Crossers (3 page)

Transcript 1 of an oral history compiled for the Arizona
Historical Society. The subject, T. J. Babcock, 78, was
interviewed at his home in Springdale, Arizona, on
April 6–8, 1966.

I have lived longer than I deserve. Been shot at and missed and shit on and hit, if you’ll pardon the language, but am still on the right side of the ground and looking age eighty square in the eye.

I have seen a great many changes too, and I cannot keep up with them anymore. I was born in Bisbee, Arizona, just two years after they captured Geronimo, and as a boy, I knew fellas, Mexicans and Americans, who had been in scrapes with the A-patch, but only last year I was down to Phoenix and saw a jet airliner taking off.

There is no name to go with the J that is my middle initial. My ma and pa, in what must have been a fit of insanity, named me Thaddeus but didn’t give me a middle name. I got made fun of a lot, so I started to call myself T, but that didn’t sound quite right, so I added the J, and all who have known me since know me as T.J.

My pa, who had a normal name, Mike, worked in the copper mine in Bisbee. When I was about three or four, he moved us down to Mexico, to Cananea, because he got a foreman’s job there with the Consolidated Copper Company, then owned by the famous Colonel Greene, who I don’t think ever was a colonel. I grew up in Mexico, went to school there, and by the time I was twelve or thereabouts, I was more Mexican than American, could speak and read and write Spanish better than I could English. If it wasn’t for this fella my ma hired to school me in my native lingo, I probably couldn’t speak it right to this day.

The book part of my education ended when I was fourteen, much to my parents’ disappointment, and I too became an employee of Colonel Greene, but not in the mine. I wanted nothing to do with mine work. The colonel owned a big ranch—it was called the RO. Worked it for some time, then I signed on as a hand with its San Rafael division, just across the border in Arizona. It was the vaquero’s life for me.

Now, as it is Ben Erskine you want to hear about, I will skip over a few years and tell you how I come to meet him and how him and me rode off together to fight in the Revolution in Mexico. It went like this: the San Rafael raised registered Herefords for the purposes of breeding. Running registered cattle is a whole lot different than running ordinary range cattle, especially the way it I learned how to do it down in Mexico. Hell, them cows was half wild. Along about 1910, I up and quit. The foreman didn’t like me, and I liked him even less. Said he was interested in scientific cattle breeding, and I reckon he reckoned my way of doing things wasn’t scientific enough for his tastes, so I saddled up and rode off, which is a cowboy’s right. Cowboys don’t ask permission from no one, including scientists.

I was in Nogales—on the Sonoran side—spending the last of my money on the señoritas—when I met Jeffrey Erskine. He was having a beer in the bar of the hotel I was staying at. We got to talking, and Jeff mentioned that he was buying some steers in Mexico. Him and his brother, Ben, were running a rawhide steer operation across the line. You might not be acquainted with that term,
rawhiding
. It’s not used anymore because nobody rawhides anymore. It means raising cattle on as low overhead as you can get away with. No buildings or barns, no machinery or windmills, just a corral or two, a few horses, and your stock. Most rawhiders were fellas getting started in the cattle business, they ran their cattle on leased land, and usually it was steers instead of cow-calf. Raising steers was speculative, a little like playing the stock market, I guess. You could make good money fast by buying steers cheap, then fattening them up, keeping your eye on prices, and when you figured they’d fetch top dollar, you would sell, and then buy another bunch for as low as you could find, usually in Mexico, where things was cheaper.

And that pretty much describes Jeff’s operation. He had ten sections under lease up in the San Rafael Valley, east of the ranch that had the same name. I was impressed with him right off. He was just past six foot, and pretty well put together, but that wasn’t what impressed me. He was the same age as me, but you know how there’s some people who seem like they were born forty years old? That was Jeff—a serious fella. He wore this mustache, reddish gold, that added to his—well, I reckon you would call it his maturity. Now, humility never has been one of my strong suits, so I asked him if he could use a top hand because I was one.

Jeff didn’t say nothing for a spell; don’t think he could take a leak without pondering aforehand. Then he said he already had a top hand in his brother. The only trouble was, his brother had a habit of going off on what Jeff called “adventures” without a word of warning. So, sure he could use a top hand, but all he could promise was a cot in a tent and chuck, and this top hand would have to do some cooking and cleaning up.

So I threw in. Had nothing better to do. We lived right hard, I will tell you that. This tent they had was a canvas wall tent Jeff had got from the soldiers over to Fort Huachuca. It had a little stove for heat, and it was pitched at the head of a draw a little ways west of the Huachuca Mountains. We had us a fly where we did the cooking, and it was beans and hash and tortillas and coffee seven days a week. Never forget the first meal I ate there. Ben had put a pot of beans on the fire in the morning, but he forgot to put the lid on it. When we come back after riding all day, I was so hungry I could have eaten the back end out of a wooden horse and dug right in. Crunchiest damn beans I’d ever put my mouth to, and when I got the hollow filled up, I wondered what was making those beans so crunchy like, and investigated the pot and saw it was grasshoppers, big ones—this was summertime. Them hoppers flew into the pot while we were gone and baked themselves. I about threw up, and Ben laughed, and Jeff, who was a book-reading man, said that over to Europe folks considered grasshoppers a delicacy and dipped them in chocolate and ate them like they was candy.

I was impressed with Ben right off the bat, but in a different way than with his brother. He was skinnier and light on his feet, but he was one helluva man with a horse or with a rope. And there was something watchful about him, like he was expecting someone to jump him any second, but it wasn’t a scared kind of watchfulness. He was relaxed and coiled up at the same time. You got the impression that if somebody did jump him, the one who did the jumping was gone to come out second best. Ben had a funny way of smiling, too. One end of his mouth would go way up and the other end way down, and I saw later on that if he smiled at you like that, well, you had better talk fast or shoot fast.

I told you Jeff was a book reader. Most of the books were about cattle breeding. He was taking a correspondence course from some agricultural college somewhere, and every now and then he would ride over to the post office in Lochiel and pick up these books they sent him, and he even took the tests and mailed them back. Like I said, a serious man.

That year of 1910 was the year of the big comet, Halley’s. It was pinned up there in the sky like a carnation made of fire. On full moon nights, with that comet shining up there, you almost thought it was daylight. Truth to tell, I didn’t know what a comet was till Jeff explained it. Said that one come from way out in the universe somewhere and was traveling, oh, hell, I can’t remember how fast he said, maybe a million miles an hour. I remember asking him, What do you mean, a million miles an hour? I been looking at that thing for a week and it ain’t moved an inch. But I took his word for it.

The reason I’m talking about that comet is the trip we took into Mexico in the fall to buy more steers. We’d got a herd together in the corrals over to Naco and were fixing to drive them to our range the next day. We overheard some vaqueros talking about the comet, that the big extra light in the sky got the cattle fidgety, and they said that it was un mal agüero, a bad omen, that it meant war and death were a-coming. It was real spooky talk. They were saying that they’d heard about pillars of fire in the middle of the country. I come to find out a long time later that it was a volcano that blew up, but to them vaqueros, who was about as unscientific as anybody can get, it was another omen. The days of Díaz were over, there was a fella named Madero who was gone to take power and give the land to the people, but there would be a lot of war and death and famine and disease first. Lord they was talking like folks out of Bible days. It had been up to me, we would have cleared out right then.