is running some risk of wearing others out who may have to listen, so I
will waive the telling of who the first cowboy was, even if I knew; but
the last one who has come under my observation lives down in Florida,
and the way it happened was this: I was sitting in a “sto' do',” as the
“Crackers” say, waiting for the clerk to load some “number eights,” when
my friend said, “Look at the cowboys!” This immediately caught my
interest. With me cowboys are what gems and porcelains are to some
others. Two very emaciated Texas ponies pattered down the street,
bearing wild-looking individuals, whose hanging hair and drooping hats
and generally bedraggled appearance would remind you at once of the
Spanish-moss which hangs so quietly and helplessly to the limbs of the
oaks out in the swamps. There was none of the bilious fierceness and
rearing plunge which I had associated with my friends out West, but as a
fox-terrier is to a yellow cur, so were these last. They had on about
four dollars' worth of clothes between them, and rode McClellan saddles,
with saddle-bags, and guns tied on before. The only things they did
which were conventional were to tie their ponies up by the head in
brutal disregard, and then get drunk in about fifteen minutes. I could
see that in this case, while some of the tail feathers were the same,
they would easily classify as new birds.
[Illustration: 36 ABOUT FOUR DOLLARS WORTH OF CLOTHES BETWEEN THEM]
“And so you have cowboys down here?” I said to the man who ran the
meat-market.
He picked a tiny piece of raw liver out of the meshes of his long black
beard, tilted his big black hat, shoved his arms into his white apron
front, and said:
“Gawd! yes, stranger; I was one myself.”
The plot thickened so fast that I was losing much, so I became more
deliberate. “Do the boys come into town often?” I inquired further.
“Oh yes, 'mos' every little spell,” replied the butcher, as he reached
behind his weighing-scales and picked up a double-barrelled shot-gun,
sawed off. “We-uns are expectin' of they-uns to-day.”
And he broke the barrels and took out the shells to examine them.
“Do they come shooting?” I interposed.
He shut the gun with a snap. “We split even, stranger.”
Seeing that the butcher was a fragile piece of bric-a-brac, and that I
might need him for future study, I bethought me of the banker down the
street. Bankers are bound to be broad-gauged, intelligent, and
conservative, so I would go to him and get at the ancient history of
this neck of woods. I introduced myself, and was invited behind the
counter. The look of things reminded me of one of those great green
terraces which conceal fortifications and ugly cannon. It was boards and
wire screen in front, but behind it were shot-guns and six-shooters hung
in the handiest way, on a sort of disappearing gun-carriage arrangement.
Shortly one of the cowboys of the street scene floundered in. He was
two-thirds drunk, with brutal, shifty eyes and a flabby lower lip.
“I want twenty dollars on the old man. Ken I have it?”
I rather expected that the bank would go into “action front,” but the
clerk said, “Certainly,” and completed this rather odd financial
transaction, whereat the bull-hunter stumbled out.
[Illustration: 37 A CRACKER COWBOY]
“Who is the old man in this case?” I ventured.
“Oh, it's his boss, old Colonel Zuigg, of Crow City. I gave some money
to some of his boys some weeks ago, and when the colonel was down here I
asked him if he wanted the boys to draw against him in that way, and he
said, 'Yes--for a small amount; they will steal a cow or two, and pay me
that way.'”
Here was something tangible.
“What happens when a man steals another man's brand in this country?”
“He mustn't get caught; that's all. They all do it, but they never bring
their troubles into court. They just shoot it out there in the bresh.
The last time old Colonel Zuigg brought Zorn Zuidden in here and had him
indicted for stealing cattle, said Zorn: 'Now see here, old man Zuigg,
what do you want for to go and git me arrested fer? I have stole
thousands of cattle and put your mark and brand on 'em, and jes because
I have stole a couple of hundred from you, you go and have me indicted.
You jes better go and get that whole deal nol pressed;' and it was
done.”
The argument was perfect.
“From that I should imagine that the cow-people have no more idea of law
than the 'gray apes,'” I commented.
“Yes, that's about it. Old Colonel Zuigg was a judge fer a spell, till
some feller filled him with buckshot, and he had to resign; and I
remember he decided a case aginst me once. I was hot about it, and the
old colonel he saw I was. Says he, 'Now yer mad, ain't you?' And I
allowed I was. 'Well,' says he, 'you hain't got no call to get mad. I
have decided the last eight cases in yer favor, and you kain't have it
go yer way all the time; it wouldn't look right;' and I had to be
satisfied.”
The courts in that locality were but the faint and sickly flame of a
taper offered at the shrine of a justice which was traditional only, it
seemed. Moral forces having ceased to operate, the large owners began to
brand everything in sight, never realizing that they were sowing the
wind. This action naturally demoralized the cowboys, who shortly began
to brand a little on their own account--and then the deluge. The rights
of property having been destroyed, the large owners put strong outfits
in the field, composed of desperate men armed to the teeth, and what
happens in the lonely pine woods no one knows but the desperadoes
themselves, albeit some of them never come back to the little fringe of
settlements. The winter visitor from the North kicks up the jack-snipe
along the beach or tarponizes in the estuaries of the Gulf, and when he
comes to the hotel for dinner he eats Chicago dressed beef, but out in
the wilderness low-browed cow-folks shoot and stab each other for the
possession of scrawny creatures not fit for a pointer-dog to mess on.
One cannot but feel the force of Buckle's law of “the physical aspects
of nature” in this sad country. Flat and sandy, with miles on miles of
straight pine timber, each tree an exact duplicate of its neighbor tree,
and underneath the scrub palmettoes, the twisted brakes and
hammocks, and the gnarled water-oaks festooned with the sad gray
Spanish-moss--truly not a country for a high-spirited race or moral
giants.
[Illustration: 38 FIGHTING OVER A STOLEN HERD]
The land gives only a tough wiregrass, and the poor little cattle, no
bigger than a donkey, wander half starved and horribly emaciated in
search of it. There used to be a trade with Cuba, but now that has gone;
and beyond the supplying of Key West and the small fringe of settlements
they have no market. How well the cowboys serve their masters I can only
guess, since the big owners do not dare go into the woods, or even to
their own doors at night, and they do not keep a light burning in the
houses. One, indeed, attempted to assert his rights, but some one pumped
sixteen buckshot into him as he bent over a spring to drink, and he left
the country. They do tell of a late encounter between two rival foremen,
who rode on to each other in the woods, and drawing, fired, and both
were found stretched dying under the palmettoes, one calling deliriously
the name of his boss. The unknown reaches of the Everglades lie just
below, and with a half-hour's start a man who knew the country would be
safe from pursuit, even if it were attempted; and, as one man cheerfully
confided to me, “A boat don't leave no trail, stranger.”
That might makes right, and that they steal by wholesale, any
cattle-hunter will admit; and why they brand at all I cannot see, since
one boy tried to make it plain to me, as he shifted his body in drunken
abandon and grabbed my pencil and a sheet of wrapping paper: “See yer;
ye see that?” And he drew a circle O, and then another ring around it,
thus: (O). “That brand ain't no good. Well, then--” And again his
knotted and dirty fingers essayed the brand I O. He laboriously drew
upon it and made E-O which of course destroyed the former brand.
“Then here,” he continued, as he drew 13, “all ye've got ter do is
this--313.” I gasped in amazement, not at his cleverness as a
brand-destroyer, but at his honest abandon. With a horrible operatic
laugh, such as is painted in “The Cossack's Answer,” he again
laboriously drew (+) (the circle cross), and then added some marks which
made it look like this: S(+)S. And again breaking into his devil's “ha,
ha!” said, “Make the damned thing whirl.”
[Illustration: 39 IN WAIT FOR AN ENEMY]
I did not protest. He would have shot me for that. But I did wish he was
living in the northwest quarter of New Mexico, where Mr. Cooper and Dan
could throw their eyes over the trail of his pony. Of course each man
has adjusted himself to this lawless rustling, and only calculates that
he can steal as much as his opponent. It is rarely that their affairs
are brought to court, but when they are, the men come _en masse_ to the
room, armed with knives and rifles, so that any decision is bound to be
a compromise, or it will bring on a general engagement.
There is also a noticeable absence of negroes among them, as they still
retain some _ante bellum_ theories, and it is only very lately that they
have “reconstructed.” Their general ignorance is “miraculous,” and quite
mystifying to an outside man. Some whom I met did not even know where
the Texas was which furnishes them their ponies. The railroads of
Florida have had their ups and downs with them in a petty way on account
of the running over of their cattle by the trains; and then some
long-haired old Cracker drops into the nearest station with his gun and
pistol, and wants the telegraph operator to settle immediately on the
basis of the Cracker's claim for damages, which is always absurdly high.
At first the railroads demurred, but the cowboys lined up in the “bresh”
on some dark night and pumped Winchesters into the train in a highly
picturesque way. The trainmen at once recognized the force of the
Cracker's views on cattle-killing, but it took some considerable
“potting” at the more conservative superintendents before the latter
could bestir themselves and invent a “cow-attorney,” as the company
adjuster is called, who now settles with the bushmen as best he can.
Certainly no worse people ever lived since the big killing up
Muscleshell way, and the romance is taken out of it by the cowardly
assassination which is the practice. They are well paid for their
desperate work, and always eat fresh beef or “razor-backs,” and deer
which they kill in the woods. The heat, the poor grass, their brutality,
and the pest of the flies kill their ponies, and, as a rule, they lack
dash and are indifferent riders, but they are picturesque in their
unkempt, almost unearthly wildness. A strange effect is added by their
use of large, fierce cur-dogs, one of which accompanies each
cattle-hunter, and is taught to pursue cattle, and to even take them by
the nose, which is another instance of their brutality. Still, as they
only have a couple of horses apiece, it saves them much extra running.
These men do not use the rope, unless to noose a pony in a corral, but
work their cattle in strong log corrals, which are made at about a day's
march apart all through the woods. Indeed, ropes are hardly necessary,
since the cattle are so small and thin that two men can successfully
“wrestle” a three-year-old. A man goes into the corral, grabs a cow by
one horn, and throwing his other arm over her back, waits until some
other man takes her hind leg, whereat ensues some very entertaining
Graeco-Roman style.
[Illustration: 40 A BIT OF COW COUNTRY]
When the cow is successful, she finds her audience of Cracker cowboys
sitting on the fence awaiting another opening, and gasping for breath.
The best bull will not go over three hundred pounds, while I have seen a
yearling at a hundred and fifty--if you, O knights of the riata, can
imagine it! Still, it is desperate work. Some of the men are so reckless
and active that they do not hesitate to encounter a wild bull in the
open. The cattle are as wild as deer, they race off at scent; and when
“rounded up” many will not drive, whereupon these are promptly shot. It
frequently happens that when the herd is being driven quietly along a
bull will turn on the drivers, charging at once. Then there is a scamper
and great shooting. The bulls often become so maddened in these forays
that they drop and die in their tracks, for which strange fact no one
can account, but as a rule they are too scrawny and mean to make their
handling difficult.
So this is the Cracker cowboy, whose chief interest would be found in
the tales of some bushwhacking enterprise, which I very much fear would
be a one-sided story, and not worth the telling. At best they must be
revolting, having no note of the savage encounters which used to
characterize the easy days in West Texas and New Mexico, when every man
tossed his life away to the crackle of his own revolver. The moon shows
pale through the leafy canopy on their evening fires, and the mists, the
miasma, and the mosquitoes settle over their dreary camp talk. In place
of the wild stampede, there is only the bellowing in the pens, and
instead of the plains shaking under the dusty air as the bedizened
vaqueros plough their fiery broncos through the milling herds, the
cattle-hunter wends his lonely way through the ooze and rank grass,
while the dreary pine trunks line up and shut the view.
[Illustration: 41 COWBOYS WRESTLING A BULL]
THE STRANGE DAYS THAT CAME TO JIMMIE FRIDAY
THE “Abwee-chemun” [Algonquin for “paddle and canoe.”] Club was
organized with six charter members at a heavy lunch in the Savarin
restaurant--one of those lunches which make through connections to
dinner without change. One member basely deserted, while two more lost
all their enthusiasm on the following morning, but three of us stuck. We
vaguely knew that somewhere north of the Canadian Pacific and south of
Hudson Bay were big lakes and rapid rivers--lakes whose names we did not
know; lakes bigger than Champlain, with unnamed rivers between them. We
did not propose to be boated around in a big birch-bark by two voyagers
among blankets and crackers and ham, but each provided himself a little
thirteen-foot cedar canoe, twenty-nine inches in the beam, and weighing
less than forty pounds. I cannot tell you precisely how our party was
sorted, but one was a lawyer with eyeglasses and settled habits, loving
nature, though detesting canoes; the other was nominally a merchant, but
in reality an atavie Norseman of the wolf and raven kind; while I am not
new. Together we started.
Presently the Abwees sat about the board of a lumbermen's hotel, filled
with house-flies and slatternly waiter-girls, who talked familiarly
while they served greasy food. The Abwees were yet sore in their minds
at the thoughts of the smelly beds up-stairs, and discouragement sat
deeply on their souls. But their time was not yet.
After breakfast they marched to the Hudson Bay Company's store, knowing
as they did that in Canada there are only two places for a traveller to
go who wants anything--the great company or the parish priest; and then,
having explained to the factor their dream, they were told “that beyond,
beyond some days' journey”--oh! that awful beyond, which for centuries
has stood across the path of the pioneer, and in these latter days
confronts the sportsman and wilderness-lover--“that beyond some days'
journey to the north was a country such as they had dreamed--up
Temis-camingue and beyond.”
The subject of a guide was considered.
Jimmie Friday always brought a big toboggan-load of furs into Fort
Tiemogamie every spring, and was accounted good in his business. He and
his big brother trapped together, and in turn followed the ten days'
swing through the snow-laden forest which they had covered with their
dead-falls and steel-jawed traps; but when the ice went out in the
rivers, and the great pines dripped with the melting snows, they had
nothing more to do but cut a few cords of wood for their widowed
mother's cabin near the post. Then the brother and he paddled down to
Bais des Pierres, where the brother engaged as a deck hand on a
steamboat, and Jimmie hired himself as a guide for some bush-rangers, as
the men are called who explore for pine lands for the great lumber
firms. Having worked all summer and got through with that business,
Jimmie bethought him to dissipate for a few days in the bustling lumber
town down on the Ottawa River. He had been there before to feel the
exhilaration of civilization, but beyond that clearing he had never
known anything more inspiring than a Hudson Bay post, which is generally
a log store, a house where the agent lives, and a few tiny Indian cabins
set higgledy-piggledy in a sunburnt gash of stumps and bowlders, lost in
the middle of the solemn, unresponsive forest. On this morning in
question he had stepped from his friend's cabin up in the Indian
village, and after lighting a perfectly round and rather yellow cigar,
he had instinctively wandered down to the Hudson Bay store, there to
find himself amused by a strange sight.
The Abwees had hired two French-Indian voyagers of sinister mien, and a
Scotch-Canadian boy bred to the bush. They were out on the grass,
engaged in taking burlaps off three highly polished canoes, while the
clerk from the store ran out and asked questions about “how much bacon,”
and, “will fifty pounds of pork be enough, sir?”
The round yellow cigar was getting stubby, while Jimmie's modest eyes
sought out the points of interest in the new-comers, when he was
suddenly and sharply addressed:
“Can you cook?”
Jimmie couldn't do anything in a hurry, except chop a log in two, paddle
very fast, and shoot quickly, so he said, as was his wont:
“I think--I dun'no'--”
“Well, how much?” came the query.
“Two daul--ars--” said Jimmie.
The transaction was complete. The yellow butt went over the fence, and
Jimmie shed his coat. He was directed to lend a hand by the bustling
sportsmen, and requested to run and find things of which he had never
before in his life heard the name.
[Illustration: 42 THE LAWYER HAD BECOME A VOYAGER]
After two days' travel the Abwees were put ashore--boxes, bags, rolls of
blankets, canoes, Indians, and plunder of many sorts--on a pebbly beach,
and the steamer backed off and steamed away. They had reached the
“beyond” at last, and the odoriferous little bedrooms, the bustle of the
preparation, the cares of their lives, were behind. Then there was a
girding up of the loins, a getting out of tump-lines and canvas packs,
and the long portage was begun.
The voyagers carried each two hundred pounds as they stalked away into
the wilderness, while the attorney-at-law “hefted” his pack, wiped his
eyeglasses with his pocket-handkerchief, and tried cheerfully to assume
the responsibilities of “a dead game sport.”
“I cannot lift the thing, and how I am going to carry it is more than I
know; but I'm a dead game sport, and I am going to try. I do not want to
be dead game, but it looks as though I couldn't help it. Will some
gentleman help me to adjust this cargo?”
The night overtook the outfit in an old beaver meadow half-way through
the trail. Like all first camps, it was tough. The lean-to tents went up
awkwardly. No one could find anything. Late at night the Abwees lay on
their backs under the blankets, while the fog settled over the meadow
and blotted out the stars.
On the following day the stuff was all gotten through, and by this time
the lawyer had become a voyager, willing to carry anything he could
stagger under. It is strange how one can accustom himself to “pack.” He
may never use the tump-line, since it goes across the head, and will
unseat his intellect if he does, but with shoulder-straps and a
tump-line a man who thinks he is not strong will simply amaze himself
inside of a week by what he can do. As for our little canoes, we could
trot with them. Each Abwee carried his own belongings and his boat,
which entitled him to the distinction of “a dead game sport,” whatever
that may mean, while the Indians portaged their larger canoes and our
mass of supplies, making many trips backward and forward in the process.
At the river everything was parcelled out and arranged. The birch-barks
were repitched, and every man found out what he was expected to portage
and do about camp. After breaking and making camp three times, the
outfit could pack up, load the canoes, and move inside of fifteen
minutes. At the first camp the lawyer essayed his canoe, and was
cautioned that the delicate thing might flirt with him. He stepped in
and sat gracefully down in about two feet of water, while the “delicate
thing” shook herself saucily at his side. After he had crawled dripping
ashore and wiped his eye-glasses, he engaged to sell the “delicate
thing” to an Indian for one dollar and a half on a promissory note. The
trade was suppressed, and he was urged to try again. A man who has held
down a cane-bottom chair conscientiously for fifteen years looks askance
at so fickle a thing as a canoe twenty-nine inches in the beam. They are
nearly as hard to sit on in the water as a cork; but once one is in the
bottom they are stable enough, though they do not submit to liberties or
palsied movements. The staid lawyer was filled with horror at the
prospect of another go at his polished beauty; but remembering his
resolve to be dead game, he abandoned his life to the chances, and got
in this time safely.
[Illustration: 43 IT IS STRANGE HOW ONE CAN ACCUSTOM HIMSELF TO 'PACK']
So the Abwees went down the river on a golden morning, their
double-blade paddles flashing the sun and sending the drip in a shower
on the glassy water. The smoke from the lawyer's pipe hung behind him in
the quiet air, while the note of the reveille clangored from the little
buglette of the Norseman. Jimmie and the big Scotch backwoodsman swayed
their bodies in one boat, while the two sinister voyagers dipped their
paddles in the big canoe.
The Norseman's gorge came up, and he yelled back: “Say! this suits me. I
am never going back to New York.”
Jimmie grinned at the noise; it made him happy. Such a morning, such a
water, such a lack of anything to disturb one's peace! Let man's better
nature revel in the beauties of existence; they inflate his soul. The
colors play upon the senses--the reddish-yellow of the birch-barks, the
blue of the water, and the silver sheen as it parts at the bows of the
canoes; the dark evergreens, the steely rocks with their lichens, the
white trunks of the birches, their fluffy tops so greeny green, and over
all the gold of a sunny day. It is my religion, this thing, and I do not
know how to tell all I feel concerning it.
The rods were taken out, a gang of flies put on and trolled behind--but
we have all seen a man fight a five-pound bass for twenty minutes. The
waters fairly swarmed with them, and we could always get enough for the
“pot” in a half-hour's fishing at any time during the trip. The Abwees
were canoeing, not hunting or fishing; though, in truth, they did not
need to hunt spruce-partridge or fish for bass in any sporting sense;
they simply went out after them, and never stayed over half an hour. On
a point we stopped for lunch: the Scotchman always struck the beach
a-cooking. He had a “kit,” which was a big camp-pail, and inside of it
were more dishes than are to be found in some hotels. He broiled the
bacon, instead of frying it, and thus we were saved the terrors of
indigestion. He had many luxuries in his commissary, among them dried
apples, with which he filled a camp-pail one day and put them on to
boil. They subsequently got to be about a foot deep all over the camp,
while Furguson stood around and regarded the black-magic of the thing
with overpowering emotions and Homeric tongue. Furguson was a good
genius, big and gentle, and a woodsman root and branch. The Abwees had
intended their days in the wilderness to be happy singing flights of
time, but with grease and paste in one's stomach what may not befall the
mind when it is bent on nature's doings?
[Illustration: 44 DOWN THE RIVER ON A GOLDEN MORNING]
And thus it was that the gloomy Indian Jimmie Friday, despite his
tuberculosis begotten of insufficient nourishment, was happy in these
strange days--even to the extent of looking with wondrous eyes on the
nooks which we loved--nooks which previously for him had only sheltered
possible “dead-falls” or not, as the discerning eye of the trapper
decided the prospects for pelf.
Going ashore on a sandy beach, Jimmie wandered down its length, his
hunter mind seeking out the footprints of his prey. He stooped down, and
then beckoned me to come, which I did.