When the West Was Young Part 27

Slade took to his bed. But he was made of the stuff which absorbs much lead without any great amount of permanent harm. He was up again in a few weeks. He hunted down Jules, who had taken refuge in the Indian country to the north on hearing of his recovery. He brought the prisoner back to Julesburg, and bound him to the snubbing-post in the middle of the stage company's corral.

Accounts of what followed differ. Some authorities maintain that Slade killed Jules. Others, who base their a.s.sertions on the statement of men who said they were eye-witnesses, tell how Slade enjoyed himself for some time filling the prisoner's clothing with bullet holes and then exclaimed,

"h.e.l.l! You ain't worth the lead to kill you." And turned the victim loose.

But all narrators agree on this; before Slade unbound the living Jules--or the dead one, whichever it may have been--he cut off the prisoner's ears and put them in his pocket.

It may be noted in pa.s.sing that this truculent efficiency expert went wrong in after years and wound up his days at the end of a rope in Virginia City, Montana.

Ben Holliday carried the mails overland throughout the early sixties.

But during the summer of 1864 the Indians of the plains, for the first time in their history, made a coalition. They united in one grand war-party against the outposts along the line, and for a distance of four hundred miles they destroyed stations, murdered employees, and made off with live stock. The loss to the company was half a million dollars.

It crippled Holliday. And the government so delayed consideration of his claims for reimbursment that he was glad to sell the property. The firm of Wells Fargo, who had been increasing their express business until they virtually monopolized that feature of common carrying throughout the West at the close of the Civil War, took the line over.

Wells Fargo! It was the old Wells b.u.t.terfield Co. again. The first winners in the struggle were the last.

The railroad came. Men said that the day of adventure was over. But this adventure has not ended yet.

While this story was being written another pioneer died on that overland mail route. And when his aero-plane came fluttering down out of a driving snowstorm to crash, in a ma.s.s of tangled wreckage, on the side of Elk Mountain, Wyoming, Lieutenant E. V. Wales went to his death within a rifle-shot of the road where so many of his predecessors gave up their lives trying--even as he was then striving--to quicken communication between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

BOOT-HILL

Boot-Hill! Back in the wild old days you found one on the new town's outskirts and one where the cattle trail came down to the ford, and one was at the summit of the pa.s.s. There was another on the mesa overlooking the water-hole where the wagon outfits halted after the long dry drive. The cow-boys read the faded writing on the wooden headboards and from the stories made long ballads which they sang to the herds on the bedding grounds. The herds have long since vanished, the cow-boys have ridden away over the sky-line, the plaintive songs are slipping from the memories of a few old men, and we go riding by the places where those headboards stood, oblivious.

Of the frontier cemeteries whose dead came to their ends, shod in accordance with the grim phrase of their times, there remains one just outside the town of Tombstone to the north. Here straggling mesquite bushes grow on the summit of the ridge; cacti and ocatilla sprawl over the sun-baked earth hiding between their th.o.r.n.y stems the headboards and the long narrow heaps of stones which no man could mistake. Some of these headboards still bear traces of black-lettered epitaphs which tell how death came to strong men in the full flush of youth. But the vast majority of the boulder heaps are marked by cedar slabs whose penciled legends the elements have long since washed away.

The sun s.h.i.+nes hot here on the summit of the ridge. Across the wide mesquite flat the granite ramparts of the Dragoons frown all the long day, and the bleak hill graveyard frowns back at them. Thus the men who came to this last resting-place frowned back at Death.

There was a day when every mining camp and cow-town from the Rio Grande to the Yellowstone owned its boot-hill; a day when lone graves marked the trails and solitary headboards rotted slowly in the unpeopled wilderness. Many of these isolated wooden monuments fell before the long a.s.saults of the elements; the low mounds vanished and the gra.s.s billowed in the wind hiding the last vestiges of the leveled sepulchers. Sometimes the spot was favorable; outfits rested there; new headboards rose about the first one; for the road was long and weary, the fords were perilous from quicksands; thirst lurked in the desert, and the Indians were always waiting. The camp became a settlement, and in the days of its infancy, when there was no law save that of might, the graveyard spread over a larger area.

There came an era when a member of that stern straight-shooting breed who blazed the trails for the coming of the statutes wielded the powers of high justice, the middle, and the low. Outlaw and rustler opposed the dominion of this peace officer. Then the cemetery boomed like the young town. Finally things settled down to jury trials and men let lawyers do most of the fighting with forensics instead of forty-fives. Churches were built and school-houses; a new graveyard was established; brush and weeds hid the old one's leaning headboards. Time pa.s.sed; a city grew; the boot-hill was forgotten.

This is a chronicle of men whose bones lie in those vanished boot-hills. If one could stand aside on the day of judgment and watch them pa.s.s when the brazen notes of the last trump are growing fainter, he would witness a brave procession. But we at least can marshal the shadowy host from fast waning memories and, looking upon some of their number, recall the deeds they did, the manner of their dying.

Here then they come through the curtain of time's mists, Indian fighter, town marshal, faro-dealer, and cow-boy. There are a few among them upon whom it is not worth while to gaze, those whose lives and deaths were unfit for recording; there are a vast mult.i.tude whose heroic stories were never told and never will be; and there are some whose deeds as they have come down from the lips of the old-timers should never die.

Thus in the forefront pa.s.s lean forms clad for the most part in garments fringed with buckskin. You can see where some have torn off portions of the fringes to clean their rifles.

Old-fas.h.i.+oned long-barreled muzzle-loaders, these rifles; and powder-horns hang by the sides of the bearers. They are long-haired men; and their faces are deeply burned by sun and wind, one hundred and eighty-three of them; and where they died, fighting to the last against four thousand of Santa Ana's soldiers, rose the first boot-hill. That was in San Antonio, Texas, at the building called the Alamo; and in this day, when schoolboys who can describe Thermopylae in detail know nothing of that far finer stand, it will do no harm to dwell on a proud episode ignored by most text-book histories.

On the fifth day of March, 1836, San Antonio's streets were resonant with the heavy tread of marching troops, the clank of arms and the rumble of moving artillery. Four thousand Mexican soldiers were being concentrated on one point, a little mission chapel and two long adobe buildings which formed a portion of a walled enclosure, the Alamo.

For nearly two weeks General Santa Ana had been tightening the cordon of cavalry, infantry, and artillery about the place. It housed one hundred and eighty-three lank-haired frontiersmen, a portion of General Sam Houston's band who had declared for Texan independence.

The Mexicans had cut them off from water; their food was running low.

On this day the dark-skinned commander planned to take the square. His men had managed to plant a cannon two hundred yards away. When they blew down the walls the infantry would charge. It only remained for them to load the field-piece. Bugles sounded; officers galloped through the sheltered streets where the foot soldiers were held in waiting. There came from the direction of the Alamo the steady rat-tat-tat of rifles. The hours went by but the cannon remained silent.

A little group of lean-faced men were crouching on the flat roof of the large out-building. The most of them were clad in fringed garments of buckskin; here and there was one in a hickory s.h.i.+rt and home-spun jeans. Six of them, some bareheaded and some with hats whose wide rims dropped low over their foreheads, were cl.u.s.tered about old Davy Crockett, frontiersman and in his day a member of Congress. Always the six were busy, with ramrods, powder-horns, and bullets, loading the long-barreled eight-square Kentucky rifles. The grizzled marksman took the c.o.c.ked weapons from their hands; one after another, he pressed each walnut stock to his shoulder, lined the sights, pulled the trigger, and laid the discharged piece down, to pick up its successor.

He crouched there on the flat roof facing the Mexican cannon. As fast as men came to load it, he fired. Sometimes a dozen soldiers rushed upon the muzzle of the field-piece surrounding it. At such moments Davy Crockett's arms swept back and forth with smooth unhurried swiftness and his sinewy fingers relaxed from one walnut stock only to clutch another; his hands were never empty. Always a little red flame licked the smoke fog before him like the tongue of an angered snake.

He was getting on in years but in all his full life his technic had never been so perfect, his artistry of death so flawless, as on this day which prefaced the closing of his chapter. The bodies of his enemies clogged the s.p.a.ce about their cannon; the rivulets of red trickled from the heap across the roadway. The long hours pa.s.sed.

Darkness came. The field-piece remained silent.

Long before daylight the next morning the four thousand were marching in close ranks to gather for the final a.s.sault. The sun had not risen when they made the charge. The infantry came first; the cavalry closed in behind them driving them on with bared sabers. The Americans took such toll with their long-barreled rifles from behind the barricaded doors and windows that the foot-soldiers turned to face the naked swords rather than endure that fire. The officers reformed them under cover; they swept forward again, and again fell back. Santa Ana directed the third charge in person. They swarmed to the courtyard wall and raised ladders to its summit. The men behind bore those before them onward and literally shoved them up the ladders. They overwhelmed the frontiersmen through sheer force of numbers. Colonel W. B. Travis fell fighting hand to hand here. The courtyard filled with dark-skinned soldiers.

The Alamo was fallen. But there remained for the lean hard-bitten men of Texas, who had retired within the adobe buildings, the task of dying as fighting men should die. It was now ten o'clock, nearly six hours since the beginning of the first advance. It took the four thousand two hours more to finish the thing.

For every room saw its separate stand; and every stand was to the bitter end.

There were fourteen gaunt frontiersmen in the hospital, so weak with wounds that they could not drag themselves from their tattered blankets. They fought with rifles and pistols until forty Mexicans lay heaped dead about the doorway. The artillery brought up a field-piece; they loaded it with grape-shot and swept the room, and then at last they crossed the threshold.

Colonel James Bowie, who brought into use the knife that bears his name, was sick within another apartment. How that day's noises of combat roused the old fire within his breast and how he lay there chafing against the weakness which would not let him raise his body, one can well imagine. A dozen Mexican officers rushed into the place, firing as they came. Colonel Bowie waited until the first of them was within arm's length. Then he reached forth, seized the man by the hair and, dying, plunged the knife that bore his name hilt-deep into the heart of his enemy.

So they pa.s.sed in stifling clouds of powder smoke with the reek of hot blood in their nostrils. The noon hour saw Davy Crockett and five or six companions standing in a corner of the shattered walls; the old frontiersman held a rifle in one hand, in the other a dripping knife, and his buckskin garments were sodden, crimson. That is the last of the picture.

"Thermopylae had its messenger of defeat. The Alamo had none." So reads the inscription on the monument erected in latter years by the State of Texas to commemorate that stand. The words are true. But the Alamo did leave a memory and the tale of the little band who fought in the sublimity of their fierceness while death was slowing their pulses did much toward the development of a breed whose eyes were narrow, sometimes slightly slanting, from constant peering across rifle sights under a glaring sun.

The procession is pa.s.sing; trapper and Indian fighter; teamsters with dust in the deep lines of their faces--dust from the long dry trail to old Santa Fe; stage-drivers who have been sleeping the long sleep under waving wheat-fields where alkali flats once stretched away toward the vague blue mountains; and riders of the pony express. A tall form emerges from the past's dim background, and comes on among them.

Six feet and an inch to spare, modeled as finely as an old Greek statue, with eyes of steel grey, sweeping mustache and dark brown hair that hangs to his shoulders, he moves with catlike grace. Two forty-fives hang by his narrow hips; there is a hint of the cavalier in his dropping sombrero and his ornately patterned boots. This is Wild Bill Hickok; he was to have gone with Custer, but a coward's bullet cheated him out of the chance to die fighting by the Little Big Horn and they buried him in the Black Hills in the spring of 1876.

James B. Hickok was the name by which men called him until one December day in the early sixties when the McCandless gang of outlaws tried to drive the horses off from the Rock Creek station of the Overland Stage on the plains of southwestern Nebraska near the Kansas boundary.

There were ten of the desperadoes, and Hickok, who was scarcely more than a boy then, was alone in the little sod house, for Doc Brinck, his partner, was off hunting that afternoon. He watched their approach from the lonely cubicle where he and Brinck pa.s.sed their days as station-keepers. They rode up through the cottonwoods by the creek.

Bill McCandless leaped from the saddle and swaggered to the corral bars.

"The first man lays a hand on those bars, I'll shoot," Hickok called.

They answered his warning with a volley, and their leader laughed as he dragged the topmost railing from its place. Laughing he died.

Now the rifles of the others rained lead against the sod walls and slugs buzzed like angry wasps through the window. He killed one more by the corral and a third who had crept up behind the wooden well-curb. The seven who were left retired to the cottonwoods to hold council. They determined to rush the building and batter down the door.

When they came forth bearing a dead tree-trunk between them, he got two more of them. And then the timber crashed against the flimsy door; the rended boards flew across the room; the sod walls trembled to the shock. He dropped his rifle and drew his revolver as he leaped to meet them.

Jim McCandless and another pitched forward across the threshold with leveled shotguns at their shoulders. Young Hickok ducked under the muzzle of the nearest weapon, and its flame seared his long hair as he swung for the bearer's mid-section with all the weight of his body behind the blow. Whirling with the swiftness of a fighting cat he spurned the senseless outlaw with his boot and "threw down" on McCandless. Revolver and shotgun flamed in the same instant; McCandless fell dead; Hickok staggered back with eleven buckshot in his body.

The other three were on him before he recovered his balance. He felt the searing of their bowie-knives against his ribs as they bore him down on the bed. Fingers closed in on his windpipe. He seized the arm in his two hands and twisted it, as one would twist a stick, until the bones snapped. He struggled to his feet, and the warm blood bathed his limbs as he hurled the two who were left across the room.

They came on crouching and their knives gleamed through the thick smoke-clouds. His own bowie-knife was in his hand now, and he stabbed the foremost through the throat. The other fled. Hickok stumbled out through the door after him, and Doc Brinck came riding back from his hunting expedition in time to lend his rifle to his partner, who insisted profanely that he was fit to finish what he had so well begun.

So young James Hickok shut his teeth against the weakness which was creeping over him and lined his sights on the last of his enemies; for the man whom he had felled with his fist and he with the broken arm had escaped some time during the latter progress of the fight. That final shot was not so true as its predecessors; the outlaw did not die until several days later in the little town of Manhattan, Kansas.

When the eastbound stage pulled up that afternoon the driver and pa.s.sengers found the long-haired young station-keeper in a deep swoon, with eleven buckshot and thirteen knife wounds in his body. They took him aboard and carried him to Manhattan where he recovered six months later, to find himself known throughout the West as Wild Bill Hickok.

How many men he killed is a mooted question. But it is universally acknowledged that he slew them all fairly. Owning that prestige whose possessor walks amid unseen dangers, he introduced the quick draw on his portion of frontier; and many who sought his life for the sake of the dark fame which the deed would bring them died with their weapons in their hands.

In Abilene, Kansas, where he was for several years town marshal, one of these caught him unawares as he was rounding a corner. Wild Bill complied with the order to throw up his hands and stood, rigid, expressionless, while the desperado, emulating the plains Indians, tried to torture him by picturing the closeness of his end. He was in the midst of his description when Hickok's eyes widened and his voice was thick with seeming horror as he cried,

"My G.o.d! Don't kill him from behind!" The outlaw allowed his eyes to waver and he fell with a bullet-hole in his forehead.