Another Lone Star Sons Story: Godfathers Three

20. February 2014 · 1 comment · Categories: Chapters From the Latest Book, Old West

Lone Star Sons Logo - Cover(Part one of my reworking of a certain classic western serial adventure – this one with plot elements lifted from a classic John Wayne Western.)

“Tell me again, why we are going to Laredo, James?” Toby asked, as he and Jim rode out on the long road toward Monterrey, the road that would lead them south into the contested borderlands. “And why has Captain Jack sent us to escort Mr. Biddle? We both know well that he is very well fit to look after himself. After the matter of the Casa Wilkinson…”
“It is a matter of honor,” Jim replied. “Mr. Biddle did us a good turn, and now we are doing him one. His errand is to do with matters of those Americans who trade in Laredo … where half the town seems to prefer to live under the rule of an autocrat, rather than in a democracy…Have you ever heard of such a thing – moving the town, their homes and businesses over the river and declaring the place to be New Laredo?”
“It is one of those things,” Toby answered, in thoughtful fashion. “Men would prefer to be misruled by those of their kind and color than accept the authority of those who are of another.”
“Seems so,” Jim answered. He used his free hand to wrap the woolen muffler tighter around the lower part of his face. An unseasonable chill wind had come with a blue norther in the middle of the night, and what had been warm and pleasant breeze the previous day was now cutting like a bitter cold knife against his hands and exposed face. He envied the fine kid gloves that Albert Biddle had drawn from the depths of his old-fashioned coachman’s overcoat with its many thick woolen capes.
“But there is another reason for us both to accompany him to Laredo,” Toby persisted. “Is there not?”
“I didn’t think I should tell you until it became necessary,” Jim replied. “But among the rumors that come to Captain Jack’s ears is one; that Gallatin and some unsavory cronies of his have taken a commission from the Mexican governor of Santa Fe to hunt Apache. According to what Jack heard, the governor authorized a bounty for Apache scalps. It’s an unsavory business.”
“And Gallatin is …” Memory and consternation broke across Toby’s usually impassive features. He and Jim were alike haunted by the memories of Jim’s brother Daniel, and four Rangers of Daniel’s company, murdered by Gallatin and his renegades, all for nothing more than being in the way of a wagon-load of tainted gold. Toby had buried the dead and nursed Jim, the sole survivor, back to health. They had been sworn brothers ever since. “A man without tribe, cast off from his people; what makes you think he will be in Laredo, James?”
“He won’t be … but there is a man of the same name, keeping a taproom in Laredo; a brother, a cousin perhaps. He might know where our Gallatin is, and what he is up to. I want to see Gallatin brought to justice,” Jim set his face to firmness, under the muffler, and Toby wisely kept silent for some moments.
“He will be a hard man to catch, Brother,” Toby ventured at last. “And harder to bring to justice; best to serve him as he served your brother and comrades; my vote is for a bullet and a lonely grave in the desert, once the birds have had their fill.”
“So you have said,” Jim replied. It was an old argument, one revived with every report and rumor about the doings of Gallatin. In a corner of Jim’s heart, he kept always the memory of five graves, each marked with a cross made of willow stems and a cairn of rocks, and a sixth which was merely an empty decoy. “Someday, Gallatin will meet with justice. If it is to be, I will be the instrument which administers it.”
“In the meantime,” Albert Biddle added, riding up on Jim’s right hand, as Toby rode on his left, “We are to Laredo and my business with those American citizens of that place.”
“And that business would be?” Jim asked, laughing as Albert Biddle replied, also with a laugh.
“That of my own nation, naturally – just as yours is yours. Ask me no questions, Jim – and I’ll tell no lies. In the meantime, your pleasant company and that of Mr. Shaw is most welcome on a personal level. Knowing of Mr. Cooper’s Deerstalker tales, it is my utmost pleasure to venture onto a trail into the wilderness accompanied by the present-day Texian version.”
“You do me an unlooked-for and unworthy honor,” Jim answered, “Although not to Mr. Shaw – who is truly a modern Chingachgook in every respect.”
“Watching someone exercise their god-given natural skill,” Albert Biddle observed, “Is a pleasure not unlike watching a master-musician perform … an education as well as an entertainment.”
Jim snorted with laughter, “Wait until you taste some of his cooking, Mr. Biddle – there is, alas, no pleasure in it, only sustenance for the body.”
“I do cook better than your mother,” Toby answered, having taken no insult. Jim laughed again. “Touché, Brother. As it happens, we have brought along enough in supplies from the marketplace in Bexar not to have to depend on hunting for some days … now, you did pay mind to Captain Hays with regard to a pair of water canteens for yourself? There is little good water between here and the valley of the Rio Grande, and we may expect several dry marches between here and there.”
“Of course,” Albert Biddle replied. He leaned forward in his comfortable Spanish vaquero saddle and slapped the side of the canteen hanging from the saddle-horn. The canteen was full to the brim with good sweet water from the San Pedro spring; the slap sounded as a hollow thump. “I am not such an arrogant fool as to disregard the advice of those who know whereof they speak.”
“Good,” Jim said. “It’s a long thirsty ride, otherwise – even if it isn’t summer yet.”

Some four days later, the three travelers approached the driest stretch of their passage to Laredo, having chosen to avoid the established wagon road and the curiosity of other travelers as to their errands. Jim thought it a good trade for the slight dangers of travelling with only two other companions. Just before midday, Toby drew rein and shaded his eyes with his hand. He had no need to tell Jim what had drawn his attention – the sight of eight or ten scavenger-birds, circling on motionless wings, on the horizon. That many birds meant something of interest to them, and dead on the ground below.
“Something is the matter?” Albert Biddle likewise shaded his eyes; an intelligent man, for all that he was a Yankee – and he learned fast, which was good, considering. Slow learners in the borderlands tended to wind up as dead as whatever the vultures were circling.
“There is something interesting to them close to where the spring is,” Toby frowned. “I do not like this, Jim. Last year when I traveled this way with my uncle, there was a goat-herder with a little holding outside Laredo who liked to pasture his goats here in spring. The grass grew sweet and thick in the bottom of the arroyos, weeks earlier than anywhere else. That is, if there had not been too much rain.”
“A dead goat, maybe,” Jim suggested, and Toby shrugged in a noncommittal way. “There is no smoke from a campfire,” he said, and they rode on. Their canteens were all but empty, and their three horses were thirsty enough to set a lively pace as they scented the distant water.

(To be continued … there is a baby involved, of course.)

Rodeo Time

17. February 2014 · 2 comments · Categories: Domestic, Old West, Uncategorized

Get along little dogiesFor all that my brothers, my sister, my daughter and I spent time atop a horse, we were never into it seriously enough to participate in or attend horse events; just never had the time, money or inclination. But a friend of ours had a pair of tickets to the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo last weekend, and then wasn’t able to go – so she gave us the tickets. We were at first a little disconcerted to see how far up in the rafters that our designated seats were – but I will have to say that we had an excellent view of the events that we did watch. And of course the utility of most of the events in relation to working cattle from horseback in the 19th century was perfectly plain to me.

Team roping – of course, that was the best strategy to secure a near-adult and semi-feral longhorn in order to brand, mark and neuter, without risking certain death by goring or trampling. Drop a slip-line over the head, and catch it by the rear legs with another – and there was the cow immobilized. Looking at diagrams and descriptions of this, I had always suspected that sending that second rope low and catching a running animal by the feet was pretty hard. It was – only two of the seven or eight competitors that we watched were able to do this successfully.

Calf-roping – that also had utility; the contest is for the rider to rope the calf, dismount while the horse holds steady (or even backs up, to hold the lariat taut) while the rider flips the calf on it’s side and ropes three legs together with a short length of rope. Most of the competitors were able to accomplish this; but one rider drew a particularly feisty small black calf that fought him every inch of the way. This calls for a pretty clever and obedient horse, since the horse is doing about a third of the work.
Calf Tie
Bronco-busting also has historical roots in working cattle the old way; horses were often wild mustangs, nearly as feral as the cattle. Such were the times and utilitarian attitudes toward horses – who were merely warm-blooded, living tools in the eyes of cattle drovers – that such horses would have to become swiftly accustomed to being saddled, bridled and ridden. This was most commonly accomplished by applying saddle, bridle and strong-nerved rider to the untamed horse and letting it buck until exhausted … and repeating when necessary. I have to say that watching the bucking horses kick, twirl, spin and buck while the rider was bounced around like a floppy rag doll was enough to make my back hurt – but being able to stay in the saddle under circumstances like that was part of a horse-wrangler’s job description.

Some of the other events don’t seem to have such a historical pedigree, but grew out of later Wild West shows and the traveling rodeo circuit. They were purely entertainment, either for an audience or for bored young men to challenge each other; I wondered if the phrase “hold my beer – and watch this!” hadn’t been involved the first couple of times. Steer wrestling – that is, jumping out of the saddle of a running horse and flipping a running steer to the ground – is likely one of those. So is bull-riding; like bronco-busting, only with a bucking bull.
Mutton Busting
And a few events were just pure good fun; mutton-busting, for example. The sheep themselves didn’t seem particularly discommoded, and the children were all rather small – including a fearless three-year old girl, whose sheep, alas, seemed to have run right out from under her when the gate opened, before the assistants holding her steady could even let go. Barrel-racing evolved as suitable rodeo event for the ladies, very few of whom in the last century or the one before, had the upper-body strength necessary to wrestle steers to the ground by grabbing its head … or at least the sense not to try. And that was my afternoon at the rodeo – I do wish I could have been a little close to watching the rope-work. That would have been educational.

The Man With a Past

24. January 2014 · Comments Off on The Man With a Past · Categories: Old West · Tags:

It was one of the clichés in the old Wild West – that part of it which featured in dime novels, silent serial movies, Wild West Shows, and television shows – the crooked lawman. It did have some basis in fact, though; the recently established cow-towns and mining towns were tough places. Very often the natural choice for keeping the local bad-hats in some kind of seemly order was to co-opt the biggest, meanest baddest bad-hat of them all to administer order as sheriff. Not infrequently, said bad-hat was also a gambler, owned a saloon or an establishment of negotiable affections, and alternated between managing said establishment or the cards and keeping law and order. Other law officers started off on the side of the angels and went to the bad – such as the sheriff of Bannock, Montana, Henry Plummer, who was hanged by the local Vigilante organization in Virginia City. (The vigilantes were convinced by evidence that he was the head of a gang of road-agents, stock thieves and murderers.) In other words, the path wavering back and forth between the darkness and the light was a pretty well-trodden one, and so was the one-way path from light to darkness. But for one who walked from darkness of a criminal life, into the light of upholding the law – and remained there for most of his life, nothing quite comes close to the life of one particular lawman.

He was born Joseph Horner – although that would not be the name he bore for most of his adult life. The Horner family moved from Virginia after the Civil War, settling in Texas, where young Joseph worked as a cow-hand, with an active hobby in criminal and recreational hell-raising. Eventually he was wanted for cattle-rustling, bank robbery, assault with intent, and public brawling. The confident prediction would have been made that he was well on the way to being hung or shot full of holes, if a stretch in prison didn’t intervene. But somewhere along the way something happened to Joe Horner. He escaped from custody, and vanished from Texas. It seemed that he had vowed to turn his life around. Probably many dangerous and reckless young men in trouble with the law had promised themselves or their loved ones that they would go straight, and some of them actually meant it, and tried to for a time.

Joe Horner actually did go straight: around 1877 he changed his name and went to Wyoming, where he married and became an upright and respectable citizen. Ironically enough, he was twice elected sheriff of Johnson County, and for a time in the early 1890s was the chief detective for the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association. He was involved in the notorious Johnson County war, which seems to have left a bad taste in his mouth. Being in the employ of the Stock Growers’ Association put him on the opposite side from the small ranchers, townsmen and farmers who had been his friends. He moved on – to Oklahoma, where he became a deputy US Marshall, a comrade of the ‘Three Guardsmen – Bill Tilghman, Heck Thomas and Chris Madsen, tangling with the particularly vicious criminals who took refuge in the last of the all-open Wild West. He also went to Alaska, in the Klondike Gold Rush – and there again, became a lawman. When he returned to Oklahoma, after the turn of the century, it was to take up a new office – as Adjutant General for the Oklahoma National Guard, increasingly respected by his colleagues as the years passed.

Sometime around that time, he arranged for a meeting with the then-governor of Texas. He wanted to come clean, about his real name and the criminal he had been, after more than a quarter of a century as a lawman. The governor arranged for a pardon, and although some old friends urged the man who had been Joe Horner to resume his real name, by that time he had spent the larger portion of his life as Frank Canton, a man the very opposite of what he had been when he was Joe Horner.

The Golden Road

19. January 2014 · Comments Off on The Golden Road · Categories: Chapters From the Latest Book, Old West · Tags: , , ,

(All right – here it is, the first chapter of the next book but one – the Gold Rush adventure that I have always wanted to write. This one takes place in between Book One and Book Two of the Adelsverein Trilogy.  Enjoy – I’ll be posting occasional chapters here. )

Chapter 1 – Two Boys

             Spring came to the lowlands around San Antonio de Bexar as it always did – with the springs of clear water flowing clear and ice-cold, with meadows of flowers splashed in swaths of yellow, pink and the deep rich blue of buffalo clover as if a reckless artist had chosen to go mad with the paint. Young Friedrich Steinmetz, whom most everyone called Fredi, had come with his brother-in-law’s herd of cattle and three hired buckaroos to sell in the market-plaza in Bexar. Carl Becker’s ranch spanned a stretch of the hills that defined the valley of the upper Guadalupe, where he had built a tall stone house and brought Fredi’s older sister to it some eight years before. The hill country – ranges of limestone hills quilted with oak trees, formed the wall between the grassy and well-watered lowlands, long-settled by white men and Mexicans, and the Comanche-haunted plains of the Llano country. For more than half his life, it had been home to Fredi and his twin brother Johann. They were alike in form, being wiry of build, hazel-eyed and with light-brown hair, but different in character.  Fredi was the scapegrace, impulsive and bold. Johann was the clever one; this very spring he was to sail away and study medicine in the Old Country, that country where the twins had been born sixteen and a half years before.

“I want to go and see Johann off when the cattle are sold,” Fredi said, that night when they were less than a day’s journey to Bexar. The sun had already faded to a deep apricot blush in the western sky, and the stars to glimmer pale in the sky overhead. The herd was pastured in a meadow on the bank of Salado Creek, running deep and cold at this time of year. The cattle drank from it eagerly, after a warm afternoon of being chivvied across a dry stretch. Fredi’s brother-in-law Carl Becker helped himself to another piece of journey-bread, and answered through a mouthful. “You’re gonna have to travel on your own, then. I can’t stay long enough from the place to see you to Indianola and back an’ I sure as hell can’t pay your way on the stage.”

“That’s what I planned on,” Fredi answered. “An’ … if I run out of money, I’ll work my way back.”

“That’s the ticket,” Carl Becker grinned. He was a big young man, Saxon-fair and soft-spoken, some fifteen years older than Fredi. They spoke together in German, that language which Carl had from his family, who had been settled in America some three generations longer than the Steinmetzes. “But you better get yourself back as soon as you can – I don’t want to explain to Magda and Vati that I’ve let you loose on the world, all on your own.”

“If Johann is old enough to go study medicine in Germany,” Fredi answered. “Then I don’t see how anyone would mind me making my way in the world. You told me that you enlisted in a Ranger company when you were the age I am in now.”

“That was different,” Carl answered, but didn’t offer any explanation as to why that would be. “And if something happens to you, your sister will skin me alive.”

“She’s all taken up with the baby,” Fredi answered, carelessly. “But I won’t see Johann for years and years, Carl – we’re brothers! I want to see him one more time … we can hurrah in Indianola for all the times we won’t be there with each other.” He fixed Carl with pleading eyes. “I promise I’ll come straight back to the ranch.”

“Promises like that are nut-shells, made to be broken,” Carl answered, with a touch of wry cynicism. “You and Johann are as thick as thieves and I always like to think that he keeps you out of trouble … Go and see him away – but if you do get into a ruckus on your own, I promise I will come down and skin you myself. Especially if I have to bail you out of the cabildo.”

“Excellent!” Fredi exclaimed, joyfully relieved. “As soon as you sell the cattle, then – I’ll take the road towards the coast. Johann and Mr. Coreth were to take passage on the steamer to New Orleans in three weeks. I’ll be back well before mid-summer. You can count on me!”

“I can count on you to be a handful – and that’s what worries me,” Carl answered. More »

Off and Away

14. January 2014 · 6 comments · Categories: Book Event, Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

Well, after procrastinating for a good few weeks, scribbling another Lone Star Sons adventure, and playing around with photoshopping a cover for another collection of essays, I got started on The Golden Road – this will be the picaresque California Gold Rush adventure that I always wanted to write. In The Adelsverein Trilogy it was alluded several times that Fredi Steinmetz had gone to California with a herd of cattle …who knew that cattle had been taken over the southern route from Texas to San Diego in the mid-1850s to supply the gold mines? I didn’t, until I read of it in The Trail Drivers of Texas. Anyway, it’s mentioned casually a couple of times that he knocked around the gold mines for a bit and then wandered home again.

So – in keeping with my plan to continue exploring the western Barsetshire, and write the adventures of various minor characters as they star in their own book – this is Fredi’s turn to cut loose. And the venue – California at the heights of the Gold Rush is also a pretty wild and woolly scene, with all kinds of interesting, eccentric, and later-to-become famous characters wandering around … here goes. It is in my grand plan to make this my book for November, 2015. It seems to take me about two years to research and write (sometimes simultaneously, as I have a wonderful idea for a plot twist, and then have to hurry to the reference materials to see if that twist is even historically possible.)

I wrote the first draft of To Truckee’s Trail in a white-hot blaze of energy over the space of three months – but then, that was a book that I had been thinking about for years, and limited as to space and time. The Trilogy did take only two years – but that was essentially one humongous story, later sliced into three helpings. The other books – all seemed to fall together at one or two years, from start to final edit, even when I was working on some of them simultaneously. There are authors who can spin out a book a year, but … those always seemed to me to be a bit mechanical, and the books produced were nothing that any but the most devoted fans could fall upon with happy cries of joy. The authors who take two years, or even three years – well, the work is most usually worth the wait. And yes, this schedule has been kicked around in writer discussion groups for as long as I have been paying attention to them. So – herewith begins the new adventure – and I will, as usual, post the occasional sample chapter, as they are written.

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