Bass Reeves and the Last of the Lawless West

23. January 2013 · Comments Off on Bass Reeves and the Last of the Lawless West · Categories: Old West · Tags: , , ,

In the year of the Centennial of the United States, the last of the West left relatively unscathed by the forces of law and order was that part of present-day Oklahoma set aside as homeland for the native Indian tribes. This was a 70,000 square mile territory in which anything went … and usually did. Among what was called the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole) there were native law enforcement officers, who upheld the law among their own. But they had no jurisdiction over interlopers of any color, or tribal members who committed crimes in company with or against an outsider, and the Territory was Liberty Hall and a refuge for every kind of horse thief, cattle rustler, bank and train robber, murderer and scalawag roaming the post-Civil War west. Just about every notorious career criminal at large for the remainder of the 19th century took refuge in the Oklahoma Territory at one time or another, including the James and Dalton gangs.

The situation was exacerbated as stagecoach and railway lines etched thoroughfares across the territory. The settlements around stage stations and depots leaked disreputable characters into the population. Herds of Texas cattle crossing the territory on their way to railheads in Kansas contributed a lawless element, as well as temptation for horse thieves and cattle rustlers.Emancipated slaves from outside the territory or formerly property of the wealthier tribes, also chose to settle in the territory, but they fell under the distant jurisdiction of the US Court … in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Lastly, the borders of the Territory were violated frequently by land-hungry squatters. Officers of the law were stretched as thin as a pat of butter spread on an acre of toast; by 1875 the situation was intolerable to law-abiding settlers along the Territorial borders, and to the equally-law abiding members of the Civilized Tribes within it.

The man – and those whom he appointed to serve under his authority – who came to the rescue of the embattled and crime-plagued citizens like a 19th century super-hero appeared in the year of the Centennial. Isaac Charles Parker did not materialize from a phone-booth or a secret underground lair, but by means of accepting an appointment as judge for the Western District of Arkansas. He was in his mid-thirties, a legalist of unimpeachable moral character, long experience in Federal administration and government, and deep sympathies for the situation of the Indians. He was also a demon for hard work, which he commenced barely a week after he arrived in Fort Smith. In his first two-month session of his court, he heard 91 cases. Of those convicted, six were condemned to death. The sentences were carried out publically and en masse – as an encouragement to those considering a life of capital crime to re-consider their career options. In short order, Judge Parker earned the nickname of “The Hanging Judge.” He spent the next twenty-one years on the bench in Fort Smith; the scourge of evildoers, criminals and scoundrels and the highest law of the land. Only a presidential pardon could set aside a Parker court death sentence.

Besides conducting his court with efficiency and dispatch, Judge Parker took other steps in establishing the rule of law rather than the gun. His chief marshal, James Fagan, was authorized to hire two hundred deputy marshals, more than any other state or territory. Parker’s marshals were sent out in teams, acompanied by a wagon for supplies and captured criminals, a cook and a small posse of assistants. Generally, they avoided actually killing a wanted man; a live criminal arrested and brought back to Fort Smith meant a payment of $2.00 a head. The only payment for a corpse was if there had been a dead-or-alive reward posted by a civil authority or an express company – a rare circumstance, but not entirely unknown. And so it went, nearly until the end of the 19th century.

One of Parker’s law enforcement more effective hires was the first black deputy US marshall west of the Mississippi; Bass Reeves, who stood 6’2 in his socks. Bass Reeves had been born into slavery in Paris, Texas, owned by one George Reeves, who had Bass Reeves as his personal attendant when he went to fight in the Civil War. Sometime during the war, Bass Reeves took his leave of his master, and fled into the Indian Territory, where he spent the rest of the war sheltering among the pro-Union and abolitionist Cherokee. Officially freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, he settled as a farmer and horse-breeder in the town of Van Buren, Arkansas. He married, raised a family – and had a good reputation as a scout and tracker, was knowlegable in the customs of the Territory Indians as well as speaking several of their languages, although he was himself illiterate. He was also an excellent shot with pistol and rifle … with either hand. He was also soft-spoken, courteous to all, a dapper dresser, although he often put off his usual clothes, polished boots and fine black felt hat, to go under cover … which he did often. Like a one-man Mountie company, he always got his man … or at least, almost always. On one occasion, he posed as a poor ragged fugitive from a posse to spend the night at a lonely cabin where pair of outlaw brothers wanted by the authorities in Fort Smith was hiding out with their mama. Bass pretended to take their suggestion that they fall in together. That night after the brothers fell asleep, he handcuffed them both, without waking them up. In the morning, he marched them off to the camp where his posse was waiting for him … accompanied for the first couple of miles by the outlaw brothers’ outraged mother, cursing him up one side and down the other.

Reeves, like Judge Parker also had a flinty and Calvinistic sense of duty; one of Reeves’ famous hunts was for his own son, who had killed his wife in a fit of jealous temper. None of the other deputies wanted to take up the warrant – but Reeves did, without a flinch. Over his career in law enforcement, he was supposed to have brought in 3,000 fugitives from justice. When the state and municipal authorities took over responsibility for local law enforcement in 1907, Reeves took a position as a patrolman in the Muskogee Police department – and for the two years that he served, there were supposed to have been no crimes at all on his beat. He died in 1910. There was a local and low-budget movie made two or three years ago about him, of which I can only find bare traces on IMDB. Pity he couldn’t have big-studio interest, but there you go. Tarantino does an unsettlingly violent cartoon of a movie about a black man in the west and cleans up, but a movie about a real-live black two-gun lawman with an incredible life story has to settle for a miniscule budget and comparative obscurity.

(In my next book, The Quivera Trail, the most obvious villains turn out to be a clan of cattle thieves from the Territory, on a murderous vendetta against Dolph Becker and the men of the new RB ranch in the Texas Panhandle. Stay tuned…)

On Having Thrown In the Towel on Larry McMurtry

20. January 2013 · 4 comments · Categories: Old West, Random Book and Media Musings · Tags: , , ,

I hung on to reading McMurtry’s Woodrow Call/Gus McCrae cycle for for several reasons – sheer stubbornness and the fact that I had purchased all four of them for pennies on the dollar at various library book sales being chief among them – but eventually I just gave up on Dead Man’s Walk, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo when it turned into a long and frustrating slog through the deserts of the metaphorical southwest. I gave up hope of reaching the end, rejoicing and acclaiming the author as one of the epochal bards of the Texas frontier after having completed Dead Man’s Walk, a third of Comanche Moon, and half a dozen chapters of Lonesome Dove. I decided instead to pack it in for the moment and explore the options of anaesthetized root canal work, or the whole season run of Bridezillas. Hey, at least there, I can root for some of the more sane family members and friends of the bridal party and hope that a much-harassed and totally-out-of-patience MOH will haul off and serve up the ‘Zilla-of-the-moment with a richly-deserved knuckle sandwich. The hope of some kind of drama strung me along for … well, it seemed like days.

I had hoped that something would happend, mostly because everyone else says such wonderful things about the Lonesome Dove cycle, including some of my very own dear fans who have, most flatteringly compared my books to his – on the basis, I think, that I wrote about frontier Texas, and had a hero who was an early Texas Ranger, and included lashings of war, local and historic color, tragic romance and the fading of the Old West. Of course, the lucky Mr. McMurtry got a whole couple of TV miniseries made from his books, (with surging royalties and residuals and all, and reissued paperbacks with stills of the stars on the covers, all of which would make his agent worth every penny of the 15% of which Mr. McMurtry earns out of his labors as a creative scribbler and raconteur of the Old West) and so it isn’t all just sour-grapes from an aspiring author, hardly blessed or even barely noticed by the literary-industrial complex … ohhh, do I get any recognition for having written a totally complicated and sort-of-run-on-sentence in the Grand Victorian Tradition? (Oh, guess not, not this time around – better move on, then.)

The first hurdle in my path of acceptance was that it was all build-up and character, but no actual delivery. I was sorta-intrigued, but not-really grabbed by interest, in the characters so delineated. I keep wondering why the deadpan flat, detached affect? Why should I care about various characters if the author doesn’t seem to give a damn about them, or even display much interest, other than in the strictly clinical? As a reader I was also a little exhausted by following the constant leaping one character’s POV to another, and another within the same chapter, and just when I had recovered from the last of them and remember who it was that I was supposed to be interested in – then I would trip and fall flat over a large chunk of expository back-story, which never seemed to lead to anything much happening. A friend of mine, also a fan of both McMurtry and I explained to me that this is very much a Texas thing, to meander and meander, and wander … eventually to come around in a circle again, without anything very much having happened. Apparently, the process of the story is supposed to be the main bit of enjoyment. So how was a couple of hours of heavy petting, leading nowhere other than a chaste kiss of the hand at the doorway supposed to be rewarding – when you have been led in happy anticipation to look for something a bit more energetic? When this happens, romantically, one tends to be a bit disappointed, think of the other party as a dreadful tease, write off the evening as a waste of time and make-up, and resolve to let the answering machine pick-up next time. With a best-selling, and to all appearances, very popular author, who started off Lonesome Dove with one of the very best opening sentences evah … well, maybe one should be a little more indulgent.

Alas – I had a bit of trouble with another aspect of the cycle, especially the earlier books, in being a bit of an amateur specialist in history. That is, amateur in the antique sense of a person who zestfully acquires knowledge for the sheer love of the field. I have no academic training, other than that required of English majors three decades ago, not even a minor in history, or any fancy qualifying initials after my name – only a burning passion to learn as much as I can about any particular aspect, and to get it right, and to weave that knowledge into my stories. Which is all very well, but has absolutely ruined me for watching westerns on television; don’t even get me started on the fantasy west, of pulp novels and TV series and movies. I’m too apt to notice that there is a zipper down the back of the heroine’s dress, that the traveling cowboy is camping with a lot more gear than he could have packed into a teensy bedroll on the back of his horse, and to wonder where in the heck in the old West that a a deep-rock gold mine could be located right next to a cattle ranch?

Plowing gamely through the first two books – Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon turned out to be a bit of a disconcerting experience, as I keep running across names, historic characters and incidents of Texas history but as if someone had jumbled them all together in a small box, and then emptied them out in random order, omitted some pivotal incidents and people, exaggerated others for effect, and now and again threw in something completely bizarre, just rang off-key for me. The real Buffalo Hump wasn’t a hunchback, if the description of him at Meusebach’s peace conference is anything to go by. The real Bigfoot Wallace lived to die of ripe old age; he drew life from a jar of dried beans in Mexican captivity … which incident happened to the survivors of the Meir expedition, not the Texan attempt to take Santa Fe a few years later. Austin was never raided, looted and burned over by a Comanche raiding party – that happened to Linnville, in 1840 – and the aftermath of that involved a massed force of Rangers, local militia and volunteers giving as good as they got in the Plum Creek fight. And there really was a formidible whore nick-named “The Great Western”, so it all makes me wonder why McMurtry needed to make anything up, when what really happened historically would have made at least as much of a good story. And it is a bit of puzzlement, wondering how the early Rangers in the first two books are pretty consistently pictured as being neophytes, hopeless little golden carp in a sea of hungry sharks – a tasty mouthful for every passing predator … which reminds me of the character who was neatly scalped of all of his hair by Buffalo Hump going past at a gallop. I’m almost sure scalping someone took a little bit more than a single swipe with a knife from horseback, although if anyone had perfected the art of a ride-by scalping, it would have been the Comanche.

It sounded a bit improbable to me, anyway – and the hapless recipient of it appearing to be as disposable as any of the red-shirted crewmen on Star Trek, beaming down to an alien planet and being killed in the first act. And that sort of disposing of a character, and other characters, and having characters appear and disappear, and such strange and improbable turns of the plot, such as having a naked English noblewoman with leprosy and a pet snake sing a Verdi aria to bluff a party of hostile Indian warriors into letting a our heroes pass by … well, that was just too television for words, and I came to that realization with a certain shock of recognition. I know they’ve made the books into movies, or into miniseries, and that’s more right than readers and watchers could possibly have known – because it is more like one of the old television westerns than has been along in years! A jumble of historical events and happenstances, check – interminable, episodic adventures – check. Handful of basic, easily identifiable characters – check – some vicious and inscrutable villains (some of them with baroque torture chambers and suitable evil henchmen) – check. Rotating stable of supporting characters, and endless supply of disposable extras – check and check again. And a disconcerting tendency for certain startling shifts in the cast to occur between seasons …or between books . . . or even chapters within books. And there you go – it’s a TV western writ large; no wonder the Lonesome Dove cycle has so many fans. Having come to this conclusion, I may try again, sometime soon … but then again – when is Bridezillas on?

A Brief Memoir of Guns

17. January 2013 · 2 comments · Categories: Domestic, Old West · Tags: , ,

Oddly enough – guns were not a terribly real presence in the household – or even the neighborhood where I grew up. Dad, and our near friends and neighbors didn’t hunt, and as near as I can recall, none of them were obsessed collectors. I never even saw a firearm, in use or on display – save in the holsters of law enforcement personnel – all the time that I was growing up. The use of firearms of any sort was an issue so far off the table that it wasn’t even in the same room. Oh, my brother JP had cap pistols, and Dad did possess two sidearms – a pistol, which may have been a Luger, and with which he nailed a particularly annoying gopher one evening with a clean shot through the nasty little buggers’ head – and a Navy Colt (actual model unspecified), which was rather more of a relic than a useful firearm. I saw it once and once only.

Dad kept those firearms in some secure place in the house; I do not know where, never wondered and none of us children were never motivated enough to search for them. We just were not that curious about guns, even though the Colt had a story behind it. Mom and Dad had found it secreted away between some rocks on the beach, in a battered old-fashioned leather holster, I think about the time that they were living in Laguna Beach when Dad had just gotten back from a tour of Army service in Korea – or possibly this happened when we were all living in GI-Bill student housing in Santa Barbara. From what Mom had said, some six or eight months before they found it, there had been a robbery of a local gun collector. They didn’t hear about the robbery for months or possibly years afterwards – so, they kept it. I don’t imagine Dad ever attempted to fire it, although being a tidy and logical person, he might have cleaned it up before putting it away.

Being a west-coast suburban sort of person, and since Dad and none of his friends were hunters – guns just were not a presence in real life, save in holsters on the hips of law enforcement personnel. As strange as it may sound to a European, or to someone from an American inner-city sink, it is entirely possible to live for decades without ever seeing anyone but a law enforcement officer carry a weapon, or witness an act of gun violence or the aftermath thereof. Just chalk that up to being a middle-class person with absolutely no inclination to walk on the wild side … of anything. It is possible that any number of my friends and neighbors at the time, or since then, had a side-arm or long gun which they kept quietly in a closet, or in the glove box of their car. Taking it out and waving it about was just not the done thing.

In point of fact – I never even handled a weapon personally until well into my military service; first an M-16, which I had to qualify on sometime in the early 1980s, and then again with a Beretta pistol in the early 1990s, upon being suddenly faced with a TDY to Saudi Arabia, better known as the Magic Kingdom. American military personnel with orders there had to be qualified to handle that sidearm. Fortunately, the orders fell through once the powers who issued them realized that I was not the flight-qualified documentary photog they were looking for.

And then I finished up settling in Texas, and turning to writing historical fiction, in which guns of various sorts do play a part. Again, although Texas is supposed to be the wild, wild, gun-loving west, personal weapons generally they aren’t any more visible here then they were back when I was a kid … although I do believe more of my friends and acquaintances here do have them – mostly as collectors and historical enthusiasts. Again, usually only the law enforcement officers carry openly … unless it is a historical reenactment event, and then it’s katy-bar-the-door. Through the offices of another blogger, I did manage to get a brief course in the use and maintenance of an early Colt revolver, and through the good offices of another friend, we enjoyed an afternoon of black-power shooting on a ranch near Beeville. But all of that – and a bit of ghost-writing about early revolvers is about all that I have ever had to do with guns. I should hate to think that I might need more than this – because it will truly mean that my world has changed, and not for the better.

(Crossposted at my book blog)

A Lynching in Wyoming

09. January 2013 · 2 comments · Categories: Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

Wyoming Lynching of Cattle KateI’ve said it over and over again, that what really happened in history is very often even more bizarre and dramatic than any fictional account of events, either written or cinematic. A book or a movie has to make sense, after all – and have some kind of logic and believability about it, whereas in reality chance and coincidence do not have to make logical sense. To put it in short; reality frequently trumps imagination. Going back to contemporary accounts, records and memoirs often turn up all kinds of interesting nuggets, which very often contradict conventional wisdom.

This is what amateur historian George W. Hufsmith has done with a very readable account of a lynching in the Sweetwater River Valley of Wyoming over a hundred and twenty years ago. But what Hufsmith found in various dusty public records was sufficient to overturn what had been put out as the conventional wisdom. The 1889 lynching of a man and a woman – Ellen Watson and James Averell – by a party of wealthy cattlemen was advertised immediately as a wholly justifiable reaction; that Watson was a prostitute paid for her favors with stolen cattle, and James Averell was her pimp – among other unsavory things. That was the song that the wealthy stockmen of Wyoming sang to local and national newspapers, and because money talks, the friends and family of Watson and Averell were as powerless in setting the story straight as they were in getting justice done for the murders of the young couple. Ellen Watson’s reputation continued to take a beating through the decades – including in the movie Heaven’s Gate, the mega-flopperoo retelling of the Johnson County War.

What emerges from Hufsmith’s exacting research and retelling of the story is that Watson and Averell were hard-working, respectable and well-thought of, among the townsfolk and small ranchers in that part of the world. Averell was an honorably discharged Army veteran, a widower whose wife had died in childbirth. He kept a store and saloon, was postmaster as well as a Justice of the Peace. Watson was separated from an abusive husband, and had worked as a cook and housekeeper at a boarding house in Rawlins, Wyoming. There she met Averell; they set up on adjacent homestead claims, and perhaps delayed marrying so that they could each prove up on a claim, instead of the single claim allowed per family. They had taken out a license to marry, but it is unknown if they had gone through with it by the time of their deaths. In any case, they were in business together, and as they began to prosper, Ellen Watson bought a legitimate cattle brand, and began to purchase cattle – all legally … but such small homestead operations as hers were viewed as a threat to the large established cattle ranchers of the district. Worse yet for the couple – both hers and Averell’s claims lay right in the middle of a well-watered tract of pastureland which one of the big ranchers had used for years as his own, although having no legal claim to it. Her having the temerity to compete with the large ranchers of the area was seen as the last straw. Six of them paid a visit to Ellen Watson’s ranch and James Averell’s store on a morning in July, 1889, wholly convinced that Watson and Averell had been illegally branding stolen cattle. They were taken away and hung from the branch of a tree on the edge of a ravine on the south bank of the Sweetwater River, and if that murderous indignity was not sufficient, their personal reputations were lynched again in the popular press for years afterwards.

Several friends and employees of Watson and Averell witnessed them being taken away by the six ranchers, and the hanging. A coroner’s inquest was held almost at once, and the six ranchers were arrested and charged with murder. Alas – it never came to a trial. The key witnesses vanished mysteriously, and Averell’s nephew, who worked as one of Watson’s ranch hands, died suddenly on the very day that the grand jury was supposed to begin hearings into the matter. With no witnesses available or willing to testify, charges against the six were dropped. They did not get off scot-free however; local feeling was very much against them in the Sweetwater Valley. And two years later the conflict between small rancher/homesteaders and the wealthy and well-connected big ranchers would erupt in the Johnson County War.

Frontier Trivia – From the Great Days of the Cowboys

29. December 2012 · Comments Off on Frontier Trivia – From the Great Days of the Cowboys · Categories: Old West

Some ranching and cattle-trailing trivia, for your holiday weekend delectation:

The classical free-range cattle-ranching and long-trail-drive west actually only lasted for about twenty years, from the end of the Civil War to the mid-1880s when bad weather and a glutted market spelled the end of those ways. The cattle-towns depicted in western movies actually were limited to a very small time and space: Kansas, the terminus for those long drives from Texas, as the railroads crawled west. Abilene was the first of them, and Dodge City the last; in between there were others like Hayes, Ellsworth, Newton and Caldwell – some of whom only thrived for a single gaudy, raucous season as a cow-town.

Most of them were not nearly as lawless as portrayed in contemporary news accounts. Many of the towns were in economic competition with each other, and since each had a fairly freewheeling press and enthusiastic (not to say cut-throat) economic backers, any sort of ruckus in one town,was quickly magnified by detractors in another. Two cowboys indulging in a bit of (relatively) harmless gun-play outside a saloon in Newton could be magnified into small war, riot and murder by a rival towns’ newspaper.

The first thing that a typical cowboy wanted, after three or four months in the saddle, alone with the cows and his fellow cowboys was not what you think. They wanted a bath and new clothes, first. Then what you think. Cowtowns offered very nice bathing facilities. Along with the other amenities – but the bathhouse was invariably the first to be patronized by the newly arrived.

One very enterprising lady of the evening in Dodge City later went by the name of Squirrel-Tooth Alice. The name came from a gap in her teeth and a penchant for keeping a pet prairie-dog, on a little leash and collar. Her real name was Mary Elizabeth Haley. She married a part-time cowboy and full-time gambler and all around bad hat named Billy Thompson. Against most expectations, she and Billy prospered. She died of almost respectable old age, in a Los Angeles nursing home. In 1953. She had also, as a child of nine or ten, been a captive of the Comanche, until ransomed by her family. (She appears very briefly as a walk-on character in The Harvesting.)

Most murderous gunplay in cow-towns usually involved members of the professional gambling fraternity or local law enforcement professionals. On occasion, this meant the same body of personnel. These were small towns, any other time than the cattle-trailing season. People doubled up when it came to jobs.

The Cherokee tribe assessed a toll of 10 cents per head on cattle herds crossing their lands on the Shawnee Trail, which ran through eastern tracts of present-day Oklahoma, to various points in Missouri – Kansas City, Sedalia and St. Louis. A well-organized patrol called the “Cherokee Light Horse” enforced it; not for nothing were the Cherokee known as one of the Five Civilized Tribes.

One of the largest western cattle-ranch holdings were acquired in California by a hardworking cattle baron named Henry Miller, of whom it was said (with very little exaggeration) that he could travel from Oregon to the Mexican border and sleep on his own property every night. It wasn’t his real name: he was born Heinrich Kreiser. Immigrating to the United States in the 1840s, he was working as a butcher in New York, when he bought a second-hand ship passage ticket to California from an acquaintance who got the gold fever in ’49, but decided at the last minute not to go. As he was boarding the ship, Heinrich Kreiser noticed that the ticket he had bought was stamped ‘not transferrable’, and became Henry Miller. (No, not that Henry Miller . . . this Henry Miller)

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