10. March 2014 · Comments Off on Lone Star Sons – Godfathers Three – Part 3. · Categories: Uncategorized

Lone Star Sons Logo - Cover(Part three of the latest Jim and Toby adventure. Part One is here, Part Two here. Our heroes have found a dying woman, who extracts a promise that Jim and Toby, with American Albert Biddle, will care for her infant son.)

At Jim’s puzzled expression, Toby added, “He must be fed on milk. The Comanche would kill a buffalo calf and feed the milk in it’s stomach to a sick child… it is said to be very nourishing.”
“Urgh,” Albert Biddle shuddered in revulsion. “Not for the calf, I warrant. Poor woman – she must have gone to hide here when her husband was murdered … else she would have been killed as well.”
“You find a goat, Brother,” Jim suggested. “We shouldn’t stay longer than necessary. I’ll search the hut again for anything useful … and then I thing we ought to head for Laredo. The sooner we can give little James Albert Toby to this Graciela, the better for him.”
Toby nodded briefly, and set off down the arroyo in that gentle trotting pace which Jim knew could eat up the miles as fast than the four hooves of a horse at the same pace. Albert Biddle deftly tucked the baby in the crook of his arm. Jim regarded this competence with envy and alarm mixed.
“You do that very well,” he observed. “I’d almost be afraid to pick the little wiggler up, for fear that I’d break him, or drop him, or something.”
Albert Biddle smiled, wryly. “Oldest of eleven children – and we always saw the newest one as a kind of pet or doll. My mother was sickly … so we eldest usually looked after the littles.” He looked very straight at Jim. “But I’ll not delude you, Mr. Reade. This little godchild of ours is strong enough, but he’ll have a better chance of thriving in a woman’s care … and not out here in this near-to-godforsaken wilderness. We should hasten on to Laredo as swiftly as we can.”
“No argument there,” Jim agreed. “We’ll linger here for no more than it takes to fill all of our canteens. This is the last clean water before Laredo … and it’s at least another two days, on the trail that we’re following. I reckon we better do what needs to be done for Toby’s friends … he’s a one for doing right, you’ll notice … more than most Christians I could name.”
“See if you can find some swaddling cloths or some such for the little one,” Albert Biddle suggested, adding in some distaste. “Or a diaper.” The infant had suddenly pissed, in a thin little arching stream which dampened the arm of Albert Biddle’s coat. For the first time, Jim thought the Yankee appeared rattled, and chuckled.
“You’ll have to teach your godson to do something about that!” Jim observed.
“He’s yours, too,” Albert Biddle answered in some heat. “And when he’s bigger I can teach him to write his name in the snow, but for now some swaddling clothes would be of much more use.”
At the hut, Jim found a length of blanket – none too clean and smelling goats and wood-smoke – which they wrapped the infant in, and laid him down in a natural cradle formed by a drift of dried leaves and grass between the gnarled roots of a small cottonwood tree. Young James Albert Toby whimpered a bit – but there was no help for it. Albert Biddle set about filling all of their canteens from the spring, one by one, while Jim ducked his head under the low lintel of the goat-herder’s hut. No, it did not take him any longer to search it than it had for the murderer or murderers to ransack it, seeking whatever pitiful small comforts it contained. Two woven baskets, one smashed to slivers, the other in rather better shape, but both empty, a coarse sack which had once held flour, a straw-stuffed pallet which had likewise been ripped open as with a knife and the contents shaken about, a coarse pillow stuffed with sheep’s wool – also eviscerated. The puffs of wool and the straw had been tossed around the hut – as if the murderer had been enraged at such a poor profit. He brought out the pillow and some of the wool, thinking that they might pad a bed for the tiny infant, to discover that Toby had returned, leading a frantically bleating nanny-goat, trailed by a pair of small goats – also protesting noisily. The racket set young James Albert Toby to wailing energetically once again.
“I have no idea of what to do next,” Alfred Biddle confessed. “I expect that one milks the wretched thing, but I have never done such a task in my life.”
“What – you’ve never had a tit in your hand?” Toby jeered and Albert Biddle flushed bright red.
“I yield to your experience in that regard, Mr. Shaw,” he answered, suddenly gone all starchy and Yankee. The small goats bawled, the baby wailed – even the horses stamped in restless irritation – and Jim shot Toby an exasperated glance.
“Well, I’ve never milked a goat – but I have a cow. But we don’t have a bucket for the milk, or a bottle, even – to feed the baby with. They need to suckle on something soft, something that dribbles a little milk …” Inspiration struck him, and he grinned at Albert Biddle. “I think you’re gonna have to give up your fine gloves, Mr. Biddle. Or at least, one of them.”
“There is no end to the hardships I endure on the frontier,” Albert Biddle observed dryly.
“And a canteen,” Jim added. “We milk the damned goat here, should be enough for the baby until we get to Laredo. I don’t want to be dragging three goats all the way there. Traveling with a crying baby will be bad enough… speaking of that – how are we going to carry him on horseback. Have either of you got any idea?”
“I have, James,” Toby added confidently. “A cradle-board, such as our people use. I can make one – not one such as my mother would approve – but from what little we have here. Children of the age of this one here – they travel in security, on their mother’s backs, or on a pack horse and offer little trouble to anyone.”
“A kind of infant portmanteaux?” Alfred Biddle ventured and Toby nodded. Both Alfred Biddle and Jim watched with much interest – aside from their own tasks – as Toby took out his own knife, unraveled the dried rawhide strips which bound together the simple wattle door of the hut and set the rawhide to soak in water.

As Toby worked at his task, Jim cornered the nanny-goat and milked her, aiming the thin white stream of milk into one of Albert Biddle’s canteens. The goat protested loudly, as did her kids, but Jim carried on, undeterred. When the canteen sloshed agreeably, Albert Biddle sighed, and with a knife cut a tiny slit into the thumb of one of his gloves. Jim poured a bare spoonful into the glove, and Albert introduced the soggy glove thumb into the mouth of young James Albert Toby, who looked until that moment to have been working himself up to fury the equal of that of the young goats. Almost instantly, the cross expression gave way to one of gluttonous satisfaction, as he sucked avidly on the glove thumb. Albert Biddle added more milk as James Albert Toby’s exertions emptied it. The silence was most welcome, although the trio of goats still emitted the occasional dissatisfied bleat. Jim owned to feeling a small amount of satisfaction himself. Yes, between them they had met the first major hurdle in caring for their godson.

And it appeared that Toby, in his quiet and competent way, was meeting the second challenge – that of carrying the child with them. Jim had a sense of what his friend meant to accomplish – knowing how rawhide thongs might soften and stretch when wet, yet once dried, to shrink and become as hard as wrought steel. Toby set aside two of the sturdiest lengths of wood which had been part of the door, and took up the undamaged basket, which had once been a sturdy yet flexible one woven of palm-leaves in the fashion of Mexico. It had an oval shape; with the dampened rawhide, Toby bound the two lengths of wood in parallel to the length of the basket, and bored both lengths through to accommodate a short length of grass rope. From the damaged basket, he took the sturdy willow hoop which had formed the handle, and bound it at right angles to his construction with more of the wet rawhide. Jim had seen infants among Toby’s people, the Lipan Apache and the Tonkaway carried in cradle-boards as Toby was constructing, so he grasped the sense of what Toby was making – with more haste than care in the usual fashion of cradle-boards, which were often ornamented with beads and small talismans to amuse the tiny passenger. Jim and Toby both acknowledged the need for haste.

“We will need for the rawhide to dry in the sun for a little time,” Toby said at last. He sat back on his heels, setting his creation aside and looking straightly at the other two. “What of Armando and his woman, James? We have not the time to dig a proper grave for them, not if we wish set out before sundown.”
“The hut,” Jim answered. “It is set into the ground and not very sturdy at all. I cannot think that anyone would care to live in it now, knowing what has happened here. Put them together in their home – let it be their tomb – and push down the walls and the roof to cover them decently, in lieu of the customary rites. ‘T’will serve as a grave marker also, for such of their kin – aside from this young lad – who care to make pilgrimage.”
Albert Biddle was already nodding his agreement. “I do not care for the thought of lingering in this place. If ever a place may be haunted by the spirits of the unhappy dead, this would be it.”

To be continued.

02. March 2014 · Comments Off on The Charming and Notorious Billy · Categories: Old West · Tags: , , ,

One of the most well-known western gunslingers of the post-Civil-War Wild West – if not one of the most storied – is also the one of whom extraordinarily little is known. His life was also brief, which continues to give all kinds of story-telling latitude to writers of pulp fiction, movie makers and musicians. An impulsive sociopath, or just an unfortunate teenager with extremely bad luck in choosing friends? Even his name and date of birth are open to considerable question; his given name was William Henry, later shortened to Billy, but his surname varied between McCarty, Antrim or Bonney, depending on the year and circumstance. His mother was an immigrant Irishwoman, Catherine McCarty, either a single mother or a Civil War widow. After the War, Catherine married, or married again – to William Antrim, who took his wife and her son west to Wichita and then to Silver City, New Mexico. Catherine McCarty Antrim kept a boarding house there until she died of tuberculosis in 1874. It appeared that William Antrim had no interest in family life; Billy and his younger brother were left more or less to their own devices.

The young Billy McCarty/Antrim was not seen as juvenile hell-raiser by anyone in Silver City at first. He was described as being no more of a handful than any other boy his age; bright and rather charming, fond of music and books. Curiously enough for the time and his station in life, he was also literate and had good handwriting. Billy made friends easily, especially with the ladies. Everyone wanted to think the best of him; long afterwards one of his friends wrote that he “seemed as gentlemanly as a college-bred youth … because of his humorous and pleasing personality grew to be a community favorite.” He also was a very good shot with a revolver – only to be expected of someone who had a natural skill and practiced a lot.

Alas, he drifted into bad company when still in his early teens – a tendency which would be repeated several times. He was arrested for stealing a bundle of clothing from a local Chinese laundry; a prank in which he may have been set up by his friends. He was caught at once and locked up. The sheriff might have known of the prank and intended to ‘scare him straight’ by locking Billy up, but instead of being reformed by the experience, Billy escaped from jail and left Silver City at speed. He drifted around for a couple of years, working as an itinerant ranch hand. He may have spent time in Mexico, thereby acquiring fluency in Spanish. By then, he was known as the ‘Antrim Kid’, and earning a living at Camp Grant, Arizona – a military post, as a teamster and general errand-runner. There he ran into trouble again, at the age of 16 or 17. In a physical altercation, Billy pulled a revolver and mortally wounded the other man; a muscular tough with a bad reputation. Likely a plea of self-defense would have been upheld, but Billy panicked, grabbed the nearest horse and departed town in a cloud of dust.

Wanted for murder, he found a new group of friends even less savory; a loose association of toughs known as the ‘Boys’, who specialized in livestock theft across a swath of southern New Mexico, a method of enterprise interspersed with public brawling, flamboyant gun-play and drunkenly harassing the relatively more law-abiding. Eventually with the attention of local law enforcement falling upon the ‘Boys’ they drifted into Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, where a brewing range and mercantile war offered a more serious diversion.
Political and economic life in Lincoln County was dominated by James Dolan, and his partner Lawrence Murphy, who owned the largest – and indeed the only – general store in the town of Lincoln. Dolan and Murphy were well-established, well-connected and becoming very wealthy from that retail monopoly and on supplying beef to local Army garrisons and the Indian reservations. They took badly to being challenged by a wealthy expatriate Englishman, rancher John Tunstall, and his business partner, lawyer Alexander McSween. Tunstall and McSween were new to the area, but they were already a threat to Dolan and Murphy – who did not handle threats to their economic and political dominance well. There may also have been an element of ethnic resentment between Irish Dolan and Murphy, and the Englishman Tunstall. Tunstall and McSween fired the opening shot in what developed into open war in the streets of Lincoln by opening a competing general store.

Dolan and Murphy’s monopoly on business and on the beef-supply contract were also furiously resented by another big cattle rancher, John Chisum, who backed Tunstall and McSween. One might have thought that a county that comprised nearly a quarter of the territory would have been big enough for all parties. One would have been wrong. Ranchers and farmers took sides as past resentments and circumstances led them. Some – resentful of Chisum’s herds crowding their own out of public grazing lands – took the side of Dolan and Murphy. Others, infuriated at being skinned economically, took the side of Tunstall, Chisum and McSween – even though Dolan, through connections with corrupt territorial officials, also controlled what passed for law enforcement in Lincoln County. The sheriff – William Brady – did Dolan’s bidding. The ‘Boys’ fell in with the Dolan faction, but Billy, the ever-charming, made friends with Tunstall ranch employees and Tunstall himself; this followed on an attempt at stealing some of Tunstall’s horses. It might be that Tunstall offered Billy a job in order to keep him close, as a potential witness against Dolan … or in part because of an understating that Tunstall’s hands were hired on the basis of their ability with firearms and willingness to use them, at least as much for skill at tending livestock.

Some versions of the Billy the Kid story suggest that Tunstall was a substitute father-figure, reining in an otherwise impulsive and reckless lost boy. But Tunstall was in his early twenties, and Billy only worked ten months or so on the ranch. During much of that time Tunstall was away in Lincoln or Mesilla. The simpler answer might be that this was Billy’s last chance to straighten out his life, and walk back from the petty criminality which had marred it so far; doing honest work for an upright and respectable man. Whatever the reason, Billy’s loyalty to Tunstall became absolute and unswerving – with dire consequences.

Early in the spring of 1878, Dolan struck back against Tunstall and McSween, procuring a court order attaching property owned by McSween in payment of a large debt to do with McSween’s legal practice. Sheriff Brady obediently ransacked the store and McSween’s home. Assuming – perhaps maliciously – that since that McSween was also Tunstall’s business partner in the general store, the writ extended to Tunstall, Brady authorized a posse to go out to the Tunstall ranch and seize some of Tunstall’s horse herd. The leader of the posse was a friend of Brady’s – a hot-tempered man named William Morton – and also part of the Dolan faction. Other members of the posse were less than upright and stalwart citizens; in the resulting confrontation at the ranch, Tunstall was murdered in cold blood blood by Morton. An unconvincing attempt by the posse members to convince others that Tunstall had been resisting arrest only added insult to injury. Tunstall’s friends, allies and employees were outraged. Most of them had been involved in the Lincoln County vendetta for far longer than Billy – the fatally impulsive saddle-tramp with a talent for gun-play. His first attempt to act on his anger – trying to arrest some members of Morton’s posse – ended in humiliation, when Sheriff Brady arrested him, confiscating his rifle, and locked him in the jail. Jail and Billy did not agree – as had been proved and would be again, several times.

On release, Billy joined with Tunstall’s friends and ranch hands – led by Tunstall’s ranch foreman, Richard Brewer – in a legal posse to hunt for the murderers, who had scattered into the rough country near the Rio Penasco, miles from Lincoln. They called themselves the Regulators (a name with a certain pedigree in Texas). Following a running gunfight, they captured Morton and one of Brady’s deputies who had been implicated in the Tunstall murder. They surrendered to Brewer, who promised them he would return them to Lincoln, alive and unharmed. Unfortunately, on the return journey, Billy’s fierce loyalties and bad impulse-control led him astray once more. He and another Regulator gunned down the captives in cold blood – along with a Regulator who apparently had tried to protect them. (Or the man had been a Dolan sympathizer to begin with.)

Shortly afterwards, Sheriff Brady and two deputies attempted to arrest Billy for on the murder charge. Billy and five Regulators forted up in the Tunstall & McSween store building, and when Brady and his deputies approached the store, Brady and one deputy fell in a hail of fire. The rifle Brady carried was the same one he had confiscated earlier from Billy – and when Billy dashed out to retrieve his property, the surviving deputy snapped off a quick shot at him. Wounded, Billy hid in town instead of skedaddling. The surviving lawmen of Lincoln ransacked the place, searching for him. One story has it that he was hiding in the house of one of his Mexican friends – inside a barrel, while a woman rolled out tortillas on the top of the barrel and the deputies searched the house. Tit for tat violence claimed nearly a dozen lives – even the U.S. Army got involved, after some Regulators exchanged gunfire with cavalry troopers.

The final spasm of violence and the one which put a final end to Billy’s stay in Lincoln was a siege of McSween’s own home, an adobe house built like a fortress, on the only street in Lincoln. McSween, his wife, Billy and a small number of their Regulator friends barricaded up against an assault by the Dolin faction, directed by a new sheriff. The siege ground on for four days, in a sporadic exchange of gunfire with the only casualties being some livestock and Alexander McSween’s rapidly unraveling nerves. On the fifth day, the sheriff demanded surrender; upon refusal, the forces of law and order piled kindling against the wooden doors and window frames of the house and set fire to them. The flames spread insidiously throughout the day to ceiling beams, floors and other flammable fittings. Billy persuaded Mrs. McSween to leave, certain that she as a woman would not be harmed. He kept up defense of the McSween establishment even as the owner of it gave up. Alexander McSween refused to use a gun throughout the siege, on the grounds that his life insurance policy would be invalidated, apparently not grasping the concept that this was a moot point, under the circumstances. By late evening, the house was filled with thick smoke. Time to leave or die, choking on it; Billy told McSween that he and two Regulators would make a break for safety, running from the back of the smoldering house to cover in the thick brush along the banks of a little creek, no more than a couple of hundred yards away. They would provide a diversion – under cover of which the others could follow. McSween hesitated at the last moment, framed in the doorway of a burning house which made the area around as bright as day. An easy target – and the Lincoln County War claimed Billy’s second employer.

There went all possibility of settling down to a more or less respectable and law-abiding life. His friends and employers were dead or in hiding – and he had made implacable enemies in Lincoln County. Such was his notoriety that he had no refuge in obscurity, as did most of the surviving Regulators. He spent the next three years on the run, sheltered and protected by those friends that he did have – many of them in the overlooked and downtrodden Mexican community, while reverting to petty thievery and stock-rustling of the sort that the ‘Boys’ had been notorious for. Likely, this propensity destroyed any chances of amnesty for him. He was captured and escaped from jail once again, which sealed his fate, for in that escape he murdered a law officer. When he was finally run to ground in Fort Sumner by Pat Garrett in the summer of 1881, he was just barely 21 years of age, but in a bare half-dozen years, he had acquired a reputation which equaled or bettered men who had lived the life of a western shootist for decades longer.

(Other survivors of the Lincoln County War fared a little better than Billy. One of the main instigators of the war itself, Murphy died of cancer in 1878, just as it was ramping up. His partner Dolan was indicted for the murder of Tunstall, but acquitted – and eventually wound up owning much of Tunstall’s ranch property. It is thought that he instigated the murder of Mrs. McSween’s lawyer, a year to the day after Tunstall’s murder. Mrs. McSween, a woman of considerable resource, had hired the lawyer to pursue those responsible for the death of her husband. Undaunted, she acquired considerable landholdings in the Three Rivers area, and prospered as a cattle rancher herself, living until 1931. John Chisum also died rich and respectable – of old age and still a power in New Mexico.)