Wild West June 2021

THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

1862 breakout from san quentin christian general oliver otis howard unsung outlaw CHEROKEE BILL

gall’s last stand

army artillery forced his 1881 surrender in montana territory

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42 THE SHORT, VIOLENT LIFE OF CHEROKEE BILL

By Art T. Burton The mixed-race freedman was the most dangerous outlaw in Indian Territory

50

64 SEARCHING

WESTWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIER

FOR VICTORIO

By Mike Coppock Civil War veteran General O.O. Howard later confronted Cochise and Chief Joseph

By Daniel Aranda The author continues his hunt for a genuine photo of the great Apache chief

58 BIGGEST BREAKOUT, BAR NONE

By John Boessenecker In 1862 San Quentin convicts staged the largest prison break in the Old West 2

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D E PA R T M E N T S

4 EDITOR’S LETTER 8 LETTERS 10 ROUNDUP 16 INTERVIEW

By Johnny D. Boggs Julia Bricklin seeks out Westerners overlooked by most other biographers

18 WESTERNERS

10

Western showman ‘Diamond Dick’ became a doctor, then returned to the arena

20 GUNFIGHTERS AND LAWMEN

By John Koster Granville Bennett was a judge of good character in wild and woolly Deadwood

22 PIONEERS AND SETTLERS

By C. Lee Noyes Survivor Charles Windolph may have ‘muddied the waters’ of the Little Bighorn

24 WESTERN ENTERPRISE

By Jim Winnerman Barbed wire changed the lives and livelihoods of cowboys, farmers and ranchers

26 ART OF THE WEST

By Johnny D. Boggs ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ helped inform Italian artist Lorenzo Barruscotto’s works

36

GALL’S LAST STAND

By Terry Halden The Little Bighorn victor surrendered after a fight on Montana Territory’s Poplar River

28 INDIAN LIFE

By C. Lee Noyes Markers at Montana’s Little Bighorn Battlefield also honor fallen Indian warriors

30 STYLE

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

76 COLLECTIONS

By Linda Wommack Kansas’ Fort Harker Guardhouse Museum recalls two forts on the overland trails

78 GUNS OF THE WEST

By George Layman J.H. Dance & Bros.’ six-shooters served the Confederacy and a notorious outlaw

80 GHOST TOWNS

By Terry Halden While the stream at Mitchell, Mont., was a washout, there was gold in the hills

82 REVIEWS

70 DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDREL

By Linda Thorsen Bond The most trusted man in Nacogdoches, Texas, broke his own bank and scrammed

Art T. Burton reviews books and films about frontier Oklahoma.

Plus, reviews of recent books about Lt. Col. George A. Custer, Oregon Trail promoter Ezra Meeker, President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1903 Western tour, frontiersman Daniel Boone and more

88 GO WEST

The Oregon Trail lured west scores of Easterners—among them Ezra Meeker ON THE COVER Hunkpapa Lakota war leader Gall, posing in a circa 1880s portrait by D.F. Barry, helped defeat George Armstrong Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn in June 1876, crossed into Canada the following year and later returned to Montana Territory, where he surrendered in January 1881 after a brief show of force.

(Stanley Weston Archive/Getty Images; photo illustration: Brian Walker) JUNE 2021

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EDITOR’S LETTER

BADMAN CHEROKEE BILL When we hear mention of Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), most of us naturally think of Indians first. Even if we know little about such indigenous tribes as the Caddo, Wichita and Kichai, many of us know 19th-century Indian Territory became home to the transplanted Southeastern people known as the Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole. Starting in 1829 the self-taught Cherokee linguist Sequoyah, who created the syllabary that made reading and writing in his native tongue possible, made his home on Big Skin Bayou, an Arkansas River tributary in what today is Sequoyah County, Okla. Other well-known Cherokee figures of the 19th century include John Ross, who was the tribe’s principal chief (in both the Southeast and Indian Territory) from 1828 until his death in 1866, and Stand Watie, who immigrated to Indian Territory in 1835 and later served as a Confederate general during the American Civil War. The best-known Indian who operated in the territory, though, is Quanah Parker. The son of a Comanche chief and a white captive, he was considered by many the last chief of the Comanche Nation.

Mighty interesting fellows. But after we’ve considered such Indians, who comes next to mind in connection with Indian Territory? Yes, indeed, those colorful characters central to the Wild West—outlaws. “The only genuinely interesting men that Oklahoma has produced have been Indians and outlaws,” said Texan folklorist, newspaper columnist and historian J. Frank Dobie in 1930. A bit of an exaggeration, of course. Who could forget such notable Sooners as humorist Will Rogers, actor James Garner and ballplayer Mickey Mantle?

But it’s true enough that following the Civil War the territory was inundated with hard cases, from whiskey peddlers and rustlers to bandits and killers. The criminal annals of Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory (which existed from 1890 to 1907, when it joined with Indian Territory to form the state of Oklahoma) featured the likes of the Dalton brothers, Bill Doolin, Belle Starr and Al Jennings. Some of the better-known outlaws operating in what became Oklahoma merit double consideration because they were also Indians, full blood or otherwise.

Heading that list is Ned Christie, born in the Cherokee Nation’s Goingsnake District, though he started out a statesman for his people and only turned criminal fugitive after being falsely accused of killing a deputy U.S. marshal. Close behind Christie in name recognition is Henry Starr, a mixedblood Cherokee who claimed to have robbed 21 banks, more than the James-Younger Gang and Doolin-Dalton Gang combined. Henry’s uncle was Cherokee horse thief Sam Starr, who married Belle “Bandit Queen” Starr in 1880.

If you’re game for triple consideration about Indian Territory figures, multiracial outlaws enter the picture. The notorious Buck Gang comprised Rufus Buck, Lewis Davis, Lucky Davis, Sam Sampson and Maoma July, all of whom were of black and Creek descent. The five desperadoes robbed, raped and killed, terrorizing Indian Territory citizens until caught and hanged together from Judge Isaac Parker’s gallows in Fort Smith, Ark., on July 1, 1896. Even so, the Buck badmen generally play second firearm to Crawford Goldsby (Feb. 8, 1876, to March 17, 1896), better known by the alias Cherokee Bill. His father was mulatto, his mother half-black, one-quarter Cherokee and one-quarter white. Before he was hanged at age 20, Bill killed anywhere from six to 13 men, probably outdoing Billy the Kid in notches on his pistol grip.

“Cherokee Bill was every bit as colorful and outrageous as any criminal of the Western frontier, perhaps even more so,” says Art T. Burton, author of Bill’s bio and also the article “The Short, Violent Life of Cherokee Bill” in this issue (see P. 42). “He received national media attention for his crimes while he was living and became the most famous black outlaw of the Wild West era. Billy the Kid was remembered and immortalized in books and films in the 20th century. This did not occur for Cherokee Bill.” How about it, filmmakers of the 21st century—Cherokee Bill Rides Again or even, dare I say it, Cherokee Bill vs. Dracula?

Art T. Burton gives the unjust Cherokee Bill his just due in this 2020 biography of the young man who became a terror in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma).

BILL KILLED ANYWHERE FROM

SIX TO 13 MEN

4

WILD WEST

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

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

JUNE 2021

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Poncho-wearing Clint Eastwood looks good (not bad or ugly) in a work by Italian artist Lorenzo Barruscotto.

MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF

JUNE 2021 / VOL. 34, NO. 1

Visit our WEBSITE FOR ONLINE EXTRAS WildWestMag.com

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

The Many Wives of Ned Buntline

Extended Interview With Julia Bricklin

“I’m proud to live in the Western United States,” says the author of books about sharpshooter Lillian Smith, dime novelist Ned Buntline and reporter Polly Pry. “There are so many stories still out there for us to unearth. The word ‘frontier’ says it all—it was where people went to get a fresh start or a new identity or to ply a trade that was different from previous generations in their families. There’s still a mystique about it.”

More About Lorenzo Barruscotto

The Italian artist believes it was in his DNA to be “charmed” by the American West. His subjects include Annie Oakley (“I admire her courage and how she lived in a world basically all man-centered”) and William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody (“He came with his Wild West show many times to Italy, so it’s almost a duty”).

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

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LORENZO BARRUSCOTTO

Award-winning author Julia Bricklin writes that Edward Zane Carrol Judson, the notorious and prolific “Father of the Dime Novel” and shameless promoter of Buffalo Bill Cody and himself, married at least nine times, never formally divorced several of his spouses and didn’t even bother to tell some of them he was leaving.

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LETTERS

PAT GARRETT TINTYPE I was a little shocked to see the cover photo of the February 2021 Wild West. I don’t know anyone who believes that’s a picture of Pat Garrett. Maybe it did belong to Jarvis Garrett at one time or another, but that doesn’t automatically ordain it a portrait of his father. There’s also a bogus Billy the Kid photo out there the owner swears came from Garrett’s family, but without something from Garrett identifying the image as Billy, it’s likely just a goofy-looking Garrett cousin.

And I find it interesting Jarvis didn’t include your cover image in the special edition of his father’s The Authentic Life of Billy, The Kid, published by Horn & Wallace in 1964, for which Jarvis provided a biographical foreword and two photos of Pat from his personal collection. Neither is the image in [the Garrett biography by] Leon Metz, who had access to the collections of Jarvis and Pauline Garrett. Now, sure, it’s possible this image could have somehow been missed by Metz, Robert Utley, Frederick Nolan, Robert McCubbin, Jack DeMattos, Herman Weisner, Donald Cline, etc., but there’s still a problem (huge problem, actually) in that it simply doesn’t look like Garrett. I realize this is one of those eye-of-the-beholder situations, but put the image side by side with all the known authentic Garrett photographs we have, and I believe you’ll see what I mean. It’s a shame the photo’s appearance on your cover lends it legitimacy that, in my opinion, it doesn’t deserve.

Mark Lee Gardner, Author of To Hell on a Fast Horse: The Untold Story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett Cascade, Colo.

Karla Steen and Sally Kading, the owners of the tintype, respond: The Pat Garrett tintype was acquired in October 2017 when the contents of the Billy the Kid Museum in Fort Sumner, N.M., were sold at action. Accompanying the tintype was the statement, “Date unknown, the estate representatives believe this was acquired by Joe Bowlin from Jarvis Garrett, Pat Garrett’s son, in 1983, 5 1/16” high x 3 1/16” wide, excellent details; original envelope with Joe Bowlin’s writing.”

David Thomas, who wrote the article “He Shot the Sheriff” in the February 2021 issue, adds: I recognize Mr. Gardner’s concern. However, I accept the provenance provided by the Billy the Kid Museum and believe that the tintype image is of Garrett. I see no reason to believe that 8

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Joe Bowlin lied about where he got it (he wrote “Pat Garrett” on the envelope it was in) and no reason to believe Jarvis would be giving out photos of anyone other than his father.

GARRETT SHOOTING I very much enjoyed reading the article “He Shot the Sheriff” by David G. Thomas, especially the transcript of testimony as [New Mexico] Territorial Attorney General James Hervey questioned Carl Adamson, who was present at the murder of Pat Garrett. Thomas contends that the mystery of who shot Garrett can now be put to rest by Adamson’s own account of an argument between Garrett and Wayne Brazel that ended in the shooting. If Adamson’s version is the final word for Thomas, the author fails to resolve a glaring contradiction in Adamson’s testimony. Adamson, who was relieving himself at the side of the road, said his back was turned to the two men when the first shot was fired. He said the first shot occurred “just about when I turned around” to look at the two men. When asked about the timing of the second shot, Adamson said it happened “as quick as a man can cock a pistol.” When asked how Garrett was standing (relative to Brazel) when the firing erupted, Adamson replied, “He was facing him.”

However, the autopsy performed on Garrett’s corpse by Dr. William C. Field states: “I was sure he’d been shot in the back of the head, because when I examined the hole, I noticed it [the hair] was driven inward toward the wound.” This suggests some sinister collaboration and perjury on the part of Adamson and Brazel. This blatant contradiction of empirical data vs. testimony is troublesome, indeed, yet it is not addressed in the article.

Mark Warren Dahlonega, Ga. David Thomas responds: Because of the space limitations, I was not able to give the entire transcript (you can find it in my book Killing Pat Garrett). Adamson testified he got out of the buggy to urinate and had his back turned to the buggy when he heard Garrett threaten Brazel. He then heard Garrett jump out of the buggy. He was still facing away when Brazel fired the first shot. He turned after hearing that shot and saw Garrett “staggering” from the second shot. He did not see Brazel fire the second shot. Garrett’s position when hit by Brazel’s first shot is unknown. Based on Dr. Field’s remembered autopsy finding that the bullet entered the back of his head, Garrett had to be turned away from Brazel, perhaps holding onto the buggy with one hand, when his feet landed on the ground. I see no contradiction between Adamson’s testimony and that finding. Regarding the issue of whether Adamson would collaborate with Brazel, I remind you that Brazel did not know Adamson until introduced by Garrett in El Paso.

NO. 11 ON LIST [Re. “Top 10 Reasons Billy Was More ‘Outlaw’ Than Jesse,” in the December 2020 Roundup:] And reason No. 11 why Billy the Kid was more “outlaw” than Jesse James: Along with being the aforementioned rock ’n’ roll star, thanks to Bon Jovi, he was also the only outlaw to have his own ballet, thanks to Aaron Copland’s 1938 Billy the Kid. Whether this is a sign of being more “outlaw” or just more famous I will leave up to you. I say this even though my wife’s relative, William Westfall, was the conductor killed on the train Jesse James robbed on July 15, 1881, in Missouri. Westfall had conveyed the Pinkertons as close as the rails could take them to the James farm and then gave them directions as to how to get to the home. The younger James boy [Archie] died and their mother [Zerelda] lost an arm when the Pinkertons threw a “smoke bomb.” Score settled.

Mike Flannery Grand Forks, N.D. Send letters by email to wildwest@historynet.com. Include your name and hometown.

JUNE 2021

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ROUNDUP

TOP 10 REASONS CHEROKEE BILL WAS MORE ‘OUTLAW’ THAN BILLY THE KID Embracing Another Culture: Bill embraced the Indian freedmen, Cherokee, Creek, black and white cultures. Billy only embraced the Mexican culture in New Mexico Territory.

Indian Territory outlaw Cherokee Bill (born Crawford Goldsby), above and at top left, has nowhere near the notoriety of Billy the Kid (top right).

3

Rifle and Pistol Expert: Bill could brace a Winchester against his thigh and lever it so fast the rifle would sound like a sewing machine (like Rifleman Lucas McCain of TV fame). Known as a deadly marksman, Bill was also game to shoot it out with a posse. The Kid, on the other hand, was known less for his shooting prowess than for his bushwhacking skills.

4

Killer Instinct: Bill was personally responsible for six known deaths, while newspapers credited him with as many as 13. Billy was personally responsible for four deaths and possibly five more in gang shootouts.

5 10 WILD WEST

Classic Outlaw: Bill robbed banks, stores, trains and stagecoaches. The Kid’s criminal

career was largely limited to a range war and some cattle rustling.

6 7

Good Looks: Bill was far more handsome and popular with the ladies than bucktoothed Billy.

Dress Code: Bill was a snappier dresser, accessorizing his outfits with a wide-brimmed hat, a red bandana, leather chaps with metal studs and Mexican jingle bob spurs. Billy was a frump by comparison.

8 9

Tall and Tan: Bill was 6 feet tall and muscular.

Skinny the Kid stood 5 feet 9 inches.

Wanted: The reward for Bill climbed as high as $1,300, while the most offered for Billy was $500.

10

Headliner: The New York Times featured a running commentary on Cherokee Bill and the Cook Gang in Indian Territory (presentday Oklahoma). The Times only mentioned Billy the Kid once before his death on July 14, 1881.

—Art T. Burton

JUNE 2021

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TOP LEFT: PAILIN SUBANNA KRAFT; ABOVE RIGHT: TERRY A. DEL BENE; FAR RIGHT: WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

The Name: Cherokee Bill is a cooler name for an outlaw than Billy the Kid.

LEFT: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; RIGHT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; BELOW: ART T. BURTON

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ROUNDUP

KRAFT GETS WRANGLER California-based historian Louis Kraft, a longtime Wild West contributor, has earned this year’s Western Heritage Wrangler Award in the nonfiction book category for his 2020 work Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway, published by the University of Oklahoma Press and reviewed online at Historynet.com. “I have nothing but praise for Chuck Rankin, then the OU Press editor in chief, for without his support there would not have been a book,” Kraft said. “I was sorry when I completed my work on the book, as it was a big part of my life for a long time.” It marks the second Wrangler for Kraft, who won in 2012 in the magazine article category for “When Wynkoop Was Sheriff” (see online at Historynet.com). The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum will honor Kraft and other award winners on September 17–18 in Oklahoma City. The late Max Evans (1924–2020) garnered a posthumous Western novel Wrangler for The King of Taos, while the Tom Hanks film News of the World (see review online at Historynet.com) and the Montana PBS documentary Charlie Russell’s Old West earned Wranglers in their respective categories. For a full list of honorees and more information visit nationalcowboymuseum.org.

TOP LEFT: PAILIN SUBANNA KRAFT; ABOVE RIGHT: TERRY A. DEL BENE; FAR RIGHT: WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

LEFT: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; RIGHT: HISTORYNET ARCHIVES; BELOW: ART T. BURTON

UTLEY, GEARS HONORED Robert M. Utley, the 91-year-old dean of Western historians, has earned Western Writers of America’s 2021 Spur Award in its historical nonfiction category for The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull and the Resistance of the Free Lakotas (see a review of the book and our recent interview with Utley online at Historynet.com). That makes four Spurs for Utley, including one for The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull. W. Michael and Kathleen O’Neal Gear (at right), a best-selling husband-and-wife writing team known for their series of North American prehistory books, will share the 2021 Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to Western literature. The WWA will present its highest honor to the Gears—along with its other awards—at its June 16, 2021 convention in Loveland, Colo. The Gears, who live in Cody, Wyo., and have co-authored 37 books, will also be inducted into the Western Writers Hall of Fame, housed outside the McCracken Research Library at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody. “Michael and Kathleen, with their careers in archaeology and as award-winning bison ranchers, bring extraordinary understanding and passion to everything they write, whether the subject involves the prehistory of America or the genetics of bison,” says WWA Executive Director Candy Moulton.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota, won Spurs in both the contemporary novel and first novel categories for Winter Counts. The prolific Johnny D. Boggs, a Wild West special contributor, expanded his record of earned Spurs to nine by winning in the original mass-market paperback category with A Thousand Texas Longhorns. Peter Cozzens earned his first Spur for the biography Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation, and Laura J. Arata won in the first nonfiction book category for Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford, the Montana Vigilantes and the Tourism of Decline, 1870–1930. Earning the spur for short nonfiction was Ted Franklin Belue with his three-part Muzzleloader series “Daniel Boone’s Life in the Far West: An Inquiry Into His Alleged Yellowstone Hunt.” For the full list of winners and finalists visit westernwriters.org.

WEST WORDS

‘Daily we see so many [buffalo] that we hardly notice them more than the cattle in our pastures about our homes.

But this cannot last; even now there is a perceptible difference in the size of the herds, and before many years the buffalo, like the great auk, will have disappeared; surely this should not be permitted’ —John James Audubon (1785– 1851) wrote this in his journal on Aug. 5, 1843, during an expedition up the Missouri River from St. Louis to Fort Union and the northern prairies.

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ROUNDUP

BLACK WESTERNERS ▲

As Wild West readers are well aware, some 19th-century homesteaders and many cowboys (as many as one-third by some reckoning) were black.

But who rates among the best-known black men and women of the Old West? In Black Heroes of the Wild West, a 2020 graphic novel intended for readers age 8 to 12, author James Otis Smith singles out “Stagecoach Mary” Fields, who delivered the mail via packhorses and a mule in Montana Territory; Bass Reeves, a larger-thanlife deputy U.S. marshal in Oklahoma and Indian territories; and Texas mustanger Bob Lemmons. Born slaves, each possessed, Smith writes, “the courage and strength to choose to be whoever they wanted to be.”

Others in the running include Bose Ikard, who inspired the character “Deets” in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove; John Ware, a ranch owner respected from Texas to Canada; Nat Love, who wrote exaggerated tales of his derring-do; and, of course, Bill Pickett, who invented the bulldogging technique used in steer wrestling and became the first black cowboy inducted into the Rodeo Hall of Fame. The most famous black businessman was Colorado entrepreneur Barney Ford, who also became a civil-rights pioneer. And, yes, there were black outlaws, too, including Isom Dart (born Ned Huddleston), a cowboy gunned down for alleged cattle rustling. Cherokee Bill (born Crawford Goldsby to mixed-race parents) is one of the hard cases featured in Art Burton’s 1991 book Black, Red and Deadly: Black and Indian Gunfighters of the Indian Territories and is the subject of the author’s feature story on P. 42 of this issue. Burton’s latest book is Cherokee Bill: Black Cowboy—Indian Outlaw (reviewed online at Historynet.com).

BEST WESTERN READS

Over the years the venerable Western Writers of America has created “Best of the West” lists in a number of categories. In recent weeks committees appointed

by WWA President Chris Enss have made the latest selections.

The group’s top 25 Western history titles of all-time follow:

First Published 1849–1947

The California and Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and RockyMountain Life, by Francis Parkman; Roughing It, by Mark Twain; The America Fur Trade of the Far West, by Hiram Martin Chittenden; The Frontier in American History,

by Frederick Jackson Turner; The Trail Drivers

of Texas: Interesting Sketches of Early Cowboys, edited by J. Marvin Hunter; The Great Plains, by Walter

SEE YOU LATER...

Robert K. DeArment

Highly acclaimed outlaw and lawman author Robert Kendall “Bob” DeArment, 95, died on Jan. 16, 2021.

Born on Aug. 29, 1925, in Johnstown, Pa., DeArment served in combat during World War II with the 63rd U.S. Infantry Division and began researching Western badge wearers and badmen in the late 1940s when studying at the University of Toledo. Among his more than 20 books are Bat Masterson: The Man of Legend (1979), Knights of the Green Cloth: The Saga of the Frontier Gamblers (1982), George Scarborough: The Life and Death of a Lawman on the Closing Frontier (1992), Alias Frank Canton (1996), Bravo of the Brazos: John Larn of Fort Griffin, Texas (2002), Courtright of Fort Worth: His Life and Legend (2004), Broadway Bat: Gunfighter in Gotham: The New York City Years of Bat Masterson (2005), Assault on the Deadwood Stage: Road Agents and Shotgun Messengers (2012) and the three-volume series Deadly Dozen: Forgotten Gunfighters of the Old West.

A charter member of the Wild West History Association, he also applied his stringent historical standards to articles for Wild West and other publications.

Larry McMurtry

Award-winning novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry, 84, who won the Pulizer Prize for his 1985 Western Lonesome Dove, died on March 25, 2021. Born in Archer, Texas, on June 3, 1936, he featured his home state in such works as Horseman, Pass By (published in 1961, which inspired the 1963 film Hud), The Last Picture Show (1966) and his Lonesome Dove series (turned into a popular TV miniseries), which included Streets of Laredo (1993), Dead Man’s Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997).

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

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You promised to save me but...’

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ROUNDUP Prescott Webb; We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher,

by E.C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott and Helena Huntington Smith; The Year of Decision: 1846, by Bernard DeVoto; Across the Wide Missouri, by Bernard DeVoto.

First Published 1950–69

Cheyenne Autumn,

by Mari A. Sandoz; Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West, by Dale L. Mor-

by Irving Stone; Army Exploration in the American West, 1803–1863, by William H. Goetzmann; The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West,

by William H. Leckie.

gan; Bent’s Fort,

by David Lavender; Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, by Paul Horgan; Men to Match My Mountains: The Opening of the Far West, 1840–1890,

First Published 1970–2012

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, by Dee Brown; The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West,

1840–60, by John Unruh; Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries, by David Dary; The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West,

by Patricia Nelson

Limerick; Platte River Road Narratives,

by Merrill J. Mattes; Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West,

by Stephen Ambrose; The Uncontested Plains: Indians, Gold-seekers and the Rush to Colorado, by Elliott West; Pacific Destiny: The Three-Century Journey to the Oregon Country, by Dale L. Walker; and Geronimo, by Robert M. Utley.

Events of the west Note: Due to the coronavirus shutdown, some events may be canceled or delayed

black rodeos and more feature in the exhibition “Vaquero Legacies & Diverse Descendants,” which continues on display through July 11 at the Booth Museum in Cartersville, Ga. Call 770-387-1300 or visit boothmuseum.org.

Santa Fe 200th Black Citizenship ▲

“Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow,” a traveling exhibition of the New-York Historical Society, visits the Bullock Museum in Austin, Texas, June 19–Nov. 18.

The exhibition explores the struggle for full citizenship and racial equality in the half century after the Civil

War. Sections include “Reconstructing Citizenship, 1865–1917,” “The Rise of Jim Crow, 1877–1900” and “Challenging Jim Crow, 1900–1919.” Visit thestoryoftexas.com.

Vaqueros Photographs celebrating the charros of Mexico, the paniolos of Hawaii, Indian relay races and rodeos,

The bicentennial of the founding of the Santa Fe Trail falls in 2021 (freighter William Becknell pioneered the route in 1821), as does the 35th anniversary of the Santa Fe Trail Association. The Bent’s Fort Chapter of the SFTA will host the Santa Fe Trail Bicentennial Symposium at sites in and around La Junta, Colo., and nearby Bent’s Old Fort National Historic

Site Sept. 22–26.

For more information visit 2021sfts.com, and santafetrail.org.

Western Heritage The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City has scheduled its Western Heritage Awards banquet for Sept. 17–18.

At the black-tie event the museum presents its Wrangler Awards in literature, music, TV and film to individuals sharing the great stories of the American West.

The Western Heritage committee voted to combine the postponed 2020 show and its 2021 event. Tickets go on sale Aug. 2. Call 405-4782250 or visit nationalcowboymuseum.org.

WWHA Roundup The annual Wild West History Association Roundup will convene in Fort Smith, Ark., Sept. 1–4, a few months after its originally scheduled date. Watch for more details on WWHA’s Facebook page and at wildwesthistory.org, also the place to join the organization.

WWA Convention Western Writers of America meets June 16–19 in Loveland, Colo., although events may be amended due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

WWA is open to any published writer whose body of work includes Western subjects. Visit westernwriters.org.

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

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INTERVIEW

LOOKING OVER THE OVERLOOKED AWARD-WINNING BIOGRAPHER JULIA BRICKLIN WRITES ABOUT JUST SUCH WESTERN CHARACTERS

BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS

Polly Pry or Ned Buntline—who wrote better?

Oh, Buntline was far and away the better writer. It’s certainly unfair to compare the two outside of my own portfolio—Ned was a novelist, while Polly was a newspaper columnist. But since we’re here: Both of them preached a lot, and both made full use of prevalent stereotypes. That’s true of almost all prolific writers of their respective generations. But Ned clearly had better command of the English language. If you read any of his stories, you can see that he mostly uses the active voice, uses subject-verb-object a lot and that his dialog is sharp and crisp. Polly was great at setting a scene, but her prose is littered with fragments and innuendo.

But who had the better pen name?

Polly Pry. You can’t beat that alliteration and allusion!

Did Pry open doors for women reporters?

I’m not sure how many doors she opened for women who were strictly fact-based journalists. Polly was this weird hybrid of “sob sister”—someone who used sentimental language to bring attention to problems—and opinion columnist, with a healthy dose of sensationalism. Half the time she wasn’t even on the scene of whatever she was writing about. But in the first quarter of the 20th century Polly made it possible for women to feel more comfortable in the public sphere in general.

How does Lillian Smith compare to Annie Oakley?

If we’re just looking at their shooting, I think they were very 16 WILD WEST

evenly matched, though I make the case that Smith may have been a shade better. I worked off contemporary observations of them both.

Certainly, Smith had equine competencies that Oakley did not. On the other hand, Oakley was much better at keeping her private life just that and staying within the confines of her “brand.”

What’s the difference between researching a 19th-century figure like Buntline and a Depression-Era couple on an L.A. crime spree?

Surprisingly little. Whenever I evaluate whether to write about a person/people, the first thing I do is to see whether there are any legal documents about them. All justice systems are subject to the time and place in which they exist. For me, though, court transcripts remain the most neutral source of information about a topic or person. From there I gather newspaper articles, oral histories, autobiographies and so forth.

How do you balance writing books and writing for periodicals, anthologies and podcasts?

That is a great question, because they really do require different parts of the brain—at least for me. I try to work on any book I might have when I first wake up. I’m not sure why that is.

I also tend to work on any podcast scripts in the morning. Afternoons are for magazine features and any essays I might have.

Evenings are devoted to research. Of course, in-person research has to be done during the day, so I dedicate special time for that.

Thankfully, these different types of projects I undertake usually have staggered due dates.

Did your television/film background draw you to write about Hannah Weinstein or your fascination with obscure figures?

It has more to do with writing about obscure people—specifically, multifaceted obscure people. But I have always loved the business affairs side of creative industries. When push comes to shove, film and television is always about the finances. I know how hard it is to get something on the air, and that’s been true since the days of radio. It just makes Hannah’s story so much more remarkable to me. Here is a woman who, in the man’s world of 1955, managed to convince scores of people on both sides of the pond to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a franchise [The Adventures of Robin Hood TV series] beloved by millions. It does check a lot of boxes for me.

CATHRYN FARNSWORTH

The last person Julia Bricklin wants to write about is some historical figure whose name alone fills volumes. So nothing from Bricklin about Jesse James or Calamity Jane. Instead, she seeks out women and men often overlooked by biographers. The career move has paid off, as Bricklin’s America’s Best Female Sharpshooter: The Rise and Fall of Lillian Frances Smith (2017) was a WILLA Award finalist, Polly Pry: The Woman Who Wrote the West (2018) was a Spur Award finalist and Blonde Rattlesnake: Burmah Adams, Tom White and the 1933 Crime Spree That Terrorized Los Angeles (2019) was nominated for an Agatha Award. Her most recent book is The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal and the Creation of Buffalo Bill (2020). Bricklin, who has worked in the television and film industry and writes scripts for the Legends of the Old West podcast, spoke to Wild West from her California home.

JUNE 2021

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FDR’s Power Move He shocked Big Business— and electrified America

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WESTERNERS

EXPERT SHOT MAKER

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Richard Jerome Tanner (1869–1943) followed an unlikely career path. The Western showman known as “Denver Dick” and “Diamond Dick” left the arena to get a medical degree, worked for a time as a doctor and then returned to showbiz as Diamond Dick.

Tanner was born in the central Illinois town of Stonington, lost his father as a boy and moved west to Nebraska with his mother. Somewhere along the way he became an expert rifle shot.

In 1893 the young man made headlines by riding his bronco, Gyp, from Lincoln, Neb., to New York City and back again—a reputed round trip of 5,500 miles. Capitalizing on his marksmanship and newfound fame, he appeared as Denver Dick in various Wild West shows (1894–95), then as Diamond Dick in circuses and his own traveling show (1895– 1905). The sharpshooter also claimed to have appeared with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, though there is no proof he did. In 1905, succumbing to “a lifelong desire,” he entered medical school, in Lincoln, and four years later he was administering shots as Dr. Tanner rather than making them as Diamond Dick.

Though his practice thrived, he must have had showbiz in his blood, as he resurfaced as Diamond Dick at the Pioneer Days Celebration in hometown Norfolk, Neb., on Aug. 28, 1925.

A complication arose, as his claim to the nickname came under dispute. Seems a Kansas snake oil salesman named George B. McClellan (1857–1911) had also used the moniker and posthumously proved the inspiration for dashing Diamond Dick, a popular dime novel hero.

In the summer of 1943 73-year-old Tanner broke his leg in a fall at home in Norfolk. Despite the biblical proverb, “Physician, heal thyself,” he died in a local hospital that July 2.

18 WILD WEST

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GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

GRANVILLE BENNETT PRESIDED OVER ONE OF THE WEST’S WILDER DISTRICTS BUT GAVE HIS COURT A GOOD NAME

BY JOHN KOSTER

K

nown for his integrity, Granville Gaylord Bennett was a celebrated jurist among the denizens of wild and woolly Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Though resolved to sentence a man to life at hard labor, the judge never sent anyone to the gallows. “Whether or not a man deserves death,” he said, “is a question for God alone to decide.”

Judge Bennett would never separate a child from its mother, however disreputable she had become or how much her reputation had suffered—whether

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

A JUDGE OF GOOD CHARACTER

merited, out of prejudice or spite, or simply from idle gossip. “I believe that the Lord knows where He sends children,” he said, “and it is not the intention of this court to take issue with the decrees of the Almighty.”

In a town whose very existence was technically illegal—Deadwood was built on land set aside for the Lakota Sioux by the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie—the judge turned down bribes and even gifts, however well-intentioned they may have been.

Shortly after Bennett was seated on the federal district bench in Deadwood in 1877, a mine owner offered him a gift of 2,000 shares in the Homestake Mine. “You don’t get a salary that will make you rich, and you have children, who will be getting more expensive every year,” the man explained.

“The stock is low now, but it’s going to be worth a lot of money before very long.”

Bennett politely declined. “You are right when you say my salary won’t make me rich,” he said.

“It won’t even permit me to speculate—or make investments. I can’t afford to buy two shares, let alone 2,000.” While the gift itself seemed innocent enough, the judge explained, it could leave him compromised were any litigation against the mine to come before him. No such case came up, and Bennett lived to see the value of Homestake shares skyrocket, perhaps with some regret. But, he told daughter Estelline, he never regretted his decision.

Born in Fayette County, Ohio, on Oct. 9, 1833, Bennett moved with his family to Illinois in 1849 and then Washington, Iowa, in 1855. He attended local Washington College, studied law and opened his own practice in 1859. A year later he married Ohio-born Mary Ann Dawson. When the Civil War broke out the next spring, Bennett accepted an appointment as a second lieutenant in the 7th Iowa Infantry. He later served as adjutant of the 19th Iowa Infantry, fought with the Army of the Tennessee and was discharged at war’s end as a first lieutenant. On returning home, he served in the Iowa House of Representatives (1865–67) and Iowa Senate (1867–71). He and Mary had four children, three of whom survived to adulthood—daughters Estelline and Helen (known to family as “Halle”), both of whom worked for newspapers and authored books, and son Gaylord, who rose through the ministry to become an Episcopal bishop.

In 1875 President Ulysses S. Grant appointed the elder Bennett an associate justice of the Supreme Court of Dakota Territory, based in the capital of Yankton, in which capacity he served until 1878.

In the spring of 1877 he was also assigned to the

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES

Granville Bennett, who in 1877 took his seat on the federal bench in Deadwood, was big on godliness and integrity, not the death penalty.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES

GUNFIGHTERS & LAWMEN

1st Judicial District, in Lawrence County, and moved the family to Deadwood mere months after Jack McCall shot legendary former lawman Wild Bill Hickok from ambush and while the displaced Lakotas remained sullen. Those who didn’t follow Sitting Bull to Canada, however, soon drifted quietly from the region.

On the opening day of the district court, initially held some 30 miles south of Deadwood in ramshackle Sheridan, a man was convicted of robbery and remanded to the custody of the U.S. marshal.

That night the marshal, his prisoner, the judge and jurors all fell asleep in the same dirt-floored log cabin. The next morning the honest citizens discovered a tunnel beneath a wall of the cabin and no prisoner. He was never seen again. Judge Bennett soon moved his bench to Deadwood, where he held forth from the restaurant/saloon in the Bonanza building.

Town officials presented him a rough-hewn chair carved with the words Made for Judge Bennett, F irst T erm of C ourt in D eadwood , O ctober 1877. A fellow jurist believed the chair lacked dignity, however, and one day Bennett arrived in court to find a fine armchair. Its appearance subjected the scrupulous judge to good-natured ribbing. “The presentation was wrong,” joked famed Sheriff Seth Bullock, “that the particeps criminis, having tried undue influence upon the head of his honor and failed, now applied their efforts to the very seat of justice.”

The rough living conditions Above: Deadwood, S.D., in 1900, in Deadwood were no joking a decade before Judge Bennett died.

Left: Pioneer photographer John C.H. matter. The family had cause Grabill took this 1890 shot of City to worry when Halle fell so ill Hall, which remained “Deadwood’s amid a summer heat wave that Pride” until burning down in 1952.

Dr. Heinrich A.L. von Wedelstaedt, a sentimental elderly Prussian, left her bedside wiping his eyes.

“The doctor says Halle can’t get well,” father Bennett told his eldest child, Estelline, who recorded the episode in her 1928 memoir Old Deadwood Days.

“He thinks she may not live through the night. But I think that God hears the prayers of little children and answers them. If you ask Him to make Halle well, I’m sure he will.”

That night big sister prayed side by side with her grandmother. “Once in the night I heard the doctor come in, and I got out of bed and said my prayer over again,” Estelline recalled. “In the morning Halle was better—incredibly, miraculously better. The doctor wiped his eyes and told father it only went to show that doctors never knew as much as they thought they did. They had no business to make such definite statements. The medicine last night had worked better than he thought it could. Father and I looked at each other. We knew.”

Though the family grew to love Deadwood, Bennett’s career brought them East in 1878 after the Black Hills booster ran for Congress as a Republican and was elected the territorial delegate. He, wife Mary, and daughters Estelline and Halle soon left for Washington, D.C., where Granville served through March 1881. He declined to seek re-election, and the family returned to the Black Hills. Baby Gaylord arrived a year later.

One day Bennett, decked out in a Prince Albert coat topped by a soft black Stetson, was strolling with a friend in Deadwood when they passed a certain notorious woman.

“Good morning, Miss Grace,” the judge said, tipping hit hat.

The friend stared straight ahead until well down the boardwalk.

“Do you speak to that woman?” the man gasped.

“Yes—I can afford to,” the judge replied tongue in cheek.

Bennett continued to practice law and raise his family in Deadwood. Elected judge of Lawrence County in 1892, he served three terms. Although tough on petty criminals, he was noted for his fair treatment of Chinese immigrants and American Indians. Bennett died in Hot Springs, S.D., on June 28, 1910, and is interred in Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery alongside such other local notables as Bullock, Hickok, Calamity Jane and Sol Star.

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PIONEERS & SETTLERS Frederick W. Benteen (left, in a circa 1890 portrait) never mentioned his reputed admonition to 7th Cavalry commander Lt. Col. George A. Custer.

7th U.S. CAVALRY CAPTAIN FREDERICK BENTEEN MOST LIKELY NEVER SAID THIS TO LT. COL. GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER

BY C. LEE NOYES

H

ollywood filmmakers are not always to blame for their failure to accurately portray history. The fault might lie with the sources they consult, even a participant in the actual events.

Notwithstanding exemplary efforts to be true to the historical record, the 1991 ABC TV miniseries Son of the Morning Star fell into this trap when depicting a supposed exchange between Captain Frederick W. Benteen and Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer just before the 7th U.S. Cavalry marched to destiny at the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. Their dialogue about the wisdom of dividing the regiment almost exactly quotes what Charles Windolph, an enlisted man at the time of the battle, “told” father-son biographers Frazier and Robert Hunt in the 1940s: 22 WILD WEST

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LEFT: LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL MONUMENT, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

‘HADN’T WE BETTER KEEP THE REGIMENT TOGETHER?’

Accounts recorded long after an event must be taken with a grain of salt, especially in the absence of corroborating primary sources. Captain Benteen, among others, never mentioned this reputed admonition to Custer. As close as he came was a private remark in an 1892 letter to fellow Little Bighorn survivor Theodore Goldin. “That is all I blame Custer for,” Benteen wrote, “the scattering, as it were (two portions of his command, anyway), to the, well, four winds, before he knew anything about the exact or approximate position of the Indian village or the Indians.”

Had Benteen cautioned Custer to “keep the regiment together,” he probably would have reported the exchange to Custer’s superior, Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry, or swore as much before the 1879 Reno Court of Inquiry, or otherwise mentioned his concern, especially in view of criticism of his own actions at the Little Bighorn—specifically that he failed to promptly come to Custer’s aid.

The best evidence for such an exchange would have been corroborating eyewitness testimony recorded soon after the battle.

But no such confirmation is known to exist.

In fact, German-born Windolph himself did not mention the exchange during his 1909 interview and related correspondence with meticulous Little Bighorn researcher Walter Mason Camp.

The only other surviving enlisted man who might have overheard the Benteen-Custer exchange was Trumpeter John Martin, who was dispatched with Custer’s last message.

But Martin never mentioned it, neither when contacted by attorney-historian Colonel William A. Graham nor when interviewed on several occasions by Camp.

The very social structure of the post–Civil War frontier Army casts further doubt on Windolph’s story. He related that “a man named McCurry” (1st Sgt. Joseph McCurry of Benteen’s company) approached him before the battle seeking to trade horses. Win-

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

I heard Benteen say to Custer: “Hadn’t we better keep the regiment together, General?

If this is as big a camp as they [scouts] say, we’ll need every man we have.” Custer’s only answer was: “You have your orders.”

LEFT: LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL MONUMENT, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

PIONEERS & SETTLERS

dolph claimed that as he approached Benteen for permission to do so, the captain was conversing with Custer (the alleged conversation), thus Windolph walked away and never exchanged horses.

But there is a better explanation for why Windolph never sought Benteen’s permission. Such unauthorized direct communication with a commissioned officer would not have been permitted in the stratified military system that partitioned the enlisted man from his social and intellectual “superiors,” as Kevin Adams has thoroughly documented in Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West, 1870–1890. Given such “social distancing guidelines,” the old soldier wouldn’t have had an opportunity to witness the reputed exchange or any other conversation between Benteen and Custer.

Company commanders delegated day-to-day management of their units to their first sergeants (McCurry, in this instance) and other noncommissioned officers. “The first sergeant could be likened to the foreman of the company,” Douglas C. McChristian notes in Regular Army O! “Through him passed all communication to and from the company commander.” A comprehensive handbook for enlisted men compiled by Captain August V. Kautz underscored that hierarchy. The 1865 edition of the cavalry officer’s Customs of Service devotes several pages to the varied responsibilities of U.S. Army first sergeants.

Private Windolph received the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Little Bighorn and was pro-

moted to sergeant. He can be excused for relating the alleged exchange more than a half century later. But again, such “told to” stories must be treated with caution, if for no other reason than memory lapses. Little Bighorn researcher William J. Ghent, for one, assumed the recollections of battle participants were susceptible to “this trick that the memory plays on all of us.” Ghent suggested another reason for doubting a story’s accuracy when questioning the authenticity of an account

by Private William Slaper that author E.A. Brininstool published in Troopers With Custer in 1952.

“It was written by Mr. Brininstool, as Mr. Slaper himself told me. [It is] about 75 percent Brininstool and only about 25 percent Slaper.” If such tales are so embellished by the writer, the soldier himself might not be at fault.

Son of the Morning of the Star erred in this instance, but the reason for the error must be attributed not to the filmmakers but to the sources on which they drew. Windolph, who was discharged as a sergeant in 1883 and went on to work for 49 years with the Homestake Mine in Lead, S.D., shared his story in the 1947 biography I Fought With Custer: The Story of Sergeant Windolph. Three years later, on March 11, 1950, Windolph died at age 98, finally achieving fame as the last white survivor of the Little Bighorn (for more on Windolph, see “Last Man Standing,”

by John Koster, in the June 2017 Wild West). He lies at rest at Black Hills National Cemetery, 3 miles southeast of Sturgis, S.D.

Charles Windolph (left), a private at the time of the June 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, claimed to have overheard Benteen and Custer (above).

Private Windolph received the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Little Bighorn

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WESTERN ENTERPRISE

At this homestead in Nebraska’s Custer County in 1888 cattle are secure inside a barbed-wire fence.

Below: In November 1874 Joseph Glidden patented “The Winner.”

WHEN THE WEST WAS WIRED

24 WILD WEST

were few trees on the Great Plains, and wooden fencerows were difficult to grow.

A workable alternative was wire fencing, which was cheaper and quicker to install.

The earliest such fences comprised a single strand of smooth wire. Homesteaders soon learned its limitations, however, as livestock could break the wire by pressing against it. But how to keep the animals away from the fencing? The simple—and later controversial—solution was to install metal barbs at regular intervals.

In 1867 the U.S. Patent Office issued six patents for barbed wire. The first to refer to its usefulness as a livestock deterrent was a June 25 patent granted to Lucien Smith, of Kent, Ohio, who pitched his single-strand design with barbed rotary spools as “especially adapted to use in the prairies of the Western states.” In his Feb. 11, 1868, patent Michael Kelly, of New York, improved on Smith’s design with a stronger double-strand wire interwoven with iron or steel “thorns.” Kelly dubbed his variation the “thorny fence.”

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JIM WINNERMAN

H

istorians often credit Winchesters and other firearms with having “won the West” in the 19th century. Certainly, gun-toting pioneers and settlers played a role. Other significant factors that moved the American frontier ever westward include victory in war (over Mexicans and Indians), the discovery of gold and silver (in California and many other places), government incentives (e.g., the Homestead Acts), technological advances (railroads, transcontinental telegraph service) and improvements in farming. Not to be overlooked in the settlement of the West was an invention that transformed the lives and livelihoods of cowboys, farmers, ranchers and American Indians alike—barbed wire.

Homesteaders out West had to protect their crops from not only wildlife but also the cattle and sheep of ranchers who had grown accustomed to having grazing access to the open range. Thus the small farmers began to build fences. In addition to the ire of the big ranchers, they faced an immediate hurdle in that there

TOP: NEBRASKA STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

LUCIEN SMITH AND JOSEPH GLIDDEN WERE EARLY INVENTORS OF GROUNDBREAKING—AND CONTROVERSIAL—BARBED WIRE

BY JIM WINNERMAN

JIM WINNERMAN

TOP: NEBRASKA STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

WESTERN ENTERPRISE

While the painful barbs taught animals to keep their distance, successive inventors kept working toward the better barbed wire, preferably one commercially viable. Between 1873 and ’99 some 150 companies manufactured various iterations of barbed wire. Among the most promising designs was one patented by farmer Joseph Glidden, of DeKalb, Ill., who conceived a method for locking the barbs in place, as well as the machinery to mass-produce the wire. Issued on Nov. 24, 1874, his patent describes a double-strand design, its barbs coiled around one wire and secured in place by the other. Facing stiff competition, Glidden boldly marketed his wire as “The Winner,” which it proved in the long run, surviving numerous court challenges from other inventors. Two years after patenting his “Improvement in Wire Fences,” Glidden got out of the manufacturing end of the business, content to live like a king on the royalties. His design remains the most familiar style of barbed wire in use.

Barbed wire had an almost immediate impact on the settlement of the Plains. The fences proved adept at keeping out unwanted animals, keeping in domestic livestock and keeping all animals off the railroad tracks bringing people westward. But the fencing off of the range came at a cost to those unused to such barriers. The wire further cut off Indians from their traditional hunting grounds and interfered with the migratory patterns of game on which they relied for food. Fencing also limited the range available to big ranchers, at the same time subjecting the remaining prairie to overgrazing.

The fence-cutting wars of the late 19th century were born as free-range ranchers snipped away miles of barbed wire across the West, sparking legal battles and retaliatory violence. Officials sought to intervene by outlawing fence cutting and imprisoning offenders. Meanwhile, homesteaders continued to f lood in and put up wire.

Taking a page from the small farmers, the big ranchers bought up vast swaths of rangeland and erected miles of fences, also cutting off access to roads and public lands. Even if the small ranchers found somewhere to graze their livestock, it proved hard to drive them to market, and many went out of business. By the end of the century the tactical use of barbed wire also became manifest to military men. During the 1898 SpanishAmerican War, for example, Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders ringed their camp with barbed wire and had to slash their way through two lines of such wire while storming Spanish defenses atop San Juan Heights.

Original wire—often framed in parallel 18-inch strands of common varieties—has become a col-

lector’s item. Strands of the more atypical designs can be expensive. “A collectible section of a Dodge Six-Point Star Barb [patented in 1881] can sell for $300,” says Brad Penka, president of the Kansas Barbed Wire Collectors Association.

Also coveted among collectors are Haish’s Concave Rail and Crimp Barb (1885), Pond’s Vented Barb (1883) and Upham’s Snail Barb on Twisted Oval Strand (1883). The international Antique Barbed Wire Society holds an annual symposium and publishes The Barbed Wire Collector.

“The Kansas Barbed Wire Museum [in La Crosse] has about 2,000 different wires on display, along with the tools used to install them, the machinery that produced the wire and a lot of historical photos,” Penka says. “A majority of the wires had been patented, but there are quite a few ‘moonshine’ wires that were made without being patented. A few times a year someone brings in a new wire that has never been seen before, but it is almost always a variation of an existing wire.”

While difficult for the layman to distinguish present-day barbed wire from that produced by the likes of Smith, Kelly and Glidden, new galvanization methods have extended its working life.

“The life of a wire depends heavily on the environment,” Penka adds. “There are still strung wires in use that are 100 years old.”

Although it had an indisputable impact on the taming of the West, barbed wire remains a subject of some controversy. Two enormous balls of the onetime animal deterrent stand outside the aptly named Devil’s Rope Museum, in McLean, Texas, whose literature perhaps best sums up barbed wire’s tangled history: “[It is] absolutely beneficial to progress, at times cruel beyond comprehension, caused drastic changes in worldwide warfare and yet protects our lives 24 hours each day.”

According to curators of the Devil’s Rope Museum, in McLean, Texas, barbed wire was both beneficial and “at times cruel beyond comprehension.”

the fencecutting wars of the late 19th century were born as freerange ranchers snipped away miles of barbed wire across the West

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ART OF THE WEST

Among Lorenzo Barruscotto’s favorite subjects is John Wayne, whom the artist captures here in an illustration inspired by the 1956 Western The Searchers.

DRAWING ON SPAGHETTI WESTERNS ention the American West to Italians, and they’ll likely visualize violent shootouts from the “Spaghetti Westerns” filmed in Europe in the 1960s and ’70s by such homegrown directors as Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West), Sergio Corbucci (Django), Enzo Barboni (They Call Me Trinity) and others.

Lorenzo Barruscotto understands the fascination. The artist has rendered many portraits of Clint Eastwood (see P. 6), who starred in Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” (Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). The 39-year-old native of Asti, in northwest Italy’s Piedmont, has captured other Hollywood Western stars, as well as historical figures from the Old West.

Yet becoming an artist was never one of his career goals.

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Barruscotto was, ironically, studying medicine when he fell so gravely ill he feared he might be sent, he recalls, “to ‘watch grass from the wrong side’ a couple of times.” While in recovery he turned to illustration. “It started as a hobby,” he says. “During my darkest times, it was also a way to put shadows away.” Though he had no formal art training, Barruscotto soon won recognition for portraits of his girlfriend and participated in expositions in Milan and Turin. Eventually he turned his gaze toward the American West.

When creating an image on his own time—not on commission —Barruscotto prints a photo that “involves my imagination and inspires me,” pencils a sketch, then goes over his work with a black pen and marker. “I delete the remaining pencil lines and

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LORENZO BARRUSCOTTO (4)

M

LORENZO BARRUSCOTTO TAKES INSPIRATION FROM BOTH THE ‘REEL’ AND REAL WEST

BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS

ART OF THE WEST

LORENZO BARRUSCOTTO (4)

Barruscotto’s subjects include both Hollywood Western stars and such real-life Western icons as (clockwise from far left) Doc Holliday, Annie Oakley and Wyatt Earp.

add shading with black charcoal,” he explains. He deviates from his Spaghetti Western inspirations in one notable aspect. “I don’t use colors, except on rare occasions.”

Barruscotto’s historical subjects have included Annie Oakley (“I admire her courage and how she lived in a world basically all man-centered), William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody (“He came to Italy many times with his Wild West show, so it’s almost a duty”) and Wyatt Earp (“You know, [the O.K. Corral gunfight] took place exactly 100 years and a month before the day I was born. Maybe it’s in my DNA, being ‘charmed’ by that savage but fascinating time”).

On the pop culture side Barruscotto has rendered illustrated tributes to the popular Italian

comic book Tex, first published in 1948. Among his favorite portrait subjects is of course John Wayne, who more than four decades after his death remains the most famous Hollywood cowboy.

“I love Western movies,” the artist freely admits, adding that a good many of his 1,600-plus completed works center on iconic films and characters.

“A good pic catches the eye more than a speech,” he says.

For all his interest in the American West, Barruscotto [facebook.com/osservatorio.tex.3] has yet to visit the landscapes that so inspire him. “It’s one of my dreams,” he says. “For sure I would like to see Arizona, the Navajo Nation and places in Texas,” he says. “I mean places of historical importance, not just the ones for tourists.”

‘For sure I would like to see Arizona, the Navajo Nation and places in Texas’

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INDIAN LIFE

These Cheyenne warriors fell beside each other during the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Seventeen such red granite markers approximate where Sioux and Cheyenne warriors died in June 1876.

HONORING FALLEN AMERICANS

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The first known call to memorialize those who had died on the Little Bighorn defending their way of life came nearly a half century after the battle. In 1925 Nellie Beaverheart, the daughter of Cheyenne Chief Lame White Man, made a poignant appeal to mark the place where her father had fallen in battle.

Not until 1958, however, did officials place a wooden marker at the site, largely through the urging of the chief’s grandson, Cheyenne Tribal Historian John Stands in Timber, and then park Chief Historian Don Rickey Jr. A more far-reaching response came in 1999, when the park initiated the Warrior Markers Project, inspired and guided by Doerner and Superintendent Neil C. Mangum.

The red granite markers selected by the tribes stand in sharp contrast to the 265 white marble military headstones that dot the battlefield. Inscriptions on the former include the Sioux or Cheyenne names of the fallen, provided by tribal elders, as well as their English translations. The tribes and the National Park Service have worked together to identify warrior death sites.

Complicating their efforts is the fact that Sioux and Cheyennes carried off the bodies of their fallen in the wake of battle.

To justify marker locations, project leaders cross-reference war-

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C. LEE NOYES

T

he 1991 renaming of Custer Battlefield National Monument to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument represented a significant cultural step toward recognizing the American Indians who participated in the June 25–26, 1876, battle on that sacred ground.

The theme “Peace Through Unity” symbolized the change and inspired subsequent events at the Montana battlefield where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his 7th U.S. Cavalry command met their match against Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho defenders of a large village on the Little Bighorn River.

The construction and dedication of an Indian Memorial (mandated by the same congressional legislation that renamed the battlefield) is the most apparent manifestation of such inclusion and reconciliation. Less obvious, but no less important for their symbolism, are red granite markers since placed near where warriors fell during battle. “Little Bighorn Battlefield now [in 1999] has the proud distinction of being the only battlefield in the world that marks the site where soldiers and Cheyenne warriors fell with commemorative white marble and red granite markers,” said Little Bighorn Battlefield Chief Historian John A. Doerner, who retired in 2011 after 21 years with the National Park Service.

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL MONUMENT RECOGNIZES WARRIORS AS WELL AS SOLDIERS WHO DIED IN THE PIVOTAL 1876 BATTLE

BY C. LEE NOYES

INDIAN LIFE rior accounts and historical documentation. They’ve also relied on stone cairns placed by friends and relatives to identify traditional death sites. “I have marked many places myself with stones,” Stands in Timber recalled.

During a visit to the battlefield on Memorial Day 1898 Captain Charles A. Varnum, Custer’s former chief of scouts, discovered one such cairn on Reno Hill, marking the spot where he’d stumbled in the dark over a warrior’s corpse in 1876. “I was standing where I thought I found that Indian’s body,” he told author E.A. Brininstool. “Small round stones had been laid in a square about 2 feet each way and then built up with small stones, forming a sort of pyramid about 4 inches high. Sticks stuck in the ground with red cloth bundles, medicine bags tied to them and some other ornaments were there.”

Unveiled on Memorial Day 1999, the first two markers of the Warrior Markers Project honored Lame White Man, the only chief slain in the battle, and the Cheyenne Noisy Walking, one of a group of warriors known as the “Suicide Boys.” On the eve of battle he and some two dozen other young men had made a pact to charge headlong into the next fight. “They would fight till they were killed,” Stands in Timber explained. Little did they realize their opportunity would come the next day. Four Cheyennes and about 20 Lakotas who had pledged themselves unto death paraded through the village on the morning of June 25, 1876, in a ceremony the Sioux called “Dying Dancing.”

On June 26, 2001, park officials dedicated this marker for Long Road, a Sans Arc Lakota warrior who died while counting coup on a trooper.

On June 26, 2001, amid the 125th anniversary of the battle, park officials dedicated the first Sioux marker at Reno Hill, in honor of the Sans Arc Lakota Long Road, whose cairn Varnum had found in 1898 (see sidebar, below). In concert with the June 2003 dedication of the Indian Memorial officials unveiled markers for an “unknown Lakota warrior” killed just east of Last Stand Hill and the Minneconjou Lakota Dog’s Back Bone, who was slain at Reno Hill on the second day of the battle. Markers have also been installed to honor other Cheyenne Suicide Boys and the three Army-allied Arikara scouts killed during Major Marcus Reno’s valley fight. To date the project has so honored 17 Cheyenne and Sioux warriors, the latest being the 2019 placement of a marker for the Cheyenne Roman Nose, aka Hump Nose. (The more famous Cheyenne warrior named Roman Nose died at the 1868 Battle of Beecher Island in Colorado Territory.)

Together the historic cavalry headstones and warrior markers serve as stirring reminders of the clash of cultures known to the Indians as the Battle of the Greasy Grass. The red granite markers dedicated to the fallen Sioux and Cheyennes add to the legacy of this hallowed ground, providing a powerful emotional contrast to the landscape of the Little Bighorn battlefield.

Several battle participants noted the death of the San Arc Lakota warrior Long Road on June 26, 1876. “Two [Sioux] men were killed in the fight with Reno on the bluffs that afternoon: Dog’s Back Bone [Minneconjou] and Long Road, a Sans Arc,” Minneconjou Lakota White Bull told authorhistorian Walter S. Campbell (given name, Stanley Vestal).

At least three 7th Cavalry troopers witnessed Long Road’s death. “When the Sioux charged our line, I saw the captain [Thomas H. French] shoot one Indian himself,” recalled Sergeant Hugh Moore of Company M. “Just previous to the charge our company was ordered over by Colonel Reno to support H Company.”

Private Jacob Adams, of Company H, picked up the story: C. LEE NOYES

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

End of LONG ROAD

While effecting a slight change of position [on June 26] my tent mate, Thomas Meador of West Virginia, fell with a dangerous wound in his right breast. I attempted to carry my wounded com-

rade back across the ridge when another bullet struck him in the head, ending his life instantly. I dropped the body and hurried to shelter, and when I happened to look back, I saw an Indian with a long stick adorned with feathers trying to reach Meador’s form.

I felt my whole nature revolt, and I assure you that Indian never attempted another such feat.

Captain Edward S. Godfrey provided a final corroborating account: An Indian had shot one of [Lt. Francis M.] Gibson’s men [of Company H], then rushed up and touched the body with his “coup stick” and started back to cover, but he was killed. He was in such close proximity to the lines and so exposed to the fire that the other Indians could not carry his body away. This, I believe, was the only dead Indian left in our possession—that is, at Reno Hill.

—C.L.N. JUNE 2021

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ART

We’ll Be Hanged!

Always wanted to hang a Western masterpiece in your home? The stretched-canvas replica paintings from Design Toscano [designtoscano.com] capture the original works’ essence—right down to the texture and intensity of color.

To add realism the copyists apply brushstrokes by hand. Each work (the originals of which are in private collections) comes mounted in a thick European-style frame with an ebony hue faux mat and a classic border in an antique gold finish. Sizes range from small to grande with respective prices from $139 to $450.

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PHOTO CREDIT

We admire replicas of famous paintings from Design Toscano and head online to shop for gift items at Sunset.com

COURTESY DESIGNTOSCANO.COM

STYLE

PHOTO CREDIT

COURTESY DESIGNTOSCANO.COM

Breaking Through the Line (detail),

by Charles Schreyvogel (1861–1912), replica painting on canvas, $149 to $450.

Though Schreyvogel never traveled with the military, he enjoyed depicting the excitement of the chase on canvas.

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STYLE

Indian Buffalo Hunt, 1856, by Karl Ferdinand Wimar

(1828–62), replica painting on canvas, $149 to $450.

Inspired by John James Audubon’s documentation of animals, Wimar set out to record the lives of the American Indians who traded furs near St. Louis.

Buffalo Bill on Charlie, 1865, by William de la

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COURTESY PACIFIC CREST TRAIL ASSOCIATION

For Supremacy, 1895, by Charles Marion Russell (1864–1926), replica painting on canvas, $139 to $399. The self-trained Russell, known as the “Cowboy Artist,” drew from his rich color palette to document the formation of the West from its earliest origins. Here the Montana-based artist depicts Plains Indians fighting other Plains Indians. For a time Russell lived with a band of Blackfeet and witnessed the tribe’s struggle to retain access to land coveted by white newcomers.

COURTESY DESIGNTOSCANO.COM (3)

Montagne Cary (1840–1922), replica painting on canvas, $149 to $450. Cary spent weeks traveling with Buffalo’s Bill’s Wild West and studying the famed showman before rendering this portrait.

COURTESY DESIGNTOSCANO.COM

COURTESY DESIGNTOSCANO.COM (3)

STYLE

Crow Outlier, 1896, by W. Herbert “Buck” Dunton (1878–1936), replica painting on canvas, $149 to $450. Dunton depicts a lone hunter of the Crow tribe riding in breechcloth and leather leggings against a vast Montana Territory sky. Dunton’s experience as a ranch hand added to the authenticity of his works, which won him regard among both collectors and his art world peers. In 1915 he was one of the founding members of the vaunted Taos Society of Artists in New Mexico.

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STYLE SHOP

Nice Sunset

Published since 1898, Sunset [sunset.com] is one of the world’s longest continually running magazines.

With an emphasis on the Western United States, it offers useful information on home design, gardening, travel and camping.

In its online shop [shop.sunset.com] it reflects such themes and honors its Western roots with a handsome collection of gift items. Here’s just a small sampling!

Clockwise from top: Sunset cover mugs, $14.99; Sunset tote, $17.99; Sunset Western trout poster, $25; personalized beer caddy cooler, $49.

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Clockwise from above: Sunset magazine cover jigsaw puzzle, $19.95; monogrammed messenger bag, $59.99; Fisher blacksmithing garden cultivator and hand trowel, $59.99 and $62.99, respectively; Sunset garden flag with stand, $31.98; personalized bamboo BBQ set, $59.99.

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GALL’S LAST STAND

A

fter the Great Sioux War of 1876–77 Sitting Bull and other Lakota leaders, including his trusted lieutenant Gall, sought sanctuary with their followers in Canada. Life up north was indeed better. Spared the wrath of the U.S. Army, the Sioux instead dealt peacefully with the sympathetic Major James Morrow Walsh, an inspector for the North-West Mounted Police. The buffalo hunting was better, too, for a while. But their Canadian exile was never intended to be permanent, and in 1880 Walsh’s replacement put more pressure on the Sioux refugees to recross the border to their homeland.

Gall was the first to return south to Montana Territory. That fall he led his Hunkpapas into camp across the Missouri River from the Poplar River Agency. Soon joining them was Spotted Eagle’s Sans Arc band, which swelled the Indian camp to more than 70 lodges. Mindful of earlier Lakota resistance, the Army sent in reinforcements, and in January 1881 the parties faced off in a little-remembered encounter known as the Battle of Poplar River.

Known to American soldiers as the “Fighting Cock of the Sioux,” Gall lost two wives and three children when the 7th U.S. Cavalry under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer attacked the large Indian village at the Little Bighorn River on June 25, 1876. Enraged, he sought vengeance. “It made my heart bad,” he later remarked. “After that I killed all my enemies with the hatchet.” He showed steady leadership in the subsequent battle (though how much leadership is still debated), played a role in stampeding the horses troopers were holding in reserve and helped wipe out Custer’s immediate command.

The fight was far from over for Major Marcus Reno and the remnants of his command, who forted up atop a hill through the following day. On June 27 they witnessed the breakup of the Indian camp as the victorious Sioux and Northern Cheyennes withdrew southeast up the Little Bighorn River valley. The logistics of sustaining a large encampment—including food, sanitation and fodder for their pony herd—and the approach from the north of a large column under Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry had convinced the Indians to leave the field. Some filtered back to their agencies to 36 WILD WEST

become what the U.S. government considered “good Indians.”

For others the war continued.

On November 25 Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie and 11 companies of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th cavalry regiments surprised the Northern Cheyenne camp of Dull Knife and Little Wolf on the Red Fork of the Powder River. In a clash best known as the Dull Knife Fight the troopers drove off the Cheyennes and destroyed their 200-lodge village, capturing both their pony herd and winter food store. Those who surrendered were ultimately exiled south to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) to live with their cousins the Southern Cheyennes.

Others fled to the camp of the vaunted Lakota warrior Crazy Horse on the Tongue River, where on Jan. 8, 1877, they fought a mixed force of infantry, cavalry and artillery under Colonel Nelson A. Miles in the Battle of Wolf Mountain.

Though considered a tactical draw, the battle demonstrated the Army would go to any lengths in its pursuit of the remaining free-roaming Northern Plains Indians. On May 6 Crazy Horse led nearly 1,000 Indians to the Red Cloud Agency near Fort Robinson, Neb., to surrender. A day later and some 250 miles to the northwest in Montana Territory the tenacious Miles and his 471-man command—Companies B and H of the 5th Infantry; Companies E, F, G and H of the 22nd Infantry; and Companies F, G, H and L of the 2nd Cavalry—caught up with Lame Deer and his Minneconjou Sioux followers on the Little Muddy Creek, a tributary of Rosebud Creek. Amid an attempted parley shooting broke out, and Lame Deer was among the first casualties of the pitched battle that followed.

The victorious soldiers destroyed the Indian camp.

In the aftermath the Hunkpapas under Sitting Bull and Gall and the Sans Arcs under Spotted Eagle fled to the Cypress Hills in southwestern Saskatchewan, Canada. Major Walsh welcomed the Sioux, provided they not make war with their traditional enemies the Crees. The British Commonwealth government in Ottawa, however, would not supply them with rations, let alone a reservation. The refugees were to fend for themselves.

Meanwhile, south of the border the Army kept busy building and garrisoning forts in Montana Territory. Con-

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NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Returning from exile in Canada in late 1880, the Hunkpapa Sioux leader briefly faced down soldiers on the Poplar River in Montana Territory

By Terry Halden

NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

A Lot of Gall

The Lakota war leader excelled in the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn and didn’t surrender for another five years.

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Soldiers at Fort Keogh in 1882

In December 1880 the Army dispatched Major Guido Ilges and 185 men from this Montana Territory post to Camp Poplar River.

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SITTING BULL

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TOP: COURTESY TERRY HALDEN; ABOVE: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

SPOTTED EAGLE

TOP AND FAR LEFT: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2); LEFT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

struction had started in the immediate aftermath of Custer’s 1876 defeat with the Tongue River Cantonment, at the confluence of the Tongue and Yellowstone rivers. In 1878 a new garrison was established a mile west and renamed Fort Keogh after Captain Myles Keogh, who had died with Custer on the Little Bighorn. Miles City, named for the officer then busy subjugating the Northern Plains Indians, sprouted up around the fort. In the spring of 1877, at the confluence of the Little Bighorn and Bighorn rivers, the Army built a garrison initially referred to as Post No. 2 but soon renamed Fort Custer. That summer the Army established Fort Missoula on land now within the city limits of Missoula. Fort Assinniboine, near present-day Havre, was built in 1879, and Fort Maginnis, east of present-day Lewistown, followed in 1880. Supplying all five of these Montana Territory forts was Fort Buford, which the Army had established in 1866 at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers in far northwestern Dakota Territory (presentday North Dakota).

The Poplar River Agency—which would grow into the present-day 2,094,000-acre Fort Peck Indian Reservation—traces its roots to 1871, when the government bought the existing Durfee & Peck Co. trading post at the confluence of the Poplar and Missouri rivers. After a particularly devastating spring flood in 1877, the agency moved up the Poplar more than a mile north of the Missouri (site of the present-day tribal offices and the town of Poplar).

According to the 1880 annual report of the commissioner of Indian Affairs, the agency comprised the agent’s house, employees’ cottages, a warehouse, schoolhouse, slaughterhouse, carpenter shop, blacksmith shop, cattle-scales house, icehouse and root cellar. Nathan S. Porter was

Montana’s Poplar River

TOP: COURTESY TERRY HALDEN; ABOVE: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

TOP AND FAR LEFT: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY (2); LEFT: DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

Below is a period diagram of the Poplar River Agency.

In November 1880 Gall camped south of the agency, near the confluence of the Poplar (above, which flows north to south) and the Missouri (which flows west to east).

the agent from July 6, 1879 to July 13, 1883. Traders Leighton & Jordan operated a large store, stables and a corral, and Charles Aubery was erecting a nearby trading post. The 6,200 resident Indians comprised mainly Assiniboines and Yankton Sioux with a handful of Santee and Teton Sioux.

According to Porter, none had participated in the Great Sioux War, though they may have supplied the fighting bands with arms and ammunition.

In 1877, while fleeing north from the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas had tried unsuccessfully to get needed supplies from the agency.

A few stayed and married agency Sioux, while small groups of Santees and Tetons joined Sitting Bull for the onward trek into Canada.

Also fleeing the Army in 1877 were Nez Perces under Chief Joseph, who like the Sioux hoped to find refuge in Canada (see related story, P. 50).

As the Nez Perces paused to rest in the Bear Paw Mountains, just 40 miles from the border, Colonel Miles raced west from the Tongue River Cantonment to intercept them, leading to the September 30–October 5 Battle of Bear Paw. While Joseph and most of his followers surrendered, some Nez Perces managed to escape the melee and join Sitting Bull’s camp in Saskatchewan. That created more overcrowding and a food shortage that

forced Sitting Bull to send hunting parties south of the “Medicine Line” in search of buffalo.

In the months that followed, Miles led regular patrols into the gently rolling borderland between Forts Assinniboine and Buford to scour for free-roaming Indians. On July 17, 1879, his advance scouts happened across a 300-strong Hunkpapa hunting party south of the Milk River (near present-day Saco, Mont.). A detachment under Lieutenant William Philo Clark pursued the Hunkpapas, who sent the women (the skinners) and children across the river, while the warriors turned to meet the outnumbered detachment. Clark was in trouble until Miles and the rest of his command rode to the rescue. In the running fight troopers managed to kill only a few warriors, but the Hunkpapas lost most of their food before crossing safely into Canada.

Thus the food shortage persisted, as did the animosity of the naturally suspicious Crees. One by one, family by family and, finally, small group by small group Sioux refugees drifted south to settle on the Poplar River Agency and apply for rations. Many of these veterans of the Little Bighorn bore rifles. In late summer 1880 an alarmed Agent Porter fled his post for Fort Buford.

To maintain order, General Terry ordered two companies of the 11th Infantry under Captain Ogden B. Read from Fort Custer to the agency.

That October, just south of the namesake river, Read’s men established Camp Poplar River.

Within weeks Gall and his Hunkpapas and then Spotted Eagle and his Sans Arcs went into camp across the Missouri from the agency. The Sioux village boasted more than 70 lodges milling with armed warriors.

Understandably overwhelmed, Captain Read sought help. In relief the Army dispatched Major Guido N. Ilges north from Fort Keogh with Companies A, B, C, F and G of the 5th Infantry. Riding JUNE 2021

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mules, the five officers and 180 soldiers made the nearly 200-mile trek to Camp Poplar River in five days, arriving in mid-December 1880.

A supply train escorted by cavalry from Fort Keogh arrived in time for Christmas. Ilges’ combined force numbered some 400 men.

Noting the influx of soldiers across the river, Gall sought a council with the soldier chief.

The parties met on December 31. Gall likely believed he was negotiating from a position of strength, as he had nearly 400 warriors at his command, while Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas were rumored to have crossed the border and camped nearby. He demanded Ilges allow his band to remain on the Missouri for the time being, keep their rifles and horses for hunting, and be supplied with rations. Ilges orders called for the complete disarmament and surrender of the Hunkpapas and their transport to Fort Buford.

His hands tied, the major presented the terms and gave Gall three days to respond.

On Jan. 2, 1881, the deadline having passed with no action, Ilges was compelled to act. Splitting his force, the major crossed the frozen Missouri with his command west of the Indian camp and had Read and his men cross the river farther east to trap Gall between them. Unlike Custer at the Little Bighorn, however, Ilges brought two fieldpieces—a Hotchkiss light mountain gun and a 3-inch ordnance rifle—which he put to good effect. Arriving outside the Indian village first, the major directed his gunners to lob a few shells into the nearby woods as a show of force. When that failed to produce results, he ordered a search of the seemingly abandoned camp, prompting 40 WILD WEST

Up north Major Walsh had taken long overdue leave, promising his friend Sitting Bull he would return on Oct. 15, 1880. Replacing him in the interim was Major Leif N.F. Crozier, who was instructed to remain on good

GALL

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MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

In 1881 Ilges, seated at center in a later portrait, cowed Gall’s Lakotas with the help of fieldpieces.

TOP: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The Officer Who Forced Gall’s Surrender

a brief firefight in which one warrior was killed. After regrouping with the newly arrived Read, Ilges ordered the shelling of the village itself.

In 10 minutes, the “screaming missiles,” as the Helena Weekly Herald described them, killed seven more Indians and wounded several others.

That was enough for Gall, who promptly surrendered on Ilges’ terms.

Thus ended the “battle,” with no soldier casualties.

Ilges had his troops round up the Indian ponies and confiscate all the guns they could find—mainly ancient muskets, as the Hunkpapas carefully hid their repeating rifles. Within days the major arranged for wagon transportation to Fort Buford for the women, children and elderly, while the warriors, including Gall, were forced to march the 65 miles through deep snow under escort. It took them four days. On May 26 the Army had Gall’s followers and other Sioux captives shipped down the Missouri on the steamers Helena, Far West and General Sherman to Fort Yates, on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in Dakota Territory (straddling the border of what eight years later would become South and North Dakota).

The troops at Fort Buford kept the pick of the Indian pony herd, and the Army auctioned off the rest to help pay for expenses. The only Sioux remaining at large in Canada were Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapas.

MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

TOP: MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

terms with the Sioux exiles but persuade them to return home. The disappearance of the northern bison herds had already prompted many Hunkpapas to head south for the rumored supplies on the reservations. When Gall left in late October, Sitting Bull stayed put, awaiting the return of Walsh, who had never lied to him. What the chief didn’t know was that the Canadian government thought the major had gotten too familiar with the Sioux and had had Walsh reassigned, making Crozier his permanent replacement.

The Americans also stepped up the pressure on the Sioux. Weeks earlier Major David H. Brotherton, the commander of Fort Buford, had sent scout Edward H. Allison north in a bid to persuade Sitting Bull to surrender.

Known to the Sioux as “Fish,” Allison had a Hunkpapa wife and was fluent in Lakota. “As an interpreter,” the Helena Weekly Herald noted, “there are but few, if any, who equal Allison.” He was the one who’d persuaded Gall to return south. In mid-December, facing another hard winter and with his friend Walsh a definite no-show, Sitting Bull finally heeded Allison’s pleas to surrender, though the chief planned to make one last buffalo hunt along the Milk. By Christmas he and his followers were encamped at its mouth on the Missouri, some 80 miles upriver from Gall’s camp.

A month later Ilges had his full complement of soldiers back at Camp Poplar River. Concerned about Sitting Bull’s proximity, he telegraphed Captain Richard L. Morris, his counterpart at Fort Assinniboine, to send troops east in a pincer movement against the Indians. Morris set out with four companies of the 18th Infantry and two companies of the 2nd Cavalry—14 officers and 214 men in all. The men were equipped for a winter campaign, with buffalo overcoats, fur caps, Artic overshoes, fur gloves, Sibley tents, stoves and extra blankets. By then, however, Sitting Bull was long gone from the Milk, having heard about the shelling of Gall’s camp. He’d also been told his daughter Many Horses, who had already returned stateside, was in irons in Fort Yates, which wasn’t true.

With a bad case of the jitters, the chief continually moved his camp to confuse his pursuers. Meanwhile, he wavered, one day resolving to surrender, only to change his mind. And so it went.

On Feb. 10, 1881, Ilges and two companies of the 5th Infantry marched 2 miles west of the Poplar to the camp of Yankton Chief Black Catfish, whom the major believed was either hiding Sitting Bull or knew where the latter was camped. A search turned up 30 Hunkpapas. When Black Catfish sought to parley, Ilges had the chief and 49 of his followers arrested and taken back to camp.

About that time the Army decided Sitting Bull was no longer a threat.

If he wanted to stay out and let his dozens of remaining followers freeze or starve to death, that was fine, but all efforts to bring him in would cease.

Military headquarters at St. Paul ordered Ilges and his troops to abandon Camp Poplar River and return to Fort Keogh for further orders. As the troops were packing to leave, the ice on the Missouri River broke up early, and a “sea of angry waters,” as the Helena Weekly Herald described it, flooded the camp. The floodwaters also inundated the agency, drowning several Indians and leaving their corpses lodged in the treetops.

Not until summer did Sitting Bull send a nephew south to Fort Buford to arrange a formal surrender. On July 19, 1881, the chief himself finally rode to the fort on a scrawny pony. He wore a dirty, tattered shirt, was wrapped in a ragged blanket and had a scarf bound low around his head to cover an infected eye. The next morning Sitting Bull had his 6-year-old son, Crow Foot, hand the chief’s rifle to Brotherton as a token of his surrender. After receiving medical attention from the post surgeon, the chief was sent downriver to join his daughter, Gall and the rest of his tribe

Gall’s Grave in Wakpala, S.D.

The Hunkpapa warrior (c. 1840–94) was known in Lakota as Pizi, or “Goes in the Middle,” for his tendency to fight at the center of any action.

at Standing Rock. Wherever the boat docked, curious townspeople thronged to see him.

Concerned he might stir up trouble among the surrendered bands, the Army soon transferred Sitting Bull with his followers downriver to Fort Randall, on the southern Dakota border, where they spent the next 20 months. In 1883 they were allowed to return to Standing Rock.

By then Gall had fully embraced his identity as an agency Indian, in no small part because he got along well with the Canadian-American agent, Major James McLaughlin. He would become a dedicated farmer and serve as a judge on the tribal court. Sitting Bull did not adjust to reservation life as easily. After a stint touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, he spent years grappling with McLaughlin over land rights and other issues. Defiant to the end, the chief was killed amid the Ghost Dance troubles while being arrested

by Standing Rock’s Indian police on Dec. 15, 1890. The battle turned massacre at Wounded Knee followed on December 29. Gall, later described by biographer Robert Larson and others as a “culture broker” (see Larson’s “Gall: ‘The Fighting Cock of the Sioux’” online at Historynet. com), died on Dec. 5, 1894, from either heart failure or an overdose of a fat-reducing remedy.

Wild West contributor Terry Halden, based in Lethbridge, Alberta, is a retired claims investigator who now researches and writes about Western history. For further reading he suggests Gall: Lakota War Chief, by Robert W. Larson, and Sitting Bull: The Life and Times of an American Patriot,

by Robert M. Utley.

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Alias Cherokee Bill

Born Crawford Goldsby at Fort Concho, Texas, on Feb. 8, 1876, the Indian Territory outlaw was of mixed blood. Opposite: Bill poses with his mother, Ellen, who was half-black, one-quarter Cherokee and one-quarter white.

OPPOSITE: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; THIS PAGE: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

I

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THE SHORT, VIOLENT LIFE OF CHEROKEE BILL

OPPOSITE: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; THIS PAGE: OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

I

Hanged at age 20, the mixed-race freedman born Crawford Goldsby killed and robbed enough men to rate as the most dangerous outlaw in Indian Territory

By Art T. Burton

ndian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) was home to the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole—and living among them were former slaves and the descendants of slaves. Crawford Goldsby was one such freedman, more noteworthy than most after garnering national press for his crimes as the outlaw Cherokee Bill. A descendant of slaves on both his mother’s and father’s side, he was born in 1876 a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, the tribe having freed its slaves in June 1863 (five months after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation) and granted full citizenship to its freedmen three years later.

Indian Territory had more than its share of outlaws—black, white, red and mixed-race. In the 1880s the most infamous outlaw in the dangerous territory was a Creek freedman named Dick Glass.

In the 1890s the title belonged to the Cherokee freedman

Goldsby. Arguably, the only outlaws in the history of Indian Territory to rival his notoriety would be the Cherokees Ned Christie and Henry Starr.

Still, unlike another notable short-lived outlaw, Billy the Kid, this Bill went largely unremembered and is scarcely mentioned in print or on-screen.

Whereas visitors to present-day New Mexico can find many reminders of Billy the Kid, travel Oklahoma today and you might never know Cherokee Bill existed.

Crawford Goldsby was born at Fort Concho, Texas, on Feb. 8, 1876.

His father, George Goldsby, was a lightskinned mulatto who had claimed Mexican, Sioux and white ancestry but later admitted that wasn’t true. Able to pass as white or black, George served with the Union during the Civil War and on the postwar frontier as a buffalo soldier with the 10th U.S. Cavalry (one of six all-black regiments, JUNE 2021

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later consolidated to four). Crawford’s mother, Ellen (née Beck) Goldsby, was half-black, onequarter Cherokee and one-quarter white. When Ellen met George in 1872, she was serving as the laundress of Troop D, 10th Cavalry, at Fort Gibson, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory.

George Goldsby left his hometown of Selma, Ala., in May 1863 as a hired servant for Confederate Captain Ducalion “Duke” Nall of Company D, 8th Alabama Infantry. Two months later, in the confused aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, George made his way north to Harrisburg, Pa., where he hired out as a teamster for a Union Army quartermaster unit. He later served under an alias with the 21st Pennsylvania Cavalry, which was at Appomattox, Va., when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered. After mustering out as a corporal in Harrisburg, he returned south to Selma, where former Rebels who’d spotted him in Union uniform at Lee’s surrender threatened to lynch him.

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In 1893 the Cherokee Nation sold the Cherokee Outlet to the federal government for $8.5 million, of which each eligible person on the tribal roll would receive a payment of $265.70. Payments were made to citizens at selected towns. In June 1894 the Cook brothers and Goldsby decided to claim their share of the land payment—but not in person, given their outlaw status. An acquaintance of the Cooks, Effie Crittenden, who managed the Halfway House stagecoach station, 14 miles west of Tahlequah, agreed to pick up their shares when she next went to town.

The men gave her a written request for their money.

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GILCREASE MUSEUM

In the spring of 1894 Cherokee Bill took up with the mixed-blood Cook brothers—Bill (pictured) and Jim—and the Cook Gang was soon terrorizing folks in Indian Territory.

COWAN’S AUCTIONS

Cooking up Trouble

George instead took his chances in Indian Territory, joining the 10th Cavalry at Fort Gibson in 1867. By 1872 he’d been promoted to sergeant major and met his future wife. Their first child, Georgia, was born later that year at the post. Two years later, at Fort Sill, came son Luther. In 1876, after George had transferred to Texas, Crawford was born at Fort Concho. A year later the youngest Goldsby, Clarence, was born. Fate soon disrupted the growing family.

At a saloon in neighboring San Angelo in 1878 drunken white cowboys and hunters engaged black troopers in a fight with racial overtones that left a hunter and a trooper dead and three others wounded. The local captain of the Texas Rangers determined Goldsby had granted the troopers access to the loaded weapons they took to town. Rather than remain holed up on the post, the sergeant hightailed it the following spring from Fort Concho—perhaps with the blessing of his commanding officer, Colonel Benjamin Grierson —and never again served in uniform. Left behind were Ellen and the children. She remained in the employ of the Army and returned with the children to Fort Gibson, where elderly friend “Aunty Amanda” Foster raised them.

After deserting the Army and his family, 35-year-old George Goldsby moved to Arkansas, changed his name to William Scott and in November 1880 married Effie Amanda Henshaw, a white 16-year-old. The Scotts ran off to Kansas and had six children of their own.

In 1883 Ellen sent 7-year-old Crawford and big sister Georgia to live with their father in Kansas. When Crawford was 12, his father returned to Indian Territory, and the boy went to live in Fort Gibson with his mother, who soon remarried. Ellen’s husband, William Lynch, was a buffalo soldier turned town barber.

Crawford did not get along with his stepfather, so at age 15 he went to live with his recently married sister and her husband, Mose Brown, near Nowata, Cherokee Nation. Turns out, Goldsby didn’t get along with Brown either, so he returned to Fort Gibson, moved in with Cherokee freedman Bud Buffington and started cowboying for local small ranches.

In early spring 1894 18-year-old Goldsby had his first recorded run-in with the law. While attending a dance in Old Town, the black section of Fort Gibson, he came to the aid of his brother Clarence, who was being bullied by black Cherokee tough Jake Lewis. For his trouble the protective older brother received a severe beating from Lewis and friends. The next day Crawford caught up with Jake at a Fort Gibson stable and shot him twice with a pistol. Leaving him for dead, Goldsby mounted a horse and rode deep into the Cherokee Nation. Lewis would recover from his wounds, and Cherokee authorities put out a warrant on Goldsby for attempted murder. Evading arrest, the fugitive took up with brothers Bill and Jim Cook, mixed-blood Cherokees he’d met while cowboying. More trouble followed.

Grab and Grin

GILCREASE MUSEUM

COWAN’S AUCTIONS

Cherokee Bill, center, seems oddly unperturbed as he poses with captors in Nowata, Cherokee Nation, while onlookers react as if he were a circus attraction.

Effie left for Tahlequah on June 15. Coincidentally, her estranged husband, Cherokee policeman Dick Crittenden, was guarding the payment and read the names on the request she handed the treasurer. He knew two of the men had outstanding warrants—Goldsby for attempted murder and Bill Cook for larceny—and naturally assumed they’d be at the Halfway House to collect their money.

Alerted by Dick Crittenden, Cherokee Nation Deputy Sheriff Ellis Rattling Gourd and a sevenman posse trailed Effie back to the Halfway House on June 17. Goldsby was waiting beneath a tree outside the stage station that Sunday evening when he spotted approaching riders and recognized Cherokee Policeman Sequoyah Houston’s white horse. Retrieving a Winchester rifle from his saddle, he dashed inside to warn the Cook brothers and prepare for a fight.

Indeed, an intense gunfight soon broke out, during which Houston was killed, at which point

Gourd and four of his possemen fled. That left brothers Dick and Zeke Crittenden to face the danger alone. The Crittendens took cover in an adjacent smokehouse, from which Dick wounded Jim Cook with a shotgun blast. Still able to work his Winchester, Jim provided cover fire for brother Bill and Goldsby to reach their horses. Jim then jumped up behind his mounted brother, and the three young outlaws rode off into the dusk. On learning of Houston’s death, a larger posse rode out from Tahlequah to question Effie Crittenden. Asked flatly if Goldsby had been in the fight, she replied, “No, it was not Crawford Goldsby, but it was Cherokee Bill.” Goldsby had previously used the moniker, but after the Halfway House fight he’d be forever known as Cherokee Bill. Even mother Ellen took to calling him that.

Cherokee Bill and the Cook brothers fled west into the Creek Nation, but Deputy U.S. Marshal John B. McGill caught up with the outlaws near the town of Muskogee. After a brief gunfight he captured Jim Cook, but Cherokee Bill and Bill Cook got away. Tried for Houston’s murder, Jim was sentenced to eight years in the Cherokee National Jail at Tahlequah.

By the summer of 1894 18-year-old Cherokee Bill stood 6 feet tall with broad shoulders and great strength. Once asked his ethnicity, he replied quixotically, “I am one-half white, one-half Indian and one-half Negro.”

With a shot from his Winchester, Bill boasted, he could burst a squirrel’s eye, as far as he could see, every time. He also claimed he could shoot accurately with his rifle at waist level or brace its butt against his leg and work the lever so fast the Winchester sounded like a sewing machine JUNE 2021

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(much like Chuck Connors’ fictional character Lucas McCain in the Western TV series The Rifleman). He claimed no accuracy with the latter method, but did it to scare opponents in gunfights.

Not long after the Halfway House fight Cherokee Bill and Bill Cook became co-leaders of the Cook Gang, an equal opportunity band comprising white, black, Indian and mixed-blood outlaws. The gang fluctuated in size, but the original members were Indian Territory freedmen Cherokee Bill, Lon Gordon, George Sanders and Henry “Texas Jack Starr” Munson; mixedblood Cherokees Cook, Sam “Verdigris Kid” McWilliams and Jim French; and white rowdies Curt Dayson, Jess “Buck” Snyder and Elmer 46 WILD WEST

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RIGHT: ART T. BURTON COLLECTION; BOTTOM: BONHAMS

In 2017 Cowan’s Auctions sold Bill’s hat (despite its worn band and holes in the crown) with supporting photos for $2,880.

TOP: GILCREASE MUSEUM; LEFT: COWAN’S AUCTIONS

Young Man’s Old Hat

“Chicken” Lucas. Their crimes Cherokee Payday at Fort Gibson Born a citizen of the Cherokee came swift and fast.

Nation, Bill lived at Fort Gibson, At 10 p.m. on July 5 Cherokee Indian Territory, in his youth, and Bill and Texas Jack robbed Dick his family held his funeral there.

Richards, the Kansas & Arkansas Valley Railway station agent at Nowata, Cherokee Nation. When Richards reached for his pistol, Bill shot him dead. On July 18 seven members of the gang robbed the Wells Fargo express agent at the station in Red Fork, Creek Nation. Not content with their haul, they boarded the southbound St. Louis–San Francisco passenger train. Overpowering the agent aboard, they ransacked the express car but came up empty.

The most brazen crime committed by Cherokee Bill and cohorts came on July 30, when the gang robbed the Lincoln County Bank in Chandler, Oklahoma Territory. During the robbery Bill remained on the sidewalk as a lookout. Barber J.B. Mitchell was sitting outside his shop nearly opposite the bank and cried out, “The Daltons are in town!” and, “They’re robbing the bank!” Bill told him to shut up. When Mitchell rose from his chair,

RIGHT: ART T. BURTON COLLECTION; BOTTOM: BONHAMS

TOP: GILCREASE MUSEUM; LEFT: COWAN’S AUCTIONS

presumably to object, the outlaw fired one round from his Winchester, killing the barber.

All hell broke loose after that, the gang firing as many as 100 shots while townspeople shot back, killing one of the bandit’s horses. In their haste the outlaws missed $300 in bills sitting in plain view on a counter and got away with only $107.50. A posse led by Sheriff Claude Parker aggressively pursued the fugitives into the timber, where the parties exchanged some 200 shots in a 15-minute gun battle. The posse killed another horse and captured the wounded Chicken Lucas, but the others escaped into the hills. Taken to the federal jail at Guthrie, Lucas identified his cohorts as Cherokee Bill, Cook, Gordon and Texas Jack.

While the gang laid low a while, it was far from finished. At 10 p.m. on September 14, in the Creek Nation capital of Okmulgee, Cherokee Bill, Cook, Thurman “Skeeter” Baldwin and Buck Snyder tied up their horses outside Parkinson & Co., the largest store in town. Even at that late hour the busy store remained open. Entering with guns drawn, the outlaws demanded whatever cash was at hand. The employees handed over $450.

This time the gang quietly mounted up and left as cool and calm as when they’d arrived. Passersby were sparse, as most of the citizens were attending a stickball game a few miles south of town.

On the evening of September 28, after crossing the Arkansas River on the ferry from Muskogee to Fort Gibson, Cherokee Nation, a half dozen gang members relieved a passing traveler of $19. The next day the highwaymen held up a wealthy Cherokee named Ed Ayers, taking $120.

Ayers identified the bandits as Cherokee Bill, Cook, French, Baldwin, Snyder and the Verdigris Kid. But they were in town for even bigger game.

On the night of October 5 they rode into Fort Gibson, dragged the Kansas & Arkansas Valley station agent from his home, escorted him to the depot and made him open the safe. Inside was $300 in cash. As the gang rode off, they fired a flurry of shots to cow anyone planning to intervene.

The ploy worked, and no one was hurt.

On October 9 the gang split forces, some members going with Cherokee Bill, others with Cook. Bill and followers promptly resumed their rampage in the Cherokee Nation, that night robbing the American Express Co. agent, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (aka Katy) Railroad station manager and passengers at the depot in Chouteau. On October 20 the gang sank to a new low. Throwing a trackside switch outside Coretta, they sent a Katy passenger train careening into a line of boxcars on a siding. Miraculously, only two passengers were injured. After firing their guns in the air for effect, the bandits relieved the express agent of $500, then went methodically through the cars, robbing passengers of their money and valuables.

On the night of October 22, some 60 miles to the north along the Verdigris River, Bill and three others hit the small town of Watova, robbing

IKE ROGERS

two stores and the post office. Locals said Bill took the first storekeeper as a hostage to the second store, then took the two storekeepers to the post office. Within hours Bill and company repeated the stunt in Talala, 7 miles to the south, boldly robbing each store in turn before riding out the far end of town.

By month’s end the gang had parted ways for keeps. Snyder and Baldwin went with Cook, but the rest of the outlaws stayed with Cherokee Bill, who seemed on a roll. His luck was about to run out.

Just before 1 p.m. on November 9 Cherokee Bill and the Verdigris Kid rode north into Lenapah, a town up near the Kansas border. Dismounting in front of the H.C. Shufeldt & Son store, which in that small town doubled as the post office, they unlimbered their Winchesters and entered. After lining up the customers against a wall, the bandits forced the store owner to open the safe and then robbed his patrons

The Rifleman

Cherokee Bill claimed to be a deadly rifle shot and could work the lever so fast his Winchester sounded like a sewing machine.

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Letter of the Law

While Bill’s fate was no shock, that he merited a trading card in 1966 is somewhat surprising.

in turn. The lucrative haul tallied $600 in cash, including post office funds, and another $200 from the customers. As Bill stepped back to the storeroom to pilfer rifle cartridges, he passed a side window.

Peering back at him from a restaurant across the way was a curious, albeit unlucky, painter named Ernest Melton, whom Bill killed instantly with a shot through the eye.

The outlaws then mounted up and rode out of town.

After that robbery-killing the federal court at Fort Smith, Ark., offered a bounty of $250 each for the capture of Bill and fellow gang members, while rewards for him alone totaled $1,300.

U.S. Marshal George Crump and veteran Deputy U.S. Marshals Bill Smith and George Lawson were intent on stopping Indian Territory’s 48 WILD WEST

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FORT SMITH NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE (2)

In the Cards

most notorious outlaw. Smith and Lawson soon learned the gang leader was sweet on a young woman named Maggie Glass, a cousin of Ike Rogers, a Cherokee freedman and former deputy U.S. marshal. The lawmen confided in Rogers, who arranged to have Cherokee Bill over during his niece’s next visit. Rogers asked friend and fellow Cherokee freedman Clint Scales to assist with the capture.

Arriving at the Rogers home on Jan. 29, 1895, Cherokee Bill spent the better part of the evening with Maggie, then played cards with Rogers and Scales till 4 a.m. The wary outlaw kept his back to a wall and his Winchester across his lap the whole time. When Ike and Bill finally retired to a shared bed for a few hours of shuteye, the cautious outlaw kept one hand on his host, the other on his rifle. After breakfast Rogers sent Maggie to a neighbor’s house to buy a couple of chickens, then he looked for an opening.

When Bill leaned in toward the fireplace to light a cigarette, Rogers saw his opportunity and struck the outlaw over the head with the poker. His wife secured the rifle. Bill was stunned but not out, however, and he wrestled on the floor with Rogers and Scales for 20 minutes before the friends managed to subdue and handcuff their quarry.

Taken by train to the federal jail at Fort Smith, the shackled Cherokee Bill soon appeared before Isaac C. Parker, the notorious “Hanging Judge,” who deemed him the worst criminal ever to come before his bench. Indicted for the murder of Ernest Melton, Bill pleaded not guilty and was represented by defense attorney J. Warren Reed. The jury apparently didn’t buy his arguments, as after a two-day trial, on February 26–27, it found Bill guilty. Parker sentenced him to death by hanging and set his execution date for June 25. Citing 14 errors in the trial proceedings, Reed appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for a new trial, and Judge Parker issued a stay of execution until it could hear the matter.

On the night of July 26, wielding a smuggled-in revolver and having jammed paper into the mechanism used to lock the row of cells, Cherokee Bill attempted a jailbreak. Jumping from his cell, he got the upper hand on guard Lawrence Keating and turnkey Campbell Eoff. When Bill told Keating, “Throw up your hands and give up that gun,” the guard

TOP: ART T. BRURTON COLLECTION ; LEFT: B&C COLLECTIBLES

In May 1896 U.S. Solicitor General Holmes Conrad wrote to ask U.S. Attorney James Read in Fort Smith, Ark., whether Bill had been executed. He had been.

A Spectacle of Himself

FORT SMITH NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE (2)

TOP: ART T. BRURTON COLLECTION ; LEFT: B&C COLLECTIBLES

Initially sentenced to hang on June 25, 1895, Bill was ultimately executed at Fort Smith, Ark., on March 17, 1896, drawing a crowd.

instead made a grab for his pistol and was shot dead for his trouble.

Meanwhile, the unarmed Eoff managed to bolt back up the corridor and lock down the cellblock. A 15-minute gunfight ensued with no casualties but also no resolution. Henry Starr, in jail on a murder charge, then offered to talk down his fellow prisoner. The guards agreed to let him try, and it worked—Cherokee Bill surrendered his revolver. But now he faced a second murder charge.

On August 8 Cherokee Bill again appeared in chains before Judge Parker, to stand trial for Keating’s murder. By day’s end the jury returned a guilty verdict, and four days later Parker sentenced Bill to death by hanging on September 10. His defense again filed an appeal, but the Supreme Court upheld the judgment of the lower court, and Parker set the new execution date for March 17, 1896.

According to the Muskogee Phoenix, on his execution day Cherokee Bill showed no sign of fear when led up the steps to the gallows. Asked if he had anything to say, the condemned replied: “I came not here to talk but to die. Proceed with the killing business.” Moments later he got his wish.

Cherokee Bill’s family brought his body home to Fort Gibson, where they held a wake and funeral in the old commissary building. He is buried near fellow outlaws Jim French and Sam “Verdigris Kid” McWilliams in the Cherokee National Cemetery, since renamed the Citizens Cemetery. In his brief criminal career the young outlaw is believed to have killed between six and 13 men, though no one knows for sure.

We do know he was one dangerous hombre, and it is hard to disagree with noted Western historian Glenn Shirley, who called Cherokee Bill “the toughest of them all.”

LAWRENCE KEATING

Wild West contributor Art Burton is a retired history teacher living in Illinois. He is the author of the 2020 biography Cherokee Bill: Black Cowboy—Indian Outlaw (reviewed online at Historynet.com), which is recommended for further reading along with his 1991 book Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves and Glenn Shirley’s Marauders of the Indian Nations: The Bill Cook Gang and Cherokee Bill.

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Forty Miles Shy of the Canadian Border

On Oct. 5, 1877, in the Bear Paw Mountains of Montana Territory, Chief Joseph surrenders his Nez Perce band after a 110-day fighting retreat, as depicted in a painting by Mort Künstler. General Oliver Otis Howard had run him to ground.

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WESTWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIER General O.O. Howard found grace and lost an arm during the Civil War before heading west to confront Apache leader Cochise and Nez Perce Chief Joseph

O

By Mike Coppock

ne would think losing an arm would be a turning point in one’s life. But by the time a surgeon amputated his shattered right arm after the Battle of Fair Oaks on June 1, 1862, Union Brig.

Gen. Oliver Otis Howard had already experienced two life-changing events, both while in the Army. Those experiences inspired his nickname and reputation as the “Christian General.”

The 31-year-old general officer would go on to found namesake Howard University in Washington, D.C., negotiate peace with Apache leader Cochise in Arizona Territory and help chase down Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce followers in Montana Territory. Howard would later quarrel with fellow general officer Nelson A. Miles over credit for having captured Joseph in October 1877. But in June 1862 Miles, then a 22-year-old lieutenant colonel, rode into battle by Howard’s side at Fair Oaks, hours before an Army surgeon sawed off the wounded general’s mangled limb. Howard evidently did not lose his sense of humor along with his right arm. When Brig.

Gen. Philip Kearny—who had lost his left arm to grapeshot wounds during the 1846–48 Mexican War—visited Howard the next day, the two joked about shopping for gloves together.

Born in Leeds, Maine, on Nov. 8, 1830, Oliver Otis Howard was only 9 when his father died. At age 19 the young man graduated from Bowdoin College and entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He endured harsh peer discipline and hazing at the academy, notably from classmate G.W. Custis Lee, eldest son of

West Point Superintendent Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee. The West Point hazing led to fights, but Howard still managed to graduate fourth out of 46 in the Class of 1854 as a brevet second lieutenant of ordnance. (His nemesis, Lee, graduated at the head of the class.) A year later Howard married Elizabeth Waite, with whom he raised seven children.

In 1856, amid the Third Seminole War (1855– 58), the Army ordered the lieutenant and his pregnant wife to Fort Brooke, in Tampa, Fla., where they attended the Methodist Church. On the night of May 31, 1857, Howard experienced a religious awakening. So changed was he that over the next four years he mulled leaving the Army to attend a seminary and become a minister. That plan was derailed when the Southern states seceded and fired on Fort Sumter, and Howard was elected colonel of a regiment of Maine Volunteers.

Howard’s overt Christian mores elicited both pushback and praise. One soldier noted he had “the tone and manner of an itinerant preacher.” His abstinence from alcohol in particular prompted ribbing from former West Point classmates. At one formal dinner, when fellow officers called for a toast, Howard held high a glass of water, shouting, “The only beverage fit for a soldier!” Critics claimed they could not trust a combat officer who did not drink. But no one could argue with his coolness under fire. General William Tecumseh Sherman joked that Howard was able to maintain his composure in combat because the Christian soldier was certain he was bound for Heaven.

CHIEF JOSEPH SURRENDERS BY MORT KÜNSTLER © 1985 MORT KÜNSTLER, INC. MORTKUNSTLER.COM

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In the summer of 1861 Howard was at his headquarters in a northern Virginia farmhouse when a terrified black woman with a toddler in arm sought out the colonel. Admitting she and her child were slaves, she begged for their freedom. Close on her heels was their legal owner, a coarse middle-aged woman in Howard’s recollection, who demanded her property. The colonel was under orders to steer clear of the slavery issue, for fear of alienating the border states. But as the abusive slave owner pressed her case, and the mother stepped up her tearful entreaties, Howard was torn. Wondering how to reconcile his Christian beliefs with his military orders, he had a revelation.

“There’s your property, take it!” he barked.

“But I can’t take it,” the slave owner cried.

“She’s stronger than I.” Howard refused to provide any assistance, and, as expected, the woman was incapable of forcing the healthy young mother back into bondage.

“Somehow that night,” the colonel wrote tongue in cheek, “the slave woman and her child found their way eastward…[and] became free.”

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In weeks to come the Federal Army was swamped with such slaves seeking their freedom.

Though Howard was soon promoted to brigadier general and then major general of Volunteers, his wartime combat record proved spotty.

In early May 1863 at Chancellorsville, Va., Confederate Lt. Gen. Stonewall Jackson outflanked him, placing the Union Army of the Potomac in jeopardy. After Howard’s XI Corps lost some 3,800 men killed, wounded, captured or missing at Gettysburg, Pa., that July, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade replaced him with a junior officer. Derided among peers as “Uh-Oh Howard,” the chastened officer was transferred to the Western theater, beyond the Appalachians, under Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Sherman. For a while his record remained as spotty as it had been in the East. In the cynical appraisal of writer Ambrose Bierce, who served under him, Howard remained a “consummate master of the art of needless defeat.”

After Sherman took Atlanta in July 1864, he appointed fellow West Pointer Howard to command of the Army of the Tennessee. Howard would remain on Sherman’s right flank during his conclusive March to the Sea and through the Carolinas. In his memoirs Sherman commended the Christian General as a commander of “the utmost skill, nicety and precision.”

Howard’s vocal concerns about the thousands of slaves freed in the wake of Sherman’s advance appeared in the latter’s reports to President Abraham Lincoln at a critical moment. Lincoln was already looking past the war and what to do with the estimated 4 million freed black Southerners. A seasoned commander like Maj. Gen. Howard, known for his Christian beliefs, seemed an ideal choice to head up an agency that became known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Sherman had already laid groundwork for the bureau by setting aside tracts of abandoned land in the Caro-

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TOP: UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL; RIGHT: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Major General William Tecumseh Sherman (seated at center) poses for a Civil War portrait with his staff, including O.O. Howard, standing at far left. Howard’s right arm was shattered at the June 1, 1862, Battle of Fair Oaks, Va., and soon thereafter amputated.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

No Armchair Generals

TOP: UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL; RIGHT: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

linas and Sea Islands for cultivation and settlement by freed slaves.

Howard’s appointment as commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau came a month after Lincoln’s April 15, 1865, assassination. Among his first acts was to rush rations to both former slaves and Southern whites, heading off mass starvation.

The bureau oversaw the establishment of schools, courts and medical facilities for freedmen. It also worked tirelessly to help Southern blacks organize themselves. The latter effort made Howard and the bureau political targets.

Not that there weren’t legitimate concerns for which Howard needed to answer. For one, he used bureau funds in part to start up Howard University, which in turn sold him an acre of land at below market value. In addition, thousands of dollars went unaccounted for on the bureau’s ledger books, and Democrats demanded the commissioner pay back the allegedly misappropriated funds. Fortunately for Howard, a subsequent court of Howard the Peacemaker While in Arizona Territory the general spoke with inquiry, held at his insistence, found the general had done his duty and a number of Apache chiefs, including Santos (in this “deserves well of his country.” sketch) and, most famously, Cochise (see bust below).

Inevitably, though, Howard and his bureau fell afoul of Southern Democrat President Andrew Johnson, who wanted to return his beloved Dixie had placed him on earth to be the Moses to the to at least a semblance of its antebellum heyday, a course that eventually Negro,” Crook recalled of Howard. “Having accomplished that mission, he felt satisfied led to his own impeachment. In the meantime, Johnson continually his next mission was with the Indian.” clashed with Howard, whom the president dubbed an “absolute Howard had his work cut out for monarch” of Reconstruction. him, as Americans had been fighting In the fall of 1865 Johnson pardoned the Sea Islands planApaches continually since the Civil tation owners, allowing them to reclaim their lands from the War. His first step was to contact black farmers the bureau had placed on their properties. scout turned overland mail superAdding insult to injury, Johnson ordered Howard to perintendent Tom Jeffords, who was sonally travel to the region and attempt to smooth over on speaking terms with Cochise. the situation with the black landowners. Howard’s brother Then, guided by two young relRowland said Oliver “dreaded it like death.” atives of the chief, Howard, JefThe homesteaders of course first welcomed Howard as a fords and Sladen rode into Coconquering hero, escorting him to a packed meetinghouse chise’s stronghold in the Dragoon on Edisto Island. There the bureau commissioner shared Mountains. Skeptical fellow offithe bad news. “Why do you take away our lands?” one man cers mocked it as a suicide mission. shouted. “You give them to our all-time enemies! That is It was certainly an act of genuine not right!” Howard sought to reach a mutually satisfactory courage, as Cochise was the most agreement, arranging leases between the freemen and the COCHISE feared Indian leader of his time and landowners, before leaving in silent chagrin. place. For his part, the Apache waited to Howard experienced some political redemption when Ulysses see if it was a trap before meeting Howard.

S. Grant replaced Johnson as president in 1869. Grant immediately Howard handed out lumps of sugar to the rolled out a new peace policy with regard to American Indians and believed the general could be an important tool in implementing it. children and slept in the open mere yards from Thus in 1872 Howard was directed to proceed to Arizona Territory, with Cochise’s lean-to. For 10 days Howard and the 1st Lt. Joseph A. Sladen as an aide, and seek peace with Cochise and his elderly Apache leader discussed plans for a tribal reservation. Finally, at Council Rocks, Chiricahua Apaches. the two men agreed on a large reserve in southArizona’s military commander, Brevet Maj. Gen. George Crook, eastern Arizona, with Jeffords as Indian agent.

Howard left the Apache camp in mid-October, offered Howard every assistance, though he found the Christian General sanctimonious and conceited. “He told me that he thought the Creator after which the killings stopped. Cochise never JUNE 2021

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Council Rocks

Within two years of his peace accord with Cochise, after the court of inquiry had cleared Howard of any wrongdoing with regard to the Freedman’s Bureau, Grant appointed the general commander of the Department of the Columbia, essentially comprising the entire Pacific Northwest.

Howard and Grant were of one mind when it came to the president’s Indian peace plan.

The most promising path for all tribesmen, according to Grant, was for them to become Christian farmers, hold title to their farms and live productive lives within the American system.

CHIEF JOSEPH

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President Grover Cleveland later echoed such sentiments, supporting the Dawes Act. All three men were sincere about the policy. It never occurred to them that once tribal lands had been subdivided into individual farms, any surplus land would be divided up and sold to white settlers. In the end the tribes would lose even more land.

It also never occurred to Howard he would encounter Christian Indians who wished to remain nomadic—namely, the non-treaty Nez Perces under Chief Joseph. Hailing from the northern Rockies, the tribe had enjoyed positive relations with the United States since the days of Lewis and Clark.

Indeed, they had provided the Corps of Discovery with horses for their onward trek to the Pacific. The Nez Perce was also among the first Western tribes to become Christian.

An 1855 treaty recognized that Nez Perce lands in Idaho, Washington and Oregon territories totaled some 7.5 million acres, though its terms required the tribe to surrender nearly 5.5 million acres. Then gold was discovered in the northern section of Nez Perce lands, and miners rushed in, followed by ranchers and farmers.

Worse still, in 1869 the leaders of one Nez Perce band unilaterally signed away 90 percent of the tribe’s lands, settling for a 750,000-acre tract in Idaho Territory. Its terms required all Nez Perce bands to move onto the dramatically reduced reservation. Most refused, deeming the treaty illegal. Thus the tribe split between those for the reservation and non-treaty Nez Perces like Joseph, who continued to roam the full boundaries of the original 1855 reservation.

Joseph’s band hailed from the Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon, where his father was buried. But as the valley lay outside the boundaries specified by the new treaty, whites poured in. As tensions increased, an argument broke out over the ownership of some horses, leading to the murder of several Nez Perces. The murderers were never brought to justice, though the Nez Perces had a good idea who they were.

Joseph hoped Howard would rectify the situation, as the general’s good reputation proceeded him. When Howard arrived in Portland, the black population marched to his home, welcoming him with a brass band.

On learning Chinese immigrants drew more ire than even the Indians, the general made it a practice to invite Chinese businessmen to dine with him. To battle the alcoholism plaguing Portland, Howard assumed leadership of the city’s YMCA, where during off hours he would minister to drunks or, in the words of one reporter, deliver sermons until “the veins in his face and neck [were] standing out like tight-drawn cords.”

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TOP: GLASSHOUSE IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

again waged war against the Americans, right up until his death on the reservation two years later. Had it not been for Howard, many settlers avowed, their lives and property would likely have been forfeit.

TOP LEFT: RANDY PRENTICE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; TOP RIGHT: KATHARINA NOTARIANNI/DREAMSTIME; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Here amid Cochise’s Arizona Territory stronghold on Oct. 12, 1872, Howard and the Apache leader made a treaty that ended years of U.S.-Apache warfare. Cochise never again warred with the Americans, right up to his death on June 8, 1874.

By the summer of 1877 Chief Joseph and other tribal leaders had gathered some 600 Nez Perces at Camas Prairie, in west-central Idaho Territory, for the ordered June 14 move to the reservation at Fort Lapwai.

On the eve of their relocation, however, White Bird’s band held a ceremony during which participants taunted several young warriors for not having avenged relatives killed at the hands of whites. Thus humiliated, three hot-headed warriors rode to the nearby Salmon River settlements and murdered four men.

Joseph had been away from camp. On returning, he quickly had his people move within the protective confines of 5-mile-long White Bird Canyon. Meanwhile, Howard had 13 friendly Nez Perce scouts guide more than 100 1st Cavalry troopers and a handful of civilian volunteers under Captain David Perry to the tribal stronghold. The general believed his men would “make short work of it.” But after a two-day ride of more than 70 miles, Perry’s men were approaching near exhaustion when they started down the slopes of White Bird Creek. Concealed among the ravines and canyons, the Nez Perces cut his force to pieces on June 17, killing 34 troopers.

Howard realized he’d need superior forces to bring the Nez Perces to ground. Success would require a reliable supply system, and that meant mules—lots of mules. While countering civilian criticism he was doing nothing, he quietly bought up every animal he could find.

TOP: GLASSHOUSE IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; RIGHT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

TOP LEFT: RANDY PRENTICE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; TOP RIGHT: KATHARINA NOTARIANNI/DREAMSTIME; LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Both Howard and the president initially sympathized with Joseph’s insistence the 1869 treaty was illegal, but by the time the general finally sat down to speak with the chief, the Grant administration had caved to the Oregon congressional delegation’s demands for Nez Perce lands.

In the wake of Lt. Col. George Custer’s June 1876 shocking defeat at the Little Bighorn the American public cried out for the collective punishment of all Indians. The following spring Howard and Joseph had their last meeting, which the former stopped in the middle of the latter’s argument.

Recognizing he’d been saddled with implementing an unjust decision, much like he’d done at Edisto Island a decade earlier, Howard regardless ordered the non-treaty bands to move within the boundaries of the 1869 reservation within 30 days and even jailed Joseph’s fellow Nez Perce leader Toohoolhoolzote for speaking against the order.

White Bird Canyon

The 1877 Nez Perce War began in this Idaho gorge, depicted in an 1891 sketch.

Following the battle Chief Joseph and his followers crossed the Salmon River Canyon, heading southeast. Howard soon followed with his infantry and mule-drawn artillery. The challenge of fording swift water with men and equipment was something the general had never mastered, however, and amid heavy rains the expedition made painfully slow progress. Once across they pursued Joseph’s trail until discovering the Nez Perces had doubled back, re-crossed the Salmon and were behind them, heading northwest for the Bitterroot Mountains.

The press decried Howard’s slow pace, calling him a blunderer and a coward. There was even talk of recalling him to Washington in disgrace. Division of the Pacific commander Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell sent an aide to investigate the general’s conduct. He arrived just as Howard launched a final charge against warriors in the July 11–12 Battle of the Clearwater. While the Nez Perces inflicted more than 40 casualties on the troopers at the cost of just four dead and six wounded, the general did force the Indians Howard Had His Share of Critics

The press (and cartoonists) pilloried him for his ineffectual initial pursuit of the Nez Perces.

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of whom perhaps 30 were warriors. The surviving Nez Perces managed to break off and escape into newly established Yellowstone National Park.

There Howard thought he had them boxed in, but warriors stole most of his mules and some ponies in a night raid early on August 20. Hours later, in the daylong Battle of Camas Meadows, each side suffered only a few casualties, but Howard regardless elected to halt the pursuit to give his tired command a rest.

By then Sherman clearly wondered whether Howard himself had the drive to conclude his mission. After the debacle in Yellowstone, he’d even sent out 7th Infantry Lt. Col. Charles Champion Gilbert to assume command of the campaign. Ironically, Gilbert couldn’t catch up with Howard.

HOWARD AND CHIEF JOSEPH, 1904

TOP: MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON; LEFT: ASSOCIATED PRESS; OPPOSITE PAGE: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

to retreat across the Bitterroots via Lolo Pass.

Howard had the after-action report sent directly to newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes, possibly saving his job.

A Nez Perce messenger soon arrived in Howard’s camp, claiming to represent Joseph and seeking terms. It was a delaying tactic. While the general parleyed with the false messenger, Joseph led his people through the Bitterroots.

Howard gave pursuit, but the mountain trail stretched his army thin, and his scouts took fire from the Nez Perce rearguard, one dropping dead, another taking a bullet wound to the chest.

Howard’s methodical pace both frustrated his superiors and prompted scorn among his enemy. The Nez Perce name for Howard meant “Day After Tomorrow,” a snide reference to when he’d catch up to them.

Though Howard’s troopers did finally catch up to the Nez Perces in southwest Montana Territory, a force led by Colonel John Gibson beat them to it. At dawn on August 9 Gibson launched a surprise attack, but Joseph’s warriors rallied and fought back hard in the two-day Battle of the Big Hole. Howard arrived too late to reinforce Gibson, but he did bring doctors, who tended the casualties (31 soldiers had been killed, 38 wounded). Joseph lost upward of 70 followers, JUNE 2021

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The Nez Perces next sought sanctuary in the Crow Nation, but the Crows flatly refused. Joseph then turned his people north for the Canadian border, hoping to find refuge there.

By that point in the pursuit Howard had noticed that whenever he slowed the pace of his march, the Nez Perces slowed theirs. Realizing time was short, he sent a messenger to Colonel Miles, then encamped to the east at the confluence of the Tongue and Yellowstone rivers, advising that if he hurried, he could intercept Joseph before he crossed the international border. Howard then slowed his pursuit.

The trick worked. Lulled into a false sense of security, the Nez Perces stopped to make camp on the north slope of the Bear Paw Mountains, just 40 miles from the border.

There Miles did catch up with them, sending word to Howard he had engaged the Nez Perces. With a small escort Howard rushed ahead of his command to be there for the finish. The battle turned into a three-day siege in which most of the Nez Perce leadership, save Joseph and White Bird, were killed. Finally, on October 5, the chief surrendered, Howard’s aide, Lt. Charles Erskine Scott Wood recording the chief ’s famed “I will fight no more forever” speech. By the Army’s count, Joseph and 417 others officially surrendered. White Bird reported that he and some 170 others managed to reach Canada.

Both Howard and Miles had promised Joseph he could return home. But General Sherman countermanded that order and ultimately had them sent to a small Oklahoma reservation. To Howard’s credit, he spent years seeking to have the Nez Perces returned to their Idaho reservation.

The following spring the Bannocks—tired of being housed with Shoshones at the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in southern Idaho Territory, and equally weary of whites cheating them out of government rations—staged a breakout. Chief

Buffalo Horn led some 600 to 800 warriors on the warpath up and down the Snake River Valley.

But the Army handled this breakout differently than when it fought the Nez Perces. First, Howard directed the campaign from camp instead of leading in the field. Second, the general placed a generous bounty on the heads of Bannock chiefs, which other tribes were all too happy to collect, leaving the marauders leaderless from time to time. On July 7, in Howard’s last field action, Bannocks attacked his camp at the confluence of Butter Creek and the Columbia River. In the forthcoming fight the Bannocks killed upward of a dozen whites at the cost of some 15 warriors. Five troopers were wounded, one mortally. Within a month the uprising was over.

In 1881–82 Howard served as superintendent of West Point.

He was then appointed commander of the Department of the Platte, serving through 1886. During this period he wrote and spoke about the Nez Perce War, at first defending his campaign and later praising Joseph. Promoted to command the Military Division of the Pacific, through 1888, he retired in 1894 as commander of the Department of the East. Around the turn of the century Howard, the ever optimistic reformer, helped set up a string of YMCAs. On Oct. 26, 1909, the 78-year-old veteran of the Civil War and Indian wars died in his sleep at home in Burlington, Vt. Despite bad press, the Christian General had logged a fine military career, having bought about peace with the Apaches and successfully pursued the Nez Perces. He’d certainly earned a place as one of the top Army commanders out West.

Oklahoma-based Mike Coppock is a frequent contributor to Wild West. For further reading he suggests Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard and the Nez Perce War, by Daniel J. Sharfstein, and Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard, Major General, United States Army.

Bear Paw Battlefield

TOP: MAP BY JOAN PENNINGTON; LEFT: ASSOCIATED PRESS; OPPOSITE PAGE: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Sixteen miles south of Chinook, Mont., and 40 miles south of the Canadian border, this final stop on the 1,170-mile Nez Perce National Historic Trail is where an exhausted Chief Joseph surrendered to General Howard and Colonel Nelson Miles in October 1877.

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C

After multiple failed attempts to escape San Quentin State Prison, Tiburcio Vásquez helped lead the 1862 ‘Big Break,’ resulting in bloody chaos

By John Boessenecker

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CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY

BIGGEST BREAKOUT, BAR NONE

CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY

C

alifornia’s San Quentin State Prison held some of the most notorious outlaws of the Old West—highwaymen Tom Bell and “Rattlesnake Dick” Barter; gang leader Henry Plummer, later lynched by Montana vigilantes; gunfighter “Longhair Sam” Brown of the California and Nevada boomtowns; poetryminded stage robber Charles “Black Bart” Boles; gentlemanly stagecoach and train robber Bill Miner, alias the “Gray Fox”; and members of the bandido gangs led by Joaquín Murrieta and Tiburcio Vásquez. The 1848–53 California Gold Rush lured west myriad desperadoes from the East Coast, the Midwest and the Deep South, as well as from Europe, Australia, Mexico and South America. Many fell afoul of the law and ended up in San Quentin, then California’s only state penitentiary.

The prison, which opened in 1854 and remains in operation, sits on Point San Quentin at the upper end of San

California’s Oldest (If Not Most Secure) Prison

San Quentin, photographed here in the early 1870s, opened in 1854. Prior to 1862 some 500 convicts escaped, fewer than half of whom were recaptured.

Francisco Bay, just outside the mouth of Corte Madera Creek.

In 1862 it held about 600 convicts. Watching the prisoners were scarcely two dozen guards known as “freemen.”

Most were inexperienced political appointees, some of whom regularly showed up for duty drunk. Their wards were crammed into three long cellblocks ringed by an outer wall 20 feet high and 500 feet to a side. Atop the wall were small guardhouses manned by freemen armed with the .54-caliber Model 1841 percussion rifle, aka “Mississippi Yager.” Outside the wall stood five guard towers built of prison-made brick. Four were mounted with cannons loaded with grape and canister shot. Three more guards on horseback patrolled the outside perimeter.

In that era of low taxes and minimal government San Quentin was expected to support itself. Many of the prisoners worked in the brickyard, just outside the west wall, while others labored in workshops inside the prison. Prisoners JUNE 2021

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TOP: WILLIAM B. SECREST COLLECTION; RIGHT: JOHN BOESSENECKER COLLECTION (4)

LEWIS MAHONEY

Joining Vásquez and Mahoney in the “Big Break” plot were some of the most notorious men in San Quentin. Francisco “Acapulco” Lulio, nicknamed for his hometown in Mexico, was serving a 14-year term for robbery. He’d been shot in the face and lost an eye during the June 1859 breakout. Jesús Villalobo had killed a justice of the peace who tried to arrest him for horse theft; Governor John G. Downey had commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment. Cross-eyed bandit Patrício Mancilla was a friend of Vásquez. Jim Smith, a onetime member

ABOVE LEFT: JOHN BOESSENECKER COLLECTION; LEFT: WILLIAM B. SECREST COLLECTION

TIBURCIO VÁSQUEZ

made bricks, cut firewood for use in brick ovens in the surrounding forests and loaded brick onto schooners for transport and sale in rapidly growing San Francisco. They were not required to wear uniforms and were thus indistinguishable from the guards—or civilians, for that matter. Their meals were meager. Convicts who violated prison rules were subject to flogging with a rawhide whip. Typical punishments were 10 bloody “stripes” for simple infringement of the rules, 12 for stealing, 18 for fighting, 30 for insubordination and a withering 60 for attempted escape.

Despite such harsh discipline—or perhaps because of it—breakouts were frequent. Prior to 1862 more than 500 convicts escaped, fewer than half of whom were recaptured. In late June 1859 Tiburcio Vásquez— an obscure prisoner who later became a nationally infamous bandido— helped organize a daring break. While marching out the west gate to the brickyard, he and more than 40 other cons whipped out prison-made knives, seized two guards as hostages, then fled up Corte Madera Creek toward Mount Tamalpais. Though Vásquez managed to elude an intense manhunt, within weeks he was captured, convicted of horse theft and returned to San Quentin. Not one to remain idle, he helped plan another breakout that September. Among his fellow plotters was Lewis Mahoney, a notorious robber and horse thief who a few years earlier had been run out of San Francisco by the city’s feared Committee of Vigilance.

This time prisoners were loading brick onto a schooner at the prison dock when Vásquez, Mahoney and some 20 others took their guard hostage, commandeered the vessel and prepared to sail. Alert guards fired a cannon at the schooner, raking its deck with grapeshot. The broadside knocked down the sails, killed two prisoners and wounded six more. The survivors wisely surrendered.

Though severely flogged for that incident, Vásquez participated in yet another escape attempt in January 1861. Armed with knives, he and several dozen other cons seized hostages, including Deputy Warden James Pennie, then forced their way out the gate and again fled toward Corte Madera Creek. Armed guards soon caught up with them but held their fire, afraid they might harm the hostages. Despite the knife at his throat, Pennie ordered them to shoot. Still the guards held fire.

“I tell you to shoot!” Pennie yelled angrily. “Shoot, or I’ll discharge every last one of you!”

At that the guards opened a blistering barrage with their Colt revolvers and Mississippi Yagers. A bullet shattered Pennie’s arm, which a surgeon later amputated, and three cons fell dead. As the rest tried to flee, the guards showered them in a hail of lead, leaving Vásquez and the 13 others writhing in the dirt with bullet wounds. Guards took the wounded men to the prison hospital, where all eventually recovered.

Vásquez remained undaunted, and the next year he and Mahoney began planning what became known as the “Big Break.” It was the largest recorded prison breakout in the Western United States and possibly the largest non-wartime mass breakout in American history.

GUARD POST NO. 2

GUARD POST NO. 1

BLACKSMITH SHOP GUARD POST NO. 3 MESS BRICKYARD

THE PORCH “MANUFACTORY”

HOSPITAL

MAIN GATE AND GUARD’S QUARTERS

GUARD POST NO. 4

WEST GATE

BRICKYARD

GUARD POST NO. 5

CEMETERY HILL

NOT TO EXACT SCALE WHARF

At the Time of the ‘Big Break’

of the Tom Bell gang of highwaymen and murderers, had escaped San Quentin thrice since 1854, but he’d been recaptured each time. Jim Driscoll had been a prominent member of Rattlesnake Dick’s gang of road agents.

Burglar Joseph Sterritt was a noted escape artist. Scores of others would soon take advantage of their efforts.

Vásquez and the others made their plans carefully. Squirreling away bits of iron from the prison workshops, they fashioned a number of small knives, some with blades only an inch long. The plotters had someone on the outside, perhaps a recently released prisoner, smuggle several revolvers onto the prison grounds. On the night of July 21, 1862, they managed, unnoticed, to pry off the lock to a large dormitory cell.

The next morning everything went routinely. After laboring in the brickyard, a group of prisoners filed back inside the prison for their noontime meal. At 12:30 p.m. guards directed the convicts from the mess hall back toward the west gate, where the men waited in line to return to work in the brickyard. The gatekeeper counted 131 prisoners as they filed outside.

All of a sudden Jim Smith and about a dozen others broke from the gate at a dead run. Guards immediately opened fire with their rifles, but the escapees remained on task. Vásquez and the others had learned their lesson from prior breaks. Instead of fleeing in the open toward Corte TOP: WILLIAM B. SECREST COLLECTION; RIGHT: JOHN BOESSENECKER COLLECTION (4)

ABOVE LEFT: JOHN BOESSENECKER COLLECTION; LEFT: WILLIAM B. SECREST COLLECTION

Scarcely two dozen guards watched over some 600 convicts at San Quentin, which had five guard towers outside the wall. On July 22, 1862, most escapees bolted from the main (east) gate.

JESÚS VILLALOBO

PATRÍCIO MANCILLA

Madera Creek, they circled the outer wall to the main gate on the east side.

The main prison entrance passed through the middle of the three-story guards’ quarters, which abutted the outer wall. The entrance had an inner and outer gate, connected by a short corridor. To the right of the outer gate was a door to the warden’s office. At the time the warden of San Quentin also served as the lieutenant governor of California. Holding both offices in 1862 was John F. Chellis, an obese, cowardly politician who had no business running the largest and most dangerous prison on the American frontier. He was relaxing in his quarters adjacent to the warden’s office when he heard someone shout, “There’s a break!”

As he peered out a window in his quarters, Chellis heard gunfire. At least one convict was armed with a revolver, for two bullets shattered the window and slammed into the wall behind the warden. Moments later a half dozen escapees burst in and seized Chellis. As they dragged the lieutenant governor outside, one man crowed, “Now we’ve got you, Gov!” Meanwhile, the rest of the band accosted Cornelius Murphy, the guard at the outer main gate.

Though armed with nothing but his padlock keys, the guard put up a desperate fight. Under duress, Chellis ordered Murphy to surrender the key to the gate, but still the guard refused.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll give it up!” he shouted.

Scooping up rocks, the convicts then stoned Murphy into submission. As he lay bleeding profusely from head wounds, they seized his keys, opened the gate and rushed down the corridor. Guarding the big iron door to the yard was a lone trusted convict, or trusty. While several cons held the trusty at knifepoint, the others forced the gate hinges with an iron bar. The small group of ringleaders then burst into the prison yard, yelling “Liberty!”

JIM DRISCOLL

JIM SMITH

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The melee that ensued beggars description.

Screaming like demons, prisoners poured from the workshops into the yard carrying hammers, knives, files, axes, hatchets and anything else they could use as a weapon. As many as 300 men, half the prison population, pressed toward the main gate. Guards manning the wall opened a withering fire on the mob with rifles and revolvers, dropping many would-be escapees in bloody heaps. Amid the confusion the ringleaders forced their way into the prison armory and seized a few six-shooters, in their haste overlooking a case full of sabers.

Several convicts made a search for the commissary official, shouting they would kill him for having tried to starve them. But the man saved his skin by hiding inside one of the buildings. As terrified guards in some of the outside gun posts dropped their rifles and pistols and fled, convicts ran over to scoop up their abandoned weapons.

Brickyard superintendent Isaac Quinn—Chellis’ predecessor as warden and lieutenant governor— was disgusted to see several freemen abandon their post on a hill high above the prison. Rushing up to the vacant gun tower, he swiveled its cannon and fired, the blast of grapeshot narrowly missing the horde surging from the main gate.

Finally, the ringleaders stepped from the main gatehouse. Holding Chellis hostage, they cautiously skirted around the wall toward the southwest guard tower, atop a bluff overlooking the prison dock. Manning the post was Thomas 62 WILD WEST

Two charges of grapeshot were enough for a handful of horrified escapees, who scurried back around to the main gate and surrendered.

But a few dozen more intrepid convicts ran down to a sloop docked at the boat landing. Using an ax to cut the mooring ropes, they raised sail to make for the open bay. But the wind was against them, and they soon ran aground. By then captain of the guard Edward Vanderlip had managed to rally those freemen who had not fled. Shouldering their Mississippi Yagers, they poured a deadly fire into the sloop. Three escapees jumped overboard, only to be shot and vanish beneath the waves. The rest aboard surrendered.

The main band of escapees, numbering about 100, kept Chellis in front of them as a shield. Reverting to form, they headed up the road along Corte Madera Creek toward Mount Tamalpais. Among them were Vásquez, Villalobo, Lulio, Sterritt and Edwards. Chellis, sweating profusely under the hot July sun, was exhausted and overcome with fear.

The convicts dragged along the obese warden, occasionally jabbing him with their knives to keep him going. Chellis repeatedly begged for his freedom, the escapees responding each time, “It’s no go.”

The warden wore a fine gold pocket watch and chain, and one of the escapees made a grab for them. Ironically, several others stopped him.

“God damn it, you don’t want to steal his watch after stealing him, do you?” one chastised. “That’s too damned mean!”

En route up the creek the convicts stopped to loot farmsteads. At one they found an unbroken stallion. With a wink and a nod, they ordered Chellis to mount him bareback.

“What?” Chellis protested. “Get on that horse, without saddle or anything else?”

“Certainly,” the prisoners replied.

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JOHN BOESSENECKER COLLECTION

To the right of the main gate on the east side of the prison is the door to the warden’s office.

During the breakout the ringleaders seized Warden John F. Chellis and held him hostage.

JOHN BOESSENECKER COLLECTION

A Calmer Day at San Quentin

Watson, a freeman with plenty of sand. Spotting the approaching mob, he swiveled his cannon and prepared to yank its lanyard. Unfortunately, Chellis was not made of the same stern stuff as Deputy Warden Pennie.

“For God’s sake, don’t shoot!” he cried out.

Holding a pistol to Chellis’ head, Jack Edwards, serving 44 years for multiple charges of robbery, barked up at Watson, “If you fire, the governor is a dead man.”

Watson backed down. Swinging the barrel of his cannon toward the water, he discharged its grapeshot into the bay. Thinking fast, he then spiked the gun by driving a nail into its touchhole. Within moments escapees led by the murderer Villalobo reached the tower and overpowered Watson. They had planned to fire the cannon across the brickyard to disable the cannon in the northwest gun tower. Enraged to discover Watson had spiked the weapon, they beat the guard savagely and hurled him down the steep bluff, sending the useless gun and its carriage tumbling after him. Badly injured in the fall, Watson barely missed being crushed by the cannon and carriage.

The escapees then marched Chellis into the brickyard, in plain view of the cannoneer in the northwest gun tower. The remaining 100-plus brickyard laborers, mostly short-term convicts, refused to join in the break and ran for cover in the nearest gatehouse. As the escapees passed through the brickyard, Chellis repeatedly waved his arms and begged for the tower guard to hold his fire. Ignoring the order, the gunner aimed his cannon at the fringe of the band and jerked its lanyard. The heavy charge of grapeshot tore into the men, dropping many. Reloading, the gunner fired again, scattering the ringleaders.

JOHN BOESSENECKER COLLECTION

JOHN BOESSENECKER COLLECTION

“For God’s sake, don’t do it,” the warden cried, “unless you want to kill me!”

Their fun over, the convicts relented.

After 4 miles of steady marching the mob arrived at Ross Landing, the uppermost navigable point on Corte Madera Creek. From its dock small sailing craft regularly shipped lumber to San Francisco. By then it was 4 p.m., and time was running out for the escapees.

At that moment a mounted band of prison guards led by Vanderlip and Quinn rode into view. Soon joining them from nearby San Rafael was a small posse under Marin County Sheriff Valentine Doub. The petrified Chellis continued to wave them off. With the warden in tow, the convicts waded into the chest-deep muddy creek, hoping the possemen could not get their horses across. On reaching the far bank, they slogged through open marshland for the foothills of Mount Tamalpais. The posse managed to cross the channel, but fearing for Chellis’ life, they followed from a distance. The prisoners soon reached a high fence that blocked their path to the rugged hills. They made several efforts to hoist Chellis over, but he was too heavy and too exhausted. The cons finally gave up and released him.

It was the opening for which the posse had been waiting. The moment Chellis was clear, the pursuers opened fire, dropping a dozen convicts.

Mortally wounded by rifle balls were Sterritt and Julien Bieta, a California Indian. Those escapees who were armed returned fire but soon ran out of ammunition. The prisoners then scattered into the brush. Sheriff Doub immediately sent a rider to San Rafael for reinforcements, and soon every man for miles around who could scare up a horse and a gun was on the scene. By dusk they had managed to capture 47 of the escapees, whom they marched back to the prison that night. Over the next several days men scoured the Marin hills, bringing in a score of convicts, some of whom had been severely wounded in the gunfight west of Ross Landing.

One band of five escapees continued north toward Sonoma County.

On the night of July 24, two days after the break, they raided a house in the settlement of Nicasio, 18 miles northwest of San Quentin, beating the owner and stealing two rifles. But a four-man posse of prison guards was hot on their trail and the next evening caught up with the five on San Antonio Creek, just south of Petaluma. At the order to surrender two convicts raised their rifles to shoot, prompting the guards to unleash a fusillade of rifle and pistol shots. Robert Graham, who’d been serving time for theft, dropped dead, and the rest fled into the brush. The next morning possemen happened across convicted arsonist John Reynolds, suffering from a pistol wound to the leg, and returned him to the prison.

Graham and Reynolds were the last men shot in the Big Break.

When all was said and done, about a dozen convicts made good their escape in one of America’s biggest—and bloodiest—prison breaks. Ten convicts had been killed in the attempt, 30 wounded. The prison hospital was packed. “For the next two weeks the groans and cries of the wounded and dying could be heard day and night,” one prisoner recalled. It marked the last mass escape from San Quentin. In the aftermath a new warden forced a dozen guards to resign and greatly improved security by hiring more guards. In 1864 the state Legislature passed a law providing for reduced sentences for good behavior, and the following year the prison system adopted gray-and-black-striped uniforms. Prison food and medical care saw improvement, while added cells reduced overcrowding.

Such changes drastically reduced breakout attempts.

And what became of the men who led and survived the Big Break?

Jesús Villalobo was among the handful of successful escapees, and his fate

Ross Landing on Corte Madera Creek

The pursuing posse and fleeing cons engaged in a gunfight near here, but the latter soon ran out of ammunition and scattered into the brush.

is unknown. Lewis Mahoney was recaptured and served out his term. A repeat offender, he served three more terms in San Quentin. After his final release, in 1881, he vanished. Found hiding in the woods after the shootout west of Ross Landing, one-eyed Acapulco Lulio told captors he was “thoroughly disgusted at being compelled to give in without having anything more than a scrimmage.” Released in 1869, he too disappeared. Cross-eyed Patrício Mancilla was caught three months after the break. Released from San Quentin in 1866, he continued to ride with bandit gangs. Jim Smith and Jim Driscoll were both quickly recaptured. Driscoll died in San Quentin in 1867, while Smith was released in 1879 and promptly resumed his career as a highwayman.

He ultimately landed back in San Quentin, where he died in 1884. Also recaptured was Tiburcio Vásquez. After serving out his sentence, he too resumed his life of crime, ultimately becoming the nation’s most infamous Hispanic bandido.

Unable to escape fate, 39-year-old Vásquez died on the gallows in San Jose on March 19, 1875.

John Boessenecker is a California-based special contributor to Wild West and the award-winning author of 10 history books. Suggested for further reading are his Bandido: The Life and Times of Tiburcio Vásquez and William B. Secrest’s Behind San Quentin’s Walls: The History of California’s Legendary Prison and Its Inmates, 1851–1900.

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NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Not Victorio

He might look the part, but the ruggedly handsome man in this well-circulated A. Frank Randall photo from late 1886 or early 1887 is a Mojave named Beitero.

SEARCHING FOR VICTORIO

The subject of this oft-published photograph is not him, but somewhere amid the archives is an authentic image of the great Apache chief

By Daniel Aranda

NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

A

s a boy I first saw the photo at left, widely accepted as a portrait of the noted Apache chief Victorio. The ruggedly handsome man looks every part the gallant leader recounted in written records. My admiration of and interest in Apaches thus piqued, I immersed myself in researching these indomitable people.

Although not as well-known as Geronimo, Cochise or even Mangas Coloradas, Victorio emerged as a hero to me.

I was thrilled when Eve Ball came out with her book In the Days of Victorio in 1970 and Dan Thrapp with Victorio and the Mimbres Apaches in 1974. Eve and Dan later became good friends of mine, and we discussed the Victorio portrait on several occasions. I accepted a story that reservation officials had to wrestle the chief into place to be photographed, hence his mussed hair and missing headband. A closer look at the image reveals what I take to be fingers beneath his left arm.

Years later, however, as I began to gather snippets on Victorio’s physical appearance, certain discrepancies made me question the identity of the man in the portrait. Then one day, while doing research at the Arizona Pioneers’ Historical Society in Tucson, historian Ed Sweeney and I by chance bumped into renowned Apache expert Allan Radbourne, and the three of us discussed the portrait at length. After a productive exchange we concluded that John Clum, who served as the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation agent from August 1874 to July 1877, likely mislabeled (intentionally or unintentionally) the portrait when submitting related articles for publication. The articles in question were “The Apaches,”

published in the April 1929 New Mexico Historical Review, and “Victorio: Chief of the Warm Springs Apaches,” which ran in the January 1930 Arizona Historical Review.

More years passed, and I kept my eyes open for clues about the Victorio portrait. Then, in February 2004, Wild West published Radbourne’s article “Capturing the Apaches: The Photographs of A. Frank Randall,” in which he concludes the purported image of Victorio was actually that of a Mojave named Beitero, who posed for Randall in late 1886 or early 1887. Randall may have taken other portraits of Beitero, as well as those of another Indian whose likeness better fits descriptions of Victorio and has been similarly misidentified.

As Victorio was said to be reclusive around the Indian agencies, he may never have sat for a portrait.

Since the discovery of the Beitero photo, however, historians Radbourne, Sweeney, Robert Watt, Bill Cavaliere, Layton Hooper, Lynda Sánchez and others have expressed optimism that a verifiable portrait of Victorio might yet exist, and a tantalizing clue has surfaced.

In 2009 Sweeney, Watt and I were conducting research at the New Mexico State Archives in Santa Fe when we made a morbidly fascinating discovery. It was Sweeney who handed me an article published in the Feb. 12, 1881, edition of Periódico Oficial, a newspaper out of Chihuahua, Mexico. I made a copy of the article to fully translate later, but what I was able to comprehend made my heart race, for the writer stated definitively that Victorio had indeed sat for a portrait.

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Tres Castillos Survivors

Captured Apache women and children pose, with warrior scalps on poles behind them, after their last battle in Chihuahua.

The writer was referring to a body recovered from the battlefield at Tres Castillos, nearly 100 miles north of the city, where Mexican soldiers surrounded Victorio and his followers and killed

Still Not Victorio

Above: Charles F. Lummis’ 1893 book Land of Poco Tiempo included this “Victorio” image.

Right: This sketch from the portrait appeared in the 1896 memoir Personal Recollections and Observations of General Nelson A. Miles.

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LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (2)

The deceased Indian wore a dark suit similar to that worn by Victorio when photographed with C. Miguel Salas, of this town, at a reservation in the United States. I had the pleasure of remitting this to General Carlos Pacheco [Villalobos], acting secretary of war.

78 of them, including Victorio, on Oct. 15. 1880. The “C” before Salas’ name may stand for colonel or perhaps ciudadano (citizen).

“The body of Victorio was identified by distinctive peculiarities, such as a scar on his face near his mouth and broken incisive teeth,” the article continues. “These distinctive features matched exactly those on the corpse, which has justifiably been considered to be that of the Apache chief.” The man in the Randall portrait later identified by Radbourne as Beitero bears no such scar. But the subject of the image described above, purportedly taken on a reservation and depicting Victorio, does bear a scar on his face.

The article brought to mind an unidentified photograph I had seen earlier while doing research at the Arizona Historical Society. Unfortunately, I cannot remember in which file the picture resides and have since been

TOP: UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO; LEFT: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES (2)

Following is a translation of the key passage:

LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; RIGHT: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (2)

TOP: UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO; LEFT: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES (2)

unable to relocate it. I have racked my brain for specifics, and this is what I do recall. It is a sepia-tone group portrait approximately 2½ inches by 3 inches. At the extreme left is an elderly Indian, seated in a chair and dressed in a dark-colored suit. The man stands out as he’s wearing dark, close-fitting oval glasses. Behind him, also wearing a dark suit, stands a burly, rough-looking Indian with medium-length cropped hair. Standing to the immediate left of the two Indians is a young man, light-complexioned, though perhaps Hispanic. By his attire he appears something of a “dandy.” If memory serves, he’s dressed in a fancy, light-colored vest and sports a thin mustache. Beside him stand two well-dressed Hispanic men in dark suits, possibly dignitaries or local officials. Could one of these men be C. Miguel Salas and the burly standing Indian at left Victorio? If genuine, Victorio most likely posed for the photograph sometime between June and August 1877, when assigned as an Indian court judge at San Carlos.

While the subject of the Randall portrait looks the way most people would like to envision Victorio, contemporary physical descriptions of the chieftain prove far from a perfect match.

For example, most sources date Victorio’s birth from circa 1820 to ’25, which would make him 55 to 60 years old in 1880. The subject of Randall’s portrait appears much younger.

Most contemporary sources concur with a description published in the Nov. 1, 1879, edition of Yuma’s Arizona Sentinel. “He is almost 50 years old,” the article reads, “5 feet 9½ inches in height, with irregular but not

Also Not Victorio

Top left: San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation Agent John Clum, posing with two Apaches, likely mislabeled the portrait of the Mojave Beitero.

Top and above: Randall took these photographs of an unnamed Yavapai Apache scout who has also been incorrectly identified as Victorio.

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Author and expert on early Apaches Dan L. Thrapp had the false image on the cover of his otherwise excellent 1974 book about Victorio.

unpleasant features, solid countenance, his long hair plentifully sprinkled with gray, hanging over his shoulders.” General Oliver Otis Howard, in a letter to his wife dated Sept. 8, 1872, offered a similar description. “He is really a fine-looking man,” the general wrote. “His hair is black but curls a little. I never saw this in a full-blooded Indian before. He is about 5 foot 10 and well formed.”

Muddying the waters somewhat are other descriptions, some from men whose veracity was generally accepted. Lieutenant Charles B. Gatewood, who famously persuaded Geronimo to surrender in 1886, later described Victorio as “a palsied, aged and decrepit chief who was barely able to accompany squaws and children in their forays.” Thrapp dismissed the officer’s assessment. “This description should not be taken too seriously,” he wrote, “in the light of unqualified assertions by agents, Army officers and others who dealt directly with [Victorio] that he was vigorous, able and the true chief of the Mimbres.” Thrapp surmised Gatewood “may have confused Victorio with Nana, already an old man, though still vigorous.” Echoing Gatewood’s recollection is an article from the March 31, 1880, Daily Southwest of Silver City, N.M., which describes Victorio as “aged and infirm (for he has 68 WILD WEST

Returning to the A. Frank Randall portrait of Beitero, my research concluded Clum was neither the first to use it nor to mislabel it.

Renditions of it, both misidentified as “Victorio,” appear in both Charles F. Lummis’ The Land of Poco Tiempo, published in 1893 by Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York, and the memoir Personal Recollections and Observations of General Nelson A. Miles, published in 1896 by the Werner Co. of Chicago.

With luck, we will once and for all determine what the great chief truly looked like. Toward that end, I’m willing to pay a $100 bounty to anyone who finds an authenticated picture of Victorio. The bounty also applies to the lost Arizona Historical Society group portrait. In the meantime, this intrepid if sleepless writer will continue combing the archives.

Historian Daniel Aranda of Las Cruces, N.M. has long researched Apaches and is author of Episodes From Apache Land. The late historian Edwin R. Sweeney dedicated his 2014 book Cochise: Firsthand Accounts of the Chiricahua Apache Chief, to Aranda. For further reading Aranda recommends In the Days of Victorio: Recollections of a Warm Springs Apache, by Eve Ball; Victorio and the Mimbres Apaches, by Dan L. Thrapp; and ‘I Will Not Surrender the Hair of a Horse’s Tail’: The Victorio Campaign, 1879 and ‘Horses Worn to Mere Shadows’: The Victorio Campaign, 1880, both by Robert N. Watt.

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TOP: CANADAALAMOSAPROJECT.ORG; RIGHT: TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY LLC/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Cover Perfect, But Again Not Victorio

dumb palsy and cannot light a cigarrito).” Like Gatewood, though, the reporter may have been describing Nana, who was closely allied with Victorio in those troubling times.

First Lieutenant Joseph Alton Sladen, another contemporary, described the chief in a journal entry dating from 1872. “Victorio, even then, appeared like an old man,” he wrote. “Hardship and exposure, disease and lack of food makes wild Indians grow rapidly old in appearance.

He was, then, a leader among his people, and his treachery, cunning and cruelty seemed stamped upon his face.” Again, Sladen may have confused Victorio with Nana.

Contradicting such descriptions is an account by Indian Affairs Inspector Edward C. Kemble published in the Nov. 28, 1880, edition of The New York Times. Having met Victorio at the Ojo Caliente Indian Reservation in April 1876, Kemble described him at the time as “short and stout, with a heavy, firm-set lower jaw…[and] moppy head.”

A similar description appears in the Nov. 29, 1890, Arizona Silver Belt, out of Globe. “At the time of his death,” the reporter notes, “Victorio was about 55 years old, heavy-set, broad-faced, square under jaw, prominent cheekbones.” The article also notes the chief “bore a bullet mark in the cheek received at the hand of Barney Conly at the ‘bean soup treaty,’ which occurred in Pinos Altos, N.M., in 1866.”

In an Aug. 30, 1873, letter to Edwin L. Dudley, superintendent of Indian Affairs for New Mexico Territory, Indian agent Benjamin M. Thomas hints at another likely scar, the result of an arrow wound to the cheek Victorio suffered during a violent intertribal fight with the Pajarito brothers. Taken together, Thomas’ recollection and the Arizona Silver Belt story strongly support the Periódico Oficial description of Victorio’s facial scar and broken incisors.

A curious description appears in the Jan. 14, 1882, edition of Silver City’s New Southwest. The article notes that Mauricio Corredor, the Tarahumara scout credited with having killed Victorio, thought the chief extremely corpulent. Perhaps by standards of the day Victorio’s stout form may have been considered such by the generally spare-bodied Tarahumaras. Or perhaps Corredor simply sought to demean his slain adversary.

Ojo Caliente (Warm Springs)

Above are the ruins of the agency the government established in southwest New Mexico Territory in 1874 for Victorio and his Chihennes. Below: Allan Houser’s Warm Springs Apache Man graces the Allan Houser Sculpture Gardens south of Santa Fe.

TOP: CANADAALAMOSAPROJECT.ORG; RIGHT: TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY LLC/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF VICTORIO Born in the early to mid-1820s, Victorio made his home near Warm Springs (known to the Spanish as Ojo Caliente), between the Black Range of the Mimbres Mountains to the south and the San Mateo Mountains to the north in what would become southwestern New Mexico. In the 1850s he became chief of the Chihenne band of the Chiricahua Apache tribe. While the Chihennes later appealed for a reservation in their sacred homeland, the U.S. government decided in 1871 to move them to a reservation near the Tularosa Mountains, some 50 miles to the northwest.

When soldiers arrived the next summer to move them, however, Victorio and many of his followers holed up in the Black Range.

In 1874 the government seemingly relented and established a Chihenne reservation at Ojo Caliente. But three years later officials decided to consolidate the Chihennes and other Apache bands within the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, on the Gila River in Arizona Territory.

Within months Victorio and other men bolted from the hated agency. After rounding them up, the Army allowed the Chihennes to return to Ojo Caliente, but only until further notice. Loath to return to San Carlos, Victorio instead went to war in early September 1879. His raids and the resulting Army pursuits kept him on the move.

After suffering his first decisive defeat near Ojo Caliente on May 24, 1880, the wounded chief fled with followers into the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico. That summer he and his warriors clashed with soldiers in west Texas, each time fleeing back across the border. In the fall Mexican

soldiers under Colonel Joaquín Terrazas finally cornered Victorio’s small band in the state of Chihuahua. There, in the October 14–15 Battle of Tres Castillos (deemed a massacre by some historians), the Mexicans killed nearly 80 Apaches and captured 68 women and children. There are several versions of Victorio’s death, but according to Apache tradition he avoided capture by stabbing himself to death. The aged but powerful Chihenne Chief Nana exacted revenge in the summer of 1881 when he raided in southwestern New Mexico Territory and eluded pursuing troops.

British historian Robert Watt, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, rates Victorio “one of the best guerrilla leaders of the Apache wars.” In his book Victorio and the Mimbres Apaches historian Dan Thrapp notes that after the chief’s death in Mexico, “Never again were [Apache] fighters in such numbers to roam and ravage that country, nor were they again to be so ably led and managed.” —D.A. JUNE 2021

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DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDREL

C

olonel Benjamin Shepherd Wettermark was the most trusted man in Nacogdoches, Texas.

The onetime mayor was also the town banker, a man willing to help anyone who needed a loan. Then one night in January 1903 he emptied the vault of his own bank, hopped a train and left his wife, his children and his mansion behind. On Wettermark’s disappearance he became one of the most wanted men in the United States. His name and image made the front page of newspapers from Texas to New York as the scoundrel who broke the bank in small-town Nacogdoches, 130 miles north-northeast of Houston. Authorities put a price on his head, and lawmen and bounty hunters set train stations buzzing and turned cargo holds inside out in their efforts to claim it.

When clerks at the bank totaled its ledgers, they discovered Wettermark had fleeced depositors of nearly a half million dollars. He hadn’t brandished a gun; the banker had destroyed the town’s economy from the inside. He was never caught, and the money was not recovered.

Ben’s father, Alfred Wettermark, was a Swede who immigrated to Texas in 1853. He arrived on the heels of countrymen brought to the state in the late 1840s by Swante Magnus Swenson at the behest of then Senator Sam Houston.

A successful entrepreneur and land speculator, Swenson assisted his fellow Swedes by advancing them passage money in return for a year of labor. Wettermark settled in Houston, which promised prosperity in return for hard work. The teenager started as a confidential clerk of Benjamin A. Shepherd, who was just establishing the private Commercial and Agricultural Bank, among the first such enterprises in Texas. In 1858 24-year-old Alfred married Araminta Sarah Noble, and a year later they had a daughter, Anna 70 WILD WEST

Louise, who died in childhood. Their second child, Benjamin, was born in 1862. Alfred gave Ben the middle name “Shepherd,” after the man who had gotten him started in the banking business.

Hardworking Alfred earned the prosperity he’d envisioned, establishing Wettermark banks across east Texas, starting with one in Henderson in 1876. In 1883 he founded the A. Wettermark & Son Bank in Nacogdoches and put 21-year-old Ben in charge of it. Among the oldest towns in the state, Nacogdoches traces its roots to 1716, when eastbound Spanish missionaries on the El Camino Real de los Tejas arrived to “save” members of the Caddo tribes. It was prominent in the 1826–27 Fredonia Rebellion—the first attempt by Anglo settlers to secede from Mexico—and became home to such notable “Texian” revolutionaries as Houston and Thomas J. Rusk.

Ben Wettermark became a veritable “Mr. Nacogdoches.”

In 1883 he married Lenore Witherspoon, the daughter of a respected druggist from Denton, cementing his respectability in the eyes of townspeople. Ben was a young man in a hurry —city alderman, town treasurer, one-term mayor and active member of the Presbyterian church. In addition to being president of the family bank, he served as treasurer of the Nacogdoches Ice and Cold Storage Co., secretary-treasurer of the Nacogdoches Compress Co., treasurer of the Merchants and Farmers Cotton Oil Co. and treasurer of several benevolent associations. Ben prided himself on giving a loan to anyone with an idea that seemed financially promising.

Soon after the local Stone Fort Rifles volunteer militia formed in 1887, Ben joined and was elected lieutenant colonel. From then on he styled himself “Colonel Wettermark,” though when the militia converted itself into Company B of the 2nd Texas Infantry Regiment

LEFT: WENDY FLOYD; OPPOSITE: LINDA THORSEN BOND COLLECTION

Colonel Ben Wettermark, the seemingly trustworthy banker and onetime mayor of Nacogdoches, Texas, became ‘most wanted’ and especially elusive

By Linda Thorsen Bond

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LEFT: WENDY FLOYD; OPPOSITE: LINDA THORSEN BOND COLLECTION

Marked Man

Colonel Benjamin Shepherd Wettermark, posing here in 1899 when he was mayor of Nacogdoches, Texas, robbed his own bank and fled town in January 1903. Opposite: The historic Wettermark Bank building remains standing.

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In 1902 Ben and other successful local businessmen founded the Nacogdoches Grocery Co., a wholesale supplier to grocery and general merchandise stores. They had its two-story brick 72 WILD WEST

headquarters built along the tracks of the Houston East & West Texas Railway. The owners soon expanded its trade territory to 11 counties in east Texas, with most merchandise shipped by train. Naturally, Ben was the treasurer, and all financial transactions went through his bank.

As New Year’s Eve 1902 approached, local attorney Junius “June” C. Harris knocked on the door of the Wettermark’s remote mansion, surprising Daisy. The colonel, Harris explained, had asked him to draft a will that would cover her and the children if anything happened to Ben. One provision guaranteed that any land in Ben’s name would become hers. The will and that clause would prove prophetic.

Wettermark Bank closed for the New Year holiday, which fell midweek. The following weekend, without any explanation to Daisy or the children, Colonel Wettermark packed a bag, took a railroad hack to the depot and caught a train. There is no evidence Daisy, Carl, Minnie or Ben Jr. knew anything about his plans. On Monday, Jan. 5, 1903, the day the bank should have reopened, clerks found the doors locked and posted with a notice from Ben’s father, Alfred. Signed “with regret,” it bore dire news for creditors: I have been forced to suspend on account of conditions at Nacogdoches.

As soon as the assets and liabilities at both Nacogdoches and Henderson can be ascertained, a meeting of all creditors will be called and the matter submitted to them. No assignment, deed of trust or petition in bankruptcy has been filed because I wish to save all expense possible for the benefit of creditors.

Nacogdoches’ Main Street, July 1899

By year’s end Colonel Wettermark had opened a new bank building kitty-corner to Main and Pecan streets (not visible from this perspective).

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TOP: NEWSPAPERS.COM (2); RIGHT: EAST TEXAS RESEARCH CENTER/ STEPHEN F. AUSTIN STATE UNIVERSITY

A table 20 feet long fairly groaned under the weight of roast beef, pork, Switzer cheese, salads, pickles, sliced tomatoes, rye bread, etc., while two kegs of beer, fresh and cold, were on tap.

Colonel Wettermark was present at the beginning and gave the boys an appropriate roast and had them eat as hard as they worked and drink as heartily as they received their pay. It is needless to say that the boys obeyed to the letter Colonel Wettermark’s injunction and did ample justice to the banquet.

Nacogdoches’ Stone Fort Rifles

Wettermark joined this local volunteer militia shortly after its 1887 formation and was elected lieutenant colonel.

EAST TEXAS RESEARCH CENTER/STEPHEN F. AUSTIN STATE UNIVERSITY (2)

in 1898 and went off to fight in the SpanishAmerican War, the colonel elected to remain at home.

Ben and Lenore already had three children— Carl, Minnie and Ben Jr.—when Lenore died in 1891 of complications after giving birth to a girl, whom Ben named Lenore. Two years later the 31-year-old widower married New Yorker Margaret Daisy Sutton. They were the power couple of their time and place. Daisy was at Ben’s side for his first full year as mayor of Nacogdoches in 1899, the same year the only other bank in town closed. By year’s end Ben had opened a new bank building, designed by German-born local architect Diedrich A.W. Rulfs, whose handiwork still graces much of downtown Nacogdoches.

The door of the two-story brick building was kitty-corner to Main and Pecan streets, thus welcoming customers from either thoroughfare.

Wettermark also hired Rulfs to design him a grand home on the far north side of town. Considered a mansion in its day, the house had 12 rooms, with a ballroom on the second floor.

Boasting Palladian windows, a wraparound porch and a widow’s walk atop the roof, it was the talk of the town. Still, people must have wondered if anyone else would follow Ben’s lead and move out so far from the heart of Nacogdoches. The cocksure colonel remained confident the direction of the town would shift his way.

Wettermark worked hard to earn the admiration of friends and acquaintances. On June 16, 1900, he threw a party at Joe’s Place, near the ice factory, on behalf of the “knights of the saw and hammer” at work on his various new buildings. A lucky reporter from Nacogdoches’ Daily Sentinel was on hand and reported on the affair:

All the News It Saw Fit to Print

The hometown Daily Sentinel didn’t initially report the commission of a crime, but other newspapers were nowhere near as reluctant.

The next day attorney Harris sent a telegram to The Houston Post, and the Houston and Nacogdoches newspapers carried these headlines:

TOP: NEWSPAPERS.COM (2); RIGHT: EAST TEXAS RESEARCH CENTER/ STEPHEN F. AUSTIN STATE UNIVERSITY

EAST TEXAS RESEARCH CENTER/STEPHEN F. AUSTIN STATE UNIVERSITY (2)

A FAILURE IN EAST TEXAS The Wettermark Firms Have Gone Into Liquidation Liabilities and Assets are Believed to be Around $400,000– A Statement Issued by the Head of the Firm.

So respected were the Wettermarks in their hometown that The Daily Sentinel did not initially report the commission of a crime. “The entire community greatly deplores the embarrassment that has fallen the Wettermark bank,” it wrote. “Their many years of work have given them very great prominence and popularity. Public confidence remains strong, and public sympathy is unbounded, both at home and abroad.”

By January 7 the news had spread to such far-flung newspapers as The Times-Democrat in New Orleans, The Kearney Daily Hub in Nebraska,

and The Daily Republican in Belvidere, Ill. Harris told reporters that on January 3 he had gone over the books with Ben and noted the bank was in unsatisfactory shape. The colonel, Harris said, claimed he would go to Houston and seek a loan to tide over the bank. If successful, he would wire back instructions to reopen. If not, Harris had been instructed to keep the bank closed.

By that Monday morning, however, Ben had vanished, and with him went his father’s reputation. Alfred had marked a half century as a reputable banker—that is, until his son proved a better bank robber.

It wasn’t long before public confidence waned.

“The outlook concerning the affairs of the Wettermark Bank has a gloomier appearance today,” The Daily Sentinel reported on January 7, “and many who spoke kindly of Colonel Wettermark yesterday, expressing confidence in him, have changed their verdict today.” The Houston Post and New Orleans Times-Democrat called the failure “decidedly worse than at first thought,” adding, “The books are in such condition that Bank in Good Standing

All was well at the Wettermark bank in July 1898 when customer James R. Arnold cashed this check.

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no intelligent statement can be made without the presence of Mr. B.S. Wettermark, who is still absent, and his whereabouts since Saturday night are unknown.”

The bad news only got worse, the papers reporting Ben had forged checks and embezzled from the bank. The January 9 Times-Democrat reported on discrepancies adding up to $188,898, including forged notes to T.B. Hardeman for $8,280 and the Nacogdoches Oil Mill Co. totaling $53,550. “Every mail is bringing in these forged instruments, and the end is not reached yet,” the New Orleans paper noted. “It may be truthfully said that the people are wild.”

The St. Louis Post Dispatch denounced it as a Ponzi scheme.

The Nacogdoches newspaper ran a sidebar on January 10 about the consequences: The worst hurt people in the bank failure are the small farmers having from $100 to $500 deposited in the bank. Old men, past 75 years of age, had all of their money in this bank to take care

of them in their declining days, and it is pitiful and heartrending to hear them talk of their losses. One old man who had $200 on deposit, which has been in the bank for years to bury him and pay his funeral expenses, is terribly disturbed. Farmers and businessmen who have lost by the failure continue to stand about in the streets in groups, talking over their trouble and besieging the sheriff with inquiries about the fugitive and his prospective capture.

Ben Wettermark’s creditors offered a $500 reward for “the apprehension of a member of the firm who, it is said, has disappeared and against whom a warrant has been sworn out charging him with forgery.”

Bounty hunters soon joined creditors in search of the colonel. Still there was no trace.

Speculating the “absconding Texas banker” may have fled to New Orleans, The Times-Democrat shared a description of Ben with its readers: Height 6 feet, weight about 200 pounds, of fairly well-proportioned build, dark hair and beard (close-cropped), a white spot on the right cheek, having the appearance of a scar; much space between the teeth which are fairly good; age about 45 years; generally good looking, a good dresser, deliberate in movements, easy swinging gait in walking, general appearance that of a man who might be deserving of confidence.

On January 10 newspapers began publishing a line drawing of Ben adapted from an 1899 portrait of him. Above the original photo was the caption, B.S. Wettermark. Mayor of and Prominent Banker. But with the line drawing the papers instead ran such one-word epithets as Scoundrel or Fugitive.

The Times-Democrat reported that authorities in New Orleans had searched ships in the harbor, as well as all inbound and outbound vessels, but had no luck. “He was not aboard,” one lawman concluded, “unless disguised as a stoker or sailor or deckhand, or perhaps stowed away in a packing case or trunk as a piece of baggage.”

A January 10 editorial that ran in both the Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel and the Houston Post was pessimistic:

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CEMENTERIO DE EXTRANJEROS

SHERIFF A.J. SPRADLEY AND FRIEND

In Ben’s absence, Daisy was left to deal with angry neighbors and nosy reporters who followed her around town. The second Mrs. Ben Wettermark and the children rattled around in the remote mansion on once proud Wettermark Street for a year. Then, on Jan. 28, 1904, Harris— granted power of attorney—sold the big, beautiful house and its 124½ acres for the then tidy sum of $7,000. By year’s end Daisy and Ben Jr. had left town. Carl, the youngest son, remained in Nacogdoches with Minnie, who had married her second cousin, Clifford Witherspoon, in a small, quiet ceremony.

Nacogdoches County Sheriff A.J. Spradley, who had lost some of his own money in the bank failure, took a more understanding tack than most

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

It is believed here by the majority of the citizens that Benjamin S. Wettermark will never be captured. He is a proud, haughty man, and before he would humiliate himself to face these people whose confidence he has grossly betrayed, he will take his own life. A great many surmises have been printed as to the cause of his downfall, but the principal cause is whiskey and neglecting his business. By his most intimate associates it is said that for years he has been a constant plunger, dealing in cotton futures, wheat, oats and corn, hog products, oil and mining stock.

people regarding Colonel Wettermark. On Sept. 6, 1916, he wrote to the Nacogdoches newspaper: I know people are ready to class Ben Wettermark as a wanton criminal. Often men are driven to desperation and commit rash acts by force of circumstances unavoidable. I understand Ben Wettermark made bad bets of speculation and lost. Now some men, some commit suicide, some murder trying to cover their shame. Mr. Wettermark is charged with forgery, I believe, with the hopes that he would save his name and his creditors. But instead he lost. It was suicide or flee; and he chose the latter.

CEMENTERIO DE EXTRANJEROS

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The only property Ben was able to keep safe from the bank’s creditors was an undivided half of mineral rights to seven tracts of land, totaling some 4,300 acres, in Nacogdoches and Rusk counties. In 1934 a related document surfaced in the public record. Though allegedly co-signed by Daisy and Ben, it gave no hint as to their whereabouts. The document granted nephew-in-law Clifford Witherspoon, Minnie’s husband, power of attorney over the mineral estate. Four years later Clifford conveyed the estate to Minnie and her brother Carl. In 1940 Carl sold his right, title and interest in the minerals on the land to the Stewart Mineral Corp.

When Minnie Wettermark Witherspoon died intestate in 1962, her share passed to brother-in-law Ford C. Witherspoon.

Nine decades after Ben Wettermark’s disappearance a shocking revelation came to light. It turns out that when Daisy left Nacogdoches with Ben Jr. in late 1904, she went to join her fugitive husband in Costa Rica. There Ben was living under the assumed surname “Wathen.” What’s more, they had a son together, naming him Burton Wathen Sutton, “Sutton” being Daisy’s maiden name. Burton grew up in Costa Rica, married María Christina Ruiz and had three children. Ben Jr. married a Nicaraguan woman, María Luisa Valle, and died in San José, Costa Rica, in 1947.

According to the March 29, 1992, Daily Sentinel, no one in Nacogdoches had been in contact with the Wettermarks/Wathens from the time Daisy left until that year, when Burton’s children sought royalties from the mineral leases in Nacogdoches and Rusk counties. Amoco Production Co. wanted to settle oil and gas lease payments for the mineral rights, on which funds had been accruing in the care of the 145th District Court of Nacogdoches County. An affidavit filed that February 27 by Amoco landman Glen S. Cade had drawn the Costa Rica clan’s interest.

Burton’s children claimed that the 1934 power of attorney granting the mineral estate to Clifford Witherspoon, who in turn had conveyed it to Minnie and Carl in 1938, was a forgery. Texas’ 12th District Court of Appeals finally resolved the matter in April 2006, ruling that the 1938 deed had unambiguously conveyed Daisy’s mineral interests to her stepchildren Minnie and Carl. Ford Witherspoon retained the mineral rights to the land.

Ben Wettermark’s heirs certainly fared better than those who had lost every cent they owned when he’d absconded and the bank had failed.

But at least the mineral rights case provided closure. Nacogdochians finally knew where Ben—and then Daisy—had gone after the colonel robbed his own bank. They also learned Ben had died in 1935 a long way from his old Nacogdoches home. Present-day travelers to San José, Costa Rica, can visit the graves of Ben, Daisy and Ben Jr. in the Cementerio de Extranjeros (Cemetery of Foreigners).

In Costa Rica’s Cemetery of Foreigners

Banker robber Ben Wettermark and wife Daisy are buried under the assumed surname “Wathen.”

The elusive Colonel Wettermark had escaped earthly retribution for skipping town with his fellow Nacogdochians’ funds in 1903, having neither humiliated himself by facing those whose confidence he had betrayed nor taken his own life. The most trusted man in town had instead died an old man of 73 in Costa Rica. Yet the colonel had been vindicated in one regard: Townspeople did follow his lead to the far north side of Nacogdoches. In 1929 the sprawling burg was incorporated as a full-fledged city that today boasts a population of 33,200. The bank building designed by the best architect in town still stands on the corner of Main and Pecan streets, as empty as the vault Ben left behind.

Award-winning playwright Linda Thorsen Bond [lindathorsenbond.com] writes for newspapers, magazines and TV and teaches at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas.

The Wettermark Bank scandal is the basis of her 2018 historical novel Saving the Oldest Town in Texas. Bond is also the author of San Angelo A to Z: A Young Reader’s Guide.

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COLLECTIONS When active Fort Harker had more than 75 buildings, including the native sandstone guardhouse (below), which today houses a museum.

FORTING UP IN CENTRAL KANSAS

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memorating both Forts Ellsworth and Harker.

Sitting astride the Santa Fe Trail, the forts had a brief but critical role in the region. In August 1864 Indian raiders drove off 50 horses and five mules from the original outpost, but none ever launched a direct attack on Fort Harker. The garrison faced a far deadlier foe in cholera, an epidemic of which broke out in June 1867 among the four companies of the 38th U.S. Infantry stationed there. By December the post had recorded some 900 cases and 50 deaths. Despite the outbreak, the troops at Fort Harker managed to escort more wagon trains that year than did troops stationed at any other frontier post. It also served as a base of operations for an Indian wars

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FORT HARKER GUARDHOUSE MUSEUM (2)

n the summer of 1864, near the junction of the Smoky Hill stage road and the Fort Larned–Fort Riley military road in Kansas, troopers of the 7th Iowa Cavalry under 2nd Lt. Allen Ellsworth crafted a temporary outpost of dugouts and log structures from which to protect traders and travelers—not from Confederate troops but from raiding Sioux, Cheyennes and Arapahos. Two years later the post was renamed in honor of Brig. Gen. Charles G. Harker, who’d been mortally wounded at the 1864 Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia. By the summer of 1867 the U.S. Army had abandoned the post and constructed a proper Fort Harker a mile to the northeast. Today the latter site hosts the Fort Harker Guardhouse Museum, com-

TOP: KAMNSASTRAVEL.ORG; LEFT: NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES COLLECTION

I

THE FORT HARKER GUARDHOUSE MUSEUM IN KANOPOLIS HONORS FRONTIER POSTS BUILT TO PROTECT OVERLAND TRAVELERS

BY LINDA WOMMACK

FORT HARKER GUARDHOUSE MUSEUM (2)

TOP: KAMNSASTRAVEL.ORG; LEFT: NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES COLLECTION

COLLECTIONS campaign under Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, commander of the military Department of the Missouri. Unfortunately, the campaign accomplished little other than to inflame tensions in the region.

That same year the Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division, extended a line past Fort Hacker, and within a year the fort became a troop staging site and major distribution point for supplies to military points farther west. In 1868 Major George A. Forsyth recruited scouts from Fort Harker for the punitive campaign that culminated in the hardearned victory at the Sept. 17–19 Battle of Beecher Island. That fall Hancock’s replacement, Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan, moved his command to Fort Harker to plan his largely successful winter campaign against the Indians. In 1869–70 Major Joseph Tilford overwintered at the fort with two troops of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th U.S. Cavalry before setting out for campaigns farther west. That spring Custer himself stopped at Fort Harker with the rest of the 7th Cavalry en route west to Fort Hays.

By the summer of 1871, as settlers flooded into the region and pushed out the Indians, Fort Harker’s importance as a military compound had waned.

In the spring of 1872 the Army relocated most of the garrison’s troops southwest to Fort Union in New Mexico Territory, and by year’s end the Kansas fort lay abandoned. In 1881 the government sold the land at public sale, and five years later developers founded the town of Kanopolis on the site.

When active Fort Harker had more than 75 buildings, the main ones flanking a 252-by-120yard parade ground. Marking its west end was a two-story native sandstone guardhouse with a half dozen upstairs cells. Today the guardhouse, at the corner of W. Ohio Avenue and Wyoming Street in Kanopolis, houses a museum. On the east end of the parade ground were 11 buildings used as officers’ quarters. Three of them—the commanding officer’s home and two of the junior officers’ quarters—were built of the same sandstone as the guardhouse and remain standing. The largest of the trio, the commanding officer’s home, comprises eight rooms and a kitchen. The Ellsworth County Historical Society owns it and the junior officers’ quarters, which it opens for tours. Only those four buildings survive.

In the fort’s heyday the enlisted men stayed in four or five sets of wood-frame buildings, each accommodating up to a company of soldiers. Behind each was a wood-frame privy fitted with a double row of seats. A separate kitchen and mess hall served the enlisted men. Southwest of the

guardhouse stood another eight wood-frame buildings first used as workshops and later converted into housing for married soldiers and laundresses. Other buildings included three large storehouses, the post hospital, a chapel, a sutler’s store and a bakery.

In the 1970s the surviving guardhouse and officers’ quarters were listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and today they house such period artifacts as firearms, uniforms, soldier’s personal items, cannons and wagons. In the midst of a residential neighborhood in Kanopolis, the historical society complex includes several other period buildings, including an 1880 schoolhouse, an 1887 livery stable and a 1905 railroad depot. For more information visit ellsworthcountykansashistory.org or call 785-472-3059.

The museum pays tribute to the men who served at Fort Harker (top) and showcases such period artifacts as uniforms, gear and wagons (above).

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GUNS OF THE WEST

1862 During the Civil War the Dance brothers made as many as 500 Colt-style revolvers, including this .44-caliber with an 8-inch barrel.

DANCING FOR DIXIE

J.H. DANCE & BROS.’ SIX-SHOOTER SERVED THE CONFEDERACY AND LATER SUCH OUTLAWS AS BLOODY BILL LONGLEY

BY GEORGE LAYMAN

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JUDE STEELE COLLECTION

TOP: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; LEFT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS

A

S.C., in April 1861, all four joined the 35th mong the most expensive U.S.Texas Cavalry, eldest brother James Henmade firearms in the antique ry receiving a first lieutenant’s commisgun collecting field are those sion. But when word got out the brothers manufactured during the Civil had the skills and tools to make firearms, War by and for the Confederacy. Wartime a commodity sorely needed in the primargunsmiths down South produced both rifles ily agrarian South, the state sent three of and revolvers, with more than a dozen small the four home to roll out revolvers similar firms doing their best to supply officers with in size and appearance to the Colt Model reliable, well-made six-shooters. For decades 1851 Navy. At least seven other members collectors have had to sort out various fakes of the 35th Calvary with machining skills and spurious examples, which are commonwere detailed to help the Dances crank out place. While many originals were framed in guns as fast as possible. While James continbrass—obtained by melting church bells and ued to ride with the 35th, he intermittently the like—several firms, including J.H. Dance returned to oversee production. & Bros., of Columbia, Texas, turned out Rebel GERONIMO Dance revolvers, first produced in 1862, revolvers with steel-hardened frames. differed from the Navy in one notable reIn the early 1850s brothers James, George, David and Isaac Dance left the Southeast for Columbia, Texas, gard—its versions had uniformly flat frames, lacking the rounded on the banks of the Brazos River between Houston and the recoil shield behind the cylinder typical of Colts and other Gulf Coast. There in 1858 they and uncle Harrison established cap-and-ball revolvers. The late antique arms authority Norm a thriving business manufacturing gristmills, cotton gins and Flayderman told me elimination of that feature enabled Dance boiler parts. Like most Texans, the brothers were Southern stal- to machine its frames far faster. Despite their comparatively warts, and soon after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, peculiar appearance, the pistols proved popular. The company

JUDE STEELE COLLECTION

TOP: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION; LEFT: HERITAGE AUCTIONS

GUNS OF THE WEST

produced as many as 500 revolvers, most in .44 caliber. The .44s had 8-inch barrels and weighed 3 pounds, 6 ounces, while .36s had 7½-inch barrels and weighed 2 pounds, 8 ounces. Most surviving examples have serial numbers but are devoid of maker’s marks.

In 1863 Union scouts got wind of the brothers’ arms-making operation on the Brazos. Fearing shelling by Union gunboats, the three surviving Dance brothers (Isaac had died of measles that March) left Columbia by year’s end and moved their whole operation 100 miles inland to a site just north of Anderson in Grimes County. Production was limited in the new locale, and many of the employees returned to their cavalry units, though apparently as late as April 1865 the factory shipped 25 revolvers to the Houston supply depot. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered that month, and with war’s end the Dance brothers returned to Columbia and went back to manufacturing gristmills and cotton gins.

While Dance revolvers were hardly a household name in the postwar West, Texas gunslinger William Preston “Bloody Bill” Longley carried a brace of them in .44 caliber. Born in Austin County, Texas, on Oct. 6, 1851, Longley was too young to fight in the war and in its wake came to resent the military occupation of Texas and other Southern states under the terms of the Reconstruction Act of 1867. The unreconstructed Longley was soon implicated in the killing of a black freedman, and in 1869 he and brother-in-law John Wilson went on a violent crime spree, taking the lives of a black freedman and freedwoman in south Texas.

In May 1870, one step ahead of the law, Longley joined a cattle drive to Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, then went panning for gold in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory. A month later he joined the 2nd U.S. Cavalry at Camp Stambaugh, Wyoming Territory, but it seems the soldier’s life didn’t agree with him. Court-martialed for desertion, he received a sentence of two years at hard labor, though four months later he returned to duty. Recognized as a crack shot, Longley was detailed to hunting parties to provide meat for the camp. But the restless hunter deserted again in the spring of

1872, and by February 1873 he was back in Texas and up to no good. First, he killed another black freedman, and then he avenged the death of a cousin by slaying boyhood friend Wilson Anderson with a shotgun. Just who Longley shot with his Dance revolvers is not known, but the outlaw had nothing but praise for his well-made .44s (one of which is believed to have been Serial No. 4, though the whereabouts of both are unknown). Authorities finally caught up to Longley in Louisiana in June 1877 and returned him to Texas to face trial for friend Anderson’s 1875 murder. On Oct. 11, 1878, thousands of people showed up in tiny Giddings to watch Longley hang. The press said he died game.

The Chiricahua Apache warrior Geronimo, who on surrendering to the Army in 1886 was sent as a prisoner of war to Florida and then Fort Still, Oklahoma Territory, later posed for a cabinet card photo (see opposite) wearing a nontraditional headdress and holding a Dance revolver. Original Dances are hard to find. In April 2016 Serial No. 135, one of only 10 known to exist, sold at a Cowan’s Auction for $52,875. Happily for firearm enthusiasts, in the 2000s F.lli Pietta of Italy began manufacturing a .44-caliber working replica, sold stateside by Taylor’s & Co. and other dealers. The Pietta models help keep alive the memory of the sturdy, easy-to-use Confederate answer to the 1851 Colt Navy.

In April 2016 Serial No. 135, one of only 10 known to exist, sold at a Cowan’s Auction for $52,875

Original Dances are extremely rare, but enthusiasts can still enjoy (and fire) replicas such as this cased Pietta version.

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GHOST TOWNS

The cabins in Mitchell Gulch have collapsed or are on the verge. Below: The headframe of the John mine has tumbled.

MITCHELL, MONTANA

O

n June 2, 1865, a prospector named John J. Doyle discovered placer gold in a stream a dozen miles east of a mining camp soon to be named Helena, the future capital of Montana Territory. Out of respect Doyle named the claim after his older partner, John F. Mitchell.

While details about the latter gentleman are scarce, it is known he quickly sold out to Doyle. Within a year dozens of eager prospectors had inundated the area. “A string of cabins extended along the gulch for over half a mile in which over 100 men wintered,” The Montana Plaindealer later wrote.

Alas, the stream was not very productive, as over the millennia its shifting course had deposited placer gold everywhere but

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nowhere in any concentration. The next four decades saw placer and hydraulic operations come and go, but most prospectors moved on to more lucrative diggings. Even Doyle set aside his pan and rocker box, opting instead to develop the gulch into a 185-acre ranch in which to settle down to married life. By 1898 area homesteaders had raised a one-room schoolhouse and installed Bertha Bennett as teacher.

Shortly after the turn of the century, Tony Smith sparked a resurgence of mining in the district when he started his ironically named Lost Hope mine, on Corral Mountain a mile west of the Mitchell Gulch feeder streams. In 1906 Smith shipped 40 tons of high-grade gold ore to a smelter in East Helena.

“He has also sunk an incline shaft 100 feet deep in the ore,”

PHOTOS: TERRY HALDEN (5)

THE MINING SETTLEMENT EAST OF HELENA DIDN’T HIT PAY DIRT UNTIL THE 20th CENTURY

BY TERRY HALDEN

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PHOTOS: TERRY HALDEN (5)

GHOST TOWNS

The Mining World breathlessly reported, “blocking out a considerable tonnage of ore.”

The news ignited all the old-time placer miners on Mitchell Gulch, most of whom lacked the capital to develop their properties. Helena merchant James Sterrett shrewdly leased his Eureka claim, adjacent to the Lost Hope, to brothers Sam, Isaac and Joe Rosenfield, who started producing ore from a shaft they dug 160 feet deep. Meantime, sitting idle on the Doyle ranch, were five separate gold veins, all patented in 1885 but none having been developed. Bert Lathrop bought the claims in 1910, and two years later he was shipping ore valued at $16 to $30 a ton to the East Helena smelter.

After consolidating his property as the Economy, he too sold out to the Rosenfield brothers, who centered their efforts in two mines, the John and the Jim. Over the next decade the Rosenfields bought up all the district mines, including Smith’s Lost Hope and other latecomers. With brother Joe back East seeking investors, and Sam and Isaac scouring Montana for the next great bonanza, they rapidly expanded their mine holdings to include the Scratch Gravel and Wolf Creek districts, north of Helena.

As the Rosenfields ramped up development in Mitchell, employees either stayed in existing cabins or built new ones near the mines. Whether the district ever hosted stores or other businesses is uncertain, though shops, saloons and services were abundant in nearby Helena and East Helena.

By the late 1920s the main shaft at the “Big John” was down to 650 feet and still producing gold, with some silver, copper and lead. The Rosenfields had built a stamp mill near the mines and were trucking the crushed ore to the smelter in East Helena. According to the 1934 Minerals Yearbook the brothers shipped some 300 tons of ore from the John and the Jim that year. As late as 1940 the yearbook showed the district producing ore, so at least a handful of employees were still living in Mitchell. The World War II ban on gold mining shuttered the claims, leaving the district to wither away into a ghost. Today in private hands, the land is once again inhabited by range cattle— a development that would have pleased prospector turned rancher John Doyle.

Clockwise from top left: The headframe of the Rosenfield brothers’ Jim mine, Mitchell’s main street and what’s left of the mill at the “Big John.”

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REVIEWS

MUST SEE, MUST READ ART T. BURTON CHOOSES BOOKS AND FILMS ABOUT FRONTIER OKLAHOMA Black, Red and Deadly: Black and Indian Gunfighters of the Indian Territory, 1870–1907 (1991, by Art T. Burton): This was the first book written about black and Indian outlaws and lawmen of the Wild West and the only such book to date. Black and Indian gunfighters were replete in frontier Oklahoma prior to statehood. Included here are such outlaws as Dick Glass, Cherokee Bill, Ned Christie, Henry Starr and Rufus Buck. Among the lawmen mentioned who dealt out justice in the region are Bass Reeves, Grant Johnson and the Indian Lighthorse Police.

West of Hell’s Fringe: Crime, Criminals and the Peace Officer in Oklahoma Territory, 1887–1907 (1978, by Glenn Shirley): This is probably the best book by Glenn Shirley, the dean of outlaw and lawmen history of frontier Oklahoma. It covers most of the important outlaws and lawmen of Oklahoma Territory, including the “Three Guardsmen”— Deputy U.S. Marshals Bill Tilghman, Heck Thomas and Chris Madsen. This book includes the gunfights, robberies and fugitive hunts that made this one of the wildest areas in the Wild West.

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Seminole Burning: A Story of Racial Vengeance (1996, by Daniel F. Littlefield): This fascinating account of a mob lynching in Oklahoma Territory in January 1898 begins with a crime in December 1897 in Indian Territory.

The arrest and trial proceedings became the largest criminal court case in Oklahoma’s pre-statehood history.

For the first time in a federal court men were convicted and sentenced to prison for racially motivated lynching.

More Oklahoma Renegades (2007, by Ken Butler): A follow-up to Butler’s Oklahoma Renegades: Their Deeds and Misdeeds, this volume is larger and includes more fascinating stories on murder and mayhem in Oklahoma and Indian territories. Many lesser-known criminals from Oklahoma history are covered in a book you’ll find hard to put down.

Sam Sixkiller: Cherokee Frontier Lawman (2012, by Howard Kazanjian and Chris Enss): This is the first biography of legendary Oklahoma frontier lawman Sam Sixkiller (1842–86), who served as high sheriff of the Cherokee Nation, captain of the U.S. Indian Police, a deputy U.S. marshal and a railroad detective. Sixkiller’s exploits rival those of

the best-known Old West lawmen, and the book ensures he won’t be forgotten.

MOVIES The Bank Robbery (1908, Library of Congress): This was lawman Bill Tilghman’s first effort at trying to relate the truth of the Old West on film.

Shot in the western Oklahoma town of Cache, it included real lawmen, such as Frank Canton and Heck Thomas, real outlaw Al Jennings and Comanche Chief Quanah Parker. It was a good effort for the time, and viewers can enjoy the sight of men in the saddle who lived on horseback. Tilghman went on to make other films, most notably Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaw in 1915.

Appalled at Hollywood glorification of outlaws, Tilghman sought to right the wrong and give due credit to lawmen.

Cimarron (1931, RKO Radio Pictures): The first Western to win the best picture Academy Award, Cimarron remained the only Western so honored until 1990, when Dancing With Wolves took top honors. Richard Dix and Irene Dunn star as homesteaders in the newly opened Unassigned Lands of Indian Territory. Filmmakers re-created the 1889 Land Run in what is probably the high point of the movie. At the time of its release the picture won high praise for what people at that time considered a realistic depiction of frontier life.

Hang ’em High (1968, The Malpaso Company/United Artists): This was the first movie to depict the Fort Smith federal court, Isaac C. “Hanging Judge” Parker and the lawlessness of Indian

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REVIEWS Territory, although filmmakers changed the names of the fort and judge. This was the first Americanmade Western for Clint Eastwood after having starred in Sergio Leone’s “Dollars trilogy” in Europe.

The strong cast includes Inger Stevens, Ben Johnson, Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper. The film brings home the point that Indian Territory (or Oklahoma Territory, as it is erroneously called in the movie) was an extremely dangerous place in frontier America.

True Grit (1969, Paramount Pictures): Adapted from the classic Charles Portis novel of the same name, this movie provides another visit to Judge Parker’s federal court at Fort Smith and a dangerous ride into Indian Territory. John Wayne plays fictional U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn in a role that earned him his only best actor Academy Award. The supporting cast includes Kim Darby, Robert Duvall and Glen Campbell, who sang the title song. The action takes place in the Choctaw Nation of Indian Territory, where a young girl joins a hired U.S. marshal and a tagalong Texas Ranger on a hunt for a wanted fugitive who murdered her father. The Coen brothers filmed a 2010

adaptation of the novel, but it did not surpass the first effort.

You Know My Name (1999, Warner Bros.): Transitioning the action from horse to automobile in early Oklahoma, the movie relates the circumstances of frontier lawman Bill Tilghman’s 1924 death in the line of duty in Cromwell.

Sam Elliott, one of Hollywood’s better cowboy actors, stars as Tilghman. Co-stars include Arliss Howard and R. Lee Ermey.

While this was a good film, hopefully someone will make a movie about Tilghman’s earlier years as a deputy U.S. marshal in Oklahoma Territory or as a lawman in Dodge City, Kan. Tilghman’s good friend and fellow Deputy U.S. Marshal Heck Thomas also merits consideration from Hollywood.

BOOK REVIEWS Ambitious Honor: George Armstrong Custer’s Life of Service and Lust for Fame, by James E. Mueller, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2020, $32.95 There appears no end in sight to the number of books—good, bad and indifferent—authors will pen and publishers will push about George Armstrong Custer and his June 25, 1876, last

stand at the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory.

Why do we need another biography of the man and his legacy? The question merits renewed consideration in the wake of T.J. Stiles’ Pulitzer Prize–winning 2015 history Custer’s Trials.

Stiles seems to have plumbed every known letter the controversial soldier wrote, among countless other primary sources.

Part of the answer lies in the role “Custer’s Last Stand” plays toward our understanding of the “winning of the West.”

Moreover, the scale of Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn shocked the entire nation, particularly given the “Boy General’s” reputation as a successful Civil War general and Indian fighter. As author James Mueller notes, “The news of his disastrous last battle, which stood in such contrast with his images of the invincible cavalryman, was so stunning that it seared a place into the nation’s consciousness that remains to this day.” That said, this refreshing effort demonstrates there is more to the story than Custer’s military legacy. Ambitious Honor offers lessons for both the Little Bighorn novice and expert.

Those with a general interest in history

will appreciate reading a clear, well-written, wellorganized biography that remains focused on its subject. While providing essential details about the 1876 Little Bighorn campaign and other events, for example, it avoids ponderous tactical details regarding Custer’s Civil War battles, which would only lose the unfamiliar reader’s attention. A journalism professor, Mueller relates a focused narrative that captures the essence of the man and his diverse accomplishments and interests.

Subject matter experts might find Ambitious Honor contains little or no new information about either Custer’s personal life or his military accomplishments (and failures).

They might bemoan its perfunctory treatment of the Little Bighorn, largely based on Captain Edward S. Godfrey’s 1892 account of the battle, and the lack of battle maps. Finally, they might complain that much

of its research is drawn from standard, albeit reliable, secondary sources.

Notwithstanding such potential criticism, students of Custer and his last battle should appreciate the author’s fresh perspective of a man that continually defies a simple, onedimensional interpretation of his character.

Custer was not only a soldier but also a scholar who had multiple interests and experiences apart from the battlefield. “He had a remarkable talent for war,” Mueller notes, “but it was a career he was thrust into because of the times in which he lived. Custer had an artistic temperament and as such was drawn to creative endeavors like writing and performing. Those talents drew him to fields such as education, journalism, entertainment and politics.”

He demonstrated these creative talents despite his poor West Point academic record.

The author’s research of Custer’s correspondence in the Elizabeth Bacon Custer and other archival collections attest to the fact his subject was an exhaustive writer of letters, which often consumed dozens of pages. Like many commissioned officers in the frontier Army, Custer took advantage of his downtime between assignments to concentrate

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on writing articles for such magazines as Turf, Field and Farm and Galaxy and his 1874 book My Life on the Plains—among the forerunners of literary journalism or narrative nonfiction. Only his death prevented the completion of his Civil War memoir.

We could point to Custer’s many other non-military experiences, such as the lure of New York City “where he could hang out with celebrities, take in shows and meet with publishers and civic leaders.” Or the offer of a lucrative nationwide speaking tour, postponed by his last campaign. Or his savvy use of the press during and after the Civil War to control his own version of events and advance his reputation. Mueller has thus written not only an articulate version of the Custer story but also a fresh interpretation of the multifaceted man who transcended the traditional perception of a soldier.

—C. Lee Noyes Saving the Oregon Trail: Ezra Meeker’s Last Grand Quest,

by Dennis M. Larsen, Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2020, $28.95 Wild West presented the Ezra Meeker story in brief in special contributor John Koster’s August 2020 feature 84 WILD WEST

“Nothing Meek About Him.” The pioneer is remembered for having traveled the Oregon Trail in his 20s in 1852, then raised awareness of the neglected route by traversing it again by ox and wagon at age 75 in 1906. But, of course, there is so much more to learn about the fascinating and magnificently mobile Meeker, who died within a month of his 98th birthday. For that look no further than Dennis Larsen, a retired high school history teacher and leading expert on Meeker. Saving the Oregon Trail is his concluding volume on Meeker. Earlier came The Missing Chapters: The Untold Story of Ezra Meeker’s Old Oregon Trail Monument Expedition (2006), Slick as a Mitten: Ezra Meeker’s Klondike Enterprise (2009) and Hop King: Ezra Meeker’s Boom Years (2016).

Meeker never forgot the storied emigrant trail, whose heyday came before completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. He wrote about traveling the Oregon to become one of Washington Territory’s first pioneers and kept on writing, promoting and preserving throughout his long life. “Ezra Meeker bestrides the legacy of the Oregon Trail like a colossus,” historian Will Bagley writes in the foreword.

Meeker was the main man behind the Ore-

gon Trail Memorial Association, incorporated in 1926. The Ohio native shouldn’t be forgotten for his role as the greatest defender of that trail, but he was many other things as well, including the “Hop King of the World” in the late 1870s–80s, a Klondike adventurer (after having gone bankrupt in the 1890s), president of the Washington

State Historical Society, a women’s suffrage advocate and author of a book The Tragedy of Leschi, about the wrongful hanging of a Nisqually chief.

“Ezra Meeker’s ethical humanity,” writes Bagley, discredits one of the worst excuses for past prejudices— the argument that bigotry was the societal standard of the time, so everybody was doing it.

Not everybody: His ethical core condemned prejudice.”

Meeker was both a dreamer and a doer.

He was a hard worker, risk-taker, selfpromoter and ruthless competitor who, Larsen writes, had “a vision of the fu-

ture that was unerringly accurate,” but who also had a pugnacious side that “tended toward selfrighteousness [and] grated on many.”

As Larsen details in these action-packed 266 pages, the driven and complex Meeker “could live as easily in a log cabin or a covered wagon as in a mansion.” The author delivers the good and bad about the man, mentioning how Meeker’s singlemindedness and crusading spirit could alienate people and took a toll on family and friends. But largely thanks to him, monuments and interpretive centers dot the route of the Oregon Trail, which he covered multiple times. He was also an early proponent of a transcontinental highway as a national defense measure.

In 1928 Meeker was touring New England in his “Oxmobile,” supplied by Henry Ford. It was, according to The New York Times, “to be a preliminary to Mr. Meeker’s sixth transcontinental trip over the Oregon Trail.” Grave illness disrupted his plans, and the end of his long trail neared. His funeral was held in Seattle. Fittingly, a pair of oxen pulled a prairie schooner filled with flowers to the mortuary.

—Editor

Go West, Mr. President,

by Michael F. Blake, TwoDot, Helena, Mont., and Guilford, Conn., 2020, $26.95 In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt took a “Great Loop” tour of the Midwest and Western states— traveling mostly by train but sometime on horseback—and though he would seek re-election the next year, his two-month trip was not a campaign tour. It was a rousing success, as detailed here by Michael Blake, who wrote the awardwinning 2018 Roosevelt biography The Cowboy President and the October 2019 Wild West article “Roosevelt’s Posse.” Theodore (he didn’t like being called “Teddy”) left Washington, D.C., on April 1, 1903, and returned to the nation’s capital on June 5.

“His charismatic personality and heartfelt words invited all the people to join him in pursuing their own dreams, as well as Theodore’s dreams for the country,” writes Blake. A Republican, Roosevelt largely

JACKET DESIGN BY KATHY HEMING

REVIEWS

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LALIRE_M

Coming in April from Gregory Lalire, the editor of

MAGA Z INE

MAN FROM MONTANA

by Gregory J. Lalire

JACKET DESIGN BY KATHY HEMING

This historical novel follows adventurer Woodie Hart to the violent goldfields of what would become Montana Territory.

Woodie discovers the boomtowns of Virginia City, Bannack and Hell Gate and faces the twin terrors of road agents looking to get rich quick and vigilantes intent on dishing out cruel justice.

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PRICE: $25.95 / 370 PAGES HARDCOVER (5.5 X 8.5) / ISBN13: 9781432871178 TIFFANY.SCHOFIELD@CENGAGE.COM FACEBOOK & TWITTER: @FIVESTARCENGAGE

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REVIEWS avoided partisanship and shared grandstands with Democrats, several of whom later endorsed his reelection. “This,” the author writes, “was just one small demonstration of Theodore’s popularity and leadership.”

On April 5–7 he visited 20 towns in South and North Dakota, his old stamping grounds.

Twenty years earlier he had hunted, ranched and worked cattle in Dakota Territory, and in 1903 cowboys, some of whom he’d known back in the 1880s, rode from as far as 150 miles away to greet him in Medora, N.D. “It is ironic that Theodore’s passion for conservation began because he wanted to hunt buffalo,” writes Blake. That passion developed further when he took a break from speechmaking to spend 17 days (April 8–24) in Yellowstone, speak on May 6 in Arizona Territory at the Grand Canyon (“Leave it as it is.

The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it”) and spend a few days (May 15–17) with naturalist John Muir in California’s Yosemite Valley. In his many speeches Roosevelt talked not only about conservation but also about giving every man and woman a “square deal” (rich and poor, 86 WILD WEST

no matter one’s race), the importance of good citizenship and the value of a strong Navy.

“In the last analysis,” Roosevelt said May 28 in Pocatello, Idaho, “what America stands for more than for aught else is for treating each man on his worth as a man; if he acts well in whatever walk of life, whatever his ancestry, his creed, his color, give him a fair chance; if he acts badly, let nothing protect him from the hand of the law.” Blake acknowledges Roosevelt had his flaws like any other man, though readers will have to go elsewhere to learn more about those. “But in the end,” says Blake, “the positive actions he took far outweigh any of his missteps.

We all owe Theodore Roosevelt a debt of gratitude for leadership by example. His actions are an inspiration to all of us.”

—Editor The Real Dirt on America’s Frontier Outlaws,

by Jim Motavalli, Gibbs Smith, Layton, Utah, 2020, $24.99 With regard to badmen of the Old West, it goes without saying plenty of real dirt is attached to them. But the title is keeping in line with Jim Motavalli’s earlier offering, The Real Dirt on America’s Frontier Legends (reviewed in the June 2020 Wild West and online at Historynet.

com). As our regular readers know, the list of frontier outlaws is extensive, so the author had to be selective in these 240 pages. He managed to cover more than a dozen desperadoes in the longer entries and adds a handful more in his last chapter, “Other Owlhoots and Unsavory Characters.”

It’s not exactly news Jesse James was no noble outlaw, though some people today still hold that notion. The author subtitles his James chapter “Refighting the Civil War” and concedes, “The brutalities of that war turned the onetime young Southern guerrilla “into something of a monster,” but suggests,

“It requires contortions to turn figures like Jesse James into heroes, but those contortions were most definitely made in the postwar South.” When it came to killings after the Civil War, though, Jesse (and probably nobody else) was a match for John Wesley Hardin, whose chapter here is subtitled “Revenge for the War of Northern

Aggression.” At one point in his evil endeavors, Hardin hooked up with cousin Simp Dixon, a young member of the Ku Klux Klan who swore “to kill Yankee soldiers as long as he lived.”

Hardin tried to justify his murders (“I didn’t kill anyone who didn’t need killing,” he said), but he clearly was always ready to pull the trigger. Naturally Hardin made himself look decent in his autobiography, but Motavalli says the Texan “was in actuality a vicious killer and avid racist.”

Jesse’s rival for best-known Wild West outlaw, Billy the Kid (“The Irish Enigma”), gets full coverage here, as do Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (“Made by the Movies”), Black Bart (“A Gentleman Bandit”) and Johnny Ringo (“A Gunman Who Died Mysteriously”). But less publicized outlaws also get their due, including the wonderfully named Hoodoo Brown (“Bad Hat with a Star”) and such minority miscreants as Isom Dart (“Rodeos and Stock Theft”), the bloody Espinosas (“Early Serial Killers”), Cherokee Bill (“A Killing Spree”) and the Rufus Buck Gang (“Multiracial Rampage”).

The ladies aren’t neglected, either, although celebrity stage robber Pearl Hart’s celebrity was

based on only one botched stagecoach robbery. “A female bandit was a novelty, so Hart was much attended and photographed by the press,” Motavalli writes. The so-called bandit queen, Belle Starr, was more a lover of outlaws than a hardened criminal herself. “The legend of Belle Starr was built in the pages of the Naitonal Police Gazette, which had a hand in creating our shared folklore,” the author writes.

The others cited in the closing chapter are Deacon Jim Miller, Dan Bogan, Bill Longley, Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum, the Dalton Gang, Soapy Smith and Belle Siddons. Readers will no doubt think of outlaws left out of the mix, but we can at least enjoy Motavalli’s entertaining treatment of this bunch of baddies.

—Editor Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America’s First Frontier, by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2021, $29.99 America’s first frontier, the one covered in this latest effort by The New York Times best-selling writing team of Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, lay west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi River. The

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title character, Daniel Boone (1734– 1820), is the most famous character associated with that frontier, thanks to his exploits as a hunter, Indian fighter, explorer (think Cumberland Gap) and settler (particularly for settling in what became Kentucky). Boone was more than merely a creation of his early biographers, the authors argue. His lifetime of adventures and achievements were real.

Although the Cumberland Gap had long been used by Indians, Boone’s 1775 forging of a trail through this gap in the Appalachian Mountains did much to encourage westward expansion.

Other notable Boone exploits cited by the authors include the rescue from Indians of his captive daughter Jemima (which laid the basis for a James Fenimore Cooper tale), his own dramatic escape and long journey to warn Boonesborough of an Indian attack, and “his subsequent leadership in the defense of that lonely outpost…[which] did have an impact on

the western front of the American Revolution.”

While at times Boone courageously forged through the wilderness alone, he often circulated in small groups that included his brother Squire and other relatives and friends. Certainly there were other risk-taking long hunters and fighting men who never achieved his celebrity status. Case in point is one Simon Kenton (1755–1836), who saved the life of his friend Boone in 1777, survived running the gauntlet and torture at the hands of the Shawnee Indians, fought alongside George Rogers Clark during the American Revolution, explored and settled in Ohio, and served in the War of 1812.

Drury and Clavin vividly depict the dangers frontiersmen faced.

At the same time they acknowledge not all of such men were heroic.

Neither do the authors neglect the other side of the story—that of the Indians, particularly the Shawnees, who chafed at the intrusion of white men into their lands. Many tribes allied themselves with the British Crown during the Revolution, and for many the fight continued long past the 1881 British surrender far to the east at Yorktown, Va. Boone eventually ventured west of the Mississippi to settle in what would become

Missouri, but that’s another story.

—Editor

John Finerty Reports the Sioux War, edited by Paul L. Hedren, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2020, $34.95 Let no easygoing journalist suppose that this Indian campaign is a picnic. If he comes out on such business, he must come prepared to ride his 40 to 50 miles a day, go sometimes on half rations, sleep on the ground with small covering, roast, sweat, freeze and make the acquaintance of such vermin or reptiles as may flourish in the vicinity of his couch, and finally, be ready to fight Sitting Bull or Satan when the trouble begins, for God and the United States hate noncombatants. Thus was I, who am peaceably disposed, placed in the position of an eyewitness, my “mess” being with the 3rd Cavalry.

Thus did John Finerty, born in Ireland

on Sept. 10, 1846, sum up what it took to be a credible war correspondent in his case for the Chicago Times. He may as well have described the Civil War journalists so detested

by William T. Sherman, the scribes recording the campaigns of Alexander the Great (who was known to arbitrarily slay any who rubbed him the wrong way), Joe Galloway in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, an embedded journalist in Iraq in 2003 or just about anyone in his profession except Gaius Julius Caesar, who circumvented the matter of reporting on his Gallic campaign by writing it up himself. It was the gonzo journalist who got involved in the hardships and even the fighting who got on the soldier’s, the officer’s and the general’s good side. And as Great Sioux War expert Paul L. Hedren reminds us in John Finerty Reports the Sioux War, Finnerty was not averse to getting in on the action—and the hardship and all else the campaigns of 1876 and beyond entailed.

Accompanying Brig.

Gen. George Crook’s column, Finerty was actively involved in the Battles of the Rosebud River, Slim Buttes and two other engagements in the course of covering them and such adjunct color as the Black Hills gold rush in Dead-

wood and Custer City.

Under the circumstances, one would expect Finerty to display an Irishman’s skill at weaving a compelling account perhaps lacking in objectivity. Indeed, one of his observations makes no secret of his feelings—oft reiterated— regarding the target of the Army’s campaign: “We soon entered magnificent Montana, a land that would maintain millions of people in living if there were enough emigrants to settle it, and if the whole tribe of Indians, friends and otherwise, were exterminated.”

Finerty later published his accounts in War-Path and Bivouac, which has become a staple of scholars seeking a firsthand account of the Sioux wars. Hedren discovered that Finerty’s book, edited with the benefit of hindsight, provides a more illuminating account of the campaign than the stories he dispatched to the Chicago Times. Here, then, is a compilation of the correspondent’s original accounts in all their immediacy, allowing readers to compare what he wrote then with what went into his book later.

The differences add a further dimension to the life and literature of one of military history’s most adventurous gonzo journalists.

—Jon Guttman

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NATIONAL HISTORIC OREGON TRAIL INTERPRETIVE CENTER, BAKER CITY

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ost people with even a passing interest in the Oregon Trail are eager to find the ruts left by pioneers’ passing wagons all those lifetimes ago. There may be no better place than this 23,000-square-foot interpretive center near Baker City, in far eastern Oregon. From the wagons parked atop Flagstaff Hill visitors can follow with their eyes nearly 7 miles of well-preserved ruts that meander across Virtue Flat.

On arrival in Oregon westbound emigrants faced a tough passage up the Burnt River Canyon before crossing the Blue Mountains to reach the Columbia River. Downriver lay the promise of the Willamette Valley and points west. Oregon Trail preservationist Ezra Meeker (inset) knew the route well, having traversed it in youth and old age.

Stone markers he placed more than a century ago still line the 2,170-mile trail.

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CLASSICSTOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; INSET: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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