THE AMERICAN FRONTIER
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the history at the The Alamo church stands as a symbol of freedom in downtown San Antonio, Texas.
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H JOHN MUIR’S ROUGH NIGHT H BUFFALO SOLDIERS IN BATTLE
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44 JOHN MUIR’S ROUGHEST NIGHT By Matthew Bernstein The famed naturalist climbed California’s Mount Shasta—straight into a blizzard
50 WHITE BUFFALO
By David Harrington 10th Cavalry Captain Louis Henry Carpenter earned the Medal of Honor for two actions
62 THE
FEARING TIME
By Michael Engelhard Navajos fought off many enemies before being forced from home on the ‘Long Walk’
56 FIRST FIGHT FOR
THE 10th CAVALRY By John H. Monnett Buffalo soldiers clashed with Plains Indians in the little-known Battle of Prairie Dog Creek 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 Johnny D. Boggs Tom Hirt makes superior beaver felt hats, including many starring on-screen
18 WESTERNERS
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Seth Bullock was in hardware before being appointed Deadwood’s first sheriff
20 GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN
By Kent Frates Fiery attorney Temple Houston, a son of Sam, got into a gunfight out of court
22 PIONEERS & SETTLERS
By Lynda A. Sánchez Black cowboy George McJunkin made a groundbreaking archaeological find
24 WESTERN ENTERPRISE
By David McCormick O.D. Gass was plagued by bad luck in the mines and on the farm but never quit
26 ART OF THE WEST
36
HOME OF THE ALAMO
By Richard Bruce Winders Remembered primarily for the Alamo, San Antonio has a rich history of its own
By Johnny D. Boggs Uruguayan-born Jo Mora depicted his life as a cowboy and living with the Hopis
28 INDIAN LIFE
By Bill LaCroix Shoshone guide ‘Old Toby’ led Lewis and Clark the long way over the Bitterroots
30 STYLE
Showcasing the great American West in art, film, fashion and more
76 COLLECTIONS
By Linda Wommack The Fall River Pioneer Museum is a hot spot for Dakota history buffs
78 GUNS OF THE WEST
By George Layman The S&W Model No. 1 was the first successful metallic cartridge revolver
80 GHOST TOWNS
By Terry Halden Montana’s Silver Star shined bright for a time, just north of famed Virginia City
82 REVIEWS
70 MORMON EXODUS FROM MEXICO By Mike Coppock The Romneys and other Latter-day Saints fled stateside amid the Mexican Revolution
Author Matthew Bernstein picks top books about John Muir and films about California. Plus, reviews of recent books about the railroad wars, outlaw Augustine Chacón, artist Jo Mora and more, as well as the new Western film The Harder They Fall.
88 GO WEST
Californians named this redwood grove to reflect John Muir’s love of nature ON THE COVER In present-day San Antonio the Alamo stands as a 4.2-acre shrine to Texas liberty, its church remaining the most recognizable structure left of Mission San Antonio de Valero. Founded by Spanish Franciscan friars in 1718, the mission provided the start for the future town of San Antonio. The U.S. Army restored the stone church in 1850, adding a roof and the world-famous “hump” to its facade. (Cover image: Randy Faris/Getty Images; photo illustration by Brian Walker)
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EDITOR’S LETTER
BLACK WESTERNERS Historian Quintard Taylor noted in a 1996 magazine article, “The ghost of Walter Prescott Webb’s 1955 comment that the West is defied by its scarcity of ‘water, timber, cities, industry, labor and Negroes’ continues to intrude on the region’s popular consciousness.” Thankfully, in the 25 years since Taylor’s observation, enough books and articles have been written about black men and women in the American West to lay to rest the ghost of Webb’s comment. To name a trio of those books: Taylor’s groundbreaking 1998 work In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990; 2008’s African American Women Confront the West, 1600–2000, edited by Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore; and 2016’s Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, on the Stage, Behind the Badge, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles. From the 1990s on countless books have been written about buffalo soldiers, the black men who served in the Army out West, though way back in 1967 William H. Leckie wrote The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West (revised editions feature the subhead A Narrative of the Black Cavalry in the West). In 1999 Art T. Burton came out with Black, Buckskin and Blue: African-American Scouts and Soldiers on the Western Frontier, though he has also informed readers of his books and articles (several of which have appeared in Wild West) that not all black Westerners were cowboys or soldiers; some were in fact lawmen and outlaws. Burton’s excellent first offering, Black, Red and Deadly: Black and Indian Gunfighters of the Indian Territory, 1870–1907, was published in 1991. His biography Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves was released in 2006. As longtime Wild West readers may recall, this magazine, which debuted in 1988, has covered black soldiers on the frontier beginning with Wayne R. Austerman’s June 1991 article “Army’s Unluckiest Regiment,” about the 38th U.S. Infantry’s hard-luck buffalo soldiers. In February 1995 we ran Reginald E. McDaniel’s “Buffalo Soldiers Won Their Spurs,” with the teaser, “Despite prejudice, substandard wages, poor food and a cholera epidemic, the 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments went on to carve a name for themselves in the West.” In this issue we are happy to revisit the 10th in two feature articles. Frequent contributor John Monnett writes about the little remembered August 1867 Battle of Prairie Dog Creek (not to be confused with an 1876 fight of the same name) in “First Fight for the 10th Cavalry,” and in “White Buffalo” first-time contributor David Harrington cites 10th Cavalry Captain Henry Carpenter’s heroic action in two fall 1868 clashes less than a month apart—Beecher Island and Beaver Creek. Congress authorized the formation of the 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments, as well as four black infantry regiments, in 1866. The move came amid the Reconstruction era, as the government sought to redress the inequities of slavery and the readmission to the Union of the 11 Southern states that had seceded. After the war many blacks immigrated to the West in search of new opportunity (as did many white Southerners). Buffalo soldiers saw much duty in Texas, where they sometimes clashed verbally and physically with civilians. On the postwar cattle drives north black men found opportunity on ranches and the open range (by some estimates one in four cowboys from the 1860s to ’80s was black). But other blacks in Texas—which didn’t officially recognize the freedom of all slaves until federal troops arrived on June 19, 1865, and didn’t fully rejoin the Union until March 30, 1870—weren’t so welcome. Outlaw gangs that overran Reconstruction-era Texas often targeted black residents, as Gregory Michno points out in “‘Worse Than the Hostile Comanches,’” in the October 2021 Wild West. “Between 1865 and ’68,” he writes, “the Freedmen’s Bureau recorded 281 known incidents of violence against black women and 25 against black children.” By 1865 there were an estimated 250,000 slaves in Texas, far more than any state west of the Mississippi except Louisiana. After emancipation most freemen stuck around to work for wages. One thing is perfectly clear: Whether mistreated or not, black men, women and children were not scarce in the Lone Star State.
The 9th U.S. Cavalry, photographed above in 1898 during the SpanishAmerican War, and the 10th Cavalry came to be known as buffalo soldiers during their service in the American West.
AFTER THE WAR
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WILD WEST
Wild West editor Gregory Lalire’s historical novel Man From Montana came out in April 2021. His earlier novels include 2019’s Our Frontier Pastime: 1804–1815 and 2014’s Captured: From the Frontier Diary of Infant Danny Duly. His short story “Halfway to Hell” appears in the 2018 anthology The Trading Post and Other Frontier Stories.
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MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF
Uruguayan-born artist Jo Mora (1876–1947) earned the moniker “Renaissance Man of the West.”
Visit our WEBSITE FOR ONLINE EXTRAS
FEBRUARY 2022 / VOL. 34, NO. 5
WildWestMag.com This article, published in the October 2020 issue of Wild West, examines the Cowboys (with a capital “C”), a loosely organized band of desperadoes who raided in the Southwest on both sides of the Mexican border and who were opposed by Wyatt Earp and his brothers in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. The piece earned author and Wild West special contributor John Boessenecker the Wild West History Association’s 2021 Six-Shooter Award for best general Western history article.
Extended Interview With Tom Hirt
“The hats were a lot cooler when Gary Cooper was making Westerns,” says Tom Hirt, who makes hats and teaches others how to make them in Colorado. “Look at Gary Cooper in The Westerner [1940] or in Along Came Jones [1945]—before they started wearing the uniform of Hollywood, which was a little, narrow-brimmed hat all the same shape, like the Cartwrights.”
More on Jo Mora
“Not many artists work in the variety of mediums that he worked in, and that’s probably an asset for him,” says Peter Hiller, author of The Life and Times of Jo Mora: Iconic Artist of the American West. “But it was also maybe why he’s not as well known, because he didn’t have the singular focus of a Remington or a Russell, who painted and sculpted, and that was about it.”
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GREGORY J. LALIRE EDITOR DAVID LAUTERBORN MANAGING EDITOR GREGORY F. MICHNO SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR JOHNNY D. BOGGS SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR JOHN KOSTER SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR JOHN BOESSENECKER SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY PAUL FISHER ART DIRECTOR ALEX GRIFFITH PHOTO EDITOR
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LETTERS
APACHERIA In your August 2021 issue I see articles by Bill Cavaliere and Ron J. Jackson Jr. that dispel some of the untruths about Geronimo’s surrender. Author Jackson hit the nail on the head in calling the Southwest “Apacheria.” A large part of west Texas was also the turf of the Lipan Apaches. That’s why the mountains that supply the spring at Balmorhea are called the Apache Mountains. The one thing said that is news to me is the statement that the White Mountain Apaches did not get along with the Chiricahuas. And I’d like to point out that Juh was not an Apache; he was a Yaqui.
Humberto C. Martinez Chaparral, N.M. Bill Cavaliere responds: Juh (pronounced “Hoo”) was indeed an Apache and not a Yaqui. He was a chief of the Nednhi band of the Chiricahua Apaches. The Nednhis ranged in the Sierra Madre of northern Sonora and Chihuahua in Mexico and north into extreme southern New Mexico. The confusion regarding Juh as being a Yaqui is understandable, since the ranges of the Nednhis and the Yaquis bordered each other. Juh’s father was Nednhi Chief Laceris, who died in the late 1850s. He had two sons, Galindo and Juh. When Galindo passed away in the early 1860s, Juh was elevated to chief of the Nednhi Apaches. He died in Mexico on Sept. 21, 1883. After Naiche and Geronimo surrendered in September 1886, “Bronco” Apaches continued raiding in the United States until 1924. Since it was assumed all Chiricahuas had been removed to Florida, newspapers assumed these raids were committed by Yaquis. Several posses were sent after these Broncos. Old-timers I spoke with who had fathers or grandfathers in these posses agreed that their relatives were actually after Yaquis. I was unable to find any reference to White Mountain Apaches not getting along with Chiricahua Apaches in my colleague Ron Jackson’s article “The Parting,” nor did I mention it in mine. However, to address the issue: White Mountain Apaches generally had good relations with the Chokonen band of the Chiricahua Apaches, sometimes even aligning themselves with them in battle. It is true that White Mountain Apaches often had conflicts with other Chiricahua bands, especially when forced to share the same reservations.
GERONIMO ON THE GILA In your August 2021 issue Ron J. Jackson Jr.’s “The Parting” contains a geographical error. Twice Arizona is erroneously referred to as the location of the headwaters of the Gila River. This is incorrect. The source of the Gila is in the mountains of southwest New Mexico. Geronimo was born in this area, and this is where he wished to return before his death. The Gila’s headwaters are west of Ojo Caliente, site of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.
Lee Peters Las Cruces, New Mexico 8
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Ron Jackson responds: In reference to Geronimo’s place of birth and the headwaters of the Gila River, the article should have been more specific. Geronimo identified his place of birth as No-doyohn Canyon, Arizona, to Stephen Melvil Barrett, who was permitted to dictate the old warrior’s memories for what became Geronimo’s Story of His Life (1906). Geronimo also stated: “In that country which lies around the headwaters of the Gila River I was raised. This range was our fatherland.” Legendary Oklahoma historian Angie Debo and author of Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place, echoed Geronimo’s claim of No-doyohn Canyon as his birthplace in her book, identifying it as “near the headwaters of the Gila River in what is now southeastern Arizona, then part of Mexico.” Debo further explains: “At other times he [Geronimo] stated simply that he was born in Arizona. But by modern nomenclature the Gila does not head in Arizona, for of the branches that unite near the present-day town of Clifton [Arizona] to form the main stream, one now carries the name into New Mexico.” As for Geronimo’s desire to be buried in New Mexico, the record clearly states he desperately sought to spend his final days in Arizona. Or, as he stated to President Theodore Roosevelt in March 1905, “Let me die in my own country” (meaning Arizona). Roosevelt told Geronimo that was not an option. Regardless, Geronimo never wanted to die a prisoner of war at Fort Sill.
ONE AND ONLY I have really enjoyed the August issue of Wild West, which features articles about Chiricahua Apache leaders Geronimo and Naiche. I also enjoyed the Top 10 list of Chiricahua leaders by Bill Cavaliere. I majored in history at Baylor University back in the mid-1960s and have been a collector/presenter of Native American weaponry, clothing and crafts since the 1970s. Your magazine is the only one to which I subscribe, and your column is the first one I read every time the magazine arrives. Thank you for such a good magazine with interesting and factual articles.
David Vardeman Waco, Texas
MATCHLESS BB GUN While reading the feature “Innocents Lost,” by Jeff Broome, in your February 2021 issue, I noted the picture at the bottom of P. 60 featuring Artell Genthner with his “rifle.” The gun is a first model Matchless BB gun, introduced in 1890 and produced until about 1895, when it was replaced by an improved version. I guess Artell would be at least 17 in this picture, and that looks about right. Here is a picture of the gun (above). I really like Wild West, particularly articles featuring relics. Keep up the good work.
Bill Johnson Tehachapi, Calif. GRISLY BUSINESS In “Trouble in Chinatown,” in the December 2020 issue, Matthew Bernstein describes how, after killing Buckskin Bill, James Franklin Burns and his group cut off Bill’s deformed foot and, “preserving the grizzly trophy,” used it as evidence of the death. I really hope Bernstein checked his facts more carefully than his spelling. (And why didn’t an editor at the magazine catch that mistake?)
K.M. Dawson Englewood, Ohio The editor responds: No excuses, except I’ve had the grizzly bears of Glacier National Park and elsewhere in Montana on my mind quite a bit lately. But that’s another grisly story.
Send letters by email to wildwest@historynet.com. Include your name and hometown.
FEBRUARY 2022
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ROUNDUP
GEORGE HEARST’S TOP 10 MINES
10 WILD WEST
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Phoenix: In 1865, lured by the promise of this mine, Hearst purchased 40,000 acres of ranchland in San Simeon, Calif. Although the mine didn’t pan out, George and son William Randolph came to enjoy camping atop an overlook of the Pacific Ocean in the Santa Lucia Mountains. The elder Hearst could not have imagined the palatial estate his son would one day build atop their beloved Camp Hill.
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Custer: Named after the “Boy General” of Civil War fame and Little Bighorn infamy, the Custer fittingly began with promise but ended in disaster. The prospectors who founded the claim in 1876 quickly realized they needed more resources. Enter Hearst. Partnering with San Francisco investors James Ben Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis, he built up the mine, around which sprouted up the town of Custer (in what would become South Dakota). In 1887 the trio sold the Custer for $125,000. Within a year the gold had petered out, and the town dwindled.
Contention: When Hearst invested in this silver mine 10 miles northwest of Tombstone in the summer of 1880, he unwittingly created a rush to Arizona Territory, attracting the likes of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. The Contention mine proved as tough as anything Hearst had ever seen. In a letter, he griped to Haggin, “I assure you this is the hardest place to accomplish anything I have ever met.”
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Hermes: In 1871 Hearst invested in this silver mine (about 80 miles south of Nevada’s present-day Great Basin National Park), which intersected with the Raymond & Ely mine. During the inevitable lawsuit it was rumored Hearst purchased members of the jury “like sausages.” Unsurprisingly, Hearst won the lawsuit. Altogether he made $250,000 on the venture.
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Ontario: Amid the Panic of 1873 Hearst’s mining empire was underwater, and his wife and son were living in a boardinghouse. But Hearst didn’t despair. A year earlier he’d gotten wind of this promising silver mine 30 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. Gambling everything, Hearst had purchased it for less than $30,000 cash. The investment paid off big, the Ontario averaging annual profits of nearly $1 million for the rest of Hearst’s life.
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Homestake: On the National Register of Historic Places, this is probably the most storied gold mine on the planet. In 1877 Hearst and partners began snapping up interest in the
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ABOVE RIGHT: ALAN CRESSLER
Above: George Hearst (1820–91), the father of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, was a self-made millionaire with a knack for mining. Top: Hearst bought a one-sixth interest in the Ophir in 1859, and when the first silver was smelted from that mine the next year, it set off a rush to Virginia City in the Comstock Lode of what would become Nevada Territory on March 2, 1861.
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TOP: VINTAGE POSTCARD, WORTHPOINT; ABOVE LEFT: WIKIPEDIA
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Ophir: If Henry Comstock and friends hadn’t sold their shares in the Ophir, Virginia City’s first profitable silver mine, he probably wouldn’t have shot himself. But in 1859 one of the partners let George Hearst buy a one-sixth interest for $3,500. After leading a mule train weighed down with 45 tons of silver across the Sierra Nevada to San Francisco, Hearst found an assayer who deemed the silver extraordinarily valuable, prompting a rush to the Comstock Lode.
ROUNDUP Homestake in Lead, Dakota Territory (3 miles southwest of Deadwood). By 1884 it had produced $4.5 million in gold, and by the time it ceased production in 2001 it had yielded nearly 1,400 tons of gold. Grand View Terrace—from which tourists to Mount Rushmore marvel at the faces of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln—was built through the generosity of the Homestake Mining Co.
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Anaconda: In 1883 Hearst and partners invested in the Anaconda, just outside Butte, Montana Territory. Before long its miners struck a bed of almost pure copper. Along with proving himself the most versatile mining operator in the frontier West, Hearst brought prosperity to Butte, hiring some 900 employees to work the mine.
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Hearst: In 1875 Hearst developed a number of claims, including this namesake mine in the Argus Range, just west of Death Valley. Although this hole in the ground didn’t bring up much silver, it did necessitate the construction of the landmark Wildrose Kilns, used to produce charcoal for smelting ore. They remain standing in present-day Death Valley National Park.
ABOVE RIGHT: ALAN CRESSLER
TOP: VINTAGE POSTCARD, WORTHPOINT; ABOVE LEFT: WIKIPEDIA
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Deadwood: This was one of many Black Hills mines in which Hearst and partners invested in 1878, though he quickly lost faith in it. More than a century later, courtesy of the eponymous HBO TV series, Hearst’s name would be linked to that of Deadwood and such notable denizens as Wild Bill Hickok, Seth Bullock, Calamity Jane and Al Swearengen. —Matthew Bernstein
PACKING THE WEST Young Americans seemingly know so little or have yet to learn about key frontier facts, figures, events and places such as the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the California Gold Rush, the Oregon Trail, Manifest Destiny, women’s suffrage out West and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Western Writers of America (WWA), founded in 1953 to promote literature about the American West, is addressing that shortfall with Packing the West, a reading and educational enrichment program to introduce students of all ages to the history and tales of the American frontier. Participating WWA members travel to schools and libraries to discuss four major themes of Western history—Western trails, Western legends and characters, women of the West and American Indians—and to read excerpts from relevant books. The speakers also bring with them a trunk packed with Western maps, artifacts, books, music, poetry and a lesson plan. Another aspect of the program is the creation of a series of videos for classroom use to relate key events in Western history. “Packing the West engages students in a fun and educational experience and develops their creativity,” explains WWA President Chris Enss (at center of photo above), who has made such presentations to 9- to 14-year-old students in Colorado, Wyoming and California. “It transports students back in time to the 1800s, when people from the Eastern part of the United States moved west for land, gold and adventure.” For an overview of the Packing the West educational series visit westernwriters.org or email gvcenss@aol.com for more information.
PICTURE CAVE A two-cave system in east-central Missouri boasting nearly 300 rock art images painted on the walls more than 1,000 years ago by ancestors of the Osage sold for $2.2 million as part of a recent property auction managed by St. Louis–based Selkirk Auctioneers & Appraisers. “Picture Cave,” as it has been dubbed, features glyphs of humans, animals and mythical creatures. It sits on 43 acres near the town of Warrenton, some 50 miles west of the “Gateway to the West.” Owned since 1953 by a St. Louis family, the land had been used primarily for hunting. When the family floated the possibility of selling the property, the Osage Nation expressed interest. “It is our ancestors who are buried there in that cave,” tribal historic preservation officer Andrea Hunter told CNN. “It is our ancestors that created the images that are on the walls and conducted the rituals that took place. It is absolutely the most sacred site that we have. And it rightfully should be in our ownership.” The family and Osage representatives could not agree on a price, however, thus the auction. The auction house described the anonymous buyers as conservationists who have worked to preserve historically significant caves. Interested parties express hope the new owner will ultimately donate Picture Cave to the Osage Nation.
WEST WORDS
‘Friends, what are you talking about? The Black Hills belong to me. Saying this, I take fresh courage’ —Sitting Bull composed and sang these words to fellow Lakota delegates at the outset of an October 1888 trip to Washington, D.C., to discuss the U.S. government’s decision to carve out six smaller reservations from the Great Sioux Reservation and purchase the 9 million acres of “excess” Lakota land.
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Decades in the making, the First Americans Museum [famok.org] in Oklahoma City has finally opened to the public. It was back in 1994 when State Senator Enoch Kelly Haney, an artist and member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, co-authored a bill to create a state agency to develop the museum. But the project languished due to a lack of funds. In 2017 Oklahoma City officials partnered with a land management subsidiary of the Chickasaw Nation, which agreed to fund the museum in exchange for the right to buy and develop the 300 acres surrounding it. The 175,000square-foot museum was designed in consultation with tribal councils, which retain the right to reject any object on display in the museum and suggest alternatives. Marking the entranceway is a steel span, evocative of St. Louis’ iconic Gateway Arch, created by father-andson Cherokee artists 12 WILD WEST
Demos Glass and Bill Glass Jr. Suspended from the peak of the arch is a welcoming open hand. The museum’s signature exhibition, “Okla Homma,” in the 18,000-squarefoot Tribal Nations Gallery, relates the stories of all 39 Oklahoma tribes through works of art, interactive media and film. The exhibition “Winiko: Life of an Object,” in the Mezzanine Gallery, presents relevant tribal artifacts that are on a 10-year loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
MARKED MAN ▲ Billy the Kid pal José Chávez y Chávez, immortalized onscreen by actor Lou Diamond Phillips in the Young Guns film franchise, has a new headstone atop his grave in remote Milagro, N.M. Decades
marker was funded by the nonprofit coalition and private donors. The project was part of the coalition’s broader effort to preserve and promote sites related to Billy the Kid before they are lost to history. The coalition has found other unmarked graves of key figures in the Kid’s life and plans to honor them as it has Chávez. —Josh Slatten
WESTERN TRAGEDY ▲
On Oct. 21, 2021, during filming of the Western Rust at the Bonanza Creek Ranch southwest of Santa Fe, actor and co-producer Alec Baldwin (above) discharged a prop .45 Colt Pietta revolver that held a live round, killing 42-year-old cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding 48-year-old director Joel Souza. Baldwin, 63, was unaware the gun was loaded and has not been charged. In the film the actor plays title outlaw Harland Rust, who is on the run with his orphaned 13-year-old grandson and younger brother in 1880s Kansas (New Mexico filling in for
SEE YOU LATER...
EARL OLD PERSON Earl Old Person, honorary lifetime chief of the 17,321member Blackfeet Nation in northwestern Montana, died at age 92 in Browning, Mont., on Oct. 13, 2021. Born on the 3,000-square-mile Blackfeet Indian Reservation on April 13, 1929, Old Person was appointed chief in 1978. He sat more than 60 years on the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council, the nation’s governing body, and was the longestserving elected tribal leader in the United States when he retired in 2016. An advocate of economic development and self-sufficiency for his people, Old Person was a keeper of tribal history, lore, song and dance and spoke the Blackfeet language at home. “He was our connection to our ancestral ways,” says Karla Bird, president of Blackfeet Community College.
TOP LEFT: VISITOKC,COM; LEFT: JOSH SLATTEN: ABOVE LEFT: GETTY IMAGES; TOP: BLACKFEET NATION/BLACKFEET TRIBAL BUSINESS COUNCIL: OPPOSITE PAGE MIDDLE: GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE PAGE TOP: UNDB.COM
FIRST AMERICANS MUSEUM ▲
ago Chávez’s son removed the weathered original marker, but he died before he could erect a replacement stone. Last fall, after several years of research, the nonprofit Billy the Kid’s Historical Coalition [billythekidshistoricalcoalition.com] pinpointed the unmarked grave and put up a headstone. Chávez (mentioned in James B. Mills’ December 2020 Wild West article “Hombres Valientes in the Lincoln County War”) rode with the Kid as a member of the extralegal Regulators and escaped several deadly situations with his pal during that violent 1878 clash between rival factions. Born in 1851 in Ceboleta, New Mexico Territory, Chávez lived a surprisingly long life as both an outlaw and lawman. Sentenced to death for the 1893 murder of gang leader Gabriel Sandoval, he saw his sentence commuted to life in prison in 1897 and then, after having aided prison guards during a riot, was pardoned in 1909 by Governor George Curry. Chavez lived out the rest of his life quietly in Milagro, dying in his early 70s on July 17, 1923. He was buried in a private cemetery just outside that small farming community. Erected on Oct. 2, 2021, the replacement
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Kansas). Bonanza Creek Ranch, which encompasses a movie set of two dozen buildings, has served as a filming location for such Westerns as The Man From Laramie (1955), The Cowboys (1972), Silverado (1985), 3:10 to Yuma (2007) and Cowboys & Aliens (2011). Production of Rust shut down while the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office investigated the incident.
Mississippi” and was “part Superman, part Sherlock Holmes and part Lone Ranger.” Hey, sounds like a candidate for a comic book, and writer Kevin Grevioux and illustrator David Williams have answered the call. In Bass Reeves— available online from Allegiance Arts & Entertainment [allegiancearts.com] and in hard copy nationwide at Walmart— they relate the story of the black deputy U.S. marshal who usually got his man in Indian and Oklahoma territories (present-day Oklahoma). It is one of four debut titles from the Little Rock, Ark., publisher, founded in 2019 by comic industry veterans Mitch and Elizabeth Breitweiser.
BASS REEVES ▲
COOPER MOLERA
In his article “Lawman Legend Bass Reeves: The Invincible Man Hunter” (in the February 2007 Wild West and available online at Historynet.com), Reeves biographer Art T. Burton notes the frontier lawman “probably made a greater impact on his assigned jurisdiction than any other badge wearer west of the
Cooper Molera Adobe, a National Trust historic site in downtown Monterey, Calif., will use its share of a $500,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to digitize hundreds of thousands of its historical records. Dating from 1827, the site is closely linked to Monterey’s role as
the political and commercial capital of the Mexican territory of Alta California. “The site’s deep history of Latinx, indigenous and women’s stories still need to be fully interpreted,” reads the National Trust for Historic Preservation [savingplaces.org] grant profile. “In addition, the grant would help fund the position of director of partnerships and interpretation, which was left unfilled during the pandemic.” The Cooper Molera complex comprises the Cooper and Diaz adobes, a corner store, an adobe warehouse, barns and gardens on some 2½ acres surrounded by a period adobe wall. The adobes and grounds are open to the public for self-guided tours.
SITTING BULL DESCENDANT ▲
Genetic researchers have confirmed that 73-year-old Ernie LaPointe (above) of
South Dakota is a great-grandson of Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull. According to lead researcher Eske Willerslev, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Cambridge, his team compared DNA samples from LaPoine to autosomal DNA drawn from Sitting Bull’s hair lock, which had been stored for more than a century at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. With that confirmation of direct ancestry, LaPointe hopes to move ahead with plans to reinter his famed ancestor, who was killed on Dec. 15, 1890, in a scuffle with Indian police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which straddles the border of North and South Dakota. Sitting Bull’s remains are reportedly split between two gravesites—one at Fort Yates, N.D., the other at Mobridge, S.D. (learn more in “A Grave Legacy,” by Ron J. Jackson Jr., in the December 2021 Wild West). LaPointe will first have to confirm the identity of those remains.
WILL THE REAL KID…? ▲ The Final Trial of Billy the Kid, a docudrama set for release in early 2022 (see trailer at youtube.com/watch ?v=LP2sjNmBvvk), deals with a subject that never seems to die—a suggestion the Kid was not killed by Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett on July 14, 1881, but lived on as either William Henry “Brushy Bill” Roberts (portrayed by Thomas Fears, above) of Hico, Texas, or John Miller of Prescott, Ariz. Michael Anthony Giudicissi writes and directs the film, which he launched in late 2020 as a straight documentary featuring interviews with former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and other interested parties, from lawmen to authors. He has since expanded the project to include a “trial,” filmed at the Old Post Office building in downtown Albuquerque, which also once
FA M O U S L A S T WO RD S
‘It’s too late now. Time to hang’ —Mexican outlaw Augustine Chacón said these words on Nov. 21, 1902, on the gallows in Solomonville, Arizona Territory, after a half-hour speech in which he proclaimed his innocence, at least with regard to killing anyone. Chacón had originally been sentenced to hang on June 18, 1897, but that June 9 he’d dug his way through the adobe walls of his Solomonville jail cell. FEBRUARY 2022
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served as a federal courthouse. In April 1881 Billy did actually stand trial for murder (and was convicted) in Mesilla, New Mexico Territory, but that has nothing to do with this fictional proceeding, which will weigh the credibility of those who claimed
to be the Kid. Whatever the merits of the film, it probably won’t change many minds about when and where the infamous outlaw died or is buried.
CUSTERIANA
Fetching the top bids at Heritage Auctions’ [historical.ha.com]
recent “Michael Ward Collection of Western Americana” signature auction in Dallas were a .45-caliber Colt Single Action Army
revolver issued in 1874 to Lt. Col. George Custer’s 7th U.S. Cav-
alry ($47,500) and a National Arms Co. derringer (at left) once owned by Custer ($40,000). Artist Ed Kucera’s 2017 oil on canvas Battlefront brought $31,250, while Edward S. Curtis’ 1908 orotone The Oath, Apsaroke sold for $30,000.
Events of the west with “Waterfalls in Yellowstone,” by M.C. Poulsen, and “Mammals in Glacier,” by Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey, through Feb. 27.
At the James ▲
Exhibitions at the James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art in St. Petersburg, Fla., include “Warhol’s West,” through Jan. 9 (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. Call 727892-4200 or visit jamesmuseum.org.
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.
Texas Dressed ▼ “Texas Dressed,” an exhibition running
through April 30
at the PanhandlePlains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, showcases the costumes and magic of the family-friendly
Yellowstone and Glacier
The Booth Museum in Cartersville, Ga., offers a double treat
outdoor musical Texas. Each summer the Pioneer Amphitheater in Palo Duro Canyon hosts the show, whose fictional characters bring to life the stories of early settlers in the Texas Panhandle. Call 806-651-2244 or visit panhandleplains.org.
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 “Tattooing: Religion, Reality and Regret,” through May 8 at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Call 405-478-
2250 or visit nationalcowboymuseum.org.
books. Visit westernwriters.org.
Sitting Bull
Powerful Women
A long-term exhibit on the life of Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull is ongoing at the Missouri-Yellowstone Confluence Interpretive Center, 20 miles southwest of Williston, N.D., and a half mile east of Fort Buford State Historic Site, where Bull surrendered on July 20, 1881. Call 701-572-9034 or visit history.nd.gov/ historicsites/mycic.
Call 317-636-9378 or visit eiteljorg.org.
WWA Convention
Old West Auction
Western Writers of America heads to Montana for its next convention, June 22–25 in Great Falls. The WWA, founded in 1953 to promote literature pertaining to the American West, boasts more than 600 members who write both fiction and nonfiction articles and
“Powerful Women II: Contemporary Art From the Eiteljorg Collection” runs at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis through Jan. 18. Museumgoers can also take in “Jingle Rails: The Great Western Adventure,” featuring a G-scale model train wonderland, through Jan 17.
The 32nd annual Mesa Old West Show & Auction hammers down Jan. 21–23 in Mesa, Ariz. Friday night’s auction features the Flood family collection of art and ephemera, with special emphasis on artist and film consultant Joe De Yong (1894–1975). Visit oldwestevents.com.
Send upcoming event notices by email to wildwest@historynet.com. Submit at least four months in advance.
14 WILD WEST
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INTERVIEW
HATS OFF TO HIRT TOM HIRT KEEPS OLD WEST HAT MAKING ALIVE—AND NOT JUST IN MOVIES BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS Tom Hirt [hatsofthewest.com] was living his dream in the late 1970s, working as a double for such actors as Mark Harmon, Richard Farnsworth and Jason Robards in Comes a Horseman (1978) before an actors strike forced him to get a steady job. He wound up in a Colorado Springs, Colo., hat shop, later bought the business and started making hats for Western films, notably Tombstone (1993), but also Conagher (1991), The Quick and the Dead (1995), You Know My Name (1999) and many others. He also made hats for Ronald Reagan during the former actor’s presidency. Hirt’s still at it, not only making hats but also teaching others how to make them. He took time to talk hats and history from his home/ranch/workshop near Penrose, Colo. How did you get started making Western hats? They used to film a lot of movies around here. I got a call one day from Sam Elliott. I had done some hat work for some real low, low budget picture. Somehow he got my name, and he said, “I’d like to see you about a hat for a movie I’m going to make at Buckskin Joe” [an Old West theme park and town set used in films such as Cat Ballou (1965), The Cowboys (1972) and others]. He came out, and we talked about hats for a while, what he wanted his to look like, design and color, and he ordered a couple of pure beaver hats, and then a few weeks later he came out again for his hats, and the producer and the director came out together, so I got myself wrapped up in that picture [Conagher]. How did you get on Tombstone? Sam called. “I’m doing a picture in southern Arizona called Tombstone,” he said. “I gave your name to the proper people, and they’ll be calling you. This is not something for me. I gave your name because you’ve done good things for me, but this is going to be a big job. Are you going to be capable of doing this? I want you to do it, but I don’t want you to be overwhelmed.” I didn’t know how demanding it was, but I said I can do it, and I did it. How authentic were hats in Tombstone? I think they were pretty authentic. I met a guy in Tucson after that movie hit the screen. He was from Hollywood. He says to me: “Tombstone may not be one of the best Westerns ever made, but it was a good Western. But for wardrobe and costume that was the first Western I’d seen where you had a Victorian man and a Victorian woman dressed in Victorian clothes. You had cowboys who were dressed as cowboys. City people living in town dressed as city people would have dressed.” They had clothing for their lifestyle. Up until then you’d find the guy who runs the general store in town having a cowboy hat on. You’d find a woman wearing a dress that was not of the era, because it was fashionable. 16 WILD WEST
When did hat making change and become big business? Back then everybody was a custom hatmaker. Every town had a hat shop. But then [ John B.] Stetson started making hats for the world. He made a hat of a better quality, which made him famous. You could buy a hat in Santa Fe and buy the same hat in San Francisco. He shipped all over the country. That’s what changed the hat industry [after the Civil War]. You make custom hats largely by hand. Is it an art? Yes, it is an art. When you consider that this is all hand-sewn. What’s hand-sewn today? I use an old 65- to 70-year-old Singer featherweight sewing machine to put the bound edge on a hat. I don’t have a flanging machine. I don’t have a blocking machine. Everything is done by hand. That puts me way out of the modern world. I still do all the work. Were hat crowns in the Old West shaped by hatmakers or by cowboys as they broke them in? I think there was a combination. Hatmakers knew they could shape a hat any way they wanted to, so they would be creative about it. But I know that early Western hats were shaped more by the style that was going around. You could almost spot a guy by the shape of his hat and say, “Oh, he’s from northern Texas or southern Texas or California or Colorado,” because of the shape of the hat. It had a certain look to it that was conducive to a certain area of the country. Not so much like that anymore. Too much to pick from. What period of cowboy hats do you like most? That is a question nobody has ever asked me. That’s cool. I’ve done them all, but you know, if I was going to go back to a period, maybe right after the 20th century to 1920, 1930. Hats were of a better quality. They looked better. What do you think of most hats in Western movies? The hats were a lot cooler when Gary Cooper was making Westerns. Look at Gary Cooper in The Westerner [1940] or in Along Came Jones [1945], before they started wearing the uniform of Hollywood—which was a little, narrow-brimmed hat all the same shape, like the Cartwrights [in Bonanza]—the crappiest looking hats in the era of the later B Westerns, the later television series. They didn’t have any nostalgia. They all looked like little fedoras, with a curl on the brim instead of a snap brim. But if you look at those early Westerns, they had a lot of nice style hats. Watch the characters on the street—not the stars, but the extras—they wore better looking hats than what the actors wore, because they were real, real hats. They weren’t made for a Hollywood image.
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BULLOCK IN BOYHOOD
TONY SAPIENZA COLLECTION
Seth Bullock (July 23, 1849–Sept. 23, 1919) is best known for having been appointed the first sheriff of Deadwood, in March 1877, some seven months after luckless gambler Jack McCall assassinated Wild Bill Hickok in that wild Dakota Territory boomtown. Born in what would become Ontario, Canada, to a strict disciplinarian father, Bullock first ran away from home to Montana Territory at age 13. Five years later, in 1867, he moved stateside for keeps, temporarily living with a married sister in Helena, Montana Territory. This previously unpublished carte de visite of the young Bullock from the Tony Sapienza Collection likely dates to that time. In 1873 he was elected sheriff of Lewis and Clark County, Montana Territory, though when he moved to Deadwood in August 1876, it was to open a hardware store with partner Sol Star. Hickok’s murder triggered a demand for stepped-up law and order, and Dakota Territory Governor John L. Pennington duly appointed Bullock sheriff. He lost two subsequent elections for sheriff, but that didn’t end his career as a lawman. Bullock was serving as a deputy sheriff in Medora, Dakota Territory, in 1884 when he met rancher Theodore Roosevelt, who went on to fame as the “Cowboy President.” In 1905 Roosevelt appointed Bullock a U.S. marshal for South Dakota, and President William Taft reappointed him in 1909. Bullock, who died at home in Deadwood at age 70, is buried in that town’s Mount Moriah Cemetery, as are Hickok and Calamity Jane. Bullock gained posthumous recognition in the 21st century as a largely sympathetic character in the HBO TV series Deadwood (2004–06) and its 2019 sequel Deadwood: The Movie.
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TEMPLE, A SON OF SAM, WAS A FIERY TEXAS LAWYER WHOSE INSULT OF OPPOSING COUNSEL IN 1895 LED TO A GUNFIGHT WITH THE JENNINGS BROTHERS BY KENT FRATES
T
emple Houston, youngest child of U.S. senator and Texas president and governor Sam Houston, was admitted to the state bar at age 19 in 1880 and was known for his courtroom antics and theatrical oratory. He later gained note as a district attorney and state senator. Houston was also handy with a gun and never went anywhere without a Colt .45 revolver he’d named “Old Betsy.” In 1894, in the wake of the Cherokee Strip land run, he moved his family to Woodward, Oklahoma Territory, where his fiery disposition got him into trouble.
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FROM TOP: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, BACA COUNTY HISTORY.COM, OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
Temple Lea Houston was born at the governor’s mansion in Austin on Aug. 12, 1860. Orphaned by age 7, he was raised by family and aided by his father’s friends. He was a hard man to ignore, standing more than 6 feet tall, with piercing gray eyes and long, flowing auburn hair. A clotheshorse, Houston sometimes dressed as a Mexican vaquero, complete with a sombrero bearing a great silver eagle. In 1895 J.D.F. Jennings was the probate judge in Woodward County. Judge Jennings had four sons—John Jr., Ed, Frank and Al— all of whom were lawyers. John and Ed practiced law in Woodward. Al later gained notoriety as a train robber, convict, Western film actor and dark horse candidate for Oklahoma governor. The brothers were an ornery, hotheaded lot. Given that Houston and the Jennings brothers practiced as opposing attorneys, sometimes before Judge Jennings, it is perhaps no surprise bad blood arose between them. Several cases served to aggravate their festering feud. One involved John E. “Jack” Love, a former sheriff of Woodward County and friend of Houston whom Temple represented in a case opposed by Ed Jennings. On Oct. 8, 1895, the animosity between Houston and the Jennings brothers boiled over in court when Temple and Ed again appeared as opposing counsel. While arguing the case Temple made a remark suggesting Ed’s ignorance of the law, prompting Ed to call Temple a liar. The two exchanged insults, and when Temple moved to physically confront Ed, the latter slapped Temple. At that, guns were drawn. Thanks to cooler heads, a shootout was narrowly averted, and court adjourned for the day. That evening Ed and John went out drinking and looking for Temple. Around 10 p.m. they arrived at Jack Garvey’s Cabinet Saloon. The saloon was divided into two rooms —the bar up front and a gambling room in back. The best description of what happened next, one that squares with other accounts, appears in a 1938 interview conducted with Casper Wister Herod as part of a Works Progress Administration oral history project. Herod served as a lawyer and later a judge in Woodward. Though he wasn’t present at the time of the shooting, he heard the shots and rushed to the scene immediately thereafter. He was also familiar with the testimony given by 20 witnesses at the subsequent
WISEABOUTTEXAS.COM
GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN
FROM TOP: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, BACA COUNTY HISTORY.COM, OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
WISEABOUTTEXAS.COM
GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN trial. Herod had also loaned Jack Love a gun earlier that evening. Soon after entering the bar, Ed and John spied Houston and Love at a table in the gambling room. Brandishing their guns, the brothers strode to the back. Temple soon rose from the table, stepped toward the rear door of the saloon and said, “Ed, I want to see you a minute.” “See me here and now, you son of a bitch!” Ed snapped in reply, prompting Temple to draw his gun and fire. Then all hell broke loose. The concussions from the first shots snuffed out the gaslights in the room, so most of the shots that followed were in the dark. Temple emptied his revolver, as did Ed and John. Love fired two shots, one grazing John in the chest before shattering his left upper arm. When the saloonkeeper relit the gaslights, bystanders found Ed prone on the floor, mortally wounded. One bullet had found its mark, entering the back of his head and lodging behind his left eye. John had stumbled into the street bound for home. Judge Jennings soon showed up at the saloon. “I murdered my own boy,” he said while kneeling over Ed. Herod interpreted the remark as an admission to the “wrong treatment” Temple had received in his court. Houston and Love went immediately to the sheriff’s office to surrender themselves and their weapons. A grand jury indicted them for firstdegree manslaughter, and the case went to trial in May 1896 in Woodward. “The prosecution made a weak case,” a special correspondent reported from Woodward on May 15, “being hampered by the general feeling that the killing was justifiable and by the further fact that none of the Jennings appeared to urge the prosecution, not even the brother [ John] of the deceased.” Evidence also surfaced to suggest John had fired the shot that killed brother Ed. After a brief deliberation the jury found the defendants not guilty. In recent decades a document surfaced to support the theory John had fired the fatal shot. A copy of the circa 1965 document, titled “Temple Houston As I Knew Him,” was discovered, unindexed, in the Temple Houston document files at the Plains Indians & Pioneers Museum in Woodward. Its author was Clark R. Hayhurst of Houston.
Hayhurst grew up in Woodward and was boyhood friends with the children of both Temple Houston and the Jennings brothers. Hayhurst was 12 at the time of the shooting. The next day he encountered John Jennings’ son “Little John” and accompanied him to the family home. There the boys found father John, wounded and in bed. Hayhurst was present when two men carried a casket bearing Ed’s body into the house. He recalled the moment: Just then there was a sound of shuffling feet in the back room, and the door swung open, and two men came in carrying Ed in his casket. They stood it up and leaned it against the wall on the left side of the entrance. It was then that John said, “Stand him up a little straighter so that I can see him better.” This was done, and after a moment of scrutinizing, John pointed his finger and asked, “What made that black and blue spot under his left eye?” “That is where the bullet lodged,” said the undertaker, and turning his back to us, he laid his finger on the back of his head just behind the right ear and said: “The bullet entered here at the base of the skull and lodged behind the left eye. He died instantly.”
Such evidence regarding the path of the bullet is consistent with other accounts of the shooting. Thus it seems likely that in the mayhem of the gunfight in the dark, Ed stepped into John’s line of fire and was shot in the head by his own brother. Al Jennings still wanted to exact revenge on Temple Houston, but Judge Jennings reportedly talked his youngest son out of it. On Aug. 15, 1905, nearly a decade after the shooting, Houston died in Woodward at age 45 of a cerebral hemorrhage. He rests beside wife Laura in the local Elmwood Cemetery.
Opposite page: Temple Houston was admitted to the state bar at age 19. Above: The animosity between Houston and the Jennings brothers boiled over here in Woodward, Oklahoma Territory. Top left: Al Jennings wanted to exact revenge on Houston. Left: In the Oct. 8, 1895, gunfight, John Jennings was not only wounded but also likely shot brother Ed in the head by accident.
it seems likely that in the mayhem of the gunfight in the dark, ed stepped into john’s line of fire
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PIONEERS & SETTLERS
BLACK COWBOY ARCHAEOLOGIST GEORGE McJUNKIN MADE A DISCOVERY NEAR FOLSOM, NEW MEXICO TERRITORY, THAT PUSHED BACK THE AGE OF MAN IN NORTH AMERICA BY LYNDA A. SÁNCHEZ
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Details about McJunkin’s early years are sketchy. He was born into slavery on the ranch of John Sanders McJunkin in Rogers Prairie, Texas, about a decade before the start of the American Civil War (1856, according to his headstone at Folsom Cemetery). He studied the art of cowboying in Texas and apparently was a fast learner. Once he had proved himself, he reportedly exchanged
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DENVER MUSEUM OF NATURE & SCIENCE (2)
Top: A Bison antiquus, a species much larger than modern bison, battles spear throwers in a fight for survival. Above: George McJunkin was not your average cowboy. Also an amateur naturalist and archaeologist, he discovered bones of the extinct buffalo species near Folsom, New Mexico Territory.
LYNDA A. SANCHEZ COLLECTION (2)
O
n Aug. 27, 1908 a devastating flood brought death and destruction to Folsom, New Mexico Territory, a community of nearly 1,000 people. More than a foot of rain in the Cimarron Valley created a 5-foot wall of turbulent, muddy water that shattered the town. Seventeen residents lost their lives that day, and most buildings were swept away. The flood also ripped into the banks of nearby Wild Horse Arroyo, felling trees, moving boulders and leaving enormous deposits of mud downstream. On August 31 Folsom’s weekly La Epoca deemed it “a most extraordinary and terrific battle of the elements.” The paper noted that the “downpour of torrential waters was heralded by the lowing of cattle…and howling of dogs.” Folsom had become a ghost town practically overnight. Today it is home to some 60 residents. Like so many others, a black cowboy named George McJunkin had his life upended by the 1908 flood, but he was destined to rise above the disaster. According to a 1999 article in The Denver Post’s Empire magazine, McJunkin was “the forgotten man at the center of the century’s most startling archaeological find.”
DENVER MUSEUM OF NATURE & SCIENCE (2)
LYNDA A. SANCHEZ COLLECTION (2)
PIONEERS & SETTLERS
tips in bronc busting for reading lessons. His Mexican and Anglo compadres likely also taught him how to read the stars and understand the lay of the land. McJunkin was bilingual, played the fiddle and guitar, roped well and was considered an amateur naturalist, archaeologist and all-around Renaissance man, though he may have been unfamiliar with the latter term. During long hours in the saddle he collected unusual rock, bone and other items of archaeological interest. People seemed to enjoy his company, and it appeared he had found a home in Folsom, a town born in the late 1880s when the Colorado & Southern Railroad cut across the northeast corner of the territory. The infamous Ketchum Gang robbed the train near Folsom three times in the late 1890s. McJunkin’s reputation and responsibilities grew over the years, and he was noted for his cow savvy and ability to break horses. For a time he rode fence and worked as wagon boss at Dr. Thomas E. Owen’s Hereford Park and Pitchfork ranches. When Owen died in 1891, McJunkin signed on as foreman of neighbor William H. Jack’s 8,000-acre Crowfoot Ranch. The 1908 flood not only destroyed Folsom but also tore away many range fences, leaving area cattle to wander aimlessly. As soon as it was feasible to ride fence, foreman McJunkin filled his saddlebag with bailing wire and pliers and set out to begin the arduous repair work. While riding along Wild Horse Arroyo about 8 miles west of the devastated town, McJunkin noticed huge bones protruding from a newly exposed bank. Having worked with cattle most of his life, he was of course familiar with their bones, and as a young man he’d hunted buffalo. These bones belonged to neither. He figured correctly they belonged to an extinct species of buffalo much larger than modern bison. At that realization, he became a man on a mission. For the next 14 years, until his Jan. 21, 1922, death in Folsom, McJunkin sought to bring attention to the find by showing people bone samples. Few seemed interested. Four months after McJunkin’s death, however, Carl Schwachheim, a blacksmith from nearby Raton, N.M., visited the site west of Folsom with fellow collector Fred Howarth, a banker. Years earlier McJunkin had shared details about his find with both men. But while early literature about the find acknowledged both Schwachheim and Howarth, none credited McJunkin. In 1926 the Colorado Museum of Natural History (since renamed the Denver Museum of Nature & Science) sponsored a dig at the site that revealed bones from at least 30 extinct Bison antiquus. The team also discovered a stunning spearpoint embedded between two bison ribs. Museum director Jesse Figgins cut out the segment and took it to Denver for further study (it remains on display at the museum). His researchers found several such projectiles, which would become known as Folsom points and blow the roof off our knowledge of early man’s existence
Only after McJunkin’s death in 1922 did the public, including the unidentified man above, take an interest in the Folsom Site. Left: This spearpoint (a Folsom point) was found embedded between two fossilized bison ribs.
in North America. It was already known that Bison antiquus had roamed the region around 9000 bc, so the discovery of the Folsom kill site and camp proved humans had inhabited this land thousands of years earlier than previously thought. Noted archaeologist David Eck summed up the significance of the discoveries: Sixteen spearpoints were found with the bones. The way the Folsom point was fluted and shaped represented a major leap in Stone Age weapon technology. The discovery pushed back the known human occupation of North America 6,000 years.
The time line didn’t last long. Three years after the museum dig near Folsom, amateur archaeologist Ridgely Whiteman stumbled across fluted points at a site farther south near Clovis that backdated humans another 2,500 years. Today evidence suggests humans have inhabited North America for some 23,000 years. McJunkin, though, remained unknown until the early 1970s when George Agogino, founding chair of the Department of Anthropology at Eastern New Mexico University, and author Franklin Folsom recognized the unsung cowboy as the true discoverer of Folsom man. The former slave who had made himself into a roper, range rider and man of the West had finally gotten his due for turning the field of North American archaeology on its ear. In 1961 Congress designated the Folsom Site a national historic landmark, and in 2019 McJunkin was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Seventh-generation rancher Matt Doherty submitted the nomination. McJunkin had worked for Doherty’s great-great-great grandfather, Dr. Owen. If the curious cowboy hadn’t made his Folsom find, the mud may have dried up, leaving the bones and points undiscovered for generations to come. “It is a discovery that made him famous, but his courage, determination and perseverance is what is remembered about the man,” Doherty said. “A true cowboy!” FEBRUARY 2022
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WESTERN ENTERPRISE
O.D. GASS WAS PLAGUED BY BAD LUCK BUT SELDOM SHIED FROM STARTING MINING, FARMING AND OTHER VENTURES OUT WEST BY DAVID McCORMICK
v
isions of untold riches filled Octavius Decatur “O.D.” Gass’ head as he sank his pick deep into the craggy goldfields of El Dorado Canyon in the Colorado Mining District. Dreams of finding his own “El Dorado” had drawn the Ohio emigrant (born Feb. 29, 1827, in Richland County) to this remote stretch of what was then far western Arizona Territory in 1862. But Gass’ adventures—and misadventures—out West began long before his arrival in El Dorado Canyon. On news of the California Gold Rush, Gass bought passage on a ship sailing from Baltimore around Cape Horn to San Francisco, where he arrived in January 1850. After earning a grubstake by offloading prefab dwellings from the ship’s hold, Gass 24 WILD WEST
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THE HUNTINGTON, THE OTIS MARSTON COLORADO RIVER COLLECTION (2)
NEVER OUT OF GAS
struck out for the goldfields of California’s El Dorado County. Within a few years partners had drawn him into a proprietary squabble over promising tin mines in the Temescal Valley, south of present-day Corona. Gass split his attentions between the valley and Los Angeles, where he sought funding for the Temescal venture and consulted with lawyers to secure title to his holdings. With the threat of civil war looming after the election of 1860, however, few wanted to invest large sums in the region, leaving the tin mining venture in limbo. Meanwhile, the hard-luck entrepreneur carved out time to farm a 640-acre parcel, efforts that came to naught after hungry scavengers ravaged his crops. In the end, monies went out and none came in from either his tin mining scheme or his experiment in farming. If hard-luck described Gass’ efforts, perseverance was his middle name. He was in his mid-30s in 1862 when he left California and reached the aforementioned El Dorado Canyon. Alas, his efforts there also proved a failure, prompting one fellow miner to refer to Gass as “the worst struck man with the prospects here I ever saw.” Finally accepting he would never strike it rich as a miner, Gass located promising ranchland 40 miles northwest of El Dorado Canyon in an even more remote corner of Arizona Territory. By September 1865 Gass and partners Nathaniel Lewis and Lewis Cole had moved into an abandoned Mormon fort on what they dubbed Las Vegas Ranch (site of the present-day namesake gamblers’ mecca). Gass ultimately bought out his partners to become sole owner of the 640-acre parcel. (In 1878 he would add the 320-acre Spring Ranch to his holdings.) Unlike his other ventures, this one came to fruition. The soil, in Gass’ words, was a “rich black loam…[that] will produce any kind of vegetables.” He proved its worth in output, which included a variety of grains; vegetables such as beets, cabbage and corn; and fruit trees laden with apples, apricots, peaches and figs.
UNLV LIBRARIES
By the time of this 1870s photo O.D. Gass was no longer a citizen of Arizona Territory, as portions of Pah-Ute County had been transfered to Lincoln County, Nev., where high taxes soon took a bite.
THE HUNTINGTON, THE OTIS MARSTON COLORADO RIVER COLLECTION (2)
UNLV LIBRARIES
WESTERN ENTERPRISE
Gass also traded in livestock, though his pursuit of the latter drew complaints from soldiers at nearby Camp El Dorado who suspected the trader of appropriating horses that strayed from the garrison. The enterprising Gass continued to branch out, investing money in Callville, Arizona Territory, a port on the Colorado River some 25 miles east of the ranch. His plan was to haul freight along the river, which was passable from Callville all the way down to the Gulf of California. Gass applied profits from his farming success to tout the port as his next “can’t miss” venture. “Since it has been fully demonstrated that the Colorado is navigable to Callville,” he wrote in one paid Arizona Miner testimonial, “the rapid accumulation of steamers for this trade will astonish the most sanguine.” But as luck would have it, mining at El Dorado Canyon slacked off, leaving few steamboats to ply the river, while the ever extending tentacles of the railroad offered travelers easier access to markets, dooming Gass’ latest venture before it ever weighed anchor. By then Gass had decided to test the political waters, and in 1865 he won election to the lower house of the Arizona Territorial Legislature. With his new political clout, he pushed for Callville to become the seat of newly formed Pah-Ute County. It appeared Gass might realize his ambitions after all. But the following spring Congress approved legislation transferring Callville and other portions of PahUte County to Lincoln County, Nev. When Arizona officials protested, Congress relented, allowing Pah-Ute County to be represented in the Legislature through 1868. But the transfer went ahead as planned, and the county was dissolved in February 1871. His involuntary transfer to Nevada citizenship woefully affected Gass’ finances. The state saddled him with a heavy tax bill, while ongoing lawsuits regarding ownership of the Temescal tin mines further drained his assets. The political savvy that had served Gass well in Arizona Territory carried little weight in Nevada. Eventually, his assets would be underwater, as would Callville, which has lain beneath Lake Mead since completion of the Hoover Dam in 1936. On Feb. 24, 1872, perhaps hoping to change his luck, Gass wed Mary Virginia Simpson, and the pair settled into domesticity on his Las Vegas
Ranch. The union produced six children. Thankfully, the ranch remained quite the operation, with more than 30 employees, including a forema n , vet er i na r ia n , bla cksmith, carpenter, Paiute domestics and a Chinese cook. That said, Gass was pushing 50 and remained deep in debt. In 1874 he mortgaged the ranch for $3,000, a debt he was able to pay off in April 1877. But the financial upturn wouldn’t last. Two years later a cash-starved Gass turned for help to neighboring cattleman Archibald Stewart, borrowing $5,000 in gold coin. Then hard luck hit again. With crop losses due to bad weather, Gass fell behind in his payments and ended up having to sell the ranch to Stewart for $6,478, with 1,500 head of livestock thrown in to sweeten the deal. In June 1881 Gass moved his family to California, settling on a farm in the Yucaipa Valley. There he formed a partnership with Tom Cover at White Water with the intention of raising grapes. But damaging winds and insufficient water thwarted that venture. By 1885 gold fever had again sunk its hooks into Gass, and he mined various quartz claims through the turn of the century. Only then did the 70-something serial entrepreneur and sometime miner set down his pick and retire to son Fenton’s property in California’s San Bernardino Valley, where he helped with the orange harvest and tended a small garden until his death at age 97 on Dec. 10, 1924. While O.D. Gass’ ambitions met with little financial success, his tireless enthusiasm did contribute to the development of the Colorado River corridor shared by Arizona and Nevada. For that he deserves thanks.
Above: In circa 1873 Gass poses at his Las Vegas Ranch, which he operated with the help of more than 30 employees. Left: In 1881 Gass moved to California, where up till his death at age 97 in 1924 he was helping his son harvest oranges.
the ever extending tentacles of the railroad doomed gass’ Callville venture before it ever weighed anchor
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ART OF THE WEST
Above: A 1905 scene from Jo Mora’s time living with the Hopis. Right: Mora finishes his Belle Starr statue, which graces the Woolaroc Museum in northeast Oklahoma.
THE WESTERN ARTIST FROM WELL SOUTH OF THE BORDER
T
hat Jo Mora became an artist wasn’t a surprise. Mora’s father was a sculptor, and his brother a painter. But few could have predicted Jo would become known for paintings, sculpture and musings centered on the American West. Joseph Jacinto “Jo” Mora was born in Uruguay on Oct. 22, 1876, and moved with his family to the Eastern United States a year later. After studying art in New York and Boston, he got his first commission in 1895, to paint a mural in a Brooklyn skating rink, and two years later landed a job at The Boston Traveler news-
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paper as an illustrator and cartoonist. That wasn’t exactly Charles M. Russell’s path to creating a Western art legacy. So what led Mora to work as a cowboy and live with the Hopis while learning about and rendering art that portrays Indian culture? What prompted him to write and illustrate books about American cowboys and early California vaqueros and spend his last 27 years in northern California? “I think it starts with his dad,” says Peter Hiller, author of the 2021 biography The Life and Times of Jo Mora: Iconic Artist of the American West (see review, P. 84). “His dad was also a cattleman
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IMAGES: COURTESY JOMORATRUST.COM
URUGUAYAN-BORN JO MORA COWBOYED, LIVED WITH THE HOPIS AND CAPTURED THE AMERICAN WEST IN PAINTINGS, SCULPTURE AND WORDS BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS
ART OF THE WEST
IMAGES: COURTESY JOMORATRUST.COM
Other Mora works include (clockwise from top left) a sketch of a broncobuster, saddles he illustrated for his 1946 book Trail Dust and Saddle Leather, a cowboy sketch he later turned into a bronze, and a book illustration with tips on identifying cows and the steps for branding them.
and moved to Uruguay before Jo was born.…His dad would tell him stories, and his memories were based on stories his dad told him.” When Mora was in his mid-20s he headed west, first to California. “And he did exactly what he intended to do,” Hiller says. That included cowboying on Western ranches and working with California vaqueros. When Frederic Remington first saw the young artist’s work, he offered encouragement. “Son, you’re doing fine,” Mora recalled the artist telling him. “Just stay with it.”
In 1904 Mora moved to northern Arizona, where he forged a lasting relationship with Hopis and Navajos. He learned the languages of both and lived with the Hopis for almost three years. Mora also worked as a printmaker, pictorial cartographer, architect and photographer. As a writer he’s best known for Trail Dust and Saddle Leather (1946) and Californios: The Saga of the Hard-Riding Vaqueros, America’s First Cowboys (1949), which was published posthumously. Mora died in Monterey, Calif., on Oct. 10, 1947. Among other books to revisit his work was the 1979 retrospective The Year of the Hopi: Paintings and Photography by Joseph Mora, 1904–1906, published by the Smithsonian Institution. Ironically, Mora’s broad range of subject matter may have hurt him. “He didn’t have the singular focus of a Remington or a Russell,” Hiller says. But Mora left a legacy, nonetheless: “A celebration of the American West and Native American cultures,” Hiller says. For more information visit the Jo Mora Trust [ JoMoraTrust.com].
in 1904 mora moved to northern arizona, where he forged a lasting RELATIONSHIP WITH HOPIs AND NAVAJOs
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INDIAN LIFE
Old Toby is in the background, above right, using sign language in council with a Salish chief while Meriwether Lewis and William Clark look on, in Lewis and Clark Meeting the Flatheads in Ross’ Hole, Sept. 4, 1805, by Charles M. Russell.
THE TRUTH ABOUT ‘OLD TOBY’
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of the Salmon River at Berry Creek (Indian Creek), just upriver from present-day Shoup, Idaho. This wellworn spur, which intersected with the main trail on the divide separating the Salmon and Selway river drainages, was named the Shoup– Elk City Trail during Idaho’s 1860s gold rush and retains that name. Tobe told Clark it was the route the Nez Perce took to the Clearwater country. Like the Lolo, it was ancient, and it would have been the most direct way across to Nez Perce lands to the north and west, where Tobe understood they wished to go. Thirty years later the next passing traveler to keep a journal, the Rev. Samuel Parker, was escorted over this very trail by Nez Perce hosts. Starting in roughly the same place as Lewis and Clark, the 56year-old missionary covered in two weeks the same distance it took the corps a month of hard traveling to traverse. It has long been a mystery why the captains didn’t take it. John E. Rees, a trader among the Lemhi Shoshones for more than a dozen years in the Salmon River country, starting in 1877, shared a different take from more familiar accounts, giving a fuller account of the mistrust and intrigues swirling amid Sacagawea’s people as a result of the corps’ appearance among them. According to Rees, Old Toby was a Shoshone war chief whose real name was Pi-keek queen-ah (Swooping Eagle), though after
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JOAN PENNINGTON MAP
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orps of Discovery narratives tend to run in epic straight lines. The part where the corps meets Sacagawea’s people in the Salmon River country tends to start at Lemhi Pass (on the Continental Divide), then beelines from Lost Trail Pass to Lolo Pass, from which it neatly follows the Lolo Trail, along which co-captains William Clark and Meriwether Lewis and their party nearly perished for lack of food during a grueling nine-day passage in 1805. The narratives say little, if anything, about the Southern Nez Perce Trail, which followed the high ridges of the Upper Selway country through the very heart of the tangled northern Rockies. Lying far to the south of the Lolo Trail, it was known as Wise’isskit (Camping Trail) by the Lemhi Shoshones, as, unlike on the former, good camping spots lay within a day’s walk of one another all along the route. Lewis and Clark’s Shoshone guide knew all this and told the captains as much. While that guide is mentioned some 80 times in the expedition journals, he is named in only two instances— as “old guide Toby” by Lewis and as “tobe our Snake Indn. guide” by Sergeant John Ordway. On August 23 Tobe (usually called “Toby” or “Old Toby” in modern retellings) took Clark along a spur of the Southern Nez Perce Trail during their reconnaissance
TOP: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; ABOVE LEFT: HUMDDB.ORG
LEWIS AND CLARK’S SHOSHONE GUIDE KNEW OF BETTER WAYS TO CROSS THE BITTERROOTS, BUT HE WAS NOT LOST BY BILL LaCROIX
INDIAN LIFE
JOAN PENNINGTON MAP
TOP: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; ABOVE LEFT: HUMDDB.ORG
River
m on
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i a l d d l e Fork mo n R iver
Sou Salm th F on or Ri k ve r
Snak e Ri ver
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the chief agreed to guide the capLewis & Clark’s Path Old Toby’s Roundabout Route, 1805 tains over the mountains, his people Southern Nez Perce Trail ater Rive r w r lea Continental Divide Lolo referred to him as Tosa-tive koo-be Clark F Towns Present-Day Creek or k Lolo Lolo Pass Nor t h (Furnished White Man Brains), later Present-Day R r i State Boundaries v e t e a r w r a shortened to Tobe. Cle Weippe Canoe Camp River chsa Swooping Eagle, said Rees, was Lewiston Lo a warrior of high regard, more than Selwa y R iver qualified to get the expedition over any road—by the Southern Nez Perce; Sula East Fo rk Big H ol e Rive Gibbons Pass r by an alternate road that threaded Lost Nez North Fork Trail Big Hole Pass to the east and then Perce Salmon River Pass Pass Big Hole Pass switched back northwest to Gibbons on River Salm Shoup Pass (the captains had expressed a IDAHO MONTANA Berry Creek wish to drop down into the Bitter(present-day Indian Creek) root Valley at Ross’ Hole, near present-day Sula); or by the convoluted Lemhi Pass M North Fork of the Salmon, over the S 0 50 100 miles Bitterroots by way of what’s known today as Lost Trail Pass. Tobe certainly knew his home country better than 18th-century cartog- the facts”—contradicted him, and Tobe, finding himself “between raphers. The latter still believed in a Northwest Passage, or at the devil and the deep sea,” didn’t insist on the Wise’isskit, as least in a short portage to a lake between the Missouri and the it “would have made an outcast of himself within his own tribe.” Though Rees had conversed with eyewitnesses, it hardly Columbia waters, one they would creatively sketch in place of the massive, yet-to-be-mapped Salmon-Clearwater country. seems credible the Shoshones would be “ignorant of the facts” Lewis and Clark also believed in the mythical water route, right about their own homeland. What makes more sense is that Cameahwait realized if the corps chose the Wise’isskit, they up until their meeting with Sacagawea’s clan—and Tobe. The Shoshones described several routes to the Clearwater would need, and demand, more stock than the clan was able to country, a couple of which the captains had already missed. trade them. If he sent them north, however, the explorers figured One was the Snake River route, which wagon trains later plied to meet up in the Bitterroot Valley with their Salish (Flathead) along the Oregon Trail through what would become southern allies, who had enough trade horses to allow the corps to cross Idaho. The captains rejected it, but not due to its reputation the Bitterroots on the Lolo. Tobe was away on Clark’s reconnaissance when the clan would as a bad road with little game or water, nor because it passed through hostile Bannock territory. They believed the route crossed have met to discuss such considerations. When the guide reSpanish-claimed territory to the Vermilion Sea (Gulf of Califor- turned and found his people suddenly forgetful about their own nia) and didn’t want to risk a confrontation with their authorities. homeland, he “made up his mind” to take the expedition north That left the Southern Nez Perce Trail as the next best route. before going west. But here again he was hamstrung. Tobe knew the best route north would have been through Gibbons Pass. Still they missed it. Why? Warren Angus Ferris, a journal-keeping trapper with John That route briefly dipped east of the Continental Divide, though, Jacob Astor’s American Fur Co. in the 1830s, provided a possi- and the captains had just subjected their crew to the greatest ble explanation. The Shoshones were on the verge of starvation hardship in surmounting that divide and weren’t interested in when the corps appeared and couldn’t spare the explorers many doing it again. But Tobe, claimed Rees, “knew that if he went up horses. According to Ferris, Chief Cameahwait (Sacagawea’s the North Fork, he would come down into Ross’ Hole on the brother) had convinced the clan “it was best to conciliate if Bitterroot along the route he had contemplated.” Thus, Tobe possible the favor of a people so terribly armed.” Still, the Sho- led the expedition up the convoluted North Fork of the Salmon shones tried to leave the expedition high and dry halfway over and over what they dubbed Lost Pass (later changed to Lost Trail Lemhi Pass. Lewis caught them at it and challenged Cameah- Pass), which was really no pass at all. According to most accounts, by the time the expedition got wait’s manhood in front of everyone, a terrible slight. The chief explained to Lewis his anguish at having to watch his people halfway up the North Fork of the Salmon toward the Lost Trail, starve and then made motions to give the corps the guides and Clark was convinced the old man was inept. By its very name horses they’d demanded. At the same time, he may have feared Lost Trail Pass represents Clark’s assumption a respected war the explorers would have demanded more horses from them if chief didn’t know his own country. It’s more likely Pi-keek queen-ah led the explorers over Lost Trail Pass and then farther they took the closer Southern Nez Perce Trail. Around August 27, according to Rees, Lewis interrogated Tobe north over the Lolo because that was exactly where Cameahwait as to the best route to take. As he had advised Clark earlier, Tobe and his people wanted them to be led. Tobe would continue to told Lewis at first that the Wise’isskit was the way to go. But most guide the Corps of Discovery until Oct. 9, 1805, when he finally of his fellow tribesmen—whom Rees contended were “ignorant of slipped away to return to his people. FEBRUARY 2022
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STYLE We explore essential new Western gear and reflect on artist Israel Holloway’s masterwork—at 16-by-10 feet, the largest watercolor in the world
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Western Reflections
16-by-10-foot watercolor, by Israel Holloway, Permanent Collection at the Museum of Northwest Colorado, Craig
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STYLE ART
West in Watercolor
Bronc Rider
28-by-18-inch watercolor
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IMAGES COURTESY ISRAEL HOLLOWAY STUDIO
Israel Holloway [israelhollowayfineart. com], 49, was born in Boulder, Colo., and grew up in the Yampa Valley, where he lives with his family. He learned design and color as a third-generation sign painter. The self-taught artist began his full-time career in 2010, and he taught painting, drawing and 2D design courses at the local community college from 2012 to ’17. “I’ve always considered myself a student of fine art,” Holloway explains. “I think the greatest teachers for me have been the public library, daily practice and certainly all the wonderful students I’ve had.” His influences include Harley Brown, Burt Silverman, Steve Hanks, Norman Rockwell and Edward Curtis. Holloway’s awardwinning works are exhibited at art shows, galleries and museums nationwide. Standing apart is his monumental 16-by-10-foot painting Western Reflections, commissioned by the Museum of Northwest Colorado, which is the largest watercolor in the world. It’s a lasting homage to his beautiful Yampa Valley.
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STYLE
Allegro Vivace
Late Morning Walk
18-by-28-inch watercolor
IMAGES COURTESY ISRAEL HOLLOWAY STUDIO
18-by-28-inch watercolor
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36-by-24-inch watercolor
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IMAGES COURTESY MICHAEL J. GULI DESIGNS
River Life
IMAGE COURTESY ISRAEL HOLLOWAY STUDIO
STYLE
STYLE
Pendleton Outback Hat
Crafted of pure virgin wool and treated for water and stain resistance, $79.50 [pendleton-usa.com]
WESTERN WEAR
Shuffle Off in Buffalo For more than 40 years designer Michael J. Guli [michaeljgulidesigns.com] of Bellvue, Colo., has produced exceptional buffalo, buckskin and leather clothing and footwear for those seeking historically inspired, quality Old West styles.
Buffalo Moccasins
IMAGES COURTESY MICHAEL J. GULI DESIGNS
IMAGE COURTESY ISRAEL HOLLOWAY STUDIO
Durable and comfortable hand-sewn, triple-soled American bison hide moccasins in natural cream color. Knee-high (left), $279; Ankle-high (below), $159.
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Putting the Star in Lone Star
San Antonio boasts a rich history, but the 1836 Battle of the Alamo remains forever at the forefront, as does defender David Crockett in this illustration by Ed Vebell.
HOME OF THE ALAMO
San Antonio rose from the midst of an unforgiving frontier to become if not the ‘Queen of the West’ at least a vibrant Texas city
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an Antonio, Texas. Home of the Alamo. What began as a frontier outpost has grown into the second largest city in the Lone Star State and seventh largest in the nation. Even so, its estimated annual 34 million visitors vastly outnumber the nearly 1.6 million people who call the city home. People from the world over come to enjoy regional attractions, including SeaWorld, Six Flags Fiesta Texas, the River Walk and, of course, the Alamo. Asked what they like most about San Antonio, residents and visitors alike most often cite the region’s temperate climate, vibrant cultural offerings and compelling history that make it 36 WILD WEST
a uniquely Southwestern mecca. “The Alamo City” tops the state when it comes to favorite American travel spots. It has not always been that way, though. For a century and a half after San Antonio’s 1718 founding as a Spanish colonial settlement the location remained an unforgiving frontier. Its isolated spot in what was then the heart of Texas actually contributed to its strategic importance. Yet surrounded by warring tribes and subjected to successive revolts, its hardy residents somehow managed to carve out a living. Present-day citizens memorialize their struggles. At the mention of San Antonio, the 1836 Battle of the Alamo pops to mind (see sidebar, P. 42),
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ED VEBELL/GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: CORREOS, SPAIN
By Richard Bruce Winders
ED VEBELL/GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: CORREOS, SPAIN
but that’s hardly the whole story. In fact, the history of San Antonio is the history of the American West in microcosm. Conditions in the San Antonio region—at the convergence of drought-tolerant chaparral, forested hills and grassy plains flush with wildlife and watered by springs welling up from the underlying Balcones Escarpment—favored human habitation. By the time of European contact Payaya Indians had named the central spring and its outpouring Yanaguana (meaning unknown), later rechristened the San Antonio River. A smaller spring gave rise to San Pedro Creek. Both water-
ways, representing lifeblood in an otherwise harsh terrain, played significant roles in the formation of the town. Among San Antonio’s several monikers is the apt “River City.” Prior to the arrival of Europeans southern Texas and northern Mexico hosted myriad nomadic bands collectively labeled Coahuiltecans. These small, family-based groups crisscrossed the region on annual treks that supported their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Circumstances had not changed much by the time castaway Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (see his image on postage stamp below) set out to explore the interior in 1529. Forced to interact— pleasantly and otherwise—with Coahuiltecans for survival, the Spaniard left a vivid account of their resourceful culture. The headwaters of the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek proved an especially attractive seasonal camping site among Coahuiltecans. Small game and fish augmented a diet centered on fruit- and nut-bearing trees. But a tidal shift in culture was upon them. By 1531 the Spanish, drawn by abundant grazing land and promising mineral deposits, had begun to extend northward from Mexico City. Soon small ranches and mining camps sprang up in lands occupied by the Chichimecas, fierce nomads who jealously guarded interior Mexico’s limited resources. Unlike the city-dwelling Aztecs, who engaged in set-piece battles, the Chichimecas mounted small raids that threatened to stymie colonial ambitions in New Spain. Drawing on experience protecting their colonial enclaves in North Africa, Spanish officials ordered presidios built and garrisoned by soldiers to protect settlers. When that proved costly and ineffective, officials turned for assistance to the Catholic Church, their more benign partner in conquest. Franciscan missionaries ventured into hostile territory to establish towns in which they might introduce indigenous people to Spanish culture. Thus, in a land in which Spaniards were scarce, officials sought to make new subjects. They would implement that largely successful method of frontier settlement across the American Southwest. The Spanish were not the only Europeans interested in the New World, and the race to claim as much territory as possible for their respective monarchs soon set Spain and France on a collision course. The Spanish initially outmatched the French, driving them away from the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. The French refocused their efforts on the St. Lawrence River valley, a major waterway that opened the North American heartland to exploration. In 1685 René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle—who a few years prior had sailed down the Mississippi River—established an ill-fated settlement on the Gulf Coast, inland from present-day FEBRUARY 2022
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Coahuiltecan Encampment
Artist Frank Weir depicts the nomadic Indian bands known as Coahuiltecans, who camped along streams and crossings near what would become San Antonio.
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Left: In 1718 Franciscan missionaries established Mission San Antonio de Valero, known today as the Alamo. Top: Spanish missions and presidios arose to protect settlers from the fierce nomads known as Chichimecas. Above: The Alamo church is in ruins eight years after Texicans and Mexicans battled there.
protected the settlement from attack, and the third offered Spanish civilians an opportunity to relocate to Texas. All were sited within or adjacent to an oxbow in the San Antonio River, providing residents with ample water. By then Spanish settlements in New Mexico had reintroduced horses into the Southwest, a resource American Indians soon incorporated into their culture. Horses in turn allowed the Apaches and Comanches in particular to extend their range into Texas around the same time as the Spanish, ushering in a convergence of forces. The often hostile interactions among these competing groups threatened life at the frontier outpost.
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LEFT: FOR GOD AND TEXAS BY RICHARD LUCE; RIGHT: INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE ESTUDIOS HISTÓRICOS DE LA REVOLUCIONES DE MÉXICO
Matagorda Bay, Texas. The rivalry between the empires intensified. By the early 1700s several presidios and missions dotted the boundary separating French Louisiana and Spanish Texas. The Spanish explorers and missionaries roaming Texas routinely commented that the headwaters of the San Antonio River, which boasted a wealth of natural resources and a thriving indigenous population, would be an ideal location for a way station. In 1691 a passing expedition renamed the Yanaguana the San Antonio after sainted 13th-century Portuguese Franciscan friar Anthony of Padua, whose feast day they were celebrating. Finally, in May 1718, Spanish officials sent another expedition to found what would coalesce into the future city of San Antonio. The party planted three separate communities: Mission San Antonio de Valero, Presidio San Antonio de Béxar and Villa de Béxar. The first represented the interests of the Catholic Church, the second
At the Heart of the Action
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MAP COURTESY DONALD S. FRAZIER, SCHREINER UNIVERSITY; NORMAN MILLER; ARTOKOLORO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; FRANK WEIR/TEXAS ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH LABORATORY
SAN ANTONIO CIRCA 1800
An Unforgettable Fight
LEFT: FOR GOD AND TEXAS BY RICHARD LUCE; RIGHT: INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE ESTUDIOS HISTÓRICOS DE LA REVOLUCIONES DE MÉXICO
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MAP COURTESY DONALD S. FRAZIER, SCHREINER UNIVERSITY; NORMAN MILLER; ARTOKOLORO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; FRANK WEIR/TEXAS ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH LABORATORY
After the epic 13-day siege (Feb. 23–March 6, 1836), Crockett and company do their thing in front of the Alamo chapel, in Richard Luce’s work For God and Texas.
Caught in the midst of the 19th-century multicultural invasion of Texas were the Coahuiltecans. Faced with the choice of being crushed or absorbed by the new arrivals, a number chose to align with the seemingly stronger Spanish by entering Valero and other missions as converts. Benefits included a reliable food supply, access to and instruction in European technology, and protection from mounted Indian raiders. The converts in turn represented potential new subjects for the king. The friars ran each mission as an Indian pueblo in which all possessions were held in common. In addition to lessons in Catholicism—the state religion of Spain— converts received training in farming, ranching, industrial arts and civic government. The goal was to create self-sufficient communities. In 1731 the Spanish government reinforced San Antonio by sponsoring the relocation of 56 Canary Islanders to the outpost. Ethnic Spaniards, each colonist was granted the honorific title of “hidalgo” along with land and other hereditary privileges as compensation for making the long and dangerous journey. The islanders formed a civil government for their new settlement, Villa de San Fernando. Adjacent to the presidio on the west bank of the river, the villa was within sight of the mission on the opposite bank. Competition for resources initially stoked tensions among the mission, the presidio and the villas, though by the turn of the 19th century the Spanish were referring to the community collectively as Béxar. By then life in San Antonio had assumed specific characteristics. Having accomplished their primary goal of establishing a stable population of Indian converts, the missions prepared to close, leaving residents to further bond as a community. Soldiers and converts had intermarried, forming a significant mestizo population. Given limited options, Canary Islanders also intermarried into local families. The economy relied on raising cattle and horses, laying a foundation for the Western cattle industry. Lacking a market for surplus crops, Béxareños grew only enough to meet their needs. Hundreds of miles from other commercial centers, and hamstrung by oppressive trade regulations, residents routinely engaged in illicit trade with French Louisiana. After years of warring with the Apaches and Comanches, Spanish officials had learned that annual tribute bought peace. Another wave of changes soon came from an unexpected source: Napoléon Bonaparte. The chaos of the French Revolution had created an opportunity for the ambitious officer to seize control of France. Needing funds for his subsequent European wars, Emperor Napoléon agreed in 1803 to sell France’s vast territory of Louisiana to the nascent United States.
MIGUEL HIDALGO Y CASTILLA
The acquisition not only extended the American frontier to the Rocky Mountains but also established a shared border with Spanish Texas. Five years later Napoléon invaded Spain, an act that destabilized the latter empire and its overseas colonies, including Mexico. This confluence of actions had dramatic implications for Texas and Béxar. Venturesome Americans eager to push farther west flocked to the Louisiana-Texas border, soon mounting trading and horse-wrangling expeditions that flouted Spanish laws forbidding foreign intrusion. Then in 1810, two years after the French occupation of Spain, Roman Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo y Castilla began a revolt in New Spain that pitted native Mexicans against European-born royalists. Although it would be a 10-year struggle, Hidalgo’s revolt ultimately led to Mexican independence. Due to its strategic location and political importance Béxar played a central role in the conflict. In April 1813 a force of American filibusters and Mexican revolutionaries captured the town after a fierce battle with royalists on nearby Rosillo Creek. The rebels intended to use Béxar as a base from which to launch a campaign deep into Mexico in support of the larger revolution. Spanish officials, however, responded to the threat by sending a column under General José Joaquín de Arredondo, which that August met the American-Mexican rebel army 20 miles southwest of town beyond the Medina River. In the ensuing Battle of Medina the royalists virtually annihilated the rebels, rounding up and summarily exeFEBRUARY 2022
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cuting several hundred survivors. Determined to punish the town for its support of the revolt, Arredondo imposed martial law on Béxar. Many residents fled to Louisiana to avoid the general’s wrath. Those remaining suffered everything from unspeakable humiliation to public execution. The event left a lasting impression on residents.
JAMES BOWIE
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One hundred years after its founding Béxar faced an uncertain future. The war had drastically diminished its population and devastated its economy. In late 1820, the last year of Spain’s tenuous hold on Texas, pioneering American settler Moses Austin arrived in Béxar and proposed to bring 300 families to Texas. From this proposal grew Spanish plans to rebuild Texas’ population with American and European colonists. Although approved by the Spanish, the project fell to a newly independent Mexico. Béxareños themselves saw two immediate advantages for their community. First, North Americans had a reputation as successful Indian fighters, and the area was again experiencing raids due to unpaid tribute. Second, the newcomers would expand economic opportunities in the region. Elites from the new Anglo colonies and Béxar soon formed strong and successful business, political and personal bonds. Among the best-known examples was American land speculator James Bowie’s marriage to María Ursula de Veramendi, daughter of Juan Martin de Veramendi, a wealthy San Antonio merchant and future governor of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Texas. Within a few short years Mexico’s experiment with colonization collapsed under the weight of more immigrants than expected. The subsequent Texas Revolution was an episode within Mexico’s ongoing conflict between centralists, led by General Antonio López de Santa Anna, and federalists who sought to preserve the Constitution of 1824. Texians, as Texans were known at the time, seized an opportunity amid this conflict to declare independence. Béxar figured prominently in the ensuing fight for Texas. Throughout the summer of 1835 the centralized Mexican government reinforced Béxar’s garrison, culminating in late September with the arrival of General Martín Perfecto de Cos (Santa Anna’s brother-in-law) at the head of 300 soldiers. The government planned to use Béxar as a base from which to conduct a campaign against the rebellious Texians, intending to either force them into submission or expel them. A skirmish at Gonzales on October 2 over the cannon of Come and Take It flag fame gave the victorious rebels a morale boost. Recognizing the importance of Béxar as a buffer between their settlements and any armies sent up from northern Mexico, Texians of all stripes surrounded the city, capturing it
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TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; RIGHT: SAN ANTONIO LAWYER
The Alamo was originally a mission, as imagined by William Ludwell Sheppard (1833–1912) in this 1883 drawing. Some Indians in Spanish Texas welcomed the missions and presidios as shelters from Apaches.
TOP: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; LEFT: PORTRAIT BY GEORGE PETER ALEXANDER HEALY , TEXAS STATE CAPITOL
Before the Battle
San Antonio remained a dangerous place to live during the decade-long existence of the Republic of Texas. Hostilities between Texians and Comanches ratcheted up after the 1840 Council House Fight, in which residents and Texas regulars, though under an ostensible flag of peace, chased several dozen Comanche chiefs and their followers through downtown, killing or capturing all but one of them. In 1842 Mexican columns
TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; RIGHT: SAN ANTONIO LAWYER
TOP: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; LEFT: JIM BOWIE AND URSULA VERAMENDI, BY HENRY GODINES
in early December after a hard-fought siege. After sending Cos and his surviving men packing, the rebels occupied both the town and the Alamo. With such important figures as Bowie, William B. Travis and James C. Neill attesting to Béxar’s pivotal role as a southern picket post, the provisional government of Texas ordered its defense. The subsequent siege and battle is best understood by recognizing the value each side placed on Béxar. For the rebels its defense would keep Mexican columns out of the settlements. For the centralist government reclamation of the strategic garrison would enable them to quell the revolt and restore order. Santa Anna later explained that the capture of Béxar was the key to opening Texas for his subsequent operations. The epic 13-day siege (Feb. 23–March 6, 1836) forever elevated the Alamo and its defenders—notably Bowie, Travis and David Crockett—to the pantheon of military glory, establishing a legend that shaped the future city’s image.
Mission Accomplished
The Franciscans at Mission San Antonio de Valero sought to convert local Indians to Christianity and make them good Spanish subjects. That done, the mission closed in 1793.
twice returned to attack San Antonio amid failed efforts to renew Mexico’s claim on Texas. Visitors during the period universally noted the town’s war-torn appearance—the byproduct of two fullscale revolts and countless raids. After nearly a century and a quarter of existence the town retained the characteristics of a frontier outpost. Béxar’s fate changed with Texas’ 1845 annexation into the Union and the subsequent 1846–48 Mexican War. Bound by law to protect the new state, federal officials sent troops to the region. Most marched straight to the Rio Grande to engage in border clashes before crossing the river to invade northern Mexico. Once again Béxar’s strategic location came into play, as the Army chose the town as a marshaling point for a push into Coahuila and Chihuahua. Many of the 3,000-plus volunteers gathered there in late summer 1846 visited the Alamo to see where Travis, Crockett and Bowie fell. The U.S. Quartermaster Department found a more mundane use for the site, which by then had become an impromptu shrine. Short on suitable structures in which to house supplies destined for field armies, its officers eyed the damaged Alamo. On signing a long-term lease with the Catholic Archdiocese, the Army renovated the long barrack (1847) and church (1850). The Fighting Raged On
In the early years of the Texas Republic residents attacked Comanches during a peace conference in San Antonio, and returning Mexican columns twice attacked the city.
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It Started Peacefully Enough
Comanches bring captive Matilda Lockhart into town on the morning of the March 19, 1840, Council House Fight, as depicted in Lee Herring’s Matilda Lockhart Comes Home.
Although military forces had long played a role in the community, the amplified presence of the Army finally brought the stability necessary for Béxar’s growth. The U.S. victory in the war ended the threat of another Mexican invasion, while the Army’s line of new Western forts diminished the frequency of Comanche raids. Just as important, the Army created a market for goods and services from local merchants and tradesmen. Reflecting this change, residents and visitors increasingly referred to the budding town by the name of the original presidio—San Antonio. By 1854 the editor of the Alamo Star could boast of San Antonio’s several newspapers, an amateur theater, a debating club, a dancing master and other cultural trappings sure to bring it accolades as the “Queen of the West.” Despite the editor’s best efforts to highlight San Antonio’s strides toward civil progress, however, the report of A Desperate Affair that December 1 indicates the town had yet to wholly shed its Wild West reputation: A scuffle took place in the vicinity of the bowling saloon. Mr. Gillespie drew his revolver and shot at Mr. Nicks, hitting him in the arm,
inflicting a severe wound. Mr. Nicks shot at Gillespie, hitting him in the back, but the wound was slight. Mr. Stephens [city marshal], in attempting to arrest Gillespie, was shot at by him and was compelled to shoot Gillespie in self-defense, the ball entering his right breast, killing him immediately. It is supposed that several shots were fired from the bowling saloon at Stephens and Nicks by the comrades of the deceased. The above particulars attending this unfortunate affair we received from a reliable source.…We have heard it originated over a game of cards, but how true it may be we know not, and it matters little. Mr. Stephens and Nicks were examined before a court of justice and cleared.
Amid the national disharmony of the Civil War the town and the Alamo continued to play commercial and military roles under Confederate overseers after the departure of federal troops from Texas in 1861. Long established relations with northern Mexico enabled the South to trade for desperately needed supplies. Although prices soared, ox carts and freight wagons remained
the “cancel culture” crowd come for the Alamo, too? The Alamo and the Texas Revolution have certainly come under intensive scrutiny in recent years. Only those critics who believe the Alamo’s image is still shaped by John Wayne’s film of the same name (see above photo of Wayne as David Crockett) view the battle in terms of “white” and “brown” people. The reality is that modern historiography incorporates international, regional and local story lines, because, as we say at the Alamo, “All history is connected.” Plans for the future museum and visitor center call for open, fair, current and inclusive interpretation. I am proud to be associated with this effort, which will give visitors valid reason to keep remembering the Alamo. —R.B.W.
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UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON LIBRARIES SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
The Alamo became a symbol almost immediately after its fall in 1836. To most Americans, Texans and even Tejanos it represented a desperate stand against a tyrannical government bent on imposing military despotism over freedomloving people. Others regarded it in a different light. Both Mexican officials and American abolitionists of the era questioned how the Alamo could symbolize a fight for liberty when its defenders belonged to a society that condoned slavery. That aspect of the battle and the Texas Revolution in general has been a bone of contention for those who have written about the Alamo up to the present. What is different today is that the argument over the meaning of the Alamo has become tangled up in the broader culture war gripping the nation. The call to reject symbols deemed offensive has already resulted in the destruction or removal of public statutes dedicated to the Confederacy, Spanish missionaries and even the Founding Fathers. Will
PHOTO CREDIT TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ABOVE: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
FIGHT TO REMEMBER
common features in the town’s plazas. The return of the U.S. Army in 1865 gave a further boost to the town’s economy. Two other hallmarks of Western expansion—cattle and railroads—contributed to San Antonio’s progress. Herds of Texas Longhorns, the descendants of mission livestock, supplied the North’s growing postwar demand for meat. Cattle drives passed through San Antonio en route to Kansas railheads. To preserve order, the city council enacted ordinances prohibiting cowboys from racing horses on the streets or parking wagons overnight in any plaza. The arrival of the railroad in San Antonio in 1877 foretold the end of the trail drive era, but the town continued to play a significant role in the Texas cattle industry. The railroad brought a new type of herd to town—sightseers. Easterners thrilled by tales of the West could finally visit the places about which they had read. San Antonio, its long and colorful history punctuated by the Battle of the Alamo, became a premier destination. Outsiders extolled the town’s mix of ancient and modern architecture and intriguing mix of cultures, a reputation it still enjoys. Seeking to live up to San Antonio’s image as an emerging modern city, businessmen and city leaders made sweeping infrastructure changes toward the end of the 19th century. The Army’s 1877–79 relocation from the Alamo to nearby Fort Sam Houston helped accelerate the transformation, as merchants flocked to purchase and occupy property adjacent to the iconic mission. By the 1890s Alamo Plaza had become a popular retail area, complete with trolley cars, sidewalks, benches, streetlights and a decorative water fountain. Although the moniker Queen of the West never caught on, there was no doubt San Antonio had finally matured from frontier outpost into thriving city. In May 1901 President William McKinley stopped in town during a statewide tour to address crowd of thousands of residents and assembled schoolchildren. From atop a review stand adjacent to the Alamo’s long barrack he addressed the crowd:
San Antonio, referred to these days as River City as much as Alamo City, had become not only a vibrant Texas city but also an American icon. UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON LIBRARIES SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
PHOTO CREDIT TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ABOVE: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
You have everything—strong men, fair women, and your fields are full of fruits waiting the uses and cultivation of men. I congratulate you upon this splendid heritage, and I join with your honorable mayor [Marshall Hicks] in saying that we stand today, one in heart, one in faith, one in liberty, one in destiny, the freest republic beneath the sun, a republic which the living and those who are to come after will pass along to the ages and to the centuries to come.
Richard Bruce Winders, an authority on the early 19th-century Southwestern borderlands, was Alamo curator for 23 years (1996–2019) and is visiting scholar at the Texas Center at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas. Recommended for further reading are his Queen of the West: A Documentary History of San Antonio, 1718–1900 and Sacrificed at the Alamo: Tragedy and Triumph in the Texas Revolution, as well as Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution, by Stephen L. Hardin; Memoirs of Mary A. Maverick, edited by Rena Maverick Green; and Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz, 1783–1840, by Art Martínez de Vara.
THIS MUST BE THE PLACE Newcomers to the Alamo usually have two questions in mind: Why is it so small? and, How did it get downtown? They are logical questions, really. The Alamo occupies a prominent place in American history, so shouldn’t it be physically imposing? And as it is often depicted as a mission in the middle of nowhere, what’s to explain its central location in a modern cityscape? Such contradictions make some wonder whether they are standing before the real Alamo. The answer to the first question centers on a long-standing misrepresentation of the church itself as the entire complex. The mission originally comprised a sprawling compound of buildings that ringed what today is referred to as Alamo Plaza. Once visitors comprehend the true parameters of the area the garrison was called on to defend in 1836, they come to appreciate the immensity of the Texians’ task. Background on the subsequent history of San Antonio answers the second question. The former mission compound was put to several different uses, each incarnation prompting physical changes to its structures. Its location across the river from San Antonio proper gave it not only a strategic importance but also a commercial one. By the 1850s the presence of the U.S. Army had created a demand for goods and services San Antonians were happy to fill. With the Army’s departure to Fort Sam Houston in 1877, the Alamo and Alamo Plaza benefited from business interests that moved into the area. Visitors sometimes mull a third question: Why, if the battle was so important, wasn’t the entire compound preserved? As the nation was rapidly expanding west and constantly redefining itself, not until decades had passed did Americans reflect on the transformative 19th century and consider preserving such sites as the Alamo. Although its reputation had already made it an informal shine shortly after the battle, not until 1883 did the Texas Legislature purchase the famed mission. Twenty-two years later, in 1905, the state acquired the long barrack, and the Alamo—at least what remained of it—was saved. —R.B.W. FEBRUARY 2022
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Caught in a Mount Shasta blizzard, the Scottish-born mountaineer and a companion resorted to extraordinary measures By Matthew Bernstein 44 WILD WEST
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he storm chased John Muir down Mount Shasta in northern California. With clouds wheeling overhead, he descended from the summit as fast as possible. Even so, he’d barely reached the tree line when the first flakes fell—skirmishes before an onslaught of freezing snow. Having lived to the ripe old age of 36, Muir had been in such fixes before. In a frenzy of energy, he gathered wood and coaxed a fire to life. As he’d neglected to bring a tent, the Scot cozied up to the lee side of a log and went to sleep on a pile of leaves. The storm burst around him. Though he’d initially set out on a day trip, Muir spent that second night on the mountain in early November 1874 listening to the tones of the wind, catching snow crystals and examining them under a lens. He awoke covered in snow. Instead of tramping directly down the mountain, however, Muir determined he would spiral around it. “By this time I began to feel a little ‘gone’ from lack of food,” Muir recalled. “I’ve often spent two days without anything to eat and even felt better for it; but the third day is getting toward the point of being too much.” Fortunately, Muir spied a plume of smoke. Working toward it, he came across a party of Mexican sheepherders and conveyed through gestures he was starving. The generous Mexicans prepared a meal for Muir and invited him to share their camp. In the morning they gifted him bread and coffee and bade him adios. For the next three days Muir continued hiking. On the seventh day he completed his circuit of Mount Shasta and strode into Strawberry Valley (site of the present-day city of Mount Shasta). Around noon he reached Sisson’s Tavern. The tavern, which doubled as an inn, was owned and operated by Justin Sisson and wife Lydia. Seven days earlier—before embarking on his spur-of-the-moment, 120-mile ramble—Muir had told Lydia he wouldn’t be gone long and to expect him back for lunch. Spotting Muir, Lydia hailed her overdue guest. “Well, Mr. Muir,” she asked, “do you call this a short walk? Where have you been?” “Oh, I just took a little walk,” replied Muir in his signature Scottish brogue. “I went around the base of the mountain. But I got back in time for lunch, didn’t I?” Having summited and circumnavigated the 14,179-foot mountain while surviving on coffee, water and bread, the intrepid Scottish-American naturalist seemed able to endure any hardship. Muir’s next ascent of Shasta would test that assumption.
California Dreaming
Posing in 1902 in his beloved wilderness, the Scottish-American naturalist may have been contemplating past adventures, such as two Mount Shasta ascents in the mid-1870s—one a very close call.
On April 29, 1875, Muir and fellow mountaineer Jerome Fay left Sisson’s Tavern bound for Mount Shasta toting blankets and a day’s worth of food, water and coffee. Their ascent had a scientific purpose—to make barometric observations at the summit while Captain Augustus FEBRUARY 2022
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A Wintry Nightmare
in the Cascade Range—10,457-foot Lassen Peak— around which “several hundred square miles of white cumuli spread out on the lava plain… squirming dreamily in the sunshine far beneath and exciting no alarm.” After resting from their climb, Muir and Fay took readings. At 9 a.m. the thermometer registered 34 degrees in the shade. Four hours later, while a venturesome bumblebee buzzed about
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UNIVERSITY OF THE PACIFIC LIBRARIES (4)
It started out as a fine spring morning in April 1875 when Muir and Jerome Fay (at left) reached the summit (above) of Mount Shasta (see two sketches at far left), but then a snowstorm struck in the afternoon amid their descent. During their climb they encountered silver firs (above middle) and dwarf pines (below).
HARPER’S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE (5); PHOTO: CALIFORNIA STATE ARCHIVES
F. Rodgers of the U.S. Coast Survey took readings at the base. Clad in his shirtsleeves, Muir was not as prepared for weather as the jacketed Fay, but without a cloud in the sky he felt little anxiety. Muir also had faith in Fay, whom he considered “a hardy and competent mountaineer.” Born on March 3, 1838, in Chittenden County, Vt., Fay had journeyed to California in 1858 on a sheep and cattle drive. In 1870 he herded stock for rancher Josiah Edson in Gazelle. After moving 20 miles southeast to Strawberry Valley and partnering with Jerome Sisson, Fay tended bar at the tavern and guided climbing parties up Mount Shasta. It was in that capacity Fay met Muir, who was his junior by scarcely a month. At midnight Muir and Fay lit a fire and made camp at the extreme edge of the timberline on a slab of red igneous volcanic rock Muir recognized as trachyte. After grabbing two hours of shallow sleep, they brewed coffee and broiled a slice of frozen venison on the coals. At 3:20 a.m. they set out. “The crisp, icy sky was without a cloud,” Muir recalled, “and the stars lighted us on our way. Deep silence brooded the mountain, broken only by the night wind and an occasional rock falling from crumbling buttresses to the snow slopes below. The wild beauty of the morning stirred our pulses in glad exhilaration.” Ascending from the west, the two mountaineers traversed a broad lava apron, threaded a gorge between two volcanic cones and circumvented Whitney Glacier. After negotiating a dangerous snow ridge a mile and a half in length—bordered on one side by steep ice slopes and the other by shattered precipices—they reached a thermal area of hissing fumaroles that reeked of rotten eggs. Shortly thereafter, at 7:30 a.m. they reached the summit. The view was spectacular. To the northeast they could see Klamath and Rhett (present-day Tule) lakes and the lava beds (present-day Lava Beds National Monument) where two years earlier the U.S. Army had fought Kintpuash (aka “Captain Jack”) and his band of Modoc Indians. To the north yawned Shasta Valley. To the east and west dark coniferous forests carpeted lesser peaks. To the south rose the southernmost peak
their heads, the mercury topped out at 50 degrees. As the wind picked up, Shasta Valley filled with clouds, eclipsing the distant lakes. Meanwhile, the clouds that had gathered around Lassen Peak drifted northward. Soon the banks merged, circling Shasta in an eerie white blanket. From their lofty perch Muir and Fay recognized the gathering clouds for what they were—the stirrings of a snowstorm. “It began to declare itself shortly after noon,” Muir recalled, “and I entertained the idea of abandoning my purpose of making a 3 p.m. observation, as agreed on by Captain Rodgers and myself, and at once make a push down to our safe camp in the timber.” Fay, on the other hand, expressed his desire to hastily return to the timberline. If they did not, he argued, they might have to overnight on the summit. Anxious to complete his barometric readings, Muir assured Fay that, as experienced mountaineers, they could descend through any storm. At 1:30 p.m. the winds rose, and thin, fibrous clouds streamed over the mountaintop, forming ringlets and whorls Muir likened to Yosemite Falls. But when it commenced to hail, raining down stones resembling small mushrooms, he found them incomparable. The pair began their descent a few minutes after 3 p.m. By then the storm had begun to violently rage. They were scarcely past the hissing fumaroles before the thermometer had plunged 22 degrees. As it dipped below zero, the hail gave way to snow. The sky was as black as night, illuminated only by flashes of lightning. Peals of thunder reverberated across the crags. A spring day that had begun with such promise had transformed into a wintry nightmare. Just beyond the thermal area Muir halted beneath the shelter of a giant block of trachyte to let Fay catch up. Ahead of them was the perilous snow ridge, where a single misstep could prove fatal. Despite the howling wind, blinding snow, lightning and deepening gloom, Muir still believed they could negotiate it. But Fay cautioned against the attempt. Even if they could grope their way through the stygian darkness, he explained, the wind would surely hurl them into the void. Muir thought otherwise, but Fay wouldn’t budge. Although not convinced, Muir decided not to leave his friend, even if it meant freezing to death.
They Started Here
On April 29, 1875, Muir (left) and Fay set out from Sisson’s Tavern, depicted above in a work by Thomas Hill. Muir was in shirtsleeves, but not seeing a cloud in the sky, he wasn’t worried.
But Fay had a plan. He dashed from the lava block—struggling 20 or 30 yards through the storm as if caught in a flood—to the thermal area. Muir was compelled to follow. “Here,” Fay said, as they shivered amid the sputtering and hissing fumaroles, “we shall be safe from the frost.” “Yes,” Muir said, “we can lie in this mud and gravel, hot at least on one side. But how shall we protect our lungs from the acid gases? And how, after our clothing is saturated with melting snow, shall we be able to reach camp without freezing, even after the storm is over? We shall have to await the sunshine. And when will it come?” With no other option, the mountaineers lay on their backs in the scalding muck, Fay in his coat, Muir in shirtsleeves. Weak from exhaustion, they shivered uncontrollably as the freezing wind tore at their exposed skin and the scalding steam cooked their backsides.
The Mountain and the Man
UNIVERSITY OF THE PACIFIC LIBRARIES (4)
HARPER’S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE (5); PHOTO: CALIFORNIA STATE ARCHIVES
Below: In a drawing adapted from Muir’s journal Mount Shasta is depicted with a cloud blanket. Right: Muir was not one to rest on his laurels, but he did know how to enjoy his quiet, restful moments under the California sun.
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TOP RIGHT: JACKSON HOLE ART AUCTION; RIGHT: BANCROFT LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF BERKELEY
As the night deepened, 2 feet of snow piled on Muir and Fay. At first they were glad for the snow, hoping it would buffer them from the freezing wind. But as the snow froze to their skin and slipped into the hollows of their clothing, their misery only magnified. The snow fell for two hours before subsiding. “The clouds broke and vanished, not a snowflake was left in the sky, and the stars shone out with pure and tranquil radiance,” Muir marveled. But the winds did not cease. Bereft of strength, the mountaineers resigned themselves to a miserable night covered in snow and icicles, while they boiled from beneath. To stand up and expose themselves fully to the wind might have proved fatal. But the fumaroles posed their own hazards. When the heat became unbearable, Muir and Fay stuffed the vents beneath them with snow and trachyte, or shifted position by crab walking on their heels and elbows. As they shifted about, the incrustations often gave way, exposing concealed vents and scalding them anew. Muir worried that if the wind were to suddenly die, they might inhale excessive carbonic acid and fall into a sleep from which they would never wake. “I warned Jerome against forgetting himself for a single moment, even should his sufferings admit of such a thing,” Muir reflected. “Accordingly, when, during the long dreary watches of the night, we roused suddenly from a state of half consciousness, we called each other excitedly by name, each fearing the other was benumbed or dead.” Muir also tried to coax Fay into sharing tales about Indian encounters or bear hunting. But his companion was in no mood for storytelling. Instead, Fay obsessed over how long the storm might last, whether Justin Sisson would attempt a rescue, and just how long they could possibly last in that hellhole. Muir tried to cheer them both by insisting that no spring storm on Shasta lasted more than a day, and that one day Fay would be able to regale family and friends with stories of this wretched night. At some point Muir and Fay began to hallucinate, imagining resiny pine logs from which they could build a fire. In the night sky Muir could make out Ursa Major, but the heavens soon took on a life of their own. Every planet seemed visible, glowing with lances of light like blossoming lilies close enough to touch. Even the ground thousands of feet below them became discernible. Frozen, burnt, starved, and oxygen- and sleep-deprived, Muir and Fay swore they could actually see the secluded valleys, haunts of the bear and deer, and tall brown fir trees with fernlike branches and trunks spotted with orange lichen. Then the banshee wind would sweep down with a flurry of snow, shattering the mirage, and the pain of reality would settle in.
“Muir?” Fay asked, his voice faint. “Are you suffering much?” “Yes,” Muir replied, struggling to keep a lightness to his voice. “The pains of a Scandinavian hell, at once frozen and burned. But never mind, Jerome; the night will wear away at last, and tomorrow we go a-Maying, and what campfires we will make, and what sunbaths we will take!” In such a manner Muir and Fay passed the night. Some 13 hours after having lain down amid the fumaroles, light touched the peaks. But as the cloudless May day dawned, and the wind abated, the mountaineers felt no warmer. They decided to wait till the sun was higher to stir and begin their descent. At about 8 a.m. on May 1, seventeen hours into their ordeal, they finally stood. Their feet and trousers were frozen. Though he’d survived the fury of the storm without a coat, Muir’s left arm was benumbed and useless. But he wasn’t overly worried. He knew mountaineers held a secret reserve of energy he called the “second self ” that they could tap in an emergency. Summoning those last reserves of strength, Muir and Fay began their descent. They found that the moaning wind had swept the treacherous ridge of almost all snow, making it easier to traverse. Once beyond it the pair made rapid if inelegant progress, shuffling through and sliding across the fresh snow. Lacking the ability to catch themselves, they lurched inexorably forward. After descending 3,000 feet, the mountaineers began to feel the reviving warmth of the sun. At 10 a.m. their camp came into view. A half hour later they heard Sisson shouting through the firs. Concerned by their conspicuous absence, the tavernkeeper had determined to ride to their rescue. Moments later he burst into sight, leading fresh horses. Although starving, Muir and Fay desired hot coffee more than anything. That Sisson happily provided. Then, after a two-hour descent, the horseback trio emerged dreamlike on a trail festooned with violets, lilies and larkspur. At 4 p.m. they finally reached Strawberry Valley and Sisson’s Tavern, where Muir and Fay promptly collapsed into a deep sleep. The next morning Muir awoke to sunbeams pouring through the window of his room. In the distance he could see Shasta—on whose sum-
FRANK SCHULENBURG, CC BY-SA 4.0
Present-day climbers often start their ascent of Mount Shasta from this trailhead at 6,950 feet on the south side of California’s fifth-highest mountain.
mit he and Fay had survived a Scandinavian hell—crowned with trees and clouds. “How fresh and sunful and newborn our beautiful world appeared!” Muir recalled. “Sisson’s children came in with wildflowers and covered my bed, and the sufferings of our long, freezing storm period on the mountaintop seemed all a dream.” Muir went on to have many more adventures and gain renown as “Father of the National Parks.” In his old age he developed a slight limp he attributed to that sleepless night on Mount Shasta. He also credited Fay with having saved his life by refusing to attempt a descent amid the blizzard. In 1880 Fay married Lucy Edson, a sister of the rancher for whom he’d worked in Gazelle. Sadly, she died two years later at age 46. For the rest of his life the mountaineer regaled listeners with the adventures he and Muir had shared in the wilds of California. On Dec. 28, 1912, 74year-old Fay died of heart failure aboard a passenger car in Redding as his train left the station. His ashes are buried beside those of his beloved Lucy at the roadside Foulke Cemetery just south of Gazelle.
Renderings of Muir’s Mountain Lairs
Muir’s friend William Keith (1838–1922) painted Mount Shasta From Castle Lake. Left: California’s state quarter fittingly depicts conservationist Muir admiring Yosemite Valley’s iconic Half Dome.
Matthew Bernstein, when not rambling through the California wilderness, teaches at Matrix for Success Academy and Los Angeles City College. For further reading he recommends A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, by Donald Worster, and The Wild Muir: Twenty-two of John Muir’s Greatest Adventures, selected and introduced by Lee Stetson.
TOP RIGHT: JACKSON HOLE ART AUCTION; RIGHT: BANCROFT LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF BERKELEY
FRANK SCHULENBURG, CC BY-SA 4.0
MUIR THE DISASTER ARTIST Of all the roles John Muir (at right) played—farmer, inventor, mountaineer, family man, conservationist, author, scientist— the most spectacular was that of disaster artist. Few men ever survived so many catastrophes and lived to tell the tale. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, on April 21, 1838, Muir immigrated to Wisconsin with his family in 1849. At age 22 the bright young polymath left the family’s Fountain Lake Farm to attend the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he created several inventions, including an alarm clock desk, and proved an adept botanist. But coursework couldn’t hold his restless mind, and he left school after two years. In March 1867 Muir was working at a wagon wheel factory in Indianapolis when he accidentally pierced his right eye with a file, blinding it. His left eye, too, went blind in nerve shock and sympathy. He spent four sightless weeks in bed before his vision returned. With a new lease on life, Muir traded Indianapolis for the wilderness. “I bade adieu to mechanical inventions,” he recalled, “determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.” After a thousand-mile ramble afoot from Kentucky to Florida, Muir nearly succumbed to a bout of malaria. Undaunted, he soon sailed for California. The young naturalist fell in love with Yosemite Valley at first sight and there raised a cabin with a creek running through a corner of it. He was asleep in his cabin at 2:30 on the morning of March 26, 1872, when a powerful earthquake struck the Owens Valley, east of the Sierra Nevada. Frightened and excited all at once, Muir leapt from his bed and ran outside shouting, “A noble earthquake! A noble earthquake!” After the initial shocks subsided, he commenced dashing about the moonlit valley to witness the transformations the quake had wrought.
In Yosemite the fearless Muir also climbed a towering Douglas spruce amid a windstorm, rode an avalanche from the heights of a side canyon to the valley floor and inched out on a ledge on the brink of Upper Yosemite Fall, where the slightest gust of wind could have shifted the torrent and sent the drenched Scot cartwheeling 1,430 feet to his death. On April 14, 1880—five years after having survived the Mount Shasta snowstorm—40-year-old Muir married longtime acquaintance Louisa “Louie” Strentzel. A day later John left for one of his many solo treks to Alaska. Muir’s subsequent escapades in the far north terrified his family. “I wouldn’t find so much to say,” Muir’s brother David complained, “if John would ever take a blanket. A few hundred feet more or less toward heaven or away from it wouldn’t count with John, but when he and that bag of bread go drifting up the side of a glacier alone, I don’t mind saying that none of us like it.” In 1890 Muir wrote two articles for The Century illustrated monthly magazine, advocating for Yosemite’s preservation. That October 1 Congress officially established Yosemite National Park, its borders identical to those proposed by the onetime resident of the valley. Muir died at age 76 in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve 1914. He lies at rest beside wife Louie in her family’s private cemetery in Martinez, Calif., their plot surrounded by trees a short distance from Alhambra Creek. —M.B. FEBRUARY 2022
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Riding to the Rescue
WHITE BUFFALO
For his 1868 actions at Beecher Island and Beaver Creek, Captain Louis Henry Carpenter of the 10th U.S. Cavalry received his nation’s highest honor By David P. Harrington
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OPPOSITE: DAVID P. HARRINGTON COLLECTION; THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, DAVID P. HARRINGTON COLLECTION
A period drawing depicts the party of frontiersmen and 10th U.S. Cavalry buffalo soldiers, led by Captain Louis Henry Carpenter, that came to the relief of besieged scouts at Beecher Island, Colorado Territory, in 1868.
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also mentioned is a fierce fight he commanded he scouts were starving. After the less than a month later. That Oct. 18, 1868, surprise attack on the morning of action, at Beaver Creek, Kan., went largely igSept. 17, 1868, they had retreated nored, but for a brief controversy that erupted to a thicketed sandbar in the midst of a broad, decades later over just who led the troops in mostly dry riverbed, killed their horses and the engagement. Never in question was the mules for use as breastworks and fought off exemplary conduct of the officers and troops repeated charges by several hundred Plains GEORGE FORSYTH at Beaver Creek. It was quite a month for CarIndians. The battle soon became a siege of penter and Company H. attrition. After days without food they had resorted to eating putrid horsemeat sprinLouis Henry Carpenter (“Henry” to kled with gunpowder, choking it down with the little friends and family) was born on Feb. 11, foul water that seeped into the rifle pits they had dug. 1839, in Glassboro, N.J. Two other future Four scouts had volunteered to crawl out through officers of Indian wars fame were also the enemy cordon in search of help, but the remainborn in 1839—Nelson A. Miles and George ing men despaired of their fate. Those unhurt fed Armstrong Custer. Henry’s birth probably the wounded the few wild plums discovered amid attracted more note than that of either the thickets. Among the most severely wounded Nelson or George, as he was born the eldest was their commanding officer, Major George “Sandy” LOUIS HENRY son of eight children into the prominent CarForsyth, whose gaping leg wound had become infested CARPENTER penter family of Philadelphia. In the late 17th with maggots. century Henry’s great-great-great-grandfather SamOn the eighth morning of the siege 16-year-old Eli Zeigler, the youngest of the band of frontiersmen, spotted riders to uel Carpenter had served as William Penn’s deputy governor the south. “There are some moving objects on the far hills!” in colonial Pennsylvania. Like Penn, Sam Carpenter was he shouted, springing to his feet. All others able to stand a Quaker and had emigrated from England in search of shielded their eyes and gazed intently in that direction. Indi- religious freedom. By 1844 Henry’s parents had moved the family to Philaans? Or white men? “By the Gods above us,” one cried out, “it’s an ambulance!” A wild cheer rose from parched throats. delphia. Living a privileged childhood due to his father’s The relief party soon came into focus. Leading them was success in real estate speculation, Henry attended Central J.J. “Jack” Peate, who had recruited nearly two dozen of the High School, widely known for its academic standards. On frontiersmen from the Saline River valley for Forsyth but graduation he enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania and had missed the battle when the force left Fort Wallace without later attended the university’s medical school. Then, in Nohim. Riding beside Peate was Jack Donovan, one of the four vember 1861—seven months after Confederate artillerymen volunteers who had gone for help. Following their lead were in Charleston, S.C., fired on Fort Sumter—Carpenter abruptly Captain Louis Henry Carpenter and a contingent of buffalo left school and walked down Chestnut Street in Philadelphia to enlist as a private in the newly formed 6th U.S. Cavalry. soldiers of the 10th U.S. Cavalry. Carpenter served with distinction in the 6th Cavalry throughGeorge Washington Oaks, one of the besieged scouts, later acknowledged his black rescuers in a candid recollection. out the Civil War, was commissioned a first lieutenant and “The troopers were Negroes,” he wrote, “but boy, were we received four brevet promotions. Among his fellow regimental officers was Nicholas Nolan, who after the war would glad to see them!” Carpenter, the commander of Company H of the 10th serve alongside Carpenter in the 10th Cavalry and command Cavalry, though boasting a military career marked by hard another notable Henry—Henry Ossian Flipper, the first black service and heroics, remains a footnote in history, even to graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Another students of the Indian wars. If he is known at all, it is for the Civil War acquaintance was George Forsyth, who like Henry Sept. 25, 1868, rescue of Forsyth and his nearly 50-man com- served as an aide to famed Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan in 1864. In late 1864 Captain Carpenter accepted a commission as pany of scouts from their sandy redoubt on the North Fork of the Republican River (present-day Arikaree River) in Colo- lieutenant colonel of Volunteers for the 5th U.S. Colored rado Territory after a fearful engagement with Cheyenne, Cavalry, an experience that influenced his future Army career. Lakota and Arapaho warriors. For his action in what became He taught his recruits dismounted tactics, fought continknown as the Battle of Beecher Island (in honor of slain Lieu- ually to obtain better equipment for them and started a tenant Frederick H. Beecher), Carpenter eventually received literacy program to enable the onetime slaves to become his nation’s highest award, the Medal of Honor—albeit in noncommissioned officers. At the close of the war Carpenter returned to the 6th Cav1898, three decades after the action. The Beecher Island rescue, however, accounts for only part of Carpenter’s citation; alry at his permanent rank of first lieutenant. Then opportuFEBRUARY 2022
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1. Captain Louis Henry Carpenter’s column (Companies H and I of the 10th U.S. Cavalry) camps overnight within a bend on the south bank of Beaver Creek, its 11 supply wagons forming a corral for the horses and mules. At dawn on October 18 an officer and two troopers leave camp ahead of the main column to scout the nearby hills. They are immediately attacked and turned back by small group of Cheyennes. Carpenter sends out 30 troopers to cover the scouts’ retreat, prompting the Indians to pull back. 2. Carpenter directs his men to cross to the north side of the creek. Forming his wagons into a double column, the captain has Company H take the van and guard the flanks with Company I covering the rear. Keeping in tight formation, the column moves upstream along the creek bottom as Indians snipe from the bluffs across the river. 3. Carpenter directs the column away from creek bottom to seek higher ground on the divide. 4. As the column ascends from the creek, upward of 600 warriors rush the wagon train from the rear, threatening to envelop it. Spotting a knoll ahead, Carpenter circles the wagons around it, the mules and horses inside. The captain later shifted the column back to the creek for fresh water, and by the next morning the Indians had dispersed.
nity came knocking in the form of the Army Reorganization Act of 1866, which authorized four new cavalry regiments, including the 9th and 10th Cavalry—black regiments led by white officers. Carpenter readily accepted a captaincy in the 10th Cavalry (an opening more famous officers, including Custer, had refused to consider). He took this step despite knowing the unit would most likely be posted to the Western frontier, where many among the largely white populace would likely clash with the black troopers. While in the 10th Carpenter had the good fortune to be under the command of Colonel Benjamin Grierson, celebrated for having led a daring raid amid the 1863 Vicksburg Campaign (subject of the 1959 John Wayne film The Horse Soldiers). Grierson, like Carpenter, was a refined, gentle soul 52 WILD WEST
of high intelligence complemented by a warrior’s demeanor. Grierson sent his captain back East to find “colored men sufficiently educated to fill the positions of noncommissioned officers, clerks and mechanics.” The recruits, mostly from the Philadelphia area, formed a solid foundation for the 10th Cavalry and, in particular, Carpenter’s Company H. The summer of 1868 found the company in Kansas, and in early September they were posted to Fort Wallace, the westernmost U.S. military outpost in that state. As summer transitioned to fall on the southern Plains, travel along the Denver stage road west of Fort Wallace became hazardous. Frequent and deadly Indian attacks by Cheyenne, Lakota and Arapaho warriors had made mail delivery and travel untenable, terrifying the few isolated ranchers living along the route. The tribes were determined to discourage white encroachment on what they considered their homeland. To combat the violence, brevet Colonel Henry C. Bankhead of the 5th U.S. Infantry, the commander at Fort Wallace, ordered Carpenter and his hard-riding troop of 10th Cavalry on an extended patrol. The captain and 70 troopers of Company H left the fort on September 21 with 30 days of rations and forage. Accompanying the patrol of frontier soldiers were Assistant Surgeon Jenkins A. Fitzgerald, 17 frontier scouts, 13 wagons and an ambulance. His orders were simple: Proceed west into Colorado Territory to where the Big Sandy Creek crossed the Denver stage road—about 60 miles from Fort Wallace—scout in all directions and ensure the safety of travelers.
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Wagons
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TOP LEFT: MAP BY JANA OVER; ABOVE LEFT: MAP BY DAVID P. HARRINGTON AND PAUL FISHER; TOP RIGHT: CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR SOCIETY
Horses
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
TOP LEFT: MAP BY JANA OVER; ABOVE LEFT: MAP BY DAVID P. HARRINGTON AND PAUL FISHER; TOP RIGHT: CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR SOCIETY
Arriving back at Fort Wallace on On the evening of Company H’s second day October 1, Carpenter and his men soon out on patrol a courier from Fort Wallace en route received orders to escort newly apto Fort Lyon stopped by camp with a message pointed 5th U.S. Cavalry commander from Bankhead. The colonel sought any news Major Eugene Asa Carr into the field about Major Forsyth and his scouts, who had left to overtake several companies of his Fort Wallace 10 days earlier. Carpenter had only command thought to be patrolling Beaa rough map of the terrain north of the Smoky ver Creek, Kan. On October 14 CarpenHill River and the Denver stage road, as the area BENJAMIN GRIERSON ter led out Companies H and I with 11 had never been extensively surveyed, and he had packed supply wagons. After a day’s no idea of the whereabouts of Forsyth’s column. march they reached the Beaver. Heading He likely turned in for the night wondering about downstream the next morning, the colhis onetime Civil War colleague. umn found no sign of Indians save an Company H got an early start the next morning, Septemabandoned campsite and a lone dead ber 23. They had just reached the stage road when another Cheyenne atop a burial scaffold. courier appeared. This rider had left Fort Wallace just On the morning of October 17 before midnight, dispatched by Bankhead with a more Carpenter sent out scouts to search ominous message. Having learned of the September 17 for Carr’s troopers and any Indians. Indian ambush of Forsyth, the colonel directed CarThe main column continued northpenter to proceed immediately to the Dry Fork of the east along the Beaver, stopping some Republican. The dispatch noted Forsyth was wounded 60 miles downstream from where and the situation dire. Unfortunately, Bankhead could only they’d first struck the creek. There they give Carpenter a rough idea of Forsyth’s location. EUGENE A. CARR camped within a bend on the south bank, The message both set off alarm bells in Carpenter’s head corralling their horses between the creek and highlighted the subtle racism his black troopers faced on and the supply wagons. Returning scouts rea daily basis. Carpenter could not help but feel Bankhead had no faith the captain and his troop of “colored cavalry” could be of any ported no trace of Carr’s troopers. Coming to the help. For one, the colonel had not sent forward the scouts who had brought conclusion the 5th Cavalry companies had never news of Forsyth’s predicament, men who could guide Company H to the reached the creek, Carpenter and Carr decided ambush site. The orders also instructed Carpenter to send Dr. Fitzgerald to turn back for Fort Wallace the next day. Shortly after dawn on October 18 as the colback to the fort, as Bankhead himself intended to search for Forsyth with umn prepared to decamp, a small group of Inhis own force and wanted the post surgeon along. “A glance showed the greatest interest and expectation on every face,” dians suddenly attacked. Carpenter sent out Carpenter recalled of his men. “The troops were on the qui vive, as all 30 troopers to cover the retreat of scouts caught felt certain that something unusual had occurred.” Resolving to dedi- in the ambush, and the Indians fled into the surcate his full complement and all his resources to the rescue mission, rounding hills. Directing his men cross to the north side of Carpenter took a chance and disregarded Bankhead’s order to return Dr. Fitzgerald to Fort Wallace. Given his own medical school background, the creek, Carpenter placed the wagons in a the captain was well aware of the advantages a surgeon’s presence would double column, Company H at the van and mean to the waiting wounded. Based on the sketchy description of the flanking the wagons, Company I covering the ambush site, Carpenter then plotted a course on his rough map to a rear. Keeping in tight formation, the column point north 10 degrees west of his current position. Around noon the then moved upstream along the creek bottom. captain turned his troopers northwest, leaving the stage road for the Sniping at them from the bluffs, the attacking Indians grew in number to around 200. uncharted plains. Carpenter concluded it best to seek higher Meanwhile, headed their way was Donovan, one of the second pair of scouts dispatched by Forsyth. On reaching Fort Wallace and finding ground. As the column made its way up from Bankhead gone, Donovan had recruited five bold volunteers and retraced the creek, a force of at least 600 warriors rushed his steps, hoping to encounter one of the rescue parties. Fortunately, he the wagon train from the rear and moved to happened across Company H. With Donovan guiding them, Carpenter, envelop it. Realizing he could go no farther, Dr. Fitzgerald and 30 men raced ahead of the column with the ambulance the captain ordered the supply wagons to form and a supply of food. Their timely arrival at the ambush site on Sep- a circular corral around a knoll to their front, the mules facing inward and spread about 20 tember 25 likely saved the critically wounded Forsyth’s life. Though the press back East heralded the rescue, only Bankhead, who feet apart. At his command the mounted trooparrived on scene a full day after Carpenter, received any official recogni- ers rushed inside the circle and dismounted. tion for the action, in the form of a brevet promotion to brigadier general. With the horses and mules sheltered within, the troopers formed along the perimeter of the Such was the lot of those who chose to lead black soldiers. FEBRUARY 2022
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On the Defensive
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FROM TOP: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In a general field order and in dispatches to wagon fort to repulse the charging Washington, General Sheridan, commander of the Indians with massed volleys from military Department of the Missouri, praised the offitheir seven-shot Spencer repeaters. cers and men of the 10th Cavalry for their actions at During a lull in the action CarpenBeaver Creek, while Carpenter received his fifth brevet, ter re-formed the wagons into a douto colonel. ble column, the horses inside and the Thus ended the most eventful period of Carpenter’s men dismounted on the outside. DiCYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY illustrious career. While he went on to further achieverecting the column back to the creek ment—leading troops in the Red River War; fighting to obtain fresh water, the captain had Victorio and his Apaches in west Texas; commanding his men make night camp. Finding no favorable opportunity for a follow-up attack, Forts Davis, Robinson, Myer and Sam Houston; running the cavalry the Indians kept their distance and eventually dis- school at Fort Riley; and becoming a brigadier general of Volunteers and persed. Carpenter, Carr and the troopers arrived serving as a provincial governor in Cuba during the Spanish-American safely back at Fort Wallace on October 21, having War—those daring few weeks in Kansas likely outweighed them all in slipped the noose with only a few men wounded. his memory. In 1898 he belatedly received his nation’s highest honor, the Medal of Honor, for his “gallant and meritorious” actions at Beecher Site of the Fight Island and Beaver Creek. Companies H and I of the 10th Cavalry had 11 supply On Oct. 19, 1899, a day after having been promoted to brigadier generwagons, which Carpenter had circle up when some 600 warriors charged them during the Battle of Beaver Creek. al in the Regular Army, Carpenter retired from the service and returned to Philadelphia for what he assumed would be a quiet and uncontentious life. Remaining a bachelor, he wrote a number of articles about his experiences and enjoyed renown in his hometown, accepting many invitations for speaking engagements. Then, in 1904, adventure novelist and historian Cyrus Townsend Brady asked the captain to pen an account of the Beaver Creek fight for Brady’s forthcoming book Indian Fights and Fighters. The resulting article, titled tongue-in-cheek “Carpenter and His ‘Brunettes,’” was well received. Brady, however, was a genius at stirring up trouble. Following Carpenter’s retelling of the Beaver Creek affair the editor included a rebuttal from an angry and bitter General Carr, who
TOP: THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON; MIDDLE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; BELOW: DAVID P. HARRINGTON
Major George “Sandy” Forsyth’s scouts fort up behind their dead mounts to repel another Indian attack at Beecher Island, in a watercolor by Frederic Remington.
essentially deemed Carpenter a liar unworthy of the plaudits totle, a philosopher the retired general he’d received. had greatly admired, Carpenter had A decade earlier Carr himself had been forced into certainly led a life well lived. retirement by Lt. Gen. John Schofield, the commanding general of the Army, and was likely resentful about the David P. Harrington is a writer and abrupt ending to his spectacular career (he, too, had rehistorian specializing in the Civil War ceived five brevets and a Medal of Honor, and he was and Indian wars. He has visited the the acknowledged hero of the 1869 Battle of Summit Beaver Creek site, near Traer, Kan., Springs against Chief Tall Bull and his Cheyenne Dog several times and is writing a biography Soldiers). Perhaps that had something to do with his pique of Louis Henry Carpenter. For further REUBEN WALLER of anger against Carpenter. In his rebuttal Carr claimed he’d reading he recommends The Battle of been in command at Beaver Creek and had issued the orders Beecher Island and the Indian War attributed to the captain in the ensuing encounter. Carpenter of 1867–1869, by John H. Monnett; Indian took the high road and acknowledged Carr had played some role in Fights and Fighters, by Cyrus Townsend Brady; the action. That said, he also made it clear he’d been in charge, as con- and War Eagle: A Life of General Eugene firmed by Sheridan’s own General Field Orders No. 4 and in the general’s A. Carr, by James T. King. subsequent recommendation for Carpenter’s brevet appointment. The matter was thus put to rest, and Carpenter’s reputation as a wise and brave soldier remained intact. Louis Henry Carpenter died a contented man in Philadelphia at age 76 on Jan. 21, 1916. To paraphrase the writings of Aris-
FROM TOP: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2); LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
TOP: THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON; MIDDLE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; BELOW: DAVID P. HARRINGTON
RACISM IN THE RANKS As every American schoolkid learns, slavery was formally abolished nationwide by ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Work opportunities for blacks remained lacking for decades afterward, however. One refuge for many freed slaves dragged the trio from their cell and lynched was the U.S. Army, which needed men to them from a railroad trestle (see above photo). garrison the West and facilitate the nation’s Unfortunately, buffalo soldiers also experiwestward progress. More than 175,000 enced prejudice at the hands of fellow white blacks had served in the U.S. Colored Troops soldiers and officers, even those who owed their during the last three years of the Civil War, lives to the black soldiers’ actions. For example, no doubt grateful for the comfort of steady Eugene Carr didn’t consider “the Negro fitted meals and shelter. They also received a salthen for a soldier,” and George Forsyth once ary and a measure of dignity. But it would N remarked, “It was a difficult undertaking to be a long, difficult journey to full equality. WILLIAM HOFFMA make good cavalrymen of colored men.” The general public routinely referred A more blatant racist was Colonel William to black troops as “Brunettes,” “Nubians,” Hoffman, who commanded Fort Leavenworth, Kan., during “Mokes” (donkeys) and often far worse, especially in the formation of the 10th Cavalry. He directed the 10th to Reconstruction-era Texas. Out West altercations between camp at swampy low ground known as One Mile Creek, townsmen and buffalo soldiers became commonplace. ordered a company commander to keep “those men” off the Hays City, Kan.—adjacent to the postwar headquarters parade field and threatened to bring court-martial charges of the 10th Cavalry and 38th Infantry at Fort Hays—was against Colonel Benjamin Grierson after the latter took up especially plagued with violence. Armed black soldiers for his men. “policed” the town, prompting resentment by some local On welcome occasions the comradery of fighting men whites. The saloons in particular became powder kegs. In prevailed. Carpenter’s hostler, trooper Reuben Waller, reJanuary 1869 three drunken buffalo soldiers of the 38th called one such encounter. “A lot of us soldiers took French Infantry, having been denied entrance to a brothel, smashed leave one night and went to Pond Creek, 3 miles west of up a barber shop (owned, ironically enough, by a black civil[Fort] Wallace,” he recalled. “We met the Beecher scouts, as ian named John White) and impulsively gunned down a Union Pacific watchman in the street. The men never made it they had been paid off. They sure treated us black soldiers to trial. The next evening a vigilante mob broke into the jail, right for what we had done for them.” —D.H. FEBRUARY 2022
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Brothers-in-Arms
White soldiers of the 18th Kansas Volunteer Cavalry and black soldiers of the 10th U.S. Cavalry charge the enemy in August 1867, in Ralph Hinz’s painting The Battle of Prairie Dog Creek.
These buffalo soldiers received their true baptism of fire in Kansas at the little remembered Battle of Prairie Dog Creek By John H. Monnett
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U.S. NATIONAL GUARD
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n 1867 the mixed-grass prairie of the Saline Valley in north-central Kansas was coveted earth among the Cheyennes and Arapahos and rival Pawnees as one of the last prolific buffalo biomes on the central Plains. It was home. It had been familiar to their families for generations. But for a young yeoman farmer hailing from the fertile soil of far-off Pennsylvania, the vast grasslands presented a strange, foreboding landscape—and a lonely place to die and be forgotten. That was the fate of Sergeant William Christy, 10th U.S. Cavalry, on Aug. 2, 1867, the first buffalo soldier from that regiment killed in action. Christy had enlisted on June 4 to serve his country in one of two post–Civil War black cavalry regiments authorized by Congress in the Army Reorganization Act of 1866. Less than two months after enlistment he was killed instantly by either a Cheyenne or Kiowa bullet to the head and buried in a dusty prairie ravine far from home. Not much else is known about this young soldier, but the 10th Cavalry would experience its first major Indian fight 19 days after Christy’s death, and his regiment, along with the 9th Cavalry buffalo soldiers, would go on to win glory and recognition in the Indian wars of the West.
U.S. NATIONAL GUARD
Fully mustered in at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in early summer 1867 under Colonel Benjamin Grierson, the 10th first moved out to Fort Riley and by late July was operating out of Fort Hays. The regiment’s orders were to protect construction crews and stations along the routes of the advancing railroads and keep Indian raiders away from the expanding Kansas settlements, as 7th U.S. Cavalry Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer had been trying to do, mostly in vain, in what came to be known as Hancock’s War (after Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, a Union hero of the Battle of Gettysburg). Earlier that summer elements of the 38th U.S. Infantry (one of four black infantry units authorized by the 1866 reorganization) had begun patrolling the rails, some from dugouts built for their protection. One snarky local reporter wrote pejoratively that black infantrymen had been placed there as “bait for the Indians.” Warriors were certainly on the warpath, provoked in part by General Hancock’s rash decision to burn an abandoned Cheyenne and Lakota village that FEBRUARY 2022
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Guidon of John A. Bodamer
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TOP LEFT: FORT LEAVENWORTH, U.S. ARMY; TOP RIGHT: LEGENDS OF AMERICA; RIGHT: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
After breakfasting on Beaver Creek on the morning of the 21st, Armes pushed east, leaving behind the supply wagons and a guard of 65 men under Lieutenant John W. Price to await further orders. Fearing the supply train might follow had assembled near Fort Larned for him directly into harm’s way, Armes sent back peace talks in mid-April 1867. 20 men under Sergeants George Carpenter On August 2 Cheyennes attacked of the 18th and William Johnson of Company F of the 10th Cavalry. The the 10th with orders for Price to head company comprised two officers and 34 down Beaver Creek some miles bemen under Captain George Augustus Armes, who on July 3 had lost his brother, William, to a fore crossing. The sergeants had ridden only a few miles cholera epidemic ravaging Forts Harker and Hays that sum- when they happened across Captain Jenness, his scouts mer. The Cheyenne force comprised an estimated 350–400 and four other stragglers. No sooner had the parties linked warriors. Hopelessly outnumbered, the company was fight- up when they came under attack by some 300 Indians. ing dismounted when Christy took the fatal bullet. Having Jenness formed his motley 29-man command into a hollow the men remount, Armes found himself in a 15-mile running square near Prairie Dog Creek and over the next six hours fight with the Cheyennes, but he managed to get his men fought a desperate engagement. In his after-action report back to Fort Hays with no further losses. In his report the Jenness claimed to have recognized Kiowa Chief Satanta, captain, who’d been wounded in the hip, claimed his men “in full uniform on a beautiful gray horse…[who] sounded had killed six warriors and wounded the charge with his bugle at least a dozen times.” At one several others seeking to show off point during the fight several Indians rode through the their “medicine” by rushing his line. square, emerging untouched despite the dozens of rounds Three troopers had been wounded, fired at them. Some of the soldiers swore one of them was while six others succumbed to chol- the renowned Northern Cheyenne warrior Roman Nose. era and had to be packed back to Though warriors harried the troopers with animal cries overnight, there were no further attacks. the fort strapped to their horses. In the predawn darkness of August 22 Jenness and his But the 10th Cavalry’s first major fight, remembered as the Bat- battered command slipped away east to a sheltered ravine tle of Prairie Dog Creek, came on near the Solomon River. There the captain took stock, estiAugust 21. That clash in far north- mating 20 Indians killed or wounded at the cost of one western Kansas has received little trooper killed and eight seriously wounded. Jenness himself attention from historians in com- had suffered a bullet wound to the right thigh. In the midst parison to the exploits of the more of the fight several warriors among the combined war party GEORGE AUGUSTUS ARMES colorful Custer that spring and sum- of Kiowas, Cheyenne Dog Men and Arapahos had taunted the troopers in English. One warrior brandishing a spear mer of 1867. On August 18 a draped with the scalp of their dead fellow trooper mostly recovered Captain Armes led 40 buffalo solyelled out, “This is the way we will serve you all!” diers of Company F and 90 men from Companies B Another claimed they had wiped out Armes’ and C of the 18th Kansas Volunteer Cavalry (a command and were about to do the same to month into its four-month term of service) out the captain and his small force. of Fort Hays to break up a concentration of Though far from wiped out, Armes certainly warriors believed to be camped on the Solohad his troubles. Under cover of darkness the mon River. Meanwhile, Major Horace L. Moore captain had returned to Beaver Creek in search led Companies A and D of the 18th on a scout of the others. Resting his men until sunrise, along the same stream. Moore marched north Armes headed upstream to look for Price and and then west up the river, while Armes went HORACE L. MOORE the wagons. He found them 2 miles up, encamped north and then east. They agreed to join their in a ravine but surrounded. Learning that Jenness commands if one or the other located the enemy, was in hiding nearby, he sent out a relief force that soon but neither encountered Indians on the Solomon. Running low on provisions, Armes marched back to Fort Hays for brought in the captain and his wounded. Armes had successfive wagonloads of supplies and went out again on the 19th. fully rejoined the elements of his command, but his 164 men On the evening of the 20th Armes sent out Captain George were facing an estimated 800 Indians. Again the warriors B. Jenness and two scouts of Company C to investigate a taunted the troopers in English. Through the clear prairie air distant light, which turned out to be an abandoned Indian came a challenge: “Come out of that hole, you white sons campfire. Turned around in the dark, the scouts bedded down of bitches, and give us a fair fight! We don’t want to fight the niggers; we want to fight you white sons of bitches!” on the prairie for the night.
FROM TOP: MORPHY AUCTIONS; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY
This flag belonged to the 10th Cavalry second lieutenant singled out for his performance at Prairie Dog Creek. So, too, were two Company F buffalo soldiers.
TOP LEFT: FORT LEAVENWORTH, U.S. ARMY; TOP RIGHT: LEGENDS OF AMERICA; RIGHT: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
FROM TOP: MORPHY AUCTIONS; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY
Not until the night of August 23 did the Indians finally withdraw. Armes Recognizing the Buffalo Soldiers Above left: Frank McCarthy (1924–2002) honors them started the command for Fort Hays on the morning of the 24th, reaching it in his dramatic Buffalo Soldiers: Advance as Skirmishers, that evening. No soldiers were reported killed on the second and third Charge! Above: A buffalo soldier sits tall in the saddle days of the three-day battle, but the allied warriors had successfully driven in an illustration by Frederic Remington (1861–1909). off their mutual enemy. One of the primary sources of the Battle of Prairie Dog Creek is an who never made it into the fight, asserted his account from scout Allison J. Pliley, from Topeka. Though just 23, Pliley fellow officers had been driven from the field and blamed Armes for the defeat, criticizing was already a veteran of the Plains. By age 18 in 1862 he was him for having twice divided his comalready driving ox-drawn supply wagons to Denver. The mand. In a letter to Kansas Goverfollowing year he enlisted in the 15th Kansas Volunteer nor Samuel J. Crawford the major Cavalry, which during the Civil War had helped break blasted his Regular Army counthe charge of Maj. Gen. Sterling Price’s Confederates at terpart, claiming Armes’ “misthe Oct. 23, 1864, Battle of Westport, Mo. After his scout erable failure is owing entirely to on August 21 Pliley reported that 300 Indians had athis having been too anxious for tacked Jenness and that another 400 were in the vicinity. a fight of his own, which led him The scout also claimed to have persuaded Jenness to to run away from me, and [to] dismount his men to repel the warriors’ attack. Though his want of judgment in scattering Pliley participated in the defense of the hollow square his command all over the plains.” and suffered two bullet wounds to his right calf, Jenness ALLISON J. PLILEY The rival officers’ stated preference made no mention of the scout in his reports. The next mornfor the Volunteers over the Regular Army ing Pliley tried to find Lieutenant Price’s wagons and return to buffalo soldiers is ostensibly prejudicial though Jenness with reinforcements but found the former’s command surrounded and was forced to flee. “My horse fairly flew,” he recalled years hardly surprising. New York Herald corresponlater from his home in Kansas City, “and as I lay over his side, I heard dent Henry Morton Stanley (the future explorer of “Stanley and Livingstone” fame) was reporting bullets singing above me like a swarm of bees.” from the Kansas plains that year and also wrote In his after-action report Jenness reported two dead and 16 wounded in favor of the Volunteers. But if the valor of the from his 29-man command. Armes reported one man killed (buried en buffalo soldiers was overlooked at the time, such route to the fort) and 13 wounded from Company F. He also singled out has not been the case in more recent literature. for distinction two buffalo soldiers—Sergeant C.A. Cromwell and Corpo- Writing a century after the battle, historian Wilral Lewis Butler of Company F—as well as white officer 2nd Lt. John liam Leckie, for one, wrote, “Armes no longer A. Bodamer. While Jenness and Armes each commended the buffalo led a bunch of recruits after Aug. 21, 1867, but soldiers for their performance, Armes heaped more praise on the men of a company of fighting men.” The Battle of Prairie Dog Creek wrapped up the 18th Kansas, stating they “acted nobly and have set a fine example offensive operations that year on the central for other volunteers from Kansas to follow.” The officers themselves garnered no such recognition. Although 38th Plains. Fed up with the largely unproductive Infantry Captain Henry C. Corbin, the commander at Fort Hays, sent a Hancock’s War, even before the last shots were glowing report to superiors about Armes and Jenness on behalf of the fired, Congress had authorized a peace commisbuffalo soldiers, Major Horace Moore, commander of the 18th Kansas, sion to treat with the Plains Indians. Council FEBRUARY 2022
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Fort Leavenworth in 1867
After mustering in at this Kansas fort, the 10th Cavalry under Colonel Benjamin Grierson rode farther west to where the action was that summer.
meetings between U.S. commissioners and tribal representatives in October 1867 led to the signing of three separate agreements, known collectively as the Treaty of Medicine Lodge. Unfortunately, the pact was never ratified and brought only a momentary lull in Plains warfare. While the 18th Kansas Volunteers went home that November, the buffalo soldiers of the 9th and 10th Cavalries went on to glory on the Plains and in the Southwest, compiling among the most
distinguished service records of all Regular units in the Indian wars. In September 1868 Company H of the 10th, under Captain Louis Henry Carpenter, rode to the relief of the beleaguered Forsyth Scouts at Beecher Island, Colorado Territory (see related article, P. 50). “We plunged right into those fights,” Sergeant Reuben Waller of Company H recalled decades later at age 89. In 1897 Sergeant Shelvin Shropshire of Company H shared his recollections with famed artist Frederic Remington. “We used to have a fight every day down on the Washita, Mr. Remington, and them Indians used to attack accordin’ to your ideas,” Shropshire said. “A feller on the flanks nevah knew what minute he was goin’ to have to horse race back to the command, with anywhar from 10 to 500 Indians a close second.” Despite instances of gallantry, the Battle of Prairie Dog Creek yielded no better results than many previous episodes of Hancock’s War. If not a disaster, it certainly hadn’t furthered the Army’s objectives of controlling the Plains Indians or protecting railroad crews in Kansas and Nebraska and emigrants as far up the road as Wyoming. Between August 2 and 23 upward of 800 Indians had engaged the troops
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the Army was among the most favorable vehicles of social mobility for black males in the postwar years, despite lingering prejudice and discrimination at Western garrisons and in adjacent communities. On campaign these American soldiers naturally regarded Indians as the enemy, and vice versa. The Utes later derided the troopers of the 9th and 10th Cavalries as the “black white men” who rode behind white officers. Present-day historians of the Indian wars have advanced scholarship to recognize the contributions of all historical actors, thus presenting a more nuanced view of the era. Among the outward signs of that maturing perspective is sculptor Eddie Dixon’s Buffalo Soldier Monument (see photo next page) at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., dedicated on July 25, 1992, by General Colin Powell. It and other such markers pay tribute to a storied and increasingly celebrated chapter of the nation’s military and Western history. —J.H.M.
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FROM TOP: ANCESTRY; KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS VISITORS BUREAU
reward, claiming to have recovered them from Indians or found them on the prairie. Were such outlaws swept up in any of the postwar clashes with frontier troops? Their presence is at very least a reminder that several sets of historical actors were at play on the Plains during the Indian war of 1867–69. Historians must be aware of all of such groups’ conflicting viewpoints when doing comparative analysis. For their part, the allied Plains Indians nearly equaled federal and state troops in firepower, often employed superior tactics and were far more familiar with the terrain. Such advantages enabled them to prevail and in subsequent treaty negotiations secure certain concessions—at least until the U.S. government nullified them. The presence of the buffalo soldiers (see Buffalo Soldiers in Pursuit, by Frederic Remington, above) raises other questions. During the fur trade era friendly Indians and blacks had intermarried, while other tribes had integrated black captives into their villages and adopted runaway slaves. Relations between the groups changed in the wake of the Civil War. Recent scholarly research reveals
TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ABOVE: PETER NEWARK AMERICAN PICTURES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
RAISING QUESTIONS
Reports from the Battle of Prairie Dog Creek raise an interesting question, one prevalent in 1867 and again in 1868: Who among or with the Indians challenged their enemy in fluent English? Bilingual Indians is one possible answer. Or perhaps it was mixed-blood Cheyenne Charley Bent, known to ride into battle with the tribe. White outlaws is another possibility worth exploring. Prior to the completion of the railroad to Denver and the ensuing arrival of civilization, including law and order, Kansas proliferated with outlaw gangs. Not all border bushwhackers of the Bleeding Kansas and Civil War years had returned home to Missouri to grow corn, certainly not as long as profits were to be made in frontier Kansas. After all, such disaffected ex-Rebels were as eager to thwart the advance of settlement in that rival state as tribesmen. Thus they engaged with central Plains Indians in horse theft and the whiskey trade. Indians would steal horses from immigrants, stage stations and even Army herds at forts such as Wallace and Hays, then trade them to the gangs for whiskey. The outlaws in turn would sell horses in Westport or Kansas City, Mo., or turn in ones with Army brands to out-of-the-way posts for a per head
A Record of Service and Sacrifice
Buffalo soldier William Christy was killed in action on Aug. 2, 1867. Below: By late July the 10th Cavalry was operating out of Fort Hays. Bottom: Eddie Dixon’s Buffalo Soldier Monument graces Fort Leavenworth.
of the 10th Cavalry and 18th Kansas. Among the allied tribes scout Pliley and others had identified Northern and Southern Cheyennes (including Dog Men), Kiowas, Arapahos and Lakotas. The simple fact is that from the burning of the vacant Dog Men village on Pawnee Fork that April through year’s end 1867 the warriors of the allied tribes had commanded the balance of power on the central Plains. The search-anddestroy tactics that had proved so effective in Colorado Territory and Kansas in 1864, culminating with the November 29 massacre on Sand Creek, bore few successes between then and Custer’s Nov. 27, 1868, attack on the Washita River in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Dividing commands to scour river and creek basins for reported congregations of warriors were largely ineffective, not to mention
potentially fatal, as the Indians remained mobile. In the summer of 1867 they even managed to put Fort Wallace under effective siege. The tribal coalitions harassed not only forts but also express stage stations along the Smoky Hill Trail, Pony Express operations in Nebraska, and the routes of both Union Pacific Railroad divisions in Kansas and Nebraska, while raids on travelers and settlers only intensified in the summer and fall of 1868. As New York Herald correspondent Stanley once observed, the problem for soldiers wasn’t finding the Indians—it’s that the Indians found them first. Kansas native John Monnett has written many books and articles about the Indian wars. Recommended for further reading are the 2021 revised second edition (with new material) of Monnett’s The Battle of Beecher Island and the Indian War of 1867–1869, as well as Voices of the Buffalo Soldier, by Frank N. Schubert, and Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890, edited by Peter Cozzens.
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TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ABOVE: CALLED TO DUTY, BY EZRA TUCKER
GOOD HISTORY Conflicting accounts from the Battle of Prairie Dog Creek speak to the importance of objectively weighing primary sources. The reporting discrepancies between rivals Major Horace Moore and Captain George Armes, and those of Captain George Jenness and scout Allison Pliley, not to mention the possibility of rogue whites riding with the Indians, illustrate the danger of accepting at face value tempting sources that lack corroboration. Hence an assessment by researchers at the University of Southern California Libraries that “all primary sources are by necessity one-sided and biased and should always be approached with a skeptical eye.”
Custer/Little Bighorn aficionados know that lesson quite well and thus argue incessantly over the details. Given the era in which they were written, primary sources on that topic are predictably ethnocentric. Complicating research efforts are accounts from officers seeking to shift blame from themselves, civilians victimized by Indians and, of course, Indians’ differing views. Historians and writers should be on guard against blind acceptance of uncorroborated sources, particularly those informed by their own personal beliefs and biases. Wherever possible one should
weigh the perspectives of all participating actors, not only for facts but also for possible motives and self-interests. Readers, too, should be on guard against poorly researched history, often characterized by one-sided, uncorroborated accounts that may be written well or sound intriguing but lack scholarly rigor—the antithesis of good historical writing. —J.H.M. FEBRUARY 2022
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After clashing with Spaniards, Mexicans and Americans for long decades, the Diné suffered forced removal —but the Navajos, as outsiders knew them, would return By Michael Engelhard
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TOP RIGHT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY; ABOVE RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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he landscape to the west falls open like a geology primer. The 7,000-footplus Defiance Plateau tilts north toward distant Black Mesa, the Chuska, Tunicha and Lukachukai mountains not quite containing its eastern edge. Silt-laden runoff from the ranges’ western flanks gouged clefts into the piñon-green bulge—rosy gashes in de Chelly sandstone substrate. Abrasive sediment there scooped out alcoves that sheltered settlers long before the Four Corners gridded maps of the Colorado Plateau desert. Time’s whittling also laid down alluvial beds fertile enough to grow corn, squash, beans and fruit. Perennial streamlets and fine grazeland along the rims made the conjoined Canyons de Chelly and del Muerto luxurious homes. In the 1860s their meandering depths were the last hope of a nation under duress. This Chuska vantage, Chézhin Náshjiní (Lava With a Black Band Around It, known today as Matthews Peak), has a second Navajo name, Tsé Binááyołí (Rock Around Which the Wind Blows). Folklorist Susan W. Fair wrote that such place names, hitched to sagas, give “contour and context to what cultural geographers have referred to as the ‘occupied earth.’” The low saddle of Ayanií, or Buffalo Pass, to the north dents basaltic escarpments that wall off northeastern Arizona from northwestern New Mexico. Rare breaches in the sierra first admitted the Navajos, Diné (“The People”) in their own language, to the Defiance Plateau. Their enemies soon followed. Buffalo Pass perfectly illustrates the shimmering facets of human perception. Orthodox scribes blame the drift of Diné families from the Largo and Gobernador drainages of the San Juan River into Canyons de Chelly and del Muerto on a circa-1750 influx of Spanish New Mexican settlers. A Diné myth accounts differently for the migration. White Shell Woman—a yé’ii, or “god” —instructed the clans to scatter, but some got lost during their wanderings. She then appeared as a white buffalo, showing them the way across the divide. In Diné culture, geography shapes history, at least two complementary forms of which coexist, kept alive in the spoken word as old men with salt-and-pepper hair sat around and revisited the past. Both are equally important for Diné group and individual identity. The first, myths, explain the origin of clans, customs and land-
marks, the workings of a world that can never be fully understood, let alone controlled. These are sacred narratives, cyclical, anchored in ceremony. Deep and rich as dark soil. Written, nontribal sources often verify the second kind: legends or chronicles—secular tales about linear, shallowtime, no less trenchant events. Outcroppings spattered with bile-green and neon-yellow lichens flank Béésh Líchíí Bigizh (Red Flint Summit), a nearby Chuska gateway. There loinclothed hunters in pre-iron days flaked toffee-colored chunks into arrowheads and spearpoints. The notch (present-day Narbona Pass) was contested ground. Pastoral dynamics drove the conflict between Diné and New Mexican Spaniards. Growth of capital on the hoof—cattle, horses or sheep—doomed colonist ranchers and tribal nomads to expand ranges and spiral into warfare over meadows and water. By 1750 most Diné had acquired enough sheep through husbandry, trade, strays and cunning to transition from full-fledged foragers to farming herders with a sideline in reaving. Wild plants and venison from the plateau and mountain folds supplemented diets. Deerskin yielded leggings and shirts (and high-top moccasins), swapped out in summer for cotton clothes. Mustangs served as currency in dealings with northern tribes still largely afoot. Warfare against New Mexican haciendas began after 1753, when settlers pushing west along the Rio Puerco occupied the best grazing ranges and springs. “The people raided back and forth with other tribes and the Mexicans,” the late Navajo centenarian Casamira Baca said. Juan Bautista de Anza, as governor of New Mexico from 1778 to ’88, implemented a new Indian policy founded on cordons of presidios, the severing of tribal trade routes and the sowing of discord—the old “divide and conquer” game. The dry lands quickly ignited. Comanches and Chiricahua Apaches who had routinely preyed on Spanish settlements turned their hostile attentions on the Diné, who were already battling their longtime nemeses the Utes. Fearing reprisals after their 1680 revolt, inhabitants of the upper Rio Grande pueblos had lived with the Diné; they now guided buckskin-vested lancers to their onetime protectors. When New Mexicans settled around Mount Taylor, denying the Diné access to pastures out-
‘The People’
Opposite page: This Diné woman carrying a child on her back was possibly photographed during the 1866 ‘Long Walk’ removal. Top: Diné Chief Manuelito. Above: A woman and two boys pose at Fort Canby, Arizona Territory, in 1873.
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Diné Stronghold
In 1873 Timothy H. O’Sullivan photographed tents (identified as “Camp Beauty”) amid the towering sandstone spires of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona Territory. In the 1860s its depths had served as a last place of refuge for a nation under duress.
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In 1864 soldiers burned the Diné cornfields, but the fields would bear crops again, as proved by this 1906 photo in Canyon del Muerto. Below right: Manuelito’s wife, Juanita, poses in 1901 with two daughters and three grandchildren.
PHOTO CREDIT
Growing Crops and Families
canyons during that more sedentary season. Somewhere in the blizzardridden Chuskas the column of New Mexican and Sonoran dragoons and Opata Indian auxiliaries from Mexico lost its way. It retreated to Laguna to regroup, recover and recruit guides from the Zuni pueblos. In January 1805 Narbona’s 300 troops forced the pass in yet another entrada. Once again snow settled on their broad-brimmed black hats, but knee-length mantles saved them from freezing. Breath plumes of horses and men mingled in the sharp air. Loaded flintlock pistols clattered, stirrup leather creaked and lance steel glistened coldly in the glare as they rowel-spurred their mounts toward what would become known as Canyon del Muerto (so named after an 1882 Smithsonian Institution expedition unearthed pre-Columbian mummies there). On January 17 the column tracked Diné into the gorge. New Spain’s soldiers wasted garden plots. They burned lodges and killed 350 goats and sheep. Scouts alerted women, children, elders and a few warriors, who then hid in a prepared cave high on the cliff face. Most of the younger men were either off hunting in the Lukachukais or on their own forays.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
The land grab affronted spirits, too. Mount Taylor (known in Diné as Tsoodził, or Turquoise Bead Mountain) is the southernmost of four compass-point peaks that anchor and demarcate Diné Bikéyah (the “People’s Homeland”). Lava that dormant volcano once spewed onto its slopes —visible near present-day Grants, N.M.—was the blood of monsters slain by twin war gods. In a foray that set a pattern, Lieutenant Antonio Narbona in November 1804 marched west from La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís (Santa Fe, if you were in a rush) via Laguna Pueblo to pierce the Diné heartland in the dead of winter. Families hunkered in the
PHOTO CREDIT
side Cebolleta (present-day Seboyeta), raids and retaliatory attacks rolled out like exchanges in a bar brawl. Diné depredations triggered manhunts by irregulars, who captured and enslaved many Indians. These human trophies fed booming silver mines and haciendas with cheap labor. Diné, conversely, adopted prisoners into special clans to replenish their numbers.
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Horsemen Cometh
TOP RIGHT: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; OTHERS: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (3)
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In the iconic 1904 Edward S. Curtis photo above Diné travelers ride through Canyon de Chelly. Right: This pictograph depicts Spanish soldiers, possibly the force under Lieutenant Antonio Narbona that invaded the canyon in 1805, killing scores and sending captives into slavery.
The undercut is scarcely visible from the canyon bottom. In one version of the raid an old woman who’d been a captive of New Mexicans couldn’t contain herself. Hurling insults, she revealed the refuge. On discovering the shelter, the intruders tackled the near-vertical, desert-varnished cliff, its defenders hurling arrows and rocks at the antlike attackers. They battled all day. Narbona finally sent a detachment of fusiliers to the rim. From their flanking position his marksmen raked the alcove. Bullets caromed off the rear wall, mixed with flying rock splinters and reaped Diné in a grim harvest. By Narbona’s accounting, his men fired close to 10,000 rounds that day, multiplied by their echoes. The next morning the assailants finally gained the ledge from below along a 700-year-old zipper
line of pecked, shallow steps. At the outset of the melee a knife-wielding young woman grappled a soldier in a macabre dance, and both tumbled 600 feet to their deaths. Oral tradition says blood streaked the cliffs crimson, and Diné shoved each other over the edge or jumped to avoid further misery. “And it is called Massacre Cave,” recalled 92-year-old medicine man Howard Gorman Sr. of the Towering House People clan, “because all the Navajos were killed except two.” Its alternate name is Adah aho’doo’niłí (Two Fell Off). Casualty estimates vary between 70 and 115. Survivors caught in the army’s dragnet were sent into slavery, and by his own accounting Narbona forwarded “84 pairs of ears of as many warriors” to Santa Fe as proof of victory. Appendages cut from the heads of women and old men likely inflated the count. The difference, supposedly, is hard to tell. Del Muerto in 1931 became part of jointly managed national monument centered on Canyon de Chelly (a corruption of tséyi’, the Diné word for “canyon,” which latter-day conquistadors mistook for a proper name). It remains a sanctuary from modernity and its ills for about 80 families, a few of which still tend plots in its stone embrace. Non-Diné wanting to explore House and Home
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PHOTO CREDIT
Left: Diné men, women and children pose outside a summer lean-to; their principal homes were enclosed hogans. Below: A present-day photo of Canyon de Chelly’s White House, which was built in 1060, later expanded and occupied until about 1300.
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by high-clearance truck, foot or horse must hire locals. From a rim vantage one can survey the setting of the 1805 drama. On a quiet fall day, with cottonwood gold lining the chasm, it’s impossible to imagine the fierceness of the fighting or the keening of women and children. The stains on its walls today aren’t blood but clay and mineral oxides leached from the scalloped cliffs. 66 WILD WEST
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Top: Navajo weavers still produce such colorful rugs. Above: Wealthy Diné, who owned hundreds of sheep and horses, boasted such fancy gear as this saddle. Opposite page: Navajos also made their own shoes.
HERITAGE AUCTIONS (2)
Made in the Nation
Navajos left undisturbed all remains in the lead-pocked cave where the spirits of the slain lingered. As late as the 1970s human bones reportedly lay heaped behind the boulders forming its parapet, though collectors had reportedly retrieved most of the skulls and other artifacts, including the oldest extant examples of Diné weaving. Diné painted a mural depicting the Spanish incursion above a rock ledge downstream from Standing Cow Ruin, one of dozens of preColumbian dwellings in the canyon. Narbona’s Creole caballeros prance across the wall in crisp, vivid detail, down to brandished muskets, riders’ ponytails and the mottled coats of their pintos. A cross is embroidered on one rider’s mantle. The mural survives as an outstanding example of Diné rock art. After Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, defense of the northern frontier fell to ragtag militias, and enslavement became the main reason for incursions. Treaties were forged and broken. Through it all the Diné prevailed in battle against competing tribes. Guerrilla fighters, they blossomed into one of the Colorado Plateau’s most powerful people. Wealthy Diné (dubbed ricos) owned hundreds of sheep and horses. By the 1860s they were recasting silver pesos, dollars and ingots into bowmen’s wrist guards, bracelets, headstall buckles and belt conchos. With the 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the Mexican War, the United States inherited 200 years of hostility, and bluecoats carried the burden of restoring order in the ceded territories. Hardline Diné regarded the initial policy of appeasement as a sign of weakness and the new rulers as just the latest odious wave of interlopers. Narbona Pass kept funneling in newcomers. In August 1849 brevet Lt. Col. John M. Washington, the governor of New Mexico Territory, launched a reconnaissance from Santa Fe into Navajo country intended to cow any rebellious subjects, making peace if possible or war if not. Nearly 200 Mexican and Indian volunteers from Jemez Pueblo joined a packtrain of 175 Regular infantrymen and artillerymen. Guiding the combined forces was Antonio Sandoval, a prominent member of the acculturated Diné most of the tribe had deemed outcasts. After marching across daunting terrain and down through Chaco Canyon, the expedition rested in Tunicha Valley, east of the Chuskas. There, on August 31, Washington and Indian agent James S. Calhoun conferred with three Diné leaders. The strangers referred to the elderly head chief as Narbona, though his Diné name was Hast’íí Naat’áni. Unlike his Spanish namesake, however, this Narbona was amenable to discussing a lasting peace. Unfortunately, the encounter spawned violence that shattered all trust, ushering in nearly two decades of bloodshed between Diné and the whey-faced, whiskered Bilagáana, as Navajos called white Americans. As the council dispersed, a member of the Army column spotted his own horse running with the Diné herd. When Washington issued an ultimatum, demanding the animal’s surrender, the Diné rode off in a huff. The troops immediately opened fire with rifles and howitzers, dropping seven warriors, including Narbona, in the dust. According to Diné sources, some member of the column scalped the headman. Naturalist and cartographer Richard H. Kern, who documented the expedition, later expressed regret at not having bagged Narbona’s head in the name of science. The next day the party crossed the Chuskas, supplanting Teniente Narbona’s moniker and renaming the gap Washington Pass. Despite the parley gone wrong, on September 9 two Diné signed a treaty near present-day Chinle. The ink had barely dried when flames blackened
a number of Rio Grande pueblos. It seems Diné had identified Pueblo scouts in the ranks firing volleys at Tunicha. At the junction of Black Rock Canyon and del Muerto, a vertical sandstone wedge broods, splitting one gorge into two. Seemingly insular, a low neck of natural rock links it to the north rim. This is Tséląą ąą’’ (Rock Tip), another nexus of hardship. Under mounting pressure from the Army, New Mexican settlers, Utes, Pueblos and Apaches, the Diné fortified Canyon de Chelly and its twin branch. “Life was an extreme hardship almost every night and day for many years,” medicine man Gorman recalled. Paths webbed the canyon pastures and gardens and areas in between as runners dashed to and fro, scanning the horizon for dust clouds heralding trouble. Crevices could hide warriors, women and children, while notched tree poles afforded the nimble stairways to the rim. Scores of vertiginous hand- and toehold trails the ancients had carved into the rock also allowed escape to the plateau above. Strewn throughout the canyons were the true pieces of resistance—a half dozen massive citadels, remnants of erosion’s downcutting. It was the beginning of Nahondzod—the “Fearing Time.”
TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; BOTTOM: NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM OF UTAH
HERITAGE AUCTIONS (2)
In late March 1862 a firm Union stand at Glorieta Pass, in central New Mexico Territory, foiled the Confederate invasion of the Southwest, freeing the Army to again turn its attention to “the Navajo problem.” That fall Brig. Gen. James Henry Carleton, a veteran of the Mexican and Indian wars, assumed command of the military Department of New Mexico.
General Carleton, a hardliner who’d studied the late Crimean War maneuvers of European armies, favored the strike-and-fade tactics of Cossack units. He applied these lessons in relentless harassment to the Diné. They were to be hounded without respite, kept on the run and from their seasonal round of subsistence and barter. A scorched-earth thrust would surely corral these brigands into civilization’s fold. Spring lambing camps and winter rancherias KIT CARSON proved especially vulnerable. In another farsighted move Carleton entrusted Lt. Col. Christopher “Kit” Carson, head of the 1st New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry, with field command of the campaign against the Navajos. Long past his prime, Carson—known to the Diné as “Red Shirt” or “Rope Thrower”—was already a legend, though the antithesis of a career soldier. In his early 50s, the polyglot friend of and agent to the Utes and Jicarilla Apaches also suffered from old injuries. The expedition’s Ute scouts knew de Chelly’s access points from decades of marauding. Each “wolf for the blue soldiers” (in Nebraska historian Thomas Dunlay’s memorable phrase), led by chief scout Grayhair (who later died the target of Diné witchcraft), could expect plunder and was furnished with blankets, food, tobacco, a rifle, a saddle and two horses, all courtesy the government in Wááshindoon (Washington, D.C.). Bone-chilling temperatures and 6 inches of snow hampered Carson’s 389 troopers as they filed out of Arizona Territory’s Fort Canby, just north of Window Rock (present-day seat of the Navajo Nation), on Jan. 6, 1864. (Formerly Fort Defiance, the post had been renamed in honor of Brig. Gen. Edward Canby, the former department commander who had hatched the plan to round up and assimilate the Navajos.) Before reaching Canyon de Chelly, 27 oxen succumbed to winter’s steely bite. Between January 12 and 14 split columns closed in like pincers from the east and west ends of the canyon. The soldiers burned cornfields and hogans (log-and-earth huts), shot livestock, filled springs with rubble and dirt, and felled peach trees that had taken years to fruit (the locals having learned pruning and grafting from Hopis). “There were no permanent homes or places for the Diné to stay,” sheepherder Yádeesbaa’ Silversmith of the Salt People clan recalled. “They depended on seeds of grass for food.” The previous October the Diné, having noticed a flurry of preparations at the fort, had hauled firewood, cornmeal, venison jerky and sun-dried peaches up Fortress Rock. Potholes atop the stronghold held enough water for the 300 refugees—initially, anyway. Even as their foes watered their horses at the canyon mouth, warriors dashed to camps for fresh mutton. Diné language instructor Teddy Draper Sr.’s greatgrandmother was present and believed the coming fight would mark “the last Navajo war.” Carleton echoed that sentiment in a February 1864 report to Washington superiors. Poles and ladders across gaps and up cracks were slick with ice. The rock exacted a toll as climbers rag-dolled into the abyss. Ever more warriors arrived, taking cover behind stone breastworks on the lower ledges, within rifle range, ready to defend their families, their lands, their traditions. Compared to Army breechloaders with “long sword edges,” the obsolete muskets of the Diné were lacking. “It took quite a while to reload them,” Draper’s great-grandmother told him, but the headbanded warriors had “plenty of bows and arrows.” FEBRUARY 2022
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At some point troops fired at the redoubt from the opposite rim with little effect. In the meantime fleeing bands had fanned out west, from central Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks —sacred heights known in Diné as Dook’o’oosłííd (Never Thaws on Top) or Diichiłí Dzil (Abalone Shell Mountain)—to southern Utah’s Bears Ears labyrinth (Shash Jaa’, birthplace of Diné headman Manuelito and proclaimed a national monument in 2006) and Navajo Mountain (Naatsis’áán, or Earth Woman’s Head), overlooking presentday Lake Powell. Within weeks exhausted leaders and their followers began trickling into Fort Canby. Promises of free rations lured many. The trickle turned into a rivulet, then a stream of defeat and despair. Torched fields, merciless cold and back-to-back droughts forced the surrender of most of the tribe. It seemed as if the earth itself had forsaken the Diné. During mop-up operations soldiers besieged Fortress Rock in an attempt to starve out its defenders. Fried bacon smells rising from campfires at its foot tormented them. “The wounded were thirsty,” Draper’s great-grandmother told him, “and the snow, ice and water were gone.” Survivors buried 20 warriors beneath rock piles. Others, channeling Spider Woman of Diné myth, climbed down the smooth cliffs. From yuccafiber ropes they lowered jugs to draw water from 68 WILD WEST
a pool “right close to the [sleeping] white soldiers’ feet,” Draper’s greatgrandmother recalled. Eventually, the troops withdrew to Chinle, certain growling bellies would bring those remaining to their knees. The last holdouts lingered into February. No major battle marked the campaign against the Diné, and the rest of the dismal epic—usually told from the victors’ perspective—has been dismissed as “anticlimactic.” Some 9,000 Diné were exiled to a reservation at Bosque Redondo, a barren eastern New Mexico plain and monument of shame. Scores perished on the initial 18-day, 300-mile journey, known plainly as the Long Walk to participants and their descendants (see sidebar, opposite). Confined there for four long years with Apache enemies, susceptible to attack by Kiowas and Comanches, and succumbing to disease and starvation, they lost another 3,000 of their people. Poverty, alcoholism, murder, suicide and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic plague the tribe disproportionately. But their beliefs, practices and the Diné language survive, because, as medicine man Eli Gorman said, “Even though we have been living among many other Indian tribes, we always kept our own culture.” Changing yet changeless, the four sacred peaks encircle more than 27,000 square miles of mesas and badlands, of sand, slickrock and sage, of lakes, streams and pine-forested heights of the Navajo Nation—the largest Indian reservation in the United States. For Herbert Zahne, a sheepherder of the Deer and Tangle clans, that land “rightfully belongs to the Navajos, because our ancestors suffered and died for it.” Michael Engelhard, a former anthropologist, has worked for decades as a wilderness guide in Alaska and the canyons of the Southwest. This article is adapted from his book Where the Rain Children Sleep: A Sacred Geography of the Colorado Plateau, which is recommended for further reading along with Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Chief Manuelito and Juanita, by Jennifer Nez Denetdale; Canyon de Chelly: Its People and Rock Art, by Campbell Grant; and Navajo Stories of the Long Walk Period, edited by Broderick H. Johnson.
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NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
Diné horsemen perhaps contemplate troubles to come in a circa 1855 lithograph by artist Balduin Möllhausen and lithographer Thomas S. Sinclair.
HANSRAD COLLECTION (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
Brooding Warriors
Bosque Redondo
The Diné spent a largely miserable four years at this New Mexico Territory reservation, where they suffered from malaria, pneumonia and dysentery.
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
HANSRAD COLLECTION (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)
HWÉÉLDI & THE WAY BACK Between 1864 and ’65 soldiers marched some 9,000 Diné more than 300 miles to the Bosque Redondo reservation at Fort Sumner, on the banks of the Pecos River in eastcentral New Mexico Territory. The captives wore tattered clothes and were low on provisions and spirit. Mount Taylor (Tsoodził, or Turquoise Bead Mountain) was the last comforting landmark of which they lost sight. At least 200 fellow Diné died during the initial spring 1864 deportation of the Long Walk. At Hwééldí (“the Fort”) they were allowed to build traditional forked-stick hogans in loose family clusters, though most of the homes at Bosque Redondo were little more than holes in the ground with roofs of branches and dirt. The people dug irrigation ditches, tilled alkaline soil. Insects and storms razed corn and wheat crops. Mosquitos breeding in the stagnant, brackish water spread malaria. Pneumonia and dysentery further weakened the prisoners. Parents often hid children the soldiers tried to take for schooling. Before long the cottonwood grove of the Bosque (Spanish for “forest”) was gone, having been used for fuel and lumber, and men and boys traveled miles to laboriously dig up mesquite to keep campfires and inmates alive. Women made clothing from used flour sacks. Twelve mouths shared a single rat. Others resorted to roasting and eating undigested grain plucked from the manure of well-fed cavalry mounts. Unfamiliar with certain foods issued on ration days, Diné sometimes just mixed flour and water into uncooked mush, or boiled whole bean coffee (gohwééh) like regular beans.
Vocationless warriors rustled livestock from off the reservation. Others absconded, heading west toward the homeland that had nourished and defined them. The spiraling costs of this mismanaged experiment in taming “heathen savages” at Bosque Redondo, in concert with a more humanitarian, Quaker-influenced stance toward tribal peoples, ultimately convinced government officials the Diné would be better off where they’d come from. On June 1, 1868, 29 headmen, Manuelito among them, pledged peace by making their marks on pages torn from a ledger book, affirming a treaty whose black marks had been sounded out for them, first translated into Spanish and then into Diné. That summer’s return journey, over hill after hill, while hopeful, resembled the one they had made in the opposite direction four years earlier. Many walked barefoot, naked but for a breechcloth. Others wore pleated yucca-leaf sandals. “Some Navajos decided to remain at places along the way,” Fred Descheene said of those who were sick, elderly or traveling with infants. “They are called Tsédee’aałhi (‘Chewing Stones’) today.” “Back at Tséhootsooí (Fort Defiance) white sheep were given out, as were some horses,” Dugal Tsosie Begay recalled. “Some people took good care of their sheep and had good-sized flocks.…Living conditions improved.” Those who witnessed these times fell silent long ago. Their words and deeds circulate still among descendants, more than 400 of whom served in the U.S. armed forces as World War II code talkers. —M.E. FEBRUARY 2022
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Fleeing la Revolución
At Colonia Dublán, Mexico, in July 1912 Mormon colonists load belongings and themselves onto an El Paso–bound train.
MORMON EXODUS FROM MEXICO To evade U.S. laws against polygamy, Romneys and many others moved south of the border, only to return stateside during the Mexican Revolution By Mike Coppock 70 WILD WEST
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Romneys in Chihuahua
Left: Gaskell Romney poses with five sons, including George, fourth from left, in Colonia Dublán around 1909. Below: Gaskell poses with second wife Anna in an 1895 wedding portrait.
LEFT: LDS CHURCH ARCHIVES; BELOW: INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE ANTROPOLOGÍA E HISTORIA, MEXICO; TOP AND FAR RIGHT: J. WILLARD MARRIOTT LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF UTAH; CENTER: LDS CHURCH ARCHIVES; BOTTOM: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)
F
FRANCISCO MADERO
ive-year-old George Wilcken Romney was bewildered by all the activity in his home. His father, mother and three older brothers were dashing about their two-story brick house in Colonia Dublán, a Mormon settlement in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, trying to decide which items to pack and which to leave. Mormon officials had decreed all women and children must leave immediately, before the revolutionaries returned. The men would remain behind as long as possible to safeguard their property. Each woman could take 100 pounds of luggage plus 50 pounds for each child. Out the window young George—a future governor of Michigan and father of governor, U.S. senator and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney—saw other Mormon families packing as fast as they could. Wagons clogged the maple-lined streets flanked with other respectable homes of brick and stone. It was late July 1912, and the Mexican Revolution was in its second year. At its outset leading revolutionary Francisco Madero had used the mountains of Chihuahua as a base of operations against the government. Madero’s election as president the prior November had done little to quell dissent, however, and rebels now threatened the 4,000-plus residents of the near dozen Mormon settlements in Chihuahua and neighboring Sonora (known collectively as the Juárez Stake). George and the other children could hear gunfire in the hills as government troops clashed with rebels. For long weeks Chihuahuan marauders led by Pascual Orozco and José Inés Salazar had been harassing and looting from Mormons and locals alike. The rebels had even dragged out one of the prominent Mormons in nearby Colonia Juárez, standing him before a cottonwood
JUNIUS ROMNEY
tree and threatening to execute him if he did not give them cash. It had become obvious to Mormon officials in Mexico that the safe harbor they had enjoyed under recently ousted President Porfirio Díaz was slipping away. Junius Romney, president of the Juárez Stake and George’s uncle, ultimately resolved the colonists should evacuate to the United States until the revolution was over. It was not an easy decision. The Mormon settlers had been in Mexico for generations and had prospered there. George’s grandfather, Miles, had been in the first wave of Mormon families who immigrated to Mexico in 1885 to make a home. His parents, Gaskell and Anna, married in Colonia Dublán in 1895, and George—the fourth of seven children—was born in Colonia Juárez in 1907. Regardless, on July 28 and over the next few days dozens of wagons escorted by the men and loaded with women, children and all they could carry snaked their way across the desert floor to
PASCUAL OROZCO
JOSÉ INÉS SALAZAR
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Leaving the Only Home Many Had Known
The Mormons had a long history in Mexico. In 1874 Brigham Young, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, first eyed northern Mexico as a location for Mormon colonies. He sent scouts south the following year. They returned with positive reports, though with the caveat that any colony established there probably would suffer from Apache raids in the area. A second group of scouts reconnoitered the region in October 1876, again bringing back positive reports. Young died the following year at age 76. His successor as LDS president, John Taylor, also believed northern Mexico had potential as a site for Mormon settlements, and church leadership approved missionary work there as a forerunner to colonization. Then, in 1882, the U.S. Congress passed the Edmunds Act, outlawing polygamy. Plural marriage, which the Mormons had openly practiced 72 WILD WEST
since 1852, had been deemed a felony, punishable by a fine and up to five years in prison. In the wake of its passage authorities fined and jailed more than 1,300 Mormon men. Thus pressured to find a sanctuary in which Mormons might practice what they had believed was a right under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, Taylor in 1885 had the church purchase 100,000 acres in Chihuahua and Sonora. To forestall any Mexican fears of another border revolution, as had happened when Texas broke away as a republic in 1836, the proposed townsites would be far in the interior, up to 200 miles. Taylor then gave his blessing to an initial wave of 350 colonists. One of them was Miles Park Romney. By then U.S. marshals were already on Romney’s trail. A prominent Mormon who had spearheaded settlement in St. George, Utah Territory, and St. Johns, Arizona Territory, he had three wives and one ex. On the advice of Mormon leadership, he left wives Hannah and Catharine and 14 children behind and traveled to Mexico with fourth wife Annie and their three children. The family trundled by wagon through the Mexican wilderness nearly 100 miles before reaching an overlook of a valley lined with scrub oak, mesquite and cactus along the banks of the Piedras Verdes River. Despite its arid appearance, the valley floor was 5,000 feet in elevation, ideal for growing peaches and apples, while snowmelt from the Sierra Madre would provide ample water. At first the Romneys did not fare well, living out of their wagon before Miles built a crude hut just before Christmas 1885. The following spring Miles sent for first wife Hannah, who set out for the border that March with their eight children in a lone wagon, trekking through the frigid Arizona Territory mountains in constant fear of Indian attack. With the help of her older children, though, she managed to get the family across the border to Miles’ homestead. She was shocked at the squalor of her husband’s makeshift hut. “When it rained, we had mud and water coming down,” Hannah wrote. “We had two boxes put together for a table…[and] some round logs sawed for chairs and a dirt floor. That was a very crude home.…But I was thankful for it, as my dear children and I would be with their father, and we
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TOP AND BOTTOM: LDS CHURCH ARCHIVES (2); TOP RIGHT: HAROLD B. LEE LIBRARY, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY
various depots on the rail line leading north to the Texas border. There the refugees boarded trains bound for El Paso. The first group arrived at El Paso’s Union Station around midnight on July 28. “We were the first displaced persons of the 20th century,” George Romney said years later. Officials in besieged El Paso quickly converted a vacant local lumberyard into a tent city for the first wave of Mormon refugees, nearly all mothers with children and without any means of financial support.
LDS CHURCH ARCHIVES (3)
Above: Mormons in Colonia Dublán pack for the journey to El Paso. Above left: Mormon women and children refugees settle in at a vacant lumberyard in El Paso. Left: A Mormon family, sans father, pose at a tent city set up by the U.S. government in that west Texas town as temporary shelter for the refugees from Mexico.
TOP AND BOTTOM: LDS CHURCH ARCHIVES (2); TOP RIGHT: HAROLD B. LEE LIBRARY, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY
LDS CHURCH ARCHIVES (3)
could live in peace, with no marshals to molest us or separate us again.” In 1887 wife Catharine arrived, swelling the already crowded household to 21, counting Miles, his three wives and their respecWIFE tive children. MILES P. ROMNEY AND FOURTH RY) DBU WOO NÉE ( IA MAR IE It usually took a Mormon family three ANN months by wagon—using floats and rafts to ferry across those rivers that had water—to travel from Utah Territory or Arizona Territory to the Juárez Stake. Almost all of them started out poor. Annie Richardson Johnson recalled how her two mothers had only three dresses between them; each had one to wear while washing the spare. A typical meal might consist of greens or roasted ears of corn and whatever could be brought in from a day’s hunt. As they had no doctors living among them or in any of the nearby towns, they JOHN TAYLOR referred health issues to either midwives or those with any kind of medical training. Communicable diseases were an ever-present threat. Nor were Mormon men averse to working for The pioneers erred in the locations they chose for some of their communities. Spring floods wiped out several months of labor. As the men Mexicans. Several earned pay as cattlemen and prepared the townsite at Colonia Juárez, families lived in dugouts along wranglers at nearby haciendas. Others hired on the riverbanks and set up a rough meetinghouse and school using poles as lumberjacks or muleskinners for local timber thatched with woven willow and chinked with mud. They’d even dug and mining operations. By age 16 Lem Spilsa canal for irrigation and begun planting before learning they were bury was regularly driving a team of 16 mules within the boundaries of the existing San Diego Ranch and had to re- more than 125 miles to and from a mine in the Sierra Madre. locate 2 miles north. Mormons learned Spanish and made lifeMore families followed until 10 Mormon settlements of various sizes (six could be called towns) dotted the Mexican states of Chihuahua and long friends among their Mexican neighbors Sonora. On arrival the newcomers dug wells and irrigation canals, built and coworkers. Unfortunately, few of the rebels dams and raised churches and schools as community projects. George’s or federal troops hailed from the settlements. father, Gaskell—the fifth of Miles and Hannah’s 11 children—built many Driven from their homes by the violence of the of the brick homes and railroad depots in their community and neigh- revolution, the Mormon refugees would join boring towns. Each town elected a bishop, who oversaw religious and an exodus of more than 1 million people who fled north to the United States. social activities. Once their cattle herds were established, Mormons opened tanneries and made leather products such as shoes, harnesses and saddles, sell- By 1897 Miles Romney had prospered to ing them to locals. They did the same with furniture and surplus flour. the point he took on a fifth wife, wealthy widow As they prospered, so too did their Mexican neighbors, as the Mor- Emily Henrietta Eyring Snow. She was 27, he mons hired locals to help cut lumber for export to both Mexican and was 53. He wouldn’t live to see the stirrings Texan markets and as extra hands in canneries when fruit ripened in of the revolution, however, dying at age 60 in Colonia Dublán on Feb. 26, 1904. the Mormon orchards. But as the din of battle grew ever closer in 1912, his half-brother Junius—the third of Miles and Catherine’s 10 children—found himself in the thick of the crisis. President Romney and his bishops faced a dilemma, as there was growing friction between the rebels and Mormon leaders. In one early encounter business partners who had set up a small store in the mountains to supply miners were accosted by local rebels who demanded they surrender their firearms. They refused, telling the rebel leader the only way he Back Into Mexico
Mormon scouts rode for U.S. Army Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing in 1916 when troops chased after Pancho Villa.
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School’s Out for Summer
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TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; ABOVE: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
signed a receipt for each gun surrendered. Such receipts were worthless, of course, but the request underscored that Mormons were law-abiding Mexican citizens, and that they fully intended to return. Acting on a bad tip, one obstreperous Mexican official demanded the party also surrender firearms rumored to be concealed in their luggage. After soldiers rummaged through their belongings and found nothing, he acquiesced. Guns turned over and receipts signed, the train finally got underway, arriving in El Paso late on the night of August 1. Citizens there were waiting with all manner of transportation to take the refugees to the Odd Fellows Hall for rest and refreshments. Church leaders in Salt Lake City had made arrangements with would get their guns was with smoke driftMormon families in Arizona’s Gila Valley to house ing from the muzzles. The rebels backed the mothers and children, and Brown was asked down. When Romney reported the incito escort them there by train. As he helped the exdent to Salt Lake City, seeking guidance, hausted refugees transfer to another line in Deming, church leaders backed the storeowners’ DAVID BRIGHAM BROWN N.M., Brown sought directions from a local standing action but suggested a time was coming on the platform. when colonists might have to surrender “I’m not interested in anything about a bunch of their firearms to avoid bloodshed. Sure enough, by late July rebel leaders had Mormons,” the man said, striding off. Brown managed to get his wards aboard the right train. Certain his wife issued orders to all civilians, including the Mormons, to turn in their firearms and ammunition. had gone into labor, and knowing men would be waiting for the refugees The rebels also demanded horses, saddles and at their destination, the good shepherd then hopped an eastbound train any cash on hand. Among the weapons the Mor- for El Paso. He arrived just before his wife gave birth. By then Romney had decided it was time for the men to leave Mexico. mons had smuggled into Mexico were three dozen high-powered rifles, which they kept con- Those with excess crops and belongings they held dear cached them cealed, and while Romney issued written orders around their homes to await their return. After gathering at a prearranged for Mormons to surrender all firearms, he spread meeting place, the 235 men and boys formed an ad hoc military unit, word for the men to hide their best weapons. with a rear guard and flanking scouts. A few warning shots from their Accordingly, on July 27 the Mormons turned long-range rifles were enough to convince rebel units to leave them alone. over 81 rifles and 15 pistols of middling quality Marching due north across the desert, they crossed the New Mexico border on August 11. (The Sonoran colonists evacuated a month later.) and enough ammunition to avoid suspicion. The men arrived in El Paso to a heartbreaking scenario. Their families That night a Mormon representative went ahead by train to El Paso to make preparations were living hand to mouth on the charity of strangers. Government assisfor the refugees. The evacuation of women and tance comprised a daily ration of salmon and crackers. No one had any children was under way. The mountain colonies money. The vast bulk of their wealth was back in Mexico. As their exile stretched into days and then weeks, men sneaked back were among the last to get word. Dave Brown of remote Chuichupa was tasked with transporting south of the border to check on their settlements, only to find their vacant the women and children there by wagon to the homes looted and crops rotting in the fields. One scouting party sent to depot at Rio Chico, where they were to board look over the mountain settlement of Colonia García was surprised to a special train waiting to take them to El Paso. discover the cattle had not been stolen but were roaming loose in the hills. Complicating the issue, many of the wives ini- Hoping to provide the Mormon refugees a measure of relief, lead scout tially refused to leave their husbands, and Brown Lester Farnsworth proposed returning with a larger group of armed men had an additional concern, as his wife was about to drive the cattle across the border for sale. Deciding to gamble, the to give birth. A bear of a man at 6 foot 6, he was leaders in El Paso signed off on the venture and placed Farnsworth in used to being obeyed and ultimately able to charge, aided by three of his brothers and Brown, among others. Using back trails the riders made it to Colonia García undetected. There persuade the colonists to leave. They arrived at Rio Chico on July 31 and took they hired trusted locals who had worked for them and split into small the train north to Nuevo Casas Grandes. Prior to groups to gather in the herd. They survived off the cached crops they’d leaving, the Mormons had arranged to turn over hidden before going into exile. A few of the men acted as scouts to their firearms at that depot, provided officials watch for rebels or bandits.
LDS CHURCH ARCHIVES (2)
Mormon children pose outside their schoolhouse in Mexico, but all would soon head north as part of the 1912 exodus.
TOP: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; ABOVE: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
LDS CHURCH ARCHIVES (2)
Within a few weeks they managed to gather more than 1,000 head and even to arrange for their transshipment north by rail from the depot at government-occupied Pearson. Then, on the very morning they began their drive, a rebel walked into camp, asking what the gringos were doing there. The men asked missionary Bert Whetten to answer, as he spoke Spanish better than the rest of them. Whetten candidly explained who they were and that they had ridden back to retrieve the cattle, which were their property. The rebel asked more questions, always circling ROSINA AND LESTER BURT FARNSWORTH back to their guns, horses and saddles. When a fellow Mormon complained sotto voce that the rebel was just delaying and suggested killing him so they could be on their way, Whetten directed the man’s gaze on June 16. Boyd was in overall command, to a tree line ahead where a line of big sombreros bobbed up and down. and Spilsbury was assigned as their scout. From the start Boyd and Spilsbury butted The rebel finally insisted that if the Mormons didn’t surrender their firearms, they would not be permitted to leave with the cattle. The men heads. The Mormon scout disliked the manner in which Boyd, a white officer, treated agreed, but as Brown had done at the depot, Whetten demanded his men, and he strongly disagreed a signed receipt for every firearm and each cartridge. When when Boyd suggested Mexicans the rebel replied he didn’t have any paper on him, one would bolt at the slightest sign of of the Mormons handed him a notepad. The rebel then a fight. As they approached Carsaid he would give them temporary receipts, which they rizal on the 21st, they encounwould have to exchange for official receipts from his tered several hundred Mexican captain up ahead. Wary of a trap, the men swallowed army soldiers, deployed in line hard and rode on. along a row of cottonwoods on As the Mormons herded their cattle into the rebel camp, the far side of an irrigation ditch. Farnsworth realized with a start he knew the captain, a The commander and his entoulocal from Colonia García. The officer exchanged their CHARLES T. BOYD rage approached, stating he had receipts, then advised the Mormons to make all haste for the orders not to let U.S. troops advance border, as riding up behind them was a unit of Pancho Villa’s any farther, despite Boyd’s intent to seize that might not be so understanding. When the train carrying the herd finally rolled into El Paso, Farnsworth was able to sell them for their mutual enemy. Spilsbury advised the cap$12,000, which was divided up among the hard-pressed Mormon families. tain to circle around town to get at Villa. Boyd Moved by the plight of the refugees, Congress ultimately set aside instead ordered a direct assault. In the ensu$100,000 for their relief. A few months later Gaskell Romney moved his ing firefight the captain, his lieutenant and family to Los Angeles, where he found work as a carpenter, and George’s 10 troopers were killed, while Spilsbury and 23 others were taken prisoner. That the Mexikindergarten classmates mockingly referred to him as “Mex.” can commander and two dozen of his men As the revolutionary violence subsided in Mexico, a few Mor- had been killed was cold comfort. The battle mon families moved back, enough to resettle Colonia Juárez and Colonia marked the effective end of the expedition, Dublán. The other settlements remained ghost towns, as the bulk of the and seven months later Wilson pulled Pershing Mormon refugees relocated to Utah, Arizona and elsewhere out West. out of Mexico. Villa was never captured. The number of Mormon communities in Voted out as president, Junius Romney ended up selling insurance, first northern Mexico has grown over the past cenin Los Angeles and then in Salt Lake City. After Villa’s bold March 9, 1916, raid on the border town of Columbus, tury, but it remains a dangerous place to live. N.M., President Woodrow Wilson sent U.S. Army Brig. Gen. John J. In November 2019 three Mormon women and Pershing into Mexico at the head of a 6,600-man punitive expedition six children were killed in the ambush of a to capture the rebel leader. Given its rail links to the United States and wedding party convoy along the Sonora-Chilargely English-speaking population, Colonia Dublán became Pershing’s huahua border, reportedly by members of a operational headquarters. He engaged eight local Mormons, including drug cartel in a case of mistaken identity. Lem Spilsbury and Dave Brown, to scout for his forces. Angered over the incursion, the Mexican government informed the Oklahoma-based Mike Coppock is a frequent United States the only direction Pershing’s forces would be permitted to Wild West contributor. For further reading he advance was northward out of Mexico. But when the general got word recommends The Real Romney, by Michael Villa’s forces were in the village of Carrizal, some 75 miles due west, he Kranish; Romney’s Way, by George Harris; ordered 10th Cavalry Captains Charles T. Boyd and Lewis S. Morey to take The Mormon Colonies in Mexico, by some men and investigate. The column, comprising fewer than 100 buffalo Thomas Cottam Romney; and Ordeal in soldiers culled from Boyd’s Company C and Morey’s Company K, set out Mexico, by Karl E. Young. FEBRUARY 2022
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COLLECTIONS
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The Fall River Pioneer Museum is housed within an 1893 Lakota sandstone building in Hot Springs, S.D. Below: This fossilized cycad (a present-day plant species with ancient origins) was unearthed nearby.
HISTORY SPRINGS ETERNAL IN THE BLACK HILLS n Hot Springs, South Dakota, a town best known for— you guessed it—its hot springs, visitors can soak up history at the Fall River Pioneer Museum [fallriverpioneermuseum. wordpress.com]. At the south end of the Black Hills, where geothermal energy is in no short supply, the museum relates the people and places of this storied region. Central to that history are the hot springs. As were the earliest inhabitants, present-day visitors are drawn to the restorative, relaxing waters. Present-day Evans Plunge—the largest spring and among the warmest at 87 degrees—rises from a gravel bottom and spills into the Fall River. According to local lore, sometime in the 18th century the Cheyennes first claimed own76 WILD WEST
ership of this spiritual place before the westering Sioux disputed possession. Finally, in 1869 the Sioux besieged Cheyenne fortifications atop a 4,431-foot peak known today as Battle Mountain, which overlooks six springs that emerge from the base of the mountain and converge in a rocky canyon 1,000 feet below. The Sioux prevailed and took possession of the springs, which they unimaginatively named Wiwíla-kháta (Springs Hot), referring to the broader area as Mni-kháta (Water Hot), since anglicized into Minnekahta. Lakota artist Amos Bad Heart Bull depicted the sacred site in a ledger art piece. At some point in the 1870s the tribes, which had allied against
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ALL PHOTOS: FALL RIVER PIONEER MUSEUM
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THE FALL RIVER PIONEER MUSEUM HIGHLIGHTS THE HISTORY OF DAKOTA TERRITORY AND THE LOCAL HOT SPRINGS BY LINDA WOMMACK
ALL PHOTOS: FALL RIVER PIONEER MUSEUM
COLLECTIONS
encroaching Americans, agreed to share the healing waters. In 1875 a scientific expedition led by Henry Newton and Waler P. Jenney mapped the region, studied the thermal area and shared information about both, intensifying interest in the gold-bearing Black Hills. Finally, in the fall of 1881 five men who had come to Dakota Territory during the Black Hills Gold Rush of the late 1870s—namely freighter/transportation company owner Fred T. Evans (of Evans Plunge fame), judge turned sawmill owner Erwin G. Dudley, First National Bank of Deadwood president Leonard R. Graves, internal revenue collector Rudolphus D. Jennings and U.S. Land Office receiver Dr. Alexander S. Stewart—convened in Deadwood to form the Hot Springs Town-Site Co. The quintet went on create the Hot Springs Resort and establish the namesake town (the seat of Fall River County) for those seeking healing waters instead of enriching ore. By 1887 the resort was bustling, with several bathhouses in which visitors might plunge or take a steam. The attraction was unique in the region. In 1907 a precursor agency of the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs established in Hot Springs one of the first medical facilities reserved for veterans. The Battle Mountain Sanitarium was a 100bed center for patients suffering from rheumatism or tuberculosis. Today the Hot Springs campus meets such modern needs as post-traumatic stress disorder rehabilitation, substance abuse treatment and outpatient services. In 2011 the National Trust for Historic Preservation declared the original buildings a national historic landmark. Relating the span of regional history is the Fall River Pioneer Museum, housed in an 1893 Lakota sandstone building that through 1961 served as an elementary school. Showcased within its more than
two dozen exhibition areas on three floors are hundreds of historic artifacts and photos of the hot springs, town and environs. Don’t miss the fossilized cycad specimen, a silicified plant excavated in the county. A medical exhibit relates the healing properties of the waters and features period exam beds, supplies and even an iron lung from the local West River Crippled Children’s Hospital, in use during the 1940–50 polio epidemic. A 19th-century schoolroom exhibit features original desks, slate chalkboards and assorted books, maps and writing implements. One side room showcases children’s toys and figurines, while another holds trophies and yearbooks. The music room houses a trove of musical instruments, including a gramophone, an Edison phonograph, early record players and radios, brass and wind instruments and an organ. Though rare in itself, an 1885 square grand piano is overshadowed by one of the museum’s most treasured artifacts—a handmade Hayes, Lattin & Co. piano from the early 1800s, only four of which were made each year of production. Also on exhibit are period tapestries and quilts, as well as original works by local artists, including paintings and sculpted sandstone, alabaster and marble pieces. Exhibits on pioneer life include the town’s first post office boxes and telephone switchboard, bank teller windows, flour and sugar bins, early canned goods and hard candy. Elsewhere visitors can peruse a variety of period clothing, sewing machines, buttons and ribbons, as well as farm and ranch artifacts, including handcrafted tools, early washing machines, wood-burning cook stoves and kerosene lamps. Curators have transformed certain rooms into a kitchen, a parlor and a bedroom, the latter centered on the bed President Calvin Coolidge and First Lady Grace Coolidge shared while vacationing in the Black Hills in the summer of 1927. You’ll find the museum at 300 N. Chicago St. in Hot Springs. For more information call 605-745-5147.
Left: The museum relates the introduction of the telephone switchboard to Hot Springs. In 1906 the Fall River Rural Telephone Co. of that city was incorporated. Above: The museum’s music room houses a trove of musical instruments, including several fine early pianos.
by 1887 the resort was bustling, with several BathHOUsES
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GUNS OF THE WEST
1860 The 2nd Issue Smith & Wesson Model No. 1, like the one photographed on these pages, served Civil War soldiers as a backup and was produced until 1868. Below: All three issues had a seven-round cylinder and a tip-up design, hinged where the upper rear of the barrel met the frame.
THE FIRST PRACTICAL CARTRIDGE REVOLVER THE SMITH & WESSON MODEL NO. 1, WHICH FIRED SEVEN .22 SHORT RIMFIRE SLUGS, SERVED LARGELY AS A GUN OF LAST RESORT BY GEORGE LAYMAN
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The Model No. 1 came in three successive versions (the 1st, 2nd and 3rd issues) that displayed only cosmetic differences. All three had a spur trigger, a seven-round cylinder and a unique tip-up design, hinged where the upper rear of the barrel met the frame. A latch at the base of the frame in front of the cylinder unlocked the barrel, allowing a user to tip it up and remove the cylinder. A sturdy extractor rod fixed beneath the barrel was used to push spent cartridge cases from the cylinder prior to reloading. With the loaded cylinder back in place and the
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IMAGES FROM THE GEORGE LAYMAN COLLECTION (3)
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assachusetts gunsmiths Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson partnered in the firearms business in 1852 and two years later, with businessman Courtland Palmer, began producing the Volcanic, a .41-caliber lever-action pistol with a tubular magazine, which used a self-contained cartridge called the Rocket Ball. In 1855 Smith and Wesson sold their ownership shares of the Volcanic Repeating Arms Co. to what was soon reorganized as the New Haven Repeating Arms Co., a firm eventually taken over by former clothing manufacturer Oliver Winchester and renamed the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. In 1856 Smith and Wesson partnered in their second venture, the Smith & Wesson Revolver Co. A year later, after having obtained exclusive rights to former Colt gunsmith Rollin White’s patent for a bored-through cylinder, Smith & Wesson rolled out the single-action Model No. 1, the first commercially successful revolver to use self-contained metallic cartridges. From then on shooters increasingly favored weapons that accepted such cartridges over those using loose powder, lead balls and percussion caps, which made for much slower loading. The Model No. 1’s rimfire cartridge case was made of copper. Later made of brass, it remains in use as the .22 Short.
IMAGES FROM THE GEORGE LAYMAN COLLECTION (3)
GUNS OF THE WEST
barrel again locked down, the revolver was ready to fire. The 1st Issue had a contoured frame, while the 2nd and 3rd issues had flat-sided frames. All three had silver-plated brass frames and rosewood grips. The 3rd Issue was distinguished by its bird’s head grip (mother-of-pearl or ivory grips available on special order), fluted cylinder and rounded barrel. All issues had 3-3/16-inch barrels. Serial numbers for the 1st and 2nd issues were sequential. Produced between 1857 and ’60, the 1st Issue bears serial numbers from 1 to 11,671 (the highest number found to date). Produced until 1868, the 2nd Issue picked up with serial numbers into the 128,000 range. During the Civil War many officers and some enlisted men either purchased this version or received inscribed models as going-away presents. Produced until 1881, the 3rd Issue was stamped with its own serial numbers, ranging from 1 to 131,163. All three were considered acceptable backups to cap-and-ball percussion revolvers until the advent of largercaliber metallic cartridges in the postwar era, though from 1861 to ’74 Smith & Wesson itself produced the Model No. 2 Army, or Old Model, with a more lethal .32-caliber rimfire cartridge. Railcar inventor John B. Sutherland of Detroit presented a cased, engraved pair of these Model No. 2s to George Armstrong Custer after an October 1869 buffalo hunt with the colonel and fellow 7th U.S. Cavalry officers near Fort Hays, Kan. While some Westerners no doubt pocketed the Model No. 1 as a backup gun, others scoffed at it, preferring even a medium-powered .36-caliber cap-and-ball revolver. Still, the Model No. 1 was no toy. While its .22 Short round might not stop an assailant cold, those wounded by it might drop dead days later, either from blood poisoning or because a vital organ took its time shutting down the body. Sto-
ries have been passed down about “soiled doves” dropping abusive clients instantly with headshots from these diminutive seven-shooters. In 1866, while serving in the 18th U.S. Infantry under Colonel Henry B. Carrington, young Civil War veteran Alson B. Ostrander was ridiculed for carrying a Model No. 1. The put-down came at Fort Laramie while he was en route from Omaha, Neb., to the Powder River Country in what would soon be Wyoming Territory. After being teased about his “play toy,” he bought some more serious armament. In his 1924 memoir An Army Boy of the Sixties Ostrander recalled having asked Jim Bridger his impression of the Model No. 1. “Yep, I’ve seen that kind, but never handled ’em,” replied the famed mountain man. “Was afeard I’d break it.” Today any example of the three issues of the Model No. 1 would be a welcome addition to a Smith & Wesson aficionado’s collection. Originally priced at $12.75, they fetch anywhere from $700 to $3,000, the first issue usually garnering higher prices. While these revolvers may not have been the most useful self-defense pieces of the Civil War or Old West eras, they did represent a deterrent. After all, no one wants to get shot, even if by a low-energy .22 Short slug.
‘never handled ‘em,’ jim bridger said of the model no. 1. ‘was afeard i’d break it’
Once the loaded cylinder is back in place, with the barrel locked down and hammer pulled back, the seven-shooter is again ready to fire.
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GHOST TOWNS The Victoria mine is in the foreground beneath the headframe. In the 1870s the owners of the Victoria and Broadway realized they were mining the same lode. Legal wrangling ensued until they combined operations.
SILVER STAR, MONTANA
v
irginia City, the seat of Montana’s Madison County, has gained deserved attention as a wellpreserved mining town/ghost town. But the county holds another town whose mining history is worthy of consideration. Driving south from I-90 on state highway 41, en route to Virginia City, one passes through the sleepy hamlet of Silver Star (population 242), centered on Granny’s roadside country store and post office. One would never guess that a century and a half ago this was the second largest and busiest town in the county. In 1866 a miner named Green Campbell was prospecting the eastern foothills of the Highland Mountains, west of the Jefferson River, when he stumbled across an outcrop of gold. He started digging and named his mine after himself. Realizing he had a major discovery but lacking the capital to develop it, he sold the claim for $80,000 to Cleveland-based investors Charles D. Everett and Frank Salisbury, who immediately built a 20-stamp mill along the river 1½ miles east of the mine. As news leaked out, the stampede was on, and newcomers soon filed other promising claims, including the Broadway 80 WILD WEST
(founded by J.C. Taylor), the Silver Star and others. Most were little more than holes dug in the ground in hopes of luring Eastern investment. But as the Broadway began freighting ore to its own riverside mill, a town emerged in the valley. “In the vicinity of Everett’s mill a snug little town, as yet without a name, is being built,” The Montana Post reported on Oct. 2, 1868. “Two saloons, a store, a commodious and well-built hotel, to be run by Mr. George Harris, a few residences and a blacksmith shop complete the hamlet.” An enterprising brewer was soon supplying beer to thirsty miners. On March 5, 1869, the same Virginia City—based newspaper reflected the richness of ore in the district when it observed, “Seven bars of gold, aggregating 310 ounces, at the current value of which is $10,000 in currency, was brought into Virginia City as being the result of about two weeks’ run on unselected rock from the Green Campbell lode.” Residents of the growing town voted to call it Silver Star and secured a post office on June 15, 1869, appointing John Conner postmaster. A period history of Montana described the town in 1872 as being “pleasantly situated…[with] quartz mills, stores, hotel, schoolhouse, Masonic
PHOTOS: TERRY HALDEN (3)
DISTRICT GOLD MINES WERE PRODUCTIVE ENOUGH IN THE LATE 1860S TO MAKE THIS THE SECOND LARGEST TOWN IN MADISON COUNTY BY TERRY HALDEN
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GHOST TOWNS
20th century. By then they had two mills in operation—a 20-stamp mill on Cherry Creek to handle top-grade ore and a cyanide mill in the valley near Silver Star to handle lower-grade ore. As the new century got under way, the quality of the ore deteriorated, although both the Green Campbell and Broadway, under various owners or lessees, continued to operate on and off until the World War II federal order to suspend all nonessential mining. By then the tracks of the Northern Pacific had reached the district, making it cheaper for mine operators to ship ore to mills in Butte or East Helena than to continue making costly upgrades. One by one the mills closed, and residents drifted away. The Broadway, renamed the Victoria, reopened after the war before shutting down again in the 1950s. Today the property is again being mined, this time from Cherry Creek to the north of the mine, where a tunnel has been bored to reach the main shaft and untapped ores. Meanwhile, a Canadian company is drilling test holes all around the Green Campbell to ascertain how far the ore veins extend and to what depth. Residents of unincorporated Silver Star await the results, hoping that maybe, just maybe, their sleepy village will once again awaken.
Above are the buildings of the Victoria mine complex, and below are the Victoria mill buildings. The Victoria shut down in the 1950s, but a company has resumed operations to the north of the mine, having bored a tunnel to reach untapped ore in the main shaft
PHOTOS: TERRY HALDEN (3)
hall, temperance lodge and many nice private residences.” By decade’s end its population peaked at around 300, not counting the scores of miners busily working claims in the hills west of town. By then, however, the mines had begun to experience troubles. Besides encountering ground water that repeatedly flooded the shafts, the nature of the ore changed at depth and could no longer be processed using the machinery in place. This necessitated re-tooling the mills, which meant big money. The Green Campbell suspended operations in 1873, and four years later the Cleveland-based investors sold the mine to Virginia City–based investors Henry Elling and William W. Morris, who later snapped up claims in nearby Pony (see the June 2020 Ghost Towns). The partners installed an adequate pump to alleviate the groundwater problem, refitted the mill and put the Green Campbell back in full operation. Meanwhile, the owners of the Broadway and those of the nearby Victoria found they were mining the same lode. After much legal wrangling that temporarily shut down both mines, they reached an agreement to combine operations under the Broadway name and split the ore between their respective mills. In 1881 the Broadway owners sold out to a London-based firm, receiving $200,000 for the mine and $25,000 for the mill. The British investors installed a tramway from the mine to the mill and at great expense retooled the mill using a new method. The process was a flop. Regardless, in the early 1890s one of the original owners, Frederick R. Merk, managed to wrest ownership of the Broadway from the British company by evoking an obscure mining law that banned foreign ownership (originally written in the 1850s to forestall the perceived “Celestial threat” in California, the statute was later rescinded). After making further upgrades, Merk and son William continued to operate the Broadway into the
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REVIEWS
MUST SEE, MUST READ MATTHEW BERNSTEIN PICKS JOHN MUIR BOOKS AND CALIFORNIA FILMS
The Wild Muir: Twenty-Two of John Muir’s Greatest Adventures (1994, by John Muir, selected and introduced by Lee Stetson): There is no better introduction to John Muir’s adventure stories than this collection selected by Lee Stetson. Renowned for his live performances as Muir, Stetson [johnmuirlive.com] certainly knows his subject. Through Muir’s own words readers see the intrepid Scot as not just the brilliant naturalist, but as a man who loved a good adventure. Time and again Muir seems one misstep from plummeting off a peak, one crust of bread away from starvation. But through his hardiness and ingenuity—not to mention the “second self”—Muir delightfully always returns from the brink.
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A Walk in the Woods (1998, by Bill Bryson): John Muir fittingly appears on the opening page of Bryson’s autobiographical trek along the Appalachian Trail. “Who could say the words ‘Great Smoky Mountains’ or ‘Shenandoah Valley,’’ the author writes, “and not feel an urge, as the naturalist John Muir once put it, to ‘throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence’?” In the spirit of Muir, albeit with a dose of sarcasm, Bryson takes us on an epic, sidesplitting journey through the wilds of Appalachia, where we experience the joys and travails of the trail.
Our National Parks (1901, by John Muir): Mark Twain defined a classic as “a book which people praise but don’t read.” Muir’s work on Yosemite, Yellowstone, Sequoia and Kings Canyon might have fit that definition, but fortunately one man did read it: President Theodore Roosevelt. Wishing to meet the author, Roosevelt joined Muir at camp in Yosemite Valley. There Muir argued the president should protect more natural wonders. Roosevelt agreed, establishing national forests, bird and game reserves, national monuments and national parks on 230 million acres of land.
Remaking History and Other Stories (1994, by Kim Stanley Robinson): It’s a shame the Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn’t considered John Muir as a caped superhero (although Muir Woods is featured in Ant-Man and the Wasp). As at home in a laboratory as a mountainside, Muir would be a perfect fit. In the meantime, readers who hunger for Muir science fiction will eat up Robinson’s short story “Muir on Shasta.” Bearing similarities to the graphic novel From Hell, by Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta), Robinson’s reimagining of Muir’s roughest night is something all fans of the genre should experience.
ON-SCREEN
A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (2008, by Donald Worster): Probably the best straight biography of Muir, Worster weaves an engaging story. Our hero is a young Scot who emigrates to Wisconsin with his family at age 11 and struggles to find his place. His father wishes him to tend the farm and read nothing but the Bible. His fellows want him to fight in the Civil War. His professors wish for him to join the march of progress as an inventor. Only after Muir goes temporarily blind does he finally see what he wants to do with his life—and we’re all the better for his decision.
Free Solo (2018, on DVD and Blu-ray, National Geographic Documentary Films): You’ve never seen Yosemite Valley like this. Alex Honnold is on a mission to fulfill his lifelong dream: to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan—a 3,000foot wall of granite—without a rope. Recipient of the 2019 Academy Award for best documentary, the film captures the beauty of Yosemite Valley, the terrors of the free solo climbing and the magnetic pull of the national park’s peaks. High Sierra (1941, on DVD and Bluray, Warner Bros.): “Come and get me, copper!” shouts bank robber Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart), brandishing a submachine gun from atop a Sierra Nevada mountainside. In this classic film noir with a cinematographic flourish, Earle has been released from prison and brought in on a heist, an escapade that takes him across the Mojave Desert past stark Joshua trees and a dangerous turnoff of the Pearblossom Highway to the slopes of Mount Whitney. Featuring the
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REVIEWS role that transformed Bogey from just another gangster to a leading man, High Sierra also features some of the most gorgeous scenery in old California. Maverick (1994, on DVD and Bluray, Warner Bros.): Directed by Richard Donner, this playful comedy is based on the namesake 1957 –62 ABC TV series. William Goldman’s screenplay is a Western romp. Mel Gibson plays Bret Maverick, a cardsharp who falls for charming femme fatale Anabelle Bransford ( Jodie Foster), who turns out to be a fellow con artist. En route to a high-stakes poker tournament they team up with TV’s original Bret Maverick, James Garner. California filming locations include Lone Pine, Big Pine, Manzanar and Yosemite National Park. While marveling at the valley, Maverick remarks, “Oh, you sure do pick the spots.” Wild (2014, on DVD and Blu-ray, Fox Searchlight Pictures): Having a midlife crisis never looked so good. Reese Witherspoon portrays Cheryl Strayed, whose memoir inspired the movie. After her life falls to pieces, Strayed is determined to rebuild herself by hiking 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, from the
California-Mexico border to the Bridge of the Gods, Ore. Veterans of the trail will appreciate her initial mistakes: packing too many clothes, not enough water and the wrong cooking oil. Wild is as much a story of redemption and renewal as a love letter to the PCT. The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009, on DVD and Blu-ray, PBS): Ken Burns’ six-part series fits right in with his pantheon of stellar documentaries, including The Civil War, Mark Twain and The West. In the first two episodes Burns highlights the sublime joy Muir found in Yosemite and his quest to preserve it as a national park. Muir’s love for the natural world, his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt and his failed battle to stop the damming of the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy Valley all add to the rich story of how our national parks came to be.
BOOKS From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West, by John Sedgwick, Avid Reader Press, New York, 2021, $30 This book’s subtitle isn’t quite accurate: War should be plural, as the battles described as the
battles described by the
author encompassed different objectives, ranged over the immense Western landscape and traversed the post–Civil War decades. Those battles didn’t, for the most part, unleash actual violence; but they were bureaucratically, legally and emotionally brutal. It was the era of unchecked capitalism, and the West (and points East) figuratively ran with the blood of smart, ambitious and steely businessmen. Building railroad lines and infrastructure, and marketing them, released the beast in ostensibly civilized gentlemen. But the stakes were great. Namely, the future of an industry —and the nation. The main combatants were William Jackson Palmer (1836–1909) and William Barstow Strong (1837–1914). A Union general in the Civil War, Palmer had a longstanding interest in the relatively new railroad business. In 1870 he co-founded the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. Strong, who didn’t serve in the military during the war, was also a lifelong railroad
man, who made his mark in American history as general manager and, later, president of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway. Both men had one professional goal: to extend their railroads west, from Denver (Palmer) and Kansas City (Strong) to the Pacific Ocean. The first transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869, turned out to be a financial bust. Powell and Strong believed they could do better. Their bitter, byzantine rivalry established a bizarre bond between them, one forged by hatred, jealousy and disdain (there wasn’t even a smidgen of mutual grudging respect). Palmer had a bit of the romantic in him about his schemes. Strong, whose business motto was “Grow or die,” was the consummate bureaucrat, and as it turned out the bureaucrat managed to snooker the former general virtually every time they fought over property rights, laying railroad tracks (they even disagreed about the width of those tracks), raising cash—anything. If nothing else, the men’s internecine conflict is an object lesson in how personalities can shape important events. The other two major players in the story are Jay Gould, a phenomenally
successful Wall Street power broker who loved owning railroads (his motto was “I don’t build railroads, I buy them”) and Collis Potter Huntington, the most influential of the “Big Four” magnates who dominated the railroad system in California by 1880 and were determined to maintain that control. Gould and Huntington were every bit as ruthless as Palmer and Strong, and dominated them—for a time. Gould, sickly since childhood, died relatively young at age 56, while Strong finally turned the tables on Huntington in a southern California price war and delighted in trouncing him. Eventually, Gould’s brethren, East Coast financiers— Boston and New York City gray eminences— imposed hegemony over the nationwide industry, and they too were merciless toward perceived adversaries. From the River to the Sea has its shortcomings. It describes so many railroads— emerging, merging, submerging, swaggering and staggering— that readers may have trouble keeping track of them (the maps help). The chronology tends to move sinuously, rather like the shoo-fly engineering technique that “allow[ed] a train to ascend a steep mountainside.” The book could have gone deep-
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REVIEWS er into how American Indians regarded and interacted with railroads, while a fuller discussion of the novel technologies engendered by the challenges of railroad building in the West would have been fun for tech buffs. Despite those shortcomings, the book is engrossing and thought-provoking, well written and diligently researched. Moreover, From the River to the Sea contains fascinating, little-known anecdotes, like the fact Palmer and Strong recruited thugs to join private armies intended to thwart and intimidate competing railroad line construction (the “armies” were more bluster than fighting force). Also that the railroads played a seminal role in transforming Los Angeles into a megalopolis. Little known today, Palmer and Strong, Sedgwick writes, “defined the West and remade a good deal of the nation too.” The book does justice to those achievements. —Howard Schneider The Story of Notorious Arizona Outlaw Augustine Chacón, by David Grassé, History Press, Charleston, S.C., 2021, $33.99 Among the more infamous killers in Arizona lore, Augustine Chacón reportedly murdered as many as 84 WILD WEST
52 people, escaped jail and his own imminent hanging on June 9, 1897, was recaptured by Arizona Ranger Captain Burton C. Mossman in September 1902 and faced his second rendezvous with the gallows on November 21 of that year with a fearless, remorseless calm that impressed all who witnessed it. Coming at a time when the Old West was rapidly giving way to the 20th century, the rise and fall of a hell-raising villain with Chacón’s attributes—catchy name included—seemed almost too good to be true. According to Arizona-based reference librarian David Grassé, who plumbed period records and journals, practically all of what has been passed down over the past century on Chacón is just that—too good (or bad?) to be true. The product of his research is less of a biography than a fascinating study on how sensationalism can take a grain of truth and snowball it into disproportionate myth. Little was known of Chacón until Dec. 17,
1895, when a botched burglary in Morenci led to a gunfight that left two perpetrators dead, along with bartender Pablo Salcido, shot while overzealously aiding Constable Alexander Davis. A wounded Chacón was taken into custody. Surviving records enabled Grassé to present an account of the subsequent trial and conviction of Chacón for Salcido’s murder— despite testimony and evidence that left more than just a shadow of a doubt—and details of how Chacón managed to dig his way out of a jail cell in Solomonville on the eve of his execution. From then on, however, hard facts on his whereabouts ceased, but speculation stampeded, as virtually every robbery or killing in Arizona was “believed to be” the work of Chacón or his “gang.” As he sifted through such accounts, the author noted the repeated use of that disclaimer “believed to be,” an abuse of the passive voice that omits the source of the rumors. Adding to the absent Chacón’s sinister public image were longstanding crossborder prejudices toward Mexicans, into which his depredations —real or not—were shoehorned. By 1902 such attitudes had elevated the fugitive into a notorious serial killer who would have to pay the ultimate penalty.
Just before hanging, Chacón requested and was granted a half hour to make a final statement, most of which he spent accounting for his time in Mexico and giving a last protestation of innocence regarding Selcido’s death. At his appointed time his last words were, “Time to hang,” and thanks to his jailers. Not content with that bland farewell, the Bisbee Daily Review attributed to him the more defiant, “I consider this to be the greatest day of my life.” Grassé deconstructs a legend that has been dutifully repeated in history publications ever since (including by this embarrassed writer in an April 1991 Gunfighters & Lawmen article in Wild West). Sloppy editing occasionally trips up what is essentially an intriguing read that reveals how a minor felon was hoisted to criminal heights. The legendary Chacón, the author maintains, was the product of yellow journalism, xenophobia and racism—a potent brew that has yet to disappear from presentday newspapers. —Jon Guttman The Life and Times of Jo Mora: Iconic Artist of the American West, by Peter Hiller, Gibbs Smith, Layton, Utah, 2021, $30 Joseph Jacinto “Jo” Mora (1876–1947)
was more than just a Western artist. In addition to rendering paintings, sculptures, murals, cartoons, illustrations, pictorial maps and photographs, he was also a historian and writer. His books include Trail Dust and Saddle Leather (1946) and the posthumously published Californios: The Saga
of the Hard-Riding Vaqueros, America’s First Cowboys (1949), which have become go-to sources for researchers. Mora worked as a cowboy and spent years with the Navajo (Diné) and Hopi nations in Arizona. Undoubtedly, he is among the most underappreciated Western artists (see Art of the West, P. 26), though Peter Hiller intends to change that. “His range of talents was astounding,” the author writes. “He could produce intimately written and illustrated birthday and Christmas cards for his family, then turn around and create heroic-scale sculptures that depicted historical figures of the West, some of which
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REVIEWS reside in museums to this day.” Hiller spent more than a quarter century researching Mora. The result is a richly detailed account of Mora’s life, often told by the artist himself, complemented by stunning reproductions of his artwork, many in full color. “Through his art,” Hiller writes, “Jo Mora left an enduring legacy of his love of the Monterey community, the county of Monterey, the state of California and the American West.” Fans of Mora will be thrilled with this comprehensive biography, while those unfamiliar with him will be thankful for this splendid introduction. —Johnny D. Boggs The ‘Sneakin’est’ Man That Ever Was: Headline Stories of Montana’s Early Days: Harmon’s Histories, Vol. 1, by Jim Harmon, Stoneydale Press Publishing Co., Stevensville, Mont. 2020, $19.95 Montana native and retired journalist Jim Harmon clearly thinks history should be fun. While it might not rate as a history book per se, this volume presents short stories Harmon wrote based on late 19th-century accounts from such newspapers as the Western Democrat, Northwest Tribune, Missoulian and Missoula Weekly Gazette. 86 WILD WEST
And they are fun— at least in part. The “Sneakin’est Man” of the title is Karolus William “Coyote Bill” Beeskove, a hunter, trapper and miner with an irascible nature who lived in Missoula’s Rattlesnake Valley. In 1894 the Missoulian gave him a tongue-lashing in print for failing to search for a missing comrade up in the Rattlesnake, and a few days later it noted Coyote Bill “has threatened to wipe out the entire staff and all the other beautiful things to be found within the four walls of the Missoulian building.” A decade later Beeskove killed a “trespassing” woodcutter, and the Missoulian, still very much intact, reported on Sept. 17, 1905, he’d been found guilty. Although sentenced to hang, he appealed, and at his second trial he was convicted of manslaughter and instead sentenced to seven years in prison. In June 1916 he was found facedown in Magpie Creek, his throat and wrists cut. Other characters include Shakespearean actor Daniel Edward
Bandman, who made headlines after settling in Missoula in the late 1880s (e.g., The Tragedian Sues His Erstwhile Leading Lady and Took a Tragedian’s Teeth: Western Dentist Holds the Molars of Mr. Bandman on a Horse Trade); cantankerous and contrary Dunn Creek Nell, a local legend up near Libby who terrified at least one neighbor by claiming to have had 17 husbands and burned them all in the cookstove; and Mark Twain, who in 1895 gave a lecture at Missoula’s Bennett Opera House, then promptly got “lost” while walking out to Fort Missoula for lunch. Harmon reports that in 1883 a member of Missoula’s clergy complained, “The streets of Missoula after nightfall were hell compared to anything he’d seen before.” But in 1917 a university student wrote in an essay, “Missoula is such a nice pretty little city, but it has no thrill, no colorfulness, no sparkle. It’s a good, convenient place in which to acquire bookknowledge, or to grow old.…Missoula smiles quietly and rather sweetly at you any sunshiny day, but can you imagine our Missoula giggling?” —Editor Bears: The Mighty Grizzlies of the West, by Julie Argyle,
Gibbs Smith, Layton, Utah, 2021, $50 On my rambles west I have seen a dozen or more bears relatively close-up. Almost every time it has provided the right kind of adrenaline rush, as none of the bruins charged me, and I walked away feeling rewarded. One time, though, in northern Montana, the bear I saw a few bushes away had the pronounced shoulder hump and “dished” facial profile of a grizzly. No, it didn’t charge, but my nervous system still went into overdrive, releasing waves of adrenaline as I fled. In short, this particular bruin scared the $#*& out of me.
Today I’m not into hiking, let alone camping, in grizzly country. I am, however, still into grizzlies and respect anyone helping to ensure they’re around for future generations. Like many people, most far braver than me, I find these iconic symbols of power and strength fascinating. A few years ago I did see a mother grizzly and two cubs on a hillside in Yellowstone National Park— albeit through a telephoto lens set atop a fellow visitor’s sturdy
tripod. Perfect. Seeing Julie Argyle’s stunning, mostly close-up shots of grizzlies in Yellowstone is the next best thing for one who, apparently unlike this professional photographer, has had a few grizzly nightmares (never mind the research suggesting a person is far more likely to be killed by a bee than a bear). No detailed grizzly history here or photos of grizzlies terrorizing anyone on two legs. But the author does introduce readers to Grizzly 791 (born in 2011), whom Argyle witnessed taking down a six-point bull elk in Yellowstone’s Hayden Valley. The author also presents a few named grizzlies—including Raspberry, to whom the book is dedicated (“The one who will be embedded in my heart forever.”); Snow (“What a blessing it was to have watched her grow from that little cub into a beautiful adult grizzly”); and Snaggletooth, who has a genetically deformed mouth. Argyle’s stunning photos send the message loud and clear this intelligent, impressive species deserves our protection. I doubt anyone who leafs through this handsome book will experience an adrenaline rush, but they likely will feel rewarded, and they won’t even need bear spray. —Editor
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MOVIE
STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (required by Act of August 12, 1970: Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code). 1. Wild West 2. (ISSN: 1046-4638) 3. Filing date: 10/1/21. 4. Issue frequency: Bi Monthly. 5. Number of issues published annually: 6. 6. The annual subscription price is $39.95. 7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor. Publisher, Michael A. Reinstein, HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203, Editor, Gregory J Lalire, HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203, Editor in Chief, Alex Neill, HistoryNet, 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 10. Owner: HistoryNet; 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 11. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent of more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. 12. Tax status: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months. 13. Publisher title: Wild West. 14. Issue date for circulation data below: October 2021. 15. The extent and nature of circulation: A. Total number of copies printed (Net press run). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 49,193. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 53,834. B. Paid circulation. 1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 26,165. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 27,075. 2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 7,491. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 8,696. 4. Paid distribution through other classes mailed through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. C. Total paid distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 33,656. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date; 35,771. D. Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside mail). 1. Free or nominal Outside-County. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 2. Free or nominal rate in-county copies. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Free or nominal rate copies mailed at other Classes through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 4. Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 607. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 588. E. Total free or nominal rate distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 607. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 588. F. Total free distribution (sum of 15c and 15e). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 34,263. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 36,359. G. Copies not Distributed. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 14,930. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 17,475. H. Total (sum of 15f and 15g). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 49,193. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing: 53,834. I. Percent paid. Average percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 98.2% Actual percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months: 98.4% 16. Electronic Copy Circulation: A. Paid Electronic Copies. Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. B. Total Paid Print Copies (Line 15c) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 33,656. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 35,771. C. Total Print Distribution (Line 15f) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 34,263. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 36,359. D. Percent Paid (Both Print & Electronic Copies) (16b divided by 16c x 100). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 98.2%. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 98.4%. I certify that 50% of all distributed copies (electronic and print) are paid above nominal price: Yes. Report circulation on PS Form 3526-X worksheet 17. Publication of statement of ownership will be printed in the February 2022 issue of the publication. 18. Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Shawn G. Byers, VP, Audience Development & Circulation. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanction and civil actions.
The Harder They Fall, Netflix, 139 minutes, 2021, R This movie, which shares the same title as a 1956 boxing film noir starring Humphrey Bogart, pays lip service to such real-life black legends of the Old West as Nat Love, Bass Reeves, Cherokee Bill and Bill Pickett, many of whom have yet to have their life stories told on the big screen (though rodeo great Pickett did star in two since lost silent films). From the opening credits—in which a body careens into the air as it’s being shot to pieces —it’s clear The Harder They Fall has no interest in being a staid historical fiction. This is pure, ultra-violent B movie pulp in which attractive movie stars in pristine clothing trade barbs and bullets across a scrumptious Wild West playground (sometimes quite literally scrumptious—I’ve honestly never seen food, from the steaks to the fruit, look so tasty in a Western). The gunslinger’s aim is as perfect as his comic timing. It’s a glossy throwback that calls to mind Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead but is kept fresh by an unfamiliar cast for the genre— an all-black one. Outside of a few notable examples (Sergeant Rutledge, Buck and the Preacher and Posse come to mind), black actors have rarely popped up in Western cinema. Considering the genre peaked from the 1930s through the ’60s, when blacks were seldom depicted on-screen at all, that may come as little surprise, but it is nonetheless an unfortunate reality, especially considering that nearly one in four cowboys in the Old West were black. As a lifelong fan of the genre and someone who has admittedly grown used to Wild West mythology feeling and looking a certain way on screen, I found The Harder They Fall a refreshing change of pace. The film darts across the frontier from one vibrant, all-black town to the next accompanied by a great soundtrack that features everything from reggae to funk. While the film is wholly and unequivocally black, a fun bank robbery scene does briefly take us to the white West—which presents an opportunity for some playful set design and color grading. The Harder They Fall is not without its faults, most of which originate from the fact it refuses one of the key tenets of the B Western—simplicity. What would otherwise be a straightforward revenge story is encumbered by unnecessary plot deviations and machinations that fly at you with all the subtlety of a load of buckshot. Despite a bloated 2-hour, 19-minute runtime, there’s little time to get to know the characters in any real way. They survive on charisma alone. Fortunately for viewers, the cast— Idris Elba (as Rufus Buck), Delroy Lindo (Bass Reeves), LaKeith Stanfield (Cherokee Bill), Zazie Beets (Stagecoach Mary), among others—has abundant charisma. Nat Love, re-envisioned as a sort of Wild West Robin Hood, is played by Jonathan Majors, and he’s so fantastic that one is left disappointed when he isn’t given more to do. The film grows overly infatuated with its thinly drawn peripheral characters and sometimes feels like it’s trying to get 20 singers to harmonize. The individual players may be fantastic, but the movie doesn’t work as a sprawling ensemble. It should be Majors’ movie—he proves himself more than capable as the lead. Despite such shortfalls, director Jeymes Samuel does boast great control over style and tone—which remains playful enough as the plot bounces from one cliché to the next—though for some it may be too reliant on cartoonish violence. Ultimately, The Harder They Fall is an on-the-nose genre film, like they used to make ’em—there’s the good guys, there’s the bad guys, and they’re gonna duke it out…and there’s Ms. Lauryn Hill on the soundtrack. —Louis Lalire FEBRUARY 2022
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MUIR WOODS NATIONAL MONUMENT, CALIFORNIA
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y the time 74-year-old John Muir (inset, at left) sat for this 1912 portrait, he’d survived many harrowing adventures (see related story, P. 44). He’d also lobbied for the creation of both Yosemite National Park (1890) and the Sierra Club (1892). In 1907, seeking to honor Muir’s environmental efforts, U.S. Rep. William Kent (inset, center) and wife Elizabeth donated a 295-acre tract of uncut coastal redwood forest in Marin County, Calif., to the U.S. government. On Jan. 9, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt designated the land a national monument. Kent insisted on the name Muir Woods [nps.gov/muwo]. Here Muir and Kent pose in the park with Tamalpais Conservation Club president J.H. Cutter. Sadly, in 1913 Muir parted ways with Kent over the latter’s support for damming Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. 88 WILD WEST
STEPHEN JOSEPH, STEPHENJOSEPHPHOTO.GALLERY; INSET: GOLDEN GATE NATIONAL RECREATION AREA
GO WEST
FEBRUARY 2022
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Recreating history in miniature since 1893
56/58 mm-1/30 Scale
matte finish
31300 · $44.00 William Tecumseh Sherman
Hand-Painted Pewter Figures
Since 1893 W.Britain has been producing military miniatures with attention to detail, quality and authenticity. Each model figure is cast out of metal and hand painted to the highest standard. Our ranges cover major time periods from the 9th to the 21st century.
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Federal Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, 1876
32000
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If you would like to see figures like these and many others make plans to take a trip down to San Antonio...
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U.S. Army Apache Scout, 1880s $42.00
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Go West
W.Britain 8.5x5.5” Mini Backdrop is printed in full-color on heavy card stock and comes with a separate, fold-out easel.
32003
© W.Britain
Captain Myles Keogh 7th Cavalry, 1876 $42.00
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