When I was little, the house we lived in
was situated next to a grove of trees. Well kept with a floor of pine needles,
the little forest had a variety of trees—all relatively short in stature.
In fact, you might call it an orchard
since it featured an apple tree, cherry trees and a raspberry bush.
And right along our sidewalk, with dozens
of branches hanging overhead, a mulberry tree.
Every spring into summer, the mulberries
fell like rain.
Fun for a kid on a hot afternoon.
Scrumptious to be sure.
Fun for the birds too, who plopped their colorful
calling cards onto the sidewalk amidst the purples and blue stains.
I’ve always wanted to write a story about
those trees, and the headache it caused for my mom when I would come in with a
stained shirt, shorts or shoe.
Fast forward to a few weeks back when,
walking along the Missouri River, I found myself once more under a canopy of
dropping mulberries, dodging the little landmines on the trail even while I
enjoyed the shade against the afternoon heat.Ahead of me, a young woman with a Great Dane was pulling mightily on his
leash, scolding him for scarfing up the free fruit.
And just like that, the following story
came together.
So I was again surprised by how stories
can spring into life. But another surprise waited when I sat down to the
keyboard.
As the first few sentences came out, the
voice seemed familiar.
Sensing, er…”Poe-tential,”I listened to the voice and ended up with one
of the few pastiche stories I’ve ever written.
As you know, a pastiche is work done in a
style that imitates another work, artist, or period (Thanks, Google!).
If you don’t get it from the title, it won’t
be hard to quickly see where “Tell Tail” got its last bit of inspiration.
It was a fun one to write. I hope you have
fun reading it.
After growing up on a Nebraska farm, Richard Prosch
worked as a professional writer, artist, and teacher in Wyoming, South
Carolina, and Missouri. His western crime fiction captures the fleeting history
and lonely frontier stories of his youth where characters aren’t always what
they seem, and the windburned landscapes are filled with swift, deadly danger.
In 2016, Richard roped the Spur Award for short fiction given by Western
Writers of America. Read more at
www.RichardProsch.com
Rugged mountain peaks cloaked in snow. A
parched desert streaked in reds and yellows. The billowing swells of a tallgrass prairie. The landscape of the West is
“scene one” in nearly every western movie you’ve ever watched, or described on the
first few pages of every western novel you’ve ever read. It acts as an unnamed but vital
character and provides a beautiful–or punishing–backdrop to the story being
told.
Director John Ford frequently
featured Monument Valley's stark scenery, beginning
with Stagecoach (1939) to Cheyenne Autumn (1965).
Writers look to landforms to evoke deep emotions, as did
William A. Quayle:
“Loneliness, thy other name, thy one true synonym, is prairie.” The Prairie
and the Sea (1905)
To explorer and conservationist John Muir, it was
more of a religious experience:
“Long,
blue, spiky-edged shadows crept out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow,
at first scarce discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every
mountain-top, flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This was
the alpenglow, to me the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations
of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a
rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting
to be blessed.” The Wild Muir: Twenty-two
of John Muir’s Greatest Adventures (2013)
Elmer Kelton recognized the
magical connection between people and the ground they lived and died
on. He wrote in The Day the Cowboys Quit, “Some people would never
understand the hold this land could take on a man if he stayed rooted long
enough in one spot to develop a communion with the grass-blanketed earth, to begin
to feel and fall in with the rhythms of the changing seasons. There was a pulse
in this land, like the pulse in a man, though most people never paused long
enough to sense it.”
Annie
Proulx also suggests that the power of landscape goes beyond the physical. Here is
her definition from the essay, “Dangerous Ground.”
“Landscape
is geography, archaeology, astrophysics, agronomy, agriculture, the violent
character of the atmosphere, climate, black squirrels and wild oats, folded
rock, bulldozers; it is jet trails and barbwire, government land, dry stream
beds; it is politics, desert wildfire, introduced species, abandoned vehicles,
roads, ghost towns, nuclear test grounds, swamps, a bakery shop, mine tailings,
bridges, dead dogs. Landscape is rural, urban, suburban, semirural, small
town, village; it is outposts and bedroom communities; it is a remote ranch.”
No other writing genre is as tied to the land as is western literature. What an incredible and inspiring resource!
“The land belongs to the future … that’s the way it seems to me. How
many names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years? I
might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s
children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people
who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little
while.” - Willa Cather
Being a peace officer is, well, not always peaceful. It is a
dangerous profession. Being in the federal marshals service has its own set of
attendant dangers, as one of our regular contributors knows from experience.
That particular profession was especially dangerous, though, in the late 19th
century.
You can go to the Officers Down Memorial Page and read
through a list, with some details attached, of every member of the U.S.
Marshals Service to die in the line of duty since it was established in 1789.
The list includes both Deputy U.S. Marshals and deputized posse members. The
first to fall was Marshal Robert Forsyth, killed in Georgia in 1794 –he was
shot through a door while attempting to serve papers. The most recent name on
the list (as of this writing) is that of Deputy Commander Patrick Thomas
Carothers, a 26-year veteran –he, too, was shot in Georgia while attempting to
enter a home to serve a warrant. In all, the list contains 280 names (again, so
far).
190 of those men died between 1870 and 1910. That is more
than two-thirds.
It will come as no surprise to many of our readers and
contributors that one-half of those 1870-1910 deaths, 95 to be specific,
occurred in the area known initially as Indian Territory, later divided into
Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory, and by the end of that era the state
of Oklahoma. To do a little more math, that means that ONE-THIRD of all members
of the Marshals Service to die in the line of duty did so in Oklahoma in the
space of a few decades.
That’s because Oklahoma was, as they say, wide open. Or as a
saying from the time put it, “There is no Sunday west of St. Louis, and no God
west of Fort Smith.”
This was due to a very unique set of circumstances surrounding
Oklahoma. The eastern half was the home (not by choice, for many of them) of
the “Five Civilized Tribes”: Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and
Seminoles, who had been removed to Oklahoma in the 1830s (and 1840s, for the
resisting Seminoles), although a minority had acquiesced and come peacefully of
their own accord before the Trail of Tears. The western half of Oklahoma was,
at that time, home to the so-called “wild” tribes- Comanches, Kiowas, and etc.
The Five Tribes had written laws and their own police
forces, called light horse, to enforce them (depending on the tribe, individual
districts also had sheriffs). This was all well and good when dealing with
Indian criminals and Indian victims, but a jurisdictional morass arose when
non-Indians were involved. You see, the Indians had no jurisdiction over crimes
that involved American citizens (non-Indians, in other words). At the same
time, the Supreme Court had long since determined that, constitutionally, state
and local governments had no jurisdiction over Indian country. In such cases
(and this is still true), only the federal government has authority. At that
time, this meant the U.S. Marshals Service, which eventually operated out of
the court in Fort Smith, Arkansas (which was right on the border of Indian
Territory). For many years, that court was presided over by Judge Isaac Parker,
known widely as “The Hanging Judge.”
What this meant, in the 1870s and 1880s, was this: if you were
an outlaw operating in Texas, Arkansas, or Missouri, you could “light out for
the Nations” and have a very good chance of getting away and being able to
continue your wayward career. The local Indian authorities could not touch you,
and state or county lawmen could not follow you. The only people who could come
after you were members of the U.S. Marshals Service. (Sometimes this situation
was altered by Indian peace officers, such as the Cherokee Sam Sixkiller, also
being deputized as Deputy U.S. Marshals. There were also quite a few black marshals, Bass Reeves being the most famous.)
Therefore, there were a lot of outlaws in the Nations, with
a finite number of federal marshals to track them down. It’s no surprise, then,
that so many marshals were killed in the attempt to do so. Look through that
280 name list, and you might be surprised how many lawmen were killed in
Oklahoma after catching their man –by sleeping on the return trip to Fort
Smith, and being killed with axes or big sticks or whatever the prisoners who
managed to work their way loose were able to get their hands on.
The situation got worse in the 1890s, after the Dawes Act
had allowed for the allotment of most tribes’ land and the opening of parts of
Oklahoma for settlement. The Five Tribes were excluded from this at first,
since they were technically already “civilized”, although an addition to the
law in 1898 brought them under allotment as well. Starting at the end of the
1880s and growing exponentially by the year, the Five Tribes were surrounded by
more and more settlers, making the jurisdictional issue ever more pronounced as
more non-Indians in the region magnified the problem. These were the days of
the Doolins and the Daltons, of Cherokee Bill, of the Starrs, of the famed “Three
Guardsmen” (Chris Madsen, Heck Thomas, and Bill Tilghman) leading federal
posses after outlaws, and of the efforts to capture Ned Christie (and other,
lesser-known Cherokees such as Bill Pigeon).
So that explains the high mortality rate of officers in
Oklahoma. But what about the rest of the country during that same period? Going
back to that concept of mathematics, fully one-third of federal marshals ever
killed in the line of duty fell from 1870-1910… outside of Oklahoma. So it was
still a pretty violent time everywhere else, as well.
Not all of them were murdered. Thomas Foley was killed in
Virginia in 1870 when a courtroom balcony collapsed and killed him and 61 other
people. Clement McCausland died in Dakota Territory in 1872 while pursuing a
fugitive, when he got lost in a blizzard. James Arnold died in 1891 while
transporting a prisoner to a prison on an island off the coast of Washington
(the state) –a sudden squall capsized their sailboat and he drowned.
Almost all, however, were murdered. As one would expect, a
large number of those deaths occurred in the American West (not counting
Oklahoma). We should probably count the two marshals killed in Alaska in
separate incidents during the Klondike gold rush among those. Some names on the
list who died in the West might jump out at the western reader: Bob Olinger,
for example, killed in Lincoln County, NM, by Billy the Kid during a jailbreak.
Here’s the interesting part, though. Taking the 95 deaths in
Oklahoma out of the mix, there were 30 marshals killed in the line of duty in
the American West. There was a grand total of ONE killed in the North –stabbed while trying
to arrest a deserter from a Russian ship in New Jersey.
And there were 56 killed in the South.
Most of these men died in Tennessee, Kentucky, northern
Georgia, and North Carolina. And most of them were killed by moonshiners,
either while serving warrants, transporting prisoners, or in ambush. (Two were killed by the Ku Klux Klan during the federal government's efforts to suppress that terrorist group in the early 1870s, one in Tennessee and one in Mississippi.)
Actually, several marshals who died in Oklahoma were killed
while raiding stills or trying to arrest bootleggers (remember Rooster Cogburn’s
testimony in True Grit?) The circumstances were slightly different, though. All
sales of alcohol were forbidden in Indian Territory; in the South, it was not
the sale or private distilling of alcohol that was the problem, it was the fact
that no taxes were being collected on it.
Farmers making their own liquor was a longstanding
tradition- in fact, at one time it had been more a general rural tradition than
a specifically Southern Appalachian one. Turning your grain into alcohol made
it easier to store and transport, and brought more money. The first federal tax
on a specific item was on whiskey, which led to the Whiskey Rebellion in
Pennsylvania in the 1790s. That tradition had remained strong in the Mountain
South.
After the end of the Civil War, presidents Grant and Hayes
stressed the enforcement of tax laws on whiskey as a way to pay down the war
debt. This led to what was known as the Moonshine Wars of the 1870s (and later,
as well). Federal agents started sweeping through the mountains, forcing
licensed still owners to pay taxes and shutting down unlicensed ones. Most of
the Mountain South had been pro-Union during the war, but during and after
Reconstruction there was a growth of ex-Confederate sensibility in the region,
and in this case it was exacerbated by federal “outsiders” trying to control
what had become a mountain tradition.
Which led to the surprising fact that –if you take Oklahoma,
a unique case, out of the equation –if you were in the federal marshals service
in the late 19th/early 20th century, you were statistically
almost twice as likely to be shot by Southern moonshiners as by Western outlaws
(in reality, of course, this would depend on where you were serving).
Oklahoma and the Mountain South had something else in common
besides violence (and Cherokees). I’m speaking of public reaction to that
violence.
As I mentioned earlier, at first the Five Civilized Tribes
were exempt from allotment. To clarify, allotment, made government policy by
the Dawes Act of 1887, meant that control over Native lands would be taken away
from tribal governments and instead each Indian family would be given (allotted)
a small farm. For most tribes, this resulted in a lot of land being left over,
previously under control of the tribe. This “leftover” public land, controlled
by the federal government, was opened to settlement.
As more settlers poured into Oklahoma, many of them eyed the
prime lands still controlled by the Five Tribes. Those settlers, and the governments
of neighboring states, immediately started proclaiming how unfair it was that
all this land was under the control of “wild, uncivilized savages.” But wait,
one might say, the Five Tribes were exempt from the new law because they were “civilized.”
Many of them operated modern businesses and spoke perfect English. Well, many
Americans started saying, if they’re so doggone civilized…. Why is it so wild
there in the Nations? Why is there so much violence and lawlessness? And it was
impossible to argue that there was no violence, because there definitely was.
The true reason for it, of course, was the complicated legal situation in which
the Five Tribes had been placed by the federal government, but no one (aside
from the Indians) was saying that. Rather, the violence was being used as a
justification for the government to come in and take over… and to redistribute the
Indians’ resources to white Americans.
Meanwhile, in the Mountain South, northern investors and
their southern partners started expanding industry after the Civil War. New
railroads were built –the antebellum Southern railroad system had existed primarily
to link cotton plantations to harbor cities so as to ship their product
overseas –and that led to new businesses. In particular, lumber and coal mining
started to boom post-Civil War. Before the war, most of the coal mining had
taken place in northern Appalachia, in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio.
Once new railroads extended into the southern mountains, coal mining became a
viable operation.
However, a lot of southern mountain folk were hesitant –or downright
unwilling –to sell or lease their land, or even the mineral and timber rights
to it, to these new businesses. They were, in effect, “holding up progress” due
to a strong affinity for their own land and traditions.
At the end of Reconstruction (which was officially over
after the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877) there was a clarion call
among progressives in the former Confederate states for a “New South” –one that
was open to industry and business (other than just cotton), and was modernized.
Southern mountaineers –who had always been presented as the ultimate frontier
heroes (Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, even Andrew Jackson if you think about it)
–were standing in the way of that, and the economic benefits (for some) that
would come with it.
Therefore, just like newspapers in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and
Missouri were doing with the Five Tribes, papers started focusing heavily on the
violence of the Moonshine Wars as evidence that Southern mountain folk were
backward, wild, and uncivilized. They especially latched onto the Hatfield and
McCoy feud on the Kentucky-West Virginia border, with papers all around the
country taking it up.
In the 1880s, therefore, the national image of southern
mountain folk changed from that of rugged, self-sufficient frontier heroes to
what we now call the “hillbilly stereotype” –violent, ignorant, wild, savage,
lazy, dishonest, and incompetent. That is a far cry from Davy Crockett.
“Hillbilly” became shorthand for a group of people that it
was okay for everyone else to make fun of and look down on (which is still the
case –watch reality TV at any random time.) But more to the point –just like those
“wild” Cherokees –hillbillies were both violent and backward, mentally incapable
of knowing what was in their own best interests, and of controlling their own
resources. So, just like in Indian Territory, it was okay for government and
private business interests to come in and make those decisions (especially
concerning resources) for them. By the 1920s and 1930s, by the way, Appalachian violence and the need to suppress it had expanded to include striking coalminers (watch the movie Matewan.)
Ned Christie, the “Cherokee outlaw”, and moonshiners in
Southern Appalachia were both resisting what they considered to be a foreign
government, and the act of their resistance reinforced the idea that they
needed to be more firmly controlled (I think it could be strongly argued that
the Cherokees had a lot more justification than moonshiners who didn’t want to
pay taxes –my point is not the justification, but the mindset.) In both cases,
this led to control of their natural resources passing out of their own hands.
The federal marshals, of course, were just doing their jobs…
a hard and thankless job, made more dangerous by the circumstances of their
times.
(by the way, to have the last portion of this piece essentially set to music, listen to the song above: "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive." The song was played in each season finale of Justified, a TV series about a former coal-miner turned Deputy U.S. Marshalin Appalachian Kentucky.)
