Wild West - June 2016 - Ebook-dlebook-dl.com/magazine/wild-west-june-2016781.pdf · 2 WILD WEST...

THE HOWLING: WOLVES IN THE WEST

ALLEGED CRAZY HORSE IMAGES

CUSTER’s COMMANDDIVIDED THEY FELL AT LITTLE BIGHORN

THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

JUNE 2016

L e g e n d a r y N D . c o m

UNSCRIPTEDJosh Duhamel

We like to think that Lewis & Clark, along with Sakakawea, enjoyed a good laugh as much as anyone could in the winter of 1804. Rich history is just one reason why North Dakota native Josh Duhamel returns home. Visit us online to discover Josh’s favorites and start your own unscripted adventure.

40 BLACK MAN

AT THE LITTLE

BIGHORNBy Lilah Morton PengraCivilian interpreter Isaiah Dorman joined George Custer’s fated column at the colonel’s own request

46 WOLF WESTBy Dan FloresThe bold predator startled frontier travelers used to civilization—till their fear gave way to loathing

F E AT U R E S

WILD WEST J U N E 2 0 1 62

28 ‘THE MOST

HARTRENDERING

TALE’By Bruce R. LiddicSeventh U.S. Cavalry Private Thomas W. Coleman survived the Little Bighorn—as did his diary 34

FIVE IN THE

VALLEY FIGHTBy John KosterOf these privates at the Little Bighorn, four lived to relate Reno’s failed attack and harried retreat

54 PATTON’S

SHOOTOUT AT

SAN MIGUELITOBy Matt BraunThe future general used his iconic ivory-handled Colt .45 in a 1916 gunfight below the Mexican border

66

J U N E 2 0 1 6 WILD WEST 3

D E PA RT M E N T S

4 EDITOR’S LETTER

8 LETTERS

10 ROUNDUP

14 INTERVIEWBy Johnny D. Boggs Paul Andrew Hutton tells how a kidnapped kid helped trigger the Apache wars

16 WESTERNERSA still photo of “Comanche Jack” Stilwell

18 GUNFIGHTERS

AND LAWMENBy Eric Bryan Boise City Sheriff “Big Dave” Updyke was also a big outlaw in Idaho Territory

20 PIONEER AND SETTLERSBy Pam Potter Arizona Territory stage line owner J.D. Kinnear landed many jobs—and wives

22 WESTERN ENTERPRISEBy Kellen Cutsforth Outlaws Cole Younger and Frank James found show business a slow business

24 ART OF THE WESTBy Kellen Cutsforth Venturesome Helen Chain was Colorado Territory’s first resident female artist

26 INDIAN LIFEBy John Koster Crazy Horse was ultimately captured, but never on film—or was he?

66 COLLECTIONSBy Linda Wommack Coffeyville, Kan., pays tribute to townsmen who shot down the Dalton Gang

68 GHOST TOWNSBy Les Kruger Tin Cup was among the wickedest towns in early Colorado

70 GUNS OF THE WESTBy C. Lee Noyes The reliable Model 1873 Springfield carbine wasn’t the cause of Custer’s fall

72 REVIEWSBooks and movies to wolf down, a review of T.J. Stiles’ new Custer book and reviews of three recent films

80 GO WESTMount St. Helens has risen from the ashes

ON THE COVERLt. Col. George Custer poses several years before the June 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. While most of Major Marcus Reno’s men survived, they too faced a tough fight. (Heritage Auctions, Dallas; colorized by Brian Walker)

60 WHEN SOLDIERS

WORE SPIKESBy John Koster Seventh Cavalry troopers proudly wore their Prussian- inspired helmets, but not at the Little Bighorn

E D I T O R ’ S L E T T E R


The other day, while sitting on the edge of my cushioned seat in a heated metropolitan theater, I endured the harrowing survival-and-revenge tale of 1820s mountain man Hugh Glass. The Revenant

delivers 156 minutes of brutal frontier realism—an Arikara Indian fight; a she-grizzly attack; freezing water at every step or crawl; enough raw red meat to make even a non-vegetarian squirm—combined with cinematographic poetry and wizardry (see review, P. 76. In other words (well, mostly pic-tures), viewers experience the splendor of a West-ern winter wilderness along with heavy doses of the coldness, aloneness and cruelty that natural-ly come with the territory. After watching this memo-rable if not feel-good film, I faced a long walk (at least 10 blocks) on the not-so-mean streets of Manhattan and felt fortunate when my younger brother hailed a cab. Regardless, the limits of human endurance were preying on my unsettled mind, and I reck-oned that while revenge might be sweet, it must always take a backseat to survival.

Survival could be the theme of this June issue of Wild West, and it might as well be, since my mind remains full of images from The Revenant (a revenant being a person, in this case Hugh Glass, who returns from the dead; The Zombie wouldn’t have been nearly as classy a title for the film or the Michael Punke novel on which it is based). One lingering image from the movie is of wolves attacking a lone buffalo—well, wolves need to survive, too—before friendly Indians drive off the pack and allow Leonardo DiCaprio’s Glass a bite of bison liver. In his feature article “Wolf West” (P. 46) award-winning environmental historian Dan Flores relates how humans nearly wiped out wolves before recent efforts to save them and notes that the only place one still has an

Wild West editor Gregory Lalire wrote the 2014 historical novel Captured: From the Frontier Diary of Infant Danny Duly. His article about base- ball in the frontier West won a 2015 Stirrup Award for best article in Roundup, the member- ship magazine of West- ern Writers of America.

A wolf, coyotes, ravens and a grizzly bear all show interest in a carcass on Swan Lake Flat in Yellowstone National Park.

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opportunity to see “the pursuit of bison and elk by packs of wolves loping through the sagebrush” is in Yellowstone National Park. “Wolf tourists,” he adds, come to the park year-round to witness the spectacle.

But this is June, so let’s get back to human survival northeast of Yellowstone at present-day Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument [nps.gov/libi]. At that site on June 25, 1876, Lt. Col. George Custer’s divided command of 7th U.S. Cavalry troopers and Indian allies (in-cluding some Arikaras, the same tribe that fought

Glass and company a half- century earlier) attacked a large Sioux and Chey-enne encampment. By the 26th Custer and the men of his immediate command lay dead on the field, while the companies under Ma-jor Marcus Reno and Cap-tain Frederick Benteen

were fighting for their lives atop what became known as Reno Hill. Unlike Custer, Reno and Benteen survived, only to become embroiled in controversy over why they were still breath-ing while the lieutenant colonel was not. In this issue, however, we focus on lesser-known par-ticipants in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, with stories about 7th Cavalry Private Thomas W. Cole-man, a Company B trooper who kept a journal of the campaign; five other privates (Frank Neely, William Taylor, Henry Klotzbucher, William Mor-ris and William Slaper) who were with Reno during the portion of the battle known as the “Valley Fight”; and Isaiah Dorman, a civilian interpreter and the only black man at the Little Bighorn. For the record, Dorman died during the fighting, as did Klotzbucher. The other five pri-vates mentioned above somehow survived the two-day ordeal, though it is doubtful any were motivated by revenge.

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When Hickok Fought the 7thEveryone knows Plains Indians killed many 7th U.S. Cavalry troopers in battle, but did you know the famed gunfighter killed one trooper and injured another in a saloon fight? See Jeff Broome’s award-winning article “Wild Bill’s Brawl With Two of Custer’s Troopers.”

Extended InterviewWith Paul Andrew Hutton“Ironically, my favorite ‘Custer’ movie is John Ford’s Fort Apache, which changes all the names and places the action in Arizona with the Apaches,” says the award- winning author and University of New Mexico professor.

More About Helen ChainThe Colorado artist (above, her oil on ivory Pikes Peak) and her husband befriended famed Western landscape photographer William Henry Jackson and traveled with him through New Mexico Territory and into Mexico.

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I read with interest Westerners on P. 16 of your February 2016 issue, showing an alleged photo-graph of Wyatt Earp taken at the Brown photo-graphic studio in Ellsworth, Kan. The text with the photo brought up the old chestnut about Earp ar-resting Ben Thompson for helping brother William

escape after killing Ellsworth County Sheriff Chauncey Whitney on Aug. 15, 1873. “But for a lack of supporting evidence historians have long discounted Earp’s claim to have made the arrest,” the text states. You then quote Cathleen Briley claiming the photo “is the missing link to the ‘Wyatt Earp in Ellsworth’ story…a photo of a decorated Wyatt Earp taken right in Ellsworth when and where it all happened.” Briley argues that the pho-tograph supports the claim Earp arrested Thompson.

For all I know the photograph could have been taken the day Whitney was killed. It is not, however, evidence that supports

the claim Earp arrested Thompson. With all due respect to Briley, the photo-graph proves nothing other than at some time in his life Earp (if it is indeed him) had his image taken at Ellsworth. Historians know Earp did not arrest Thomp-son, because the Ellsworth Reporter, in its account of the murder of Whitney, stated on Aug. 21, 1873, that the man who disarmed Thompson was Ellsworth County Deputy Sheriff Edward O. Hougue. Was Wyatt Earp in Ellsworth while this was going on? Probably, as it is known his brother James was there.

A final thought: Why is Wyatt Earp blamed for the historical inaccuracies in Stuart N. Lake’s 1931 book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal? Earp provided much valuable information to Lake for the book. But Earp died in 1929, and Lake did not publish the book until two years later—plenty of time for Lake to alter the book to make Earp look more heroic, despite whatever truthful things Wyatt may have told him. After all, Earp and Hougue were both dead; who was going to contradict Lake’s account? That it was Lake who was re-sponsible for the inaccuracies is shown by the fact he included the Ellsworth

Reporter account of the killing of Whitney in the book but deliberately left out the line about Hougue receiving the arms of Thompson.

James D. Drees

Hays, Kan.

The first thing I noticed when I saw the image Cathleen Briley says is Wyatt Earp was the hair. From the earliest known photos of Earp until his death he always parted his hair on the side, never in the middle. Darby Tipple

Carrollton, Texas

I bid $4.95 for the Earp/Ellsworth pic. Scott Dyke, Earp researcher

Green River Valley, Ariz.

YOUNT AND GLASS

Readers of the February 2016 Pioneers and Settlers article about George Yount (“The Taos Trapper Who Made His Mark,” by Harry Murray) might be interested to know Yount knew Hugh Glass (subject of the recent film The Revenant ) and later had his memories of the West set down in George

C. Yount and His Chronicles of the West , edited by Charles Lewis Camp.Roni Silverberg

San Francisco

L E T T E R S


NOT FORD OR JAMES

NOT WYATT EARP

I see on P. 11 of your Roundup department in the February 2016 issue of Wild West an appear-ance of the Bob Ford/Jesse James photo hoax [see above]. Sandy Mills, its owner, submitted this image to me for authentication purposes in 2013, as I am the Jesse James family genealogist and historian. I replied, advising her not to waste any money trying to authenticate an image so clearly not authentic. I also posted on the family blog [ericjames.org/wordpress/2015/11/01] that the image is bogus. Regarding the claimed genealogy stated by fiction book author Freda Cruse Hardi-son, I have seen no evidence of it or any docu-mentation supporting it. Since 1997 the official and documented Jesse James family genealogy has been published on the website Stray Leaves [ericjames.org].

I am writing a five-volume history of the family, of which the fourth volume addresses Frank James. I have researched the family of Annie Ralston (Frank’s wife) extensively for 20 years, and I have never seen any documentary reference or evi-dence regarding Jane W. Hill, whom Hardison claims is related to image owner Mills. No one in the James family had ever seen the image or heard of its existence in more than 130 years.

Everything stated by Mills, Hardison and others in their cabal of hoaxers is imaginary, speculative and unsupported by any facts or documentary evi-dence. Their effort to make it otherwise amounts to chicanery that not only denigrates history and misinforms readers of Wild West but also amounts to identity theft of the Jesse James family.

Eric F. James

Danville, Ky.

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TOP 10 POP CULTURE

WOLF APPEARANCES“The King of the Currumpaw: A Wolf Story” (1894), by Ernest Thompson Seton. Seton fictionalized this account of the pursuit of a wolf pack by New Mexico stockmen.

White Fang (1906), by Jack London. The famed writer penned this novel about a wolf and its human companion at a time when wolves were direly threatened in the Lower 48.

Never Cry Wolf (1963), by Farley Mowat. In the age of ecology this book had a profound impact on Americans’ attitudes toward predators.

Dances With Wolves (1992). Adapted from Michael Blake’s 1988 novel, this Oscar-winning Kevin Costner film linked the fate of Western wolves to that of Plains Indians.

Game of Thrones (2011–). This ongoing HBO series, adapted from George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels, includes a family that adopts a litter of dire wolves.

The Wolf Is at Your Door (1951–60), by Howlin’ Wolf. This collection of songs by Chester Arthur Burnett (aka Howlin’ Wolf) is one of the seminal blues albums.

“Li’l Red Riding Hood” (1966), by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. In this Top 10 single Sam howls and flatters Red as having “everything a big bad wolf could want.”

“Werewolves of London” (1978), by Warren Zevon. Zevon’s Top 40 rock single played on werewolf chic the way recent pop culture has with vampires and zombies.

“Hungry Like the Wolf” (1982), by Duran Duran. When this British new wave single hit the airwaves, wolf restoration in the American West was only a decade away.

“How Will the Wolf Survive?” (1984), by Los Lobos. This Los Angeles group based the title song of its debut album on a National Geographic article about wolf ecology.

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A wary wolf warms up to a handout from Kevin Costner in the film Dances With Wolves.

Duran Duran

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TRUTH BEHIND THE REVENANTActor Leonardo DiCaprio was born nearly 200 years after mountain man Hugh Glass, whom he portrays in the 2015 film The Revenant. Though it’s no surprise the movie strays from the facts, the fact is much about Glass and his incredible survival of an 1823 bear attack is uncorroborated. In the June 2000 Wild West (and online at HistoryNet.com) author Nancy M. Peterson tells his story in “Hugh Glass: The Truth Behind the Revenant Legend.” Little is known, as Glass didn’t leave an autobiography, but before his run-in with a she-grizzly he may have been a seaman captured by pirate John Lafitte. “The prequel to Hugh Glass’ adventures on land may be an even stranger story,” Peterson writes. Historians largely agree that fellow trappers John Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger abandoned Glass to his fate after the mauling (similar to the one depicted by Gary Zaboly above), but it is debatable whether a desire for revenge buoyed his will to live. Spoiler alert: In the film Glass has just reason to seek revenge, as Fitzgerald (played by Tom Hardy) not only abandons him but kills his half-blood son, which never happened.

—Francis Parkman, author of the 1949 classic The Oregon Trail, writing about elderly Lakota man Mene Seela, whom he befriended.

WEST WORDS

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum [nationalcowboymuseum.org] in Oklahoma City will hold its 2016 Western Heritage Awards Banquet on April 16. Recipients of the museum’s coveted bronze Wrangler include the nonfiction book The

Western Cattle Trail , by Gary and Margaret Kraising-er; the TV film Texas Rising ; and the Western novel Endangered: A Joe Pickett Novel , by C.J. Box. The museum will also formally induct three actors into its Hall of Great Western Performers: B-Western star Bob Steele (1907–88); Lee Marvin (1924–87), title villain (at left) in the 1962 film The Man Who Shot

Liberty Valance ; and Tommy Lee Jones, co-star with Robert Duvall in the 1989 miniseries Lonesome Dove.

Grizzly Saga is GoldenThe Revenant more than survived the 2016 Golden Globes—it thrived. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association [goldenglobes.com] awarded the survival saga best dramatic motion picture, best director (Alejandro Iñárritu) and best dramatic actor (Leonardo DiCaprio, at right). The visually engaging picture (see review, P. 76) thus became a favorite to pick up Oscars at the 88th Academy Awards (held February 28, after press time). Ennio Morricone won the best original score Golden Globe for Quentin Tarantino’s West-ern The Hateful Eight (see review, P. 78). Tarantino was nominated for best screenplay, and Jennifer Jason Leigh was nominated for best supporting actress for her role as outlaw Daisy Domergue.

WRANGLERS

R O U N D U P


Wister to St. Clair RobsonNovelist Lucia St. Clair Robson [luciastclair robson.com] has received Western Writers of America’s Owen Wister Award for lifetime contributions to Western literature. In 1982 WWA [western writers.org] presented Robson its Spur Award for her historical novel Ride the Wind, about Comanche captive Cynthia Ann Parker. Among her nine other historical novels are Ghost Warrior, about the female Apache warrior Lozen, and Last Train

From Cuernavaca, a 2011 Spur Award winner.

What Big FeetA 7-year-old male gray wolf named OR-7 (the seventh wolf fitted with an electronic track-ing collar in Oregon) has reached celebrity status out West—but paparazzi have their work cut out for them. In the winter of 2011–12 the 90-pound canid (certainly no weakling) wandered more than 1,000 miles

from his home range in northern Oregon to and from Northern California in search of a mate. That made him the first documented wolf in the Golden State since 1924. OR-7 (aka Journey), his mate and their offspring now compose the first wolf pack in western Oregon since wolves returned to the region in the 1990s. But because the batteries in OR-7’s collar expired last year, researchers can only track him via live sightings or trailside cameras.

On April 6, 1906, outside a bordello in the mining camp of Manhattan, Nev., Sheriff Tom Logan issued this warning to quarrelsome customer Walter Barieau, who

promptly ignored the advice and shot the sheriff five times. Logan died two hours later.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

‘DON’T PULL THAT GUN’

In 1839 Texas Ranger James Campbell built a two-room log cabin in the settle-ment of Walnut Springs, soon renamed Sequin in honor of Texas Revolution hero Juan Seguín. Comanches killed Campbell in 1840, but that same year surveyor Joseph F. Johnson turned the cabin into Sequin’s first stage station and in 1844 added a three-room hotel out back. Famed Ranger Captain John

“Jack” Coffee Hays was married there in 1847. In 1850 owners named the hotel and local hotspot the Magnolia. It survived the Civil War and Reconstruction, flourished again in the 1880s, then became a boardinghouse and finally apart-ments. By the mid 1990s, however, the building lay abandoned. Enter Jim and Erin Ghedi, who bought the Magnolia [hauntedmagnoliahotel.com] in 2013 and are restoring it to its 1880s luster. “The building is stunning now,” Erin reports. “We are open to the public once a month for tours and look forward to someday being a full-time museum for all to enjoy as much as we do.” Frontier

on NetflixThe North American fur trade of the late 18th century is the subject of Frontier, a Canadian adventure drama directed by Brad Peyton (San Andreas) and coming soon to Netflix. Jason Momoa, known for his role as Khal Drogo in the HBO fantasy series Game of

Thrones, has the lead role in Frontier, which will examine from multiple perspectives an industry that in- volved power strug- gles among regional Indians and the mostly European traders.

See You Later, Dale WalkerAward-winning writer Dale L. Walker, 80, died on Dec. 8, 2015, in El Paso, Texas, where he spent most of his life. Onetime president of Western Writers of America [westernwriters.org], Walker won WWA Spur Awards for his Oregon history Pacific Destiny and his article “Killer of Pain’s Trans-

continental Journey,” in the June 2001 Wild West. Among his other well-received books are Bear Flag Rising (1999) and Eldorado (2003).

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The publication of Christopher Cardozo’s Edward S. Curtis: One

Hundred Masterworks coincides with a traveling exhibition of the photographer’s images.

The exhibit visits the Palm Springs Art Museum in California through May

29; the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, June 18–Sept. 18; and the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Fla., Oct. 11–Dec. 31. The exhibition and book highlight Curtis’ photographs of American Indians (see Geronimo, above). Visit edwardcurtis.com.

Western Writers Meet

Western Writers of America holds its annual convention June 21–25 in Cheyenne, Wyo. Visit westernwriters.org/convention2016. The Wild West History Association’s annual roundup kicks off in Oklahoma City July 6–9. Visit wildwesthistory.org.

Custer’s 26th Stand

The Real Bird Family hosts the 26th annual Battle of the Little Bighorn Reenactment, which this summer marks the 140th anniversary of Custer’s Last Stand. Held on the banks of the river between Crow Agency and Garryowen, Mont., the reenactment begins at 1 p.m. on June 24, 25 and 26. Bleacher seating is on a first-come basis, and spectators may interact with reenactors and take photographs. Visit littlebighorn reenactment.com. Also this summer the Custer Battlefield Historical & Museum Association meets June 23–26 in Hardin, Mont. Visit custerbattlefield.org.

Send upcoming event notices to Wild

West, 1600 Tysons Blvd., Suite 1140, Tysons, VA 22102–4883. Submit at least four months in advance.

Events of the west

Edward Curtis

Masterworks

I N T E R V I E W


PAUL ANDREW HUTTON TURNS TO THE APACHESTHE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR PROFILES MICKEY FREE,

THE APACHE KID AND GERONIMO BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS

Paul Andrew Hutton is no stranger to this magazine —or to Western history buffs nationwide. He is the recipient of multiple Spur Awards from Western Writers of America [westernwriters.org] and Wran-gler Awards from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum [nationalcowboymuseum.org]. And if you catch a Western documentary on TV, chances are you’ll see Hutton waxing eloquent about a subject he loves. This spring Crown, a divi-sion of Penguin Random House, releases Hutton’s The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache

Kid and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War

in American History. Hutton, a history professor at the University of New Mexico, took time from grading students’ papers to discuss his new book.

How did the kidnapping of Mickey Free affect Apache-U.S. relations?The kidnapping of Felix Ward, later to be named Mickey Free, set in motion a quarter-century of unrelenting, brutal warfare between various Apache bands and the U.S. government. There had been conflict before—most notably skir- mishes with Jicarilla and Mescalero Apaches in New Mexico and Colonel Benjamin Bonneville’s Gila campaign of 1857— but it was Mickey’s abduction that led to the infamous Bas- com Affair with Cochise at Apache Pass. That event started the war, much like Pearl Harbor started America’s involve- ment in World War II. Behind it all, of course, was American territorial expansion and most especially the quest for mineral wealth in both New Mexico and Arizona.

Geronimo. Good guy, bad guy, in between?Geronimo is a fascinating and complicated character. He has morphed from a notorious murderer into a patriotic freedom fighter in American popular culture and probably is the best- known Indian in our history. He was never a chief, but he certainly was a charismatic and powerful war leader, who was said to have mystical powers. Was he a good guy or a bad guy? I’ll leave that to my readers to decide. He was certainly a fabulous man who earned his reputation through incredible deeds of daring.

How did your research shape your opinions of other Apache leaders?I came away with increased respect for Mangas Coloradas, probably the greatest Apache chief, and my childhood ad- miration for Cochise (from the film Broken Arrow) was abso- lutely confirmed. Victorio proved a fascinating leader and a true patriot chief. His last stand at Tres Castillos really was the stuff from which great legends arise.

And Victorio’s sister Lozen?Lozen is a controversial character to say the least. Two historians who I respect immensely, Ed Sweeney and my mentor Bob Utley, dis- miss her as a fabrication. I had to disagree with them. Apache oral tradition on her adventures, as set down by Eve Ball, Sherry Robinson, Lynda Sánchez, Henrietta Stockel, Ruth Boyer and Nar- cissus Gayton, is vivid and compelling. The warrior woman was real, and her exploits were incredible. She is a major character in my book.

You’re a Custer guy. How would he have fared against the Apaches?Well, I certainly retain my childhood fascination with the “Boy General,” and many of my earliest

publications were on him. I don’t think of myself, however, as a “Custer guy” any more than I am a Davy Crockett guy, or a Kit Carson guy, or a Buffalo Bill guy or a Billy the Kid guy— for I’ve retained a love for all these grand frontier characters. As for Custer and the Apaches: He would have been miserable in Arizona or New Mexico and terribly frustrated by the nature of that warfare. Howard Cushing of the 3rd Cavalry was something of a Custer-like character in the Apache campaigns, and he met exactly the same fate as the Boy General. Ironically, my favorite Custer movie is John Ford’s Fort Apache , which changes all the names and places the action in Arizona with the Apaches. A chapter in my book titled “Fort Apache” tells the story of the Cibecue fight, which may well have inspired James Bellah’s short story “Massacre,” on which Ford based his film.

Any other intriguing characters in your book?My story is about the Americans and the Mexicans as well as the Apaches. You could not hope for a more colorful cast of characters than Tom Jeffords, Jack Swilling, Kit Carson, Al Sieber, Tom Horn, William Oury, “Texas John” Slaughter and John Clum. On the Mexican side there is the relentless Colonel Joaquín Terrazas, the scout Mauricio Corredor and the remarkable Russian soldier of fortune Emilio Kosterlitzky. Wyatt Earp even has a cameo. Hollywood could never dream up a story like this, with so many incredible characters.

Read the full interview at WildWestMag.com.

BOOKS BY HUTTON: He is the author of Phil Sheridan and

His Army (1985) and the editor of such books as Soldiers West:

Biographies From the Military Frontier (1987, with Durwood Ball),

Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee

(1987), The Custer Reader (1992) and Western Heritage: A Selec-

tion of Wrangler Award–Winning Articles (2011).

It’s a crime.

Most Americans living today have never held a het y, gleaming U.S. silver dollar in their hands.

Where did they go? Well, in 1918, to provide aid to the British during WWI, the U.S. government melted down nearly half of the entire mintage—over 270 million silver dollars. If all those missing silver dollars could be stacked, they would tower over 400 miles into the sky! If laid in a chain, they would span 6,400 miles—enough to stretch from New York to Los Angeles more than 2½ times!

h ese vanished coins were not just any silver dollar–they were America’s largest circulated coin, the beloved Morgan Silver Dollar. Each Morgan Dollar is struck from nearly an ounce of 90% i ne silver and measures a massive 38.1mm in diameter. Morgan Silver Dollars were the engine of the American dream for decades. Created by famed American coin designer, George T. Morgan, they feature Lady Liberty’s radiant proi le and a majestic eagle, symbols of American strength and prosperity. Since their inception in 1878, they jingled in the pockets of famous and infamous Americans like John D. Rockefeller and Teddy Roosevelt, and desperados Jesse James and Al Capone. Today, Morgan Silver Dollars are the most collected coin in America.

Lady Liberty takes a Final BowJust three years at er the massive meltdown, the government gave the Morgan Silver Dollar a i nal chance to shine. In 1921, facing a serious shortage, the mint struck Morgan Silver Dollars for one more brief, historic year. Today, the last-ever 1921 Morgan Silver Dollar belongs in the hands of collectors, history buf s, or anyone who values the artistry and legacy of this American classic.

A Private Vault Gives Up its SecretsMillions more silver dollars were melted over the past ninety years and today, private hoards account for virtually all the surviving Morgan Silver Dollars. We should know—we hunt for them every week. In fact, on one buying trip into America’s heartland, as we were guided into a wealthy owner’s massive private vault, we were thrilled to discover a hoard of nearly two thousand 1921 Morgan Silver Dollars, all in lustrous near uncirculated condition. We wasted no time in securing the entire treasure trove of silver dollars into our own vault.

Saved from Destruction, but Bound for Extinction It’s been estimated that less than 15% of all the Morgan Dollars ever minted have survived to the present day. And the number grows smaller with each passing year. The 1921 Morgan Silver Dollar is the last of its kind. But you can get one now before they’re only a memory. Your chance to own this legend won’t last long, so get yours today—and at a fantastic value!

SAVE $35 or More!h is same coin in About Uncirculated condition is of ered elsewhere for $95. But today, you can secure your own 1921 Morgan Silver Dollar—the last Morgan Silver Dollar ever—for as little as $57.95 each. Buy with complete coni dence. If you aren’t satisi ed, return your coins within 30-days for a full refund (less s/h).

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Simpson Everett

Stilwell (1850–1903), standing at right, was a noted frontier scout, gained fame as a hero of the 1868 Battle of Beecher Island and boasted a catchy nickname—“Comanche Jack.” Regardless, he will forever remain in the shadow of younger brother Frank, who in 1882 was a suspect in Morgan Earp’s murder in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, and soon turned up dead at the Tucson train depot, gunned down by Wyatt Earp and friends. When revenge-minded Jack traveled to Tombstone after Frank’s death, he posed for this C.S. Fly cabinet card armed with a Model 1876 Winchester rifle. The unidentified man at left holds an 1873 Winches- ter. Collector Tony Sapienza acquired the photo at a June 2014 Cowan’s [cowansauctions.com] American history auction.

THE OTHER STILWELL

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G U N F I G H T E R S & L AW M E N


espite swirling rumors about his character, David “Big Dave” Updyke managed in March 1865 to get himself elected sheriff of Idaho Territory’s Ada County, founded the previous December and

originally encompassing present-day Canyon, Payette and Gem counties. Born circa 1830 in the Cayuga Lake region of western New York, Updyke had ventured in 1855 to California, where he worked various jobs, including stage driver. In the early 1860s he went to the goldfields of Boise Basin (in what would become Idaho Territory on March 4, 1863) and panned about $1,500 worth of ore, enabling him to buy a livery stable in Boise City and soon thereafter invest in a ferry, a saloon and a nearby ranch.

Updyke’s transition from miner to businessman might have appeared aboveboard, but his life took a dark turn. The livery became a rendezvous for criminals, whom citizens took to call-ing Updyke’s Gang. The cancer spread, his ranch becoming an outlaw hideout and his saloon a place for passing off stolen and counterfeit (gilt lead) gold dust.

Many of the men who aggregated around Updyke reportedly had ties to Henry Plummer, the sheriff and notorious head of a gang of road agents over in Bannack (in present-day Montana),

‘BIG DAVE’ UPDYKE SPELLED BIG TROUBLE FOR BOISE CITY

THE SHERIFF LED BADMEN AGAINST GOOD CITIZENS—UNTIL VIGILANTES ACTED

BY ERIC BRYAN

D

Future Idaho Governor William McConnell headed up the vigilance committee. Right: The Idaho Statesman office in Boise City in 1866.

whom vigilantes hanged on Jan. 10, 1864. Some have argued that Plummer associates deliberately moved on to Boise City the fol-lowing year to help get their man Updyke elected sheriff. Whether true or not, Updyke has been cast in the same mold as Plummer —a crooked lawman who provided inside information to road agents. Crimes attributed to Updyke and gang, before and after his election, included extortion, burglary, stage robbery and murder.

Horse theft was also rampant, and not long after the election a group of Payette Valley ranchers, headed by future U.S. sena-tor and Idaho governor William McConnell, formed a vigilance committee to protect their settlement some 30 miles northwest of Boise City. In the spring of 1865 Sheriff Updyke issued warrants for the 30 known vigilantes—though he reportedly intended to serve them with bullets not papers. After throwing together a “posse,” he led it north to Horseshoe Bend to join forces with another band of malefactors. When the others didn’t show, Up-dyke’s party headed west to the Payette Valley settlement, where he found himself staring down the guns of a vigilante force twice as large as his posse. (Fleet horsemen from Boise City had fore-warned the vigilantes of Updyke’s approach.) While refusing to turn over their weapons, the vigilantes did agree to ride into

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Boise City. With the help of legal counsel there, all charges against them were dismissed.

Updyke was still in business, though. On July 13, 1865, a stagecoach on the new route between Mon-tana and Utah territories encountered boulders on the road in Portneuf Canyon in southeast Ida-ho Territory. Driver Frank Williams, with shotgun messenger Charlie Parks sitting to his left, moved to steer around the obstacles when some half-dozen armed men with blackened faces stepped from the surrounding brush and ordered everyone out of the coach. As the passengers disembarked, one or more of them fired at the robbers, triggering a volley of buckshot that left four passengers dead and Parks seriously wounded. Among other loot, the holdup men made off with some $65,000 in gold dust packed in cans that was en route to Salt Lake City for shipment east. Vigilantes soon caught up with Williams, who admitted to complicity in the rob-bery, identified the bandits and fingered Updyke as the gang leader. The vigilantes promptly hanged Williams and those robbers they managed to find. Then they waited for the wayward sheriff to slip up.

In August 1865 the county commissioners held another election, and Updyke lost to local ferry owner John Duvall. But the sheriff-elect wouldn’t take office until the new year, so the commissioners kept searching for a way to drive Updyke from office. As sheriff, Updyke collected taxes, and that fall the county treasurer noted that thousands of dol-lars had gone missing. In September the district attorney filed embezzlement charges, and on the 28th of that month sheriff-elect Duvall and a posse arrested and jailed Updyke. But the sheriff quickly posted bail and returned to his duties. The day before his October trial was to begin, however, he restored the missing funds to the treasurer and re-signed as sheriff. The prosecutor dropped all charges.

In February 1866, to deal with Indian raids, Ada County citizens, including some of the disgraced sheriff’s old gang, formed a company of volunteers and chose Updyke as captain. They saw limited ac-

This Boise City photo

was taken circa 1866,

the year Dave Updyke

met his violent end.

Three days after the

lynching the notice

below, written in the

same hand as that

of the one pinned

to Updyke’s body,

was posted on Boise

City’s Main Street.

DAVE UPDYKE,Accessory after the fact

to the Port Neuf stage robbery.Accessory and accomplice to the robbery

of the stage near Boise City in 1864.Chief conspirator in burning property

on the Overland Stage line.Guilty of aiding and assisting West Jenkins, the murderer, and other criminals to escape

while you were Sheriff of Ada County.Accessory and accomplice to

the murder of Raymond.Threatening the lives and property

of an already outraged and suffering community.Justice has overtaken you.

tion, but other trouble surfaced when a man who had provided the militia with ponies sued for non-payment. On April 3 Updyke associate John Clark shot down Reuben Raymond, who had testified for the plaintiff in the suit. Clark was arrested for the killing, but three days later Boise City vigilantes took him from the local guardhouse and lynched him.

Updyke threatened to burn down the town, but vigilantes turned up the heat, and on April 12 Up-dyke and cohort Jake Dixon fled town and holed up in a cabin near remote Rocky Bar, 30 miles west of Boise. Vigilantes chased them down and hanged them from the rafters of a shed at Syrup Creek, 10 miles from the cabin. A note pinned to Updyke’s chest labeled him an “aider of murderers and horse thieves.” The lawless lawman, who died with $50 on him, had refused to say where his gold was stashed, and no one is known to have discovered it.

An Arizona Territory stagecoach is Crossing Caliche Flats, in this oil painting by Tom Haas. John D. Kinnear is best remembered for running a stage line between Tucson and Tombstone.

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hose familiar with the name John D. Kinnear may recall he was proprietor of the Tucson and Tomb-stone Express stagecoach line (later known as the Arizona Mail and Stage Line). In 1879 he started

regular service between those two Arizona Territory towns. His previous exploits and personal life have not received much attention, yet Kinnear was a man with a history of adventure, multiple careers and several wives.

J.D. Kinnear’s stage line might have gone unremembered had not bandits attacked one of his treasure-bearing coaches on March 15, 1881, killing driver Eli “Bud” Philpott (or Philpot) and passenger Peter Roerig. As the stage traveled between Conten-tion and Drew’s Station several armed men stepped into the road, cried out, “Hold!” and then abruptly opened fire. Struck by one of the shots, Philpott fell between the traces into the road, and the horses broke into a run. As the stage careened away, Wells, Fargo & Co. detective and shotgun messenger Bob Paul

THE LIFE AND LOVES OF J.D. KINNEAR

THE STAGE LINE OWNER HAD A COMPLICATED CAREER AND PERSONAL LIFE

BY PAM POTTER

returned fire and hollered the classic reply, “I hold for nobody!” Men from Drew’s Station recovered Philpott’s body. He was just 27 and had been in Kinnear’s employ a year.

Kinnear’s business competition came from his former office agent Howard C. Walker and rancher William “Billy” Ohne-sorgen. In the spring of 1880 Kinnear and Walker briefly teamed up to form the Arizona Mail and Stage Co. By March 1881, the month of the Drew’s Station holdup, Kinnear was again on his own, this time as the Arizona Mail and Stage Line.

The only known Kinnear obituary, housed at Arizona State University’s Hayden Library in Tempe, is from a 1916 newspaper. While not all information in the obituary can be corroborated, it does detail a hardworking quintessential frontiersman. Kinnear was born in Marion, Ohio, on April 26, 1840. He learned black-smithing and wagon making—trades that likely came in handy in the stagecoach business. He married and had two children. At some point his young family died, and Kinnear eventually moved

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Kinnear had more success in the stage business than he did with his marriages.

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to Colorado. In addition to stints in law enforce-ment, he reportedly ran a stage station on Ben Hol-laday’s Overland Stage route. The obituary claims Kinnear fought Indians in New Mexico Territory before arriving in Arizona Territory. It eulogizes the deceased as having been bright and cheerful and always ready to help his fellow man.

It is doubtful Jeannie, wife No. 3 (counting No. 2, who was a common-law wife), would have agreed with that characterization, as it diverges wildly from the abusive husband she described in divorce papers. Kinnear’s love life was certainly a tangled web. By 1862 he was in Trinidad, Colorado Terri-tory, running a gambling hall and saloon and living with an older woman, Charlotte L. Kinnear (some-times listed as Louise Kinnear), who was reportedly his common-law wife.

“Mrs. [ John D.] Kinnear [was] the only Ameri-can woman in the town,” Alice Blackwood Baldwin recorded in her period memoir. Baldwin was preg-nant when she arrived in Trinidad with her hus-band, Lieutenant Frank Baldwin, in 1867. Although Alice gave birth in the home of Spanish-speaking Señora Felipe Baca, the wife of an important local rancher, she placed more value on the help she re-ceived from “Mrs. Kinnear,” in fact the common- law wife of a saloon owner. “The baby,” noted Alice, “was the first white child of unmixed blood born in Trinidad.” That same year John Kinnear and a business partner purchased property that included a station on the Barlow, Sanderson & Co. line. So it appears Kinnear was in the stagecoach business long before arriving in Tombstone.

That December the racial tensions in Trinidad hinted at in Baldwin’s memoir exploded into an Anglo-Hispanic clash that became known as the Christmas Day War. Three weeks later, on Jan. 14, 1868, Las Animas County Sheriff Juan Gutiérrez Jr. resigned. Kinnear had served as a deputy U.S. marshal during the outbreak, and in its aftermath county commissioners appointed him to replace Gutiérrez. Apparently Kinnear handled the fall-out from the Christmas Day War and his duties well, for when officials laid out a town plat in 1872, one of the streets was named “Kinnear.”

On Dec. 10, 1872, in Pueblo, Colo., Kinnear married third wife Jeannie, who was about a dozen years younger than him. Within months of the wedding, however, John faced a charge of bigamy. Apparently the charge stemmed from references to Charlotte Kinnear as his legal spouse, when in fact they had only lived together, though she had taken his name. In June 1873 the district court found John not guilty, and Jeannie stood by him.

The Kinnears arrived in Cochise County, A.T., in 1877 and settled on a ranch at the north end of

the Whetstone Mountains, about 7 miles from the town of Benson. Jeannie reportedly enjoyed pros-pecting in the foothills. But in 1888 she filed for divorce and moved into town.

The divorce papers raised embarrassing ques-tions about John’s character. Apparently someone outside the family had spread rumors that prompted John to hit Jeannie in the face hard enough to draw blood. According to Jeannie, John also used pro-fane language and threatened she would be his wife in name only. After years of dealing with stub-born horses and mules, the stagecoach man cer-tainly could have developed a colorful repertoire of profanity. The couple subsequently slept in sepa-rate quarters. Prior to John’s alleged abuse, Jeannie claimed (as do many women in divorce cases) to have been a “dutiful and faithful wife.”

When filing for divorce, Jeannie also questioned John’s fidelity. In 1883 John’s niece Mary Kinnear moved into the ranch house. Five years later, when Jeannie left John and took up residence in Benson, she happened to come into possession of a letter meant for him from a young woman who had been living at the ranch. Jeannie was convinced some-thing inappropriate had transpired between John and the young woman. Whether the mystery woman was Mary was unclear —the home-wrecker went unnamed in the divorce papers.

John Kinnear never answered the summons in the case, and a judge granted the divorce in May 1889. On Dec. 22, 1893, Kinnear married Lelah Hakes, a woman a full 30 years his ju-nior. At the time of his death on Aug. 4, 1916, at age 76, Kinnear was living in the Pioneer Home in Prescott, Ariz. The death certificate lists him as mar-ried, but it was the superintendent of the Pioneer Home, not fourth wife Lelah, who filled out the form.

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n 1903, having spent most of their lives outside the law,

the country’s most infamous outlaws, Cole Younger and

Frank James, made a bid at legitimacy with a foray into

the entertainment industry. That February the duo devised

the Great Cole Younger and Frank James Historical Wild West,

a short-lived enterprise that proved one of the most misguided,

unscrupulous and financially disastrous exhibitions of its kind.

On Sept. 7, 1876, the James-Younger Gang came to grief

when armed citizens foiled its attempt to rob the First National

Bank of Northfield, Minn. Frank and Jesse James fled, while

the badly wounded Cole, Jim and Bob Younger were caught,

convicted and sent to the state prison in Stillwater. Jesse James

was assassinated in 1882, while Frank turned himself in the next

year and was acquitted of all charges against him. Bob Younger

died of tuberculosis in prison in 1889. After a quarter-century

behind bars, Cole and Jim were paroled in 1901, but Jim killed

himself the next year. On Feb. 4, 1903, Cole, the last surviving

Younger brother, received a full pardon on condition he never

I

THESE OUTLAW ‘HEROES’WERE SHOWBIZ ZEROS

COLE YOUNGER AND FRANK JAMES MADE A POOR SHOWING

IN THE ‘WILD WEST’ BY KELLEN CUTSFORTH

return to Minnesota and “never exhibit himself or allow himself

to be exhibited as an actor or participant at any public perfor-

mance…where a charge is made for admission.” Cole reached

his hometown of Lee’s Summit, Mo., by train on February 15

and within days arranged a meeting with old friend Frank James

to discuss a business proposal.

Cole was already busy writing his autobiography and seeking

other legitimate sources of income. Soon after arriving home,

he had met with Wally Hoffman, a wealthy Chicago brewer and

investor, and Henry E. Allott, owner-operator of Buckskin Bill’s

Wild West, who hoped to capitalize on Younger’s outlaw fame

to boost ticket sales. Cole expressed interest and also convinced

Frank to lend his name to the venture. Their timing seemed ideal.

William Fredrick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, the biggest box office draw

in the country, was about to pack up his celebrated Wild West for

its latest tour of Europe. Cody’s absence from that season’s show

circuit would leave the country wide open for competing exhibi-

tions to capitalize on the still burgeoning Wild West craze.

Left: Within days of being pardoned, Cole Younger

teamed up with Frank James. Above: James poses about

five years before the outlaw duo’s foray into showbiz.

W E S T E R N E N T E R P R I S E


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Wanting a financial stake in the business, Cole next approached Steve Elkins, a U.S. senator from West Virginia and an acquaintance of 40 years, about being a silent partner. Younger ultimately convinced Hoffman and Elkins to advance him $67,000 to buy an interest in the show. The terms named Cole as manager and promised him 25 per-cent of the net proceeds, while Frank would re-ceive $300 a week as arena manager. Cole’s nephew Harry Younger Hall was appointed treasurer and placed in charge of a $5,000 reserve fund from the gross earnings. The agreement also permitted Henry Allott to stay on as assistant manager. Allott (alias Bunk Allen), proprietor of the Bucket of Blood saloon and gambling house in Chicago, was him-self an ex-convict, with ties to that city’s under-world and a reputation as a notorious bunco artist. But neither Younger nor James learned any of this until long after they had entered into the contract.

On hearing of the enterprise, former Minnesota state auditor Robert C. Dunn, who had championed Younger’s release, sent Cole a letter warning him not to jeopardize the terms of his pardon. Younger answered Dunn in a letter published in several newspapers. Insisting he was simply trying to make “an honorable and honest living,” Cole assured the auditor, “I do not intend to exhibit myself as an actor or participate in any public entertainment, nor do I intend to allow myself to be so exhibited. …The show with which I will be connected will in no way refer to my life or the life of any of my asso-ciates but will be of an educational and moral order, very much like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” Minne-sotans remained disgusted at his participation.

After much advance publicity, including news-paper reports touting its authenticity, the renamed Great Cole Younger and Frank James Historical Wild West opened in Chicago in early May 1903. Reviews were blistering, even in the outlaws’ home state of Missouri, next stop on their tour. On May 19 The Springfield Republican dubbed the production “a very weak and abbreviated imitation of the Buffa-lo Bill show.” One Marysville columnist was even less forgiving, writing, “The show is without excep-tion the poorest ever seen in our city.”

While the decision to downplay the outlaws’ ex-ploits may have appeased Minnesotans, ticket hold-ers were likely disappointed not to see reenactments of the Northfield Raid and other bank robberies or much of Frank and Cole themselves. Spectators also had to deal with hucksters charging high prices for everything from seat cushions to souvenirs.

In late May the troupe traveled to Tennessee, playing such cities as Memphis, Jackson and Nash-ville. The Nashville American wryly noted that while

Younger and James took no part in the perfor-mance, “Nothing was lost by the nonparticipation of these two, for neither has ever been known to possess any talent as an entertainer.” But in Roa-noke, Va., on June 21, Cole and Frank did put in an appearance and were well received. Over the following weeks their Wild West traveled to, among other places, Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Md.; Harrisburg, Pa.; Wheeling, W.Va.; and Lexington, Ky. Cole was happy to promote his autobiography, while both outlaws took advantage of the public forum to deny their participation in various crimes of which they’d been accused.

As fall approached, however, it became clear to Younger and James their exhibition was little more than a mismanaged circus populated by thieves and grifters. When Frank wrote ahead to author-ities in several towns, advising them to be on the lookout for lowlifes connected with the show, the investors accused him of hurting ticket sales. On Sept. 21, 1903, fed up with their run-ins with grift-ers and the runaround from Hoffman and Allott, Younger and James quit the enterprise that bore their names. Younger’s nephew also quit as trea-surer, and Cole took the $5,000 reserve fund.

Following their departure, accusations flew between Hoffman, Allott and the former outlaws. Authorities issued a warrant for Younger’s arrest on charges of embezzling the $5,000 reserve fund. Cole insisted he was simply holding the money until the matter could be settled in court. In a countersuit Frank and Cole asked for a combined $29,000 in damages.

In testimony on October 1, Younger stated, “This show com-pany owes me and has never paid me the [25] percent of the net income I was to receive under the contract.” Cole added he had received only $150, while he knew the show had been taking in some $1,500 to $3,500 a day. On October 2 a judge acquitted Younger of the embezzlement charges, allowing him to keep all of the show funds except $1,000, which he had to repay to the enterprise. Three weeks later the Great Cole Younger and Frank James Historic Wild West closed for keeps.

This ad for Younger and James’ Historical Wild West appeared in the Aug. 14, 1903, Tribune in Montgomery City, Mo.

A RT O F T H E W E S T


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elen Henderson Chain settled in Colorado Terri-tory in 1871 and was its first resident female artist. But the pioneering painter eschewed such typi-

cally feminine subjects as still lifes, instead venturing outdoors to render rugged landscapes.

Born in Indianapolis in 1849 to George and Mary Hender-son, Helen majored in English and studied art at Illinois Female College (present-day MacMurray College) in Jacksonville, Ill. She graduated in 1869 and soon met future husband James Albert Chain. After marrying in Indianapolis on March 23, 1871,

THE WESTERN LANDSCAPE DREW HER, AND VICE VERSA

HELEN CHAIN SET UP HER FIRST STUDIO IN THE BACK

OF A DENVER BOOKSTORE BY KELLEN CUTSFORTH

H the couple moved to Denver, where James and business part-ners started a bookstore that also published volumes on local history and sold art supplies. Using a back room as her studio, Helen worked on her painting technique. But the outdoors beckoned. The Rockies particularly inspired her. Chain became the first woman to scale and paint 14,011-foot Mount of the Holy Cross and among the first to paint 14,115-foot Pikes Peak. In her oil on ivory Pikes Peak (see P. 6) a worn wagon path in the foreground climbs into the foothills while an iridescent morning mist wreathes the distant summit.

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In 1873, while on a sketching trip through Colo-rado, landscape artists Hamilton Hamilton and John Harrison Mills, both of Buffalo, N.Y., met the Chains and took note of Helen’s developing style. Chain also explored Yosemite, Yellowstone and Arizona Territory, where she became one of the first women to paint the Grand Canyon. By 1877 she was studying under Denver landscape painter W.F. Porter, who organized Chain’s first art exhi-bition. When Porter died suddenly, she took over his classes and taught from the bookstore. One of her first students was 19-year-old bookstore clerk Charles Partridge Adams, who went on to become one of Colorado’s most famous landscape artists.

The Chains befriended renowned Western artist Thomas Moran and through him met photographer William Henry Jackson, with whom they made re-peated trips to New Mexico Territory and south into Mexico. Jackson and Helen Chain often worked from the same vantage points to capture the beauty

Among Helen Chain’s Southwest paintings are (clockwise from left) San Juan Pueblo (Ohkay- Owingeh), Taos Pueblo and Man and Burro. Also see her Pikes Peak on P. 6. The Denver- based artist and her husband, James, made repeated trips to New Mexico Territory and Mexico with famed Western photographer William Henry Jackson.

of the Southwest, his photographs often informing the settings for her paintings. For example, a noted Jackson image of a historic New Mexico mission church in the early 1880s was the subject of Chain’s exquisite oil San Juan Pueblo (Ohkay-Owingeh).

The Chains spent the rest of their lives exploring and capturing what they saw in words and paint. In March 1892 the couple embarked on a two-year world tour. That October 10, as they crossed the South China Sea between Shanghai and Hong Kong on the steamship Bokhara, a typhoon sank the vessel, drowning the Chains and 123 other passengers. More than a century later, in 2014, Helen Chain was the focus of two well-received Denver retrospectives—“Helen Henderson Chain: Art and Adventure in Early Colorado,” at the cen-tral library’s Western History Art Gallery [history.denverlibrary.org/exhibits], and a 20-work exhibit at the Kirkland Museum [kirklandmuseum.org]. Her legacy lives on with the land.

I N D I A N L I F E


egend has it Crazy Horse never sat for a photograph—a notion that enhances the warrior’s mystique among the La-kota people. But legend is not history,

and the question remains: Was Crazy Horse, who fought the U.S. Army in the Battles of the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn, ever photographed? Could he have been photographed more than once?

According to popular lore Crazy Horse refused to pose because he did not want his spirit captured in a box. That rationale seems deliberately conde-scending, however, an extension of the argument that Indians were “fighting for their way of life.” The Plains tribes, that argument ran, were too stubborn to give up buffalo hunting, moving camp every 10 days and plural marriage, often to all the sisters in one family. Never mind that the proffered alternatives were to somehow farm dry land, squat in outhouses and marry one’s cousins,

DID CRAZY HORSE EVER POSE FOR THE CAMERA?

SEVERAL SURVIVING IMAGES PURPORTEDLY DEPICT THE LAKOTA WARRIOR

BY JOHN KOSTER

Las many frontier whites did at serious detriment to family genetics. The Lakotas and Cheyennes at the Little Bighorn (aka Greasy Grass) were not “fighting for their way of life”—they were fighting to avoid certain slaughter.

Back east in prior decades tribal leaders had warned their people to discard the trappings and vices of the white man, alcohol in particular, and return to a traditional spiritual and metabolic life. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull certainly opposed the use of alcohol. But they accepted other ac-coutrements and tools of the whites—firearms, for example. By the 1870s many Indians had posed for the camera. Sitting Bull (who was killed in 1890) and Red Cloud (who died in 1909) appear in scores of photographs, several dating from the 1870s. For argument’s sake, had Crazy Horse also consented to have his picture taken, which of the purported images might be authentic?


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The photograph that gets the most attention is a tintype in the collection of the Custer Battlefield Museum [custermuseum.org] in Garryowen, Mont. Its original owner was U.S. Army scout Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier, who claimed to have con-vinced onetime friend Crazy Horse to pose for the image. The Lakota warrior was murdered in a bun-gled arrest attempt on Sept. 5, 1877. But dubious experts date the photo from the 1880s, as estab-lished by the young Lakota subject’s ascot tie and the length of his hair pipe breastplate. The back-drop in the photo also doesn’t appear in any other known portraits from the time period or region.

Another “Crazy Horse” photograph, purport-edly taken at Camp Robinson in 1876, shows an older man wearing an elaborate warbonnet. But Crazy Horse was killed in his mid-30s, never wore a warbonnet and was not at the Nebraska camp in 1876. He was resisting sale of the Black Hills, fighting at the Little Bighorn and evading capture. In 1877 he finally came in to Camp Robinson (renamed Fort Robinson in January 1878). Historians have since identified the older man in this photograph as Race Horse, possibly a Lakota relative of Crazy Horse.

Three other images—two portraits and a drawing —are not so easily dismissed, though they lack any definitive provenance.

A period photo labeled “Hawk Wing” shows a Lakota man, about the right age, with loose feath-ers in place of a warbonnet (in the style of Crazy Horse) and a scar on his left cheek (similar to one Crazy Horse bore). He holds a fan made from the wing of a large raptor (the hawk was a totem ani-mal for Crazy Horse, having appeared in one of his early visions). The subject looks grimly defiant, and his face reflects wary intelligence.

“Crazy in the Lodge,” a Stanley J. Morrow pho-tograph dating from 1877, shows a young Lakota man with unbraided hair and an expression sug-gestive of impending doom. Historian Colonel W.A. Graham published this image in his 1953 book The Custer Myth , noting, “Competent judges have expressed opinion that its authenticity is probable.” While some observers suggest Hawk Wing and Crazy in the Lodge might be the same person, others cite several differences. Hawk Wing appears to have a stronger chin and straighter nose, for example, while Crazy in the Lodge seems to have a wider mouth and thicker neck. Their

Opposite top: Could the Lakota subject “Crazy in the Lodge” actually be Crazy Horse? Opposite below: The 1934 “Mormon Missionary Drawing” of Crazy Horse is based on a description given by a surviving sister. Below: This “Hawk Wing” photo shows a Lakota man with a fan made from the wing of a large raptor. Could he be Crazy Horse?

resemblance could reflect a familial relation-ship, however.

Last up for consideration is the “Mormon Mis-sionary Drawing,” sketched in 1934 by a Latter-day Saint genealogist and sketch artist after a descrip-tion by Julia Clown, a surviving sister of Crazy Horse. The subject has an aquiline nose and strong chin, though he lacks Crazy Horse’s signature fa-cial scar—perhaps omitted out of regard for Clown’s feelings, as her brother had been scandalously shot in the face for absconding with another man’s wife. Obviously a somewhat idealized rendering, the sketch does share aspects of both plausible “Crazy Horse” photographs. His eyes call to mind those of Hawk Wing, while his thicker neck resembles that of Crazy in the Lodge.

One dogged naysayer quotes a great-grandson of Crazy Horse who insisted his famed forebear never sat for a photograph, period. But Crazy Horse had no great-grandson. His only child, a daughter by Black Shawl, died in infancy in 1873. Another critic doubts the authenticity of a purported photograph of Black Shawl, noting she was invalided at the time of Crazy Horse’s murder and died shortly afterward. In fact Black Shawl recovered and lived at least until 1920 and possibly until 1927. She died, like mil-lions of others worldwide, in a secondary influenza epidemic after World War I.

Based on legend or hearsay, no one can prove whether or not Crazy Horse ever posed for a photograph. Neither does the sketch informed by a de-scription from his sister con-firm the authenticity of the visually similar photographs of Hawk Wing and Crazy in the Lodge—though it does suggest those photographs capture how Crazy Horse might have looked. For the time being, though, we have no authenticated picture of Crazy Horse, and the Lakota people remain firm in their conviction none exists.


‘THE MOST HARTRENDERING

TALE’Private Tom Coleman fought at the Little Bighorn, described the action and

aftermath on Reno Hill and helped bury the dead By Bruce R. Liddic


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ven a light rain that fell in the

early morning did not disturb

the slumbers of Tom Coleman that sultry moon-

less night. The day before, June 25, 1876, was as

long as it was arduous for this Company B trooper

and his fellow cavalrymen. Captain Thomas Mc-

Dougall had instructed his company sergeants to

wake the men before daylight, so as to be in posi-

tion on their assigned perimeter, facing west along

the steep bluffs above the Little Bighorn River.

There was little doubt the Indians would renew

their attack at first light.

As Coleman awoke, his mind must have flashed

back to the horrors of the previous day. It was

not like his Civil War service with Surgeon Moses

Gunn of the 5th Michigan Infantry in 1861 or his

later service in the Union Navy as a second-class

boy. He had experienced sore muscles, hunger

and mind-numbing fatigue before, but the fear,

yesterday’s fear, was something he could almost

taste. It was only through sheer exhaustion anyone

in B could have rested, given the vast Indian village

spread out below them on the west bank of the river.

Compounding their fear and fatigue was the cele-

bration the victorious Sioux and Cheyennes had

held that night. What the troopers saw and heard

after sundown was a bona fide “monster’s ball.”

One officer described it as “a veritable pandemo-

nium of savage joy—all night long they continued

their frantic revels; beating tom-toms, dancing,

whooping, yelling with demoniacal screams. They

were having the greatest scalp dance in history.”

It wasn’t to have turned out this way. When

the regiment left Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota

Territory, in mid-May, it promised to be a short

campaign. Following directives from the admin-

istration of President Ulysses S. Grant, the 7th

Cavalry was one of three columns sent to round

up noncompliant Indians and force them back

to their reservations. Any resistance on the part

of the “hostiles” would probably result in just a

few short engagements. But the Sioux and Chey-

ennes had surrounded and outfought the 7th Cav-

alry, the survivors of which had holed up among

desolate bluffs above a rather nondescript stream.

Coleman was one of the veteran troopers in his

company. In addition to his service in the Civil

War, he was now four years into his five-year en-

Seventh U.S. Cavalry Private Thomas W. Coleman kept a diary while on the

1876 campaign along the Yellowstone and Little Bighorn rivers in Montana

Territory. He was born on Christmas Day 1849 in Troy, N.Y. His father, Morris,

mother Ann, two brothers and two sisters spent their lives in Troy. Thomas was

only 12 when he served as a surgeon’s assistant in the Civil War; he then enlisted

in the Union Navy and served through war’s end. After his May 1865 discharge

he returned to Troy and followed his father into the carpentry trade. In 1872,

perhaps seeking adventure, he again enlisted in the Army and, after a brief stay

at Jefferson Barracks, Mo., was assigned to the 7th Cavalry. The late author-

historian John M. Carroll arranged with the owner of Coleman’s diary to have

it donated to the library at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. Text

rendered in italics in the following article indicates an excerpt from the diary

that preserves Coleman’s spelling, grammar, capitalization and punctuation.

Troopers flee across the Little Bighorn in a circa 1900 ledger drawing by the Oglala Amos Bad Heart Bull.


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Company DWEIR

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Company MFRENCH

June 25

Company BMcDOUGALL

Company MJune 26

Field Hospital

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Indian VillageWeir Point

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Thomas Coleman was a private in Company B under Captain Thomas McDougall, aunit tasked with guarding the pack train. He joined surviving troopers in the defense ofReno Hill and later helped bury the dead. Fellow troopers recalled Coleman as one of

the water party volunteers, though he was overlooked for the Medal of Honor.

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listment and had participated in both the 1873 Yellowstone

Expedition and the 1874 Black Hills Expedition. As his eyes

adjusted to the early light of June 26, he noticed the Indians

occupied high ground to his right and rear. From there they

could fire on the soldiers backs and flanks. Coleman’s world, and

that of his fellow troopers, had changed dramatically in 24 hours

—in fact, it had been turned upside down.

It was on May 17 the 7th Cavalry started westward, accord-

ing to Coleman’s field diary, on a Compaigne against the

Siux. He noted that when the regiment left Fort Lincoln

as the principal element of the Dakota Column, Brig.

Gen. Alfred H. Terry, the column’s commander, had

deemed it a fine Boddy of Men. It took the column nearly a month

to reach the Yellowstone River for its prearranged rendezvous

with Colonel John Gibbon’s eastbound Montana Column. Brig.

Gen. George Crook’s northbound Wyoming Column had yet

to arrive. Coleman had been over this ground three years earlier

during the Yellowstone Expedition and noted that his regiment

was camped opposite the place we had the fight with the Indians.

Once the Montana and Dakota columns had converged on

the Yellowstone, General Terry sought more current intelligence

on the location of the hostiles. He ordered 7th Cavalry Major

Marcus Reno, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s second-

in-command, to take six companies on an extended scout to

the south and west. Reno was gone for eight days, returning to

the Yellowstone on June 18. He had been unable to locate the

Coleman joined the fighting at the Battle of the Little Bighorn when his Company B arrived on Reno Hill.

Indians, finding only old trails and camps, and could only report

where the hostiles were not. Terry decided to double down with

a larger force to find their quarry and complete his mission.

On June 20 the government-contracted steamboat Far West

resupplied the columns. Private Coleman recorded they drew

rations for 15 days and Tobacco the wead that a soldier likes eaven

better than he does Whiskey. He also noted that some men ob-

tained liquor and got gloriously drunk. Coleman believed the

regiment was preparing to follow the trails Reno had discovered,

and the march would lead Custer’s men to the Indian camps.

His belief was well founded; that evening General Terry de-

tached the entire 7th Cavalry, ordering it to march the next day

and round up those Indians, wherever they might be. The regi-

ment was to be the tip of Terry’s spear and would probably be

the first to make contact with the enemy.

On the 23rd Custer’s 7th was following the trail up Rosebud

Creek when they came to a camp the Indians had built for

their Religious Cermony Called the Sun dance and nearby was a

fresh scalp supposed to have been taken from the head of one of Gen-

eral Gibbons Soliders that was out hunting. On Saturday the 24th

the soldiers were up at 4 a.m. as usual and, after a breakfast

of coffee and hardtack, on the march at 6. Coleman recorded

the troops felt much refreshed but that uneasiness had set in; the

trail the regiment was following kept expanding, indicating

that somewhere up ahead big trouble could be waiting. Before

turning in for the night, he wrote that every Man feeling that the

next twenty four hours would deside the fate of a good manny men.


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Their hopes for another good night’s rest were dashed a little past 10 p.m.

Custer had been keeping his scouts active ever since they left the Yellowstone, even more so as the trail had become much fresher and larger. He was certain the 7th was on the heels of its target. That evening Crow scouts had returned to report the hostiles’ trail led across the divide and into the valley of the Greasy Grass, or Little Bighorn. Custer summoned his officers to his shelter and announced the regiment would undertake a night march, insist-ing he wanted to be at or near the divide by sunup on the 25th. From there the scouts would pinpoint the exact location of the Indian village, and while the men and mounts rested for a day, the colonel would lay plans for a dawn attack on the 26th.

No sooner had the troopers bedded down on the 24th than their officers were waking them. Coleman noted the men were saddly Disappointed

for we again Marched at 11 and the night being so dark

we could scarsely see the horses a head of us. He re-corded they traveled about 8 miles in the dark-ness, then picketed their unsaddled horses and tried to grab some rest. The planned attack for the 26th never came about, as during the night march several companies lost supplies that had worked loose from the pack mules. A detail sent back to recover the supplies discovered Indians on the regiment’s back trail. The expected element of surprise had slipped away. For many men of the 7th Cavalry, when the Sabbath sun broke the east-ern horizon, it brought the edge of darkness. Nearly half of the soldiers riding behind Custer would not live to see another dawn.

Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry had overall command of the Dakota Column in the Little Bighorn campaign of 1876.

Colonel John Gibbon headed the eastbound Montana Column, which was to meet the Dakota Column.

Captain Thomas McDougall ably led Coleman’s troop, Company B, during the Reno Hill defense.

By the time Major Marcus Reno had retreated to the hill that would bear his name, he had lost about a third of his command.

Having found no Indians to the southwest, Captain Frederick Benteen finally led his force to join Reno in defense of the hilltop.

Early on the 25th the Scouts came in and

reported a large village in our front the Gen-

eral [Custer] was highly pleased to hear it

he then foremed his plan of battle. Accord-ing to Coleman, Custer’s plan was to

retain five companies, while detaching Major Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen with three compa-nies each. Company B was assigned to guard 1st Lt. Edward Mathey’s pack train, which would follow with supplies and the reserve ammunition. Reno and Custer would charge the village, while Benteen was to scout for hostiles to the south and west. Custer and Reno initially rode parallel to one another down a creek toward the reported Indian village. It was about 2:30 p.m. when Custer sent Reno forward. The colonel continued to follow the major’s bat-talion toward the Little Bighorn before suddenly veering off to the north. Reno charged the Indians but

he was entirely Surrounded and had to Cut his way back

to the bluffs with the remnant of his Command the indians

following. It was about 4 p.m. when Reno reached the bluffs above the river with about a third of his battal-ion dead or missing. Benteen, finding no side trails or Indians to the southwest, finally joined him there.

When the men of Company B arrived on the bluffs just ahead of the pack train, they formed a skirmish line, linking up with fellow troopers already in position. Coleman recalled the soldiers fought them until dark when the drawed off and left us

in command of the bluffs we dug holes with our hunting

Knives and awated the indians in the Morning. Though the men could hear heavy gunfire to the north, no one knew the exact location of Custer and the five companies in his immediate command.


Captain McDougall was right to have his B troopers in posi-tion early on the morning of the 26th. The indians oapened a Mur-

derous fire on us, wrote Coleman, and one of our men got Killed and

two baddley wounded. When encroaching Indians threatened Ben-teen’s key position, the captain led a charge to clear them from his front. McDougall later noted hostiles closing on his perimeter. The Indians, Coleman recorded, cept up a heavy fire on us from

three different points and our horses and pack Mules suffered severely.

The soldiers also suffered, from the gunfire, heat and lack of water. Coleman noted, We had now been 22 hours without water and

we were Suffering verry Much for the want of it espessially the wounded

it was almost impossible for a Man to goe to the River without getting

Killed or wounded. Plenty of volunteers were willing to try, and 19 of these water party volunteers and the sharpshooters who pro-tected them later received Medals of Honor. Not all who went for water were awarded the decoration, however. Years later Indian wars interviewer Walter Camp heard from old troopers that Tom Coleman was also a member of the water party, and they had no idea why he too hadn’t been recognized.

By late afternoon the incoming shots had dropped off. Coleman speculated on the cause: Their fire Slack-

ened i suppose for the want of amunition and at dark the

left altogether their families going towards the big horn

mountains and the wariors going towards the Yellowstone

The left us Masters of the field, but how dearly bought 42 Wounded and

14 Killed to night we got plenty of water for our Men and horses and

we lay in the trenches with the Sky for a Covering and Slept Soundly

until Morning. The real reason the Indians broke off contact with Reno’s command is they had spotted Terry’s and Gibbon’s sol-diers coming down from the north. Only then did the soldiers on the bluffs realize just how many hostiles they had faced; the withdrawing Indians reminded Benteen of a full division of Civil War cavalry on the march.

After sunrise on the 27th Coleman went oaver the Battlefield on

this side [east] of the river and the first person I saw was Lieut B.H.

Hodgson of my Company he was shot twise with Ball and once with

Company B guarded the pack train under Lieutenant Edward Mathey, who stands at center post-battle.

arrow Several other Boddies lay close by I buried the Lieut on a nice

Knowl oaverlooking the River with a Cedar tree at his head he was a

Brave officer and a true gentleman. Coleman noted the arrival of the other troops: About 10 A.M. General Terry and gibbons Came to our

reliefe the General was profoundly affected at the Sad disaster. That after-noon Coleman and others crossed the river to look for the boddy

of one of our Company and we could not recognise him all of them were

Scalped and otherwise horably mutilated Some had their heads Cut off

others arms and legs their hatred extended eaven to the poor horses. Their labors carried over into the evening, as they moved the Wounded across the

river the poor fellows feel verry bad for the

want of propper Care and nourishment.

Terry arranged for burial details on the 28th. Reno directed Captain McDougall to take charge of bury-ing the dead of Company E, as he had once commanded the unit. Coleman recorded the sad scene: Now Comes the Most hartrendering tale

of all.…How Manny homes are Made

desolate by the Sad disaster…My Com-

pany burried 30 of E Company the

were in line not 10 feet apart they were

This page from the June 28, 1876, entry in Coleman’s campaign diary describes the aftermath of the battle.


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so Disfigured by those female Monsters the squaws that I could not

recognise one of them…After burrying the dead we went across the river

and went through the Village there was one funeral tent left standing

filled with dead savage we left them as the were. On the 29th the men constructed litters to transport the wounded about 18 miles north to the Bighorn River, where the riverboat Far West waited to return them to Fort Lincoln. That evening the combined forces left camp, arriving at the Far West early on the morning of the 30th. The boat left in the afternoon for Fort Lincoln with

the Wounded, wrote Coleman, 40 in all and to get supplies for the

command. He also wrote about the muster that evening, noting that about 250 men were fit to take the field, though the horses were in poor condition. The able-bodied men resumed the search for hostiles along the Yellowstone and Rosebud before Terry ordered the 7th to return to Fort Lincoln for rest and re-fitting. The regiment arrived in late September after a nearly five-month absence. By then Tom Coleman had only weeks left to serve on his enlistment, and on Jan. 4, 1877, he was dis-charged “as a private of very good character, with no objection to his being re-enlisted is known to exist.”

Rather than wade into the ever expanding sea of ink of opin-ions on the hows and whys of the Custer battle, Coleman simply told it as he had experienced and recorded it: As I have said before

General Custer with five Companies went below the Village to Cut them

off as he Supposed but instead he was Surrounded and all of them Killed

to a Man 14 officers and 250 Men Their the bravest General of Modder

times met his death with his two Brothers Brotherinlaw and Nephew

not 5 yards apart Surrounded by 42 Men of E Company.

Coleman, who neither married nor had any children, re-mained in the vicinity of Bismarck, N.D. (near Fort Lincoln), until 1882 when he traveled to Lewistown, Mont., to work on the Northern Pacific Railroad. He kept at it until failing health precluded him from doing manual labor. In 1906 he applied for his Civil War pension and was granted $10 a month. Coleman’s small but steady income increased over time, and he spent his days ranging central Montana between Lewistown and Grass Range. By 1919 he had moved permanently to Lewistown and was drawing a comfortable pension of $50 a month. But his health soon went into steep decline, and he was becoming in-creasingly senile. By January 1921 he was in his last home—the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Los Angeles. There he died of bronchopneumonia and arteriosclerosis on Nov. 30, 1921.

Private Thomas W. Coleman, Company B, 7th U.S. Cav-alry, might have remained one of the forgotten warriors of the Little Bighorn if not for the diary he kept, something no other enlisted man is known to have done. He took part in that iconic battle of 140 years ago, and in this case you can take his word for it.

Bruce R. Liddic of Lancaster, Pa., has written or edited four books and

many magazine articles about the Little Bighorn. For further reading

see his books I Buried Custer: The Diary of Pvt. Thomas W. Coleman,

7th U.S. Cavalry (1979); Camp on Custer: Transcribing the Custer

Myth (1995); Custer & Company: Walter Camp’s Notes on the Custer

Fight (1998); and Vanishing Victory: Custer’s Final March (2004).

34 WILD WEST J U N E 2 0 1 6

Troopers in Major Marcus Reno’s 7th U.S. Cavalry command retreat across the Little Bighorn River after their failed attack on June 25, 1876.

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Of these privates at the Little Bighorn, one died, three failed to save him but survived, and the fifth fled on the dead man’s horse By John Koster

FIVE IN THE

VALLEY FIGHT


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Frank Neely

Francis “Frank” Neely was born in the sleepy little southwestern Ohio town of Collinsville in March 1850. The Celtic surname Neely (“son of the descendant of the hound”) has warrior origins and is suggestive of speed and ferocity in a fight. Neely’s parents, like a million or more Irish, likely fled Ireland during the suc-cessive potato blights of the late 1840s. When Neely joined the U.S. Army in Cincinnati on April 8, 1871, he was 21 years and 1 month old. He listed his occupation as “painter.” His hand-writing suggests he was schooled in American country schools. He stood 5 feet 10 inches tall, with light eyes and hair and a fair complexion—the image of the Celtic hero he later proved to be.

William Taylor

William Othneil Taylor, born in Canandaigua, N.Y., on Feb. 18, 1855, enlisted at Troy, N.Y., on Jan. 17, 1872. Anglo-Saxon in

he June 25–26, 1876, Battle of the Little Bighorn

was a tragedy for Lt. Col. George A. Custer and his immediate command, and elsewhere along that Montana Territory river men in the commands of Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen also fought for their lives or to the death. The casualties were not as great among those 7th U.S. Cavalry commands, but even the unwounded had to deal with the shock of battle, residual terror and self-imposed recriminations in the aftermath. Little has been written about the enlisted survi-vors. Most of them, especially the privates, left a thin paper trail. Some were illiterate. Others wrote in German as their first language and sent their accounts elsewhere. What follows are the personal stories of five enlisted men—one casualty and four survivors—whose lives were defined by their roles in that part of the battle known as the Valley Fight.

heritage, Taylor was a natural scholar with fine handwriting. On enlistment he stood 5 feet 1 inch, but he would grow 3 inches during his hitch in the Army. Taylor was perhaps atypical of the men profiled, in that he sought to understand the Indian perspective even in the midst of the fight.

Henry Klotzbucher

Heinrich Klotzbuecher (later Angli-cized to Henry Klotzbucher) was born in Baden (in present-day southwest Germany) in 1848. In 1866 a coalition of Germanic states, including Baden, Bavaria and Hanover, joined Austria in its civil war against Prussia and its allies. They lost. Klotzbuecher sailed for the United States from Hamburg the next year. Schooled under the old Zunft (trades guild) apprentice system as a cooper, or barrel maker, he wrote in an elegant hand. In Philadelphia on Oct. 4, 1873, he enlisted as Henry Klotzbucher. On enlistment he stood 5 feet 6 inches, with brown eyes and hair. The Germanic states that lost in 1866 were overrepresented in the 7th Cavalry rosters, while far fewer men listed their place of origin as Prussia, largest of the German states.

William Morris

William Ephraim Morris, from Boston, enlisted in the Army on Sept. 25, 1875. He gave his enlistment age as 21, but he was actually 17. His red hair suggests he, like Neely, may have been of Irish ancestry, though he was buried in a nondenominational cemetery. His older half-brother Byron Tarbox, of Company L, joined up the same day and was surprised when William appeared by his side to be fitted for a uniform.

William Slaper

On Sept. 10, 1875, days before Morris lied his way into the 7th Cavalry, William C. Slaper of Cincinnati enlisted because he was

William Taylor empathized with the Indians’ plight.

Henry Klotzbucher hailed from Baden, a Germanic state.

Major Marcus Reno led his men into the valley.

William Slaper enlisted because he needed work.


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Private Henry Klotzbucher diedhere from a stomach wound.

Privates Frank Neely,William Taylor, WilliamMorris and WilliamSlaper made it back here.

Companies A, G and Mand a company of Arikarascouts attacked one flank

of the Indian village.

‘Private’ Fight

out of work (see “Little Bighorn: Slaper’s Side of the Story,” by John Koster, in the June 2014 Wild West ). Slaper, with a father from Baden and a mother from Prussia, found his uniform an embarrassment, later saying, “At that time any young man wear-ing the uniform of a United States soldier was looked upon as an idler—too lazy to work.” Slaper’s father, his mother’s brother, her brother-in-law and a cousin had been killed in the Civil War. When his mother first saw William in uniform, she fainted.

Into the Valley They Go

Frank Neely, William Taylor and Henry Klotzbucher were ex-perienced soldiers by the time the regiment left Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory, on May 17, 1876, and William Morris and William Slaper knew how to ride a horse. Eleven days after their departure Neely, the Celtic warrior, and his friend Private William C. Williams, later a pharmacist, carved their names on the face of an exposed sandstone boulder known as Initial Rock in present-day Little Missouri National Grassland, North Dakota. They must have had a sense of history—or foreboding.

Taylor, who had been recently transferred from Company M to Company A, bemoaned his own situation when, as the newest trooper, he was given the oldest horse. “[He] bore the name of Steamboat,” the private quipped, “because of the particular noise he made while traveling.” Taylor was all ears the night before the fight when some of the younger officers sang, among other tunes, the Christian doxology. “Was it not something in the nature of a prayer,” he later mused, “coming from the hearts of those young officers, several of them but a short time from West Point? May it not have been born of an unconscious premonition of the sad fate that so soon awaited many of them?”

On June 25 Custer sent three companies—A, G and M—under Major Marcus Reno with a fourth company of Arikara Indian scouts to attack one flank of the Indian village while the colonel himself moved to attack it from the other end. When the command split up, Tarbox of Company L called out to half-brother Morris of Company M: “Look out for your scalp, Bill! Those Indians don’t like red-headed fellows.” It was the last time the brothers would see each other alive.

Taylor, for one, was leery of Reno’s behavior as they approached the valley. “The major and Lieu-tenant [Benjamin] Hodgson were riding side by side a short distance in the rear of my company,” he recalled. “As I looked back, Major Reno was just taking a bottle from his lips. He then passed it to Lieutenant Hodgson. It appeared to be a quart flask, and about one-half or two-thirds full of an amber-colored liquid.”

Morris described the scene when the command crossed the river and came under attack from an overwhelming Indian force: “Reno, very properly, gave the command, ‘Battalion, halt—prepare to fight on foot—dismount!’ He directed [Captain Thomas] French to send 10 men from the right of his troop

to skirmish the wood, before the ‘numbers four’ proceeded there with the horses. We immediately deployed as skirmishers and opened fire.…In less time than it takes to relate it, the Indians were on three sides of us. We were ordered to lie down, and every man that I could see, except Reno and French, were fight-ing lying down. Reno walked along the line giving instructions to the men, while French was calling his men’s attention to his own marksmanship with an infantry Long Tom [Springfield Model 1873 rifle] that he carried.”

“This was my first experience under fire,” Slaper said afterward. “I know that for a time I was frightened, and far more so when we got our first glimpse of the Indians riding around in all direc-tions, firing at us and yelling and whooping like incarnate fiends.”

The Valley Fight

In the morning count-off Taylor had called out “four” and thus was designated as the horse holder for his section of four men. He actually wanted to be in the fight, but the No. 3 man refused to exchange places with him. Morris and Slaper each saw 1st Sgt. Miles O’Hara crumple to the ground. “Then I observed another, and yet another,” Slaper said. “Strange to say, I had recovered from my first fright…although conscious that I was in great peril and standing a mighty good chance of never getting out of it alive.”

The swarming Lakotas outflanked the Arikaras and killed Bob-tailed Bull, the sergeant of scouts. Within moments the

Overwhelmed in the valley, Reno’s men retreated across the river and made their stand atop a hill.


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three companies pulled back to the cottonwoods beside the river. “Reno,” Morris recalled, “then made his only error; he gave the command, ‘Retreat to your horses, men!’ French immediately corrected the mistake with the command, ‘Steady, men—fall back, slowly; face the enemy and continue your fire.’” Morris said Company M pulled back in perfect order, covering Com-panies A and G.

“Word came to retreat back to the horses in the timber,” Sla-per said. “We got back there about as quickly as we knew how.” Not so the wounded Sergeant O’Hara, who reportedly cried out, “For God’s sake, don’t leave me!” No one stopped to help him.

“All at once the skirmishers came rushing into the woods seeking their horses,” Taylor, the reluctant horse holder, recalled. “Then I heard someone say, ‘We must get out of here, quick!’”

Their attackers were infiltrating the woods. Bloody Knife, Custer’s favorite scout, half Lakota and half Arikara, had just leaned over to speak to Reno when a bullet spattered his blood and brains all over the major’s face. Reno panicked.

“All was in the greatest confusion, and I dismounted twice and mounted again, all in a few moments,” Taylor wrote. “I looked

to my left and rear and saw quite a number of mounted Indians rushing through the woods.…My first thought was that they were some of our Indian scouts, but a second look undeceived me, for these Indians were mostly stripped.…There was one exception, however, a study-looking chap who was the nearest of all. He wore a magnificent warbonnet of great long feathers.…I did want to take a shot at him, but the trees were close together, and I was not a very good marksman. Besides, my comrades seemed bent on getting out of there as soon as possible. So I let him live.”

Taylor had damaged his right stirrup strap in the thicket, so his balance in the saddle was shaky. He fired his Colt Single Action Army .45 at approach-ing Indians, didn’t hit any and, while steadying himself to cross the river, dropped his revolver. But he remained in the saddle. “I turned my horse a little to the right to avoid the crowd and, jumping him into the river, was soon across.”

Slaper never heard the order to withdraw. “Nei-ther did I hear any bugle calls or commands of any sort,” he later said. “When I got to my horse, there were not many of us left in the timber that I could see. Soon after, Private Henry Klotzbucher, who was ‘striker’ [orderly] for Captain French, was shot through the stomach just as he was in the act of mounting his horse. He fell to the ground, and I saw Private Francis Neely dismount to help him. I thereupon got off my own horse and helped Neely drag the wounded trooper into a clump of heavy underbrush, where we thought he might not be found by the Indians. Wm. E. Morris, another comrade, came up at this juncture and helped us care for Klotzbucher.”

“Leave me alone, for God’s sake!” Klotzbucher cried out in pain.

“We saw that he was probably mortally wounded,” Sla-per recalled, “so we left him a canteen of water and hurriedly mounted again, dashing toward the river in the wake of our flying trooper comrades.”

Morris recounted the rescue bid. “I went to his relief, which caused me to be the last man to leave the timber with the com-mand, with the exception of Lieutenant [Luther] Hare, who passed me in the [river] bottom.”

The rout was ugly. Private David Summers was killed as he left the cottonwoods. As the troopers approached the river, Morris saw Corporal Henry Scollin’s horse shot from beneath him. “For God’s sake, boys, don’t leave me here!” Scollin [aka Cody] shouted while pulling his carbine for a last-ditch fight. Private Rollins Thorpe had no sooner helped Scollin swing up behind him on the saddle when Thorpe’s horse dropped, tum-bling both troopers to the ground. Thorpe quickly caught a stray Indian pony and fled, leaving Scollin to his fate.

“Every man that I saw used his revolver at close range,” Morris recalled. “I was at least 20 yards behind the rear of the command.

Lieutenant Benjamin Hodgson, Reno’s adjutant, was killed beside the river during the retreat.


The Indians closed in, so I was compelled to jump my horse off the bank.…When I reached the cut in the bank, I found [Privates Henry] Turley and [William] Rye mounted and Lieu-tenant Hodgson wounded and dismounted. He was waist-deep in the water. He grasped my off stirrup strap with both hands. Rye let Turley go ahead through the cut, and he was killed as he reached the top. Rye followed without receiving a scratch. The lieutenant held onto my stirrup for two or three seconds and was dragged out of the water. He was hit again and let go as my horse plunged up the cut.”

“As I urged my horse through the water,” Slaper said, “I could see Indians in swarms about the ford above me, and many lashing their ponies to reach that spot, paying no attention to me. One reason for this was that I was alone, and they were after bigger game.…Death seemed to ride on every hand, and yet a kind Providence must have been watching over me, for I crossed the stream unscathed.”

“The rapid pace and exertion over the river had completely exhausted my horse, and he stood trembling with fatigue and refused to go any further,” Taylor recalled of old Steamboat. “I dismounted and amid whistling of bullets stood there for a few moments, waiting for him to get his breath. Then I tried to lead him along, but he would not budge.…In my anger and dis-gust I gave the beast a parting kick, unslung my carbine and started up the bluff, a mark as I thought for hundreds of rifles, little puffs of dust rising from the ground all around as the bullets buried themselves in the dry, dusty hillside. The slope which we were ascending was a funnel-shaped ridge, the small end being near the top of the bluff.…It must have been Providence that directed us to that particular spot, for there was no other place anywhere near that we could have made the ascent with so much haste and so little trouble.”

Private William “Tinker Bill” Meyer of Company M, also afoot, caught up with Taylor a third of the way up the hill. “We walked along quite close together for a few feet when with but the single exclamation, ‘Oh!’ Meyer pitched forward face down to the ground. I bent over him, but he was dead, shot between the left ear and the eye.…Within a short distance of the top I was overtaken by a former comrade of M Troop, Frank Neely. He was mounted and had a led horse with him. This horse he turned over to me, very glad to get rid of his charge. It was with a deep feeling of relief that I got into a saddle again, for my chances were a little better now.”

His fellow troopers had not been able to save the mortally wounded Klotzbucher on the other side of the river, but Neely had used his horse, Old Dutch, to save Taylor.

“Upon reaching the level above the cut,” Morris wrote to historian Cyrus Townsend Brady in 1904, “I dismounted and led my horse as fast as possible up the bluff and overtook ‘Tinker Bill’ Meyer and [Private Henry] Gordon about halfway up the bluff. We stopped a moment to rest.…At this instant a shower of lead sent Meyer and Gordon to the happy hunting ground, and a .50 caliber passed through the left breast of your humble servant. Our horses were also hit. I continued up the hill alone and joined the command; was then assisted to the improvised hospital.”

Reno Hill and Later

Klotzbucher was gone, but Neely, Slaper, Morris and Taylor survived a night and a day of thirst and fear on Reno Hill. None of them killed an Indian, and none received the Medal of Honor. Morris expressed to Brady his spiteful amusement that Private Charles Windolph did receive the decoration. “I remember him as the tailor of ‘H’ troop, and have a distinct recollection of his coming to the field hospital, bent almost double, and asking for treatment of a wound which, his appearance would suggest, was a mortal one, but which the surgeon found, on removing his trou-sers, to be only a burn. The surgeon ordered him back to the line amid a shout of laughter.” Windolph, in fact, was a shoemaker, not a tailor, and never asked to be taken from the line despite a bloody flesh wound to the chest. Slaper later recalled that it was Trum-peter Charles Fischer, and not Morris, who directed Lieutenant Hodgson to grab one of his stirrups and then towed him to the far bank of the river, where Hodgson fell victim to another bullet.

Taylor, while helping to gather supplies and dispatch wounded horses and mules, stumbled across the body of an Indian, scalped presumably by a vindictive solder. “He looked like a bronze statue that had been thrown to the ground,” the eloquent trooper re-called. “I could not help a feeling of sorrow as I stood gazing upon him. He was within a few hundred rods of his home and family which we had attempted to destroy and he had died to defend.”

Taylor, shaken and emotionally exhausted, took his dis-charge in January 1877 and soon found a job as a metal polisher at a sewing machine factory in Orange, Mass. Through 40 years of a childless marriage Taylor read everything from newspaper accounts to congressional reports about the Great Sioux War of 1876 and ultimately concluded that blundering, corrupt politi-cians or a combination thereof had forced the war on the Indians. He died in Massachusetts in 1923 at age 68.

Slaper completed his full hitch, was discharged in 1880 and consoled his ailing mother for the last three months of her life. A salesman in civilian life, he married but also had no children. He died in Los Angeles in 1931 at age 76.

Morris was discharged in 1877 for disability as a private of “worthless character.” Landing in New York City the next year, he worked as a waiter in tough Bowery saloons, studied law in his spare time, cultivated the Tammany Hall political machine and became a lawyer, a judge and a New York City alderman. His son, William E. Morris, became a civil engineer in the Bronx sewer system. The elder Morris died respected and prosperous in Westchester County, New York, in 1933. His reported age was 75.

Neely served two more full tours in the Army, receiving successive character upgrades from “good” to “very good” to “excellent.” On his discharge he told friends something about having accidentally killed a man—could he have meant Klotz-bucher, the man he had failed to save? Neely then wandered off “to hunt” in the desert. He was never seen again.

John Koster, author of Custer Survivor, is a Wild West special

contributor. He credits the National Archives [archives.gov] for

research on Neely and the New-York Historical Society [nyhistory.

org] for research on Morris. For further reading Koster recommends

With Custer on the Little Bighorn, by William O. Taylor.

WILD WEST J U N E 2 0 1 640COURTESY WEST POINT MUSEUM COLLECTION, U.S. MILITARY ACADEMY;

TOP RIGHT: FROM THEY HAD A DREAM, BY GEORGE REASONS AND SAM PATRICK

While there are no known photos of Isaiah Dorman, his body is depicted at center right in the pictograph Reno’s Retreat, by the Cheyenne White Bird. See P. 44 for more about the conceptual sketch atop the opposite page.


BLACK MAN AT THE LITTLE

BIGHORNInterpreter Isaiah Dorman rode

with Custer and died in battle, but the rest of his story is shrouded in myth

By Lilah Morton Pengra

saiah Dorman died at the Little Bighorn

on June 25, 1876. Many men and some

women and children were killed that day, so his

death itself was not remarkable. However, he was

neither a soldier nor a warrior, neither white nor

Indian. Dorman was black, a civilian employee

of the Army and regularly the Lakota interpreter

at Fort Rice, Dakota Territory. But that day, at the


cates challenged historians to pay equal attention to the contri-butions of black Americans, Roland McConnell worked on a project to locate documents relating to black history at the National Archives. Based on Army records he found there, he wrote an article in 1948 about Dorman’s employment as mili-tary mail carrier and then post interpreter at Fort Rice.

In 1965, responding to growing public interest in both black history and the Little Bighorn, Robert Ege wrote an article about Dorman for Negro Digest and a similar article for Montana: The

Magazine of Western History. As the published information then available only recorded Dorman’s life in Dakota Territory after 1865, Ege hypothesized Dorman must have been a runaway slave. That hypothesis and other unsubstantiated details about Dorman—such as his wife’s name, their family and whether Sitting Bull gave the mortally wounded interpreter a drink of water before his death—passed from author to author, and as happens in the children’s game of telephone, a distorted version of his life became accepted truth. The real story, culled from primary documents found during 15 years of research, turns out to be far more interesting.

orman reported to a census taker in 1860 that he was free and born in Pennsylvania in 1832. Extant written records suggest he was born in Water Street, Pa., the sixth child of George and

Rosetta Dorman. Years after his death a soldier who had known him wrote, “Dorman’s father was said to be a Jamaica Negro, and his mother a squaw.” Dorman’s grandfather was captured from the Igbo tribe along the Bight of Bonny (in present-day Nigeria) and enslaved in Jamaica; his father immigrated to the United States as an indentured servant after the British aboli-tion of slavery. Dorman’s mother, Rosetta Hazzard, whose fore-bears were possibly African and Lenape (Delaware Indian), was deeded her freedom at age 10.

George Dorman helped build the Pennsylvania Canal but was unable to find work after its completion. Poverty and the threat of being mistakenly captured by newly legalized slave catchers apparently convinced young Isaiah to seek better fortune in the West. Although no documentation exists to show his route, many black men worked their way along the Western rivers—traveling the Pennsylvania Canal to the Ohio, then north on the Mississippi to the Missouri and Minnesota.

No record survives to verify how or when Dorman first ar-rived in Minnesota, but in 1852 he purchased two pairs of socks and a plug of tobacco at a fur trader’s store in Mendota, across the river from Fort Snelling. The trader’s daybook once noted him in the company of Joseph LaFramboise, whose nephew Frank would serve as the interpreter at Fort Rice before Dor-man. The elder LaFramboise operated a trading post near the site selected by the Army for Fort Ridgely, the new outpost on the Minnesota, where Dorman worked for five months in 1853 as a personal servant for Dr. Alex Hasson and three lieutenants— S

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request of Lt. Col. George Custer, he was on temporary duty with the 1876 campaign along the Yellowstone and Bighorn rivers.

In that era black Americans, their lives and activities, were largely invisible to white contemporaries. Only a few of Dor-man’s associates even mentioned him to Indian wars researcher Walter M. Camp or in their memoirs about the Battle of the Little Bighorn and its participants. Arikara scouts interviewed by historian Orin Libby related two anecdotes about the black interpreter, while Sitting Bull biographer Stanley Vestal re-corded a thirdhand Sioux anecdote of Dorman’s last moments. His life before the Little Bighorn received even less notice. Ben Arnold Connor told his wife about working with Dorman on a woodcutting crew one winter. Three others mentioned him briefly in their diaries or letters home.

Official written records about black Americans were equally sparse. However, early in the civil rights movement, when advo-

Born in 1855 to Isaiah Dorman and Celeste St. Pierre, Baptiste in later years used as his surname either Pierre” or “Black Hawk.”

James Scully stands at right in this Civil War photo. When he later served as quartermaster at Fort Rice in Dakota Territory, Scully cited Dorman’s integrity.

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John Kelton, James Corley and Thomas Wilson. The following spring he worked three months in the better-paying position of laborer on the fort construction crew.

While living and working along the Minnesota and Red rivers, he married Celeste St. Pierre, daughter of Baptiste St. Pierre, a Métis, and his Hunkpati wife. Dorman and St. Pierre’s first child, Baptiste, was born in 1855. When Dorman purchased supplies for his family, the trader sometimes recorded him by his nick-name, Black Hawk; in later years Dorman’s son sometimes used Black Hawk as his surname. This clarifies a seeming discrepancy in Dorman’s biography; when interpreter Sam Bruguier told researcher Camp that “Black Hawk” was married to a woman named Visible, he meant Baptiste Black Hawk not Black Hawk Dorman. Baptiste and first wife Visible (aka Mary King) had two children, Mary and Sam King, while he and second wife Winyantanka had a daughter, Lucy.

The Hunkpati, a subgroup of the Dakota people, never signed the 1851 treaty ceding their territory in Minnesota, as other tribes did in exchange for annuities that turned out to be inade-quate. They were, however, affected by the ensuing starvation, so Dorman once again sought employment as a servant. Captain Alfred Sully hired him in 1859, a few months before his transfer from Fort Ridgely to Fort Kearny, Neb. Dorman continued in Sully’s employ in Nebraska and then in Virginia during the Pen-insula campaign of the Civil War when then Lt. Col. Sully com-manded the 1st Minnesota Volunteers. “The bullets sang through the leaves just as if a rainstorm were taking place,” Sully wrote his sister in June 1862. “My negro Isaiah was close by me all the action. Neither of us were touched.” When the Army ordered newly promoted Brig. Gen. Sully to Dakota Territory in 1863 to lead ex-peditions against the Sioux, Dorman returned with him. Captain Javan B. Irvine later served in the military department and mentioned Dorman in a letter to his wife. “We have good guides and inter-preters,” he wrote. “One, Isaiah Dorman, the best in the country, honest and reliable, was with Genl. Sully through this country during his campaign in 1864 and 5, against the Sioux.”

By then Dorman had rejoined his wife and chil-dren, Baptiste and Maria Celeste (aka Saless), born in 1861. At first they lived with the St. Pierre family near Fort Sully (built in 1863) and then with Two Bears’ band near Fort Rice (built in 1864). During the winter of 1866–67 Dorman carried mail on foot the 210 miles between Forts Rice and Wadsworth (built in 1864 and renamed Sisseton in 1876) when no one else would attempt the trip due to deep snow, subzero temperatures and the threat of In-dian attack on open prairie. Major Joseph N.G. Whistler, the Fort Rice commander, wrote his su-periors at the Department of Dakota about the situ-ation: “[I have] so far found it impossible to obtain

the services of Indians in carrying the mail between this Post and Fort Wadsworth. They will not consent to go under any consid-eration. I am now employing a colored man, who agrees to carry the mail during the whole season for one hundred dollars per month.” Dorman completed three round-trips and twice met a courier from Fort Wadsworth at a midpoint. When spring arrived, the post transported the mail downriver by steamboat, ending Dorman’s civilian employment with the Army until 1871.

To make ends meet, Dorman joined a woodcutting crew supervised by Durfee & Peck trader Charles Galpin during the winter of 1867–68 and stayed through the following summer to sell cordwood to passing steamboats on behalf of his employ-er. When Father Pierre-Jean De Smet arrived that summer at Fort Rice to broker peace between the U.S. government and the Sioux, Dorman and St. Pierre took their third child, Henry, to De Smet for baptism. Henry’s godparents were Louis Agard and Louisa Picotte, whose mother, Eagle Woman That All Look At, was married to Galpin. Dorman established his own woodlot 20 miles south of Fort Rice to support his growing family, and son Baptiste supplemented the family’s income with trapping and gardening until he’d acquired enough land to become a horse rancher. Saless and her husband, German immigrant and Army veteran Ernest Mutchler, established a homestead directly across the Missouri. When she died, her son William moved in with his uncle. Dorman’s son Henry moved to Montana Territory, where he and wife Stretched the Earth had a son, Alfred (aka Benjamin). After Henry’s death his son also moved to the family ranch.


By Dakota kinship reckoning, whereby children of sisters are siblings, Baptiste took in brothers Peter and Frank after their father, Peter Frank, acciden-tally killed his wife, who was Celeste St. Pierre’s sister. Some of the confusion about Dorman’s life arose from this extended family relationship, as Peter Frank was also black, operated a woodlot, worked for a short time as an interpreter at the Standing Rock Agency and was nicknamed Black Hawk when enslaved as a boy by Francis Char-don at Fort Clark. Frank’s sons, like Baptiste and Henry, used either Pierre or Black Hawk when Indian agents, missionaries and other white offi-cials required them to give a surname.

In late summer 1871 the steamboat Far West

stopped at Dorman’s woodlot to take on fuel for its onward trip to Fort Rice. Aboard were Captain Irvine and troops from Fort Sully, en route to join the military escort assigned to guard a Northern Pacific Railroad surveying party looking for a route from the Missouri to the Yellowstone. Irvine wrote in his diary the steamboat “tied up at the wood yard of Isaiah Dorman, whose ranch I visited and was entertained with a dish of wild plums.…We left Isaiah’s at daybreak, he having concluded to ac-company us to Rice.” Immediately on arrival at the fort Dorman signed a contract to accompany the expedition as guide. Whistler commanded the escort and, due to excessive alcohol consumption and incompetence, often took wrong turns. On one occasion a rumor spread through camp blaming Dorman for missing the trail. He reportedly threat-ened to leave rather than be treated unfairly.

The day the expedition returned to Fort Rice, Dorman accepted the position of post interpreter. His job required him to translate for the command-ing officer and, according to the post surgeon’s wife, Linda Slaughter, “to keep him informed as to the movements of the hostile Sioux.” Although she did not quite accuse Dorman of duplicity, she noted that he obtained his information “through his wife…but I always suspected that she, Delilah-like, kept her relatives informed as to all affairs at the fort and movements of the troops of which she

S.J. Morrow took this stereotype of a scout’s camp near Fort Rice in either 1871 or 1873.

could learn from her husband.” Slaughter obvi-ously did not understand tribal affiliations. Just as the Civil War sometimes set brother against brother, Dorman’s wife’s people, the Hunkpati, who had long since cast their lot with the encroaching U.S. Army, did not directly support Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapa band. Other non-Indians who incor-rectly reported that Dorman’s wife was Hunkpapa made the same error, further confusing his story.

orman quickly became a trusted employee at Fort Rice. When a new commanding officer ques-tioned Dorman’s honesty, quar-

termaster Captain James W. Scully responded, “Isaiah has always been in the habit of drawing the supplies for the Scouts upon the proper requi-sitions, and neither my clerk or myself take any more notice of where he takes them than we do of those drawn by the non-com’d officers of the companies.” In addition to taking charge of scouts’ supplies, Dorman wrote letters on their behalf when, due to a series of disagreements between the Army and the Indian Service, scouts were re-quired to go to Standing Rock to collect annuities rather than receive rations at the post. Eventually, these squabbles spilled over onto Eagle Woman That All Look At (Matilda Galpin), and the Fort Rice commander sent Dorman to assist her with an affidavit to help reinstate her license as trader at Standing Rock. However, his position of trust eroded when Captain Frederick Benteen took com-mand in October 1875. Benteen refused to enlist scouts recommended by Dorman, although he did hire Cold Hand, who had assaulted Dorman the previous month. When Benteen was unable to replace scouts whose terms of enlistment had ex-pired, he assigned their duties to Dorman.

One such task was to deliver cattle and horses to Fort Abraham Lincoln in preparation for the departure of one column of the three-column ex-pedition along the Yellowstone and Bighorn. The Dakota column, under Colonel Custer, was poised

The sketch of Dorman, rendered in the 1970s, was apparently based on the above portrait of Lt. Col. George Custer.

A marker stands on the approximate spot where Dorman died at the Little Bighorn.


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to move west toward the Yellowstone and its trib-utaries in coordination with two other columns, moving east and north, to force free-roaming Sioux back to Dakota Territory to live on reservations. Dorman, one scout and the livestock reached Fort Lincoln two days after Custer who, although he had been relieved of overall command of the ex-pedition, had arrived to lead the 7th U.S. Cavalry. Custer immediately asked Dorman to accompany him as Dakota interpreter.

Dorman’s decision to accept the offer might have been, as Bruguier said in later years, because he wanted to see that country again. He might also have welcomed the higher salary the position en-tailed, as well as the chance to distance himself from an increasingly disagreeable situation at Fort Rice. Then again, he might simply have wanted to accom-pany his Dakota friends, four of whom were en-listed as scouts. Round Wooden Cloud (aka Carrier) and brother Appearing Bear (aka Buffalo Ancestor) had worked with Dorman at Fort Rice but enlisted at Fort Lincoln when Benteen refused their services. Dorman knew Cards as a young boy, when he lived near the St. Pierre family. White Cloud was from Two Bears’ band and may have been with him when Dorman and family lived in the same band in the early 1860s.

Thus, on the morning of May 17, 1876, Dorman rode from Fort Lincoln with guide “Lonesome Charley” Reynolds, four Dakota scouts, an Arikara interpreter and 30 or so Arikara scouts on their way west with Custer and the Dakota column. On sev-eral occasions Custer forged ahead but advanced too far to be useful to Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry, who had taken the field to coordinate the movements of the three columns. On June 11, in the absence of information from Custer or other scouting parties, Terry noted in his diary: “[Captain Thomas] Weir not returned determined to trust to Isaiah. Custer with own company the advance. Self with main body.” As he had traveled the area at least twice before, Dorman might have been consulted on other occasions about the best route to take. Arikara scouts Young Hawk and Red Star told historian Libby that once, in Custer’s absence, Dorman had taken the wrong turn. “Red Star was at some distance, scouting among the hills,” Young Hawk related, “but as he rode into camp, he saw Isa [sic ] on his knees before Custer, who was cursing him furiously, while the darky was crying and begging for mercy. The next day, as a punishment, Isa had to go on foot all day.” The story does not ring true, however, as Custer rarely cursed, and Dorman on at least three other occa-sions had calmly advocated for himself when treated unfairly.

On June 22 Terry sent Custer up the Rosebud. Three days later, in an attempt to surround a Lakota village his scouts had spotted from a point on the divide between the Rosebud and Little Bighorn, Custer split his forces, ordering Major Marcus Reno to attack the village from one end while he approached it from the other. As Reno came under fire and led a disorganized retreat across the Little Bighorn to high ground, Dorman and Reynolds had their horses shot from under them and were left stranded 150 yards apart in the valley. Private Roman Rutten told

Dorman’s grandson William Mutchler lived with uncle Baptiste on the family horse ranch.

Camp he saw Dorman “down on one knee, cooly [sic ] firing his sporting rifle.” Rutten provided further detail: “Isaiah and I were intimate acquaintances, and as I passed him, he looked up at me and cried out, ‘Goodbye, Rutten!’” Another witness reported see-ing Dorman shot by a woman, later identified as Moving Robe, whose brother Deeds was killed that morning.

It was Vestal, however, in his biography of Sitting Bull, who provided the most oft-repeated description of Dorman’s death. According to a note from interpreter Frank Zahn, Bear Ghost told him that Two Bull, Shoots Walking and other Hunkpapas were there when Sitting Bull offered a horn of water to Dorman as he lay dying between the timber and the river. But as Sitting Bull was reportedly nowhere near the place where Dorman died and would not have had time to pause and give him water regardless, Zahn almost certainly embroidered the truth, as he did on other occa-sions. He might have added the touching scene to assuage the grief of his landlady; when he wrote the note to Vestal, Zahn was board-ing in the home of Dorman’s granddaughter, Lucy Brought Plenty.

Today a restored 19th-century stone house just a few hundred yards from Dorman’s Pennsylvania birthplace operates as a bed-and-breakfast. Fort Ridgely is a Minnesota state park. Dorman’s woodlot and ranch in North Dakota are underwater, flooded when the Missouri River was dammed. Of his grand-children only two, Sam King and William Mutchler, had living descendants, but none of their family stories provide additional details about their great-great-great-great-grandfather. However, Isaiah Dorman does live on in tales—some true, others not—about those who fought at the Little Bighorn.

Lilah Morton Pengra operates Multicultural Consulting Services in western South Dakota. She is the author of Corporals, Cooks, and Cowboys: African Americans in the Black Hills and Surrounding Areas and Sarah Campbell: The First White Woman in the Black Hills Was African Ameri- can. Her forthcoming book, Isaiah Dorman: Interpreting the Evidence, is due out in June from Lune House Publishing.

46 WILD WEST J U N E 2 0 1 6

Photographer Evelyn

Cameron (1868–

1928) shot this

unique portrait of

husband Ewen and

their pet wolves in

1890s Montana.

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WOLF WEST

Western ecology revolved around wolves—that is, until people shot, roped, trapped, gassed, stomped and strangled them By Dan Flores


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t the midpoint of the 19th century, when Americans regularly traversed the West

but—except for spotty locales in the Southwest and on the West Coast—had yet to settle it, the ancient world of the Indian- managed continent remained in place across much of the region. Judging by the accounts of those who witnessed it, the Indian West was something to see, rivaling the world’s great spectacles. No element of this surviving version of Western America amazed travelers so much as the staggering abun-dance of wildlife, and no animal surprised people used to the civilized conditions of the East or Europe with the same kind of shock value as the Western wolf.

Dr. Michael Steck, a newly appointed Indian agent traveling the Santa Fe Trail in the early 1850s, offers a glimpse of what represented the North American equivalent of the African Seren-geti. Steck noted that anytime his traveling party got among the bison herds on the Great Plains, they encountered “immense numbers” of wolves. “A common thing to see [is] 50 at a sight,” he recalled. “In the daytime, never out of sight of them, [we] see

A

Late in life Frederic

Remington (1861–

1909) depicted a

lone canid in his oil

Moonlight, Wolf.

hundreds in a day.” Famed wildlife painter John James Audubon, traveling up the Missouri River near the eastern border of future Montana a decade earlier than Steck, made a similar observa-tion: “If ever there was a country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it is the one we now are in.”

Today you could drive repeatedly across the southern Plains, where Steck wrote of seeing hundreds of wolves a day, or the northern Plains, where Audubon reported the most abundant wolf population he’d ever encountered, and never see a single wolf. Not one. Our erasure of them down through the years from 1850 to 1925 was that thorough. If lucky, you might hear an occasional wolf howl in New Mexico or Arizona. You can experience that siren call of Old America more readily in the northern Rocky Mountains. But in the 21st century the only place in the West you can still see primeval America—with that timeless set piece, the pursuit of bison and elk by packs of wolves loping through the sagebrush—is in Yellowstone National Park. There year-round crowds of wolf tourists line the park road through the Lamar Valley to witness the kinds of wild spectacles


in one’s car and then expecting to motor down the highway just the same.

he Canidae family first appears in the North American fossil record in the Southwest roughly 5.3 million years

ago. Like American-evolved wild horses, ancestral wolves became geographically cosmopolitan by crossing the land bridges from America to Eurasia. Other wolves remained, giving rise to lines that led to coyotes (Canis latrans) and to animals that became the Eastern wolf (Canis lycaon) and the intriguing, coyote-like red wolf (Canis rufus), whose range stretched from the Texas Gulf to New England. Colonizing ancestral wolves eventually evolved in their travels into various types of gray wolf (Canis

lupus), which finally began to return—group after group—to their natal American homeland.

As the great beasts of the late Pleistocene—mam-moths, mastodons, long-horned bison—migrated across the Bering land bridge to range among vast herds of horses and camels on the midlatitude plains of the West, gray wolves trailed along with them. One early type that returned to America was a very large wolf no one who has ever read about (or watched Game of Thrones ) ever forgets. A quarter-million years ago the thick-bodied dire wolf (Canis dirus) trotted out onto the Pleistocene Great Plains, where it joined American wolves and coyotes in hunting and scavenging among one

In his notes for Buffalo

Hunt: White Wolves

Attacking Buffalo Bull

George Catlin (1796–

1872) noted that even

old or wounded bison

could kill pack wolves.

Audubon and Steck readily found in the 19th centu-ry West. Yellowstone’s opportunities are the result of truly heroic efforts on behalf of wolves across just the past two decades. Our modern facsimile of a Wolf West is that recent.

The larger story is that up until 1925 the Ameri-can West had anciently been wolf country, had been so for 5 million years. Consider that a moment. Wolves were members of the biological family Ca-nidae, their evolutionary origins in North America, and although some species migrated elsewhere and evolved into their present forms in Asia and Europe before returning to our continent, until the 1920s there was never a time when wolves were not the keystone predators throughout the West. Before humans arrived on the continent 15,000 or more years ago, wolves likely shaped life here more profoundly than any other mammal. Today, following a wildly successful Western war against wolves that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, they are making a comeback in a West that had once ridded itself of them and remains decidedly of two minds about their return.

Like it or not, however, we will never again erad-icate wolves from the West, for a simple reason. Today we understand the science behind a reality we made no effort to grasp in the early 1900s—that wolves had played a crucial role in the region for millions of years before man ever set foot in Amer-ica. Western ecology revolved around wolves. Re-moving them was like tossing aside the transmission


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was likely another late arrival from Asia. The Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi), a small gray species of Mexico and the American Southwest, may have led the migrations home. But the wolf that occupied more of the continent than any other, extending from the Pacific across the Great Plains on to the western Great Lakes and north-ward through much of the eastern half of Can-ada, was Canis lupus nubilus. This was the famed “buffalo wolf,” “loafer” or “white wolf of the plains” of so much Western history and lore.

All these gray wolves arrived in time for one of the grandest predator buffets in world history. Before the Pleistocene ended, gray wolves joined short-faced bears, saber-toothed tigers, scimitar cats, American cheetahs, steppe lions and running hyenas to chase down camels, sloths, horses, long-horned bison and perhaps mammoth calves in a Serengeti-like world that now seems like science fiction. When an extinction event took out all the giants, the reconstituted Western bestiary be-queathed to Western gray wolves their prominent place in American ecology. With buffalo the only Western grazer still standing after the extinctions, bison numbers skyrocketed to between 20 and 30 million animals. Some 1.5 to 2 million wolves served as their primary predators in this new order. As Western trader-explorer-author Josiah Gregg put it in the 1840s, “Although the buffalo is the largest, he has by no means the control among the prairie animals; the scepter of authority has been lodged with the large gray wolf.”

ince the mid-1990s Yellowstone National Park has provided a window into pri-meval predator/prey ecology. There re-

search has confirmed the striking significance of wolves as keystone predators. Wolves appar-ently influenced continental ecology in ways that rippled through nature, affecting not only popula-tions of prey species but also other predators and scavengers, even down to the kinds of vegetation (like aspen trees) found in a particular landscape. With gray wolves present, coyote populations may drop by 50 percent, while fox numbers rise. Wolf predation exerts strong evolutionary pres-sures on the behaviors and even habitat selec-tions of wolf prey species. Such was the “scepter of authority” the gray wolf wielded and humans unthinkingly ripped from the Western landscape a century ago.

of the planet’s grand, thronging assemblages of wildlife.

Game of Thrones notwithstanding, dire wolves were not fated to survive the extinction crash that ended the American Pleistocene 10,000 years ago. But roughly 20,000 years ago several kinds of Canis lupus, our present-day gray wolf, began lop-ing home to Western America. Once they joined the other American canids in the grand predator picnic of the Pleistocene, gray wolves decidedly made their presence felt. Big, 5- to 6-foot-long pack hunters weighing 80 to 130 pounds, gray wolves outmatched their long-lost relations, red wolves and coyotes, in both size and pack instinct. Once dire wolves disappeared from the continent, gray wolves were left as the swaggering big dogs on the block.

They appear to have migrated home to America in distinctive waves. A half-century ago Ameri-can taxonomists designated a whopping 23 sub-species of Canis lupus. In 2012, though, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sought to come to terms with modern genetic research on wolves, it concluded that North America’s wolves sprang from two origins. Eastern wolves, red wolves and coyotes all represented American wolf evolution, animals that never left. Gray wolves, on the other hand, constituted several separate, unique waves of returning animals.

This taxonomic rethink has shrunk the number of gray wolf subspecies from the 23 of the 1940s to just four. The Arctic wolf (Canis lupus arctos), found in the extreme north of the continent, was probably the last to return to America. The north-western wolf (Canis lupus occidentalis), ranging from the Montana Rockies northward to Alaska,

In 2000 Doug Smith,

who has studied wolves

for more than 20 years,

photographed this wolf

of Yellowstone National

Park’s Druid pack.

In 2009 the author

came across gray

wolf tracks in the Bob

Marshal Wilderness

of western Montana.

When early Western diarists like Meriwether Lewis, George Catlin and John James Audubon first encountered wolves on the Great Plains, they referred to them as the “shepherds” of the buffalo herds. Josiah Gregg observed of wolves that although there were “immense numbers of them upon the prairies,” their presence in the landscape was often dependent on bison. Indian portraitist Catlin crisscrossed much of the West in the early 1830s. One of his observations about buffalo wolf, or white wolf, hunts was how dearly a wolf pack often won a meal. Even an old, sick or disabled buffalo was “a huge and furious animal” and would often deal “death by wholesale to his canine assail-ants, which he is tossing into the air or stamping to death under his feet.” Catlin’s painting Buffalo Hunt: White Wolves Attacking

Buffalo Bull shows such a scene, wherein an aging bull holds off a wolf pack with such resolution that “his eyes were entirely eaten out of his head—the grizzle of his nose was mostly gone—his tongue was half eaten off, and the skin and flesh of his legs torn almost literally into strings.” Yet even with the bull in that condition, numerous wolves “had been crushed to death by the feet or horns of the bull.”

William Clark observed, and Lewis recorded, the most com-mon wolf-hunting technique in April 1805, as their expedi-tion ascended the Missouri through the Dakotas. “Capt. Clark informed me,” Lewis wrote, “that he saw a large drove of buffaloe [sic ] pursued by wolves today, that they at length caught a calf

which was unable to keep up with the herd.” An old Pawnee adage held that wolves ran down and devoured four of every 10 bison calves, an equation that kept both species stable across millennia.

One trait many observers noted when first encountering Western wolves was how docile they appeared. In that wolf country par excellence along the Missouri, Audubon marveled how wolves would lie on the banks as the steamboat passed, yawning like dogs at passersby. Clark was able to approach close enough on land to impulsively stab one dead with his bayo-net. When Audubon arrived at Fort Union, at the confluence of the Yellowstone, he was met by American Fur Co. trader Alex-ander Culbertson, whose chief hobby when boredom set in was running down wolves on his Indian pony. As Audubon’s companion Edward Harris described it, with wolves in constant view, the trader offered them a demonstration.

“Mr. Culbertson…,” wrote Harris, “started his beautiful Black-foot pied mare at full speed, when within a half-mile of the wolf, who turned and galloped off leisurely until Mr. C. was within two or three hundred yards of him, when he started off at the top of his speed.” Within the time it took Harris to scribble his account, Culbertson was back at the post with the wolf draped across his horse in front of the saddle, shot through the lungs and shoulders as the trader had chased him at breakneck speed across the prairie. It was an impressive performance, no doubt, so long as you hadn’t experienced it from the perspective of the wolf.


ong centuries of benign interaction with

the Plains Indians had taught Western

wolves not to fear humans. Despite Old

World folklore and Hollywood hype, except in the

rare rabies case wolves were not aggressive toward

people. In fact, it was a Western trope that both

wolves and coyotes were fearful around humans.

While scornful of canine cowardice, early observ-

ers often remarked on how trusting wolves seemed,

trotting before approaching horses like dogs or

watching curiously as travelers passed within feet.

But as more and more people arrived in the

West, most armed and many inclined to shoot at

any wolf they saw, wolves learned to keep their

distance. Rifle fire was an initial and largely casual

cause of wolf mortality, but it was merely a hint of

killing techniques employed in rapid succession

across the 19th century. With the launch of the

Western frontier by an animal products industry,

followed by the arrival of thousands of overland

migrants, what should have been canine good times

actually ushered in the end game for the Wolf West.

Made from the seed of an East Indian fruit tree,

strychnine poison was in commercial production in

the East as early as 1820. To Western travelers it rep-

In John C.H. Grabill’s

1887 photo “Roping

Gray Wolf,” five

Wyoming Territory

cowboys lasso a

canid on the range.

resented a cheap, unregulated and lethal means of

collecting animal pelts. In an age inured to animal

slaughter it was a horrifying killer. Within minutes a

white tablet gulped down from a baited carcass

launched the quarry into waves of convulsive cramp-

ing. Death from asphyxia followed, but not before

the poison had wrenched the body into a signature

death pose—a corpse with a sharply arched spine

and frazzled tail, as if the animal had been electro-

cuted. Baited buffalo or horse carcasses surrounded

by strychnine victims—poisoned wolves, coyotes,

bears, eagles, ravens and magpies in a wide arc—

became an all too common sight on the prairie.

For a couple of decades after the Civil War, as

U.S. Indian policy herded the tribes onto reserva-

tions and the market hunt reaped the most devas-

tating slaughter of wildlife in world history, wolves

continued to thrive despite strychnine and pelt

hunters. But with most of their historic prey ani-

mals in decline, wolves turned to domesticated cat-

tle and sheep, the property of ranchers who would

brook no losses to predators. Pegged as hateful

symbols of an untamed America, wolves from the

1880s through the 1920s became the targets of a war

of eradication, one stockmen launched to convert

the ancient wilderness they’d acquired into a money-

making pasture for cows, sheep and the market.


cultural appreciation of predators, we set about correcting what most Americans by then believed to have been a mistake.

e-creation of the Wolf West hasn’t happened yet. The best success so far has been in the northern Rockies, where more than 1,500 gray wolves roam

the mountains, and the Fish and Wildlife Service has turned over management to the states, whose response has been to create wolf-hunting seasons in places like Idaho and Montana to placate sport hunters convinced that wolves are the reason they didn’t get their elk. Reintroduction of Mexican wolves to the Southwest has been far less successful, although a recovery rule adopted in 2015 will allow an increase to some 325 wolves across an expanded range from the California border to the Texas line. But wolves remain absent from the Great Plains states, as well as Colorado and Utah, where The Salt Lake Tribune recently quoted one skepti-cal member of a wildlife advisory board: “People want to use the wolf as the silver bullet to kill the culture of the West. There is no need to have them here other than those political reasons.”

The truth, of course, is that the West is and always has been a mix of many cultures. And where economics was once the primary driver of politics, in the case of America’s charismatic predators it’s actually science that now drives politics. Under-standing such dynamics won’t make the debate go away, but it may help explain why a Wolf West that’s 5 million years old is with us once again.

Dan Flores writes books about the environmental West and is a frequent contributor to Wild West. His latest books are Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016) and American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, (2016). To learn more about wolves, see Reviews (P. 72).

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First bounty hunters and then government field agents shot, roped, trapped, gassed, stomped and strangled wolves. They hung wolves from trees like human avatar outlaws. Montana, whose territorial government sometimes used up two-thirds of its annual budget in the war against predators, passed a state law in 1905 that instructed the state veterinarian to secure a popula-tion of wolves, coyotes and their pups, inject them with sarcoptic mange and then release them throughout the state to spread the wasting disease. In the Texas Panhandle through the 1890s such noted wolfers as Jack Abernathy and Allen Stagg each captured or killed dozens of wolves a year, while hands of the XIT Ranch tolled more than 200 during the period. Between 1883 and 1927 Montana paid bounties on a staggering 111,545 wolves and 886,367 coyotes. Subsidizing both ranchers and wolfers, the state paid bounties on 23,575 wolves in 1899 alone. Under such pressure wolf populations declined so dramatically that in 1920 Montana paid bounties on only 17 gray wolves.

Field agents from a federal division called the Biological Sur-vey, which Congress charged and funded in 1914 with an official predator-killing mission, slammed the door on the wolf in a few short years. By 1925, with agents distributing 3.5 million strych-nine baits across the West annually, ancient America’s Wolf West had collapsed. Its demise made good sense to ranchers, as well as agents from the Biological Survey and state fish and wildlife agen-cies, all of whom were convinced that in the absence of wolves sport hunters would become the keystone predators and harvest surplus game. Everyone from average Americans to Audubon So-ciety officials cheered when wolves vanished from national parks like Yellowstone and hunters killed the last few pitiable individuals.

So the 1920s saw the demise of the wolves in the West. Mon-tana’s last wolf was called Snowdrift. South Dakota’s sole survi-vor was the Custer Wolf, charged with livestock depredations a T. rex couldn’t have pulled off. Individuals named Rags, Whitey and Lefty were Colorado’s last. One final, pathetic story from that state relates the saga of a female wolf named Three-Toes, so desperate to find a mate on the wolfless prairie that she mated with a ranch collie before Biological Survey agents killed her collie paramour, all their hybrid pups and, finally and mercifully, her.

In a grand irony of the Wolf West, these last indi-viduals died in the very decade ecologists Joseph Grinnell, E. Raymond Hall and Aldo Leopold were discovering the indispensable role wolves actually played in keeping nature functioning properly. In-sights about predators, like the ones Leopold offered up in his 1949 classic A Sand County Almanac, eventu-ally led to the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and to wolf recovery plans the Fish and Wildlife Service (successor to the Biological Survey) drew up in its wake. So 70 years after Snowdrift and Three-Toes died, armed with reams more science and a deeper

Yellowstone National

Park tourists line up

to capture wolves

with their cameras.


Four-star General George S. Patton poses wearing his trusty Colt. 45 three decades after his fight with Villistas.


PATTON’S SHOOTOUT AT SAN MIGUELITOIn May 1916 the future U.S. general used his ivory-handled Colt Single Action Army .45 in a gunfight with three mounted Mexican Villistas By Matt Braun

The horsemen opened fire as they charged through the arched doorway of the haci-enda. George Patton, who was caught in the open on foot, pulled his Colt Peace-maker. On that day in May 1916, deep in the mountains of the Mexican province of Chihuahua, a young cavalry officer became a gunfighter.

Turn back the clock to early fall 1915. Second Lieutenant George S. Patton Jr. reported for duty at Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, Texas. There he was assigned to the 8th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, whose primary mission was to patrol the Rio Grande. Mexico’s bloody Revolución was entering its sixth year, and border raids by desperate revolutionary rebels were endemic.

In command at Fort Bliss was Brig. Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing, whose garrison comprised both cavalry and infantry units. Protocol required that newly arrived officers pay a “cour-tesy call” on the post commander. Though regarded as a stern disciplinarian, Pershing was unusually impressed by Patton, who at age 29 was already something of a legend in the cavalry.

In 1903, at age 18, Patton had enrolled at the Virginia Mili-tary Institute. A year later, through family connections, he se-cured an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point as a cadet. Following graduation in 1909 he was posted to Fort Sheridan, near Chicago, and transferred two years later to Fort Myer, adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia. A good runner, skilled at fencing and horsemanship, ©

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Patton attracted attention. His commanders marked him as a future leader of the mounted cavalry.

But in the summer of 1912 the young lieutenant’s skills brought him recognition on the world stage, after superiors selected him as the U.S. Army’s entry in a new Olympic sport, the modern pentathlon. Held in and around Stockholm, Sweden, the pen-tathlon comprised five events: a 5,000-meter steeplechase, pistol shooting on a 25-meter range, a fencing tournament, swimming 300 meters and a 4,000-meter cross-country run. Of the 32 competitors from 11 nations, barely a dozen had the stamina to complete all five events. Patton excelled at shooting (using a .38-caliber Colt revolver, though the top three places in that event went to Swedes using .22-caliber Smith & Wesson target pistols), fencing (Patton was fourth) and horsemanship. He finished fifth overall—the top showing by a non-Swede.

After the Olympics, Patton learned advanced fencing tech-niques at the French cavalry school in Saumur. Returning state-side, he refined the U.S. mounted combat doctrine and designed a new saber for the cavalry. In the fall of 1913, in recognition of Patton’s abilities, the Army assigned him to the Mounted Ser-vice School at Fort Riley, Kan., to teach his fellow cavalrymen the science of the saber. The Army also bestowed on him a title never before awarded: Master of the Sword. The desig-nation was so unique and auspicious that word of it spread throughout the nation’s military branches. Patton reveled in being Master of the Sword, for it suggested the age of chivalry he had revered since childhood.

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Patton had his initials engraved on the grip of his .45-caliber Colt Single Action Army Model 1873. The gun he put to use in 1916 became his trademark.

Lieutenant Patton poses at Fort Sheridan, Ill., in 1910. Two years later he competed in the modern pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.


o when Lieutenant George Patton re-ported to Fort Bliss in 1915, he was already a young officer of some dis-tinction. General Pershing, with that thought in mind, had him assigned

to one of the most dangerous sections of the Rio Grande. Commanding Troop A of the 8th Cavalry, Patton was posted to Sierra Blanca, a rough border town just north of the river. Mexican revolutionary bandits routinely raided into Texas to steal horses and smuggle guns back across the border. Though Patton was eager for action and glory, over the next several months his only brush with danger came with rumored Thanksgiving incursions by one force of 200 bandits and another of nearly 100 raiders. The rumors proved false. “We met nothing,” a disappointed Patton wrote his father.

Yet his time in Sierra Blanca changed Patton in a way he might never have imagined. In performing his regular duties, he often met with town consta-ble Dave Allison, and they became fast friends. A Wild West holdover, Allison was a grizzled, white-haired lawman who had been a sheriff in Midland County, a Texas Ranger, an Arizona Ranger and a city marshal in Roswell, New Mexico Territory. Although tales of his exploits were predictably exaggerated, Allison did dispatch several despera-does to their graves. He still carried the Model 1873 Colt .45 Peacemaker he’d packed for decades and was a crack shot. His reputation as a gunfighter was unsurpassed along the border.

Patton proved a ready convert. He’d never fully trusted the Colt Model 1911 .45 ACP semiauto-matic, the cavalry’s standard sidearm. Regulations dictated it be carried on an empty chamber. Secured in a flap holster, the pistol was slow to draw, slow to work the slide and thus chamber the first round, and prone to jam in rapid fire. Persuaded by lawman Allison, Patton ordered a Colt Single Action Army .45, nickel-plated, heavily engraved and with ivory grips. It would become his trademark sidearm.

In January 1916 Patton was ordered back to Fort Bliss. The Mexican Revolution, always in a state of flux, had taken a new and ominous turn. President Woodrow Wilson had officially recognized revolu-tionary leader Venustiano Carranza as president of

In 1916 Patton was an aide-de-camp to Brig. Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing, the soldier bound to a cactus in this cartoon spoofing the fruitless pursuit of Mexican raider Pancho Villa.

Mexico. Feeling betrayed, Pancho Villa disavowed his former ally (as had fellow revolutionary general Emiliano Zapata) and fled to the mountains with his personal army, the División del Norte. He was particularly enraged by Wilson’s derogatory dis-missal of his role in the revolution.

Villa’s fury sparked a bloody vendetta. In Janu-ary, near the Chihuahuan town of Santa Isabel, his men stopped a train carrying 18 American sil-ver miners and summarily executed all but one of them by firing squad. On March 9 he crossed the border with nearly 500 mounted Villistas and raided Columbus, N.M. A ferocious firefight en-sued with resident civilians and 13th Cavalry troop-ers from adjacent Camp Furlong. The raid was of no military value and accomplished little aside from leaving the streets littered with dead, most of them Villistas. Though Villa’s men had killed eight troopers and 10 civilians, the firefight claimed more than 100 of their own. Villa, feeling vindicated to some measure, retreated back into Mexico.

President Wilson, supported by Congress, im-mediately authorized a punitive expedition and directed Pershing to cross the border and capture or kill Villa. Eager to get in on the action, Patton pestered the general into appointing him as an aide-de-camp. In mid-March, Pershing led a divi-sion some 6,600 men—two cavalry brigades and one infantry brigade—into Mexico. The expedition,


which swelled to more than 10,000 troops, ulti-mately marched more than 500 miles into the Sierra Madre, with cavalry units ranging farthest south-ward in search of Villa’s División del Norte. As Pershing’s aide-de-camp, Patton was assigned the dangerous role of courier between the far-flung cavalry units, seldom accompanied by more than a dozen troopers. “Remember, Patton,” the general quipped before one especially risky mission, “if you don’t deliver that message, don’t come back.”

By late April, Villa remained at large. Thor-oughly frustrated, Pershing switched tactics and ordered a search for key Villista commander Julio Cárdenas, as his capture might well lead the Amer-icans to Villa’s mountain headquarters. Patton, de-termined to participate personally in the manhunt, obtained temporary assignment from Pershing to the 13th Cavalry. Pursuing a tip that his quarry was holed up at the family hacienda near the town of San Miguelito, Patton rode out to the ranch with two other men. Cárdenas wasn’t there, but his wife, infant daughter and an elderly uncle were home. Brutal interrogation of the uncle (“a very brave man,” Patton wrote his father, “[who] nearly died before he would tell me anything”) revealed no A

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During a friendly 1915 visit to El Paso, Texas, Villa (center) poses with General Pershing (at right). Looking over Pershing’s left soldier is Lieutenant Patton.

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new information. But Patton’s instincts, which he trusted implicitly, told him Cárdenas would return.

month later, on May 14, 1916, Patton set out on a foraging expedition to procure corn and hay for the ex-pedition’s horses. His party of 10

troopers, two civilian guides and two civilian drivers piled into three Dodge tour-ing cars. After stops at two village markets, they drove on to Rubio, where several dozen hard-faced Mexicans milled about the town marketplace. One of the guides, a former Villista soured on the Revo-

lución, identified the men as followers of Villa and Cárdenas. On a hunch Patton decided to have an-other look at the hacienda and ordered the drivers to head to San Miguelito, some 6 miles north.

On approaching the ranch, Patton saw four men butchering a cow outside the house. One ducked inside, as if to raise the alarm. After waving two carloads of eight troopers into position to the south-west, Patton ordered his driver to stop northwest of an arched doorway leading to an interior courtyard. Jumping from the car with the two remaining sol-diers, he was approaching the house just as three


horsemen galloped through the gate and opened fire. Patton—with bullets throwing up gravel all around him—coolly pulled his Colt .45 and emptied all five shots (the hammer, per regulation, resting on an empty chamber) at the trio, who turned in his direction. Patton reloaded, and as one horseman closed within 30 feet, the quick-thinking lieutenant purposely dropped his horse. As the rider scrambled to his feet, pistol in hand, Patton and others shot him dead. The other horsemen split up in an effort to escape, but soon they, too, were down and dead.

Patton ordered the house searched, but his troop-ers found only Cárdenas’ mother, wife, infant daugh-ter and several elderly women. Under questioning, one of the men butchering the cow finally identified one of the dead riders as Cárdenas. Patton then instructed his men to strap down the corpses like trophy deer, one across the hood of each car. Though exultant over the results of the gunfight and comple-tion of his assigned mission, he intended to provide Pershing with irrefutable proof of Cárdenas death.

As they prepared to leave, Patton and his men spotted several dozen armed horsemen approach-ing overland at a gallop, perhaps the same Villistas they’d seen not an hour before at the Rubio market-place. Whoever they were, the small party of Amer-icans was outnumbered at least 3-to-1. The men exchanged shots at long range, but Patton quickly realized it was time to go. As he later commented in a sardonic tone, “We withdrew gracefully.” The Dodge touring cars sped off in a cloud of dust.

On his return to headquarters Patton found him-self mobbed by reporters. The pursuit of Villa had been an arduous, largely uneventful sojourn into the mountains, and correspondents traveling with the expedition were starved for a story. Here at last, standing before them, a Colt .45 strapped to his hip, was the man who had tracked down and killed Villa’s second-in-command.

Overnight, Patton became a national hero. The story of a young American officer blazing away at armed Mexican bandits with an ivory-handled Colt Peacemaker was the stuff of legend. Moreover, as one reporter noted, with his troops mounted in Dodge touring cars, Patton was the first American officer to lead a motorized cavalry charge. Army dispatches trumpeted his name.

He was in every sense the ancient warrior of old. He stood and fought and killed.

And so it would continue. Patton remained a legend throughout his military career. In World War I Lt. Col. Patton organized the 1st Provisional Tank Brigade, the first tank unit in the U.S. Army. Always in the thick of the fight, he supported in-fantry attacks in numerous key battles. Sustaining a serious leg wound during the Meuse-Argonne

Offensive, he received the Distinguished Service Cross for continuing to direct the attack from a shell crater while medics attended him. He returned to duty within a month.

In World War II, during the North African cam-paign, he rallied the U.S. II Corps to victory against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his vaunted Afri-

ka Korps. In the Sicily campaign his Seventh Army drove the Germans back onto the Italian mainland. Following the June 1944 D-Day landings at Nor-mandy his Third Army liberated practically half of France, and later that year, in a bold counterattack at the Battle of the Bulge, his Third Army decimated the German offensive, opening the door to Germa-ny itself. By war’s end Patton’s Third Army had cap-tured or killed nearly 1.5 million German soldiers.

Yet the legend of George S. Patton Jr. began in rural Mexico in 1916. From then until the end of World War II, he carried his Colt Peacemaker with ivory grips. Of all the senior generals in Europe or the Pacific, he was the only one known to have killed armed combatants in a face-to-face gunfight. In truth he was more than soldier or general. Patton was the consummate warrior, with an Old West flair.

Matt Braun has written 60 books with more than 40 million copies in print. His novel Black Fox was adapted for a CBS miniseries, while another, One Last Town, was adapted for the TNT movie You Know My Name.

His gunfighting days decades behind him, Patton observes a desert battlefield in Tunisia in 1943.


WHEN SOLDIERS

WORE SPIKES

In 1873, three years before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Lt. Col. George Custer poses beside his spiked helmet.

7th U.S. Cavalry troopers and other frontier soldiers flaunted Prussian-style spiked helmets—till the political tide turned By John Koster


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The U.S. Army staff corps private above and two of the three artillerymen at right wear spikes without plumes in 1888.


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n May 1876 George Armstrong Custer and his men left behind their spiked, plumed dress helmets at Dakota Terri-tory’s Fort Abraham Lincoln, thus none turned up on the Little Bighorn battlefield in Montana Territory. But the 7th U.S. Cavalry officers and troopers had obviously enjoyed posing for portraits in their U.S.-made facsimiles of the Prussian Pickelhaube, some-times at studios in the Dakota town named after that Prussian of Prussians, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The Ameri-can cousin of the Prussian-inspired headgear apparently never made it into a Hollywood Western, but a number of photographs, paintings, memoirs and Army records document its use.

The U.S. Army began issuing enlisted men helmets on July 27, 1872, with the cavalry and light artillery first on the list. By 1878 the Army had contracted the manufacture of some 25,960 hel-mets, mostly from Horstmann Bros. & Co. of Philadelphia. The cavalry helmet featured a blunt spike with a whorl to retain a horsehair plume fitted on a brass retainer disk. Subsequent artil-lery, engineer and staff helmets featured pointed spikes like that of Prussian infantry and dragoon helmets. The bodies of U.S. helmets were covered in fur felt, not leather like the Prussian versions. Enlisted men’s issue helmets cost the government about

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck sports the Prussian Pickelhaube.

Captain Myles Keogh of the 7th U.S. Cavalry looks sharp in his helmet.

$5 with the trimmings. Officers paid for their own. While that “gallant Irishman” Captain Myles Keogh posed in his with pride, Custer himself, perhaps vain of his reddish-blond curls, set his dress helmet atop a studio table for at least one portrait.

Cavalrymen and light artillerymen were issued two blunt-spiked helmets with attachable horsehair plumes—one with their initial clothing issue at enlistment and the second in the third year of their five-year hitch. The editor of the Army and Navy Journal

wrote in 1881 of the helmet that “German prowess [in the Franco- Prussian War] has brought into fashion.”

“Our uniforms conformed much with the Prussian style, espe-cially my helmet,” 10th Cavalry Major Anson Mills observed in 1878 when posted as a military attaché to the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Parading in public in their spiked helmets, Mills and entourage received a cold reception from crowds, until an astute Frenchman noticed that the motto etched into the brass scroll above a brazen eagle read E PLURIBUS UNUM and not MIT GOTT FÜR KÖNIG UND VATERLAND.

The heyday of the spiked helmet spanned the Bismarck years, from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the German chancellor’s death in 1898. Bismarck was possibly more popular in the United States than in some parts of Germany. Ulysses S. Grant and Bismarck admired one another. In 1878, when former President Grant visited Berlin on his world tour, he and Bismarck had a deep and varied conversation, in English, as Bismarck suggested to a saddened Grant that the terrible casualties of the

Sergeant Daniel Kanipe was with Custer but carried a message to the pack train and survived.


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U.S. Civil War may have proved necessary to save the union, just as he had “saved Germany.” Bismarck was a believing Christian and expressed sympathy with the plight of American Indians. Popular lore has it he once expressed the desire to be buried in a tree, like a “Sioux,” and when supporters hounded him at restau-rants, he would say gruffly, “Now I know what it feels like to be an Indian!” Might an Indian arrow have inspired the Pickelhaube?

In truth, the body of the U.S. military helmet was actually more British than German in construction, with a longer visor and higher dome that actually looked something like a London bobby’s hat. The Prussians may have borrowed the form of the Pickelhaube from onetime friend and ally Russia. One apocryphal story has it that around 1830 a czarist officer inadvertently added an extra zero to a contract order for spiked dress helmets. Discov-ering to his horror he had exponentially exceeded the authorized number, he offered the notoriously stingy Prussians a chance to pick up thousands of helmets at a steep discount.

In the early 1880s an Army board adopted specifications for new helmets made of cork with cloth coverings. The approved officers’ patterns transcended the flimsy construction of the enlisted men’s issue helmets. Henry V. Allien & Co. and Baker & McKenney of New York were among a handful of firms that manufactured the finer models, and they were expensive: Allien’s top-of-the-line helmet, with satin lining, brass side buttons, solid

Lieutenant Henry Nowlan was Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry’s quartermaster on the 1876 campaign.

Company B Private Daniel Shea had neither helmet nor sword during the defense of Reno Hill.

gold wire, a rich ormolu gilt eagle and a yak hair plume, delivered in a tin storage box, would set back a well-heeled officer an astro-nomical $60—nearly $1,500 in today’s dollars. The “discount” version, with gilt wire and no tin storage box, was a more afford-able $16—still a whopping $400 in today’s dollars.

Politics spelled the end of the Army’s spiked helmet. Kaiser Wilhelm II hated the Japanese and in the 1890s invented the term “yellow peril” to alert Western leaders, who promptly ig-nored him. In 1902 the British signed an alliance with the Japa-nese, and three years later President Theodore Roosevelt signed a secret agreement with Japan, allowing it to annex Korea. From that point on contracts for German-looking helmets, soon to be the emblem of “the Hun,” were strictly verboten. Following suit, that era’s American heiresses—known as Dollarprinzessinen or “Dollar Princesses”—began marrying more British aristocrats and fewer titled Germans. After 1902 the Horstmann Brothers, Henry Allien and others stopped manufacturing the once popu-lar Prussian-style helmets, which today are eminently collectible —perhaps a kinder, gentler term for kaput.

John Koster, author of Custer Survivor, is a Wild West special contributor. For further reading he recommends Brass Spikes & Horsetail Plumes: A History of U.S. Army Dress Helmets, 1872–1904, by Gordon Chappell.

C O L L E C T I O N S


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n Oct. 5, 1892, in the quiet town of Coffeyville, Kan., five members of the notorious Dalton Gang tried to

rob two banks simultaneously. Things quickly went south, as the city marshal and armed citizens con-verged to engage the outlaws in an exchange that left four townspeople and four of the would-be robbers dead. Today history buffs can learn about the failed robbery turned gun battle at the Dalton Defenders Museum [daltondefendersmuseum.com] just east of the Coffeyville plaza. At the heart of the plaza is the restored 1871 Perkins Building, once home to C.M. Condon & Co.—one of the banks the gang tried to rob. It now houses the Coffeyville Area Chamber of Commerce [coffeyvillechamber.org].

On that fateful fall morning the gang mem-bers boldly crossed the plaza, split up and headed toward the Condon and First National banks.

KANSAS MUSEUM HONORSTHE DALTON DEFENDERS

IN 1892 ARMED CITIZENS OF COFFEYVILLE BATTLED THE DALTON GANG

BY LINDA WOMMACK

Emmett Dalton (inset) was badly wounded but survived. Not so

lucky were (below, from left) Bill Power,

Bob and Grat Dalton and Dick Broadwell.

The front doors of the First National, one of two banks the gang robbed.O According to one account, though the outlaws

wore fake beards, merchant Aleck McKenna rec-ognized one or more of them and sounded the alarm. Several citizens armed themselves with rifles from local hardware stores. Unaware they had been recognized, Grat Dalton, Bill Power and Dick Broadwell entered the Condon while Bob and Emmett Dalton hit the First National.

At the Condon, cashier C.M. Ball stalled Power, Broadwell and Grat Dalton with a lie, telling them the safe was on a time lock that wouldn’t open for another 10 minutes. The outlaws scooped up what they could from the tellers, but within minutes shots from the street broke the plate glass window, wounding Power in the arm. Across the street at the First National, Bob and Emmett Dalton, having collected more than $20,000, headed for the front door, using employees and customers as a shield.

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Gunfire greeted them. In the confusion most of the hostages ran, while the outlaws retreated inside with teller William Shepard. As the Daltons exited the back door with their hostage, Bob fatally shot young store clerk Lucius Baldwin, who barred their way with pistol in hand. As the brothers worked their way to the horses, Bob found other armed targets, killing George Cubine and Charles Brown —men he had known since childhood—and hitting cashier Thomas Ayers, who had run to fetch a rifle, in the left cheek (he would recover). Two other citizens were wounded in the fight.

Meanwhile (the exact sequence of events is un-certain), Broadwell, Power and Grat Dalton had fled from the Condon with their take of the rob-bery to join their two cohorts in what became known as Death Alley. Grat shot City Marshal Charles Connelly from behind but in turn took a bullet to the throat, probably fired by livery stable owner John Kloehr. Power took a bullet to the heart while trying to mount a horse. Broad-well managed to ride off but soon dropped dead from multiple gunshot wounds. Bob Dal-ton was the next to fall, with a bullet to the chest. Emmett Dalton was hit multiple times, the last time with buckshot while trying to hoist brother Bob up onto his horse. Though expected to die from his wounds, Emmett was the only one of the five outlaws to survive the Coffeyville fiasco. The banks retrieved all their money.

The Dalton Defenders Museum displays historic photographs of the town and many related to the robbery, including family photos of the Dalton brothers, as well as the infamous photographs of the dead outlaws laid out on boards in front of Kloehr’s livery stable. The grain sack Emmett Dalton was holding when shot—absent the loot, of course—rates a showcase of its own. The doorframe of the Condon vault is also on display, as are the safe and original doors from the First National. Among other historic guns are a revolver that belonged to Bob Dalton and six-shooters that belonged to Bill Power and Emmett Dalton. Other items of interest include Emmett’s cartridge belt, Bob’s hat, gang members’ saddles and personal items that belonged to townsmen killed in the raid.

A Coffeyville resident snatched this hat off

Bob’s dead body.

Bob and Emmett Dalton robbed this safe, which was in the vault at the First National Bank.

Citizens also scooped up Grat Dalton’s Winchester rifle after the failed raid.

The Dalton Defenders Museum is just east of the Coffeyville plaza.

Bob Dalton carried this Colt six-shooter prior to the fiasco at Coffeyville.

The museum, at 113 E. 8th St., is operated by the nonprofit Coffeyville Historical Society. Walking tours take in the museum, the Condon bank site, the restored old jail in Death Alley, bronze markers at spots where the townsmen and outlaws fought and died, and Elmwood Cemetery, where defenders George Cubine and Charles Brown are buried, and where a granite stone marks the graves of Bob and Grat Dalton and Bill Power (Dick Broadwell is bur-ied in Hutchinson, Kan.). Contact the Coffeyville Chamber of Commerce (620-251-2550; [email protected]). Each first full weekend in October, “Dalton Defenders Days” commmemorates those who gave their lives to protect the town.

egend has it in 1859 an 18-year-old Georgia-born prospector named Jim Taylor discovered gold in Gunnison County when he knelt to scoop drink-

ing water from Willow Creek and came up with ore in his tin cup. Another version has it the teen struck ore and toted a sample back to camp in his tin cup. However it happened, Taylor gets credit for finding gold in the valley he named Tin Cup Gulch before departing for places unknown.

Over the next several years the gulch drew sea-sonal placer miners, though few kept at it due to the harsh winters and risk posed by Ute Indian attacks. Things picked up in 1878 when a diligent digger discovered a lode deposit, and enough miners and support businesses had arrived by the following spring to lay out a town, incorporated as Virginia City. By 1880 the new settlement and surrounding camps boasted nearly 1,500 residents.

Due to confusion with towns named Virginia City in Nevada and Montana Territory, the U.S. Post Office insisted on a name change. In July 1882 offi-cials reincorporated the Colorado town as Tin Cup. By then the population had risen to 6,000, and resi-

TIN CUP COLORADO,FOR A TIME THE WICKED MINING TOWN TOOK ITS TOLL ON MARSHALS

BY LES KRUGER

Only scattered mine ruins and other structures remain from Tin Cup’s heyday. Below: Among the grave markers on Boot Hill Knoll is one for Deacon Jones, the town’s alleged peeping Tom.

Ldents were served by two banks, five grocery stores, two butchers, many shops and other services, four hotels, several boardinghouses, a school and some 20 saloons with an accompanying red-light district. The Garfield Banner reported the local news.

The saloons brought in revenue but also a share of trouble, and Tin Cup earned a reputation as the third wickedest town in Colorado behind Creede and Leadville. Corrupt saloon owners paid off local lawmen to protect the gambling houses over the interests of citizens. In a few short, violent years Tin Cup went through eight marshals. The first one, Harry Rivers, had a running feud with popu-lar saloonkeeper Charles LaTourette that led to the latter’s arrest in early 1882. That March the men met on the street and drew guns, and LaTourette killed Rivers with a shot to the head. LaTourette successfully pleaded self-defense, while the mar-shal was buried on Boot Hill Knoll, the section of the town cemetery reserved for those who died by violence. (The other sections were divided by reli-gion, namely Protestant Knoll, Catholic Knoll and Jewish Knoll.) Rivers’ successor, Frank Emerson, lasted four months before also dying in a gunfight,

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his murderer receiving a 12-year sentence. In May 1883 Emerson’s successor, 27-year-old Marshal An-drew Jameson, was shot down during a saloon brawl at the St. James Hotel, his killer getting four years in the state pen. Young Jameson, like Rivers and Em-erson before him, was laid to rest on Boot Hill Knoll. Of the other five Tin Cup marshals, one quit, one was fired, one went insane, one became a man of the cloth, and the last actually finished out his term.

The roster of colorful characters who found their way to Boot Hill Knoll includes Deacon Jones, the town’s alleged peeping Tom, and Black Jack Cameron, who “held five aces” when killed, according to his now illegible marker. Also lying somewhere atop the knoll is a dance hall girl nick-named “Pass Out,” said to have been part of a love triangle. One beloved longtime resident with a place of honor atop Protestant Knoll is “Aunt Kate” Fisher, a onetime slave who ran a success-ful boardinghouse and restaurant (beds cost $1, a meal 50 cents). Fewer than 100 others are known to be buried atop the four knolls.

A photo of Tin Cup in 1906, during a brief resurgence. Below: Graves on Catholic Knoll share this heavenly view.

By 1884 the gold and high-grade silver ore was playing out. The Gold Cup and Jimmy Mack mines cut back opera-tions, and the popula-tion dropped to 400. The 1902 discovery of a rich silver seam at the Jimmy Mack prompted a brief resurgence, but by 1917 mining activity had all but ended. The next year the post of-fice closed. Perched at 10,160 feet on one end of Cumberland Pass, Tin Cup [tincupco.com] is now an unincorporated community of summer homes and hunting camps. Scattered mine ruins and tumbledown structures remain. There’s a small store and souvenir shop, and on a lucky day you’ll find the doors open at Frenchy’s Café, a tamed-down nod to Tin Cup’s former saloons.

G H O S T T O W N S


G U N S O F T H E W E S T


n the aftermath of the June 25–26, 1876, Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana Terri-tory, government and military officials sought to establish responsibility for what Brig. Gen.

Alfred H. Terry reputedly called “a sad and terrible blunder.” Many blamed Lt. Col. George A. Custer for the military disaster, in view of his reputation for impulsiveness and alleged quest for glory for himself and the 7th U.S. Cavalry. Others held Custer’s subordinates—particularly Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen—accountable for that bloody Sunday. Still others attributed the U.S. Army defeat to mechanical failures, specifi-cally with the single-shot Springfield Model 1873 carbine issued to the 7th Cavalry.

Survivor Edward S. Godfrey, a lieutenant at the time of the battle, blamed Custer’s defeat on “the defective extraction of the empty cartridge shells from the carbines,” tertiary to the surprising strength and cohesion of the Lakotas and Cheyennes and Reno’s “panic rout from the valley” (see related fea-ture, P. 34). The recollections of several enlisted men allude to this extraction problem, although Godfrey conceded its impact was impossible to measure.

Adopted in 1873 as the standard long arm of the cavalry, based on the recommendation of the Terry-led Ordnance Board, the Springfield car-

THE BLAME LAY NOT SO MUCH WITH THE CARBINE AS WITH BAD MARKSMANSHIP

BY C. LEE NOYES

Top: The Army issued the Springfield Model 1873 carbine to such frontier units as the 7th Cavalry. Above: Captain Otho E. Michaelis of the Army Ordnance Department saw little wrong with the rifle, but recommended systematic target practice and a canvas cartridge belt to thwart corrosion.

SPRINGFIELD MODEL 1873: LITTLE BIGHORN SCAPEGOAT

Ibine was the culmination of the Army’s experimen-tation since the Civil War with a variety of breech-loading weapons. It fired a .45-caliber internally primed center-fire copper cartridge that could not be reloaded. A 55-grain black powder charge pro-pelled the 405-grain lead bullet. The gun weighed just under 7 pounds.

The Springfield carbine had its defenders as well as detractors. “I have always maintained,” Benteen said, “that for a range of 500 yards the U.S. Spring-field carbine was as good a rifle as the ‘Long Tom’ [Model 1873 rifle] of the ‘Web Feet’ [infantry], and for shorter ranges than 500 yards it was a very much surer gun—at least for me.” Captain Otho E. Mi-chaelis of the Army Ordnance Department empha-sized that “in the hands of good shots [italics added] our gun has always proved satisfactory” and noted the satisfaction of Benteen and other 7th Cavalry officers “with the standard carbine.” Colonel John Gibbon of the 7th U.S. Infantry praised the Spring-field breechloader as an excellent arm—“the best one our troops have ever had” and the first military weapon “sought after by the frontiersman.”

Army ordnance officers were, in fact, sensitive to complaints concerning defective arms and am-munition. Before and after the Little Bighorn, Chief of Ordnance Brig. Gen. Stephen Vincent Benét

G U N S O F T H E W E S T


(grandfather of the namesake poet) led the effort to examine such allegations, rectify defects and modify as well as improve weapons issued to frontier units. For example, Benét instructed the national armory at Springfield, Mass. (where the carbines were pro-duced), to conduct inspections “of such a rigid char-acter as to render” such malfunctions “impossible.” Michaelis and other ordnance officers in the field played a critical role in this process.

Two distinct scenarios illustrate the failure of the Springfield Model 1873 carbine to eject spent car-tridges, though such instances were far from univer-sal. First, discharge of the weapon might blow open the breechblock, tearing off the cartridge head and leaving the cylinder hopelessly stuck in the cham-ber. “I believe this is a radical defect,” Reno warned, “and in the hands of hastily organized troops would lead to the most disastrous results.” (Reno had been a member of the ordnance board that had rec-ommended the Springfield.) In such incidents the breechblock failed to close and lock, as the soldiers had been issued oversized cartridges. Replacement of such defective ammunition, accurate cartridge gauging at Philadelphia’s Frankford Arsenal, adop-tion of a headless shell extractor and modifications to the breech solved this problem.

The second possibility was that corrosion might prevent ejection of a spent cartridge. Such corro-sion was the result of a chemical reaction between the copper case and handmade leather cartridge belts worn by many enlisted men. It coated the cartridge with a green deposit known as verdigris. Dirt, dust and grime compounded the problem. The Army’s solution, based on the recommenda-tions of ordnance officers in the field, was adoption of a standard canvas cartridge belt. “The prairie or loop belt is universally demanded,” Michaelis insisted, “and a properly made loop belt is abso-lutely required for troops serving against Indians.” Few instances of extraction failure were reported after the Army replaced the defective ammunition and issued the new belt.

The modifications and improvements testified to the Ordnance Department’s recognition of sol-

Post–Little Bighorn modifications of the Springfield carbine included the addition of a buttstock trap in which to store a three- piece cleaning rod and headless shell extractor.

diers’ needs and its respect for the recommen-dations of Michaelis and other officers who had witnessed the realities of the Sioux War of 1876. However, one must agree with Godfrey’s ob-servation that the impact of the Springfield carbine extraction failure is difficult to assess, especially in light of archaeo-logical evidence that suggests it played a minimal role in Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn. We must look else-where for an explanation, broadly to the inexperience of the average soldier during the Indian wars and specifically to the inexperience of the 7th Cavalry.

At the heart of the problem were marksmanship and disci-plined fire control—or the lack thereof. Following the Little Bighorn and Nez Perce cam-paigns, Gibbon asserted that “in fighting Indians good marksmanship is the first requisite.” He la- mented the enlistment of many men who “never looked through the sights of a rifle six months before they are called on to shoot Indians!” Cap-tain Edwin V. Sumner of the 1st U.S. Cavalry re-iterated the consequences of “men under fire for the first time” who “keep up a rapid and continuous fire, no matter in what direction or to what effect.” During the siege of Reno Hill at the Little Bighorn, Godfrey permitted only the proven marksmen in his company to fire. “If allowed,” he recorded in his field diary, “the men would fire all the time

at random [italics added].” Michaelis echoed Gibbon’s call for the develop-

ment of a comprehensive system of target practice to replace what he called the “disjointed system” that did nothing “to improve individual marks-manship.” Until the Army recognized the need for systematic target practice beyond the permitted expenditure of 10 rounds per man per month, and until it emphasized individual marksmanship, the problem (as the Little Bighorn and other Indian fights demonstrated) was a question not so much of arms but of the men who fired them. T

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BOOKS

MUST SEE, MUST READDAN FLORES RECOMMENDS FIVE BOOKS AND FIVE VIDEOS ABOUT WOLVES

Wolf Wars (1995, by Hank Fischer): Written by an active conservationist who worked for Defenders of Wildlife, this is the best book about the lead-up to wolf restoration in the Mountain West.

The Wolves of

North America

(1944, by Stanley Young and Edward A. Goldman): This survey of wolf biology and history was written by two leading predator specialists at the Bureau of Biologi-cal Survey (precursor of the present-day U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), the federal agency whose mission was to usher in civiliza-tion by erasing wolves from the continent.

A Sand County

Almanac (1949, by Aldo Leopold): With this classic collection of essays the famed biologist brought predator appreciation to the fore. It includes a heartrend-ing account of the time young Leopold shot a wolf and then, as he watched “the green fire” die in her eyes, realized his mistake.

The Custer Wolf:

Biography of a

Renegade (1979, by Roger Caras): This popular biography

profiles not the legendary 7th U.S. Cavalry commander but one of the celebrated “last wolves” of the 1920s.

Vicious: Wolves and

Men in America (2004, by Jon T. Coleman): This scholarly volume on the natural history of wolves from colo- nial New England to the frontier West posits which species was the more “vicious.”

VIDEO

White Fang (1991, on DVD, Walt Disney Home Video): Ethan Hawke stars in argu- ably the best of the screen adaptations of Jack London’s classic novel about a Yukon Territory gold miner and his wolf. In the role of White Fang is the wolf-malamute mix Jed, who also appeared in 1994’s White Fang 2:

Myth of the White Wolf.

Wolf Wars: America’s

Campaign to Eradicate

the Wolf (2008, PBS): An episode of the

R E V I E W S


popular Nature series, this is among the most comprehensive wolf documentaries to date. It covers the origins of anti-wolf attitudes, amateur and profes-sional wolf baiting, and the Bureau of Biological Survey, which the U.S. Forest Service enlisted in 1906 to clear cattle ranges of gray wolves.

The Grey (2011, on DVD, Open Road Films): This modern adventure thriller starring Liam Neeson pits a pack of wolves against the passengers of a downed aircraft in Alaska. Wolf biol- ogists and activists protested the film for its fallacious portrayal of wolves, who stalk the stranded men.

Meet the Coywolf

(2014, on DVD, shoppbs.org): This 60-minute Nature episode examines the emergence of a new wild canine—a coyote/wolf hybrid—that is rapidly spreading across the Eastern United States.

BOOK

REVIEWS

Custer’s Trials: A

Life on the Frontier

of a New America,

by T.J. Stiles, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2015, $30The first question one is likely to ask when considering yet

another biography of the ubiquitous George Armstrong Custer is, Why? Why another book on the man? In the years since his 1876 death in combat against Sioux and Cheyenne warriors at the tender age of 36, the “Boy General” has faced far more writers than the number of Indians he confronted at the Little Bighorn. Michael O’Keefe’s two-volume bibliogra-phy, Custer, the Seventh Calvary and the Little Big Horn (The Arthur H. Clark Co., 2012), annotated more than 10,000 items, 3,000 of which were books. T.J. Stiles may well have been daunted by this prodigious output, but he nevertheless mastered all extant sources on Custer. The result is a brilliantly original biography that sheds new light, breaks new ground and is a marvel of organization, insight and graceful prose.

Stiles’ approach is the same he used to fashion his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2009 biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt and his 2002 biography of Jesse James. In both earlier books he used his subjects to illumi-nate the history of 19th-century America,

and he does the same with Custer to explore the Civil War era and Gilded Age. The book is thus far more than just another biography of the famous soldier.

Custer’s life was one of daunting contra- dictions, but in Stiles’ skilled hands we see how perfectly this idiosyncratic behavior reflected his age—a time he both exempli-fied and often rebelled against. Custer was a conservative rebel and hopeless romantic caught up in a rapidly changing America to which he could never quite adjust. His spectacular death solved his identity crisis and secured him the glory he had always craved—though it proved fleeting. It is ironic that Stiles now joins a long list of Custer biographers —Jay Monaghan, Rob- ert Utley, Evan Con- nell, Louise Barnett, Jeffry Wert—who find much to admire in the much-maligned general. It will be interesting to see if this fine new biography can rescue Custer from the pop culture–gener-ated historical hell into which his reputation has descended.

This is not a book only for Custer buffs

Never Cry Wolf (1983, on DVD, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment): Directed by Carroll Ballard, this Disney adaptation of Farley Mowat’s fictionalized best- seller raised awareness of the wolf on the eve of its restoration. Charles Martin Smith portrays the government biologist who lacks survival skills yet is assigned to subarctic Canada to learn whether wolf attacks are causing a decline in the caribou population.

R E V I E W S


Passionate Player”; “Charlotte Cushman —The Actress in Trou- sers”; “Catherine Hayes—The Irish Prima Donna”; “Lillian Russell—The American Beauty”; and “Helena Modjeska—The Polish Phenomenon.” Each tale hits several high notes, often when Enss quotes from period newspapers. For instance, the Hum- boldt Register published an account by Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) of Adah in action: “I went to see her play Mazeppa, of course. They said she was dressed from head to foot in flesh-colored ‘tights,’ but I had no opera-glass, and I couldn’t see it, to use the language of the inelegant rabble.”

San Francisco and other California Gold Rush communities pop up repeatedly, as many of these women per- formed at such places, where entertainment was at a premium. Actress Laura Keene, credited in 1855 with “revitalizing theatre in the Gold Country,” became far more famous for her associa-tion with John Wilkes Booth, the play Our American Cousin and one particular perfor-mance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

—Editor

Buffalo Bill, Boozers,

Brothels and Bare-

Knuckle Brawlers:

An Englishman’s

Journal of Adventure

in America, by Evelyn Booth, edited by Kellen Cutsforth, TwoDot, Guilford, Conn., and Helena, Mont., 2015, $22.95Evelyn Booth, born in 1860 to wealthy English parents in Dublin, Ireland, visited the United States with two friends after grad- uating from college and kept a journal that begins on Oct. 24, 1884, and ends in April 1885. As the title of this book suggests, Booth was mighty frank about what he was up to during his stay in the States. He and affluent compan-ions Reginald Beau-mont Heygate and Dr. John Percival Frizzle seemed most interested in gambling, drinking, boxing and hunting for both animals and women (in bordellos or elsewhere).

Call the trio sports- men or carousers, but their American adventures make for most interesting reading, especially since Booth writes about taboo subjects of the time with a good dose of what editor Kellen Cutsforth calls “rough-hewn humor

and biting wit.” Frizzle on occasion adds his own take on events. Their writings are loaded with references to people and places of the Gilded Age unfam- iliar to most modern readers, but Cuts- forth provides ample informative endnotes.

The biggest treat for fans of the 19th- century American West is an account of the self-indulgent trio’s encounter with celebrated showman Buffalo Bill Cody, who was performing his Wild West show in New Orleans. Booth and Buffalo Bill met for two shooting matches. Booth won the first by three, and Cody won the rematch, although Booth noted: “The return match was shot off with the following result, Bill 47 Self 46, though three were counted to him which he never touched.” The Englishman added, “In the evening we all got very full, and I was arrested for giving the Cowboy yell in the streets.…As it was getting rather hot, [and] some of us being arrested every night, I determined to accept Bill’s invitation to stay up in the camp and did stay there till they left the town.”

Major John Burke, general manager and press agent for Cody’s Wild West, soon arrived with 30 Indians to replace others in the show, and Booth

or those interested in the Indian wars, though they will be well served to read it. It actually gives but slight attention to Custer’s final battle, and readers should look elsewhere —such as in James Donovan’s excellent A Terrible Glory—for the full story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. This is, rather, a story for all readers interested in a changing America and in the incredibly talented yet fatally limited young soldier who so perfectly defined his age. Custer was and is America in all its glorious contra-dictions, and we ignore him at our peril. Stiles brings him superbly to life while also reveal-ing much about how we got to where we are as a nation.

—Paul Andrew Hutton

Entertaining Women:

Actresses, Dancers

and Singers in the

Old West, by Chris Enss, TwoDot, Guilford, Conn., and Helena, Mont., 2015, $16.95Surprise! Chris Enss has written an entertaining book about 19th-century entertainers who appeared out West and wore dresses—well, at least some of the time; sometimes they wore pants (especially the actresses playing male roles), and sometimes they wore consider-ably less (for example, Adah Menken, the “Frenzy of Frisco”). Of course, Enss’ latest

is no surprise. She is prolific, having written more than two dozen books on similar topics, including such

titles as The Lady Was a Gambler: True Stories of Notorious Women of the Old West, Love Lessons From the Old West: Wisdom From Wild Women, The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West, Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West and Hearts West: True Stories of Mail-Order Brides on the Frontier. This go-around the Old West actresses, dancers and singers get their due, though of course they were all born elsewhere and also entertained in the East and sometimes in not-so-wild Europe.

Along with the story of performer Menken, whose shorts and form- fitting costumes were considered scandalous in the 1860s, 13 other female entertainers get chapters to themselves. The titles are intriguing enough. A sampling: “Catherine Norton Sinclair—The Talented Divorcee”; “Leslie Carter—The

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remarked, “Among the new ones were three squaws, two of them quite good looking.” He also reported that “the first boxing match on record between Indians took place at the Wild West camp…and resulted in one being knocked out.”

It’s unfortunate Booth didn’t keep a journal when he returned to the United States in 1886 and, according to Cuts- forth, provided much financial support for Buffalo Bill’s show and helped Cody hatch the idea of taking the Wild West to England (see related story in Western Enterprise in the February 2014 issue of Wild West ).

Among other names that pop up in Booth’s journal are opera singer Adelina Patti (“looking the worse for wear”), champion boxer John L. Sullivan (“a mass of muscle”), Chicago brothel owner Carrie Watson and jockey Frederick James Ar- cher, a well-known Englishman of the day, who joined the adventurers in Hot Springs, Ark. The only disappointments are that the diary isn’t longer and that on this trip the boys didn’t venture farther west than Arkansas. Booth, by the way, later owned ranchland in Wyoming, visited Ca- nada’s Klondike and settled in Oregon. He died in 1901 at age 41.

—Editor

Galvanized Virgin-

ians in the Indian

Wars, by Dr. Thomas Power Lowry, Idle Winter Press, Portland, Ore., 2015, $16.99Among the seemingly infinite accounts from the American Civil War, one that has hitherto escaped public scrutiny is a story its protagonists unlikely recalled with much pride: the tale of captured Confederates

who volunteered to escape the boredom and neglect of Union prison camps by wearing Yankee blue in one of six U.S. Volunteer regi- ments stationed on the Western frontier. Scattered among these units, they manned numerous forts and guarded land and riverine routes against Indian depredations, while U.S. Regulars served in the final battles back East.

Virginian Thomas Power Lowry has continued the research of the late Robert E. Denney into the careers of the 292 known Virginians who went West, among the more than 3,000 other known “Galvanized

Yankees” who vol- untarily switched uniforms. The result is certainly an impressively refer-ence for anyone with a broad interest in American history, though a Wild West reader might also find its presentation a bit exasperating. Lowry writes primarily for an audience of Civil War buffs, going into great detail on the wartime prison system and describing the Western terrain and climate to an audience intimately familiar with Gettysburg, Pa., and utterly ignorant of the Greasy Grass in Montana Territory.

He fills many pages before cutting to the chase with what is known of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th U.S. Volunteers and the Virginians who served in their ranks. Nevertheless, those with an interest in the Indian wars should find a lot of new ma- terial here, including insights into the mal- nutrition and disease that constituted a greater menace than enemy fire. The author concludes with the hope his book will encourage col- leagues to similarly document the activities of volunteers from the other Confeder- ate states during an oft-overlooked tran- sitional period in the settlement of the Wild West.

—Jon Guttman

MOVIE REVIEWS

The Revenant,

20th Century Fox, 156 minutes, 2015Equal parts revenge saga and survival story, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant was inspired by the frontier tale of Hugh Glass, who in 1823, against all odds, endured a mauling by a she-grizzly and abandonment to his fate by his fellow fur trappers. Those before and behind the cameras went to pain- staking lengths to re- create the unforgiving Montana frontier and the rough characters who inhabited it. Although the narrative falls short—the journey of Glass (portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio) fails to reach any sort of emotional or psy- chological plateau—the visually magnificent film succeeds with three transcendent sequences. First is an Arikara Indian attack on the trappers’ camp, in which Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera ceaselessly floats across the battlefield from one mano a mano conflict to

the next; second is the achingly long and bloody brawl between Glass and the bear; last comes the equally violent showdown between Glass and John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), one of the duo who left him to die.

DiCaprio may well win an Oscar for huffing and puffing his way through the scenery as Glass—quite a transformation from his last role as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (among the more memorable comedic performances in recent memory). What’s most impres-sive here is the actor’s ability to wholly em- body the desperation of a man pushed time and again to his physi- cal breaking point by his harsh surround-ings. The same can be said for co-star Hardy. Viewers forget they’re watching two well- paid actors playing in the snow. That authenticity is the film’s strongest selling point.

Their performance is also a credit to director Iñárritu, who in relating this story of ultimate human resil- ience expects the same from not only his actors but also his audience. The Revenant is a brutal, relentless and powerful film. To be absorbed by it for the 2½-hour run (and sometimes crawl) is emotionally drain- ing. Iñárritu strives to project all of Glass’ anguish, grief and

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despair onto his audience—and he mostly succeeds. Needless to say, the film is not for everyone’s taste.

The most common critique of The Revenant, and of much of Iñárritu’s past work, is its unrelenting coldness and solemnity. There is a stark lack of humor. But ultimately the film succeeds by vir- tue of being a perfect marriage between directorial style and subject matter: What better way to illustrate an unforgiving landscape than with unforgiving cinema?

—Louis Lalire

The Hateful

Eight, Weinstein Co.,

167 minutes, 2015

In Quentin Tarantino’s latest spectacle, eight travelers with gleefully outsize personalities sit out a blizzard together at Minnie’s Haberdash- ery, a stagecoach stop- over in post–Civil War Wyoming. The group comprises two bounty hunters (Samu- el L. Jackson and Kurt Russell), a prisoner ( Jennifer Jason Leigh),

a sheriff (Walton Goggins), an English hangman (Tim Roth), a cowboy (Michael Madsen), an ex-Con-federate general (Bruce Dern) and Bob the Mexican (Demián Bichir). The perfor-mances are strong across the board— it’s all very wordy, theatrical fun—but it’s Goggins, as the racist oaf Chris Mannix, who steals the show.

The setup: John Ruth (Russell) is trans- porting Daisy Domer-gue (Leigh), a criminal with a $10,000 bounty on her head, to the gallows in the town of Red Rock. He sus- pects one or more of the strange characters at the cabin of either being in cahoots with Daisy and wanting to free her or wanting to steal her and claim the reward themselves. What follows is classic Tarantino: slow-burn-ing, tense dialogue in a claustrophobic setting, intermittently diffused by humor—until it isn’t and explodes in a hail of bullets.

The Hateful Eight is billed as “The Eighth Film From Quentin Tarantino,” and it seems to operate under the assumption its audience already knows the director’s bag of tricks. What makes the first half of the film so suspense- ful is the inevitability of the second, in which blood—lots of blood —will be spilled. It plays out as a murder

mystery for a violent act we’ve yet to witness. The audience gets its kicks from trying to guess which of the suspicious stagecoach passengers will instigate Tarantino’s patented style of bloodshed—and how, and when.

Unfortunately, the “when” proves crippling to Eight’s final act. Once the violent inevitability presents itself, it dif- fuses all the height-ened tension long before film’s end. Tarantino plays his hand too soon yet expects the audience to remain entertained. We’re left with a gory but dawdling final act further hin- dered by an exposi-tory, unnecessarily violent flashback that spends far too much time revealing what we already suspect. Tarantino always seems to mistake body counts for pro- vocative payoffs.

One wonders if he’ll ever really pull the rug from under his audience and forgo bloodletting altogether. Eight films in Taran- tino remains unwilling to subvert his own style in that manner. He once again flaunts his adeptness for creating strong suspense and merging it with humor, but the only way The Hateful Eight could have truly shocked is if no one ended up pulling the trigger.

—Louis Lalire

Jane Got a Gun,

Weinstein Co.,

98 minutes, 2016

This independent Western starring Natalie Portman as the title character survived a plethora of production issues just to get made. First, director Lynne

Ramsay quit the production before the first day of shooting, reportedly because it lacked a finalized budget, schedule or script. Then Michael Fassbender, Jude Law and Bradley Cooper each in turn dropped out of the project. Unfortunately, the production difficul- ties seem to have pervaded the final product, which often feels incongruous and unfinished.

Early in the film Jane Hammond’s husband, Bill (Noah Emmerich), returns to their isolated ranch house with grave wounds, his back full of lead. Hot on his trail and seeking revenge is his old gang, the Bishop Boys, led by devious John Bish- op (Ewan McGregor). Determined to hold them off, Jane drops

off her daughter with a neighbor, recruits former fiancé Dan Frost ( Joel Edgerton) for help and, as the title suggests, gets a gun. The rest of the film centers largely on Jane and Dan’s prepa- rations for the Bishop Boys’ inevitable attack. Various flashbacks of their pre–Civil War relationship in Mis- souri and Jane’s journey West interrupt and ultimately bog down what could have been a short film. Tacked on in the final few scenes is a side plot involv- ing a missing child that would have made for better stakes had it been introduced earlier.

So, what could’ve been an entertaining genre piece led by a very capable Port- man is upended by a frustrating narrative that jogs in place while we wait for the showdown. Viewers will also likely ask, Why

would Jane abandon

her young daughter and

face almost certain death

for a dud of a husband

who’s likely to die from

his wounds? The film is never able to con- vincingly answer that question (and doesn’t even try to until the third act), nor does it sufficiently explore Jane’s bullheaded- ness on the matter. Jane, you’re better off

fleeing to safety with

the better man and

your daughter—it seems

so obviously misguided

to reach for a gun.

—Louis Lalire

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issue a special high quality

36x27 limited edition print

of the famous painting.

To order call (406) 638-1876. he

print is available for $79.99 delivered.

Partial proceeds from the sale of this

print will go towards maintaining the

Peace Memorial and the

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

on the battleield.CUSTER BATTLEFIELD MUSEUM, Garryowen, MT

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Back Issues

AUDIO/VIDEO

BOB’S FILMS. 1930’s to 1970’s out of print and hard to find films. Free catalog. Bob’s Films, PO Box 291746, Port Orange, FL 32129. [email protected]

BOOKS/PUBLICATIONS

V I N T A G E W E S T E R N MAGAZINES. Back Issues of Wild West, True West, others. Contact : Magazine House 5 4 1 - 5 3 6 - 5 2 2 7 . L W a l k e r @magazinehouse.us

REAL ESTATE

CUSTER BATTLEFIELD for sale. www.townforsale.net

CLASSIFIEDS


G O W E S T

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IT

MOUNT ST. HELENS, WASHINGTON

Those who recall the May 18, 1980, catastrophic eruption of Mount St. Helens—which blew the topmost 1,300 feet from its summit and spewed ash across 11 states—might be surprised to find abundant life beneath its scarred slopes. It’s a cycle that stretches back millennia. In 1847, during an especially active period for the volcano, Canadian painter Paul Kane depicted Indians observing the spectacle (inset) from the Lewis River, 40 miles distant. Downed trees point the way to the caldera, at the heart of today’s national volcanic monument [www.fs.usda.gov/mountsthelens]. ©

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38

3

© 2016 fi rst STREET for Boomers and Beyond, Inc.

DuraLux II

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