Wild West October 2021

THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

200th ANNIVERSARY

santa fe trail commemorating america’s first commercial highway

H friends of wyatt earp H quanah parker in photos H texas desperadoes

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44 TRACKING THE ‘WHITE APACHE’

By Daniel R. Seligman Zebina Streeter raided with Apaches yet later helped the Army pursue Geronimo

50 PICTURING QUANAH PARKER

By Richard F. Selcer and Clara Wallace Holmes No American Indian leader posed for more photos than the last Comanche chief

64 EARP FELLOW

SOPHISTICATES

By Don Chaput and David D. de Haas Wyatt and family ran into a host of fascinating figures out West after leaving Tombstone

58 ‘WORSE THAN THE

HOSTILE COMANCHES’

By Gregory Michno Gangs of ex-Confederate outlaws and other ne’er-do-wells overran Reconstruction-era Texas

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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 David Thomas writes about Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid and other New Mexicans

18 WESTERNERS

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Celebrated ‘Pathfinder’ John Frémont scoured the West on five expeditions

20 GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

By Don Chaput An Oregon state senator survived a bloody shootout and became a U.S. senator

22 PIONEERS & SETTLERS

By Jeff Broome Left for dead by raiding Cheyennes, 4-year-old Kansan Willis Daily recovered

24 WESTERN ENTERPRISE

By Terry Halden Montana rancher Harris Kirk unearthed a valuable mineral on his land and dreamed of riches that never materialized

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REVISITING THE SANTA FE TRAIL

By Diana West Our westering nation’s first commercial highway marks its bicentennial in 2021

26 ART OF THE WEST

By Johnny D. Boggs Florida’s James Museum showcases Western and wildlife art in the ‘far East’

28 INDIAN LIFE

By Diana West Santa Fe Trail travelers often met up with Indians, not always with happy results

30 STYLE

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

76 COLLECTIONS

By Linda Wommack Kansas’ Mahaffie Stagecoach Stop & Farm recalls travel on the Santa Fe Trail

78 GUNS OF THE WEST

By George Layman The Winchester Model 1894 was a favorite of outlaws, lawmen and hunters

80 GHOST TOWNS

By Jim Pettengill Mineral Park brought miners to and became a county seat in Arizona Territory

82 REVIEWS

70 REINVENTED IN TEXAS

By Paula Selzer Fleeing an unrealized socialist utopia, Adolphe Gouhenant thrived in Fort Worth and Dallas

Wild West special contributor Johnny D. Boggs reports on books and films about Western journalists. Plus reviews of recent books about theater in the West, dreams of El Dorado, the firearms of Texas Rangers, Buffalo Bill and the birth of American celebrity, and poker in the Old West

88 GO WEST

The California Trail answered dreams but led to one party’s long nightmare ON THE COVER Southwestern Indians look on as American traders and their oxen-pulled wagons plod westward in the oil on canvas On the Santa Fe Trail, by Frank Tenney Johnson (1874–1939). During its first quarter century of existence the trail served as a trade route between the United States and Mexicancontrolled Santa Fe. (Cover image: Woolaroc Museum, Bartlesville, Okla.)

OCTOBER 2021

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EDITOR’S LETTER

TO OLD SANTA FE

Once upon a time the Spanish citizens of Santa Fe looked to the South, namely Mexico City, for most of their needs to be met or unmet, as was often the case when it came to requesting material goods. What few visitors came from the East, namely the United States of America, were not welcome. Change was in the works in 1821 when Mexico gained its independence from Spain, and many Santafesinos put out the alfombra de bienvenida (“welcome mat”), desiring the arrival of American goods if not non-Catholic American settlers. William Becknell of Franklin, Mo., arrived that fall with a trading party and conducted the first successful legal commerce with New Mexico province, eventually earning Becknell the title “Father of the Santa Fe Trail” (see our cover story on the bicentennial of that trail on P. 36). Mexico’s declaration of free trade came two years later.

Some argue that the capitalization of New Mexico’s economy brought on by the trade with Americans benefited the upper classes in Santa Fe but didn’t end poverty in the province, thus making it dependent, in neocolonial fashion, on the United States. Of course, that was of little concern to the stampede of traders who followed in Becknell’s tracks and earned profits galore. From 1821 to ’48 the 900-mile trail was “a highway between nations,” as U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri dubbed it in 1825.

The route started in western Missouri, which meant travelers spent most of their time crossing the rolling prairies of what would become Kansas, whether they chose to take the trail’s Mountain Route or the shorter Cimarron Cutoff.

Either way, the travelers eventually rolled through Mexican-controlled northeast New Mexico to reach Santa Fe. That final destination has always appealed to me, even as a kid.

For much of my life I thought Santa Fe, which became a town under Spanish law 10 years before the Mayflower Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, was the oldest surviving European settlement in the contiguous United States. Much later I learned that it was No. 2, behind St. Augustine, Fla. But that was good enough for me, as the Southwest fascinated me more than the Southeast. (Only this year did I finally visit St. Augustine, founded in 1565, for the first time, and it is indeed historically cool, too, even if I failed to locate the Fountain of Youth). Santa Fe, which celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2010, does, of course, rate as the United States’ oldest capital city, and no matter how many scenic trails there are in Florida, none comes close to capturing the imagination of historically minded Americans as does the Santa Fe Trail.

The much longer Oregon Trail may have passed through more interesting terrain, but the Willamette Valley meant nothing to me, and I was 30 before I actually laid eyes on any part of Oregon Country.

On the other hand, I had visited New Mexico several times early on and was fascinated with its historic adobes, Pueblo Indians, green chile, roadrunners, Billy the Kid and a señorita or two. Photographer Bart Smith has walked the Santa Fe Trail—as well as the other 18 national historic trails (see his “Trailing Western History” in the April 2021 issue)—though most people prefer to experience the trail from the vantage of a motor vehicle traversing the Santa Fe Trail National Scenic Byway from Independence, Mo., through Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico.

There are countless reasons to celebrate the bicentennial of the Santa Fe Trail this fall. But I can’t help wondering how many 19th-century New Mexicans came to regret welcoming all those Santa Fe–bound caravans, which from 1829 on were often escorted part of the way by U.S. soldiers. In 1846 the United States went to war against Mexico, and the Santa Fe Trail became a route of invasion for Brig. Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny and his Army of the West.

This attractive sign marks the trail along U.S. Route 400 some 10 miles west of Dodge City, Kan. Two-thirds of the old route to Santa Fe, N.M., crossed what would become Kansas.

PUEBLO INDIANS,

GREEN CHILE, ROADRUNNERS,

BILLY THE KID AND A SEÑORITA OR TWO.

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TOP: BART SMITH

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.

OCTOBER 2021

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Rick Nez’s Utah alabaster Following Grandpa’s Wisdom stands in front of the oil on canvas Winter Sunrise Circle of the Big Sky People, by Earl Biss, at the James Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla.

WildWestMag.com Kit Carson’s Rescue Ride

“The trail, already cold, led Carson and the other scouts to many a dead end,” writes Paul Andrew Hutton, distinguished professor of history at the University of New Mexico. “[Jicarilla Apache captive] Ann White was their great ally. ‘In nearly every camp we would find some of Mrs. White’s clothing,’ Carson noted, ‘which was the cause of renewed energy on our part to continue the pursuit.’”

Extended Interview With David Thomas

“I believe I prove in my Billy the Kid’s Grave book that his marker is within a few feet of the original burial location, and the grave was not washed away,” says the historian from Las Cruces, N.M. “The evidence is the map made by Charles Dudrow in February 1906.

More on the James Museum

The museum of Western and wildlife art in St. Petersburg, Fla., boasts a distinct Old West connection, featuring a Frontier gallery, which focuses on the cowboy myth and reality; a Native Life gallery, presenting artistic interpretations of historic Indian tribes from the Eastern Woodlands to the Southwest; a Native Artists gallery, showcasing works created by Indians; and an Early West gallery, highlighting the work of Charles Russell and other masters.

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

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OCTOBER 2021 / VOL. 34, NO. 3

GREGORY J. LALIRE EDITOR DAVID LAUTERBORN MANAGING EDITOR GREGORY F. MICHNO SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR JOHNNY D. BOGGS SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR JOHN KOSTER SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR JOHN BOESSENECKER SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR

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

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LETTERS

THE ‘REAL’ LAS VEGAS While binge-reading back issues of Wild West, I came across the very interesting article “Dead Men for Breakfast,” in the August 2020 issue, about the old West’s wildest towns. Author Ron Soodalter obviously knows his stuff, as included in his list was Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory. While far less well known than Tombstone, Deadwood and other notably bad places, Las Vegas was indeed a den of iniquity in the latter part of the 19th century. I didn’t know about the Dodge City Gang but do know other notables such as Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday visited “the real Las Vegas,” as natives refer to their town, during the West’s hell-raiser days.

The picture accompanying the Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, segment of the article shows the Plaza Hotel (top right), which faces the town plaza, and to the right of and abutting the hotel is the original headquarters of the Charles Ilfeld Co. My great uncle Charles Ilfeld opened the business there in the early 1870s and in 1874 returned to his native Germany to secure a wife—Adele (née Nordhaus) Ilfeld, after whom the auditorium at Las Vegas’ Highlands University is named. On arriving back in Las Vegas, Charles and bride Adele took up residence on the top floor of the Ilfeld Co. building, a common living arrangement at the time for many merchants starting new business ventures. Adele’s first morning as a new bride in the untamed Western town of Las Vegas was initiated by her looking out her new residence’s window and, to her horror, seeing the body of a man hanging in the center of the plaza from one of the large trees that often served as a gallows for individuals who had run afoul of frontier “justice.” A true Wild West welcome to the new frontier!

Larry Ilfeld Sandia Park, N.M. TO BAT FOR A BROTHER In his article “Damage Control,” in the April 2021 Wild West, my friend John Boessenecker describes the story that Bat Masterson was responsible for shooting his brother’s attackers as a myth, which was very much the prevalent view following publication of the late Robert K. DeArment’s classic biography of Bat [Bat Masterson: The Man and the Legend ] in 1979. Bob later revised his views on this incident in the light of further information, notably evidence Bat had admitted to shooting both Jack Wagner and Alf Walker in two court cases when it was not in his interests to do so. In the introduction to his later book on Bat’s New York years (Gunfighter in Gotham) Bob listed the fatal shooting of Wagner and wounding of Walker among the few occasions when Bat used a firearm against a fellow man. I reviewed the emergence of this and other evidence in my article “Gunfire in Dodge

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City: The Night Ed Masterson Was Killed,” in the December 2004 Wild West. Incidentally, at one point in John’s article it is stated Wagner survived his wounds when it was actually Alf Walker who recovered.

Chris Penn Marsham, Norfolk United Kingdom John Boessenecker responds: I am the last one to argue with my friend Chris Penn. Many thanks for setting the record straight. I stand corrected.

RABBIT REDUX On P. 45 of Bart Smith’s “Trailing Western History,” in your April 2021 issue, the lower photo caption states that the pictured deer are standing near Rabbit Ear Mountain in Oklahoma. Rabbit Ear Mountain is outside of Clayton, N.M.

Randy McLain Perryton, Texas Bart Smith responds: Sorry for the confusion. I photographed the deer and their immediate surroundings from the westernmost reaches of the Oklahoma Panhandle, along the Cimarron Route of the Santa Fe Trail. While the telephoto lens may make Rabbit Ear Mountain appear near, it is some distance away in New Mexico, as you point out.

LONGLEY’S DANCES In response to George Layman’s Guns of the West article in the June 2021 issue on the Dance pistol, with regard to outlaw Bill Longley carrying a “brace” of such firearms: The source of that information is not revealed. Such a claim was made by Ed Bartholomew in his 1953 book Wild Bill Longley: A Texas Hard Case, Carroll C. Holloway in his 1951 book Texas Gun Lore and Robert Elman in his 1974 book Badmen of the West.

However, none gave any attribution. Longley himself never mentioned the manufacturer of any firearm he carried, and after very thorough research into that so-called gunman, I never found any contemporary mention of a Dance revolver. It would be helpful for sake of accuracy if a credible source for that information could be provided your readers.

Rick Miller Belton, Texas George Layman responds: Miller, the author of Bloody Bill Longley: The Mythology of a Gunfighter, makes a good point. A generations-old tale, “Longley and his Dances” appears to have been repeated so often for so long it became “fact.”

COLONEL GIBBON Mike Coppock’s article on General O.O. Howard and the Nez Perces (“Westward, Christian Soldier”) in the June 2021 Wild West contains an error on a name. The “Colonel John Gibson” mentioned at the Battle of the Big Hole in Montana Territory is actually Colonel John Gibbon.

Dennis Yows Prescott, Ariz.

Editor responds: Our apologies for the error. Though rather remote, Big Hole National Battlefield (10 miles west of Wisdom, Mont., on state Highway 43) is well worth a visit. For information visit nps.gov/biho/index.htm.

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

OCTOBER 2021

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ROUNDUP

10 INTERESTING EARP/HOLLIDAY/O.K. CORRAL WESTERN FILMS

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Winchester ’73 (1950): Will Geer’s unique take on a Dodge City–era Wyatt is hicktown clownish—until you get him riled. Anthony Mann’s taut revenge tale, however, revitalized the Western genre and star James Stewart’s career.

3

Law and Order (1932): Walter Huston plays an Earp-like Frame Johnson, Harry Carey a Doc-based Ed Brandt in this film based on Saint Johnson, the first Western by crime novelist W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar, High Sierra).

Grim, leathery—and Andy Devine gets hanged!

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957): This Cold War Western features Burt Lancaster as the stalwart, no-nonsense Earp, Kirk Douglas as the charming, loyal, terminally consumptive Doc, the longest O.K. Corral gunfight on film and Frankie Laine’s irresistible theme song.

7

Tombstone (1993): You can’t argue with its unpredicted success or cult status, but beginning with the gunfight the editing turns sloppy and the story often repetitive. Anyone can appreciate Val Kilmer’s performance as Doc and the period-correct details.

8

Dawn at Socorro (1954): This movie goes downhill quickly, but the opening setup and early morning gunfight that pits peace officer brothers (James Millican, Scott Lee) and a perpetually coughing gambler (star Rory Calhoun) against a clannish Clantonlike family is well staged.

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9

5

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Warlock (1959): Novelist Oakley Hall’s reimagining of the O.K. Corral story, with Henry Fonda as a town-taming gunman and Anthony Quinn as his overprotective, crippled gambler friend, bears unmistakable homoerotic overtones.

Masterson of Kansas (1954): This ho-hum B—maybe C—oater with a wooden George Montgomery as Bat Masterson wouldn’t be worth watching except for character actor James Griffith’s brilliant turn as Doc, delivering lines with wit, charm, dedication and calibrated coldness.

10 WILD WEST

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Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die (1942): This rarely shown B Western with Richard Dix as Earp and Victor Jory as Ike Clanton gets points for the screenwriters’ realization the O.K. Corral story doesn’t end with the gunfight.

Doc (1971): A wretched film with Stacy Keach as Holliday and Harris Yulin as Earp. But director-producer Frank Perry’s vision of the Earps as shotgun-wielding, graft-hungry murderers seemed fitting amid a period of assassinations, riots and Vietnam War protests.

—Johnny D. Boggs

OCTOBER 2021

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TOP LEFT: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY; TOP RIGHT: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; RIGHT: COURTESY ROY YOUNG

Top: Burt Lancaster portrayed a stalwart, no-nonsense Wyatt Earp in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Above: Kurt Russell’s Wyatt in Tombstone was solid if overshadowed by Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday.

My Darling Clementine (1946): Basically a remake of Frontier Marshal (1939), also based on the fictionalized 1931 Wyatt Earp biography by Stuart N. Lake, this John Ford classic wholly ignores history, even getting the year of the gunfight wrong. But poignant moments, Henry Fonda’s performance and Joseph MacDonald’s noirlike cinematography make this among Ford’s best Westerns.

TOP: TCD/PROD.DB/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LEFT: COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

1

ROUNDUP

LAST AT BAT

Seldom does the death of a sportswriter merit mention in Wild West, but this particular fellow had a connection to many of the best-known people, places and events in the Wild West. It was 100 years ago— Oct. 25, 1921, to be exact—this 67-year-old journalist and celebrity dropped dead at his desk from a heart attack after having written what turned out to be the last of his thrice weekly columns for New York’s Morning Telegraph. From the day he moved with wife Emma to Manhattan on June 5, 1902, he’d been writing about boxing, horse racing and other timely topics. Of course, he was better remembered for having associated with and written about Wyatt Earp, as well as his own adventures as a buffalo hunter, gambler and lawman in Sweetwater, Texas; Dodge City, Kan.; and Colorado. They called him Bat. Born on Nov. 26, 1853, at Henryville, Quebec, and baptized under the Christian name Bartholomew, Bat Masterson earned fame as a feared gunfighter. In a Sweetwater saloon on Jan. 24, 1876, he shot a soldier calling himself Melvin A. King over the affections of dance hall girl Mollie Brennan. On April 9, 1878, he drew his six-shooter to avenge the mortal wounding of his brother, Dodge City Marshal Ed Masterson, by most accounts killing cowboy Jack Wagner (the triggerman) and wounding trail boss Alf Walker (who had drawn his gun and later died from pneumonia related to his lung wound). In addition to his work as a columnist in Manhattan, Bat served from 1905 to ’09 as a deputy U.S. marshal for the Southern District of New York. Reports that he had killed as many as 28 men were definitely false. When asked in May 1913 how many he had killed, he guessed the total was three. “I do not feel that I ought to be ashamed about it,” he added. “I feel perfectly justified.” For more on his later years see Robert K. DeArment’s 2013 book Gunfighter in Gotham: Bat Masterson’s New York City Years or his June 2001 Wild West article “Bat Masterson” (online at Historynet.com).

TOP LEFT: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY; TOP RIGHT: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; RIGHT: COURTESY ROY YOUNG

TOP: TCD/PROD.DB/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LEFT: COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

frankly, it was STILWELL

Frank Stilwell—one of the outlaw “Cowboys” of Cochise County, Arizona Territory, at the time of the Oct. 26, 1881, gunfight near Tombstone’s O.K. Corral—was killed by Wyatt Earp at the Tucson train yard on March 20, 1882. Wyatt was with his vendetta posse, hunting the men who had maimed brother Virgil on Dec. 28, 1881, and killed brother Morgan from ambush at the Campbell & Hatch saloon and billiard parlor on March 18, 1882.

The coroner’s jury named five men, including Stilwell, as suspects in Morgan’s assassination. Any one of them, as well as some 15 other Cowboys, could have been the triggerman, but Stillwell has long been considered the prime candidate.

Roy B. Young, first vice president of the Wild West History Association, has a vested interest in the guilt or innocence of Frank Stillwell, as the Cowboy is a distant relative. “I finally learned who actually did kill Morgan Earp,” Young recently concluded. His information comes from none other than Frank’s older brother, Simpson E. “Jack” Stilwell (1850–1903). A legendary U.S. Army scout best known for his heroism at the 1868 Battle of Beecher Island, Jack was interviewed a quarter century later by a reporter at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In the resulting article, which Young discovered last December, Jack is quoted as saying, “I never faced Wyatt Earp but once, although my brother killed Morgan Earp and was afterward killed by the Earp gang.” Jack Stillwell’s unequivocal statement that brother Frank killed Morgan was enough to convince Young, who has more to say on the subject in an episode of WWHA’s YouTube series Fireside Stories [youtube.com/watch?v=oiWhosXe4_A].

WEST WORDS

‘There are two classes of people, one demanding the utter extinction of the Indian, and the other full of love for their conversion to civilization and Christianity.

Unfortunately, the Army stands between and takes the cuffs from both sides’ —General William T. Sherman wrote this in a March 5, 1870, telegram from Army headquarters in Washington, D.C., to Lt. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, who was commanding the Military Division of the Missouri from Chicago.

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

‘WHy, you son of a bitch!’

—In April 1879 Joe Smith, a member of Doc Middleton’s gang of horse thieves, said this to fellow badman Joe Reed as he lay dying on a billiard table in Joe Lane’s Dance Hall in Sidney, Neb. Bystanders had dragged the mortally wounded outlaw inside after possemen shot him from the saddle in an alley behind the dance hall. Earlier that year detectives had captured Reed but released him, most likely because Reed had struck a deal with the authorities: Walk free in return for a promise to betray Middleton, Smith and the other gang members. Smith paid the ultimate price in Sidney for Reed’s treachery. For more see “The End of His Rope,” by Robert Rybolt, in the August 2021 Wild West.

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ROUNDUP

“With the exception of the public demonstrations held over the news of the assassination of President Lincoln, more imposing funeral ceremonies were never before witnessed in Portland,” the Morning Oregonian reported of the ceremony held for Brig. Gen. Edward R.S. Canby, who on April 11, 1873, was murdered under a flag of truce during a peace conference with Modoc Indians in northern California.

Canby rests beneath an imposing tombstone at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, while a large white cross at Lava Beds National Monument marks the site of his murder.

(Learn more about the Modoc War in the April 2021 Wild West feature article “A Little Indian War Goes Big,”

by Robert Aquinas McNally, online at Historynet.com.)

But what about the peace commissioner killed alongside Canby?

The Rev. Eleazer Cady Thomas (see photo above) is buried in an unmarked grave 12 WILD WEST

TRAILBLAZER ▲

Award-winning singer-songwriter Michael Martin Murphey is serving as honorary chair of the Santa Fe Trail 200 [santafetrail200. org] bicentennial commemoration this year. “It is one of the greatest honors ever given to me,” he says, “to be a communicator and artistic representative of the great Western epic—the story of the Santa Fe Trail.” It is a fitting honor, as Murphey’s half-century career has revolved around the American West.

Among the songs he will perform at trailrelated events this year are “Along the Santa Fe Trail” and “Santa Fe Trail,” both written for the soundtrack of the 1940 film Santa Fe Trail, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland.

Already this year Murphey has recorded nationally syndicated radio segments for the Santa Fe Trail Association and given concerts in Council Grove, Kan., and south of there for the nonprofit Symphony in the Flint Hills. In September he’ll appear at the bicentennial

Santa Fe Trail Symposium at Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site in La Junta, Colo., and in mid-November he’ll perform at a commemoration of William Becknell’s arrival in Santa Fe as a legal American trader. For more details visit Murphey’s website [michaelmartinmurphey.com/tour].

—Diana West

ENDANGERED PLACES ▲

Chinese laborers represented close to 90 percent of the Central Pacific Railroad workforce that constructed the first transcontinental railroad through California’s Sierra Nevada from 1865 to ’68. The railroad housed them in a series of transitory camps. The longest lasting was Summit Camp (near presentday Truckee, Calif.), where several hundred Chinese lived for two years in barracks while blasting out nearby Tunnel No. 6 and laying tracks beyond. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has placed Summit Tunnels Nos. 6 and 7 and the Summit Camp site on its annual list of America’s 11 most endangered historic places, mainly due to vandalism, including graffiti. Also on

SEE YOU LATER...

B.J. THOMAS Billy Joe “B.J.” Thomas —who was born in Hugo, Okla., on Aug. 7, 1942, and died in Arlington, Texas, at age 78 on May 29, 2021—was a five-time Grammy Award winner with many hit songs. To Western film buffs he is best known for having sung “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which accompanied the bicycle stunt sequence in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Directed

by George Roy Hill, the buddy film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford was considered a nontraditional Western. The song, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, either fit the mood to a T (according to its fans) or made no sense at all. Redford, who achieved superstar status as the Sundance Kid, was initially among the many critics of the song, dismissing such lyrics as “And just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed/ Nothin’ seems to fit” as plain dumb. “How wrong I was,” Redford said later, “as it turned out to be a giant hit.”

FROM LEFT: FROST’S PICTORIAL HISTORY OF INDIAN WARS AND CAPTIVES (1873), BY JOHN FROST; BILL CURRY PHOTO; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; MARK REINSTEIN PHOTO/GETTY IMAGES

REVERENCE AT LONG LAST ▲

at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Colma, Calif. “I intend to honor the Rev. Thomas, who has been all but forgotten,” says Frank Jastrzembski, founder of the nonprofit mission Shrouded Veterans. “He deserves to be honored just as General Canby is.”

Jastrzembski is raising funds for a headstone to mark Thomas’ grave.

The Rev. Thomas served as a Methodist Episcopal minister in New York and California for 35 years.

In March 1873 he received word from Washington, D.C., he’d been appointed to the commission to broker peace with the Modocs. That April 11 Thomas, 59, was shot in the head and chest

by Boston Charley, who was later convicted of war crimes and hanged alongside Modoc ringleader Captain Jack and two others. The popular clergyman was survived by his widow, Cordelia, and three of their four children.

Thomas was originally buried at San Francisco’s Lone Mountain Masonic Cemetery, then reinterred at Woodlawn in 1910.

To contribute toward the $1,700 to cover a headstone and its installation at Woodlawn, email Jastrzembski at fjastrzembski10@ jcu.edu or message him on his Shrouded Veterans Facebook page [facebook.com/ shroudedvetgraves].

OCTOBER 2021

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ROUNDUP the list of endangered places west of the Mississippi are Oljato Trading Post in San Juan County, Utah; the 1862 Trujillo Adobe (the oldest known building in Riverside, Calif.) and the Threatt filling station and family farm in Luther, Okla. (the farm dates to the early 1900s, and the filling station was the only known blackowned and -operated station along Route 66 during the Jim Crow era). For the full list visit savingplaces. org/11most.

CUSTER CONNECTION

Placekicker Adam Vinatieri—a 6-footer who in 24 seasons with the New England Patriots and Indianapolis Colts scored 2,673 points to become the National Football League’s alltime leading scorer and won four Super Bowl rings—retired this spring at age 48. Why are we announcing that in Wild West? It’s all about ancestors, baby! From 1873 to ’76 Vinatieri’s 5-foot-2 Italian-born great-great-grandfather, Felix Vinatieri (born in

ADAM VINATIERI

FELIX VINATIERI

Turin in 1834), served as Lt. Col. George Custer’s chief musician at Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory.

“Custer admired Vinatieri’s musicianship and brought him along on the Yellowstone and Black Hills expeditions of 1873 and 1874,”

Wild West special contributor John Koster writes in “Frontier Bandmaster Felix Vinatieri Made a Musical Name for Himself,” in the February 2012 issue and online at Historynet.com.

In the spring of 1876 Vinatieri and the regimental band led Custer

and his doomed 7th U.S. Cavalry command out of Fort Lincoln. But the musicians (except for bugler John Martin) didn’t join them at the Little Bighorn. The band ended its march at the Yellowstone River and gave a farewell concert disrupted by the death songs of the Arikara scouts. “Custer,” Koster writes, “then confiscated the band’s horses to give to troopers under arms and instructed the musicians to follow upriver on the steamboat Far West. He did the band a big favor.”

Events of the west

Two hundred years ago (Aug. 10, 1821, to be exact) Missouri was the 24th state admitted to the Union. Its 114 counties and the independent city of St. Louis are commemorating the history of the “Show Me State” with ongoing events.

For more information visit missouri2021.org.

The 101 Ranch

Yellowstone and Glacier t

The Booth Museum in

The Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Wild West Show of the early 1900s included performing cowgirls, and those galloping gals

Cartersville, Ga., presents a double treat with “Waterfalls in Yellowstone,” by M.C. Poulsen, and “Mammals in Glacier,” by Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey, Oct. 21,2021– Feb. 27, 2022. Artist Poulsen captures remote cascades in Yellowstone National Park few visitors get to experience, while Cawdrey showcases some two dozen silk paintings of all the major animals in Glacier National Park. Call 770-387-1300 or visit boothmuseum.org.

Black Citizenship “Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow,” a traveling exhibition of the New-York Historical Society, visits

the Bullock Museum in Austin through Nov. 18. The exhibition explores the struggle for full citizenship and racial equality in the half century after the Civil War. Sections include “Reconstructing Citizenship, 1865– 1917,” “The Rise of Jim Crow, 1877–1900” and “Challenging Jim Crow, 1900–1919.” Visit thestoryoftexas.com.

Western Heritage

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City will present its prestigious Wrangler Awards in literature, music, television and film at the annual Western Heritage

Awards banquet Sept.

17–18. Call 405-4782250 or visit nationalcowboymuseum.org.

OIW Assembly

The Order of the Indian Wars (OIW) will hold its annual assembly Oct. 7–11 in Oklahoma City.

Among the featured speakers will be Roy B. Young, first vice president of the Wild West History Association, and members will discuss the Trail of Tears. The OIW is the namesake “spiritual” descendant of an earlier group that comprised actual veterans of the Indian wars. Anyone may join the present-day OIW. Call 970-420-8193 or visit indianwars.net.

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

14 WILD WEST

TOP LEFT: KEITH ALLISON, CC BY-SA 2.0

Missouri Bicentennial ▲

will be well represented at the 101 Ranch Collectors Western Memorabilia Show Nov. 19– 20 at the Kay County Fairgrounds Event Center in Blackwell, Okla.

Presented by the 101 Ranch Collectors Association, the show will also feature original cowboy gear, firearms, antiques, rare photos and ephemera for viewing and/or sale.

Call 918-440-9172 or visit facebook.com/ 101ranchcollectors.

OCTOBER 2021

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INTERVIEW

ZEROING IN ON SOUTHERN NEW MEXICO WELL-TRAVELED HISTORIAN DAVID THOMAS WRITES ABOUT BILLY THE KID, PAT GARRETT AND OTHER MESILLA VALLEY CHARACTERS

BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS From childhood David Gerald Thomas aspired to be a good chess player, and as a young man in 1974 he played for Lebanon at the 21st Chess Olympiad, in Nice, France. He also wanted to travel, so over a span of four years he checked off Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia while “bumming around the planet.” Another of his goals was to become a writer. After launching a software company and writing computer programming manuals, he went on to author well-received books about New Mexico history, including several about the notorious outlaw Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War. Thomas, 75, recently spoke with Wild West about his writing and some of the more interesting figures from the Mesilla Valley.

What prompted you to write about the Mesilla Valley and southern New Mexico?

I moved to Las Cruces in 2002 and quickly became fascinated with the history of Mesilla. I was surprised so little was known about it, and much that was known was false.

What are some misconceptions about Billy the Kid? That he was not killed in Fort Sumner by Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett. He was.

Does Billy’s headstone in Fort Sumner mark the spot, or were his remains washed away in a flood as some allege?

I believe I prove in my Billy the Kid’s Grave book that his marker is within a few feet of the original burial location, and the grave was not washed away. The evidence is the map made by Charles Dudrow in February 1906. Dudrow was hired to move the military burials from the cemetery. The map shows Billy’s burial location. Dudrow found the military burials undisturbed by the massive Pecos River flood of 1904, which submerged the cemetery under 4 feet of water for seven days. By the way, Garrett visited the cemetery a year after the flood and was able to locate Billy’s grave.

Explain the scarcity of records for Billy’s trial in Mesilla for the murder of Sheriff William J. Brady.

There are several reasons. The records of the trial were sketchy to begin with, and people began stealing them from the files in the 1930s. For this reason I found records in personal collections that were not available elsewhere. There were two Mesilla newspapers at the time. One has many missing issues, and the other 16 WILD WEST

was on the verge of collapse. The newspaper that is extant published little on the trial, which is surprising, given the extensive coverage Billy was receiving in the territorial press. The editor of that paper did write he had two interviews with Billy that he would make “public at the proper time.” But shortly after the trial ended, his paper folded. He restarted it later under a different name in El Paso, but he never published the promised interviews. What a loss!

Did the Kid receive a fair trial?

The trial was unfair. Judge Warren Bristol manipulated the jury to get the outcome he wanted. First, he only permitted the jury to consider a first-degree murder conviction or an acquittal. The territory recognized five degrees of murder. The appropriate conviction was one of the lesser degrees, given the evidence the territory had. Second, Judge Bristol provided the non–English-speaking jury with deliberation instructions that included spurious instructions designed to confuse the jury. Also, the instructions were given to the jury only in English. It’s doubtful any of the jurors could speak or read English, and many could not read Spanish.

Judge Bristol rejected the jury instructions proposed by Billy’s attorney, Colonel [Albert Jennings] Fountain, which, if supplied to the jury, would probably have produced an acquittal.

What have you learned about Pat Garrett’s death?

I am able to prove that “Deacon Jim” Miller did not kill Garrett.

My book [Killing Pat Garrett: The Wild West’s Most Famous Lawman —Murder or Self-Defense? ] and my article [“He Shot the Sheriff”] in the February 2021 issue of Wild West reveal nine previously unknown facts supporting this statement. I’m able to show that purported killer Miller was in a hotel in Las Cruces when Garrett was killed, and that that fact was known to the jury and attorneys during trial of the man who did kill Garrett—Wayne Brazel.

I’m also able to show there was no “Fornoff Report,” the oft-cited evidence of a conspiracy to kill Garrett.

Anything else you’d like readers to know?

I would like to call readers’ attention to the Pat Garrett Western Heritage Festival, held annually in Las Cruces in the Rio Grande Theatre. This year the festival will be November 6. The festival consists of movies, original music and a play. Last year the play was the trial of the men charged with killing Colonel Fountain.

The prior year it was the trial of Wayne Brazel, charged with killing Garrett. This year the play will be the trial of Billy the Kid.

OCTOBER 2021

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April 2021 HISTORYNET.com

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PORTRAIT OF A PATHFINDER

TONY SAPIENZA COLLECTION

John Charles Frémont was born out of wedlock in Savannah, Ga., on Jan. 21, 1813, to French-Canadian immigrant Charles Frémon (no “T”) and married Virginian Anne Whiting Pryor. The young man was determined to rise above his origins. Frémont led five expeditions into the frontier West, two guided by Kit Carson to the province of Alta California in advance of the 1846–48 war with Mexico that secured the region for the United States. His insubordinate streak got Frémont court-martialed amid the Mexican War and later relieved of command as a general during the Civil War. Regardless, the acclaimed “Pathfinder” briefly served as military governor of California, struck it rich during the gold rush and served as one of the first two U.S. senators from that state. In 1856 Frémont, an opponent of slavery, became the first Republican nominee for president, only to lose the election to pro-slavery Democrat James Buchanan. After losing much of his wealth to overspeculation in railroads and the Panic of 1873, Frémont was appointed governor of Arizona Territory (1878–81). Though his expedition journals—co-authored by wife Jessie, daughter of the expansionist Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri—inspired Americans to go West, Frémont retired to New York and died there at age 77 on July 13, 1890. Taken that month, this portrait is likely the last for which he ever posed.

He is buried in Rockland Cemetery in Sparkill, N.Y. In recognition of his services, Congress granted Jessie an annual widow’s pension of $2,000. She died in Los Angeles at age 78 on Dec. 27, 1902.

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GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

SENATOR SHOOTS SUSPECT

BY THE SEASHORE

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DON CHAPUT COLLECTION

T

he toll from the 1898 shootout in full-time residents. Among the cottages lining Oregon was two lawmen dead, anthe beach was one owned by Republican State other wounded and one desperado Senator Charles William Fulton, who worked killed, with much of his face shot off as an attorney in Astoria when the legislaby a rifle round. When the firing ceased, a state ture wasn’t in session. In the early morning senator stood over the smoking rifle. Quite a hours of December 28 the Fulton cottage went scenario. But that’s only part of the grisly saga up in flames. Neither the house nor its conon what began as a quiet day in the Clatsop tents were insured. The next morning’s Daily County community of Seaside, named for a Astorian noted that Seaside had been experihotel built there in the 1870s by transportation encing a rash of robberies and vandalism, that SENATOR CHARLES magnate Ben Holladay. the fire was “undoubtedly the work of an inWILLIAM FULTON The narrative is a bit thin, given that no trial cendiary [arsonist],” and that County Sheriff was forthcoming, as the suspect went to his grave.

John W. “Jack” Williams was en route to SeaEnough information survives, though, to establish what trans- side by train to look into the situation. Senator Fulton was there pired that December 30. to meet him.

By the close of the 19th century the summer resort of Seaside, Speculation was rife the arson had been an attempt to cover on the coast some 15 miles south of Astoria, had fewer than 200 up a robbery, and some Astorians suspected Charles Willard,

TOP: SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, JAN. 7, 1889; LEFT: DON CHAPUT COLLECTION

A SHOOTOUT IN THE SUMMER RESORT TOWN OF SEASIDE, OREGON, LEFT THREE DEAD BUT GAVE A STATE SENATOR INVOLVED A POLITICAL BOOST

BY DON CHAPUT

DON CHAPUT COLLECTION

TOP: SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, JAN. 7, 1889; LEFT: DON CHAPUT COLLECTION

GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN a dislikable brute who had served as a winter watchman over some of the cottages. The morning of the fire witnesses had spotted him leaving the vicinity pushing a wheelbarrow full of goods. A blowhard, Texas-born Willard had lived in town nearly eight years and still not managed to gain the respect of neighbors. He was also known to tote a rifle and two revolvers.

On arrival in town Sheriff Williams had solicited Senator Fulton’s help and deputized local Constable Alvin E. Miller and full-time resident Jacob E. “James” Lamers to accompany them while he conducted his investigation. Midafternoon on the 30th the four set out to search the cottage Willard rented.

When Williams and posse stopped by Willard’s home, and the sheriff presented his search warrant, the suspect flared at the accusation and suggested they instead investigate a recent break-in at one of the cottages of which he had charge. “On pretense of being on the lookout for a beach thief,” one news account had it, Willard grabbed his rifle and said he would accompany the posse.

While inside Willard’s cottage Fulton spotted loose cartridges he was certain belonged to him, and soon after the group left the house, the senator foolishly confronted the suspect about what he had seen. Willard fumed, claiming a former resident had given him the shells. The story apparently didn’t wash with Sheriff Williams, however, and the party turned back for a further sweep of the Willard cottage. Williams and Deputy Lamers remained outside with Willard while Fulton and Constable Miller went inside to search.

Bang! Bang! came two shots in quick succession.

Fulton and Miller ran out the front door in time to see the sheriff “throw up his hands and fall backward.” Though shot through the right groin, Lamers grappled for control of Willard’s rifle. Leaping on Willard, Fulton pulled him to the ground and kicked him repeatedly in the head, hoping to render him unconscious. Miller, meanwhile, wrenched the rifle from Willard’s hands, tossed it aside and then clobbered the suspect over the head with a revolver.

Securing the rifle, Fulton told Willard not to move. Willard ignored the warning. As the suspect broke into a run, Fulton fired, missed, then fired again, this time striking Willard in the face.

With much of his mouth and nose blown away, Willard collapsed and was presumed dead. Realizing things had gotten tragically out of hand, the senator dropped the rifle and went to seek help in town.

Meanwhile, Miller went to aid Lamers. As he did so, the constable noticed Willard fumbling

with his belt. Before Miller could react, Willard yanked one of his revolvers and fired three quick shots, hitting the constable in the left leg below the hip. Scooping up the rifle, Miller fired twice.

The first shot only grazed Willard in the shoulder, but the second penetrated his torso near the groin, finally killing him.

In the aftermath of the bloody encounter the local coroner called a jury, but there were no surprises.

Jurors determined Willard had killed Sheriff Williams and Deputy Lamers, and he in turn had been killed by Constable Miller. Their verdict didn’t mention Fulton’s role in the affray. Specifics regarding the shooting of Williams and Lamers were also lacking, as there were no witnesses, though it was determined Willard had fired a total of six shots from his revolvers.

Authorities shipped the bodies of Sheriff Williams and Deputy Lamers in caskets by train to Astoria for memorial services and burial. They were laid to rest beneath fine memorials in Greenwood Cemetery. Willard’s remains were wrapped in tattered sailcloth and buried in an unmarked grave in a potter’s field—perhaps an expected end for the Texas hard case.

Yet there were unusual aspects to the case. When the time came to settle Lamers’ estate, Senator Fulton volunteered and was accepted as administrator.

Even more unusual, in late February 1899 the administrator of Willard’s estate put up for public auction the weapons used in the December 30 shootout.

A local saloonman paid $25 for Willard’s revolvers. For an undisclosed sum Fulton himself privately purchased the rifle he’d used to shoot Willard in the face and Constable Miller had used a short time later to finish off Willard. Few politicians could claim to be “the man who shot” a wanted desperado, let alone possess the gun they used to do the deed. Perhaps not as surprising is that the state senator was later elected a U.S. senator from Oregon.

In this period postcard view a crowd lines the Seaside boardwalk.

Ben Holladay (1819– 87), who created a stagecoach empire before becoming a railroad man, built his Seaside House hotel there in the 1870s. The namesake summer resort grew up around it.

with much of his mouth and nose blown away, willard collapsed and was presumed dead

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PIONEERS & SETTLERS

THE BOY THE INDIANS COULD NOT KILL A CHEYENNE RAID IN 1869 KANSAS DEVASTATED THE ALDERDICE FAMILY, BUT 4-YEAR-OLD WILLIS SURVIVED HIS MULTIPLE WOUNDS

BY JEFF BROOME

O

n May 31, 1869, settlers escorted by a detachment of 7th U.S. Cavalry troopers retraced the deadly events of the previous afternoon when Cheyenne Dog Soldiers had raided the Saline Valley in Lincoln County, Kansas. The troopers’ grim search revealed that eight settlers were dead and three missing—two young married women and an 8-month-old girl.

About 60 Dog Soldiers under Chief Tall Bull had staged the May 30 raid in north-central Kansas. Splitting into sorties of six to 20 warriors, they’d hunted down the homesteaders then scrabbling out a living in the valley.

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The Cheyennes had eluded pursuit by the 7th Cavalry in the wake of Lt. Col. George A. Custer’s Nov. 27, 1868, victory on the banks of the Washita River in Indian Territory. Having fled through the Texas Panhandle, they were headed north for the Powder River country in Dakota Territory. Meanwhile, Brevet Maj. Gen. Eugene A. Carr and nearly 250 men of the 5th Cavalry had been ordered northeast from Fort Lyon, Colorado Territory, to Fort McPherson, Neb., on the Platte River. En route on May 13, in the vicinity of present-day Traer, Kan., Carr’s soldiers encountered Tall Bull’s warriors. In the clash along Beaver Creek near a landmark named Elephant Rock the soldiers killed upward of 25 warriors and destroyed some two dozen lodges. Four troopers were killed. Three days later Carr again engaged the warriors, wounding at least two dozen and losing no troopers.

In retaliation Tall Bull resolved to attack the same valley in which raiding Cheyenne warriors had murdered as many as 40 settlers the summer before.

The May 30 raid began along Spillman Creek near present-day Denmark. Continuing south several miles to the Saline River, the Dog Soldiers caught other settlers unawares. It was in the wake of that murder raid responding 7th Cavalry troopers found eight dead settlers and one wounded 12-yearold boy who would die at Fort Harker 10 weeks later. Of the three missing, two would not survive their captivity.

The family of Tom and Susanna (née Zeigler) Alderdice suffered the most. The couple was raising four children. John, 5, and Willis, 4, were the sons of Susanna and first husband James Alfred Daily, a Kansas infantryman who had died of typhoid fever at Fort Leavenworth on Nov. 25, 1864, when Willis was scarcely 7 weeks old. Two years later the widowed young mother married Tom Alderdice, and by the time of the May 1869 raid the family had grown to include 2-year-old Frank and 8-month-old Alice. Susanna, 24, was five months pregnant with her fifth child when John and Frank were killed and she, Alice and neighbor Maria Weichell were captured.

In 1911, more than four decades after the attack, Tom Alderdice testified in an affidavit

JEFF BROOME COLLECTION (3)

On May 30, 1869, raiding Cheyenne Dog Soldiers captured Willis Daily’s mother, Susanna Alderdice, and baby sister Alice, as depicted here by James Davis Nelson.

Though the raiders fired five arrows into Willis, the 4-year-old survived his ordeal.

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JEFF BROOME COLLECTION (3)

PIONEERS & SETTLERS

to Lincoln attorney John J. McCurdy that the Cheyennes had killed Alice soon after leaving the valley.

Tom was returning from a business trip to Salina the day after the raid when he learned of the destruction of his family. He then spent several days tracking the Dog Soldiers and approached their camp. Traveling to Fort Leavenworth for help, he wrote a report noting the probable location of the camp and describing his missing wife and daughter. That report was telegraphed to Fort McPherson and then delivered to Carr in the Republican River Valley. Meanwhile, Tom returned to Lincoln County and with about 100 volunteers searched for the Cheyennes and may have visited their abandoned camp. The rescued Weichell later reported that Alice, due to her continual crying, had been strangled with a bowstring and left hanging in a tree in camp. In his 1911 affidavit Tom said Alice had been “roasted alive.” Had the Cheyennes tossed the body on a fire before moving on, and had Tom found his infant daughter’s charred remains? We can only speculate.

On July 11, six weeks to the day of the Kansas raid, Carr surprised Tall Bull’s village in northeast Colorado Territory at a place called Summit Springs, 14 miles south of present-day Sterling. There the soldiers and their Pawnee scouts (Pawnees were traditional enemies of the Cheyennes), killed Tall Bull and upward of 52 of his warriors. Susanna was found dead beside a tepee on the far side of where Carr’s men had charged into the village. In his 1911 affidavit Tom Alderdice said Chief Little Bear’s wife shot Susanna in the head, as witnessed by Weichell.

According to the June 20, 1869, Leavenworth Times and Conservative, Tom said the Dog Soldiers had riddled his eldest son, John, with four bullets, youngest son Frank with five arrows (his 1911 affidavit differing slightly in the number and type of projectiles). Middle son Willis was found unconscious but alive with five arrows in his body, “one entering his back to the depth of 5 inches.”

Responding to a 1965 inquiry, Willis’ daughter Anna Watters distinctly recalled having seen the five scars from arrow wounds on her father’s back.

The Cheyennes had stripped and tortured the boys before shooting them with bullets and arrows, raid survivor Bridget Kine later testified. Kine had managed to hide along the banks of the Saline and listened, horrified, as the boys were “shamefully abused and murdered.”

When found the day after the raid, Willis was taken to the home of Mart Hendrickson, north of the river. Those attending him pulled out four of the arrows, but the fifth had lodged deep into the underside of his breastbone, somehow missing his heart, and no one was able to yank it free. When Willis regained consciousness, he wailed continually from

the pain caused by the remaining arrow.

Recalling that an Army surgeon, Lt. William H. Renick, was assigned to the 7th Cavalry, the settlers tracked him down at the Schermerhorn Ranch, south of the Saline. Of the company of troopers who had arrived late on the afternoon of the raid, most had continued 25 miles north to the Solomon River in pursuit of the Indians, leaving only Renick and a handful of soldiers behind.

The surgeon, perhaps fearing another attack, flatly refused to cross the river to remove the arrow from the suffering Willis. Two days later neighbors resolved to do the job themselves. Washington Smith held the boy down, while Phil Lantz used a bullet mold as pliers to yank out the shaft. Onetime scout James Jared “J.J.” Peate kept the arrowhead as a memento. Later donated to the Lincoln County Historical Society, it now resides in the county museum.

The late Susanna Alderdice’s parents, Michael and Mary Zeigler, who lived just east of Lincoln at the time of the raid, took in Willis. They soon moved out to the since vanished township of Cedron— 3 miles due west of present-day Ash Grove and within 10 miles of Tom and Susanna’s former homestead—where they raised the boy to adulthood.

On March 25, 1886, 21-year-old Willis married 18-year-old neighbor Mary Twibell. The couple raised three children—James Alfred (named for his grandfather Daily, the late infantryman), born April 3, 1887; Rhoda Anna, born Feb. 12, 1889; and Elsie Ellen, born June 16, 1891. Two years later Willis moved his family to Blue Rapids, Kan., where he settled into life as a farmer. Diagnosed with cancer in his early 50s, he died on June 16, 1920, daughter Elsie’s 29th birthday, and was buried on granddaughter Berniece’s eighth birthday.

Though Willis Daily seldom spoke of the raid, he recalled every detail from that awful day of May 30, 1869, when he was just 4 years old.

Above: Willis Daily, 21, posed for this portrait on March 25, 1886, the day of his wedding to Mary Twibell. Top: Daily relaxes with wife Mary and grandkids at their farm outside Blue Rapids, Kan.

the cheyennes had stripped and tortured the boys before shooting them with bullets and arrows

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WESTERN ENTERPRISE

Corundum is the primary mineral in this sample from the Gallatin River in Montana’s Gallatin County. It was there in 1901 Harris Kirk unearthed crystals that assayed at 92 percent corundum.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE CORUNDUM KING

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farm west of Salesville and an 80-acre dairy farm in Bozeman.

Harris Kirk took to ranch life and on Sept. 15, 1886, married local farmer’s daughter Elizabeth Baker in Bozeman.

Soon after he bought four sections of land (2,560 acres) at $1 an acre 4 miles west of Salesville. There, the young man grazed 600 cattle and also set aside 100 acres for growing wheat and oats. He and Elizabeth lost a child in infancy in 1887, but they would go on to raise five children —Grace, Cassius, Marguerite, Howard and Eleanor.

Meanwhile, Kirk continued to add to his ranch holdings in what became the state of Montana on Nov. 8, 1889. During the nationwide economic Panic of 1893, when beef was selling for the low price of 5 cents a pound, he took a carload of his steers to market in Chicago and returned

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GALLATIN HISTORY MUSEUM (2)

W

hen Harris Kirk discovered crystals of corundum—a mineral building block of gemstones—on his Bozeman, Mont., ranch in February 1901, he had visions of great wealth. He figured it would only be a matter of time before he found sapphires, as had happened when Yogo blue sapphires were unearthed farther north. As word of his find leaked out, even the press confirmed his expectations. “It is expected that, among other things usually found in mines of this nature, the sapphire will not be conspicuous by its absence,” Butte’s Daily Inter Mountain speculated on April 16, “and should the Oriental blue be found, the claim will be a very desirable one indeed, as these stones are valued at $20 per carat in the rough, and it does not take much of a stone to weigh a carat.”

With a large and growing family to support, Kirk was ready to be rich.

Born to Henry and Margaret (née Sample) Kirk on April 1, 1863, in New Castle, Pa., Harris Kirk was the fourth of six children (the youngest of whom was adopted). Three years earlier his father, who ran a hardware store in nearby Mahoningtown, had shortened his last name from Kirkpatrick to Kirk, as he’d grown tired of signing his long name to payroll checks. In 1880 Henry left the management of the store to 22-year-old son Charles and headed west in advance of his family in hopes a drier climate would relieve his asthma. Lighting on Montana Territory’s Gallatin County, he bought a 320-acre ranch 2 miles northwest of Salesville (present-day Gallatin Gateway). Over the next couple of years Margaret and teen sons Harris and Howard joined him. In 1884 Henry and Margaret bought two more tracts of land—a 160-acre

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

MONTANA RANCHER HARRIS KIRK UNEARTHED THE VALUABLE MINERAL ON HIS LAND AND PLUNGED INTO MINING—TO HIS OWN DETRIMENT

BY TERRY HALDEN

GALLATIN HISTORY MUSEUM (2)

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

WESTERN ENTERPRISE

to deposit a check for $3,000 in his Bozeman bank account. In 1899, using red sandstone quarried from the ranch and with the help of two masons, he completed a two-story house with all the modern conveniences. The family entertained lavishly and were popular throughout the area. The ranching life had been good to Kirk. He should have stuck to it.

After unearthing those promising crystals in early 1901, Kirk took a sample to Bozeman, where it assayed at 92 percent corundum. The mineral, second in hardness only to dia monds a nd a n excellent abrasive (used in grinding stones and sandpaper), was then worth as much as $60 per ton. Hearing of the find, Dr. Columbus Epaminondas “C.E.” McCoy, of Belgrade, approached K irk, and the two resolved to organize a company to mine the product . On November 23 t he Montana Corundum Co. was born. McCoy, Kirk and partner Fred L. Klein each had 400 shares, while engineer Leverett S. Ropes and mine superintendent Prestley S. Johnston each had 100 shares.

As soon as the company was formed, Colorado School of Mines professor Frank W. Traphagen and geologist Reno Sales filed suit in district court, seeking a two-thirds interest in the property. The pair contended that on or before Feb. 23, 1900, they had located the corundum ledge at the head of Elk Creek on what they supposed was public land. It was later revealed Kirk had purchased the land from the Northern Pacific Railroad. In early January 1902 the case was heard at the Ga l latin County Courthouse in Bozeman, and the plaintiffs were given 30 days to resubmit their case. They never did, and Montana Corundum continued its operations unabated.

Meanwhile, brothers James and Edwin Blankenship located a second corundum mine a mile to the northeast, and on May 26 they and several investors formed the Bozeman Corundum Co. Kirk’s next order of business was to erect a mill, for which he borrowed the funds from a Bozeman bank. “Corundum is being turned out in large quantities by the mill of the Montana Corundum Co.,” The Butte Inter Mountain reported on Dec. 12,

1902. “Shipments will begin at an early date, and the valuable product is expected to soon become famed in the markets of the world.” For a nominal fee Bozeman Corundum also used Montana Corundum’s mill to process its ore. Although a disagreement among the directors of Montana Corundum caused a brief shutdown in 1903, the company’s operations continued to make a profit. Its fortunes would soon take a downturn, however, owing to a development that took place far from Montana.

Through much of 19th century French scientists had been seeking ways to synthesize such gemstones as rubies and sapphires, and in 1902 Aug uste Verneuil announced his discovery of just such a method. He’d found a way to synthetically produce corundum crystals twice the size of those found in nature. It wasn’t long before such synthetic corundum could be mass produced more cheaply than mining and milling the natural kind. Montana Corundum was forced to close down. With no mill and the same bleak future, Bozeman Corundum did likewise.

Kirk, on the hook to the bank for the loan to finance the mill, suffered financially more than anyone. He’d put up his land as collateral, and to satisfy the bank he was forced to sell off a large chunk of it, including the family ranch house.

Rather than trying to scrape a living out of his remaining small farm, he sold out and used the proceeds to purchase a small herd of dairy cows that he operated on land closer to Salesville bequeathed to him by his father.

Kirk’s mother, Margaret, had died on Sept. 20, 1891. Father Henry, who had remarried in 1893 and “retired” to a 160-acre farm northeast of Bozeman, had died on Jan. 25, 1902. At age 60 Harris moved to California with wife Elizabeth, but they missed Montana and returned to farm in the region another 15 years. After Elizabeth died at age 74 on Jan. 7, 1940, Harris went to live with son Howard and his wife, Mary, in Bozeman.

While his venture into mining was short-lived, Harris Kirk lived a long life, dying in Bozeman at age 95 on June 9, 1958.

On Sept. 15, 1886, rancher Harris Kirk (left) married farmer’s daughter Elizabeth Baker (below left) in Bozeman. Hoping for great riches after his crystal find, Kirk and partners formed the Montana Corundum Co. on Nov. 23, 1901.

it wasn’t long before synthetic corundum could be mass produced more cheaply than mining and milling the natural kind

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ART OF THE WEST

Set off whimsically in front of the museum’s waterfall is John Campbell’s 2014 bronze Honeymoon at Crow Fair. Right: Harry Jackson’s dynamic 1978 bronze Two Champs is in good company.

A FLORIDA MUSEUM LOOKS WEST

T

hough Florida forts once held tribal prisoners of the Indian wars, few people would otherwise connect the state to the American West. But in 2018 St. Petersburg welcomed the new 80,000-square-foot James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art (with 26,000 square feet of gallery space), and its executive director has a distinct Old West connection. Laura Hine is a great-granddaughter of Pat Garrett, the New Mexico sheriff who shot and killed Billy the Kid in 1881. Hine even named her youngest son Garrett, though she downplays that family tie. “I named him after my mother,” she says, “who just happens to be the granddaughter of Pat Garrett.”

While a Western museum in the South may seem unlikely, so does Hine’s path to being appointed director. A Tampa native, she studied aerospace engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis Md., spent six years as a naval surface warfare

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officer, then became a licensed general contractor in her hometown. She met and married Hank Hine, director of St. Petersburg’s Dalí Museum, and through him got to know Tom and Mary James, art patrons with an extensive collection of Western and wildlife art. When the couple decided to gift that collection to the St. Petersburg community, Tom James tapped contractor Hine to design the building and its galleries. “It was a radical renovation of an existing building that was essentially a parking garage,” Hine says. “How do you turn that into a world-class museum?”

Today museum visitors start in the Introductory gallery, featuring a range of Western paintings and sculptures. The succeeding Early West gallery presents such masters as Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. Next up is the Native Life gallery, which relates the history and culture of American Indian tribes.

COURTESY JAMES MUSEUM OF WESTERN & WILDLIFE ART (5)

THE JAMES MUSEUM OF WESTERN & WILDLIFE ART BRINGS THE OLD AND NEW WEST TO ST. PETERSBURG

BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS

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ART OF THE WEST

an influential and thought-provoking museum that inspires every visitor. That’s a big vision. I think that our exhibitions over the next couple of years might demonstrate that that’s the direction we’re going.”

That lineup includes “Warhol’s West” (Oct. 2, 2021–Jan. 9, 2022); “Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories” ( Jan. 28–March 16, 2022); “Ansel Adams: The Masterworks” and “Clyde Butcher: America the Beautiful” (April 30– June 31, 2022); and “Black Pioneers: Legacy in the American West” (Sept. 3, 2022–Jan. 8, 2023).

“The potential here is so high,” Hine says, “and I feel really great about that.”

Above left: Visitors take in an Indian-rendered painting in the Native Artists gallery. Above: The Native Life gallery addresses historical and cultural aspects.

Below: From its 2018 opening the James has taken St. Pete by storm.

COURTESY JAMES MUSEUM OF WESTERN & WILDLIFE ART (5)

The linked Native Artists and Jewel Box galleries showcase contemporary Indian art and jewelry, respectively. Fur traders, cowboys and other “new arrivals” are the focus of the Frontier gallery. The Wildlife gallery expands beyond Western animal life for a global perspective on conservation issues.

Finally, the New West gallery looks at the region through the prism of pop, cubist, surreal and other modern genres.

Hine took the helm as director in 2019 at Tom James’ urging. “He said, ‘You have good business sense, you have good common sense, and you’re good with people,’” she recalls. “Our vision is to be

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INDIAN LIFE

INDIANS ON THE SANTA FE TRAIL

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steal their mules, horses and other livestock.

Most tribes also felt an obligation to defend their hunting grounds. Indians depended on the buffalo and other game for sustenance, while white hunters would shoot a buffalo for sport and leave much of the carcass to rot.

In mid-August 1828 a caravan of 220 men with 1,200 head of stock left Santa Fe for the return trip to Missouri. As the party approached the Cimarron River, two men scouting ahead were killed by unknown Indians. Soon after the group was approached by seven Pawnees. Assuming incorrectly the Indians were from the same tribe as those who had killed the scouts, the traders opened fire, killing all but one Pawnee, who fled and reported the massacre to his tribe. The Pawnees retaliated by stampeding about 700 of the party’s horses and mules.

The following month another Missouribound caravan of 21 men and 150 horses and mules left Santa Fe. Among its number was 21-year-old Milton E. Bryan, who kept a journal. Near Upper Cimarron Springs the caravan came upon a large Comanche camp.

After feigning friendship, the Indians attacked. “We were kept busy all night resisting the onslaughts of our merciless foes,” Bryan wrote. The fighting continued off and on for

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CHARLES GOSLIN, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

T

he opening of the Santa Fe Trail to Americans in 1821 (see related feature, P. 36) further complicated the “Indian problem” west of Missouri. At first tribes living along the trail scarcely noticed the small wagon parties passing through. But as traders and travelers began to violate their hunting grounds and otherwise disrupt their way of life, the Indians defended their turf. Or at least they tried to.

In decades prior Osage and Kansa (Kaw) Indians lived in relative peace in what today is the eastern third of Kansas. “Never had I witnessed such general happiness in any community as prevailed here,” George C. Sibley recalled of observing 1,000 Indians at an Osage hunting camp in 1811. As government factor at Fort Osage, Sibley had traded with the tribes since 1808.

Even with the opening of the trail, caravans had little to fear from Indian attacks over the 150 miles stretch from the western border of Missouri to Council Grove.

Accustomed to trading at Fort Osage, the Osages and Kansas weren’t threatened by the influx of whites. In 1825 the tribes signed right-of-way treaties that permitted the government to mark the route and promised Americans free use of the trail in perpetuity. A period of calm followed along that section of the Santa Fe. To further assure traders safe passage, the government also made boilerplate treaties with the Pawnee, Cheyenne and other tribes, Article 4 of which stated in part, “Nor will they, whilst on their distant excursions, molest or interrupt any American citizen or citizens who may be passing from the United States to New Mexico or returning from thence to the United States.”

Cheyennes and Sioux lived and hunted along the original Mountain Route of the trail. Pawnees were centered farther north in what today is Nebraska, but they hunted along the route. As Comanches, Kiowas and Jicarilla Apaches lived along the onward trail in the Mexican province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México, they were beyond U.S. control—for the time being.

Within three years traffic along the trail had increased, as had friction with the Indians. As tensions mounted, Indian raiders struck several trading parties, primarily to

MAP BY RONALD KIL

AT LEAST A HALF DOZEN TRIBES LIVED ALONG THE ROUTE, WITNESSES TO AN EVER INCREASING NUMBER OF PASSING WAGONS

BY DIANA WEST

CHARLES GOSLIN, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

MAP BY RONALD KIL

INDIAN LIFE four days before the Comanches succeeded in stampeding the party’s horses and mules. After burying some $10,000 in coin, the traders continued afoot until rescuers picked up every last straggler. They recovered their money the following spring.

Such incidents prompted newly elected President Andrew Jackson to have U.S. troops escort the spring 1829 caravan west to the Arkansas River crossing. At one point an estimated 2,000 Indians lined the hills overlooking the trail. But the sight of four full companies of 6th U.S. Infantry soldiers under Major Bennett Riley apparently deterred them. But not for long.

Soon after the caravan crossed the river, 120 Mexican soldiers showed up to escort them into Santa Fe. The Indians attacked regardless, killing two of the soldiers en route. And when Riley’s escort party encamped along the Arkansas near Chouteau’s Island, he lost four men to attacks. The Indians also ran off many horses as well as oxen used to pull the supply wagons.

A year later trader William Bent took a different approach. Knowing the Comanches and Cheyennes were committed enemies, he resolved to exploit the fact to his benefit. Bent was operating a trading camp on the Mountain Route. When Comanches came looking for a pair of Cheyennes who’d taken refuge in the camp, he told the inquiring warriors they weren’t there. That simple act helped him secure the Cheyenne trade at Bent’s Fort, built three years later in what today is southeastern Colorado.

In 1846 17-year-old Lewis H. Garrard was traveling the Mountain Route on a lark. He spent several months at Bent’s Fort, often visiting a nearby Cheyenne lodge. “Their company was acceptable,” he recalled, “as their manners, conversation and pipes were agreeable.” Despite his favorable impression, on his return stateside Garrard enlisted with the Army at Fort Mann (west of present-day Dodge City, Kan.). “As I had never been in an Indian fight,” he explained, “I concluded, for excitement’s sake, to join them.” Though he experienced little excitement there, when he eventually got his discharge papers and set out for home, he was involved in two Indian fights—“nearly scaring the life out of us,” he wrote.

The Jicarilla Apaches created the most trouble along the trail, raiding caravans and clashing with the cavalry into the early 1850s. On March 30, 1854, upward of 200 Jicarillas roundly defeated a troop of 60 U.S. Dragoons at the Battle of Cieneguilla, in the vicinity of present-day Pilar, N.M. The following week a punitive expedition led by Kit Carson dispersed the Jicarillas, many of whom died in the extreme cold. The tribe soon settled on a reservation.

Pressure on the remaining tribes along the route picked up with the 1858 discovery of gold in what would become Colorado. “Traffic increased on the trail,” Indian Affairs Commissioner Alfred B. Greenwood noted in his annual report, “which caused Indians to feel more difficulties in maintaining their natural subsistence.”

In October 1867 near the site of present-day Medicine Lodge, Kan., leading Kiowa, Comanche, Kiowa-Apache, Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho representatives signed a series of treaties with the government, which assigned each tribe its own section of a 3-million-acre reservation in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). However, many warriors refused to leave their hunting grounds and the only way of life they had ever known. Regardless, the treaty was never ratified. From midAugust 1868 to mid-February 1869 Cheyenne Dog Soldiers targeted travelers and settlers along the trail through what had become Kansas Territory. The Army caught up to them in northeast Colorado Territory, where on July 11, 1869, at the Battle of Summit Springs, troopers and their Pawnee scouts killed Tall Bull and upward of 52 of his warriors.

In September 1878 some 300 Northern Cheyennes led by Chiefs Little Wolf and Dull Knife fled north from Indian Territory, bound for their traditional lands in Wyoming and Montana territories. In Kansas the renegades stole horses and cattle, killed some 40 settlers and fought off pursuing soldiers in a number of skirmishes. Yet traffic on the Santa Fe Trail wasn’t affected. By then it was in free fall, as railroads crisscrossed Kansas, allowing for faster and more frequent shipment of goods. On Feb. 9, 1880, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe reached Santa Fe, leaving Indians along the tired old trail to watch trains go by instead of wagons.

On Aug. 10, 1825, at Council Grove, Kan., Osage Indians and U.S. commissioners, including George C. Sibley, sign a treaty that grants travelers free and safe passage on the Santa Fe Trail, as depicted in a painting by Charles Goslin.

dog soldiers targeted Travelers and settlers along the trail through what had become Kansas territorY

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COURTESY CAROL WALKER

Gypsy Vanner horses plunge through the snow in this gorgeous print by equine photographer Carol Walker.

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COURTESY CAROL WALKER

STYLE

Witness the living legacy of the Old West in Carol Walker’s equine photos, enjoy the vaquero art of Sean Michael Chavez and rest a spell in Jackson, Wyo. 31

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Unbridled

A palomino mare, her yearling cremello and her chestnut foal gather at Oregon’s Palomino Buttes Herd Management Area.

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ALL IMAGES COURTESY CAROL WALKER

Brought to the New World by the Spanish in the 1500s, American mustangs are a powerful living reminder of the Old West. Their bloodlines include Barb and Iberian breeds.

Extremely intelligent and intuitive, these horses were tough to capture and domesticate but performed many laborious tasks for people out West.

The stunning images by photographer Carol J. Walker (above with her adopted mustang, Mica) bring that legacy to life. Prints are available for purchase on her website [livingimagescarolwalker.com].

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STYLE A family of mustangs roams the Red Desert Complex in Wyoming.

ALL IMAGES COURTESY CAROL WALKER

The father of Mica, Walker’s mustang, remains wild and free in Wyoming’s Adobe Town Herd Management Area.

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ART

Arte de Vaquero

Wild Ride, 48-by-48-inch oil on canvas

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Encounter, 36-by-48-inch oil on canvas

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IMAGES COURTESY HOTEL JACKSON

Diablero, 60-by-48-inch oil on canvas

IMAGES COURTESY SEAN MICHAEL CHAVEZ

Galleries across the Southwest showcase the paintings of native New Mexican artist Sean Michael Chavez [paintingsofthewest.com]. Chavez’s works are in notable corporate and private collections, and his recent show at Santa Fe’s Acosta-Strong Fine Art gallery sold out. Later this year his art will feature at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City and the Albuquerque Museum of Art. Next year, he will show at the Coors Western Art show in Denver’s National Western Center and the Couse Foundation Gala & Art Auction at the Couse-Sharp Historic Site in Taos, N.M.

STYLE Clockwise from top: The entrance to Hotel Jackson; at each corner of Jackson’s town square is a steel frame arch decorated with more than 2,000 local elk antlers; the hotel’s Sacajawea Library; one of the hotel’s 55 luxurious rooms.

TRAVEL

IMAGES COURTESY HOTEL JACKSON

IMAGES COURTESY SEAN MICHAEL CHAVEZ

Luxury & Location

The AAA Four Diamond Hotel Jackson [hoteljackson.com] is in the heart of Jackson, Wyo., a stone’s skip down the Snake River from Grand Teton National Park and a scenic two-hour drive south of Yellowstone National Park. The hotel provides such unique experiences as hat making, while the concierge can help you put together a perfect adventure package.

After a meal at the in-house Figs restaurant, lounge awhile in the Sacajawea Library.

Finally, kick off your boots in a room or suite with a pillow-top bed, a fireplace and handsome decor.

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The End Had a Beginning

Artist Jim Carson depicts the End of the Santa Fe Trail, which for westbound traders and travelers was of course Santa Fe, the capital of Nuevo México. William “Father of the Santa Fe Trail“ Becknell first made the trip in 1821. The painting at right by Daniel MacMorris is titled William Becknell Expedition to Santa Fe, 1822. On that second trip he took three wagons. On his first trip he had only packhorses.

WILLIAM BECKNELL

REVISITING THE SANTA FE TRAIL Two hundred years have passed since William Becknell led the first successful American trading party from Missouri to then Nuevo México

By Diana West 36 WILD WEST

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Recalling the Route

In the early 20th century the Daughters of the American Revolution and the state of Kansas placed markers (since restored) along the Kansas stretch of the Santa Fe Trail.

I PAINTING BY JIM CARSON, JIMCARSONSTUDIO.COM; INSET: SANTA FE TRAIL ASSOCIATION; ABOVE: BILLY HATHORN, CC BY-SA 3.0

n the 1821–80 heyday of the Santa Fe Trail traders, teamsters, settlers, the military and assorted others plied the route. Early travelers faced daunting obstacles, including mountainous terrain, biting cold, blazing heat, torrential rains, blood-sucking mosquitoes, biting flies, snakes, runaway mules and horses, Indian ambushes, starvation and often no water to drink or wood with which to build a fire. Regardless, many made repeated trips along the 900-mile route from Missouri to Santa Fe, some even recalling it fondly. This year states and local communities along the Santa Fe Trail are marking the 200th anniversary of a route that played a crucial role as the westering nation’s first commercial highway.

In 1821 William Becknell of Franklin, Mo., was drowning in debt. To remedy his financial woes, the desperate U.S. Army veteran turned serial entrepreneur proposed a trading expedition.

On June 25 he posted a notice in the local Missouri Intelligencer seeking able-bodied men willing to join his venture. It read in part: Every man will fit himself for the trip with a horse, a good rifle and as much ammunition as the company may think necessary for a tour or three months trip and sufficient cloathing [sic ] to keep him warm and comfortable.…

It is requisite that every eight men shall have a packhorse, an ax and a tent to secure them from the inclemency of bad weather.

On August 10 Missouri was admitted to the Union as the 24th state. Less than a month later, on September 1, Becknell and five other men set out with packhorses carrying $300 in merchandise. Their destination: the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México. In the past American traders rash enough to visit Spanish-governed Santa Fe had been arrested and sent to Mexico City in chains. Unknown to Becknell when he set out, Mexico was on the cusp of winning its war of independence from Spain.

Becknell’s trading party headed west through unorganized territory that would become Kansas, veered northwest near the site of present-day Dodge City to follow the Arkansas River into what would become Colorado, then traveled southwest through Raton Pass into Santa Fe de Nuevo México. Their route came to be called the Mountain Route.

On November 1, two months into their trying journey, Becknell updated his journal. “Unexpected hardships and obstacles occurring almost daily,” he wrote. “Our company is much discouraged; but the prospect of a near termination of our journey excites hope and redoubled exertion, although our horses are so reduced that we only travel from 8 to 15 miles per day. We found game scarce near the mountains and one night encamped without wood or water.”

On November 13 they encountered Mexican soldiers near the site of present-day Las Vegas, N.M. Much to their surprise the soldiers were friendly and permitted the Americans to continue to Santa Fe, where they arrived three days later. Relieved to be free of Spanish rule, the citizens welcomed Becknell and company with open arms. The first successful legal commerce between the United States and Santa Fe was underway.

The trading expedition was a great success, Becknell realizing a $6,000 return on his $300 investment. On December 13 he, a member of his group and two other men they met in Santa Fe (perhaps trappers) set out for the United States with trade blankets, mules, donkeys and bags full of silver coins. Avoiding the mountain passes, they took a more southerly route and arrived in Franklin on Jan. 30, 1822. Becknell’s exact path home isn’t certain, but it proved the basis for the more popular route later called the Cimarron Cutoff.

Becknell almost immediately planned a second trip for the spring. He formed a company of 21 men who together purchased $3,000 worth of trade goods and set out from Franklin with three OCTOBER 2021

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Westward Ho!

Santa Fe–bound travelers could take the Mountain Route or the shorter Cimarron Route. Their trailhead was in Missouri— first in Franklin and then Independence.

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In early 1825 U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, realizing the commercial potential of the “highway between nations,” sponsored a bill to survey and mark the Santa Fe Trail from Missouri to the Arkansas River, the international divide between the United States and Nuevo México. Outgoing President James Monroe signed the bill into law on March 3.

Incoming President John Quincy Adams promptly appointed Lieutenant Governor Benjamin Harrison Reeves of Missouri, prominent Illinois politician Thomas Mather and George C. Sibley commissioners to oversee the survey and negotiate with American Indians along the Santa Fe Trail. Sibley was especially useful, as he had dealt with the Osage and Kansa (Kaw) Indians as the government factor at Fort Osage, Mo., from its 1808 founding.

Sibley recorded an August 9 meeting with the Osages. “The commissioners explained to them fully and clearly what they desire respecting the road,” he wrote, “and proposed to give them $800 as compensation for the privilege of marking it through their land and the free use of it forever.” Agreeing to the terms, the Indians signed a treaty the next day and were paid in cash and merchandise. Sibley named the site Council Grove, as the parties had met beneath a copse of trees. On August 16 the Kansa representatives agreed to the same terms (see related article, P. 28).

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BART SMITH (3)

From 1822 to ’28 traders shipped some $452,000 worth of goods from Franklin to Santa Fe, though by 1824 savvy Mexican officials had begun imposing import taxes, cutting into the Americans’ fabulous margins.

DOUG HOLDREAD, COURTESY OF THE SANTA FE TRAIL ASSOCIATION

loaded wagons on May 22, 1822. Near the site of present-day Great Bend, Kan., two of his party went in search of runaway horses and were waylaid by Osages. “They were overtaken, stripped, barbarously whipped and robbed of their horses, guns and clothes,” Becknell wrote.

The party continued southwest to Santa Fe on the Cimarron Cutoff, shaving 10 days from their previous travel time on the Mountain Route.

Again they were generously rewarded, this time reaping a profit in excess of $90,000. Their trade goods gone, Becknell sold for $750 the wagon he had bought in Missouri for $150. “A great advance is obtained on goods, and the trade is very profitable,” Becknell advised interested Americans back home. “Money and mules are plentiful, and they do not hesitate to pay the price demanded for an article if it suits their purpose or their fancy.”

Becknell’s back-to-back expeditions set in motion a quarter century of U.S. trade with Mexican-controlled Santa Fe and earned him the title “Father of the Santa Fe Trail.” A stampede of American traders followed in his tracks, most of whom took the shorter Cimarron Cutoff.

BART SMITH (3)

DOUG HOLDREAD, COURTESY OF THE SANTA FE TRAIL ASSOCIATION

While Sibley considered the project the honor of a lifetime, he had trouble mustering enthusiasm on either side of the border. On reaching Nuevo México, he waited several months for word from Mexico City regarding its interest in having his survey party mark its segment of the trail.

The Mexican government invited the Americans to survey the route, but “without marking or cutting it out.” Sibley made a second trip down the trail, during which he helped set up 37 mounds of sod on the U.S. side, marking the trail from just south of Fort Osage to the Arkansas River (in present-day western Kansas). He sent the commission’s completed paperwork with recommendations to Washington, D.C., on Oct. 27, 1827, but it was never published.

By then the Missouri River had begun to encroach on Franklin, so in 1828 officials moved the town 2 miles inland and renamed it New Franklin. That effectively ended its tenure as the eastern terminus of the trail. Founded in 1827, Independence, Mo., 90 miles to the west, boasted a landing on the Missouri River from which boats could unload goods onto wagons. Happily taking the trade away from New Franklin, Independence remained the primary trailhead of the Santa Fe for about 20 years.

In the 1840s Westport, Mo., a dozen miles farther west, began to split the trade with Independence. From 1840 to ’43 freighting firms operating out of Westport reportedly grew from 60 wagons to 350, their trade valued at $450,000. In the 1850s Westport was incorporated into Kansas City.

Disputing ownership and use of the trail, the Pawnee, Comanche and other tribes continued to attack caravans. To protect travelers on the U.S. side of the border, the Army established Fort Leavenworth (in present-day northeast Kansas) in 1827. In the spring of 1829 newly elected President Andrew Jackson for the first time ordered U.S. soldiers to escort a Santa Fe–bound caravan to the Arkansas River. But the raiding soon resumed. Finally, in 1833 Congress mandated Army escorts for Santa Fe– bound caravans, a move that largely worked to deter Indian attacks.

In 1831 Josiah Gregg, a tubercular 24-year-old schoolteacher from Independence, joined a Santa Fe–bound caravan on his doctor’s advice, though on setting out he was confined to a wagon bed. Within a week, however, he was able to saddle a horse and ride. By 1834 Gregg was serving as captain of a caravan of 160 men and 80 wagons carrying $150,000 in merchandise. He spent nine years as a trader, logging four round trips on the trail. “The wild, unsettled and independent life of the prairie trader,” he noted in his journal, “makes perfect freedom from nearly every kind of social dependence.” In 1844 Gregg related his experiences on the Santa Fe Trail, as well as regional geography, botany, geology and culture, in his two-volume Commerce of the Prairies, an indispensable guide for future travelers.

That same year 26-year-old trader James Josiah Webb made his first trip down the trail with a wagon, four yokes of oxen, mules and $1,200 in goods purchased partly on credit. Taking the Mountain Route by way of Raton Pass, he doubted his chances of safely descending the steep 300-foot bluff. “Every moment it seemed as if we should, and the mules must, stumble and fall, go rolling and tumbling over the rocks to the bottom,” he recalled. “After long and patient effort we landed on the plain below without accident to man or mule.”

On the return trip to Missouri with pack mules Webb and companions had no luck hunting and nearly starved. “We had boiled corn without grease, salt or seasonings and coffee without sugar for breakfast and boiled, unsifted flour for supper,” he wrote. Then the mules

Traces of Onetime Traders and Travelers

Top: Bent’s Fort was reconstructed in 1976. William and Charles Bent and partner Ceran St. Vrain built the original trading post on the Mountain Route in 1833. Middle: The grave of stage driver Edward Dorris, who died in 1865 of sunstroke or a heart attack, stands outside Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site, near La Junta, Colo. Above: Markers (this one in Grand Pass, Mo.) line the entire route.

balked at crossing an iced-over river. “So, with long ropes thrown around them and men taking hold of each end, we would slide them ashore,” Webb recalled. “And we were all, most of the time, in the water waist deep, breaking and sinking the ice.…Our clothes were frozen, and it required all our efforts and exercise of will to keep from freezing.”

By late 1849 the onetime greenhorn had become a prosperous Santa Fe merchant, boasting “the largest store and premises in town.”

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Trailblazers

Experienced traders lead the way in Ronald Kil’s The Trail to Santa Fe, which the Santa Fe artist rendered to mark the trail bicentennial.

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Thursday [June] 11th.… The cracking of whips, lowing of cattle, braying of mules, whooping and hallowing of the men was a novel sight rather. It is disagreeable to hear so much swearing.…It was a common circumstance for a mule (when first brought into service), while they are hitching him in, to break away with chains and harness all on and run for half hour or more with two or three horsemen at his heels endeavoring to stop him.…

Monday 15th.…Not a breath of air is stirring, and everything is scorching with heat.…

Monday 22nd. Ouch, what a day this is! We started in the rain, came in the rain and stoped [sic ] in the rain.…

Friday 26th.…We had had nothing to eat since dinner yesterday.…We got our dinner, or rather breakfast, about 1 o’clock.…Snakes and mosquitoes are the only disagreeable parts of my prairie life.

Little Arkansas River. June 30th.…To make water was our object; both man and beast were craving it.…

Sunday [ July] 5th.… The traders are all stoped [sic ] here by an order of the government, to wait the arrival of more troops…for our protection to Santa Fe. We are quite a respectable crowd now, with some 75 or 80 wagons of merchandise, beside[s] those of the soldiers.…When all that are behind us come up, we shall number some hundred and fifty.

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DIANA WEST COLLECTION

cozily seated by a small comfortable fire with plenty of tobacco and a modicum of meat to sustain life.” Garrard later penned Wah-to-Yah and the Taos Trail, a lively narrative of his 10-month adventure, published in 1850 before he’d turned 21.

On June 10, 1846, newlywed Susan Shelby Magoffin, 18, and husband Samuel, a trader 27 years her senior, set out on the trail, arriving in Santa Fe on August 31. She kept a journal of their trek, and the following entries lend a sense of the everyday challenges:

RONALD KIL, COURTESY OF THE SANTA FE TRAIL ASSOCIATION

tired in 1854, Webb and John M. Kingsbury joined forces, typically transporting $35,000 to $45,000 in goods west annually. When they retired in 1861, Webb was just 43.

On Sept. 12, 1846, Lewis Hector Garrard, all of 17, joined a westbound caravan to Bent’s Fort (in present-day southeastern Colorado), the largest merchandising and fur-trading post at the time. “We never eat but twice a day, very often but once in 24 hours,” he wrote. The party was thus grateful when it encountered and killed a fat young male buffalo. “The men ate the liver raw,” Garrard recalled. “To hungry men not at all squeamish, raw, warm liver with raw marrow was quite palatable. Before the buffalo range was half traversed, I liked the novel dish pretty well.” He also learned to relish cooked dog meat, deeming it “delicate and sweet,” while leftovers reminded him of “cold roast pig.”

On the return to Missouri insects made the travelers’ lives miserable. “Myriads of biting flies attacked our poor beasts with such fury that speedy progress was impeded,” Garrard wrote.

“In a gnat-infested, fly-ridden, miserably hot and uncomfortable hollow we made noon camp.”

Yet like others similarly beset on the Santa Fe Trail, he recalled the adventure with fondness.

“Never was I more contented, silently happy, than when…with a choice companion or two,

By treaty in the wake of the 1846–48 Mexican War the United States acquired the land comprising present-day California, Utah and Nevada and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. Two years later the former Spanish and Mexican province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México became New Mexico Territory.

By 1854 teamsters could make more money hauling freight for the government than for merchants. Among the eager entrepreneurs, Alexander Majors, William Hepburn Russell and silent partner William B. Waddell contracted to transport supplies from Fort Leavenworth in northeast Kansas into New Mexico Territory, operating 100 wagons pulled by oxen. “Each wagon was as large as four ordinary wagons and carried a load averaging 3 tons,” teamster James A. Little recalled.

From 1831 Council Grove, some 130 road miles west of Independence, served as a rendezvous and dividing point between civilization and the Southwestern frontier. Built in that budding town in 1857, the Last Chance Store for several years was the last stop on the trail to Santa Fe where traders could buy supplies. A sign over the entrance gave fair warning: Last Chance Bacon, Beans & Whiskey On Valentine’s Day 1859 the first Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad passenger train pulled into St. Joseph, Mo., then the westernmost railroad terminus in the United States. From 1863 to ’70 the Kansas Pacific Railway laid tracks west from Kansas City, Mo., through Lawrence, Topeka, Junction City, Fort Harker, Fort Hays and Sheridan (Kan.) to Kit Carson (Colorado Territory). As tracks extended west, so did the eastern terminus of the Santa Fe Trail. In 1868 the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe began laying tracks across Kansas, a branch line of it finally reaching Santa Fe itself on

Feb. 9, 1880. The Old Santa Fe Trail Passes Into O blivion, read a headline in the February 14 Santa Fe New Mexican. The glory days of the Santa Fe Trail had come to an end.

In 1987 the Santa Fe Trail was designated a national historic trail. The National Park Service administers the trail, while the 16 chapters of its nonprofit partner the Santa Fe Trail Association maintain their respective segments. The SFTA’s mission is to protect and preserve the Santa Fe Trail and to promote awareness of its historical legacy. Carole Wendler, chief of interpretation for the National Trails System, sums up its significance this way: “It’s a trade story. It’s an international story. It’s a multicultural story.”

Diana West of Joplin, Mo., has written some 400 travel, historical and other articles for a variety of national, regional and local publications. She is a member of Missouri River Outfitters Chapter of the Santa Fe Trail Association. For further reading she suggests The Santa Fe Trail: Its History, Legends and Lore, by David Dary; “The Journals of Capt. Thomas Becknell,” in the January 1910 Missouri Historical Review; Diary & Letters of Josiah Gregg, Vol. I: Southern Enterprises, 1840–1847, edited by Maurice Garland Fulton; and Adventures in the Santa Fe Trade, 1844– 1847, by James Josiah Webb.

DIANA WEST COLLECTION

RONALD KIL, COURTESY OF THE SANTA FE TRAIL ASSOCIATION

ROUGHING IT In 1958 Smith Bros. Mfg. Co. of Carthage, Mo., sponsored retired marshal Ralph Hooker, of nearby Greenfield, to walk the Santa Fe Trail wearing the company’s line of Big Smith work clothes. “It had always been my dream,” the sometime adventurer explained in his autobiography, Born out of Season, which chronicles the highlights and lowlights of his journey. Hooker trekked the Cimarron Cutoff eastbound from Santa Fe to Independence, Mo. “I made the trail in reverse,” he explained, “because I wanted to get over the hottest and driest parts before it got hotter and drier.”

Setting out on May 3, he walked through rain, sleet, hail and heat and slept out in the open without any blankets. “This was really roughing it,” he said in understatement. By the end of the first week his feet had swollen, and they only got worse—blistering, peeling and bleeding, sometimes soaking his socks. En route he immersed them in running water for relief. While their condition slowed his pace, he still managed to cover 30 to 55 miles a day.

Often offered rides, he refused them all.

Kept apprised of his progress by newspaper coverage, people along the trail greeted Hooker at the outskirts of town, offering him a bed and hot meals. He spent those rest days speaking to civic groups and students, doing radio and television interviews, and learning local trail history.

Hooker carried a flintlock rifle that once belonged to Daniel Boone.

A dozen years earlier he’d acquired the 5-foot-2-inch long gun from the Ash family, whose ancestor had bought it from the famed frontiersman. “It was still very accurate and in good shooting condition,” he said. People young and old were fascinated with the relic, which Hooker put to the test. At central Kansas’ Maxwell Wildlife Refuge the sharpshooting marshal killed a 1,250-pound buffalo with one shot. Just south in Galva he nailed an iron plug on a telephone pole from 100 yards.

On July 15, after a wearying 73 days on the trail, Hooker trudged into Independence, Mo., where he was the guest of honor at a dinner thrown by former President Harry Truman, whose maternal grandfather, Solomon Young, had freighted on the Santa Fe Trail.

“I think of the cold nights, severe storms, miles from any living soul, snakes, starvation and black nights where I could know no direction and I couldn’t sleep from the cold,” Hooker recalled.

“But I never gave up.” He was haunted by the memory of those who preceded him. “Sometimes I felt I could almost hear those wagon wheels crunching along behind me.” —D.W. OCTOBER 2021

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SANTA FE TRAIL HIGHLIGHTS Following are some of the myriad sites to visit along the Santa Fe Trail:

Sibley Rebuilt much as it appeared when abandoned in 1812, the Fort Osage National Historic Landmark (107 Osage St.) in Sibley offers period cooking and sewing demonstrations, while its education center touches on geology and traces the history of Missouri and the Hopewell and Osage Indians.

Independence Just north of town, the Wayne City/ Upper Independence Landing, where steamboats docked to unload merchandise onto Santa Fe–bound wagons, is home to several exhibits. The National Frontier Trails Museum (318 W. Pacific Ave.) relates the history of the five national historic trails—including the Santa Fe— that stem west from Independence.

Council Grove The Trail Days Café & Museum (803 W. Main St.) occupies the RawlinsonTerwilliger Home, a restored stone house built along the trail in 1861. The national historic landmark Hays House Restaurant (112 W. Main St.) dates from 1857, when Daniel Boone’s great-grandson Seth Hays built it. The 1850 Kaw Mission (500 N. Mission St.) was built as a boarding school for Kansa boys, while the 1857 Last Chance Store (516 W. Main St.) was at one time the last trading post on the trail to Santa Fe. Both Kansas state historic sites host museums that relate their history.

and business partner Ceran St. Vrain, it was the largest such post in the region.

NEW MEXICO Santa Fe La Fonda on the Plaza (100 E. San Francisco St.), a member of Historic Hotels of America, occupies the site of the town’s first inn by the same name. Mary Donoho, the first known Anglo American woman to have traveled the trail, in 1833, managed the hotel for four years after arriving in Santa Fe with husband William, a trader, and their toddler, Mary Ann. Watrous Fort Union National Monument (3115 New Mexico Highway 161) centers on the adobe ruins of the fort that protected travelers from 1851 to ’91. Tours, exhibits and special programs explain its historic role.

Larned The Fort Larned National Historic Site (1767 Kansas Highway 156) is an authentic re-creation of the Army fort whose garrison protected travelers from 1859 to ’78. The Santa Fe Trail Center Museum (1349 Kansas Highway 156) relates the history of the route through exhibits, photos and its on-site research library.

Cimarron South of town on New Mexico Highway 21, Philmont Scout Ranch is home to two historic sites—the Kit Carson Home & Museum, which captures life in the 1850s, and the Lucien Maxwell House, also dating from the mid-century, when Maxwell convinced Taos-based friend Carson to visit and build a home along the Rayado River.

COLORADO La Junta Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site (35110 Colorado Highway 194, see photo below) centers on the reconstructed 1840s adobe fur trading post on the trail’s original Mountain Route. Built by brothers Charles and William Bent

Can’t make the trip in person? Take a virtual tour of the trail via safe.toursphere.com or by phone at 505-4286429. Stops include historic sites, interpretive centers, forts and other areas of interest along the 900-mile route. Standard rates apply to phone and data use.

—D.W.

JOHN ELK III (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

KANSAS Olathe Dating from 1858, the Mahaffie Stagecoach Stop & Farm Historic Site (1200 Kansas City Road) was a frequent stop for travelers on the trail. Built in 1865, the Mahaffies’ limestone farmhouse served as a stagecoach stop. Today the

site features a heritage barn, historic outbuildings and a museum (see Collections, P. 76), with stagecoach rides, living history interpreters, period farm implements and representative animals.

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

MISSOURI Franklin A stone post on Route 87 a half mile west of the Boonville Bridge marks the site of old Franklin, the original starting point of the Santa Fe Trail. The South Howard County Historical Society Museum (110 E. Broadway, New Franklin) relates the story of William Becknell and his pioneering trading expeditions.

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2021 SANTA FE TRAIL EVENTS SEPT. 4–5 Celebrating the Santa Fe Trail. This weekend event at the Fort Osage National Historic Landmark (105 Osage St., Sibley) is sponsored by the Missouri River Outfitters Chapter of the Santa Fe Trail Association (SFTA), Jackson County Parks & Rec and the Society of Friends of Fort Osage. For more info visit fortosagenhs.com/event/celebrating-the-santa-fe-trail, call 816-650-3278 or email MRO Chapter President Anne Mallinson (annemallinson@gmail.com) or SFTA President Larry Short (ldshort@comcast.net).

SEPT. 10–11 “Taking the Smoky Hill Trail to Santa Fe.” This encampment and mini symposium will take place at the Fort Wallace Museum (2655 U.S. Highway 40) in Wallace, Kan. As the railroad moved westward in the 1860s and ’70s, the Smoky Hill was incorporated into the Santa Fe Trail. Living historians will highlight the trade that characterized the end-of-the-track towns. For more info email museum@ftwallace.com or follow the museum on Facebook.

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

SEPT. 11 “Raytown’s Festival on the Trails.” This commemoration of the trail bicentennial in Raytown, Mo., is sponsored by the Missouri River Outfitters Chapter of the SFTA, the Raytown Chamber of Commerce, Raytown Historical Society, Raytown Parks Department, Rice-Tremonti House and Cave Spring Association. For more info email president@raytownchamber.com.

SEPT. 17–18 Rendezvous at Council Grove. This event will include the “Voices of the Wind People Pageant,” a mountain man exposition, antique wagon show, blacksmith, wheelwright, nonmotorized parade and the participation of the Kaw Nation. For more info call the Council Grove/Morris County Chamber of Commerce & Tourism at 620767-5413, visit santafetrail200.com or follow @voicesofthewindpeople on Facebook.

JOHN ELK III (ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)

SEPT. 18 Bicentennial of the Santa Fe Trail.

This festival at the Trailside Center (9901 Holmes Road) in Kansas City, Mo., will feature speakers, music and displays of trail-worthy items. For more information call 816-942-3581 or email Margaret Hughes (margarethughes527@yahoo.com).

Santa Fe Trail Days. Burlingame, Kan., will host this commemorative event featuring a pancake breakfast, beard and pie contests, stagecoach rides, speakers, a parade, music and a chuck wagon supper. For more info email Sheila Curtis (shellicurt@gmail.com).

SEPT. 19 Classical Piano Concert. Polish-born Slawomir Dobrzanski, professor of piano at Kansas State University, will play at 2 p.m. in the Council Grove High School Auditorium (129 Hockaday St.). Dobrzanski will present renditions of “Home on the Range” and American Indian music, as well as music composed before 1868. Admission is $15, with proceeds benefiting the Trail Days Historic Site Restoration Project. For info and reservations call 620-767-7986 or email Kenneth McClintock (2traildays@tctelco.net).

SEPT. 22–26 “The Santa Fe Trail Lives On: 200 Years of Commerce & Cultural Connections.”

Co-hosted by the Bent’s Fort Chapter of the SFTA and Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site, this symposium will be held at Bent’s Old Fort in La Junta, Colo., and will include speakers, tours and living history interpreters. For more info visit 2021sfts.com.

SEPT. 25–26 Santa Fe Trail Bicentennial. Events in and around Lyons, Kan., include ”Fair on the Square,” a bike ride, a horse ride, the dedication of Plum Buttes Massacre Memorial, sunset at Gunsight Notch and supper at Ralph’s Ruts (on Kansas Highway 56, 4 miles west of Chase). For more info visit 2021SantaFeTrailKansas.com, call 620241-8719 or email quivira.sfta@gmail.com.

SEPT. 27–OCT. 3 Regional Santa Fe Trail Events. Commemorative events in the cross-border towns of Trinidad, Colo., and Raton, N.M., will include the following: On Sept. 27–30 tour the trail east to Timpas and south to Raton Pass and visit the Baca House and Santa Fe Trail Museum & Daughters of the American Revolution Marker at Kit Carson Park in Trinidad. On Oct. 1–3 in downtown Trinidad take in speakers, re-enactments, theater productions, music, dancers, youth activities and living-history demonstrations, all focused on cultural and historical aspects of the trail. For more info email Marty Hackett (marty.hackett@trinidad.co.gov).

OCT. 17 “Tales From the Trail and the Beyond.” The Quivira Chapter of the Santa Fe Trail Association presents this program by Robert Yarmer, beginning at 2 p.m. at the Ellin-

wood Senior Center (103 N. Main St.) in Ellinwood, Kan. For more info visit 2021SantaFeTrailKansas.com, call 620-2418719 or email quivira.sfta@gmail.com.

NOV. 12–14 Bicentennial Commemoration. The Corazón de los Caminos Chapter of the SFTA and the Las Vegas Citizens Committee for Historic Preservation are hosting events in and around Las Vegas, N.M., to mark the 1821 meeting of William Becknell and Captain Pedro Ignacio Gallego. For more info contact Corazón Chapter President Doyle Daves (davesgd@ yahoo.com or 505-426-8958). The End of Trail Chapter of the SFTA will present related events in and around Santa Fe. (Above photo: Journey’s End, by Reynalda Rivera, in Santa Fe.) For more info contact End of Trail Chapter President Joy Poole (amusejoy@msn.com or 505-820-7828).

NOV. 13 “On the Trail to Your Ancestors.” Held at the Old Mill Museum (120 E. Mill St.) in Lindsborg, Kan., this program will teach one how to research ancestors who traveled the Santa Fe Trail. For more info visit 2021SantaFeTrailKansas.com, call 620-2418719 or email quivira.sfta@gmail.com.

ONGOING Interactive Digital Tour Experience. This digital offering at the Coronado Quivira Museum (105 W. Lyon St.) in Lyons, Kan., and on the museum website [cqmuseum. org] will introduce viewers to sites along the 35 miles of Santa Fe Trail in Rice County. For more info visit 2021SantaFeTrailKansas.com, call 620-241-8719 or email quivira.sfta@gmail.com.

—D.W. For more information visit santafetrail200.org/calendar-of-events and nps. gov/articles/000/santa-fe-trail-200thanniversary-events-map.htm.

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For Him Before He Was Against Him

Zebina Streeter fought alongside renegade Apaches, only to later help track down the most famous Apache leader, depicted here in Geronimo With His Band in the Chiricahua Mountains, an oil on linen by Charlie Dye (1906–72).

CHARLIE DYE, JACKSON HOLE ART AUCTION

TRACKING THE ‘WHITE APACHE’ Zebina Streeter enlisted with the Union in the Civil War, fought with Juáristas in Mexico, raided with Apaches and helped the U.S. Army pursue Geronimo

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O

CHARLIE DYE, JACKSON HOLE ART AUCTION

n April 15, 1877, Apache raiders struck Thomas Hughes’ Casa Blanca ranch in the Sonoita Valley of southeastern Arizona Territory, stealing seven horses and a mule belonging to Hughes and Francisco Martínez, his partner and brother-in-law. It was not the first such attack. The Hughes ranch was a favorite target of renegade Chiricahua Apaches holed up in the rugged mountains along the border between Arizona Territory and Sonora, Mexico.

Hughes, Martínez and ranch hands Jesús Robles, Martin Sánchez and Manuel Soto saddled up and went in pursuit, hoping to recover the livestock. A few miles south, while rounding a bend, they came under fire from some three dozen Apaches concealed in the roadside rocks. Sánchez, Robles and their horses were killed, while Hughes and Martínez managed to gallop off. Soto was unhorsed but found cover.

Over the next four days the Apaches attacked neighboring ranches, either stealing, running off or killing livestock. Two unarmed men—Addison P. Hardin and William Devers—were ambushed while working a field at Hardin’s ranch. Devers was shot in the shoulder and left leg, but both men reached the safety of the ranch house. On April 19 the Apaches returned to Hughes’ ranch, stole several more horses and slaughtered some cattle before disappearing to the east. Two 6th U.S. Cavalry detachments out of Camp Huachuca—40 troopers under Captain William A. Rafferty and a dozen

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Zebina Nathaniel Streeter was born in Genoa, N.Y., on Oct. 8, 1838, the son of first cousins William Adams Streeter and Hannah Coe Day. William Adams Streeter was a man of many talents, interests and considerable energy who made his living at different times in his life as a cabinetmaker, shoemaker, carpenter, dentist, machinist, engineer, doctor, prospector, storekeeper and businessman. In the fall of 1841 he seems to have abandoned his family in New York. Citing health concerns, he moved to Peru and two years later to Mexican-controlled Alta California, where he assumed informal diplomatic roles in a rebellion against Governor Manuel Micheltorena and in the later American occupation. Streeter ultimately settled in Santa Barbara, where he held a variety of municipal offices. In the fall of 1848—though wife Hannah remained alive and well back in New York— William apparently considered himself free to marry Josefa Valdez, great-granddaughter of José Francisco Ortega, founding commandant of the presidio of Santa Barbara. Joining his father in California by 1860, Zebina apparently

Viva Juárez!

The president’s troops execute Maximilian and cohorts on June 19, 1867. Streeter fought with the Juárez-aligned American Legion of Honor.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; GRANGER; HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

While hiding from the Indians Soto counted thirty six (36) Indians, a few being mounted.

He also saw a white man who seemed to direct the movements of the party and to command it.

Hughes also saw this man and says he believes him to be one Streeter, formerly employed at one of the agencies, and whom he knew for more than a year.

got on well with his father’s friends and associates among the newly American Hispanic gentry, receiving training as a vaquero and attaining fluency in Spanish.

In May 1864, three years into the Civil War, 25-year-old Zebina joined the largely Hispanic 1st California Cavalry Battalion (aka “Native California Cavalry”) as a second lieuPresident tenant. In short order he wasBenito court-martialed Juárez and dismissed for drunkenness. Presumably repentant, he rejoined the battalion as a private that December.

By the summer of 1865 the battalion found itself stationed in mosquitoinfested and disease-ridden Fort Mason, Arizona Territory, within 10 miles of the border with Mexico. They had had no contact with the Confederacy.

At that time Mexican troops under Emperor Maximilian I—the Austrian archduke and puppet of Louis Napoléon of France—were warring against those of President Benito Juárez, whom the United States recognized as the legitimate head of state. Preoccupied with its own civil war, however, the Union was able to provide only limited and informal support to the Juáristas. Washington also remained leery of a possible Mexican invasion of Arizona Territory in order to nullify the Gadsden Purchase.

Anticipating just such an incursion by Imperialistas under Colonel BENITO JUÁREZ Refugio Tanori, the Native California Cavalry had briefly crossed into Mexico, but Tanori’s forces eluded them, and they saw no action. The battalion also attempted to engage the Chiricahua Apaches under Cochise and managed to kill a lone warrior during a skirmish. Streeter returned to San Francisco and mustered out in April 1866, but he didn’t spend much time as a civilian. He soon enlisted in the American Legion of Honor to fight alongside the Juáristas.

At the close of the Civil War the United States found itself awash with unemployed veterans of both armies, and the Mexican armies needed soldiers. Confederate veterans tended to join the Imperialistas, while Union veterans favored the Juáristas. The American Legion of Honor was commissioned by Juárez and privately supported

by Americans indignant at Louis Napoléon’s flagrant violation of the Monroe Doctrine in his attempt to install a Hapsburg archduke on a Mexican throne.

Streeter enlisted as a second lieutenant and was henceforth known as Casimiro Streeter.

TOP RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; LEFT: DEAGOSTINI/GETTY IMAGES

under 2nd Lt. Louis A. Craig—had no luck tracking them. According to Lieutenant Craig, who questioned rancher Hughes:

Commanding the legion was Colonel George M. Green. The Americans left San Francisco on June 15, 1866. Traveling by sea and land, they made it to the border at Paso del Norte in August and arrived at Juárez’s temporary capital of Chihuahua on September 15. Owing to his language skills, Streeter became Colonel Green’s adjutant and liaison with the Mexican general staff.

The legionnaires distinguished themselves in battle at Zacatecas in January 1867 and amid the sieges of Querétaro and Mexico City that spring.

They were also witness to the brutal tactics of the Juáristas, including the murder of disarmed prisoners and, in the face of international diplomatic opposition, the execution of Maximilian.

By some accounts the Americans participated in an aborted attempt to rescue the fallen emperor.

The legionnaires were further alienated by their subsequent treatment by the victorious Juáristas. Essentially mercenaries, they had been promised money, land and Mexican citizenship in return for their support but received only a fraction of what they had been promised. They were not even provided transportation back to the United States but rather had to make their way through Mexican provinces where law and order had pretty much broken down.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; GRANGER; HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

TOP RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; LEFT: DEAGOSTINI/GETTY IMAGES

Streeter returned with little more than the rank of colonel and Mexican citizenship.

He crossed into Arizona Territory and for the next few years worked at various stints. As a supervisor of Apache hay harvesters near Tubac he began to develop an understanding of their language and an appreciation for their culture.

In 1870 he hired on as translator, clerk and office manager at Cañada Alamosa, a small Apache reservation near Fort Craig, New Mexico Territory. Underpaid at $500 per year, he was

THOMAS JEFFERSON JEFFORDS

nonetheless able to hone his Apache language skills and thus expedite communication among the English-speaking administration, the Apaches and the local Mexican population. He also grew to sympathize with the Apaches.

Streeter and Tom Jeffords—former Army scout, messenger, stagecoach driver and trader turned Tucson overland mail supervisor—also effected the transfer of some OLIVER OTIS HOWARD very reluctant Apaches to a new reservation in the Tularosa Valley. In the fall of 1872 Streeter signed on as a packer and accompanied Brig. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard and Jeffords in their historic expedition to negotiate peace with Cochise at the latter’s stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains.

Jeffords had befriended Cochise and was probably the only white man the chief trusted.

The meeting resulted in an informal agreement to establish a Chiricahua reservation in southeastern Arizona Territory with Jeffords as agent. For the next few years Streeter assisted Jeffords in establishing and managing the agency. The reservation functioned reasonably well as long as Cochise was alive, although the decision to make its southern boundary coincident with the international boundary caused friction with Sonoran officials, as some Apaches continued their habit of raiding in Mexico and took refuge in the reservation.

Several factors led to its demise. In the spring of 1874 Cochise took ill and died, depriving the reservation of his leadership. There was widespread disapproval of Jeffords, who drank and traded contraband with the Indians, though his faults were exaggerated by a hostile press. There was general antipathy to the Apaches on the part of the Arizona Territory settlers, coupled with an interest in the economic potential of reservation lands for mining, agriculture and ranching. Finally, in April 1876 a dispute over the sale of whiskey to an Apache warrior named Pionsenay led to several deaths.

With the support of the Arizona Territory Governor Anson P.K. Safford and Surveyor General John Wasson, Congress appropriated funds to transfer the Chiricahua Apaches to the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, and on May 3, 1876, agent John P. Clum was authorized to escort them to their new home with the aid of the San Carlos Apache police and the Army. While 325 Apaches COCHISE made the trip, some 200 renegades under leaders Juh, Nolgee and Geronimo bolted and fled south into Sonora, pursued unsuccessfully by four companies of the 6th U.S. Cavalry and their scouts.

With them went Streeter in the most significant—and baffling—decision of his life.

At ease in both the Mexican and American cultures, fluent in both languages and JOHN P. CLUM WITH a legal citizen of both nations, he could APACHE CHIEFS DIABLO have functioned effortlessly in polite soAND ESKIMINZIM ciety on either side of the border. Yet he OCTOBER 2021

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HEN L

GERONIMO

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passed a bill, clearly aimed at Streeter, “to provide for punishing persons for living with Indians while they are engaged in hostility against citizens of the United States, or any friendly power or tribe, or for furnishing them with arms or ammunition.” The governor also placed a bounty on his head. In the wake of an erroneous 1879 report of Streeter’s death in Janos, Chihuahua, the August 29 edition of Tucson’s Arizona Citizen cheered the news. “It is certainly a cause for congratulation when such a character is placed beyond the possibility of further harm,” it wrote. “It is difficult to conceive of a worse crime than that of inciting and aiding savages in their depredations upon civilized communities.”

By the latter half of 1879 Streeter’s participation in Apache raids seemed to be tapering off. He took up residence in Sonora and began working for an English-owned silver mining company. His outlaw status notwithstanding, he crossed the border and likely visited with his brother, William, who was living in Silver City, New Mexico Territory.

In September 1880, in another puzzling life decision, Streeter threw in with U.S. Army scout John Wallace “Captain Jack” Crawford as the latter scoured Chihuahua for the camp of Apache Chief Victorio. Despite having spent several years living with renegade Apaches, sympathizing with them, planning and participating in raids on both sides of the border and fleeing two armies, Streeter turned against them and employed his knowledge of the Apaches to hunt one of their own—unsuccessfully, as it turned out. A month later the Mexican army killed Victorio at Tres Castillos, Chihuahua.

Streeter spent the next several years in Sonora surveying ranches and working other civilian jobs. In the spring of 1883 a Mexican soldier recognized him from his Apache raiding days, and authorities imprisoned Streeter in Hermosillo, Sonora. Despite the widespread belief he would be executed (legally or otherwise), Streeter was soon released, apparently through the efforts of two people—his half-brother, Charles Streeter, who was employed by the New Jersey & Sonora mining concern of Sonora, and Colonel Green, Streeter’s erstwhile commanding officer in the American Legion of Honor, who’d become an influential citizen of Sonora. For the next few years Streeter assisted the colonel in his business dealings, worked for Green’s horse breeding

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FROM LEFT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; HERITAGE AUCTIONS

In September 1876 Streeter showed up in Fronteras, Sonora, to parlay with Colonel Ángel Elías, the local commander, on behalf of Juh and Geronimo, who sought “to establish themselves with their respective bands upon territory of this state of Sonora, to live in peace and good amity with its inhabitants.” Elías forwarded the proposal to General Vicente Mariscal, the military governor of Sonora, who responded with an offer that amounted to confinement one of five reservations. The Apaches were given eight days to present themselves at either Bacoachi or Santa Cruz. Apparently, the governor’s terms were unacceptable, as no one showed up.

Over the next three years Streeter rode with Juh, Geronimo and the renegade Apaches, raiding in both the United States and Mexico and taking refuge with them in the rugged Sierra Madre, where the armies of both countries had difficulty following. He appears to have achieved a position of responsibility and respect among the Apaches. Indeed, with his military experience and ability to blend into the populace of either nation, he must have been a considerable asset in planning and reconnaissance.

Local newspapers reported any number of sightings of a white man among the attacking Apache war parties on both sides of the border.

Streeter was generally assumed to be directing the raids. The idea of a renegade white man aiding the marauding Indians struck a nerve among the Arizona citizenry, whose animosity toward the turncoat was visceral. In 1877, at the request of Governor Safford, the Territorial Legislature

Geronimo Connection

For three years Streeter raided with the Apache renegades led by Geronimo, posing above (center) in talks with Brig. Gen. George Crook (second from right).

LEFT: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; RIGHT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

chose to throw in with a couple of hundred renegade Chiricahua Apaches whom even their reservation brethren regarded with suspicion.

FROM LEFT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE; HERITAGE AUCTIONS

LEFT: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; RIGHT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

Streeter biographer Lynn Bailey offers a few answers to the first question: that Streeter sympathized with those fleeing Apaches who were “Mexican Indians” and wanted to live in their traditional homeland; that Streeter was involved in illegal trading and, with the closing of the reservation, was certain to be called to account; and that his soldier’s nature demanded the excitement of conflict. To these reasons we might add a shared antipathy for the Mexican government, and a suggestion by Streeter acquaintance C.J. Wimple that Streeter was at odds with the corrupt traders and powerful officials caught up in the “Indian Ring,” JOSEPH ALTON SLADEN by which, the newspapers reported, “he CAPTAIN JACK CRAWFORD was hounded and hunted down to starvation point.” Any or all of these considerenterprise and also made money ations might well have contributed to his as an arms dealer.

Meanwhile, Geronimo—having twice surren- decision to leave with the renegades.

Bailey discounts the notion Streeter might have been following an dered since bolting the Chiricahua reservation, only to flee again each time—remained a thorn Apache woman, arguing that his soldier’s nature “was not conducive in the side of the Army and reservation authori- to strong attachments.” That said, there are indications women were an ties. In the spring of 1886 Brig. Gen. Nelson important part of Streeter’s life. Captain Joseph Alton Sladen, a particiA. Miles organized an expedition of Regular pant in and chronicler of the Howard expedition, made mention of Army troops and Apache scouts under Captain “Streeter, the packer we had picked up in the little mud Mexican village Henry Ware Lawton to pursue the fugitive into of Cañada Alamosa, where he was living in squalor and happiness with Sonora, which led to the surrender of Geronimo his alleged Mexican wife.” Wimple noted another entanglement. “While and Naiche, the last hereditary chief of the at the [San Carlos] agency,” he told reporters, “[Streeter] became enamChiricahuas. Though about to turn 48, Streeter ored of a squaw belonging to this tribe, and it was that fact that induced signed on as a tracker, once again employing his leaving civilization to cast his fortunes with the Apaches.” Finally, the his skills and insider knowledge to help the Army erroneous 1879 report of Streeter’s death in Janos refers to a “personal quarrel with a Spanish officer” apparently stemming from an insult chase down his former companions.

After a four-month campaign, mostly in north- concerning Streeter’s relationship with an Indian woman.

We don’t know how many women were part of Streeter’s life, but ern Sonora, Geronimo and Naiche finally surrendered to Miles at Skeleton Canyon, Ari- clearly they were important to him. And while the circumstances of his zona Territory, on Sept. 3 and 4, respectively. death remain murky, it seems reasonable it may have been provoked by Leaving the Army, Streeter visited with half- his attentions to a young Mexican woman.

Regardless, his impulse to join the Apache renegades remains quixotic, brother Charles in Nacozari, and the two visited family in Santa Barbara that December. as he had far more practical options as either an American or Mexican Returning to Nacozari with Charles, Zebina citizen. His decision to join Crawford and then Lawton in pursuit of spent the next few years pursuing a range of Victorio, Geronimo and the remaining renegades is more easily undercivilian jobs, including brickmaker, cordwood stood. An aging Streeter had probably come around to an attitude common in late 19th-century American society—that the defeat of the Indians cutter and surveyor.

In the summer of 1889 Streeter, 50, report- was a necessary evil in the service of a greater good. At the very least he edly died violently in a dispute involving a must have acknowledged their confinement to reservations was an ineviwoman. If a July 6 dispatch from the Tombstone tability. In that he had much in common with such figures as Buffalo Bill Daily Prospector is to be believed, Streeter “was Cody and Maj. Gen. George Crook, as well as the Indian scouts, Apache shot and killed near Nacozari last week by a and otherwise, who assisted in the defeat of their own tribesmen. young Mexican, the brother of a young senorita to whom Streeter was paying attention.”

Daniel Seligman is a retired engineer from Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in the American West. For further reading he recommends White Apache: The Central to an understanding of Streeter Life and Times of Zebina Nathaniel Streeter, by Lynn R. Bailey; Making are why he joined the Apache renegades in the Peace With Cochise: The 1872 Journal of Captain Joseph Alton Sladen, first place and why he turned on them and as- edited by Edwin R. Sweeney; and Chasing Geronimo: The Journal of Leonard sisted the Army several years later.

Wood, May–September 1886, edited by Jack C. Lane.

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Quanah, circa 1910—The elderly, weather-beaten chief poses at the Wright Studio in Lawton, Okla., not long before his death. Though 65 or 66 years old here, he is still recognizable as the fierce warrior chief who once terrorized settlers in Texas.

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Cynthia Ann Parker, 1861— Comanche raiders captured Quanah’s mother in 1836 as a girl. Kwahadi Chief Peta Nocona later took her as his wife, and she gave birth to her son circa 1845. This tintype was taken when Cynthia’s Uncle Isaac Parker took her to Austin to tell her story to the Texas Legislature. She scrawled her name across the bottom of this copy, making this a priceless version of an otherwise familiar photograph.

It is published here for the first time.

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PHOTOS FROM THE CLARA WALLACE HOLMES COLLECTION

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PICTURING QUANAH PARKER We present a pictorial study of the Comanche chief who was photographed more than any other American Indian

By Richard F. Selcer and Clara Wallace Holmes

PHOTOS FROM THE CLARA WALLACE HOLMES COLLECTION

W

hile people may still debate who was the most photographed American of the 19th century (Abraham Lincoln?

George Custer? Ulysses S. Grant?), there is no doubt who was the most photographed American Indian—Quanah Parker. The Comanche chief sat for more portraits than even the indisputably photogenic Apache leader Geronimo or Sioux leader Sitting Bull. He had the advantage over such noteworthy earlier chiefs as the Shawnee Tecumseh and the Apaches Cochise and Victorio, as they either lived before the age of photography or were reluctant to pose for photographers.

Quanah not only came along at the right time but also never met a photographer he didn’t like. A true celebrity of his day, he loved the camera, and it loved him. From the time he settled on the reservation in 1875 until his death in 1911 he craved publicity, and his classic good looks made him a favorite subject. The fact he was half-Comanche and half-white (his father was Kwahadi Chief Peta Nocona, his mother captive Cynthia Ann Parker) made him especially intriguing to a curious American public. He was a man born in a tepee who made war on whites for years before ultimately becoming a peacemaker between the two races.

For 36 years Quanah kept one foot in the world of his father and one in the world of his mother. He managed his image by adopting distinct personas: He was a Comanche war chief when he wore his traditional garb but a civilized modern man when he donned a business suit. He traveled in the latter clothing but wore his native garb for public appearances. What never changed were his chiseled features and the long braids in which he wore his hair. His good looks help explain how Quanah was able to win seven wives and keep them all happy.

Finally, Quanah aged well. It is difficult to discern differences in his appearance between his early pictures and those taken in later years. In his 66 years he never got jowly or stooped. The cheekbones, the firm jaw, the straight back— those never left him, a boast not every famous Indian (e.g., Geronimo, Red Cloud) could make. Though he could look stern, Quanah didn’t wear a perpetual, off-putting scowl like

some of the other chiefs. He’d apparently learned the camera could either attract viewers or drive them away.

Another notable aspect of Quanah’s pictorial legacy is how many period portraits have been misidentified as him.

The authors of this article have collected a file of such misidentified “Quanah” pictures. The mislabeling could be an innocent mistake, or it might be every collector wants their portrait of an Indian to be valuable. How much is a picture of an anonymous subject worth, and who wants it anyway? Have one’s image identified by an “expert” as Quanah, however, and the value of the image increases exponentially. Suddenly, every other collector is claiming to have a photo of the coveted Comanche. The same happens with lookalikes of Billy the Kid and other famous Westerners.

What makes Quanah distinctive are his multiracial complexion and facial structure. Other identifying features include the braids he always wore, the size of his hands (he could have easily palmed a basketball) and a particular piece of jewelry (a stickpin?) he wore at his neck when dressed in white man’s attire.

The pictures on the following pages trace Quanah’s life from infancy with his mother through his funeral. Some have been authenticated only recently, and many of the dates are educated guesses. In some Quanah poses with one or more wives. For an Indian living among whites, he showed an unusual willingness to travel publicly with his several wives.

Perhaps even more remarkable was his willingness to share camera time with them.

These represent only a handful of the scores of known images of Quanah. To be comprehensive would require a book-length treatment. We based our selection on historical significance, composition, familiarity (how many times has the image been published) and the verifiable provenance of each picture. Where the date is an educated guess, it is preceded by “circa.” As the pictures show, Quanah effected multiple personas—the warrior chief in Plains Indian garb, the “blanket Indian” of the reservation, the dapper businessman in white man’s attire, the family man, etc. He was a chameleon who slipped easily between worlds, pausing only long enough for the shutter to open and close.

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Quanah Parker, circa 1875—Quanah surrendered to the U.S. Army in May 1875 and lived on the reservation the rest of his life. Here he wears traditional Indian garb while posing in the Fort Sill, Indian Territory, studio of William S. Soule. The image is incorrectly dated 1869 (Quanah was still on the warpath then) and misidentifies him as a “Comanche medicine man.”

It is the earliest known photo of Quanah.

Quanah (?), circa 1870s— Although not all experts agree this Comanche/Kiowa warrior is Quanah, certain clues point to it being him, and some of his descendants believe it is. Photographer unknown.

Quanah, father-in-law Yellow Bear and others, 1885—The chief (stand-

CHIEF NAICHE

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ing at left), Yellow Bear (seated at left) and acquaintances pose in the Fort Worth, Texas, studio of photographer Augustus R. Mignon. It was during this visit Yellow Bear died of asphyxiation by gas from an improperly extinguished lamp in their shared hotel room. Quanah almost suffered the same fate but didn’t hold a grudge.

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Quanah and medicine men, circa 1890—

Labeled “Chief Quanah and his men,” this portrait shows Quanah (seated at left) with Comanche medicine men Quassiyah (seated at right) and Frank Moetuh (standing). Quanah sports traditional garb, except for the officer’s sash over his left knee.

His scalp knot is barely visible. This is one of many studio portraits by William J. Lenny and William L. Sawyers, identifiable by their props and backdrop.

Quanah and lawmen, circa 1889—The chief poses with six-shooter in hand in Paris, Texas.

In this notable image Quanah adopts yet another persona, that of shootist, to complement his warrior chief and businessman personas.

Quanah, circa 1890—In the studio portrait at left Quanah poses in native garb for Oklahoma City photographer E.W. Hamilton.

Lenny and Sawyers later reproduced this image for their “Indian Views” series of cabinet cards. The cabinet card at right, by Charles Milton Bell, captures Quanah in full business attire with an umbrella. Note: He still has his braids and will never cut them off.

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Quanah and wives, March 1894—Quanah, Tonarcy and Neda were part of a Comanche and Kiowa delegation visiting Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Quanah sits front and center with Tonarcy beside him and Neda beside her. As they are posing with students, the visitors want to look as “civilized” as possible, thus their white-man’s attire.

Chief Quanah, circa 1891—Quanah poses in front

of the tepee in which he lived before building Star House in Cache, Oklahoma Territory, in 1890. He left the tepee standing as a background for portraiture. In this publicity shot by photographer H.P. Robinson the chief is dressed in full war chief regalia.

Quanah and delegates, circa 1895—Quanah and “fellow committee-

men” of the Comanche Nation pose in a wagon for some reason at Fort Sill, Oklahoma Territory. Note the group dynamics: Quanah is in the front of the wagon, slightly separated from the others. He always stands out in any group of which he is a part. Photographer unknown.

Quanah, Tonarcy and others, 1897— Quanah at Star House, 1892—Quanah poses

in his bedroom beside a portrait of his mother and sister, Topsannah (Prairie Flower), nursing at Cynthia Ann’s breast. The visible props—a bed draped with a feather headdress, a six-shooter slung over the bedpost and a long gun leaning against the wall—reflect a life shared between two worlds. The photo also reveals Quanah’s devotion to his mother four-plus decades after their last meeting. Photographer unknown.

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The chief and his wife pose during an Indian delegation to Washington, D.C. Quanah stands at far left with Tonarcy seated beside him. The group poses outside Ben Beveridge’s Washington House Hotel. Beveridge, wearing a derby, stands by the window in back.

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Quanah at Star House, circa 1897–1900—A mature Quanah relaxes in his home office. The candid photo can be roughly dated

by the chromolithograph Custer’s Last Fight, by Otto F. Becker, hanging on the wall above and behind him, which was produced by the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association in 1896 and distributed by the thousands. Its presence on the wall of his office shows Quanah definitely had an ironic sense of humor.

Quanah in Washington, D.C., March 1905— When he went to the nation’s capital for President Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration, the Comanche chief (at left) posed in classic profile showing off his full-length feather headdress. For the grand parade Quanah (above, on white horse third from right) dressed in full warrior regalia but must have left his headdress in the studio. Among his fellow riders are the Chiricahua Apache Geronimo (third from left) and Oglala Lakota American Horse (far right).

Quanah and co-stars, 1907—On the white horse front and center is Quanah Parker, star of stage and screen. He costarred with genuine Oklahoma Territory outlaw Al J. Jennings and lawmen Bill Tilghman, Frank Canton and Heck Thomas in the silent Western The Bank Robbery, filmed on location in Cache (note the Cache Bank inscription on the building) and released the following year.

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Quanah and Tom Burnett, 1909—The chief poses with the eldest son of

cattle baron Samuel Burk Burnett at the Fat Stock Show in Fort Worth. Quanah enjoyed associating with powerful cattlemen like Burnett and William Thomas Waggoner. It was reportedly a one-sided relationship. He was the “pet Indian” they trotted out for state fairs and stock shows. The real basis of the relationship was that Quanah leased them grazing rights on Comanche reservation land.

A stock show tent, not a tepee, stands behind them. Photographer unknown.

Quanah at the Matador Ranch, Texas, 1910— The aging chief appears out of warrior garb in a rare candid photo. Posing with thumbs hooked casually in his pants, showing a little tummy, he remains erect and proud. And, of course, there are those braids.

Quanah and family, circa 1897 (right) and 1892 (far right)—

In the image at right Quanah and his favorite wife, Tonarcy, strike a chummy pose on the front porch of Star House. Apparently, Quanah never felt threatened posing beside a woman. Posing at far right are five of Quanah’s 28 known children by three or four different mothers.

Photo by Hutchins & Lanney.

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Quanah the pitchman, 1910—Companies exploited

the chief’s well-known name and classic features for promotional purposes, in this case for the Quanah, Acme & Pacific Railway (aka “Quanah Route”), a Texas short-line railroad. Quanah was a principal stockholder, though it is doubtful the company paid him for the use of his name and image. Most other well-known Indians were too feared or hated to use in such pitch pieces.

Quanah, circa 1910— The elderly chief, about 66 years old and soon to die, is still the proud warrior chief. Quanah died on Feb. 23, 1911.

Paying their respects, 1911—Wives Topay (left)

and Tonarcy (right) pose at Quanah’s first gravesite, at the Post Oak Cemetery in Indiahoma, Okla. The headstone incorrectly lists his date of birth as 1852.

Cynthia Ann and daughter Topsannah are buried in separate graves out of the picture to the right.

In 1957 the family’s remains were moved to the Fort Sill Post Cemetery.

Fort Worth–based Texas author Richard F. Selcer is a frequent contributor to Wild West. Clara Wallace Homes is a retired hospital administrator dedicated to preserving Fort Worth history. For further reading they recommend Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S.C. Gwynne; The Last Comanche Chief: The Life and Times of Quanah Parker, by Bill Neeley; and Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief, by William T. Hagan.

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Unrepentant Rebel

Among the worst of the badmen to plague Reconstruction-era Texas was Ben Bickerstaff, who after the war teamed up first with gang leader Bob Lee and then with Josiah Thompson, another fellow Confederate veteran.

So said one U.S. cavalryman of the roving gangs of desperadoes who overran Reconstruction–era Texas

By Gregory Michno

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FROM TOP: TXOILGAS, WAYMARKING.COM; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

‘WORSE THAN THE HOSTILE COMANCHES’

NORTHEAST TEXAS DIGITAL COLLECTIONS

C

They Died Here

In 1869 citizens of Alvarado, Texas, ended Bickerstaff and Thompson’s reign of terror in a hail of gunfire.

FROM TOP: TXOILGAS, WAYMARKING.COM; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

NORTHEAST TEXAS DIGITAL COLLECTIONS

C

aptain Thomas M. TolGeographically and culturally man and a detachment of speaking, Texas was and remains 6th U.S. Cavalry troopers both Southern and Western. While its were under siege. Regrouping in a brick store at the heart of Reconstruction-era troubles centered on both black and Sulphur Springs, Texas, they had hurriedly built a 10-foot-high Indian “problems,” much of the violence was actually comstockade that encompassed an entire block. It was August mitted by white malefactors. Several of the former Confed1868. To the north in Kansas raiding Cheyennes were terrorerate states were in the running for the hall of shame, but izing settlers along the Solomon and Saline rivers and giving Texas turned in an almost unparalleled record for postwar Major General Philip Sheridan fits. But Tolman had his own hatred and violence. worries. His men were trapped. Supply wagons could not get When the Confederate armies surrendered in 1865, the through. From the occasional news that got in, anywhere from war did not end; it merely morphed into a new phase in 150 to 500 heavily armed enemies surrounded the troopers, which violence was no longer the provenance of large, waiting to blast them to pieces. Like a scene from the organized armies but transferred into the hands Alamo, Tolman sent out couriers to beg for at least of vengeful ex-Rebel soldiers and their sympa200 more soldiers. thizers. As the most visible symbol of defeat, Tolman did finally receive succor. Lieutenant newly liberated blacks became convenient James H. Sands with 35 men of the 6th Cavscapegoats for such vigilantes, though white alry, Lieutenant Charles A. Vernou with a Unionists living in Texas were also high detachment of the 4th Cavalry and a squad of on their hit lists. There was no sudden 7th Infantry soldiers left Pilot Grove, to the halt to the internecine conflict, which from northwest, and marched nearly 80 miles 1861 to ’65 had proved more deadly than over two days to reach Sulphur Springs. As the Indian raids on frontier settlers. the reinforcements neared town, the enemy Consider, for example, the October 1864 fled. Vernou found Tolman “in a desperate Elm Creek Raid, in which several hundred position” with only 24 men, many of them sick.

Kiowas and Comanches swept down on the PHILIP SHERIDAN But the siege was broken. north-central Texas settlement, killing three At the post in Jacksboro 6th Cavalry trooper settlers and five soldiers who gave pursuit. ComH.H. McConnell took note of the situation and later pare that to the “Great Hanging” in Gainesville in mentioned it in his book, Five Years a Cavalryman. He wrote October 1862, when Confederate sympathizers summarily of the usual soldier complaints about poor food, hard work lynched more than 40 suspected Unionists, killings that and dangerous patrols after Indians, but what really aggrain turn sparked a series of deadly vendettas. In the Reconvated him was how the Army sent its soldiers to protect struction era such feuds spread statewide. settlers in east Texas, “leaving this entire frontier exposed The slaughter, and how to prevent it, was a constant topic. to the ravages of Indians.”

The most obvious remedy seemed to be an influx of solIn the case of Sulphur Springs, however, McConnell was diers, but just how many were necessary to keep the peace mistaken. The “Indians” besieging that town were actually seemed unanswerable. On taking office in June 1865, Texas white outlaws and Ku Klux Klansmen.

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Reconstruction laws enabled the military to remove recalcitrant civil officials, and in July 1867 Sheridan duly replaced Throckmorton with Elisha M. Pease, a Texas Unionist and Republican more supportive of Reconstruction policies. President Andrew Johnson in turn had Ulysses S. Grant, commanding general of the Army, replace Sheridan in the 5th Military District with Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, a fellow Democrat who like the president thought federal authorities were being too heavy-handed. In January 1868 Pease challenged Generl Hancock’s assertion Texas was experiencing a “profound peace” and pointed instead to a “perceptible increase of crime and manifestations of hostile feelings toward the government.” The situation grew worse as Hancock continued to thwart intervention from the military and the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas affairs.

JOHN WESLEY HARDIN From the disorganized brush men and vigilantes who haunted the wild

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FROM TOP: TEXAS FRIENDS OF THE GOVERNOR’S MANSION; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Unionists and ex-Rebels alike to send soldiers to protect them from both raiding Indians and renegade whites. Regardless, the postwar demobilization continued apace. Through the summer of 1865 the number of federal troops in Texas dropped from 52,000 to about 3,000.

The demobilization especially denuded the interior, where outlaw gangs and white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan proliferated.

One Freedmen’s Bureau agent called them “a migratory class commonly called cowboys.”

As commander of the postwar 5th Military District, General Sheridan grew increasingly incensed at the situation. In one egregious incident two privates from the 80th U.S. Colored Infantry, on garrison duty along the Louisiana border in Jefferson, Marion County, had stopped in town for a drink of water when the deputy marshal blasted them to the ground with his shotgun, then drew his revolver and blew their brains out. He was not even arrested. On learning of those murders and other atrocities, Sheridan was flabbergasted that civil authorities remained more concerned about Indians raids.

“It is strange that over a white man killed by Indians on an extensive frontier the greatest excitement will take place, but over the killing of many freedmen in the settlements nothing is done.”

In August 1866 former Confederate general James W. Throckmorton took office as governor, and he immediately downplayed the vio-

FROM TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

JAMES W. THROCKMORTON

lence in the Texas interior, instead pointing a finger at Indian depredations on the frontier. In his melodramatic inaugural address he bemoaned “our devoted frontiersmen filling bloody graves, their property given to the flames or carried off as booty, their little ones murdered, their wives and daughters being carried into a captivity more terrible than death.”

The actual number of female Texans killed or captured by Indians the year prior to Throckmorton’s election was eight.

Throckmorton demanded soldiers vacate the interior, “where there is peace and quiet.” In fact, not only were freedmen being killed but also the troops protecting them. In September 1866 rowdies in Brenham shot two 17th Infantry soldiers, prompting their comrades in arms to set fire to a portion of town. As word spread, other units posted warnings to any locals plotting similar attacks. If this camp is molested, read one such notice, every house in the community will be burned.

Sheridan wearied of Throckmorton’s constant alarms about Indians.

“There are more casualties occurring from outrages perpetrated upon Union men and freedmen in the interior than occur from Indian depredations on the frontier,” he wrote the governor. Calling the Unionists who made such allegations a “howling crowd of canting, lying scamps,” the governor laid blame at Sheridan’s feet. “Suffer me to say,” he wrote in terse reply, “that of the robberies committed upon freedmen in Texas a great number of them have been by soldiers in your command.” The governor then returned to form. Petitioning county judges for an account of Indian depredations, Throckmorton reported to Sheridan that between April 1865 and August 1867 Indians had killed 162 people (the actual total was 110).

Meanwhile, a committee established by the state constitutional convention found that from 1865 to ’68 Texas had recorded 939 murders.

Of those, 373 were murders of blacks by whites, while only 10 were of whites by blacks.

FROM TOP: TEXAS FRIENDS OF THE GOVERNOR’S MANSION; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

FROM TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

ELISHA M. PEASE

thickets of northeast Texas during the Civil War, the hardest cases coalesced into dozens of bloodthirsty gangs, many with ties to the Ku Klux Klan, that terrorized nearly everyone. Among the worst were bands led by Bob Lee, Cullen Baker and Ben Bickerstaff. Soon-to-be notorious outlaw John Wesley Hardin began his criminal career riding with kinsman Lee. Such gangs were replete with racists, rapists, thieves and murderers. While it is true that Plains Indians captured and raped white women, largely forgotten is the record of terrorized black women. White slave owners had brutalized female slaves in the antebellum years, and others continued that legacy of terror against freedwomen.

Between 1865 and ’68 the Freedmen’s Bureau recorded 281 known incidents of violence against black women and 25 against black children. In Davis County a group of whites dragged freedwoman Susan Goosely from her bed, pistolwhipped her, knocked her teeth out, raped her and left her strung up by the thumbs. In Harrison County a deputy sheriff “arrested” freedwoman Rose Campbell, took her from her home, raped her and then “released” her. In Grayson County a six-man gang under Dick Johnson robbed and murdered freedman Jeremiah Everhart, then forced his family to watch as they raped his daughter.

By the summer of 1868 freedmen in the Brazos County town of Millican had formed a segregated community on the outskirts of town defended by their own militia. In June the Ku Klux Klan paraded through the black section till driven off by militia members. A month later someone

spread the false rumor that a prominent black townsman had been murdered and the white suspect released. The black militia went on high alert, providing the Klan the excuse they’d been seeking. Sweeping through the countryside over the next two days, they lynched the militia leader and killed upward of a half dozen other freedmen.

Meanwhile, Hancock alienated Grant with his dithering and interference in local politics, and in March 1868 the commanding general transferred Hancock out of the 5th Military District. Succeeding him that summer was Brevet Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds, who resolved to put an end to the outlawry and promptly shifted several companies of the 6th Cavalry away from the frontier. Captain Adna R. Chaffee’s Company I went to Sulphur Springs, in Hopkins County, where Lee and Bickerstaff had ramped up their depredations. With Tolman as his second-in-command, Chaffee went to work with a vengeance against the outlaws. Their rapid reprisals and swift justice earned the troopers the nickname “Chaffee’s Guerrillas.” But Lee and Bickerstaff proved elusive. Familiar with the countryside, they holed up deep within the thickets and repeatedly bushwhacked the detachments hunting them. On one occasion Tolman sent out a seven-man patrol under Sergeant Edward Grey, and Bickerstaff ambushed it, killing Grey, Private John Miller and a freedman who’d guided

ADNA R. CHAFFEE

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them. As Private Miller lay wounded, begging for water, an outlaw strode up and put a bullet through his head.

Chaffee and Tolman’s counterintelligence activities in Sulphur Springs and environs met with a mixed reception, some locals aiding them, many siding with the gangs. In August as many as 500 men besieged the town, and the scenario played out as described above.

For three months Chaffee and Tolman chased Lee and Bickerstaff across northeast Texas, racking up more than 1,000 miles and killing several gang members, but losing more of their own men. Meanwhile, sympathetic townsfolk hid, fed and otherwise aided the suspected killers. Reynolds offered a $1,000 reward each for Bickerstaff, Lee and Baker, dead or alive. But no one talked. On numerous occasions soldiers were assaulted, robbed and arrested, only to face prosecution in the same civilian courts that dismissed charges against their attackers. William Harding Carter, a 6th Cavalry officer who received the Medal of Honor for rescuing wounded soldiers from an Apache attack in 1881, wrote 62 WILD WEST

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FROM TOP: HARPER’S WEEKLY, OCT. 9, 1886; TXOILGAS, WAYMARKING.COM

An 1860s-era cavalry officer and soldier confer in an illustration by Randy Steffen. In 1868 Texas two 6th Cavalry captains declared “war” on the gangs.

WESTERN ARTIST AND HISTORIAN RANDY STEFFENMOUNTE

Cavalry vs. Criminals

that duty in Texas was particularly hazardous, as the country “was overrun with desperadoes and outlaws who were even worse than the hostile Comanches.”

In his memoir McConnell claimed the cavalry did “more fighting” than any other units, but that fighting was mostly with the outlaw gangs. The trooper himself admitted they “didn’t actually kill many Indians.” Fighting hardcase whites proved a far deadlier proposition. From 1866 through ’69 the 6th Cavalry and 4th Cavalry each lost two men fighting Indians, while the outlaws they pursued killed at least 14 troopers.

Of course, freed blacks suffered the most. While it is almost impossible to calculate the precise number of murders and other crimes committed in Texas during the period, there are estimates, including 331 murders in 1867; 206 murders in the first six months of 1868; 939 murders from June 1865 to June 1868; 384 murders from January to October 1869; and 2,239 reported murders, assaults, shootings, stabbings, robberies and whippings from 1865 to 1868. The majority of the victims were black, while the albeit more populous whites committed far more crimes than blacks, Indians, Mexicans and Asians combined. In 1868, as Congress debated the impeachment of President Johnson, Pennsylvania Congressman William D. Kelley invoked “the unsheeted ghosts of the 2,000 murdered negroes in Texas” as reason enough.

A modicum of justice was forthcoming, thanks more to exasperated citizens than the Army. All three main gang leaders were killed in the first half of 1869. The first was Cullen Baker, who had recently returned to his Arkansas stamping ground and attacked the family of his onetime father-in-law in Bright Star, having the bad judgment not to finish the job. On January 6 friends of Baker’s victims surprised the outlaw and an unfortunate companion named Dummy Kirby, reportedly as they slept off a drunk. Baker was said to have been armed with four six-shooters, a double-barrel shotgun, three derringers and several knives. They proved useless. Their attackers blasted the sleeping outlaws to pieces, leaving them “terribly mangled.” Deeming Baker “a bold, bad man,” The Texas Republican coldly summarized, “We can but rejoice at his death.” The killers turned over his body to military authorities in Jefferson for the $1,000 reward.

With Reynolds’ $1,000 bounty on his head, and things getting too hot in Hopkins County, Ben Bickerstaff headed to Johnson County, where he reconnected with fellow ex-Rebel Josiah Thompson and formed a gang. Targeting black homes, they stole food and supplies, killed the men and raped the women. But Chaffee and Tolman inexorably closed in. The cavalrymen warned the citizens of Alvarado that Bickerstaff was planning a raid, as townspeople had aided the hated “Yankees.”

Sure enough, on April 5 Bickerstaff and Thompson left the other gang members in a schoolhouse outside of town and rode in a half hour before sundown. As residents seemingly scattered at their approach, Bickerstaff “gave vent to a lusty laugh” and raised his hat in a sarcastic salute.

Drawing their guns, the duo boldly rode up to a hitching post outside a mercantile store, intending to kill its owners for having called in authorities. At that moment plucky citizens poured from the storefronts and charged in shooting. One man ran up to Bickerstaff and knocked him from his horse with a shotgun blast to the face. A lifeless Thompson soon dropped to the ground beside him. Bickerstaff lingered another

FROM TOP: HARPER’S WEEKLY, OCT. 9, 1886; TXOILGAS, WAYMARKING.COM

WESTERN ARTIST AND HISTORIAN RANDY STEFFENMOUNTE

two hours. As he breathed his last, the outlaw allegedly told his assailants, “You have killed as brave a man as there is in the South.” Singularly unimpressed, the vigilantes beheaded his corpse. Surrounding the schoolhouse, they managed to round up several more gang members. Finally, they presented their prisoners and Bickerstaff’s severed trophy head to military authorities at Waco. The Alvaradians had more than earned the $1,000 reward.

Last came Bob Lee, also with a $1,000 reward on his head.

In the spring of 1869 he was hiding out in Wildcat Thicket, along the southern borders of Fannin and Grayson counties.

Citizens tipped off 6th Cavalry Lieutenant Charles H. Campbell, and on May 22 the lieutenant sent a trio of sergeants and 12 troopers to converge on the hideout. Civilian guides led the way. On May 24 Lee emerged from the thicket to visit his home and fetch breakfast for his men. Catching the returning gang leader at the edge of the thicket, the posse sprang an ambush and pumped eight bullets into Lee, who dropped from his horse without a word. The riderless animal trotted home, alerting the outlaw’s wife to his probable fate.

While Lee claimed to have killed 42 men, a June 1868 estimate set the number at 214 white victims. The number of blacks he’d killed was unknown but almost certainly higher.

In his annual report Reynolds reported that from January to September 1869 Texas recorded 384 murders. That was good news, he stated, for “with the partial breaking up of desperadoes by military aid the number of murders is diminishing from month to month.”

For comparison’s sake, Reynolds estimated raiding Indians had killed 26 civilians over the same period.

The number of whites killed, captured or raped by Indians on the Texas frontier in the five years after the Civil War paled in comparison to the malicious violence, murders and assaults committed by outlaw gangs, Klansmen and other desperadoes. Texans owed a debt of gratitude to the officers and men who ended their depredations. But theirs was a thankless duty.

In 1869 Captain Thomas Tolman, convicted at court-martial of having mistreated a prisoner, was suspended from rank and command for a year. In 1871 he transferred to the 1st Infantry on the Dakota frontier.

Captain Adna Chaffee remained in the Army another four decades, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant general. But by 1869 the depredations committed by white Texans, and the disregard for authority of those who aided and abetted them, had so disgusted Chaffee that he wanted out. “So long as this state of things exists,” he said, “it is utterly impossible to get near them [outlaws] with soldiers in uniform.” That January he requested his command be “relieved from this duty” and returned to the frontier. Fighting Indians was far safer.

A Slur Against Cowboys

Top: Frederic Remington’s In From the Night Herd.

Above: The graves of Thompson and Bickerstaff, who were called “cowboys” but were really just badmen.

Wild West special contributor Gregory Michno is an award-winning author of history books.

For further reading see his The Settlers’ War: The Struggle for the Texas Frontier in the 1860s, as well as Murder and Mayhem: The War of Reconstruction in Texas, by James M. Smallwood, Barry A. Crouch and Larry Peacock; The Army in Texas During Reconstruction, 1865–1870, by William L. Richter; and Five Years a Cavalryman, by H.H. McConnell.

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Friends Till the End

L

egendary lawman Wyatt Earp and family associated with an assortment of Western characters before, during and after their tumultuous time in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. The long list of fellow sophisticates includes such notable gunfighters/lawmen as Bat Masterson and brothers, Doc Holliday, Bill Tilghman, Fred Dodge, Luke Short, “Buckskin Frank” Leslie, “Rawhide Jake” Brighton, Bob Paul, Jim Leavy, John Behan, Clay Allison and John Ringo. But they befriended plenty of others outside that circle, from writer Jack London to film star William S. Hart, boxing promoter “Tex” Rickard, businessman “Lucky” Baldwin, mining investor George Hearst and oil man Ed Doheny. The Earps’ ties to such noteworthy figures deserve a deeper look.

Any discussion of Earp connections should begin with a mention of prolific Western diarist George Whitwell Parsons, who wrote extensively of his time in Tombstone during the Earp era. By the late 1880s Parsons was well established in Los Angeles, where he became a Chamber of Commerce kingpin, headed several mining information bureaus, was active in church affairs, served as an officer in and president 64 WILD WEST

of the Southern California Academy of Sciences and spearheaded a campaign to signpost water sources in the desert.

In an era when influential individuals were pressing for Santa Monica to become the Los Angeles area port city, Parsons advocated preservation of that picturesque ocean resort.

Due in part to his tenacious efforts, San Pedro wound up with the port facilities. He was an admirer of Wyatt Earp from their Tombstone days and remained so when the famed lawman moved to Los Angeles with common-law wife Josie.

He commented broadly on the Earps in his six decades’ worth of diaries. Little wonder he was a pallbearer at Wyatt’s 1929 funeral. Parsons stopped keeping a diary that year.

Most mentions of Wyatt in the two decades after Tombstone originate from San Diego and San Francisco, where he engaged in his usual pursuits—gambling, mining, horse racing and the sporting life in general. But as family members settled in Colton and San Bernardino, and Wyatt, Virgil and James followed the boxing and horse racing circuit, the brothers— and sometimes father Nicholas—found themselves increasingly drawn to Los Angeles.

Several prominent personalities with Tombstone ties had assumed leading roles in Los Angeles’ affairs. Albert Bilicke

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TOP: LEE SILVA COLLECTION; RIGHT: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The pallbearers at Wyatt Earp’s Jan. 16, 1929, funeral in Los Angeles included (left to right) attorney Will Hunsaker, diarist George Parsons, editor John Clum, silent film star William S. Hart, playwright Wilson Mizner and Western actor Tom Mix.

EARP FELLOW SOPHISTICATES Wyatt and brothers had Western connections galore in California and elsewhere after their Tombstone days

TOP: LEE SILVA COLLECTION; RIGHT: KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

By Don Chaput and David D. de Haas

Bilicke’s hotel. Sherman’s Tombstone visit was operating the downtown Hollenbeck and territorial inspection tour is detailed Hotel (billed as the “Headquarters for Ariby diarist Parsons, whom the general perzonans”), while Remi Nadeau erected L.A.’s sonally invited to accompany him to Fort first four-story building (the Nadeau Hotel, Huachuca. On May 7, 1915, Bilicke was which also boasted the first elevator in a passenger aboard RMS Lusitania when town). Operating the restaurant at the Naa German U-boat torpedoed and sank the deau was Hyman Solomon. The trio had British ocean liner—one of the events that already made their mark in Tombstone. precipitated World War I. He was killed, In the tense wake of the O.K. Corral WYATT EARP while his wife survived. Nadeau, a leadshootout Bilicke’s Cosmopolitan Hotel AND JOHN CLUM ing freighter in the region, had purchased served as the Earps’ emergency headquarmining property in Tombstone from the ters, and the family later held murdered brother Morgan’s funeral ceremonies there. In quieter times Earps. Solomon, a merchant and member of the Tombstone Bilicke and Earp had consummated mining deals in the Common Council and Cochise County Board of Supervisame building. In April 1882, after the Earp/Holliday party sors, had presented a Winchester to the rifleless Holliday had left Tombstone on their vendetta ride, the Cosmopoli- as the Earp party left town on their vendetta ride.

There is no telling how often these fellows may have met, tan welcomed General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had replaced Ulysses S. Grant as commanding general of even in passing, in Los Angeles. Hints suggest encounters the Army in 1869 after Grant was elected president. Local at the Agricultural Park horse racing grounds. In July 1890 dignitaries, including Tombstone Epitaph editor John Clum, one of the races was dubbed the Nadeau Handicap, while attorney Ben Goodrich and Oriental Saloon owner and entered in other races were mounts belonging to both Wyatt local politico Milt Joyce, wined and dined the general at Earp and Lou Rickabaugh, a former partner of Wyatt’s OCTOBER 2021

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LUCKY BALDWIN

Not a Bad Fellow

Dr. George E. Goodfellow, who has a horse by the tail here, attended to wounded Earps in Tombstone and lived and traveled in the Los Angeles area.

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They Met in a Later Chapter

Author Jack London and Wyatt Earp were both prominent in Alaska, but evidence they first met there is mighty thin.

The Earps doubtless encountered other prominent Tombstoners in Los Angeles. Tombstone lumber dealer Lewis W. Blinn became the lumber king of southern California, with 40 yards in the region, and also had banking interests in Los Angeles and San Pedro with Parsons. Dr. George E. Goodfellow, who tended to the Earp brothers’ assorted wounds in Tombstone, lived and traveled in the Los Angeles area and died in town in 1910. Tombstone attorney Goodrich—who had represented Ike Clanton as a prosecutor in the 1881 post–O.K. Corral gunfight “Spicer Hearing” and served in the Arizona Territorial Legislature—later bounced between Tombstone and Los Angeles, where he was the attorney of choice for the mining empires of Eliphalet Butler Gage and Colonel William C. Greene.

Attorney William J. “Will” Hunsaker, who practiced law in Tombstone when the Earps were in town, served as mayor of San Diego in 1888 and was a leading figure in California legal circles, eventually becoming president of the California Bar Association. He was a pallbearer at Wyatt’s funeral, and until Hunsaker’s own death in 1933, Josie took her personal and financial issues to him—probably too often, as it is doubtful he would have allowed her to pay for his services. Tom Fitch, a leading figure in the O.K. Corral hearings, also lived in Los Angeles for years but doesn’t seem to have had much contact with the Earps.

According to Josie, rancher Henry Clay Hooker, who retired to Los Angeles and died there in 1907, “was in touch with Wyatt for years after he left Tombstone and was one of his best friends.” Hooker’s former daughter-in-law Forrestine promised Wyatt she would “tell the world” of his importance, but only a flabby manuscript resulted.

Former Tombstone Epitaph editor Clum moved to San Bernardino in 1886, where he dabbled in real estate and intermingled with the Earps.

He later encountered both Wyatt and Parsons while serving as a postal inspector and postmaster in Alaska from 1898 to 1909. In 1928 Clum moved to Los Angeles, where he made sporadic visits to Wyatt. He spoke with Earp the night before his death and was a pallbearer at his funeral.

Clum died in Los Angeles in 1932.

Wyatt first met George Hearst early in 1882 when Hearst was considering mining properties in and around Tombstone. Later, in San Francisco, when then U.S. Senator Hearst and son William Randolph Hearst were running the Examiner, Wyatt renewed their acquaintance.

In 1903, when the Hearst newspaper empire opened an office in Los

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: POLICE GAZETTE, JUNE 18, 1892; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; NATIONAL ARCHIVES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

in the gaming concessions at Tombstone’s Oriental Saloon. The following month the track featured the running of the Hollenbeck Stakes, and the onetime saloon partners had horses in races.

Nadeau himself had died in 1887, leaving middle son George in charge of his business concerns, including a namesake racetrack, primarily a practice area for trotters. Another Nadeau holding that would have interested the Earps was the area’s largest winery and newest distillery.

The Curtis family of San Bernardino must have encountered Earps many times over the half century ending in 1930. In 1864 they joined the California-bound caravan led by cantankerous Nicholas Earp and family, a trek documented in the diary of fellow traveler Sarah Jane Rousseau. The Earps and Curtises don’t appear to have been social intimates in San Bernardino County, but they moved in similar circles. Nicholas served as justice of the peace and Virgil as chief of police in Colton, while James ran a San Bernardino saloon. Around the same time William Jesse Curtis, the patriarch of his family, served as district attorney of San Bernardino County. His son Jesse succeeded him as district attorney and later served on the California Supreme Court.

TOP, FROM LEFT: LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY; CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY; HERITAGE AUCTIONS; HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; LEFT: DON CHAPUT COLLECTION

WILLIAM S. HART

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: POLICE GAZETTE, JUNE 18, 1892; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; NATIONAL ARCHIVES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

TOP, FROM LEFT: LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY; CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY; HERITAGE AUCTIONS; HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; LEFT: DON CHAPUT COLLECTION

Angeles, it set up in the Bilicke Building, reasserting the old Tombstone connections.

The Baldwin-Earp affiliation spanned virtually the entire Pacific Coast.

Wealthy real estate and mining investor Elias Jackson “Lucky” Baldwin was a headline-grabbing personality known for his namesake San Francisco hotel, his thoroughbred racehorses, his arrogance and his womanizing (he was twice shot by women, once in a courtroom drama). Lucky and Wyatt first met in San Diego racing circles in the 1880s and later in the Los Angeles racing world (Earp and Rickabaugh trained some of their horses on the Baldwin Ranch), as well as the racing-gambling world of San Francisco (negotiations for the 1896 Fitzsimmons-Sharkey fight, controversially refereed by Earp, took place at the Baldwin Hotel). In 1900 Lucky and Wyatt met over a few glasses at the Earp-run Dexter Saloon in Nome, Alaska. Wyatt, Josie and Lucky remained in contact in the Los Angeles area until Baldwin’s death in 1909.

It is astonishing how many individuals destined for fame Wyatt and Josie met in Alaska amid the Klondike Gold Rush. Sid Grauman and Alexander Pantages of movie theater fame were there at the outset of their working lives, trying to make a buck by entertaining miners, and at best saw Wyatt dispensing drinks or sitting at a faro table in Nome. Others, like boxing promoter Rickard, would continue their relationships with Wyatt in Nevada and California. Although some say Call of the Wild author London first knew Wyatt in Alaska, they most likely didn’t meet until later in California.

Playwright, raconteur and serial entrepreneur Wilson Mizner (another pallbearer at Wyatt’s funeral) spent many a tipsy evening with the Earps while snowed in for weeks in the boomtown of Rampart. Entertaining them was luckless prospector Rex Beach on his mandolin ( Josie called it a banjo). Beach had better fortune as a novelist, his best-selling saga of Nome, The Spoilers, being adapted for the stage and screen, including five films. Also associating with Wyatt and Josie in Rampart and Nome were U.S. Marshal Cornelius L. Vawter and wife Sarah. Marshal Vawter was among the principal figures in the Nome gold claim swindle, a central plot device of The Spoilers. Coincidentally, he was also related to Williamson Dunn Vawter, an influential pioneer of both Pasadena and Santa Monica.

Among others snowed in with Wyatt and Josie in Rampart were Washingtonians John Harte McGraw and Eugene M. Carr, who were working neighboring gold claims and often socialized with the Earps. McGraw had recently served as the second governor of Washington state and was a former sheriff of King County, while Brig. Gen. Carr had stepped down as head of the Washington National Guard to join the gold rush.

Gun Trumps Fists

Virgil Earp reportedly objected to Jim Corbett’s abuse of a sparring partner, and when the boxer objected to the objection, Virgil pulled a six-shooter.

The list of Californians in the Earp orbit is particularly impressive. Associates from northern California included jockey Tod Sloan. He rode several mounts for Wyatt at San Francisco’s Bay District Track in 1895 and went on to become one of the most successful jockeys in the United States and Britain.

Southern Californians also figured into the Earp mix. By the early 1900s Los Angeles oil developer Edward L. Doheny was a millionaire many times over. He apparently entered the Earp fold via Virgil, whom he met in the late 1870s in Prescott, Arizona Territory, where Virgil served as a constable and stagecoach driver, and Doheny dabbled unsuccessfully as both a painter and prospector. In the 1920s Wyatt was a minor player in the Kern County, Calif., oilfields, which may have brought him into contact with the oil baron. Doheny grabbed head-

Rampart, Alaska

This cabin belonged to luckless prospector but future novelist Beach, who befriended Wyatt and Josie.

REX BEACH

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST

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lines in 1922 when implicated (with Harry Ford Sinclair of Sinclair Oil) in the Teapot Dome Scandal. He was twice acquitted of having bribed New Mexico politico turned U.S. Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall for oil leasing rights, though Fall and Sinclair both served prison terms for their roles. Doheny and second wife Carrie garnered more headlines for their philanthropy in Los Angeles. They donated the land for Doheny State Beach, in Dana Point, Calif., the surfing strand celebrated in the Beach Boys’ 1960s hits “Surfin’ Safari” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.” When finances were strained, a widowed Josie Earp reportedly contacted Doheny to the point of pestering.

Tom Mix, among few genuine Western cowboys to have starred in films, was a known companion of the Earps and attended horse races with Wyatt and Josie. The couple’s primary Hollywood contact, though, was William S. Hart, the foremost Western star of the silent era. Hart met and corresponded with them frequently from his ranch north of Los Angeles.

For years he urged Wyatt to pen his autobiography and have a realistic film made about his life. Mix and Hart both served as pallbearers at Earp’s funeral.

Richard “Dick” Gird—who made a fortune setting up the Tombstone mining district and went on to found Chino, Calif., in 1910—reconnected with Wyatt in the early 1890s through the Los Angeles horse racing circuit.

Not all former fellow Tombstoners in greater Los Angeles fawned over Earp, though. Historians have yet to establish any further interaction between him and mining executive Gage, miner/cattleman John Van Vickers or financier John Vosburg, for example.

One of the world’s most successful book publishers is on the list of Wyatt Earp acquaintances. Bookseller Alexander M. “Aleck” Robertson arrived in Tombstone in 1881, prior to the gunfight of O.K. Corral fame, setting up shop on Fifth Street between Allen and Fremont. Robert68 WILD WEST

TASKER ODDIE

ENDICOTT PEABODY

son became the publisher and close associate of such famed authors as London, Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Robert Louis Stevenson. In later years he hosted Earp, Parsons, Blinn, Buckskin Frank Leslie and other former Tombstoners in his massive San Francisco book emporium.

Born Nashville Franklyn Leslie, Buckskin Frank was a classic Western figure who at times worked as a Tombstone saloonman and faro player, government scout and prospector. A noted gunfighter, he killed a few folks (including a female paramour, for which he served six years in the Yuma Territorial Prison). On June 22, 1880, while living at Bilicke’s Cosmopolitan Hotel in Tombstone, Leslie shot down Mike Killeen. Days later he married Killeen’s widow, Mary, a chambermaid at the hotel. For the time they lived in town, Buckskin Frank and the Earp brothers saw each other almost daily.

Other Earp associates from the Tombstone days became nationally prominent figures. On leaving Arizona Territory in 1898, restaurateur/hotelier/ miner Nellie Cashman spent another quarter century as an entrepreneur, marked by notices in the mining journals as well as The New York Times.

Tombstone City Marshal David Neagle—who with Cochise County Sheriff John Behan tried and failed to arrest Wyatt and Warren Earp, Holliday and their vendetta posse at the Cosmopolitan as they left Tombstone for keeps in 1882—later moved to California. In 1889, while serving as a bodyguard for a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice, Neagle killed a former California chief justice amid an assault by the latter. The Supreme Court eventually ruled in Neagle’s favor in a case with profound implications for the supremacy of federal law over state law. Photographer C.S. Fly, revered for his rare images of the frontier Southwest and Mexico, got his start in Tombstone. You could say Fly knew the Earps up close, as his studio abutted the vacant lot behind the O.K. Corral—scene of the 1881 shootout.

When the gunfight broke out, Ike Clanton hid in Fly’s studio, and the photographer personally disarmed Ike’s mortally wounded brother Billy.

Six years later in Arizona Territory well-known Western lawman and detective Jonas V. “Rawhide Jake” Brighton sent Ike Clanton to an early

TOD SLOAN

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DAVID D. DE HAAS COLLECTION

TOM MIX

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NEWSPAPERS.COM; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); FDR LIBRARY; VANITY FAIR, MAY 18, 1899

JOHN McGRAW

DAVID D. DE HAAS COLLECTION

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NEWSPAPERS.COM; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2); FDR LIBRARY; VANITY FAIR, MAY 18, 1899

grave. In 1893 the lawman had a leading role in ending the depredations of the Sontag-Evans gang in California. After 1900 Brighton served as a policeman and constable in the Sawtelle district of Los Angeles and its Old Soldiers’ Home, where he resided. He would have seen the Earps almost daily in Sawtelle, as James was running illicit booze, and father Nicholas and eldest son Newton also lived in the Old Soldiers’ Home.

Corporal Brighton is buried beside wife Mary and not far from Sergeant Nick Earp in the Los Angeles National Cemetery (the former Sawtelle Veterans Cemetery).

A notable Earp associate with no ties to California was Key Pittman.

He and Wyatt met in Nome, where Pittman prospected and served as the first city attorney. After leaving Alaska, both men arrived in the silver boomtown of Tonopah, Nev., in 1902. Pittman put down roots, serving as a U.S. senator from Nevada for almost 30 years. A notorious lush, the politico almost certainly patronized Nome’s Dexter Saloon and Tonopah’s Northern Saloon, both Earp operations.

There is more to the Nevada angle. Among the more influential Nevada politicians of the era was Tasker Oddie, one-term governor, two-term U.S. senator and a key figure in the rise of the Tonopah mining district.

From his Washington office in 1928 Senator Oddie recalled that in those days “Wyatt Earp and 15 others of similar spirit were mustered to protect our claims from squatters.”

Another notable Earp acquaintance with no known California connection was the Rev. Endicott Peabody. He arrived in Tombstone in the immediate wake of the O.K. Corral fight, founded the historic St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and immersed himself in the community’s social and sporting circles. In later years he heaped praise on the Earp brothers for their roles in law enforcement. Peabody became a nationally known figure in education and officiated at the wedding of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (a former pupil of the reverend’s at Massachusetts’ prestigious Groton School for Boys, as were cousin Theodore Roosevelt’s four sons).

Another nationally known figure with Earp ties was boxing legend James J. “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, a world heavyweight champion and future inductee in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. You could say Virgil Earp knew Corbett up close. As the story goes, Corbett was in San Bernardino in May 1892, giving an exhibition and observing other matches. In one such bout his sparring partner was being pulverized when Corbett intervened. Entering the ring, he proceeded to kick and otherwise abuse the challenger. Referee Virgil Earp told “Ungentlemanly Jim” to desist. Instead, Corbett yelled at and advanced on Earp. Bad idea.

“Paralyzed by the sight of a big Navy revolver in the hands of Earp,” one newspaper reported, “Corbett very wisely did not strike.” The story made headlines coast to coast.

When refereeing the controversial 1896 Fitzsimmons-Sharkey bout, Wyatt Earp became all too familiar with Judge James G. Swinnerton and son Jimmy, a budding cartoonist at William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner.

In the wake of the fight Judge Swinnerton was part of the cabal seeking to overturn Earp’s upset decision for Tom Sharkey over Bob Fitzsimmons.

At the same time Jimmy was lampooning Earp with biting cartoons in the Examiner. Young Swinnerton went on to become a leading cartoonist for the San Francisco and New York papers. Indeed, some consider him the “father of the comic strip,” having drawn his first for Hearst in 1892.

A close friend and favorite employee of the famed newspaper publisher (and Earp acquaintance), Jimmy later earned acclaim as one of the Southwest’s preeminent “Painters of the Desert.” He befriended fellow desert

JIMMY SWINNERTON

painter Victor Clyde Forsythe, whose parents and uncle were merchants in Tombstone in the early 1880s—contemporaries with the Earp brothers there and later in Los Angeles. In 1952 Forsythe painted a well-received, accurate depiction of the “Gunfight at O.K. Corral” based on his parents’ diaries.

In the sporting world of bookmakers and “plungers” (high-risk gamblers), Riley Grannan stood out from New York to San Francisco. Several Earps were familiar with Grannan. In the wake of the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey fight Grannan was among those who lambasted Wyatt’s decision in the press. Days after the bout Wyatt and brother James encountered Grannan at a local racetrack. An alcohol-fueled James cursed Grannan and demanded they shoot it out with revolvers. Apologizing for his brother’s outburst, Wyatt managed to defuse the situation.

One would have to search far and wide to uncover another family with such diverse, influential and historically significant Western connections. And to think the Earps would reconnect with many of them for one last hurrah in the early decades of the 1900s.

A frequent contributor to Wild West, Don Chaput is the author of Virgil Earp: Western Peace Officer and co-author with Lynn R. Bailey of Cochise County Stalwarts: A Who’s Who of the Terrritorial Years.

His article “Clusters of Earps” appeared in the October 2020 issue. David D. de Haas’ Art of the West article about Victor Clyde Forsythe is online at Historynet.com. For further reading see the authors’ 2020 book The Earps Invade Southern California: Bootlegging Los Angeles, Santa Monica and the Old Soldiers’ Home (reviewed in the February 2021 issue and online at Historynet.com).

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Towering Ambition

In 1830 Adolphe Gouhenant (opposite) had a 100-foot tower built atop Fourvière Hill in Lyon, France (depicted below), to serve as an observatory, a natural history gallery and an artist’s workshop. It was among the dreamer’s failed endeavors.

REINVENTED IN TEXAS

French revolutionary, artist and frontier physician Adolphe Gouhenant failed to realize a socialist utopia but made a name for himself in Fort Worth and Dallas

By Paula Selzer 70 WILD WEST

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LEFT:ARCHIVES MUNICIPALES DE LYON; RIGHT: LÉON SOULIÉ, CONSEIL DÉPARTEMENTAL DE LA HAUTE-GARONNE, ARCHIVES DÉPARTEMENTALES

I

n the Cross Timbers of north Texas on a late summer evening in 1848 François Ignace “Adolphe” Gouhenant listened in horror as the men around him debated his fate.

Some wanted to kill him outright. Others suggested they cinch a rope around his neck and force him to walk behind a wagon the 500 miles back to New Orleans. That evening Gouhenant, realizing his life hung in the balance, strolled down to a nearby creek under the pretense of bathing. Leaving his clothes and belongings behind, he ran for his life.

Two decades earlier Gouhenant had started his working life in the artistic community of Lyon, France. Newly married, he worked in an apothecary, selling drugs and mixing pigments for local artists. He also dabbled in painting himself. In 1830, with no formal education but a keenly focused vision and his wife’s dowry as seed money, Gouhenant embarked on a wildly ambitious project—the construction of a 100-foot tower atop Lyon’s Fourvière Hill to serve as an astronomical observatory, a natural history gallery and a workshop for artists. Dubbing it a “temple to the arts and sciences,” he furnished it with telescopes and other scientific instruments, paintings and elegant décor. The project proved more expensive and complicated than he had anticipated, however, and Gouhenant ultimately filed for bankruptcy. Broke and disheartened, he soon left Lyon.

Gouhenant turned up next in southern France, where he took up the banner for workers’ rights, advocating for fair pay and universal education for artists and craftsmen. By the 1840s he’d become a devotee of prominent utopian socialist Étienne Cabet. Gouhenant championed Cabet’s “Icarian” philosophy throughout southern France. However, while Cabet promoted political change through peaceful means, Gouhenant became increasingly involved with revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the French monarchy.

By early 1843 Gouhenant was under police surveillance, and that January 27 he was arrested and charged with conspiracy against the government. Authorities detained him in a cold, damp prison cell in Toulouse until bringing him to trial seven months later. The case was reported widely in the press, thrusting Gouhenant into the spotlight. Commencing in the dog days of August, the courtroom drama featured 10 co-defendants, fainting spectators and a dispute over legal representation when the judge refused to allow Cabet to represent Gouhenant. For his part Gouhenant refused to answer questions and even perused a newspaper during part of the proceedings. The trial lasted 10 days. Ultimately, the jury acquitted Gouhenant and his co-defendants, and they were released.

Five years later Cabet took the first steps toward realizing his dream of a utopian colony when he appointed Gouhenant to lead a vanguard of 69 idealistic European socialists to establish Icaria, Texas. Cabet had contracted with land agent William S. Peters to provide a promised 1 million acres for the Icarians within the namesake Peters Colony. Leaving their families behind (Gouhenant left his wife, daughter and son with plans for them to join him later), the would-be colonists departed France on Feb. 3, 1848, aboard the sailing ship Rome.

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LEFT: COURTESY JOHN J. GOOD FAMILY PAPERS, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UT ARLINGTON; RIGHT: PAULA SELZER COLLECTION

After a rough 53 days at sea the Icarians dis- creeks, the blazing Texas clime had reached its miserable peak. As they embarked in New Orleans on March 27. They set out to build cabins and plant crops, their troubles only mounted. had planned to take a steamboat up the Missis- Mosquito- and waterborne illnesses ultimately overtook the Icarians, sippi and Red rivers to reach the Peters Colony. killing a dozen and rendering the others unable to continue their labors.

One unfortunate was struck dead by lightning, his clothes On arrival, however, they learned the Red was seared from his corpse. only navigable to Shreveport, a few hun“Our position is now the most deplorable,” weaver dred miles to the northwest. From there Joseph Therme wrote to his father. “We are unthey would have to walk another 200 able to help each other. There are not enough miles west to their promised land, able-bodied men for the sick, and we only have which comprised far less than the tea for medicine. Many suffer physically and 1 million promised acres. They morally. Others are convinced that there will also discovered that in order be no second advance guard.” to fulfill the contract obligations Cabet had sent a follow-on party to Texas, Cabet had made with Peters, but it didn’t arrive until August. Furtherthey would have to clear the more, its members brought word that would land and raise cabins by July 1. deliver a final blow to the struggling colony— Physical and emotional huraccusations from the wake of Gouhenant’s dles plagued their overland jour1843 trial that he’d offered to provide auney. Trying to maneuver sevthorities incriminating information about his eral dozen men and wagonloads co-conspirators. Whether or not the accusations of supplies across the Texas fronMAJOR RIPLEY ALLEN ARNOLD were true, the Icarians went wild with anger, and tier was no small feat in itself, esAND WIFE CATHERINE Gouhenant fled the colony in fear of his life. pecially for a group that included a He sought refuge at the family farm of Texas Ranger watchmaker, a couple of weavers, tailors, Samuel Pritchett, some 10 miles northeast of the Icarian cabinetmakers and a handful of farmers but no frontiersmen. To better their odds, the men settlement. Gouhenant remained with the Pritchetts about a year, during traveled in small groups. En route the Icarians which he rested from his monthslong ordeal, improved his English and got lost, encountered flooded creeks and swarms contemplated his future. In his 44 years Gouhenant thus far had survived of mosquitoes, and suffered from various ill- bankruptcy in Lyon, imprisonment and trial in Toulouse, and rebellion nesses. They also dealt with food shortages and by his Icarian brothers in Texas. But tenacity was his greatest asset, and broken wagons. One night the exhausted trav- he would rise again to make his mark on the frontier. elers camped in an abandoned house whose residents had reportedly been massacred by In the summer of 1849 Major Ripley Allen Arnold and his company of 2nd U.S. Dragoons began constructing Fort Worth some 30 miles American Indians.

When they did finally reach their destina- south of the Pritchett farm. Venturing to the budding garrison, Gouhenant tion, near the confluence of Oliver and Denton employed his many talents to make himself a fixture among the officers.

MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON; TOP RIGHT: BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONAL DE FRANCE; LEFT: RIPLEY ARNOLD COLLECTION, TARRANT COUNTY ARCHIVES

ÉTIENNE CABET

LEFT: COURTESY JOHN J. GOOD FAMILY PAPERS, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UT ARLINGTON; RIGHT: PAULA SELZER COLLECTION

MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON; TOP RIGHT: BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONAL DE FRANCE; LEFT: RIPLEY ARNOLD COLLECTION, TARRANT COUNTY ARCHIVES

FUTURE DALLAS MAYOR JOHN JAY GOOD AND WIFE SUSAN ANNA FLOYD

Arnold already spoke French, and he hired Gouhenant to teach it and other subjects to his family. “There is a French gentleman here teaching all the officers, Mrs. [Catherine Arnold] and her two daughters the French language,” Lieutenant Samuel Starr wrote to his wife in January 1850.

“He is a genius, teaches music, drawing, dancing—everything.”

As Gouhenant had arrived in Texas prior to July 1848, he met criteria under the Peters Colony contract to receive a 320-acre grant, regardless of his failed attempt to establish an Icarian utopia. In the spring of 1850 he laid claim to land just north of Fort Worth, but he didn’t remain in the area long.

By midcentury some 500 people had settled in burgeoning Dallas, 30 miles to the east. Gouhenant recognized an opportunity, and in October he purchased a lot from town founder John Neely Bryan. The lot was at the corner of Commerce and Houston streets on the south side of the courthouse square—a perfect spot for the first daguerreotype studio in north Texas. Gouhenant built a 25-by-40-foot one-story frame building, purchased a camera and soon began making daguerreotypes of prominent townspeople. He named his studio the Arts Saloon.

The novelty of the Arts Saloon, coupled with Gouhenant’s charisma, served to attract locals and travelers alike. In the spring of 1852 Charles DeMorse, editor of the Northern Standard regional newspaper, arrived in town and recorded his impressions: The Arts Saloon we soon found to be the headquarters of Monsieur Gouhenant, a gentleman of education and accomplishments who had come out with the first French emigration to the Cross Timbers, and after some vicissitudes incident to life in a strange land, and the fortunes of an enterprise, had settled himself in Dallas, and between teaching French and Spanish languages, the painting of pictures and signs, and instruction upon half dozen musical instruments, had constituted himself a decided feature of the place.

The Arts Saloon grew into far more than just a daguerreotype studio.

Gouhenant had resumed painting and exhibited his own works in the saloon. He showed DeMorse some of his oils and watercolors, the latter of which the editor deemed “decidedly beautiful.” Gouhenant welcomed community gatherings and worship services in the saloon, and in 1852 the

Works by Gouhenant

Above left: This wedding portrait is an example of the Frenchman’s photography. Above: One of his few surviving paintings. The title is unknown, but it was painted sometime between 1832 and ‘46.

district court rented the 1,000-square-foot studio for legal proceedings. The Tannehill Masonic Lodge, of which Gouhenant was a member, also used it for special occasions. When Gouhenant hosted dances, frontier folks would travel from miles away to spend all evening at the saloon.

DeMorse wrote about one such dance: At night, attracted by the lights and sound of the violin, we proceeded to the saloon and found a dance in full operation, in which, besides the ladies and resident gentlemen, were participating Maj. Arnold, the gentlemanly commandant of Fort Worth, and Maj. Young, the sutler for that post. We found the main room of the saloon large enough for two sets at a time, and in a little recess at one side was an Hon. Member of the Legislature playing the violin, assisted by Mons. Gouhenant. The saloon itself was draped with flesh-colored canvas and pleasantly lighted.

Having abandoned his socialist ties, Gouhenant reignited his longstanding passion for the arts and sciences and indulged his entrepreneurial spirit once more. In addition to daguerreotypes and fine art paintings, he made wine, painted signs for local businesses and collected fossils, OCTOBER 2021

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After seven months in prison and a 10-day trial in Toulouse, France, Gouhenant was acquitted by a jury and released, as were his co-defendants.

$91. When Gouhenant returned to town, he was outraged to learn his beloved Arts Saloon had been sold out from under him. He countersued, and the jury found in favor of Gouhenant. The case was far from settled, however, as some of Cockrell’s friends came forward and presented new evidence. Ordering a new trial, the district judge reversed the decision.

Gouhenant’s disputes with both Brisbane and Cockrell dragged on another couple of years.

Determined to reclaim the Arts Saloon, Gouhenant ultimately appealed to the Texas Supreme Court. Justice John Hemphill decided the case. “He was daguerrotypist, a wanderer by vocation,” Hemphill wrote, “and it was proven that in pursuit of his business he had been absent on former occasions.…He had come up to settle his son in business, this evidence shows beyond a doubt that he had some purpose of removing from Dallas.” The justice ruled that the Arts Saloon was not only Gouhenant’s livelihood, but also his homestead, and as such it should remain exempt from any forced sale.

Not long after Gouhenant left Dallas for keeps.

Resuming his wanderings, he reinvented himself once again. While he’d never had any formal medical training, he’d familiarized himself with a health regimen developed by exiled French socialist and self-taught scientist François-Vincent

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\OUR CITY--DALLAS: A COMMUNITY CIVICS (1927), BY JUSTIN F. KIMBALL

Gouhenant basked in his newfound success in Dallas and Fort Worth, but his luck was about to take another downturn. In the light of his long absence, his marriage had ended. While his wife had chosen to remain in France with their daughter, Gouhenant’s son, Ernest, and nephew came to join him in Texas, arriving a few days after Christmas 1853. Responsible for feeding and housing the two young men and helping them get settled, Gouhenant faced mounting expenses. To free up cash, he mortgaged some of his properties, creating a legal morass that would take years to untangle.

In early February 1854 Gouhenant mortgaged the Arts Saloon to American utopian socialist Albert Brisbane for $500. When it came time to repay the loan 14 months later, however, Gouhenant deferred, and Brisbane sued to obtain the mortgage. Gouhenant refuted Brisbane’s right to the mortgage, claiming he’d only received $300 of the creditor’s promised $500.

Meanwhile, a conflict arose with another Dallas resident. Alexander Cockrell had loaned Gouhenant $100, and during one of Gouhenant’s sojourns in Fort Worth the creditor sued for payment before the justice of the peace. To recover Cockrell’s debt, the justice—presumably unaware of the mortgage dispute with Brisbane—ordered the Arts Saloon sold. In a sheriff’s auction on the steps of the courthouse the studio sold for a mere

On Trial for Conspiracy Against the Monarchy

CONSEIL DÉPARTEMENTAL DE LA HAUTE-GARONNE, ARCHIVES DÉPARTEMENTALES

sending specimens of the latter to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Gouhenant often returned to Fort Worth, where he’d staked his land grant and made fast friends. In 1853 he rode over to paint a mural on canvas for display on the facade of Ephraim Daggett’s hotel. Featuring deer, bear and other wildlife, the mural was soon the talk of the town.

By then Gouhenant had purchased additional lots in Dallas and was building a small real estate empire. His holdings included nearly a dozen town lots, and he had plans to expand the Arts Saloon. Planted firmly on Texas soil, Gouhenant took an oath of citizenship on May 16 as the first man in Dallas County to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.

\OUR CITY--DALLAS: A COMMUNITY CIVICS (1927), BY JUSTIN F. KIMBALL

CONSEIL DÉPARTEMENTAL DE LA HAUTE-GARONNE, ARCHIVES DÉPARTEMENTALES

Raspail. Raspail’s methods of disease prevention through hygiene and self-treatment were well-known among the Icarians, and Gouhenant employed such techniques to treat north Texas settlers who lacked access to a trained physician.

“Doctor” Gouhenant had mixed success. In one instance in Lancaster, just south of Dallas, he tended to the 32-year-old wife of one Solomon Brundage. Over the course of a month Gouhenant prescribed the woman elixirs, applied poultices and gave her uterine and bowel injections, billing her husband $34. Dissatisfied with the outcome, Mr. Brundage sued, testifying that “neither visits nor medicine of said Gouhenant done his wife any good but greatly damaged her, to the amount of $50.”

Arguing that his lack of credentials was irrelevant to their contract, Gouhenant successfully countersued. Regrettably, it was Mrs. Brundage who suffered most.

In another instance Gouhenant was in Pilot Point, north of Dallas, when a young woman injured her ankle in a buggy accident. He treated her ankle, yielding far better results for both patient and caretaker. The woman was local schoolteacher Elizabeth Martin, and though there was a 38-year difference in their ages, she and Gouhenant married a short time after they met. The couple remained in Pilot Point, where they opened two apothecaries and raised cattle. Gouhenant helped establish the local Masonic lodge in the summer of 1862 and was elected an officer. Perhaps at the suggestion of his young wife, Gouhenant also changed the spelling of his name to Gounah to approximate its pronunciation.

In October 1866 Gouhenant reconnected with his onetime Dallas creditor Brisbane. Brisbane had written from New York to introduce his son, Charles, to Gouhenant. Charles was in poor health, and Brisbane sought Gouhenant’s help. “My son speaks French perfectly,” the elder Brisbane wrote. “I advised him to hunt in the Cross Timbers and to live outdoors. Give him information on what he should do.”

Oddly for one seeking assistance, Brisbane also brought up an existing mortgage agreement with Gouhenant (the men had entered into yet another contract in 1859). “I have authorized him [Charles] to make any settlement practical in relation to the mortgage,” Brisbane wrote.

“I am not in a hurry for the money, and very likely you are.” Charles made it to Texas, but his condition took a turn for the worse, and he

died in San Antonio in March 1867, having never met Gouhenant.

Over the next few years, as Gouhenant settled into married life at home near wife Elizabeth’s parents, he seemed to finally hit his stride. He touted himself in the local newspaper as a “practical chemist and physician,” and by 1870 he was among the wealthiest men in Pilot Point, with holdings worth an estimated $15,000. At age 66 Gouhenant was embarking on the final chapter of his life.

In April 1871 he boarded a train for Washington, D.C., reportedly to make arrangements for “a geological survey of Texas.” On reaching Springfield, Mo., he and the other passengers disembarked for a meal near the depot. Sometime later they heard the ringing of the bell on the locomotive, and Gouhenant made a dash for the train. “Seizing hold of the railing on the car platform,” the Missouri Weekly Patriot reported, “he stepped up with his right foot, and in attempting to raise his left foot, it was caught under the wheels and crushed.…He was carried 40 feet.” A few days later Gouhenant died of complications from his accident and subsequent amputation.

Gouhenant’s unique talents and magnetic personality had helped cinch his place in Texas history. His Arts Saloon has been well documented as the first artistic endeavor in Dallas, and his few surviving photographs capture some of the town’s earliest citizens. The Texas Supreme Court’s decision on the Arts Saloon case served as a precedent in Texas homestead law for decades to follow. Like his father, Ernest Gounah [sic] became a naturalized citizen. Amid the Civil War, Ernest sided with fellow Texans and enlisted as a Confederate soldier. He was promoted to chief bugler for the 6th Texas Cavalry, survived the war and had seven children.

The tower Adolphe Gouhenant built in Lyon still stands on Fourvière Hill. Undergoing renovation, it will reopen as a restaurant, presumably with its founder’s blessings from beyond utopia.

A descendant of Adolphe Gouhenant, Paula Selzer is co-author with Emmanuel Pécontal of Adolphe Gouhenant: French Revolutionary, Utopian Leader and Texas Frontier Photographer. She drew from primary sources cited in the book to write this article.

Dallas Courthouse

Gouhenant took this daguerreotype in 1856. Earlier his Arts Saloon sold at a sheriff’s auction on the steps of the courthouse for $91. He won it back in court.

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OPPOSITE AND THIS PAGE TOP: MAHAFFIE STAGECOACH STOP & FARM (3); BOTTOM: PHOTO BY DIANA WEST

COLLECTIONS

Between Labor Day and Memorial Day the Mahaffie Stagecoach Stop & Farm offers regular stagecoach rides. Here matching grays Chip and Ace pull a reproduction Concord-style coach.

A DON’T-MISS STOP ON THE SANTA FE TRAIL

A

THE MAHAFFIE STAGECOACH STOP & FARM, IN OLATHE, KAN., RECALLS 19th-CENTURY TRAVEL AND COMMERCE

BY LINDA WOMMACK

mong the iconic routes of the frontier era, the Santa Fe Trail marks its bicentennial this year (see feature article, P. 36). Pioneered in 1821

by American trader William Becknell, it served mainly as a commercial thoroughfare between western Missouri and Santa Fe in what was then the Mexican province of Nuevo México and in 1850 was organized as New Mexico Territory.

Travelers’ rests popped up along the trail. Among them was the Mahaffie farm, just outside the Kansas Territory town of Olathe, which began welcoming visitors in 1858. Today, the site is preserved as the Mahaffie Stagecoach Stop & Farm Historic Site.

In the fall of 1857 James Beatty and Lucinda (née Henderson) Mahaffie ventured west from Logansport, Ind., and moved into a wood-frame house in Olathe. The next year they used oxen to move the house to a 160-acre farm within a mile of the town square. Travelers headed west on the Oregon, California and Santa Fe trails found Westport a convenient jumping-off point, 76 WILD WEST

and the Mahaffies opened their home to passersby as a lodging and restaurant. The family acquired more land, and in 1865 they built a two-story stone addition to the original house. Their holdings ranked them among the more prosperous residents of Johnson County.

In 1863 the Barlow, Sanderson & Co. stage line contracted with the Mahaffies to provide livery service and meals to coaches carrying passengers and mail between Forts Scott and Leavenworth and those bound from Independence, Mo., to Santa Fe. Passengers took their meals in the basement kitchen of the stone addition, and by 1867 Lucinda, her daughters and hired help were serving up to 100 meals a day. While passengers ate, James and his hands would switch out the teams of horses, though farming remained the family’s bread and butter.

The arrival of the railroad in Olathe put an end to stagecoach operations in the area in 1869, and James and Lucinda retired from farming in 1881. Two years later they moved back

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OPPOSITE AND THIS PAGE TOP: MAHAFFIE STAGECOACH STOP & FARM (3); BOTTOM: PHOTO BY DIANA WEST

COLLECTIONS

to Olathe, where Lucinda died in 1903, and James in 1907. They rest side by side in the Olathe Memorial Cemetery.

The old farm changed hands several times in the 20th century. Realizing the historic significance of the Mahaffie property, the city of Olathe in 1979 purchased the surviving buildings and remaining 13 acres, as well as surrounding acreage to protect the site from development. The Mahaffie Stagecoach Stop & Farm Historic Site occupies nearly 40 acres. Operated by Olathe’s Parks & Recreation Department, it is one of few remaining stagecoach stops along the 200-year-old Santa Fe Trail and the only one preserved as a historic site (listed on both the National Register of Historic Places and the Register of Historic Kansas Places). The National Park Service has designated the site an official component of the Santa Fe National Historic Trail, and it is also a partner site of Freedom’s

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Frontier National Heritage Area in eastern Kansas and western Missouri.

At the heart of the grounds are the well preserved farmhouse and stone addition. The large kitchen centers on the original cookstove, stone oven and large hearth. As was the case in the Mahaffies’ heyday, the timber-frame barn and surrounding acres are home to horses, sheep, chickens and other livestock. Also enjoy the new outdoor sculpture of a stagecoach approaching the farm. Living history activities include rides in a reproduction Concordstyle coach or smaller vintage mud wagon, as well as blacksmithing and period cooking demonstrations. Doubling as a welcome center and exhibit hall, the timber-frame Mahaffie Heritage Center is available for rent and can seat as many as 150 people. Open year-round, the historic site is at 1200 E. Kansas City Road in Olathe. For more information visit Mahaffie.org or call 913-971-5111.

Above left: The original cookstove graces the basement kitchen of the Mahaffie farmhouse.

Above: Upstairs is a comfy parlor. Below: A recent addition to the historic site is the sculptural work Going West on the Old Santa Fe Trail, by Kwan Wu.

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GUNS OF THE WEST

1901 This special order Model 1894 Winchester uses .38-55 black powder cartridges instead of smokeless powder cartridges and has a flat butt plate instead of the usual crescent-shaped one.

THE PEERLESS SMOKELESS WINCHESTER THE MODEL 1894 WAS FAVORED BY 19th-CENTURY LAWMEN AND OUTLAWS AND HAS SINCE REMAINED A FAVORITE OF HUNTERS

BY GEORGE LAYMAN

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JUDE STEELE

TOP: JUDE STEELE; LEFT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

R

to 1980, followed by its successor, the U.S. eplacing ages-old black powder Repeating Arms Co., under the Winchester propellants with cleaner, safer name, until the historic New Haven facility and more powerful smokeless closed in 2006. powder—formulated in 1884 by French chemWhen Winchester introduced the Model ist Paul Marie Eugène Vielle—revolutionized 1894, it offered the rifle in two calibers for the firearms industry at the close of the 19th metallic black powder cartridges—.32-40 Wincentury. In the 1890s American gun makers chester and .38-55 Winchester. By the spring jumped on the bandwagon that had started in of 1895, however, the Model 1894 had reEurope, designing rifles, pistols and shotguns alized its full potential with the introduction that could handle cartridges packed with the of two smokeless powder cartridges—.25-35 nitrocellulose-based propellants. The U.S. Winchester and .30 WCF (Winchester Center Army set the precedent when it adopted the Fire). The latter cartridge, more commonly Krag-Jorgensen Model 1892 bolt-action reJOHN MOSES BROWNING referred to as the .30-30 Winchester, earned peating rifle, chambered for the .30-40 Krag worldwide repute. smokeless cartridge. Most U.S.-based fireWinchester produced the Model 1894 in both rifle and cararms manufacturers then upgraded their product lines. The Winchester Repeating Arms Co. was early to the game, bene- bine variants, the rifle with either a 24- or 26-inch barrel, and fitting greatly from the input of pioneering firearms designer the carbine with a 20-inch barrel. By 1902 the company had introduced yet another smokeless cartridge, the .32 WinchesJohn Moses Browning.

Having already designed several rifles for Winchester, in- ter Special, for use in the Model 1894. The .32 Special had a cluding the single-shot Model 1885 and lever-action Models slightly larger bullet diameter than the .30-30, thus the two were 1886 and 1892, Browning soon contributed another repeater. not interchangeable. The rifle variant proved especially popular The Model 1894 was—and arguably remains—the best lever- with hunters of deer and other medium-size game, as the knockaction repeating rifle ever devised. Winchester produced the down power of the high-velocity .30-30 or .32 Special was unrifle from its headquarters in New Haven, Conn., from 1894 like anything available during the black-powder era. Thanks to

JUDE STEELE

TOP: JUDE STEELE; LEFT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVE

GUNS OF THE WEST

vertical locking lugs and improved nickel steels, the Model 1894’s strong action enabled it to withstand higher pressures.

The handy 6.8-pound Winchester ’94 carbine found favor with the San Francisco Police Department and countless Western sheriff’s departments, prison guards and other law enforcement agencies. The Texas Rangers were especially fond of the powerful new lightweight Winchester carbine in .30-30, as its flat trajectory could reach out to far longer ranges than the .44-40 or any other black powder cartridges.

The rifle variant also found its adherents. Charles A. “Charlie” Siringo, who spent nearly 22 years with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, embraced the Model 1894 rifle at first sight. Controversial range detective Tom Horn’s last rifle was a special order .30-30 Model 1894 (Serial No. 82667) with a “button magazine,” meaning the tubular magazine was shortened, right to the tip of the wooden forearm, at a cost of $1 extra. Winchester shipped the rifle to Horn on June 19, 1900. Before Wyoming authorities hanged him for murder in Cheyenne on Nov. 20, 1903, Horn presented the rifle to rancher friend Charles B. Irwin. In 2015 the rifle and other personal items of Irwin’s fetched $130,000 at auction.

Harry Severns (alias Harry Tracy) was among the many outlaws who took a liking to the reliable seven-shot Model 1894 carbine in .30-30. Tracy was serving time in the Oregon State Penitentiary when a former prisoner smuggled in two Winchester ’94s and several boxes of cartridges to him and fellow convict David Merrill. On June 9, 1902, the pair shot their way out, killing three guards in the process, which prompted a region-wide manhunt. The escapees made their way to Washington state, where they quarreled and engaged in a duel on June 28, Tracy spinning around early to kill Merrill. Tracy engaged in other fatal shootouts before a posse cornered and wounded him in a wheat field in Creston, Wash., on August 6. At one point during the standoff dead-shot Tracy aimed his Winchester at a pursuer but fired wide. A later examination of the rifle chalked up the miss to a bent

front sight. To avoid capture, Tracy shot himself with a single-action Colt.

In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I in Europe, France bought 15,100 Winchester ’94 carbines for mobile support troops, and the British Royal Navy obtained 5,000 for shipboard personnel. While making its own war preparations, the U.S. government bought 1,800 .30-30 Model 1894s for use by the Signal Corps to thwart labor strikes in the Pacific Northwest amid crucial lumbering operations (the Sitka spruce was used in aircraft production). Winchester later presented milestone Model 1894s to a number of U.S. presidents—Calvin Coolidge received the 1 millionth rifle in 1927, Harry S. Truman the 1½ millionth in 1948, and Dwight D. Eisenhower the 2 millionth in 1953. During World War II Canada’s Pacific Coast Militia Rangers carried the Model 1894 to defend against possible Japanese invasion.

From 1894 to 2006 Winchester Repeating Arms and U.S. Repeating Arms rolled out more than 7.5 million Model 1894s. Since 2010 Japan’s Miroku Corp. has been making Winchester ’94s under license by the U.S.-based Olin Corp., which owns the brand. The Browning Arms Co., of Ogden, Utah, imports them stateside. In demand globally from the close of the 19th century through present, the Winchester 1894 may just deserve the nickname “The Gun That Won the World.”

the Model 1894 may just deserve the nickname ‘the GuN that won the world’

A close-up of the loading gate of the 1901 special order 1894 Winchester.

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GHOST TOWNS This adobe cabin is one of two surviving miners’ dwellings at Mineral Park, which at its peak had more than 700 residents.

MINERAL PARK, ARIZONA

P

erched at 4,200 feet on the western slope of the Cerbat Mountains northwest of Kingman, Arizona, Mineral Park has an unusual—and unusually long— mining history. Like most mining towns it went through periods of boom and bust, but unlike most its mineral resources have been coveted by humans for some 2,000 years.

Known for significant yields of copper, molybdenum and silver, the namesake mine is also one of the world’s largest producers of turquoise. The local Kingman turquoise has a distinctive matrix and veining, and archaeologists have unearthed trade specimens of it dating from 57 bc in northwest New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon and others dating from ad 200 in the region of present-day Mexico City. Ancient Hohokam stone hammers found in Mineral Park date from ad 600. Precontact Navajo craftsmen also worked the diggings.

Modern exploration dates from the 1863 creation of Arizona Territory. On reports of gold and silver in the Cerbat Mountains, miners made their way by ship to the Gulf of California, then by steamboat more than 300 miles up the Colorado River to Hardyville (present-day Bullhead City). From there they faced a nearly 40-mile trek to the diggings by horse or mule.

In 1870 the discovery of an especially rich silver deposit in quartz monzonite around Ithaca Peak prompted the first big boom. Camp residents founded the Mineral Park District in 1871. The first major mine was the Mayflower, followed by the Keystone, the New Moon and dozens of smaller discoveries.

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By 1872 some 500 people had descended on the district, and a post office opened that December.

Development progressed quickly, and Mineral Park became the major supply point for surrounding mines and cattle ranches.

In 1873 it was chosen as the fourth seat of Mohave County, taking over from nearby Cerbat. The mines first shipped their ore overseas to Wales at tremendous cost for processing. All that changed in 1876 when the owners of the Keystone built a five-stamp mill, and the mines shipped their ore to a smelter in San Francisco at a cost of $125 per ton. By then the town had a courthouse and jail, a school, stores, hotels, restaurants, saloons, doctors, lawyers, an assay office, two stagecoach stations and a red-light district.

As with most Western boomtowns, easy money attracted a criminal element. Mineral Park’s three newspapers reported various shooting scrapes. Legend has it sometime in the 1880s a band of five men robbed a local saloon and a departing stagecoach, making off with 400 pounds of gold, which they promptly buried. A posse soon caught up with the robbers and killed all five of them, and the gold was never found. Whether the story is apocryphal or not, local miners continued to unearth plenty of riches.

In 1883 the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad established a siding near Beale Springs, scarcely 20 miles to the south, greatly improving both the time and cost of shipping ore. Mineral Park’s population swelled to more than 700 on the news. However, the unassuming siding grew rapidly into the city of Kingman, which

PHOTOS BY JIM PETTENGILL (3)

COPPER, MOLYBDENUM AND SILVER HAS DRAWN MODERN MINERS, BUT TURQUOISE HAS ATTRACTED INTEREST FOR MILLENNIA

BY JIM PETTENGILL

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PHOTOS BY JIM PETTENGILL (3)

GHOST TOWNS

by 1886 had assumed enough importance that Mohave County voters chose it as county seat.

Despite the lopsided vote of 271 for Kingman to just 93 for Mineral Park, officials of the latter town refused to give up the county records. Kingman officials had to physically remove them.

Mineral Park had other problems. By 1887 the silver ore was largely depleted, and miners began moving to Kingman or new camps. Even the newspapers moved to Kingman. A drop in silver prices attending the Panic of 1893 closed most of the mines, and the post office suspended operations for several uncertain months. Mining continued on a smaller scale, centered primarily on copper, lead and zinc.

In its heyday one of the district’s more interesting residents was Cordelia Kay, aka the “Lady Miner of Mineral Park.” In 1874 miner and former county sheriff Lamber Collier Welbourn brought the young bride to town. On his death in 1883 Cordelia became sole owner of their lucrative mines.

A year later she married Englishman John Kay. Three sons and two daughters were born to the couple (their twin daughter and son dying in infancy), but the difficult childbirth of their third son nearly killed Cordelia and left family in financial straits. To tide them over, John opened the Pioneer Saloon, and Cordelia ran a restaurant until able to resume mining.

By 1902 they were again in the money, having discovered a significant silver deposit assayed at more than 3,000 ounces per ton. “Mrs. Kay entered the mine herself and hit the head of a drill with the energy of hope,” reported Kingman’s Our Mineral Wealth. “She cut the fuse, bit the cap, tamped the powder and returned into the smoke to see the result of the shot.”

Though James Haas is credited with the rediscovery of Kingman turquoise in the 1880s, Cor-

delia Kay had uncanny luck at finding the gemstone. In 1909 the Mohave County Miner reported she’d sold turquoise from her Ostrich copper mine to a San Francisco buyer for more than $3,000.

The couple’s copper diggings also made them a fortune. After decades of hard work and high yields, John died in 1924, Cordelia in 1933. They rest side by side at the Mountain View Cemetery in Kingman.

Copper, lead and molybdenum remained the mainstays of the Mineral Park District until demand fell off after World War I. The post office closed for keeps in 1912, and by 1920 mining operations were at a crawl. In 1948 the Keystone was the last of the district’s 225 mines to close. By then it had produced 3,000 ounces of gold and 450,000 ounces of silver.

But Mineral Park wasn’t dead, only dormant.

In 1959 the Duval Sulphur & Potash Co. (renamed the Duval Corp. in 1963) bought the district for taxes and began exploration. In 1962 the company opened a large open pit copper and molybdenum mine that eventually devoured Ithaca Peak and all but a sliver of the town. By the time Duval ceased operations in 1981, the mine had yielded more than 323,000 tons of copper, 25,000 tons of molybdenum and 5 million ounces of silver worth more than $1 billion.

After Duval ceased production, the mine went through a succession of owners. The current owner, the Origin Mining Co., is not producing copper, as the price remains too low to make it profitable.

But turquoise mining is in full swing at the mine.

When Duval started operations in the early 1960s, S.A. “Chuck” Colbaugh obtained the rights to remove turquoise from the mine, and his family continues operations to this day. Their terrific turquoise shop is at 3471 W. Chea Drive in Golden Valley, 7 miles north of Kingman.

All that remains of the town of Mineral Park is the foundation of the first mill, two miners’ dwellings, stone walls and the well-maintained cemetery within the fenced-in mine property.

Left: The foundation of the original 1876 mill is the largest remaining structure. Above: This cabin at Mineral Park is barely hanging on.

by 1881 the silver ore was largely depleted, and miners began moving to kingman or new camps

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REVIEWS

MUST SEE, MUST READ JOHNNY D. BOGGS PICKS BOOKS & FILMS ABOUT WESTERN JOURNALISTS Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power (2010, by James McGrath Morris): A rich account of Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungary-born immigrant who got his start in journalism as a reporter for a German-language newspaper in St. Louis, then took the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to national prominence before moving to New York and launching the era of modern mass communication.

They Carried the Torch: The Story of Oklahoma’s Pioneer Newspapers (1937, by Mrs. Tom B. Ferguson): “We want a story every morning that will justify someone waking us up before noon with a gun and the promise of sudden death,” an editor told a reporter in Oklahoma City in 1893.

A solid account by the newspaperwoman who became Edna Ferber’s model for Cimarron’s Sabra Cravat.

Red Blood and Black Ink: Journalism in the Old West (1998, by David Dary): Western Writers Hall of Fame inductee Dary, known for his books about frontier cowboys, prostitutes and doctors, tackles newspapers, from tramp printers to printing presses to editors who weren’t afraid to call their competition “crane-necked, blobber-lipped, squeaky-voiced, emptyheaded, snaggletoothed, filthy-mouthed, box-ankled, pigeon-toed, red-footed…”

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The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism (2017, by Mitchell Stephens): Thomas is best remembered as a broadcaster—“So long until tomorrow” was his catchphrase—but he got his start in a Colorado mining camp, working his way from newsboy to newsman for the Victor Record, Victor Times, Denver Times and Rocky Mountain News.

The Times of Wichita (1992, by Bruce H. Thorstad): A well-crafted novel about two brothers who settle in Wichita, Kan., in 1871 to start The Times of Wichita—which doesn’t make them popular with the man who runs the town and a competing newspaper.

Thorstad’s eye for detail, from printing presses to buffalo hunts, is impeccable.

MOVIES The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, on DVD and Blu-ray): “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

James Stewart is the lawyer who takes

a job for Shinbone Star founder, publisher and editor Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brien).

What else can be said about John Ford’s classic, somber, elegiac ode to the end of the West? Except … no newspaper journalist would ever give up the scoop of the century!

Fort Worth (1951, on DVD): Randolph Scott tries to tame his hometown through the power of the press, but as one would expect from a Western, he won’t be able to do it without gunplay. The screenwriter did draw on journalistic history. Scott’s paper prints an article about a panther spotted sleeping on Belknap Street. In 1875 the Dallas Herald printed a letter saying that Fort Worth was so dull, a panther was seen sleeping in the street.

Jesse James (1939, on DVD and Bluray): Part of the 1939 canon that reinvigorated the Western genre, this film casts character actor Henry Hull as Major Rufus Cobb, a Hollywoodized version of Missouri newspaperman John Newman Edwards. While the plot is scant on history, Cobb’s eulogy at Jesse’s graveside service is slightly reminiscent of Edwards’ Sedalia Democrat editorial published after Jesse’s death.

The Cowboy and the Indians (1949, on DVD): In this surprisingly pro-Indian programmer Gene Autry tries to get reporter Bob Collins (Harry Macklin) to write articles about the reservation.

Collins declines, saying, “The boss says interest in the noble red man died with Geronimo.” That kind of sarcastic quip rings true from a newspaper reporter from any era. But after Autry exposes corruption and crime, he tells the

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REVIEWS reporter, “There’s your story and you’re going to write it,” paving the way for a happy ending.

The Oregon Trail (1959, on DVD): In this formulaic oater New York Herald reporter Neal Harris (Fred MacMurray) delivers plenty of quotable newspaper lines.

When a pioneer calls him “a man of letters,” MacMurray quips, “No, just a reporter.”

Asked if he’s a failure, he answers: “A failure, ma’am? Yes, I guess you might say I am. I work for a newspaper.”

BOOK REVIEWS From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West, by Carolyn Grattan Eichin, University of Nevada Press, Reno and Las Vegas, 2020, $60 Let’s face it, there are only so many times one can shoot up the Long Branch Saloon before it gets old. As the West got properly settled and boredom set in, there was an increasing cry for decent entertainment.

Such, in fact, was the demand for good, respectable stage fare that by 1870 San Francisco boasted the third busiest theater district in the United States, after New York and Boston. Besides its own theaters, the “City by the Bay”

served as a hub from which traveling troupes extended their range by sea to Portland, Seattle and Vancouver or by land to whichever cities or towns could/would accommodate them.

Here Carolyn Grattan Eichin profiles the producers, directors and performers who brought theater to the West and reveals how Victorian-era attitudes shaped what they wrote and presented.

Despite the expected trends, such as overwrought acting and a class-conscious divide between “respectable” theater and such lowbrow fare as minstrel and burlesque shows, Eichin demonstrates that the West exerted its own influence on the material, effecting changes that eventually made their way back East.

Victorian mores were most starkly evident in how implicit the mention of sex was in highbrow theater compared to more permissive fare, though both sold their ample share of tickets.

While most extant

plays referencing prostitution came with the puritanical assumption “doves” were irreversibly “soiled,” the controversial Camille, with its more sympathetic portrayal of a “whore with a heart of gold,” was a guaranteed sellout wherever it played out West, as well as offering an emotionally challenging role few leading ladies could resist.

Another slowly but steadily growing Western trend was for minstrels in blackface to be joined or even supplanted by such talented black Americans as the autistic savant Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins and the Hyers Sisters, who presented their music and humor in a less-stereotyped and more recognizably human way.

Similarly, the theatrical move west gave Irish immigrants the chance to chip away at the degrading image under which they had labored since the Potato Famine. To a lesser degree Chinese, Japanese and American Indian performers likewise assaulted the racist ramparts by taking the stage.

Lavishly illustrated with period photographs, From San Francisco Eastward offers a look at Western entertainment from a different perspective, demon-

strating that some of the most profound influences on modern American theater came not westward from New York but back east from California.

—Jon Guttman

Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West, by H.W. Brands, Basic Books, New York, N.Y., 2019, $32 More than one writer has likened life to train travel, an understanding of the journey largely dependent on when a person embarks and—ahem—debarks.

History allows us the luxury of hindsight, if we remain curious and refrain from the contemporary rush to reframe it to suit our present sensibilities.

Omit the sometimes impolitic events of the 19th century from a study of the American West, for example, and its history—how we arrived here from there—would be incomprehensible. Place that very American century under a microscope, however, dissect it unflinchingly, and you’ll have a decent grasp on what

makes the region and its people tick, its strengths and weaknesses, its unique character, its peculiar contradictions and how it transformed from untamed frontier into a largely homogenous part of the American whole.

“Any work of history must have a beginning and an end,” H.W. Brands writes in the prologue to Dreams of El Dorado.

“This one commences with the Louisiana Purchase at the start of the 19th century, when the United States first gained a foothold —a very large one—beyond the Mississippi.”

That 1803 transaction between then aspiring French Emperor Napoléon and third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson gained the latter an 828,000square-mile foothold, to be exact, and for the bargain-basement price of $15 million, or $18 per square mile.

Just what Jefferson had bought and whether it would prove a bargain remained to be seen. Thus Brands steps off into the interior with Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery to explore “Napoléon’s Gift,” the first of eight broad sections on which he drapes his history of the American West.

Brands, a chaired history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, knows his topic well, having authored

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REVIEWS more than 30 histories of the United States, including wellreceived biographies of Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt and regional studies of the Texas Revolution and California Gold Rush.

Those westwardgazing presidents feature here, while each of the latter events merits its own section (“Gone to Texas” and “The World in a Nugget of Gold,” respectively). Other sections examine the fur trade, emigrant and cattle trails, Western explorers, the railroads, Indian wars, land rushes and the rush to mythologize the passing frontier in song and print and on canvas and film.

Though Brands keeps largely to well-trod ground, this is no formulaic textbook.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist is a gifted storyteller.

Alas, all good histories must come to an end. “Inevitably, the blank spot was filled in,” Brands writes of the “closing of the frontier” announced in the 1890 U.S. census and famously reaffirmed by historian Frederick Jackson Turner.

“As the West passed from dream to reality, it became more like the East, until nothing significant distinguished the one from the other,” he concludes. “Yet a 84 WILD WEST

residue remained.”

Sounding its echoes, Brands argues, were Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Hollywood filmmakers and 20th-century dude ranches. But those are topics for his yetto-be-written history of the New West— a train still rolling down the tracks.

—Dave Lauterborn

Firearms of the Texas Rangers,

by Doug Dukes, University of North Texas Press, Denton, 2020, $45 The lore of the Texas Rangers over the past two centuries has been both collective and individual, with about as many books written about the characters who contributed to the organization’s evolving form and reputation as have been written on the institution itself.

Considering the Rangers’ original purpose— to guard the Western frontier against depredations by Indians, Mexican bandits and lawless Anglos—and the long transition from “weapons of choice” to standardization, the Rangers’ firearms often were and continue to be as individualistic as the

persons with whom each was associated.

Given that fact and the rather comprehensive collection of historic weapons preserved by the organization, Doug Dukes’ hefty volume, Firearms of the Texas Rangers, not only seems inevitable, but also might leave Old West aficionados wondering why it took so long.

In essence, Dukes recounts the origins, notable personnel and development of the Rangers by tracing the weapons that accompanied them from formation to the present. More than 180 photographs illustrate the point. The first firearms mentioned, in association with Stephen Austin’s 1823 call to arms, are a mixed bag of flintlock and percussion firearms in use at the time. The first of those tied to specific individuals is a caplock rifle converted from a flintlock that was used both by Samuel Johnson during the 1836 Texas Revolution and in 1841 with Captain James Bourland’s Texas Ranger company. From there on Dukes relates the history behind specific weapons, such as a cut-down Colt singleaction revolver packed by the incongruously named Baz Outlaw, an engraved Remington Model 8 semiautomatic rifle presented to Frank Hamer and a Colt Combat Com-

mander semiautomatic pistol presented to John W. Dendy for his rescue of kidnap victim Amy McNeil in 1985. Aficionados of the Texas Rangers will find this specialized volume a welcome supplement.

—Jon Guttman

Buffalo Bill and the Birth of American Celebrity,

by Kellen Cutsforth, Two Dot, Guilford, Conn., Helena, Mont., 2021, $29.95 Even after taking the trouble to take acting lessons, William Frederick Cody’s thespian talents were barely passable at best. When he launched his “Old Glory Blowout” on July 4, 1882, however, that handicap was meaningless. Endowed with affability and charisma, combined with being a bona fide hero of the formative days of the American West, “Buffalo Bill” didn’t need Edwin Booth’s flair for the theatric.

To lift an appropriate phrase from Irving Berlin’s 1946 musical Annie Get Your Gun, Bill could sell himself and his outdoor

extravaganza just by “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly.”

Even with that raw material, however, there was influence, inspiration, perspiration and evolution behind what became Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. In Buffalo Bill and the Birth of American Celebrity Western writer and unapologetic Buffalo Bill fan Kellen Cutsforth conveys the reader along a profusely illustrated path to re-create the process that created the nation’s—and perhaps the world’s —first superstar.

“In the case of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the aspects of frontier life it embodied were nearly foreign concepts to the crowds who watched the circuslike spectacle,” Cutsforth writes in his first chapter, titled “Every Idea Is Inspired. “The show consisted of reenactments of historic battles combined with displays of showmanship, sharpshooting, buffalo hunts, horse racing and rodeostyle events. Each show was three to four hours in length and began with a parade on horseback.

The parade was a major ordeal—an affair that involved huge public crowds and multiple performers. Not too entirely different from the

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REVIEWS parades currently held at Walt Disney’s numerous theme parks every night.”

Among Cody’s earliest influences, of course, was Phineas T. Barnum, whose collection of museums and freak shows under a single tent combined whatever he could find with whatever he could conjure up.

This came to include American Indians, walking exhibitions whom he treated with undisguised contempt.

“P.T.’s use of native peoples in his exhibitions was often one of exploitation,” writes Cutsforth. “He paid the Indians poorly, treated them as savage brutes and only used them to make a quick buck. In what was perhaps a deserving end for the business and indicative of his exploitive ways, in 1865 Barnum’s American Museum burned to the ground.”

In contrast, Buffalo Bill genuinely and seriously believed he was edifying his audience on a rapidly vanishing era. It it is no coincidence he never used the term “show” for his extravaganzas. He treated his Indians with dignity and equitable pay.

For instance, writes Cutsforth, “In addition to his weekly salary and bonuses, Sitting Bull had a clause written into his contract allowing him to sell autographs 86 WILD WEST

and his portrait while keeping all the proceeds.”

Cody also treated Annie Oakley and his other female employees well. “With Oakley’s stage presence and ability to draw large crowds wherever she went, Buffalo Bill paid her like the star she was,” writes Cutsforth. “In fact Bill paid most of his female performers just as well as his male stars. Referring to this subject, Bill was quoted as saying, ‘What we want to do is give women even more liberty than they have. Let them do any kind of work they see fit, and if they do it as well as men, give them the same pay.’” That said, Cody might have showed his “showgirls” a little too much attention at times to the annoyance of his wife, Louisa.

As for the hokum the dime novels presented alongside his Wild West, Cody was aware of and willing to exploit the exaggerations, secure in knowing his exploits as Pony Express rider, Army scout and frontier hero were built around a kernel of truth. For the audience, seeing Buffalo Bill was, as the author expresses it, like a later generation meeting Superman…except this hero was for real.

Cutsforth concedes Cody had his human flaws—he was not the

best of family men, and his lack of management skills proved a fatal weakness on more than one occasion. Ultimately, however, this unabashed hagiography concludes Buffalo Bill laid the groundwork for all the celebrities that followed, as well as the superhero comic book (or “graphic novel”), cinematic and television Westerns and, for that matter, the still-recurring concept of the American West itself.

—Jon Guttman

Aces and Eights: Poker in the Old West, by Ralph Estes, TwoDot, Helena, Mont., and Guilford, Conn., 2021, $18.95 The title refers to the most famous poker hand in the Old West —the one Wild Bill Hickok reportedly held when Jack McCall shot him down on Aug. 1, 1876, at Nutall & Mann’s No. 10 Saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Ralph Estes, a writer of fiction and nonfiction who confesses to have won enough at poker “to salvage my pride if not

pay the rent,” briefly covers Hickok’s final card game in his preface. He also devotes Chapter 5 to Hickok, perhaps the best-known gambler/gunfighter/ lawmen in the Wild West, an impressivelooking man who “cleaned up” Hays City and Abilene, though not necessarily at the poker tables in those Kansas cow towns. In 1979, nearly 100 years after his death, Hickok was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame. It was, writes Estes, “allegedly for his legendary pokerplaying abilities and his dedication to the game—although I suspect it was mostly due to his giving us the most famous poker hand in history.”

What Estes gives us is an interesting, often amusing and definitely nonacademic look at what Leonard Cohen, in his 1967 song “The Stranger,” called “the holy game of poker.”

As it says in the subtitle, the focus here is (mostly) the Old West.

You’ll need to go elsewhere to learn how the game originated and developed before spreading to the likes of New Orleans, San Antonio, Santa Fe and the boomtowns of the West. Estes offers depictions of legendary Westerners with emphasis on the part poker played in their lives.

The cast of characters who knew their way around gaming tables

is long. Besides Hickok, Estes profiles, among others, Doc Holliday (who was a dentist and a gunman but foremost a gambler), Calamity Jane (she drank too much when playing cards and “was easy pickings at poker, but it was a way to be in among ‘the boys’”), Wyatt Earp (who made some money at poker but more running gambling operations in saloons), Bat Masterson (who favored his role as professional gambler over that of frontier town lawman), Poker Alice (who in her 70s said, “At my age I suppose I should be knitting, but I would rather play poker with five or six ‘experts’ than eat”) and Belle Starr (the “Best Lady Gambler in the West,” who once supposedly said, “A pair of sixshooters beats a pair of sixes anytime”).

Estes admits his book is not a serious history of the West. “Legends,” he notes “can be a hard thing to stare down, so in this book I’m mostly taking them at face value.” Even his subtitle stretches the truth, as Chapter 14 does touch on poker in the New West, while Chapter 15 covers everything from 20th-century poker kingpin Benny Binion to the World Series of Poker, which originated in 1970 and featured Texas hold ’em instead of seven-card stud.

—Editor

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WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING HOLLYWOOD ACTORS NEVER PORTRAYED WILLIAM F. “BUFFALO BILL” CODY ONSCREEN? Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, Keith Carradine, or Lee J. Cobb?

For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ MAGAZINES/QUIZ

HISTORYNET.com ANSWER: LEE J. COBB. 1953’S PONY EXPRESS FEATURED CHARLTON HESTON AS CODY. IN 1976 PAUL NEWMAN STARRED AS CODY IN ROBERT ALTMAN’S BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, OR SITTING BULL’S HISTORY LESSON. IN 1995 KEITH CARRADINE PORTRAYED CODY IN WILD BILL, A CAREER LOW POINT FOR LEGENDARY DIRECTOR WALTER HILL.

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CALIFORNIA NATIONAL HISTORIC TRAIL

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unny California? So it would be for thousands of American emigrants who trod, rode or drove wagons west along the 1,600-mile route from the banks of the Missouri River. But one luckless party late to cross the Sierra Nevada in 1846–47 met a dismal winter scene like that above. Today the lake and nearby pass bear that unfortunate party’s name—Donner. For those familiar with its fate the name calls to mind deep snowdrifts, starvation and survivors’ desperate resort to cannibalism. Of the 87 Donner party members who wintered here, only 48 lived to tell the grim tale. In the inset painting artist Vincent Decourt reimagines their unimaginable predicament.

88 WILD WEST

TOM FALCONER/FALCONERPHOTOGRAPHY.COM; INSET: VINCENT DECOURT, CC BY-SA 4.0

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