I have a guest post about the Goliad! It’s here. History Undressed is rather more English historical fiction oriented, so it’s fantastic that the are branching out. Check out some of the other entries, too: The truth about Miss Kitty, and a Civil War (our civil war) adventure with the title Southern Fried Dragon…
But Jack Slade was not quite dead. Some stories have it that he looked up at Jules Beni and gasped, “I’ll live long enough to hang your ears from my watch chain!” The two stage drivers carried him into the station and laid him in a bunk. Almost before the smoke had cleared, a westbound stage pulled into Julesburg, carrying Slade’s immediate boss, the operations superintendent on his own tour of inspection. Accounts differ on what happened to Jules Beni upon being arrested by the outraged operations superintendent. Without provocation, Jules Beni had gunned down an unarmed man in front of witnesses. Anyway it was sliced on the frontier; it came out as cold-blooded murder. Although Jack Slade was still breathing, everyone seemed fairly certain he wouldn’t continue to do so for long. Beni was hung from an improvised gallows and half-strangled; either the rope broke and he managed a daring getaway, or the superintendent ordered him let down and extracted a promise that he would depart immediately and at speed, and stay the hell away from the division. The Pony Express had a real-time test, as one of the newly-hired riders was sent galloping hell for leather to the Army post at Fort Laramie two hundred miles away – the nearest place to find a doctor.
The Army surgeon was probably astonished to find Jack Slade still alive. Before antibiotics and sterile surgery, a non-fatal bullet wound was a serious matter, even when bones, the abdominal cavity or vital organs were not involved. Infection, sepsis, gangrene; all could kill in slow-motion and with a great deal more agony. The military doctor extracted some of the lead balls and fragments … and Jack Slade hung on well enough to be moved to his home station, and later to St. Louis for another round of surgery. He was back at work as on the division … even as Russell, Majors and Waddell sold out to Ben Holladay. Holliday was known as the stagecoach king; a businessman whose personal flamboyance was only equaled by his drive and shrewd, far-sighted sense, in running extensive stagecoach lines in California. With Holladay, Jack Slade would be on his third employer in as many years, all in more or less the same place, and performing the same duties.
Meanwhile, Jules Beni hid out with local Indian tribes and then settled on a new road ranch, some hundred miles east of Julesburg. Having done his best to kill Slade, and fled that part of the Platte Valley which was under Slade’s authority – he had spent the time since then unmolested, and growing bolder. He had a herd of cattle pastured on property that he owned within Slade’s division, and he came to get them, boasting that he was not afraid of Slade, that Slade had no power over him – and if Slade didn’t kill Jules, Jules would kill him. For some weeks, Jack Slade managed to avoid a direct encounter. He consulted with the officers at Fort Laramie regarding the threat which Jules Beni posed – not only to him personally, but to general peace, law and order in the area. He had their acquiescence, as about the only duly anointed civil authorities in the district, to do what everyone agreed best; kill Beni. He dispatched four of his own men on horseback to the area where Beni was said to be, promising a reward of $500 if he was captured alive. A day or so later, Jack Slade was traveling by coach between two stations, when two of the men whom he had sent flagged down his coach. They were greatly excited – they had captured Jules Beni after a brief exchange of bullets and blows at a neighboring ranch; they had tied him over a pack-saddle and brought him to Cold Spring station, just ahead. Presently, he was tied up to a post in the corral at the Cold Spring station, awaiting Slade’s arrival and judgement.
There are two versions of what happened, when Jack Slade arrived at Cold Spring Station, and inspected Jules Beni – the man who had done his best to murder him in cold blood a little over a year before. One is prosaic: Beni had been wounded in the gunfight, and died of shock and loss of blood. Slade’s men would miss out on the reward, so they tied up the corpse and insisted that he was alive – but playing possum. Slade answered, “I’ll see who’s playing possum,” and cut off one of Beni’s ears. No movement at all, and Slade continued, “That proves it, but I might just as well have the other ear.” The other version, a frontier Grand Guignol spectacle, luridly embroidered upon for years afterwards, had Jules Beni still alive, tied to the corral post and Jack Slade snarling, “You made me suffer, now I’ll try to pay you for it.” That version had Slade shooting Jules Beni at short range in non-vital places, retiring between shots for a stiff drink, and then returning for another shot. Other versions had Slade taunting the dying man by telling him to write up his will, or saying in response to Beni’s plea to see his wife one last time, “When you shot me, you gave me no chance to see my wife… so now take your medicine.” When the tormented Beni finally expired – a by-then-very-drunken Jack Slade sliced off the ears and put them in his vest-pocket. He carried at least one of the severed, dried ears for the rest of his life and his reputation as the ultimate hard man of the Central Overland was cemented into frontier legend. The following day, he surrendered to the authorities at Fort Laramie and requested investigation of the incident – they did not press charges, and he was released.
In 1862, Ben Holladay had bought out the Overland completely at a fire-sale price and renegotiated the mail contract with the government. This involved moving the stage road – with all of the stations which supported it – from the line of the North Platte, to a new route along the South Platte, through present-day Greeley, Colorado, and the mining settlements established in the Black Hills. This route bypassed Fort Laramie, shortened the total time it took to cross half a continent and removed stage-line personnel and travelers from what had become a dangerous war zone from raiding Indians. To carry this out, with minimal disruption to service represented a herculean effort on the part of Central Overland managers and superintendents. Unfortunately, the move of the route to more inhabited regions put the increased temptation of drink in the way of Jack Slade … to his misfortune. The soft-spoken and polite aspect of his demeanor was utterly vanquished when he drank. It was truly a Jekyll and Hyde personality change. When sober, Slade may have been impatient with incompetence and dishonesty in subordinates, but mild-spoken, cordial to travelers and professional to his superiors. Drunk, he became as dangerous and as uncontrollable as a coiled rattlesnake. His binges increased in frequency and in violence, even though he customarily apologized afterwards and paid the damages. In the course of a particularly violent spree late that year, however, he and some friends shot up the sulter’s store at Fort Halleck, which brought down the wrath of the Army. The Central Overland’s lawyer bargained away the charges by agreeing to dismiss Slade.
Still fit, and with a reputation as a trustworthy and reliable wagon-master, he gravitated into hauling freight to the Wyoming gold-rush town of Virginia City. In March of 1864, he was hanged in public by vigilantes there, after a particularly drunken and violent spree. There have been conflicting reasons for them having done this. Other offenders executed by the vigilantes had committed murder, been a part of an organized criminal gang. Jack Slade was no more than a violent and belligerent drunk, and perhaps more feared than others of that temperament because of his reputation – a much-exaggerated reputation that had enhanced his authority in a dangerous place at a dangerous time. But perhaps the citizens of Virginia City were tired of wrecked saloons and shot-out windows, and wanted to serve notice on the most egregious offender in that line as a means of serving notice on the others. The drunken binges were what came to minds of citizens – not the work that he had done to expedite the Pony Express and keep the stagecoaches running. What had he done for them lately? So, he was hanged by the neck until dead, barely into his thirties. His wife, who was sent for but arrived too late to see him alive, later took his body to Salt Lake City for burial as soon as the spring thaws opened up the roads out of Virginia City … ironically, Joseph Alfred Slade’s body was preserved in a tin-lined coffin filled with alcohol.
(Much of this information was drawn from Death of a Gunfighter, which I think is a fantastic book.)
… at John P. Bloch’s Website, here.
“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.)
One of the best things about buying a house and retiring from the military was being able to feel free to actually get serious about a garden. I went through a phase of planting roses – many of which have thrived and survived – and a long project to rip out the existing lawn, back and front, and put in xerioscape plants. The back yard was the place that I put the most into, though. Because of the layout of the rooms and the windows in them, the back was the part I looked at the most. And because of the peculiar soil composition – a foot or so of heavy, dense clay laid down over an impermeable layer of caliche which apparently goes all the way to the core of the earth – getting certain things to thrive and grow in it has been a challenge. Really, if I had known then what I do now, I would have hired someone to come in with a bulldozer, scrape up all the topsoil and replace it with Miracle-gro. But I made do with putting a lot of things in pots, and I had quite a nice little garden going, until a pair of disasters. The first were the two rambunctious young dogs that my daughter fostered for a couple of months. They were whirling balls of destruction … and by the time we found permanent homes for them, they uprooted half a dozen of the potted and planted specimens and dug holes everywhere. Then a hard and prolonged freeze in January, 2010 pretty well finished off everything else.
Beginning last spring, I had to start pretty much from scratch, at least as far as the potted plants were concerned. Bit by bit, half a dozen at a time; a trek up to Wimberley for Market Days, and to the San Antonio Herb Market to replace the exotics and the herbs, a start on filling the dozens and dozens of empty pots. Late last spring, my daughter bought a number of topsy-turvy tomato and pepper planters, marked very well down at the grocery store. I had never had much luck growing tomatoes in San Antonio; really, sometimes it seemed like it was a curse or something. But they grew well in the topsy-turvys last year … so this year, we planted them all again. We had an idea, from seeing one in a neighbor’s yard, to build a frame so as to hang a row of them from branches of the big mulberry tree that shades half of the back yard. The frame is two lengths of 2×4, one below the other and connected by chains, and hanging from another set of chains, suspended between two high branches. 
Then, there were the three earth-box planters that we found, put out for the trash. Apparently, they are supposed to be the absolute bee’s knees when it comes to growing veggies. We hauled them home, looked up the instruction manual on line, and now two of them are full of tomatoes and the third with zucchini and cucumbers. I also had one of those special pots for growing strawberries – with seven or eight little openings along the sides, which never grew strawberries or much of anything very well, as the soil leaked out before the roots of the plants grew enough to stabilize it all. We had the notion to plant it with various kinds of mint – which grows like a weed anyway – and cut bits of coir to put around the base of each plant to keep the soil in place. This looks to be working well; this week, we can hardly see the sides of the pot for all the mint.
I also had a number of long rectangular pots – now they are filled with thriving lettuce and salad greens. It would be fantastic to keep salad greens going for as long as possible: nothing beats the taste of fresh-picked greens. The long planters and the earth-boxes are mostly arranged on the ground underneath the hanging frame, so that they can all be watered at once, and water overflowing from the uppermost will drip down on the lower.
A couple of weeks ago, one of our neighbors were having some trees heavily trimmed. Out in front of the house, there was one of those wood-chippers and a small covered truck to haul the chipped wood in – and we got the attention of the crew boss and asked if they would give us some mulch. He said sure – but warned us that the stuff came off the back of the truck two or three cubic yards at a time. Were we sure we wanted that much? Oh, yes we were. There was a veritable Matterhorn of finely-chopped fresh wood mulch in our driveway by that afternoon. We could have used even more, but my daughter said flatly that her back couldn’t have handled another couple of wheel-barrow loads. Just about every one of the planting beds, front and back, is now covered with three or four inches of mulch, and looks a thousand times better than it did after the dogs and the frost got done with everything.
In one big empty patch, where I used to have a cluster of potted plants, I decided that I wanted a mixture of salvia – which does thrive in clay soil, fortunately – and some artichokes, which are only a species of thistle. How hard could it be? I love artichokes, and being able to pick them fresh from the garden would be fantastic. So – a little salvia there, some artichokes, cardoon and lambs’ ear there … and maybe at last I can fill in that bare patch. The surviving roses – which were all from the Antique Rose Emporium outlet, are heavy with clusters of buds. We might even have something spectacular from the roses at last.
And just this very morning, we were talking about building a raised bed from the treated timbers intended to construct decks with. It wouldn’t be very hard at all, to build one to fit into the back corner of the yard which is so full of little bits of brick and concrete rubble left from constructing the house that I have despaired of getting anything to grow there. Something long and relatively narrow, rather like the earth-boxes, but several times bigger, something that we could even cover with a plastic sheet in the winter, to keep stuff going … now, that will have to wait for another year. Right now, I’ve got the place back to where I enjoy looking at it, again.
(Sammy, the three-legged, cross-eyed flame-point Siamese approves of the salad greens – “Yes, yes – these will make most excellent barfs!”)
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