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RANCH LIFE AND THE HUNTING TRAIL
by Theodore Roosevelt
CHAPTER 6
FRONTIER TYPES
The old race of Rocky Mountain hunters and trappers, of reckless,
dauntless Indian fighters, is now fast dying out. Yet here and there
these restless wanderers of the untrodden wilderness still linger, in
wooded fastnesses so inaccessible that the miners have not yet
explored them, in mountain valleys so far off that no ranchman has
yet driven his herds thither. To this day many of them wear the
fringed tunic or hunting-shirt, made of buckskin or homespun, and
belted in at the waist, &emdash;the most picturesque and
distinctively national dress ever worn in America. It was the dress
in which Daniel Boone was clad when he first passed through the
trackless forests of the Alleghanies and penetrated into the heart of
Kentucky, to enjoy such hunting as no man of his race had ever had
before; it was the dress worn by grim old Davy Crockett when he fell
at the Alamo. The wild soldiery of the backwoods wore it when they
marched to victory over Ferguson and Pakenham, at King's Mountain and
New Orleans; when they conquered the French towns of the Illinois;
and when they won at the cost of Red Eagle's warriors the bloody
triumph of the Horseshoe Bend.
These old-time hunters have been the forerunners of the white
advance throughout all our Western land. Soon after the beginning of
the present century they boldly struck out beyond the Mississippi,
steered their way across the flat and endless seas of grass, or
pushed up the valleys of the great lonely rivers, crossed the passes
that wound among the towering peaks of the Rockies, toiled over the
melancholy wastes of sage brush and alkali, and at last, breaking
through the gloomy woodland that belts the coast, they looked out on
the heaving waves of the greatest of all the oceans. They lived for
months, often for years, among the Indians, now as friends, now as
foes, warring, hunting, and marrying with them; they acted as guides
for exploring parties, as scouts for the soldiers who from time to
time were sent against the different hostile tribes. At long
intervals they came into some frontier settlement or some fur
company's fort, posted in the heart of the wilderness, to dispose of
their bales of furs, or to replenish their stock of ammunition and
purchase a scanty supply of coarse food and clothing.
From that day to this they have not changed their way of life. But
there are not many of them left now. The basin of the Upper Missouri
was their last stronghold, being the last great hunting-ground of the
Indians, with whom the white trappers were always fighting and
bickering, but who nevertheless by their presence protected the game
that gave the trappers their livelihood. My cattle were among the
very first to come into the land, at a time when the buffalo and
beaver still abounded, and then the old hunters were common. Many a
time I have hunted with them, spent the night in their smoky cabins,
or had them as guests at my ranch. But in a couple of years after the
inrush of the cattlemen the last herds of the buffalo were destroyed,
and the beaver were trapped out of all the plains' streams. Then the
hunters vanished likewise, save that here and there one or two still
remain in some nook or out-of-the-way corner. The others wandered off
restlessly over the land, &emdash;some to join their brethren in the
Coeur d'Alene or the northern Rockies, others to the coast ranges or
to far-away Alaska. Moreover, their ranks were soon thinned by death,
and the places of the dead were no longer taken by new recruits. They
led hard lives, and the unending strain of their toilsome and
dangerous existence shattered even such iron frames as theirs. They
were killed in drunken brawls, or in nameless fights with roving
Indians; they died by one of the thousand accidents incident to the
business of their lives, &emdash;by flood or quicksand, by cold or
starvation, by the stumble of a horse or a footslip on the edge of a
cliff; they perished by diseases brought on by terrible privation,
and aggravated by the savage orgies with which it was varied.
Yet there was not only much that was attractive in their wild,
free, reckless lives, but there was also very much good about the men
themselves. They were &emdash;and such of them as are left still are
&emdash;frank, bold, and self-reliant to a degree. They fear neither
man, brute, nor element. They are generous and hospitable; they stand
loyally by their friends, and pursue their enemies with bitter and
vindictive hatred. For the rest, they differ among themselves in
their good and bad points even more markedly than do men in civilized
life, for out on the border virtue and wickedness alike take on very
pronounced colors. A man who in civilization would be merely a
backbiter becomes a murderer on the frontier; and, on the other hand,
he who in the city would do nothing more than bid you a cheery
good-morning, shares his last bit of sun jerked venison with you when
threatened by starvation in the wilderness. One hunter may be a
dark-browed, evil-eyed rufffian, ready to kill cattle or run off
horses without hesitation, who if game fails will at once, in Western
phrase, "take to the road," &emdash;that is, become a highwayman. The
next is perhaps a quiet, kindly, simple-hearted man, law-abiding,
modestly unconscious of the worth of his own fearless courage and
iron endurance, always faithful to his friends, and full of chivalric
and tender loyalty to women.
The hunter is the arch-type of freedom. His well-being rests in no
man's hands save his own. He chops down and hews out the logs for his
hut, or perhaps makes merely a rude dug-out in the side of a hill,
with a skin roof, and skin flaps for the door. He buys a little flour
and salt, and in times of plenty also sugar and tea; but not much,
for it must all be carried hundreds of miles on the backs of his
shaggy pack-ponies. In one corner of the hut, a bunk covered with
deer-skins forms his bed; a kettle and a frying-pan may be all his
cooking-utensils. When he can get no fresh meat he falls back on his
stock of jerked venison, dried in long strips over the fire or in the
sun.
Most of the trappers are Americans, but they also include some
Frenchmen and half-breeds. Both of the last, if on the plains,
occasionally make use of queer wooden carts, very rude in shape, with
stout wheels that make a most doleful squeaking. In old times they
all had Indian wives; but nowadays those who live among and
intermarry with the Indians are looked down upon by the other
frontiersmen, who contemptuously term them "squaw men." All of them
depend upon their rifles only for food and for self-defense, and make
their living by trapping, peltries being very valuable and yet not
bulky. They are good game shots, especially the pure Americans;
although, of course, they are very boastful, and generally stretch
the truth tremendously in telling about their own marksmanship. Still
they often do very remarkable shooting, both for speed and accuracy.
One of their feats, that I never could learn to copy, is to make
excellent shooting after nightfall. Of course all this applies only
to the regular hunters; not to the numerous pretenders who hang
around the outskirts of the towns to try to persuade unwary strangers
to take them for guides.
On one of my trips to the mountains I happened to come across
several old-style hunters at the same time. Two were on their way out
of the woods, after having been all winter and spring without seeing
a white face. They had been lucky, and their battered pack-saddles
carried bales of valuable furs &emdash;fisher, sable, otter, mink,
beaver. The two men, though fast friends and allies for many years,
contrasted oddly. One was a short, square-built, good-humored Kanuck,
always laughing and talking, who interlarded his conversation with a
singularly original mixture of the most villainous French and English
profanity. His partner was an American, gray-eyed, tall and straight
as a young pine, with a saturnine, rather haughty face, and proud
bearing. He spoke very little, and then in low tones, never using an
oath; but he showed now and then a most unexpected sense of dry
humor. Both were images of bronzed and rugged strength. Neither had
the slightest touch of the bully in his nature; they treated others
with the respect that they also exacted for themselves. They bore an
excellent reputation as being not only highly skilled in woodcraft
and the use of the rifle, but also men of tried courage and strict
integrity, whose word could be always implicitly trusted.
I had with me at the time a hunter who, though their equal as
marksman or woodsman, was their exact opposite morally. He was a
pleasant companion and useful assistant, being very hard-working, and
possessing a temper that never was ruffled by anything. He was also a
good-looking fellow, with honest brown eyes; but he no more knew the
difference between right and wrong than Adam did before the fall. Had
he been at all conscious of his wickedness, or had he possessed the
least sense of shame, he would have been unbearable as a companion;
but he was so perfectly pleasant and easy, so good-humoredly tolerant
of virtue in others, and he so wholly lacked even a glimmering
suspicion that murder, theft, and adultery were matters of anything
more than individual taste, that I actually grew to be rather fond of
him. He never related any of his past deeds of wickedness as matters
either for boastfulness or for regret; they were simply repeated
incidentally in the course of conversation. Thus once, in speaking of
the profits of his different enterprises, he casually mentioned
making a good deal of money as a Government scout in the South-west
by buying cartridges from some negro troops at a cent apiece and
selling them to the hostile Apaches for a dollar each. His conduct
was not due to sympathy with the Indians, for it appeared that later
on he had taken part in massacring some of these same Apaches when
they were prisoners. He brushed aside as irrelevant one or two
questions which I put to him: matters of sentiment were not to be
mixed up with a purely mercantile speculation. Another time we were
talking of the curious angles bullets sometimes fly off at when they
ricochet. To illustrate the matter he related an experience which I
shall try to give in his own words. " One time, when I was keeping a
saloon down in New Mexico, there was a man owed me a grudge. Well, he
took sick of the small-pox, and the doctor told him he'd sure die,
and he said if that was so he reckoned he'd kill me first. So he come
a-riding in with his gun (in the West a revolver is generally called
a gun) and begun shooting; but I hit him first, and away he rode. I
started to get on my horse to follow him; but there was a little
Irishman there who said he'd never killed a man, and he begged hard
for me to give him my gun and let him go after the other man and
finish him. So I let him go; and when he caught up, blamed if the
little cuss didn't get so nervous that he fired off into the ground,
and the darned bullet struck a crowbar, and glanced up, and hit the
other man square in the head and killed him! Now, that was a funny
shot, wasn't it?"
The fourth member of our party round the camp-fire that night was
a powerfully built trapper, partly French by blood, who wore a gayly
colored Capote, or blanket-coat, a greasy fur cap, and moccasins. He
had grizzled hair, and a certain uneasy, half-furtive look about the
eyes. Once or twice he showed a curious reluctance about allowing a
man to approach him suddenly from behind. Altogether his actions were
so odd that I felt some curiosity to learn his history. It turned out
that he had been through a rather uncanny experience the winter
before. He and another man had gone into a remote basin, or inclosed
valley, in the heart of the mountains, where game was very plentiful;
indeed, it was so abundant that they decided to pass the winter
there. Accordingly they put up a log-cabin, working hard, and merely
killing enough meat for their immediate use. Just as it was finished
winter set in with tremendous snow-storms. Going out to hunt, in the
first lull, they found, to their consternation, that every head of
game had left the valley. Not an animal was to be found therein; they
had abandoned it for their winter haunts. The outlook for the two
adventurers was appalling. They were afraid of trying to break out
through the deep snow-drifts, and starvation stared them in the face
if they staid. The man I met had his dog with him. They put
themselves on very short commons, so as to use up their flour as
slowly as possible, and hunted unweariedly, but saw nothing. Soon a
violent quarrel broke out between them. The other man, a fierce,
sullen fellow, insisted that the dog should be killed, but the owner
was exceedingly attached to it, and refused. For a couple of weeks
they spoke no word to each other, though cooped in the little narrow
pen of logs. Then one night the owner of the dog was wakened by the
animal crying out; the other man had tried to kill it with his knife,
but failed. The provisions were now almost exhausted, and the two men
were glaring at each other with the rage of maddened, ravening
hunger. Neither dared to sleep, for fear that the other would kill
him. Then the one who owned the dog at last spoke, and proposed that,
to give each a chance for his life, they should separate. He would
take half of the handful of flour that was left and start off to try
to get home; the other should stay where he was; and if he tried to
follow the first, he was warned that he would be shot without mercy.
A like fate was to be the portion of the wanderer if driven to return
to the hut The arrangement was agreed to and the two men separated,
neither daring to turn his back while they were within rifleshot of
each other. For two days the one who went off toiled on with weary
weakness through the snow-drifts. Late on the second afternoon, as he
looked back from a high ridge, he saw in the far distance a black
speck against the snow, coming along on his trail. His companion was
dogging his footsteps. Immediately he followed his own trail back a
little and lay in ambush. At dusk his companion came stealthily up,
rifle in hand, peering cautiously ahead, his drawn face showing the
starved, eager ferocity of a wild beast, and the man he was hunting
shot him down exactly as if he had been one. Leaving the body where
it fell, the wanderer continued his journey, the dog staggering
painfully behind him. The next evening he baked his last cake and
divided it with the dog. In the morning, with his belt drawn still
tighter round his skeleton body, he once more set out, with
apparently only a few hours of dull misery between him and death. At
noon he crossed the track of a huge timberwolf; instantly the dog
gave tongue, and, rallying its strength, ran along the trail. The man
struggled after. At last his strength gave out and he sat down to
die; but while sitting still, slowly stiffening with the cold, he
heard the dog baying in the woods. Shaking off his mortal numbness,
he crawled towards the sound, and found the wolf over the body of a
deer that he had just killed, and keeping the dog from it. At the
approach of the new assailant the wolf sullenly drew off, and man and
dog tore the raw deer-flesh with hideous eagerness. It made them very
sick for the next twenty-four hours; but, lying by the carcass for
two or three days, they recovered strength. A week afterwards the
trapper reached a miner's cabin in safety. There he told his tale,
and the unknown man who alone might possibly have contradicted it lay
dead in the depths of the wolf-haunted forest.
The cowboys, who have supplanted these old hunters and trappers as
the typical men of the plains, themselves lead lives that are almost
as full of hardship and adventure. The unbearable cold of winter
sometimes makes the small outlying camps fairly uninhabitable if fuel
runs short; and if the line riders are caught in a blizzard while
making their way to the home ranch, they are lucky if they get off
with nothing worse than frozen feet and faces.
They are, in the main, hard-working, faithful fellows, but of
course are frequently obliged to get into scrapes through no fault of
their own. Once, while out on a wagon trip, I got caught while camped
by a spring on the prairie, through my horses all straying. A few
miles off was the camp of two cowboys, who were riding the line for a
great Southern cow-outfit. I did not even know their names, but
happening to pass by them I told of my loss, and the day after they
turned up with the missing horses, which they had been hunting for
twenty-four hours. All I could do in return was to give them some
reading matter &emdash;something for which the men in these lonely
camps are always grateful. Afterwards I spent a day or two with my
new friends, and we became quite intimate. They were Texans. Both
were quiet, clean-cut, pleasant-spoken young fellows, who did not
even swear, except under great provocation, &emdash;and there can be
no greater provocation than is given by a "mean" horse or a
refractory steer. Yet, to my surprise, I found that they were, in a
certain sense, fugitives from justice. They were complaining of the
extreme severity of the winter weather, and mentioned their longing
to go back to the South. The reason they could not was that the
summer before they had taken part in a small civil war in one of the
wilder counties of New Mexico. It had originated in a quarrel between
two great ranches over their respective water rights and range
rights, &emdash;a quarrel of a kind rife among pastoral peoples since
the days when the herdsmen of Lot and Abraham strove together for the
grazing lands round the mouth of the Jordan. There were collisions
between bands of armed cowboys, the cattle were harried from the
springs, outlying camps were burned down, and the sons of the rival
owners fought each other to the death with bowie-knife and revolver
when they met at the drinking-booths of the squalid towns. Soon the
smoldering jealousy which is ever existent between-the Americans and
Mexicans of the frontier was aroused, and when the original cause of
quarrel was adjusted, a fierce race struggle took its place. It was
soon quelled by the arrival of a strong sheriff's posse and the
threat of interference by the regular troops, but not until after a
couple of affrays, each attended with bloodshed. In one of these the
American cowboys of a certain range, after a brisk fight, drove out
the Mexican vaqveros from among them. In the other, to avenge the
murder of one of their number, the cowboys gathered from the country
round about and fairly stormed the "Greaser" (that is, Mexican)
village where the murder had been committed, killing four of the
inhabitants. My two friends had borne a part in this last affair.
They were careful to give a rather cloudy account of the details, but
I gathered that one of them was "wanted" as a participant, and the
other as a witness.
However, they were both good fellows, and probably their conduct
was justifiable, at least according to the rather fitful lights of
the border. Sitting up late with them, around the sputtering fire,
they became quite confidential. At first our conversation touched
only the usual monotonous round of subjects worn threadbare in every
cow-camp. A bunch of steers had been seen traveling over the scoria
buttes to the head of Elk Creek; they were mostly Texan doughgies (a
name I have never seen written; it applies to young immigrant
cattle), but there were some of the Hash-Knife four-year-olds among
them. A stray horse with a blurred brand on the left hip had just
joined the bunch of saddle-ponies. The red F. V. cow, one of whose
legs had been badly bitten by a wolf, had got mired down in an alkali
spring, and when hauled out had charged upon her rescuer so viciously
that he barely escaped. The old mule, Sawback, was getting over the
effects of the rattlesnake bite. The river was going down, but the
fords were still bad, and the quicksand at the Custer Trail crossing
had worked along so that wagons had to be taken over opposite the
blasted cottonwood. One of the men had seen a Three-Seven-B rider who
had just left the Green River round-up, and who brought news that
they had found some cattle on the reservation, and were now holding
about twelve hundred head on the big brushy bottom below Rainy Butte.
Bronco Jim, our local flash rider, had tried to ride the big,
bald-faced sorrel belonging to the Oregon horse-outfit, and had been
bucked off and his face smashed in. This piece of information of
course drew forth much condemnation of the unfortunate Jim's
equestrian skill. It was at once agreed that he "wasn't the
sure-enough bronco-buster he thought himself," and he was compared
very unfavorably to various heroes of the quirt and spurs who lived
in Texas and Colorado; for the best rider, like the best hunter, is
invariably either dead or else a resident of some other district.
These topics having been exhausted, we discussed the rumor that
the vigilantes had given notice to quit to two men who had just built
a shack at the head of the Little Dry, and whose horses included a
suspiciously large number of different brands, most of them blurred.
Then our conversation became more personal, and they asked if I would
take some letters to post for them. Of course I said yes, and two
letters &emdash;evidently the product of severe manual labor
&emdash;were produced. Each was directed to a girl; and my
companions, now very friendly, told me that they both had
sweethearts, and for the next hour I listened to a full account of
their charms and virtues.
But it is not often that plainsmen talk so freely. They are rather
reserved, especially to strangers; and are certain to look with
dislike on any man who, when they first meet him, talks a great deal.
It is always a good plan, if visiting a strange camp or ranch, to be
as silent as possible.
Another time, at a ranch not far from my own, I found among the
cowboys gathered for the round-up two Bible-reading Methodists. They
were as strait-laced as any of their kind, but did not obtrude their
opinions on any one else, and were first-class workers, so that they
had no trouble with the other men. Associated with them were two or
three blear-eyed, slit-mouthed rufffians, who were as loose of tongue
as of life.
Generally some form of stable government is provided for the
counties as soon as their population has become at all fixed, the
frontiersmen showing their national aptitude for organization. Then
lawlessness is put down pretty effectively. For example, as soon as
we organized the government of Medora &emdash;an excessively
unattractive little hamlet, the county seat of our huge, scantily
settled county &emdash;we elected some good offficers, built a log
jail, prohibited all shooting in the streets, and enforced the
prohibition, etc., etc.
Up to that time there had been a good deal of lawlessness of one
kind or another, only checked by an occasional piece of individual
retribution or by a sporadic outburst of vigilance committee work. In
such a society the desperadoes of every grade flourish. Many are
merely ordinary rogues and swindlers, who rob and cheat on occasion,
but are dangerous only when led by some villain of real intellectual
power. The gambler, with hawk eyes and lissome fingers, is scarcely
classed as a criminal; indeed, he may be a very public-spirited
citizen. But as his trade is so often plied in saloons, and as even
if, as sometimes happens, he does not cheat, many of his opponents
are certain to attempt to do so, he is of necessity obliged to be
skillful and ready with his weapon, and gambling rows are very
common. Cowboys lose much of their money to gamblers; it is with them
hard come and light go, for they exchange the wages of six months'
grinding toil and lonely peril for three days' whooping carousal,
spending their money on poisonous whisky or losing it over greasy
cards in the vile dance-houses. As already explained, they are in the
main good men; and the disturbance they cause in a town is done from
sheer rough light-heartedness. They shoot off boot-heels or tall hats
occasionally, or make some obnoxious butt "dance " by shooting round
his feet; but they rarely meddle in this way with men who have not
themselves played the fool. A fight in the streets is almost always a
duel between two men who bear each other malice; it is only in a
general melee in a saloon that outsiders often get hurt, and then it
is their own fault, for they have no business to be there. One
evening at Medora a cowboy spurred his horse up the steps of a
rickety "hotel " piazza into the bar-room, where he began firing at
the clock, the decanters, etc., the bartender meanwhile taking one
shot at him, which missed. When he had emptied his revolver he threw
down a roll of bank-notes on the counter, to pay for the damage he
had done, and galloped his horse out through the door, disappearing
in the darkness with loud yells to a rattling accompaniment of pistol
shots interchanged between himself and some passer-by who apparently
began firing out of pure desire to enter into the spirit of the
occasion, &emdash;for it was the night of the Fourth of July, and all
the country round about had come into town for a spree.
All this is mere horse-play; it is the cowboy's method of
"painting the town red," as an interlude in his harsh, monotonous
life. Of course there are plenty of hard characters among cowboys,
but no more than among lumbermen and the like; only the cowboys are
so ready with their weapons that a bully in one of their camps is apt
to be a murderer instead of merely a bruiser. Often, moreover, on a
long trail, or in a far-off camp, where the men are for many months
alone, feuds spring up that are in the end sure to be slaked in
blood. As a rule, however, cowboys who become desperadoes soon
perforce drop their original business, and are no longer employed on
ranches, unless in counties or territories where there is very little
heed paid to the law, and where, in consequence, a cattle-owner needs
a certain number of hired bravos. Until within two or three years
this was. the case in parts of Arizona and New Mexico, where land
claims were "jumped" and cattle stolen all the while, one effect
being to insure high wages to every individual who combined murderous
proclivities with skill in the use of the six-shooter.
Even in much more quiet regions different outfits vary greatly as
regards the character of their employes: I know one or two where the
men are good ropers and riders, but a gambling, brawling,
hard-drinking set, always shooting each other or strangers.
Generally, in such a case, the boss is himself as objectionable as
his men; he is one of those who have risen by unblushing rascality,
and is always sharply watched by his neighbors, because he is sure to
try to shift calves on to his own cows, to brand any blurred animal
with his own mark, and perhaps to attempt the alteration of perfectly
plain brands. The last operation, however, has become very risky
since the organization of the cattle country, and the appointment of
trained brand-readers as inspectors. These inspectors examine the
hide of every animal slain, sold, or driven off, and it is wonderful
to see how quickly one of them will detect any signs of a brand
having been tampered with. Now there is, in consequence, very little
of this kind of dishonesty; whereas formerly herds were occasionally
stolen almost bodily.
Claimjumpers are, as a rule, merely blackmailers. Sometimes they
will by threats drive an ignorant foreigner from his claim, but never
an old frontiersman. They delight to squat down beside ranchmen who
are themselves trying to keep land to which they are not entitled,
and who therefore know that their only hope is to bribe or to bully
the intruder.
Cattle-thieves, for the reason given above, are not common,
although there are plenty of vicious, shiftless men who will kill a
cow or a steer for the meat in winter, if they get a chance.
Horse-thieves, however, are always numerous and formidable on the
frontier; though in our own country they have been summarily thinned
out of late years. It is the fashion to laugh at the severity with
which horse-stealing is punished on the border, but the reasons are
evident. Horses are the most valuable property of the frontiersman,
whether cowboy, hunter, or settler, and are often absolutely
essential to his well-being, and even to his life. They are always
marketable, and they are very easily stolen, for they carry
themselves off, instead of having to be carried. Horse-stealing is
thus a most tempting business, especially to the more reckless
ruffians, and it is always followed by armed men; and they can only
be kept in check by ruthless severity. Frequently they band together
with the road agents (highwaymen) and other desperadoes into secret
organizations, which control and terrorize a district until
overthrown by force. After the civil war a great many guerrillas,
notably from Arkansas and Missouri, went out to the plains, often
drifting northward. They took naturally to horse-stealing and kindred
pursuits. Since I have been in the northern cattle country I have
known of half a dozen former members of Quantrell's gang being hung
or shot.
The professional man-killers, or "bad men," may be horse-thieves
or highwaymen, but more often are neither one nor the other. Some of
them, like some of the Texan cowboys, become very expert in the use
of the revolver, their invariable standby; but in the open a cool man
with a rifle is always an overmatch for one of them, unless at very
close quarters, on account of the superiority of his weapon. Some of
the "bad men " are quiet, good fellows, who have been driven into
their career by accident. One of them has perhaps at some time killed
a man in self-defense; he acquires some reputation, and the
neighboring bullies get to look on him as a rival whom it would be an
honor to slay; so that from that time on he must be ever on the
watch, must learn to draw quick and shoot straight, &emdash;the
former being even more important than the latter, &emdash;and
probably has to take life after life in order to save his own.
Some of these men are brave only because of their confidence in
their own skill and strength; once convince them that they are
overmatched and they turn into abject cowards. Others have nerves of
steel and will face any odds, or certain death itself, without
flinching a hand's breadth. I was once staying in a town where a
desperately plucky fight took place. A noted desperado, an Arkansas
man, had become involved in a quarrel with two others of the same
ilk, both Irishmen and partners. For several days all three lurked
about the saloon-infested streets of the roaring little
board-and-canvas "city," each trying to get "the drop," &emdash;that
is, the first shot, &emdash;the other inhabitants looking forward to
the fight with pleased curiosity, no one dreaming of interfering. At
last one of the partners got a chance at his opponent as the latter
was walking into a gambling hell, and broke his back near the hips;
yet the crippled, mortally wounded man twisted around as he fell and
shot his slayer dead. Then, knowing that he had but a few moments to
live, and expecting that his other foe would run up on hearing the
shooting, he dragged himself by his arms out into the street;
immediately afterwards, as he anticipated, the second partner
appeared, and was killed on the spot. The victor did not live twenty
minutes. As in most of these encounters, all of the men who were
killed deserved their fate. In my own not very extensive experience I
can recall but one man killed in these fights whose death was
regretted, and he was slain by a European. Generally every one is
heartily glad to hear of the death of either of the contestants, and
the only regret is that the other survives.
One curious shooting scrape that took place in Medora was worthy
of being chronicled by Bret Harte. It occurred in the summer of 1884,
I believe, but it may have been the year following. I did not see the
actual occurrence, but I saw both men immediately afterwards; and I
heard the shooting, which took place in a saloon on the bank, while I
was swimming my horse across the river, holding my rifle up so as not
to wet it. I will not give their full names, as I am not certain what
has become of them; though I was told that one had since been either
put in jail or hung, I forget which. One of them was a saloon-keeper,
familiarly called Welshy. The other man, Hay, had been bickering with
him for some time. One day Hay, who had been defeated in a wrestling
match by one of my own boys, and was out of temper, entered the
other's saloon, and became very abusive. The quarrel grew more and
more violent, and suddenly Welshy whipped out his revolver and blazed
away at Hay. The latter staggered slightly, shook himself, stretched
out his hand, and gave back to his would-be slayer the ball, saying,
"Here, man, here's the bullet." It had glanced along his breast-bone,
gone into the body, and come out at the point of the shoulder, when,
being spent, it dropped down the sleeve into his hand. Next day the
local paper, which rejoiced in the title of "The Bad Lands Cowboy,"
chronicled the event in the usual vague way as an "unfortunate
occurrence" between "two of our most esteemed fellow citizens." The
editor was a good fellow, a college graduate, and a firstclass
base-ball player, who always stood stoutly up against any corrupt
dealing; but, like all other editors in small Western towns, he was
intimate with both combatants in almost every fight.
The winter after this occurrence I was away and on my return began
asking my foreman &emdash;a particular crony of mine &emdash;about
the fates of my various friends. Among others I inquired after a
traveling preacher who had come to our neighborhood; a good man, but
irascible. After a moment's pause a gleam of remembrance came into my
informant's eye: "Oh, the parson! Well &emdash;he beat a man over the
head with an ax, and they put him in jail!" It certainly seemed a
rather summary method of repressing a refractory parishioner. Another
acquaintance had shared a like doom. "He started to go out of the
country, but they ketched him at Bismarck and put him in jail"
&emdash;apparently on general principles, for I did not hear of his
having committed any specific crime. My foreman sometimes developed
his own theories of propriety. I remember his objecting strenuously
to a proposal to lynch a certain French-Canadian who had lived in his
own cabin, back from the river, ever since the whites came into the
land, but who was suspected of being a horse-thief. His chief point
against the proposal was, not that the man was innocent, but that "it
didn't seem anyways right to hang a man who had been so long in the
country."
Sometimes we had a comic row. There was one huge man from Missouri
called "The Pike," who had been the keeper of a wood-yard for
steamboats on the Upper Missouri. Like most of his class he was a
hard case, and, though pleasant enough when sober, always insisted on
fighting when drunk. One day, when on a spree, he announced his
intention of thrashing the entire population of Medora seriatim, and
began to make his promise good with great vigor and praiseworthy
impartiality. He was victorious over the first two or three eminent
citizens whom he encountered, and then tackled a gentleman known as
"Cold Turkey Bill." Under ordinary circumstances Cold Turkey, though
an able-bodied man, was no match for The Pike; but the latter was
still rather drunk, and moreover was wearied by his previous combats.
So Cold Turkey got him down, lay on him, choked him by the throat
with one hand, and began pounding his face with a triangular rock
held in the other. To the onlookers the fate of the battle seemed
decided; but Cold Turkey better appreciated the endurance of his
adversary, and it soon appeared that he sympathised with the
traditional hunter who, having caught a wildcat, earnestly besought a
comrade to help him let it go. While still pounding vigorously he
raised an agonized wail: "Help me off, fellows, for the Lord's sake;
he's tiring me out!" There was no resisting so plaintive an appeal,
and the bystanders at once abandoned their attitude of neutrality for
one of armed intervention.
I have always been treated with the utmost courtesy by all
cowboys, whether on the round-up or in camp; and the few real
desperadoes I have seen were also perfectly polite. Indeed, I never
was shot at maliciously but once. This was on an occasion when I had
to pass the night in a little frontier hotel where the bar-room
occupied the whole lower floor, and was in consequence the place
where every one, drunk or sober, had to sit. My assailant was neither
a cowboy nor a bona fide "bad man," but a broad-hatted rufffian of
cheap and commonplace type, who had for the moment terrorized the
other men in the bar-room, these being mostly sheep-herders and small
grangers. The fact that I wore glasses, together with my evident
desire to avoid a fight, apparently gave him the impression &emdash;a
mistaken one &emdash;that I would not resent an injury.
The first deadly affray that took place in our town, after the
cattle-men came in and regular settlement began, was between a
Scotchman and a Minnesota man, the latter being one of the small
stockmen. Both had "shooting" records, and each was a man with a
varied past. The Scotchman, a noted bully, was the more daring of the
two, but he was much too hot-headed and overbearing to be a match for
his gray-eyed, hard-featured foe. After a furious quarrel and threats
of violence, the Scotchman mounted his horse, and, rifle in hand,
rode to the door of the mud ranch, perched on the brink of the
river-bluff, where the American lived, and was instantly shot down by
the latter from behind a corner of the building.
Later on I once opened a cowboy ball with the wife of the victor
in this contest, the husband himself dancing opposite. It was the
lanciers, and he knew all the steps far better than I did. He could
have danced a minuet very well with a little practice. The scene
reminded one of the ball where Bret Harte's heroine "danced down the
middle with the man who shot Sandy Magee."
But though there were plenty of men present each of whom had shot
his luckless Sandy Magee, yet there was no Lily of Poverty Flat.
There is an old and true border saying that "the frontier is hard on
women and cattle." There are some striking exceptions; but, as a
rule, the grinding toil and hardship of a life passed in the
wilderness, or on its outskirts, drive the beauty and bloom from a
woman's face long before her youth has left her. By the time she is a
mother she is sinewy and angular, with thin, compressed lips and
furrowed, sallow brow. But she has a hundred qualities that atone for
the grace she lacks. She is a good mother and a hard-working
housewife, always putting things to rights, washing and cooking for
her stalwart spouse and offspring. She is faithful to her husband,
and, like the true American that she is, exacts faithfulness in
return. Peril cannot daunt her, nor hardship and poverty appall her.
Whether on the mountains in a log hut chinked with moss, in a sod or
adobe hovel on the desolate prairie, or in a mere temporary camp,
where the white-topped wagons have been drawn up in a
protection-giving circle near some spring, she is equally at home.
Clad in a dingy gown and a hideous sun-bonnet she goes bravely about
her work, resolute, silent, uncomplaining. The children grow up
pretty much as fates dictates. Even when very small they seem well
able to protect themselves. The wife of one of my teamsters, who
lived in a small outlying camp, used to keep the youngest and most
troublesome members of her family out of mischief by the simple
expedient of picketing them out, each child being tied by the leg,
with a long leather string, to a stake driven into the ground, so
that it could neither get at another child nor at anything breakable.
The best buckskin maker I ever met was, if not a typical
frontierswoman, at least a woman who could not have reached her full
development save on the border. She made first-class hunting-shirts,
leggins and gauntlets. When I knew her she was living alone in her
cabin on midprairie, having dismissed her husband six months
previously in an exceedingly summary manner. She not only possessed
redoubtable qualities of head and hand, but also a nice sense of
justice, even towards Indians, that is not always found on the
frontier. Once, going there for a buckskin shirt, I met at her cabin
three Sioux, and from their leader, named One Bull, purchased a
tobacco-pouch, beautifully worked with porcupine quills. She had
given them some dinner, for which they had paid with a deerhide.
Falling into conversation, she mentioned that just before I came up a
white man, apparently from Deadwood, had passed by, and had tried to
steal the Indians' horses. The latter had been too quick for him, had
run him down, and brought him back to the cabin. "I told 'em to go
right on and hang him, and I wouldn't never cheep about it," said my
informant; "but they let him go, after taking his gun. There ain't no
sense in stealing from Indians any more than from white folks, and
I'm not going to have it round my ranch, neither. There! I'll give
'em back the deer-hide they give me for the dinner and things,
anyway." I told her I sincerely wished we could make her sheriff and
Indian agent. She made the Indians &emdash;and whites, too, for that
matter &emdash;behave themselves and walk the straightest kind of
line, not tolerating the least symptom of rebellion; but she had a
strong natural sense of justice.
The cowboy balls, spoken of above, are always great events in the
small towns where they take place, being usually given when the
roundup passes near; everybody round about comes in for them. They
are almost always conducted with great decorum; no unseemly conduct
would be tolerated. There is usually some master of the ceremonies,
chosen with due regard to brawn as well as brain. He calls off the
figures of the square dances, so that even the inexperienced may get
through them, and incidentally preserves order. Sometimes we are
allowed to wear our revolvers, and sometimes not. The nature of the
band, of course, depends upon the size of the place. I remember one
ball that came near being a failure because our half-breed fiddler
"went and got himself shot," as the indignant master of the
ceremonies phrased it.
But all these things are merely incidents in the cowboy's life. It
is utterly unfair to judge the whole class by what a few individuals
do in the course of two or three days spent in town, instead of by
the long months of weary, honest toil common to all alike. To
appreciate properly his fine, manly qualities, the wild rough-rider
of the plains should be seen in his own home. There he passes his
days, there he does his life-work, there, when he meets death, he
faces it as he has faced many other evils, with quiet, uncomplaining
fortitude. Brave, hospitable, hardy, and adventurous, he is the grim
pioneer of our race; he prepares the way for the civilization from
before whose face he must himself disappear. Hard and dangerous
though his existence is, it has yet a wild attraction that strongly
draws to it his bold, free spirit. He lives in the lonely lands where
mighty rivers twist in long reaches between the barren bluffs; where
the prairies stretch out into billowy plains of waving grass, girt
only by the blue horizon, &emdash;plains across whose endless breadth
he can steer his course for days and weeks and see neither man to
speak to nor hill to break the level; where the glory and the burning
splendor of the sunsets kindle the blue vault of heaven and the level
brown earth till they merge together in an ocean of flaming fire.
Ranch Life and
the Hunting Trail Continued
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