’t harm itself. The meat from harvested animals is

a highlight of the ranch-to-table food program for guests. Ranchlands also sells bison to other ranches and organizations developing herds.

The bison roam free and are pasture-fed yearround. They are not treated with pesticides nor given supplemental feed, salt or minerals. The 50,000 acres of grazeland includes meadows, alkali flats and deep sandy hills that host a range of native vegetation. Ranchlands’ intent is to allow the bison to live, mate, give birth, grow and fulfill their life cycles without interference.

Here survival of the fittest takes its natural course.

The ranch maintains a herd of Angus and Beefmaster cattle, the latter a composite breed that does well in arid environments like that of the San Luis Valley. Hands rotate the cattle through pastures in a planned method that emulates natural grazing patterns. The ranch is also home to all manner of wildlife, including elk, coyotes, raptors, porcupines and pronghorns. It also straddles the flight path of some 25,000 sandhill cranes, which light here and elsewhere in the valley during their twice annual migrations.

Between March and October the guest ranch side of the operation, at the Zapata and Chico Basin spreads, provides a separate revenue stream and keeps the spirit of the Old West alive by introducing the historic property to people with little conception of that time and place. A three-night minimum stay is required. Meals (around the table or campfire and available to go), horseback riding and naturalist-led hikes are included. While you won’t find a TV on the property, cell service is available, as the ranch encourages visitors to mingle and report home.

The Zapata Ranch [zranch.org] is off State Highway 150, minutes south of Great Sand Dunes National Park and a half-hour drive from the regional airport in Alamosa. Visitors can also fly into Denver International Airport, rent a car and spend a half day driving down through the Rockies to the San Luis Valley.

Original log buildings remain standing on the Medano-Zapata Ranch, both sides of which are on the National Register of Historic Places. The Nature Conservancy has owned the ranch since 1999. Ranchlands manages the property.

The guest ranch side of the operation keeps the spirit of the old west alive

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ART OF THE WEST Theodore Waddell’s Monida Angus # 23 serves as the cover illustration for his 2020 book Cheatgrass Dreams.

Inset: When not painting, the artist enjoys tending to stock on his ranch.

CHEATGRASS DREAMS COME TRUE

M

ontana has long attracted and produced writers and artists. In the late 1800s it drew “Cowboy Artist” Charles M. Russell and painter Joseph Henry Sharp, who rendered portraits of Indian survivors of the Little Bighorn. Need more examples of writers? Theodore Waddell is happy to provide. “In the 1950s and ’60s writers like A.B. Guthrie Jr. and Dorothy M. Johnson were celebrating the West in their writings,” he says. “Tom McGuane and others arrived in Livingston.

In 1968 Richard Hugo arrived at the University of Montana.

He hired William Kittredge, and the show was off and running.” To the list of homegrown artists one should add Waddell [theodorewaddell.com], whose art book/memoir Cheatgrass Dreams was honored by Western Writers of America as a 2021 Spur Award finalist for contemporary nonfiction.

His 2019 canvas Monida Angus # 23, the cover illustration

26 WILD WEST

for Cheatgrass Dreams, is representative of the modernist painter’s work.

“Nearly all my works have a geographic reference, places where I have seen something that inspired a painting,” Waddell says. “Between studios in Hailey, Idaho, and Sheridan, Mont., I’ve probably traveled over Monida Pass over 100 times. I saw something special on one of those drives, so I painted it, because it just kept resonating in my head. No idea about how long it took for me to work on that piece, and when someone asks that question, all I can answer is, ‘A lifetime.’”

Born in Billings in 1941, Waddell studied at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and received a master of fine arts from Wayne State University in Detroit. His work is exhibited at such museums as the Booth Museum of Western Art, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and the Denver Museum of Art. His wife, Lynn Campion, is a writer and photographer who teaches at the Sun Valley Art Center.

COURTESY THEODORE WADDELL (6)

THEODORE WADDELL PUTS A MODERNIST TOUCH ON PAINTINGS OF CATTLE, SHEEP, HORSES AND OTHER CREATURES OF THE NORTHERN ROCKIES

BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS

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ART OF THE WEST

COURTESY THEODORE WADDELL (6)

Western Writers of America recognized Waddell’s Cheatgrass Dreams as a Spur Award finalist. Among the artist’s recent works are (clockwise from top left): Beaverhead Horses, Cheatgrass Dreams Dr. # 7 and Cheatgrass Dreams Dr. # 1.

Waddell, like C.M. Russell, was drawn to the Western lifestyle, but where Russell cowboyed, Waddell turned to ranching. Waddell dedicated Cheatgrass Dreams “to cows, who have changed my life.” “I quit my tenured faculty position [at the University of Montana in Missoula] in order to take over a family ranch,” Waddell explains. “With no experience, I had to learn everything. We had 200 mother cows on the first ranch. I quickly learned that if I took care of them, they would take care of me. And they did.”

But cattle aren’t the only animals Waddell is drawn to. He has illustrated a series of children’s books about a Bernese mountain dog named Tucker and is working with Campion on the latest volume, Tucker Plays the Back Nine.

“Dogs, cats and horses have always been a part of my life,” says Waddell, who doesn’t sketch first

and paints only with oils because he likes the fact oil paint takes longer to dry than acrylics or watercolor. “In the past 25 years I have slowed down a bit with cattle, but we live with Bernese mountain dogs, horses and a Maine Coon cat. I love to paint these animals. And because of where we live, elk are grazing or moving just outside our kitchen window almost every day. Adding to that are the bands of sheep that annually move through our valley in spring and fall. A wonderful history, and great painting.”

Would he be the same artist if he were in Arizona or running cattle for 30 years somewhere other than Montana? “Probably not,” says Waddell, “The Arizona terrain is nothing like most of the land in Montana. I paint what I see and have spent my life studying the landscape in Montana and Idaho.”

‘i paint what i see and have spent my life studying the landscape in montana and idaho’

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INDIAN LIFE

APACHE RATTLESNAKE POWER

[These] venomous serpents…slipped about like rattlesnakes, crept around boulders and hid behind trees along mountain trails. When a Mexican passed, a poisoned arrow laid him low.

Found on every continent but Antarctica, venomous snakes are often feared and hated.

If handled with respect and caution, they do not necessarily pose a threat, though they should never be treated lightly. Some indigenous cultures, including the Hopis of 28 WILD WEST

Arizona and the Mayans and Aztecs of Mexico, revered the snake. The plumed serpent god Quetzalcoatl is among the better-known Mesoamerican deities, while the Hopis consider snakes “messengers to the gods” during their nine-day ritual dances and prayers for rain in the thirsty Arizona desert. On the other hand, Navajos—related to the Apaches as fellow Athabascans—consider snakes bad omens.

The desert-bred and born Apaches of the 19th century had their own strong beliefs and taboos regarding the rattlesnake, or el serpiente de cascabel, and to some extent such beliefs persist today. Their natural fear of the venom stored within its fangs is, of course, pretty much universal. While a rattlesnake bite is rarely fatal today—given prompt treatment—the venom can still cause significant damage, destroying skin and blood cells and attacking the circulatory and nervous systems. For those living in the 19th century such bites and the subsequent symptoms usually brought

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NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

F

or centuries the Apache people have treasured the bounties of their mountain and desert homelands.

They fought long and hard to retain them. After all, Ussen (the creator) had set aside this land for Indeh (“the people”). Even the rattlesnake was considered a part of that bounty. Their enemies sometimes referred to the Apaches themselves as rattlesnakes. Consider, for example, this 1841 excerpt from a newspaper in the Mexican state of Chihuahua:

TOP: NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LEFT: GLENN MCCREA/ALAMY

APACHES MADE USE OF RATTLERS’ VENOM IN POISONED ARROWS AND RESPECTED TRIBAL MEMBERS WILLING TO HANDLE THE SNAKES

BY LYNDA A. SÁNCHEZ

NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

TOP: NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LEFT: GLENN MCCREA/ALAMY

INDIAN LIFE unimaginable pain—until the peace of death ensued.

A young Apache once told me that when she went running in the desert, she wore ankle amulets to protect her from rattlesnakes. Another member of the tribe said a reason his people despised rattlesnakes was because they were known to infiltrate burial grounds and feed on corpses. The dead represent a respected and sacred part of Apache culture, thus they resent any interference in the time of transition from Earth to the “Happy Place” (Heaven). More often than not Apaches are unwilling to even discuss the subject of snakes with outsiders.

While Apaches’ widespread fear and dislike of rattlesnakes is understandable, there is more to the story. A few tribal warriors and medicine men reportedly possessed “rattlesnake power,” enabling them to overcome their fear and temper the venom. Apache tradition includes a strong belief in “power,” a gift from Ussen, though few have been graced with it. Geronimo, the most famous 19th-century Apache, was not only a war leader but also a medicine man with the reputed ability to pinpoint the enemy. A similar ability has been attributed to Lozen, a female warrior and prophet and sister to Chief Victorio of the Chihenne (Warm Springs) band.

The elderly Chihenne Nana, or Kas-tziden (“Broken Foot”), Victorio’s second-in-command, was an excellent tracker and adept at all forms of guerrilla warfare despite his advanced age and vision problems. James Kaywaykla (1877–1963), who called Nana “grandfather” out of respect for his wisdom and courage, told oral historian Eve Ball about Nana’s gifts during interview sessions in the early 1960s. Among his powers was the ability to locate ammunition supplies. Another was power over rattlesnakes. The latter in particular earned Nana much respect among his band, as the rattler proved a constant menace to the people and their horses.

Nana’s power took on greater importance after the devastating 1880 Battle of Tres Castillos, in which Mexican soldiers killed 62 men, including Victorio, and 16 women and children. Nana’s infamous vengeance raid across the American Southwest (see related article, P. 62) proves that even well into his 70s he remained a hardened warrior who could wreak havoc on his enemies.

Between raids Nana patiently taught the young-

er men how to use the potent venom of el cascabel to poison arrow and spear heads carefully crafted from chert or obsidian and, later, metal. Apaches also made use of rattlesnake venom when hunting.

Obtaining adequate supplies of venom was always an issue and required a special hunt.

Apaches relied on the bravest among them to gather rattlesnakes, forcibly at times. As such men drew the rattlers from their sun-drenched lairs, they placed the snakes in large buckskin sacks. Once the tribal leaders felt they had obtained sufficient numbers, the doubtless relieved Apaches could return to their rancherias.

Meanwhile, young boys on the path to becoming warriors eagerly helped construct cages (jaulas) from the branches of thorny ocotillo or cholla cacti.

Into these large cages the rattlers were thrown, followed by the liver from a freshly killed deer, horse or perhaps bighorn sheep. In a sense it was a sacrificial offering to the angered reptiles, which were then repeatedly prodded and provoked into striking the liver again and again with their fangs.

Saturated with venom and baking beneath the heat of the desert sun, the liver would eventually turn a sickly grayish green. The rattlesnakes, having served their purpose, were not killed but released back into the surrounding desert.

Finally, the mass of poisonous, vile-smelling meat was ready for the final step in the ceremony.

Gathering around the liver—confident as long as someone with power over snakes stood nearby —warriors thrust the tips of their lances and arrows into the liver until they glistened, then put them out in the sun to dry before use. In 1895 former U.S. Army assistant surgeon turned historian Elliott Coues confirmed the practice in his book The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike. “It is within my certain knowledge that [Indian arrows] were in some cases poisoned,” he wrote. “The common opinion was that the septic substance was derived from a deer’s liver into which a rattlesnake had been made to inject its venom, and which was then left to putrefy in the sun.”

In isolated parts of the world indigenous hunters continue to make use of such deadly natural toxins.

“Venom toxins are the only molecules on Earth explicitly selected by evolution to take a life in less than one minute,” notes toxicologist Zoltán Takáts.

Old Nana, who died in 1896, might have learned just that two centuries ago.

Opposite: An Apache procures poison for his arrow in a hand-colored 1800s woodcut. Left: In the 19th century Apaches used both firearms and bows and arrows­—and sometimes the arrow tips were laced with venom.

into these large cages the rattlers were thrown, followed by the liver from a freshly killed deer, horse or perhaps bighorn sheep

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Sentinel

A mounted Plains Indian is on the lookout for buffalo in this Blair Buswell bronze, available as a limited-edition 27-by-23-inch, 10-inch-deep tabletop sculpture.

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Trading for Directions

In this Buswell bronze a frontiersman asks two Indians for the best way to continue his journey while they gaze curiously at his map. The larger-than-life figures stand in Pioneer Courage Park in Omaha, Neb.

STYLE

We marvel at Blair Buswell’s magnificent monuments and extraordinary statues

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STYLE SCULPTURE

Blair Buswell

His bronzes are eerily lifelike. Perhaps that stems from Blair Buswell’s [blairbuswell. com] admitted fascination with the human figure. He has parlayed that interest into a successful career as a sculptor of such American sports legends as Mickey Mantle, Jack Nicklaus and Merlin Olsen. Since 1993 the Utah-born former running back for Brigham Young University has served as the chief sculptor for the Pro Football Hall of Fame and has sculpted more than 115 busts of the inductees now on display at the hall. He also loves to depict Old West figures and Western wildlife from his studio in Pleasant Grove, Utah. Buswell studied illustration at Utah State University, in Logan, and later earned his degree in art education and sculpture from BYU, in Provo. Among other Western projects, he has collaborated with fellow sculptors Ed Fraughton and Kent Ullberg on largerthan-life bronzes of pioneers, wildlife and American Indians for display in downtown Omaha, Neb. One of their creations is a wagon train stretching a full city block.

“I like the challenge of capturing the gesture, mood, and expression of my subject,” the artist says. He does so with uncanny realism.

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Buswell stands beside his Omaha Phase II sculpture of westering pioneers with a covered wagon pulled by two yoke of oxen.

Pioneer Courage Park

The Nebraska community served as the eastern terminus and outfitting center for many westwardbound pioneers. In 2002, to honor its legacy and commemorate all those who dared trek the overland trails, the city invited Buswell and fellow sculptor Ed Fraughton to create a life-size wagon train monument. Each wagon and team is as long as an 18-wheel semi-trailer truck.

The monumental work, from concept to model to full-size cast and installation, was completed in three phases (stagecoach, Indians, animals), each phase taking four years to complete.

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STYLE How Many More

48-by-22-inch, 24-inch-deep bronze An Indian wonders how many more broken promises, intruders, battles, hard winters and deaths his people will have to endure. Will his life ever be the same?

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STYLE

IMAGES COURTESY BLAIR BUSWELL STUDIO

Buswell works on the full-size clay of The Wagon Master, who is signaling the others on the wagon train to “Come this way.”

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STYLE Sentinel

IMAGES COURTESY BLAIR BUSWELL STUDIO

This close-up of the bronze on P. 30 reveals Buswell’s attention to the smallest of details.

Cousin Jack,

Panned Out,

limited-edition, sold out 20 1/2 inches tall

18 1/2 inches tall Thus were nicknamed these skilled hard-rock miners from Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of England, who came to work the Western mines.

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Did They Meet?

In an imagined scene by artist Jim Hatzell friends Billy the Kid, at left, and Jesse James sit down together for a July 1879 meal at Scott and Minnie Moore’s hotel at the hot springs 6 miles northwest of Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory. A half century later Dr. Henry Franklin Hoyt claimed to have dined with the notorious outlaws, though many historians doubt his delicious tale.

D

A biographer sizes up Billy the Kid and Jesse James, the two most infamous Old West outlaws

By Bill Markley

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ILLUSTRATION BY JIM HATZELL

BILLY & JESSE DECEMBER 2021

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ILLUSTRATION BY JIM HATZELL

D

id Billy the Kid and Jesse James meet? Include such a scene in a novel, and readers would shake their heads in suspended disbelief.

Write it as nonfiction, and they would scoff.

But it just might have happened.

In July 1879 Dr. Henry Franklin Hoyt was supplementing his medical practice by tending bar at the Exchange Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory. Minnesota-born Hoyt had been drifting around the West looking for adventure.

A year earlier he’d been cowboying in the Texas Panhandle, near Tascosa, where he met Billy the Kid. As the story goes,

the two became close friends. One day Hoyt won a ladies’ gold watch in a poker game. The Kid admired the watch and made an offer on it. Instead, Hoyt gave it to him. In late October 1878, as Hoyt prepared to move from Tascosa to Las Vegas, the Kid presented him with his favorite horse, Dandy Dick.

Six miles northwest of Las Vegas is a cluster of hot springs.

At the time Scott and Minnie Moore owned a hotel at the springs, whose waters were popular among those who believed in their curative properties. The Moores were widely known for their fine cuisine and went all out with their DECEMBER 2021

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Jesse Slept Here...and Here

He had piercing steely blue eyes with a peculiar blink, and the tip of a finger on his left hand was missing. I mentally classed him as a railroad man.

He proved to be congenial, was a good talker, had evidently traveled quite a bit, and the meal passed pleasantly.

After finishing their meal, Billy invited Hoyt to his room. After pledging the doctor to secrecy, the Kid told him Howard was none other than Jesse James.

So how did they meet?

The Kid was friends with the Moores, who were from Missouri and old friends of James. They had introduced the outlaws to one another, and the pair hit it off. Jesse had invited Billy east to join his gang, but the Kid declined. He knew how to rustle cattle and steal horses but didn’t care to rob trains and banks.

Hoyt and the Kid spent the evening with the man calling himself Howard. At one point Hoyt asked the latter whether he’d ever been to the doctor’s hometown of St. Paul, Minn. In 1876 the James-Younger Gang had visited St. Paul before their disastrous raid on the bank in Northfield, Minn. “He replied in the negative in the most nonchalant manner,” Hoyt said, “and changed the subject.”

Many historians doubt Hoyt’s tale, as he related it a half century after having allegedly sat down with Billy and Mr. Howard. But it’s conceivable and certainly intriguing. Who wouldn’t have wanted to engage in— or eavesdrop on—conversation with the Old West outlaws? To this day practically every American recognizes the names Jesse James and Billy the Kid, though few know much about their lives. Let’s take a closer look at the notorious pair, focusing on their similarities and differences.

Americans love an underdog, and Billy the Kid and Jesse James fit the mold. They personify the rebellious spirit against authority. Though the two were inarguably criminals and killed people, many Americans still overlook their crimes, only seeing the romance of the rebel.

Billy the Kid died at age 21. Jesse was born a dozen years before Billy and outlived him by eight months, dying at age 34. If you think of their careers as astronomical events, Jesse’s was like a comet, slowly traversing the night sky, while the Kid’s was like a meteor, flaring brightly before falling to earth.

James was born near Kearney, Mo., on Sept. 5, 1847. The Kid was born Henry McCarty likely in New York City in 1859, though the place and date have both been disputed. Henry later took his stepfather’s surname, Antrim. After setting out on the criminal path, he went by William H. Bonney and was known as the Kid. Not until late in his career did people refer to him as Billy the Kid. Brothers and a Fellow Bushwhacker

Outlaws Jesse (at right) and older brother Frank James (seated at center) were Missouri bushwhackers and Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War, as was their friend at far left, Charles Fletcher “Fletch” Taylor.

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LEFT: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY; RIGHT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

Sunday fare. One Sunday in late July 1879 Hoyt rode out to the springs to relax and enjoy a good meal.

Entering the hotel’s crowded dining room, Hoyt spied a vacant chair at a corner table. One of the three men already seated at the table was none other than his friend Billy the Kid, dressed in new store-bought clothes. The Kid invited Hoyt to sit and, gesturing to the man on his left, said, “Hoyt, meet my friend Mr. Howard from Tennessee.” Hoyt described Howard in his 1929 autobiography, A Frontier Doctor:

TOP LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; TOP RIGHT: PATEE HOUSE MUSEUM AND JESSE JAMES HOME; LEFT: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Left: An 1877 image captures Jesse James’ childhood home near Kearney, Mo. Above: Bob Ford killed James in this since relocated home of Jesse and family in St. Joseph, Mo.

Real Bad Boys, Not Posers

LEFT: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY; RIGHT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

TOP LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; TOP RIGHT: PATEE HOUSE MUSEUM AND JESSE JAMES HOME; LEFT: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Left: Jesse James sat for this portrait as a 17-year-old Confederate guerrilla. Above: The only authenticated photograph of Billy the Kid is this circa-1880 tintype.

Both men grew up without their natural fathers. Robert Sallee James died in California in 1850 during the gold rush. It remains uncertain who Billy’s father was. Both had stepfathers. William Antrim, the Kid’s stepfather, spent little time with him and later abandoned the family.

Jesse’s first stepfather, Benjamin Simms, did the same. His second stepfather, Dr. Reuben Samuel, proved faithful to widow Zerelda James and helped raise Jesse and siblings. Billy’s mother, Catherine McCarty, died when he was about 15. Zerelda was always there for Jesse. After the death of his mother, the Kid and his younger brother, Joe, drifted apart. He had no other siblings or known extended family. Jesse, on the other hand, had elder brother Frank, younger sister Susan, four half-siblings and a passel of uncles, aunts and cousins, not to mention the security of a family farm to which he could always return. After the Kid’s mother died, the orphan had nowhere to call home.

Jesse and Billy had some schooling, and both enjoyed reading. Jesse avidly read and quoted from the Bible. The Kid enjoyed reading books, dime novels and The National Police Gazette.

Billy became a small-time cattle rustler and horse thief, while Jesse, brother Frank and gang robbed banks in broad daylight and held up trains—the most powerful machines of the age. The Kid was impetuous, Jesse more calculating. Billy was jailed and escaped several times. Jesse was never caught. The Kid stood trial. Jesse never did.

Both men had extensive support networks. Jesse relied on fellow former bushwhackers, Confederate soldiers and their sympathizers. The

Kid was congenial, and people liked him. He quickly mastered the Spanish language, and Hispanos supported him (see two related feature articles by James W. Mills in the December 2020 Wild West ). Hard as it may be to believe, both outlaws were polite, respectful to women, friendly to children, pleasant company and enjoyed a good joke. Both were also reliable headliners for newspapers. In fact, Jesse had what amounted to his own publicist in editor John Newman Edwards of The Kansas City Times, a Confederate veteran only too happy to provide alibis for the James brothers. The Kid often made the papers, readers either loving or hating his deeds, with little middle ground.

During the Civil War the James brothers had been Missouri bushwhackers and Confederate sympathizers. After the war, as Jesse and Frank took to robbing banks and trains, Edwards and other publishers portrayed them as crusaders against Northern oppression. Indeed, Jesse came to be regarded as something of an American Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Sympathizers regarded the Kid in DECEMBER 2021

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True and False

Lincoln resident Mary Ealy, wife of the Rev. Taylor Ealy, had fond memories of gatherings with the Kid and his Regulator friends in the home of Alexander and Susan McSween, central figures of the opposition to the Murphy-Dolan faction. Mary played the McSweens’ piano while the fully armed men stood around it and sang. “They were very nice and polite,” she remembered.

During Jesse’s last train robbery, at Blue Cut east of Independence, Mo., on the night of Sept. 7, 1881, a woman fainted from fright after a gang member took a silver dollar from her.

Jesse attended to her, applying a wet handkerchief to her face. When she came to, he gave her back the dollar.

Billy and Jesse were loyal to friends, but one definitely didn’t want to cross them. They were stone-cold killers, and in their own minds they could justify murder.

On the evening of July 15, 1881, the James Gang robbed a train at Winston, Mo. Jesse, Frank and cousin Wood Hite were riding in the smoking car when they sprang from their seats, shooting their pistols into the ceiling in warning. Jesse then shot conductor William Westfall twice in the back, killing him. Several explana40 WILD WEST

tions circulated as to why he killed Westfall—it was an accident; Westfall was reaching for a gun; Jesse recognized Westfall as having participated in a Pinkerton National Detective Agency raid on the family farm that led to the death of half-brother Archie and mangling of mother Zerelda’s right arm. When the gang robbed the train at Blue Cut that September, conductor Joel Hazelbaker disobeyed Jesse’s orders. Waving the muzzle of his pistol under Hazelbaker’s nose, James growled: “Damn you, smell of that! That’s the pistol I shot Westfall with at Winston!”

Billy was equally cold-blooded. In the spring of 1881 the Kid was being held in the Lincoln County Courthouse, awaiting execution for the 1878 murder of Sheriff William Brady. Pat Garrett, who’d since been elected sheriff, left town to collect taxes. Before riding off, he warned his deputies, Bob Olinger and Jim Bell, to be vigilant with regard to the Kid. While Bell treated Billy decently, Olinger mercilessly taunted the outlaw.

On the morning of April 28 Olinger loaded his double-barreled shotgun in front of Billy saying, “The man that gets one of these loads will feel it.”

“I expect he will,” the Kid replied, “but be careful Bob, or you might shoot yourself accidentally.”

That evening Olinger left Bell alone with Billy, who somehow managed to slip out of his handcuffs, grab Bell’s revolver and kill him with it. The Kid then grabbed Olinger’s shotgun. Moments later, as the deputy ran toward the courthouse, Billy leaned out a second story window and called out, “Hello, old boy!” When Olinger looked up, the Kid triggered one of the barrels, sending a load of buckshot into his tormentor’s face and chest, killing him instantly. The Kid then stepped out onto the balcony, coldly triggered the second barrel into Olinger’s body, then broke the stock of the shotgun across the railing. Throwing the pieces at the corpse, Billy shouted, “Take it, damn you—you won’t follow me anymore with that gun!” Before riding out of town, the Kid paused over Bell’s body, saying, “I’m sorry I had to kill you, but couldn’t help it.”

Americans of all stripes disapproved of the way Billy the Kid and Jesse James died—both killed in ambush by so-called friends.

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LEFT: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM; CENTER AND RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

a different light. Amid the Lincoln County War in New Mexico Territory he represented the lone, misunderstood youth standing up to the Murphy-Dolan faction of corrupt businessmen and government cronies.

LEFT: BILL MARKLEY; RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Left: The Kid really did kill two men while escaping the Lincoln County Courthouse on April 28, 1881. Above: Inaccuracies pepper Pat Garrett’s 1882 bio of Billy.

LEFT: PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES, NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM; CENTER AND RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

LEFT: BILL MARKLEY; RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Garrett and the Kid had been, if not friends, on friendly terms when both lived in Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory. Weeks after Billy murdered Bell and Olinger and fled, Garrett and two deputies learned the Kid was in the vicinity of Fort Sumner. After the war cattle baron Lucien Maxwell had purchased the deactivated military post and converted an officers quarJESSE JAMES ters into a 20-room house. In 1881 the surrounding community comprised mostly Hispanos in the employ of Maxwell’s son, Pete. Many of them had befriended the Kid. Late on the night of July 14, 1881, while his deputies waited outside, Garrett entered Pete Maxwell’s unlit bedroom from an outside door. The pair chatted a while in the dark. A butchered steer was hanging from the porch of the house, and the Kid soon strolled from another room of the house with a knife to slice off a slab of meat to cook. Spotting the deputies, Billy ducked into Maxwell’s bedroom to ask who they were. As the Kid entered, Pete whispered to Garrett, “That’s him!” The sheriff fired two quick shots.

One found its mark, and Billy dropped dead on the floor.

By the spring of 1882 Jesse James had invited two gang members, brothers Bob and Charley Ford, to live in his St. Joseph, Mo., home with him and his wife and two children. Unknown to James, Bob Ford and gang member Dick Liddil had killed Jesse’s cousin Wood Hite, and Liddil had since surrendered to Missouri authorities and was spilling all he knew about the gang. In addition, the Ford brothers had made a deal with Missouri Governor Thomas T. Crittenden to aid in the capture of Jesse and claim reward money. On April 3 Jesse read in the morning paper about Dick’s surrender and wondered aloud why the Fords were unaware of it, given their close relationship with Liddil.

The brothers grew nervous. Fearing Jesse was on to them, they resolved to act. Jesse and Bob had moved to the living room. It was hot

Crime Scenes

Above left: Garrett shot Billy in the Maxwell family house (former officers quarters) at Fort Sumner. Above: Jesse lies ready for burial after his April 3, 1882, murder.

day, and the front door was open for the breeze. Jesse took off his coat and his gun belt, not wanting passersby to see him armed. Turning his back to Bob, he then stood on a chair to dust or adjust a picture hanging on the wall. Seeing his opening, Bob drew his revolver and shot Jesse in the back of the head. The confidant James had welcomed into his home turned out to be his assassin.

After all these years people are still outraged at the manner in which Billy the Kid and Jesse James met their respective ends. Of course, their violent deaths only added to their legend, and two decades into the 21st century they remain iconic Old West outlaws who fascinate us to no end.

Bill Markley of Pierre, S.D., writes both history books and fiction and is a longtime member of Western Writers of America. This article is adapted from his 2019 book Billy the Kid & Jesse James: Outlaws of the Legendary West. For further reading Markley also recommends Shot All to Hell and To Hell on a Fast Horse, both by Mark Lee Gardner; Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, by T.J. Stiles; Frank and Jesse James: The Story Behind the Legend, by Ted P. Yeatman; The West of Billy the Kid,

by Frederick Nolan; and Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life, by Robert Utley.

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Claim to Infamy

Far left: J. Frank Dalton insisted he was Jesse James. Above: Dalton was still pushing that claim from bed at age 102. Left: William Henry “Brushy Bill” Roberts said he was Billy the Kid. Dalton and Roberts did actually meet.

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Kan.; that he’d been a deputy U.S. marshal under “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker at Fort Smith, Ark.; and that he’d piloted an airplane (in his late 60s) in World War I. Dalton’s claim to be Jesse James was similar to that of William John James.

He’d even borrowed material from the latter, claiming that one Charlie Bigelow had been shot and killed while he (Dalton) hid in a nearby stable. But the truth came out.

During the Civil War the real Jesse James had been wounded twice in the same lung, yet Dalton bore no scars where the bullets would have entered, and he refused to have a chest X-ray to show evidence of those wounds. Jesse was missing the tip of his left middle finger, but Dalton’s was intact.

Neither did Dalton’s handwriting match samples of Jesse’s script. None of that kept Dalton from earning a living at carnivals and fairs proclaiming he was Jesse James. Disgusted members of the James family refused to meet with him.

After Bob Ford murdered James, four doctors conducted an autopsy on Jesse’s body. They found two bullet wound scars on the right side of his chest and the tip of the left middle finger missing, as well as other distinguishing marks.

Reporters were also permitted to examine the corpse. His wife, mother, friends and foes observed and identified the body, which was repeatedly photographed. Hundreds, if not thousands, of others viewed it. Still doubts lingered. Finally, on July 17, 1995, with the permission of the James family, the body was exhumed. Forensic expert James E. Starrs led a team that analyzed the remains. On Feb, 23, 1996, Starrs held a press conference amid the 48th annual meeting of the

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LEFT: CAKNUCK, CC BY-SA 4.0; RIGHT: QUARRELLADEVIL/WAYMARKING

One thing Jesse James and Billy the Kid had in common was a host of impostors.

James’ son, Jesse Edward, said he knew of 26 such men masquerading as his father. One well-known impostor was John James, who in January 1932 took a speaking engagement at the Royal Hotel in Excelsior Springs, Mo., claiming to be James. He insisted the Ford brothers had actually killed a man named Charlie Bigelow and passed him off as Jesse.

Many people believed the speaker’s claims, until Jesse Edward James’ wife Stella arrived in town with a pair of her late father-in-law’s size 6½ boots, along with Frank Milburn, the cobbler who had made them for Jesse. Stella insisted John try on the boots. They did not fit; his feet were too big. When quizzed by Stella, the impostor couldn’t remember such significant family details as the name of Jessie’s half-brother Archie and which of mother Zerelda’s arms had been mangled in the Pinkerton attack on the family farm. Stella later learned the impostor was one William John James, on parole from prison after having served time for murder. Despite the revelations, an unflappable John James continued to proclaim he was the outlaw and toured as such in shows and circuses.

Another bold impostor was J. Frank Dalton of Lawton, Okla., who first claimed to be the outlaw on a nationally broadcast radio show in 1948. Dalton claimed many things —that he’d served in the Confederate army; that he was a Texas Ranger and police chief of Alpine, Texas; that he’d served in the U.S. Cavalry from 1866 to ’68 at Fort Harker,

LEFT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE (2); RIGHT: BETTMAN/GETTY IMAGES

ALL THOSE IMPOSTORS

They Didn’t Fake Their Deaths

LEFT: CAKNUCK, CC BY-SA 4.0; RIGHT: QUARRELLADEVIL/WAYMARKING

LEFT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE (2); RIGHT: BETTMAN/GETTY IMAGES

Left: Kid impostor Roberts died in Hico, Texas, and was buried in nearby Hamilton. Above: James impostor Dalton, who insisted Bob Ford shot someone else in April 1882, died at 103 and was buried under the outlaw’s name in Granbury Cemetery in that Texas town.

American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Nashville, Tenn.

Having conducted DNA tests and scrutinized artifacts found with the remains, Starrs stated, “There is no scientific basis whatsoever for doubting that the exhumed remains are those of Jesse James.” (See related feature, P. 44.)

Several men claimed to be Billy the Kid, the most notorious being William Henry Roberts, who went by the alias Ollie Roberts and the nickname “Brushy Bill.” In 1948 St. Louis–based probate investigator William Morrison learned of a man living in the central Texas town of Hamilton whom some claimed was Billy the Kid. Morrison visited and corresponded with Roberts for a time before the latter claimed to be the outlaw. The man shared an elaborate backstory, confessing that he’d used many aliases over the years. Roberts had been reluctant to reveal his identity, he explained, as Billy remained under a death sentence for the murder of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady. He further claimed that on the night of July 14, 1881, Pat Garrett had actually killed the Kid’s friend Billy Barlow and passed him off as the outlaw.

Morrison believed the story and arranged a meeting on Nov. 30, 1950, between Roberts and New Mexico Governor Thomas J. Mabry, hoping the governor would pardon William (aka Brushy Bill, aka Billy the Kid). When pressed to answer identifying questions, however, Roberts failed. He had to be prompted to recall Garrett’s name and denied having killed Deputies Jim Bell and Bob Olinger. The Kid had buckteeth.

Roberts did not. Defenders said the outlaw had had those

teeth removed years earlier. In 1989 the Lincoln County Heritage Trust commissioned forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow to conduct a computer analysis of the Kid’s known tintype, comparing it to a photo of Roberts and 150 other people. The photos of 41 of the others looked more like that of the Kid than did the snapshot of Roberts.

J. Frank Dalton (still claiming to be Jesse James) once appeared onstage with Brushy Bill Roberts (still claiming to be Billy the Kid) and “Colonel” James Russell Davis (who claimed to be Cole Younger). On Jan. 13, 1950, the trio appeared on NBC’s nationally broadcast We the People radio and television show. Whether they convinced the audience is anyone’s guess.

If Jesse James and Billy the Kid had somehow faked their deaths, many people would have been in the know. In the Kid’s case such a hoax would have to include Sheriff Pat Garrett and deputies, the Maxwell family, members of the coroner’s inquest and virtually every resident of Fort Sumner. In Jesse’s case accomplices would have to include his mother, wife and children, Bob and Charley Ford, doctors and reporters at the autopsy, and those friends and enemies alike who viewed the body. It’s human nature to share secrets, and such elaborate hoaxes would have eventually come to light.

The preponderance of evidence proves Pat Garrett killed Billy the Kid, and Bob Ford killed Jesse James. Jesse still lies moldering in his Kearney, Mo., grave, while the Kid still lies moldering in his Fort Sumner, N.M. grave. RIP to both restless Old West outlaws. —B.M. DECEMBER 2021

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A GRAVE LEGACY

Even in death legendary Westerners were dogged by a sordid collection of grave robbers, relic hunters, politicians and lawyers

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rivate William Othniel Taylor gazed numbly across the Little Bighorn battlefield on the morning of June 28, 1876, three days after he and fellow troopers of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, commanded by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, had charged into a large Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment on the banks of the Montana Territory river.

Taylor and comrades had been pinned down by the enemy for 36 hours with limited water before being saved by relief forces that brought astonishing news: Custer and his entire command had been annihilated.

“Our errand now was to seek our comrades who had died with Custer and pay our last respects by a scant and hasty burial,” Taylor recalled. “The most that could be done was to cover the remains with some branches of sagebrush and scatter a little earth on top, enough to cover their nakedness, a covering that would remain but a few hours at the most when the wind and rain would undo our work and the wolves, whose mournful and ominous howls we had already heard, 44 WILD WEST

would scatter their bones over the surrounding ground.”

Standing on that desolate ridge, Taylor could never have imagined how those shallow graves would soon mark a very different type of battleground—one on which various factions exploited the dead in skirmishes over class warfare, politics and legacy.

Each year upward of 240,000 people make a pilgrimage to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Grave markers scattered across its grounds carry different meanings for different people. The site has also generated an estimated $14 million a year in tourist dollars, thanks largely to one iconic name: Custer. Yet, the morbid allure of the Little Bighorn dead is not an uncommon phenomenon.

The graves of such legendary Western figures as Geronimo, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Sitting Bull, Quanah Parker and Wild Bill Hickok have all been disturbed in one way or another—some by relic hunters and grave robbers, others in the wake of lawsuits and public squabbles over whose bones actually lay beneath a particular headstone.

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TOP: PHOTO BY RON J. JACKSON JR.; RIGHT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

By Ron J. Jackson Jr.

They Fell at the Little Bighorn

Marble slabs at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument mark the approximate spots where 7th U.S. Cavalry soldiers died. Below: Bones of men and horses litter the field in the aftermath of the June 1876 battle.

Holley—a cousin of Texas colonist Stephen F. Austin and among the first Anglo visitors to that region—groped for the words to describe the grandeur they found. “One’s feelings in Texas are unique and original and very like a dream or youthful vision realized,” Holley gushed in an 1833 memoir. “Here, as in Eden, man feels alone with the God of nature and seems, in a peculiar manner, to enjoy the rich bounties of Heaven in common with all created things.” In Texas, she marveled, the “sun and the air seemed brighter and softer than elsewhere.”

Such embellishments were infectious. Yet countless descriptions sprang from truthful if incredible eyewitness accounts. Lieutenant John Williams Gunnison, a surveyor with the Corps of Topographical Engineers, learned that firsthand after an encounter with mountain man Jim Bridger (see related feature, P. 68). “With a buffalo skin and piece of charcoal,” Gunnison recalled, “[Bridger] will map out any portion of this immense region and delineate mountains, streams and the circular valleys called ‘holes’ with wonderful accuracy.” The lieutenant related Bridger’s sensational—and, it turns out, reasonably accurate—description of what would become Yellowstone National Park:

TOP: PHOTO BY RON J. JACKSON JR.; RIGHT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

He gives a picture most romantic and enticing of the headwaters of the Yellowstone. A lake [Yellowstone] 60 miles long, cold and pellucid, lies embosomed amid high precipitous mountains. On the west side is a sloping plain several miles wide, with clumps of trees and groves of pine. The ground resounds to the tread of horses.

Geysers spout up 70 feet high, with a terrific hissing noise, at regular intervals. Waterfalls are sparkling, leaping and thundering down the precipices and collect in the pool below.

The [Yellowstone] river issues from this lake and for 15 miles roars through the perpendicular canyon at the outlet. In this section are the Great Springs [Mammoth Hot Springs], so hot that meat is readily cooked in them, and as they descend on the successive terraces, afford at length delightful baths.

Americans’ enduring fascination with the West is the root of this collective narrative. Long ago the American West was a faraway place of surreal landscapes that stoked the imagination. Beyond the Mississippi and across the wide Missouri early explorers and pioneers discovered oceans of prairie grass, the majestic Rocky Mountains, the expansive Grand Canyon and a yet unspoiled California boasting goldfilled streams and soaring redwoods. Wild and untamed, the land invited rhapsodic language. Pioneers like Mary Austin

Few believed Bridger. Regardless, Americans remained captivated by stories of the magnificent wilderness beyond the bounds of civilization. The West presented a grand stage for Eastern audiences, a stage that necessarily called for larger-than-life actors. In that aspect, too, the region delivered in abundance. The cast of Westerners proved diverse, from dashing generals (Custer) to unflinching gunslingers (Hickok), “righteous” outlaws (the Kid and James), “hostile” Indians (Geronimo and Sitting Bull) and “noble savages” (Quanah Parker). Where the storyline sometimes strayed, yellow journalists and dime novel hacks stood ready to deliver a lively narrative blended with myth and reality.

Dime novelist Ned Buntline was prototypical of this propaganda machine. He wrote yarns about Army scout William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody—“founded entirely on fact”— and drew on incidents from Wild Bill Hickok’s life to flesh out a villain named “Jake M’Kandlas.” Buntline eventually killed off the character at the hands of two Texas women, DECEMBER 2021

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Left: With his dime novels Ned Buntline helped make heroes out of Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok.

Above: This is the grave marker in Fort Sumner, N.M., of Billy the Kid, a legend even before his violent death.

Custer and Seventeen Commissioned Officers Butchered. General William Tecumseh Sherman perhaps best expressed the nation’s stunned disbelief when he stated, “I don’t believe it, and I don’t want to believe it, if I can help it.” The image of “wild hordes” of Indians descending on Civil War hero Custer and his bluecoats surely toyed with the American psyche.

In the aftermath of the June 1876 battle Sitting Bull was cast firmly in the role of villain, at least by observers in “civilized America.” Though he’d provided pivotal spiritual inspiration for Lakota warriors that day, the story of his life and eventual violent death was left to the mercy of prejudiced journalists.

Yet not even Sitting Bull could surpass Geronimo in fame—or infamy— on the Western frontier. The Chiricahua Apache’s mystique arguably soared higher in death than it did in life—an admirable feat given his reputation as a prolific warrior who for years, with a handful of fellow holdouts, eluded thousands of U.S. and Mexican troops in the rugged mountains of Arizona, New Mexico, Chihuahua and Sonora. When he surrendered for the final time on Sept. 3, 1886, Americans kept abreast of the drama in Eastern newspapers breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Geronimo suffered an ignominious postscript, dying on Feb. 17, 1909, of pneumonia after having lain overnight in a puddle of water following a drunken fall from his horse. He died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Okla.

Death often ushered in renewed interest in such frontier icons. The subsequent exploitation of their graves occurred in different forms at difGeronimo’s Grave

The infamous Chiricahua Apache, who is buried in the Beef Creek Apache Cemetery at Fort Sill, Okla., was a terror up until his final surrender in 1886, but his mystique arguably soared even higher in death.

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TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: JIM WEST/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; FAR RIGHT: MARILYN ANGEL WYNN/NATIVESTOCK.COM/ALAMY

Custer, Sitting Bull and Geronimo were also living legends by the time they were lowered into their respective graves. As with the Kid, the world would most remember Custer for his final act—a sensational death. MASSACRE OF OUR TROOPS, trumpeted one New York Times headline in the wake of the Little Bighorn.

Legend Maker and Legend

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prompting Hickok to complain tongue in cheek in an 1873 letter to a newspaper, “Ned Buntline of the New York Weekly has been trying to murder me with his pen for years.” The end for the real Wild Bill came on Aug. 2, 1876, when he was shot down in a Deadwood, Dakota Territory, saloon—a salacious demise that spawned still more pulp fiction.

Hack writers pounced on Billy the Kid’s 1881 shooting death with equal enthusiasm and shameless greed to publish new Western sagas. News of the Kid’s demise had barely reached the East Coast when dime novelist John Woodruff Lewis dashed off a sensational “True Life of Billy the Kid,” under the pseudonym Don Jenardo, for The Five Cent Wide Awake Library, a New York–based blood-and-thunder publication with nationwide distribution. More than a dozen dime novels soon followed, although the Kid’s legacy didn’t need any padding. He was a bona fide legend well before his violent end. Editors of Eastern newspapers, keenly aware of readers’ insatiable appetite for sensational frontier happenings, had routinely published stories of his exploits.

ferent times. Those shameful episodes certainly revealed the dark side of human nature. Secretary of War J. Donald Cameron sparked a firestorm of controversy in the summer of 1877 when he had the remains of Custer and his officers recovered from the battlefield so they might be “properly prepared for burial.” Word of the selective reinterment disturbed Samuel E. Staples, whose son, Corporal Samuel Frederick Staples, died with Company I at the Little Bighorn. The grieving father offered a scathing assessment of the decision in a letter to his congressional representative: I think the government can do no less than to give these remains decent burial, by putting them in coffins, and remove them to some suitable place.…It is hard for me to understand how the remains of the officers could be in condition for removal… while those of privates and noncommissioned officers had become food for wolves.

TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: JIM WEST/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; FAR RIGHT: MARILYN ANGEL WYNN/NATIVESTOCK.COM/ALAMY

FROM TOP: JACK VANCE/GETTY IMAGES; HERITAGE AUCTIONS; LOOPER5920

Public outcry resulted in the proper reinterment in place of the 7th Cavalry rank and file in 1879, followed two years later by the erection on Last Stand Hill of a granite obelisk inscribed with the names of 261 dead, including officers, enlisted soldiers, Indian scouts and attached civilians.

Then, in December 1886, by executive order, President Grover Cleveland set aside 1 square mile of the surrounding Crow Indian Reservation to create the National Cemetery of Custer’s Battlefield Reservation, later redesignated Custer Battlefield National Monument. But restoring peace to this hallowed ground proved elusive. In 1988 American Indian Movement protesters accompanied activist Russell Means to the monument on Last Stand Hill, where they left a steel plaque inscribed “in honor of our Indian Patriots who fought and defeated the U.S. calvary [sic ] in order to save our women and children from mass murder.” Though more than a century had passed, the Custer name clearly evoked strong feelings among Indians who felt disenfranchised from the American experience. The irony is the colonel’s remains had long been removed from the site. Exhumed at the request of his wife, Elizabeth, Custer had been reinterred with full military honors at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on Oct. 10, 1877. Libbie’s motives were clearly driven by her husband’s legacy.

A Grave Calamity

In 1903 Martha Jane (née Cannary) Burke, better known as “Calamity Jane,” poses by the grave of Wild Bill Hickok, at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, S.D. She died on August 1 that same year and per request was buried alongside Hickok.

Relic hunters and grave robbers have committed the most egregious acts of desecration. In Deadwood, S.D., officials learned the full scope what it means to have a Wild West legend buried in one’s town. An early newspaper account noted how visitors, “before returning east,” would stop at the local cemetery to gawk at the hand-painted headboard of murdered gunfighter Hickok. In 1879 friend Charlie Utter paid to have Wild Bill’s original headboard and remains moved to the new Mount Moriah Cemetery, discovering to his shock that Hickok’s body had “petrified” in the calcium carbonate soil. Word of the macabre discovery spread rapidly, and bit by bit relic hunters whittled Hickok’s headboard down to nothing. In 1891 Deadwood officials commissioned a sculptor to carve a 9-foot-tall stone monument capped by a bust of Hickok with two crossed pistols below his name. Chip by chip Wild Bill aficionados also

Sitting Bull’s Grave(s)?

Killed in 1890 on South Dakota’s Standing Rock Indian Reservation, the Lakota leader was buried at nearby Fort Yates, N.D. (above). In 1953 his remains were exhumed and reportedly reburied in Mobridge, S.D. (right).

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managed to destroy that monument and its 1902 sandstone replacement. Finally, in 2002, on the anniversary of his death, officials unveiled a bronze replica of the 1891 monument, which remains standing.

Billy the Kid’s grave attracted a bolder type of vandal. On July 14, 1881, Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett shot down the Kid at Fort Sumner, N.M., where he was buried at the post cemetery.

Over time the wooden marker disintegrated.

In 1940 a Colorado stonecutter and big fan of the outlaw donated a granite headstone for the Kid’s unmarked grave. Ten years later the Albuquerque Journal reported “some varmint” had “swiped the marker.” In 1975 it resurfaced in Texas. Though restored and placed within a chain-link fence, it was swiped again in 1981. Ten days later California detectives caught the thief—an opportunistic, crowbar-wielding truck driver—red-handed.

Today wrought-iron fencing protects the marker.

In Sitting Bull’s case it is uncertain whether any of his remains actually remain in his original gravesite. Shot dead in a botched arrest by Indian police at South Dakota’s Standing Rock Indian Reservation on Dec. 15, 1890, the Lakota leader was taken to nearby Fort Yates, N.D., for burial. In 1953 a group claiming to represent his descendants crept into the post cemetery at night and exhumed his remains. Though they reburied Sitting Bull beneath a proper monument on a scenic Missouri River overlook in Mobridge, S.D., historians question whether they succeeded in retrieving all his bones. H e was buried here, but his grave has been vandalized many times, states a plaque at his original gravesite at Fort Yates.

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In the decades after Geronimo’s 1909 death rumors of grave robbers and whispers of reburials by loyal tribesmen swirled around his unmarked plot in the Beef Creek Apache Cemetery at Fort Sill, Okla. Some accounts claimed followers secreted away his body to his stamping grounds in Arizona or New Mexico. For 15 years Master Sgt. Morris J. “Mike” Swett, the post librarian, doggedly pursued the truth, and in 1930 he solved the mystery, thanks to Nah-thle-tla, a then 103-year-old cousin of Geronimo. That spring, sensing her own imminent death, she led Swett to the exact location of her famous relative’s unmarked grave. It was later marked with a pyramid of stones capped by a stone eagle.

In recent decades a story surfaced to reignite debate. In 1986 an anonymous tip alleged members of Yale University’s Skull and Bones secret fraternity had stolen Geronimo’s skull from “a tomb” in 1918. Of course, Geronimo’s grave wasn’t marked in 1918, nor were his remains ever placed in a tomb. If “Bonesmen” had indeed stolen a skull from Fort Sill that year, it likely belonged to some other poor soul. Regardless, the myth endures and was even the basis for a federal lawsuit by Geronimo’s great-grandson, Harlyn Geronimo, who sought to rebury his famed ancestor’s remains near his purported New Mexico birthplace. The lawsuit—filed in 2009 on the centennial of Geronimo’s death—was dismissed a year later. Was Harlyn Geronimo trying to preserve Geronimo’s legacy or create his own?

Quanah Parker, the last Comanche chief, is also buried at Fort Sill. The day after his death on Feb. 23, 1911, he was laid to rest in full battle regalia with a buckskin bag containing his favorite warbonnet, feathers and other keepsakes, including a signature star-shaped diamond brooch presented to him by local cattlemen. Tribesmen stood guard over his grave for four straight nights. Alas, four years later thieves dug up and looted his casket.

Just plain notoriety appears to have been at the core of at least one notable grave mystery. In the early 20th century several men surfaced claiming to be “the real” Billy the Kid or Jesse James. In 1970 a Missouri jury awarded a James descendant $10,000 for finally proving Texan J. Frank Dalton was not the famed outlaw assassinated at home by gang member Bob Ford on April 3, 1882. Questions remained. Finally, in 1995 forensics expert James E. Starrs exhumed Jesse’s remains from Mount Olivet Cemetery in Kearney, Mo., and conducted mitochondrial DNA tests to solve the mystery once and for all. “There is no scientific basis

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HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

On Feb. 24, 1911, the day after his death, Quanah Parker was buried at Cache, Okla. Right: In 1957 his body was moved to the Fort Sill Cemetery and buried beneath this obelisk beside his mother and sister.

LEFT: DOLPH BRISCOE CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY, UT AUSTIN; RIGHT: CRIMSONEDGE34, CC BY-SA 3.0

The Last Comanche Chief

whatsoever for doubting that the exhumed remains are those of Jesse James,” Starrs concluded.

Case closed—or is it?

Grave robbers, activists, politicians, tourists, lawyers and even descendants have all cast a shadow in one sense or another over the graves of iconic Westerners. Some simply wanted to possess a “true relic” of a Wild West legend. Others had more complicated motives. Perhaps their collective obsession stems from an insatiable fascination with a time and place only discoverable at the intersection myth and reality—an elusive, untamed American West that evokes a romantic yearning for adventure. Author Louis Fairchild once quoted a mournful 19th-century ballad to address this romantic theory: They have gone the long dim trail, Down the shadow of the vale, O’er their long graves the lean Coyotes sigh.

“Easterners had thoughts of a lonely but peaceful grave with sounds of coyotes yelping in the distance,” Fairchild wrote. “The wrangler saw these coyotes fighting over his remains.” Men such as Custer, Geronimo and Hickok earned a sort of immortality through their daring deeds, thus sparking an attraction to their final resting places. That connection—whether real

or perceived—has attracted the masses, dictated political agendas, tempted thieves and garnered notoriety for generations. In his 1982 book Inventing Billy the Kid author Stephen Tatum offered perhaps the most reasonable advice on how best to retrace the Kid’s path in New Mexico. “Not the least of ways to travel through Kid country,” he wrote, “is the route of the imagination, a route that has known few boundaries in the century since the Kid’s death in 1881.” Thus will the final resting place of any legendary Westerner be forever in the mind.

Ron J. Jackson Jr. is an award-winning author from Rocky, Okla., and a regular contributor to Wild West. For further reading he recommends Stricken Field: The Little Bighorn Since 1876,

by Jerome A. Greene; Hunger for the Wild: America’s Obsession With the Untamed West, by Michael L. Johnson; and The Lonesome Plains: Death and Revival on an American Frontier, by Louis Fairchild.

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LEFT: DOLPH BRISCOE CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY, UT AUSTIN; RIGHT: CRIMSONEDGE34, CC BY-SA 3.0

A CRAZY MYSTERY The history of the American West is rife with mysteries, many of which will remain unsolved.

Just where Crazy Horse is buried is one such cold case that might never be cracked. Given the sad legacy of legendary Westerners’ final resting places, perhaps that is best.

The location of the Lakota warrior’s grave is most likely unknown today, even by those claiming to be in the know. Crazy Horse’s father, Worm, wanted it that way. He distrusted not only the white man but also jealous tribesmen whom he believed turned on his son in his final days. “His father hid his body so not even my sister [Black Shawl] knew where it was buried,” said Red Feather, Crazy’s Horse’s brother-in-law at the time he was mortally wounded by a bayonet-wielding post guard at Fort Robinson, Neb., on Sept. 5, 1877 (see the Amos Bad Heart Buffalo drawing at above right).

By most accounts the elderly Worm and wife had Crazy Horse’s body wrapped in his prized red blanket and transported east to a burial site at the Spotted Tail Agency near Camp Sheridan. There it was placed into a coffin with ceremonial objects and foodstuffs. The coffin was then set atop a low scaffold, around which Worm had a carpenter build a protective fence. Red Feather recounted how an eagle walked on the coffin each night, speaking to the warrior’s enduring spirit.

Within weeks the Army moved the Spotted Tail Agency up closer to the Missouri River in Dakota Territory. Horn Chips, a Lakota holy man and contemporary of Crazy Horse, said the warrior’s remains were first reburied at White Clay Creek in northwest Nebraska. However, in interviews in 1907 and ’10 Chips claimed Crazy Horse’s remains were moved to least four other locations, including White Horse Creek (above Manderson, in present-day South Dakota). Sometime later Chips and his brother reburied his bones farther southeast along Wounded Knee Creek, disjointing the legs, wrapping the remains in a black blanket and hiding them within “a butte rock cave.” The last reinterment, Chips claimed, came around 1883, when he cinched up Crazy Horse’s bones in “a rawhide sack” and buried them on land that in 1889 became the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Chips died on Jan. 4, 1916, at around 80 years of age. The secret likely died with him. —R.J.J. DECEMBER 2021

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Gambling Gal Alleged onetime Confederate spy Belle Siddons may have come to Deadwood, Dakota Territory, and opened a gambling hall under the alias Madame Vestal. Women and gambling went together in the West, as depicted in this lively saloon scene by California artist Lee Dubin.

OPPOSITE: LEE DUBIN; THIS PAGE: ABC TELEVISION/BUREAU OF INDUSTRIAL SERVICE

THE WESTERN BELLE WHO NEVER WAS Belle Siddons was a debutante and Confederate spy who landed in a St. Louis prison before making her mark in Deadwood under assumed names—or was she?

By Jim Motavalli

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records fails to turn up any mention of her debutante days, her supposed trial and conviction, or time spent with other female Confederate spies at that city’s well-known Gratiot Street prison. “Several society columns made mention of her,” purports a 2020 article in the Jefferson City, Mo., News Tribune, but that assertion and A REMARKABLE WOMAN the Examiner’s claim that “she had made quite Madame Vestal and H er Career a sensation in Jefferson City on her debut in on the F rontiers. society” simply aren’t reflected in the archives.

Twenty Years of Romance and In the wake of the Examiner piece, however, Adventure–P itiable Condition of a ACTRESS KATHLEEN CROWLEY came a curious twist. In an Oct. 22, 1881, blurb Once Noted Western B elle. the Deadwood-based Weekly Pioneer expressed its doubts about the syndicated story “of a woman at present In frequently florid detail the unnamed author told the colorful story of the beautiful Belle Siddons, debutante of in jail in that city, who, we infer, is Monte Verdi [sic], formerly a distinguished family in Civil War St. Louis who became of this city.” If its inference was correct, the Pioneer wrote, “The article, although based on facts, contains many inaccua defiant Confederate spy and was ultimately caught and imprisoned. On her release she married a U.S. Army sur- racies.” It would have been helpful had the editor enumergeon from Kansas City, Mo., and moved to Texas. Soon ated the falsehoods for readers, but fact-checking was not widowed, she joined the gold rush to Deadwood, Dakota a priority in frontier journalism.

If Siddons didn’t exist, then the woman portrayed in San Territory, where she opened a gambling hall under the assumed name Madame Vestal. Her fortunes took a down- Francisco is likely a composite, as Deadwood card dealer, singer and saloonkeeper Lurline Monte Verde (alias Madame turn, the paper wrote, when she became the paramour and confederate of lowlife stage robber and road agent Archie Vestal) most definitely did exist and was amply documented in McLaughlin (alias Cummings). It was his demise at the end newspapers of the period. She married a well-known musician of a rope that sent Belle spiraling into drug addiction and named Eugene Holman, toured with him to great reviews, ran a bar, dealt cards, got into scrapes and turned up later a pitiable appearance in San Francisco’s drunk tank. running a brothel in the notoriously open town of Las Vegas, “Her career has been eventful and exciting,” the Examiner wrote. “She has passed through the several phases of life— New Mexico Territory. There’s no known photo of her, either.

While the woman in the Examiner story was portrayed belle of society, affianced bride, spy, hospital nurse, gamas “a slave to opium and brandy” who was “fast drinking bler’s wife, gambler, confederate of robbers, saloonkeeper— and now, after wandering all over the frontiers, she finds herself into the grave” (some period accounts claimed Belle herself behind the bars of the female cell in the City Jail of was also afflicted with cancer), Monte Verde appeared onstage in the mining camps for at least three years after what San Francisco.” the Examiner implied was her imminent demise in San That newspapers nationwide reprinted the lurid story is not surprising. The 1792 Postal Service Act permitted pub- Francisco. She’s on the bill, for instance, at the Theatre lishers to exchange copies of their newspapers through the Comique (“The Finest Variety Entertainment in the West!”) mails for free, and material culled from these exchanges in Butte, Montana Territory, in January 1882, and in August supplied much of the copy for harried, short-staffed editors 1884 Idaho Territory’s Lewiston Teller touted nightly appearances by “vocal star” Monte Verde in the booming Murray without much local news.

Thus a new Western legend was born. The Examiner story mining district.

According to a profile in the Oct. 18, 1881, Las Vegas Daily became the basis for scores of subsequent profiles of Belle Siddons in magazines, books, broadcasts and online posts. Optic, the mysterious Monte Verde first ventured to that New Today she remains a minor celebrity, having made appear- Mexico Territory town in September 1879 and began dealing ances in 1950s radio serials and TV Westerns. Jeanne Bates short faro at the Toe-Jam saloon on Centre Street. “There she played Siddons on four episodes of the 1958 CBS Western led a life of dissolution,” the paper wrote. After a stint on radio drama Frontier Gentleman, and Kathleen Crowley por- the road Monte Verde returned to Las Vegas in March 1880.

When she wasn’t entertaining audiences at the local Globe trayed her in “Destinies West,” a 1962 episode of the Western TV series Bronco. At least in theory she’s better looking than Theatre with her banjo playing, Madame Vestal was luring men into The Parlor, a “palace of pleasure” she opened on notorious outlaw Belle Starr (Myra Belle Shirley)—though Sixth Street. not nearly as famous.

On May 18, 1880, the Las Vegas Daily Gazette reported the Despite her legendary beauty, there are no known photographs of Belle Siddons—perhaps because she never existed death of a “demimonde” (prostitute) named Minnie Clark of typhoid fever at “the residence of Monte Verde.” On the Fourth under that name. A search of St. Louis newspapers and other

OPPOSITE: LEE DUBIN; THIS PAGE: ABC TELEVISION/BUREAU OF INDUSTRIAL SERVICE

n Sept. 18, 1881, readers of San Francisco’s Daily Examiner stirred their coffee while reading an unusual front-page story. The headlines were catchy:

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Far from appearing to mourn, she continued to make the rounds at of July that year Monte Verde drew notice in the Gazette for “using a knife a little too freely.” In De Bar’s Opera House and local parties, dancing and socializing with its 1881 profile the Optic wrote, “She has ruined Union officers. All along, however, she was secretly feeding information plied from her admirers to Confederate Generals Nathan many a Las Vegas young man and Bedford Forrest and Sterling Price. She got away with it ‘broke up’ some of the older ones, a until late 1862. That December, on learning of her impendnumber of whom still reside here.” ing arrest from a sympathetic source on Union Maj. Gen. The Parlor, or a place like it, was Samuel Ryan Curtis’ staff, Belle fled for the protection of still operating as late as 1883. That the Southern states. But she was caught.

January the Daily Gazette cited the “When brought before General [ John McAllister] Scho“glamour and painted vice of Monte field, the proud Southern beauty daringly announced her Verde’s ‘parlor house.’” The referguilt,” wrote the Examiner. If a Belle Siddons had been ence appeared in a cautionary tale, arrested and tried in such a flamboyant manner, it should written in the melodramatic style of be on the public record, but a search of period newspapers the period, about a young man of STERLING PRICE and other accounts of Confederate women who ran afoul good virtue ruined by the siren of Union law failed to reveal a female spy by that name. Gensong of “the gambling table and eral Schofield was real enough, but there is no record of his dissolute companions.” ever having tried such a case.

So it appears either Belle/ Belle claimed to have spent only a few months in the Gratiot Monte Verde/Madame Vestal Street prison before being exiled down South. Her next move, managed to pull herself togethonce hostilities had ceased, seemed credible enough. If her er after her 1881 stint in a San beloved Confederates couldn’t win the “War of Northern Francisco drunk tank, or she was Aggression,” they could win the peace—at least in Missouri. never there. Monte Verde was Thus, she became a lobbyist in the state capital, Jefferson always cagey about her past. “No NATHAN BEDFORD City, fending off “carpetbaggers” and advocating for such one in Las Vegas knew her full FORREST causes as amnesty for former bushwhackers and Rebel solhistory,” wrote the Optic, citing that as a reason locals ate up the Examiner piece. diers. Belle’s methods for twisting politicians’ arms were similar to those she’d employed as a spy. “She became notorious for her subtle The broad outlines of the Belle Siddons power and influence upon certain members story, via the Examiner, are these: The reporter of the Legislature,” the Examiner wrote, “and happens across a disheveled wreck in the San many were the scandalous stories afloat of caFrancisco City Jail, recognizes her in the gas- rousals, wine suppers and mysterious excursions light and persuades her to share her story. Belle to St. Louis.”

Of course, none of that is in the public record, Siddons, beautiful and “intensely Southern at heart,” was the “belle of St. Louis” at the outset either. A search of Missouri newspaper archives of the Civil War. There she met the love of her between 1865 and ’72 turns up references only to life, a Confederate captain named Parrish, who the celebrated Welsh-born actress Sarah Siddons. became her “devoted worshipper” and even One wonders whether the anonymous scribe fought a duel on her account. Alas, he was soon of the Examiner story borrowed the surname called South and killed in an early skirmish. Siddons from that acclaimed thespian.

The scene changes when Belle meets a “hand“His death seems to have changed the entire JOHN M ALLISTER disposition and course of life of Miss Siddons,” some young sport from Kansas City” named SCHOFIELD Dr. Newt Hallet, an Army surgeon with Souththe Examiner wrote.

TOP: DEADWOOD HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMISSION (2); CENTER AND BELOW: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)

Gem in Deadwood In the Dakota Territory town Monte Verde/Madame Vestal had an engagement at Al Swearengen’s Gem Theater (at left and above) and also ran a competing saloon/gambling hall.

ern sympathies. The two were reportedly married in 1868 and stationed at Fort Brown, in Cameron County, Texas, where Belle learned the rudiments of nursing in the post hospital. There, in his off-duty hours, Hallet also taught his curious wife how to deal faro, Spanish monte, blackjack and other card games. But alas, a year later the doctor died of yellow fever, leaving Belle to reinvent herself again. (Before you shed a tear for poor Dr. Hallet, know that he, too, is absent from the historical record.) Widow Hallet took up her husband’s yen for gambling. Her early exploits as a dealer came in Kansas, where she honed a reputation as a cardsharp and also gained a new moniker— Madame Vestal.

Here Belle’s story begins to track with that of traveling gambler Monte Verde. The Black Hills Gold Rush peaked around 1876, and where there was gold, there was money in the pocket of potential marks.

An account that August 4 from Wyoming Territory’s Hat Creek Dateline expounded on Monte Verde’s grand arrival in Deadwood:

TOP: DEADWOOD HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMISSION (2); CENTER AND BELOW: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)

The most colorful caravan to come up the Cheyenne-Deadwood trail so far is here today. It is the gambling establishment of Lurline Monte Verde. At least a dozen of her counting dealers, spindlemen, bartenders and bouncers are accompanying her on this trip. She is traveling in a yellow omnibus that has been remodeled into a comfortable home on wheels, with a bed, alcohol stove for light cooking, curtained windows and a shelf for books. When tired of riding inside, she rides on top with the driver.

What Happens in Las Vegas By 1880 Monte Verde was running a brothel in Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory (photographed here in a period street scene), when a prostitute died at her place.

TOP: GRANGER; RIGHT: PHOTO 12/GETTY IMAGES; FAR RIGHT: NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

The caravan appears to have been fit for a pasha, hardly standard fare in the hastily erected shantytowns of the Black Hills. Lurline’s maid and staff traveled in a second wagon, while a third carried baggage and served as the commissary. Bringing up the rear was a wagon packed with the entourage’s large tent and attendant gambling paraphernalia.

The proprietor herself made an even bigger splash. “Lurline is the most beautiful, charming and sophisticated traveler so far to chance the trip to Deadwood Gulch,” the paper gushed. “She is in her early 30s, always carefully groomed and never loses her sloe-eyed smile.” Even the New-York Tribune took note. “Then there is Monte Verde,” the paper wrote in 1878, “with her dark eyes and tresses, who upon her arrival in Deadwood stood upon a board and was borne through the town on the shoulders of four strapping miners and now deals ‘21’ and dances a jig with a far-off look in her left eye.”

ACTRESS SARAH SIDDONS

Composite Character?

Western saloons, like that at left, were the reported haunts of mystery woman Belle Siddons, a name possibly borrowed from a popular actress (above).

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She is probably the most gifted female in the hills, has a somewhat large figure, dark eyes, dark hair; is a most excellent dancer and singer; has a quiet, unostentatious way, yet fully self-possessed. On the stage, in the role of a comic dancer or songstress, she is greatly admired.…She deals “21,” sings, dances, plays excellently and yet mingles in the rough crowd of the gambling saloon and appears enchanted with her surroundings.

In a 1997 write-up for the Rapid City Journal correspondent Irma Klock seconded the description of Monte Verde as a “somewhat large figure.” Klock, author of All Roads Lead to Deadwood, related the traveling gambler’s March 1877 return to Deadwood for an engagement at Al Swearengen’s Gem Theater. Two men with a horse met her stage on the outskirts of town, intending to escort Monte Verde to the theater.

The lady, Klock wrote, “weighed close to 300 pounds,” and as the men boosted her into the saddle, she fell into a snowbank, unleashing a flood of vulgarity. “Her language was truly scandalous,” Klock wrote, “enough to melt the snowdrifts. Most of her tirade was directed toward the management of the Gem.” Other accounts Leadville Lady

Only men are visible in this gambling hall, but traveling gambler Monte Verde was in the Colorado boomtown in 1879–80.

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The next chapter of Belle’s story in the Examiner is definitely based on fact. There was indeed a Dakota Territory stage robber and road agent named Archie McLaughlin (alias Cummings). According to the paper, Belle became his lover and an informant for his gang, employing her spying skills to glean intelligence from conversations overheard in the gambling hall.

Strengthening the Examiner’s version somewhat is the existence of a Moore’s Patent Firearms revolver, engraved on the backstrap To Belle, with love , from A rchie , that surfaced for auction in 2016. Its factory presentation case bears the related inscription Madame Vestal. If nothing else, the revolver is an interesting, period-correct artifact (30,000 similar pistols were made between 1864 and ’70).

On Nov. 3, 1878, vigilantes wrested McLaughlin from authorities and lynched him. Monte Verde does not appear by name in period accounts

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OMAHA BEE

Monte Verde and Wild Bill Hickok would have made quite the pair, but he’d been murdered while playing poker at Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon No. 10 just two days before her arrival. In his absence, local papers gave the lady gambler great reviews, the most detailed of which ran in the Jan. 10, 1878, Yankton Daily Press and Dakotaian:

TOP: FFF MOVIE POSTERS; BOTTOM: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

Did She Look or Sound Like Belle?

Jeanne Bates, third from left and facing Charles Starrett in the 1944 Western Sundown Valley, was the voice of Belle Siddons on the radio show Frontier Gentleman.

confirm Monte Verde’s ability to curse like a sailor, if not her girth.

Among her contemporaries was John Slaughter McClintock, who arrived in Deadwood in 1876 looking for gold. In his 1939 memoir Pioneer Days in the Black Hills he recalled Monte Verde vividly. Her venue was a large, hastily erected frame building known as Eureka Hall, which featured a bar and gambling concessions. “It was here,” McClintock wrote, “that Eugene Holman, an accomplished violinist, and his consort, ‘Monte Verde,’ one of the finest singers ever heard in Deadwood, furnished the music.” The popular gaming establishment was at 135 Main St., near the Wall Street intersection, and “Miss Monte Verdi [sic]” is listed at that address in the 1878–79 Collins’ Deadwood Resident Directory.

Her establishment would have been direct competition to Swearengen’s neighboring Gem, which boasted prizefights, dancers, singers, comedians, multiple faro tables and, of course, a bevy of prostitutes. Monte Verde and Swearengen doubtless had dealings—after all, the latter controlled Deadwood’s opium trade, and the lady gambler was reportedly a devotee of the drug. But while Swearengen, Hickok, Calamity Jane and other historical figures featured as characters on the popular Western TV series Deadwood, Monte Verde did not.

Farewell to Belle

OMAHA BEE

TOP: FFF MOVIE POSTERS; BOTTOM: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

of the gang, but the Examiner claimed that Belle, after one failed robbery, paid a secret visit to their lair to nurse her lover and another wounded robber back to health. On learning of McLaughlin’s hanging, she was reportedly inconsolable, fled town and tried to kill herself with an overdose of morphine. A January 1879 account in The Cheyenne Daily Sun provides a strikingly similar account from an unnamed woman who was almost certainly Monte Verde. Believing herself dying, she had summoned a reporter, to whom she gave a lurid, albeit embellished, account of her involvement with the road agents.

“I am familiar with nearly all the members of the gang recently engaged in stage robbery,” the woman told the Sun. “I was not in any way connected with their business; but my restaurant in Deadwood was a place of resort for some of the members of the gang, and there I learned much concerning their actions.” The woman confessed to having nursed a wounded road agent, but not McLaughlin himself.

Published nearly three years before the Examiner piece, it likely provided fodder for the Belle Siddons profile in the San Francisco paper.

In the Examiner’s retelling, heartsick Belle became a wandering gambler and addict, though she mounted a brief comeback in the fall of 1879 as “the proprietress of the largest music hall and dance house” in Leadville, Colo. Many Deadwood entertainers did relocate to up-and-coming Leadville around this time, and Eugene Holman and Monte Verde were on the billing there the following fall, but the theater in question was owned and operated by the colorful James McDaniels (builder of the first theater in Deadwood) in conjunction with celebrated courtesan Mollie May. The Nov. 4, 1880, Leadville Daily Herald listed Eugene and Monte Holman among players pledging to stage a forthcoming benefit for the ailing theater owner.

McDaniels was known to be a funny guy, and he knew how to drum up business. In the next morning’s edition of the Herald he mock-scoffed at the idea that “Monti Verdi [sic ] will stand on her head and play ‘Home, Sweet Home’ and all the variations on the banjo with her toenails. In the first place, her toenails ain’t long enough, and then again, she can’t stand on her head, anyhow.”

It’s entirely possible most of the Examiner story was true—that Monte Verde was a former Confederate spy and did indeed inhabit a San Francisco jail cell in September 1881. In that case, her real name might have been something other than Belle Siddons. If we’re going down that road, consider circumstantial connections to the mysterious Mary Ann Pitman. Her bona fides as a Confederate spy are unimpeachable, though much of her story remains unknown.

Born in Kentucky around 1836, Pitman later moved to Tennessee. At the outbreak of the Civil War she disguised herself as a man to join the 22nd Tennessee Infantry Regiment (aka “Freeman’s Regiment”). As “Lieutenant

On Oct. 10, 1881, Nebraska’s Omaha Bee picked up the San Francisco Examiner story about the collapse of once-beautiful Belle Siddons, who was in a drunk tank.

Rawley,” she fought in the April 1862 Battle of Shiloh. When it was discovered Pitman was female, General Forrest was reportedly so impressed by her skulduggery that he enlisted her as a spy and dispatched her to St. Louis to acquire desperately needed weapons and ammunition. To avoid suspicion, she reverted to her identity as a woman and went by the alias “Mary Hays.”

Pitman was eventually captured by federal forces and put on trial, whereupon she switched sides. “I found the Union officers and soldiers not to be the desperadoes which I had been taught to believe them to be,” she told Colonel John P. Sanderson, provost marshal of the military Department of the Missouri, in June 1864. She also expressed intimate knowledge of a vast spying and sabotage operation organized by Copperheads (Northern turncoats) of the Knights of the Golden Circle secret society. Belief in Pitman’s story was split along party lines. Then, much as now, papers aligned with either the Republican or Democratic parties (the former rallying behind the Union, the latter the Confederacy). Bent on defaming Pitman, the Ohio-based pro-Democratic Cadiz Sentinel published and widely distributed a story maligning her as “a mulatto girl” who “drinks, chews tobacco, smokes, dresses in men’s clothing when necessary and is addicted to all the vices of a woman who is a regular camp follower.” That’s a prostitute, if the meaning isn’t clear.

No pictures of Pitman survive, and after giving her sensational testimony, she vanished from the historical record. Could she have heeded Horace Greeley’s famous advice—slightly amended to “Go West, young woman”—and changed her name in the process to Lurline Monte Verde?

Jim Motavalli, based in Fairfield, Conn., is the author of nine books, including The Real Dirt on America’s Frontier Legends and The Real Dirt on America’s Frontier Outlaws. For further reading he recommends Wicked Women: Notorious, Mischievous and Wayward Ladies From the Old West, by Chris Enss, which includes a chapter titled “Belle Siddons: The Reformed Spy.” DECEMBER 2021

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Riding Point for the Cheyennes The Dog Men, called The Dog Soldiers in this painting by Joe Beeler, earned renown for their military prowess while protecting their central Plains people.

WATCHDOGS of the CHEYENNE

Staking themselves literally and figuratively to their traditional grounds, the Dog Men resisted encroachment on the Plains almost to the last man

I

days. First and foremost, its members were t happened, according to Cheyenne to pledge to protect Tsistsistas (“the people”), oral tradition, far out on the mixedas the Cheyennes called themselves. grass prairies of the high Plains someOn the fourth day two Cheyennes looking where between the Missouri and Platte for their dogs arrived at the lodge, and the river valleys. We don’t know exactly when, young man shared with them what he had but it was before horses were introduced from learned. The pair rushed back to the camp the south, when the Cheyennes were transcircle to share the news while the dog humans forming from farmers to hunters. A young transformed back into dogs. When the other man of little influence, his name lost to time, villagers arrived, the young man asked warleft his camp circle one night, rebuffed in his GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL riors to join his society, and hundreds did so. efforts to form a warrior society and wailing He then directed the villagers to set up their in desperation to receive a vision from the prophet Sweet Medicine and the creator, Maheo. All the lodges around his. After this the Dog Men, as society memdogs from the village, carrying their puppies in their mouths, bers called themselves, were welcomed to pitch their lodges followed the young man out onto the prairie. When he finally within the camp circles of the people, and dogs became sat down to rest, a buffalo hide lodge formed around him. sacred to the Cheyennes.

At that the dogs rushed inside, took human form and began to sing. The “dog humans” blessed the young man and in- The Dog Men ( or Hotamitanio, as translated by period structed him to form a new warrior society based on the cere- ethnologist George Bird Grinnell) were one of seven warrior monies and instructions they taught him over the next three societies of the Cheyennes. Brave warriors and protectors, 56 WILD WEST

TOP: THE DOG SOLDIERS BY JOE BEELER/CLAGGETT REY GALLERY; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

By John H. Monnett

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TOP: THE DOG SOLDIERS BY JOE BEELER/CLAGGETT REY GALLERY; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

they earned regard for their military prowess. Their distinctive loose warbonnets of crow feathers became a sight to be admired and feared by their enemies on the central Plains.

The society honored each of its four bravest Dog Men (often called Dog Soldiers; see sidebar, P. 61) with a wide sash of buffalo hide (later red trade fabric) that draped over the left shoulder and reached the ground. At its trailing end was a picket pin. When enemies attacked, these dog rope warriors would stake themselves to the ground with the picket pin, pledging to fight around its circumference until killed or until another Dog Man released them from their pledge by pulling their picket pin and quirting them away from the scene of the battle. Several Plains tribes, including the Arapaho and Kiowa, emulated their use of dog ropes and other customs.

According to the precontact oral record of the Dog Men, they gathered many captives in order to grow their numbers.

Many ethnologists believe present-day Cheyennes are largely descended from captive women from other tribes. With the introduction of the Rocky Mountain fur trade in the 1830s the Dog Men reached new heights of power, but ironically

they proved central to the eventual fracturing of Cheyenne hegemony, as well as that of their powerful Sioux allies on the Great Plains. The Dog Men were fiercely opposed to Westward expansion by white settlers, so much so that frontier accounts often blamed them for the hostile actions of any Plains Indians, while U.S. troops often ignored deeds by other Indian raiders in their pursuit of the Cheyenne warriors.

Their fearsome reputation led many to believe the Dog Men were invincible. In truth they lost battles along the way, and by 1869 they had all but vanished.

Decades earlier increasing contact with whites had already altered the tribe’s culture and traditions. Trafficking in buffalo meat, fur and hides with trade companies at American forts brought them fully into the capitalist market economy but thinned out that critical game animal. Horses, though certainly a boon to their mobility and resulting rise to power, depleted crops and grazeland, eroding the Cheyennes’ ability to sustain themselves. Firearms both increased their military power and reduced their own numbers. But nothing was as damaging to their way of life as whiskey, which became DECEMBER 2021

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FROM TOP: DOG SOLDIER BY STEVEN LANG OPAM, WWW.LANGART.COM/INFO@LANGART.COM; KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY; DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

a chief trade item and featured in many other interactions with those pouring onto the Plains.

It may be argued that whiskey, directly or indirectly, was a root cause of many, if not most, of the Indian wars in the West.

In the early 1830s and with the establishment of Bent’s Fort an estimated 3,000 Cheyennes— about half the tribe—moved south from the Platte River to the Arkansas River and were recognized from then on as Southern Cheyennes.

(While brothers Charles and William Bent and partner Ceran St. Vrain reportedly didn’t use whiskey in their trade operations, plenty was available up north along the Platte corridor.)

The Dog Men, meanwhile, roamed and raided between the Arkansas and the Platte in what would become Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming, as did several other tribes, including their traditional enemies the Pawnees.

Sometime in 1837, while rallying support for a vengeance raid against the Kiowas, prominent Dog Man Porcupine Bear began arguing with fellow warrior Little Creek. The drunken tiff turned into a brawl and then a killing, as Porcupine Bear stabbed Little Creek to death with his

DOG SOLDIERS, BY JAMES BAMA/GREENWICH WORKSHOP

Feathered and Fearsome Dog Men could be a menacing sight. In the notes to James Bama’s Cheyenne Dog Soldiers the depicted warrior’s headdress is said to hold four eagle feathers, 25 owl feathers and 450 magpie feathers.

own knife. Among the Cheyennes intertribal murder was not a capital offense; the punishment was banishment for an indefinite amount of time. Thus Porcupine Bear was directed to erect his lodge away from the main Cheyenne camp circles. Most of the Dog Men and their families followed him into quasi exile. As pledged protectors of the people, however, they camped within sight of the principal villages when not off raiding.

In a hard-fought 1838 victory against allied Kiowas, Comanches and Plains Apaches at Wolf Creek (in present-day northwest Oklahoma), Porcupine Bear alone slew a dozen enemies and counted 20 coups, and the outlawed Dog Men proved themselves loyal protectors of the people. Two years later principal Dog Men, with the help of William Bent, negotiated a lasting peace with their southern adversaries, recognizing Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho lands as lying between the Arkansas and the North Platte, and those of the Comanches, Kiowas and Plains Apaches as lying south of the Arkansas. That prompted more Cheyennes to join the Dog Men camps. Their numbers saw another uptick after the devastating cholera epidemic of 1849, which the warrior society largely survived. By 1850 many Dog Men had married into the southern Oglala and Brulé Sioux, further boosting their numbers.

The Cheyennes lost scores of warriors in an ill-considered 1853 fight with Pawnees and Potawatomis on the latter’s home ground on the southern Plains, though Dog Men likely didn’t participate.

But it was the Pikes Peak Gold Rush, which reached fever pitch in 1859, that marked the most significant and volatile turning point for the Dog Men and Southern Cheyennes at large. The South Platte and Smoky Hill trails, running through what would become Kansas and eastern Colorado Territory, were at the heart of the Dog Men’s hunting grounds. They often camped along the Smoky Hill River and each year defended their turf from Pawnee hunters venturing south of the Platte from Nebraska Territory. By the early 1860s prospectors, freighters and stage lines were using the two trails as major thoroughfares into Denver.

A stage route operated by Russell, Majors and Waddell operated along the Smoky Hill, while freight companies brought in supplies weekly along both routes. The traffic and resulting degradation of the short-grass prairie disrupted buffalo migration patterns. The Cheyennes realized all too well the threat to their future when the U.S. government established Colorado Territory in February 1861. Determined to drive away the intruders, the Dog Men stepped up their raids on homesteads and passersby.

With the establishment of Forts Larned (1859) and Lyon (1860) in Kansas Territory to protect traffic through the region, the raids intensified and brought military reprisals. Disputes over the best course of action fractured the traditional band structure of the Cheyennes. Those seeking trade and accommodation gathered around Chief Black Kettle, while those favoring resistance gathered around the Dog Men led by Bull Bear, who was also a council chief. Cheyenne bands were traditionally matrilineal, a separate and larger group structure than the warrior societies. Society members were also members of their wives’ bands, each led by a council chief. By the 1860s, however, the Dog Men had grown so numerous that they transcended these traditions and became a de facto band, patrilineal in structure, as the men who joined the society brought their families into its camp.

In the fall of 1864 Major Edward Wynkoop of the 1st Colorado Volunteer Cavalry, the post commander at Fort Lyon charged with keeping peace on the Plains, persuaded friendly Cheyenne council chiefs to come

FROM TOP: DOG SOLDIER BY STEVEN LANG OPAM, WWW.LANGART.COM/INFO@LANGART.COM; KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY; DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

DOG SOLDIERS, BY JAMES BAMA/GREENWICH WORKSHOP

Taking a Breather A warrior gives himself and his pony a rest but keeps his rifle close at hand, in Stephen Lang’s recent painting Dog Soldier. The Dog Men were the Southern Cheyennes’ principal military force.

heated up again in 1867 as the government prepared to push two major railroads across the Dog Men’s lands—the Union Pacific through the Platte Valley (effecting a transcontinental link with the Central Pacific, building east from California) and the Union Pacific Eastern Division (later renamed the Kansas Pacific) along the Smoky Hill trail to Denver. In the absence of a ratified treaty, the Cheyennes continued to to Denver from the Smoky Hill to treat for peace with Colorado Terri- roam between the Arkansas and the Platte and tory Governor John Evans. The governor was displeased with Wynkoop’s along the two projected railroad routes. By then the renowned Northern Cheyenne warrior action, as he wanted to further punish the Cheyennes. In ambiguous Roman Nose, a member of the Crooked misinterpretations at Camp Weld that September the chiefs underLance warrior society, had headed stood that if they reported to Fort Lyon and camped on nearby south from the Powder River CounSand Creek, the soldiers would protect them. But Evans had try to aid his friends among the issued a previous ultimatum to the chiefs to surrender. He Dog Men. Stopping at freight staand Colonel John Chivington, commander of the 1st Voltions along the Smoky Hill, he unteers and the soon-to-be-formed 3rd Volunteers, had warned workers to be out of the no intention of making peace. Both instead resolved to country by winter or there would follow the standing instructions of Maj. Gen. Samuel Ryan be war. Rumors of a spring war Curtis, commander of the military Department of Kansas, persisted in early 1867. The govto roundly defeat the Cheyennes. Black Kettle and White ernment responded with a show Antelope’s people, along with Chief Niwot and some ArapaBULL BEAR of military force. hos, accepted Evans’ garbled invitation, gathered their people In April 1867 Maj. Gen. Winfield and moved to Sand Creek. But Bull Bear and the Dog Men Scott Hancock, who had no experience weren’t fooled and returned to their camp on the Smoky Hill. fighting Indians, led a force that included the It was a wise decision, as the Dog Men escaped Chivington’s Novemnewly formed 7th U.S. Cavalry under Lt. Col. ber 29 attack and massacre at Sand Creek.

Survivors fled to Bull Bear’s Dog Men camp on the Smoky Hill, and George Armstrong Custer to parley with the together they moved to a winter village on Cherry Creek, near present-day chiefs of a mixed Dog Men and Sioux camp St. Francis, Kan., which offered sheltered bluffs and forage for the cold on the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas near Fort months. From there the chiefs sent the war pipe to the Oglala and Brulé Larned. Roman Nose rode right up to Hancock.

Sioux on the Platte and to the Arapahos, who had also suffered at Sand Prior to their meeting the warrior had boasted Creek. The Southern Cheyennes again embraced the Dog Men as their he would kill the general, but Bull Bear had dismain fighting force. Making war in winter was not the usual practice, but outrage over Sand Creek prompted calls for swift retribution. In January 1865 combined war parties swept across Kansas and Colorado like a whirlwind. Twice they attacked and burned the freighting hub at Julesburg, Colorado Territory, defying attempts by troops at neighboring Camp Rankin (later Fort Rankin/Fort Sedgwick) to stop them. Any bluecoat venturing away from his post was public enemy number one for the Dog Men. That summer Congress sent peace commissioners to Denver to negotiate a new treaty. Black Kettle and other friendly chiefs agreed to a reservation along the Arkansas in Kansas and Colorado Territory. The Dog Men adamantly refused. Coloradoans wanted the recalcitrant Cheyennes exterminated, while Kansas authorities nixed a new reservation in their state. Preoccupied with the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, the Senate never ratified the October 1865 Treaty of the Little Arkansas.

Life on the Plains remained relatively peaceful in 1866, with the exception of depredations committed by young Dog Men. But things

ROMAN NOSE

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Forsyth’s scouts for more than a week at Beecher Island, though the brash Roman Nose paid with his life. That experiment led to Sheridan’s winter campaign of 1868–69, highlighted by the November 27 Battle of the Washita, in which Custer’s 7th Cavalry decimated Black Kettle’s village and killed the peace chief. The Dog Men were also absent from that battle. Some were downstream on the Washita, rode up to the battle site and helped push Custer back north. In the aftermath many Cheyennes went into camp on the Sweetwater River in Indian Territory. Custer

GEORGE BENT AND WIFE MAGPIE

Dog Men Don’t Die They do, of course, but while they had all but vanished by 1869, warrior societies lived on, as captured in this 1910 photo by Edward S. Curtis.

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LEFT: MICHAEL C. ROCKEFELLER MEMORIAL COLLECTION/METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3), INCLUDING A CIRCA 1905 EDWARD S. CURTIS PHOTO AT BOTTOM RIGHT

The Death of Roman Nose The renowned Northern Cheyenne Dog Man proved fearless in the 1868 Battle of Beecher Island, until, as depicted in this 1895 sketch, he flung his arms into the air and fell dead.

TOP: BRITISH LIBRARY; FAR LEFT: J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM; LEFT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

suaded him, so Roman Nose settled for counting coup and leaned in to touch the face of the hero of Gettysburg and future presidential candidate.

When Hancock later discovered the warriors and their families had abandoned the camp, he ordered it burned and directed Custer to pursue the fugitives. War had returned to the central Plains.

The Dog Men and bold Sioux allies such as Pawnee Killer ran circles around Custer, chasing him from the Republican Valley south to Fort Wallace and back again. Meanwhile, Indian raiders targeted freight stations, trail traffic and settlers.

On August 21 the Dog Men engaged the 18th Kansas Volunteer Cavalry and buffalo soldiers of the 10th U.S. Cavalry at Prairie Dog Creek in Kansas, pinning down the soldiers overnight. At one point the Dog Men halted all freight and stage traffic to Denver. The futility of the Hancock expedition again led the government to send peace commissioners to negotiate with the Plains tribes. That fall, after talks with the northern tribes stalled at Fort Laramie, the commission moved south to Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas to treat with the southern tribes.

This time around Cheyennes under Black Kettle and other council chiefs agreed to a reservation south of the Arkansas in Indian Territory (presentday Oklahoma). Only through the negotiating efforts of interpreter George Bent—the son of trader William Bent and his Cheyenne wife, Owl Woman —did the Dog Men agree to the treaty. Bent’s words went unrecorded, but promises were exchanged.

The peace would not last. On Aug. 2, 1868, some 200 warriors from among the Cheyennes, Sioux and Arapahos waiting for annuities at Fort Larned left to raid the Pawnees. The Dog Men were not among them; Bull Bear and his people showed up at Fort Dodge a few days later. But between August 10 and 12 a number of raiders descended on the Saline and Solomon river valleys in Kansas, killing, raping and pillaging. By August 13 Lt. Col. Alfred Sully was on scene and collected affidavits from settlers, some of whom said the raiders may have been white whiskey peddlers and renegade Indians from north of the Platte. It made no difference. Major General Philip Sheridan, commander of the Department of the Missouri, called up reinforcements to advance on all Indians between the Arkansas and the Platte.

The Dog Men were again at war with the government, as were most Cheyennes, save Black Kettle’s peace faction. The raids in Kansas persisted into fall. Sheridan’s experiment with the “Forsyth Scouts”—a mobile ranger unit of 48 frontiersmen hastily recruited from Forts Harker and Hays—failed to catch the enemy. Indeed, in mid-September hundreds of Dog Men under Bull Bear and Tall Bull pinned down Major George

Making Them Sweat Curtis photographed this frame of a sweat lodge, used by Dog Men and other tribesmen to cleanse and purify the body. The very sight of Dog Men was enough to make enemies of the Cheyennes sweat.

LEFT: MICHAEL C. ROCKEFELLER MEMORIAL COLLECTION/METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3), INCLUDING A CIRCA 1905 EDWARD S. CURTIS PHOTO AT BOTTOM RIGHT

TOP: BRITISH LIBRARY; FAR LEFT: J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM; LEFT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

Cheyenne Challenge A mounted warrior wounds a foot soldier who confronts him in one of 105 drawings from the Maffet Ledger, a 19th-century compilation of drawings by an estimated 22 Cheyenne artists.

pursued and in mid-March 1869, through skillful maneuvering, took hostages from the main Cheyenne village and negotiated a surrenPHILIP SHERIDAN der and the release of white captives, whom he transported triumphantly to Fort Hays.

Most Dog Men, meanwhile, remained farther north, raiding and taking captives along the Republican River. Sheridan tasked Maj. Eugene A. Carr and the 5th U.S. Cavalry with cleaning out the valley. On July 11, 1869, Carr’s 244 troops and Frank North’s 50 Pawnee Scouts caught the Dog Men under Tall Bull as the latter sought escape north across the South Platte in high water at a place called Summit Springs, Colorado Territory.

Carr’s force decimated the Dog Men, killing Tall Bull. Rope wearer Wolf With Plenty of Hair was the last Dog Man to stake himself out and die in battle. Among the dead was white captive Susanna Alderdice, whose husband, Tom, had fought at Beecher Island.

Summit Springs broke the back of the Dog Men as the Southern Cheyennes’ principal military force. A handful fled south to the reservation and fought again alongside Comanches at Palo Duro Canyon and Adobe Walls during the 1874–75 Red River War, the last of them surrendering with Chief Gray Beard’s band. A few fled north from Summit Springs, and Dog Men may have fought at the June 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. In

1878–79 Dog Men were among those who traveled north with Dull Knife’s Northern Cheyennes in their famed exodus from the Darlington Agency in Indian Territory. One of the Dog Men, Tangle Hair, was a hero of the Fort Robinson, Neb., outbreak of Jan. 9, 1879, taking bullets to the legs while shielding women and children as they escaped from the barracks. He later became a council chief.

Bull Bear became the first Cheyenne chief to enroll his children in white reservation schools.

Today the Dog Men society pursues philanthropic endeavors and honors the Cheyenne veterans of American wars since those proud days on the prairies.

John H. Monnett is a professor emeritus of history at Metropolitan State University of Denver and author of The Battle of Beecher Island and the Indian War of 1867–1869. For further reading he recommends Life of George Bent, by George E. Hyde, and The Fighting Cheyennes, by George Bird Grinnell.

DOG MEN OR DOG SOLDIERS? Throughout the 20th-century historians often referred to this most famous of Cheyenne warrior societies as the “Dog Soldiers,” due to their military role in Cheyenne society. Ethnologist George Amos Dorsey—curator of the Department of Anthropology at Chicago’s acclaimed Field Museum and one the earliest anthropologists familiar with the warriors and oral traditions of the Cheyenne Nation —emphatically insisted that society members referred to themselves as the “Dog Men.” Cheyenne tribal historian Steve Brady confirmed that the term “Dog Soldier” was absent from

the lexicon of the 19th-century Cheyennes and isn’t used by present-day Cheyennes familiar with their cultural traditions. Historians have largely recognized that fact and revised their narratives accordingly. —J.M. DECEMBER 2021

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NANA’S VENGEANCE RIDE

Seeking retribution for Victorio’s death, the aged but able Chihenne warrior led Apache raiders on a five-week, 1,000-mile rampage across New Mexico Territory

Nana Was Angry

The Chihenne Chiricahua also known as Has-ke-na-dil-tla (“Angry”) sought revenge after his nephew Victorio was slain in battle at Tres Castillos, Mexico.

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OPPOSITE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ABOVE: SWANN GALLERIES

By Bob Hagan

OPPOSITE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ABOVE: SWANN GALLERIES

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hen Mexican army Colonel what Jerusalem is to Jews or Mecca to Muslims, Joaquín Terrazas finally and by 1881 they had been fighting the Ameritrapped the Chiricahua cans for 20 years to keep it.

Chief Victorio in the ChiRumors of great mineral wealth in the Chihuahuan hills of Tres Castillos in mid-October henne homeland began to circulate soon after 1880, he meant to end once and for all the Apathe Mexican War. One version of the popuche threat that had blighted northern Mexico lar “Lost Adams Diggings” legend names Nana JOAQUÍN for generations. After slaying the chief and scores as the Apache chief who warned a Californian TERRAZAS of his followers, Terrazas and his men marched the named Adams (first name lost to history) and surviving women and children to the capital at Chihuafellow prospectors away from the sacred upper hua, where crowds lined the streets and the cathedral bells reaches of a gold-bearing gulch named Zig Zag Canyon. rang out as soldiers paraded by displaying 78 Apache scalps So the story goes, Nana’s men later killed the intruders. from the tips of their pikes.

Years later Asa Daklugie—the son of Chief Juh and a nephew But Terrazas had missed one old Apache warrior, and the of Geronimo—recalled a time raiders returned to his father’s long war was far from over. camp with a mule loaded with “the yellow and white metals At Tres Castillos two small groups of warriors had been the White Eyes love.” Grabbing a handful of ore, Nana preaway from the main body of Apaches when Terrazas sprang dicted, “It is this stuff that will bring our people to ruin and his ambush. Some had been off raiding to replenish the cause us to lose first our land and then our lives.” band’s depleted supply of ammunition. The others had been As he led the survivors away from Tres Castillos in the acting as rear guard under Victorio’s uncle, a tough old man fall of 1880, Nana must have felt his gloomy prophecy had the Mexicans and Americans knew as Nana (variously spelled come true. Yet he refused to give up. To the Apaches revenge “Nane,” “Naneh,” “Naney,” “Nanay” and “Nané” in contem- was a cultural imperative necessary to restore the balance porary sources). Those 20-odd warriors had sought in vain to of their world. break the siege, though a handful of women and children had Around the campfire at night Nana told Kaywaykla and managed to escape into the surrounding desert. After the vic- other young Chiricahuas of Child of the Waters and White tors had departed with their scalps and captives, the survivors Cloud Woman, the mythical Apaches who had dared fearhad returned to find their fellow Apaches’ bodies scattered some perils and overcome great difficulties to save their among the rocks. people. “Grandfather impressed upon me that every struggle, “Too late,” mourned Nana’s chief lieutenant, a young whether won or lost, strengthens us for the next to come,” warrior named Kaytennae.

Kaywaykla recalled. “It is not good for people to have an “It is not too late so long as one Apache lives,” Nana easy life. They become weak and inefficient when they cease replied grimly. to struggle. Some need a series of defeats before developing the strength and courage to win a victory.”

By 1881 Nana was well into his 70s. His people knew The question was how to win that victory. Victorio had him as Kas-tziden (“Broken Foot”) for an old injury, though assembled the largest force of warriors in Apachería since as young tribal member James Kaywaykla (who called the the days of Cochise and Mangas Coloradas and had left a respected elder “grandfather”) recalled, “He asked no odds trail of death and destruction across southwest New Mexico because of either age or lameness.” Nana was said to pos- Territory. Yet after his passing there were more intruders in sess power over rattlesnakes (see related article, P. 28), sug- his mountains than ever before. gesting he was a dangerous man to cross. His other Apache The region was fast becoming the “New Eldorado,” The name was Has-ke-na-dil-tla (“Angry”), attesting to his razor- Albuquerque Morning Journal boasted. “The reports from our edged disposition. mining districts are so encouraging as to lead thousands of “He has a strong face, marked with intelligence, courage prospectors into the mountains from North, South, East and and good nature,” then 2nd Lt. John G. Bourke observed, West. New towns are springing up almost every month, and “but with an understratum of cruelty and vindictiveness.” in every direction we can only see enterprise and developLike Victorio, Nana was a member of the Chihenne (“Red ment for the better.”

Paint People”), a Chiricahua band known for the single broad For such men the lure of riches was stronger than the fear red stripe each warrior painted across his face below the eyes. of death itself. The tide of miners was inexorable, and proThe red clay used as tint came from the creek below their tecting them were ranks of U.S. Army soldiers. Victorio had sacred spring—known to Mexicans as Ojo Caliente and to won tactical victories, but ever more soldiers were on the Americans as Warm Springs (a rough translation from the march. The conflict had become a war of attrition, the hosSpanish). North of Alamosa Creek on the western slopes of tiles continually on the jump with weary troopers in stubborn the San Mateo Mountains in southwest New Mexico, the pursuit, guided by Apache scouts the insurgents considered spring was the center of the Chihenne world. It was to them traitors to their own people.

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Nana’s Raid, June–August 1881 Fort Wingate

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To avenge the October 1880 death of Chief Victorio at Tres Castillos, Chihuahua, his elderly Chihenne lieutenant, Nana, led Apache raiders on a five-week, 1,000-mile raid into southwest New Mexico Territory.

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safely ensconced their women and children in the Sierra Madre, he turned back north and traveled secretly to the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona Territory.

He went there to meet Noch-ay-del-klinne, a shaman of the Cibecue band of Western Apaches, who was preaching a mystical vision that promised salvation to demoralized Apaches on the reservation: If the people danced and prayed, dead relatives would return to life, and the whites would disappear.

In the spring of 1881 Nana attended one of these dances, according to Daklugie, who was a young boy on the reservation at the time. Afterward, to prove his spiritual power to any remaining skeptics, Noch-ay-del-klinne conjured up the spirits of Cochise, Mangas Coloradas and Victorio. “Nana said that he had seen this, and the word of Nana was not to be questioned,” Daklugie said. While it’s possible Nana became a convert to the new cult, more likely he saw its potential as a disruptive influence on the Western Apaches.

Though the latter were no friends to the Chiricahuas, were the new prophet to agitate them sufficiently, the resulting uprising might serve to divert troops from New Mexico.

Shortly after Nana’s visit Noch-ay-del-klinne prophesied the great awakening would come later that summer, “when the corn was ripe,” but he said the whites would have to disappear before the dead could return to life. Some followers took that to mean they must do more than dance and pray; were the prophecy to be fulfilled, they would CHIHUAHUA have to act.

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LEFT: FROHNE’S HISTORIC MILITARY; RIGHT: SCHOLARLY RESOURCES

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Chiricahua Leaders at Fort Sill Nana is at center in this circa 1890 portrait in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). At left are Geronimo and Chihuahua; at right, Loco and Ulzana. Nine years earlier Nana had raided into New Mexico Territory.

Renewing the struggle with perhaps no more than 40 warriors was clearly futile. But the Mescaleros to the east had their own grievances against crooked government contractors, duplicitous agents and white horse thieves. Mescalero warriors had comprised a substantial part of Victorio’s force, and Nana knew he could call on them again.

North of Apachería dwelled the Navajos.

Though they were traditional rivals of the Apaches, many had grown so angry with their agent that he had moved back to Albuquerque, leaving the Army to manage his disgruntled charges.

“This large and powerful tribe of Indians has been discontented and dissatisfied for some time,” Brevet Maj. Gen. John Pope, commander of the Department of the Missouri, warned in 1881. “The Navajoes [sic ] could, on reasonable estimate, place 3,000 men in the field—a most formidable force in those mountains, and one which would require a very heavy force of troops to deal with.”

Among the most restless of those warriors were roaming the mountains south of their reservation, and Nana probably contacted them there that winter. Once his own warriors had

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LEFT: FROHNE’S HISTORIC MILITARY; RIGHT: SCHOLARLY RESOURCES

TOP LEFT: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; TOP RIGHT: MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; FAR LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

His own preparations complete, Nana had only to wait on the weather.

The desert Southwest receives half its annual rainfall in the summer monsoon season, when locally heavy thunderstorms fill the natural catchments in the desert . The rains would make it impossible for soldiers to guard all such waterholes and would hamper pursuit by washing away the raiders’ tracks.

Nana and his raiders swept down out of the Sierra Madre in late June.

While still in Chihuahua south of El Paso they attacked in turn a party of railroad surveyors, a stagecoach and a packtrain, leaving a half dozen corpses in their wake as they headed up into Texas. The Army had twice foiled Victorio’s attempts to cross the border there a year earlier, but Nana’s much smaller force forded the Rio Grande and rode north almost to the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation near Fort Stanton without being detected.

On July 17 they ambushed two men leading a string of mules through a canyon near the site of present-day Alamogordo, not realizing it was an Army packtrain. Abandoning their mules, the packers fled into the mountains to join a company of patrolling Apache scouts under 9th U.S. Cavalry 2nd Lt. John F. Guilfoyle. Abandoning his search for Mescalero renegades, Guilfoyle returned to the nearby agency, picked up 20 buffalo soldiers of Company L and led them and the scouts in pursuit of Nana. Managing JOHN GUILFOYLE the friendly Apaches were Chief of Scouts Frank P. Bennett and Sergeant Chihuahua, a Chiricahua of the Chokonen band. Two days later they exchanged shots with the raiders as the latter paused to murder three travelers—two men and a woman—on the road skirting White Sands, but the raiders escaped west into the San Andres Mountains.

For the next week Guilfoyle and his men scoured those rugged mountains, wearing down men, horses and mules. Although the raiders did find one mining camp, where they killed a man and stole a horse and a mule, there was little else of value to them in that barren region. The warriors likely lingered there a time while Nana made a solo pilgrimage to 8,967-foot Salinas Peak—the highest point in the range and sacred to the Chihennes—to renew his power.

Guilfoyle’s troopers caught up with the raiders again on July 25, later claiming to have killed two of Nana’s men, though they found no bodies, only bloodstains. The chase continued across the Jornada del Muerto desert basin to the Rio Grande, which the raiders forded. Nana’s men killed eight more men and captured a young boy as they rode for Ojo Caliente, but soldiers were waiting for them there, so the raiding party turned north into the San Mateos.

While Guilfoyle went into Fort Craig to resupply, a posse of local miners and ranchers took up the pursuit. Unfortunately, the latter proved remarkably careless. Stopping by a canyon spring at midafternoon on August 2, they put their horses out to graze, then retired for meal and a siesta beneath the cottonwoods. They were literally caught napping when Apaches struck. When the dust cleared, one man was dead, several were wounded, and Nana’s raiders had acquired three dozen fresh mounts with which to continue their offensive.

The next day the raiders plundered two ranches before stopping at a sawmill owned by Robert Stapleton, who had once served as a civilian

BRENT WOODS

interpreter at Ojo Caliente. Nana apparently trusted Stapleton enough to leave a message for the soldiers.

“We have killed everyone we have come across thus far, and after we leave here, we will kill everyone we meet again,” Nana told him. He rejected Stapleton’s suggestion they surrender. “No matter where I am—here, there, everywhere—they shoot at me,” he said. “I will die with my face to my bitter foes.”

The Chihennes would be willing to surrender, Nana conceded, if allowed to return to Ojo Caliente. Meanwhile, he set out on a course that must have sent a chill through Colonel Edward Hatch, commander of both the 9th Cavalry and the military District of New Mexico. “I want to try and get some Navajos with me,” Nana told Stapleton as he and his men rode north.

That afternoon Guilfoyle and his men caught and skirmished with the raiders a third time on the north slope of the San Mateos, but Nana slipped the noose once again. Somewhere north of the Datil Mountains he met up with a handful of Navajo allies. He divided the war party into two groups. A dozen warriors rode west toward Arizona Territory, killing 13 men and a woman and capturing five young boys as they went.

Guilfoyle followed but was unable to catch the raiders before they either dispersed into the mountains along the Arizona Territory line or fled north toward the Navajo Nation. A larger party under Nana rode north and then east, en route killing several men and kidnapping a woman and her baby.

By then Hatch had sent every available soldier and scout into the field. Unfortunately, he DECEMBER 2021

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TOP LEFT: HISTORY AND ART COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; TOP RIGHT: GRANGER; BOTTOM: BOB HAGAN

THOMAS SHAW

was desperately short of both men and mounts mountains. But the attacks at last gave Hatch an and had only the vaguest notion of the raiders’ idea where the war party was headed. Nana was whereabouts. Heavy rains had washed out the predictably circling back toward the Chihennes’ railroad tracks, leaving four of the regiment’s sacred spring.

Unfortunately, the colonel had only one comcompanies stranded in Colorado. A fifth was guarding the Mescalero agency, to prevent more pany free to intercept the raiders, and it was warriors from joining the outbreak. That left just among his weakest. Company I had only enough seven companies available for the chase, all horses to mount about two dozen men, and the troop was commanded by a young and inexpeshort of serviceable horses.

Meanwhile, the telegraph lines to headquar- rienced officer. Fresh out of West Point, 2nd Lt. ters were choked with wild rumors and hys- George Burnett was an eager and energetic offiterically exaggerated reports of Indian out- cer, but he had never fought Apaches. To prorages from across the territory. A rancher in vide more mature leadership, the colonel put western New Mexico claimed his men had Prussian-born Lieutenant Gustavus Valois in successfully stood off 200 Navajos, but not command before the company rode out of Fort before the large raiding party had made off Craig. Although he was a Civil War veteran, with “300 head of cattle.” Meanwhile, a dis- Valois had spent most of his career as a quartertraught farmer on a lathered horse rode into master with little field experience. Fortunately, Fort Wingate to report the massacre of an the company had an experienced noncom in entire village south of the nearby Zuni In- 1st Sgt. Moses Williams.

On August 16 the dismounted troopers were dian Reservation.

Unable to separate the wheat from such watering their horses at Alamosa Creek, downchaff, Hatch was forced to split his compa- stream from Ojo Caliente, when they received nies into small detachments and order them word the raiders had killed a family at a nearby to spread out in search of the raiders. Thus ranch. Burnett led a dozen ready men in pursuit the soldiers were outnumbered when they did of the raiders, leaving Valois to follow with the rest of the command when able. encounter the raiders.

Arriving at the ranch, Burnett spotted upOn August 12 Captain Charles Parker was ward of 40 raiders taunting the soldiers patrolling the Rio Salado with 19 men of from the heights above the valley.

Company K when he rode into an Over a long afternoon of confused ambush by some 40 Apaches. Outfighting some raiders lured his denumbered 2-to-1, he lost two killed tachment southwest into the broand three wounded as well as half ken foothills of the Sierra Cuchillo his horses. Only the steady leaderwhile the rest circled back to attack ship of his two veteran sergeants, Valois and his men. Sergeant WilThomas Shaw and George Jordan, liams ultimately saved the day by saved the command from worse.

GEORGE BURNETT persuading Burnett to abandon purBoth of the latter received the Medal suit of the decoys and return in time to of Honor for their actions that day. rescue Valois. Burnett, himself wounded After shaking off Parker, the hostiles twice while rescuing comrades, lost two men continued south, killing seven more men and burning a ranch house before vanishing into the and half his horses before the reunited compa-

FROM TOP: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; STOCK IMAGERY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES

Apache War Fighters Left: Nana is fourth from left, beside Geronimo, in this March 1886 council with Brig. Gen. George Crook (second from right).

Right: Medal of Honor recipient Private Augustus Walley poses with fellow buffalo soldiers in 1898.

Far right: In this sketch Nana surrenders to Crook in 1883. In 1885 he fled the reservation, surrendering for keeps a year later.

TOP LEFT: HISTORY AND ART COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; TOP RIGHT: GRANGER; BOTTOM: BOB HAGAN

FROM TOP: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; STOCK IMAGERY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES

AUGUSTUS WALLEY

ny fell back on Alamosa Creek, blocking Nana’s path to Ojo Caliente.

Burnett, Williams and Private Augustus Walley each received the Medal of Honor for his part in the fight.

The warriors who had decoyed Burnett continued south past the mining camps east of the Sierra Cuchillo, the smoke of burning ranches marking their path, while the main body trailed down the western slopes.

On August 19 the reunited war party ambushed a mixed group of 18 troopers and civilian possemen in Gavilan Canyon. The cavalry commander and the posse leader were each killed in the opening volleys, and the possemen panicked, tangling up the soldiers and their packtrain as they fled up the narrow gorge. By the time Sergeant Brent Woods extricated the survivors from the canyon, four soldiers and two civilians were dead, others were gravely wounded, and 30 horses and a pack mule loaded with ammunition had fallen into the hands of the Apaches. Woods received the Medal of Honor for his cool leadership in the six-hour fight.

With that last victory Nana broke through the cordon Hatch had spread to prevent the raiders’ escape back across the border. The war party killed another four men and kidnapped two boys before crossing into Mexico with their horses and captives.

Ten days later the violence authorities at San Carlos had been nervously anticipating all summer finally erupted when a force of cavalry and Apache scouts arrested Noch-ay-del-klinne. When armed followers intervened to rescue him, all but one of the Apache scouts turned their guns on the soldiers, killing six enlisted men and an officer. Amid the melee troopers shot and bludgeoned the prophet to death before withdrawing to the safety of Fort Apache.

On a rumor Noch-ay-del-klinne’s followers had massacred the entire force of troopers, the Army rushed troops to Arizona Territory from as far away as California and Colorado. By the time the relief forces arrived, the insurgents, bewildered at the death of their prophet, had dispersed. Meanwhile, the Navajo and Mescalero reservations remained conspicuously quiet. Although dozens of their warriors had joined Nana’s raid, their chiefs were determined to avoid another ruinous full-scale war with the Army.

By then Nana had sated his appetite for vengeance. Over five weeks he and his raiders had killed upward of 60 people, wounded many more, taken a dozen captives and stolen hundreds of horses and mules (if not cattle). Although soldiers claimed to have killed and wounded several Apaches, there is no evidence Nana lost a single man, as he left no dead or wounded behind.

But Nana had failed in his efforts to reclaim the Chihennes’ homeland.

While he fought on­—until his final surrender, along with Geronimo and

Naiche, to Brig. Gen. George Crook in March 1886­—Nana never again saw the sacred spring.

He spent the last 10 years of his life as a prisoner of war, dying in captivity in his 90s at Fort Sill, Oklahoma Territory, on May 19, 1896.

“Ussen [the Apache creator] had not commanded that we love our enemies,” Kaywaykla said. “Nana did not love his; and he was not content with an eye for an eye, nor a life for a life.

For every Apache killed, he took many lives.”

R.M. “Bob” Hagan is a former newspaper reporter who spent more than 40 years in New Mexico and now lives on the edge of the Mojave Desert in southern Nevada. He is distantly related to Jack Hagan, one of the pioneering prospectors who opened the Black Range and was killed fighting Victorio. For further reading he recommends Indeh: An Apache Odyssey, by Eve Ball; Chiricahua and Janos, by Lance R. Blyth; The Great Escape: The Apache Outbreak of 1881, by Charles Collins; Apache Voices, by Sherry Robinson; and War of a Thousand Deserts, by Brian DeLay. To learn more visit Hagan’s website [trackingnana.com].

Narrow Monticello Box (at left) leads to Ojo Caliente, which was sacred to the Chihennes.

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Monumental Namesake

David Alan Clark’s 8-foot-tall bronze Jim Bridger (2008) greets visitors to southwest Wyoming’s Fort Bridger State Historic Site.

COURTESY DAVID ALAN CLARK

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BRIDGER IN BRONZE

Sculptors Ott Jones and David Alan Clark depict the iconic mountain man Jim Bridger in exquisite, historically correct detail

COURTESY DAVID ALAN CLARK

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By Fred F. Poyner IV

cattered across the Western United States are sculptures of varying size, accuracy and style that help define one of the archetypal figures of the 19th-century American frontier—the mountain man, whose heyday came during the 1825–40 height of the Rocky Mountain fur trade era.

While period writings, artwork and even photographs survive, the varying degrees of rigor with which sculptors have researched the mountain man—what he looked like, what clothing he wore, the firearms he used and what other equipment he relied on for survival and his livelihood—have resulted in works on a sliding scale between realism and inspired romanticism. The most diligent sculptors have drawn details from the surviving images and written accounts of those who lived and worked as fur trappers, explorers, guides and surveyors. Of course, each sculptor’s own inspired vision also factors into his work.

Several sculptors have rendered statues of Jim Bridger, arguably the most famous of all American mountain men.

Virginia-born James Felix Bridger (March 17, 1804–July 17, 1881) made his mark as a trapper, U.S. Army scout, wilderness guide and pathfinder in the decades after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s groundbreaking 1804–06 Corps of Discovery expedition to the Pacific Coast. Among other milestones, Bridger was one of the first frontiersmen to explore the Yellowstone region and the Great Salt Lake. In his last year Charles M. Russell (1864-1926), the “Cowboy Artist,” sculpted the lost-wax bronze Jim Bridger (see P. 71), which depicts the mountain man on horseback, clean-shaven, wearing fringed buckskins and a wide-brimmed hat, and raising a rifle as his mount shies away from whatever Bridger is targeting. It is an evocative piece.

Two present-day sculptors, Ott Jones and Alan David Clark, have also rendered noteworthy sculptures of Bridger that merit a closer look.

Ott Jones, whose bronze Jim Bridger—King of the Mountain Men is on public display in Bozeman, Mont., thoroughly researched earlier images of Bridger, as well as some of the actual items he wore or carried. When considering which

items to include in the statue’s final design, the sculptor compiled a comprehensive list: • powder horn made of hollow buffalo horn, slung over his left shoulder; • patch knife, hung around his neck, used to cut cloth patches to hold the gunpowder and lead ball in his gun; • large skinning knife with antler handle, tucked beneath his belt; • hatchet, beneath his belt on his backside; • “possibles” bag, in which he carried various items like firemaking materials, cloth for lead shot; • shot bag, hung from his belt in front, which carried lead shot balls; • hollow antler or horn tip, hung around his neck, used to measure the gunpowder; • brush and pick (gun tools), hung from his belt; • cap holder made of leather, hung from his belt; • castoreum (beaver scent), carried in a buffalo horn tip and hung from his belt; • trap, a one-spring setup, carried over his right shoulder.

In 2000 Jones identified three items from the collection of the Montana Historical Society (MHS) at Montana’s Museum in Helena that helped him refine his design. Most important was a postcard produced from a well-known circa 1866 black-and-white portrait of Bridger that shows the mountain man wearing “infrequent” (i.e., new) buckskins and a wide-brimmed hat. The postcard was of such poor quality that Bridger appears clean-shaven. Sharper versions of the same image reveal that Bridger in fact sported a short beard.

Jones’ modeled his final figure with a full beard and mustache (more on that decision later).

Displayed alongside the postcard were a Hawken rifle, a powder horn and binoculars known to have belonged to Bridger. Jones inspected each item and chose to include the rifle (held in the figure’s left hand up close to the muzzle, its butt resting on the ground) and the powder horn (resting on the figure’s right hip, the strap across his left shoulder).

The sculptor chose to omit the binoculars.

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Mountain of a Man

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OPPOSITE: COURTESY OTT JONES; THIS PAGE, FROM LEFT: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY; AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, FORT WORTH; GILCREASE MUSEUM

PHOTO CREDIT

Ott Jones’ 8-foot-tall bronze Jim Bridger—King of the Mountain Men stands within sight of the Bridger Mountains outside the Bozeman Area Chamber of Commerce visitor center in south-central Montana.

A Model Subject

OPPOSITE: COURTESY OTT JONES; THIS PAGE, FROM LEFT: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY; AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, FORT WORTH; GILCREASE MUSEUM

PHOTO CREDIT

The circa 1866 portrait of Bridger at left guided both Jones and Clark as they modeled their statues. In 1926 “Cowboy Artist” Charles M. Russell sculpted the lost-wax bronze Jim Bridger (shown above in two views).

book Firearms, Traps and Tools of the Mountain Men author Carl P. Russell referred to a rifle once owned by Bridger as “the ‘standard’ percussion Hawken rifle as distributed to the mountain men during the greater part of the period of beaver trade…[resembling] in almost every particular the Hawken rifles once owned by Kit Carson, Mariano Medina, Edwin T. Denig and James Clyman.” Since the publication of Russell’s book, however, firearms historians have challenged his claim about the Hawken, noting that ownership of the famous rifle wasn’t widespread until after 1840, which marked the end of the fur trade era.

While items that belonged to Bridger were available to review firsthand, Jones found it more difficult to find contemporary physical descriptions of Bridger or his fur trade cohorts. For help he consulted the 1988 book The Mountain Men, by George Laycock. Laycock includes many details about their accoutrements and appearance, including an especially valuable firsthand description of the typical mountain man from the 1858 book Rocky Mountain Life, by writer and sometime explorer Rufus B. Sage: His hair, through inattention, becomes long, coarse and bushy and loosely dangles upon his shoulders. His head is surmounted by a low-crowned wool hat or a rude substitute of his own manufacture. His clothes are of buckskin, gaily fringed at the seams with strings of the same material, cut and made in a fashion peculiar to himself and associates. The deer and buffalo furnish him the required covering for his feet, which he fabricates at the impulse of want. His waist is encircled with a belt of leather, holding encased his butcher knife and pistols—while from his neck is suspended a bullet pouch securely fastened to the belt in front, and beneath the right arm hangs a powder horn transversely from his shoulder, behind which, upon the strap attached to it, are affixed his bullet mold, ball screw, wiper, awl, etc.

With a gun stick made of some hardwood and a good rifle placed in his hands, carrying from 30 to 35 balls to the pound, the reader will have before him a correct likeness of a genuine mountaineer, when fully equipped.

Jones incorporated many of these details in his design, though it is worth noting Sage didn’t explore the region until the early 1840s, after the close of the fur trade era, and published his account nearly 20 years later.

In a chapter of his book titled “King of the Mountain Men,” Laycock includes a bare-bones description of Bridger as “tall, muscular…having a thick neck, high cheekbones, long brown hair, blue-gray eyes and a hooked nose.” Though he doesn’t cite a source, the profile is similar to one found in a 1905 biographical sketch of Bridger

by Maj. Gen. Grenville M. Dodge, published in the 1925 book James Bridger, by J. Cecil Alter.

As a surveyor for the Union Pacific Railroad, Dodge tapped Bridger for his pathfinding expertise, and the general later employed him as a scout, so his description was from life: In person [Bridger] was over 6 feet tall, spare, straight as an arrow, agile, rawboned and of powerful frame, eyes gray, hair brown and abundant even in old age, expression mild and manners agreeable.

Central to Jones’ modeling process was how to sculpt his subject’s hair, both on the head and face. The aforementioned MHS postcard, capturing Bridger in his early 60s, was the only authenticated image the sculptor had to reference. Thus Jones rendered Bridger with a head of hair that hung partway to the shoulders. His decision to break with the postcard image and depict the mountain man with a full beard and mustache has borne out as partially correct.

In his biographical sketch Dodge cites the 1866 photo as the “only known portrait” of the mountain man. As reproduced in Alter’s book, the image clearly shows Bridger with a scraggly beard but no mustache. Given that Bridger posed DECEMBER 2021

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for the portrait more than a quarter century after the peak of the fur trade, Jones took creative license and added a mustache to his figure of a younger Bridger. The only other sculptural elements not sourced to any historical record are two eagle feathers tucked into the mountain man’s hatband.

While Jones strove to make his statue of Bridger as accurate as possible, he did reference both a human skeleton and a live model to render the basic anatomy of a fit, middle-aged man. The resulting figure captures the famed mountain man’s strength of character as reflected in another passage by Dodge: Bridger was accustomed to carrying metal arrow points in his flesh, to bearing knife and bullet wounds, and to the general discomforts that attended the life of a frontiersman, yet he nevertheless attracted business by his natural graciousness.

Dodge also described the 7-foot-tall granite monument at Bridger’s gravesite at Mount Washington Cemetery in Kansas City, Mo. The general was the patron for the monument, which officials dedicated on Dec. 11, 1904, just before Dodge published his biographical sketch. On its face, above a summary of Bridger’s storied career, is a sculpted bust of the mountain man in relief, clearly adapted from the 1866 portrait.

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The identity of its sculptor is unknown. Regardless, as Jones confirms, “I never used the gravesite for any of my research.”

Having settled on a design, Jones first had his depiction of Bridger cast into maquettes (scale model sculptures) for two commercial editions; the first was 13 inches tall, the second 23 inches tall. In 2003, to cast his final, monumental model in bronze, the sculptor turned to Northwest Art Casting foundry in Bozeman. Gifted by the sculptor to the people of Gallatin County, the statue was unveiled in September 2004 outside the Bozeman Area Chamber of Commerce visitor center, at N. 19th Street and Baxter Lane. Standing atop a 3-foot-tall brick-and-stone pedestal, with the eponymous Bridger Mountains visible in the distance, Jones’ 8-foot-tall bronze serves as fitting tribute to the iconic figure of the Rocky Mountain fur trade era. It is also a credit to Jones’ efforts to include historical details both specific to Bridger and in keeping with written accounts of the period.

David Alan Clark’s monumental bronze Jim Bridger stands at the entrance to Fort Bridger State Historic Site, in the southwest corner of Wyoming. It is a fitting locale, as Bridger and partner Louis Vasquez first established the site in 1843 as a fur trading outpost and resupply point on the Oregon Trail. During the 1857–58 Utah War the mountain man turned scout leased the site to the Army, which occupied it off and on until 1890, when Wyoming was admitted to the Union.

In 2004 Clark approached the Fort Bridger Historical Association with his concept for a sculpture at the historic site. Receptive to the idea, the association commissioned the sculptor and began raising funds to cover the cost of the design process and foundry casting of the 8-foot-tall statue. As expressed on his website, Clark considers research an integral and enjoyable part of any new project: I believe that the best public art is the result of collaboration between my client and myself. My partner (and wife), M.J., and I love researching each new commission, developing novel ways to express the spirit of the place and working closely with our clients to create a unique and timeless work of art.

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COURTESY DAVID ALAN CLARK

On display at Montana’s Museum in Helena, in the collection of the Montana Historical Society, Jones discovered this Hawken rifle, powder horn and binoculars known to have belonged to Bridger.

COURTESY OTT JONES, MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

From His Very Hands

COURTESY DAVID ALAN CLARK

COURTESY OTT JONES, MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

By Clark’s own admission, while his portfolio is “broad and figurative,” he is “not a Western artist.” Thus, while researching and designing the Bridger statue, he and his wife sought the input of two Wyoming-based experts—Martin Lammers, historian of the state historic site, and A. Dudley Gardner, a professor of history and political science at Western Wyoming Community College.

Their collaboration continued through 2006, when the sculptor completed his initial maquette.

While modeling the face, Clark referenced the same 1866 portrait of an elderly Bridger used

by Ott Jones, though he too rendered his subject as a middle-aged man, representing Bridger at the time he established the fort in 1843. Clark obtained his copy of the photo from Kansas City’s Mount Washington Cemetery, site of the mountain man’s grave and the 1904 memorial erected by Grenville Dodge.

While researching Bridger’s stature and other physical traits, Clark also drew on Dodge’s 1905 biographical sketch, but he and Lammers discovered another contemporary description. An excerpt from the 1996 book News of the Plains and Rockies, 1803–1865, by David A. White, describes Bridger from his days as a guide, sitting around a campfire. Left with the impression the mountain man had an “Olympic-caliber body,” Clark modeled his statue in kind.

Clark and team took great care to research items worn or carried by mountain men. For example, the sculptor personally inspected a J. Henry English-pattern flintlock trade rifle, a variation of which Vasquez presented to Bridger in 1853. Clark’s figure grasps the rifle in his left hand and has a similar-vintage flintlock pistol tucked in his belt. The flints in the jaws of both guns’ hammers are wrapped in red flannel—a thoughtful historical detail. The powder horn resting on Bridger’s right hip is based on another period artifact inspected by the artist. Other period-specific details include “pucker toe” moccasins, a trade knife in a leather sheath and a “possibles” bag.

Two years passed from the time Clark completed his maquette till the final, monumental model was ready for the casting process. In the interim the sculptor examined the Western works of 19th-century painters Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (notably Trappers at Fault—Looking for the Trail) and Alfred Jacob Miller for a glimpse at frontier figures, gear and clothing. Throughout the design and modeling process Clark was impressed at how the local community of mountain men enthusiasts (a “most discerning audience”) got behind the effort. He credits their input with

Portrait of the Trapper as a Younger Man

Clark reimagined the source image of an elderly Bridger as a middle-aged man with a full beard and an “Olympic-caliber body,” though the artist was a stickler for such period-correct details as his clothing and firearms.

determining, for example, the choice of firearms presented (flintlock vs. percussion).

Cast by the Eagle Bronze foundry of Lander, Wyo., using the lost-wax method, Clark’s Jim Bridger was dedicated on Aug. 8, 2008. Facing the intersection of Main Street and I-80 business in Fort Bridger, the workmanlike statue stands with its right hand outstretched and uplifted, conveying Bridger’s identity as a guide without equal showing the way.

As representative models of the mountain man character, the Jim Bridger sculptures by Jones and Clark serve to visually enhance the history of the fur trade era, both implicitly as outcomes of their surrounding communities and explicitly as models of a character that unquestionably impacted the history of the West.

Fred F. Poyner IV is a Seattle-based historian and author with nearly 30 years of experience researching and writing about the art and history of the Pacific Northwest, including his two most recent books, Pacific Fishermen Inc.: 150 Years of Norwegian Heritage Shipbuilding (2020) and Portland Public Sculptors: Monuments, Memorials and Statuary, 1900–2003 (2021). For further reading he recommends James Bridger: Trapper, Frontiersman, Scout and Guide—A Historical Narrative, by J. Cecil Alter and Grenville M. Dodge; Journal of a Trapper, or, Nine Years in the Rocky Mountains, 1834–1843, by Osborne Russell (edited by Aubrey L. Haines); Jim Bridger: Mountain Man, by Stanley Vestal; and Jim Bridger: Trailblazer of the American West, by Jerry Enzler.

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OTHER MOUNTAIN MaN SCULPTURES

PHOTO CREDIT

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OPPOSITE, FROM LEFT: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; COURTESY MICHAEL HAMBY; THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY JERRY MCKELLAR; COURTESY GARY KERBY; AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, FORT WORTH

John Shields was a member of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, and it was Clark who named the river in the explorer’s honor. Nicknamed “Thunder Jack,” Kerby’s lifesized figure of a generic mountain man stands in a traditional posture of greeting—his right hand raised high overhead with fingers splayed, the butt of his rifle resting on the ground.

It’s no wonder Western sculptors continue to favor mountain men as a subject. These buckskin-clad trappers and explorers led lives full of drama and danger, and in the right hands that translates into stunning, action-packed bronzes. —F.F.P. IV

PHOTO CREDIT

During his celebrated career Frederic Remington (1861–1909) used a wide variety of media—from pencil and charcoal studies and drawings to watercolor and oil paintings and pastels on paper—to chronicle the 19th-century American frontier. The artist also rendered limited-edition scale model bronzes for display. His 1903 statuette The Mountain Man (below and in reverse at bottom left on opposite page) portrays a figure clad in buckskins and a coonskin cap riding a horse down a steep slope—among the earliest such depictions in bronze.

Nearly a century later Michael Hamby rendered a far larger bronze titled The Mountain Man (at right). Installed in 1996 at Utah State University in Logan, the 10-foot-tall sculpture was the first major public work to depict the iconic frontier character. Wearing a long, fringed buckskin coat and a conical fur cap, the bearded figure holds a long rifle in his left hand and carries two sheathed knives beneath his belt—one across the waist, the other at his left side. Over his right shoulder he totes what appears to be a set of elk antlers.

In 2007 Jerry McKellar’s 8-foot-tall bronze Working the Line (at top of opposite page) was installed outside the Sublette County Visitor Center in Pinedale, Wyo. The sculptor was inspired by John Clymer’s 1974 painting Beaver Flats, which depicts a mountain man dressed in heavy winter clothing working his trap line. The maquette McKellar designed for the larger monument won the Purchase Award at the National Western Art Show and is part of the permanent collection of the Clymer Museum, in Ellensburg, Wash.

In 2012 officials in Montana’s Shields Valley dedicated sculptor Gary Kerby’s bronze Welcome to the Shields (at bottom right of opposite page) which overlooks the Shields River along U.S. 89 north of Kerby’s hometown of Wilsall.

Bridger’s Buds in Bronze

OPPOSITE, FROM LEFT: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; COURTESY MICHAEL HAMBY; THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY JERRY MCKELLAR; COURTESY GARY KERBY; AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, FORT WORTH

PHOTO CREDIT

PHOTO CREDIT

Among the many sculptors who have chosen mountain men—real or imagined—as their subjects are Frederic Remington, Michael Hamby, Jerry McKellar and Gary Kerby, whose works are depicted on these pages.

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COLLECTIONS

The Grand Encampment Museum’s dozen historic buildings include residences and businesses. The Palace Bakery & Ice Cream Parlor dates from the turn of the 20th century.

A GEM IN SOUTHERN WYOMING n the 1830s trappers and traders held rendezvous at Camp le Grande, at the base of the Sierra Madre in what would become south-central Wyoming. There they bartered with Utes and other local tribes. At the end of the next decade Forty-Niners bound for the California goldfields passed through on a branch of the Cherokee Trail. By the 1860s and ’70s settlers and ranchers had put down roots. Not until the discovery of rich ore deposits, however, did people demand the removal of the Indians. In the late 1880s George Doane found copper in the mountains to the west, up by Battle Lake, and partnered with others in the Doane-Rambler Mine. But it was sheepman Ed Haggarty’s 1897 find of a significant copper vein that opened the floodgates to settlement. Soon Chicago newspaperman Willis George Emerson and associates established the town of Grand Encampment, though they later had to drop the “Grand,” as the postal service deemed the name too long. The boom times lasted about a decade, Encampment’s population rising to about 2,000, till falling copper prices and several smelter fires ended its mining heyday. Cattle, hay raising and tie cutting kept the town going.

Forty miles south of I-80 and 80-odd miles west of Laramie, the Carbon County community is home to just 500 souls today.

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But townspeople still pull out the superlative “Grand” from time to time. Case in point, the Grand Encampment Museum [gemuseum.com], which affords visitors a chance to tread the floorboards of their frontier forebears.

The GEM, for short, centers on a dozen historic buildings filled with artifacts from the mining, ranching and timber industries, as well as frontier life and Western culture. Suspended overhead is an original section of the 16-mile aerial tramway built in 1902 to transport ore from the Ferris-Haggerty Mine down to the smelter in Encampment. Supported by 375 wooden towers, the longest tramway in the world at the time carried more than 800 buckets that each held up to 700 pounds of ore.

Each day the mine produced 50 tons of copper ore.

At the heart of the GEM is the Battle Miner, a small cabin from the ghost town of Battle, on the crest of the Continental Divide 12 miles west of Encampment. In 1902 miner George Eberhart moved the cabin down to Encampment and lived there with wife Josephine while their new house was being built. The far larger Peryam House—built in 1886 by Guy Nichols and nephew Ezra and later sold to the Peryam family—had to be transported from nearby Riverside to the museum in two halves due to its size.

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TOP LEFT AND RIGHT: CANDY MOULTON (2), ABOVE: THE GRAND ENCAMPMENT MUSEUM

I

THE GRAND ENCAMPMENT MUSEUM BOASTS BUILDINGS FROM THE REGION’S RESPECTIVE MINING, TIMBER AND RANCHING HEYDAYS

BY LINDA WOMMACK

TOP LEFT AND RIGHT: CANDY MOULTON (2), ABOVE: THE GRAND ENCAMPMENT MUSEUM

COLLECTIONS

As Encampment grew, schools became a necessity. In 1895 William Henry Wolford, the father of nine boys and a girl, saw an immediate need and built a schoolhouse on his ranch. The Wolford Schoolhouse was moved to the museum in 1986.

The Tie Hack Cabin is an example of a typical logging camp residence. The loggers were known as “tie hackers” because they cut logs for the railroad companies. After working all winter, they would haul logs to the Encampment River and ride them downriver (north) to Fort Steele for milling. From there the ties were shipped to the train yards. Each camp usually had two or three such cabins, each sleeping six to eight men. This one features a cookhouse and a reconstructed two-story outhouse— designed to remain in use whenever the, ahem, bottom story got snowed in.

Alongside the residences the GEM also boasts several businesses. In the late 1870s William Brause built the Lake Creek Stage Station along its namesake roadside stream 23 miles to the north. Ranch-

ers Nettie and Charles Scribner later bought the surrounding property, on which they pastured more than 150 horses. The Koffman family ran the Palace Bakery & Ice Cream Parlor when it sat three blocks west on McCaffrey Avenue. In 1945 the Royal Neighbors of America Lodge met upstairs.

For $50 the lodge sold out to Robert Bechtel, who used the building for a painting and sign-lettering shop before donating it to the museum. While George Kuntzman sold insurance out of his airy namesake building, the museum has transformed it into a saloon, as it is the only structure on the grounds that can accommodate the lofty backbar. Other businesses represented here include a blacksmith shop and a livery stable.

A structure of more recent vintage is the Weber Springs Forest Service Guard Station, built in 1940 as a watchtower for spotting fires in the Sierra Madre. At one time eight such stations spanned the east side of the range.

All roads begin and end at the Doc Culleton Memorial Building, the museum’s main exhibit hall and gift shop. Those interested in history will appreciate the on-site research library, which houses period newspapers, family papers, funeral records, maps and tens of thousands of photographs, much of it arranged in collections by family name and industry (mining, ranching and timber.) You’ll find the GEM at 807 Barnett Ave. in Encampment.

For more info call 307-327-5308.

Above: The Peryam House, built in 1886 in Riverside, Wyo., and later moved to the nearby museum, is well-supplied with period dinnerware. Left: Covered wagons and buggies make the livery stable a must-see.

All roads begin and end at the doc Culleton Memorial Building

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GUNS OF THE WEST

1902 Emilio Kosterlitzky, posing below atop a white horse in 1906, received this Model 1902 Remington rollingblock rifle as a gift from compañeros.

EMILIO KOSTERLITZKY’S ROLLING BLOCK

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He changed his first name from Emil to Emilio, joined the Mexican army and in the early 1880s saw action against Apache and Yaqui warriors.

In 1885 Kosterlitzky signed on as an officer of the newly established Gendarmería Fiscal, or customs guard, and he rose to become lieutenant colonel of the Sonoran rurales. Many of his recruits had shady pasts, and to those hard cases the colonel presented a choice—join the rurales or be executed on the spot. He made the resulting force work, and his reputation for running a tight group of law-enforcing onetime desperadoes became legendary. Kosterlitzky himself was known for being tough, surviving multiple arrow and knife wounds. He could speak Spanish and English (and reportedly seven other languages), and his language skills enabled him solve issues on either side of the Rio Grande. He helped the U.S. Army deal with Apache troubles along the border, earning the nickname the “Mexican Cossack.” By the turn of the 20th century Kosterlitzky was working closely with Thomas Rynning, who in 1902 became captain of the Arizona Rangers. In 1906

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JUDE STEELE

A

mong the more colorful Old West figures ever to roam both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border was a man who was born in Moscow on Nov. 16, 1853, fought battles and enforced the law in Mexico, and died 74 years later in Los Angeles. It was in Sonora Emil Kosterlitzky made his mark as a commander of the rurales, or border police, earning the nickname Aguila de Sonora (“Eagle of Sonora”). In 1922 a group of his old compañeros presented him with a Model 1902 Remington rolling-block rifle in 7 mm Mauser caliber that I obtained nearly a century later.

Born to a German mother and a Cossack colonel in the imperial Russian army, Kosterlitzky attended one of the czarist military academies but washed out by late 1871. How he wound up in Latin America is hazy, but most accounts say that while serving as an 18-year-old midshipman in the Russian navy he grew weary of life at sea and deserted in a Venezuelan port. Ever seeking adventure, young Kosterlitzky soon headed north to the Republic of Mexico, finding the province of Sonora to his liking.

TOP: JUDE STEELE; LEFT: ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

THIS REMINGTON RIFLE BELONGED TO THE RUSSIAN-BORN ADVENTURER WHO WENT WEST AND BECAME KNOWN AS THE ‘MEXICAN COSSACK’

BY GEORGE LAYMAN

JUDE STEELE

TOP: JUDE STEELE; LEFT: ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

GUNS OF THE WEST

Rynning led a force of American militiamen across the border to help his Mexican counterpart quell a copper mine revolt at Cananea, Sonora, that threatened the lives of American mining engineers.

Today Kosterlitzky might be labeled a soldier of fortune or a mercenary. He certainly was a man who found the right vocation.

The rurales carried an assortment of rifles and revolvers. In 1899 and 1900 the government of President Porfirio Díaz ordered more than 14,000 7 mm Remington rolling-block rifles and carbines for second-line army units and mounted troops, as well as for such law enforcement groups as the rurales. Some men chose to purchase their own Winchesters, preferring the lever-action repeating rifles over the single-shot Remington. Díaz handily won the 1910 presidential election, but massive electoral fraud angered the population, and he was forced to resign on May 25, 1911, fleeing six days later to Spain with his family and plenty of gold and other valuables. Kosterlitzky, a Díaz loyalist, retired in February 1912, but that fall he returned to federal duty at the request of the new president, Francesco I. Madero.

On March 13, 1913, amid the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution, Kosterlitzky was losing a battle against insurgents in far northern Sonora when he chose instead to surrender his troops to American soldiers in the border town of Nogales, Ariz. He and his 200 men were interned for a year at Fort Rosecrans, near San Diego, Calif. Granted asylum for his past services to the United States, Kosterlitzky relocated with his wife and three children to Los Angeles, where he found work as a translator for the U.S. Postal Service. During World War I he was a special employee of the Department of Justice, doing both translation and undercover work. Masquerading as a doctor, he infiltrated many proGerman groups and kept the government informed about their activities. In 1926 he returned to Mexi-

co to help foil a revolt in the state of Baja California. After a final two-year battle with heart failure, Kosterlitzky died in Los Angeles on March 2, 1928.

Many of Kosterlitzky’s effects are in museums in Arizona, but gun collector Jim Masterson was able to obtain the 1902 Remington rolling-block rifle the adventurer was presented in 1922. In excellent condition, it bears a plaque on the left buttstock engraved Para Nuestro Coronel Emilio Kosterlitzky Gendarmería Civil, suggesting the rifle was a gift from former members of the rurales. Two years before his death Kosterlitzky gave the rifle to Phil Curran, a close friend from his Postal Service years, who later sold it to Masterson. In 2018 Masterson’s grandson sold me the rifle, which resides in the collection of my cousin Jude Steele, a well-known Remington collector. Ironically, though owned by one of North America’s most active military adventurers, the rifle has never been fired and perhaps never will be.

the rifle has never been fired and perhaps never will be

Kosterlitzky’s rifle bears this plaque on the left buttstock.

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GHOST TOWNS If you’ve worked up a thirst, Montoya has little to offer today. But if you’re after a sense of the Old West, you might explore this adobe ruin that once hosted a saloon.

MONTOYA, NEW MEXICO

E

ven if one drives slowly while searching for Montoya, N.M., the ghost town is easy to miss. All that remains of the once bustling main street are the crumbling brick and red adobe walls of two commercial buildings. Amid the desertscape a half mile away are two residential remains hemmed in by mesquite, juniper and cacti.

It is, therefore, difficult to imagine that in the early 1900s the town was host to a railroad depot, several hotels, restaurants, mercantile stores, saloons and 1,000 residents. It also boasted a Catholic mission church and a flourishing newspaper. If ghosts had names, Montoya’s would include Esequiel Benavidez, Maxinio Aguilar, Rusalio Ortega, Grover Kinkead and Duke and Maggie Hornsby. All are listed in archival documents as onetime residents.

The site has its early, albeit unrecognized, roots in the historic Goodnight-Loving Trail, along which cattle once tramped a scant few miles to the west. Opening in 1866, the trail from west Texas through New Mexico and Colorado on into Cheyenne remained in use till the arrival of railroads in the 1880s.

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Montoya, little more than 20 miles west of Tucumcari, was born at the turn of the 20th century as the village of Rountree, named after local postmaster Henry K. Rountree. Within a year residents had changed its name to Montoya, after the surrounding Spanish land grant. On the arrival of a branch line of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1902 the town served as the cattle loading point for all area ranches. As the tracks passed just yards north of downtown, Montoya also became a home away from home for railroad section crews, and the community began to prosper.

G.W. Richardson, an experienced storekeeper from Missouri, saw promise in the budding town and started a namesake mercantile store in Montoya in 1908. Richardson’s General Store is among the surviving ruins. Its large front portico, which once provided welcome shade to the gas pumps and front windows, has crumbled into a heap. A long sidewall with high windows designed to let in breezes but not sunlight remains intact, having survived a century of exposure to the prevailing west winds. The store adjoined a picnic grove, and clerks once toted groceries and auto supplies to both tourists and residents. It also stocked saddle blankets, lariats, work gloves, feed buckets, windmill parts and the like

THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE, LEFT AND CENTER: JIM WINNERMAN (3); OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; OPPOSITE FAR RIGHT: DANITA DELIMONT/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD GAVE RISE TO THE TOWN, AND ROUTE 66 SAW IT THROUGH ITS HEYDAY—UNTIL BYPASSED BY I-40

BY JIM WINNERMAN

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THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE, LEFT AND CENTER: JIM WINNERMAN (3); OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; OPPOSITE FAR RIGHT: DANITA DELIMONT/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

GHOST TOWNS

for ranchers. Like other local stores of the period, Richardson’s was also a community meeting spot.

Adjacent to Richardson’s, stenciled on the sole remaining wall of a roofless adobe ruin, are the barely discernible words Cold B eer . “It was a saloon,” explains Paula Neese, curator of the Tucumcari History Museum. “Descendants of the early residents still live on ranches in the area, and the memories of what Montoya was are still very much alive and fondly remembered.”

In 1918 state authorities directed work crews to improve the road through Montoya connecting Tucumcari and Santa Rosa. As had the railroad crews and ranchers before them, highway workers boosted the local economy and population.

The route eventually became part of the national highway network as a leg of Route 66. While it brought waves of curious tourists and commercial traffic to town, a prolonged drought in the 1920s had already begun to take a toll, and Montoya’s population drifted away. The Great Depression only hastened the exodus.

The final nail in the coffin came in 1960 when the four-lane I-40 opened just a hundred yards south of town. Montoya didn’t hold sufficient allure for people to exit the interstate. “Although Montoya was already struggling, more than anything I-40 was the reason for its demise,” Neese says.

Richardson’s remained open for a time before shuttering along with the post office in 1980. Recognizing its past significance to the local economy and community, the National Park Service listed the store on the National Register of Historic Places. But even that honor couldn’t stop the ravages of time. Route 66 itself was officially decommissioned in 1985.

Local ranchers still drop by Richardson’s for their letters and packages. A cluster mailbox and a few freestanding boxes flank a side entrance to the building, which is cordoned off by a chain link fence. The fence protects curious passersby from the crumbling remains of what was once the living heartbeat of a vibrant community.

Clockwise from top left: One of two abandoned residences in the area; a photo of Richardson’s General Store when it remained intact; the store, though on the National Register of Historic Places, has since split its seams; Route 66 gave the town a boost for a little while.

NO GHOST RANCH A few hundred yards from the ruins of Montoya stands an astounding paradox. Dominating the skyline is a sprawling, active ranch, one whose history runs contrary to expectation in a ghost town.

In the early 1900s the Kohn family, drawn by the seeming promise of the burgeoning area, purchased ranchland adjacent to Montoya. Today known as the T4 Cattle Co., the spread remains in the family, not only having survived but also continuing to flourish more than a century later. It has grown to encompass more than 220,000 acres under one continuous fence line. Cowboys on horseback manage the operation’s 2,400 cattle, and the Kohn descendants are among the largest landowners in New Mexico.

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REVIEWS

MUST SEE, MUST READ CANDY MOULTON EXPLORES BOOKS AND FILMS ABOUT WYOMING Arapaho Journeys: Photographs and Stories From the Wind River Reservation (2011, by Sara Wiles): Stunning photographs and evocative writing put this contemporary book about the Northern Arapahos in a class of its own. Wiles, an awardwinning photographer and writer, provides an inside look at the central Wyoming reservation.

Give Your Heart to the Hawks (1973, by Win Blevins): Since first reading this book in 1990 while on a backcountry horse pack trip in Yellowstone, I’ve had it on my Top 10 list.

Suffice it to say the vivid scenes of mountain men encountering grizzlies really come to life when one is camping in grizzly country! The narrative celebrates such free-roaming real-life characters as John Colter, Jed Smith and Jim Bridger. Though the narrative reads like nonfiction, the dialogue puts it in the historical fiction category.

Shane (1949, by Jack Schaeffer): The classic, quintessentially Western story of a good guy with a gun who rides into a beautiful valley and meets a family of homesteaders struggling due to unrelenting pressure from cattlemen. Told from a kid’s perspective, Shane was originally published in three parts in Argosy magazine in 1946 under the title “Rider From Nowhere.”

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Homesteading and Ranching in the Upper Green River Valley (2021,

by Ann Chambers Noble and Jonita Sommers): The depth of the authors’ historic research about early and present-day ranchers in the Upper Green River valley is clear. The contemporary narrative and photographs demonstrate how such families are working to conserve their ranches and maintain them in the face of encroaching development. Most of the images in this beautiful book were taken by local photographers.

Wyoming Range War: The Infamous Invasion of Johnson County (2010,

by John W. Davis: This history goes beyond the violent drama that boiled over in Johnson County in 1892. An attorney by trade, author Davis mined the court records for details that add

depth to this account. His approach, first employed in A Vast Amount of Trouble: A History of the Spring Creek Raid, blends deep research and accessible writing.

VIDEOS

Shane (1953, Paramount, on DVD and Blu-ray): Shot in Jackson Hole with the Grand Tetons as an ever present backdrop, the classic Western provides a sense of place as solid as the storyline, featuring Alan Ladd as Shane, Van Heflin as Joe Starrett, Jean Arthur as wife Marian and Brandon de Wilde in his starring role as their son, Joey. Based on the excellent novel by Jack Schaefer, the films boasts an Oscar-nominated screenplay by historian A.B. Guthrie Jr. Wind River (2017, Lionsgate, on DVD and Blu-ray): Starring Jeremy Renner and Graham Greene, this neo-Western tackles a very real problem in Indian country—missing and murdered indigenous women—and does so with powerful dialogue and acting. Directorscreenwriter Taylor Sheridan nails a lots of reservation nuances, and the final scene is a stunner.

The Mountain Men (1980, Columbia Pictures, on DVD): Charlton Heston and Brian Keith star in this narrative of the fur-trapping mountain men who roamed Wyoming and elsewhere in the West from 1825 to ’40. Why this film makes my list goes back to the premiere, held in Jackson, Wyo., in 1980. I was in the theater with all the actors and extras, and it was danged near as raucous as a real mountain man rendezvous from the period they portrayed.

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REVIEWS The Drift: An American Cattle Drive (2019, Caldera Productions, on DVD from calderaproductions.com/ shop): Documentary filmmaker Geoff O’Gara takes viewers along on the annual Green River Drift, a 100-year-old, 100-mile cattle drive in which ranchers from throughout the namesake river valley move their herds from winter and home ranges to high country grazing in the Wind River Range. In an era in which development often conflicts with tradition, The Drift reminds us some traditions are worth preserving.

Johnson County War (2002, Hallmark/Larry Levinson Productions, on DVD): Based on the novel Riders of Judgment

by Frederick Manfred, with a teleplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, this film is one of many that highlights the conflicts and resolutions of open-range cattle operations.

BOOKS Geronimo & Sitting Bull: Leaders of the Legendary West, by Bill Markley, TwoDot, Guilford, Conn., and Helena, Mont., 2021, $19.95 One operated in the American Southwest and Mexico, the other on the northern Great Plains and for a time in Canada. One was from

the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apaches but never a chief. The other was a Hunkpapa Lakota political and spiritual leader who in the late 1860s was made supreme chief of the Sioux Nation.

They never met.

So why present Geronimo (1829–1909) and Sitting Bull (circa 1831–1890) in a dual biography? Well, for one this informative book is the third volume of author Bill Markley’s Legendary West series, having already written the dual biographies Wyatt Earp & Bat Masterson (who were friends and lawmen together in Dodge City, Kan.) and Billy the Kid & Jesse James (who may have met; see P. 36). For another Geronimo and Sitting Bull are probably the most famous American Indians of the Old West, yet Markley suggests the general public knows little about their lives.

“During the second half of the 19th century, when they opposed white intrusion and expansion into their territories, just

the mention of their names could spark fear or anger,” the South Dakota–based author writes in his introduction. “After they surrendered to the Army and lived in captivity, they evoked curiosity and sympathy for the plight of the American Indian. I’m concerned the current younger generation is losing touch with the past.”

Many writers, of course, have already published books about these two famous Indians. Among those cited by Markley are Geronimo: His Own Story (edited by S.M. Barrett, 1906), Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place (by Angie Debo, 1976), Geronimo (by Robert M. Utley, 2012), From Cochise to Geronimo: The Chiricahua Apaches 1874–1886 (by Edwin R. Sweeney, 2010), Sitting Bull: His Life and Legacy (by Ernie LaPointe, great-grandson of Sitting Bull, 2009) and The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (by Robert M. Utley, 1993, which Markley considers the gold standard of biographies on Sitting Bull).

None of these fine works put Geronimo and Sitting Bull under the same cover.

Although Markley doesn’t stress what the two leaders had in common, they both resisted U.S. Western expansion; both

wanted to continue to live as their ancestors had done; both showed military prowess; both surrendered to the United States (Geronimo did so a number of times); both reportedly had spiritual qualities, including the gift of insight and prophecy; both became prisoners of war and continued as leaders of their people after their fighting days were over; and both were photographed often in their later years and sometimes charged for their autographs and photos.

Markley basically follows the lives of his latest featured duo in chronological order, most chapters covering the activities of both men, starting with “Chapter 1: The Early Years, 1829–1845” and ending with “Chapter 12: Geronimo, Prisoner of War, and Sitting Bull on the Reservation, 1886–1900.”

A few of the chapters concentrate on one or the other, such as “Chapter 6: Little Big Horn Summer 1876” and “Chapter 14: The Life and Death of Geronimo, 1890– February 17, 1909.”

Interspersed are sidebars on such topics as the Lakota Sun Dance, the Apache Sunrise Ceremony, the Ghost Dance, Sitting Bull’s graves and Geronimo’s skull. To see photos of the principals, readers will have to look elsewhere, though the

insightful book does include 16 illustrations from Jim Hatzell of Rapid City, S.D., who also created illustrations for Markley’s first two books in the series.

Markley dedicates the book to his parents and the Chiricahua and Hunkpapa people.

He includes opening quotes that capture the essence of his two subjects. “We will avoid them [the Army] if we can,” said Sitting Bull. “If we cannot, we will fight.” Geronimo showed equal resolve when he said, “We thought it more manly to die on the warpath than to be killed in prison.”

Readers may also wonder what Sitting Bull and Geronimo might have said to each other had they actually met at some point in their storied but separate lives.

—Editor

Terror on the Santa Fe Trail: Kit Carson and the Jicarilla Apache,

by Doug Hocking, TwoDot, Helena, Mont., 2019, $29.95 In use for a quarter century (1821–46) as

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REVIEWS a route of commerce, the Santa Fe Trail, which marks the bicentennial of its founding this year, was heavily traveled by traders long before the U.S. Army of the West under Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny used it as an invasion route in 1846 to wrest control of the region from Mexico without firing a shot. In the aftermath of the Mexican War the Jicarilla Apaches pressured travelers along the New Mexico Territory stretch of the trail, stopping traffic on it three times, most notably after defeating a detachment of 1st U.S. Dragoons in the 1854 Battle of Cieneguilla amid the ongoing Jicarilla War. The Jicarillas, less well known than the Chircahua Apaches in Arizona Territory, numbered about 1,000 altogether but lived in small bands of only around 50 people, seldom congregating in larger groups. But on the morning of March 30, 1854, some 250 Jicarilla warriors were encamped along Cieneguilla Creek between Taos and Santa Fe when 1st Dragoons Lieutenant John Davidson, at the head of Companies F and I, and scout Jesús Silva spotted ground churned by many unshod horses —unmistakable sign Indians were nearby.

As Davidson’s 60 84 WILD WEST

troopers rode toward the Jicarilla camp, the forewarned warriors set up an ambush.

Author Doug Hocking provides rich detail of the ensuing fight that left 22 soldiers dead and 36 wounded.

Hocking relies on archival research and the archaeological record to depict the fighting at Cieneguilla, as well as other places, events and figures tied to that pivotal clash.

For example, he elaborates on the central role scout Kit Carson played in the dramatic events. Extensive endnotes, an appendix that highlights the posts and forts in Jicarilla country and another that lists treaties with the Jicarillas make this a useful volume for anyone interested in Southwestern or Apache history.

—Candy Moulton

Cheyenne Summer: The Battle of Beecher Island: A History,

by Terry Mort, Pegasus Books, New York, 2021, $27.95 The Battle of Beecher Island rates as one of the most dramatic, if not significant, clashes

of the Indian wars.

Touching off in western Colorado Territory on Sept. 17, 1868, the nine-day fight and siege pitted as many as 1,000 Cheyenne attackers against 48 civilian scouts under the command of Major George A. “Sandy” Forsyth and Lieutenant Fred Beecher. Forsyth had the foresight to have his men dig rifle pits and take up a defensive position on a sandbar in the Dry Fork of the Republican River (presentday Arikaree River), but the major was wounded early in the fight, and his secondin-command was mortally wounded.

Regardless, the scouts held off repeated charges by the warriors and for seven more days lived off the meat of their dead horses before help arrived (Forsyth had sent out volunteers to seek assistance) in the form of buffalo soldiers of the 10th U.S. Cavalry.

That’s the story of the battle in a nutshell.

Terry Mort, of course, spends much more time on the clash, but not as much as might be expected, considering the subtitle. Part I sets the stage as the author introduces the participants (the Cheyennes, the Army and the civilians), and not until P. 195 does he get to Part II, “The Fight at Beecher Island.”

Earlier books, notably John Monnett’s The

Battle of Beecher Island and the Indian War of 1867–1869, have covered much of the same ground. That said, Mort does such a good job of making the Cheyenne summer of 1868 come alive in Part I that readers won’t be in a hurry to skip ahead to the action and heroics of the battle itself.

The author gives Forsyth a mostly positive review as an officer who had been breveted colonel for his conduct in the Civil War and three years later jumped at the chance for a field command. Unlike Captain William Fetterman, whose command was annihilated in December 1866 in what would become northern Wyoming, Forsyth didn’t display impudence or contempt for the Plains Indians. “Sandy Forsyth didn’t know much about fighting Indians, but at least he realized it,” writes Mort. “He also knew that superior firepower and discipline could overcome numerical disadvantages. He could reasonably assume that 50 well-armed men—men who could shoot well—could defeat, or at least discourage, many times that number of attackers, especially if the men were placed in a reasonably good defensive position.”

The major was also delighted to have

Beecher with him, describing the young lieutenant as “a splendid specimen of a thoroughbred American and a most valuable man in any position requiring coolness, courage and tact.” To track the Indians the major relied on both Beecher—who had been an experienced outdoorsman in the East and had adapted well to the challenges of the Plains—and civilian scout Abner “Sharp” Grover. That said, when the trio determined the war party they were chasing would soon reunite with the main body of Cheyennes, Forsyth made the command decision to advance and attack rather than withdraw and likely be overwhelmed by a large force of attackers on the open Plains.

The author carefully considers the thinking of the Cheyennes (as best one can with few reports or reminiscences from the Indian side), who likely felt the same urgency as Forsyth.

The Cheyenne plan was to attack en masse before the scouts grew alarmed and dug in, for though the Indians had the enemy outnumbered at least 7-to-1, “attacking 50 frontiersmen who were firing from defensive positions would be a formidable and dangerous proposi-

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TODAY IN HISTORY FEBRUARY 28, 1995

DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT OPENS. FEATURING AN EXTERIOR DESIGN WHICH BEARS RESEMBLANCE TO BOTH THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS AND TEPEES OF NATIVE AMERICANS, THE AIRPORT SPRAWLS OVER 52.4 SQUARE MILES OF LAND, 1.5 TIMES THE SIZE OF MANHATTAN. COST OVERRUNS AND CONTROVERSIAL PLANNING DECISIONS HAVE LED TO CONSPIRACY THEORIES RELATED TO THE ILLUMINATI AND THE PRESENCE OF DOOMSDAY BUNKERS. For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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REVIEWS tion.” The plan was spoiled by eight young warriors who on their own initiative attacked, aiming to capture the horses and count coup.

Forsyth had enough time to get his scouts to the sandbar and establish a strong defensive position, avoiding what could have been a panicked flight.

The odds were still daunting, of course, but the scouts, armed with repeaters, were able to thwart a number of Cheyenne charges. As Mort points out, Roman Nose had not yet joined the fight but would later try “to ride over the island and through the scouts.” even if it meant death. “For the Cheyenne,” writes Mort, “it may not have been an important battle, but it was an important story— primarily because of Roman Nose, his exploits and his death.”

Standouts on the white man’s side included Forsyth himself, the doomed Fred Beecher (for whom the battle was named), and Jack Stilwell and three other scouts who made the risky ride for help.

—Editor Texas Jack: America’s First Cowboy Star,

by Matthew Kerns, TwoDot, Guilford, Conn., and Helena, Mont., 2021, $26.95 Long overshadowed by the inimitable 86 WILD WEST

William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, John B. “Texas Jack” Omohundro gets his due in this biography of a man who was Cody’s buddy and like Cody was a frontier scout, actor, showman, celebrity and a hero in some of Ned Buntline’s dime novels. Texas Jack was also something Buffalo Bill never was—a genuine cowboy. That, as the title indicates, is the theme for author Matthew Kerns, who manages the Texas Jack Facebook page (facebook.com/ jbomohundro) and has written many articles about Omohundro for The Texas Jack Scout, the triannual publication of the Texas Jack Association. One big difference between the two friends—and this accounts in part for why one is far better known today than the other—is how long they were in the public eye.

Cody died at age 70 in 1917; Omohundro was just 33 on June 28, 1880, when he died in Leadville, Colo., probably of consumption (tuberculosis), although pneumonia has most often been listed as

the primary cause of his death.

Omohundro packed a lot of living into his short time on Earth. Born in Virginia’s Fluvanna County on July 26, 1846, he served the Confederacy as a courier and scout before heading to Texas, where he first worked as a ranch cook before proving his cowboy skills to trail bosses. Fellow drovers nicknamed the likable cowboy “Happy Jack.” It was up in Ellis County, Kan., that Wild Bill Hickok told Omohundro about the money he could make hunting and scouting out of frontier forts and steered him to his friend Bill Cody. In the fall of 1869 Texas Jack caught up to future pal and business partner Buffalo Bill in North Plate, Neb. Up north, Kerns writes, Omohundro hunted with Cody, taught school and was in demand as an adviser to ranchers about cattle and cattle rustlers due to “his expertise as the best cowboy in the region.” Then along came Ned Buntline.

“Texas Jack was a voracious reader and knew of Buntline’s stories of pirates and murderers and heroes,” writes Kerns, who adds it was Omohundro who pointed out the longhaired Cody to Bunt-

line. In time Buntline would include both Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack in his dime novels and stage dramas (starting with The Scouts of the Prairie in December 1872).

While appearing with Cody, Texas Jack met Italian dancer Giuseppina Morlacchi, whom Buntline hired to play the female lead as the “Indian” Dove Eye. Cody and Omohundro pleased audiences by playing themselves, but including the beauty known as the “Peerless Morlacchi” guaranteed ticket sales. She and Jack fell in love.

After having appeared repeatedly with Cody, Omohundro began to tour in 1877 without his old friend and partner, starring in such border dramas as Texas Jack in the Black Hills.

Costarring in many of his shows was Giuseppina, who married Jack on Aug. 31, 1873, at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Rochester, N.Y. By the time Buffalo Bill started his famous Wild West extravaganza a decade later, Texas Jack had been dead for three years. Cody went on to achieve his greatest fame offstage while taking his Wild West on tour in the United States and Europe.

While John B. Omohundro is all but forgotten today, Kerns contends that he lives on “in every tourist who tries on a Stetson,

every child playing cowboys and Indian,” as well as in every Western book, film and TV show. Clearly the author believes that Texas Jack, “perhaps the only person in Bill Cody’s life who qualified fully as a partner,” epitomizes the 19th-century cowboy. Whether you agree with him or not, the Omohundro story is one worth remembering, and Kerns tells it well.

—Editor Bison: Portrait of an Icon, by Audrey Hall with Chase Reynolds Ewald, Gibbs Smith, Layton, Utah, 2021, $50 As its title suggests, this book centers on images, and what wonderful images they are. Gracing its pages are no fewer than 200 color images from the camera of Audrey Hall, who studied photography at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland and splits her time between homes in Montana and Santa Fe. Bison—or buffalo if you prefer—are by nature photogenic, but Hall showcases our national mammal in creative, often dramatic fashion.

“Like a whiff of fresh pie, each majestic bull on the skyline and every bison traffic jam immediately transports me back to my early years in the mountains,” writes Hall in her intro-

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UNCOVER A STORY YOU WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO KNOW! A B R I A N PAT R ICK F I L M

BURYING THE PAST LEGACY OF THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE duction. “For this book bison are my muse, and the landscape my studio.” Chase Reynolds Ewald, WINNER OF FILM AWARDS! Hall’s collaborator on this strong SELECTED BY MORE THAN coffee table book (espresso table 20 FILM FESTIVALS! book might be a better name for it), writes, “To contemplate Audrey’s images of buffalo in their natural On September 11, 1857, a wagon train of 120 men, women, and children from Arkansas habitat is to understand both their were massacred under a white flag by Utah Mormons in one of the most horrifying crimes in American history. Through the actual testimony of a young girl who survived, ancient presence and their immediate interviews with descendants and forensic interrogations, this compelling film breaks relevance as they continue to occupy a through the decades of cover-up to expose a story kept out of the history books. crucial niche in the Western landscape.”

The photos—of buffalo young and DV D A N D V H S AVA I L A B L E old, in herds and solitary, close up and A M A ZON.COM / 1- 801- 554 - 8640 from afar, under big skies, in the snow, behind fences, in front of mountains— speak loudly for themselves. There are no captions. But, yes, there are interesting items to read among the visual treats, including an extended essay by Ewald and a foreword from writer/filmmaker John Hemingway, who writes that we should look upon bison “as icons of a continent, totems of the nineteenth century, and solemn admonishments to all of us inmates of the twenty-first century to do better.”

Also look for the poem “Buffalo Talk” and the short piece “The Seven Buffalo Bulls Become the Big Dipper”

by Henry Real Bird, a Crow Indian who served as Montana poet laureate (2009–11). Interspersed throughout - 1945 are buffalo-related quotations, such - 1947 as this 1890 musing from Blackfeet - 1950 warrior Chief Crowfoot: WW-211200-002 BURYING THE PAST-PATRICK-3.indd Brian Patrick Burying the28Past.indd 1

11

$ 25.0 0

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

What is life?

It is the flash of a firefly in the night.

It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.

It is the little shadow which runs across The grass and loses itself in the sunset.

—Editor

WIWP-211200-REVIEWS .indd 87

- 1974 For more,search visitDAILY QUIZ For more, WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ at HistoryNet.com.

MAGAZINES/QUIZ HistoryNet.com

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

ENLISTED IN THE JAPANESE ARMY IN 1943.

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

9/20/21 2:13 PM

PONY EXPRESS NATIONAL HISTORIC TRAIL

I

magine being delighted to receive a letter from halfway across the country in the breakneck speed of...10 days. That’s the boast the Central Overland California & Pikes Peak Express Co. made about its short-lived (April 3, 1860–Oct. 26, 1861) Pony Express.

Running 1,900 miles from St. Joseph, Mo., to Sacramento, Calif., the route comprised 197 stations spaced 5–20 miles apart. “Swing stations” provided fresh horses for ongoing riders (who covered upward of 75 miles a day each), while “home stations” offered room and board for those done with their route. The telegraph put the express out of business.

Today’s national historic trail [nps.gov/poex] takes in more than 130 attractions.

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GREG RYAN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; INSET: NATIONAL POSTAL MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

GO WEST

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He quickly secured as many as he could, and now you can secure full rolls of this historic World War II-era coin at an incredible price.

What is a Steel Cent?

When the United States entered World War II, copper quickly became a coveted material. Required for our communications as well as munitions, every major supply of copper needed to be turned over to the war effort. That included the large supply of copper used by the U.S. Mint to strike Lincoln Cents!

The Lincoln Cent is the U.S. Mint’s longest-running series, sitting in the pockets and piggy banks of Americans for more than 100 years. But for one year only—1943—the Lincoln Cent was struck in steel-coated zinc instead of copper. This unique, historic mintage is now one of the most coveted in U.S. history!

Authentic Pieces of WWII History

Each 1943 U.S. Steel Cent is an authentic piece of World War II History—an example of America’s dedication to aiding the Allies and winning the war.

Buy a Full Roll and SAVE!

Look elsewhere for these coveted World War II Steel Cents in this same condition, and you could wind up paying as much as $1.80 per coin, or a total of $90 for a full 50-coin roll’s worth! But while our supplies last, you can secure a roll of authentic World War II 1943 Steel Cents for just $29.95 — a savings of over $60!

In addition, you’ll also receive a BONUS Replica WWII newspaper, reprinting frontpage news from 1943!

There’s no telling when or if another hoard of these historic WWII coins will be found.

Don’t wait — secure your very own piece of the Allied victory now!

BONUS

REPLICA WWI I NEWSPAPER

1943 U.S. Steel Cent 50-Coin Roll - $29.95 + s/h

FREE SHIPPING on 5 or More!

Limited time only. Product total over $149 before taxes (if any).

Standard domestic shipping only. Not valid on previous purchases.

Call today toll-free for fastest service

1-800-329-0225 Offer Code RLC359-01 Please mention this code when you call.

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