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And you can picture the turbaned Apaches with their frowzy hair and the ugly smears of paint across their grinning faces. You can see them creeping on their bellies through the clumps of coarse bear-grass, gliding like bronze snakes among the rocks, slowly enough––the Apache never liked the music of a rifle-bullet––but coming closer every hour. Every gully and rock and clump of prickly pear for a radius of a half-mile about that knoll sheltered its portion of the venomous brown swarm.
Night followed day; hot morning grew into scorching noontide; the full flare of the Arizona afternoon came on; and night again. The rifles cracked in the bear-grass. Thin jets of pallid flame spurted from behind the rocks. The bullets kicked up little dust-clouds.
So for three days and three nights. For it took those six hundred Apaches that length of time to kill the seven white men.
But before the last of them died, the Free Thompson party slew between 135 and 150 Indians.
In after years Cochise told of the battle.
“They were the bravest men I ever saw,” he said. “They were the bravest men I ever heard of. Had I five hundred warriors such as they, I would own all of Chihuahua, Sonora, New Mexico, and Arizona.”
That was the breed of men who kept the Butterfield stage line open, and the affair at Stein’s Pass is cited to show something of their character, although it took place after the company began removing its rolling-stock. For in 1860 Russel, Majors & Waddel accomplished267a remarkable coup and brought the overland mail to the northern route.
They performed what is probably the most daring exploit in the history of transportation. The story of their venture bristles with action; it is adorned by such names as Wild Bill Hickok, Pony Bob Haslam, Buffalo Bill, and Colonel Alexander Majors.
Colonel Majors held the broadhorn record on the old Santa Fé trail, ninety-two days on the round trip with oxen. He was the active spirit of the firm of Russel, Majors & Waddel. In 1859 these magnates of the freighting business had more than six thousand huge wagons and more than 75,000 oxen on the road between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Salt Lake City, hauling supplies for government posts and mining companies; they were operating a stage line to Denver where gold excitements were bringing men in droves.
One day in the winter of 1859-60 Senator W. M. Gwinn of California had a meeting with Majors’ senior partner, William H. Russel, and several New York capitalists in Washington. Senator Gwinn proposed a plan to show the world that the St. Joseph-San Francisco route was practical throughout the year.
That scheme was the pony express; men on horseback with fresh relays every ten or twelve miles, to carry letters at top speed across the wilderness. Congress had pigeonholed his bill to finance such a venture. He urged now that private capital undertake it, and he talked so convincingly that Russel committed268himself to enlist his partners in the enterprise.
Russel went back to Leavenworth, Kansas, the headquarters of the firm, and put the matter up to Majors and Waddel. They showed him in a very few minutes that he had been talked into a sure way of losing several hundred thousand dollars. But he reminded them that he had committed himself to the undertaking. They said that settled it; they would stand by him and make his word good.
Their stage line had stations every ten or twelve miles as far as Salt Lake; beyond that point there was not a single building; but within two months from the day when Russel had that talk with Senator Gwinn, the firm had completed the chain of those stations clear to Sacramento, purchased five hundred half-breed mustang ponies which they apportioned along the route, hired eighty riders and what stock-tenders were necessary, and hauled feed and provisions out across the intermountain deserts. They had droves of mules beating down trails through the deep drifts of the Sierras and the Rockies.
On April 3, 1860, Henry Roff swung into the saddle at Sacramento and Alexander Carlyle leaped on a brown mare in St. Joseph, Missouri. While cannon boomed and crowds cheered in those two remote cities, the ponies came toward each other from the ends of that two-thousand-mile trail on a dead run.
At the end of ten miles or so a relay mount was waiting for each rider. As he drew near the station each man let out a long coyote yell; the hostlers led his animal into the roadway. The messenger charged down upon them, drew rein, sprang to the earth, and269while the agent lifted the pouches from one saddle to the other––as quickly as you read these words describing the process––gained the back of his fresh horse and sped on. At the end of his section––the length of these intervals varied from seventy-five to a hundred and twenty-five miles––each rider dismounted for the last time and turned the pouches over to a successor.
In this manner the mail went across prairie and sage-brush plain, through mountain passes where the snow lay deep beside the beaten trail and across the wide silent reaches of the Great American Desert. And the time on that first trip was ten days for both east and west bound pouches.
The riders were light of weight; they were allowed to carry no weapons save a bowie-knife and revolver; the letters were written on tissue-paper; the two pouches were fastened to a leathern covering which fitted over the saddle, and the thing was lifted with one movement from the last horse to the relay animal. When one of these messengers came within earshot of a station he always raised his voice in the long shrill coyote yell, and by day or night, as that signal came down the wind to them, the men who were on duty scrambled to get the waiting horse into its place.
Many of these half-breed mustangs were unbroken; some were famous for their ability at bucking. There is a man in my town, Joe Hand––he would hate to acknowledge that he is getting on in years even now––who used to ride the western end, and he said:
“They’d hold a bad horse for a fellow long enough to let you get the rowels of those big Mex spurs fastened in the hair cinch. Then it was you and that horse for270it. The worst of it was that the pony would usually tire himself out with his pitching, and you’d lose time. I remember one that left me pretty badly stove up for a while, but I had the satisfaction of knowing he’d killed himself trying to pile me.”
But bad horses were a part of the game; like bad men every one in the business expected them and took them as a matter of course. The riders of the pony express hardly recall such incidents because of the larger adventures with which their lives were filled.
There was the ride of Jim Moore, for a long time famous among the exploits on the frontier. His route went from Midway station to old Julesburg, one hundred and forty miles across the great plains of western Nebraska. The stations were from ten to fourteen miles apart. Arriving at the end of that grueling journey, he would rest for two days before making the return trip.
One day Moore started westward from Midway station, knowing that his partner, who carried the mail one way while he was taking it the other, was sick at Julesburg. It was a question whether the man would be able to take the eastbound pouches, and if he should not be there was no substitute on hand.
Realizing what might lie ahead of him, Moore pressed each fresh horse to its utmost speed during that westward ride. A man can endure only so long a term of punishment, and he resolved to save himself what minutes he could at the very beginning. He made that one hundred and forty miles in eleven hours.
The partner was in bed, and there was no hope of his rising for a day or two. The weary messenger started toward one of the bunks to get a bit of rest, but before271he had thrown himself on the blankets, the coyote yell of the eastbound rider sounded up the road.
It was up to Moore to take the sick man’s place now. While the hostlers were saddling a pony and leading it out in front of the station, he snatched some cold meat from the table, gulped down a cup of lukewarm coffee, and hurried outside. He was just in time to swing into the saddle. He clapped spurs to the pony and kept him on a run. So with each succeeding mount; and when he arrived at Midway he had put the two hundred and eighty miles of the round trip behind him in twenty-two hours.
In western Nevada, where the Paiute Indians were on the war-path, several of the stations were little forts, and riders frequently raced for their lives to these adobe sanctuaries. Pony Bob Haslam made his great three hundred and eighty mile ride across this section of scorching desert.
He rode out of Virginia City one day while the inhabitants were frantically working to fortify the town against war-parties whose signal-fires were blazing at the time on every peak for a hundred miles.
When he arrived at the Carson River, sixty miles away, he found that the settlers had seized all the horses at the station for use in the campaign against the savages. He went on without a relay down the Carson to Fort Churchill, fifteen miles farther. Here the man who was to relieve him refused to take the pouches.
Within ten minutes Haslam was in the saddle again. He rode thirty-five miles to the Carson sink; got a fresh horse and made the next thirty miles, without a272drop of water; changed at Sand Springs and again at Cold Springs; and after one hundred and ninety miles in the saddle turned the pouches over to J. G. Kelley.
Here, at Smith’s Creek, Pony Bob got nine hours’ rest. Then he began the return trip. At Cold Springs he found the station a smoking shambles; the keeper and the stock-tender had been killed, the horses driven off by Indians. It was growing dark. He rode his jaded animal across the thirty-seven-mile interval to Sand Springs, got a remount, and pressed on to the sink of the Carson. Afterward it was found that during the night he had ridden straight through a ring of Indians who were headed in the same direction in which he was going. From the sink he completed his round trip of three hundred and eighty miles without a mishap, arriving at the end within four hours of the schedule time.
Nine months after the opening of the line the Civil War began, and the pony express carried the news of the attack on Fort Sumter from St. Joseph to San Francisco in eight days and fourteen hours.
Newspapers and business men had awakened to the importance of this quick communication, and bonuses were offered for the delivery of important news ahead of schedule. President Buchanan’s last message had heretofore held the record for speedy passage, going over the route in seven days and nineteen hours. But that time was beaten by two hours in the carrying of Lincoln’s inaugural address. Seven days and seventeen hours––the world’s record for transmitting messages by men and horses!
The firm of Russel, Majors & Waddel spent $700,000 on the pony express during the eighteen months of its273life; they took in something less than $500,000. But they accomplished what they had set out to do. In 1860 the Butterfield line was notified to transfer its rolling-stock to the west end of the northern route; their rivals got the mail contract for the eastern portion.
The Wells-Butterfield interests were on the under side now. The change to the new route involved enormous expense; and with the withdrawal of troops at the beginning of the Civil War, Apaches and Comanches plundered the disintegrating line of stations. The company lasted only a short time on the west end of the overland mail and retired. Its leaders now devoted their energies to the express business.
At this juncture a new man got the mail contract. Ben Holliday was his name, and in his day he was known as a Napoleon. Perhaps it was the first time that term was used in connection with American promoters. Holliday, who had begun as a small storekeeper in a Missouri village, had made one canny turn after another until, at the time when the mail came to the northern route, he owned several steamship lines and large freighting interests and was beginning to embark in the stage business. The firm of Russel, Majors & Waddel was losing money, owing in part to bad financial management and in part to the courageous venture of the pony express. Holliday absorbed their property early in the sixties. He was the transportation magnate of his time, the first American to force a merger in that industry.
One of his initial steps was to improve the operation of the stage line. Some of the efficiency methods of274his subordinates were picturesque to say the least. In Julesburg, which was near the mouth of Lodge Pole Creek in northeastern Colorado, the agent was an old Frenchman, after whom the place had been named. This Jules had been feathering his own nest at the expense of the company, and the new management supplanted him with one Jack Slade, whose record up to that time was either nineteen or twenty killings. Slade was put in charge at Julesburg with instructions to clean up his division.
While the new superintendent was exterminating such highway robbers and horse-thieves as Jules had gathered about him in this section, his predecessor was biding in the little settlement, watching for a chance to play even.
One day Slade came into the general store near the station, and the Frenchman, who had seen a good opportunity for ambush here, fired both barrels of a double-barreled shotgun into his body at a range of about fifty feet.
Slade took to his bed. But he was made of the stuff which absorbs much lead without any great amount of permanent harm. He was up again in a few weeks. He hunted down Jules, who had taken refuge in the Indian country to the north on hearing of his recovery. He brought the prisoner back to Julesburg, and bound him to the snubbing-post in the middle of the stage company’s corral.
Accounts of what followed differ. Some authorities maintain that Slade killed Jules. Others, who base their assertions on the statement of men who said they were eye-witnesses, tell how Slade enjoyed himself for275some time filling the prisoner’s clothing with bullet holes and then exclaimed,
“Hell! You ain’t worth the lead to kill you.” And turned the victim loose.
But all narrators agree on this; before Slade unbound the living Jules––or the dead one, whichever it may have been––he cut off the prisoner’s ears and put them in his pocket.
It may be noted in passing that this truculent efficiency expert went wrong in after years and wound up his days at the end of a rope in Virginia City, Montana.
Ben Holliday carried the mails overland throughout the early sixties. But during the summer of 1864 the Indians of the plains, for the first time in their history, made a coalition. They united in one grand war-party against the outposts along the line, and for a distance of four hundred miles they destroyed stations, murdered employees, and made off with live stock. The loss to the company was half a million dollars.
It crippled Holliday. And the government so delayed consideration of his claims for reimbursment that he was glad to sell the property. The firm of Wells Fargo, who had been increasing their express business until they virtually monopolized that feature of common carrying throughout the West at the close of the Civil War, took the line over. Wells Fargo! It was the old Wells Butterfield Co. again. The first winners in the struggle were the last.
The railroad came. Men said that the day of adventure was over. But this adventure has not ended yet.
While this story was being written another pioneer died on that overland mail route. And when his aëro-plane276came fluttering down out of a driving snowstorm to crash, in a mass of tangled wreckage, on the side of Elk Mountain, Wyoming, Lieutenant E. V. Wales went to his death within a rifle-shot of the road where so many of his predecessors gave up their lives trying––even as he was then striving––to quicken communication between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
277BOOT-HILL
Boot-Hill! Back in the wild old days you found one on the new town’s outskirts and one where the cattle trail came down to the ford, and one was at the summit of the pass. There was another on the mesa overlooking the water-hole where the wagon outfits halted after the long dry drive. The cow-boys read the faded writing on the wooden headboards and from the stories made long ballads which they sang to the herds on the bedding grounds. The herds have long since vanished, the cow-boys have ridden away over the sky-line, the plaintive songs are slipping from the memories of a few old men, and we go riding by the places where those headboards stood, oblivious.
Of the frontier cemeteries whose dead came to their ends, shod in accordance with the grim phrase of their times, there remains one just outside the town of Tombstone to the north. Here straggling mesquite bushes grow on the summit of the ridge; cacti and ocatilla sprawl over the sun-baked earth hiding between their thorny stems the headboards and the long narrow heaps of stones which no man could mistake. Some of these headboards still bear traces of black-lettered epitaphs which tell how death came to strong men in the full flush of youth. But the vast majority of the boulder heaps are marked by cedar slabs whose penciled legends the elements have long since washed away.
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The sun shines hot here on the summit of the ridge. Across the wide mesquite flat the granite ramparts of the Dragoons frown all the long day, and the bleak hill graveyard frowns back at them. Thus the men who came to this last resting-place frowned back at Death.
There was a day when every mining camp and cow-town from the Rio Grande to the Yellowstone owned its boot-hill; a day when lone graves marked the trails and solitary headboards rotted slowly in the unpeopled wilderness. Many of these isolated wooden monuments fell before the long assaults of the elements; the low mounds vanished and the grass billowed in the wind hiding the last vestiges of the leveled sepulchers. Sometimes the spot was favorable; outfits rested there; new headboards rose about the first one; for the road was long and weary, the fords were perilous from quicksands; thirst lurked in the desert, and the Indians were always waiting. The camp became a settlement, and in the days of its infancy, when there was no law save that of might, the graveyard spread over a larger area. There came an era when a member of that stern straight-shooting breed who blazed the trails for the coming of the statutes wielded the powers of high justice, the middle, and the low. Outlaw and rustler opposed the dominion of this peace officer. Then the cemetery boomed like the young town. Finally things settled down to jury trials and men let lawyers do most of the fighting with forensics instead of forty-fives. Churches were built and school-houses; a new graveyard was established; brush and weeds hid the old one’s leaning headboards. Time passed; a city grew; the boot-hill was forgotten.
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This is a chronicle of men whose bones lie in those vanished boot-hills. If one could stand aside on the day of judgment and watch them pass when the brazen notes of the last trump are growing fainter, he would witness a brave procession. But we at least can marshal the shadowy host from fast waning memories and, looking upon some of their number, recall the deeds they did, the manner of their dying.
Here then they come through the curtain of time’s mists, Indian fighter, town marshal, faro-dealer, and cow-boy. There are a few among them upon whom it is not worth while to gaze, those whose lives and deaths were unfit for recording; there are a vast multitude whose heroic stories were never told and never will be; and there are some whose deeds as they have come down from the lips of the old-timers should never die.
Thus in the forefront pass lean forms clad for the most part in garments fringed with buckskin. You can see where some have torn off portions of the fringes to clean their rifles.
Old-fashioned long-barreled muzzle-loaders, these rifles; and powder-horns hang by the sides of the bearers. They are long-haired men; and their faces are deeply burned by sun and wind, one hundred and eighty-three of them; and where they died, fighting to the last against four thousand of Santa Ana’s soldiers, rose the first boot-hill. That was in San Antonio, Texas, at the building called the Alamo; and in this day, when schoolboys who can describe Thermopylæ in detail know nothing of that far finer stand, it will do no harm to dwell on a proud episode ignored by most text-book histories.
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On the fifth day of March, 1836, San Antonio’s streets were resonant with the heavy tread of marching troops, the clank of arms and the rumble of moving artillery. Four thousand Mexican soldiers were being concentrated on one point, a little mission chapel and two long adobe buildings which formed a portion of a walled enclosure, the Alamo.
For nearly two weeks General Santa Ana had been tightening the cordon of cavalry, infantry, and artillery about the place. It housed one hundred and eighty-three lank-haired frontiersmen, a portion of General Sam Houston’s band who had declared for Texan independence. The Mexicans had cut them off from water; their food was running low. On this day the dark-skinned commander planned to take the square. His men had managed to plant a cannon two hundred yards away. When they blew down the walls the infantry would charge. It only remained for them to load the field-piece. Bugles sounded; officers galloped through the sheltered streets where the foot soldiers were held in waiting. There came from the direction of the Alamo the steady rat-tat-tat of rifles. The hours went by but the cannon remained silent.
A little group of lean-faced men were crouching on the flat roof of the large out-building. The most of them were clad in fringed garments of buckskin; here and there was one in a hickory shirt and home-spun jeans. Six of them, some bareheaded and some with hats whose wide rims dropped low over their foreheads, were clustered about old Davy Crockett, frontiersman and in his day a member of Congress. Always the six were busy, with ramrods, powder-horns, and bullets, loading the281long-barreled eight-square Kentucky rifles. The grizzled marksman took the cocked weapons from their hands; one after another, he pressed each walnut stock to his shoulder, lined the sights, pulled the trigger, and laid the discharged piece down, to pick up its successor.
He crouched there on the flat roof facing the Mexican cannon. As fast as men came to load it, he fired. Sometimes a dozen soldiers rushed upon the muzzle of the field-piece surrounding it. At such moments Davy Crockett’s arms swept back and forth with smooth unhurried swiftness and his sinewy fingers relaxed from one walnut stock only to clutch another; his hands were never empty. Always a little red flame licked the smoke fog before him like the tongue of an angered snake. He was getting on in years but in all his full life his technic had never been so perfect, his artistry of death so flawless, as on this day which prefaced the closing of his chapter. The bodies of his enemies clogged the space about their cannon; the rivulets of red trickled from the heap across the roadway. The long hours passed. Darkness came. The field-piece remained silent.
Long before daylight the next morning the four thousand were marching in close ranks to gather for the final assault. The sun had not risen when they made the charge. The infantry came first; the cavalry closed in behind them driving them on with bared sabers. The Americans took such toll with their long-barreled rifles from behind the barricaded doors and windows that the foot-soldiers turned to face the naked swords rather than endure that fire. The officers reformed282them under cover; they swept forward again, and again fell back. Santa Ana directed the third charge in person. They swarmed to the courtyard wall and raised ladders to its summit. The men behind bore those before them onward and literally shoved them up the ladders. They overwhelmed the frontiersmen through sheer force of numbers. Colonel W. B. Travis fell fighting hand to hand here. The courtyard filled with dark-skinned soldiers.
The Alamo was fallen. But there remained for the lean hard-bitten men of Texas, who had retired within the adobe buildings, the task of dying as fighting men should die. It was now ten o’clock, nearly six hours since the beginning of the first advance. It took the four thousand two hours more to finish the thing.
For every room saw its separate stand; and every stand was to the bitter end.
There were fourteen gaunt frontiersmen in the hospital, so weak with wounds that they could not drag themselves from their tattered blankets. They fought with rifles and pistols until forty Mexicans lay heaped dead about the doorway. The artillery brought up a field-piece; they loaded it with grape-shot and swept the room, and then at last they crossed the threshold.
Colonel James Bowie, who brought into use the knife that bears his name, was sick within another apartment. How that day’s noises of combat roused the old fire within his breast and how he lay there chafing against the weakness which would not let him raise his body, one can well imagine. A dozen Mexican283officers rushed into the place, firing as they came. Colonel Bowie waited until the first of them was within arm’s length. Then he reached forth, seized the man by the hair and, dying, plunged the knife that bore his name hilt-deep into the heart of his enemy.
So they passed in stifling clouds of powder smoke with the reek of hot blood in their nostrils. The noon hour saw Davy Crockett and five or six companions standing in a corner of the shattered walls; the old frontiersman held a rifle in one hand, in the other a dripping knife, and his buckskin garments were sodden, crimson. That is the last of the picture.
“Thermopylæ had its messenger of defeat. The Alamo had none.” So reads the inscription on the monument erected in latter years by the State of Texas to commemorate that stand. The words are true. But the Alamo did leave a memory and the tale of the little band who fought in the sublimity of their fierceness while death was slowing their pulses did much toward the development of a breed whose eyes were narrow, sometimes slightly slanting, from constant peering across rifle sights under a glaring sun.
The procession is passing; trapper and Indian fighter; teamsters with dust in the deep lines of their faces––dust from the long dry trail to old Santa Fé; stage-drivers who have been sleeping the long sleep under waving wheat-fields where alkali flats once stretched away toward the vague blue mountains; and riders of the pony express. A tall form emerges from the past’s dim background, and comes on among them.
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Six feet and an inch to spare, modeled as finely as an old Greek statue, with eyes of steel grey, sweeping mustache and dark brown hair that hangs to his shoulders, he moves with catlike grace. Two forty-fives hang by his narrow hips; there is a hint of the cavalier in his dropping sombrero and his ornately patterned boots. This is Wild Bill Hickok; he was to have gone with Custer, but a coward’s bullet cheated him out of the chance to die fighting by the Little Big Horn and they buried him in the Black Hills in the spring of 1876.
James B. Hickok was the name by which men called him until one December day in the early sixties when the McCandless gang of outlaws tried to drive the horses off from the Rock Creek station of the Overland Stage on the plains of southwestern Nebraska near the Kansas boundary.
There were ten of the desperadoes, and Hickok, who was scarcely more than a boy then, was alone in the little sod house, for Doc Brinck, his partner, was off hunting that afternoon. He watched their approach from the lonely cubicle where he and Brinck passed their days as station-keepers. They rode up through the cottonwoods by the creek. Bill McCandless leaped from the saddle and swaggered to the corral bars.
“The first man lays a hand on those bars, I’ll shoot,” Hickok called. They answered his warning with a volley, and their leader laughed as he dragged the topmost railing from its place. Laughing he died.
Now the rifles of the others rained lead against the sod walls and slugs buzzed like angry wasps through the window. He killed one more by the corral and a285third who had crept up behind the wooden well-curb. The seven who were left retired to the cottonwoods to hold council. They determined to rush the building and batter down the door.
When they came forth bearing a dead tree-trunk between them, he got two more of them. And then the timber crashed against the flimsy door; the rended boards flew across the room; the sod walls trembled to the shock. He dropped his rifle and drew his revolver as he leaped to meet them.
Jim McCandless and another pitched forward across the threshold with leveled shotguns at their shoulders. Young Hickok ducked under the muzzle of the nearest weapon, and its flame seared his long hair as he swung for the bearer’s mid-section with all the weight of his body behind the blow. Whirling with the swiftness of a fighting cat he spurned the senseless outlaw with his boot and “threw down” on McCandless. Revolver and shotgun flamed in the same instant; McCandless fell dead; Hickok staggered back with eleven buckshot in his body.
The other three were on him before he recovered his balance. He felt the searing of their bowie-knives against his ribs as they bore him down on the bed. Fingers closed in on his windpipe. He seized the arm in his two hands and twisted it, as one would twist a stick, until the bones snapped. He struggled to his feet, and the warm blood bathed his limbs as he hurled the two who were left across the room.
They came on crouching and their knives gleamed through the thick smoke-clouds. His own bowie-knife was in his hand now, and he stabbed the foremost286through the throat. The other fled. Hickok stumbled out through the door after him, and Doc Brinck came riding back from his hunting expedition in time to lend his rifle to his partner, who insisted profanely that he was fit to finish what he had so well begun.
So young James Hickok shut his teeth against the weakness which was creeping over him and lined his sights on the last of his enemies; for the man whom he had felled with his fist and he with the broken arm had escaped some time during the latter progress of the fight. That final shot was not so true as its predecessors; the outlaw did not die until several days later in the little town of Manhattan, Kansas.
When the eastbound stage pulled up that afternoon the driver and passengers found the long-haired young station-keeper in a deep swoon, with eleven buckshot and thirteen knife wounds in his body. They took him aboard and carried him to Manhattan where he recovered six months later, to find himself known throughout the West as Wild Bill Hickok.
How many men he killed is a mooted question. But it is universally acknowledged that he slew them all fairly. Owning that prestige whose possessor walks amid unseen dangers, he introduced the quick draw on his portion of frontier; and many who sought his life for the sake of the dark fame which the deed would bring them died with their weapons in their hands.
In Abilene, Kansas, where he was for several years town marshal, one of these caught him unawares as he was rounding a corner. Wild Bill complied with the order to throw up his hands and stood, rigid, expressionless,287while the desperado, emulating the plains Indians, tried to torture him by picturing the closeness of his end. He was in the midst of his description when Hickok’s eyes widened and his voice was thick with seeming horror as he cried,
“My God! Don’t kill him from behind!” The outlaw allowed his eyes to waver and he fell with a bullet-hole in his forehead.
As stage-driver, Indian fighter, and peace officer Wild Bill Hickok did a man’s work in cleaning up the border. He was about to go and join the Custer expedition as a scout when one who thought the murder would give him renown shot him from behind as he was sitting in at a poker game in Deadwood. He died drawing his two guns, and the whole West mourned his passing. It had never known a braver spirit.
The silent ranks grow thicker: young men, sunburned and booted for the saddle; the restless souls who forsook tame Eastern farm-lands, lured by the West’s promise of adventure, and received the supreme fulfilment of that promise; the finest of the South’s manhood drawn toward the setting sun to seek new homes. They come from a hundred boot-hills, from hundreds of solitary graves; from the banks of the Yellowstone, the Platte, the Arkansas, and the two forks of the Canadian.
There are so many among them who died exalted that the tongue would weary reciting the tales. This tattered group were with the fifty who drove off fifteen hundred Cheyennes and Kiowas on Beecher Island. The Battle of the Arickaree was the name men gave the288stand; and the sands of the north fork of the Republican were red with the blood of the Indians slain by Forsythe and his half hundred when night fell.
These three who follow in boots, jean breeches, and Oregon shirts are Billy Tyler and the Shadler brothers, members of that company of twenty-eight buffalo hunters who made the big fight at Adobe Walls. The sun was just rising when Quanah Parker, Little Robe, and White Shield led more than eight hundred Comanches and Kiowas in the first charge upon the four buildings which stood at the edge of the Llano Estacado, one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest settlement. The Shadler boys were slain in their wagon at that onslaught. Tyler was shot down at midday as he ventured forth from Myers & Leonard’s store. Before the afternoon was over the Indians sickened of their losses and drew off beyond range of the big-caliber Sharp’s rifles. They massacred one hundred and ninety people during their three months’ raiding but the handful behind the barricaded doors and windows was too much for them.
Private George W. Smith of the Sixth Cavalry is passing now. You would need to look a second time to notice that he was a soldier, for the rifle under his arm is a long-barreled Sharp’s single shot and he has put aside much of the old blue uniform for the ordinary Western raiment. That was the way of scouting expeditions, and he, with his five companions, was on the road from McClellan’s Creek to Fort Supply when they met two hundred Indians on that September morning of 1874.
Up near the northeast corner of the Texas Panhandle,289where the land rises to a divide between Gageby’s Creek and the Washita River, the five survivors dug his grave with butcher-knives. They pulled down the banks of a buffalo wallow over his body in the darkness of the night; and they left him in this shallow sepulcher, unmarked by stone or headboard. There his bones lie to this day, and no man knows when he is passing over them.
The six of them had left General Miles’s command two days before. At dawn on September 13, they were riding northward up the long open slope: Billy Dixon and Amos Chapman, two buffalo hunters serving as scouts, and the four troopers, Sergeant Z. T. Woodhull, Privates Peter Rath, John Harrington, and George W. Smith. You could hardly tell the soldiers from the plainsmen, had you seen them; a sombreroed group, booted to the knees and in their shirt-sleeves; all bore the heavy, fifty-caliber Sharp’s single-shot rifles across their saddle-horns.
The bare land rolled away and away, dark velvet-brown toward the flushing east. The sky was vivid crimson when they turned their horses up a little knoll. They reached its summit just as the sun was rising. Here they drew rein. Two hundred Comanches and Kiowas were riding toward them at the bottom of the hill; the landscape had tricked them into ambush.
There passed an instant during which astonishment held both parties motionless: the white men on the crest, unshaven, sunburned, their soiled sombreros drooping over their narrowed eyes; and at the slope’s foot the ranks of half-naked braves all decked out in the war-path’s gaudy panoply. Their lean torsos gleamed under290the rays of the rising sun like old copper; patches of ocher and vermilion stood out in vivid contrast against the dusky skins; feathered war-bonnets and dyed scalp-locks fluttered, gay bits of color in the morning breeze. The instant passed; the white men flung themselves from their saddles; the red men deployed forming a wide circle about them. A ululating yell, so fierce in its exultation that the cavalry horses pulled back upon their bridles in a frenzy of fear, broke the silence. Then the booming of the long Sharp’s fifties on the summit mingled with the rattle of Springfields and needle-guns on the hill’s flank.
Now, while the bullets threw the dust from the dry sod into their faces, five of the six dropped on their bellies in a ring. And by the sergeant’s orders Private George Smith took charge of the panic-stricken horses. Perhaps that task fell to him because he was the poorest shot, perhaps it was because he had the least experience; but it was a man’s job. He stood upright clinging to the tie-ropes, trying to soothe the plunging animals; and he became the target for a hundred of those rifles which were clattering along the hillside below him. For every warrior in the band knew that the first bullet that found its mark in his body would send the horses stampeding down the slope; and to put his foes afoot was the initial purpose of the plains Indian when he went into battle.
So Private Smith clinched his teeth and did his best, while the deep-toned buffalo-guns roared and the rifles of the savages answered in a never-ending volley all around him. The leaden slugs droned past his ears as thick as swarming bees; the plunging hoofs showed291through the brown dust-clouds, and his arms ached from the strain of the tie-ropes.
Billy Dixon had thrown away his wide-rimmed sombrero and his long hair rippled in the wind. He had been through the battle at Adobe Walls and men knew him for one of the best shots in the country south of the Arkansas River. He was taking it slowly, lining his sights with the coolness of an old hand on a target-range. Now he raised his head.
“Here they come,” he shouted.
The circle was drawing inward where the land sloped up at the easiest angle. A hundred half-naked riders swung toward the summit, and the thud-thud of the ponies’ little hoofs was audible through the rattle of the rifles. The buffalo-guns boomed in slow succession like the strokes of a tolling bell. Empty saddles began to show in the forefront. The charge swerved off, and as it passed at point-blank range a curtain of powder smoke unrolled along the whole flank.
Private George Smith pitched forward on his face. His rifle flew far from him. He lay there motionless. A trooper binding his wounded thigh glanced around when the assault had become a swift retreat.
“Look!” he cried. “They’ve got Smith.”
“Set us afoot,” another growled and pointed after the stampeded horses.
Smith lay quite still as he had fallen. They thought him dead. Within the hour, a dozen whooping Comanches ran their ponies up the hill toward his limp form. To gain that scalp-lock under fire would be an exploit worth telling to their grandchildren in after292years. And there was the long-barreled rifle as a bit of plunder. But the five white men, who had changed their position under a second charge, emptied four saddles before the warriors were within a hundred yards of the spot, and the eight survivors whipped their ponies down the slope again.
The sun was climbing high when Amos Chapman rolled over on his side and called to Billy Dixon that his leg was broken. Dixon lifted his head and surveyed the situation. The Indians were gathering for another rush. Thus far they had taken things as though they were so sure of the ultimate result that they did not see fit to run great chances. But this could not last. The next charge might be the final one. Down on a little mesquite flat about two hundred yards distant, he saw a buffalo wallow. He pointed to it.
“We got to make it,” he told the others, and they followed him as he ran for the shelter. But Amos Chapman crawled only a dozen paces or so before he had to give it up. The four fell to work with their butcher-knives heaping up the sand at the summit of the low bank which surrounded the shallow circular depression. They dropped their knives and picked up their rifles, for the savages were sweeping down upon them.
So they dug and fought and fought and dug for another hour and then Billy Dixon was unable to stand the sight of his partner lying helpless on the summit of the knoll.
“I’m going to get Amos,” he announced, and set forth amid a rain of bullets. Those who saw him after the fight was over––and General Miles was among them––said that his shirt was ripped in twenty places by flying293lead. He halted on the hilltop and took up Chapman pick-a-back, then bore him slowly down the slope to the little shelter.
Noon came on. The sun shone hot. Dixon had got a bullet in the calf of his leg when he was bearing his companion on his back. Private Rath was the only man who was not wounded. They all thirsted as only men can thirst who have been keyed up to the high pitch of endeavor for hours. The savages charged thrice more; and when they came, numbers of them always deployed toward the top of the knoll where Private Smith lay dying: dead his companions thought, but they were grim in their determination that the red men should never get the scalp which they coveted so sorely. The big Sharps boomed; the saddles emptied to their booming. Private Smith wakened from one swoon only to fall into another. Sometimes he wakened to the thudding of hoofs and saw the savages sweeping toward him on their ponies.
Near midafternoon the warriors formed for a charge and it was evident from the manner of their massing that they were going to ride down on the buffalo wallow in one solid body. But while their ranks were gathering there came up one of those sudden thunderstorms for which the Staked Plains were famous. The rain fell in sheets; the lightning blazed with scarcely an intermission between flashes. And the charge was given up for the time being. The braves drew off beyond rifle-shot and huddled up within their blankets.
Morris Rath seized the respite to go for ammunition. For Smith’s cartridge-belts were full. He came back from the knoll breathless.
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“Smith’s living,” he cried.
“Come on,” Billy Dixon bade him and the two went back to the summit.
“I can walk if you two hold me up,” Private George Smith whispered. A bullet had passed through his lungs and when he breathed the air whistled from a hole beneath his shoulder-blade. They supported him on either side and half-carried him to the buffalo wallow.
The thunder-shower had passed. Another was coming fast. The Indians were gathering to take advantage of the brief interval. The agony which had come from rough motion was keeping Smith from swooning now. He saw his companions preparing to stand off the assault. Amos Chapman was holding himself upright by bracing his body against the side of the wallow. Private Smith whispered to the others,
“Set me up like Chapman. They’ll think there’s more of us fit to shoot that way.” And they did as he had asked them.
So he held his body erect while the life was ebbing from it; and the rain came down again in sheets. The Indians fell back before the charge was well begun. It was their last attempt.
The wind rose, biting raw. The savages melted away as dusk drew down over the brown land. Some one looked at Smith. His head was sunk and he was moaning with pain. They found a willow switch and tamped a handkerchief into the wound. And then they laid him down in the rain-water which had gathered in the wallow. His blood and the blood of the others turned that water a dull red.
Some time near midnight he died. And several days295later, when General Miles’s troops came to rescue them, the five others buried his body. It was night-time. The fires of the troopers glowed down at the foot of the slope. They made the grave with their butcher-knives by pulling down the sand from the wallow’s side upon the body. And then they went to the camp-fires of the soldiers.
They are passing from bleak graveyards on the alkali flats and in the northern mountains where the sage-brush meets the pines: gaunt men in laced boots and faded blue overalls who traveled once too often through the desert’s mirage searching for the golden ledges; big-boned hard rock men who died in underground passages where the steel was battering the living granite; men with soft hands and cold eyes who fattened on the fruits of robbery and murder.
This swarthy black-haired one in the soft silk shirt and spotless raiment of the gambler is Cherokee Bob, who killed and plundered unchallenged throughout eastern Washington and Idaho during the early sixties; until the camp of Florence celebrated its third New Year’s Eve with a ball in which respectability held sway, and he took his consort thither to mingle with the wives of others. Then he kindled a flame of resentment which his blackest murders had failed to rouse. The next morning the entire camp turned out to drive him forth together with Bill Willoughby, his partner. The two retreated slowly, from building to building, facing the mob. Shotguns bellowed; rifle-bullets sang about their ears, and they answered with their revolvers, until death left their trigger fingers limp.