One Against a Gun Horde

For a long time I wanted to write about one particular Saturday afternoon in the 1970s. Last year that idea became a story, "One Against a Gun Horde."

In those years I lived with my parents on a Nebraska acreage that sat on a hill, overlooking a creek valley grassland. About a mile to the southwest sat a small group of buildings we rented for livestock. Cattle grazed in the pasture. Hogs lived in the barns. A gravel road ran parallel with our homestead. Half a mile away, a right turn would take you half a mile to the other place.

So on this one sunny, summer Saturday, my dad and I were walking across our open yard, heading to the house for coffee, when we heard a gunshot. Then another. 

It was the middle of summer. Not hunting season. And the thunder echoing up through the cedars and cottonwoods from the other place didn't come from a BB gun or even a .22 rifle.

This was high powered stuff. 

We held up our hands to shield our eyes from the sun and searched the horizon.

The shooters weren’t hard to find. Their bright red pickup was a give away, parked in the ditch at the other place.

Taking off in a run, Dad said over his shoulder, "Get in the pickup.” I followed, feet dragging a little, while my heart picked up the pace. "Call the dog," he said

"Where are we going?" Like I didn't know. I got our German Shepherd into the box, and we jumped into our ancient blue Ford. 

Dad turned the key, but before throwing the pickup into gear, he said, "Sons a bitches are too close to the hogs and cattle to be shootin'." His face was red, he was breathing hard, holding his voice down to a low growl.

"We're going down there?!?!"

I thought he'd lost his mind.

He thought I'd lost mine for the question.

We were both partly right.

"Dad. They've got guns," I said. "They've got guns." Trying to be extra dramatic.

"Oh yeah," he said, flinging open his door. Seconds later he was back with a single barrel shotgun that was older than the truck. "Hold onto that," he said.

Spinning gravel, we set out to confront the weekend gunnies, whoever they were, with an ancient shotgun, one shell, and a barking German Shepherd.

Less than a minute later, braking sideways on the gravel road, Dad deliberately spraying rocks at the parked red pickup, I decided it could've been worse.

I only saw two guys.

Then I decided it could've been better.

Each of the bearded men were bigger than dad and me combined. Each held a rifle.

"Do you know 'em?" said Dad. "Because I sure as hell don't." As if I hung around with bearded rednecks who were at least twice my age.

I shook my head, but he was already out of the pickup, stomping toward them. I decided to leave the shotgun in the cab.

When I joined them, I got a surprise.

Dad sure as hell did know 'em. 

In fact, he'd gone to school with one of the men, and rode to Army basic training with the other.

Just like that, the anger was gone, all was forgiven, and it was old home week.

And like every kid left standing alone while a parent yuks it up with old friends, I immediately wanted to be someplace else.

So while I waited around and toed the dirt, I started to imagine how things might've been different. 

What it these guys hadn't been old pals? What if they'd tried something? How would my dad act? How would I act?

That's the premise of “One Against a Gun Horde,” that interplay between real life and fiction, and it served as an origin story of sorts. For a while now I've written about a character named John Coburn who some folks know as "The Peregrine" thanks to a series of dime adventure stories written about him "back east."

But who wrote those stories about Coburn? And why? Here's the answer, and the afternoon incident above is where it all started.

Download the story in PDF format here.

The story is part of a Kindle collection available at Amazon here.

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. Read more at www.RichardProsch.com

Sex and the Single Soldier

To quote Kevin Adams, “Sex may well have surpassed drinking as the most popular leisure pursuit for enlisted men on the frontier.”

The army veteran of the time, Reginald Bradley said, “You take a young fellow of 22 or 23, and he’ll always be thinking about where he can get a drink of beer, or a girl. The first item on the menu was filled by saloons, post traders, or the nearest town. Prostitutes filled the second, and no fort in the frontier was without prostitutes nearby. Mostly at hog ranches, which usually consisted of ramshackle buildings that housed dance halls, saloons, gambling joints, and soon. Adams says “lights out” at the typical frontier fort came at 9 p.m., which gave the rank and file soldier plenty of time to get off to the hog ranch, get his fill or whatever, and be back before reveille. I quote: “Not surprisingly, venereal disease was one of the top two reasons for medical discharge in the United States Army every year between 1877 and 1889.”

Calamity Jane
was on the line for a while,
they say.

 The book Class and Race in the Frontier Army kind of blames the rash of venereal disease among enlisted men on the all-male environment, and the increasingly stratified society of the late 19^th century. Specifically: “While bourgeois Americans enjoyed a gender system that celebrated companionate (if not egalitarian) marriage and domestic life, working-class Americans struggled to fashion viable households in an era of economic turmoil. Men who lived on the margins of the working class fared even worse, shunted into transient jobs and homosocial environments such as logging, mining, and cowboy camps. Like those men, soldiers lived within a class structure that promoted a masculine form of gendered oppression.”

OK. So the ranks had a hard time making families that endured, it was doubly hard for those of color, male and female. Thus, white soldiers found that their status as white men provided them access to women who were particularly vulnerable.

Poverty kept men too poor to have families. Women didn’t have job skills other than domestic ones. There were far more men than women around a military camp. Thus, in addition to prostitutes, soldiers often consorted with working class white women, and of course those of color.

Troop K, 1st Cav.

Here is a case in point, taken from Adams’s book.

Private Patrick Moriarty of the 9^th Infantry was charged at Fort McPherson, Nebraska, with attempted rape for assault upon Mrs. Thomas Bock, laundress of Company A, 9^th Infantry. Testimony of witnesses conflicted, but both sides agreed that Mrs. Boch was known to have consorted with drunken enlisted men. The prosecution argued that her miserable drunken husband was to blame, because he often had other miserable drunkards like the “prisoner” over to his house for the purpose of drinking.

Private Moriarty claimed he was far from the only soldier to have become intimate with Mrs. Boch, and it was only after her sister caught the two in the act that the cry of rape was raised. Defense witnesses said they had seen the prisoner frequently put his arms around her, and also several men in the company do the same when over there drinking. They also said they had seen Mrs. Boch in company with prostitutes in North Platte, and that they heard her husband, a private in the same regiment as Moriarty, call his wife a “whore.”

Moriarty was convicted of assault and unlawful entry, but acquitted of intent to commit rape. No one on either side ever observed that Mrs. Boch’s status in the army left her vulnerable to such assaults. And Adams notes: “Indian, Mexican, and black women were even more liable to experience sexual exploitation than working-class white women.”

Crib girls were not known
for fancy quarters

Witness the case of an Indian girl named Julia, employed as a servant by an officer of the 11^th Infantry. A certain Thomas Vanstan entered her tent without invitation and assaulted her without cause or provocation and with the intent of committing rape. Vanstan’s defense was that “such liasons were common among enlisted men, and that he intended to ask Julia to a dance, not to assault her. He said also that his advances were “not unwelcome.”

Adams writes: “Vanstan’s defense worked: he was acquitted of attempted rape. He pled guilty to assault and entry into Julia’s tent ‘without authority.’ Vanstan’s main offense was not the act itself, but that he failed to ask permission first. That his approach was more troubling than his actions is a compelling indication that even though white enlisted men lived on the margins of American society, they retained significant power over nonwhite women on the frontier.”

Enlisted men had it hard in the frontier army, but any women within his grasp had it worse.

Just released from Western Fictioneers. 

The Sheriff. 

About Commodore Perry Owens.

Shooting Irons, Part 2: G

What would the Old West be without the gun? From the Hawken of the Mountain man to the Peacemaker of the gunslinger, we just can’t imagine our protagonists any other way. A gun was not just a means of war between men, but a way to put food on the table and protect against wild animals. Of course, there was that ever-present incentive to politeness we’ve already discussed…

Here’s the second round of our gun glossary.

Greener: a shotgun, from the maker of superlative shotguns in London.

Gun-hung: armed with holstered gun(s)

Gun-caps: percussion caps used to ignite the powder charge of a cap-and-ball pistol.

Hardware: a belt gun

Heeled: armed with a gun – however, “armed heels” meant wearing spurs

Hawken: Jacob and Samuel Hawken made these rifles in St. Louis from 1822-49, when Jacob died. Samuel carried on alone until 1861, then sold out. Hawken began as a mountain rifle, specially made for the fur trade. Carl Russell (1967) described it as “a heavy 34-inch octagonal barrel, about .53 caliber (1 ½ -ounce round ball, 214 grains), low sights, set trigger, percussion lock with a peculiar basket of steel (the ‘snail’) enclosing the nipple, half-stock, ramrod carried under a metal rib, sturdy butt stock, crescent-shaped butt plate, and the total weight of the piece 10 ½ to 12 pounds.” By that time, it had developed into the Plains rifle, the frontier man’s ideal weapon.

Henry: starting manufacture in 1860, this repeating rifle was the forerunner of the Winchester, and gave way to that gun in 1866. It was conspicuous in being all metal from muzzle to stock, with a tubular magazine under the barrel which held 15 rimfire shells and loaded from the front. The lever-trigger guard ejected empty shells, inserted a fresh round into the chamber, and cocked the trigger.

Iron: a gun, especially a revolver

Jewelry: firearms, especially a belt-gun

Lead: bullets; this resulted in got leaded (got shot) or swap/swing leather (to shoot it out). My personal favorite is leaned against a bullet going past.

Lead-chucker, lead pusher: a pistol

Leather: a revolver holster (to slap leather was to grab for your gun)

Le Mat: a strange and formidable belt-gun that found its way West after popularity during the Civil War; a nine-chamber, single-action cap-and-ball revolver which fired conventional shots through a rifled, .40-caliber upper barrel and a load of buckshot through a smoothbore, .66-caliber lower barrel. This gun was originally made in France, but copied by a number of makers in the Confederacy.

Long Tom: a long-barreled, large-caliber rifle sometimes used in buffalo hunting

Meat in the pot: the rifle or revolver with which the hunter shot for the pot

Navy Model: a revolver by makers like Colt and Remington, supplied to Navy specification, with a slightly shorter barrel and smaller caliber than the Army model. Navy models were popular with civilians for their comparative lightness and slightly smaller size.

No beans in the wheel: an unloaded revolver

Old Reliable: a Sharps rifle

Packing, pack iron: to carry a revolver

Peacemaker: the Colt Revolver Model 1873. The innovation that helped make this the finest and most famous weapon of its kind was that the .44 ammunition fit the Winchester repeating carbine made in the same year.

Pepperbox, coffee mill:  an early development of revolving pistol, in which the cylinder consisted of a number of barrels consolidated into one moving part. This gave the appearance of a pepperbox. These were cap-and-ball guns.

Persuader: a six-gun, bullwhip, or spur

Plains Rifle: the original requirement was for a “plain rifle,” a utilitarian weapon for use on the plains and for trade with Indians. This developed into the Plains Rifle, a name which took the place of the Mountain Rifle. The Mountain was a long-barreled, long-stocked weapon, while the Plains was short-barreled and short-stocked. Shortening the barrel was probably due to the scarcity of steel on the plains, but also, when the muzzle was damaged, it was just sawn off. Many manufacturers made several types of rifles in this category.

Powder-burning contest: a gunfight

Pup: a Mountain Man term; a single-shot percussion pistol

Quick-draw artist: a gunman proficient with the fast-draw

Sources:

A Dictionary of the Old West, Peter Watts, 1977

Dictionary of the American West, Win Blevins, 1993

J.E.S Hays

www.jeshays.com

hays.jes@gmail.com

Ranger Jim's Rambling's for December

Just got back from a shootout with a real bad hombre. He plugged me, and it looked like I was done for, but thanks to my loyal cayuse, Yankee, who revived me, (Yes, that is his big tongue swiping my face) I was able to gun down that outlaw. A Ranger needs a faithful horse.

Speaking of horses, with winter fast coming upon us, my thoughts turn to how horses, like all creatures, have to adapt for cold weather. I often kid folks that Yankee is a better weather forecaster than any of the professionals. If his back is warm, it's sunny, if it's wet, it's raining, if it's white, it's snowing, and if his mane is ruffling and his tail is switching back and forth it's windy.

Seriously, I can always tell how hard a winter is going to be by how think Yankee's coat grows. The thicker it is, the colder, and usually snowier, the winter. This one looks to be about average in these parts.

That's one fallacy many horse people have, that horses need to be confined inside during cold weather. Most horses do just fine outside, and will be okay as long as they have some shelter to get under if the weather turns too frigid or stormy. Blanketing a horse is fallacy number two. Blanketing a horse too soon, or all the time, means he won't grow a proper winter coat, which can lead to chills and illness. Let Mother Nature do her job, let the horse's coat grow, and he'll be just fine, except in the most extreme cold or wet. Then is the time to bring him in and blanket if necessary. Most times, you'll see horses who have the choice to go inside remaining out, even in the worst weather. It's their nature.

Shoes for the winter are another story. Regular flat horseshoes are a real hazard. They are as slippery as walking on ice, and snow can ball up inside them and freeze, so the horse is literally walking on balls of ice, sometimes up to four inches thick. A broken leg waiting to happen. So, in cold climates, horses either go barefoot for the winter, or else wear special borium shoes, which have little studs or cleats, as well as pads under the shoe. Those pads have a bulge in them, which prevents snow from building up.

So, let your horse's coat grow, shoe him properly or not at all, and he'll be just fine... until spring, when all that long hair sheds out and you can make yourself a horsehair sofa.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

"Ranger" Jim

KIT CARSON vs. JOHN CHIVINGTON: THE TWISTS AND TURNS OF HISTORY by Steven W. Kohlhagen

Kit Carson

Flash back 151 years to February 1863.

At that time Kit Carson was a bona fide American hero. It’s right there in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: frontiersman, mountain man, Indian fighter. He was also a hero of the Mexican-American War, “Father Kit” to his Ute and Apache Indians on his Agency, fictional hero-savior to any number of innocent women and children in distress in the 19^th Century “Blood and Thunder” dime novels, and loving Taos father and husband to, over time, three wives, two of whom were Cheyenne Indians.

John M. Chivington was a Methodist Minister celebrated for his role in turning the tide against the Texans in the Civil War Battle of Glorieta in New Mexico Territory, and then helping the citizens of Denver City and the ranchers along the south fork of the Platte River fend off raiding Cheyenne Indians.   

On the other hand, many of the Cheyenne warriors harassed farmers and settlers, while the Navajo Indians---the Dine---were friendless throughout the West. Severely and serially ill-treated by the Spaniards in the preceding centuries, the Navajos evolved into a civilization that discriminated against no one in robbing, pillaging, murdering, and enslaving women and children. The Dine succeeded in the seemingly impossible: uniting Whites, New Mexicans, Pueblo Indians, Cheyenne, Utes, Mexicans, and all manner of Apache tribes in their hatred of marauding Navajo warriors. Even the Navajo headsmen, when confronted with the opportunity to bring peace, admitted that it was beyond their power to stop their young men from raiding. They essentially responded to attempts by the U.S. Army to enlist their support with the 19^th Century equivalent of “Kids today!”

What about today? The general view of the Navajo today is one of a venerable, peaceful Native American culture. A spiritual nation inhabiting their reservation on their native lands in northern Arizona. A people that, to this day, largely view Kit Carson as a genocidal murderer of innocent Navajo. And the Cheyenne, astonishingly only around 2,500 people at their peak while fighting the whites? The Cheyenne are arguably viewed as one of the great nomadic tribes of the Plains, begrudgingly held by their opponents as maybe the greatest cavalry ever, and today as a positive force for Native American cultures.

And, if asked to name great American frontiersman, very few Americans get to Kit Carson’s name, even after mentioning Lewis and Clark, Davey Crockett, Buffalo Bill Cody, and maybe Jim Bridger. And virtually nobody has anything good to say about the despicable John Chivington.

What happened during the intervening 150 years to bring about this 180-degree change?

My first introduction to the legend of Kit Carson was by a young Navajo guide on a private tour of Canyon de Chelly. He took me to a medium-high, cylindrical hill covered with brush and small trees deep in the canyon and said, “That’s where Kit Carson brought the Navajo women, children, and elderly and massacred them.” Years later, a friend told me of his tour of the Canyon and the story he’d been told of the massacre at that same spot. But his guide’s version was that the culprits were the Spaniards, centuries before Kit Carson. And then I read Hampton Sides wonderful Blood and Thunder. That book launched me into research into the history of the Southwest. A passage in it inspired me to write my own novel, Where They Bury You, Sunstone Press, a murder mystery based on the actual 1863 murder of Carson’s U.S. Marshal.

Six or seven generations of Navajo oral history about the, in fact, horrible 1860’s “Long Walk” to Bosque Redondo has left many, if not the majority, of living Navajo believing that Carson was responsible.

General James Henry Carleton

The actual fact is that Bosque Redondo was the misguided vision and policy of one General James Henry Carleton, head of the Union Army in the Territories. When the Civil War battles ended in the New Mexico and Arizona Territories in 1862, the Navajo and Mescalero Apaches continued raiding and killing, and, in the case of the Navajo, enslaving the New Mexican people and tribes. Carleton decided the only answer was to round them up and deport them to Bosque Redondo, a totally inappropriate section of land along the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico.

Carson objected to the policy as untenable and tried to retire to his family and his Ute and Jicarilla Apache Agency. But Carleton insisted that the famous frontiersman carry out his last military orders.

First, Carson induced the Mescalero to surrender and delivered them to Bosque Redondo.

The Navajo turned out to be a bigger challenge. They simply vanished into the deserts and canyons of their homeland. Carson, frustrated by his inability to find the Navajo and their previous refusals to stop raiding and killing the other neighboring tribes and New Mexicans, implemented a scorched earth policy throughout the Dine homeland. It took nine months, but the Navajo people began trickling in and surrendering. Carson, objecting to the 9,000 person four hundred mile walk without adequate provisions, returned home to Taos for several months. He then insisted on being the Indian Agent at Bosque Redondo in a failed attempt to help the Navajo adjust to their new home.

Carleton’s Bosque Redondo was a colossal failure. The Mescalero just up and left one night in 1865 to return to what continues to be their home near Ruidoso, New Mexico. The Navajo negotiated their departure and walked the four hundred miles back home in June 1868, one month after the 55 year old Carson died in Taos.

At the time, General Carleton was blamed for the failure and, in 1878, returned to his Texas home to die in relative obscurity. The Navajo, though, have never stopped blaming Carson for their hardships and deaths. Today, the Navajo story and memory of Carson’s culpability resonates better in the public American culture, while the numerous Navajo depredations and Carleton’s miserable failure have long faded into history. In contrast to modern New Mexicans, some modern Native American tribes still do retain a very negative cultural memory of the Navajo history.

Justifiable or not, reaction to the Navajo oral tradition had caused Carson to lose his chance to be remembered alongside Davy Crockett and Buffalo Bill Cody and Lewis and Clark as a first string All-American legend.

           

John Chivington

Chivington, for his part, until recently had been celebrated for over a century by Coloradans for his part in defeating the Cheyenne at the Battle of Sand Creek. That “battle” took place one hundred fifty years ago last month. Over the recent decades, historians, Native Americans, and Chivington’s own family have more accurately portrayed the “battle” as it in fact was, namely the massacre of innocent women and children.

Black Kettle

How Carson actually felt about the Indians is best expressed by Carson himself about Chivington. The Cheyenne under Black Kettle had disarmed and relocated their village at Chivington and Governor Evans’ direction. While their warriors were out hunting, the truly despicable Methodist Minister and commander of the Colorado Volunteers massacred and mutilated the defenseless elderly, women, and children of the village. Carson was asked to testify at the resulting Congressional inquiry. He testified:

“Jis to think of that dog Chivington and his dirty hounds, up thar at Sand Creek. His men shot down squaws, and blew the brains out of little innocent children. You call sich soldiers Christians, do ye? And Indians savages? What der yer 'spose our Heavenly Father, who made both them and us, thinks of these things?

“I tell you what, I don't like a hostile red skin any more than you do. And when they are hostile, I've fought 'em, hard as any man. But I never yet drew a bead on a squaw or papoose, and I despise the man who would.”

It is said that the winners write the history books. But it is often more complicated than that. Respect and pride should, and does, go out to the surviving, constructive cultures of both the Navajo and Cheyenne Indians. Chivington is now properly remembered for the horrific person he was. The public jury is still evolving on Kit Carson. The final chapter may not yet have been written. We’ll see.

Carson and Chivington figure prominently in my historical fiction novel, “Where They Bury You,” 2013, Sunstone Press.

Chivington, Black Kettle, and George Armstrong Custer carry the story in the sequel, “Chief of Thieves,” following the survivors of the first novel from 1863 Colorado to June 25, 1876 at the Little Bighorn. “Chief of Thieves,” Sunstone Press, is coming out this winter.

  

I’m not hiding, and can be found at:

www.StevenWKohlhagen.com

http://www.amazon.com/Steven-W.-Kohlhagen/e/B00E5LZ0B4/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

https://www.facebook.com/SteveKohlhagenAuthor

stevekohlhagen@comcast.net

“Where They Bury You” can be purchased at http://www.amazon.com/Where-They-Bury-You-Novel/dp/0865349398/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1389914377   

An earlier discussion of some of these subjects can be found both on my blog and on Andrea Downings’s: http://andreadowning.com/2014/01/30/kit-carson-great-american-hero-or-villain-of-navajo-history/#more-903 . Thank you, Andrea.

Western Fictioneers Presents -- WEST OF THE BIG RIVER: THE SHERIFF by Chuck Tyrell

Outlaws ran wild in Apache County, Arizona Territory, until the day a long-haired, straight-shooting cowboy with the unlikely name of Commodore Perry Owens pinned on the sheriff's badge and set out to rid the county of lawlessness. Owens would need every bit of his gun skill just to stay alive as he cleaned up the territory!

Acclaimed Western author Chuck Tyrell brings the illustrious career of Commodore Perry Owens to vivid life in THE SHERIFF, the latest entry in the West of the Big River series from Western Fictioneers. An action-packed blend of history and fiction, this novel is a compelling portrait of a brave man in a time and place that have become legendary. It's excitement all the way in this new West of the Big River saga!

EXCERPT
    Four riders pounded toward us from the east, raising a cloud of dust and firing like they had all the bullets in the world. I took a bead on the lead horse, a three-color paint, and squeezed off a shot. The horse went down and the rider tumbled head over heels to the ground. When he scrambled to his feet, I put him down again with a shot in the brisket. I jacked another shell into my Winchester. 
    I switched my aim to another rider, not worrying about the one I’d shot. He was dead.
    The other three scattered. There wasn’t all that much cover on the flat, but they ran for what there was. Andy was firing, but the running horses showed that his lead took little effect.
    “Aim for the horses,” I hollered.
    A six-gun cracked and a bullet plowed into the dirt not an inch from my left foot. I whirled and pulled the trigger when the Winchester’s muzzle lined up with Denny, whose hand worked at earing back the hammer of an old Colt Army M1861. My bullet took him just above the belt buckle and knocked him on his butt, where he sat, staring with disbelieving eyes at the blood stain spreading on his shirt.

BIO
Charles T. Whipple, an international prize-winning author, uses the pen name of Chuck Tyrell for his Western novels. Whipple was born and reared in Arizona’s White Mountain country only 19 miles from Fort Apache. He won his first writing award while in high school, and has won several since, including a 4th place in the World Annual Report competition, a 2nd place in the JAXA Naoko Yamazaki Commemorative Haiku competition, the first-place Agave Award in the 2010 Oaxaca International Literature Competition, and the 2011 Global eBook Award in western fiction. Raised on a ranch, Whipple brings his own experience into play when writing about the hardy people of 19th Century Arizona. Although he currently lives in Japan, Whipple maintains close ties with the West through family, relatives, former schoolmates, and readers of his western fiction. Whipple belongs to Western Fictioneers, Western Writers of America, Arizona Authors Association, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Asian American Journalists Association, and Tauranga Writers Inc.

BUY LINKS     B&N Nook      Smashwords

      

Christmas Lights in a Wad

by Phil Truman

Thought I'd share a story with you this month as we head into The Season. It involves a couple friends of mine. Intimate friends, I guess you could say, because they wandered into my mind some years ago as conjured-up good old boys.

I've known these two fellas quite awhile. They were born with bits and pieces of the same assemblage of virtual DNA as a dozen or so flesh and blood men I've known over the years with, I suppose, a few bits my own psyche thrown in. They show up in my stories every now and then, because I like them. Honest, hard-working, loyal and unpretentious, they're as common as the good earth, and they make me laugh. I'm hoping maybe this little story will give you some of that, too.
 

Driving down County Road 52 the old rancher could see his young friend had gotten himself into another pickle, so he braked the one-ton and wheeled it onto the gravel driveway leading the fifty yards up to the mobile home.

"What is it you're doing, Punch?" White Oxley asked. He'd shut the truck down and stepped out, not expecting a simple answer. Punch's big blonde retriever and whatsit mix, Doolittle, ambled over to give the rancher a "howdy" sniff and get an ear scratch.

White stood looking up at his friend perched atop a ladder leaning none too securely against the roof line of the trailer. He lifted his Resistol straw off his head to better block the low afternoon sun. In his left hand Punch held a wad of green wires with little protruding light bulbs while he tried with the other to extract one end of the string. He glanced down at White.

"Well, what's it look like I'm doing?" He spoke with irritation, returning his attention to the snaggle of wire and lights.

"My first thought was some kind of alien life-form had landed on your roof, and you'd got up there and nabbed it," White answered. "But then I seen it was some kind of electrical thing, so I figured you'd come up with a peculiar sort of suicide attempt. I'm just here to talk you down, son."

"No, it ain't none of that," Punch said, not seeing the humor. "I's hanging these dang Christmas lights for Jo Lynn."

"Well, I ain't no expert on hanging Christmas lights, like you," White said. "But wouldn't it be more simpler and smarter to untangle that string of lights on the ground instead of up on that ladder?"

Punch lay the wad of lights on the flat roof, and looked up at the sky. He sighed loudly. "Yes, it would," he answered. "I just didn't think it'd be this complicated when I started. I's in a hurry to get back to my ballgame."

White pictured the scene: Punch had done something stupid, had got Jo Lynn mad at him again, and

was trying to make up for it by agreeing to do any blame thing she asked him. This happened on a pretty regular basis. Over the years, White'd come to think Jo Lynn used this tactic regular to get things done around the place.

"Well, why don't you come on down from there before you break your fool neck, and I'll help you get all that straightened out."

Once Punch descended, they moved to the vinyl picnic table sitting in the yard. Doolittle tagged along. White straddled a bench and sat, took the ball of lights and started working on it. Punch and the dog watched, the man mildly impressed with his friend's patience and tenacity with the task.

"I don't understand why Jo Lynn wants them lights up, anyway," Punch said.

"It's festive," White said, pulling on a loop of wire. "Your women like festive. Makes 'em feel like things look better'n they actually are. That's why they watch all them TV shows about weddin's and such."

Punch took about a half minute to consider all that. "I got to get her a Christmas present. I ain't done that yet. You got your wife anything yet?" he asked.

"Yep," White answered.

"What'd you get her?"

"Something nice; something she won't expect."

"I ask Jo Lynn what she wanted and she said," Punch switched to a mocking falsetto voice. "Oh nothing really. I got everthing I need." Doolittle perked his ears.

"Uh huh. You know that's a test."

"A test?"

"Yessir, when they tell you they don't really want nothin' for Christmas, it's their way of seein' what you'll come up with. And then they'll look at what you do end up gettin' 'em on your own to determine your devotion to them, one way or t'other."

"Do what? Why, holy cow, it's just a dang Christmas present."

"I know, I know. But your women look at things different than you and me. We see Christmas presents as merely something that'll come in handy, like a new compound bow or a set of socket wrenches or a flat screen TV for the garage. They, on the other hand, take them as a measure for the depth of your relationship."

"No way," Punch said, shaking his head and grinning back at White thinking this was another one of his friend's jokes. White loved to pull his leg. Doolittle decided to take a little nap.

"I'm dead serious, boy. You got to think long and hard before you decide what to give 'em, they take that into account, too. Like I said, needs to be something nice, not necessarily practical, and something she won't expect."

Punch nodded, scrunching his brow as he submerged deep in thought. After a bit, he snapped his fingers, his face brightened. "I got just the thing. I'm going to get her a bus ticket to go visit her momma for a month. She won't expect that."

The old cowboy looked at his friend, then down at Doolittle, who raised his head and looked back, apparently laughing. White unloosed the last tangle in the string of lights and stood. "Let's get these here lights hung up, son. I 'spect I'll have to come back in May to help you take 'em back down."

Phil Truman is the author of the award-winning historical western novel,  Red Lands Outlaw, the Ballad of Henry Starr;  a sports inspirational about small town schoolboy football entitled GAME, an American Novel; and Treasure Kills, a mystery adventure in a small town.

Phil's new fiction series, West of the Dead Line, the Complete Series, is available in electronic format at Amazon.com. Set in Indian Territory, the collection of short srories is based on the life and times of Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves.

 

This Means War: the Devil’s Rope Comes to Texas

By Kathleen Rice Adams

I’m going to leave old Texas now.
They’ve got no use for the longhorn cow.
They’ve plowed and fenced my cattle range,
And the people there are all so strange.

–from “The Cowman’s Lament”
(Texas folksong, origin obscure)

The Fall of the Cowboy, Frederic Remington, 1895
(Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas)

In the late 1860s and early 1870s, Texas saw a massive influx of former Confederates dispossessed by the Civil War and seeking a place to start over. Texas seemed like a good spot: The state offered plenty of open range and brimmed with feral cattle called longhorns. Many a man with nothing more than guts and grit built both fortune and legacy by shagging longhorns from deep scrub and driving the tough, stubborn, nasty-tempered critters north to the railheads in Kansas and Nebraska. Others pushed herds to Montana and Wyoming to begin new lives where the West was even wilder.

Between 1866 and 1890, Texas cowboys drove an estimated twelve million longhorns and one million horses north. A crew of twelve to twenty men could push a herd of 2,000 to 3,000 beeves about ten to fifteen miles a day, reaching Kansas railheads in three to four months.

(photo by Darius Norvilas,
used with permission)

The development of barbed wire in the mid-1870s—along with an incursion of sheepmen and farmers—put a crimp in the cattle drives by crisscrossing Texas’s wide-open spaces with miles and miles and miles of fence. To protect themselves and their herds from the yahoos who would use Texas range for something besides Texas cattle, wealthy ranchers strung wire around the land they owned or leased, often extending their fences across public land, as well. What once had been open range across which cowboys drove enormous herds of steak on the hoof became parceled off, causing no end of frustration and unfriendly behavior.

Fence-cutting began almost as soon as the first wire went up. Small confrontations over “the Devil’s rope” happened frequently, with wire-nipping taking place in more than half of Texas counties.

In 1883, the conflict turned deadly. Instead of merely cutting fences that got in the way during trail drives, bands of armed vigilantes calling themselves names like Owls, Javelinas, and Blue Devils destroyed fences simply because the fences existed. Fence-cutting raids usually occurred at night, and often the vigilantes left messages warning the fence’s owner not to rebuild. Some went so far as to leave coffins nailed to fenceposts or on ranchers’ porches. During one sortie, vigilantes cut nineteen miles of fence, piled the wire on a stack of cedar posts, and lit a $6,000 fire.

In response, cattlemen hired armed men to guard their wire…with predictable results. Clashes became more violent, more frequent, and bloodier. In 1883 alone, at least three men were killed in Brown County, a hotspot of fence-cutting activity, during what came to be known as the Texas Fence-Cutter War.

The bloodiest period of the Fence-Cutter War lasted for only about a year, but in those twelve months damages from wire-nipping and range fires totaled an estimated $20 million—$1 million in Brown County alone.

Although politicians stayed well away from the hot-button issue for about a decade, in early 1884 the Texas legislature declared fence-cutting a felony punishable by a prison term of one to five years. The following year, the U.S. Congress outlawed stringing fence across public land. Together, the new laws ended the worst of the clashes, although the occasional fracas erupted in the far western portion of Texas into the early part of the 20th Century.

The Texas Rangers were assigned to stop several fence-cutting outbreaks, and being the Texas Rangers, they proved remarkably effective…with one notable exception. In February 1885, Texas Ranger Ben Warren was shot and killed outside Sweetwater while trying to serve a warrant for three suspected fence-cutters. Two of the three were convicted of Warren’s murder and sentenced to life in prison.

In 1888, a brief resurgence of fence-cutting violence erupted in Navarro County, prompting famed Texas Ranger Ira Aten to place dynamite charges at intervals along one fence line. Aten’s method was a mite too extreme for the Texas Adjutant General, who ordered the dynamite removed. The mere rumor of the explosive’s presence brought fence-cutting to a rapid halt in the area, though.

In Prodigal Gun, a barbed-wire fence touches off a war in the Texas Hill Country, bringing an infamous gunman to Texas for the first time since he left to fight for the Confederacy sixteen years earlier. Reviewers are calling the book “a gripping, vivid western” wrapped around a love story. Prodigal Gun is available in paperback and e-book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. All royalties will be donated to charities benefiting the hungry and animals in the U.S.


Descended from a long line of Texas ranchers, preachers, and teachers on one side and Kentucky horse thieves and moonshiners on the other, Kathleen Rice Adams had no choice but to become an outlaw. Maybe that’s why all of her protagonists wear black hats. Visit her at KathleenRiceAdams.com.