Fast Horse Outta Town: Trollheart Explores the Legend of the American West

[Trollheart]

John B. Jones (1834 - 1881)

Another who fought for the South in the war, Jones was born in South Carolina but moved with his family when four years old to Texas, where he would spend the rest of his life. He achieved great fame in the Civil War, rising to the rank of Adjutant in only a month and later Adjutant-General. He took defeat hard, not surprisingly, as his service was now seen more or less as an act of treachery and rebellion, and there was neither thanks nor glory awaiting him at the war’s end. He left America, travelling to Mexico and Brazil with some half-baked idea of setting up a colony for Confederates, but it of course came to nothing and he returned to Texas, where he was elected to the State Legislature. As Texas was by now in the process of being returned to the Union, he refused to take the seat.

His chance to shine though came in 1874, when he was appointed by the governor as Major of a battalion of the Texas Rangers, and with six companies under his command he led attacks on Native American tribes such as the Apache, Comanche and Kiowa before being sent to Lampasas to try to deal with the Higgins-Horrell feud which had been going on for nearly four years at that point. Managing, in a sneak attack, to catch all the gang and arrest them, Jones then proved to be more than just a hard-headed tough old soldier, as he successfully negotiated a truce between the two clans. He next turned his attention to the apprehension of the notorious train robber Sam Bass and his gang, and after a four month chase he finally ran them to ground at Round Rock, where he shot and wounded Bass, who would die of the injury a few days later.

Jones died of natural causes in July of 1881, still in command of his Texas Rangers battalion, his exploits earning him a place in the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame.

“Big” Dave Updyke (c. 1830 - 1866)

Another bad lawman, Updyke was the black sheep of his family, and after a stint driving stagecoaches and another spent in Columbia, he returned to the USA to join in the gold rush that had sprung up in Idaho state. He was successful here, earning enough from his claim to allow him to buy a livery stable in Boise, which is where his life, which had up until now been law-abiding, took very much a left turn. His stable began to become a meeting place for all the local desperadoes - whether he courted them or just fell in with them I don’t know - and before long he was consorting with some of the baddest men in that part of the country. His election to the post of Sheriff in 1864 did nothing to arrest (sorry) his slide towards criminality, in fact it had the opposite effect, as it put him in a position to turn a blind eye to, or often even participate in robberies orchestrated by his new friends.

So well known was his connection to the outlaws that they began to be known as “Updyke’s Gang”, though there was no proof that he was part of their enterprise. Realising that the only real threat to his power was a recently-formed vigilante group out of Payette River, about thirty miles outside of Boise, he vowed to disband it, to the anger of the citizens of Ada, who relied upon them - as they could not trust the sheriff to look after their interests - to keep them safe from robbers and murderers. Going completely against the wishes of the people he was supposed to protect, he in fact planned to have the members of the vigilante group (or vigilance committee, as they were often known) shot, claiming they had resisted arrest.

Word however was sent to the Payette folk of the planned treachery and they were ready for Updyke and his men, outnumbering them two to one. Forced to negotiate, the corrupt sheriff allowed the Payettes to return to town to answer the charges against them, and allowed them to keep their weapons. The charges were dismissed, and the vigilantes went free, but Sheriff Updyke had, in the words of Charles Montgomery Burns, made a powerful enemy, and the Payettes, who had long suspected Updyke’s involvement in the crimes that took place in the county, began to watch him closely.

They didn’t have to wait for very long, as Updyke and his criminal buddies were always on the lookout for easy prey, and they didn’t come much easier than the local stagecoach, passing through Pontneuf Canyon on its way from Montana to Utah, which was known to transport gold as well as passengers. The gang was co-led by Updyke with a desperado called Brockie Jack, who was actually on the run, having broken out of an Oregon prison, while the third member of their gang, Fred Williams, had been detailed to ride along with the stage to ensure there were no slip-ups, and to make certain it carried the big strongboxes of gold that were being shipped down from the Montana mines. He would desert the coach when it stopped near the spot where later it would be ambushed. No doubt Updyke’s experience as a stage driver in his younger days helped the gang plan their strategy.

The raid did not quite go according to plan, unless the gang intended killing everyone on the stage, and I have to believe they were more interested in getting the gold than slaughtering the passengers, but one of them was armed and put up a fight, leading to a sudden explosion of gunfire and when the smoke cleared all the passengers were dead. Nonplussed, the thieves collected their loot and headed off, but were pursued by the Payette vigilantes, who caught two of them, one shot down when he resisted arrest, the other hanged. Both men were said to have been almost penniless at the time, leading me to believe either that they had received a smaller share of the haul or had spent it very quickly, as this was only weeks after the raid.

Updyke evaded arrest, skipping town and heading to Boise City, but he had no power here and the citizens were organising their own vigilance committee. He stayed there until spring but eventually fled, along with another outlaw, John Dixon. Unaware that a posse was hot on their heels, the men stopped to rest at a cabin along the way. Taking them by surprise in the night, the vigilantes took the two men prisoner and the next morning they were hanged. No trace of the stolen gold was ever found - Updyke had a mere fifty dollars on him when he swung - and its whereabouts remains a mystery to this day.

Seth Bullock (1849 - 1919)

Canadian born, with an English father and Scottish mother, Bullock ran away from home at sixteen and went to live with his sister in Montana, but not for long, as she sent him back home to his parents. Two years later he was gone again, and this time to stay. Two years after that he was elected to the Montana Senate, and helped create the famous Yellowstone National Park. Elected sheriff of Lewis and Clark County in 1874, he went into business with another man as a hardware merchant, and though he married the next year he sent his wife home to Michigan when he and his partner headed to Deadwood, South Dakota, to try their luck there.

And here we see that, despite my contention as to the unlikelihood of some stranger riding into town and becoming the local law enforcement official, this seems to have been exactly what happened to Bullock and his partner. Shows what I know!

Arriving in Deadwood, the two men discovered it to be a lawless place, with rowdy miners, cowboys, outlaws and prostitutes running wild, and nobody in charge. On the day they arrived, the famous Wild Bill Hickok was killed, and the townsfolk were demanding someone pay. Law and order needed to be established in Deadwood, and so their first marshal was appointed, but he did not last long, gunned down in an ambush less than two weeks later. Deadwood was really just a mining camp at this point, but when it was incorporated into the newly-formed Lawrence County, Bullock was elected as its sheriff, with authority too over the territory of South Dakota.

Bullock proved to be different to most sheriffs of the time. Though he appointed fearless deputies who helped him clean up Deadwood, it’s reported that he never shot a man during his time there, being able to, according to his grandson, “outstare a mad cobra or rogue elephant”, and his calm, brooding manner usually unnerved most gunhands who surrendered without firing a shot. As Deadwood began to settle down, Bullock sent for his wife and daughter, meanwhile he was promoted to US Deputy Marshal, and in 1884 met future President Theodore Roosevelt for the first time. The two men got on great, and would remain lifelong friends. When his hardware store burned down ten years later, Bullock took the opportunity to replace it with Deadwood’s first hotel, and the humbly-named Bullock Hotel quickly became the place to stay. It was certainly luxurious for the time, with three floors with a bathroom on each, steam heat throughout its sixty-four rooms. It still stands today.

Given his friendship with Roosevelt, it was no surprise that Bullock signed up with the Rough Riders when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, but the war was over so quickly that he never got to see service. He did however ride in Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905 along with a group of fifty cowboys, including the legendary Tom Mix. Following his taking office, the new president promoted Bullock to the post of US Marshal for South Dakota. The two men would die within months of each other, both passing away before 1919 was out. Seth Bullock was buried alongside Wild Bill and Calamity Jane, in Mount Moriah Cemetery.

[Trollheart]

William Carr

US Deputy Marshal in Fort Smith, Arkansas, he hunted down and arrested outlaw Harris Austin, who was a Chickasaw Indian charged with murder. When Austin resisted arrest Carr shot him, then took him back to Fort Smith where he was hanged a year later. He killed one of a gang of whiskey runners in what was then known as Indian Territory, but the rest escaped back to Texas. He had his own run-ins with the law though, arrested in 1892 and charged with murder and arson pursuant to a fire in Lexington which resulted in the death of one man, but he was cleared of the charges and returned to duty, in time to take on the famous Doolin-Dalton Gang two years later. In this battle he was shot three times and left for dead by the outlaws, but he survived, to face further controversy.

In June 1895 a bunch of outlaws broke out of the Oklahoma City jail, killing the Chief of Police in the process. As Carr was known to be friendly with two of the escapees, brothers Will and Bob Christian, he was suspected of having planned or assisted in their jailbreak, and stood trial. Most felt it was a fit-up, to cover the negligence of Sheriff C. H. Deford in allowing the men to escape, but Carr was arrested and indicted by a Grand Jury, but having raised bail he skipped out of the state and disappeared from history. His name did pop up in unsubstantiated reports and anecdotes, mostly in connection with the Doolin Gang, though none of these sightings were ever confirmed. Below are some of them.

(Note: No apologies for the language, out-of-date racial slurs or even spelling and capitalisation (or mostly, lack of it) in these accounts. As they said back then in those parts, I ain’t a-changin’ nothin’. These are authentic accounts of an authentic time, and gosh darn it, they gunna remain as they woz scribed down, pardner. Or Somethin’.)

“A man who don’t know Carr should not be permitted to live in the Territory,” Rowdy Kate Daniels used to say while holding court in the Red Light Saloon in Purcell, [Oklahoma,] in 1889.

“Never heard of Bill Carr?” says Jim Davis, who has been in the country “since their days of Sam Bass.” “Wal, stranger, you’d better git acquainted with him. Jist now he’s laying up at the Clifton House nursing a sore arm. One uv ther Rogers gang shot him last week.

“Who is Bill? He’s a double-distilled rattler, a bunch of catmounts, a whole herd of Texas longhorns, and a grizzly bear all tied together with chain lightning. By profession, he’s a Deputy Marshal in this yer district, and he’s a killer from way up near the headwaters of Bitter Creek.

“You can jest yell that he is a daisy,” continued the old man. “Bill civilized this heathen country. He’s the chap who made angels of the Franklins and Washingtons and Christianized the Indians, and he dun it with cold lead, the only simon-pure religion of any use on the border.

“Is he the man they call the King of the Chickasaw Nation?” asked an interested tenderfoot, while the gang strolled up and took a drink of chain lightning.

Carr, the officer in question, is a handsome Pennsylvanian with a record as Deputy Marshal that is little short of miraculous. The story, as stated by old man Davis, would appear , in the vernacular of the border, “durned fishy” were it not backed up by the testimony of United States Marshals Nix and Walker.
Billy Carr came here before the Oklahoma boom” resumed Davis reflectively, as he shot a mouthful of saliva at a crack in the floor. “Yep! I believe he’s called the King of the Chickasaw country. He first came into notice on the 4th of July in 1887. Down there in the bottom, a lot of sharks were fleecing suckers. A pretty girl was in one of the crowds trying to induce her foot brother to quit a brace game, but the grinning sharp only gave her the laugh and joked the fool boy into playing until all his money was gone.

Then he insultingly ordered them to ‘clear out and let him alone.” the girl cried bitterly over her brother’s losses and the tough gang stood about and laughed. Nobody knowed Bill Carr them days, and so he didn’t cut much figger. The man who had robbed the boy was ‘Coyote Dave,’ and he had killed a man or two, and had a private graveyard down in No Man’s Land. Well, Bill, he sorter stood ’round awhile after the pretty girl and her brother had left, and then he began to play. ‘Coyote Dave’ won some his money and when Carr accused him of cheating, he said:
“‘Course I did, tender. W’at you going to do about it, hey?’
“The camp turned out an’ buried Dave next day,” and her the old-timer’s face took on a contented frown, as his mind traveled back to that delightful occasion.

“Yes, Billy put three holes in David’s carcass inside a second, and as he walked away I heard him say, ‘That’s for that pretty girl with blue eyes; durn his ugly picture.’

“Well, a day or two after this a wild and wooly chap from the Brazos country plugged a hole through our City Marshal and then skipped out for Oklahoma. There wasn’t any one to foller him, and no one wanted the job of Marshal till Bill Carr said he’d take it if he could have an assistant, and he chose Joe McNally. (Poor Joe was killed by Sheriff Throttler at Fort Smith a month or so ago.) while Joe held down the town Bill Carr mounted his horse and chased the murderer down to where Oklahoma City now stands. The skunk turned on Bill, and there was another killing. A durned foot United States Marshal arrested Carr and took him to Wichita for trial, but he beat the case, and when he came back to the Territory the boys lynched ‘Horse Thief Johnny,” a witness agin Bill, just to show their goodwill. Bill said he’d a-knowed their hearts was all right without this proof, but he couldn’t bring Johnny back to life, so he helped plant him.

“Bill and Joe had their prison about three miles out of town, in the hills. They dug a hole back into a bank and staked their prisoners out in a pen till they had a load for Fort Smith. They made a camp up on a hill where they could overlook this pen, and if any of them durned murderers, horse thieves, whiskey peddlers, or outlaws generally thought they could skip out, they were usually brought to their senses with a bullet in their carcasses.

“About this time Harris Austin, a full-blooded Chickasaw Indian who had been killing people worse than the Bender family for about ten years did some new devilment, and the Fort Smith officers wanted him captured. The old heathen had the whole country ‘buffaloed’ except Bill Carr, and some of the boys said he didn’t have sense enough to know when he was a fool. So Bill he got on his old sorrel pony and rode out to this Indian’s lair in the mountains. He laid for him at daylight, and when the old red man came out to the spring for water Bill popped out and tried to arrest him, but the chief wouldn’t have it that way and slid behind a tree. Bill and him banged away at one another from undercover for about an hour, and then Bill put three bullets into the old rascal. That night he landed him into town across his horse’s back. The Indian recovered and was afterward hung at Fort Smith.

“But the very worst fight Billy ever had was with the Franklins and Washingtons. they was n[only word ahm a-blankin’; y’all know the one; starts with that there N] hoss thieves, and lived in a cabin back in the hills. when Bill went after them he took a posse along, and when they reached the cabin a posse man, a personal friend of Bill’s rode up and pounded on the door. Then those heathen n[]s just opened a crack and stuck out their guns and killed that posseman. Bill vowed then and there that he would kill every one of them for murdering his pard. So he set fire to the woods back of the house, and when those heathens came running out with their guns in their hands he shot them all down. There were five in the party. Three he killed and two were taken to Fort Smith and hanged.

“Whisky peddling was one of the tough crimes about now, and a gang of outlaws along the Red River district took to sending in their red liquor by the gallon. You see, the boys rather liked the poison, and didn’t think the traffic ought to be curtailed by law so that when Bill started in to stop the supply the boys were agin it. One night Bill corralled three members of a gang of smugglers near Dennison, [Texas.] They were Lewis Jackson, his brother, and Walter Keene, a full-blood Injun. Together with a Sheriff’s posse, Carr sat down to watch a bridge. About dark, the posse went to supper, and Bill just staid on guard. While his friends were gone them chaps sneaked across the bridge, and when Carr halted them they began to shoot. Talking about hell a popping wasn’t in it. When the Sheriff heard the firing and run back they found Bill wounded and two of the gang dead. The next day they followed a trail of blood and run into Lewis Jackson’s body in a cave.

“As Carr was returning to Purcell, [Oklahoma] he was thrown from his horse and had a leg broken. He was carried into a ranch house, and who do you think he found there?” and Jim glanced eagerly into the faces of his interested audience. “Why the girl whose brother had been plucked by ‘Coyote Dave.” When Bill’s leg got well his heart was gone to the girl, and he married her soon after. All the boys turned out to Bill’s wedding, and after it was over he rode out to his ranch with his bride. While they were riding along in that moonlight one heathen coyote that had it in for Bill tried to shoot him, and they had a running fight, but Bill was too much for him, and Cherokee Ned was buried next day. Some of the boys found him along down the trail with a bullet between his cross-eyes.

“After Bill had been spliced a while and had been shot two or three times, his better half got him to quit and go down to violet springs, Oklahoma and buy a grocery. The idea of Bill Carr a-selling peas, and corn, and taters, like a common clerk!” and old Jim wiped his mouth and squinted up his eyes to show his utter contempt for such a proceeding. “Es I was a-saying, Bill turned clerk, but he didn’t like it, and neither did the boys. Arter a little a papoose was born, and then Bill was happy. At this time Bill Dalton and Bill Cook and other tough gangs was a cavorting around, and I often said that if Bill Carr hadn’t got married and settled down he’d made them fellers hard to ketch. Sure enough, Bill got into it last Spring year ago. Course you seen it in all the papers. Marshal Nix dun heered that Bill Dalton was down near Violet Springs, so he sends Carr a warrant for him and Slaughter Kid. Bill felt just like getting into the harness again. One afternoon along comes two galoots on horseback. Bill seen ’em a-coming and watched them hitch their horses to the old rack. His wife and kid were in the store when they came in and eyed Bill.
“‘Be you Bill Carr?’ asked on of the chaps.
“‘Recon I be,’ said Bill, bold as brass, as he slid along the counter toward a six-shooter. ‘Who be you’ns?

“‘I’m Bill Dalton, and this is Slaughter Kid,’ said one of the strangers. ‘Head you’d a warrant for us and thought we’d come in,’ with a laugh.
“‘Yes, she is red-hot and still a hottin,’ said Bill, as he raised his gun. Just then his two-year-old kid run in atween them and his wife run in arter it. This spoiled Bill’s aim, and afore he could pull a second time the two geisers begin to bore holes in him. But he was game and drove ’em out arter they had shot him three times. They got on their horses and escaped, but poor Bill lay about dead on the floor. When the outlaws heered that Bill wasn’t dead they threatened to finish the works, so a lot of the boys from Oklahoma City went down and guarded his house till he got better. Shortly after this Dalton was killed. when Bill got well he sold out his grocery and since then he’s making it hot for the balance of the gang. Someone shot him last week during the Rogers fight, but they can’t kill Bill Carr,” and old Jim took a drink with a tenderfoot and went off up to the Clifton House to see how the “King of the Chickasaw Country” was getting along.

Fred White

Linked with one of the most famous lawmen of the Old West, White was the first town marshal of Tombstone, Arizona (yes, it did exist) and partnered up with the deputy sheriff of the county, some guy called Earp or something. The two men also became friends, but Hollywood tried to twist the truth about White, turning him into a different man than he was in reality. He was in fact respected by cowboy gangs such as the Clantons and was particularly friendly with their leader, “Curly Bill” Brocius. One thing the movies did get right was that Tombstone, like many mining towns and railroad towns, was a lawless, raucous place where a man had to be handy with a gun or his fists in order to survive, and White was no shrinking violet.

However his easy manner with Brocius came to an abrupt and painful end when, demanding the Clantons hand over their guns, which they had been shooting and hollering with in the early hours of the morning of October 28 1880, the gang leader handed his pistol to the marshal barrel first and it went off, shooting White in the groin. Ouch! Enraged, Wyatt Earp began to pistol-whip Brocius before he and his gang were taken to the cells, but it was already too late for Fred White, who died two days later. The gang were only charged with violating city ordnance by shooting their guns in public, as at the time of the arraignment White was still alive and expected by the doctor to make a recovery. As Brocius had to wait to hire a lawyer, he was still in the town when White began to seriously decline, and as a lynch party was forming, Earp escorted him out of town as the marshal lost his battle.

Brocius was said to regret White’s death, swearing it was an accident - a claim confirmed by the dying man’s own testimony - but he resented Earp’s treatment of him, which simmered and grew and would lead to a confrontation between his gang and the marshal and his brothers which would go down in the history of the West.

Tom Nixon (born c. 1837)

Hyperbole it may be, but if one man - one white man - could be said to be most responsible for the near-extinction of the buffalo from the West, Tom Nixon must be a prime contender for that title. He once killed 120 in just forty minutes (an event witnessed by a crowd and so irrefutable) and in the course of just over a month slew 3,200. Born in Georgia, he ended up in Dodge City, Kansas, where he set up a ranch and became a very successful buffalo hunter, the only man his equal being the man himself, Buffalo Bill Cody.

Luke Short, a, well, short man who was a gunfighter, trader and businessman - perhaps what we might call today an entrepreneur - having also crossed paths with Wyatt Earp, ended up in Dodge where he fell foul of the mayor when he opened up a saloon. Dodge was the shipping point for the Texas cattle drives, and if there’s one thing thirsty, trail-weary and sex-starved range cowboys want it’s booze, gambling and women. All right, that’s three things. But they wanted them. So whatever saloon could attract the patronage of the Texan cattlemen stood to make a fortune. Trouble was, the mayor of Dodge City had his own saloon and had no intention of letting anyone else take his business. Being mayor he could of course make the laws, at least town ones, and he combatted the fact that Short was a Texan, and therefore the cattlemen were more likely to go to his saloon than that of the mayor, by passing an ordnance that prohibited music in saloons.

Of course, he did not intend the new law to apply to himself, and his saloon kept on jumping while Short’s was silent. But when he realised the mayor was breaking his own rules, Short got his band going again, and they were all arrested while he was away visiting a sick friend. On his return, as he tried to get bail to release them, nobody would help him until he saw the officer he needed to deal with. This man, however, shot at him, missed and then ran when Short returned fire. The next morning he was placed under arrest and escorted that afternoon to a train bound for Kansas City. But if the mayor was exulting, thinking that was the end of his rival, he didn’t know Luke Short.

Enlisting the help of Earp and other friends, and with tacit approval from the governor of Kansas, he returned to Dodge, but the reputation of the feared marshal - and the stated due arrival of Bat Masterson, another lawman nobody in his right mind wanted to face - convinced the mayor to allow Short to return and carry on his business without interference. A truce was called, and Earp went to the telegraph office to convey the mayor’s change of attitude to the other two men. On his return to Dodge, Short issued his demands, including firing of the man who had shot at him without provocation, and those who had arrested him, as well as the revoking of the law prohibiting music. All were agreed to; not that the town had any choice, as they were literally under the gun.

The mayor was far from beaten though, and he now telegraphed the governor, requesting assistance in the shape of companies of militia. This request was flatly refused, the governor telling the mayor he had to handle the situation himself, that the militia would not ride to his rescue when it had been he himself who had started the whole affair. Finding himself without the expected reinforcements, and his support melting away, the mayor had to give in and allow Luke Short to ply his trade unmolested. Later Short moved on to Texas, but the bad feeling he had left behind continued to ferment.

Into this cauldron had already entered our hero, who had worked on the side of the mayor, and who also owned a saloon, which Webster allowed circumvent the music law. Nixon mustered a vigilante group to hassle Short and other saloon owners and drive them out of town. He ended up going head to head with the Assistant Marshal, the oddly-named “Mysterious Dave” Mather, who, you guessed it, opened his own saloon which was banned on the basis of his intending to make it into a dance hall. When ordinance left only Nixon’s saloon untouched, a bitter feud raged between the two men, exacerbated when the city replaced Mather with Nixon as the Assistant Marshal. Nixon was now authorised to collect “licence fees” (read, I think, protection money) from saloons, gambling dens, brothels and even pimps.

When Nixon shot at Mather one night, “Mysterious Dave” lived up to his name, and mysteriously did not return fire, even though he had been wounded. The mystery was solved three nights later when Mather shot Nixon from behind, killing him. More mysteriously still, Mather was acquitted on the somewhat ludicrous grounds of self-defence!

[Trollheart]

John M. Larn (1849 - ?)

A salutary tale showing why a good vigilante does not make a good sheriff, Larn was elected to the post in Fort Griffin, Texas, in 1876, and immediately set about abusing the trust of the people of the town in him. Looking back over his career to that date, it’s obvious why he was never going to be a good upholder of the law, as he was mostly on the wrong side of it prior to this. When his boss, a rancher in Colorado, accused him of stealing one of his horses in 1869 he shot the man and fled to New Mexico, where, believing the man was after him, he shot and killed a sheriff. While working for another rancher, Bill Hays, on a cattle drive back to his old stomping grounds in Colorado in 1871, he shot and killed three more men, two of them Mexicans.

By now he was established in Fort Griffin and considered a pillar of the community, having married one of the local powerful family’s daughters, and then he got involved with the vigilante group The Tin Hat Brigade (sounds like someone who believes the CIA are monitoring our communications and aliens are trying to infiltrate our brains, doesn’t it?) and turned on his old boss, leading a posse against Hays on a charge of cattle rustling (true or not, I don’t know) iand, nstead of bringing them in, killed every last one of them. Notwithstanding this - or who knows, maybe due to it - he was made sheriff three years later, and entered into a contract with the local garrison to supply them with cattle.

However he decided the least expensive way to fulfill this contract was to take cattle from the herds of other ranchers, and so became a cattle rustler, something of which he had been privately suspected prior even to pinning on the tin star. He would not wear it long though, and whether due to pressure from the town or in order to concentrate fully on cattle rustling, he resigned the next year and with his ex-deputy went fulltime into the business of raiding herds. He continued to supply the fort, and stepped up his tactics of intimidation, waylaying ranchers and cattle men, shooting at their houses and shooting their horses, and generally prosecuting a reign of terror across the territory. Showing how little the authorities knew or cared about his extracurricular activities, he and Selman were made hide inspectors of Shackelford County, which gave them easy access to cattle - foxes in charge of the henhouse, indeed.

His crimes eventually came to light and he was arrested, though later released, but when he shot and wounded a rancher a warrant was issued for his arrest. Shackled to the floor of the cell to deter any attempts by his supporters to free him, it was in fact his old friends the Tin Hats who stormed the jail, not to set him at liberty but to hang him. As the chains made that impossible, they opted for shooting him instead.

Edward “Ned” Bushyhead (1832 - 1907 )

A Cherokee miner, Ned was seven years old when his family joined the infamous “Trail of Tears” as the Native Americans were forcibly resettled as the West began to open up to the white man. They ended up in Oklahoma, where Ned took a job as apprentice on the local newspaper, The Cherokee Messenger, later moving to Arkansas where he worked as a printer. In 1850 he and his brother heard the call of gold and headed to California, but three years later Ned was running his own newspaper in San Diego. He became a fixture there, well respected, and after selling his interest in the paper he became deputy sheriff in 1875 and sheriff in 1882, a post he would hold for two terms.

In 1899, on the very cusp of the new century, he became Chief of Police, and remained in that post until four years before his death in 1907. He was described as intrepid, brave, courteous, patient and sagacious, all qualities very much required in any good lawman.

Fred Dodge (1854 - 1938)

A man with an appropriate name for an undercover detective, Dodge worked for the Wells Fargo Company in such places as California, Arizona and Nevada. It was in fact while working in Tombstone that he recommended the services be sought of Wyatt Earp to guard the stage line. He became friends with Earp and stood with him and his brothers against the Clantons and was later himself elected constable of Tombstone, while still working undercover for Wells Fargo. He helped US Deputy Marshal Heck Thomas track down the famous Doolin-Dalton Gang. In 1906 he moved with his family to Texas, where he bought a ranch and to which he retired.

George Maledon (1830 - 1911)

Perhaps not strictly a lawman, it can’t be denied though that the end of many a convicted criminal ended with the hangman, and Maledon, with a name like some sort of devil out of Goethe or something, was acknowledged as one of the best. As in the case of every practitioner of the deadly art, no real blame can be attached to Maledon, as he merely carried out the lawful orders of his master, Judge Isaac Parker, the so-called Hanging Judge of Arkansas, whose motto was “permit no innocent man to be punished, but let no guilty man escape” and “Do equal and exact justice”. Of German descent, Maledon came to America with his family when still a child, and they settled in Detroit, Michigan. He moved to Arkansas as a young man, enlisting in the military when the Civil War broke out, having previously been a police officer there.

He cut far from the imposing figure you might associate with a hangman: short, with a little beard, dressed in black and very quietly spoken, not really the kind of person you would tremble before (for his own sake) on your way to the gallows. But soon after the war ended and he returned to Fort Smith, he was appointed as “deputy with special charge of the execution of condemned prisoners”, in other words, the prison hangman. What surprises me is that, unlike later English hangmen such as Albert Pierrepoint and John Ellis, Maledon does not seem to have received any sort of basic training, needed no qualifications and was in no way any different to other turnkeys in the prison, so why he was chosen as the hangman is a mystery to me, particularly given his diminutive stature (five feet five inches). Maybe nobody else wanted the post, and because he was said to be a mild-mannered and quiet man, the authorities didn’t expect any resistance from him?

At any rate, he soon became known as “the Prince of Hangmen” and this being a time when hangings were a public spectacle, his fame spread as more and more people attended the hangings at which he officiated. At one point, in September of 1875, he hanged six men at once, before a crowd of almost five thousand fascinated onlookers. The men had of course been condemned by Judge Parker, this event earning him his epithet, and bringing his court the unofficial title of “Court of the Damned”. I’m sure they didn’t, but someone could apparently just as easily have hung a sign over the door to the court reading “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” There certainly seemed to be no hope for anyone who went into Parker’s court, as any man found guilty ended up dancing his last dance in air.

Though Maledon was famous, he was really more infamous, and people shunned him, as they would mostly with hangmen down the centuries, association with them being seen as an omen of bad luck, the stink of death believed to cling to them, and perhaps some of the blame for the deaths of the criminals too, as it had been he who had launched them into the afterlife, even if the decision was most decidedly not his and he was merely a tool of the justice system. If he had not done it, someone else would have.

In 1878, though hanging was very much still legal, and would remain so well into the next century, it became more a private affair, by invitation only, and a large fence was constructed around the gallows. Spectators were now limited to about fifty, usually the relatives and friends of those the criminal had killed, maybe his own family, officers of the court, dignitaries from the state and so on. Though dedicated to his art, Maledon did evince human feeling when he refused to execute his friend, US Deputy Marshal Sheppard Busby, who was accused and found guilty of shooting another marshal whom he had tried to arrest. Quite why this should be seen as a hanging offence, when it seems clear Busby was only carrying out his duty, I don’t know, but he was sentenced to swing (maybe just unlucky that the Hanging Judge was in town) and Maledon would not drop him. It’s not as if it saved the marshal’s life: Maledon was just replaced for the hanging by another man.

After giving twenty years of his life to the prosecution of state killing, Maledon retired in 1894, but he was not to have a quiet retirement. His daughter, having fallen in with a thief and cheat who turned out to be already married, was shot by the man, Frank Carver, and killed. Though Judge Parker passed the sentence of death upon him, by now the appeal process was in force and Carver’s lawyer successfully argued the death penalty down to life imprisonment. As a man who had meted out final justice to what he surely believed to be deserving men, the overturning of the judge’s verdict sickened Maledon, who believed the system was going soft on criminals. He took to the road with a sort of carnival of the dead, displaying his hangman paraphernalia, telling stories of those he had hanged and showing their pictures.

If, for most of his life, Maledon was a quiet, reserved and mostly unremarkable man, he died as he had lived really. He became seriously ill as he entered his mid-seventies and moved into an old soldiers’ home in 1905, where he died six years later, in 1911.

Thomas “Bear River” Smith (1840 - 1870)

Whereas I remarked earlier that the idea of a man chosen to be sheriff casting his badge down in the dust, for it to be left there until some stranger riding into town picked it up seemed to me to be nothing but Hollywood hokum, it appears I don’t know shit, which will come as no surprise to most of you. How come I don’t know shit? Well, because it happened, that’s why, at least once, in the rough and dangerous Texas “cowtown” of Abilene. What was a cowtown? One of the stops along the way for the great cattle drives that took place every summer as ranchers drove or paid for their herds to be driven up north to be sold in the cattle markets. Small towns, dependent on the passing trade from cowboys (literally, the guys who herded the steers and bulls were called cowboys, and that’s where the name came from) and their trail bosses, hosted these cattle parties as the drovers passed through on their way north, availing themselves of gambling dens, brothels, saloons and dance halls. Things could, and did, get mighty rowdy when the boys were back in town (sorry), and it would be a brave or foolhardy man who would stand up to them and try to instigate, never you mind keep law and order there.

Such a man was Thomas “Bear River” Smith, one of the few who would take the job (another famous marshal having looked into it and said no thanks, heading out on the next train anywhere) and he would pay for it with his life. A professional boxer in his youth, Smith had served in the police force in New York but had to retire when he accidentally shot a fourteen-year-old boy, and took up a post with the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868, which took him to Bear River, Wyoming (presumably from which his nickname sprang). He soon became city marshal, and had to deal with vigilantes who had hanged a member of the railroad who had killed a man. A tense confrontation ensued and the army was called in.

Smith left Wyoming and made his way down south, ending up in Abilene. He took the job as the town’s marshal, and quickly made his name known as “No gun marshal”: having banned all weapons from the town, he utilised his boxing skills to subdue lawbreakers with his fists, but his edict of banning guns was unpopular in the rowdy town, where cowboys liked to ride around shooting off their pistols, settling disputes with hot lead, and generally raising hell. He survived two attempts on his life, but when he went to arrest a local man for having killed a farmer, he was ambushed and shot. His cowardly deputy fled, instead of standing to help him fight off two men. Unfazed, Smith returned fire, but the lawbreaker’s partner grabbed an axe and buried it in Smith’s head. He had lasted less than a year in the job, and would be succeeded by a real legend of the West, Wild Bill Hickok.

No less a personality than President Eisenhower himself later paid Smith homage, saying

“According to the legends of my hometown, he was anything but dull. While he almost never carried a pistol he…subdued the lawless by the force of his personality and his tremendous capability as an athlete. One blow of his fist was apparently enough to knock out the ordinary ‘tough’ cowboy. He was murdered by treachery.”

[Trollheart]

Cowboys and Angels: Bringing the Word to God’s Country

In Ireland it was once said, and quite truly, that even the smallest villages whose population numbered in the tens would always have two things: at least one pub, and a church. And so it was in the West too. While men and women - though mostly men - wanted saloons and whorehouses and gambling dens to allow them to blow off steam after a hard ride across the range, or day in the mines, or chasing bad guys in a posse, or even just serving customers in the general store, they also needed to be close to their god. I heard somewhere, I can’t recall where, recently, the phrase “Saturday’s for drinkin’ and fightin’, Sunday’s for repentin’!” And that’s very apt. For men, certainly - very few women would be drinkin’ and fightin’ - the idea of expiating their sins on a Sunday appealed; to many, it was essential. The biggest, baddest, meanest hombre in a cowtown would still believe himself a child of God, and want to beg forgiveness for all the trouble he had caused. Faith was one exceptionally strong thread running through, and binding together the tapestry of the lives of the folk who moved out into the West.

But a church without a preacher is just an empty building, the same as a saloon without a barkeep, so men had to be sent out to take control and ownership of these places of worship - in some cases, even build them or have them built - and tend to the souls of their flock where they were in the greatest need. No matter that I’m not a believer and have no time for priests, I can recognise the incredible bravery and fortitude of these men, sent forth by their bishop or church to act as shepherd to the lambs who had headed out into the vast unknown. Those pioneering families who had chosen to leave the towns of the east and head in the opposite direction had done so with the intention of starting up a whole new life, and the husband at least would have been armed for the journey. While a priest might certainly have carried a gun, or more likely travelled with a party who were armed, his magical cloak of protection, which constrained folks to treat him with honour, respect and even fear in the civilised towns, would be of little use to him out on the range.

Bandits who attacked the wagon train might, possibly, baulk at hurting a preacher; indeed, his very presence might deter them from attacking at all. Not always of course; many desperadoes had as much respect for God’s ministers as they had for the local sheriff or a rattler, but some would defer to his authority, perhaps in their ignorance feeling that they would actually be offending the Big Man himself were they to go after his preacher. But there was one group who were more likely to prey on the settlers, and they would have no respect for, nor fear of the man in black. Indians, to whom this man would be a natural enemy, mocking their sacred rituals and denying their gods, trying to convert them to his ways, would hate and loathe preachers, or else would see them as no different from any other invader. Threatened with the wrath of God if they were to touch him, they would most probably laugh, assuming they could understand him, which they probably could not: their gods were more mighty and powerful than the man on the cross whom this man wore around his neck for protection, and his admonitions would mean nothing to them.

Unlike the early disciples of Christ, it’s doubtful the preachers of the Old West were in any great hurry to martyr themselves, and so if they were taken prisoner and tortured, while their faith may have sustained them for a time, they might certainly have cause to regret having travelled to the frontier. Amongst the savages, they could expect no better treatment than any other prisoner, and might indeed fare worse, their very presence seen as an insult to the native gods. As well as this, they would not on the whole have been fighting men. It’s a rare thing when a priest has to break up a fistfight or draw his gun (if he has one) and back home, just about everyone gave way when the man in black appeared, or else ignored him. It would be a brave man indeed who would lay hands on a preacher, an action which would most assuredly have him watching the world through a grille of iron bars for at least a day.

But out here, the priest was on his own. Well of course he would say he was not: everywhere he went, God went with him. But God could not pull a Colt 45 on assailants or cut the rope that tied the preacher to a stake as Indians danced around it, or stop his horse if it bolted after being spooked by bandits. Sure, if he wanted to believe God was with him, then technically he was not alone. But in reality, he was. He might have a wife, he might have children, but they all depended on and looked to him for their comfort and safety, and he would have nobody to speak for him. In time, yes, he would be welcomed by the community and become a valuable and respected member of it, but first he would have to earn that place, and while in general a preacher was welcomed, in some of the more lawless and dangerous towns, he would be about as welcome as a skunk in an outhouse.

Now here I think we need to make a distinction between two types of religious figures. While preachers generally stuck to their own people, tended to their flock or at least attempted to bring others of their own race over to their side from whatever heretical faith (Calvinism, Catholicism, Anglicanism etc) they held, missionaries were the type of people who couldn’t or refused to keep their god to themselves, and had to go around trying to convert “savages” who had followed their own paths for thousands of years before the palefaces ever set foot on their land. Many of these were doomed to failure, and most did more harm than good. Which leads me to

My View on the Missionary Position (sorry)

Personally, while I can certainly acknowledge the bravery and dedication of men and women who went forth among the uncivilised masses to try to get them to back their horse rather than the one they were betting on, to vote for God V2.0 as it were, the new improved deity that everyone who was anyone was worshipping, I have never had time for missionaries. I don’t see the point in anyone trying to force their philosophy, much less their religion on someone who hasn’t asked for it. At a very basic level, it’s rude and it’s also arrogant. Why do these people think they’re better than these people they call heathen? What gives them - us - the right to say to another race “Nah mate, yer doing it all wrong. Let me help you. Here’s a god you can really get behind. I promise, son, stick with me and I’ll see you right.”

Isn’t it strange that when white men visited any Indian tribe those tribes almost never tried to convert the white men to their religion? What stories or accounts exist of say a Sioux or Blackfoot or, hell, Seminole chief saying “Look, white brother, you got to worship the Great Spirit otherwise we no do business”? Never ever happened, did it? Because Indians and other so-called “savage” peoples didn’t want white interlopers getting, to somewhat use the language of the street, all up in their shit. They didn’t want the whites worshipping their gods, they didn’t proclaim they were the only gods you could worship; they just said, tell you what, brother: you keep your gods and we’ll keep ours, is that a deal?

But it wasn’t a deal. For reasons that can only be traced to incredible arrogance and a sense of superiority and disdain, white men wanted - and still mostly want - everyone to kneel down at the altar of the Christian god. And even that wasn’t enough, as we’ll see further on: it had to be the right Christian god. If you were a Protestant, forget that stupid papist Catholic god, he’s shit. Worship our good Protestant god and you’ll be in clover. And of course, behind the encouragement, the carrot so to speak lurked the stick. Reject our god (our good Protestant/Catholic/Presbyterian/insert stupid religious faction here god) and, well, we can’t be held responsible for what happens to you. Almost a kind of religious protection racket: nice god(s) you got there. Be a real pity if you kept worshipping them. Yeah. Anything could happen. Oh sorry! Was that one of your sacred relics? How clumsy of me!

Of course, it wasn’t quite that, as these tribes for the most part weren’t meek and mild, and often laughed at, derided or sometimes plain ignored the missionaries. That’s when they pointedly didn’t ignore them, and some proud clan mother might have a new skull cup to drink out of. The point being that while the Native Americans might, and almost certainly would, have been happy to have shared the country with this new god, either welcomed him as one of the lads, or just put him in a corner, over there somewhere, don’t bother us, just keep it buttoned, the reverse was definitely not true of us. We wanted one god, and it had to be our god.

And if they didn’t play ball, things were going to get very nasty.

But before we start looking into these busybod - I mean, brave and pious missionaries, let’s check out the kind of men who stayed on their side of the fence, so to speak, but were no less brave for all that.

Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show: Keeping the Faith with Circuit Preachers

Just like judges in the Old West, preachers were constantly on the move, going from town to town dispensing the word of the Lord to people hungry for salvation as effectively as His Honour would dole out justice to the deserving. And just like trials and disputes would wait for the arrival of the Circuit Judge, so too would weddings, baptisms but obviously not funerals be timed to coincide with the arrival of the preacher. In the early days these men were real sort of gunfighters of the church, (so shows, once again, what I know when I said men of the cloth never toted a shootin’ iron!) armed and usually quite young, single men, often without any religious training but plenty of fire in the belly. They would preach in houses, schools or barns, even fields, and occasionally those “dens of iniquity”, the saloon and the dance hall, would be cleansed by a fire-and-brimstone sermon - no doubt returning to their sinful ways as soon as the preacher had packed up and left town.

Though these preachers could be of any religious denomination - or none - by far the largest percentage of them, at least around Texas, were Methodist. They had plenty to rail at: out here on the frontier people took what pleasure they could, and as per usual with the church, anything that gave the slightest bit of comfort was looked down upon by God, apparently. Drinking, gambling, lying, stealing, cheating, womanising, fornication and even the taking of snuff (the devils!) were all seen as affronts to God, and preached against. This of course would have hardly made the preacher popular, but in many ways this was not his job. He didn’t particularly care if people liked him, as long as they did the right thing and followed God’s laws. Perhaps slightly comparable to a doctor who you don’t like but who makes you better as long as you follow his or her advice, although in this case it wasn’t the person’s body the preacher was attempting to save but their soul.

As per usual, too, it was sometimes do as I say, not do as I do, or to put it another way, some of these men literally did not practice what they preached. In Wilbarger County in 1899 George Morrison, a Circuit Preacher, fell in love with another woman and poisoned his wife. Whether, as he believed he would, God forgave him is unknown, but what is known is that he hung for the offence. Murder was murder, regardless of what colour coat you wore or how close you were believed, or believed yourself to be to God.

“Ain’t nothing out today but crows and Methodist preachers.” - Old West saying

Preaching was not something you got into to make money. Like the early marshals we spoke of previously, payment was poor, and preachers often relied on the time-honoured collection plate to raise any sort of money on which to live. People were generally as generous as they could afford to be, but most of them having left everything behind to come to the West and yet to make their fortune, there was seldom much to go around. Most preachers died an early death, few making it into their thirties. Perhaps they received their reward in Heaven? Perhaps not.

[Trollheart]

One thing that sometimes drove preachers of the Methodist or other Protestant persuasion west was the increasing influence of Catholicism with the influx of Irish and Italian immigrants to America. Feeling somewhat marginalised in the bigger cities of the east, many preachers decided there were “better souls to save” out there in the wilderness, God’s own country, and headed west either alone or with their families. One such was Joseph Powell, who came to Ohio with the image of Welsh Calvinists working in Jackson, Ohio smelting iron for the railroad. A native of the land of the dragon himself, Joseph believed these men would benefit from his preaching, but he ran almost headlong into a feud which was boiling towards a conflict that would spread out across the country and divide the newborn land in two, raging for six years.

Ohio borders Kentucky, one of the then-slave states, and escapees were constantly crossing over into the free state, on the run from their masters, who had not always as easy a time retrieving their absconded “property” as they might have wished. A cadre of white abolitionists had arisen in Ohio, and they faced down any slaveowner who tried to recapture escaped slaves, often leading to bloody clashes between both.

Circuit preachers also acted as a kind of messenger or news service, carrying information on births, deaths, accidents and diseases, and every other sort of titbit of reliable intelligence they could impart to the townsfolk, who had few other ways of knowing what was going on in the next town, never mind the rest of the territory. Sometimes he would carry copies of - by now well out of date - newspapers, and hand them out, and offer advice, perhaps also books for the edification of those who could read, and afford them. He would be given shelter by families, fed by them and would in return preach the word of God to them, offering them the biggest and best bargain he had in his saddlebags: absolution from their sins and acceptance into the good graces of the Lord - as long as they repented, of course.

Rev. Ralph J. Hall (1891 - 1973)

A genuine Texas-born cowboy, Hall had a different approach than most ministers arriving in a new town. Aware that his appearance was likely to annoy and rile the cowboys rather than placate their souls, he kept his religious affiliations hidden, introducing himself merely as a cowboy, and earning his spurs, so to speak, by taming wild horses, roping steers, drinking and all the other things cowboys do. By the time he began to speak about God and his ministry, the men had got to know and respect him so much that they listened to what he said without discounting it right away, and so he converted, or ministered, by stealth. Many of his contemporaries back home, thinking “I’ll try that” tagged along with him on his next visit, and were quickly disillusioned about the believed romantic and glamorous life of a cowboy. As they examined their rope-burned hands through which many a steer had pulled the harsh cord, or sat with aching backs or arms tired from herding cattle, they definitely had second thoughts, and a lot more regard for the man who had brought them there, and with whom they had ridden along, a man to whom such harsh and long work days were the norm. Clearly, not everyone could pull this off.

Francis Asbury (1745 - 1816)

One of the first circuit riders in the United States, a sort of holdover from the original missions, most of whom legged it when the colony went to war against Britain, Asbury was born in the West Midlands, but moved to America - then still a colony - when he was twenty-two, and gave his first sermon at Staten Island. He worked as a circuit rider on behalf of the Methodist missions, continuing the work he had begun back home in England and assisting John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. When war broke out eight years later, only he and one other minister remained in America. His job was not easy, and he walked a religious and political tightrope as things shifted fundamentally in the former British colony:

“During his early years in North America, Asbury devoted his attention mainly to followers living on the eastern shore between the Delaware River and the Chesapeake Bay. Bishop Asbury was a good friend of the Melsons and was their guest many times on his rounds. When the American revolution severed the traditional ties between the American Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain, Bishop Asbury, in the interest of his religious tenets and principles and in an attempt to remain aloof from the political and military fervor that swept the country, announced he would, to keep the embryonic Methodist congregations neutral, refrain from endorsing either Great Britain or the newly formed United States of America government and urged all his followers to do the same. This request placed almost all of his followers, especially those living in Maryland, in an untenable position. The State of Maryland had enacted a law requiring all citizens to take an Oath of Allegiance to the newly formed American Congress. In addition to this, it stipulated all non-residents within its boundaries also had to take and sign an Oath of Allegiance. Those refusing were summarily incarcerated for treason. Asbury, after proclaiming his neutrality, fled to Delaware, where taking an oath of allegiance was not a requirement. His adherents in Maryland suffered the rancor of the proponents of the Oath.”

As a result of this Asbury had to emulate Irish Catholic priests during the time of Cromwell and the Reformation, and go into hiding while the war of independence raged across the continent. By 1780 though things were calming down and he was able to venture forth again, and met “Black Harry” Hosier, a freed black man who would become a famous preacher in his own right, and the first African American to preach directly to a white audience. Hosier was able to memorise entire passages of the Bible despite being illiterate, and he became Asbury’s driver and guide. In 1784 Asbury and Henry Coke were given the responsibility by Wesley of leading all the Methodists in America, work Asbury engaged in for a further thirty-two years, up to his death.

Asbury preached anywhere and everywhere he could: courthouses, public houses, tobacco houses, fields, public squares, and rode approximately 6,000 miles every year - that’s almost twice the entire distance from eastern seaboard to west coast - but you can’t keep that kind of pace up forever, and in 1814 he began to sicken, and so took two years off from preaching. He returned to give a sermon on March 24 1816, but it would be his last, and he died the following week, having increased the new Methodist Church membership from a mere 1200 to over 214,000 during his lifetime.

He had been, according to all sources, a powerful speaker and a dazzling preacher. One of his biographers noted raptly “If to speak with authority as the accredited messenger of God; to have credentials which bear the seal of heaven … if when he lifted the trumpet to his lips the Almighty blew the blast; if to be conscious of an ever-present sense of God, God the Summoner, God the Anointing One, God the Judge, and to project it into speech which would make his hearers tremble, melt them with terror, and cause them to fall as dead men; if to be and do all this would entitle a man to be called a great preacher, then Asbury was a great preacher.” Not in any way a vain man, he apparently hated publicity - other than for his church - and was not sold on the idea of personal popularity either, believing the message was its own reward. He suffered from bouts of depression and could be very sarcastic and cutting, even in his prayers.

“Lord, we are in thy hands and in thy work. Thou knowest what is best of us and for thy work; whether plenty or poverty. The hearts of all men are in thy hands. If it is best for us and for thy church that we should be cramped and straitened, let the people’s hands and hearts be closed: If it is better for us; for the church,—and more to thy glory that we should abound in the comforts of life; do thou dispose the hearts of those we serve to give accordingly: and may we learn to be content whether we abound, or suffer need”.

He rose at five every morning to read the Bible, and did not suffer fools gladly. He came to America with a heavy heart, leaving his beloved England behind, but said that the call of God could not be ignored. The many things and places named in his honour are too numerous to note, but as you might already have guessed, the town of Asbury, New Jersey, was named after him, as was the park made famous by Bruce Springsteen on his debut album.

[Trollheart]

Spreadin’ the Disease: If You Build It, They Will Come

While itinerant preachers arriving in town on horseback and preaching in fields or schools was all well and good, and possibly all the community could hope for at the time, the main aim of the church has always been to, rather like a foreign military power in a hostile land, establish a permanent presence, and it traditionally has managed that through the building of churches. Once a church existed, there was a physical reminder of God’s presence, and of the power and authority of the Church (with a capital C); like a stern parent overlooking the town, frowning down on the saloons and whorehouses, the church would be a moderating influence on the townsfolk, a warning that the punishment of perdition was always just waiting for those who slipped into Satan’s unholy grasp, and that if the good citizens believed they had been tempted, or had succumbed to temptation by the evil one, there was only one place they were going to be safe, so they had better get down to the church double quick.

It stands to reason that the building of a church in a town or village also heightened its social status; a town with a church was a God-fearing town and didn’t mind showing it, was proud to, in fact, and its inhabitants might look down on other towns not so similarly blessed. It also did away, of course, mostly with the need for travelling preachers, as a house could be built beside the church in which the preacher could stay, where he could live, and he would hold all his sermons, masses and celebrations in the newly-built church. It’s possibly likely too that the building of a church by one denomination - let’s say the Methodists, as they have been cited as being the busiest of them in this period - might dissuade or at least demoralise those of another, let’s say maybe Mormons, who had planned to erect their own. The Methodist church might silently say “this is a Methodist town, move on, boy. Nothing for you here” to visiting preachers of other religions. Of course, conversely, it might have the opposite effect, and lead to determination by that other faction to build their church.

Whichever, it meant that churches began to pop up all over the frontier, as the power of God was demonstrated physically. Between 1887 and 1913 Methodist ministers built over 1,500 churches in rural America, nevertheless circuit preachers, now rebranded as mobile ministries and driving cars instead of riding horses, survived well into the 1950s, as preachers brought the comfort and absolution of God to those who could not get to church: the sick, the old, the weak and the disabled.

Hassling the Heathen: Missionaries in the Old West

But of course the problem with America was that there were those who just didn’t want a church - of any denomination - unless it was built to worship the Great Spirit, and even he wasn’t too fussed. Mountains, rivers, valleys, fields and plains were good enough for him; no need for some ugly squat building with a spire reaching up like a accusing finger to the heavens. Yep, the vast majority of the American West was inhabited by what white settlers - especially Christian ones - would refer to as “the heathen” or “savages”, quite more often simply, and inaccurately, as “Indians”.

And these guys needed to be converted. They just didn’t realise it.

The boys to take on this job were an entirely different class to your itinerant wandering circuit preachers, or even your by-now-settled ones. The former had no real need to convert anyone; they filled a requirement for the people. The good folk needed a preacher, here was one, and each was happy with the bargain. But the heathen? They didn’t want, or feel they needed God, and certainly had no time for His interfering messengers and errand boys, which made the mission of these men (and some women, as we will see) that much harder.

See, a missionary is called that for a reason. He - or she - sees saving souls as a mission, and a sacred duty that has been entrusted to them. They don’t really take no for an answer, and with the already long established religions of the American West firmly entrenched in the peoples of the plains, their job was not going to be that easy.

But then, nobody became a missionary because it was a doddle, did they? It took special men and special women to face down an Indian tribe and tell them outright their gods were a load of Tottenham, a steaming pile of hotspur, and they should get with the programme and come over to the winning side. Men and women like these.

Pierre-Jean de Smet (1801 - 1873)

A man who would be instrumental in brokering peace treaties among warring factions, and who would step in to negotiate on behalf of the Native American tribes, particularly the Sioux, De Smet was born in Belgium and came as a missionary to the USA when he was twenty years old, with the idea of converting the natives. After six years he was ordained as a priest and founded religious academic institutions, such as seminaries, in Missouri, but in 1833 he had to return to Belgium due to poor health, and would not return to the United States until 1837. When he returned he settled in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which you may remember would become one of the main points along the transcontinental railroad, thirty years later. Seeing the danger the trade in whiskey with the Native Americans was wreaking, he set out to stop it and also helped map the upper Missouri River.

After certain tribes learned of Christianity, believing that the Christian God had the power to save their sick and dying children, they sent delegations to St. Louis requesting visitations from priests, or as they called them, rather appropriately, “black robes”. For whatever reason, the first two requests were ignored, and the third delegation ran into the Sioux, their mortal enemy, who slaughtered them. Fourth time lucky, thought the indomitable Indians, and this time their party not only reached St. Louis alive, but managed to convince the bishop to send priests, who then met up with De Smet in Council Bluffs. Having obtained permission from the bishop to make this a missionary, he baptised over three hundred people. No records exist to tell whether or not he cured any sick children. Two years later he was back, and this time they founded the St. Mary Mission in Bitterroot Valley.

Having convinced more tribes to convert and invited them to his mission, he sent back word to St. Louis that supplies and housing were needed to stop these peoples from having to be wandering nomads, a state in which it made it tough to civilise them. Cattle, the tools needed to farm the land, seed and the necessity to gather them together in villages were all, he said, vital. Perhaps he hadn’t heard that the US Government was already forcibly relocating thousands of Indians in hundreds of tribes to make way for their own white asses?

Not just a preacher but a true adventurer, De Smet then headed to the Rockies where he travelled extensively, meeting tribes such as the Cree, Chippawa and Blackfoot, crossing into Canada and returning in 1845 to Fort Edmonton, where he spent the winter. The next year he established missions in Montana and Idaho, ending up at Fort Vancouver, having covered over a thousand miles. Despite all these amazing achievements though, he is best remembered for being the first white man to successfully treat with the great Sioux war chief Sitting Bull, who had previously vowed to kill any white man coming into their territory. He so impressed the great chief that Sitting Bull was convinced to send a delegation to talk to the US peace commissioners, which led to the signing of the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868.

This was to be one of his last triumphs though, as he died in St. Louis in 1873. Almost a hundred years later, he had the honour of being one of the few preachers to be inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. He had streets, a school, mountain range and a lake named after him, and in South Dakota, his name was on the city and county seat of the birthplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who would go on to become famous through her Little House books, which would be later televised and loved as the series Little House on the Prairie.

Henry Spalding (1803 - 1874)

Now there’s a man who looks like a preacher! You can almost see the brimstone sparking behind his eyes, can’t you, and that impressive beard, which might have made ZZ Top envious, would have added to his dramatic, almost dreaded aspect. I can just see him standing there holding court from his pulpit, thumping the bible and warning all of his congregation that they were going to Hell! Never quite got that: why go see someone rant on about how damned you were, how you had no chance and were going to burn in an eternal fire? Kind of ruins the atmos, doesn’t it? But that’s religion for you I guess.

Spalding was a Presbyterian minister, who worked, along with his wife Eliza, among the Nez Perce peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Spalding was a native New Yorker, and met his wife through a pen pals arrangement (ask yer da) before meeting her in person, with marriage quickly following as they realised they were both zealous about bringing religion to the heathen. Oddly, for such on the face of it sanctimonious people, Eliza was the daughter of cousins - her mother and father were first cousins - which seems a little, I don’t know, unconventional for a man of the cloth to accept? But as I’ve said before, and will say again, what do I know? Times were different I guess, and maybe that sort of thing went on all the time.

In those days, it seems if you wanted to civilise someone you had to go through some red tape, and the holders of that red tape was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which seems something of an unnecessary mouthful, but again, WDIK? Applying, the Spaldings were assigned to the Osage tribe in Missouri, but on meeting Narcissa (seriously, now!) Prentiss (ah come on!) Whitman and her husband Henry, they decided to go instead to what was then known as the Oregon Country, basically the same area wherein operated Pierre-Jean De Smet. These people were so devout that they even changed steamships in order not to have to travel on the Sabbath! Ah yeah, I’ve done the same thing myself hundreds of times. Not.

They travelled through much of the same region which De Smet would later explore, he remarking some years later that the Presbyterian way of preaching had not been altogether successful and made the Nez Perce wary of preachers, though that could of course have been merely his view of an opposing religion. Having travelled part of the way with traders from the Rocky Mountain Fur Company for protection, the Spaldings and the Whitmans split up, the former going on to Idaho while the Whitmans headed off to try their luck in Washington. This would turn out to be a very bad move for them, as we will see in the next section. But back to the Spaldings. Settled in Idaho, and making history as the first whites to live there, they introduced the first ever printing press into the state, and despite the grumblings of De Smet later, Henry seems to have got on very well with the Nez Perce, converting and baptising many of their leaders, and even translating parts of the Bible into their own language.

Ah. No. I see. He wasn’t actually that well liked, as he was, being a strict Presbyterian and all, down on liquor, gambling and other fun activities the Nez Perce, being human, enjoyed, and in fact they quite disliked and even ridiculed him. They surely disliked him mightily when he whipped them or (it says here) instructed them to whip each other for having broken God’s laws. But his often brutal treatment of them was ameliorated by his wife, whom the Nez Perce loved, especially the women, who thought her very brave and strove to emulate her example. Henry’s inflexible attitude towards his, um, flock, led to the American Board dismissing him in 1842. Not that he took a blind bit of notice, just continued doing what he was doing until, maybe with a sense of fatalism, realising there wasn’t really any way they could stop him, him being out in the wilderness with savages and all, they shrugged and rescinded their decision.

When they learned of the massacre of their friends the Whitmans (see further) the Spaldings, thankful that their daughter, who had been staying at the mission, had survived, holed up at Fort Walla Walla (shut up, I’m serious) and, I guess to his credit despite what I said about him above, Henry petitioned the bishop to convince the army not to step in, as it was believed further Indian uprisings and attacks were expected. Oh but again, I should read all the way ahead before writing, as it seems once they reached safety Henry’s attitude changed and he advocated for reprisals. So, just looking after his own skin then. Anyway, the Board decided the last thing they wanted was to get involved in a Pacific Northwest war with Indians - Indians whom, after all, they had gone there to convert, and I don’t mean into piles of bones - and got the fuck out of there, ceasing all missions in the area.

Safe now in Oregon, and fuming that all his work was to go for nothing, Spalding decided to do what every good Protestant has done since Martin Luther nailed his Grievances to the cathedral door: he blamed the Catholics. Well, it made sense, didn’t it? Didn’t it? Of course it did. In a nineteenth-century version of the “stab in the back theory” that galvanised support for World War II and brought Hitler to power, Spalding decided that the bishop who had advised halting all missions in the area - and who was of course a Catholic - had somehow orchestrated the massacre of the Whitmans and their mission for reasons. I mean, come on! But though the bishop is reported to have thought him “most ungrateful”, Spalding does not seem to have been censured or punished in any way for spreading his lies. How Trumpian, eh? Instead he settled in Oregon and became pastor of the Congregational Church, while his wife took a post as a teacher. She died in 1871 and Henry was married again in 1873, taking the sister-in-law of another preacher whom we’ll be looking at too, John Smith Griffin.

Six years later he was back with the Nez Perce, though his mission seems to have only lasted less than a year, and once again he had Catholics in his sights, so much so that he travelled on the new transcontinental railroad back to the Big Apple and on to Washington where he testified before Congress as to the role they and the federal government had played - supposedly - in his failure. He died three years later, having founded a federally funded school for Indians and continued his missionary work in Idaho and Washington up almost to his death.

[Trollheart]

Narcissa Prentiss Whitman (1808 - 1847) and Henry Whitman (1802 - 1847)

As we’ve seen in the account above, husband and wife joined up with Henry and Eliza Spalding to attempt to convert the Nez Perce Indians of the Pacific Northwest, but at one point in the mission their paths diverged from those of the Spaldings, as they headed for Washington with their friends going towards Idaho. This was the beginning of the end for the young couple, but where did it all begin? Like Spalding, Narcissa Prentiss was born in New York and at the age of twenty-eight decided she wanted to be a missionary. She was married the next year (1836) to Marcus Whitman, taking his name and also keeping her own, which I think may have been somewhat atypical for the time and may have shown her to be rather independent, though I doubt she was any sort of feminist. Marcus had wanted to be a minister but was unable to afford the school fees. He trained as a doctor but felt the pull of the west, as did his new wife. Marcus had already answered this call in 1835, travelling with fellow missionary Samuel Parker to northern Idaho and northwestern Montana where he ministered to the Nez Perce Indians.

The done thing seems to have been to have got married and then almost spent your honeymoon telling natives how great your god was, and why they should worship him. Worked for them anyway, and also the Spaldings, who set off on the same journey after having been only recently married too. The Whitmans, having crossed the Rockies with the Spaldings and thereby Narcissa and Eliza becoming the first two women to do so, they set up their mission in the hilariously-named Walla Walla, in Washington. Narcissa at least saw her role as not just converting the heathen, but teaching them white American values, such as chores, making candles and soap, and baking.

The typical white sense of superiority towards what were considered savage and uncivilised peoples shows in Narcissa’s letters, where she declares the natives, the Cayuse, are "so filthy they make a great deal of cleaning wherever they go … " and goes on to lament “we have come to elevate them and not to suffer ourselves to sink down to their standard.” Thanks lady: I don’t think they asked you to step in with your bloody wooden cross and your posturing and pontificating. ****ing Christians. The Whitmans further instructed the Cayuse to build a place of worship for themselves, and when the Indians wondered what was wrong with the one they had already, Narcissa muttered icily in her letters that “we could not have them worship there for they would make it so dirty and fill it so full of fleas that we could not live in it.” Charming. Segregation already in their minds: one church for us, one for those “dirty” natives. That’s how to convert them to the love of God, all right.

Samuel Parker had made promises to the Cayuse that they would be compensated for the land on which the white men built. When this payment was not forthcoming, their chief, Umtippe, made dire warnings, especially when his wife fell ill. He told Whitman “Doctor, you have come here to give us bad medicines; you come to kill us, and you steal our lands. You had promised to pay me every year, and you have given me nothing. You had better go away; if my wife dies, you shall die also.” Further tensions arose when the Catholic Church sent its representatives, including Bishop François Norbert Blanchet to compete with the Protestants for the souls of the Cayuse, and the natives, not surprisingly, played each against the other. Henry Spalding would later, as already related, blame the Catholics for the coming massacre, as well as the closure of all missions in the Pacific Northwest. No evidence exists to support or refute this, but historically the two denominations have always hated and tried to thwart each other, so I’d say it’s perhaps not outside the realm of possibility.

Tragedy struck in 1839 when Narcissa’s only child, her daughter Alice Clarissa, was drowned when she fell into a pool, but this did not stop her striking out on her own to visit other towns and settlements when her husband headed back home to gain reinforcements, but unbeknownst to him, the mission itself was on borrowed time, as were they. Like the Spaldings, Whitman believed that the alteration of the natives’ nomadic habits, and settling them in villages while teaching them European-based agriculture would make them easier to convert, or perhaps to put it more bluntly, a stationery target is easier to hit.

The Cayuse shrugged and said they didn’t see what the problem was, so to speak. They had been a nomadic people for thousands of years, and weren’t about to change now. Incensed at their stubbornness and reluctance to change, that is, to remodel their lives to shape his vision and for his convenience, Whitman raged again against the Papists: “The novelty of working for themselves and supplying their own wants seem to have passed away; while the papal teachers and other opposers of the mission appear to have succeeded in making them believe that the missionaries ought to furnish them with food and clothing and supply all their wants.” Complaints and accusations that were echoed in part across the water in England, and which led to the setting up of workhouses.

Rather oddly, it seems to me, in order to safeguard melon patches from which the Cayuse had been, cartoon-animal-like, stealing the fruits, William Gray, another pioneer who would go on to eventually more or less set up the provisional government of Oregon, had poisoned them. Just a little, not to kill but just to deter the Cayuse from taking the melons. Now, if you’re already having problems with natives and are trying to gain their trust, I don’t think poisoning their food, even a little bit, is the smartest move, especially when they’ve already accused you of bringing bad juju in the form of diseases into their community.

In 1847 an epidemic of measles swept through Washington, and the natives, having no natural immunity to the disease, died while the whites mostly survived. While Whitman and the other missionaries did what they could for them, things went from bad to worse when a half-breed Iroquois called Joe Lewis, who had recently joined the mission, spread it about that the white men were poisoning, not treating the patients. Given that they had suffered poisoning before - and deliberate poisoning too - this then was not hard for the natives to believe.

They did, and all hell was set free.

Marcus was the first to go, taking an axe in the head when he was asked for medicine and taken by surprise, then shot in the neck. As the camp erupted in violence, Cayuse swarmed all over the mission and death was everywhere. Narcissa died soon after her husband, and so ended the mission of the Whitmans to civilise the Cayuse. Soon afterwards their mission was abandoned, and shortly after that the ABCFM declared there would be no more missions authorised into the Pacific Northwest. Neither Narcissa nor Marcus would live to see the results of their interference in a culture, as the Cayuse War exploded across the area, resulting in the decimation of the tribe and leading, along with other Indian wars, to the forced resettlement of the tribes on reservations while white people took their land. I’m sure God would have been proud.

America certainly was (which might be the same thing to some people). Not only was Whitman (Marcus, that is) commemorated in the name of schools and colleges, a forest and a glacier, he has (or had, until it was removed recently in the wake of BLM protests) a statue in the Capitol and even has a day dedicated to him, September 4 being Marcus Whitman day. There is also a hotel and conference centre with his name.

Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814 - 1888)

At the extreme other end of the country, we have this guy. French born, he arrived in America in 1839, about the same time as the Whitmans and the Spaldings, but went to the mission in Cincinnati, and worked in Ohio and Kentucky until 1850, when he was appointed by the Pope as Bishop in New Mexico. This seems to have come as a surprise to him, and I can’t say why he was chosen, whether it was due to reports of his good works or whether in fact it was a poison chalice doing the rounds at the Vatican that Pius XII had to unload on someone. Either way, he arrived way down south in Sante Fe in the summer of 1851, but though the governor welcomed him, the Spanish priests already there did not. They refused to recognise his authority, and he had to go personally to their bishop to confirm the diocese was now under his control. The Spanish priests probably said something similar to “We don’ need no steenking Frenchman telling us what to do,” but had to accept his authority, as their bishop had said “sorry hombres, is how it is,” or something.

With his authority no longer in doubt - the Pope trumps any bishop you may care to name - Lamy set about reforming the New Mexico Church, building schools and making new parishes, and of course building churches. He made himself unpopular by ending the custom of concubinage, by which the local priests, forbidden to marry, could still get their end away with the local talent, and also broke up many brotherhoods, secret and exclusive religious societies. Let’s just say he wasn’t exactly Mr. Popular from the off. Nevertheless he was successful in moulding the Catholic faith in New Mexico, and he had the St. Francis Cathedral built, but he died in 1888 from pneumonia at the age of seventy-four.

Thomas Starr King (1824 - 1864)

Here’s one we haven’t come across before. Unitarians apparently believe that God is one being, not a trinity (sounds somewhat more logical than Christianity) and so while they are prepared to believe Jesus was a prophet, an emissary of God, they do not accept that he was God too. Which again I have to say makes far more logical sense, but probably made it hard for King to convince those who were not of his faith to switch. Oh, look! Unitarians also reject the idea of Original Sin and the infallibility of the Bible. I like these guys more and more. Another native of New York, King doesn’t appear to have attended any seminaries or schools, leaving his education in fact at the age of fifteen to support his family, and taught himself to be a minister.

He made his name in Boston, in the church on Hollis Street, of which he was made pastor in 1849, and also on the lyceum circuit, his speeches making him one of the most famous preachers in New England. An abolitionist and an environmentalist, he moved to San Francisco in 1850 and gave sermons on the beauty of Yosemite, for which he would lobby and eventually achieve the status of a national park. During the Civil War he was credited by Lincoln as “the man who saved the Union”, by speaking fervently and at length as to why California should not secede.

“I pitched into Secession, Concession and (John C.) Calhoun (former U.S. vice president), right and left, and made the Southerners applaud. I pledged California to a Northern Republic and to a flag that should have no treacherous threads of cotton in its warp, and the audience came down in thunder. At the close it was announced that I would repeat it the next night, and they gave me three rounds of cheers.” … King covered his pulpit with an American flag and ended all his sermons with “God bless the president of the United States and all who serve with him the cause of a common country.”

He set up the Pacific branch of the United States Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the Red Cross, which raised money for wounded soldiers, but the constant grind of the lecture circuit took a toll on his health and he died of diphtheria and pneumonia in 1864. Like other missionaries, he is commemorated in schools, parks, mountains, streets, even a giant Redwood, and he has his own statue in the Capitol, though it was replaced by Republicans in 2006 with one of Reagan. Right. Reagan. Okay.

[Trollheart]

Buffalo Gals: Women in the American West

Part I: A Man’s World: Where No Woman Had Gone Before

It took a special kind of woman to face the new frontier. Perhaps it could be said to have been at least partially responsible for a shift in attitude among women in America towards the middle of the nineteenth century. No longer would it be enough to be demure, elegant, soft-spoken and retiring, allowing men to direct every aspect of their lives. That might have worked in the big - and small - cities of the east, but out here in the West, out on the prairie or in the boom towns a woman would have to consider being able to look after herself. While she would almost certainly leave her home accompanied by a man, it was a long and dangerous journey, and there was no guarantee she would arrive at her destination with that man alive, if she reached it at all. But if she did reach it, having lost her man or men to anything from bandit raids or accidents to diseases or sunstroke or exposure, she would have nobody to fall back upon. Assuming she was not heading to already-established relatives, she would be alone and would have to carve out her own future in this brave new world. Nobody was going to help her, and if anything, any man she might encounter would be more likely to try to take advantage of her, so she would need to be able to take care of herself.

While the legend of the West does not lack entirely for female figures - who does not know Annie Oakely or Calamity Jane? - it kind of centres around those two figures, and if you ask anyone who isn’t a student of either feminism or the American West for other names, most will scratch their heads in puzzlement. I know I did. Overall, women in the West seem to traditionally fall into two broad (no pun intended) categories: gunslingers and whores or madams. But of course there were many, many brave women who accompanied their husbands out to the new frontier and made their homes there, and many who made a name for themselves, names which have been all but erased and ignored by history, as generally speaking, the Wild West was a man’s world, and its writers, to a very large degree, were and are men, and to be brutally honest, in these men’s view, women don’t belong on the range.

But belong or not, ignored or not, pushed to one side and told to hush up, they stubbornly refuse to be forgotten, and many books have been written (mostly, unsurprisingly, by women) chronicling their lives and adventures, and trying to place their contributions to the legend and history of the west into context amid all the gunsmoke, thundering of hooves and whooping of injuns. While the above two ladies certainly deserve their place in history, as do the likes of Belle Starr, Susan Anderson, Eleanor Dumont and Cathay Williams (the first African American woman to serve in the US Army), and they will be covered and given their voice in other sections, here I want to concentrate on more unsung heroes (yes, even less sung than these women, who are at least remembered slightly grudgingly, but are still remembered for all that) who have been completely excluded from the story of the west.

But as Winifred Gallagher puts it in her book New Women in the Old West: From Settlers to Suffragists - An Untold American Story, the new frontier actually, almost paradoxically, provided and opened up new opportunities for women. “Women’s status also benefited from conditions in the West’s so-called settler society, which by definition was simpler, more forward-looking, and less encumbered by tradition, precedent, and an entrenched, oppositional establishment. During the hardscrabble settlement era, as in most of America today, it took two industrious partners to support a family, which increased women’s work and its value. In agrarian areas, unmarried women had their pick of suitors among men loath to homestead without a wife to handle the house and garden and earn much-needed cash from her “home production,” whether selling eggs and bread or taking in sewing or boarders.

In mining towns, women used those same domestic skills to make what seemed like small fortunes by marketing hot meals and clean laundry to the overwhelmingly male population. Some settlers also increased women’s civic profile by moving from the private into the public sphere as the “town mothers” who organized many of the West’s first schools, churches, and charities. These homemakers and community builders could not achieve economic much less political parity with men in the patriarchal system, but their record of hard work and dedication won respect and made them a force, albeit nonelectoral, to be reckoned with.”

In fact, equality for women would come sooner in the west than back in the east, where the worth of, and reliance on women was seen to be more important than was admitted by the comfortable city gents in their furnished houses with all their modern appliances and easy lifestyle. When you’re facing a harsh winter or a bleak summer without food or provisions, it’s surely an immense comfort to have the little woman there beside you, to share your tribulations as well as your triumphs. So why should they not be able to vote? Why should they be unequal? Despite the picture drawn by our old friend Hollywood of the woman of the west being a weak, ineffectual, often hysterical female who had no real role other than to be exploited or protected, depending on your protagonist(s) and the theme of the particular movie, respect for women grew exponentially in the west, leading to states such as Wyoming (the first in the USA), Utah (though later temporarily rescinded), Colorado and Idaho passing suffrage resolutions before the century was out.

The Homesteader Act, already mentioned earlier, did not differentiate between the sexes: man or woman could own land as long as they went to the west and cultivated it, and this was a huge step forward for women, who up until the passing of this act had been unable to own property. Another major development was the Morrill Land-Grant Act, passed a month later, which set up tuition-free colleges and universities, enabling women to study for careers traditionally dominated by men - law, medicine, journalism - and allowing them for the first time to be other than mere homemakers. This sudden influx of highly-educated and capable women (who could of course be, and were, paid less than their male counterparts) also opened up lucrative opportunities for employers, who had until then had to advertise all their positions for men only, and who probably, in most cases, found the idea of women working in their establishments a more attractive prospect.

A sort of reverse backlash in the east, too, meant that women who had until now been confined to the home could seek education in these new colleges and go into waitressing, work in factories, as secretaries and many other occupations previously denied to them for lack of education. The balance of power, work-wise, began to shift dramatically as women, almost en masse, entered the workplace and threatened the dominance of the male. In some ways, these two acts of Congress could be said to have galvanised a sort of female revolution, symbolically striking from them the chains that had held them imprisoned and restricted for so long, and, to carry the analogy slightly further, releasing them into the wild.

Homesteaders, cowgirls, saloon keepers, all the women who kept the men on the straight and narrow (or failed to, or did exactly the opposite) and stood shoulder to shoulder with them against attacks and adversities. They deserve to be recognised and celebrated, and for my source on this I’m using Erin H. Turners’s Wild West Women: Fifty Lives That Shaped the Frontier. Obviously I can’t feature all of them, but I will try to give a reasonable and varied cross-section.

[Trollheart]

Clara Shortridge Foltz (1849 - 1934)

Showing her streak of independence at an early age, Clara eloped with her lover when only fifteen years old, but as their family grew he found it difficult to support them. She, for her part, was able to do so by writing articles for newspapers such as The New Northwest and the San Jose Mercury. After thirteen years her husband abandoned her, leaving her with five children to support. She did so by studying law in a local judge’s office thanks to the patronage of Sarah Knox-Goodridge, a local suffragette, and by giving lectures on suffrage. She managed to get a bill through which changed the requirement for lawyers to be white males, and so became in 1878 the first woman in California, indeed the first on the west coast, to pass the bar. However having been but poorly educated (given that she ran off to have babies at 15) she wanted to study to improve her knowledge of the law, and immediately ran into another obstacle set up by the male-dominated society.

Applying to Hastings College of Law, she was refused admission due to being a woman. With her ally, Laura deForce Gordon, she authored a bill which argued that if women could practice law (a right she herself had procured) then it made no sense for them not to be able to study it. Her bill suggested that “No person shall, on account of sex, be disqualified from entering upon or pursuing any lawful business, vocation, or profession.” At a time when women’s rights were beginning to be taken seriously, she was able to convince the judge and gain admission to the college for all women. Ironically, the long and protracted legal battle had exhausted her funds, and she was unable to attend the college herself, returning to practicing rather than studying the law. She practiced in San Diego, San Francisco and New York.

Originally a supporter (though not allowed to vote) of the Republican party, she spoke publicly for them in four elections, but switched her allegiance after 1886, lecturing now for the Democrats in Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa. She became a leading figure in the women’s voting rights movement, working with the suffrage movement for over half a century and gaining many essential rights for women. In 1893 she suggested the radical idea of a public defender, a system which is now in use across the USA and most of the world, but which then wasn’t even considered. This was certainly another first, and Foltz’s life would be characterised by pioneering attempts and ideas and firsts.

She was the first female clerk for the State Assembly’s Judiciary Committee (1880); the first woman appointed to the State Board of Corrections; the first female licensed Notary Public; the first woman named director of a major bank; and, in 1930, the first woman to run for Governor of California, at the age of 81. She also became the first woman deputy District Attorney, and authored the Women’s Vote Amendment for California in 1911. Despite her heavy workload, she never neglected those five children (she did not marry and had no more) and again, despite her prominence in the women’s suffrage movement, was keen to stress the importance of the domestic role in women’s lives.

When she passed away in 1934 from a heart attack at the age of 85, her coffin was carried by federal and state judges, as well as the Governor of Los Angeles. Although she never got to study at Hastings, under pressure from its female members the college granted her a posthumous degree in Law in 1991. In 2002, the Criminal Court in Los Angeles was renamed in her honour.

Susette La Flesche aka Inshata Theumba (1854 - 1903)

Born to the son of a French fur trader and his Ponca wife, Susette was educated at a white school in New Jersey after the Presbyterian mission school on the reservation closed. Her parents favoured assimilation with the white people, believing it held the best prospects for their children, and perhaps seeing the writing on the wall as the white man moved west. As regards education, their instincts proved right, as Susett’s sister, Susan, was to become the first ever Native American physician, while her other sister, Rosalie, became a financial manager for her tribe. Susette though was more interested in politics and so ensured she could learn the English language, which would be vital if she were to pursue such a career. Having graduated, she returned to the reservation where she wished to teach the Omaha, whose chief, Big Elk, had adopted her father as his son and where her family now lived. She ran into problems of a legal and bureaucratic nature though.

She was told by the Indian Commissioner that she could not teach on the reservation without a certificate, in order to obtain which she requested permission to leave the reservation, was refused, left anyway, and got her certificate. On her return though she was further baulked when the Commissioner said she needed also a “certificate of good moral character”. She got this from her school in New Jersey, but now the Commissioner was just simply ignoring her calls. She threatened to go to the newspapers about his intransigence and the clear impression that he simply did not want her teaching here, and he gave in, unwilling to be a part of any investigation, much less a scandal.

She travelled to Oklahoma, where her people, the Ponca, had been forcibly relocated and reported on the poor conditions of the camp, putting into action her earlier threat of using the newspapers to get her point across. Nearly one third of the tribe had already died due to the conditions and the journey to get to the reservation, and malaria was rampant while supplies were scarce, despite the government having promised to furnish them. Further, when the chief of the Omaha, Standing Bear, left the reservation for Nebraska to bury his son, who had died on the journey down, in his native land, he was arrested and put on trial. Susette interpreted for the chief, testifying as to the dismal conditions on the reservation, bringing media attention to the trial and confirming for the first time the rights of Indians as US citizens.

After he won his case, Standing Bear travelled throughout the eastern USA, accompanied by Susette as his interpreter, speaking about the rights of Native Americans. They later took their tour across the Atlantic to England and Scotland. Susette had by now married Thomas Tibbles, the editor of the Omaha Herald, who had been so instrumental in bringing the needed attention to her cause through his newspaper coverage. On their return to America, the couple wrote about the incipient Ghost Dance movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee, in which almost three hundred Lakota were slaughtered by the US Army in 1890. She also wrote and lectured about Native American women’s issues. She died in 1903, having just barely seen the new century in, and eighty years later was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame, with entry to the National Women’s Hall of Fame following in 1994.

Sarah Jane Cummins

You couldn’t call it the ideal honeymoon, could you? Picture the scene: jammed in with the rest of your family and your new husband into a ten foot by three space, jolting and banging along the dirt tracks and across onto the prairie known initially as the Great American Desert, and later renamed as the Great Plains, up the steep inclines of the Rockies and across those mountain ranges, following the trail mostly laid down by Native Americans in earlier times that led to the New Promised Land, sleeping out under the stars because there was so little room in the wagon, and when forced by bad weather to endure the cramped conditions, sharing it with tools, meat, provisions and other worldly goods which had all been piled on and packed into the wagon at the beginning of the journey, and which would not be unloaded until the destination was attained. Sunup to sundown, constantly on the move; hot, sweaty, aching in every bone, apprehensive of bandits or Indians along the way, unsure of even arriving safely, or if you did, of making a success of your new endeavour, and homesick already for the life left behind.

Such was the situation sixteen-year-old Sarah Jane Cummins found herself in when, along with her new husband of barely weeks, Benjamin Walden, she and her family set out from Missouri in search of a better life on the new frontier. Sarah found that she was forced to grow up very quickly during the journey, and traditional gender roles began to mix and turn fluid as everyone did what they could, regardless of sex, to ensure the success of the venture. Sarah had been used to travelling and moving, as her father had followed the opportunities in each territory as he saw them unfold, moving first to Ohio and then Illinois, but this was to to be the longest and most gruelling journey her father would ever take her on, lasting four months over wet, rocky, and at times arid and scorching terrain with no small amount of danger on the way. I suppose she must have thought that if she and Benjamin lasted through this ordeal, they would be together forever.

Sarah showed herself more than willing to do men’s work, as she disdained the practice of ladies riding “side saddle” and rode her horse like a man as she guided her husband’s wagon past ruts and pitfalls, also noting the vast wilderness as she rode, taking in all its rugged beauty and composing lyrical descriptions of the trail in her journal. However, as with most of the missionaries written about in the previous piece, there was no real regard for the Native Americans whom, by their incursions into what was their ancestral lands, Sarah and her family, along with all the other settlers, were displacing. Rather, she seems to have taken great umbrage - through her entry in her diary - at Cayuse and Walla Walla parties who caused “a night of terror” as they harassed the wagons trains passing through their homelands, only placated by strong coffee brewed by the invaders.

Sarah turned seventeen during the journey, and by the time they arrived in the Williamite Valley in Oregon and had staked their claim, it became clear that tough as the journey had been, the end point was not like arriving at a hotel or someone’s house where you could stay for the holidays. There was nothing at the end of this particular dusty rainbow other than the land - precious though it was, and given free of charge - and everything that they wished to create there they would have to mould with their own hands, from building a home to tilling the land and raising cattle and other livestock. This was definitely a new life that came, to use a twentieth-century expression, with some assembly required. Hard work was the order of the day, and there was no time for rest, chiefly because all that awaited them at their destination was a pretty basic shack or cabin, and it would take real effort to turn it into anything resembling a home they could live in.

I began writing this piece, learning as I went and wondering what great contribution to American history Sarah Jane Cummins made. The answer, I found out, is nothing really, but then in another way everything. She didn’t become a lawyer or a doctor (though she did dabble in real estate, something few women back east had the chance or opportunity to engage in) and she didn’t single-handedly (so far as I know) hold off any bloodthirsty bands of native savages. Her husband lasted forty-odd years with her, so she wasn’t left alone to fend for herself in the new wilderness. In many, most indeed ways she was nothing remarkable.

And yet, Sarah Jane stands as an example of the kind of eastern girl who very quickly became a western woman, adapting to her new life and the challenges of the frontier, making a home for herself and her family (she eventually had five children, though only two survived) and proving that women were more than the sum of their parts. She set, if not a trailblazing path, then at least a marker down for the women who would follow her and colonise the west, the women who would dare to dream of a better, more exciting, more profitable - both in terms of money and of personal betterment - life out beyond the fringes, over the Rockies and across the plains, and, as someone once said, into the West. Proof, indeed, that not all the women who went out to seek their fortune and make a new life were heroines, but they all had courage and determination, and sometimes that’s all you need.

[Psmith]

Very interesting.I don’t think contemporary people would be able to endure such hardships.

[Trollheart]

They were a hardy lot all right. We complain if the air conditioning is broken or if there’s too much traffic on the road. There’s no way I would have endured such a journey, and then, at the end of it, had to build my house!