Skin Medicine (22 page)

As Cobb walked through the carnage, his buckskins wet with blood and burned from blazing shrapnel, he saw living men drag themselves out from under corpses. Wild-eyed, blood-drenched things, they brandished empty pistols and gored knives. They bayoneted the already dead and those begging for death. Battle-shocked officers in blackened uniforms stumbled out, cursing and crying and shouting out orders to dead men. They called for corpses to rise and give chase to the enemy, while amongst them soldiers shambled to and fro, looking for fallen comrades, dropped weapons, and lost limbs.

Cobb and his blood-stained, fire-baptized volunteers, moved through the burning fields of corpses, parting seething mists of smoke, and began mutilating the Mexicans. Scalping and dismembering, chopping off fingers and ears and plucking free death-masks and hands. They laughed with a deranged cackling as they arranged Mexican corpses in obscene displays.

And Cobb urged them on to new and more twisted atrocities as the birthmark on his back blazed and steamed and pulsed.

Something in him was very pleased, very satisfied with what it saw.

War is hell.

And for whatever was in Cobb, this was like coming home.

***

Fire and heat and smoke and screaming.

The schoolhouse was burning.

Voices inside cried out in Spanish, bastardized English, Indian tongues…begging, pleading to be released, released for the love of God. And Cobb had every intention of releasing them—right into the hands of their maker.

Cobb watched the fire, fed on it, felt it burning inside him, too. His blood was acid that bubbled and seethed. His heart a red-hot piston hammering and hammering, throwing sparks and oily steam. The birthmark at his back was like an iron brand scorched into his flesh.

The volunteers ringed the schoolhouse, muskets at the ready.

“
Any of them chilis get out,” Cobb told them. “Drop them bastards.”

The volunteers had tracked the Mexican guerrillas here to a little town called Del Barra. This is where they lived, operated out of. Just a shabby collection of shacks and adobes leeched by the sun and blasted by desert wind, all lorded over by an old Spanish church and schoolhouse. In the basement of the church, the volunteers found rifles and ammunition, uniforms and weapons stripped from American dead. Many of these still had bloodstains on them.

The priest had refused to let them see the cellar.

Cobb slit his throat.

So the schoolhouse blazed in that hot, arid country and the wind was that of pyres and crematories, the sun melting like a coin of yellow wax in the cloudless sky above.

Sweat ran down Cobb’s face like tears, cutting clean trails through the ground-in dirt. His eyes were wide and unblinking, red-rimmed like the boundaries of hell. A pink worm of a tongue licked salt from his lips. He could hear the sounds of the shouting and shrieking within. Flames had engulfed one side of the schoolhouse now and were greedily licking up another. Inside…old men, women, children. Pounding and screeching to be let out.

There was a sudden wild, roaring sound and the entire schoolhouse was engulfed. It didn’t take much. The wood was dry as tinder, caught flame like matchsticks. Smoke twisted in the air, black belching funnels of it. It stank of charred wood, cremated flesh and singed hair.

The screaming and pounding was dying out now.

“
Just about all fried up, I reckon,” Jones said, scratching at his crotch.

A few flaming forms burst from the inferno now, stick figures swallowed in yellow and orange flame. They stumbled about, arms waving about crazily. If it hadn’t been so profane, it might have been comical. Volunteers opened up on them dropping them as danced through the doorway. More followed. Anything, anything to escape the flames. The volunteers fired, primed and loaded, fired again.

A final form came running with a weird, jerking gait, flames licking from it in flickering plumes. It carried something. Cobb figured it was a mother carrying her child.

He held his hand up.

The volunteers did not fire.

She made it maybe ten, fifteen feet, collapsed in a smoldering heap. Cobb watched her until the fire died out and she was just a folded-up, blackened window dummy, her flesh falling away in cinders. She and the child had been melted together in a roasted mass. Their faces were incinerated skulls. The smoke that came from them was hot and stinking.

Within an hour, as the volunteers sat around drinking mescal and chewing on tortillas looted from the adobes, the schoolhouse had fallen into itself in a jackstraw tumble of soot and blackened beams.

There was nothing left.

After a time, the volunteers burned the church and dynamited the adobes until there was nothing left to mark the village of Del Barra but embers and smoke and the stink of death.

And that’s how they left it.

***

But, of course, the war had to come to an end.

After Monterrey and Camargo, Buena Vista and Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo and Palo Alto, the Mexicans, beaten and weary and just simply tired of the carnage, signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the war ended.

The Americans filtered back into Texas and New Mexico.

Some were grateful that it had come to an end.

Others just went looking for another fight.

James Lee Cobb went looking for something, too…he just wasn’t sure what.

5

Long before the Mexican-American War, the Mexican authorities paid private armies to hunt down and kill marauding tribes of Indians—particularly Apaches and Comanche’s—that were harassing Mexican towns and villages. The Indians would swarm down from the U.S side of the border, killing men, kidnapping women, stealing livestock and horses…in fact, anything they could lay their hands on.

The Mexican army simply couldn’t contend with these raiders, so scalp bounty laws were enacted. The scalps acted as “receipts”: each worth roughly a hundred pesos. And for industrious, prolific bounty hunters the rewards could be quite lucrative indeed. One might think the repellent nature of the business would limit the amount of hunters, but this wasn’t so. After the Panic of 1837, there were plenty looking for quick cash. And they weren’t real particular as to what they had to do to get it.

During the Mexican-American War, Indian depredations diminished somewhat. Mainly because U.S. soldiers spent their free time hunting down renegade bands. When the war ended…the Indian raids picked-up considerably. Comanche’s and Apaches killed hundreds of Mexicans, stole thousands of heads of livestock, and kidnapped an untold number of women and children.

The scalp bounties were revived in most Mexican states, but particularly in Chihuahua and Sonora…and with a vengeance.

The price was now $200 American for a single “receipt”.

James Lee Cobb, like many other soldiers, found himself suddenly working for the very government he’d done his damnedest to sack during the war. The whole thing became something of a cottage industry complete with regulatory committees and inspectors. Standards were set by the Mexican authorities to prevent fraud—a scalp had to include either the crown or both ears and preferably both. This prevented fresh scalps from being stretched and sliced-up, sold off as a dozen or more.

Cobb worked with a team consisting of himself, two ex-Texas Rangers, and three Shawnee Indians who were expert at removing scalps. They hunted down Apaches, Comanche’s, even Seri Indians. They scalped men, women, children…sparing no one.

Since it was easier to work on a freshly-killed body—the living ones protested the practice vehemently—Cobb and his boys usually put their rounds into the chests of their victims. A clear heart-shot simplified the hell out of things. Their prey went down dead and you could get to work on them right away, instead of waiting for them to expire from their wounds. Because scalp-hunting was a business like any other and time was money. Of course, to save time you could slit their throats or stab them in the heart to speed things along. Women and children you could lay in wait for, lasso ‘em like stock and gun them down.

Drop ‘em and peel ‘em, as Cobb liked to put it.

The braves took a little more stealth. Sometimes Cobb and his boys sprang carefully-arranged ambushes to bring down hunting parties and sniping from a distance had its merits. The Shawnees were real good with the wet work. They’d slit around the crown of the head and then, sitting with their feet on the victim’s shoulders, yank the scalp free. They could go through a dozen Indians in record time.

Of course, Cobb and the Texans were no slouches either.

After the scalps were yanked, they were salted and tied to poles to preserve them until they could be cashed-in.

One time, in Durango, Cobb’s hunters killed a party of thirty braves by sniping them in a dry wash with long rifles. After they’d dropped and peeled ‘em, they backtracked to the Indian’s camp and slaughtered no less than sixty women and children. Though, truth be told, they spent most of the day beating the brush for those that had run off.

Eventually, the scalp business fanned hateful animosity from the targeted tribes. They began a program of bloody reprisals. This more than anything made Cobb and the boys start hunting peaceful tribes like the Pimas and Yumas in Arizona Territory. In a single raid, they took nearly four-hundred scalps. But the real boom for them came about the time the Indians started actively hunting the hunters.

See, Cobb had come up with a better idea.

Scalps of Mexicans looked the same as scalps of Indians. There was no true way to tell the difference…so why not? Let the Mexicans pay for the murder of their own people. It was a novel idea.

One of the Texans, a fellow named Grendon, wasn’t entirely taken with the idea. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, shit, killing injuns is one thing…but Mesicans, they’s almost like real people.”

“
Ye killed ‘em during the war, didn’t ye?” Cobb put to him. “What’s the difference now? They ain’t real folk anyhow, they’s just injuns what like to act like white men. All the more reason to drop and peel ‘em, ye ask me. Fuck, son, we got us a crop ready for the harvesting, one that’ll turn into lots of green and folding…if ye follow me on that.”

The others agreed most heartily, particularly Coolan, the big ex-ranger who it was said decapitated no less than two dozen Mexican officers during the war…using nothing but a short-bladed hunting knife. But Grendon just couldn’t get by his morals and ethics, so they shot him and Coolan scalped him as a joke.

They hit a Mexican village and caught the entire population in church. They charged in on horseback, pulling triggers and throwing knives and hatchets until their arms were sore and pistols smoking and the dead were heaped-up like sheaves of wheat. It took them the better part of four hours to scalp all two-hundred of ‘em, but they went at it with the diligence and zeal that marked the professional. They made a broad sweep through central Mexico and harvested so many scalps, they began wiring them together in bails.

In 1850, just before the boom died out, they rolled into Sonora with nearly 8,000 scalps piled high in the bed of a wagon.

Shortly afterwards, the scalping business went belly-up and Cobb rode hell-for-leather out of Mexico with a price on his head for murdering Mexicans.

But as Cobb said later, it was fun while it lasted.

***

The next twenty-odd years of his life passed in the blink of an eye.

Cobb rustled cattle and horses. Worked as range detective for various cattle combines, a hired gun for just about anyone who would pay him. He robbed banks and stages, made something of a name for himself as a road agent. Was arrested no less than three times and escaped the noose each time by breaking out of jail. He served as scout during the Indian Wars, sold guns to renegade Apaches, and managed a brothel in San Francisco. But that came to a crashing halt when it was discovered that he and the ladies under his employ were not only robbing their patrons, but murdering them and burying their remains in the cellar. After that, he ran roughshod through Indian Territory, stealing and killing and forcing Indians and whites alike to pay his gang protection money. He became something of a terror along the Canadian and Arkansas Rivers.

Then in 1873…he lost five-thousand dollars gambling in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Lost it to a professional gambler named Maynard Ellsworth. Cobb pulled his hatchet and split the crown of Ellsworth’s head. After that, he lived his life pretty much on the dodge.

But in 1875, he was arrested for extorting mining camps in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming Territory and sentenced to five years in the territorial prison. Of which he served every single day. As the warden was heard to say to a parole board, “James Lee Cobb is completely lacking in anything which might be even remotely considered human. He is, gentlemen, the very epitome of what the territories need to be purged of—creatures that walk like men, but think like animals.”

When Cobb got out, evading bounty hunters and numerous warrants out circulating for him under various aliases, he joined three men—Jonah Gleer, Lawrence Barlow, and Butch Noolan—in a peculiar undertaking. Cobb had coerced them into following him up into the Sierra Nevadas to search out a gold mine he had heard of in prison.