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)

Christmas Present for My Fans!

24. December 2012 · Comments Off on Christmas Present for My Fans! · Categories: Chapters From the Latest Book, Old West

From The Quivera Trail, the current work in progress – a new chapter! Chance has separated Lady Isobel from her faithful maid, Jane. During that separation, Isobel and Jane have begun to discover new and unexpected qualities and talents within themselves. And Jane is beginning to be attracted to Sam Becker, the younger brother of Isobel’s husband. Sam himself has a few unexpected talents and qualities himself …

Chapter 17 – The Turning of the Year

It came as a mild shock to Jane; that end of the fall months, when the apple trees in the walled orchard below the Becker home ranch hung heavy with ripe fruit – russet and ruby and a yellow-splotched pink – and the term of her school year came to an end. The months and weeks had passed as swift and sweet as the hours and days. She knew well that her tenure as a schoolteacher was to end when the family went to Austin to spend the Christmas holidays with their Vining cousins – but in Jane’s mind, Christmas meant frost, cold, snow and dark evenings which descended in the late afternoon. When the weather remained summer-mild, even as the oak leaves turned from green to bronze, Jane somehow maintained a degree of serene detachment from the calendar. The happy dream sustained until one morning where a pale layer of frost veiled the ground and the remnants of summer grass crunched under her feet. A fire burned in the parlor fireplace that evening, and when Sam Becker came in from riding his pastures and paddocks, he shed his coat in the hall and came into the parlor rubbing his hands.
“About time,” he observed. “There’s never a good crop the next year, without there’s a good hard freeze about now. Miss Jane, are your pupils nearly ready for the Christmas holidays? The term is nearly ended, you know,” he added. Jane felt as if the comfortable parlor had shuddered underneath her, as if in some kind of earthquake. She stared at Sam, mildly horrified. How the time had passed so swiftly! She had forgotten, or managed to put it all from her mind – that at Christmas the family would go to Austin – Lady Isobel would return from the Palo Duro ranch with Mr. Becker, and she herself would be a simple ladies’ maid once more. Her first instinct, unbidden was of horror and distaste. She had never in her life been so happy and content as those weeks and days spend in that makeshift classroom; her oddly-assorted pupils were advancing – and now to be snatched away from that… the prospect was like being put in prison, although Jane chided herself for that unworthy and selfish thought. She owed so much to Lady Isobel … and after all, she was not really a teacher. To continue as such was beyond her station, and Lady Isobel needed her. She would be ungrateful – and yet . . .
“I had forgotten,” Jane allowed, honestly. “They are all doing so very well. I will miss them very much.”
“And you will miss teaching them, Miss Jane?” Sam asked, with an unexpectedly shrewd expression on his face.
“I will,” Jane confessed. “I had not thought that work – for it is truly work – could be such a pleasure. I took pride in serving my lady … but not nearly as much as I did in teaching these children.”
“It made more of a difference,” Sam answered. “That’s why.” It almost seemed as if he would say more, but Lottie exclaimed, “You will love Austin, and Cousin Peter’s house, Jane! There are so many amusements and parties. It is especially lively when the Legislature meets. Everyone who is everyone knows the Vinings … because of Aunt Margaret, you know. They used to say that if you came to supper at her house every night for a month you would meet simply everyone of importance in Texas.”
‘I am not sure that I want to meet everyone,’ Jane thought to herself. ‘But, oh – I would like to return with my lady to this place. Surely she would permit me to continue with the school. Society is so very, very different; it can’t be that I must wait upon her every moment of the day…and she has always been dedicated to the welfare of the tenants. I might be able to convince her of lending me to that service …’
That was a happy thought – yes, recalling how Lady Isobel had done the rounds of calls to Sir Robert’s tenants, surely her ladyship could be brought to see the usefulness of that …even if Lady Isobel returned to the Palo Duro, rather than the Becker home ranch. Jane thought again that Sam was looking at her as if he were thinking about her, but he did not speak again about the school, until the morning came for their departure, a fortnight later. Her trunk was packed again with her clothing and few possessions, and loaded with Lottie’s and Mrs. Becker’s trunk, along with another trunk of Lady Isobel’s into the back of the odd-looking two-horse spring conveyance that the family used for their long trips. As Sam handed her her up into it, he said very softly,
“Miss Jane, if you should want to return and open your school again, I would do what I could to see that happen. I would talk to my brother…”
“I would like that,” Jane answered, in the same quiet tone. “But my duty is to m’lady. What she desires must always be my first consideration.”
“Then whatever you would like, Jane,” Sam answered. “Bu I promise … I will always do what I can for you.” He closed the little door at the rear of the conveyance, and Jane took her place, wistfully thinking that she would miss his company at least as much as she would miss her school and pupils, should Lady Isobel’s plans return them all to the Palo Duro, once the Christmas celebrations were done.
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All About Christmas

02. December 2012 · Comments Off on All About Christmas · Categories: Book Event, Old West · Tags: , ,

Christmas at Goliad on the Square – and in the author corral. Amazingly, I sold a couple of copies of To Truckee’s Trail – usually, people around here are keener on the books set in Texas …

Michelle and Jeanne - Goliad Author Corral - 2012

Of course, I think most families were coming to see Santa … or to take a picture of their little darling sitting on a tame long-horn…

Christmas Onna Longhorn

I have one more Christmas event – at St. Mary’s University, on Friday December 7th – there is a Christmas Fair sponsered by the IAAP Tejas Topaz Chapter. See you there!

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