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A.A. HART, UNTITLED, CIRCA 1900 HAND-COLORED LANTERN SLIDE, 3.25-BY-4-INCH, COLLECTION OF THE OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA, GIFT OF BO PEEP CHAPTER, CHILDRENʼS HOME SOCIETY, NO. 81.96.42
F E AT U R E S
In 1866 a man sits where snowed-in members of the Donner Party once cut trees (the height of the stumps reflects the snow depth).
Cover Story
30 Donner Party Cannibalism: Did They or Didn’tThey? By Kristin Johnson The contention that none of the desperate pioneers resorted to eating human flesh during their tragic 19th-century overland trail trek doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
38 Murder, Mobs and the Marlow Brothers
By Jim Pettengill In a gun battle with vigilantes on the night of January 19, 1889, two Marlow prisoners survived, but both were wounded and remained chained to their dead brothers.
ON THE COVER: On the Way to the Summit (The Donner Party), a circa 1891 painting (oil on canvas board, 24 by 18.25 inches) by William Gilbert Gaul, captures the emigrants’ struggle through the deep snow at Donner Pass, which back in 1846–47 had more challenging boulders and no such smooth, wide road. (Cover painting: The Oakland Museum of California Kahn Collection, No. A65.98)
46 New Mexico’s
Reviled Heroic Padre
By Doug Hocking Taos Priest Antonio José Martínez founded his own parish and school, ministered to the poor and served as a legislator before facing a contentious excommunication.
52 Wright Was Might Among Oregon Indians By Carole Nielson Ben Wright sometimes lived among the tribes, but other times he hunted them, earning a reputation as a fearsome Indian fighter—until betrayed.
58 Marshal Gosling’s Final Train Ride
By J.R. Sanders Charged with escorting a pair of convicted Texas outlaws to the pen, affable U.S. Marshal Hal Gosling showed just enough human kindness to get himself killed.
DECEMBER 2013
WILD WEST
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D E PA R T M E N T S 4 5 6 8
Editor’s Letter Weider Reader Letters Roundup
24 Indian Life
By Louis Kraft Indian agent Ned Wynkoop welcomed into his home at Fort Larned, Kansas, such friends as Tall Bull, Roman Nose and Black Kettle.
28 Western Enterprise
Author Kristin Johnson considers 10 intriguing Donner Party connections, while our News of the West covers the 175th anniversary commemoration of the Trail of Tears and the selling of Earp and Holliday items at a weeklong auction in Harrisburg, Pa.
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By Terry Halden In early 1890s Montana, William Emery boasted the most productive mine in Rocker Gulch, and the town born there took his name.
By Candy Moulton Dennis McCown spent 16 years tracking the story of Helen Beulah Mrose, including her relationship with notorious Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin.
16 68 Collections
16 Westerners
66
By Linda Wommack Time stands still but not the timepieces at the Conger Street Clock Museum in Eugene, Ore.
Two bullets lacked the killing power to stop George Rock, but a noose at the Montana State Penitentiary in Deer Lodge did the trick.
70 Guns of the West
18 Gunfighters and Lawmen
20 Pioneers and Settlers
28
66 Ghost Towns
14 Interview
By R.K. DeArment His right arm shattered by a rifle bullet, U.S. Marshal Ed Johnson practiced, practiced, practiced to become a deadly left-handed shot.
By Don Stradley Tex Rickard, who went on to become a famous sports promoter, helped Goldfield, Nev., stage a 1906 prizefight to boost the town’s fortunes.
By Lee A. Silva The Colt Lightning, a slide-action (or pumpaction) rifle manufactured from 1884 to 1904, proved a hit with the San Francisco police.
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72 Reviews
Wagon master Will Bagley tracks down some of the best books and films about overland trails and trail disasters. Plus reviews of recent books about Commodore Perry Owens and Solomon Butcher and a critique of the 2013 movie The Lone Ranger.
By Peggy Sanders Annie Tallent considered herself “a delicate woman,” but she was a hardy pioneer and the first white woman to enter the Black Hills.
23 Art of the West
Johnny D. Boggs Utah artist Gary Ernest Smith doesn’t kid around with his historically accurate Billy Leaves Town.
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80 Go West!
Death Valley has long been worth its salt.
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Visit our WEBSITE
Onlineextras December 2013
www.WildWestMag.com for these great exclusives:
WWHA Six-Shooter Award Winner Jeff BroomeÕs article ÒWild BillÕs Brawl With Two of CusterÕs Troopers,Ó which ran in the December 2012 Wild West, has won the 2013 Wild West History Association Six-Shooter Award for best general Western history article. Read the award-winning tale online.
More on Dennis McCown ÒOne publishing company was so insulting about this being a womanÕs story, I am single-handedly boycotting any of their books,Ó says the author of The Goddess of War: A True Story of Passion, Betrayal and Murder in the Old West.
www.WildWestMag.com In the 1846–47 Donner Party tragedy, 36 of the 81 emigrants trapped in the snow-covered Sierra Nevada died. More than half of the survivors likely ate human flesh to stay alive. What would you do in a similar predicament—resort to cannibalism or hope that help would arrive before you starved to death? 2
WILD WEST
DECEMBER 2013
More on Gary Ernest Smith ÒI love the West,Ó says the Utah artist. ÒI read a lot of history that gets into real life, real situations, things that go beyond what Hollywood has gone into in the West.Ó
Colorado Lodgings In Colorado’s Landmark Hotels Linda Wommack profiles historic lodgings in her native state. Read a review of her four-star book.
EDIT O R’ S LET TER
The Donner Party Meal Plans Went Awry W EIDE R H ISTO RY G RO UP GROUP MANAGING EDITOR Roger L. Vance
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Vol. 26, No. 4
December 2013
Gregory J. Lalire
EDITOR
Mark Drefs David Lauterborn Martin A. Bartels Lori Flemming SPECIAL CONTRIBUTORS
Lee A. Silva Gregory F. Michno Johnny D. Boggs
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WILD WEST
T
he Donner Party tragedy of 1846–47 is one of the Wild West’s most grisly legends, thanks in no small part to the cannibalism involved. Of the 81 emigrants trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada, 36 perished. The others survived by eating oxen, deer, dogs, mice and, yes, dead people. Eliza Poor Donner, who was 3 in April 1846 when her father, George, captained the arduous trek from Illinois, arrived in California an orphan and more than half a century later published an account of her family’s ordeal. “Like fated trains of other epochs whose privations, sufferings and self-sacrifices have added renown to colonization movements and served as danger signals to later wayfarers,” she writes, “that party began its journey with song of hope, and within the first milestone of the promised land ended it with a prayer for help.” In the introduction to a 1997 Bison Books reprinting of Eliza’s tale, Kristin Johnson suggests: “The Donner Party became a legend, not because of the emigrants’ sufferings but because of the dire extremity to which some of them had been reduced. The specter of cannibalism haunted the survivors for the rest of their lives.” Pardon the tasteless wordplay, but the nation continues to feast on this juicy saga, which has embedded itself in popular culture (e.g., Terry Del Bene’s 2003 book Donner Party Cookbook: A Guide to Survival on the Hastings Cutoff and Nathan Hale’s 2013 graphic novel Donner Dinner Party) and overshadowed most other 19th-century overland journeys. Truth is, though, it wasn’t the worst such catastrophe. As master of trail writingWill Bagley points out in the “Must Read” section of Reviews (P. 72), the 1856 Mormon handcart tragedy resulted in more than 200 dead, but it is not as well known today as the Donner Party, perhaps because these Mormons were not known to have eaten their dead fellows. Next is the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormons, not bad weather, claimed some 120 emigrant lives (no, not for food). And in 1845 the first and hardest journey on the Meek Cutoff led to nearly 50 deaths (but no meek emigrant is known to have cut off and devoured another’s body part). That is not
DECEMBER 2013
to say there was one big communal feast at Donner Pass. “Twenty of the 45 survivors had not resorted to cannibalism,” Johnson writes in her cover article (P. 30). Johnson was the historian for the 2003– 04 Donner Party Archaeology Project, which turned up “no physical evidence” that cannibalism took place at Alder Creek, one of the Donner Party campsites. Many people interpreted this to mean the cannibalism must be a frontier myth. They are dead wrong, insists Johnson, who argues that cannibalism was surely part of the not-so-pretty picture at Alder Creek and the other sites. She names nine survivors who wrote or stated they themselves had, out of desperation, eaten human flesh. “The lack of confirmation in the archaeological record may mean physical evidence has disappeared through natural processes or human interference, but it may also reflect the possibility that archaeologists simply have not discovered it yet,” she writes. Makes sense—just consider what happened in Jamestown. It wasn’t until spring 2013 that archaeologists excavated a trash pit at the site of that Virginia colony and found the first physical evidence of cannibalism— cut marks on the skull and skeleton of a 14-year-old girl suggesting that her fellow colonists had, after her death, removed and presumably devoured her flesh and brain during the 1609–10 “starving time.” Louis Keseberg was the most notorious of the Donner Party members who resorted to cannibalism. He resorted to it— including cannibalizingTamzene Donner, wife of George and mother of Eliza—for nearly two months. It kept him alive and healthy. In 1879 Keseberg tried to set the record straight about his role as the last survivor of the Donner Party. “It has been told that I boasted of my shame—said that I enjoyed this horrid food, and that I remarked that human flesh was more palatable than California beef,” he said. “This is a falsehood. It is a horrible, revolting falsehood. This food was never otherwise than loathsome, insipid and disgusting.” By 1879 Keseberg was a widower, unsuccessful in business and destitute. Did he get his just desserts? It’s hard to say. Those were tough times. Today he might have opened a fast-food restaurant. Gregory Lalire
WEIDER READER
A sampling of decisive moments, remarkable adventures, memorable characters, surprising encounters and great ideas from our sister magazines
American History Core of the Corps of Discovery
British Heritage The Making of an Evil Reputation
MHQ Japanese Attack on Oregon
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark produced reports on frontier flora and fauna,Western geography and Indians during their groundbreaking transcontinental trek. The success of their expedition was due to decisive leadership, as Anthony Brandt points out in this excerpt from “Decision Point,” in the December 2013 issue:
George Custer was never a king, or even president, but while commanding the 7th Cavalry in the West, he has been viewed as an egotistical officer who mistreated his men and wronged American Indians— in other words, sort of dark and evil like Richard III. But there is another side to such men, as evinced in this excerpt from “Richard III in Yorkshire,” by Dana Huntley, in the December 2013 issue:
In Oregon during the mid-19th century settlers often worried about attacks by neighboring Indians. But 100 years later, in the summer of 1944, an attack came from Japan by way of its I-25 submarine and a floatplane. The idea was to start a forest fire that would terrify Americans. That attack is detailed in “When Japan Bombed Oregon,” by Bill Yenne, in the Autumn 2013 issue. An excerpt follows:
After being crowned king for less than six months and having faced down an armed rebellion, in December 1483 Richard established the Court of Requests, where poor people without recourse to legal representation could have their grievances heard. The next month he instituted the notion of bail, to prevent the imprisonment and seizure of property of accused individuals before trial. Richard also directed that law be translated into English from the French it had been written in from Norman times. And he abolished any restrictions on the sale and printing of books, effectively becoming the first monarch to champion freedom of the press. That’s not the sort of picture we usually see of the last Plantagenet king. Still, it’s not a bad record of accomplishment for a king who spent his twoyear reign largely occupied with defending his throne. Every medieval monarch had blood on their hands; it was the necessary and expected nature of their office. Whether in Richard’s case that included the blood of his nephews may never be known. In the North Country, however, where Richard’s Council of the North had materially improved both the rule of law and the economy, the Tudor portrayal of Richard III has never mattered. In York and in Middleham, the king’s death at Bosworth Field was greatly mourned.
The I-25 arrived off the Oregon coast in early September. Rough seas delayed the attack for a week, but by September 9 the waters calmed enough to launch the E14Y1 floatplane. Pilot Nobuo Fujita took off from about 20 miles offshore. A 170pound bomb filled with incendiary magnesium pellets was mounted under each wing. He crossed the foggy Oregon coastline near the town of Brookings, not far from the California border.…Fujita turned northeast toward Mount Emily, about five miles inland, circling the mountain. He dropped one of his bombs, then the other. Fujita said the magnesium pellets ignited like fireworks. Mission accomplished, he turned back to the shoreline and the sub. Americans did not realize they had been attacked for quite some time. Several observers on the ground had heard Fujita’s aircraft. At 6:42 a.m. Howard Gardner, a U.S. Forest Service observer on duty at the Mount Emily fire lookout, spotted the plane; its engine, he said, sounded like a Model T Ford backfiring. Gardner reported the sighting to the army’s Aircraft Warning Service, but no one saw a threat in a lone, unidentified seaplane circling above a wilderness area. When fires were discovered later that day, Gardner and others went to investigate.
On August 18, 1804, Lewis and Clark courtmartialed Moses Reed, who had deserted their Corps of Discovery and been caught. Leniency was not an option—as veteran Army officers themselves, the two captains knew that any dissension in the ranks threatened to sabotage the entire expedition and cast doubts on their ability to lead it. At the trial Reed confessed and was sentenced to run the gantlet of the entire corps four times. Courtsmartial were not frequent events, but they occurred often enough, and as the expedition worked its way up the Missouri River, men unused to military discipline came to understand it and adjust to it. Lewis and Clark were after a corps with a single spirit, devoted to its mission with one mind. The mission was certainly worthy of devotion. They were making history with a capital H, crossing North America to find a route to the Pacific Ocean. Turning a bunch of individualistic, independent frontiersmen, plus some of the least disciplined members of the little U.S. Army’s frontier forces, into the astonishingly effective Corps of Discovery is one of the great feats of American leadership—and one of the less celebrated of Lewis and Clark’s accomplishments. To subscribe to any Weider History magazine, call 800-435-0715 or go to HistoryNet.com.
DECEMBER 2013
WILD WEST
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LETTERS
‘[Soapy Smith’s] grave is indeed a spot people search for. Over the years I have seen people place flowers, a deck of cards, letters and even money upon his grave’
FINDING FINCKLE I enjoyed John Koster’s excellent article “Desperate Flight From the Little Bighorn” [ June 2013], in which he addressed the issue of possible survivors of the Last Stand, a topic many historians have dismissed as absurd. One of these men whom Koster believes might have escaped and survived was August Finckle. The author argues that Finckle’s body was not found on the battlefield, and he states that Daniel Kanipe, who supposedly identified Finckle’s corpse, was mistaken. Koster also cites CharlesWindolph as saying, late in life, “I tried to find the body of my German friend, Trooper Finckle.…But I could not identify him.” How ever, Windolph gave another account to Walter Camp decades earlier, “Windolph corroborates Knipe’s [sic] story about [the] line of Benteen’s march on p.m. of 6/27. Saw Finckle’s body sticking full of arrows, just as Knipe says.” Perhaps the most credible account of a survivor from Custer’s detachment relates to Gustave Korn. Newly discovered evidence suggests Korn’s horse was struck by a bullet early in the fight and became unmanageable from pain. The animal then ran back to Reno’s detachment, carrying Korn to safety. Because of Koster’s reopening of the topic of possible survivors, such accounts will gain more attention and possible approval. Albert Winkler Orem, Utah John Koster responds:Walter Mason Camp probably misheard “Finley” as “Finckle.” Kanipe indeed said Sergeant Jeremiah Finley was shot full of arrows. Kanipe never described Finckle as riddled with arrows to Camp or W.A. Graham; he simply said he was “very badly mutilated.” Camp died in 1925. But in 1944Windolph again told interviewer Arthur Kannenberg how bad he felt about not being able to find Finckle’s body, and Windolph’s daughter said her father talked about it all the time.Windolph could not have seen Finckle’s body, and Kanipe was mistaken, because the photograph of “Sergeant August Finckle” that George Kush discovered 6
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in the papers of Sergeant Samuel Alcott has been identified by a professional portrait photographer, two semiprofessional photographers, a Fulbright scholar with a degree in engineering from Dartmouth, a police chief with special training in facial recognition, a portrait painter and an anthropologist as undeniably a younger likeness of Frank Finkel. The photos of Sergeant August Finckle (above, left) and Frank Finkel (above, right) were analyzed point by point. Sergeant Alcott also says that “Sergeant Finckle” had trouble speaking German, which is bluntly impossible for a recent Prussian officer but no trick at all for an Ohio farm boy who never lived in Prussia and whose parents spoke a Bavarian dialect. No Prussian officer named Finckle, Finckle or Finkel turns up on the roster for Bismarck’s army in 1869–73. August Finckle and Frank Finkel were the same guy. MORE DOPE ON SOAPY Thanks for Jeff Smith’s article [“Soapy Smith’s ShowdownWith theVigilantes”] in the April 2013 issue. I have researched him for several years, and there’s some additional information of interest. Soapy never killed anyone until that fateful day of his demise. He is not buried in the cemetery but just outside it, because locals didn’t want the hallowed grounds defiled. Frank Reid was buried inside under the large granite marker erected to honor him. This was ironic, because Reid also sported an unsavory reputation. Today tourists are moderately interested in Reid’s gravesite but flock to view Soapy’s resting place. This, too, is ironic. When visiting Skagway, Alaska, I was told that two years after Smith’s burial the site was flooded, and his
DECEMBER 2013
body washed away. It was never recovered, but there was no publicity on this, because the site had become a drawing card for tourists and remains so today. Soapy never achieved the notoriety bestowed upon the likes of Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy and others, because he didn’t leave a trail of bodies behind him. But he probably made more money than all the others combined. He had gangs with memberships approaching 100. He kept agents in Portland who spotted people heading for Skagway who had a lot of cash with them. The agents would book passage on the same ships as the marks and alert Soapy, who would then relieve the newcomers of their money. It is no wonder he has been called America’s first gangster. His biggest successes in Colorado came when he owned a tavern in Creede. He would sit at a table in the back of the gambling hall section of the tavern and, when engaged in a conversation, would quote Shakespeare from memory to make a point. His stint there also revealed he had a benevolent streak, when he funded the construction of Creede’s first church. I authored a Western novel that covered his time in Creede, although he’s not the main character. Interestingly, other notables there at the same time were Bat Masterson, Bob Ford, Frank James, Poker Alice, Calamity Jane and others. In my opinion Soapy deserves a lot more attention than he has received. Bob Fry Flowood, Miss. Author Jeff Smith responds: Thank you for your comments. In regard to Soapy Smith not having any deaths to his name: Counting Frank Reid, Soapy has two “notches,” with a possible third, though the latter body was never found. It is true Soapy was not buried inside the cemetery grounds in 1898.It is also true his corpse no longer rests in the plot. A flood in 1919 carried his body out to sea. When standing at the foot of his grave, looking at his marker, turn your head to the right, and you will see among the brush a gully. It is there the original grave was.His grave is indeed a spot people search for. Over the years I have seen peo-
ple place flowers,a deck of cards,letters and even money upon his grave. Again, you are correct when you say that Soapy deserves more attention. That is changing. Today annual parties in his honor on the day he died are held in Skagway, Hollywood, Denver and Chicago. Fox has a screenplay for a book-to-film adaptation of Howard Blum’s The Floor of Heaven, in which Soapy Smith plays a major part. WYATT EARP’S SIX-SHOOTER I agree with reader Michael Tynio’s comments (April 2013 “Letters”) about Roger Jay’s article “Fatal Mix-up on Fremont Street” (October 2012), except thatWyatt’s Smith &Wesson was a No. 2 Model American single action (Serial No. 20029). The fact Wyatt was ready for action shows he probably already had it cocked in his pocket. As far as Lee Silva’s comments about the American being obsolete, the Smith &Wesson No. 3 Model, which came out in 1878 to 1904, still offered the .44 American cartridge as well as the .44 rimfire. Remington UMC was still selling .44 American cartridges in the 1920s and later. Winchester still sold Model 66
Winchester rifles until 1899. Neither cartridge was obsolete in 1881. Virgil Earp owned a No. 3 Model .44 Russian caliber. Did he have it before the Fremont Street incident or after he saw whatWyatt could do with a 7-year-old “obsolete” American? Ken Black Winnsboro, S.C. Lee Silva responds:Your letter proves how easily Old West myth can turn into presumed reality. You note that Smith & Wesson single-action American Model No. 20029 was Wyatt’s gun, when in fact it was John Clum’s gun, as I wrote. The late Earp relative Charles Dearborn had been a silent partner (1866–73) in Earp historian John Gilcrease’s museum in Tombstone, and Dearborn described No. 20029 to me as it was when Gilcrease first got it directly from the Clum family (when it still had the pearl grips presentation-inscribed to Clum, not the wood grips it has now). It is a .44 Russian caliber, and it is on display at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles. The Smith & Wesson American Model was discontinued in 1874 and replaced by the Russian Model that year and the No. 3 New Model in 1878. There is a .44 Russian
caliber No. 3 New Model (No. 14289) in the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City that is attributed to Virgil Earp, but it has no written history to back up the story. And Smith & Wesson didn’t make a .44-caliber doubleaction revolver until the summer of 1881, so it’s doubtfulWyatt would have had one as soon as October 1881. As for the various calibers of cartridges that were manufactured for decades, there is a big difference between ones produced in the East for special order and ones readily available on the frontier. While Colt eventually even made its Single Action Army Model available in .44 Russian caliber, in 1889, the popular calibers of the Colt in .45 Long Colt and .44-40 Winchester were stocked by every sutler and merchandise store on the frontier. So why would Wyatt have been packing a Smith & Wesson with cartridges that were hard to get instead of a Colt like all the Cowboys were carrying? So I will stick to my guns (pun intended) and repeat my conviction that Wyatt Earp did not use a Smith & Wesson at the 1881 shootout, especially not the obsolete American Model.
ROUNDUP
News of the West
Wild West ’s Top 10
Hammer Down in Harrisburg
Cash-strapped Harrisburg, Pa., held an auction of mostly Western artifacts in July in an attempt to pay off some of its enormous debt. Over a span of 15 years former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen R. Reed (who served from 1982 to 2010) spent some $8.3 million to buy 10,000 mostly Western artifacts, some of which proved inauthentic, for a Wild West museum that never materialized. In 2007 and 2008 Heritage Auctions of Dallas, hired by the Pennsylvania capital city, sold 2,000 of the items, netting Harrisburg $1.7 million. This summer Guernsey’s of New York posted some 8,000 items in an online catalog and on July 11–14 previewed the holdings. Most everything went in the weeklong auction that followed, and the city kept about $2.7 million of the sales generated. Thus the entire 10,0000-piece collection recouped $4.4 million for Harrisburg. Earp and Holliday items were most popular. A Doc Holliday frock coat, which his onetime lover Mary Catherine “Big Nose Kate” Horony Cummings still had at her death in 1940 at the Arizona Pioneers’ Home in Prescott, sold for $55,000 (the high estimate had been just $3,000). A February 13, 1882, mortgage document signed byWyatt and Mattie Earp, showing the sale of their home and lot on Freemont Street in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, also brought $55,000. A notso-comfy dental chair supposedly used by Doc sold for $40,000 (see photo). A bowie knife said to have been owned by Virgil Earp (see photo) fetched $16,000, while a Virgil pocket watch went for $9,500. Billy the Kid was not left out. His March 21, 1881, letter to New Mexico Territorial Governor Lewis “Lew”Wallace, requesting a meeting, sold for $32,500. 8
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AUTHOR KRISTIN JOHNSON LISTS INTRIGUING DONNER PARTY CONNECTIONS AND INTERSECTIONS James F. Reed, a leading figure in the Donner Party from Springfield, Ill., enlisted in Jacob M. Early’s company of volunteers during the 1832 Black Hawk War. Serving in the same unit were noted frontiersman James Clyman and lawyer Abraham Lincoln. The connections don’t stop there. 1. After Jacob Early’s company disbanded, James Clyman wound up settling near what would become Milwaukee, Wis. Clyman headed west in 1844, returning east in early 1846. He traveled with Lansford W. Hastings over the Hastings Cutoff, the shortcut that later doomed the Donner Party. 2. Parting from Hastings, Clyman continued his journey and met a large number of emigrants at Fort Laramie on June 27. Among them was his former comrade-in-arms James F. Reed, who eagerly asked about the new route. Clyman told him to “take the regular wagon track and never leave it” and that the cutoff “might turn out to be impracticable.” 3. At the time Reed’s baggage contained three muster rolls and an inventory from the militia company in which he and Clyman had served. In 2010 experts confirmed that Lincoln had written a section of one of the muster rolls; some theorized that Reed had acquired the documents when he administered the estate of Jacob Early. 4. Among the emigrants at Fort Laramie that day was someone else with a Lincoln connection. Noah James, a teamster for the Donners, was a first cousin of William G. Herndon, Lincoln’s last law partner and biographer. Noah survived the 1846–47 Donner Party only to be hanged as a horse thief in Stockton, Calif., in 1851. 5. Former Donner Party teamster Walter Herron, who had driven a wagon for Reed, lived in Stockton in 1851 and almost certainly witnessed Noah’s execution. 6. Herron, the San Joaquin County surveyor, gave his occupation as “civil engineer.” Walter’s elder brother, James, also a civil engineer, had an interesting connection of his own. In June 1842 James Herron received a letter from a grateful friend: “I found here your kind letter from Washington, enclosing a check for $20 and giving me new life in every way. I am more deeply indebted to you than I can express.” The letter was signed “Edgar A. Poe.” Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) includes an incident of survival cannibalism. 7. Before Clyman left California in spring 1846, he stopped in the Napa Valley to visit retired trapper George C. Yount (1784-1865). A year later Yount hosted an acquaintance of Clyman’s—Reed, who was in the area finding men and supplies for the Second Relief. 8. John Turner, one of the men Reed recruited, had been an early associate of the legendary Jedediah Smith. Reed was already acquainted with another of Smith’s comrades—Clyman. 9. Fur traders intersected with the Donner Party at many other points. At the Little Sandy the Donners took in Luke Halloran of St. Joseph, Mo., who owned six town lots purchased from Joseph Robidoux. They picked up another lone traveler at Fort Bridger, young Jean Baptiste Trudeau, the orphaned son of a trapper. Mountain man William O. Fallon led the Fourth Relief. John Sinclair, Caleb Greenwood, William Gordon and several others with fur trade connections participated in or assisted the Donner Party relief efforts. 10. Most significant, it was a mountain man who created the need for the others’ involvement: In late July 1846 Jim Bridger convinced Reed and others that Hastings Cutoff was practicable, supplanting Clyman’s advice and sealing the Donner Party’s fate.
DECEMBER 2013
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Hand-painted touches of symbolic colors recall the ceremonial face paint and regalia of the tribal past
Acclaimed eagle artwork graces a dramatic bronze sculpture in the Native American style
Ted Blaylock’s Artwork Soars Upon Gallery-Quality Bronze
ROUNDUP
Constable Earp of Cibola
In the late 1890s hardy prospects established a mining camp in Arizona Territory on the east bank of the Colorado River about 50 miles north of Yuma, 40 miles south of Quartzsite, Ariz., and 40 miles south of Blithe, Calif. The camp was named Cibola after the fabled Seven Cities of Gold that Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázques de Coronado had tried in vain to find in the 1500s. The valley east of Cibola promised fertile farming and grazing land, provided settlers could divert water from the river. The first settlers sold beef, eggs and produce to the riverboats that stopped there, and in 1903 a post office was established (the old post office building stands behind Bobby Bishop in photo). And a grandiose plan was developed to build a 16-mile canal through the valley to turn it into a bonanza of permanent cattle grazing and farming land.
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WILD WEST
West Words
“The feeling among the best class of our citizens is that the marshal was entirely justified in his efforts to disarm these men, and that being fired upon, they had to defend themselves, which they did most bravely. So long as our peace officers make an effort to preserve the peace and put down highway robbery—which the Earp brothers have done, having engaged in the pursuit and capture, where captures have been made, of every gang of stage robbers in the county—they will have the support of all good citizens.” —Tombstone, Arizona Territory, mayor and newspaper publisher John Clum, in the October 27, 1881, Epitaph
Indians and the Civil War
The National Park Service is including American Indian voices in its 2011–15 sesquicentennial commemoration of America’s CivilWar by partnering with the American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Raised in Blithe and Quartzsite, I often drove in the 1950s down to what was left of Cibola, looking for OldWest artifacts. I had been toldWyatt Earp had lived in Cibola and had run for constable in Quartzsite in 1904 and lost. But according to the November 23, 1904, Arizona Sentinel (Yuma), it was in Cibola, not Quartzsite, Earp had run for constable that year, and he had won by a vote of nine to one (see image above). According to the memoirs of Wyatt’s wife Josie in the unpublished Cason manuscript, she, Wyatt and Wyatt’s brother Jim had settled in Cibola briefly to find land for a ranch. But the canal was never completed, and Josie and Wyatt moved on to Goldfield, Nev., in early spring 1905.
DECEMBER 2013
LEE A. SILVA COLLECTION
Trail of Tears at 175
This year marks the 175th anniversary of the forced removal of Cherokees from the Southeast to IndianTerritory (present-day Oklahoma). The removal began in May 1838, and several thousand Cherokees are thought to have died en route or at internment camps. Last May, Cherokee representatives and others held a memorial service at New Echota (www.gastateparks .org/newechota, a state historic site outside Calhoun, Ga.), capital of the Cherokee Nation from 1825 until the removal. In August officials marked the Trail of Tears anniversary in southeastern Tennessee’s Red Clay State Historic Park [www .tn.gov/environment/parks/RedClay], where the Cherokees held 11 of their last 12 council meetings before the removal. On October 26 and 27, at Moccasin Bend National Archaeological District [www .moccasinbendpark.org] in Chattanooga, Tenn., the National Park Service opens the Federal Road Trail, a route Cherokees and Creeks used when they went West. Interpretive tours are planned. Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker will deliver a related lecture October 28 at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga.
the Bureau of Indian Education and publisher Eastern National to produce American Indians and the Civil War. Daniel Wildcat and Elliot West are among the 11 authors of this cultural heritage interpretive book edited by Robert K. Sutton and available at www.eparks.com.
Thus far I have found no evidence of Wyatt’s activities as constable of Cibola. There was a scandal involving investors in the canal, and Wyatt, as constable, might have been involved somehow in that legal issue. During my 1950s visits with members of the pioneer Bishop family in Cibola, I was told Wyatt had often stopped by the Bishop Ranch to play poker and had once left behind a deck of his favorite playing cards. The Cibola story is an important part of the legend of Wyatt Earp, as it was not only just the second time he was actually elected to a law enforcement office (the first time was when he was elected constable in Lamar, Mo., in 1870) but also probably the last time he officially wore a badge. —Lee A. Silva,Wyatt Earp biographer
ROUNDUP Forgotten Journey
Anyone interested in the 19th-century overland treks to the West has heard of the 1846– 47 Donner Party tragedy in the Sierra Nevada (see cover story, P. 30). But let’s not forget the other California-bound emigrants that preceded the Donners and company. John Krizek hasn’t. In 2001 he produced Forgotten Journey: The Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Saga, a 57-minute documentary about the first pioneer wagon train to cross the Sierra, in 1844. “In spite of deserts, Indians, snow, etc., they arrived at Sutter’s Fort with two more than they started with, because of babies born en route,” says Krizek, who codirected the documentary with Kit Tyler and Miles Saunders. “The Donner Party was attempting to follow the same track when they got stranded. The Breen family survived the winter of 1846–47 thanks to a crude log cabin built two winters before by three young men of the S-T-M Party left to guard several wagons left behind. There is a plaque outside the visitor center at Donner Memorial State Park to mark that spot.” Forgotten Journey is a trail story of success in the face of great difficulty, quite a change of pace from the downer Donner tale. For more info, visit www.forgottenjourneyprod.com.
Little Bighorn Memorial
Ten years ago officials dedicated the Indian Memorial at Montana’s Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument [www.nps.gov/libi]. Although Congress had authorized the Indian Memorial on December 10, 1991, construction didn’t begin until 2002, and the dedication came on June 25, 2003, 127 years after the battle. Temporary plaques were erected to honor the allied Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors, as well as the Crow and Arikara scouts on the side of the 7th Cavalry. This year, says Little Bighorn Superintendent Denice Swanke, the park service will replace those plaques with thick granite panels inscribed with text (mostly quotes from battle participants) and graphics chosen by the respective tribes.
Mary Kaye’s Place
The Western Writers of America Spur Awards [www.westernwriters.org] don’t just honor Western books, articles and films. At the WWA’s 60th annual convention, held in Las Vegas, Nev., in June, the co-winners of the Spur for best Western song performed their winning numbers —Mary Kaye singing “Any NameWill Do” (the lead track on her 2012 album No Wilder Place), and Jim Jones performing “Texas Is Burnin’”—for the enthusiastic WWA members and their guests. The Spur finalist was Jerry Faires for “The Last Real Cowboy in Old Santa Fe.” Texas-born Kaye’s most recent album, The Dawn and the Dusk [www.marykayeknaphus.com], features such fitting tracks as “Take Me Back to Texas,” “Git Along Little Dogies” and “Wyoming Woman, Montana Man” (although the Lone State native herself married a Utah cowboy).
Stolen Statue in Independence
Thieves stole the statue of a bonneted pioneer woman—a baby in one hand, a bucket in the other—from the grounds of the National Frontier Trails Museum [www.ci.independence.mo.us/nftm] in Independence, Mo., last June. Police nabbed three suspects, but the 6-footbronze statue had been chopped up for scrap. Sculpted by the late Juan Lombardo-Revera of Mexico City, The Pioneer Woman had welcomed museum visitors since 1990. Earlier this year the museum completed a preliminary study for the expansion and makeover of the facility, which includes a collection of trail artifacts and pioneer diaries. Now it must also seek funds to replace the lost statue.
Charlie Russell Success
The sale of three Charles M. Russell watercolors helped the nonprofit C.M. Russell Museum [www.cmrussell.org] in Great Falls, Mont., raise more than $1 million during its fundraising auction earlier this year. Russell’s High,Wide and Handsome went for $550,000, My Dear Mr. Cobb for $300,00 and Indian Signaling for $200,000. Two living artists also did well: R. Tom Gilleon’s Hair Apparent sold for $225,000, while Andy Thomas’ Russell Paints a Masterpiece sold for $200,000.
See You Later, Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard, 87, who died in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., on August 20, was best known for his crime novels, but his first published novel, The Bounty Hunter (1953), was a Western, and his 1961 novel Hombre was made into a classic Western film starring Paul Newman. Leonard’s short stories provided the plots for such 1950s Western film gems as The Tall T and 3:10 toYuma, and the contemporary TV Western Justified is based on Leonard’s writings.
See You Later, Stan Lynde
Montana native Myron Stanford “Stan” Lynde, 81, best known for his Western comic strips Rick O’Shay and Latigo, died of cancer in Helena on August 6. Rick O’Shay ran in newspapers for 20 years. Lynde later wrote Western novels.
See You Later, E.N. Flayderman
Antique American arms expert and collector E. Norman Flayderman, 84, died on May 23 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The Boston native was well known among gun enthusiasts for producing Flayderman’s Guide to Antique American Firearms…and Their Values, which is in its ninth edition and is considered the bible of American arms collecting.
Famous Last Words “Let this be a warning to you all, for you may at some future day be convicted of a crime through the power of money and false witnesses and still die an innocent man. With this, gentlemen, I bid you all goodbye.” —Perfecto Padilla, who was convicted of killing prospector John Vipond but maintained his innocence to the end (see story on P. 18 of the August 2013 Wild West), said these words from the gallows in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico Territory, on September 24, 1896.
DECEMBER 2013
WILD WEST
11
ROUNDUP
Events of the West Moran in Denver
Briscoe Western Art Museum
San Antonio’s Briscoe Western Art Museum, downtown on the River Walk, celebrates its grand opening Oct. 26 and 27. The new museum showcases a collection of art and artifacts. Call 210-299-4499 or visit www.briscoemuseum.org.
Monterey by the Bay
“Thomas Moran’s Yellowstone: A Project for the Nation” runs at the Denver Art Museum Oct. 6, 2013–Jan. 19, 2014. The exhibition features 15 chromolithographs of Yellowstone National Park and the Rocky Mountain region Moran published in a popular 1876 portfolio. (See Moran’s The Mosquito Trail, Rocky Mountains of Colorado, above.) Call 720-8655000 or visit www.denverartmuseum.org.
Battle of Honey Springs
The Honey Springs Battlefield Historic Site in Checotah, Okla., commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Honey Springs Nov. 8–10. Fought on July 17, 1863, Honey Springs was the most important Civil War engagement over control of Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Call 918-473-5572 or visit www .okhistory.org/sites/honeysprings.
John Coleman Art
“Honored Life: The Art of John Coleman,” runs through Nov. 17 at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis. Coleman, the 2012 winner of the museum’s Quest Artist of Distinction Award, is best known for his Western sculptures, but this exhibit includes some of his Western paintings and drawings. Call 317-636-9378 or visit www.eiteljorg.org.
Remington in Alpine
“Treasures from the Frederic Remington Art Museum” brings the artwork of the influential Western artist from its home in Ogdensburg, N.Y., to the Museum of the Big Bend in Alpine, Texas, through Dec. 8. Call 432-837-8143 or visit www .sulross.edu/museum. 12
WILD WEST
DECEMBER 2013
The Monterey (Calif.) Cowboy Poetry & Musical Festival, which kicked off 14 years ago, goes live Nov. 30–Dec. 2. Visit www.montereycowboy.org. or call 800722-9652.
Chandler Chuck Wagon
Authentic 1880s chuck wagons from around the Southwest compete in the fourth annual Chandler Chuck Wagon Cook-Off Nov. 8–10 at the Tumbleweed Ranch in Chandler, Ariz. Visit www .chandleraz.gov/chuckwagon.
Happy Trails
The Happy Trails Children’s Foundation honors B-Western star Ray “Crash” Corrigan (1902–76) this year in its Silver Screen Legend XVI raffle. This is the 16th year the foundation, through the generosity of the Colt’s Manufacturing Co. LLC of Hartford, Conn., has auctioned special guns and holsters to raise money for abused children. The drawing will be held Dec. 14. Call 760-240-3330 or visit www.happytrails.org.
John Wayne Ride
John Wayne’s Monument Valley Ride, a guided, four-day horseback jaunt through the iconic Western film locale made popular by director John Ford, saddles up Nov. 4–8. Call 505-286-4585 or see www .great-american-adventures.com.
Western Art
Nov. 9 and 10—American Indian Arts Marketplace at the Autry National Center, Los Angeles (323-667-2000). Send “Roundup” events submissions to Wild West, 19300 Promenade Dr., Leesburg, VA 20176. Entries must be received three months in advance of the issue date in order to be printed (space permitting).
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INTERVIEW
Dennis McCown Has Gone the Extra Mile In Search of Helen Beulah Mrose’s Story
She had ties to gunfighter turned lawyer John Wesley Hardin
By Candy Moulton
D
ennis McCown spent 16 years tracking the story of Helen Beulah Mrose. He searched from Mason County west across Texas to El Paso, south into Mexico and north to Sacramento, Calif. He conducted interviews with a “crazy woman,” a deaf man, cemetery caretakers and a big cowboy with a bad German accent. He negotiated the sticky field of outlaw-lawman history, following connections with JohnWesley Hardin, George Scarborough and John Selman. All this tracking and tracing, researching and writing resulted in as complete a biography of one of the West’s great female characters as might ever be possible. The Goddess of War: A True Story of Passion, Betrayal and Murder in the Old West (Sunstone Press, 2013) is an important contribution to Western literature. McCown (see his photo at right) recently discussed his research methods and book with Wild West. What drew you to Helen Beulah’s tale? It wasn’t Helen that drew me to the story. It was Laura Jennings, her daughter. I knew Laura’s traumatic childhood soured the rest of her life. As research progressed, I found other women from the Wild West with conflicted lives and wonderful, strong characters: Annie Williams, John Wesley Hardin’s landlady at the Herndon House, who was unafraid to stand up to him; Rae Wilmarth Lee, rejected by her father because she was pregnant and wouldn’t return to her husband; Annie Londonderry, a Polish Jew from Boston who broke all sorts of conventions to bicycle around the world in bloomers; and Carolyn Baze, who lived her life ostracizing anyone who dared talk about her youthful marriage to Hardin. In each case the scandals these women incurred echoed into the lives of their children and grandchildren. In Helen’s case she had many chances to get her life on track, and she squandered every opportunity. For me the tragedy of her story took a couple of years’ research before I decided she was going to be the main figure. How hard was it to find out where Helen Williams met killer turned outlaw John Wesley Hardin? 14
WILD WEST
It was awfully hard. I knew that Helen Jennings (neé Williams) in central Texas was Helen Beulah Mrose in faraway El Paso. The family legends I heard at Thanksgiving dinners, summer barbecues along the Blanco River or over the hoods of F-250 trucks while waiting for cattle auctions to begin were clear: John Wesley Hardin had stolen Helen from her husband in Mason County. For at least a year that looked plausible, for Hardin was in and near Mason County in December 1894. The conundrum was, however, that Helen was already living in New Mexico Territory before Hardin arrived in Mason. I had a hard time reconciling this to the idea Hardin had stolen her, but in the end, after dozens of interviews and hundreds of letters, I realized that having a runaway wife was embarrassing, but having her run away with someone famous was less so. That’s when I reevaluated what I was being told. I wasn’t being lied to in interviews; it was what the family wanted to believe. You sorted out the facts from the myths? With great difficulty. To give you an example: Both Leon Metz and Dr. Richard Marohn, in their biographies of JohnWesley Hardin, stated that Helen Beulah had
DECEMBER 2013
a son. I knew it wasn’t true, but every mention of Beulah since the mid-1950s claimed it was a boy. I knew this was based on the photograph “Mrs. McRose and Kid,” in which a tired and worn Helen posed with daughter Laura, with shorn hair and wearing a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit....As I began work on this, I learned that a number of competent researchers and a bunch of hacks had settled on “Albert Mroz” (M-r-o-z being the accepted spelling at the time) as Martin’s son....It was a bogus claim. In the end I became satisfied the idea Helen’s child was a boy originated with C.L. Sonnichsen in El Paso, who concluded that from the photo. . . . I had historical proof the child was a girl, [most notably] an original of the photo, inscribed on the back “Aunt Hellen [sic] and Laura Jennings.” Which was more exciting, trailing Helen or an icon like Hardin? Truth be told, Hardin. I knew he had been in Arizona, though no one else had ever figured this out. One day, sitting in front of a microfilm machine in a public library in Tucson, I found Hardin in Tucson in 1895. It was better than finding the Lost Dutchman gold mine. I jumped up and danced around the machine.
Read more at www.WildWestMag.com.
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New Mexico: True Adventures
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Travel to New Mexico, where blue jeans aren’t just a fashion statement, but a way of life; where Route 66, El Camino Real, and the Santa Fe Trail are here and now; and where the western tales of Max Evans, Tony Hillerman and Slim Randle recall a pioneer spirit of working cattle ranches, ancient civilizations and smalltown life that are as real today as the abandoned wheat mills, forts and wagon ruts in northern New Mexico. Follow in the footsteps of Billy the Kid; from his childhood home in Silver City to his adventures in the Lincoln County War, his daring escape from the Lincoln County jail and his death and burial in Fort Sumner.
Visit www.newmexico.org
n this 1911 political adventure, the US and Mexico are on a collision course over America’s border territories. The unjust commitment of a woman to an insane asylum reveals a conspiracy to find the Revert Document. If found before the New Mexico and Arizona obtain statehood, Mexico could reclaim those lost territories—and change history. Statehood Delegate Adobe Centori manages intrigue and danger while embroiled in the mysteries surrounding the Revert Document. Affairs of the heart complicate affairs of state—his strongest opponent is Gabriella Zena—La Guerrillera. They share love but not the same side of the border.
Artist Dave McGary’s “Free Spirits at Noisy Water” sculpture greets visitors to the Hubbard Museum of the American West in Ruidoso on the Billy the Kid Scenic Byway.
Little has changed in the old railroad town of Las Vegas, where Butch Cassidy once worked as a bartender; Teddy Roosevelt gathered his Rough Riders; and Tom Mix made western movies. From mountain peaks to rolling prairies and miles of backcountry trails wandering through endless forests, your true Western adventure begins in New Mexico.
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Coming in 2014! Anarchism in Gotham Sequel to Statehood of Affairs
WESTERNERS
Death in Deer Lodge Prisoner George Rock, with a hood over his head, hangs by the neck in front of well-dressed observers at the Montana State Penitentiary in Deer Lodge on June 15, 1908. Three months earlier, in a desperate escape attempt, Rock and fellow prisoner William Hayes attacked Warden Frank Conley and Deputy Warden John Robinson with knives. As he and Robinson were being stabbed, Conley managed to pull out a .41-caliber Colt and fire six times, hitting Rock twice and Hayes twice. None of the shots proved fatal. Conley needed 103 stitches but survived his stab wounds (he’s at far left in photo). Robinson did not, and so Rock went to the prison gallows for murder, and, after a failed appeal, so did Hayes, on April 7, 1909. “In 1912,” writes Lee A. Silva in his Wyatt Earp: A Biography of the Legend,Vol. I, “Warden Conley wrote a letter to the local hardware store that had supplied the .41-caliber Peters ammunition for his Colt, complaining about the lack of killing power…and stating that when he had recovered from his wounds, he had test-fired the Peters ammunition into a board, and the bullet hadn’t even penetrated it, whileWinchester ammunition had.” Silva adds, “The story behind this hanging photo graphically illustrates how important the man-stopping .45- and .44caliber six-guns were to the men who lived by the gun.” (Photo:The Greg, Jennifer and Susan Silva Memorial Old West Archives)
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WILD WEST
DECEMBER 2013
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G U N F I G H T E R S A N D L AW M E N
One-armed Deputy U.S. Marshal Ed Johnson Once Chased After the Marlow Brothers
His right arm lost in a gunfight, he became a deadly left-handed shot
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WILD WEST
federate general, U.S. marshal for the Northern District of Texas. Cabell’s deputy marshals included his son, Ben E. Cabell, and Ed Johnson, who became fast friends. In 1893 Johnson would name one of his own sons “Ben” after his pal. In early 1886 Johnson moved his family to Graham, Young County, the seat of a federal court, where he was responsible
ALL IMAGES: R.K. DEARMENT COLLECTION
L
awman Ed Johnson was destined to play a lead role in the Marlow brothers’ remarkable story (see related feature, P. 38). In August 1888 he was part of a posse that ventured into Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) to apprehend the brotherhood one newspaper called “the most dangerous gang of outlaws that ever infested the Texas border.” Arkansas native Edward Walker Johnson was born on December 13, 1854, on a plantation near Arkadelphia to plantation owner Henry Augustus (“Gus”) Johnson and wife Caroline. Gus Johnson fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War and was severely wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg. Returning home, he became embroiled in the bitter factionalism of Reconstruction, and in 1868 assassins ambushed and shot him to death. Marked by this violence, Ed grew to manhood as a fearless fighter, quick with fist or gun. Such attributes led to his appointment at age 22 as a deputy under Dallas County Sheriff Jim Abrams. Soon after, on Valentine’s Day 1877, he married 19-year-old Caddo Emily Wilson of Arkadelphia. The couple would produce 10 children. Around 1880 his brother Gus, named for their father, was getting the worst of a fight when Ed jumped in and clubbed the other guy unconscious. Fearing the man might die, Ed left Arkansas in a hurry for an uncle’s farm in Ellis County, Texas. Johnson tilled the soil on rented land near Waxahachie for a season before taking his growing family northwest to Clay County for another year of farming. In 1883 he moved into Newport and resumed his law enforcement career as Sheriff Cooper Wright’s deputy. In 1885 President Grover Cleveland appointed William L. Cabell, a former Con-
Ed Johnson won a gunfight in February 1888 but at no small cost—his right arm.
for enforcing federal law in a district stretching from the New Mexico Territory line east to Purcell, Indian Territory, and from the Kansas border south to the Texas & Pacific Railway. He augmented his federal pay by picking up a job as a detective for the Stock-Raisers’ Association of North-West Texas. The hardest and most dangerous part of Johnson’s deputy marshal job was serving arrest warrants in Indian Territory,
DECEMBER 2013
By R.K. DeArment
which swarmed with wanted men. He had 40 warrants and subpoenas in hand on one such expedition with posse members J.G. Hill and Charles Bingham in February 1888. On the 27th the three lawmen stopped for the night at Wichita Falls. They were partying at Valentine Faber’s lodging house along with Zack and Pete Randolph and several women when they exchanged harsh words with two uninvited, inebriated men—Rip Pierce and Frank James. The party crashers finally left, muttering threats. Frank James, perhaps imagining himself the fighting equal of his notorious outlaw namesake, armed himself with a Winchester rifle and, with Pierce tagging along, returned to the Faber house. Johnson, with pistol in hand, met them at the door and told them to leave. Instead, James raised his rifle and fired. Johnson’s six-shooter response came so fast that witnesses swore the two shots sounded like one. James, shot through the heart, staggered a few feet and keeled over dead. Johnson fell back into the room, his right arm shattered by the rifle bullet. Two doctors tended to him, but gangrene set in, and they could not save his arm. On leap year day, February 29, 1888, they amputated the limb between the elbow and shoulder. Johnson lost so much blood that one newspaper reported, “The room he was in looked like they had been killing hogs.” Adding insult to injury, he was charged with murder, and Bingham was named as an accessory. After a preliminary hearing on March 6, each was released on $2,000 bond. Johnson was back on the job within a month, but he would not be cleared until a jury acquitted him at his November trial. The court later dropped the charges against Bingham.
lease of the brothers Johnson was named as a lynch mob conon bond, the killing spirator in some of the actions. He was ofYoung County Sher- jailed at Dallas from November 23, 1890, iff Marion Wallace by until released on bond January 30, 1891; Boone, the latter’s dis- the charges were later dropped. appearance, the subJohnson remained in Graham, overseesequent rearrest of the ing several businesses and providing for other Marlows, their his family. His wife died in 1904, and for escape from jail and several years this man with one arm and recapture, and their a crippled hand was both mother and desperate repulse of father for his children. What’s more, his a lynching attempt. law enforcement career was not over. He But Johnson’s boss, was a deputy sheriff for a couple of years U.S. Marshal Cabell, under Young County Sheriff O.H. “Ol” concerned at this turn Brown in the 1910s. By 1915 Johnson had of events, wired his moved to Los Angeles, where he served for deputy to remove the 15 years as a deputy sheriff in the civil law Marlows from the Gra- department of the county court. Ed Johnham jail and transport son died in Los Angeles at age 76 in 1931. them to Weatherford Relying on two biased books published for safekeeping. in 1892 and 1931, authored by William In an attempt at se- Rathmell, a close friend of Charley and crecy, Johnson made George Marlow (the surviving brothers), the move on the night most of the later published accounts of Deputy U.S. Marshal Johnson (left) poses with Texas Ranger of January 19, 1889, but the amazing Marlow story have portrayed Lorenzo Creekman (center) and Deputy Sheriff E.A. Hutchison. news leaked out, and Ed Johnson as a villain. A close study of the Johnson diligently practiced drawing a gang intent on wiping out the Marlow history indicates just the opposite. and shooting with his left hand. “Ed John- brothers was waiting just outside of town son was the quickest man ‘on the draw’ for the buggy and wagons carrying John- R.K. DeArment edited, annotated and inthat I ever saw handling a six-gun,” re- son’s prisoners and their guards. When troduced Rathmell’s Life of the Marlows: called Phlete A. Martin, a young attor- challenged at Dry Creek by armed men, A True Story of Frontier Life of Early Days ney in Graham who had served in posses Johnson fired the first shot. In the en- (University of North Texas Press, 2004). with Johnson and later held the offices suing gunfight he sought to of county attorney and district judge. protect his prisoners, but a “Driven to the use of his left arm, he soon bullet soon struck him in—of became a deadly left-handed shot, and I all places—his only hand, dishave seen him do some marvelous shoot- abling the deputy marshal. He ing with his left hand.” scurried to the nearby creek In late August 1888, three months be- bed and, when the shooting fore he stood trial, Johnson pursued the was over, made his way on Marlows. Holding warrants for their ar- foot back to town, where Dr. rest on a horse theft charge, he ventured Richard N. Price treated his into Indian Territory with fellow Deputy wounded hand. U.S. Marshal Lon Burrison and posseEd Johnson remained in fedmen Sam Criswell, David “Dink” Allen eral law enforcement until late and Marion A. “Little Marion” Wallace, 1889, when the incoming Renephew of the Young County sheriff. The publican administration relawmen nabbed Charley, Alf, Boone and placed Marshal Cabell with Epp Marlow, escorted the four brothers George A. Knight, who apto Texas and locked them up in the Gra- pointed his own deputies. But ham jail. After traveling to Graham to Johnson still faced legal trouseek his brothers’ release, George Marlow bles. In the many and comwas also arrested and joined his brothers plicated court cases, crimiin the calaboose. nal and civil, resulting from Johnson played no direct part in the en- the attack on the Marlows Charley (left) and George Marlow lived to tell about suing events of the Marlow saga—the re- and their guards at Dry Creek, Dry Creek, where they and Johnson were wounded. DECEMBER 2013
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PIONEERS AND SETTLERS
The First White Woman to Enter the Black Hills, Annie Tallent Wrote Her Memoirs of That Time
Arriving in the Dakotas in 1874, she was among a group of ‘trespassers’
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young blood,’ etc.—usually one in which tomahawks and scalping knives conspicuously figured. … It was truly glorious out under heaven’s dark canopy, with its myriads of bright stars twinkling lovingly down upon us like a very benediction— more especially so in that we realized that we were soon to become trespassers and outlaws without the pale of civilization.”
SOUTH DAKOTA HALL OF FAME
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hile strolling the streets of Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, in the summer of 1875, Annie Tallent spied a man in a broad-brimmed hat headed in her direction. He suddenly stopped, doffed his hat and spoke to her: “Madam, I hope you will pardon my seeming boldness, but knowing that you have recently returned from the Black Hills, I take the liberty of asking a few questions in regard to the country, as I expect to go there myself soon. My name is Hickok.” Tallent recognized the name. After a few pleasantries Wild Bill remarked that Annie had a lot of “sand” for her part in entering the hills. Soon he took his leave, parting with the words, “Perhaps I may yet die with my boots on.” Tallent didn’t hear of Hickok again until the following summer, when the cries of “Wild Bill is shot!” echoed through Deadwood, Dakota Territory. A year earlier, in July 1874, Lt. Col. George A. Custer’s troops had found gold on French Creek in the Black Hills. By late December the Collins-Russell Expedition (aka the Gordon Party) had arrived and set up camp just east of present-day Custer, S.D. The group included Annie Tallent, the first white woman to enter the Black Hills; her husband, David; their 9-year-old son, Robert; and 25 other men. Along the trail party members shared stories and music around the campfires. Some discussed the fact their trek was in violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. As Tallent recalled in her 1899 memoir and history, The Black Hills: Or, The Last Hunting Ground of the Dakotahs [sic]: “Storytelling being more in my line, I would sometimes rehearse a tale calculated to ‘harrow up the soul, freeze the
Tallent was a refined but hardy trail pioneer.
The opening pages of Tallent’s book evince a sympathetic bent toward the plight of Indians and include an overview of the history of forced migration and broken treaties. The balance of the tome relates her observations on contemporary happenings in the Black Hills and her recollections of the region’s general history. It is one of the most complete histories of the Black Hills from that era. Today teachers, community activists and politicians of a certain stripe vilify Tallent’s writings, though she recorded the prevailing sentiments of the time. In a few instances she disparaged Indians, writing of her fear of being scalped or
DECEMBER 2013
By Peggy Sanders
taken captive. During the 78-day journey she recounted only one close encounter with Indians, when five braves from a larger band entered the camp. The Indians coveted Winchesters and, when they were denied, asked in turn for food staples. Recalling the event, Tallent referred to them as “the most inveterate of beggars.” The proverbial nail in the coffin came when she quoted the saying there are “no good Indians but dead Indians.” Annie Fraser was born in York, N.Y., in 1827 and educated at Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, N.Y. She married lawyer David Tallent in 1854. Eleven years later Robert was born. At some point the family moved to Elgin, Ill., where two of Annie’s brothers lived. It was in Elgin that Annie and David connected with Charlie Collins and Thomas H. Russell, who were organizing a gold-seeking venture to the Black Hills. Collins was the editor of the Sioux City (Iowa) Weekly Times. An experienced frontiersman, Russell had heard of the proposed trip by moccasin telegraph. Collins and Russell opened an office on Clark Street in Chicago to enroll adventuresome individuals. When reports from the Custer Expedition reached Chicago in 1874, the August 28 edition of the Daily Inter-Ocean featured the headlines: THE GOLD FEVER. INTENSE EXCITEMENT IN THE CITY YESTERDAY OVER THE NEWS FROM THE BLACK HILLS. That was all Collins and Russell needed to finalize their plans. The expedition, with six oxen-drawn covered wagons, five horses, two greyhounds and the trappings for mining gold, set out from the Missouri River on October 6. The trip was difficult. Leaving in late fall put them at risk for terrible weather, which they encountered. They packed
STATE ARCHIVES OF THE SOUTH DAKOTA STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
The Collins-Russell Party built the Gordon Stockade but left it in 1875 when the U.S. Army said Tallent and the others were trespassing.
their feet with gunny sacks for protection against the snow and cold. The cattle were emaciated, their hooves worn to the quick, and the party fashioned leather shoes to relieve them. Though Tallent referred to herself as “a delicate woman” (which her photo seems to reinforce), she was a hardy soul. She traveled on foot for the much of the trip, but for a two-week illness when she rode in the wagon. In order to not overtax the animals, it was common practice for any able-bodied person to walk alongside. The wagons, laden with supplies, traveled between 15 and 20 miles each day. By trip’s end Annie had worn out two pairs of shoes. Knowing she would be bereft of reading materials, she had surreptitiously cached two books, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Mary Jane Holmes’ comic romance The English Orphans. In her own book Tallent reveals the men sometimes dismissed her opinions out of hand. Early in the party’s travels, when the men were shooting for recreation, she questioned the wisdom of wasting ammunition. After a sharp retort, she wrote, “I meekly yielded the point and referred no more to the subject.” Later, when one of the men decided to return to Sioux City, Annie wrote, “A council was called that night…at which a preamble and resolution were adopted,” but, she added, “I was never admitted to their conferences.” ThoughTallent had no say in it, the council’s resolution forbade individuals from leaving the expedition. One man had earlier returned to Sioux City, and a second would die along the route, leaving 26 to reach French Creek on December 23, 1874. By mid-January 1875 the pioneers had constructed the 80-square-foot Gordon Stockade and, within its walls, seven log cabins. Tallent spent her days within the
stockade, which felt akin to a prison. She ventured forth by herself one time and was so convinced she saw Indians lurking behind every bush, she didn’t go out alone again. It was during these months she practically memorized her secreted books. During an early April snowstorm four horsemen, including two U.S. cavalry lieutenants, arrived to inform the CollinsRussell group it was under arrest for trespassing and had 24 hours to prepare to leave for Fort Laramie under escort. A temporary camp 12 miles away was their first stop. Tallent was granted a saddled government mule, but it would not cross the first ford of French Creek. Annie praised and cajoled the mule, kicking her spurless heels into its side, to no avail. She resorted to a willow whip. On the first blow the mule reared and leaped across the creek, and Annie stayed on. These antics were repeated at every crossing. Two days after arriving at Fort Laramie, the civilians were released and journeyed on to Cheyenne. The Tallents remained in that city for a year, awaiting official permission to legally enter the Black Hills, which was granted in May 1876. The family spent four years in Deadwood then moved to Rochford. With Annie’s college training as a teacher, she was welcomed as one of the first teachers in Pennington County. She organized several schools, teaching in Rochford and later at Tigerville and Hill City, after which the Tallents moved on to Rapid City. Bert Shedd, a student of Annie’s in Tigerville from 1884–85, recalled his teacher: “Her method of teaching was thorough. She required her pupils to demonstrate their lessons in arithmetic, geography and grammar on the blackboard. If a pupil could not do this, he must work until he could.…She possessed the quality of
teaching without anger or impatience. In appearance she was dignified and attractive. I never saw her punish a pupil.” When Annie and her son went to visit relatives in Elgin in 1887, husband David deserted her and never returned. Annie was Pennington County superintendent of schools from 1891 to 1895, after which she served on that county’s board of education for three years. Annie was one of 153 charter members of the Society of Black Hills Pioneers [www.blackhills pioneers.com], whose membership was exclusive to those who had arrived in the Black Hills before December 31, 1876. She died in Sturgis, S.D., in 1901 and was buried at the Bluff City Cemetery in Elgin. In 1924 Black Hills officials erected a monument near the site of the Gordon Stockade, with a plaque inscribed in part: IN MEMORY OF ANNA DONNA TALLENT,TEACHER AND AUTHOR.…THE FIRST WHITE WOMAN TO ENTER THE BLACK HILLS. In 1954 the South Dakota Education Association formed the Annie D. Tallent Club to honor the state’s women educators, pronouncing: “In an evaluation of Mrs. Tallent, all the evidence shows that she was a woman of dignity, refinement, and she contributed to the advancement of culture in the hills.” The club name was changed to Honored Women Educators in 1993 when Annie’s book fell into disfavor because she had written things like, “They [Indians] rarely took the provisions of their victims, and indeed they had no need to, as those graceless wards of the government were amply provided with rations.” In 1950 Rapid City opened the Annie Tallent Elementary School, but 40 years later a vocal minority forced the board to change the school’s name. Fortunately, such attempts to obliterate Annie Tallent from history have not succeeded.
DECEMBER 2013
WILD WEST
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ART OF THE WEST
Minimalist Gary Ernest Smith Maximizes Billy the Kid’s Escape
The artist broke from contemporary art to depict the breakout
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painting and and research trip to wellpreserved Lincoln. It was a bit of a departure for Smith, who, despite having grown up on a cattle ranch in the heart of Oregon Trail country near Baker City, Ore., usually paints more contemporary scenes. “It wasn’t my focus at the time, but from time to time I experimented with paintings dealing with Old West subject matter,” explains the artist, who was born in 1942. “My dad was a real fan of the Western novels of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. It was all in my background, my culture, growing up. That was a big focus. I rode horses, herded cattle, packed guns.” A passion for art, however, took Smith to Eastern Oregon College and Brigham Young University, where he earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in fine
arts. His art then took him on the 1986–88 “Third Western States Traveling Exhibit,” sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the 1990–92 traveling exhibit “Journeys in Search of Lost Images.” Finally his art drew him to Highland, Utah, in the mountains near Bull River, where he lives with wife Judy, a professional musician, and paints at his home studio. “I minimize detail and go for the form of things, let the form establish the design of the paintings,” he says. “I don’t go into detail. I like the form and colors to be the vehicle that carries the messages. I guess it’s somewhere between traditional contemporary style, with a minimalist quality to it.” To see more of Smith’s work visit www. overlandgallery.com/Artists/Smith.html.
COURTESY OF JEFFERY PUGH
or all the stories and legends about Billy the Kid, the event that really propelled the young outlaw into the national consciousness happened on April 28, 1881—“as bold a deed as those versed in the annals of crime can recall,” the Santa Fe Daily New Mexican reported. That’s when the Kid escaped from the courthouse/jail in Lincoln, New Mexico Territory, after killing deputies James Bell and Bob Olinger. “When he rode off, he went on a walk,” an eyewitness wrote, “and every act, from beginning to end, seemed to have been planned and executed with the coolest deliberation.” Utah artist Gary Ernest Smith captures that cool deliberation in Billy Leaves Town, a 36-by-48-inch oil painting high on historical accuracy, down to the lone staircase in front of the courthouse (a second set of stairs was added later).“Billy the Kid was someone I had grown up with,” Smith said during a recent break from plein air painting in southern Utah. “The myth and reality didn’t really come together until later on.” The painting, and others dealing with Billy the Kid and Lincoln County, came about in spring 2009 when Smith accompanied friends and fellow artists Ed Mell and Bob Boze Bell, the latter also a Western historian and executive editor of True West magazine, on a
By Johnny D. Boggs
Smith captures the young outlaw’s cool deliberation in the oil Billy Leaves Town.
DECEMBER 2013
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INDIAN LIFE
The National Park Service Has Rebuilt Ned Wynkoop’s Indian Agency Home at Fort Larned Guests at the original building included Tall Bull and Black Kettle
By Louis Kraft
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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lans survived for the building Indian agent Ned Wynkoop rented from post sutler Theodore Weichselbaum at Fort Larned, Kansas, in 1867–68, and archeological studies pinpointed where it stood. But it took years for staff members at Fort Larned National Historic Site [www.nps.gov/fols] to convince the National Park Service to re-create the structure. The original building that served as Wynkoop’s home and headquarters for the Upper Arkansas Agency sat just outside the western perimeter of the post and southwest of officers’ row near a bend in the Pawnee River. The present-day Fort Larned staff noted the building could also function as a screen to hide modern buildings that mar the fort’s historical aura. The National Park Service agreed, and Wynkoop’s agency home, officially termed a “screening element,” became reality in spring 2012. Actually, the building Wynkoop rented was just one of four Weichselbaum built near the Pawnee River. The others were a wooden-planked mess hall (north of the residence), a stone store (north of the mess hall), and a stone saloon/billiard room (west of the store). After becoming U.S. Indian agent for the Arapahos and Southern Cheyennes in September 1866, Wynkoop selected Fort Larned for his headquarters. But he immediately ran into problems. Three months passed with no paycheck, and, worse, the Interior Department had done nothing to set up his agency at the post, forcing Wynkoop to live in a mud dugout in the bank above the Pawnee. He asked Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, who commanded the Department of the Missouri, for help. The general ignored his letter.
Ned Wynkoop wears a coonskin cap in this fanciful depiction of the August 5, 1868, wolf attack at Fort Larned. The animal savagely bit 1st Lt. John Thompson, seated at right.
Wynkoop eventually rented Weichselbaum’s residence, which included a storage room, for $100 per month. But the Interior Department refused payment. Did they expect him to continue operating his agency from the mud dugout? Months passed, and still his superiors ignoredWynkoop’s requests for back salary and the residence/office rental fee. Regardless, his wife, Louise, and children joined him at the post. Wynkoop’s residence/office presented an open door to all visitors—some famous, some considered infamous and one rabid terror. Wynkoop had gained national attention when, without orders, he tried to end
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a Cheyenne war that terrorized Colorado Territory in 1864. His efforts went up in smoke on November 29 when Colonel John Chivington’s Colorado volunteers attacked and destroyed the lodges of Black Kettle’s Southern Cheyennes and Left Hand’s Arapahos camped on Sand Creek. WhenWynkoop learned that people who thought they were under military protection, per his and Major Scott Anthony’s word, were slaughtered and mutilated, he exploded with rage, setting the stage for him to become perhaps the most hated white man in the territory. Initially opposed to working with Indians, Wynkoop changed his mind in fall
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“His parlor is in a little building of board. …His library contains some valuable and entertaining books, and his walls are hung with photographs and Indian trophies.” Wynkoop did not obtain his Indian trophies in battle—there were no scalps. Rather they were gifts from Indians he had befriended. Chief Tall Bull of the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers often visited Wynkoop at Fort Larned, as did the famed Cheyenne warrior Roman Nose.
ployed to move among the Arapahos, grabbed their weapons and gave chase. Meanwhile, a sentinel at the guardhouse saw his peril, frantically fired his carbine, missed and was bitten. The wolf then moved across the parade ground, Wynkoop and Morrison in pursuit. Before they could get off a shot, the wolf dashed past the buildings on the northern side of the parade ground and entered the hospital, an adobe building that sat just south of the Pawnee River. Inside the assault continued. The wolf went after a soldier in bad health, biting off a finger and nearly severing his arm (he was the only casualty to die from the attacks), and then bit a 10th Cavalry trooper. Wynkoop and Morrison dashed into the hospital but were too late. The wolf had moved on to a laundress’ quarters. As the woman pulled back in fright on her bed, the rabid beast leaped and tried ORIGINALLY IN NED WYNKOOP AND THE LONELY ROAD FROM SAND CREEK, BY LOUIS KRAFT
1865. He was ordered to lead a military escort for peace commissioners seeking to end the war triggered by Sand Creek. Wynkoop expected the angry Indians to kill him at the peace council on the Little Arkansas River in Kansas. Instead he found Black Kettle ready to listen. According to Wynkoop, the chief told him “that not for one moment had any of them [Black Kettle’s band] doubts of my good faith.” Wynkoop suddenly had a new future —first working with Indians on detached duty from the military, then as special Indian agent for the Interior Department, and finally in September 1866 as U.S. Indian agent. Wynkoop had become a cultural broker, serving as a conduit for goods, services and information between Indians and whites. Many people on the frontier and in Washington found Wynkoop a nuisance, for he refused to back down when he considered himself in the right. Once he accepted Indians as human beings, he became the enemy of pioneers, the press, the military, even the Interior Department. Regardless of Wynkoop’s less-than-sparkling relationship with other white men, those who knew him found him charming and a good host. He welcomed whites and Indians to his home and agency at Fort Larned. And they came. Chiefs Satanta (Kiowa), Little Raven (Arapaho) and Poor Bear (Apache) enjoyed his hospitality just prior to the Medicine Lodge Creek peace council in fall 1867. So did reporter Henry Stanley, whose pen was as deadly as a rattler, and who targeted Wynkoop when reporting on the Indian wars during the late 1860s.Yet when Stanley joined aWynkoop party in 1867, he reported: “The major is a genial soul and a polished gentleman. He is a skillful concoctor of drinkable beverages, and in his company we whiled away a social hour.” Captain Albert Barnitz of the 7th U.S. Cavalry visited Wynkoop later that year and wrote:
The photo shows the Fort Larned site. Wynkoop’s residence (detail at left) is at far left in the bird’s-eye illustration.
By summer 1868 Black Kettle had become a good friend. Other visitors were less welcome. As darkness drew near and the heat of the day mellowed on August 5, 1868, Ned and Louise were entertaining a number of officers and their ladies at the sutler residence. AsWynkoop put it, “[We] were sitting on the portico in front of my quarters, engaged singing and playing…” Without warning a rabid visitor struck. Women screamed as everyone scrambled to escape the vicious assault. Some were lucky; 1st Lt. John Thompson of the 3rd U.S. Infantry wasn’t. According to Wynkoop, a snarling wolf savagely bit the lieutenant, “tearing his limbs in a frightful manner,” before it loped east toward the hexagonal blockhouse that served as a guardhouse, the southeasternmost building at the post. Wynkoop and James Morrison, a scout Ned em-
DECEMBER 2013
to bite her. Luckily, the canine’s teeth ripped through her bedding and nightclothes but didn’t injure her. Just as quickly it darted from the building and ran north toward the Pawnee River. A sentry saw the wolf, fired and killed it. The evening of the wolf attack might have been the last time Wynkoop entertained at Fort Larned. Five days later, on August 10, warriors from Black Kettle, Little Rock, Bull Bear and Stone Forehead’s villages, en route to raid Pawnees, began killing settlers on the Saline and Solomon rivers in north-central Kansas —raids that would turn Wynkoop’s and the Cheyennes’ lives upside down, never to be righted. The 1868 Indian war had begun, marking the beginning of the end of the Cheyennes’ lifeway and freedom. But at least Wynkoop’s agency home is upright again and will eventually welcome new visitors to Fort Larned.
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Legendary Confederate Coins Hidden from Lincoln The man who made Civil War history fears for his life!
O
n February 22, 1861, just a week before his inauguration, presidentelect Abraham Lincoln visited Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and addressed a large crowd gathered in the street outside. Only one block away, Robert Lovett, Jr. was at work in his modest coin engraver’s shop. Ironically, as Lincoln spoke to the crowd about impending Civil War, the Yankee coiner was busy designing the first and only coins ever commissioned by the Confederate States of America. His actions would haunt Robert Lovett, Jr. to his grave—and caused him to hide his secret from Lincoln for fear of his very life.
He Dreamt of Glory—then Feared the Gallows Agents from the South had commissioned Robert Lovett, Jr. to design a one-cent coin for the newlyformed Confederacy. Lovett agreed, thinking that if Lincoln allowed the South to peacefully leave the Union, he would go down in history. But after engraving the dies and striking a handful of coins, Lovett quickly got cold feet. Soon after President Lincoln took office, he issued an executive order which made it clear that any Northern business helping the South could be charged with treason. Fearing for his neck, Lovett hid the Confederate Cents and buried the coin dies in his basement. No one would learn his treasonous secret for the next 12 years. A Civil War Treasure Comes to the Smithsonian Institution After they were finally revealed in 1873, Lovett’s coins and dies began a colorful saga. Today, one of his original 1861 Confederate Cents is highly sought-after by both coin collectors and Civil War enthusiasts. One sold at a 2005 auction for more than $74,000! 100th anniversary restrikes were made in 1961, and one of the gold 1961 restrikes recently sold for $21,000.
Lovett’s original hand-engraved dies for the coins finally came to be housed in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution®.
Official Release: 1861 Confederate Cent Proof—in Pure Silver! Now, in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, New York Mint is proud to be releasing this 1861 Confederate Cent
Actual size 19 mm
Silver Proof carefully recreated from the original dies. Struck in stunning, deeply mirrored and frosted 99.9% pure proof silver—and officially licensed by the Smithsonian Institution.
Secure Civil War History RISK FREE! Each 1861 Confederate Cent Silver Proof is certified Gem Proof by Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC) and comes in a protective acrylic capsule. You must be completely satisfied or return your 1861 Silver Proof within 30 days for a prompt refund (less all s/h). This is an unprecedented opportunity to literally hold Civil War history in your hands. Don’t miss out!
Prices and availability subject to change without notice. Past performance is not a predictor of future performance. NOTE: New York Mint® is a private distributor of worldwide government coin and currency issues and privately issued licensed collectibles and is not affiliated with the United States government. This product was minted privately and is not legal tender in the U.S. Facts and figures deemed accurate as of June 2013. ©2013 New York Mint, LLC.
1861 Confederate Cent Certified Silver Proof $189.00 (plus s/h) Call Toll Free 24 hours a day
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Smithsonian Institution®
WESTERN ENTERPRISE
To Lure Investors to Goldfield, Nevada, ‘Tex’ Rickard Promoted a Prizefight
The 1906 bout pitted the ‘Old Master’ against the ‘Durable Dane’
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between John L. Sullivan and James J. “Gentleman Jim” Corbett. In August 1906, along with 27 other businessmen, Rickard formed the Goldfield Athletic Club. They planned a match on the scale of Sullivan-Corbett in hopes of attracting investors to buy mining stock. Some biographers claim Rickard became the bout’s promoter only because his partners were glad to finance the event but dreaded doing the work. Rickard also likely understood that promoting such a fight might be a path to fame. Regardless
PHOTOS © BETTMANN/CORBIS
A
massive crowd descended on Goldfield, Nevada, on Labor Day 1906. People arrived by train from as far away as Maine and Massachusetts, while the region’s miners reached Goldfield by trudging the desert for miles. Such a swell in population was unusual, as Goldfield’s climate was so awful one visitor had dubbed the town “Dante’s inferno with the lid off.” The enormous gathering was the culmination of George Lewis “Tex” Rickard’s hard work. He believed that hosting such a championship bout would improve Goldfield’s bleak image. A 1902 gold strike had transformed Goldfield into Nevada’s largest town, creating the biggest buzz in Nevada since the 1859 discovery of the Comstock Lode. Rickard, a Missouri-born entrepreneur who, according to some sources, picked up the nickname “Tex” after living briefly in Henrietta, Texas, was one of the treasure seekers who had landed in the newly thriving district. Operator of the Northern saloon and gambling hall, he had become one of Goldfield’s top businessmen, reportedly even hiring Virgil Earp of Tombstone fame as pit boss. But Rickard agreed with the town fathers that Goldfield would continue to thrive only if it moved beyond the usual boomtown staples of brothels and opium dens. The men floated various ideas, including a camel racetrack and a manmade lake of beer. Rickard understood the allure of prizefighting. He’d previously owned a saloon in theYukon, where aging bare-knuckle star Frank Slavin sometimes fought for the customers’ entertainment. Rickard reminded anyone who would listen that men still reminisced about the September 1892 New Orleans bout
Rickard proved a visionary sports promoter.
of how he stepped into the role, Rickard soon attracted the attention of two great fighting men—lightweight champion Joe Gans and a man known in the newspapers as Battling Nelson. Nelson, prophetically named Oscar Matthew Battling Nelson by his father, was born in Copenhagen but raised in Chicago. Dubbed the “Durable Dane” by
DECEMBER 2013
By Don Stradley
sportswriters, Nelson was allegedly the model for Jack London’s novel The Abysmal Brute. Gans, a crafty fighter from Baltimore known as the “Old Master,” was the first black American to win a world boxing title. Both were interested in the whopping $30,000 purse (it would grow to $32,000 in gold) offered by the Goldfield group. Nelson’s manager, Billy Nolan, laid out several stipulations, including a $20,000 payment to Nelson, win or lose. The fight would also be a “finish fight,” decided only when one of the men dropped or quit, a scheme thought to favor the hardheaded Nelson. Inundated by gambling debts, Gans agreed to Nolan’s demands. When the news broke that Rickard had secured the fight for Goldfield, mine owners blasted off three loads of dynamite in celebration. Part of the hoopla was that a black champion was facing a white challenger. Indeed, Nelson laid claim to the “white lightweight championship,” a distinction not unusual in the 1900s. Rickard thus chose to present the fight not as a mere sporting contest, but as a “battle of the century,” with heroes, villains and a welldefined racial plotline. But if Rickard sought a battle of the races, he may have been surprised to learn that Gans drew the admiration of even the most bigoted of whites. The champion’s mere arrival in Goldfield was an event. “Gans was met by carriages and automobiles,” reported The Salt Lake Tribune, “and a great crowd.” Meanwhile, Nelson appeared moody. He made things worse for himself by working a spell on the Goldfield women, declaring one day per week at his training quarters as “Ladies’ Day.” Without trying too hard, Rickard had his hero (Gans) and his heel (Nelson).
Battling Nelson, right, squares off against lightweight champion Joe Gans in the September 1906 Rickard-promoted bout in Goldfield.
Rickard then brought a photographer to the John S. Cook & Co. Bank, where the $30,000 purse was on display in stacks of $20 gold pieces. It was the largest amount ever guaranteed to two fighters up to that time. The Cook & Co. photo, in which Rickard poses beside the 1,500 coins, appeared in newspapers around the country. The Police Gazette anointed Rickard the “new fight king.” Local men worked frantically to erect an 8,000-seat open-air arena on the edge of town. By the time the last nail was hammered into the last plank, Goldfield had switched from gold fever to boxing fever. Tickets were priced from $5 to $25, with a higher-priced section reserved for local dignitaries and politicians. The printed programs contained more information about mining stock than the fight. Hotels were overbooked, so fight fans pitched tents on the street. Con artists roamed the area looking for marks. Rumors of a fixed fight were soon quashed. On September 3 the region locked down for the fight. Stores closed, mining equipment was silenced. Although folklore has Gans and Nelson fighting under a blazing sun in 100-degree heat, contemporary accounts describe “the brightest and most perfect September day,” as if Rickard had even managed the weather.
Boxing historians regard the bout as one of the greatest and bloodiest in the history of prizefighting. Gans fought in his usual artistic manner—“the Paderewski of the boxing glove,” one reporter called him, after the great composer— while Nelson butted, elbowed and even kicked. Finally, after nearly three hours of fighting, Nelson opened the 42nd round by punching Gans repeatedly below the belt. “I never saw such agony on a human countenance as was on Gans’ when he went down,” wrote Joel L. Priest of The Salt Lake Herald. “His face was gray and drawn, his mouth was open, and in his eyes was the look one sees sometimes in the eyes of an animal that has been mortally wounded.” Referee George Siler immediately disqualified Nelson, who protested. The San Francisco Call noted that as Gans was carried back to his dressing room, he “was followed by hundreds who were anxious to shake his hand and tell him they thought he was the greatest fighter in the age.” The next day Gans rode around town thanking the people for their kind support. He was in good spirits, having made extra money by placing side bets on himself. Regarding Nelson, The Minneapolis Journal reported, “There are several thousand pretty tough citizens of Goldfield who would like to escort him out of town
on a rail, or following a custom of the desert, stake him out on the alkali with a rattlesnake for an interesting companion.” But Nelson would fight Gans twice more, winning both times by knockout. Gans, showing signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him in 1910, was never the same after the Goldfield bout. Although marred by a foul ending, the bout had been a grand success. The arena was full, and box office receipts totaled more than $70,000. By the day’s standard it was a smashing achievement. Goldfield enjoyed another year or so of prosperity, but labor disputes and a decrease in ore production spelled a downturn. By 1910 the population had fallen from 20,000 in 1906 to 4,838. In 1923 a fire devastated the town. Goldfield kept producing gold, but its glory days were over. As Goldfield’s fortune faded, Rickard went on to promote million-dollar bouts nationwide. His big star was heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey. By the time of Rickard’s death in 1929, at age 59, he had promoted the first boxing show atYankee Stadium, built the Boston Garden and founded the New York Rangers hockey team. In his 1906 promotion to sell goldmining stock, Rickard had inadvertently ushered in the golden age of boxing in America and laid the foundation for all sports promotion to come.
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DONNER PARTY CANNIBALISM:
Did They or Didn’t They? (Spoiler alert: They did)
The recent notion that America’s most infamous instance of humans eating humans is a myth does not stand up to scrutiny
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n early October 1846 James F. Reed was banished from George Donner’s wagon train and set out across the Nevada desert for California, reaching Sutter’s Fort in the Sacramento Valley three weeks later. Nothing further was heard from the company he left behind until late January 1847, when a skeletal figure staggered into Johnson’s Ranch, 40 miles north of Sutter’s. The first news of the Donner Party to reach the world beyond the snowy mountains that trapped them was a sensational tale of starvation, death and cannibalism. Cannibalism has been the Donner Party’s hallmark ever since. Right-minded historians and history buffs have downplayed the Donner Party’s most memorable feature. Cannibalism was the “last extremity,” the short-lived culmination of a long chain of events, they insist; the real story is the human drama—the combination of personalities and events, of good intentions, questionable decisions and sheer bad luck that created a situation in which the unthinkable became reality. Recent reports of archaeological findings from the Donner Party camp at Alder Creek have given rise to a startling new perception: There was no cannibalism in the Donner Party. After more than 160 years it’s finally time to drag cannibalism from beneath the rug, dust it off and take a good hard look at it.
T
he people who comprised the Donner Party were a mixed bag —native-born and immigrants, of both genders and all ages, of various occupations and social backgrounds—but most were American-born farming folk who set out from states bordering the Mississippi 30
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KRISTIN JOHNSON COLLECTION
By Kristin Johnson
Mary Graves Clarke
‘Finding himself chilling and growing weak so fast …[my father] began to talk to me, entreating, hugging and imploring me to do everything that youth and strength would permit. He urged me to eat human flesh or anything. He said it was no sin in this case, “For you must remember all depends upon your getting in, on account of your mother and the sufferers back at the cabins”’ ‘Father died on Christmas night at 11 o’clock in the commencement of the snowstorm. During that storm we had neither fire nor food. When it was over, we started, leaving four of our number there, and traveled on until the 5th of January, subsisting on human flesh’
River. There were 10 family groups of various sizes and nearly a score of single people, mostly teamsters working their passage across the Great Plains by driving the wagons of others. Prominent among them were three well-todo citizens of Springfield, Ill.—farmer George Donner, his brother Jacob and businessman James F. Reed—along with their families and employees, 32 people in all. They set out for California on April 14, 1846, and on May 19, just west of the Missouri River, they joined a large wagon train led by William H. Russell. For the next two months they enjoyed a typical journey across the Plains. On July 19 several emigrant parties camped at the Little Sandy River in what would become Wyoming. Some of the travelers decided to take the new Hastings Cutoff, said to shave 300 miles from the journey, or about three weeks’ travel. They formed a separate wagon train and elected George Donner captain. On July 31 the Donner Party left Fort Bridger, where the cutoff began, and soon ran into difficulties. They had to hack a road through the Wasatch Mountains and nearly perished of thirst on the desert west of the Great Salt Lake, finally rejoining the California Trail on September 26 along the Humboldt River in present-day Nevada. The cutoff had added three weeks to their journey. The trek along the Humboldt was another disaster. Provisions were low, the overworked cattle suffered from poor water and grazing, and Paiute raiders decimated their livestock. The emigrants jettisoned property and abandoned wagons. They grew exhausted and anxious; time was running out if they were to cross the Sierra Nevada before winter. The 70 original members of the Donner Party had acquired and lost companions along the
KRISTIN JOHNSON COLLECTION
The Donner Party attempts to cross the Sierra Nevada in a driving snowstorm, in the lithograph Donner Pass.
way. Travelers joined them, and a baby was born; five men died, and four went ahead to California, including James Reed, exiled for killing a teamster in a fight. One man came back with provisions from Sutter’s Fort and two of Sutter’s Indian vaqueros as assistants. By late October, as they neared the foot of the pass over the Sierra, the Donner Party numbered 81 (79 emigrants and the two vaqueros). Three-quarters of them reached the west end of Truckee (Donner) Lake and attempted to scale the snow-covered boulders to the summit, but a heavy snowfall forced them to retreat to the east end of the lake. The Breens occupied an existing cabin, against which Louis Keseberg put up a leanto for his family. The other emigrants erected more solid structures. The Murphys and Eddys built a cabin against the east face of a large boulder about 200 yards south of the Breens’ cabin; half a mile to the east a double cabin housed the Graveses and the Reeds. The rest of the Donner Party was back up the trail, camped alongside Alder Creek some six or seven miles northeast of the lake. The snow came on so fast that they pitched tents, one for each family, some distance apart. The tents sheltered 16 Donners and six others. The emigrants had only a few oddments of food left besides the animals they slaughtered
and buried in the snow. As time passed, they felt the effects of meager rations and knew they had to get help. On December 16 a party set out over the mountains on improvised snowshoes—nine men, five young women and a 13-year-old boy. The “Forlorn Hope,” as the group was later dubbed, completed its mission, but at a price. Only seven survived—two men and the five women—and all but one of the dead had been cannibalized. The survivors had shot Sutter’s vaqueros for food. The remnants of the tattered, emaciated band reached Johnson’s Ranch on January 18, 1847; it had taken them 33 days to travel approximately 100 miles. After hearing their dreadful tale, the settlers rallied and outfitted a rescue party, the First Relief, which left for the mountains on February 5.
M
eanwhile, back at the camps, the Donner Party weakened from hunger. By the time the First Relief reached the lake camp on February 18, nine of the emigrants there had died, and a tenth died soon after. The rest were gaunt with famine; most had been subsisting on boiled hides and bones. At Alder Creek four emigrants had died. Outnumbered, the seven Californians selected DECEMBER 2013
Patrick Breen
‘Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that [she] thought she would commence on Milt [Elliott] and eat him. I don’t [think] that she has done so yet. It is distressing. The Donnos [ sic] told the California folks that they [would] commence to eat the dead people…if they did not succeed that day or next in finding their cattle, then under 10 or 12 feet of snow, & [they] did not know the spot or near it. I suppose they have done so ere this time’
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camps to care for those left behind and get them strong enough so that they could leave with the next relief. The Second Relief and their charges endured a two-day blizzard in Summit Valley at the top of the pass; when it ended, the party was completely out of food. Reed wanted to leave, but most of the refugees could not or would not move; they would wait for Woodworth. Unable to budge them, Reed and his men took three children and left. In a few days they reached the Woodworth camp, but Woodworth and his men declined to go after the emigrants, for reasons that remain murky. Leading the Third Relief were William Eddy and William Foster, survivors of the Forlorn Hope who returned to the mountains to rescue family members still at the lake and who managed to persuade five of Woodworth’s men to join them. At the camp in Summit Valley the Third Relief found 11 survivors, three mangled corpses and human remains boiling in a pot over the fire. Three of the rescuers stayed to help the refugees out of “Starved Camp” while the rest continued. On March 13 the Third Relief arrived at the Breen cabin, where the remaining emigrants had moved. Eddy and Foster’s sons had died, but Levinah Murphy (Foster’s mother-in-law), her youngest boy and Louis Keseberg were still alive. The rescuers also found George Donner’s wife, Tamzene (Tamsen), and her three little girls; two of the men Reed had left
FROM THE EXPEDITION OF THE DONNER PARTY AND ITS TRAGIC FATE, BY ELIZA DONNER HOUGHTON
the strongest emigrants from both camps to accompany them and doled out a little flour and dried meat to each person left behind—so little, in fact, that the Donners told the rescuers they would have to start on the corpses buried under the snow. The First Relief left on February 22; on the way down they met James F. Reed leading the Second Relief up to the camps. Funded by donations, the San Francisco– based relief efforts had been organized in early February with naval officer Selim E. Woodworth in charge of the expedition. Reed rounded up men, horses and supplies from the area north of the bay. When Woodworth failed to rendezvous with him at the appointed time, Reed set out, believing the Navy man was right behind him. When Reed arrived at the lake on March 1, he discovered what desperation had wrought during the week between the First Relief ’s departure and his arrival. At the door of the Murphy cabin lay a corpse with most of the flesh missing; inside were partially eaten limbs and scattered bones. The other two cabins were free of such sights. At Alder Creek, Reed found grisly scenes centered on Jacob Donner’s tent: human bones at the hearth, the snowy grave containing Jacob’s mutilated body. George Donner was too weak to leave; his wife and youngest daughters would wait for Woodworth. Reed took 17 emigrants when he set out for California on March 3, leaving three men at the
Georgia Donner Babcock ‘My uncle’s [body] was the only one they could find for some time. His wife expressed her wish to [un]bury the body, saying the limbs might be used, and from these food was prepared for the little ones in both camps who were too young to understand why they had been asking so long in vain. While eating, I chanced to look up. My mother had turned away, and father was crying’ ‘We little ones felt that we could not help it. There was nothing else. Jacob Donner’s wife came down the steps one day saying to mother, “What do you think I cooked this morning?” Then answered the question herself, “[Samuel] Shoemaker’s arm”’
WEIDER HISTORY GROUP ARCHIVE
‘The dead bodies furnished the only food during our stay that I remember seeing in the [Breen] cabin until the morning the relief party came’
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Emigrants Crossing the Plains, an 1869 engraving published in black and white and hand colored later, shows a group that has not suffered much yet.
Born in 1814 in Berleburg, Westphalia, in the Kingdom of Prussia, Johann Ludwig (Louis) Christian Keseberg remains the most enigmatic figure of the Donner Party. A brewer and distiller by trade, he was intelligent, well educated and a competent businessman who made an excellent first impression. As one fellow Donner Party survivor wrote, “You’d think he was a gentleman, unless you saw his dark side.” That dark side was his unbridled temper, often accompanied by violence. During the trip across the Great Plains he gained the reputation of a wife-beater. At the lake camp Keseberg subsisted almost entirely on human flesh for nearly two months. The Fourth Relief, revolted by the carnage at the lake and by Keseberg’s wild, filthy appearance, came back with lurid tales
that grew and took on a life of their own. Keseberg himself contributed to this image. For example, Eliza Gregson recalled a conversation she and a friend had with the “maneater” at Sutter’s Fort in 1847: Mrs. Lenox asked him “how human flesh tasted, and he said it was better than chicken.” Keseberg became an ogre, a symbol of all the horrors of the Donner Party. The popular charges against him—malingering, theft and murder—are likely untrue, but he was such a deeply troubled man that it was easy for his contemporaries to believe such tales. Predeceased by his wife and all but one of their 12 children (two of them had died in the Donner Party), he died a charity case at the Sacramento County Hospital in 1895. K.J.
behind had agreed to rescue the children but instead abandoned them at the Breen cabin and fled. Tamzene had left George in his sickbed and trudged to the lake in time to meet Eddy and Foster. Mrs. Murphy was too weak to travel, Keseberg had an injured foot, and Tamzene refused to abandon her husband, so the relief, with no time to spare, took the four children and left only a few hours after having arrived. William Fallon led the seven men of the fourth and last relief—actually a salvage expedition to bring in the Donners’ property. The lake camp was deserted when they arrived on April 17 and found, Fallon wrote, only “human bodies terribly mutilated, legs, arms and sculls scattered in every direction.” Alder Creek was also devoid of life. Some of the men busied themselves preparing and packing goods while others returned to the lake to find Keseberg at the Breen cabin. He told the relief that Tamzene Donner had come to the cabin after George’s death and died the same night; he had eaten her body. The Fourth Relief left on April 21 carrying heavy packs while Keseberg shambled after them. When he reached Sutter’s Fort on April 29, the rescue of the Donner Party was complete; all of the trapped emigrants were either alive in California or dead in the mountains. Of the 81 people snowbound at the beginning of November, 36 had died: 14 at the lake, eight at Alder Creek and 14 while trying to escape
the snow. Twenty of the 45 survivors had not resorted to cannibalism.
BANCROFT LIBRARY
Keseberg the Cannibal
Notorious Louis Keseberg said he boiled the flesh of those he ate but added: ÒTo go into details, to relate the minutiae, is too agonizing! I cannot do it! Imagination can supply these.Ó
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KRISTIN JOHNSON COLLECTION
I
n June 1847 Brig. Gen. Stephen W. Kearny went east overland by way of what is now called Donner Pass. When he and his entourage reached the lake camp, they were horrified at what they found. One of the party, Edwin Bryant, wrote: “Strewn around the cabins were dislocated and broken bones—skulls (in some instances sawed asunder with care for the purpose of extracting the brains)—human skeletons, in short, in every variety of mutilation. A more revolting and appalling spectacle I never witnessed.” The general ordered the remains buried. Five of the men gathered them into the Breen cabin and set it afire, but it was only partially consumed. In September 1847 travelers noted that human remains again littered the ground at the lake camp, presumably dragged about by scavengers. Over the next five years passersby recorded gruesome sights at “Cannibal Camp”—scattered limbs, bones smashed to access the marrow, skulls sawn open. Some stopped to rebury the remains; others took pieces as souvenirs. As for Alder Creek, Kearny’s party stopped there as well. According to Bryant, the men found George Donner’s body wrapped in a sheet and buried him, although another member of the party claimed the general did not order any such burial. The Donners’ flimsy
Nancy Graves Williamson ÔShe told us of her being at “Starved Camp”—how her mother died, how part of the flesh was prepared for food without her knowledge—and how she was told of it after she had partaken of it, and how perfectly heartbroken she had been ever since. We tried to soothe and comfort her, but it seemed no use; for she would cry, “How can I forget it; or forgive myself?”’
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FROM THE EXPEDITION OF THE DONNER PARTY AND ITS TRAGIC FATE, BY ELIZA DONNER HOUGHTON
shelters did not last long, and they were some distance from the trail; with only two or three exceptions, travelers did not mention them.
Mary Donner Houghton
I
n January 2006 the codirectors of the Donner Party Archaeology Project held a press conference regarding the results of their 2003–04 digs at Alder Creek, announcing they had recovered no evidence of cannibalism at the Donner family camp. The media responded with a wave of articles that soon inflated “no physical evidence at Alder Creek” into “no cannibalism among the Donner Party,” period.
JOAN PENNINGTON
‘She told me, with tears running down her face, that she saw them [two boys] cooked, and had to eat them; but added, as though fearful of having committed a crime, “I could not help it; I had eaten nothing for days, and I was afraid to die”’
R
eports of Donner Party cannibalism date from the earliest accounts of the disaster published in 1847 and were related by the survivors themselves, rescuers and officials connected with the relief efforts. Other accounts based on survivors’ testimony appeared in published accounts in 1848, 1849 and 1856. In the 1870s survivors and rescuers began writing their own reminiscent accounts. Truckee newspaperman C.F. McGlashan corresponded with and interviewed survivors and others while researching his History of the Donner Party (1879), and Eliza P. Donner Houghton collected information from Alder Creek survivors for her Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate (1911). According to the historical record, there were four foci of cannibalism in the Donner Party: among the Forlorn Hope, at the lake camp, at Alder Creek and at Starved Camp. In each instance cannibalism was the last resort. The emigrants waited until there was nothing else to eat before they began on the bodies of the dead. Except at the lake camp, cannibalism lasted only briefly: about
15 days for the Forlorn Hope, about nine days at Alder Creek and about three days at Starved Camp. Residents of the lake camp engaged in cannibalism for varying lengths of time, from approximately five days for the Donner girls to nearly two months for Louis Keseberg (see chart, P. 37). At times commentators have cast doubt on the historical sources, claiming that much of the testimony is hearsay or otherwise would not stand up in court. This is a false analogy. The bar of history is not a court of law, and historians are not bound by legal strictures; they may look at all the available evidence, using their own judgment as to its reliability. Granted, there are many problems with Donner Party sources, but there is also a great deal of agreement among them. One cannot simply dismiss them out of hand.
Donner Party members suffered from thirst on the new Hastings Cutoff, but that was nothing compared to the hunger in the Sierra.
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DECEMBER 2013
KRISTIN JOHNSON COLLECTION
‘You no doubt heard of [the] sufferings of the company that starved in the California mountains in ’46.…I was not reduced to the last extremity, although I had to eat boiled ox hide near three weeks. …Pleas, pleas [ sic] excuse my writing anymore at present’
Forlorn members of the Donner Party, trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada, huddle by a fire to keep warm, in a 19th-century engraving.
There was another eruption in spring 2010 when a scientist reporting on the Alder Creek bone analysis made some unfortunate offthe-cuff statements about the Donner Party. This created another, more widespread “no Donner Party cannibalism” flap. In its wake many people seemed ready to dismiss Donner Party cannibalism as practically a myth. Among the stated reasons were that the survivors had denied cannibalism; contemporary journalists had sensationalized the story to sell more papers; and, most important, the present-day researchers had turned up no physical evidence. The claims that Donner Party survivors had fiercely denied cannibalism are puzzling, given the number of survivors who said it did in fact happen; several of them—William Eddy, Mary Graves, Sarah Graves Fosdick, Georgia Donner, Frances Donner, Nancy Graves, Mary Donner and Louis Keseberg—wrote or stated they themselves had eaten human flesh. Granted, a few survivors did make denials in later years. In 1884 Jean Baptiste Trudeau told Eliza Donner Houghton no cannibalism had occurred at Alder Creek; but in 1847 he
had described his own acts of cannibalism in sickening detail, and rescuers had seen him carrying a dismembered human leg over his shoulder. Other survivors denied only that they had participated in cannibalism, not that it occurred. The sole blanket denial occurred in June 1879, when Elitha Donner Wilder’s husband sought an injunction to stop the publication of C.F. McGlashan’s history, alleging its descriptions of cannibalism were false and defamatory. They were false with regard to Wilder’s wife—she had been rescued before cannibalism began at Alder Creek—but not when it came to others. (A judge refused to grant Wilder’s injunction.) The idea that newspapers had sensationalized the Donner story to sell papers is absurd. This was not a case of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst battling for readers among the teeming masses of New York City. In 1847 California was very sparsely settled and had only two newspapers; the Donner Party story was a sensation in itself and required no exaggeration. The 20 articles that appeared in San Francisco’s California DECEMBER 2013
KRISTIN JOHNSON COLLECTION
THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK
Eleanor Graves McDonnell
William H. Eddy ‘[December] 29th—No food for five days; a portion of the company eat human flesh. 30th—Stripped all the flesh from three of the bodies; traveled four miles’ [Note: Eddy’s dates are wrong]
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KRISTIN JOHNSON COLLECTION
‘Father perished in the beginning of this storm, of cold; four of our company died at that place [“Camp of Death”]. As soon as the storm ceased, we took the flesh of the bodies, what we could make do us four days, and started’
KRISTIN JOHNSON COLLECTION
Star were mostly straightforward, with only an occasional purple passage here and there. A notable exception was an untitled and unsigned account relating lurid and false scenes of cannibalism that appeared on April 10, 1847. A second article, William Fallon’s Fourth Relief diary, is problematic on many counts and may well have been exaggerated, but other sources corroborate many of its shocking details. One of the three articles about the Donner relief that appeared in the Monterey Californian included sensational details apparently taken from the April 10 Star article. When the Eastern press got hold of the story later in the year, they reprinted many of the Star articles, along with two or three accounts from other sources, but not the scurrilous piece printed on April 10, although one of the independent accounts referenced it in part. Some of the papers did sensationalize the Donner Party to a degree, but it is doubtful whether this could have augmented sales. Out of more than 300 newspaper articles about the Donner Party published in 1847, the most common headline is a variation of FROM CALIFORNIA; the fairly tame SUFFERINGS OF THE CALIFORNIA EMIGRANTS is also frequent, but only 34 headlines contain such adjectives as “distressing,” “dreadful,” “extreme,” “horrible” or
Sarah Graves Fosdick
Mary Murphy Covillaud ‘I shall always wish that it had been God’s will for me to die with my mother’
©JAMES L. AMOS/CORBIS
FROM THE EXPEDITION OF THE DONNER PARTY AND ITS TRAGIC FATE, BY ELIZA DONNER HOUGHTON
Jean Baptiste Trudeau ate flesh at Alder Creek.
“thrilling,” and a mere seven contain the word “cannibalism.” These headlines are of normal size, and most appear on inside pages. If any newspapers sensationalized the Donner Party story, they did so discreetly. When people eat animals, including other humans, the bones of those animals exhibit signs of having been processed for food—cuts, chops, scrapes, saw marks, bones broken to get marrow, skulls opened to extract the brains, edges smoothed from boiling (“pot polish”), charring and so on. Animal bones with many of these marks have been recovered from Donner Party sites, but only a very few human bones, and none bearing the cannibal’s signature. In his 1879 investigation of the Breen cabin site, C.F. McGlashan found part of a human toe that had been burnt, possibly when General Kearny’s men fired the cabin in 1847. Scientists apparently have never examined it. During the 1984 dig at the Murphy cabin Donald L. Hardesty’s team recovered three fragments of human bone, so small and badly deteriorated that they provided no information about possible cannibalism. At Alder Creek in 2003–04 the archaeologists found more than 16,000 pieces of bone, 86 percent of them under one-quarter inch in size. Some of the larger pieces were in good enough condition to be tested; cattle, horse or mule, deer, dog and rodent were identified, but not human. There are a number of possible explanations for this, but the most likely scenario is that human bone was treated differently. Members of the Donner Party ate the meat from their animals, boiled the hides into a barely edible glue and charred or boiled the bones to eat. All the bones recovered at Alder Creek were calcined—that is, they had been
Another survivor of the Donner Party was this tiny doll. Eight-year-old Patty Reed (who posed years later for this framed photo) rescued the doll when her family cached property in the Utah desert. Hidden in Patty’s dress, “Dolly” weathered the ordeal in the Sierra Nevada and reached California safely with her young owner. Patty treasured the doll for life.
Louis Keseberg, nearly two months; others, various lengths of time
About three days
About nine days
About 15 days
Forlorn Hope Cannibalism Alder Creek Cannibalism Starved Camp Cannibalism Lake Camp Cannibalism
boiled so much that they lost their organic constituents, leaving behind only minerals. Since there was no organic content in the calcined fragments, the bones did not decompose. When the Donner families started eating their dead companions, they had meat again; they did not have to eat the bones, so the human bones were not boiled repeatedly. They did not become calcined but retained their organic content and decomposed. A point supporting this theory is what was not identified among the bones from Alder Creek. In March 1847 rescuer Nicholas Clark killed a bear cub for food. As with human flesh, bear was eaten only briefly at the end of the Donner ordeal, and bear bones would not have been boiled repeatedly. Bear bones, like human bones, are absent from the Alder Creek bone assemblage, and probably for the same reason. There is, in fact, evidence that human bones decomposed at Alder Creek. Before the 2004 dig a team of experts—historic human remains detection Approximate dogs—examined the area. Date These dogs are trained to alert only at the scent of decomposed human remains, which Nov. 4 can linger in the soil for cenDec. 16 turies after the body has disDec. 22 integrated. At Alder Creek the Dec. 25 dogs alerted at several spots, Jan. 6 including one that proved to be the hearth. Human reJan. 8 mains at a hearth certainly Jan. 10 sounds like cannibalism, but Jan. 18 final proof—actual bones—is Jan. 24 lacking, so the “dogumentary” Feb. 7 evidence remains suggestive Feb. 18 but inconclusive. Feb. 19 Based on the historical recFeb. 22 ord, there can be little question members of the Donner Feb. 26 Party practiced cannibalism. Feb. 27 The lack of confirmation in Mar. 1 the archaeological record may Mar. 2 mean physical evidence has Mar. 3 disappeared through natuMar. 5–7 ral processes or human interMar. 8 ference, but it may also reflect Mar. 11 the possibility that archaeologists simply have not disMar. 12 covered it yet. Statements Mar. 13 that cannibalism occurred came from the sur vivors themselves, augmented by Mar. 20? the testimony of their resMar.24–Apr.17 cuers, who saw emigrants preparing and eating human Apr. 17–21 flesh and the evidence of Apr. 29 their having done so.
Librarian Kristin Johnson of Salt Lake City has been researching the Donner Party for more than 20 years. She was the historian for the Donner Party Archaeology Project, is the editor of the 1996 book “Unfortunate Emigrants”: Narratives of the Donner Party (Utah State University Press) and has written extensively about the Donner Party on her website “New Light on the Donner Party” [www.utahcrossroads.org/DonnerParty]. Also suggested for further reading on the OldWest’s most famous bad trip: An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp, edited by Kelly J. Dixon, Julie M. Schablitsky and Shannon A. Novak; The Archaeology of the Donner Party, by Donald L. Hardesty; The Indifferent Stars Above, by Daniel James Brown; Desperate Passage, by Ethan Rarick; So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812–1848, by Will Bagley; and The Far Western Frontier, 1830–1860, by Ray A. Billington.
Cannibalism Chronology 1846–47 Donner Party camps at two sites in vicinity of Truckee Lake. Seven snowshoers (“Forlorn Hope”) set out from the lake to get help. Snowshoers discuss cannibalism, draw lots but decide to go on until someone dies. Four dead after blizzard; snowshoers resort to cannibalism at “Camp of Death.” William Eddy shoots deer; Jay Fosdick dies. William Foster shoots Luis and Salvador, two Indian vaqueros from Sutter’s Fort. Snowshoers reach Indian village; cannibalism ends. Last of snowshoers reach Johnson’s Ranch. Louis Keseberg moves into Murphy cabin. Eight people dead at Lake Camp; Milt Elliott speaks of eating bodies but does not. First Relief arrives at the lake. No cannibalism has occurred. At Alder Creek the Donners tell rescuers they intend to eat the dead. First Relief leaves the lake. Donners begin eating human flesh (?). Mrs. Murphy tells Patrick Breen she intends to start on Milt and eat him. Cannibalism begins at Murphy cabin (?). Second Relief arrives, finds cannibalism at Murphy cabin, not at others. James Reed sees evidence of cannibalism at Alder Creek. Rescuers leave Lake Camp with 17 emigrants; five remaining move into Breen cabin. A blizzard catches the relief in Summit Valley (“Starved Camp”); three die. Reed leaves, taking three; 11 others remain behind at Starved Camp. Three have died at Starved Camp; the survivors begin eating human flesh. Nicholas Clark returns to Alder Creek, tells Tamzene Donner her daughters are at risk. Third Relief finds cannibalism at Starved Camp. At Breen cabin Third Relief finds much evidence of cannibalism; departs lake same day with four children, leaving five at camps, Mrs. Murphy and Keseberg at lake, and George, Tamzene and nephew Samuel Donner at Alder Creek. Levinah Murphy dies (?). Keseberg, last emigrant at camps, subsists on human flesh for nearly a month. Fourth Relief salvages at both camps, finds mutilated bodies at both; Keseberg admits to and is seen eating human flesh. Keseberg reaches Sutter’s Fort.
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Murder, Mobs and the Marlow Brothers
Texas lawmen had orders to transfer the four Marlows in chains from Graham to Weatherford, but at Dry Creek all hell broke loose when lynch-minded vigilantes appeared By Jim Pettengill
annals of history where unarmed prisoners, shackled together, ever repelled a mob. Such cool courage that preferred to fight against such great odds and die, if at all, in glorious battle rather than die ignominiously by a frenzied mob deserves to be commemorated in song and story’ —Judge Andrew Phelps McCormick, April 18, 1891
A
cold moon shone down late in the evening of January 19, 1889, as two wagons and a buggy slowly crossed Dry Creek, two miles east of Graham, the seat of Young County, Texas. The lead wagon held six prisoners, chained together in pairs, and a guard, Phlete A. Martin. The second wagon carried Deputy U.S. Marshal Edward W. Johnson, three guards, weapons and ammunition, while four more guards followed in the buggy and on horseback. Suddenly several masked figures rose from the roadside bushes, one man commanding: “Halt! Hold up your hands!” Diving clear of the lead wagon, Martin shouted, “Here they are—take all six of the sons of bitches!” What followed 38
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was a deadly gunfight between a vigilante mob and the prisoners—George, Charles, Alfred and Llewellyn Marlow and two others—the climactic act in a pageant of frontier justice that included misinformation, persecution, politics, mistakes, mob attacks, murder, lawsuits, a famous Texas Ranger, a coolheaded Colorado lawman and the U.S. Supreme Court.
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he Marlows were a closeknit family. They were travelers, following their patriarch, Dr. Williamson Marlow, through Missouri, Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), Old and New Mexico, Colorado and Texas, holding small herds of horses and cattle. While rumors suggested they had acquired strays from others’ herds, no charges were filed, and the family caused no trouble. The elder Marlow died in 1885 in Texas, leaving his second wife, Martha Jane, and their five youngest surviving sons—George, Charles (Charley), Alfred (Alf ), Boone, and Llewellyn (Epp, or Ellie)—to search for a place to settle down. The sons worked on railroad grading crews and as farmers and stock handlers. The family bothered no one until late 1885, when Boone shot and killed cowboy James Holston (or Holdson) in Vernon,
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‘This is the first time in the
Texas, allegedly in self-defense. Although a court hearing would later dismiss murder charges against Boone for lack of evidence, he fled to Colorado. The family followed, joined him in Trinidad and later that year moved to Indian Territory, where they felt Boone might be safer from prosecution. After two quiet years, in 1888 the Marlows were living near Anadarko. George, Charley and Alf were married, George and Charley with a daughter apiece. George, Epp and Boone were farming, while Charley and Alf worked near Fort
Five Marlow brothers—from left, George, Boone, Alfred (Alf), Llewellyn (Epp) and Charles (Charley)—pose on their mounts at Fort Sill, Indian Territory (presentday Oklahoma) in 1880.
Sill for a Kiowa chief named Sun Boy. In mid-spring George rode to the Gunnison area of Colorado to visit his inlaws and his friend Cyrus Wells “Doc” Shores, the county sheriff and deputy U.S. marshal. All was peaceful until August, when Las Animas County Sheriff William T. Burns in Trinidad sent a letter to Deputy U.S. Marshal Edward W. Johnson in Graham, Texas, cautioning him to “look out for five Marlow brothers who are endeavoring to get away with 40 head of horses stolen from this place.”
Johnson, a career law enforcement officer who had lost his right arm in a gunfight earlier in the year (see “Gunfighters and Lawmen,” P. 18), was a most enigmatic character. Some contemporaries portrayed him as a scheming minion of the area cattlemen’s association, desperate to curry favor by prosecuting someone to discourage rustling. Others characterized him as a brave defender of the law. The truth is likely between these extremes. He was in fact employed as a range detective by the Stock-Raisers’ Association of North-
West Texas (which later became the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association) in addition to his appointment as deputy U.S. marshal, not an unusual arrangement at the time. Johnson supposedly received a second message from Sheriff Burns: “I find that I was mistaken in regard to the 40 head of horses. The parties owning them have since found them. They had only estrayed.” No action was taken on this message, and there is some doubt whether it actually existed. Both letters are puzzling, as with the exception of George
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the family had not been in the Trinidad in trouble with the law, except for Boone, invited him in for dinner, but Collier area of Colorado for more than two who had killed that cowboy in self- refused, stepped inside, spotted Boone years. Johnson headed for Indian Terri- defense several years before. While the Marlow and said, “I’ve come for you, tory with a small posse but returned brothers were in jail, Johnson had gone Boone.” Collier then drew his revolver empty-handed. On a follow-up trip in to Vernon and requested a warrant for and fired, but missed. Boone grabbed late August he arrested Charley, Alf, Boone’s arrest on murder charges. The a Winchester and returned fire, grazing Boone and Epp and took them to Gra- warrant arrived in mid-December. With Collier and splintering the doorframe. ham for arraignment and trial. Christmas approaching, the Marlows’ As Collier fled, Boone rushed to the On his return from Gunnison, George nightmare was about to get much worse. door and, seeing movement outside, was detained for several days fired another shot. at Fort Sill, under orders left Wallace, on hearing the by Johnson, then released. earlier shots, had hurried He gathered up the rest of the around the corner of the family and headed for Gracabin, and Boone’s second ham to seek his brothers’ reslug struck him in the side, lease. The family rented a cabmortally wounding the sherin from area rancher Oscar iff. For a moment the others G. Denson, but when George stood stunned. Then Charley went to the jail on October 6 called for Collier to come to ask about his four brothers, help treat Wallace, while Epp he was immediately arrested rode to town to fetch a docand jailed with them. tor. Collier left after a few Later that month a grand minutes and immediately jury indicted the brothers began distorting the events for theft of horses from three to make himself look better, Indians—a Caddo named saying that it could have Ba-Sinda-Bar, a Comanche been Charley who shot Walnamed Black Crow and a lace, that Wallace had been Caddo named Washington. shot while Collier was around None of these Indians lived back of the cabin, and that anywhere near Trinidad, and Wallace told him to run. In none testified against the fact, Wallace clearly identified Marlows. Ba-Sinda-Bar told Boone as the shooter to the the jury he did not “own that doctor while being treated. many horses” and that “Mar- George Marlow (left) and Charley Marlow (right) flank their friend, Collier returned with a large low men no steal Indian man’s lawman Cyrus Wells “Doc” Shores, who stood up for the brothers. posse and arrested Charley; horses anyway, because he Epp was already in custody [the Marlows] have better horses he get hile the family felt that in Graham. Boone had bolted before somewhere else, but Indian man thinks Deputy U.S. Marshal the posse arrived, which earned him a these white mans [meaning Johnson Johnson was persecut- price on his head and triggered a masand his deputies] steal if Indian man ing them, they had re- sive manhunt. Although George and don’t sleep with one eye open.” Even so, ceived fair treatment from Marion Wal- Alf were miles away at the time of the the brothers were bound over for trial, lace, the sheriff of Young County, whom shooting, they too were arrested and set for March 1889. they considered a friend. Wallace was placed in the Graham jail. All were After fruitless weeks of trying to ar- universally liked in the community but charged with complicity in the shootrange bail for her sons, Mother Marlow did not get along with Johnson. He had ing. Bail was set at $1,000 each, so they got her landlord to back her, and in late warned the Marlows to be careful. remained in jail with little hope of reOctober the court released all the brothThe day after the warrant for Boone’s lease. Wallace succumbed to his guners but Boone, who finally made bail on arrest arrived, Sheriff Wallace and his shot wound on Christmas Eve, and December 15. Convinced they would be deputy, Tom Collier, rode out to the Collier was named sheriff. acquitted, George, Charley, Alf and Epp Marlows’ rented cabin on the Denson The four jailed brothers were in seriwent to work for Denson and a neighbor spread. They arrived at midday, just as ous trouble. Even though Boone alone while awaiting trial. All was not quiet, the family was about to have dinner. had done the shooting and had not however. While Johnson was transport- While Wallace took care of the horses, intended to kill Sheriff Wallace, the ing them to Graham, the brothers had Collier went around to the cabin door, boys heard talk among their jailers of repeatedly insisted they had never been where Charley Marlow met him. Charley plans to lynch them, and Graham had
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The two men in this 1897 family photo in Colorado are George and Charley Marlow (the latter holding baby daughter Georgia).
Alf—before returning them to jail under heavy guard. News of the jailbreak spread quickly. Several people, including some deputies, began urging mob action. A few citizens warned Deputy Marshal Johnson, but he felt that Collier and his deputies had the jail adequately protected. Then, near midnight on January 17, a body of men entered the building, and jailer John Leavell led them to the prisoners’ cell. The mob first tried to force the brothers from their cell at gunpoint. When they refused, a young man named Bob Hill rushed in to grab Charley, but Charley walloped him. Falling back,
Hill struck his head against a wall and later died of his injury. Other vigilantes tried to drag the brothers from the cell but were forced back by Alf, who had armed himself with a section of lead water pipe another prisoner had unscrewed from the plumbing. Eventually the mob gave up. The next morning the town awoke to claims that a mob of 40 men, possibly a gang of outlaws led by Boone, had tried to rescue the Marlows, but Collier’s men had stopped them. While the Graham Leader reported that none of the mob had been recognized, Charley, George and two other prisoners later testified
R.K. DEARMENT COLLECTION
a history of mistreating its prisoners. The Marlows thought they had been framed for horse theft and were likely to be lynched or convicted of Wallace’s killing by a hostile citizenry. Rightly or wrongly, they believed their best chance of survival was escape, so they obtained a large knife from another prisoner and patiently cut their way through the wall of their cell. On January 14, 1889, they broke through to freedom and started toward their families but were quickly recaptured. Collier promptly took the brothers to a blacksmith and had them chained in pairs—George to Epp and Charley to
An early 1880s view of Gunnison, Colo., where George visited Doc Shores in 1888. While George was away, his brothers were arrested.
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they knew at least 10 of the men, including guards Eugene Logan and Dick Cook, County Attorney Phlete Martin (a convicted killer from North Carolina), Sam Criswell and Frank Harmiston, and that jailer Leavell had helped the mob. A concerned citizen named Marion Lasater urged Deputy Marshal Johnson to protect the Marlows from further mob action, and Johnson telegraphed U.S. Marshal William Cabell in Dallas for advice. On January 19 Cabell ordered Johnson to move the prisoners to Weatherford, about 60 miles southeast, where they could be held in safety until trial. Cabell also instructed Johnson to move quickly and in strict secrecy. Johnson decided to move the prisoners that same night. He arranged for wagons and guards, including several friends of the late sheriff, supposedly to keep them from organizing another attack. The guards were Marion The Marlow brothers faced steep odds twice near Graham, Texas, and two survived those scrapes. A. “Little Marion” Wallace (nephew of the dead sheriff ), Sam Waghe transfer party left Gra- Criswell fell, followed by mob leader goner, John Leavell, Sam Criswell, John ham at 9 p.m. on January 19. Bruce Wheeler. Clift took a shot to the B. Girand, Will Hollis, Eugene Logan As the wagons reached Dry thigh, while Alf Marlow fell dead, ridand Phlete Martin. All were told to Creek, Johnson called loudly dled by 15 bullets. Charley Marlow kept keep the transfer secret, but as at least for his men to pause for a drink, which firing, and although George Marlow was five of these men were members of the the Marlows interpreted as a signal, struck in his right hand, he kept fightmob at the jail, news of the transfer and when they reached the far embank- ing as brother Epp died at his side. The spread quickly. ment, the fight began. Accounts of the surviving Marlows stood back to back, When Johnson told the Marlows of the clash differ, but when Johnson saw his firing at every muzzle flash. transfer order and identified his guards, trusted guards run, he knew he had Charley was struck in the head and the brothers thought another attack like- been double-crossed. Johnson’s descen- chest by a shotgun blast that nearly ly. As the guards walked the Marlows dants claim he fired the first shot, kill- killed him as George shouted to his atand fellow prisoners Lewis Clift and ing one of the mob before taking a bullet tackers: “Come again, you cowardly basWilliam Burkhart to the wagons, some through the hand, which rendered the tards! We have plenty of ammunition 30 men gathered to watch, and the boys one-armed marshal defenseless and and nobody hurt. Come on!” Only one knew the move was no longer a secret. prompted him to seek cover. mob member, Frank Harmiston, took “You lied to us, Ed,” Charley accused The Marlow brothers, Clift and Burk- up the challenge. He walked straight Johnson. “You are taking us out to have hart leaped from the lead wagon, shuf- toward George, revolver raised, and us mobbed again.” When the marshal fled back to the second wagon and both men fired. Harmiston fell dead denied the charge, Charley asked, “If armed themselves. Their situation was in the road. While George dueled with they do, will you give us guns?” John- desperate; shackled together, they could Harmiston, Charley spotted Eugene son replied, “Yes, and die with you if it not run, so they stood behind the wag- Logan taking aim at George. Charley comes to that.” ons and fought for their lives. Vigilante shot Logan down.
were guards. Lasater, Auburg and a doctor arrived about the same time. Lasater quickly stood up to the posse, declaring that there had been enough bloodshed, that he and the doctor were going to attend to the wounded, and that if anyone were to attack the cabin, they would have to kill him first. With that, Lasater and the doctor strode down to the cabin and went inside. George and Charley told them they would only surrender to U.S. Marshal Cabell or his deputy, and Lasater sent the doctor to get word to Cabell. By then Sheriff Moore had learned the mob was composed of men from Graham and had also grown disgusted with the affair. He told Collier he lacked jurisdiction. Collier became angry and pushed for an attack. Moore left the scene and immediately telegraphed Marshal Cabell. The following two days were tense, the Marlows expecting an assault by Collier’s men at any time. On January 21 the bodies of Alf and Epp were delivered to the cabin after having been displayed at the courthouse in Graham. The grisly appearance of the bodies may have given pause to some of Collier’s force. Mother Marlow made arrangements to have the boys buried in the nearby town of Finis.
Cabell’s deputy, W.H. Morton, arrived January 22. After an argument with Collier, Morton was on the road with his prisoners within 20 minutes. A member of Collier’s posse asked where they would board the train, and Morton immediately changed course for another station. On the trip Charley coughed up several balls of buckshot and began to improve.
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eorge and Charley Marlow and Lewis Clift were safe, but Boone Marlow was not. On January 29, 1889, Martin Beavers, G.E. Harbolt and J.E. Direkson brought his body into Graham and claimed the reward. On closer examination of the body it was determined they had poisoned Boone, then shot him and claimed he had resisted arrest. They were charged with murder and convicted. Boone was buried beside Alf and Epp at the cemetery in Finis. The brutal mob ambush at Dry Creek shocked most citizens of Graham. Even the partisan Graham Leader demanded speedy punishment for the attackers. In late January a grand jury indicted Phlete Martin, Eugene Logan and Sam Waggoner for obstruction of justice and
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By then the mob, completely demoralized, had fled. Three vigilantes lay dead, as did Alf and Epp, with several more wounded. George and Charley had survived, but both were seriously wounded, and they remained chained to their dead brothers. Charley bore nine buckshot wounds. George found a clasp knife on Criswell’s body and cut the feet off the bodies of Alf and Ellie, enabling him to flee with Charley, Clift and Burkhart. They drove one of the wagons to the Marlow family cabin, stopping at a farmhouse along the way to break their leg irons. Clift stayed with them, while Burkhart disappeared. When the survivors reached the cabin, they treated their wounds and prepared to defend themselves again, for they knew Sheriff Collier would find them. The next morning, the 20th, Collier and a large group of men surrounded the cabin. Disgusted at the turn of events, Marion Lasater sent a dispatch to Texas Ranger Charles Auburg, who lived nearby, to come help defuse the situation. At the same time Little Marion Wallace recruited Sheriff George Moore of neighboring Jack County for help, telling him that the mob had been in cahoots with the Marlows, and that all of the dead
This 1880 photo shows Main Street and Sixth Avenue in Ouray, Colo., whose citizens found the Marlow brothers to be law-abiding.
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TEXAS RANGER HALL OF FAME AND MUSEUM, WACO, TEXAS
murder. Bail was set at $2,500 deaths of Alf, Epp and Boone. each, and they were freed After several compromises, within 30 minutes. Their trial the cases were settled for was set for October. around $6,500. George and George and Charley were Charley’s problems should tried for horse theft in March have been over. They were and acquitted, but they reexonerated, safe and free, livmained in custody as feding happily in southwestern eral witnesses in the mob Colorado, having been warmtrial. They lived in Dallas ly accepted into the commuuntil August, when Charley nity. But one more chapter heard that Collier had obremained in their ordeal. tained a warrant for his arrest for the murder of Sheriff n May 22, 1891, Wallace. Certain they would Texas Governor be killed if they returned to James S. “Big Jim” Graham, the Marlows moved Hogg issued an to southwestern Colorado, arrest warrant for Charley near the new railroad town Marlow as an accessory in of Ridgway. They worked for the killing of Sheriff Walrancher Arthur Hyde, who lace, even though the mob was also a friend of Sheriff verdict had been issued and Doc Shores of Gunnison. Collier was dead. On June 20 When the mob case came two Texas Rangers—Captain up for trial in October, and William Jesse McDonald and the Marlows did not appear Sergeant James M. “Grude” to testify, the trial was post- Texas Ranger William McDonald traveled north to arrest Charley. Britton—stepped off the train poned until March 1890. in Ridgway, and a large crowd When they failed to appear in March, On the strength of the Marlows’ testi- gathered. Bill McDonald was not just U.S. Marshal George A. Knight of the mony, the grand jury issued warrants for any Ranger. The newly appointed capNorthern District of Texas issued a war- a dozen more Graham residents, includ- tain of Company B of the Frontier Batrant for their arrest as witnesses. Shores ing Sheriff Collier and Deputy Marshal talion, he would become one of the most saw the notice and knew he had to act. Johnson. Learning of Collier’s rumored legendary of the Texas Rangers. He was The Marlows were his friends, but he murder warrant against Charley, Mar- known for reckless bravery and, accordalso had a duty to fulfill. He and a dep- shal Knight in January 1891 appointed ing to one account, “would charge hell uty traveled more than 90 miles out to George a deputy U.S. marshal, specif- with a bucket of water.” His tombstone the Marlow homestead and argued the ically to hold Charley in custody as a carries the motto NO MAN IN THE WRONG situation with the brothers. George and witness in the mob trials; he then ap- CAN STAND UP AGAINST A FELLOW THAT ’S IN Charley were adamant they would be pointed Charley to hold George. This THE RIGHT AND KEEP ON A-COMIN.’ killed if they returned to Texas. Shores farsighted action would prove crucial The Texas Rangers contacted Sheriff proposed they travel with him to Gun- in months to come. On April 17, 1891, J.F. Bradley of Ouray County, Colo., nison, where he and Knight would ar- a jury found Logan, Waggoner and Little to request that he arrest Charley and range to provide them with disguises Marion Wallace guilty of conspiracy but place him in their custody. A friend and an armed guard to transport them not guilty of murder. Collier and anoth- of the Marlows, Bradley brought them safely to court. Eventually they trusted er defendant had died before the trial to town for a meeting and pledged to Shores and agreed. After meeting with began; the other defendants were acquit- oblige the Rangers to make any arrest. Knight, they were provided with new ted. Logan, Waggoner and Wallace were The meeting was tense. “The Texas clothes, hats and gray wigs and testi- sentenced to 10 years in prison, but their Rangers,” the Ridgway Herald reported, fied against the mob not once but sev- lawyers appealed the decision to the “were armed to the teeth with Wineral times. For his part in resolving the U.S. Supreme Court. In April 1892 the chesters and revolvers in anticipation affair, Shores drew a reprimand from Supreme Court set aside the verdict on of trouble in making the arrest. The Albert H. Jones, the District U.S. Mar- procedural technicalities and ordered Marlows were likewise ‘heeled,’ and shal for Colorado, for going outside a new trial. Despite the order, the case when they all met and shook hands, official channels and negotiating di- was never retried. it was noticeable that the shaking was rectly with Knight rather than going The surviving Marlows had filed a series all done with the left hand. The boys through him. of damage suits related to the wrongful treated the officers courteously, how44
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OURAY COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, OURAY, COLO.
ever, and everything passed age or more daring and reoff smoothly.” markable incidents than The Marlows refused arrest, were enacted in real life by as Charley remained held these famous brothers.… by George, and vice versa, as Arriving in this country, the federal witnesses and were Marlows were always pernot subject to civil authorfectly law-abiding citizens ity. They requested the Texas and ear ned hundreds of Rangers telegraph Colorado friends, not one of whom Governor John Long Routt. was ever let down.” After several days of negotiations between Governors Jim Pettengill, once a geoloRoutt and Hogg and Marshal gist with the U.S. Department Knight, McDonald and Britof the Interior who retired ton left empty-handed. In near Ridgway, Colo., in 1999, Ridgway the story circulated has been a freelance writer that if Texas again sought the for more than a quarter cenMarlows, they would need tury. He has sold more than to send 2,000 Texas Rangers 160 articles and 700 photoinstead of two, and the newsgraphs to many national magpaper circulated a petition azines, including Wild West. “setting forth that the Marlow The Wild West History Assoboys are known by the signciation awarded him for his ers to be good and law-abidarticle “The Marlow Brothers ing citizens of Ouray County —Their Texas Ordeal and Their and praying the governor that Lives in Colorado,” published they be permitted to remain George (left) and Charley Marlow both lived into the 1940s. in the 2010 edition of the here.” The newspaper’s petiOuray County Historical Sotion concluded, “The Marlows deserve coach robbers, assisted with cattle sales ciety Journal. For further reading on the support of all citizens in their en- and arrested a murderer. Charley even- the Marlows, Pettengill suggests: The deavor to be freed from persecution.” tually moved to California to be near Fighting Marlows: Men Who Wouldn’t George and Charley Marlow were in- his children and died on January 19, be Lynched, by Glenn Shirley; Life of deed good citizens in Colorado. They 1941, 52 years to the day of his wound- the Marlows: A True Story of Frontier had large families, became success- ing in the Dry Creek ambush. George Life of Early Days, revised by William ful small ranchers and were active in stayed in Colorado, passing away on Rathmell, edited with an introduction the community, serving as lawmen July 3, 1945. In Charley’s obituary the by R.K. DeArment; and Marlow Brothfor more than a decade. They helped Montrose Daily Press reported: “The ers Ordeal, 1888–1892: 138 Days of Hell Doc Shores put down a labor strike wildest Western fiction magazines have in Graham on the Texas Frontier, by in Crested Butte, Colo., chased stage- never produced men of greater cour- Barbara A. Neal Ledbetter.
The Marlow Legend on the Big Screen
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fter the deaths of George and Charley Marlow in the 1940s, their legend was destined to grow— but without their names attached. In 1953 screenwriter William H. Wright found a copy of their biography, Life of the Marlows, written decades earlier by Ouray Judge William Rathmell, in a used bookstore. Impressed by the power of the story, he paid $1,000 to each of the Marlow descendants for rights to their story. The film appeared in
1965 as The Sons of Katie Elder, starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Michael Anderson Jr. and Earl Holliman, which very loosely follows the Marlow story of four brothers wrongly accused of the murder of a popular sheriff, fighting for their lives during an ambush at a creek crossing while chained together. In 1987, on her 102nd birthday, George’s daughter, Myrtle Gilliam, said John Wayne was nothing like her father, but Dean Martin was very much like her uncle Charley, “always joshing.” J.P. DECEMBER 2013
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New Mexico’s Reviled Heroic Padre
Padre Antonio José Martínez dared to speak out against Anglos and the French bishop, making him a sore thumb in this land with few priests
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e picture New Mexico, when Brig. Gen. Stephen W. Kearny’s army arrived in 1846, as a priest-ridden land full of fat friars who took their ease at the gambling halls and bordellos of Santa Fe. The parish priest of the Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís may have taken his ease in this manner, despite being 46
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COURTESY PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES (NMHM/DCA), NEG. NO. 9970
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istory is written by the victors. Great heroes can be lost and have even their purest motives denigrated. To make themselves appear great, the triumphant often choose to magnify the villainy of the defeated. In the mid1800s Padre Antonio José Martínez held power difficult to imagine today. This made him a target for Anglo leaders and French clergymen. They described him as clutching for power and implied he was immoral. French-born Jean-Baptiste Salpointe, bishop of Arizona and archbishop of Santa Fe, largely omitted Padre Martínez from his 1898 history of the Catholic Church in New Mexico despite the fact the padre had established the region’s first school for both genders, printed its first books, educated the first native priests and bridged a period when New Mexico was almost completely without priests. To understand Martínez, we must comprehend his time and place and what he was defending. In this light his motives appear more pure.
COURTESY PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES (NMHM/DCA), NEG. NO. 11262
By Doug Hocking
Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy (left) arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory, in 1852 and clashed with Padre Antonio José Martínez (right) over various church matters.
an old man. The priest of a neighboring town might even have joined him on occasion. But there were no friars in New Mexico in 1846, fat or otherwise, and few priests. Controlling religious observances was the mysterious and secretive brotherhood of Penitentes (“Penitents”), a lay organization proscribed by the Catholic Church for its excesses. During Holy Week the brothers whipped and otherwise tortured themselves in public. Others dragged a
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cart full of heavy stones atop which sat the skeletal figure of Doña Sebastiana, representing death, bearing her bow and arrow. The cart’s ungreased axle and wheels squealed and skidded over the road to shrill tunes played on the pito, a small flute. In the final ritual a brother depicting Christ was roped to a cross, hoisted aloft and left to suffer, sometimes to the point of unconsciousness. The ecclesiastical power shift began centuries before when the Spanish crown
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The Penitentes, who by choice suffered much in northern New Mexico, are closely associated with the striking Santuario de Chimayó, about 25 miles north of Santa Fe.
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gave New Mexico to the Franciscans as a mission field, paying for the friars’ upkeep from the royal treasury. At first there were no secular priests (those not associated with a monastic order), only the missionaries who sought out the Pueblo Indians in their villages. Only much later, in 1797, did New Mexico become part of a secular diocese, with parish priests at Albuquerque, El Paso del Norte, Santa Fe and Santa Cruz de la Cañada. Through 1821, when Mexico won its independence from Spain, these secular priesthoods were seldom filled, and the Franciscans also found it difficult to find friars for the northern frontier. New Mexico became a land with few priests and was soon to have even fewer. A lay brotherhood of obscure origins, la Santa Hermandad (“the Holy Brotherhood”) has gone by many names. Anglos called them the Penitentes due to their penitent rites of self-abuse. Franciscans disavow the group, which has often been confused with the Franciscans’ lay Third Order, whose brothers practiced a private and gentler form of self-flagellation. When the Hermandad first came under public scrutiny in the
This Spanish-era chapel stands at Picuris Pueblo, about 18 miles south of Taos Pueblo.
early 19th century, it was already old, perhaps as old as the conquest, and widespread. Its rituals closely resemble the Holy Week observances of a society in Seville, Spain, but the route of transmission is unknown. This secret society of mutual aid and assistance is similar to the Freemasons, binding society together beyond family and across class lines. In the absence of priests, the brotherhood thrived in New Mexico as a source of succor and religious observance. But the Hermandad had a dark side. Members of this secret society appeared hooded in public processions as they whipped themselves until blood ran. Onlookers likely wondered what such self-abusing fanatics might do to outsiders. While they punished brothers severely for minor infractions against other brothers, they overlooked major crimes—even murder—when the victim was an outsider. As populations grew, the Catholic Church created additional parishes at Taos, Abiquiú, San Miguel and Tomé, but the priesthoods often remained unfilled; rarely were there more than two secular priests in all of New Mexico. In this was a mercy for the poor of New Mexico. As the crown was paying the Armed with her bow and arrow and seated atop a cart is Doña
Sebastiana, a skeletal figure who represented death to the brotherhood of Penitentes. DOUG HOCKING PHOTO
Franciscans’ expenses, there was no mandatory tithe. Thus New Mexicans had grown accustomed to forgoing the tithe. In the absence of that income, secular priests charged parishioners high “stole fees,” payments for ceremonies like baptism, marriage and last rites. But people soon found ways to avoid even these. A baby who might soon die, they reasoned, didn’t really require baptism, and a formal wedding was an extravagance; instead they would save for the truly necessary— last rites. Then, in 1828, the Mexican government, mistrusting the predominately Spanish monks, drove out the Franciscans, leaving New Mexico with only two priests. In this vacuum of religious leadership, the self-supporting Penitentes flourished. Representing the Catholic Church were a priest in Santa Fe and Padre Antonio José Martínez in Taos. In 1833 the departing Franciscans appointed Padre Martínez to watch over their lay brotherhood, Terciarios de Penitencia (“Third Order of Penance”; the first two orders were of friars and nuns). At the time the Terciarios were in disarray, while the Penitentes were growing in political influence. Padre Martínez, perhaps unable to distinguish between the two lay brotherhoods with oddly similar names, seems to have taken charge of the dominant Penitentes. The Penitentes are associated with the Santuario de Chimayó, about 25 miles north of Santa Fe. Its founder brought a peculiar belief system, the cult of Our
corporated ideas from the Norte Americano experience. Soon after Martínez returned home an ordained priest in 1823, his daughter died. The padre immersed himself in his work and within a year held the parish of Don Fernando de Taos. There he preached the ideals of freedom and castigated the gringo mountain men who finagled Mexican land grants—in competition with his family interests—and who provided the area’s nomadic Indians with guns, powder and intoxicating Taos “lightning.” Chief among such interlopers were Charles and William Bent, who in partnership with fur trader Ceran St. Vrain ran Bent’s Fort and other interests. The Río Arriba was not the Río Abajo, the land south of Santa Fe, realm of haciendados ricos and their debt-slave
system geared to support only manufacturers from Spain or, later, from the Valley of Mexico. The elevation was high, and the growing season short. In the early 19th century there were few Hispanic towns—Santa Fe, Santa Cruz de la Cañada, Chimayo and Don Fernando de Taos. Most of the remaining towns were Indian Pueblos—Taos, Picuris, Santa Cruz, San Juan, Pojoaque, Nambé, San Ildefanso and others. Abiquiú, Las Trampas and Truchas were genízaro towns. Genízaros were nomadic Indians, captured and held as slaves. Their Spanish masters baptized them and gave them religious instruction, then provided them land grants on the periphery of the settlements, which they were expected to farm and defend. The people of the Río Arriba lived their lives in great isolation from the outside world.
Padre Martínez lived in this adobe house (exterior above and one of two courtyards at left) built by his father, which now hosts La Hacienda de los Martínez museum in Taos.
DOUG HOCKING PHOTOS
Lord of Esquipulas, from Guatemala, which included the unusual practice of geophagy—eating clay (considered by pilgrims tierra bendita, or “blessed earth”). A leader of the local Penitente group built the chapel sometime before 1810. The Hermandad was already coming to prominence, and its symbols appear prominently on the altar screen. The santuario became a pilgrimage site and is known today as the “Lourdes of America.” At Easter the Penitentes come to practice their Holy Week rites, and pilgrims walk all night from distant towns to hear Mass. Many leave behind their crutches, having seemingly been healed. Others take home dabs of clay from an opening in the floor of a room just off the sanctuary. They mix it with food or sprinkle it on window and doorsills to ward off brujos (“witches”). This religion of the Río Arriba (the region north of Santa Fe) is unique in North America. Such beliefs had a powerful hold in early New Mexico. In the 18th and early 19th centuries education was the purview of a few ricos, the rich, who could afford to bring tutors into their h om e s. E l se w h e re priests often taught at village schools, but New Mexico lacked priests. There were no printing presses and no newspapers, as there were few who could read them.
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ntonio José Martínez was born at Abiquiú in 1793 to one of the wealthiest families in the Río Arriba. His family soon moved to Taos. Young Martínez married in 1812, but his wife soon died, leaving him a baby daughter. In 1818, the child installed with family, he entered seminary in Durango, Mexico, seeking a secular priesthood. He was present for the excitement and hope of the Mexican War of Independence while maintaining a good academic record. Mexican leaders framed a new constitution that in-
peones. The men of the north were free, if poor. They possessed their own lands, plowed the earth with forked tree limbs and shared water, wood lots and grazing commons. Water and commons governed their lives and their natures. In such circumstances one who does well must be stealing from his neighbors, and only a brujo would do that. By politicking among his neighbors a man might win respect and honor, but there were great disincentives to advancement in agriculture or business. The land was cut off from trade, being farther from Mexico City than from St. Louis. Mexican tariffs were high, and the people were metal poor, denied tools and discouraged from manufacturing by a
Padre Martínez arrived like a thunderbolt. In 1826 he opened the first enduring school, accepting students of either gender. In 1834 he acquired and operated New Mexico’s first printing press, using it to create books for his school. (As the only press in the region it continued to turn out books and government documents, including the 1846 Territorial Constitution.) Martínez also taught preparatory seminary classes. By 1852, when Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy arrived to organize the first diocese of New Mexico, 18 of its 22 priests were former students of Padre Martínez. In 1832, in the first visit to New Mexico by a bishop in more than seven decades, Bishop José Antonio Zubiría of Durango
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Penitentes circa 1915 proceed to the site of the “final ritual,” during which a brother depicting Christ was roped to hang from a cross.
visited his far-flung diocese and was shocked by what he found. The iconic carvings of local santeros (“saint makers”) offended him, as did the retablos (devotional paintings) of local manufacture. Recognized today as works of art, they were too crudely fashioned to please the bishop, and he ordered them removed from the churches. Even more shocked by the rites of the Penitentes, he promptly proscribed the brotherhood. With the bishop safely returned to faraway Durango, Padre Martínez chose to ignore his orders and support local art and customs. Then came political upheaval, in 1835, when President Antonio López de Santa Anna suspended the Mexican Constitution of 1824 and replaced it with the Siete Leyes (“Seven Laws”), seeking to strengthen the central government. His action would lead to rebellion in Texas, New Mexico and California. Under the new measures New Mexico became a department governed from Mexico City rather than a self-governing territory. It was rumored high taxes were to follow. The appointed governor, Albino Pérez, was subject to excesses of living and spending, calling forth the militia at its own expense and refusing to repay loans he took from Santa Fe merchants. Padre Martínez spoke against these abuses from the pulpit, and when the people of the Río Arriba rose in revolt in 1837—literally tearing Governor Pérez limb from limb—officials suspected the outspoken priest was behind the revolt. There is no evidence Martínez was anything but shocked by the violence, and he joined General Manuel Armijo, soon to be governor, in its suppression. 50
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Ten years later Padre Martínez was again suspected of instigating revolt, after speaking out against the excesses of the Anglos. The mountain men led outrageous lives and defiled willing Mexican women. Through connivance and bribes Anglos cornered vast land grants that were in direct competition with the Martínez family. Worst of all the villains—the Bents and St. Vrain in particular—sold guns and liquor to the wild Indians who stole from the Mexicans and often killed them for tradable goods. In 1847 rebelling Pueblo Indians at Taos killed, scalped and mutilated the first American governor of New Mexico Territory—none other than Charles Bent. Once again, Padre Martínez played no part in the bloody revolt. On the contrary, at great personal risk he hid Anglos in his home. Regardless, Kit Carson, whom the padre had joined in matrimony to local girl Josefa Jaramillo, never forgave Martínez for the murder of his friend and brother-in-law, Bent. Abandoning the Catholic Church he had joined in order to marry Josefa in 1843, Kit in 1854 sought religious solace by becoming a Freemason. Padre Martínez’s love of the U.S. Constitution is well known, though his understanding of it was both novel and eccentric. In 1846, after the American invasion, the padre told his seminary students that as the government had changed, they must change their ideas, as the genius of this American government traveled in complete harmony with freedom of worship and separation of church and state. A student asked what form this new government took, and he replied, “Republican. You can say that in comparison the American gov-
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ernment is like a burro, but on this burro ride the lawyers and not the clergy.” Padre Martínez saw no conflict in a priest speaking out from the pulpit on political matters. To him “freedom of religion” meant in part that the government was free to protect the people from the church. He served in both Mexican and American legislatures and still found time for his own parish and school. From a position in the new American legislature, Padre Martínez was among the first native New Mexicans to agitate for statehood.
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hat the padre and the new bishop, Jean-Baptiste Lamy, should clash was inevitable. New Mexico Territory, severed from Durango, was made a diocese within an American archdiocese, with French-born Lamy sent out as bishop. When Lamy arrived in Santa Fe in 1852, the priest was at the height of his power. He enjoyed vast influence among the widespread Penitentes, who had long slipped from church oversight and control. Most of the secular priests, the first native clergy in New Mexico, were his former students. At the same time the bishop’s lack of empathy for local customs was astounding; his basilica and the chapel of the Sisters of Loretto were built in the French style. As the 1850s progressed, the conflict intensified. Vicar General Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, serving as the bishop’s hammer, circulated to the outlying churches, finding immorality and improper handling of church funds everywhere except in Taos. He relieved most of the native clergy, replacing them with mostly French priests. Machebeuf or-
ABOVE PHOTO: COURTESY PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES (NMHM/DCA), NEG. NO. 88706
By then Bishop Lamy had excommunicated “this unhappy priest,” Padre Antonio José Martínez. The censure came sometime between 1857 and 1860, though the date is uncertain, as the record was kept not in Santa Fe but concealed in the record of baptisms at Taos in a comment written by the bishop. Padre Martínez questioned the validity of the excommunication, which Lamy had put through without admonition, formal charges or a hearing. Indeed, the underhanded manner in which it was handled makes it likely the reading of the order was not done with public
DOUG HOCKING PHOTO
dered that all church funds should come first to Santa Fe, from which priestly stipends would then be dispensed. The vicar’s inordinate focus on money shows in his efforts to have himself appointed executor of the Francis X. Aubry (aka “Skimmer of the Plains”) estate and in his actions in that portion of New Mexico coming to be called Arizona. Charles Poston, cofounder of the Sonora Exploring and Mining Co. in Tubac, had been conducting marriages at no charge for his Mexican workers under the authority of a civil appointment. Machebeuf nullified all of those marriages during his visit in 1859, though he soon settled the matter and blessed the marriages in a gala that cost Poston some $700. James Tevis, stationkeeper for the Butterfield Overland Mail, once claimed Machebeuf showed him the silver altar service he had taken from the Indians at San Xavier del Bac, implying he’d put one over on them. One might normally doubt Tevis, a notorious teller of tall tales, but this anecdote fits a pattern, and in 1860 Padre Martínez accused Machebeuf of selling church silver. Martínez also accused Vicar Machebeuf of betraying the secrets of the confessional from the pulpit, a very serious charge. Lamy managed to mediate that particular episode. In 1852 Bishop Lamy reduced the stole fees by half, claiming they had been set far too high. Only later did he learn that New Mexicans had never tithed. Putting his foot down, the bishop insisted in his Christmas letter of January 14, 1854, that parishioners must tithe before priests could administer the sacraments. Padre Martínez retorted that were the bishop successful in collecting the tithe, his treasury would soon greatly exceed that of the territorial government. The cathedral in Santa Fe stands as evidence of Lamy’s success. When stole fees were the only fees collected and tithing was voluntary, the prohibitively high fees still left priests quite poor. In following years Padre Martínez consistently spoke out in published letters and tracts against the compulsory tithe. In 1860 he publicly denounced the practice as “true simony,” a serious religious crime.
This bronze statue of Padre Martínez holds forth in present-day Taos Plaza.
fanfare, as claimed years later. Anglos and French residents reportedly stood with Vicar Machebeuf against a potential rising of the locals who adored Padre Martínez. The former were described in church records as “good Catholics,” though among those listed were Kit Carson and Ceran St. Vrain, who were Freemasons. There is no contemporary record of the vicar’s visit, and there was no rising. The charges against Padre
Martínez would not usually have been considered grounds for excommunication; he stood accused of having conducted a baptism at the oratory in his home, as the church was not available to him. And, of course, he had failed to first collect the tithe. Despite the rift with Bishop Lamy, Padre Martínez continued to minister to the poor and close friends until the end of his life in 1867. Although this created a schism of sorts in the church at Taos, the padre never sought to teach a new doctrine. He simply felt the bishop had acted improperly. Although he did not resist the Protestant missionaries who came to the Río Arriba, he never strayed from the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church. A leader of the church and legislature, at the forefront of printing and education, a defender of New Mexicans’ rights and native culture, Padre Antonio José Martínez is all but forgotten. Immersed in a tradition few outsiders understood, the priest was reviled by Kit Carson, Ceran St. Vrain, Bishop Lamy and others for defending the common people of the north. He surfaces as the villain in Willa Cather’s 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, while his antagonist Lamy—a man who unwittingly trod on his parishioners and built a cathedral on their backs—is held up as a saint. In a land where education was almost unknown, Padre Martínez’s wisdom and expertise in canon law was renowned. Despite his dour demeanor and vociferous opposition to those who would exploit his people, he taught religious tolerance and constitutional principles and was instrumental in preparing New Mexico for democracy. Frequent Wild West contributor Doug Hocking is a retired Army officer who has studied ethnography, history and historical archaeology. Suggested for further reading: But Time and Chance: The Story of Padre Martínez of Taos, 1793–1867, by Fray Angelico Chavez; Los Hermanos Penitentes: A Vestige of Medievalism in Southwestern United States, by Lorayne Ann Horka-Follick; and Rebellion in Río Arriba, 1837, by Janet Lecompte.
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Wright Was Might
Among Oregon Indians
Benjamin Wright, who built a reputation as a fearsome Indian fighter, worked to broker peace as an Indian agent— until a half-blood friend turned on him By Carole Nielson
OREGON HISTORICAL SOCIETY
dark hair flying in the wind. Close on his heels were 27 scruffy miners armed with rifles, pistols and knives. A wagon train of emigrants was under attack, pinned down between a lakeshore and a high volcanic bluff. From behind brush and boulders Modoc Indians kept a steady hail of arrows whizzing amid the wagons. Smoke billowed from a grass fire, while terrified livestock milled inside the wagon corral, stirring up a cloud of dust. Shouting and shooting, Wright’s riders whipped their horses to a run and thundered into the fracas. Indians fell where they crouched or dove into the lake to swim for waiting canoes or to hide amid the tule reeds. Cheers went up from the emigrants, even as the fight continued. Miners plunged into the lake to shoot and club Indians as they came up for air or tried to paddle away. Hand-to-hand fighting broke out along the shore. When the last of the Indians were either dead or had escaped, the rescuers returned to the wagons to Enigmatic Ben Wright sometimes lived and dressed check on the travelers. like an Indian and at other times hunted them down.
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It was August 1852. The six-wagon train of 30 men, a boy and a woman had taken the Applegate Trail, a supposedly safer alternative to the main Oregon Trail. Modoc raiders had trapped the emigrants on the shore of Tule Lake, just south of the present-day Oregon-California border. The wagon train was one of several passing through Modoc country that summer, bound for the goldfields and settlements of northern California and southern Oregon Territory. A few days earlier and a couple of miles to the west the Modocs had ambushed a party of eight packers. The lone survivor, a fellow named Coffin, had escaped by cutting the pack from one of the party’s mules, jumping on its back and dashing straight toward his attackers. Taking the Indians by surprise, Coffin had broken through their line. After hiding in the tules for several days, he had stumbled into the northern California gold boomtown of Yreka. Concerned citizens had called a town meeting and asked BenWright to lead a patrol to guard wagon trains passing through Modoc country for the remainder of the sumSCOTTS BLUFF NATIONAL MONUMENT
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unfire cracked in the distance. Twenty-eight riders kicked their mounts to a trot, topping a sage-covered ridge. Leading the way was buckskinclad Benjamin Wright—mountain man, prospector and Indian fighter—his long,
In November 1847 Cayuse and Umatilla warriors attacked the Whitman Mission, depicted here in a Henry Jackson painting, and soon Wright was fighting the Cayuses.
mer and fall. Twenty-seven men had volunteered to join him.
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mysterious man with glossy black hair that hung in ringlets nearly to his belt, Benjamin Wright was an enigma. At times he lived with Indian tribes, adopting their customs and modes of dress, and taking a squaw as his common-law wife. At other times he hunted Indians, mutilating his victims according to the respective tribe’s traditions. He had been known to scalp or cut off noses and was even reported to have worn a necklace of human finger bones hacked from Indian hands. Some said his parents were Quakers, while others claimed he was the son of
a Presbyterian minister. Born on April 7, 1828, in Milton (Wayne County), Ind., Wright arrived in Oregon City in the fall of 1847. Indians had attacked the wagon train in which he had traveled west, killing the daughter of the wagon master. It was rumored she was Wright’s sweetheart and that her death had turned him into an Indian hater. On November 29, 1847, warriors from the Cayuse and Umatilla tribes attacked the Whitman Mission, near present-day Walla Walla, Wash., killing missionary couple Marcus and Narcissa Whitman plus 11 other whites and taking more than 50 women and children captive. This incident sparked the Cayuse War. Ben Wright quickly joined the volunteer militia and by December 1847 was
a private under Captain William Martin, fighting Cayuses along the Columbia River. In spring 1850 the Cayuses turned over five from their tribe to be tried for the murder of the Whitmans. Most of the volunteers, including Wright, were discharged at that time, even though sporadic fighting continued until 1855. Wright tried farming in the Willamette Valley in 1850 but decided it was not to his liking. For a few years he trapped beaver and hunted Indians, at times living with various tribes in northern Oregon, adopting their customs and style of dress. When prospectors discovered gold in southern Oregon and northern California,Wright drifted south. By the spring of 1851 he was living near Yreka, Calif., less than 20 miles south of
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FROM HISTORICAL ATLAS OF WASHINGTON AND OREGON, BY DEREK HAYES
Wright fought and dealt with many Pacific Northwest tribes, including the Modocs, who were in southern Oregon and California.
the Oregon border, where he took up with a Shasta Indian woman and prospected for gold on the Scott River. A few weeks after Wright arrived in the Scott Valley, a Modoc band raided a pack train and stole nearly 50 mules and horses. He joined a vigilante group seeking to recover the stolen animals and punish the Modocs. Passing a Modoc village near Tule Lake, the vigilantes made a show of camping nearby. But while the Indians slept, a party under Wright’s leadership surrounded the village. At daybreak the force attacked, killing several men and capturing women and children. The triumphant vigilantes returned to Yreka with stock—although just whose is unclear. In August 1852 Wright, given his reputation as a fierce Indian fighter, was the 54
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miners’ logical choice to lead a patrol escorting wagon trains through Modoc country. After rescuing the six-wagon train at Tule Lake, Wright and his men searched the marshes and to their horror discovered the mutilated remains of at least 22 white emigrants, plus charred wagons, clothing and other personal effects. The miners buried the victims. News of the Modoc attacks reached the gold boomtown of Jacksonville in southern Oregon’s Rogue River Valley. A company of volunteers under Captain John E. Ross rushed toward Tule Lake, where the men discovered the remains of 14 more emigrants, including several women and children. It was impossible to tell how many settlers the Indians had killed (some historians estimate as many as 70 may have died at the hands of the Mo-
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docs that summer), but at Tule Lake it appeared they had wiped out at least one entire wagon train. The scene of the attacks became known as Bloody Point. The Oregon volunteers joined forces with Wright’s men, and together they scoured the countryside. One gruesome discovery—the body of a young woman —particularly infuriated the volunteers. It appeared she had run more than a mile before the Modocs overtook her. Her attackers had cut her throat, scalped her, stripped her body of clothing and sliced off her breasts. Eligible white women were scarce on the frontier, and the sight of this mutilated young woman caused some of the men—many of whom were as young as the victim— to weep or shake with rage. All vowed to avenge her death.
mistress that the Modocs planned to attack the whites in the next couple of days. Wright decided to wait no longer. He would approach the Modoc village alone to settle things—one way or another. The Indian village sat on a low ledge just above the river. Rising directly behind it was a 20-foothigh bluff. That night Wright placed 10 of his volunteers on the bluff and six others across the river opposite the Indian encampment. The men hid in the brush. At daybreak he strode boldly into the Modoc camp. Over his buckskins he wore a blanket poncho, beneath which he concealed a pistol. Wright could not locate Schonchin John, the headman, so he walked up to the man he knew was second in command and demanded he release the captive white girls and return all the stolen property. The warrior scowled and refused, so Wright fired two shots through the blanket. The Indian dropped dead. At that instant Wright lay flat on the ground. The volunteers on the riverbank opened fire, and as Wright scrambled from the village, the men on the bluff joined in, catching the Indians in a crossfire. Some Modoc men tried to grab their bows but were soon cut down. Others dove into the water and were shot when they came up for air. Still others ran for the sagebrush only to be rounded up and clubbed
When Wright attacked a Modoc village in November 1852, Curly Headed Doctor escaped the fray to fight another day.
PHOTOS: AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY
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hat summer and fall Wright and 15 of his men continued to patrol the Applegate Trail through Modoc country. Through Indian interpreters Wright negotiated with the Modocs, seeking the return of stolen property. Learning that two white girls had been captured in a raid on a wagon train near Lower Klamath Lake, he added their immediate release to his demands. He met with Modoc leaders, pressing them to bring in the captives and stolen property in return for his promise to leave their country. He also offered to trade with them for feathers and furs. None of these tactics worked. By early November 1852 the volunteers were running short on supplies, so Wright dispatched four men to Yreka for food and ammunition. Arriving just before Election Day, the miners decided to stay long enough to vote. For six days Wright and his men were on starvation rations, and they were preparing to slaughter one of their horses when the four finally returned with beef on the hoof and additional ammunition. The miners killed one of the steers, and Wright invited local Modocs to the feast. An oft-repeated rumor had it that one of Wright’s men had purchased strychnine in Yreka, that the volunteers prepared poisoned beef, and that more than 40 Modocs died from eating the poisoned food. Wright and his men vehemently denied this version of events, saying it wouldn’t have been “sporting enough.” Most historians agree it is doubtful poison was used. According to Wright, the Indians remained suspicious, and only two Modoc men showed up. He fed the pair, gave them presents and allowed them to return to their village. Still the other Modocs kept their distance. In mid-November, Wright moved his camp to the trail crossing at the natural bridge on the Lost River, a few hundred yards from the Modocs’ winter village. The dropping temperatures brought more Indians into camp every day, and their fighting men now outnumbered the whites 3 to 1. The miners were understandably nervous and grew even more so when a volunteer named Fenning brought information from his Indian
Modoc headman Schonchin John also fled that November fight and would play a role in the Modoc War 20 years later.
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or shot to death. In all, Wright’s men killed more than 40 Modocs, including several squaws, while just three of the volunteers were wounded, none seriously. The two captured white girls were never found. Only two Modoc warriors escaped—Schonchin John and Curly Headed Doctor. Neither would forget that day, and both would play important roles in the Modoc War 20 years later. The miners scalped and mutilated their victims, as the Modocs had done to the emigrants’ bodies, and then rode back to Yreka, their ghastly souvenirs dan-
but also in the other settlements and mining camps.
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hile Ben Wright and his men were fighting the Modocs, prospectors discovered gold on the beaches of southern Oregon, near the mouth of the Rogue River. Ruffians of every sort were soon pouring into the area, pushing aside local Indians in pursuit of mineral wealth. When a prospector turned up dead, white miners assumed the Rogue Indians (or Takelmas, as they called themselves) had done the killing and retaliated by raiding their villages. On May 12, 1854, Joel Palmer, the Oregon superintendent of Indian Affairs, wrote to Brig. Gen. John E.Wool, commander of the Department of the Pacific, asking for troops—not to protect the whites, but to protect the Indians of the region. “How mortifying that we have so reckless a population as to demand the presence of troops, to protect the natives against the barbarities of our own citizens,” Palmer wrote in his letter to General Wool. In September 1854 Superintendent Palmer appointed Wright special sub-agent of Indian Affairs at Port Orford, a district that included In May 1854 Joel Palmer, Oregon superintendent of Indian the lower Rogue River Affairs, asked for troops to protect not whites but Indians. and the southern Oregling from their guns, hats and horses’ gon coast between Coos Bay and the bridles. An honor guard and cheering California border. It seems puzzling citizens met the riders and carried them Palmer would choose a man like Ben from their horses to the saloons, which Wright for the job, but he may have been dispensed free whiskey for all. The res- desperate. Earlier that year two Port Oridents then honored the fighting min- ford sub-agents had resigned after filers with a grand banquet. The drunk- ing reports about the brutality of miners en revelry continued, day and night, against local Indians. “Within the last six into the following week. Wright and months four [Indian] villages have been his men were heroes, not only in Yreka, burned by the whites,” reported Josiah 56
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Parrish, the sub-agent whom Wright replaced. “Many of them have been killed merely on suspicion that they would arise and avenge their own wrongs, or for petty threats that have been made against lawless white men for debauching their women.” When portions of those reports were leaked to the newspapers, irate miners threatened the agents’ lives. Palmer may have felt he needed a man like Wright, respected by whites and Indians alike as a fearless fighter, someone who spoke several Indian languages and claimed friends among whites, Indians and mixed bloods. By February 1855 Wright was busy trying to prevent the “Exterminators,” a ruthless group of white vigilantes in Crescent City, Calif., from crossing into Oregon to slaughter Chetco Indians. The no-nonsense agent met with the men and warned them of “fearful consequences” if they entered his district. When the fearful Chetcos asked Wright what they should do, he advised them “to keep out of the way of the whites and not fight the whites…[and] to take to the mountains when the whites commenced killing them.” He warned them not to cross the California border under any circumstances, for fear the Crescent City vigilantes would attack them. They promised not to. The Rogue River War broke into wholesale violence in early October 1855, after a mob from Jacksonville attacked a sleeping Indian village near the Table Rock Reservation, killing more than two dozen Shasta men, women and children. In response the Shastas, Umpquas and Rogues combined forces to attack and slaughter miners, packers and homesteaders. The whites retaliated by raiding Indian villages and hanging captives from oak trees along the streets of Jacksonville. Freighters refused to travel through hostile Indian territory, which led to shortages and drove up prices. The whites petitioned the Army to round up the Indians and confine them to reservations. Fighting in the interior valleys of southern Oregon added to Ben Wright’s problems. He threatened to arrest anyone— white or Indian—who caused trouble.
camp at Gold Beach. They killed 31 the other southern Oregon tribes to whites and burned 60 houses and most inland reservations. of the rest of the buildings in the minThe enigmatic Ben Wright had been ing settlement. the best Indian fighter in northern CaliAccording to one account, Ben Wright fornia and Oregon, and to those he resand Captain John Poland, commander of cued and their descendants he would the Gold Beach Guard volunteers, were remain a hero. But many Indians, esat Wright’s cabin when some Tututnis pecially the Modocs, recalled only his stopped by to complain that Enos was in ruthlessness, as when Wright destroyed their camp and causing trouble. Wright the Modoc winter village in fall 1852. and Poland paddled a canoe to the vil- When the Modocs took up arms again lage, where Indians immediately seized in 1872–73, they cited Wright’s bruthem. Enos personally walked up be- tality 20 years earlier as one of their hind Wright and buried his tomahawk primary motivations. in the Indian agent’s head. The Indians killed Poland, too, then mutilated both men’s bodies. While the rest of the tribe danced around a huge bonfire in a celebratory frenzy, Enos and Chetco Jenny reportedly roasted and ate Ben Wright’s heart, believing it would give them courage. Several more months of fighting followed before white officials arrested Enos on the Grand Ronde Reservation, west of Salem in Oregon’s Coast Range. They took him in chains to Port Orford, where miners lynched him on April 12, 1856. According to greatgreat grandsons Larry and Donny Fry, Chetco Jenny married a white man named Randolph Tichenor. This allowed Brig. Gen. John E. Wool, commander of the Department of her to escape “Oregon’s the Pacific, openly condemned the actions of local militias. Trail of Tears,” as it is called, when soldiers rounded up most Carole Nielson, of Shady Cove, Ore., is a of her people, held them for weeks in retired school secretary who has traveled pens at Port Orford, then forced them with her husband, Dan, to 27 countries. to march north nearly 200 miles to the They give talks on local history, though, Siletz Reservation. and her writing centers on the American In 1857 the agent at Siletz confiscated West. Suggested for further reading: The from his wards Ben Wright’s scalp, which Modocs and Their War, by Keith A. Murthey had affixed to a tall pole and used ray; Indian Wars of the Rogue River, by as the object of traditional scalp dances. Dorothy and Jack Sutton; and The People By then soldiers had confined most of and the River, by Elizabeth Heckert. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Hearing that hostile Indians from the inland valleys were making overtures to the coast tribes to join them in war, Wright hurried between villages of the Coquilles, Chetcos and Tututnis, reminding them of treaties signed in 1853 and 1854. He then ordered the Coquille Guard, a militia of whites patrolling the coast, to cease their aggressions against Indians. He also persuaded a group of Coquilles to move onto a temporary reservation at Port Orford. By November 1855 the Takelmas were making a last-ditch stand for their freedom, battling white forces on the lower Rogue River. The coastal tribes grew increasingly apprehensive as they watched white intruders push the Takelmas toward the Pacific. But heavy snows in the mountains curtailed communication between the regions. By early winter a deceptive calm had settled over the coastal Indian villages and neighboring white settlements. Living among the Tututnis was an English-speaking half-blood FrenchCanadian named Enos, who had arrived in Oregon in the 1840s as a scout for John C. Frémont and had recently become an employee of Ben Wright. Enjoying the Indian agent’s full confidence, Enos came and went as he pleased. He had lived in Yreka and Jacksonville but had also spent much time among the warring tribes. Under Wright’s very nose Enos was inciting the coastal Indians to unite against the white miners and settlers. At the time Wright was living with an Indian woman known as Chetco Jenny, whom he’d hired as a government interpreter. One night in a rage Wright stripped Jenny naked, then walked her along the boardwalks of Port Orford while whipping her with a riding quirt. Even the hardened miners were outraged by Wright’s actions. Jenny turned to Enos to help her seek revenge. Enos had been plotting with local chiefs to launch an attack on the lower coast settlements. His chance came on the night of February 22, 1856, when miners gathered to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. While white revelers kicked up their heels at an all-night dance, the Indians struck the mining
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NICE GUYS FINISH LAST
Marshal Gosling’s
Final TrainRide While escorting two Helotes Gang members to jail by rail, the U.S. marshal for the Western District of Texas acted the perfect gentleman—and paid the ultimate price By J.R. Sanders
TEXAS TRANSPORTATION MUSEUM, SAN ANTONIO
An International & Great Northern train gave Gosling his final ride in 1885. Here’s an I&GN locomotive in 1892.
“How they peppered us!” Jim Pitts
complained as he and Charlie Yeager leaped from the International & Great Northern express train a few miles north of New Braunfels, Texas. “I am full of holes!” It was true enough— varying accounts place between three and seven lead slugs in Pitts’ body as he and Yeager hit the ground and began running. The words would be his last. Before they’d made it 90 feet, Pitts sank to the ground. Yeager dragged him a few yards farther then eased down beside his dying partner. He had no choice; heavy steel manacles linked their wrists together. Yeager had always looked up to the older Pitts, but survival instinct trumped hero worship. As he pondered how to get free of his fix, he spied a large, sharp-edged rock—not so heavy it could shatter steel links, but plenty enough to bash through meat, cartilage and bone. It’s tough to feel sorry for Pitts. He was fleeing a rightful prison sentence and had left several dead or, for all he knew or cared, 58
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dying people aboard the train. A string of bad choices made of his own free will had led him to this end. Still, he’d likely have breathed a few years longer—albeit the rank air of a prison cell—were it not for the well-meaning but ill-considered actions of the lawman in charge of ferrying him and Yeager to the pen in February 1885. Harrington Lee “Hal” Gosling wasn’t a career peace officer. The Tennessee native and Annapolis graduate was an attorney and journalist. Former editor/publisher of The Quill in Castroville, Texas, Gosling’s active participation in Republican politics had garnered him an 1882 appointment as U.S. marshal for the Western District of Texas. A genial sort by all accounts, he was, according to one friend, “a big, bluff, kindly, rollicking daredevil, afraid of nothing.” If such a learned lawman had remembered his Shakespeare, Falstaff’s admonition that “the better part of valor is discretion” might have served him well. For whether his kind nature, his fear-
lessness or both were to blame, Hal Gosling’s gross errors in judgment would cost three lives, one of them his own.
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TEXAS PRESS ASSOCIATION, AUSTIN
FROM FORT WORTH DAILY GAZETTE, FEBRUARY 23, 1885
ames B. Pitts (aka Tom Pitts or Jim Hall/Hale) and Charles Yeager were nobody’s idea of kindly. A 30ish career criminal who’d reportedly served prison time alongside John Wesley Hardin, Pitts was described in news accounts as “an old road agent, train robber and murderer, and a man of undoubted nerve.” At 23, Charlie Yeager was his eager apprentice and accomplice, called by a fellow outlaw “Pitts’ tool, the lesser villain in every way.” The pair ran with a confederation of miscreants known variously as the Robbers’ Cave Gang or the Helotes Gang. They were thieving, murdering thugs, described in the newspapers as “young in years but old in crime.” The gang had torn a bloody swath across south Texas throughout the early 1880s, and one recent caper, the robbery of a post office at Smithwick, 50 miles northwest of Austin, had landed Pitts and Yeager in the U.S. District Court in Austin. There, on the morning of February 21, 1885, they were convicted of robbery and each sentenced to life terms. Judge Ezekiel B. Turner charged U.S. Marshal Hal Gosling with escorting Pitts and Yeager from Austin to the San Antonio jail, thence to the federal penitentiary at Chester, Ill. Unlike the usual U.S. marshal of his time, Gosling was no pencil pusher who left the fieldwork to deputies. He would personally lead the escort detail and chose Deputy U.S. Marshals John Manning and Fred Loring to accompany him. Manning was an experienced hand, described in one account as “sober, gentlemanly, reliable,” yet a man who “would rather fight than eat.” Loring had experience not only as a deputy but also as a train conductor—knowledge that would prove handy before this assignment was over. During the trial several female relatives had sat at the railing behind the defendants. Throughout the proceedings the two men conversed in whispers with Pitts’ wife of four months, Melissa; her sister, Annie Scott; Pitts’ grandmother, Elizabeth Drown; and Yeager’s sister, Rosa Yeager. A bulky matron of about 60, Drown was said to have offered her home as a hideout for the Helotes Gang. Annie Scott and
Hardly the image of a hard-bitten U.S. marshal, Hal Gosling was a brave man whose geniality led to tragedy on the rails.
FROM MOONEY & MORRISON'S GENERAL DIRECTORY OF THE CITY OF AUSTIN, TEXAS, 1877-78
Rosa Yeager were still in their the marshals seated Pitts and teens; Melissa Pitts was only Yeager against the wall, facslightly older. ing one another, their manaAfter sentence was procled arms reaching across the nounced, Manning handspace between the benches. cuffed Pitts and Yeager toMelissa Pitts sat beside her gether and walked them into husband, Rosa Yeager next to the grand jury room. A symher brother. As they boarded, pathetic Gosling permitted Grandmother Drown indithe women to wait with them cated the seat just behind while he made transportation Pitts and begged Gosling’s arrangements. Here, more permission to occupy it. The murmured communications affable Gosling consented, took place. Another deputy, and even “assisted the old Gordon Walker, warned Gosvixen” to her requested place, ling he feared the group was seating Annie Scott beside plotting an escape. The deher on the aisle. fendants’ own lawyer, M.G. On the walk from court to the Austin train station, Gosling treated Across the aisle, Gosling and “Mac” Anderson, expressed his prisoners, Jim Pitts and Charlie Yeager, to a costly dinner at Loring took the facing aisle similar suspicions to Judge Salges’ Chop House, a popular spot that advertised its spreads. seats, and Manning took the Turner, concerned “that no window seat next to Loring. part in the performance should be attributed to him.” Gosling Gosling’s friend Will Lambert, a former newspaperman and paid their cautions little mind, except to have Walker and chief clerk of the state Legislature, happened to be aboard, another deputy accompany his group to the railroad depot, returning from business in Austin. At Gosling’s invitation where they’d board the late train for San Antonio. On the way Lambert took the window seat beside him. Beyond them sat they stopped at Salges’ Chop House where Gosling, ever the the other assorted Pitts-Yeager followers, with Carroll Brangentleman, treated the prisoners to a costly dinner. non several rows ahead in the car’s front row. Gosling, at least, Manning had observed the whispered courtroom confer- apparently found the seating arrangement tactically sound. ences and noted the presence in court of more of the defen- He faced Yeager, if on the oblique, and could view the othdants’ relations and friends, including several hard case pals. ers of the party beyond, all the way to Brannon. His depuHis keen law dog sense smelled trouble, especially when ties likewise faced Pitts. Thus, both prisoners were in view, Gosling admitted he’d given Carroll Brannon their itinerary. and the lawmen could easily foresee any danger. Or so Carroll’s brothers Joe and Dick were among the worst of the Gosling thought. Helotes bunch; Dick was currently standing trial for his part in the Smithwick post office robbery, while Joe was on the he train pulled out at about 4:30 p.m. on Februdodge in Missouri. ary 21. All went smoothly for the first hour and a When Manning learned that many of these folks—Carroll half of the journey. The Pitts’ whispered conferBrannon among them—planned to board the same train, he ence behind a newspaper seemed to raise no conurged Gosling to postpone the trip until the next day. Gosling cern. Melissa Pitts and Rosa Yeager cried much of the way waved this off as he had the earlier warnings. To Manning’s and hung about the necks of the prisoners, but this seemed dismay the marshal even ordered the deputy to unshackle natural; Pitts and his wife were still newlyweds, and the men the prisoners in the restaurant, that they might eat in comfort. were going away for a very long time, likely for good. As the After the meal was finished, as Manning prepared to cuff train neared New Braunfels, little more than halfway between the prisoners together again, Pitts presented his left hand, Austin and San Antonio, the two women abruptly repaired to Yeager his right. Manning balked—they’d had the oppo- the adjoining ladies’ car, carrying with them a small black site wrists connected earlier. Pitts pleaded a sore wrist, so valise. Lambert and Loring were watching but expressed no Manning grudgingly complied. suspicion. When the women returned several minutes later, At the depot, the lawmen found the Pitts and Yeager con- they were without their piece of luggage and looking “sad, tingent ready to board. Melissa Pitts tearfully begged Gosling’s as though going to a funeral.” permission to ride to San Antonio alongside her husband. If Gosling or the others found any of this behavior worriChivalry and compassion again got the better of Gosling’s some, it didn’t show. Though Gosling had stepped out on the common sense; he agreed that the ladies in the party, plus platform at every stop to ensure, according to Lambert’s later several of the men, might share the smoking car with the law- statements, “that no allies of the prisoners were at the station men and their prisoners. The motley group climbed aboard. to aid any attempt at rescue,” the marshal appeared at ease Near the rear of the smoker, bench seats on either side of with the known confederates inside the smoking car. In Lamthe aisle were turned facing each other. On the right side, bert’s view Gosling treated his prisoners “more like friends
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than a brace of the most villainous desperadoes ever con- the ladies’ car. Loring emptied his pistol and retreated into signed to the keeping of an officer.” To the ladies he showed that car to reload. Manning finished reloading, shot until “a manner becoming a Chesterfield.” Perhaps the ladies’ pres- empty a second time and was falling back to reload again ence put the lawmen at ease, for while they focused some when the two prisoners charged him and thrust their pistol vigilance on the men, they paid scant attention to the women. barrels against his body. Manning just managed to deflect Unfortunately, it seems this was just what the Pitts-Yeager them as they fired, getting his face and coat scorched in the crew was counting on. process but avoiding further wounds. When the ladies returned to the car, their displays of grief Hearing the ruckus, the train conductor charged in from became downright histrionic. They sobbed and hugged the the forward car, armed with a handgun. Seeing Drown level men so tightly the prisoners’ hands disappeared among the a pistol in Gosling’s direction and then swing it toward him, billows of their bustled skirts. Manning saw it first—Pitts’ free the conductor gut-shot the old warhorse. Rosa Yeager took hand emerging from the folds of his wife’s skirt clutching a stray bullet from someone’s pistol and also went down. a revolver. What happened next took place in an instant, As Manning fended off the two outlaws, they shoved past which accounts for some confuhim, wrestled open the smoker’s sion among the various accounts. rear door and, with the express Lambert heard a noise from the train still moving at 30 or 40 miles aisle, Loring saw a shadow, and per hour, leaped out. They tumboth turned to see Pitts and Yeabled onto the roadbed, clamger rising, each brandishing a bered to their feet and disappistol in his free hand. Before anypeared into the night. one could react, Pitts snapped, Loring and Lambert re-entered “Hands up, gentlemen!” just after Pitts and Yeager had Gosling looked at Lambert and jumped and found the smoking said, “Well, I didn’t believe they’d car a bloody mess. Gosling was try it,” as he rose to stand. Sudsprawled dead across a seat, one denly, two pistol shots rang out, bullet hole behind his left ear, and the trusting marshal pitched another in his back. Manning was forward across Lambert’s and bleeding badly from his wounds Manning’s laps, a bullet in his and weakening. Drown lay dying, head. Lambert noticed that his a .45 revolver beneath her seat. lifeless hand gripped the butt of Rosa Yeager had an ugly wound in a pistol tucked inside his waistthe right thigh, and the conducband, trapped beneath his vest. tor had a bullet crease in his foreLoring left his seat shooting. head. Lambert later claimed the Manning, wounded in the first participants had fired at least 50 volley and briefly pinned by Gosshots in the car. Taking the variling’s inert form, quickly got his ous statements into account, his own revolver into action. The firestimate is likely dead on. ing then “grew general,” Lam- A key eyewitness in the Gosling shooting, Will Lambert Among the combatants Loring bert recalled, adding, “The pistol was a former chief clerk of the Texas state Legislature. alone was uninjured, and he now shots were incessant, and the took charge. Having been a consmoke filled the compartment so densely it was almost im- ductor, he knew to use the pull cord to stop the train. He left possible to see the forms of the men.” No stranger to gun Lambert and the conductor to tend the wounded, hopped off battles, having served as both a Texas Ranger fighting In- and made a quick but fruitless search for Pitts and Yeager. dians and a Confederate soldier battling Union troops, Loring then returned to the train, and he and the conductor Lambert later said, “I never heard bullets whistle or hit like “made prisoners of the whole Pitts-Yeager ‘layout.’” they did in that car the night poor Hal Gosling was killed by one of his prisoners.” he train double-timed it into New Braunfels, where The two deputies fought side by side, the prisoners returnthe injured received attention, and Loring turned ing fire and pressing them toward the ladies’ car. A shot from over his prisoners to the Bexar County sheriff. ManManning struck Yeager in the neck. Manning, by now hit in ning was made comfortable in a sleeping car, and both the neck and shoulder, fired until his pistol was empty. As he and Lambert took the train, and Gosling’s body, on into he backed up a couple of rows to reload, his ejector jammed. San Antonio, where they arrived about 11 p.m. Loring immeA model of cool under fire, Manning squatted down, snatched diately organized a posse, which rode off to hunt the escaped a pencil from his vest pocket and used it to punch out the convicts. At least two more posses headed out. Leading one empty casings. Lambert, who was unarmed, sought refuge in group of deputy sheriffs was Gosling’s old friend Texas Ranger
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This diagram shows the passenger positions in the “death car,” as recalled by Will Lambert five years after the bloody escape.
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ADAPTED FROM THE GALVESTON DAILY NEWS OF DECEMBER 24, 1890
A – Mrs. Drown, grandmother of Jim Pitts B – Miss Annie Scott, sister of Mrs. Pitts C – Jim Pitts D – Mrs. Jim Pitts E – Charlie Yeager F – Miss Rosa Yeager G – U.S. Marshal Hal Gosling H – Will Lambert I – Deputy U.S. Marshal Fred Loring J – Deputy U.S. Marshal John Manning K – “Squire” Boerner, a government witness L – T.J. Scott, father of Mrs. Pitts M – Defendant’s witnesses N – Celestine Yeager, brother of Charlie O – “News butcher” P – W.E. Browne, correspondent of The Houston Post Q – Conductor, when shooting at Mrs. Drown, seeing a pistol in her hand
Captain (and also a deputy U.S. marshal under Gosling) Josephus Shely. Drown died later that evening, maintaining her innocence to the last and pleading to be buried alongside her grandson. She and outlaw Pitts would be planted side by side in New Braunfels the next day. Shely’s posse found Yeager the next morning, several miles from the fatal scene, with bullet wounds in his neck and shoulder. He led the posse to Pitts’ body, lying in a weed patch near where they’d bailed out. Pitts left forearm was horribly mangled, the hand missing; thus had Yeager used that sharp rock he’d found to separate himself from his pal. Yeager made a lengthy statement about what had occurred, fixing blame for the bloody escape on his dead partner. Pitts had smuggled the weapons aboard in his boots, Yeager claimed (no doubt to shield his sister), and had threatened Yeager to aid him or be the first casualty. He swore Pitts had shot Gosling, admitting only that when the shooting started, “I followed, keeping up a fire with my left hand, my right hand being handcuffed to Pitts.” The posse abandoned plans to take Yeager into San Antonio on learning of “the excited state of feeling” there. Instead, they took him to the jail at New Braunfels, where the others were being held. It was a wise move; Hal Gosling had been well liked and respected and left a wife and two young sons. By the following day talk of a lynching was making the rounds all the way to New Braunfels. The sheriff detailed 16 deputies to watch over the prisoners and dissuade any vigilante action. Gosling was buried in San Antonio on February 23. The Galveston Daily News reported that “strong men wept as bitterly as the ladies,” though it pulled no punches when it noted “the deplorable tragedy is largely due to Mr. Gosling’s own almost criminal carelessness.” The kindly late Marshal Gosling rode to the Knights of Pythias Cemetery in a four-horse hearse, which headed a stately procession of mounted police, U.S. cavalrymen and light artillerymen, the 8th Cavalry band, two rifle units, multiple fire companies and numerous dignitaries. Among the pallbearers was Joe Shely. With Gosling laid to rest, it only remained to bring his killers to justice. On February 27 Yeager and the others held in Gosling’s murder faced a preliminary hearing in New Braunfels. Manning, still bedridden but improving, was absent. District Attorney Eugene Digges read affidavits before Justice of the Peace James Aveline charging Charles Yeager, Celestine Yeager (Charlie’s brother), Rosa Yeager, Melissa Pitts, Annie Scott, T.J. Scott (Pitts’ father-in-law), Carroll Brannon, William Hardeman and Carl and Emile Krant (other members of the Robbers’ Cave bunch) with the murder of Marshal Harrington Lee Gosling. Mac Anderson, again defending Charlie Yeager, waived examination on his client’s part and entered not guilty pleas for all the others. Loring gave a straightforward account of the incidents, beginning with Pitts and Yeager’s trial and concluding with the arrest of the defendants after the shootings.
TEXAS RANGER HALL OF FAME AND MUSEUM, WACO, TEXAS
Texas Ranger Captain Josephus Shely (standing third from left among members of Company F) was also a deputy U.S. marshal and led the posse that brought in escaped outlaw Yeager. Shely also served as a pallbearer at the funeral of old friend Gosling.
Will Lambert’s testimony was brief; he stated that he left the car after the firing commenced, and that when he returned, Gosling was already dead. In all, nine prosecution witnesses testified over two days. Some of the most damning testimony came from aptly named jailhouse informant James Leak, who had shared a cell with Pitts and Yeager for several days during their robbery trial. Leak testified that Melissa Pitts and Rosa Yeager had visited the two men regularly, and that he heard the group planning Gosling’s killing. He named Melissa Pitts “the sole hatcher of the plot” and said she “begged and plead [sic] with her husband and Yeager to make one effort for liberty.” Pitts, Leak said, wanted no part of the scheme, but “cried bitterly over [Gosling’s] arranged taking off.” By March 28 Manning was well enough to testify at a habeas corpus hearing in San Antonio. The deputy corroborated Loring’s and Lambert’s statements, bluntly detailed Gosling’s egregious lapses in judgment and testified he saw Pitts obtain a pistol from his wife. Manning also claimed someone snapped a shot at him from near the front of the car as Pitts and Yeager jumped out, though he couldn’t identify the shooter. The judge fixed bail for Carroll Brannon and Rosa Yeager, but they were unable to pay it. So they and the other defen-
dants were bound over for trial in June, for which a special judge was selected (Judge Thomas Paschal, who would normally have heard the case, was Hal Gosling’s brother-in-law). Judge L.D. Denman immediately continued the case until December, when it was further continued until June 1886. In the meantime, a series of events involving the Helotes Gang and their circle eclipsed the Gosling murder, possibly burying the case for good.
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round the time of the first continuance, Jim McDaniel, another Helotes Gang member awaiting a federal prison term for mail robbery, had broken jail in San Antonio. On the first of July he was run to ground and killed in a fierce gun battle with Deputy Sheriffs James Van Riper and Ed Stevens, both members of the posse that had captured Charlie Yeager. In early August, Yeager and Dick Brannon (convicted in March for his part in the Smithwick robbery) made a daring, if short-lived, jailbreak from the county lockup in Austin. Neither made it more than a few hundred yards. A pursuing crowd quickly cornered Brannon, who, despite being armed with a pistol taken from the jailer, meekly surrendered. Yeager tried to stand off his DECEMBER 2013
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FROM LEFT: SAN ANTONIO DAILY LIGHT, AUSTIN WEEKLY STATESMAN AND NEW YORK SUN
As these excerpts show, newspapers closely followed Frank Scott’s trial, the murder of Frank Harris and the parole of Charlie Yeager.
pursuers with an ax he’d snatched up. When the well-heeled group explained the folly of bringing an ax to a gunfight, Yeager conceded the point. The escapees were hauled back to their cells, and shortly afterward Yeager made his longdelayed trip to the federal pen at Chester, Ill. Around June 1, 1886, local lawmen got word that Joe Brannon had returned from Missouri. Under indictment in the Gosling murder and suspected in a string of other crimes, Brannon was very much wanted. Deputy James Van Riper and his brother William (also a deputy sheriff ) set out for Carroll Brannon’s place, where they expected to find his fugitive brother. To help identify the outlaw they took along Frank Scott, Melissa Pitts’ brother and a Bexar County constable. Joe Brannon was indeed there. When confronted, he broke for cover while firing on the lawmen. In the hot skirmish that ensued, a well-placed Winchester shot sheared off Brannon’s trigger finger. The unfazed outlaw quickly performed the famous “border shift.” Passing his gun to his left hand and bracing it with his mangled right, Joe continued blazing away. After swapping a dozen more shots with Brannon, the deputies rushed his position and found the outlaw shot through the lungs and bleeding to death. Within weeks Frank Scott was himself in irons, indicted for murder. Local handyman Frank Harris had unwisely courted Annie Scott against the express wishes of her brother Frank and brother-in-law Jim Pitts. Harris had disappeared the previous September. His skeleton was found months later in a cave near Carroll Brannon’s property, a bullet hole through the back of the skull. The Harris murder case again involved witnesses from both the Scott and Brannon families, this time on opposing sides. Since Gosling’s death, there had been bad blood between the Scotts and Brannons. Mary Brannon (Carroll’s wife and Jim Pitts’ sister) blamed Melissa Pitts and her Scott relations for Jim’s death. Carroll blamed Frank Scott for his brother Joe’s death. The Brannons were therefore more than happy to testify against Frank Scott. He was convicted and given a life term. 64
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With Joe Brannon and Jim McDaniel dead (along with Jim Pitts and Grandmother Drown), Yeager, Dick Brannon and Frank Scott in prison, and the Scotts and Brannons no longer on friendly terms, the Helotes Gang was effectively out of business. Perhaps it seemed redundant to spend state resources to prosecute Charlie Yeager; he was already facing a life stretch in the pen, and Pitts, whom most witnesses agreed had killed Hal Gosling, was sleeping beneath the Texas sod. Whatever the reasoning, Yeager and the others never stood trial for Gosling’s murder. In December 1903 Charles Yeager received an unexpected early Christmas gift. Rosa Yeager, now Mrs. Leo Ichter, had for nearly two decades vigorously petitioned Washington for her brother’s release from prison. As an eyewitness to Gosling’s murder, she swore Pitts had done the deadly deed. An affidavit from none other than Gosling’s former deputy Fred Loring bolstered her claim. Her lengthy campaign paid off; President Theodore Roosevelt signed the pardon on December 23, and Yeager spent his holidays a free man. He returned to south Texas, vowing “to show his friends that he could and would be a good citizen.” Charlie Yeager seems to have kept his promise. When the onetime outlaw died on January 15, 1931, the San Antonio newspapers mentioned only that he was “a native of San Antonio” and “an employee of the city park department.” Long forgotten, or maybe forgiven, were his lengthy prison term, his hell-bent younger days as a Helotes Gang outlaw and his role in the murder on a train of a too-decent-forhis-own-good U.S. marshal. A frequent contributor to Wild West magazine and a member of Western Writers of America, J.R. Sanders [www.jrsanders .com], who writes from Redlands, Calif., adapted this article about the shooting of Hal Gosling and the aftermath from his book Some Gave All: Forgotten Old West Lawmen Who Died With Their Boots On, which is due out in January 2014 and is suggested for further reading.
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GHOST TOWNS
• In 1872 H.L. Hoffman and George Boothroyd first discovered placer gold in Rocker Gulch, a tributary of Cottonwood Creek, seven miles east of Cottonwood City (as Deer Lodge was then known). But their success was modest. • Not until the late 1880s, while searching for the source of placer gold in Rocker Gulch, did prospectors finally find several lucrative lode mines. William Zosel’s Bonanza mine gave rise to the namesake camp Zosel, which opened a post office in 1892. But it was William Emery who claimed the most productive mine, which bore his name. • As the mines sank deeper, gold gave way to silver galena, but in 1893 the government stopped purchasing silver at an inflated price, and the resulting crash spelled disaster for the mining district and town of Zosel. • It was soon to recover, as the Carbonate Extension Co. in Deer Lodge, in a reported silent partnership with local cattle baron Conrad Kohrs, invested in the claims of Emery and others. Although Zosel continued to work his Bonanza mine, locals now referred to the repopulated town as Emery. • A partnership led by Phillip Harrington, reported the May 1, 1896, edition of Deer Lodge’s New North-West newspaper, leased the Emery mine. The partners paid 25 percent royalties to the owners yet still cleared $7,500 a month. The newspaper noted that Emery was a company town with no saloon but well-supplied stores and a boardinghouse boasting “a first-
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By Terry Halden
MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Emery, Montana
The Emery mill circa 1902, when the town’s population peaked at about 400 souls.
class table.” All year freighter Jack Reid hauled daily loads of ore down the mountain to the railhead in Deer Lodge, in winter using huge bobsleds. • In 1896 Emery got a new post office, which operated almost continuously until 1906. It would reopen in 1936 for less than two years. • In 1902 the Emery Mining Co., headed by Marvin W. Trask, bought out the Carbonate Extension’s assets and erected a concentrator at the mine. Shipping high-grade concentrated ore (46 percent gold, 44 percent silver and 10 percent lead), the company pulled down nearly a half-million dollars profit in just five years. Emery’s population peaked at about 400. • Everything came to a grinding halt in 1907 when Emery Mining sold out to an English syndicate that knew little about mining and even less about running a company. Its partners fought among themselves, ran out of capital, went bankrupt and closed the mine. The town emptied out.
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• In 1910 the Emery Consolidated Co., a group of experienced men who knew the mine and its potential, bought the Emery property at a sheriff’s auction and reopened the mine and mill. An eager workforce soon moved into the existing cabins in town. Production continued until 1923, the last year the tailings were worked. Other mines kept producing on and off, though, and the town held on. • The Emery reopened in 1931, its lessees sinking a new shaft 850 feet and building a flotation mill. Though an explosives ban shut down production during the war years, operations otherwise continued through 1948. Meanwhile, the Bonanza mine, which the Zosel family had operated straight through until 1924, peaked in 1947–48, yielding 686 ounces of gold and 3,569 ounces of silver. • The first mine to open in the district, the Bonanza was also the last to close, in 1950. In the decades since, the town of Emery has slowly deteriorated. To visit its ghosts, head east on FR 705 (Emery Road) from Deer Lodge into the BeaverheadDeerlodge National Forest.
PHOTOS BY TERRY HALDEN
Clockwise from top: Since the last area mine closed in 1950, the town of Emery has slowly deteriorated; log cabins like this served as miners’ homes several times before being permanently abandoned; the remains of a boardinghouse; a cabin from the lower part of town; the largely intact mill superintendent’s office; a collapsed old store; and a cabin built by a man who sought respite from the hustle and bustle.
COLLECTIONS
The Conger Street Clock Museum Offers a Timely Visit Into the Past
At this Eugene hall time stands still, but the clocks keep ticking
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ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE CONGER STREET CLOCK MUSEUM
T
he Conger Street Clock Museum in Eugene, Oregon, is literally a step back in time. “The clocks all work, but here time stands still,” is the slogan of this unique gallery, whose collection relates the history of timekeeping. Paying heed to the seasons was critical to Indians, mountain men and emigrants in the early West, but telling time daily by the position of the sun was usually good enough for them. Times were a-changing, however, and more precise timekeeping became more important, especially for Western travelers, after May 10, 1869. That was the day the Golden Spike ceremony was held at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, to mark the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. After that meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific, company managers met a new challenge—time management. In the mid-19th century the country relied largely on two types of time measurement—natural time (the motion of the sun) and local time (using synchronized astronomical time, based on time at the meridian of a specific location). As few Westerners carried pocket watches, town officials often placed clocks in prominent spots to aid citizens. The trains, however, ran on the time kept in the particular city where the rail line originated. Train passengers would be alerted to the time change as the train crossed each meridian. As railroads progressed west, companies began publishing timetables to coordinate time between the various destinations. When the transcontinental railroad arrived, railroad officials sought a plan for standardizing time. Charles Ferdinand Dowd is generally credited with developing the first comprehensive national time zone system.
Even the circa 1750 tower clock still works.
After consulting with railway superintendents, Dowd proposed time standards in hourly divisions, or time zones, positioned similarly to those in use today. In time those standards set Eastern Time on the 75th meridian, Valley Time (later called Central) at the 90th meridian, Mountain Time on the 105th meridian and Pacific Time on the 120th meridian. The General Time Convention of 1883 adopted the new standards, and at noon on November 18 at the 75th meridian the railroads began operating on “Railroad and Telegraph Time.” Of course, clocks were being massproduced in the United States well before the railroads became obsessed with timetables. The Conger Street Clock Museum centers on 26 window displays featuring several hundred vintage clocks, novelty clocks and chime clocks of all shapes and sizes. A 19th-century street clock stands prominently in the large lobby, where you’ll also find a variety of wall clocks and grandfather clocks. An 1898 clock that
DECEMBER 2013
By Linda Wommack
once tolled large bells outside of a bank now controls both the red bells to its right and the bells of an adjacent 1901 master school clock that in times past signaled recess, lunch and the end of a school day. It’s hard to miss the 18-foot-tall Conger Street tower clock, circa 1750, which features two sets of bells—a 7-foot-long single bell on the right, and 8-foot-long double bells on the left. “The right side is for counting the quarter-hour, and each 15 minutes it rings one more time,” explains museum owner J.D. Olson. “So at 15 minutes after the hour it strikes one time. On the half-hour it rings twice, at 15 minutes before the hour it rings three times, and on the hour it rings four times.” Don’t let the 1858 Davies Illuminated Alarm Clock startle you. “When the alarm was triggered,” Olson explains, “a spring on the top of the clock would release. This would allow a match to travel across the spring covered with leather sandpaper. In theory, the match would strike and continue to rotate until over an oil lamp on the top of the clock. The match would light the lamp to provide light in the dark of the night. However, what often happened was that the match head would snap off and light the clock on fire instead of the lamp.” If you have time, also check out the promotional 1917 General Electric refrigerator clock, a 1907 candle clock, the collection of Wells Fargo clocks and several bank vault timers. And remember, clockwatchers were as common in the OldWest as they are today. Heck, if not for clocks, Gary Cooper never would have made it on time to his shootout at High Noon. The Conger Street Clock Museum is at 730 Conger St. in Eugene. Visit www .conger-street-clock-museum.com or call (541) 344-6359 for more info.
The Conger Street Clock Museum is all about vintage clocks—some meant to hang from walls, some meant to stand on their own, and still others meant to enable railroads and train passengers to stay on schedule.
GUNS OF THE WEST
While Colt Passed on Most Other Rifles, It Produced Some That Were ‘Pumped’ By Lee A. Silva
MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, VIA LEE A. SILVA
The company made these Winchester challengers for two decades
These Montana hunters are loaded for bear around 1890. The man at right poses with a large-frame pump-action Colt Lightning.
O
f all the makes of guns used in the “shoot-’em-up” days of the Old West, Colts became the most iconic revolvers of that period, andWinchesters the most iconic repeating rifles. In fact, as I wrote in the August 2012 “Guns of the West,” the two firearms makers made a “gentlemen’s agreement” in 1884 that Colt would stick to revolvers, and Winchester would stick to repeating rifles. The Colt factory, however, apparently interpreted that agreement to apply only to lever-action rifles, because in 1884 the company began to produce a slideaction, or pump-action, repeating rifle, and it would continue to do so for two 70
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decades. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Colt pump-action rifle story is that the rifle was designed by former Remington gunsmith William H. Elliot, who had designed the Remington .41-caliber over-and-under-barreled “double derringer,” which became the most iconic cartridge derringer on the Western frontier. The Winchester repeating rifles used a lever beneath the frame to open and close the action. But Colt’s new mechanism utilized a horizontally sliding forearm to open and close the action and put a new cartridge into the breech each time the forearm was “pumped.” Colt’s pump-action rifle was offered in three different frame sizes. The first was
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the medium size, which was introduced in spring 1884. Winchester’s Model 1873 lever-action repeater had made its three biggest calibers of .44-40, .38-40 and .3220 so popular on the frontier that Colt had quickly offered its Single Action Army Model revolver in the same calibers, so the same cartridges worked in both the rifle and the revolver. And this meant fewer extra cartridges had to be carried on the frontier. So it is no surprise that Colt’s pump-action repeater was also produced in those same three calibers, with the .44-40 instantly becoming Colt’s best-selling repeating rifle. The new Colt rifle also had an external hammer like the lever-action Winches-
LEE A. SILVA COLLECTION
This medium-frame pump-action (also known as slide-action) .44-40 Colt Lightning was manufactured in 1890. Colt first began making its pump-action repeating rifles in 1884.
calibers. So it was advertised as the “Express Model.” Its standard features were the same as the smaller-sized pump rifles, and any option was also available at extra cost. Standard barrel lengths were 28 inches for the rifle and 22 inches for the carbine. The rifle length magazine held 10 cartridges, the carbine length eight. Colt produced only 6,496 of these giant rifles before production ended in 1894, its short lifespan probably hastened because its oddball-sized cartridges were often hard to get on the frontier. The factory-suggested retail prices ranged from $19 to $20.50 for the smallframe rifle, $16.50 to $18 for the mediumframe size and $19 to $20.50 for the Express rifles. In their classic book Firearms of the AmericanWest,1866–1894 historians Louis Garavaglia and Charles Worman quote a June 1885 letter from one of Colt’s biggest dealers, E.C. Meacham of St. Louis, who wrote glowingly to the Colt factory: “If your line covers the 22, 32, 38, 44 & .4060, and you can furnish them as fast as the trade demands, we think our New Haven friend [Winchester] will find a great falling off in his rifle business. … In our opinion [these calibers] will cover the wants of the trade. Particularly because there is so much of this kind of ammunition in the market. A party does not wish to buy a rifle and feel that it is necessary for him to take his entire quantity of ammunition with the rifle.” In Gunsmoke and Saddle Leather Worman adds that in an October 2, 1886, letter to Colt, Captain W.R. Thomas of the Oakland (Calif.) Police Department asked for 24 more Colt Lightning rifles because Winchesters“do not work well, they catch, and it is with great difficulty that the shells can be thrown out [extracted].” But Lightnings also “met with mixed reviews,” according to Worman. “Some early guns,” he writes, “were plagued by ejection problems, and Deputy Sheriff J.G. Jacqurdin of Brownsville, Texas, in 1889 wrote the factory expressing his
dissatisfaction with the two he had and asked if he could exchange them.” In a December 30, 1889, letter to Colt, exhibition shooter George H. Sickles wrote, “I understand you have made an Improvement on your 44 Cal Carbine—does it eject the shell perfectly in doing rapid shooting? I do shooting at Glass Balls and Marbles. I understand that a person can do more rapid shooting with your Carbine Improved than I can with a Winchester.” In October 1892 an elaborate, factoryengraved .45-85-caliber Express Model, DIAZ COLLECTION, ROYAL MILITARY COLLEGE, KINGSTON, ONTARIO, CANADA
ters, so the gun could be cocked or uncocked without pumping open the action, and the shooter could also visually know if the gun was cocked or uncocked. And one of the factors that was unique about the Colt pump rifle was that when the trigger was held against the back of the trigger guard, the gun could be fired as rapidly as the fore-end could be“pumped” back and forth, in a sense making it the “semiautomatic” rifle of its time. So Colt named it the Lightning Model after its advertised “lightning” speed of action. This first pump rifle was offered in either a round or octagonal barrel, in 26-inch rifle length or 20-inch carbine length, with —like the Winchester lever-actions—a tubular magazine under the barrel that held 15 cartridges in the rifle length and 12 in the carbine length. The first models had an open-topped breech, but later a dustcover was added that slid back when the action was pumped open. The standard finish was blue, with walnut stocks. And, as with all Colts, any extras like engraving or special finish could be ordered at an additional cost. Colt made 89,777 of these medium-sized pumps from 1884 until production ceased in 1902. In 1887 Colt introduced its small-frame Lightning Model rifle in .22 Short or .22 Long calibers, and the two differentsized cartridges could be mixed in the magazine without the gun malfunctioning. This Lightning became a popular boys’ rifle for small game hunting and target shooting. Its standard and optional finish was the same as the medium-frame Lightning, and the standard barrel length was 24 inches. Colt made 89,912 of these small-frame Lightnings until 1904. By far the most impressive looking of the Colt pump rifles was the mammoth large-frame model, also introduced in 1887. Advertised as being especially designed to take down any-sized North American big game animal, the largeframe Lightning came in .38-56, .40-60, .45-60, .45-65, .45-85 and .50-95 Express
A buffalo hunt on horseback is one of the panel scenes on this fancy Express Model.
Serial No. 5963, was shipped to T.E. Denel in Red Lodge, Mont. In June 1898 the San Francisco Police Department bought 401 of the medium-frame .44-40-caliber Lightning rifles, marked and numbered in a special range for them. And a cased, factory-engraved Express Model is in the collection of Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz at the Royal Military College Museum in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. There are various explanations about why Colt pulled its pump-action rifles off the market. The factory said it needed the space to produce more pistols. But I suspect that Winchester had its hand in the cookie jar, too. Whatever the case, the Colt pump-action repeating rifles became as extinct as the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon.
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REVIEWS
Must See, Must Read
Accounts of overland treks and disasters in print and on-screen By Will Bagley
If you read only one book about the trails, make it the one that starts at the beginning —the very beginning. Keith H. Meldahl’s Hard Road West: History and Geology Along the Gold Rush Trail (2007) is enlightening and eminently readable. (Editor’s note: The same can be said about the first volume in Will Bagley’s own epic narrative trails history, So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812–1848, which earned the author a 2011 Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.) Here are the best books about five trail disasters, ranked by body count, and a few screen gems.
BOOKS
1856 Mormon Handcart Disaster (more than 200 dead). Devil’s Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy (2008, by David Roberts): Staying home was only slightly less dangerous than crossing the plains to Oregon, California and Utah in the mid-19th century, but when disaster hit, it hit hard. Greed and mismanagement brought Brigham Young’s handcart “experiment” to a catastrophic conclusion in 1856, when the usual October blizzards trapped some 1,000 Mormon converts, mostly Europeans, in central Wyoming. About a quarter of them died —no one kept a careful count. Adventure writer Roberts, best known in Western circles for Once They Moved Like theWind, refuses to sugarcoat the story. Two other titles deserve a tip of the hat: Tom Rea’s Devil’s Gate: Owning the Land, Owning 72
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the Story (2006), which told a broader story, and Sandra Dallas’ novel True Sisters (2012), which recounts a devastating human story with honesty and compassion. Watch for Candy Moulton’s upcoming masterwork on the subject. Mountain Meadows Massacre (about 120 emigrants killed). The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950, by Juanita Brooks): Forget the war parties circling embattled wagon trains in dozens of Westerns: White men pulled off the worst massacre on any overland trail at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah on September 11, 1857. The Nauvoo Legion, Utah’s territorial militia, promised to rescue the besieged Baker-Fancher Party from the “Indians,” then slaughtered every man, woman and child above the age of 7. Born on the “ragged edge” of the Mormon frontier and a lifelong Latterday Saint, Brooks told the story fearlessly. Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Bagley, 2002) brought the story up to date, and Sally Denton won a 2004 Wrangler for American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857. Three church employees responded with the officially unofficial Massacre at Mountain Meadows:An American Tragedy (2008, by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Glen M. Leonard). Meek Cutoff (about 50 dead). Terrible Trail: The Meek Cutoff, 1845 (1967, by Keith Clark and Lowell Tiller): Stephen Meek, the older brother of leg-
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endary mountain man Joe Meek, persuaded about 1,000 people in 214 wagons to take his shortcut across southeastern Oregon. It proved imaginary. An Indian led the wagons to Crooked River, and the “Lost Meeks” eventually found and crossed the Deschutes River, which they followed to the Columbia. This desert nightmare led to scores of deaths—and Meek narrowly escaped being lynched. Survivor Hiram Smith wrote that his party “had been led astray by a pilot by the name of Stephen Meek” and described their “intense suffering, and the loss of near 50 souls, young and old.The greatest number that died were children.” WanderingWagons: Meek’s Lost Emigrants of 1845 (1993, by Robert G. Boyd) is also worth a look. Indian War of 1864 (August 7–16; 51 known casualties). Massacre Along the Medicine Road: A Social History of the IndianWar of 1864 in Nebraska Territory (1999, by Ronald Becher): In 1840 Indians owned every bit of land between the Kansas River and the Pacific Crest. Without the support and cooperation of dozens of tribes not a single wagon would have made it to Oregon or California. The 1854 KansasNebraska Act began the relentless conversion of Indian lands into farms and transportation corridors and forced the Lakotas and Cheyennes to fight for their land and lives. In early August 1864 they launched coordinated attacks in Kansas’ Little Blue Valley that soon extended along the entire Medicine Road, the native name for the overland trails. Master historian Greg Franzwa called Nebraska schoolteacher Ron Becher’s deeply researched and vibrantly written book “the magnum opus of this decade, as far as I am concerned.” Captain Eugene F. Ware’s The Indian War of 1864 (1911) is a forgotten classic.
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Donner Party (41 dead, 36 after becoming snowbound in the Sierra Nevada). “Unfortunate Emigrants”: Narratives of the Donner Party (1996, by Kristin Johnson): Granted, other trail disasters killed more people than died in the Donner Party, but nothing can top the tragically compelling story of the 81 people trapped in the Sierra Nevada from October 1846 till the last of the 45 survivors emerged in April 1847. Johnson lets the participants relate their own stories while correcting the tales told in C.F. McGlashan’s History of the Donner Party (1879) and George Stewart’s still-compelling Ordeal by Hunger (1936). Gabrielle Burton’s Impatient With Desire: The Lost Journal of Tamsen Donner (2010) provides us with a reasonable facsimile of Tamzene (how she actually spelled it) Donner’s diary until the real McCoy turns up.
ON-SCREEN
Burying the Past: Legacy of the Mountain Me a d ow M a s s a c r e (2004, on DVD, Patrick Film Productions): No copy of the French sil e n t f i l m Mo u n t ai n Meadows Massacre, produced by Pathé Frères in 1912, survives. Christopher Cain’s 2007 September Dawn was an artistic and financial disaster, so filming this particular massacre has been a challenge. Brian Patrick’s Burying the Past steps up to the mark, telling the story of the LDS Church’s attempt to come to terms with the darkest event in its history. Patrick had his reenactors roll in the dirt to create his realistic mule train, interviewed relatives of the victims and historians, and made a unique visual record of key events, like the 1999 dedication of a monument that led a backhoe to turn up the bones of about 28 victims. Sweetwater Rescue: The Willie and Martin Handcart Story (2007, on BYU-TV and DVD, Groberg Films): Most movies about the Mormon handcarts, notably the wretched 17 Miracles, are must-notsees. Lee Groberg’s PBS documentary 74
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Sweetwater Rescue is the exception, a beautiful, haunting historical and visual re-creation. The film enlisted the top experts—historians Lyndia Carter, Mel Bashore and Michael Landon—and lets the victims tell the story of a scheme that made men, women and children do the work of horses, oxen and mules. Meek’s Cutoff (2010, on DVD, Oscilloscope Laboratories): A tight budget limited Kelly Reichardt to about 197 fewer wagons than Stephen Meek lured west in 1845, but his film’s authenticity, harshly beautiful location and stellar crew bring this compelling saga to life. Bruce Greenwood’s blustering Stephen Meek, Michelle Williams as Emily Tetherow, and Rod Rondeaux’s mysterious Cayuse are right on the mark. The film ends as ambiguously as did most overlanders’ lives. You’ll love it or hate it. The CoveredWagon (1923, onVHS,Paramount): James Cruze made the greatest trail movie of all time only 10 years after an Army post noted the passing of the last Oregon-bound wagon train. The film is based on the 1922 Emerson Hough novel. Cruze issued a cattle call to southern Utah and gathered “750 real redskins,” 2,000 actors, extras and technicians at Otto Meek’s Baker Ranch on the Utah-Nevada border. He filmed 300 oxen, 200 mules and 1,100 horses pulling some 400 wagons—some said to be relics from the old days. The blockbuster set the standard for later generations of Westerns. “It was in every way pioneering in picture work,” Cruze wrote. “We blazed new trails all the time.” Nobody will ever match the dusty realism of this American classic.
DECEMBER 2013
American Experience: The Donner Party (1992, DVD, PBS Home Video): Those who suspect Ric Burns was the genius behind the blockbuster PBS Civil War series will
find confirmation in this hypnotic retelling of the Donner disaster. Hal Schindler, the“grizzled historian” The NewYorker hailed for adding much of the film’s color and drama, filled Shelby Foote’s boots. As “Old Griz” said, the story has it all: “Human endeavor and failure, blunders, mistakes, ambition, greed: all the elements. And if you call the rescue of the surviving parties a happy ending, it’s a happy ending.” Some call the film “the greatest documentary ever made. Period.”
BOOK REVIEWS
A Killer Is What They Needed: The True, Untold Story of Commodore Perry Owens, a Sheriff of the Arizona Territory, by David Grassé, Graphic Publishers, Santa Ana, Calif., 2013, $34.95. Commodore Perry Owens has long been a footnote in the chronicles of Wild West lawmen. Though his story is not quite “untold,” historians have written comparatively little about the quick-draw Arizona Territory sheriff with the memorable name and rock-star mane of reddish-brown hair. Several authors have mentioned him in passing, and WildWest has run articles that touched on his lively career. But no one had taken on the challenge of a comprehensive biography. David Grassé stumbled across Owens in Arizona State Historian Marshall Trimble’s Roadside History of Arizona (1986), wrote a college-level paper about him and promptly leapt into the research rabbit hole that claims those with a penchant for writing and an interest in Western history. His resulting biography is the first definitive look at this Tennesseeborn Quaker and sometime cowboy (and possibly outlaw) turned seemingly fearless territorial enforcer. Owens, like other noted Western lawmen (e.g., Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett), is best remembered for one particular violent episode—a September 4, 1887, gunfight sparked when Owens alone sought to serve a murder warrant on notorious killer and rustler Andy Cooper (aka Andy Blevins), who had holed up with compatriots in the Holbrook home of his brother Charlie Blevins. In the re-
sulting bloody exchange Owens killed Cooper and two others, wounded a fourth man, yet emerged without a scratch and avoided prosecution. In his chapter on the gunfight Grassé is unapologetic in his critique of the sheriff’s methods: “His actions on that September Sunday afternoon in Holbrook can only be described as reckless and foolhardy. In his effort to prove his mettle as a lawman to both his superiors and to his constituency, he had killed three men, wounded a fourth and endangered the lives of several innocent persons.” Regardless, Owens had secured a spot in frontier history. In his meticulously researched book Grassé uncovers other engaging if less sanguinary stories from Owens’ life and clears up more than a few running myths (the origin of his historical name, his reasons for drifting west, much ado about his “do,” his alleged wanton slaughter of Navajos, etc.). Holes remain, particularly at the beginning and end of Owens’ life. Perhaps those details will emerge from Grassé’s next foray down a rabbit hole. Dave Lauterborn Light on the Prairie: Solomon D. Butcher, Photographer of Nebraska’s Pioneer Days, by Nancy Plain, Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2012, $16.95. Light on the Prairie earned author Nancy Plain her third Western Writers of America Spur Award for Western juvenile nonfiction. She won in 2008 for a profile of cowboy artist Charlie Russell and in 2010 for her story of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce. This time around she introduces young readers to Nebraska pioneer photographer Solomon Butcher, and it’s clear from the opening sentences why Plain deserves the recognition of her peers and acclaim of young readers: “In the springtime of 1880, two white-topped wagons traveled, creaking and swaying, across the Nebraska prairie. ‘Prairie schooners,’ the wagons were called. They were like boats on a rolling sea—a sea made of earth and waves of grass.” Plain is as deft an artist with words as her subject was with his bulky wooden
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Kill-Crazy Gang: The Crimes of the Lewis-Jones Gang is about the violent Lewis-Jones gang of the 1910s. One of the frst gangs to use the automobile, it was the forerunner of the major bandit gangs of the 1930s. They came out of Oklahoma to rob banks and trains and steal cars. It is said they killed twenty-one lawmen and maimed a dozen more before the law finally wiped them out. Among the colorful criminals were Dale Jones, a cross-dresser, Eva Lewis, a beautiful young singer and dancer, and Mattie Howard, "the girl with the agate eyes and the smile of death," who was said to have had ten sweethearts of hers who had died. One lawman wrote, "the crimson records of the Lewis Boys gang easily over matched all the rest." By Jefery S. King, Author of The Rise and Fall of the Dillinger Gang and The Life & Death of Pretty Boy Floyd
Available at Amazon.com Paperback, $19.99 ISBN 978-0615660424 DECEMBER 2013
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box camera and glass-plate negatives. Though few people recognize Solomon Butcher by name, most are familiar with his images. Hardy pioneers pose proudly before their “soddies” (sod houses) with a yard full of furniture and prized possessions. A white cow floats above a soddie roof. Draft horses flank a quartet of stalwart sisters. Schoolgirls in braids arrive at school atop the family mules. Virginia-born Butcher (1856–1927) rose with the tide of homesteaders that poured into Nebraska in the 1880s, lured by the promise of free land and self-sufficiency for those willing to put their hands to the plow. Butcher wasn’t willing, but he made a go of Nebraska life anyway, tilling homestead country for subjects for his camera and plowing the profits into his “history scheme,” a photographic and written record of pioneer life in Custer County. He’d make a book of his images and interviews, selling subscriptions to the future tome to fund even more images. Like any life story, there were hurdles along the way—drought, crop failures, economic near-ruin, a devastating house fire. But when all was said and done, Butcher had 3,000 images and the nugget for his book Pioneer History of Custer County and Short Sketches of Early Days in Nebraska. While the book was a success, Butcher was not. Compelled to sell his entire collection of glass-plate negatives to the Nebraska State Historical Society for $1,000, he retreated into real estate and land speculation before moving to Colorado, where he later died. Butcher’s collection survives as a testament to life on the hardscrabble Nebraska frontier. Light on the Prairie in turn showcases several dozen of the photographer’s most striking images, illumined by Plain’s insightful prose. Now, about that cow on the roof… Dave Lauterborn Bedside Book of Bad Girls: Outlaw Women of the Midwest, by Chris Enss, Farcountry Press, Helena, Mont., 2012, $14.95. Behind many a bad man there was a bad woman…and in some cases in the Old West she might take the 76
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lead. Such is the underlying theme of Chris Enss’ entry in Farcountry Press’ Bedside Reader series, which showcases women who made their mark in the Midwest during the transition from frontier days. The entries include classic cases ranging from Sarah Quantrill, whose notoriety was primarily by association through her marriage to Confederate bushwhacker Colonel William Clarke Quantrill, to Flora Mundis, who took her own initiative as a gambler, prostitute and horse thief disguised as a man. Suspected of taking even more “initiative” was Kate Bender, who may have been the mastermind behind her family business in Labette County, Kansas—a way station at which an alarming number of travelers with worthwhile personal assets checked in but never checked out. Enss highlights the occasional sexism on which notoriety is based, as in the case of “Poker Alice” Ivers. Although she was generally regarded as a bad girl for making a career of gambling, she prided herself on running an honest game all her life, even though she kept a loaded gun handy in case anyone might violently dispute it. Also straddling the fence between good and not so good is Victoria Woodhull, a healer-spiritualist (read “charlatan”) who in 1872 became the first woman nominated to run for the presidency of the United States—a bold move permitted under the same Constitution that denied women the vote—but was undermined by her “free love” platform, which angered other women suffragettes. Less disputable is Arizona “Ma” Barker, alleged brains behind the Barker-Karpis Gang, which kept the Midwest wild well into the 20th century. Surviving member Alvin Karpis insisted Barker “was just a plain little hillbilly out of the Ozarks” who “never even knew how to use a machine gun.” Ma’s tale like the bulk of Enss’ anecdotes occurred after the pioneer days of the Midwest had long passed, but she does serve up intriguing tales of women who operated on either or both sides of the law. For Wild West neophytes who think only men stepped over the line, Bad Girls serves as a good primer to how often the opposite sex could match or beat the boys at that game. Jon Guttman
DECEMBER 2013
Dragoons in Apacheland: Conquest and Resistance in Southern New Mexico, 1846–1861, by William S. Kiser, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2013, $29.95. Although the New Mexican territorial capital of Santa Fe surrendered to Brig. Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of the West without firing a shot in August 1846, his promise to afford permanent protection to inhabitants proved empty. To defend the newly conquered territory from Apache raids, the Army stationed there the 1st and 2nd Dragoon regiments, while in that same year Congress created the Regiment of Mounted Rifles (RMR), which received the “pay of infantry and forage of dragoons.” Most infantry soldiers serving in New Mexico belonged to the 3rd Infantry Regiment, a unit unsuited to fighting the elusive Apaches. William Kiser earlier wrote Turmoil on the Rio Grande: The Territorial History of the Mesilla Valley, 1846–1865. In his new book he examines the role U.S. soldiers played in New Mexico up to 1861 and the reasons the federal government failed during that period either in forcing the Apaches to coexist with the white settlers or in countering their depredations. One problem lay in the fact that many of the soldiers were Irish or German immigrants, while most of the locals spoke only Spanish. Officers and soldiers alike developed racially superior attitudes against the populace they were supposed to protect. Delays in pay, casualties and difficult desert conditions made matters worse. In 1852 a frustrated Colonel Edwin V. Sumner wrote to Washington, recommending the abandonment of New Mexico Territory to the Indians and the “idle and worthless” Mexicans, and that the removal of the Army would be in the government’s best economic interests. Fortunately for New Mexico’s future as a state, not all officers shared his opinion. Major Enoch Steen, for example, understood how rich the territory was in minerals. But another perplexing problem arose from the discord of the Office of Indian Affairs, which in 1849 was transferred from the War Department to the
Department of the Interior. In 1852 the commissioner of Indian Affairs issued a proclamation to allow Indian agents to accompany military expeditions in order to stop the Army from attacking peaceful Indian bands. Colonel Sumner, for one, absolutely refused to comply. The power struggle after New Mexico became a territory was continuous between Apaches, who were protecting their homeland and believed the environment was something holy, and the invading soldiers, settlers and miners (gold at Pinos Altos, copper at Santa Rita). There was no way of reaching a peaceable agreement. According to Kiser, government officials, merchants and soldiers acted in the advancement of imperialist ideologies intended to hasten the economic exploitation of the landscape and to exert social power and authority over cultures they deemed inferior. Dragoons in Apacheland reveals the mistakes soldiers made in their dealings with the Indians and how the process of Americanizing New Mexico and Arizona would take some time. Thomas Zacharis
American Indian Tribes of the Southwest, by Michael G. Johnson, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, U.K., 2013, $17.95. The latest title in Osprey’s Men-at-Arms series, American Indian Tribes of the Southwest is a compact summation of the Yuman, Piman, Athabaskan and Pueblo peoples who often clashed violently with the Spanish, Mexican and American settlers and accompanying armed forces. These, of course, include such famous tribes as the Chiricahua Apaches, Navajos, Pimas and Zunis. Given the 48-page limit Osprey provided, Johnson’s text is necessarily concise but manages to cover the overall subject, including the major wars and the manner in which the various tribes waged them. Accompanying the text is the usual wealth of amply captioned photographs and eight pages of color plates rendered in exceptional detail by artist Jonathan Smith. As with the other Indian books in the series, this one does not
focus exclusively on the warriors, the illustrations including holy men, ritual dancers, women and children. Likewise the text deals with the religious and social mores of the respective groups, a reminder that for the Southwestern Indians, as elsewhere in North America, those aspects were integral to their lives. Jon Guttman
MOVIE REVIEW
The Lone Ranger, Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 149 minutes, 2013, coming to DVD (October 2013). In time The Lone Ranger will be remembered primarily from a fiscal perspective, for being, like last year’s John Carter, another $250 million failure from the Hollywood summer blockbuster machine. From an aesthetic viewpoint the movie isn’t much better. Disney used too broad a brush with The Lone Ranger. The result is a bloated attempt to entertain mothers, fathers, teens and toddlers,
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HISTORICAL VIDEOS Just awarded the
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JFK:
A DAY IN DALLAS A 50TH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTIBLE ISSUE!
Item: AHJFK Price: $11.99 (incl. S&H)
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, shook the world and remains a touchstone for a generation a half century later.
s Never-before published photos s Chilling eyewitness accounts s Behind the scenes insights To Order: 1-800-358-6327 HistoryNetShop.com WW312C
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a mess of conflicting tones and styles that ultimately fails to satisfy anyone—Western lovers or otherwise. It is astonishing to see so much money thrown at a Western in an era when it’s difficult to get a Western made on even the most miniscule budget. But one is able to trace how it came to fruition: It takes director Gore Verbinski, who’s had great success with movies of this scale, reteams him with Johnny Depp, the star of his billion-dollar-grossing Pirates of the Caribbean series, and puts them behind a story that plays much like a superhero film, the dominant genre of the summer blockbuster scene. Like Batman Begins or Iron Man, The Lone Ranger serves as an origin story for our hero. But unlike Batman or Iron Man, this hero (made popular on 1950s television by Clayton Moore) has no relevance for today’s kids and teens and is played by an actor (Armie Hammer) whose best-known role is a supporting one, as theWinklevoss Twins in The Social Network. On top of that it’s a Western. Perhaps Disney realized these logistical shortcomings and tried to offset them by jamming enough into this movie for everyone. The result is 149 minutes of visual effects, laden mischief that throws everything at you, most conspicuously Depp’s bizarre-looking Tonto (complete with dead crow headdress and a far cry from Jay Silverheels’ yesteryear look). Ironically, not until the film throws in the proverbial kitchen sink, in its action-packed finale, does it truly become enjoyable, as horses jump onto trains, heroes shoot guns from villains’ hands, and the “WilliamTell Overture” booms from the speakers. The Lone Ranger saves the girl with gusto, and the film finally understands what it is—a kid’s movie. What precedes this belated moment of joy is two long hours of contrived mush. One can simply look at the violence in the film to see how unsure of itself it is. For instance, the first time we see John Reid as his masked alter ego is during a goofy scene in which he shoots a bullet that ricochets off various surfaces before slicing through a rope that drops a heavy piece of equipment—it might as well have been an anvil—onto the unsuspecting bad guys. It is pure Looney Tunes, and
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this would have been refreshing, had the film struck this tone throughout. But this “anvil on head” scene is sandwiched between folks getting scalped, Comanches getting massacred and our uninspired baddie, Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner), tearing a heart from a man and eating it. Conflicting tones were an issue with Verbinski’s final Pirates entries as well, which were equally bombastic and lengthy. At times you’re not sure whether you’re watching a Saturday morning cartoon or a Sergio Leone Western. The latter seems to be an inspiration for Verbinski, who now has two Westerns notched on his résumé. He fills The Lone Ranger with as many references to classicWesterns as he did in his previous film, Rango, an animated tale of a chameleon (Depp again, at least in voice) that was exponentially more delightful. The Lone Ranger’s soundtrack is filled with nods to Ennio Morricone, and fans of John Ford (The Searchers in particular) will notice visual callbacks. MonumentValley, meanwhile, couldn’t look more beautiful. The best thing the film has going for it, other than Ford’s iconic Western valley, is the back-and-forth between Hammer’s upright Lone Ranger and Depp’s deadpan Tonto, as well as some silly sight gags involving Silver, the Lone Ranger’s horse. The movie spends far too much time with characters that are devoid of life, like Rebecca Reid (Ruth Wilson), and far too little with characters that show promise, like Red Harrington (Helena Bonham Carter), a brothel owner with a mechanical leg that leaves men drooling.Verbinski completely wastes talents like Tom Wilkinson and Barry Pepper, putting them through nonsensical plot twists in an attempt to conceal their one-dimensionality. Onedimensional characters are forgivable in a summer flick as long as its fun. But fun is spontaneous, an offshoot of originality and wit, two aspects completely absent from this film (even Cavendish’s cardiac extraction isn’t original; see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). The Lone Ranger proves there is no surefire studio formula to ensure “fun for the whole family,” nor is there one to recoup a $250 million budget. Disney is learning that the hard way. Louis Lalire
© 2013 JIM PATTERSON PHOTOGRAPHY, SANTA CRUZ, CALIF., JIMPATTERSON.PHOTOSHELTER.COM; INSET: WWW.OUTWESTPHOTOS.COM
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Death Valley National Park, California
Death Valley [www.nps.gov/deva] is officially the hottest spot on earth, hovering above 100 degrees in summer and spiking to a hellish 134 degrees in July 1913. Hot enough to fry an egg? You bet. But if you insist on trying, bring a skillet, as park rangers tire of scraping eggy goo from the asphalt. Badwater Basin, pictured at sunrise, will provide the salt for your omelet. Back in the day the valley provided the key ingredient for 20 Mule Team Borax detergent booster— that busy mom’s standby and sponsor of the classic TV Western series DeathValley Days (1952–70). In the 1880s teams of, actually, 18 mules and two horses (see inset) hauled out 30-ton loads of borax to the nearest railhead.Two wagons held the ore, while a tanker wagon supplied the thirsty equines with water. Hot work.
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