Boot-Hill! Back in the wild old days you found one on the new town's
outskirts and one where the cattle trail came down to the ford, and
one was at the summit of the pass. There was another on the mesa
overlooking the water-hole where the wagon outfits halted after the
long dry drive. The cow-boys read the faded writing on the wooden
headboards and from the stories made long ballads which they sang to
the herds on the bedding grounds. The herds have long since vanished,
the cow-boys have ridden away over the sky-line, the plaintive songs
are slipping from the memories of a few old men, and we go riding by
the places where those headboards stood, oblivious.
Of the frontier cemeteries whose dead came to their ends, shod in
accordance with the grim phrase of their times, there remains one just
outside the town of Tombstone to the north. Here straggling mesquite
bushes grow on the summit of the ridge; cacti and ocatilla sprawl over
the sun-baked earth hiding between their thorny stems the headboards
and the long narrow heaps of stones which no man could mistake. Some
of these headboards still bear traces of black-lettered epitaphs which
tell how death came to strong men in the full flush of youth. But the
vast majority of the boulder heaps are marked by cedar slabs whose
penciled legends the elements have long since washed away.
The sun shines hot here on the summit of the ridge. Across the wide
mesquite flat the granite ramparts of the Dragoons frown all the long
day, and the bleak hill graveyard frowns back at them. Thus the men
who came to this last resting-place frowned back at Death.
There was a day when every mining camp and cow-town from the Rio
Grande to the Yellowstone owned its boot-hill; a day when lone
graves marked the trails and solitary headboards rotted slowly in the
unpeopled wilderness. Many of these isolated wooden monuments fell
before the long assaults of the elements; the low mounds vanished
and the grass billowed in the wind hiding the last vestiges of the
leveled sepulchers. Sometimes the spot was favorable; outfits
rested there; new headboards rose about the first one; for the road
was long and weary, the fords were perilous from quicksands; thirst
lurked in the desert, and the Indians were always waiting. The camp
became a settlement, and in the days of its infancy, when there was
no law save that of might, the graveyard spread over a larger area.
There came an era when a member of that stern straight-shooting breed
who blazed the trails for the coming of the statutes wielded the
powers of high justice, the middle, and the low. Outlaw and rustler
opposed the dominion of this peace officer. Then the cemetery
boomed like the young town. Finally things settled down to jury
trials and men let lawyers do most of the fighting with forensics
instead of forty-fives. Churches were built and school-houses; a new
graveyard was established; brush and weeds hid the old one's
leaning headboards. Time passed; a city grew; the boot-hill was
forgotten.
This is a chronicle of men whose bones lie in those vanished
boot-hills. If one could stand aside on the day of judgment and watch
them pass when the brazen notes of the last trump are growing fainter,
he would witness a brave procession. But we at least can marshal the
shadowy host from fast waning memories and, looking upon some of their
number, recall the deeds they did, the manner of their dying.
Here then they come through the curtain of time's mists, Indian
fighter, town marshal, faro-dealer, and cow-boy. There are a few among
them upon whom it is not worth while to gaze, those whose lives and
deaths were unfit for recording; there are a vast multitude whose
heroic stories were never told and never will be; and there are some
whose deeds as they have come down from the lips of the old-timers
should never die.
Thus in the forefront pass lean forms clad for the most part in
garments fringed with buckskin. You can see where some have torn off
portions of the fringes to clean their rifles.
Old-fashioned long-barreled muzzle-loaders, these rifles; and
powder-horns hang by the sides of the bearers. They are long-haired
men; and their faces are deeply burned by sun and wind, one hundred
and eighty-three of them; and where they died, fighting to the last
against four thousand of Santa Ana's soldiers, rose the first
boot-hill. That was in San Antonio, Texas, at the building called the
Alamo; and in this day, when schoolboys who can describe Thermopylae in
detail know nothing of that far finer stand, it will do no harm to
dwell on a proud episode ignored by most text-book histories.
On the fifth day of March, 1836, San Antonio's streets were resonant
with the heavy tread of marching troops, the clank of arms and the
rumble of moving artillery. Four thousand Mexican soldiers were being
concentrated on one point, a little mission chapel and two long adobe
buildings which formed a portion of a walled enclosure, the Alamo.
For nearly two weeks General Santa Ana had been tightening the cordon
of cavalry, infantry, and artillery about the place. It housed one
hundred and eighty-three lank-haired frontiersmen, a portion of
General Sam Houston's band who had declared for Texan independence.
The Mexicans had cut them off from water; their food was running low.
On this day the dark-skinned commander planned to take the square. His
men had managed to plant a cannon two hundred yards away. When they
blew down the walls the infantry would charge. It only remained for
them to load the field-piece. Bugles sounded; officers galloped
through the sheltered streets where the foot soldiers were held in
waiting. There came from the direction of the Alamo the steady
rat-tat-tat of rifles. The hours went by but the cannon remained
silent.
A little group of lean-faced men were crouching on the flat roof of
the large out-building. The most of them were clad in fringed garments
of buckskin; here and there was one in a hickory shirt and home-spun
jeans. Six of them, some bareheaded and some with hats whose wide rims
dropped low over their foreheads, were clustered about old Davy
Crockett, frontiersman and in his day a member of Congress. Always the
six were busy, with ramrods, powder-horns, and bullets, loading the
long-barreled eight-square Kentucky rifles. The grizzled marksman took
the cocked weapons from their hands; one after another, he pressed
each walnut stock to his shoulder, lined the sights, pulled the
trigger, and laid the discharged piece down, to pick up its
successor.
He crouched there on the flat roof facing the Mexican cannon. As fast
as men came to load it, he fired. Sometimes a dozen soldiers rushed
upon the muzzle of the field-piece surrounding it. At such moments
Davy Crockett's arms swept back and forth with smooth unhurried
swiftness and his sinewy fingers relaxed from one walnut stock only to
clutch another; his hands were never empty. Always a little red flame
licked the smoke fog before him like the tongue of an angered snake.
He was getting on in years but in all his full life his technic had
never been so perfect, his artistry of death so flawless, as on this
day which prefaced the closing of his chapter. The bodies of his
enemies clogged the space about their cannon; the rivulets of red
trickled from the heap across the roadway. The long hours passed.
Darkness came. The field-piece remained silent.
Long before daylight the next morning the four thousand were marching
in close ranks to gather for the final assault. The sun had not risen
when they made the charge. The infantry came first; the cavalry closed
in behind them driving them on with bared sabers. The Americans took
such toll with their long-barreled rifles from behind the barricaded
doors and windows that the foot-soldiers turned to face the naked
swords rather than endure that fire. The officers reformed them under
cover; they swept forward again, and again fell back. Santa Ana
directed the third charge in person. They swarmed to the courtyard
wall and raised ladders to its summit. The men behind bore those
before them onward and literally shoved them up the ladders. They
overwhelmed the frontiersmen through sheer force of numbers. Colonel
W. B. Travis fell fighting hand to hand here. The courtyard filled
with dark-skinned soldiers.
The Alamo was fallen. But there remained for the lean hard-bitten men
of Texas, who had retired within the adobe buildings, the task of
dying as fighting men should die. It was now ten o'clock, nearly six
hours since the beginning of the first advance. It took the four
thousand two hours more to finish the thing.
For every room saw its separate stand; and every stand was to the
bitter end.
There were fourteen gaunt frontiersmen in the hospital, so weak with
wounds that they could not drag themselves from their tattered
blankets. They fought with rifles and pistols until forty Mexicans lay
heaped dead about the doorway. The artillery brought up a field-piece;
they loaded it with grape-shot and swept the room, and then at last
they crossed the threshold.
Colonel James Bowie, who brought into use the knife that bears his
name, was sick within another apartment. How that day's noises of
combat roused the old fire within his breast and how he lay there
chafing against the weakness which would not let him raise his body,
one can well imagine. A dozen Mexican officers rushed into the place,
firing as they came. Colonel Bowie waited until the first of them was
within arm's length. Then he reached forth, seized the man by the hair
and, dying, plunged the knife that bore his name hilt-deep into the
heart of his enemy.
So they passed in stifling clouds of powder smoke with the reek of hot
blood in their nostrils. The noon hour saw Davy Crockett and five or
six companions standing in a corner of the shattered walls; the old
frontiersman held a rifle in one hand, in the other a dripping knife,
and his buckskin garments were sodden, crimson. That is the last of
the picture.
"Thermopylae had its messenger of defeat. The Alamo had none." So reads
the inscription on the monument erected in latter years by the State
of Texas to commemorate that stand. The words are true. But the Alamo
did leave a memory and the tale of the little band who fought in the
sublimity of their fierceness while death was slowing their pulses did
much toward the development of a breed whose eyes were narrow,
sometimes slightly slanting, from constant peering across rifle sights
under a glaring sun.
The procession is passing; trapper and Indian fighter; teamsters with
dust in the deep lines of their faces--dust from the long dry trail to
old Santa Fe; stage-drivers who have been sleeping the long sleep
under waving wheat-fields where alkali flats once stretched away
toward the vague blue mountains; and riders of the pony express. A
tall form emerges from the past's dim background, and comes on among
them.
Six feet and an inch to spare, modeled as finely as an old Greek
statue, with eyes of steel grey, sweeping mustache and dark brown hair
that hangs to his shoulders, he moves with catlike grace. Two
forty-fives hang by his narrow hips; there is a hint of the cavalier
in his dropping sombrero and his ornately patterned boots. This is
Wild Bill Hickok; he was to have gone with Custer, but a coward's
bullet cheated him out of the chance to die fighting by the Little Big
Horn and they buried him in the Black Hills in the spring of 1876.
James B. Hickok was the name by which men called him until one
December day in the early sixties when the McCandless gang of outlaws
tried to drive the horses off from the Rock Creek station of the
Overland Stage on the plains of southwestern Nebraska near the Kansas
boundary.
There were ten of the desperadoes, and Hickok, who was scarcely more
than a boy then, was alone in the little sod house, for Doc Brinck,
his partner, was off hunting that afternoon. He watched their approach
from the lonely cubicle where he and Brinck passed their days as
station-keepers. They rode up through the cottonwoods by the creek.
Bill McCandless leaped from the saddle and swaggered to the corral
bars.
"The first man lays a hand on those bars, I'll shoot," Hickok called.
They answered his warning with a volley, and their leader laughed as
he dragged the topmost railing from its place. Laughing he died.
Now the rifles of the others rained lead against the sod walls and
slugs buzzed like angry wasps through the window. He killed one more
by the corral and a third who had crept up behind the wooden
well-curb. The seven who were left retired to the cottonwoods to hold
council. They determined to rush the building and batter down the
door.
When they came forth bearing a dead tree-trunk between them, he got
two more of them. And then the timber crashed against the flimsy door;
the rended boards flew across the room; the sod walls trembled to the
shock. He dropped his rifle and drew his revolver as he leaped to meet
them.
Jim McCandless and another pitched forward across the threshold with
leveled shotguns at their shoulders. Young Hickok ducked under the
muzzle of the nearest weapon, and its flame seared his long hair as he
swung for the bearer's mid-section with all the weight of his body
behind the blow. Whirling with the swiftness of a fighting cat he
spurned the senseless outlaw with his boot and "threw down" on
McCandless. Revolver and shotgun flamed in the same instant;
McCandless fell dead; Hickok staggered back with eleven buckshot in
his body.
The other three were on him before he recovered his balance. He felt
the searing of their bowie-knives against his ribs as they bore him
down on the bed. Fingers closed in on his windpipe. He seized the arm
in his two hands and twisted it, as one would twist a stick, until the
bones snapped. He struggled to his feet, and the warm blood bathed his
limbs as he hurled the two who were left across the room.
They came on crouching and their knives gleamed through the thick
smoke-clouds. His own bowie-knife was in his hand now, and he stabbed
the foremost through the throat. The other fled. Hickok stumbled out
through the door after him, and Doc Brinck came riding back from his
hunting expedition in time to lend his rifle to his partner, who
insisted profanely that he was fit to finish what he had so well
begun.
So young James Hickok shut his teeth against the weakness which was
creeping over him and lined his sights on the last of his enemies; for
the man whom he had felled with his fist and he with the broken arm
had escaped some time during the latter progress of the fight. That
final shot was not so true as its predecessors; the outlaw did not die
until several days later in the little town of Manhattan, Kansas.
When the eastbound stage pulled up that afternoon the driver and
passengers found the long-haired young station-keeper in a deep swoon,
with eleven buckshot and thirteen knife wounds in his body. They took
him aboard and carried him to Manhattan where he recovered six months
later, to find himself known throughout the West as Wild Bill Hickok.
How many men he killed is a mooted question. But it is universally
acknowledged that he slew them all fairly. Owning that prestige whose
possessor walks amid unseen dangers, he introduced the quick draw on
his portion of frontier; and many who sought his life for the sake of
the dark fame which the deed would bring them died with their weapons
in their hands.
In Abilene, Kansas, where he was for several years town marshal, one
of these caught him unawares as he was rounding a corner. Wild Bill
complied with the order to throw up his hands and stood, rigid,
expressionless, while the desperado, emulating the plains Indians,
tried to torture him by picturing the closeness of his end. He was in
the midst of his description when Hickok's eyes widened and his voice
was thick with seeming horror as he cried,
"My God! Don't kill him from behind!" The outlaw allowed his eyes to
waver and he fell with a bullet-hole in his forehead.
As stage-driver, Indian fighter, and peace officer Wild Bill Hickok
did a man's work in cleaning up the border. He was about to go and
join the Custer expedition as a scout when one who thought the murder
would give him renown shot him from behind as he was sitting in at a
poker game in Deadwood. He died drawing his two guns, and the whole
West mourned his passing. It had never known a braver spirit.
The silent ranks grow thicker: young men, sunburned and booted for the
saddle; the restless souls who forsook tame Eastern farm-lands, lured
by the West's promise of adventure, and received the supreme
fulfilment of that promise; the finest of the South's manhood drawn
toward the setting sun to seek new homes. They come from a hundred
boot-hills, from hundreds of solitary graves; from the banks of the
Yellowstone, the Platte, the Arkansas, and the two forks of the
Canadian.
There are so many among them who died exalted that the tongue would
weary reciting the tales. This tattered group were with the fifty who
drove off fifteen hundred Cheyennes and Kiowas on Beecher Island. The
Battle of the Arickaree was the name men gave the stand; and the
sands of the north fork of the Republican were red with the blood of
the Indians slain by Forsythe and his half hundred when night fell.
These three who follow in boots, jean breeches, and Oregon shirts are
Billy Tyler and the Shadler brothers, members of that company of
twenty-eight buffalo hunters who made the big fight at Adobe Walls.
The sun was just rising when Quanah Parker, Little Robe, and White
Shield led more than eight hundred Comanches and Kiowas in the first
charge upon the four buildings which stood at the edge of the Llano
Estacado, one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest settlement. The
Shadler boys were slain in their wagon at that onslaught. Tyler was
shot down at midday as he ventured forth from Myers & Leonard's store.
Before the afternoon was over the Indians sickened of their losses and
drew off beyond range of the big-caliber Sharp's rifles. They
massacred one hundred and ninety people during their three months'
raiding but the handful behind the barricaded doors and windows was
too much for them.
Private George W. Smith of the Sixth Cavalry is passing now. You would
need to look a second time to notice that he was a soldier, for the
rifle under his arm is a long-barreled Sharp's single shot and he has
put aside much of the old blue uniform for the ordinary Western
raiment. That was the way of scouting expeditions, and he, with his
five companions, was on the road from McClellan's Creek to Fort Supply
when they met two hundred Indians on that September morning of 1874.
Up near the northeast corner of the Texas Panhandle, where the land
rises to a divide between Gageby's Creek and the Washita River, the
five survivors dug his grave with butcher-knives. They pulled down the
banks of a buffalo wallow over his body in the darkness of the night;
and they left him in this shallow sepulcher, unmarked by stone or
headboard. There his bones lie to this day, and no man knows when he
is passing over them.
The six of them had left General Miles's command two days before. At
dawn on September 13, they were riding northward up the long open
slope: Billy Dixon and Amos Chapman, two buffalo hunters serving as
scouts, and the four troopers, Sergeant Z. T. Woodhull, Privates Peter
Rath, John Harrington, and George W. Smith. You could hardly tell the
soldiers from the plainsmen, had you seen them; a sombreroed group,
booted to the knees and in their shirt-sleeves; all bore the heavy,
fifty-caliber Sharp's single-shot rifles across their saddle-horns.
The bare land rolled away and away, dark velvet-brown toward the
flushing east. The sky was vivid crimson when they turned their horses
up a little knoll. They reached its summit just as the sun was rising.
Here they drew rein. Two hundred Comanches and Kiowas were riding
toward them at the bottom of the hill; the landscape had tricked them
into ambush.
There passed an instant during which astonishment held both parties
motionless: the white men on the crest, unshaven, sunburned, their
soiled sombreros drooping over their narrowed eyes; and at the slope's
foot the ranks of half-naked braves all decked out in the war-path's
gaudy panoply. Their lean torsos gleamed under the rays of the rising
sun like old copper; patches of ocher and vermilion stood out in vivid
contrast against the dusky skins; feathered war-bonnets and dyed
scalp-locks fluttered, gay bits of color in the morning breeze. The
instant passed; the white men flung themselves from their saddles; the
red men deployed forming a wide circle about them. A ululating yell,
so fierce in its exultation that the cavalry horses pulled back upon
their bridles in a frenzy of fear, broke the silence. Then the booming
of the long Sharp's fifties on the summit mingled with the rattle of
Springfields and needle-guns on the hill's flank.
Now, while the bullets threw the dust from the dry sod into their
faces, five of the six dropped on their bellies in a ring. And by
the sergeant's orders Private George Smith took charge of the
panic-stricken horses. Perhaps that task fell to him because he was
the poorest shot, perhaps it was because he had the least experience;
but it was a man's job. He stood upright clinging to the tie-ropes,
trying to soothe the plunging animals; and he became the target
for a hundred of those rifles which were clattering along the
hillside below him. For every warrior in the band knew that the
first bullet that found its mark in his body would send the horses
stampeding down the slope; and to put his foes afoot was the
initial purpose of the plains Indian when he went into battle.
So Private Smith clinched his teeth and did his best, while the
deep-toned buffalo-guns roared and the rifles of the savages answered
in a never-ending volley all around him. The leaden slugs droned past
his ears as thick as swarming bees; the plunging hoofs showed through
the brown dust-clouds, and his arms ached from the strain of the
tie-ropes.
Billy Dixon had thrown away his wide-rimmed sombrero and his long hair
rippled in the wind. He had been through the battle at Adobe Walls and
men knew him for one of the best shots in the country south of the
Arkansas River. He was taking it slowly, lining his sights with the
coolness of an old hand on a target-range. Now he raised his head.
"Here they come," he shouted.
The circle was drawing inward where the land sloped up at the easiest
angle. A hundred half-naked riders swung toward the summit, and the
thud-thud of the ponies' little hoofs was audible through the rattle
of the rifles. The buffalo-guns boomed in slow succession like the
strokes of a tolling bell. Empty saddles began to show in the
forefront. The charge swerved off, and as it passed at point-blank
range a curtain of powder smoke unrolled along the whole flank.
Private George Smith pitched forward on his face. His rifle flew far
from him. He lay there motionless. A trooper binding his wounded thigh
glanced around when the assault had become a swift retreat.
"Look!" he cried. "They've got Smith."
"Set us afoot," another growled and pointed after the stampeded
horses.
Smith lay quite still as he had fallen. They thought him dead. Within
the hour, a dozen whooping Comanches ran their ponies up the hill
toward his limp form. To gain that scalp-lock under fire would be an
exploit worth telling to their grandchildren in after years. And
there was the long-barreled rifle as a bit of plunder. But the five
white men, who had changed their position under a second charge,
emptied four saddles before the warriors were within a hundred yards
of the spot, and the eight survivors whipped their ponies down the
slope again.
The sun was climbing high when Amos Chapman rolled over on his side
and called to Billy Dixon that his leg was broken. Dixon lifted his
head and surveyed the situation. The Indians were gathering for
another rush. Thus far they had taken things as though they were so
sure of the ultimate result that they did not see fit to run great
chances. But this could not last. The next charge might be the final
one. Down on a little mesquite flat about two hundred yards distant,
he saw a buffalo wallow. He pointed to it.
"We got to make it," he told the others, and they followed him as he
ran for the shelter. But Amos Chapman crawled only a dozen paces or so
before he had to give it up. The four fell to work with their
butcher-knives heaping up the sand at the summit of the low bank which
surrounded the shallow circular depression. They dropped their knives
and picked up their rifles, for the savages were sweeping down upon
them.
So they dug and fought and fought and dug for another hour and then
Billy Dixon was unable to stand the sight of his partner lying
helpless on the summit of the knoll.
"I'm going to get Amos," he announced, and set forth amid a rain of
bullets. Those who saw him after the fight was over--and General
Miles was among them--said that his shirt was ripped in twenty places
by flying lead. He halted on the hilltop and took up Chapman
pick-a-back, then bore him slowly down the slope to the little
shelter.
Noon came on. The sun shone hot. Dixon had got a bullet in the calf of
his leg when he was bearing his companion on his back. Private Rath
was the only man who was not wounded. They all thirsted as only men
can thirst who have been keyed up to the high pitch of endeavor for
hours. The savages charged thrice more; and when they came, numbers of
them always deployed toward the top of the knoll where Private Smith
lay dying: dead his companions thought, but they were grim in their
determination that the red men should never get the scalp which they
coveted so sorely. The big Sharps boomed; the saddles emptied to their
booming. Private Smith wakened from one swoon only to fall into
another. Sometimes he wakened to the thudding of hoofs and saw the
savages sweeping toward him on their ponies.
Near midafternoon the warriors formed for a charge and it was evident
from the manner of their massing that they were going to ride down on
the buffalo wallow in one solid body. But while their ranks were
gathering there came up one of those sudden thunderstorms for which
the Staked Plains were famous. The rain fell in sheets; the lightning
blazed with scarcely an intermission between flashes. And the charge
was given up for the time being. The braves drew off beyond rifle-shot
and huddled up within their blankets.
Morris Rath seized the respite to go for ammunition. For Smith's
cartridge-belts were full. He came back from the knoll breathless.
"Smith's living," he cried.
"Come on," Billy Dixon bade him and the two went back to the summit.
"I can walk if you two hold me up," Private George Smith whispered. A
bullet had passed through his lungs and when he breathed the air
whistled from a hole beneath his shoulder-blade. They supported him on
either side and half-carried him to the buffalo wallow.
The thunder-shower had passed. Another was coming fast. The Indians
were gathering to take advantage of the brief interval. The agony
which had come from rough motion was keeping Smith from swooning now.
He saw his companions preparing to stand off the assault. Amos Chapman
was holding himself upright by bracing his body against the side of
the wallow. Private Smith whispered to the others,
"Set me up like Chapman. They'll think there's more of us fit to shoot
that way." And they did as he had asked them.
So he held his body erect while the life was ebbing from it; and the
rain came down again in sheets. The Indians fell back before the
charge was well begun. It was their last attempt.
The wind rose, biting raw. The savages melted away as dusk drew down
over the brown land. Some one looked at Smith. His head was sunk and
he was moaning with pain. They found a willow switch and tamped a
handkerchief into the wound. And then they laid him down in the
rain-water which had gathered in the wallow. His blood and the blood
of the others turned that water a dull red.
Some time near midnight he died. And several days later, when General
Miles's troops came to rescue them, the five others buried his body.
It was night-time. The fires of the troopers glowed down at the foot
of the slope. They made the grave with their butcher-knives by pulling
down the sand from the wallow's side upon the body. And then they went
to the camp-fires of the soldiers.
* * * * *
They are passing from bleak graveyards on the alkali flats and in the
northern mountains where the sage-brush meets the pines: gaunt men in
laced boots and faded blue overalls who traveled once too often
through the desert's mirage searching for the golden ledges; big-boned
hard rock men who died in underground passages where the steel was
battering the living granite; men with soft hands and cold eyes who
fattened on the fruits of robbery and murder.
This swarthy black-haired one in the soft silk shirt and spotless
raiment of the gambler is Cherokee Bob, who killed and plundered
unchallenged throughout eastern Washington and Idaho during the early
sixties; until the camp of Florence celebrated its third New Year's
Eve with a ball in which respectability held sway, and he took his
consort thither to mingle with the wives of others. Then he kindled a
flame of resentment which his blackest murders had failed to rouse.
The next morning the entire camp turned out to drive him forth
together with Bill Willoughby, his partner. The two retreated slowly,
from building to building, facing the mob. Shotguns bellowed;
rifle-bullets sang about their ears, and they answered with their
revolvers, until death left their trigger fingers limp.
Here comes one with catlike tread, slender and with a dignity of
presence which proclaims the gentleman. But when you glance at the
lean immobile face, there is that in the pale eyes which checks your
blood; their gray is like the gray of old ice late in the wintertime.
This is Henry Plummer. Behind him troop thirty others, bearded men,
and the evil of their deeds is plainly written on their features; the
members of his band who slew for gold, leaving the dead to mark their
trail through Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. In Alder Gulch
their leader was elected sheriff and planned their murders for them
while he held the office. Finally such men as Sam Hauser, N. P.
Langford, J. X. Beidler, and Colonel W. F. Saunders took their lives
in their hands and organized a vigilance committee at Virginia City.
They got their evidence; and in January, 1864, they lynched the
sheriff and his thirty, whose deeds would make a long story were they
worthy of a place within this chronicle. But the mining camps never
produced the type of desperado who was willing to take his share of
chances in a shooting affair; excepting when the cattle country was
close by. The bad man who could command a measure of admiration always
was a horseman.
Here pass those who died boldly in the glaring lands by the Arizona
border; a multitude of sunburned men with revolvers swinging low
beside their hips and in their hands the deadly Winchesters. One comes
among them, rugged of frame, big-featured, red from weather and the
fulness of his blood. There is, in the poise of his head and in his
eyes, a fierce intolerance. This is Joe Phy. More than forty years
have passed since they buried him in the little boot-hill at
Florence, Arizona. To-day the town is as conventional as any Eastern
village, but it saw a time when men lived up to the rude clean code of
our American age of chivalry. During that era Joe Phy met his end with
a grimness befitting a son of the Old West.
Florence was the county-seat and Pete Gabriel was sheriff. He was a
handsome man with his twisted mustache and Napoleon goatee,
free-handed with his money, widely liked. Moreover he was a wonderful
shot with his rifle and deadly quick with a single-action revolver.
Among the gun-fighters of southern Arizona none was better known than
he, and Joe Phy was his deputy.
The county of Pinal extended from the glaring flats below the Gila
northward beyond the Superstition Mountains, a savage land where the
sun was killing hot in summer-time, where forests of giant cacti
stretched for miles like the pine woods that cloaked the higher
plateaus. Phy and Gabriel rode together through the country on many a
bold errand; they shared their blankets and the hardships of dry
camps; they fought beside each other while the bullets of wanted men
snarled, ricochetting from the rocks about them.
Then politics brought a rift in their friendship and the day came when
the deputy ran for office against his former chief. The campaign was
made bitter by accusations. There was, men said, a court-house ring;
the big companies were dodging taxes, the small ranchers were getting
the worst of it. Election came and the rancor of the reformers grew
hotter when the count showed that Gabriel had won. Many openly
proclaimed that the court-house crowd had juggled with the ballots,
and Phy was among these. When a contest was instituted and the result
of the election was carried to the courts, he grew to hate Gabriel.
The hatred flamed within him until he could stand it no longer and one
night he hunted the town over until he found the sheriff in Keating's
saloon.
"Pete," he said, "I'm going home after my six-shooter and I'm coming
back to fight it out with you. Get ready while I'm gone."
And Gabriel answered quietly, "All right, Joe. I'll be here when you
come back."
The swinging doors closed behind Phy's back and the sheriff turned to
the man behind the bar.
"Call 'em up," he said. "This is on me." He ordered whisky and those
who lined up beside him kept looking toward the street entrance; but
he remained with his back to the swinging doors. The minutes passed;
the doors flew open. Within the threshold Joe Phy halted.
"Commence!" he shouted and flung an oath after the word. "Commence!"
Pete Gabriel turned, and his revolver flew from its holster spitting
fire. Phy's forty-five ejected a thin stream of orange flame. The
voices of the weapons mingled in one loud explosion. The two men took
a pace toward each other and the smoke grew thicker as they shot again
in unison. They came on slowly, pulling the triggers until the room
was filled with the black powder fumes.
Then Pete Gabriel stood swaying within arm's length of Joe Phy's
prostrate form. And as he struggled against the mortal weakness which
was now creeping through his lead-riddled body the man on the floor
whispered,
"I cain't get up. Get down. We'll finish it with knives."
"I guess we've both of us got enough," the sheriff muttered, and
staggered out through the door, to lie all night in a near-by corral
and live for two years afterward with a bullet through his kidneys.
Joe Phy died hard on the saloon floor. Those in the room gathered
about him, and Johnny Murphy strove to lift his head that they might
give him a sip of water. A year before he and two others had slain Joe
Levy, a faro-dealer in Tucson, and they had done it foully from
behind. Since that time men had avoided him, speaking to him only when
it was absolutely necessary, and his hair had turned snow-white. Joe
Phy opened his eyes and recognized his would-be helper.
"Don't you dare lay a hand on me," he cried, "you murderer," and
struck Murphy full in the face. His hand fell limply back. The breath
had departed from his body with that blow.
The long procession is waning. Now those are coming whose headboards
were erected in the early eighties. A company of swarthy black-eyed
riders in the flaring trousers and steep-crowned sombreros of Mexico
jog along elbow to elbow with hard-eyed horsemen from the valleys of
the San Simon and the Animas. Smuggler and cow-thief, there is a story
in their passing which centers about a deep gorge near the place where
the boundary between New Mexico and Arizona meets the international
line. That story goes a long way back.
Down in the southwestern corner of the Animas valley the Guadalupe
canyon trail approached the gorge from which it got its name. In the
days when the American colonists were still contented with Great
Britain's rule it was a main thoroughfare between the Pinos Altos
mines and old Mexico. Long trains of pack-mules, laden with treasure
which the Spaniards had delved from the sun-baked mountains near where
Silver City now stands, traveled this route. Apaches and bandits made
many an attack on them in the canyon.
The Pinos Altos mines were abandoned. The trail fell into disuse. The
years passed by. The '49 rush brought new travelers of another breed
who beat down the old track again. Passing through the gorge they too
found the Apaches lurking among the rocks and more than one old
argonaut laid down his eight-square rifle for the last time within the
shadow of those arid cliffs.
Old Man Clanton came with one of these '49 outfits, a typical specimen
of that lean-jawed leathern-faced breed who have fought Indians,
lynched Mexicans, and established themselves in hundreds of dreary
outposts beyond the last settlements. He went on to California, failed
to find the gold, and returned some time during the latter seventies
to the upper San Pedro valley. Here he "raised his family," as the old
expression has it, and, his sons grew up, Finn, Ike, and Billy. Those
were wild days, and the two last-named boys became more proficient
with rope, running-iron, and forty-five revolver than they ever did
with their school-books. In time they were known as rustlers and in
the lawless town of Charleston by the San Pedro River they fell in
with Curly Bill. When the outlaw went eastward into the valleys of
the San Simon and the Animas the two young Clantons went with him. The
cow-thieves of the San Simon and the Animas did not go to the trouble
of altering brands or "sleepering," as their successors have in later
years, but drove entire herds and sold them, as they were, to
shippers. Occasionally they rode down into Sonora to raid the ranges
south of the border. One July day in 1881 a number of them embarked on
such an expedition and they gathered a bunch of several hundred
longhorns. They brought them up through Guadalupe canyon and came on
northward to the Double Dobe Ranch. Here they left the cattle with a
man to hold them, while they rode over to Curly Bill's place, not far
distant.
But the Mexicans had been suffering from this sort of depredations
until patience had ceased to be a virtue and a band of thirty dusky
vaqueros were following the trail of those stolen longhorns. On the
afternoon of July 26 the man who was riding herd caught sight of the
steep-crowned sombreros coming out through the mirage on the flats to
the south. He waited only long enough to satisfy himself as to the
nationality of the riders, then clapped spurs to his pony and raced to
Curly Bill's place.
It took the rustlers some time to saddle up. When they arrived at the
Double Dobe they found nothing of their former prizes but a fresh
trail. They made the best speed they could, but the Mexicans were
"shoving those cattle hard," as the old-timers say. They had a good
lead and they held it clear to Guadalupe canyon. The running fight
that followed lasted half-way through the gorge. The men from Sonora
were seasoned hands at Indian warfare, and they had no mind to give
up their beef. They left a small rear-guard, who fell back slowly
from rock to rock while their companions urged the longhorns to a
run. The shouts of "Toro! Toro! Vaca! Vaca"! mingled with the
crackling of the rifles. And when the rustlers finally routed the
stubborn defenders to chase the herders on through the ravine and
reassemble the panic-stricken stock, they took back three dead men
across their saddles. They buried the bodies at the Cloverdale
ranch and so started a lonely little boot-hill whose headboards
showed on the edge of the mesa for many years.
There came now to the old Guadalupe canyon trail a new traffic. Mexican
smugglers who had formerly been crossing the boundary at the southern
end of the San Pedro valley shifted their route hither and traveled
northward to Silver City. They were hard men, accustomed to warring
with the Apaches, bandits, and border officers. They banded together
in formidable outfits to guard the dobie dollars which loaded down the
aparejos during the northern journey. And Curly Bill's companions saw
them passing on more than one occasion: a scuffle of hoofs, a haze of
dust, through which showed the swarthy faces of the outriders under
the great sombreros--and, what lingered longest in the memories of
these hard-faced men of the Animas, the pleasant dull chink of the
dobie dollars in the rawhide pack-sacks.
In Galeyville the rustlers talked the matter over. It was a simple
problem: go and get the money. They went one day and made their camp
near Guadalupe canyon. They sent scouts on through the gorge to watch
the country from the mesa above the spot where John Slaughter's ranch
buildings now stand. One hot noontide the scouts came riding in.
"There's a big outfit coming. Must be a dozen mules and nigh on to
thirty men." The outlaws were in the saddle before those who brought
the tidings had time to breathe their horses.
In those days you were supposed to give a man what the old-timers
called an even break before you killed him. The supposition was lived
up to by the chivalrous and ignored by many who gained large
reputations. But when it came to Mexicans there was not even that
ideal to attain; they were not rated as full-fledged human beings; to
slay one meant no addition to the notches on one's gun, nor did one
feel obliged to observe the rules of fair play. You simply killed your
greaser in the most expeditious manner possible and then forgot about
it. The rustlers went about the business according to this custom.
Save for Curly Bill the members of the party left their horses in
charge of a man around a turn of the gorge. They hid themselves behind
the rocks on the steep mountain-side and waited while their burly
leader rode slowly to meet the smugglers.
The train was traveling after the Mexican fashion, which is very much
like the Spanish California manner of driving a herd. The chief of the
outfit rode in the lead some distance before the first pack-mule. The
laden animals followed in single file. Flanking them on each side were
the armed guards, with one or two closing in on the rear. Thus they
came, winding their way among the stark rocks and the clumps of
Spanish bayonet, and when the leader caught sight of Curly Bill from
under his huge, silver decked sombrero, he reined in his horse; his
grip tightened on the rifle which he carried across his saddle. The
outriders pulled up; there was a low rattle of shifting weapons and
the bell of the first mule stopped tinkling as the train came to a
stand.
But the strange rider was alone. The leader raised his arm in signal
and the straggling procession resumed its advance. The solitary
American rode on until he was alongside their head man.
"Buenos dias, Senor," he said and checked his pony. The Mexican
answered. The pair shook hands. When they had talked for some moments,
Curly Bill turned and rode back up the canyon beside the smuggler. The
pack-train followed and the men on the flanks eased their rifles back
into the sheaths. They traveled until the lead mule had passed the
last hidden rustler.
Curly Bill's right hand swept to his revolver holster and came on
upward clutching the weapon's butt. The movement was so quick that
before those who were looking at him really grasped its meaning the
hot rocks were bandying echoes of the report. The Mexican was sliding
from his saddle, quite dead. The outlaw was spurring his pony up the
mountain-side.
Now the outriders dragged their rifles from the sheaths but while they
were seeking to line their sights on the murderer the rustlers opened
fire on them. Those cow-thieves of the Animas were good shots; the
range was brief. The flat explosions of the Winchesters, the scuffling
of hoofs, the voices of dark-skinned riders calling upon their saints
as they pitched forward from their frenzied horses, dying; the
squealing of a hit burro; these things the arid cliffs heard and
repeated to one another. And then the rat-tat-tat of hoofbeats as the
surviving smugglers fled westward.
That is the way the rustlers told the story in Galeyville amid grim
laughter; and the voices of the narrators were raised to carry
above the staccato pounding of the painos, the scuffling of boot
heels on the dance-hall floors, the shrill mirthless outcries of
rouge-bedizened women, and the resonant slapping of dobie dollars
on the unpainted pine bars. Now and again the recitals were
interrupted by the roaring of forty-five revolvers as the more
fervid celebrants showed their expertness at marksmanship by shooting
the French heels from the shoes of the dance-hall girls.
John Ringo, the king of the outlaws, got wind of what was going on and
rode over from Tombstone, silent as usual, and with that saturninity
of expression which grew darker as the whisky began to work within
him. He took no part in the celebration but sat through one day and
two blazing nights, dumbly sardonic, at a round table. Save for his
dark countenance, the faces which ringed that table were changing
constantly. Men came noisily, sat down for a time, and departed at
length in chastened silence as the poker-game which he had organized
went on and on--until a large share of those dobie dollars passed unto
him. Then, with the sudden flare of recklessness which invariably came
to him sooner or later, he in his turn flung away the silver over the
unpainted bars. So the incident passed and was forgotten--by the
rustlers.
The Mexicans did not forget.
Old Man Clanton started with a Tombstone butcher and three others on
a journey for the Animas valley a few weeks later. They were going to
buy beef cattle and they took the Guadalupe canyon route. One night
they made camp near the middle of the gorge. And while they slept a
dozen swarthy men, who wore the steep-crowned sombreros and the
trousers with leathern facings which were a part of every Mexican
smuggler's costume, came creeping in and out among the boulders like
the Apaches whose ways they had studied in years of border warfare.
They had waited a long time in the lofty mountains south of the
boundary, watching the malapi flats for a party of Americans; and at
last these had come. They had dogged their trail through the long hot
afternoon, keeping well back lest they should be discovered. Now they
were closing in. The air grew cooler and the hour of dawn approached.
They slipped, black shadows a little deeper than the night which
enfolded them. The light climbed up the eastern sky and leaked down
between the cliffs; the cold gray dusk which comes before the dawn.
The shadows melted slowly; the heavens began to blush. Down here a man
could line the notch of his hindsight with the bead. A pebble tinkled
in the arid watercourse. One of the sleepers stirred in his blankets.
He caught the sound, opened his eyes, and saw the crown of a sombrero
rising behind a rock. He leaped from his bed and flung himself among a
clump of boulders just as the rifles began to talk.
Two or three cow-boys were lounging about the Cloverdale ranch-house
on a blazing summer afternoon when a queer figure came into sight upon
the palpitating plain. The spectacle of a man on foot was so uncommon
in those days that they had a hard time making themselves believe that
this form, which at times took distorted shapes in the wavering
overheated air, was that of a human being. Then they set forth to meet
him, and they brought the one survivor of the Canton party to the
ranch-house. His bare-feet were bleeding; he was half-clad; and his
tongue was swollen with thirst. They got his story and they rode to
Guadalupe canyon where they found the bodies of his companions. They
buried them on the little boot-hill overlooking the ranch buildings.
But the episode was not yet finished.
Time went by. Billy Clanton and the two MacLowery boys, who are said
to have been parties to the dobie dollar hold-up, died one autumn
morning fighting it out against the Earp faction in Tombstone's
street. Curly Bill's fate remains something of a mystery, but one
story has it that Wyatt Earp killed him near Globe two years or so
later. John Ringo killed himself up in the San Simon, delirious from
thirst. Rattlesnake Bill, who helped to spend the Mexican silver, was
shot down by a fellow-rustler in Galeyville. Jake Gauz, another of the
participants, was lynched for horse-stealing not far from the head of
Turkey Creek canyon.
So they went one after the other, and it is possible that every man
who was present at the massacre of the Mexicans died with his boots
on.
* * * * *
"Those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword." The words
come from one who rides near the grim procession's end; a slim young
fellow, beardless, his hair hanging to his shoulders. It is the boy
whom men called Billy the Kid. He quoted the passage to Pat Garret
when the Lincoln County sheriff and his posse were taking him and his
captured companions to Santa Fe.
"Those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword." Only a few
nights before he spoke, Tom O'Phalliard, one of the last of his band,
had fallen from his horse with a bullet through his chest in Fort
Sumner to die, cursing the tall silent sheriff, in the room where the
posse had carried him. Two mornings afterward at the Arroyo Tivan,
Charley Bowdre had staggered into the stone house where the outlaws
were hiding, wounded unto death by the rifles of these same pursuers.
"Charley, you're done for. Go out and see if you can't get one of
them," Billy the Kid had told the dying man, and through the crack of
the door had watched him stumbling over the frozen snow toward the
posse, while his numbed fingers fumbled with his revolver butt in a
final access of vain effort.
And now this youth, the deadliest of the Southwestern outlaws, spoke
from the Scriptures to Pat Garret; perhaps it was all of his Bible
that he knew. He said it in December. In July Garret shot him in Pete
Maxwell's room at Fort Sumner. The years went by. One day the former
sheriff fell in the sand hills west of Tularosa with an assassin's
bullet in his back.
Thus, throughout the Old West: bad man and frontier officer, Indian
fighter, cow-boy, stage-driver, trooper, and faro-dealer, they lived
their lives in accordance with bold customs which bridged the gap
between savagery and modern civilization. In a strange land they did
the best they could; and, bad or good, they came to their ends with a
fine unflinching disregard for the supreme adventure.
To-day fat prairie corn-fields stand tasseled in the sunlight, the
smoke of lusty young cities rises black against the sky; while
automobiles speed upon concrete highways over the forgotten graveyards
where their bones lie.