He was of an old-and well-respected Hispanic Californio family, was Tiberico Vasquez; born in Monterey, the capital of what little government burdened the far-flung Spanish and then Mexican province which is today the state of California. (And such a state is in, these days, too – but I digress.) He was born sometime between 1835 and 1840; his family home in Monterey is now part of the local historical district. He was handsome, well-dressed and well-educated. He could read and write, had charming manners, and a touchingly gallant way with the ladies … which eventually spelled his doom, if the Mexican-American War and the Gold Rush had not already end the idyllic isolation in paradise for the old Californio families. They had lived lives of casual comfort, such as it was, a life based on cattle ranching and a profitable trade in hides, of bountiful hospitality among the great land-owning families and their friends, rounds of celebrations, of grand balls and fandangos, and genteel amusements such as bear-and-bull fights, and flirtations in the shade of the olive and citrus orchards planted here and there.
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Westering Wagons – And Other Frontier Legends!
This is a collection of essays originally posted as blog entries here, and at various other blogs where I have contributed, all put together in one! This one is not so much focused on Texas, as my previous collection was.
Westering Wagons is available as a Nook book, here – and as a Kindle eBook from Amazon here. Enjoy!
Considering all those cinematic or literary occasions in which an emigrant wagon train on the California/Oregon trail was pictured being attacked by a war-party of Indians, it actually happened as represented on very few occasions. That is, a defensive circle of wagons, with the pioneers being well-dug in while the Indians ride around on horseback, whooping and shouting to beat the band, and firing volleys of arrows at them. A little disconcerting for the fan of traditional Wild Westerns to find this out; kind of like discovering that most cowboys didn’t have much actual use for a six-shooter, and that most western towns were actually rather refreshingly law-abiding places. It ruins a whole lot of plots, knowing of these inconvenient verities, but those historians who become passionately interested in the stories of the trail, the frontier, the cattle baronies; they are not terribly surprised. As with everything, the more one looks… the more nuance appears. Of such are books made, non and fiction alike.
Why does this image reoccur, in the face of considerable scholarship to the contrary? Besides the inherent drama in the stories of the westering pioneers and gold-rushers and the desire of those later telling the stories to heighten the drama, probably the biggest reason may be that those who took part in the great transcontinental migrations actually anticipated something of the sort. They had two centuries of bitter history to draw upon, of grudges, warfare, and atrocities on both sides. Of two cultures colliding, of ancient grudges breaking into fresh enmity; why would it be any different west of the Mississippi than it had been east of it?
Amazingly enough, for at least two decades, until well after the Civil War, wagon-train pioneers actually encountered little open hostility from those various tribes whose territories they passed through. Not of the open sort described above, anyway. There was a certain amount of petty thievery, of oxen, horses, and mules stolen or strayed at night, sniping from the badlands along the Humboldt River, and sometimes single wagons and small parties of travelers beset, robbed, or murdered at any point along the way. There are any number of reasons for this, some of them overlapping. In the early years, there were actually relatively few wagon parties venturing over the trail during the course of the trail season. They were transitory, well-armed and usually well led, and had no desire to pick a fight with warrior-tribes like the Sioux, the horse-lords of the upper plains. Other tribes along the route took the opportunity to do business with the wagon-train parties, either trading commodities or labor in helping them to cross rivers, and as historian George Steward pointed out, it must have gotten pretty darned boring in the winter camps in the Rockies and the upper plains. A new set of travelers passing through their lands offered an interruption to the same old routine.
Up until the Civil War there were only a handful of incidents where Indians made a concerted, sustained and ultimately effective attack on a wagon train party; twenty members of the Ward party (including women and children) were overrun and gruesomely massacred near Ft. Hall in 1854, and 44 emigrants of Elijah Utters’ company met a similar fate after being besieged near Castle Butte, Idaho in 1860. Considering the enormous numbers of emigrants and Indians wandering around, fully armed and not particularly inclined to trust each other very much, the length of the trail. and the wide-open nature of the country, this is a very fortunate record indeed.
But there was one single incident which puts the deaths of the Ward and Utter parties into the shade, besides which all the other small incidents pale. There was one particularly brutal and horrendous massacre of wagon-train emigrants which started almost exactly as outlined in all those melodramatic books and movies: the pioneers forted up in a circle of the wagons, and besieged for days while awaiting rescue by the cavalry. And it happened just before the Civil War… More »
Well, the early critical reviews are out and the knives are in: the latest movie remake of The Lone Ranger looks to be tanking like the Titanic,(the original ship, not James Cameron’s movie fantasy) although the some of the reviews posted at Rotten Tomatoes are favorable, most of them are entertainingly vicious. Jerry Bruckheimer again goes over the top from the high-dive with a half-gainer and a jackknife on the way down, all with the noisy special effects, Johnny Depp was promised that he could wear bizarre hair and a lot of makeup and it appears as if the ostensible lead character is just there…
There have been so many iterations of The Lone Ranger, on radio, television and in the movies, and each one added its conventions, characterization and images that now it has become a creaking tottering edifice built of clichés. No more growth is possible, just a recitation of the same old verities. I believe that we can do better by the old Wild West, and so I propose a very, very radical solution; to reboot the Lone Ranger by amputating it from the post Civil War never-never-land of mid-20th century imagining and transplanting it squarely back in pre-Civil War Texas, with forays perhaps into Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana, and to New Mexico – perhaps even as far as California. John Reid would be the sole survivor of a ranger unit ambushed and wiped out by – oh, whoever would be the villainous gang of the time; a scalp-hunting gang, villainous Comancheros, cattle and horse thieves from the Nueces Strip. Really, any sufficiently well-organized gang of baddies from the period would serve. He could even be a survivor of the Mier Expedition, escaped from Mexican custody and found near-death in the wilderness by Tonto … who could be a Lipan Apache or Tonkawa scout.
And thereafter, the two would roam the southwest as it was at that particular time, with attention to actual historical figures and facts. They could do all the fighting of evil-doers and injustice that the plot would require; a pair of fearless and adventurous friends. (Ix-nay on any suggestion of gayness, mostly because I’m damned tired of that particular character development.) Keep the horse named Silver, though. But lose the silver bullets, the white hat and the mask. Sorry – but the first is impractical, given the weapons of the time, second given the custom of the time … and in the days before wide circulation of photographs, you could be a total stranger once you were five miles away from where you lived and worked. One didn’t need a mask – in fact, in the real Wild West that would have made the lone Ranger even more noticeable. “Hey, who was that masked man? Did you ever see the like? Oh, I heard tell of him …” Whereas, sans mask: “Hey, who was that guy? Oh, just another saddle tramp, passing through; don’t pay him no mind…”Keep the sense of honor, though – the chivalry, the sharp-shooting and the unwillingness to kill, unless there was no other way. I know this seems radical – and loosing the mask might be seen as heretical – but the situation calls for radical steps. Look, this latest version had Tonto with a crow squatting on his head, so I believe we have reached the point where something must be done to resuscitate our popular cultural heroes.
(Crossposted at Chicagoboyz.net and at www.ncobrief.com)
Her proper given name was Myra Maybelle Shirley, later shortened to Belle, and she had a lamentable taste for dangerous men and walking on the far side of the law, which eventually brought her to an untimely grave, murdered by the last in that series of dangerous men. Her career brought considerable embarrassment to an otherwise respectable and law-abiding family, who resided near Carthage, Missouri in the year of her birth, 1848. Her father was a Virginian, a prosperous man, a pillar of the community, and a judge – and she was the only daughter in a family of boys. Her father the judge had her expensively schooled in those arts thought proper for a Victorian-era lady of good family at at the local female seminary, where she excelled in French and in playing the piano. Her older brother Bud, more problematically taught her to ride, to shoot, curse like a trooper and love the out-of-doors. A show-off and a bit of a tomboy – how could an independent and spirited girl with five indulgent brothers be anything else?
Alas, the prosperity of the Shirley family took a hit in the period leading up to and during the Civil War, Guerrilla warfare between pro- and anti-slavery sympathizers in Kansas and Missouri spiraled into a vicious partisan war. Kansas bled and Missouri hemorrhaged … and the Shirley family was not spared. Bud Shirley joined William Clark Quantrill’s band at the start of the war, and was killed in a skirmish in the last year. Some versions have it that Myra Maybelle was a spy for Quantrill, or one of his lovers, others that she strapped on a pair of revolvers and took her own revenge for Bud’s death. Such tales are unlikely in the extreme; she would have been a school girl barely into her teens and under the authority of per parents. While her father may have been indulgent – he wouldn’t have been that indulgent. In any case, when Carthage was burned by Confederate guerrillas late in 1863, Judge Shirley had enough. He moved his surviving family to Texas, to a farm in a little town which is now a suburb of Dallas.
A little more than a year after the war ended, several members of the James-Younger gang showed up seeking refuge after pulling off a profitable bank robbery in Liberty, Missouri. The older James and Youngers were comrades of Bud Shirley’s in Quantrill’s band; likely it was not a coincidence they turned up asking hospitality from the family of a comrade, on the grounds that they were still fighting the good fight against the hated Yankee victors. Myra Maybelle was eighteen by then – and she fell heavily for Cole Younger … although possible with equal ardor for another Quantrill veteran from Missouri, one James Reed. In any case, she married James Reed the following year, supposedly running away to the woods and being married there – shades of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. It is a matter of conjecture if her family approved this or any of her subsequent nuptials. If they had objections, they kept them to themselves, being by this time unable to turn their wayward daughter from her chosen course. Perhaps they simply hoped that she was entering into a secure, respectable married life and giving up an unseemly affection for horses, guns and dangerous scoundrels. James Reed – with his own lawless reputation not yet established – must have appeared as much more promising husband material than Cole Younger, who was already wanted across several mid-western states. And Myra Maybelle was well-bred, well-schooled, and existing photographs taken of her in the bloom of youth confirm that she was not unfortunate in looks. Later she did look like a couple of miles of bad road. Possibly in compensation, she developed a taste for flamboyant hats and was usually seen wearing a black-velvet riding habit in the latest style.
For a number of months and possibly years, James Reed managed the straight and narrow with regard to law and order. Myra Maybelle bore two children to him, although rumors persisted that the older of them was actually fathered by Cole Younger. Unfortunately, it turned out that James Reed’s family back in Missouri had a thriving side-line in horse thievery. A rival family ambushed and killed James Reed’s brother – and in the manner of Old West vendettas, James retaliated. He and Myra Maybelle fled the resulting murder warrants … all the way to California, which afforded a safe refuge, until the local constabulary discovered the warrants … and there was a little matter of a stagecoach robbery near San Diego. The Reeds returned to Texas, Myra Maybelle to her long-suffering family, and James to Oklahoma … to a refuge in a remote hide-out in the Cherokee part of Indian Territory.
This was a small settlement on the Canadian River between Briartown and Eufala, the home of Tom Starr and his extended clan of sons, daughters, cousins, in-laws … and outlaws. Tom Starr had been such a violent partisan of the Confederate faction of the Cherokees that at the end of the war he was essentially bribed into behaving himself. Myra Maybelle visited often to see her husband – where she would have met Tom Starr’s son Sam – or James traveled to Scyene to see her. But by 1873, she had dispatched the children to relatives and was running a livery stable in Dallas … a stable which also served the essential function as a front for disposing of stolen horses. Contra popular movies and television, horse thievery was a profitable business, and not one in ten of professional thieves were ever caught. Myra Maybelle was perfectly situated: Dallas was a thriving boom-town, the center of trade and commerce in cattle and cotton, on the intersection of two major railways. She was intelligent and literate, in the ideal location to plan crimes, fence the stolen horses, and to ensure that those of her associates unwary or unlucky enough to be caught were defended against legal charges. She was literate, and intelligent – and in a perfect location to both plan crimes, to fence the stolen property afterwards, and to see that those of her associates unwary – or unlucky – enough to be caught were defended against the charges, one way or another. But was she really the ‘bandit queen’, the brains behind a motley gang of thieves of every description – or merely a thrill-seeker and enabler of violent men? Alas, the facts are in considerable dispute among historians and folklorists, since they were obscured by the interests of sensational newspaper stories and dime novels about the wild, wild west – a process which had Myra Maybelle’s enthusiastic cooperation.
On one of his conjugal visits to Dallas, James Reed joined some of his good bad friends and robbed the San Antonio to Austin stage – but didn’t get to enjoy his share of the loot for long, as he was subsequently shot and killed by a local deputy sheriff. When Myra Maybelle was called to ID the remains (there was a substantial reward in the offing for James Reed, dead or alive) she supposedly claimed the deputy had killed the wrong man – leaving the lawman unrewarded.
Around 1880, Myra Maybelle married Sam Starr, and gained the surname by which she is best known – Belle Starr. The reconstructed family settled in a small house overlooking the Canadian River, which property she named Younger’s Bend, and she gave an interview to a Dallas newspaper in the mid-1880s claiming that she was the model of upright propriety, and there was no woman in the world more peaceably inclined than herself … but alas, the cozy house at Younger’s Bend was the center for an active bandit gang – just one of many in Indian Territory, the last outpost of the lawless wild west. She and the hubby-of-the-moment were charged with stealing horses, and brought before the great Judge Parker in Fort Smith. The pair were found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison. Belle Starr improved the idle hours of confinement by writing a memoir of her life and tutoring the warden’s children in music and French. She and Sam returned to Younger’s Bend on release … where, after another accusation of armed robbery, Sam Starr was killed in a blazing gun battle with a local deputy with whom he had tangled before.
Her final husband was a Creek Indian, who moved into the Younger’s Bend house. Jim July was handsome, educated, half her age and – like many of her amorous and professional associates – a professional horse thief. Early in February, 1889, he departed for Fort Smith, to answer the latest round of criminal charges against him. Belle rode along with him for a short distance, before returning to Younger’s Bend. She stopped to visit a neighbor’s wife and while there, another neighbor stopped by. This neighbor wanted to lease a portion of her property. She had so far refused to do so, and the neighbor was irate. His name was E. A. Watson; local rumor had it that he was wanted in Florida for murder. In the course of the argument, Watson remarked slightingly about the frequency with which officers of the law came to visit Younger’s Bend in the course of their professional duties. Stung, Belle Starr shot back, “Maybe the officers in Florida would like to know where to find you?” and made an angry departure.
Everyone assumed this meant Watson was certain-sure that she was going to inform on him. He is assumed to have gone home, armed himself with a shotgun, and waited for Belle Star to ride past. A little way up the trail, two men waiting for a crude ferry to cross the Canadian River heard two shots and saw Belle Starr’s riderless horse run down the bank and swim across the river. When they back-tracked, they found her body lying in the trail. She had been shot in in the back, thrown from her horse, and then the murderer had made sure with second load of turkey shot as she lay on the ground. Jim July came riding hell-for-leather back from Fort Smith as soon as he heard the news about his wife. His suspicions immediately focused on Watson, who furiously insisted that he was not guilty, although his shotgun was found to have both barrels fired recently and a set of footprints similar to his own had been found, leading from his house to the place where Belle Star had been ambushed, and back to his house again. Watson submitted to being arrested by July, and all parties concerned – the witnesses and Belle’s daughter Pearl trooped off to Fort Smith to testify in the matter. Several curious things; the footprints were only circumstantial evidence, so was the recently-used shotgun. Watson had a good repute among his neighbors, as hard-working and well-liked … and he wasn’t a wanted man, which removed a motivation for murder. He was ordered to be released.
Almost immediately, Jim July skipped out on the original charge … and a deputy marshal who probed a little farther into the murder talked with Watson upon his release. It seemed that Jim July had come to borrow his shotgun on the very day he had departed, claiming that he needed to kill a wolf. When he returned it, an hour later, both barrels had been fired. Watson was certain that July had attempted to frame him. Judge Parker authorized further investigation. It also emerged that one of the neighbors – one of the witnesses who had seen Belle Starr’s horse and discovered the body – had been offered $200 to kill Belle … by her husband. The man had refused immediately, and Jim July had replied, “Hell – I’ll kill the old hag myself and spend the money for whiskey!” When neighbor was asked why July would want to kill his own wife, he explained that July had gotten involved with another woman, and Bell was furious. She would do nothing to help him fight the current charges against him. That provided motivation for the murder. A year later the fugitive Jim July was arrested after a gunfight in Ardmore with the arresting deputies, but died before he could confess anything. Belle Starr’s daughter Pearl had her buried at Younger’s Bend, under a tombstone ornamented with the images of a bell, a star, a hand holding a bunch of flowers, Belle’s favorite horse and the verse, “Shed not for her the bitter tear, Nor give the heart to vain regret; ‘Tis but the casket that lies here, The gem that filled it sparkles yet.”
(These people do not appear in my next book, although the time period and location overlap slightly. I do have a cattle-rustling gang based in Indian Territory as an element, which is loosely based on some of the large organized gangs which thrived there. And John Wesley Hardin wanders in, and out on two occasions. The Quivera Trail will be out in November, 2013. )
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