Great Plains (31 page)

That you can trace old cattle trails from the air by following the mesquite I learned from Lester Galbreath, superintendant of Fort Griffin State Historical Park, near Albany, Texas.

Chapter 8

 

Information about Billy the Kid's name and family comes from “Dim Trails: The Pursuit of the McCarty Family,” by Philip J. Rasch and R. N. Mullin, in
The New Mexico Folklore Record,
Vol. XIII (1953–54), pp. 6–11. Charles A. Siringo, in
A Texas Cowboy; or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony
(Lincoln, Neb., 1979), pp. 168–69, says that Billy the Kid's mother and stepfather ran a restaurant in Santa Fe.

Biographical details about Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson come from
Great Gunfighters of the Kansas Cowtowns,
by Miller and Snell, pp. 78–85 and 193 et seq.

 

Information about the Lincoln County War comes from
The Negro Cowboys,
by Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones (New York, 1965). Charles Siringo is the source for Billy the Kid's piano playing during the siege (p. 170). The further exploits of Billy the Kid in Lincoln are also described in Siringo, pp. 172–75.

 

Santa Fe was founded in 1610. Many other New Mexico towns—Taos, Santa Cruz, etc.—date from the seventeenth century. For more on the early history of the Spanish in the Southwest, see
Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795,
by Elizabeth A. John (College Station, Tex., 1975).

 

Information about the Arkansas River and Bent's Fort comes from
The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West,
pp. 46, 48, 87, 90.
Life in the Far West,
by George Frederick Ruxton, describes cactus “of all the varieties common on the plains” growing on the coping of the walls (p. 189).

 

I learned that “crystallized essence” existed in 1840 from Bill Gwaltney. Mosquito netting is mentioned in
Up the Missouri with Audubon,
by Edward Harris (Norman, Okla., 1951), p. 136. The quotation about the air mattresses is on pp. 73–74.

 

I read that Billy Dixon's hair was “something less than nine feet long” in
Dodge City,
by Fred Young.

 

“Deacon” Cox is mentioned in
The Longhorns,
by J. Frank Dobie.

Some of the information about Dodge City comes from
The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West,
p. 185. Buffalo products shipped from Dodge City in its early years are mentioned in Fehrenbach,
Comanches: The Destruction of a People,
pp. 522 et seq.

Doc Holliday's career in Dodge City is discussed in
Doc Holliday,
by John Myers Myers (Chap. V).

 

Accounts of violence in Dodge City are from
Great Gunfighters of the Kansas Cowtowns,
by Miller and Snell. Lizzie Palmer is mentioned in
Queen of Cowtowns: Dodge City,
by Stanley Vestal (p. 19).

A table in
The Cattle Towns,
by Robert R. Dykstra (p. 144), shows a total of fifteen homicides in Dodge City during the years of the cattle boom; about five people a day died of violence in New York City in 1987.

 

A map in a published account of the 1819 Stephen Long expedition had the words “Great Desert” covering an area which is today western Oklahoma and northern Texas. A version of this map included in a popular atlas in 1822 extended the label over more territory, and another version published the following year changed it to “Great American Desert.” Long went west through the Nebraska sandhills, “the deserts of the Platte,” which helped convince him that the plains were a desert. See James,
Account of an Expedition;
see also G. Malcolm Lewis, “The Cognition and Communication of Former Ideas about the Great Plains.” (See also note, p. 221.)

 

Old photos of Fort Robinson (in the Fort Robinson Museum) show the buildings sitting on a treeless plain like Monopoly houses on a card table.

 

I learned that names on Register Cliffs were written in hog fat and tar from a guide at the Fort Laramie National Historic Site near Fort Laramie, Wyoming.

References to Parkman,
The Oregon Trail,
are from pp. 75 and 88.

 

Some information about Fort Benton comes from the entry for “Missouri River” in the
New Columbia Encyclopedia
(New York, 1975). Other facts are from
Whoop-Up Country,
by Paul F. Sharp (Minneapolis, 1955), and from the Fort Benton Museum. Joseph Kinsey Howard was the historian who said that you couldn't see the sidewalks for the playing cards (
Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome,
p. 143).

The suspicion of Army officers about Fort Benton's illegal Indian trade is mentioned in
The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone,
by Mark H. Brown, p. 238.

The six dams between Fort Benton and St. Louis are Fort Peck, Garrison, Oahe, Big Bend, Fort Randall, and Gavin's Point. One dam, Canyon Ferry, is upstream from Fort Benton.

 

I saw a map of a block plan of Fort Benton in the office of Joel Overholser, publisher of the River Press in Fort Benton. Mr. Overholser showed me the list of the businesses (including Madame Moustache's Cosmopolitan) which had occupied each lot over the years.

Chapter 9

 

Information about the history of Nicodemus and the Black Exodus comes from Everett Dick,
The Sod-House Frontier, 1854–1890
(New York, 1937); Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones,
The Negro Cowboys;
David Emmons,
Garden in the Grasslands;
Walter L. Fleming, “‘Pap' Singleton, the Moses of the Colored Exodus,” in
The American Journal of Sociology,
Vol. XV, no. 1 (July 1909), p. 61; Roy Garvin, “Benjamin, or ‘Pap,' Singleton and His Followers,” in
The Journal of Negro History,
Vol. XXXIII, no. 1 (Jan. 1948), p. 17; John G. Van Deusen, “The Exodus of 1879,” in
The Journal of Negro History,
Vol. XXI, No. 2 (1936), p. 111.

Other sources include the historic marker on Highway 24 at Nicodemus, and
The Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West.

 

The efforts made by Governor St. John and the Kansas Pacific Railroad to discourage black emigration are discussed in Emmons, pp. 88–90.

Verses to “The Land That Gives Birth to Freedom” appear in Fleming, p. 67. He also says that the town of Nicodemus had its own song, called “Nicodemus”:

 

Nicodemus was a slave of African birth,

And was bought for a bag full of gold.

He was reckoned a part of the salt of the earth,

But he died years ago, very old.

Chorus
Good time coming, good time coming,

Long, long time on the way;

Run and tell Elijah to hurry up Pomp

To meet us under the cottonwood tree,

In the Great Solomon Valley,

At the first break of day.

 

According to one source, Nicodemus was named after a slave who came in the second slave ship to America and later bought his freedom (Dick, p. 197).

 

A colorful account of Jim Beckwourth's life is
The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians … written from his own dictation, by T. D. Bonner
(Minneapolis, 1965). In it, Beckwourth prevails against overwhelming odds of Blackfeet rather more often than is credible. He had a reputation for exaggeration; one of the stock stories of the West is about the trapper who, upon hearing the Book of Revelations for the first time, said, “Why, I'd'a knowed that for one o' Jim Beckwourth's lies anywhere!” However, Beckwourth's claim that he was a chief among the Crow, as well as much else in the book, is very likely true.

Desirée, the Missouri River pilot, is mentioned in
Up the Missouri with Audubon,
by Edward Harris, pp. 83–84: “… We got under way at 12 O'Clock and crossed the river to where the Trapper lay to put on board of her our Mate Mr. Durac and our black Pilot Desirée who has undertaken to Pilot her down without an assistant, a pretty serious undertaking as he will be obliged to stick at the wheel the whole time the boat is running or from daylight to dark.”

Britt Johnson's remarkable journey is recounted in
Comanches: The Destruction of a People,
by T. R. Fehrenbach, pp. 456–59.

Isaiah “Teat” Dorman is mentioned in many sources; e.g.,
Sitting Bull, Champion of the Sioux,
by Stanley Vestal. A more thorough discussion of Dorman and his fate is in Connell,
Son of the Morning Star,
pp. 25–28.

The 4th Cavalry and its achievements are in Fehrenbach, pp. 517–21.

Isom Dart, also known as Ned Huddleston; his Shoshone love, Tickup; and her daughter Mincy are all mentioned in Durham and Jones, p. 184.

Bose Ikard's name appears in many books about the early days of the cattle business; e.g.,
The Cattlemen,
by Mari Sandoz, p. 82.

Bill Pickett's life and his career in rodeo are the subject of
Bill Pickett, Bulldogger,
by Colonel Bailey C. Hanes (Norman, Okla., 1977). In a bullfight arena in Mexico, Bill Pickett once tried to bulldog a fighting bull. To the amazement of the audience and of the bull himself, Bill Pickett grabbed the bull by the head (with his arms, not his teeth) and tried to throw him. After a moment's reflection, the bull attempted to gore Pickett, rammed him against the arena wall, and shook him “like a sheet in the wind.” Pickett clung to the blood-slick horns in a rain of bottles and knives from the angry crowd. He stayed in the ring for thirty-eight minutes and somehow did not die.

 

The words to “Home on the Range” were published originally as a poem titled “My Western Home” in the
Smith County Pioneer
in 1873. (Smith County, Kansas, is about fifty miles northeast of Nicodemus.) The author was Dr. Brewster Higley, of Pleasant Township, in Smith County. The music was written by a carpenter named Dan Kelly. The song was popular locally in Kansas, and by the early 1900s was a widely known folk song. In 1908, musicologist John Lomax recorded a black saloonkeeper's version of it in San Antonio, and later published the words and music in a book called
Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.
In the 1930s, “Home on the Range” became a hit on the radio after President Franklin Roosevelt said it was his favorite song.

The history of the song, and all its lyrics, are in
True Tales of the Old-Time Plains,
by David Dary (New York, 1979), pp. 236 et seq. In the third line of the second verse, I have changed “On” to “Or” because I think it makes more sense.

 

For more on Kit Carson, see
Kit Carson's Autobiography,
edited by Milo Milton Quaife (Lincoln, Neb., 1966). As Quaife points out, Carson often describes journeys which would provide most writers with material for a lifetime in just a paragraph or two. He comes across as intrepid, resourceful, and mute.

Information on Jim Bridger is from
The Rocky Mountain Journals of William Marshall Anderson
(San Marino, Cal., 1967), pp. 259–70; see also
Jim Bridger,
by J. Cecil Alter (Norman, Okla., 1962), Chap. 33.

 

The Gomorrah of the Cattle Trail is mentioned in
The Log of a Cowboy,
p. 259; Hell on Wheels is in
Empty Saddles, Forgotten Names,
by Doug Engerbretson (Aberdeen, S.D., 1982), p. 83 and note 13, p. 91; the Holy City of the Cow is in Sandoz,
The Cattlemen,
p. 338.

The Cottage Saloon in Miles City and Connie the Cowboy Queen are mentioned in Abbott,
We Pointed Them North,
pp. 102, 107.

 

Books which discuss the life and career of General George A. Custer make up a measurable percentage of all books about the West. I have referred to these few:

Stephen E. Ambrose's
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors;

Elizabeth Bacon Custer's
“Boots and Saddles”; or Life in Dakota with General Custer
(Norman, Okla., 1961);
Following the Guidon
(Norman, Okla., 1966); and
Tenting on the Plains; or, General Custer in Kansas and Texas
(New York, 1889);

George Armstrong Custer's
My Life on the Plains
(edited by Milo Milton Quaife [Lincoln, Neb., 1966]);

Marguerite Merington, editor,
The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth
(New York, 1950);

Jay Monaghan's
Custer
(Boston, 1959);

Frederick Whittaker's
A Complete Life of Gen. George A. Custer
(New York, 1876).

Elizabeth Custer's assertion that her husband was the happiest man on earth is in
“Boots and Saddles,”
p. 193. Mrs. Custer lived until 1933. One of her addresses was 148 East Eighteenth Street, New York City.

Custer graduated thirty-fourth out of a class of thirty-four. See the Folio Society edition of
My Life on the Plains
(London, 1963), p. 7.

Custer's hell-bent marches across the Kansas and Nebraska plains in 1867 are detailed in Ambrose, Chap. 15.

One of Custer's fights with Indians was the Battle of the Washita River, on November 27, 1868, in which the Cheyenne later said they lost thirteen men, sixteen women, and nine children when Custer attacked their camp (Grinnell,
The Fighting Cheyennes,
p. 300). Among the dead was the chief, Black Kettle, who wanted peace with the whites and who had just returned from a council with General Hazen the day before. Custer's force of seven hundred lost two officers and nineteen enlisted men killed. The Indians also killed Custer's staghound, Blücher.