Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Slade – Part One

21. March 2012 · Comments Off on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Slade – Part One · Categories: Old West · Tags: , , , , , , ,

 “In due time we rattled up to a stage-station, and sat down to breakfast with a half-savage, half-civilized company of armed and bearded mountaineers, ranchmen and station employees. The most gentlemanly- appearing, quiet and affable officer we had yet found along the road in the Overland Company’s service was the person who sat at the head of the table, at my elbow. Never youth stared and shivered as I did when I heard them call him SLADE! … Here, right by my side, was the actual ogre who, in fights and brawls and various ways, had taken the lives of twenty-six human beings, or all men lied about him! … He was so friendly and so gentle-spoken that I warmed to him in spite of his awful history. It was hardly possible to realize that this pleasant person was the pitiless scourge of the outlaws, the raw-head-and-bloody- bones the nursing mothers of the mountains terrified their children with.”  That was what Mark Twain wrote, years afterwards in an account of a stagecoach journey to California, in 1861, upon encountering Joseph Alfred  ‘Jack’ Slade, a divisional superintendent for the Central Overland, and a man who combined a horrific reputation with a perfectly soft-spoken and gentlemanly demeanor … and who in the space of four years,  went from being a hard-working, responsible and respected corporate man (as these things were counted in the 19th century wild west) to being hanged by the Virginia City, Montana, Committee of Vigilance.

It’s a curiosity of history; most people who have heard of Jack Slade have heard of him only through reading Roughing It. While Mark Twain cheerfully repeated every horrific tale he had heard about Slade without acknowledging that the very worst of them were either exaggerations or flat-out untruths – he did acknowledge and puzzle briefly over the curious dichotomy.  Which was the real man? The notorious murderer Slade … or the mild-mannered, gentlemanly person that he met at breakfast?  And what in Slade’s life would lead to the ending of it in such an awful and degrading way?

The person known as Jack Slade began his career in the west, as a seventeen-year old Army teamster, driving military freight wagons to Santa Fe during the Mexican War. Born Joseph Alfred Slade, he was a younger son of a fairly respectable family from Carlyle, Illinois. No authenticated photographic likenesses exist of him – very likely, he didn’t hold still long enough. He was later described as being a small and stocky man, with dark hair and eyes, a swarthy complexion, quick-moving and with a phenomenally good memory. He was also an excellent shot with a revolver, and had that elusive quality known as a ‘command presence.’ In the decade following the war, he worked as a teamster and stage-coach driver before achieving the dignity of a job as wagon-master for a Salt Lake City-based freighting concern on the Overland Trail. This was position of extreme responsibility; a wagon-master had absolute authority on the trail, in sole charge of valuable property and the lives of subordinates while traveling through a dangerous country devoid of any kind of law, civil or otherwise. The job demanded a cool head, a mastery of the profession, and command of men and animals; a wagon-master was paid three or four times as much as a teamster in the west – and teamsters were quite well-paid in comparison. Jack Slade went on to serve a succession of employers during a chaotic three years on the eve of the Civil War as section superintendent, overseeing the doings of the all-important stage line on the Central Overland trail. He had authority – and responsibility for siting, building and supplying the stage stations along his section of the overland trail. Hiring personnel, seeing that the mail, the company employees, and the passengers moved along the road in safety and at full gallop – all that made him of inestimable value to his employers. Jack Slade had one more valuable quality – that of a man who solved problems. The unsavory reputation as a stone-hearted killer was the unspoken side-bar to that. Frontier teamsters were a rowdy and barely disciplined lot, out and away from any governmental authority, civil or otherwise. That Jack Slade had killed a drunken, rebellious and disorderly teamster in a trailside dispute in the late 1850s was an established fact. The encounter might have been a fair fight – or not. The accounts (none of them first-hand) varied. Anyway, it wasn’t the most notorious murder ascribed to Jack Slade; that would be the death of a man whose severed, dried ear Slade took to carrying around in his waistcoat pocket.

By 1859, Slade’s experience in freighting operations and knowledge of the territory along the overland trail made him of inestimable value to his employers – and so had his reputation as the hardest of hard men. He was the go-to manager when the shipping firm of Russell, Majors and Waddell decided to establish the Pony Express in the critical year of 1860. Jack Slade was promoted and moved east to take up authority over 500 miles of a division which ran all the way from Julesburg to South Pass. So varied and vast was the professional experience and sheer dogged drive of the managers who set it up and employees who subsequently ran it, that the Pony Express was able to begin operations in a little more than two months. In that time, they hired eighty riders, purchased hundreds of strong, fast horses, and equipped nearly two hundred stations. In the middle of all urgent and complex project, one of Russell, Majors & Waddell’s problem employees came back to haunt Jack Slade – worse than that; to shoot him at least six times and leave him for dead.

Jules Beni was a Canadian-French trapper who had set up a little trading post and road roach at a point on the overland trail to Oregon, California and Utah crossed the Platte River. The place became known as Julesburg when a rough and ready settlement grew up around it. Jules was in his fifties, a very good a good age at that time and place, and most everyone around called him “Old Jules.”  It was only logical that Russell, Majors & Waddell hire him to stationmaster at Julesburg for the stagecoach and Pony Express enterprises. His place was right where the road branched – one leg going on to Salt Lake City, the other to Denver. Almost at once it became clear that Jules Beni was incompetent as a stationmaster and abusing his position. Old Jules appropriated company horses and supplies for his own use – and sometimes horses were stolen outright – and ‘returned’ after a reward negotiated with the thieves by Old Jules and charged to the company. Travelers complained of extortionate prices for lodgings and food, the constantly missing horses played havoc with the stage schedule, and the mail was often mis-routed; that intended for Denver sent to Salt Lake and vice versa. This kind of incompetence couldn’t be tolerated for long – and Jack Slade essentially fired Old Jules from position as stationmaster late in 1859. Not from Julesburg, though – where Old Jules still maintained his trading post. Jules Beni simmered for months over the implied insult. On a spring day, three weeks before the Pony Express was set to run the first cross-San Francisco-St. Joseph run, Jack Slade stopped off at Julesburg. He was making a routine inspection of the stage stations on his divisions, and fatefully had forgotten his knife and revolver at the last station of his rounds.  After an apparently amiable conversation with Jules Beni and two of the company stage drivers, Jules Beni noticed that Slade was unarmed. He fetched a six-shooter from his own quarters. Before anyone could react, he emptied the weapon at short-range into Slade’s body. Slade, who looked to be mortally wounded, staggered towards the stage station. Jules reached inside the door of his own place, and brought out a double-barreled shotgun and finished off the job with two barrels of buck-shot. He turned to the horrified stage drivers, saying, “There are some blankets and a box – you can make him a coffin if you like.”

(To be continued … of course.)

The Other Alamo

19. March 2012 · 5 comments · Categories: Old West

The Texas Revolution and War for Independence from Mexico initially rather resembled the American Revolution, some sixty years before— a resemblance not lost on the American settlers in Texas. At the very beginning, both the Colonies and the Anglo-Texans were far-distant communities with a self-sufficient tradition, who had been accustomed to manage their own affairs with a bare minimum of interference from the central governing authority. Colonists and Anglo-Texans started off by standing on their rights as citizens, but a heavy-handed response by the central government provoked a response that spiraled into open revolt. ‘Since they’re trying to squash us like bugs for being rebellious, we might as give them a real rebellion and put up a fight,’ summed up the attitude.

The Mexican government, beset with factionalism and seeing revolt against it’s authority everywhere, sent an army to remind the Anglo-Texan settlers of who was really in charge. The rumor that among the baggage carried along in General Martin Cos’ train was 800 pairs of iron hobbles, with which to march selected Texas rebels back to Mexico did not win any friends, nor did the generals’ widely reported remarks that it was time to break up the foreign settlements in Texas. Cos’ army, which was supposed to re-establish and ensure Mexican authority was ignominiously beaten and sent packing.

Over the winter of 1835-36 a scratch Texan army of volunteers held two presidios guarding the southern approaches from another attack, while representatives of the various communities met to sort out what to do next. First, they formed a shaky provisional government, and appointed Sam Houston to command the Army. Then, in scattershot fashion, they appointed three more officers to high command; it would have been farcical, if the consequences hadn’t been so dire. With no clear command, with military companies and commanders pursuing their own various plans and strategies, the Texas settlers and companies of volunteers were not much fitted to face the terrible wrath of the Napoleon of the West and President of Mexico, strongman, caudillo and professional soldier, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. He did not wait for spring, or the grass to grow tall enough, or the deep mud to dry out: he intended to punish this rebellious province with the utmost severity. Under his personal command, his army reached the Rio Grande at Laredo in mid-February, and laid siege to a tumbledown former mission garrisoned by a scratch force of volunteers –  San Antonio de Valero, called simply the Alamo. But this story is about the other presidio, and another garrison of Texans and volunteers; Bahia del Espiritu Santo, or Goliad.

Santa Anna had detached General Don Jose Urrea, with a force of about a thousand soldiers, a third of them heavy cavalry, to guard his eastern flank along the rivers and lowlands of the Gulf coast, and to mop up the Anglo-Texan garrisons at San Patricio and Goliad. A small force at San Patricio, which had embarked on an expedition to raid Matamoros— a scheme which can only and with charity described as half-assed— was surrounded and wiped out. Then it was the turn of Colonel James Fannin with 500 Texian and American volunteers at the presidio in Goliad. Three times couriers arrived from William Barrett Travis’ tiny garrison in the Alamo, begging for help and reinforcements from Fannin. The kindest thing one can say about Fannin is that he dithered indecisively. He was battered from each direction with bad news and the consequences of bad decisions, or even worse, decisions not made until they were forced upon him. He made an abortive attempt to march to San Antonio, to come to Travis’ aid –  but turned back after a few miles, assuming that relief of the Alamo was just not possible. In the mean time, spurred by the knowledge that they must either fight, or go under to death or exile, a new convention of settlers met at Washington-on-the-Brazos, and declared independence on March 2. In short time they had drafted a constitution, elected an interim government, and commissioned Sam Houston as commander of what army was left.

Houston went to Gonzalez, intending to rally the settlers’ militia there and lift the siege of the Alamo. He arrived there on the very same day that news came that Santa Anna’s army had finally broken through the walls. Travis’ rag-tag collection of volunteers had held for fourteen days. They had bought time with their blood. Houston sent word to Fannin, still holed up in the old La Bahia presidio, ordering him to retreat north. But Fannin had sent out a small force to protect Anglo-Texan settlers in a nearby town, and refused to leave until he heard from them. When he finally decided to fall back, and join up with Houston, it was already too late. Urrea’s column had already made contact. Fannin and his men moved out of Goliad on March 19th, temporarily shielded by fog, but they were caught in the open, a little short of Coleto Creek. They fought in a classic hollow square, three ranks deep for a day and a night, tormented by lack of water, and the cries of the wounded. By daylight the next morning, Urrea had brought up field guns, and raked the square with grapeshot. Fannin signaled for a parley, and surrendered; he and his men believing they would be permitted honorable terms. They were brought back to Goliad and held under guard in the presidio for a week, along with some stragglers who had been rounded up in the neighborhood, and a party of volunteers newly arrived from the States.

(A view from inside the compound of the Loreto Chapel, where 300 of Fannin’s company were imprisoned for a week)

Fannin and his men all assumed they would be disarmed, and sent back to the United States. Three English-speaking professional soldiers among Urreas’ officers assumed the same, and were appalled when Santa Anna sent orders that all the prisoners were to be executed. Urrea himself had asked for leniency and Colonel Portillo, the commander left in charge of Goliad was personally horrified at this development –  but he obeyed orders. On Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, those of Fannin’s garrison able to walk— about three hundred of them– were divided into three groups, and marched out of town in three different directions, before being shot down by their guards. Forty wounded were dragged into the courtyard in front of the chapel doors and executed as they lay on the ground. Fannin himself was shot last of all, knowing what had happened to his men. Reportedly he asked only that he not be shot in the face, that his personal belongings be sent to his family, and that he be given decent burial. He was executed at point blank range with a shot in the face, his belongings were looted and his body was dumped into a trench with those of others, and burnt, although many were left where they lay. A handful survived by escaping into the brush and down to the nearby river, during all the confusion. Another handful of prisoners were kept out of the columns, concealed in the Presidio by one of Portillo’s officers, or rescued by Francita Alavez, later called the Angel of Goliad, the common-law wife of Captain Telesforo Alavez.

Santa Anna, who until then had been thought of as a competent soldier and a more than usually slippery politician was thereafter branded a brute and — as he was decoyed farther and farther into Texas in pursuit of Sam Houston —an overreaching and arrogant fool. A month later, when Houston had finished falling back, and back and back, and training all the men who had gathered to him, he turned and fought and Santa Anna’s grand army disintegrated, as Houston’s men shouted “Remember the Alamo!” –  and “Remember Goliad!”

(Presidio La Bahia’s Loreto Chapel stood for many years, although the citadel’s walls and barracks disintigrated over time. They were reconstructed, beginning in the 1960s. Today, it is the only significant location from the Texas War of Independence to still appear much as it did in 1836.)

The Original ‘Dog’

09. March 2012 · Comments Off on The Original ‘Dog’ · Categories: Domestic, Old West · Tags: , , , , , ,

The character in To Truckee’s Trail who goes by the name “Dog” is actually a real dog – she belongs to my daughter. She is actually a boxer-who-knows-what mix, not a mastiff as I described her (although she could very well have a portion of mastiff in the mix.) She does have a white splotch on her nose and at the end of her tail… and she is very loyal, but not quite as obedient and bright as “Dog”. Still – if I am writing a story, I get to make it my way, right?

A Message from Bexar

06. March 2012 · 1 comment · Categories: Chapters From the Latest Book, Old West · Tags: , , , , , , ,

Several days following the final assault on the walls of the Alamo, word was recieved in Gonzales, the nearest Texian settlement to San Antonio.  Sam Houston had gone there to rally the Texas Army … and a company of local men had gone to the Alamo in response to Travis’ plea for help. From Daughter of Texas, this is what happened on the day that Susannah Dickinson brought the world from San Antonio that the Alamo had fallen.

            The hours and days of March dragged past at a snail’s pace; a week and a half since the Gonzales Ranging Company had ridden down towards the ferry and the road to Bexar. Surely they had achieved a safe passage into that crumbling and shabby fortress and other reinforcements were on the way? Now and again, Margaret fancied that when it was very still – at dawn, or just after sunset, and the light breeze came from the north that she could hear a faint continuous rumble, like distant thunder – the sound of cannon-fire. Toward the end of that time, rumors swept Gonzales, each more dreadful than the last: the worst of them had the Alamo fallen and all the defenders put to the sword, but that tale had been brought by a pair of Mexican cattle-drovers, who – as it turned out, had not seen anything of the sort, but had heard the dreadful tale from another drover.

Within days of reading Colonel Travis’ declaration and plea in the Telegraph, soldiers, militia, and ranging companies began arriving in Gonzales, singly or in companies. Colonel Neill, who had taken leave from his duties at Bexar, thinking that all would be in order and there would be time enough to finish reinforcing theAlamo, began gathering those new recruits to his little army. Race, with his face seeming to be pale skin stretched over the bones of his face, had recovered enough strength to resume his duties as a courier and dispatch rider. More »

When Buntline Was in Flower

03. March 2012 · Comments Off on When Buntline Was in Flower · Categories: Old West · Tags: , , ,

Ned Buntline, that is … a dime novel writer, publicist, playwright and producer … as well as publisher and popularize of popular cheap novels about the American west, published in mass quantities during the latter half of the 19th century. His name was actually Edward Zane Carroll Judson, and he had been a sailor, a brawler, an instigator of riots, an ex-convict and a prodigious drinker and public lecturer on the benefits of temperance. Presumably he knew whereof he spoke, on this subject, although the phrase ‘do as I say, not as I do’ certainly does occur to one. But this is not about E.Z.C.Judson, or his alter-ego, Ned Buntline … or even any of the Wild West personalities that he wrote about in his dime novels.

No – what he, and his scribbling ilk did in a fair part, was to popularize the far west – the frontier west as it then existed in the late 19th century –  as a fountainhead of unending drama and breathtaking adventure. Granted, anyone who does this now, or in previous decades has had wonderful material to work with: eccentric characters galore, marvelous and improbable events, romance of every variety, warfare and friendship with strange and alien peoples (Indians, unreconstructed Confederates and Mormons among them). But Buntline and his less famous competitors did it first, establishing the meme almost before the dust was settled.

Of course – some of that dust was purposefully raised, in the course of telling a ripping good yarn for the price of one thin dime. They had not the luxury of being able to wait and see, to consider events steadily or see them whole. They were also not able to thoroughly fact-check the back-stories alleged by some of their most famous heroes – say, Buffalo Bill Cody, or Wild Bill Hickok, or cared very little others were out and out criminals and sociopaths. Or that others –like the small landowners and homesteaders who came out on the wrong side of something like the Johnson County War were not, and had experienced the bad fortune of being relatively voiceless in a contest where the other party had the bigger public megaphone. (And that much of their output is hideously racist by modern attitudes should go without saying.) They also were guilty of creating or flat-out exaggerating every convention imaginable regarding cowboys; who were usually plain old working men of every color, performing backbreaking and/or totally boring labor – but they did it in the open air, and from the backs of horses, which must have looked pretty good from the perspective of a factory hand or clerk back east.

Still – Buntline and his ilk set the stage for the enduring image and conventions of the Old West: timeless stories and stock characters, which were lovingly sent up in a movie like Rustler’s Rhapsody. Even so, it was vision of the Wild, Wild West which gripped our grandparents and great grandparents in print, entranced our parents at the movies … and had us glued to the television.

But you know what? The real Wild West was even more incredible than Ned Buntline ever dreamed.

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