The Outlaw Trail

Another kind of woman in the west -- Road to Rimrock

2011-11-18T11:39:00.003+09:00

In fact, Tom Hall, as requested by Catherine de Merode, found Melanie Powers and escorted her to Bob Brow’s Palace, where there were private rooms for . . . whatever private rooms are used for.

Catherine sat in the restaurant with Alice, who was enjoying her first dish of ice cream since she left San Francisco, and Shotgun Lou Grimes, who looked uncomfortable without his coach gun.

Tom held Melanie Powers by the arm in an iron grip as he steered her into the dining room. “You stay gentle, girl, and it’ll hurt a lot less,” he said. “Just you listen to what Miss de Merode has to say.”

“Good evening, Miss Powers,” Catherine said. “I’ve been wishing to have a word with you. I’ve reserved a private room upstairs. Perhaps you would care to join me?”

Melanie fairly hissed. “I spit in the face of any friend of Matt Stryker. I’ll see him dead, I truly will. He murdered my brother.”

“And your brother would be Clayton Powers, correct?”

“Yes!”

“Then, may we repair to the second floor. What I have to say includes your brother.” Catherine shifted her gaze to Tom Hall. “Mr. Hall, would you be kind enough to stay here with April and Mr. Grimes? April would be gratified with your company.”

The brilliance of Catherine de Merode’s smile made Tom Hall do anything she asked. “Be glad to,” he said, and meant every word.

Catherine lead the way. Melanie followed, sure Tom Hall would catch her again if she bolted. A round table sat in the center of the private room with six chairs carefully placed evenly around it, ready for the high-rollers who ordinarily used it. Catherine waved at the chair on the far side. “If you would be so kind,” she said. She took the near chair.

Melanie plonked herself on the seat of the far chair. “What?” Anger flushed her face and she tapped her fingers on the table in frustration. Then she shouted. “WHAT!”

“I understand you wish to see Matthew Stryker killed,” Catherine said.

“He murdered my brother,” Melanie said.

“Murdered?”

Melanie pouted. “Shot him dead.”

Catherine speared Melanie with a sharp look. She let the silence build. The scent of Melanie’s rose water wafted across the table. At least she keeps a proper toilet.

“I took the privilege of looking into your dead brother’s affairs,” Catherine said. “He was not only a robber and a thief, he also killed without compunction.”

“He. Was. My. Brother.”

“Clayton Powers killed at least eleven fellow human beings. Beginning with a clerk at the National Bank of Denver and going on to include a drummer, two railway guards, a stagecoach shotgun rider, a jailer and a deputy, a working girl, and a U.S. Marshal.”

Catherine fell silent again. Melanie stared at her tapping fingertips. Faint voices came from the next room. Melanie opened her mouth, then closed it.

“His last killings were innocents, not saying the other victims were not innocent, but Clayton Powers became involved in a gunfight in Bisbee, and shot a nine-year-old boy and his mother.”

“The kid was an accident,” Melanie said.

“So you know what kind of man your brother was, then?”

“They expelled him from West Point. Everybody there had it in for him.”

Catherine’s eyebrows rose. “West Point?”

In a small voice, Melanie said, “The oldest son in our family has always gone to West Point. Ever since the beginning.”

“Cashiered, then?”

“Picked on. Harassed. Hazed, I think they call it. Just because Papa fought for the South. He was just paying them back.”

Catherine looked astounded. “My God. You can’t really believe that.”

Melanie jumped to her feet and charged around the table, her fist cocked.

Catherine stood calmly to meet Melanie’s rush. She caught Melanie’s fist in the palm of her right hand and turned her momentum aside. As Melanie passed, Catherine shoved her with both hands and sent her staggering. Melanie crashed into the wall and fell to her knees. Catherine unbuckled her belt and her skirt fell away. She wore dancer’s tights, with soft leather shoes on her feet.

When Melanie rose, she clutched a small knife. “Bitch,” she hissed. “I’ll carve your gizzard into little pieces for that.”

Catherine smiled. “I think not,” she said. Slowly, she backed away from the table and into an open area that gave her more room.

Melanie stalked her, knife held low and to the side.

Catherine stopped and faced Melanie, her arms hanging naturally her fingers slightly curled, her feet shoulder-width apart. She still wore the little smile.

“You laughing at me, bitch?” Melanie’s voice dripped venom. “We’ll see how much you laugh with your belly slit and your guts dragging on the ground.” But Melanie made no move to rush Catherine. Instead, she moved in a circle around the woman, staying some distance away at first, and then slowly narrowing the gap.

As Melanie circled, Catherine turned. The little smile never left her face, but it came nowhere near her eyes. She kept her gaze fastened on Melanie, the knife always in her field of view.

Melanie telegraphed her rush by dropping her eyes and lifting the knife. She took a big breath and lunged, but Catherine was not there. She’d spun aside and now stood a good ten feet away, smiling. “Surely you can do better than that,” she said, sounding as if she were having a chat with an old friend.

Melanie’s face contorted. She growled like a wild beast. Her face flushed. Spittle formed little patches of cotton in the corners of her mouth. She crouched, knife held low with its cutting edge up. Again she lunged at Catherine, this time leading with her left shoulder. The blade of the knife was horizontal to the floor, waist high, and ready to slash across Catherine’s abdomen.

Catherine whirled in time with Melanie’s rush, lifting her left leg as she spun and smashing her foot into the side of Melanie’s face in a classic savate kick. Melanie went down on all fours, dazed. The little knife skittered across the floor to fetch up against the floorboard. Catherine scooped the knife up, then delivered a kick to Melanie’s ribcage that knocked her breathless and lifted her up, over, and onto her back. Catherine dropped onto the prone woman, her knees pinning Melanie’s arms to the floor. Melanie mewled in fear.

Carefully, Catherine placed the tip of the little knife at the corner of Melanie’s left eye. Her voice kept its conversational tone. “Miss Powers, I hear you have a vendetta against Matthew Stryker. Let me warn you. If he is injured or killed by anyone even remotely connected to you, no matter how nebulous that connection, I will personally hunt you down and cut your eyes out. Do I make myself clear?”

The whites of Melanie’s eyes showed like a frightened calf’s. She gulped and opened her mouth as if to speak, but no sound came out. Tears escaped the corner of her eyes and trickled into her ears.

Catherine pricked at the skin next to Melanie’s eye. “Do I make myself clear?”

Melanie couldn’t move without pushing the point of the knife into her own eye. Again she opened her mouth. She panted. She swallowed. Catherine raised an eyebrow.

“Yes,” Melanie managed to say.

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid I couldn’t quite hear you,” Catherine said.

“Yes,” Melanie said, louder.

“Yes what?”

“Yes you will cut my eyes out.”

“Why would I do a thing like that?”

“If Stryker is harmed.”

“By whom?”

“By anyone connected with me.”

“Good.” Catherine stood and offered Melanie a hand up.

Melanie sobbed and ignored Catherine’s hand. She rolled over onto her stomach and struggled to all fours. Then, clutching a chair, she pulled herself upright.

“You’ll want to take this. It’s yours, after all.” Catherine held the little knife out, handle first.

Melanie’s hand went to her mouth. She stifled a cry, then fled the room, leaving the knife in Catherine’s hand.

First major scene from Hell Fire in Paradise

2011-11-18T11:29:00.001+09:00

Jimmy Baker complained. “But Ma, it’s hardly dark. I’m five now. I don’t need to go to bed so early.”

“I know, son. But tomorrow will come before you know it, and I want you in bed right now. Jason’s in the loft and asleep already, and you should be, too.”

“Ah, Ma. How come I have to go to bed so early all the time?”

Laurel Baker chuckled at her sturdy son’s resistance. “Unless you get enough sleep, you won’t grow big and strong like Pa. And if you don’t grow big and strong, how are you going to help on the ranch?”

“Okay. I’m going. But I’ll stay up when I get bigger, I surely will.” Grumbling, the youngster climbed the ladder into the boys’ private bedroom in the loft under the eaves.

Laurel put the youngsters to bed right after supper for good reason. Jack Baker took the wagon into Ponderosa for supplies that morning, and he’d not returned. A knot settled into the pit of Laurel’s stomach. Jack didn’t run late. He didn’t go to Bogtown to drink and he wasn’t one to waste time jawing. He might need assistance, but the road from Ponderosa to Paradise was little travelled. If Jack needed help, Laurel had to provide it. She waited until the boys were asleep, changed into a cutdown pair of Jack’s old jeans, and stomped her feet into her riding boots. Laurel saddled her steeldust gelding Angel, and rode toward Ponderosa with a Yellow Boy Winchester in her hands.

Paradise Creek tumbled through a malapai gorge at least a hundred feet deep and the mail road to Alpine travelled the gorge’s edge for a good five miles after crossing the plateau from Ponderosa. The wagon track to Paradise branched off the mail road just beyond Sheepshead promontory. Laurel cantered Angel up the wagon track and onto the mail road. She guided the gelding along the road at a trot as deep wagon-wheel ruts made the footing precarious for a running horse. Clouds backed up against Mt. Baldy and Mt. Ord, covering the sky for miles north of Paradise. The dark night made tracking impossible so Laurel could only hope that if Jack needed help, he was out in the open where she could find him. In the dark night, she felt uneasy, and jacked a shell into the chamber of the Yellow Boy.

Laurel rode more than halfway to Ponderosa but found no trace of Jack. Despondent, she turned Angel around and trotted him back along the mail road toward the Rafter P ranch in Paradise. Jack could take care of himself. He never wore a gun in Ponderosa and didn’t drink, so the chance of a random gunfight was next to none. Yet she worried. Jack wouldn’t stay away from the ranch all night without good reason. A crippled horse. A broken wagon tongue. A rim separated from a wheel. Something. She turned off to follow the wagon track back to the ranch. Tears burned at the corners of her eyes. No. She could depend on Jack. In their six years together, he’d never let her down. Jack would be home. Laurel raised her head and took a deep breath. He would be home. He would.

Jack and Laurel built their house above Paradise Creek on a small rise that looked out across the valley, which also bore the name of Paradise. From their knoll, the Bakers could see three miles or more downstream when the weather was clear. Laurel peered toward the house, not that she could see it on such a dark night. An orange-red flicker caught her attention. Had she left a lamp on? Fire? A new fear blossomed in her heart. Fire! Jimmy and Jason were in the loft. No one to wake them. No one to carry them from danger. Laurel shoved the Winchester into its scabbard and raked her spurs across Angel’s ribs. The startled horse hit a dead run in three strides. Laurel leaned over his neck, urging him on, her eyes on the orange-red glare that gradually got brighter as the gelding plunged on.

By the time they reached the burning house, Angel was streaked with lather and Laurel’s cheeks were streaked with tears.

“Jimmy! Jason!” She screamed her children’s names, but only the roar of the fire replied. Smoke poured from the chimney and seeped out between the cedar shingles. Through the windows, Laurel saw only rolling flames. She dashed to the tack room for a horsehair-filled cover and threw it over her head and shoulders for protection. She wrenched open the front door. Flames billowed from the house, fed by the rush of fresh air. The roar increased.

“Jimmy! Jimmy! Jason! Can you hear me? Are you in there?

Only the roar of the infernal flame.

“Oh God! Save my children. Save my boys. Dear God. My God!” Even wrapped in the horse cover, Laurel could not fight her way into the burning house. She choked on the smoke. Flames licked at her hands. The roar of the fire got louder. Sparks flew as the rafters collapsed into the maelstrom. Laurel howled at the fire. She screamed at God. She sank slowly to her knees, not trying to escape the sparks that burned pinholes in the horse cover and singed her hair and face. Tears welled in her eyes and coursed down her cheeks. Their home was on the Paradise; now it was Laurel’s Hell.

She curled into a foetal ball and screamed and screamed until her throat was cracked and bleeding. Jimmy, poor Jimmy. Five and so grownup. Helpful. Thoughtful. Poor Jimmy. Gone to God. Laurel could only pray that he’d died before the hideous flames made a cinder of his small body. Jason. First born at Paradise. At three, his baby warblings were finally turning into coherent speech. He loved big brother Jimmy. Followed him everywhere. Wanted to do all that Jimmy could do. Gone. Burned in a blaze of pine-fed fire.

By morning, only the log walls and the stone chimney stood. Small flickers of flame played along the smoking logs. Laurel couldn’t move. She dared not try to look among the ashes inside the gutted house. She sat with the horse cover around her shoulders. Sat and rocked back and forth and keened her pain to the heavens.

The first wagon arrived at midmorning. Seth Owens, the Bakers’ nearest neighbor, drove the wagon with his wife Priscilla clinging grimly to the seat. She scrambled down almost before the wagon stopped and ran to Laurel.

“Laurel, oh Laurel. What on earth happened. Oh, your lovely home.”

“God damn the house,” Laurel screamed. “God damn it. My boys. My Jimmy. My Jason. . . .” She could say no more, merely point at the ruins in speechless pain.

Priscilla gathered Laurel into her ample arms. “Poor lass. Poor lass,” she crooned. Above Laurel’s head she looked meaningfully at her husband and motioned with her head that he should look into the smoking ruins. “Poor lass,” she crooned.

Laurel made no sound, but tears flooded from her eyes and cascaded down her singed face. She laid her head on Priscilla’s shoulder and sobbed and sobbed.

Seth came back from the house. “They’re both in what’s left of their beds, Laurel,” he said. “I’m sure the smoke smothered them before the fire ever reached the loft. Thank God for that. Still, you’ll not be wanting to look at them, lass. Best to remember them as they were when you last saw them. I’ll make some boxes for their burial.”

Laurel sat with her head on Priscilla’s shoulder for a long time. “It’s all my fault,” she said in a tiny voice.

“That’s crazy. Of course it’s not your fault.”

“It is. I put them to bed and left them alone while I went out to meet Jack on the road back from Ponderosa. I banked the Franklin, but must have left the lamp burning on the table. I don’t know what knocked it off, but that’s what must have happened. I left them alone. If I’d stayed where I belonged, my boys would be alive.”

“Now, now, don’t blame yourself. God works in mysterious ways. Now he’s called your boys home. They feel no pain. And now they’re singing with the angels.” Priscilla did her best to comfort Laurel, but couldn’t reach her.

Laurel felt herself sinking into a deep dark place where she could neither think nor feel. She lost contact. Her awareness weakened. She felt the fires of Hell coming nearer and nearer. In her heart, she screamed and screamed, but made no sound. Only the tears and the pain seemed real. Still, she struggled from Priscilla’s embrace, stood up, and looked at the smoking remains of her Paradise. Inside, she felt numb. Outside, she shivered.

“Let go,” she said to Priscilla. “Let me go.” She shed the horse cover, wincing as her burned hands grasped the rough canvas. She stood on uncertain legs, almost unfeeling from remaining in the same position for so long. She took a step toward the house.

“Honey, don’t,” Priscilla pleaded, reaching out to grasp Laurel’s arm.

Laurel shrugged out of Priscilla’s grasp. She could think only of seeing her sons, of bidding them farewell. She took another step toward the ruins, and another.

“Seth,” Priscilla called. “Seth. She’s going in.”

Laurel was dimly aware of running footsteps, but they seemed far away. She was already through the doorframe, and her thick boot soles crunched on ashes and embers. Her grieving self was a tiny hard ball in the pit of her stomach. Her empty eyes registered only what they saw and the sight failed to reach her heart. The loft had fallen with the rafters, but the fire had not consumed it. The little bodies still lay in their bunks, scraps of burnt bedclothes covering them. The heat had pealed off the skin but mercifully had not burned away their eyelids. In the aftermath of the blaze, they seemed to be still asleep; horribly burned, but sleeping.

“Come away, Laurel. Let them rest in peace. Let me take care of them for you.” Seth Owens touched her arm.

The emptiness deepened. From the depths of her despair, she could hardly hear Seth’s voice. She let him lead her from the death chamber, once again to be enfolded in Priscilla’s arms.

A spark lit the darkness. Jack would soon be home. Jack would know what to do. Jack. Laurel leaned into Priscilla’s embrace and waited for her husband to come home.

Seth Owens built two small boxes with pine boards and tools he found in the barn. He wrapped the two boys in saddle blankets, placed them in the boxes, and sealed the lids with horseshoe nails. He put the little coffins in an open stable until Laurel and Jack decided where their burial ground should be.

“Shall we clean up around, Laurel?” Seth asked.

Laurel heard the question from the bottom of the dark pit in her mind. She shook her head. “Wait,” she said. “Wait for Jack.”

Seth nodded.

Laurel took a deep breath. She couldn’t just sit here. Things waited to be done. She staggered toward the granary with Priscilla a step behind.

“Laurel, honey, what are you doing?”

“Chickens need fed.” Laurel scooped a measure of oats from the bin with the usual bucket.

“Chick chick chick chick,” she called and broadcast the oats for the chickens to eat. No use milking the cows. The milk bucket probably burned with the house. She turned the calves in with the milk cows. They’d get an extra portion today. She sighed. When would Jack get home?

The second wagon came shortly after noon, and it came at a run. Frank Wills shouted at the team and slapped at their rumps with the ends of the reins, trying to urge them into yet greater speed. They came to a stop in a cloud of dust that drifted over the remains of the Paradise ranch house.

“Jeez,” he said to Seth. “What happened here?

“Dunno yet. Laurel thinks it may have been a wayward lantern.”

Frank tested the air with a high thin nose. “Does smell a bit like coal oil.”

Seth looked up, then tested the air himself. “Does at that.”

“That’s not why I’m here. We found Jack Baker’s wagon at the bottom of Paradise Gorge. Where’s Missus Baker?”

Seth motioned toward the granary. Laurel hurried across the yard. “Frank Wills,” she called. “Have you seen Jack?”

“I know this is hard, Missus Baker, your house burned down and all, but Jack’s wagon is at the bottom of Paradise Gorge. Looks like something spooked the team and they went right off the edge, wagon and all. Nothing moving. Both horses dead. Some fellers climbing down there right now to see about Jack.”

The thunder of hooves came before Laurel could speak. Two men Laurel knew only by sight reined their lathered mounts in beside Wills’s wagon. “We found Jack Baker,” one said. “Neck broke. They’re hauling him out of the gorge now.”

Laurel sank to her knees. The black pit threatened to consume her. First Jimmy and Jason. Now Jack. Cut, her mind said. Bleed. Get out of this place where you can’t think or even feel. She fumbled in her trouser pocket for the clasp knife she always carried when riding. Opening the blade, she slashed first her left arm, then her right. Pain. Blood. Then she cut her face from the hairline by her ear down to the point of her jaw. I’m alive, she thought. Maybe the pain will take away the emptiness. Bleeding profusely, she hacked away her long brown hair, sawing off each handful with the knife.

First chapter of A Man Called Breed

2011-11-18T11:23:00.000+09:00

I lay at the edge of a ridge overlooking Adam’s Well, watching. I’d come a far way from Ehrenburg on the Colorado River and the well held the only water in twenty miles. Zeeb, my brindle grulla, smelled the water and tossed his head, rustling the leaves of the scrub oak thicket where he stood.

Below, a faded yellow wagon sat by the rock-bound pool. The horses were out of the traces and cropping at the sparse grama grass. I took my time. I had to see what kind of people were at the well before me.

The sound of a hard female voice drifted up. “Get your cracker ass moving.”

A redheaded woman in a tight-waisted low-cut gingham dress strode to a dark-haired one who was washing clothes in a tub at the edge of the pool. She swung a roundhouse at the smaller woman. A moment later the smack reached my ears, accompanied by a squeak. The little one looked like a kid.
I took a long look at the man. Back against a willow tree, spraddle-legged, hat over his eyes, he didn’t move. Either he slept sound or he was ignoring the woman.

“I want clean bloomers, bitch,” the woman said.

“It’ll only take a little while, Miss Polly, just a minute,” the girl pleaded. “The water’s clear and good, and I got a bit of soap. Only a minute more. Honest.”

The whore – I decided Polly was a very soiled dove; nothing else could make a woman so hard – flounced to a wooden chair over by the wagon and sat. “Just you get along with it. That’s all I’ve got to say.” Polly bit at a fingernail, then rubbed her palms along her thighs. She heaved a sigh, scratched one armpit, then the other. Jumping up, she climbed the steps at the rear of the wagon. A moment later, she reappeared with a silk Chinese fan in her hand. “I hate Arizona,” she said. “Hot as Hell. Maybe hotter.”

The girl rinsed indigo bloomers and white cotton chemises, wrung the water from them, and spread them on a nearby manzanita bush to dry. “All done, Miss Polly,” she announced.

Polly rose and stalked over to inspect the laundry. She reached a hand to the girl’s face and gave her left cheek a twisting pinch. “Someday you’ll be decent help,” she said, “if Garfield don’t sell you to the Mexicans first.”

The girl put a hand to her face, but stood still, her head bowed.

No spirit left, I figured. Still, I saw nothing alarming about the trio, but decided to keep an eye on the sleeper. I scuttled back from the lip of the ridge, mounted Zeeb, and worked my way down the front side of the slope toward Adam’s Well.

The trio at the wagon looked like greenhorns. None of them noticed me until Zeeb was at the bottom of the ridge.

“Garfield. Garfield! There’s a guy on a horse coming this way.” The whore’s voice rose an octave, like she’d concluded I might be dangerous.

I ignored the man and his two women, and rode Zeeb to the edge of the well. The girl backed away from the water, her hands at her mouth and her eyes wide.

Polly watched, her legs spread like she was inviting me.

Garfield didn’t move.

Faded letters on the wagon side read “Pleasure Palace.” I should have guessed. A whorehouse on wheels. I turned Zeeb and stepped out of the saddle with him between me and the wagon people.

“Looking for a good time?” Polly the whore simpered.

“Not the kind you’d give,” I said. “Not in a hurry to catch the clap . . . or worse.”

Polly pouted.

“My girls have no diseases.”

“Garfield! Such language.” Then Polly giggled.

“Invite our visitor to dinner, Polly. The sun will soon be down, and there’s no need for him to ride on while food and water and certain entertainments are available here.” Garfield removed his hat, brushed a lion’s mane of tawny hair back over his head, and clamped the bowler down over it.

“Mister?” Polly’s voice was tentative. “You can stay for dinner if you want.”

“I reckon jackrabbit and prickly pears’d be better’n anything you all could cook,” I said. “I’ll be moving on.” I knelt by the pool and scooped some of the clear water into my mouth. It smelled of granite and tasted wet, not muddy like a lot of desert water. Zeeb stood between me and the wagon people like he was on guard. I filled two canteens and hung them by their straps over the saddlehorn.

“Mister?” The girl moved a little closer around the edge of the pool.

I ignored her and urged Zeeb to take another drink, then fitted him with a gunnysack nosebag. The only sounds were Zeeb munching dry oats and the girl’s breathing.

“Mister?”

I looked at her.

“I’ll cook real good.” The girl’s voice pleaded and so did her eyes. “Can’t you stay for dinner?”

“You cooking?”

She nodded. “I always do.”

I turned away and stared at the pool for a long moment, then looked up. “I’ll stay if you want, but there are men on my back trail . . . men who’ll shoot first and ask for explanations later.” I didn’t mention the canvas money belt under my union suit, filled with half a hundred gold double eagles earned with hard work and cunning and an ability to train horses well, coins from the sale of forty-nine prime mustangs to the quartermaster at Fort Yuma.

“We got beans and some chilli peppers. I can make fry bread, too.” The girl’s voice got stronger.

I grubbed through my saddlebags and pulled out a fist-sized lump wrapped in a piece of flour-sack cloth. “Half a rabbit,” I said. “Can’t have no chili con carne without it’s got meat in it.” I held out the lump to the girl.

Her eyes went wide. “Meat?” She took a hesitant step toward me. “Can I use it? Really?”

I nodded, still holding the lump out toward her.

“Take the meat, damn it.” Garfield’s voice had a hard edge to it.

The girl shrank back into herself. She kept her eyes on the ground as she came up to me.
I studied her as she approached. Thin. Too thin. Dark complexion, but not Mex. Simple cotton dress. Likely nothing underneath. She barely came to my shoulder.

She took the meat. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “My name is Blessing.” She stood there, waiting to hear my name.

“I’m just passing through, Blessing,” I said. “My name don’t matter. Leave it be.”

Blessing reached out to pat Zeeb. “Your horse sure looks funny, mister,” she said.

Zeeb snuffled at her dress and decided he didn’t mind the young woman.

“Zeeb’s taken a liking to you, Blessing. You must be something special.” I smiled.

Blessing blushed. “Thank you for the meat, mister. I’ll surely make chili con carne y frijoles. The beans is already done.” She returned to the wagon, put the meat away, picked up a hand axe, and went out in the brush. Probably looking for firewood. A jay chattered in the alders back of the pool. The other two could have been hunks of stone for all they moved.

I took the saddle off Zeeb and turned him loose to graze. The brindle grulla was as good as a watchdog, and he’d come whenever I whistled.

Blessing came back through the brush with an armload of sticks.

“You build the fire,” I said. “I’ll get more wood.”

“You don’t have to do that. You being a guest and all.”

I smiled again. “My mother always said I should do my share. Wouldn’t want to disappoint her.” I took her hand axe and walked out into the desert.

Adam’s Well lies in the foothills on the western slope of the Kofa Mountains, overlooking the basin that stretches across more than forty miles of desert to the Trigo range. On the other side of the Trigoes, Ehrenburg squats on the eastern bank of the Colorado River, scraping out a living from the steamboats that paddle north and south from the Sea of Cortez to the point where the shallows start at La Paz.

A week ago, Zeeb and I took a river steamer north from Arizona City and landed in Ehrenburg. The trip gave Zeeb some time to rest and I got in a bit of gambling with a would-be shark. His teeth weren’t long enough, and my dark poker face let me bluff him out of nigh onto four hundred dollars. A decent grub stake that meant I could leave the gold in my money belt – double eagles to buy land and good horses to graze the long grass along Cherry Creek in the Tonto Basin.

If I’d just stayed out of the Black Diamond, I could have ridden straight for Cherry Creek instead of looping through the desert. But that’s not how things work for the likes of me.
The Black Diamond didn’t even have batwings. Just a plain white door that opened to a long skinny room with a bar down the left-hand wall and a row of five tables to the right.

I’m not one to wear a sixgun. I prefer a Bowie up close and a one-in-a-thousand Winchester ’73 when there’s room. Folks talk about fast guns, but no gunman can get his iron out faster than I can shuck a Bowie. Up close, cold steel’s best.

When I opened the door, three of the five men in the saloon turned to size me up. I knew what they saw. A man too dark to be all white. A man who wore knee-high Apache moccasins and had a 14-inch Bowie aslant his left hip with its grip close to hand. A man in faded Levi’s and canvas shirt with longish black hair curling out from under a battered Stetson. A man with a Winchester ‘73. I wasn’t a pretty sight.

“Turley’s Mill?” I said to the barkeep. I leaned the rifle against the bar, muzzle up.

He shook his head. “Old Potrero out of San Francisco’s the best I’ve got.”

“Gimme.”

“Dollar a shot. I see the dollar, I pour the whiskey.”

I put a cartwheel on the bar. “Trusting soul, eh?”

The ‘keep gave me a curl of the lip that may have been a smile. He took the silver dollar and poured a finger of amber into a cloudy glass. He pushed the drink across the bar in my direction. “Was I you, I’d make that my last drink,” he said.

I gave him a broad smile. “I’m just getting started.” I tossed the whiskey and thumped the empty glass on the bar. “Nother,” I said, and dug in my pocket for a second silver dollar.

The door swung open to let a big chunky man walk in. Although young, his gait was ponderous. He planted each foot like his legs were stone columns. His face, thrust forward, was covered with three-day stubble and an unfriendly scowl. He stopped two steps away and shucked his gun.

“You.” The voice sounded like a rumble deep in some distant cave.

“Me?” I shifted to face the man.

“Yeah. You. Git.”

I smiled and kept my body loose. “I just put a dollar on the bar,” I said, my tone as reasonable as I could make it.

“Your kind don’t belong with regular folks. Git.”

“Reckon my cash is the same color as yours,” I said with my best poker face. “I’ve got another dollar. Buy you a drink. This Old Potrero ain’t bad booze.” I waved at the bar. “How ‘bout it?” I didn’t really want to tangle with the big man, but I wouldn’t back down either, not on account of my skin color, anyway.

He spit on the floor and moved closer. “Git. Or they’ll carry you out.”

I turned my back to him. Slowly. Deliberately. “Pour that whiskey, bar man,” I said. “Now.” I pushed the silver dollar at him.

He stood stock still, eyes darting from me to the big man behind me.

A click came as the big man thumbed back the hammer of his .45. I whirled to my right, snaking out my Bowie and slashing through his bicep with its 14-inch blade as I turned. My left fist smashed into his square jaw as my momentum carried me past. The .45 clattered to the floor.

The big guy fell to his knees, clutching his half-severed arm with his big left hand. “You miserable sumbitch.” He mumbled the words. “Sumbitch. You. Cut. Me!” Blood pumped down his arm to drip off his splayed fingers.

“Feel lucky I didn’t cut your miserable throat,” I said. “Get that bound up,” I said to the ‘keep, “or he’ll bleed out.” I picked up the bar towel and wiped the Bowie’s blade clean. “Keep the extra dollar. I was just leaving.” The Winchester came natural to my hand, and I jacked a cartridge into its chamber.

It seemed an awful long way to the door, but I forced myself to walk normal, not too fast, not too slow, the rifle under my arm.

As I neared the door, the barkeep called out. “Reed Fowley’s got family,” he said. “They’ll be wanting to know who done this to their brother and son. What should they call you?”

I stopped with a hand on the door. “Same as everyone else,” I said. “They can call me Breed.”

Something I agree with

2011-11-08T09:59:00.002+09:00

This came from a friend and I agree with its sentiments. Didn't know how to send it in a more effective way than to post it on my blog. Here goes:

Please, e-mail a copy of this column to twenty friends, ten legislators, CNN/MSNBC/FOX NEWS. You America, can, "Be the difference."

"Congressional Reform Act of 2011"
Whereas elected officials will recognize a new national standardized ethical working practice (NSEWP) for procedure as an government employee.
Be it known to all members of Congress that there will be: No Tenure / No Pensions.
Whereby, a congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they're out of office.
Whereby, Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social
Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the
Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into
the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the
American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.
Whereas congressmen/women can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
Whereby Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise and
congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
Whereas congressional legislators and senators lose their current health care system and participate in the same health care system as the American people.
Whereby Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
Whereas all contracts with past and present congressmen/women are void effective 1/1/12.
Hear, hear! I don't recall the American people agreeing to the separation of benefits with our elected officials. Shouldn't congressmen/women who made all these contracts for themselves have their pensions taxed and reduced? Just as they have done to mine? Shouldn't they get the same retirement plan as me or visa-versa? I have as many degrees and professional certifications as most of them, plus 14 years of service to my community, teaching in a public high school. I'm ashamed to tell you the pittance my pension amounts to, and I will have to work into my 70's if there is hope for me to raise enough income to rent a one room studio in a housing project. It is a bleak outlook.
To work in Congress is an honor, a responsibility to help, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned a constantly changing constituency. Elected officials would serve their term(s), then go home and back to work. Not, to stay in Washington, living off the bones (there is no more fat) of the land.
Change changes change. End the greed! Occupy the net!

Lazy days, my . . .

2011-10-25T17:49:00.000+09:00

So how long have I been ignoring my blog? Far too long.

A new Chuck Tyrell novel is coming out from Hale's Black Horse Western line at the end of November. You can pre-order it from the Book Depository. The title is A Man Called Breed, and it deals with the problems a man can come up against when his father is an unknown white man and his mother was a Cheyenne killed by the Colorado Volunteers at Sand Creek. He's mustered out of the army civilian scout corps, gone mustanging, built a grubstake, and now he wants to get his ranch going. Along the way, he gains a follower named Sparrow and a woman named Blessing. But the Fowleys are out to get him, and won't let well enough alone. The Breed meets them with a Bowie and a one-in-a-thousand Winchester '73. Believe me. He's been there and done that. More than once.

Is the Western dead?

2011-09-14T11:24:00.000+09:00

This subject often comes up when people find out I write western novels. "Oh, voice from the past, eh?" Well, yes, but if the numbers are to be believed, more people read and view westerns all the time. I mean, the audience for the genre is growing. True, there are more cop shows and comedies produced, but more people watch westerns than any other genre on TV. Finally, as you can see in this link, the powers that be are beginning to notice. Read about the Cowboy Comeback and smile.

The Six Month Anniversary winds down

2011-09-11T23:07:00.000+09:00

Borrowing again from friend Yuri Kageyama and the Associated Press. Here are some anniversary images posted tonight.

Minamisanriku, where a young woman kept broadcasting messages urging people to run for high ground until the surging tsunami waters swallowed her.

Another Minamisanriku.

Japan Earthquake September 11 World

Thank you, Yuri, for those images.

Please remember that all proceeds from Nik Morton's When the Flowers Are in Bloom and my own A Matter of Tea go directly to victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.

Author and newswoman Yuri Kageyama on six months after

2011-09-10T11:41:00.000+09:00

My good friend and colleague (we both do journalism, but she's far ahead of me) Yuri Kageyama sent me a link to her story written for the six-month anniversary of 3/11. Read it. Then help.

You can also help by buying Nik's and my books, published specifically to raise money to help the 3/11 victims.

Six months since 25,000 people died

2011-09-09T16:32:00.000+09:00

On March 11, 2011, a quake registering 9.2 on the Richter Scale was caused by shifting of tectonic plates off eastern Japan. Unlike most earthquakes, which tend to center in one place, such as the one that hit ChristChurch New Zealand, this one spread for 200 kilometers along the edge of the Pacific Plate and was felt as far away as Alaska and Siberia. Devastation wracked Japan. Not just in the areas hit by massive tsunami, but in places hundreds of kilometers away -- Urayasu, for instance, where Disneyland is located, suffered immensely from liquifaction, which left holes beneath streets that only came to light when the heat of summer arrived.

Remember that more than 1,500 children lost their parents. Remember that 250,000 people were displaced. Remember that some people around the Fukushima Nuclear Plant may never see their homes again in their lifetimes.

I have picked up some scenes from Youtube that you who search in English would never find. The soundtracks are in Japanese. Turn off the sound if you wish, but look at the messages. Please.

Nik Morton and I have both published books for the disaster. All the proceeds, from the authors and from the publishers, go to help victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. At the end of this post, I'll give you tags where you can spend a little money to help many people.

Scenes not shown even on Japanese TV

More from the early days after the quake

The town of Ishinomaki in June

More than three million views of the tsunami at Ishinomaki

A 40-second drive along a beachside road

This is what was left of the Watari-Arahama Fishing Co-op building after the tsunami. Friend Conan Grames sent word that the LDS church donated an ice maker capable of making 3.3 tons of crushed ice to the Co-op. All 84 of the ships operated by fishermen belonging to the co-op were damaged. So far, 16 are back in operation and the ice maker allows them to get their catches to market. People still need help.

Nik Morton's blog is here. And his book, When The Flowers Are In Bloom is here.

My book, A Matter of Tea, is a selection of short stories about Japan, including the one that received first prize in the 2010 Oaxaca International Literature Competition.

New Review by Geoff Gander

2011-08-31T08:28:00.000+09:00

The Snake Den is the harshly realistic, yet ultimately uplifting, story of Shawn Brodie, a 14-year old boy living on the frontier in late 19th century Arizona Territory. Faced with the need to feed his mother and younger sister, Shawn comes across a lamed cow on the open range. He puts is out of its misery, and is caught while carving off a haunch to take back home. Judged to be a common thief, he is sentenced to three years in Yuma Penitentiary, a place that is widely known to be a hellhole from which no one escapes.

Once there, we see the horror of prison life through Shawn’s eyes. He is reduced to a number, or, even worse, forced to answer to crude nicknames. He is beaten up by guards, subjected to arbitrary punishment – including confinement in an isolated cell known as the Snake Den - and threatened by fellow inmates with death. At the outset, one wonders whether Shawn will survive his sentence.

Fortunately, he is not alone. Shawn’s three cellmates – Shoo Lee, “Kid” Pringle, and “Shark” Blanchard – take a liking to him, and become his protectors, friends, and teachers. He learns life lessons from each of them, and as the novel progresses he grows in ways that would not have been possible had he not been sent to Yuma. Pride of place goes to Shoo Lee, a taciturn Oriental man who teaches Shawn how to meditate, and how to defend himself, and whose guidance gives Shawn the confidence he needs to face his enemies.

By the end of the novel, after surviving a major, much-anticipated conflict, Shawn is well on his way to becoming a strong, independent man. The story concludes with the door open to further adventures.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. Mr. Tyrell does an expert job in bringing the reader into Shawn’s world, presenting the prison through his (at first) terrified eyes, and later making that world somewhat less intimidating as Shawn matures and begins to figure out what he needs to do. I would certainly recommend this to anyone.

And the winner is . . . . . .

2011-08-26T18:18:00.000+09:00

THE SNAKE DEN

This novel was a labor of love. Many times I've told the story. I sailed my boat DoriKam from Olympia WA to San Diego, where I left her for three months as I could not take more than two weeks off at a time. I had an extra day or two, so I rented a car to drop off at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, and drove across the bottom of California to Yuma.

Yuma is so close to sea level that you have to wear galoshes just in case (not true). It's also so hot that you can dig down two feet and hear voices. It's that close to Hell. Maybe that's why they called the Yuma Territorial Prison the Hell Hole.

Well, anyone who writes westerns who gets within shouting distance of the Yuma Prison (now a state park) and doesn't go, is not true to his (or her) craft. Naturally, I went. I saw the cells, the watchtowers, the brick yard, the sallyport, and a large-scale model of the prison as it was in 1880.

And I found out one fact that set my mind racing. The youngest inmate ever incarcerated in Yuma Territorial Prison was only 14 years old. THE SNAKE DEN is the story of that 14-year-old. Totally fiction, except for the setting, but one of the toughest growing-up stories you'll ever read.

THE SNAKE DEN refers to what the original inmates called the "Dark Cell." A solitary cell. A cube made of iron straps, five feet on a side. It hangs by chains from the top of a cave dug in the south hillside that formed the wall there. It's totally dark inside, except for the ventilation hole in the top of the cave. That's where the snakes crawl to get out of the hot sun. Rattlesnakes. Diamondbacks. Sidewinders. You name it. How does a kid of 14 stand up to THE SNAKE DEN. What gives him the strength to see it through?

Read THE SNAKE DEN and find out.

This is why I write

2011-08-20T21:40:00.000+09:00

Reba Wagner has an invalid husband and she reads westerns to him. She said she had gotten through all in the library and wondered if there were others we could help her with. I sent PDFs of Vulture Gold and The Snake Den and asked her to review them and have her husband review them when they finished with them. Here's is Reba's 2:30 a.m. post on Western Book Readers group of Facebook.

Good morning everyone, Look like I'm not the only one up at this hour of the morning. I wanted to say thank you to Charles Whipple for the books he sent us in pdf. format. I received his e-mail this evening with the attachment. I thought I would take a quick look and then maybe start one of them this weekend.

Wellllll, I took a look alright, and here it is 2:30 a.m. and I just finished "The Snake Den". I was hooked from the beginning and couldn't stop, just had to see what the next page was going to bring. What a character Shawn Brodie is. We look forward to reading more about him in future stories.

Thanks again Charles and I will be reading this to my husband over the weekend.

Vulture Gold is a finalist

2011-08-19T17:19:00.000+09:00

My novel Vulture Gold is a finalist in the Global e-Book Awards. It is available on Amazon in either Kindle or print versions. Or, it can be ordered from SmashWords or Barnes & Noble. The publisher is Western Trail Blazers.

Garet Havelock was a Cherokee half-breed and the marshal of Vulture City. But that wasn’t enough to stop outlaw kingpin Barnabas Donovan from sending in three armed men to rob $100,000 in bullion from the Vulture Mine headquarters, killing two people in the process. Havelock set out to catch the thieves and recover the gold and in the unforgiving Mojave Desert, Jicarilla Apaches forced Havelock and Donovan’s bunch together in a cave on Eagle Eye Mountain. Then there was Laura Donovan, half-sister to the outlaw leader . . . Now Havelock must survive the Apache ‘run of death” and face Donovan’s gunslingers to get the gold and the girl.

The Traditional West

2011-07-23T19:53:00.000+09:00

Here's a new anthology by the best western authors alive today. I'm glad to call them friends and fellow westerns lovers. Here's a trailer to whet your appetite. THE TRADITIONAL WEST

Book Depository offers preorder discounts

2011-07-09T11:51:00.002+09:00

Book Depository is an online bookseller in the UK that will send your purchases anywhere in the world, free of charge. Right now, two of my books are on preorder status, one at 25% discount.

The Killing Trail is on preorder for the large print version, at 25% off. The cover you see at the left is the hardback version, and I'll put up the large print cover as soon as I get it.

A Man Called Breed is a new Chuck Tyrell novel from Black Horse Westerns that will be out in late November. But you can order it now from Book Depository at a 24% discount and they'll ship it to you free of charge the moment it becomes available.

CLICK HERE to see the Chuck Tyrell books available at Book Depository.

Now in Print

2011-06-12T20:13:00.000+09:00

My novel The Snake Den is now available in print here. Of all my novels, this one holds a special place in my heart. I sailed a yacht from Olympus, WA, to La Paz, BCS, Mexico in 2000. On the way, I left the boat in San Diego for three months. I tied the boat up to her pier, made arrangements with the marina staff, and rented a car. From San Diego, I drove straight across California to Yuma, AZ, where the Territorial prison was for so many years. It is now a state park, and is well preserved. I walked the prison yard, inspected the buildings, went into the tunnel in the south caliche wall where the dark cell, the isolation cell, where a cube made of iron straps hangs a foot off the floor and gives the inmate only 5 feet of space, up down or sideways. This is the place they called The Snake Den. This is the place sidewinders and diamondbacks come to get out of the blazing Arizona sun. It gave my novel a name.

Records told me much about Yuma Prison. Books told me more. But in the records, one fact stuck in my mind. The youngest inmate in the Hell Hole was only 14 years old. The Snake Den is his story, or at least it is the story of a young man, only 14, who has been falsely accused of stealing beef and thrown in the Hell Hole. This is the story of how he survives. How he gets along with the Mexicans. How he deals with the king of the prison underworld. How he learns martial arts from an Oriental inmate, and uses those skills to quiet his heart and mind, and to overcome the guard sergeant who raped him.

This is the story of Shawn Brodie, and how he survived The Snake Den.

Western Writers Arise

2011-06-01T08:37:00.002+09:00

Western Writers all

Perhaps you've heard of the Global eBook Awards, sponsored by Dan Poynter. I went to take a look at the site as Solstice Publishing, which published my book The Snake Den, suggested some of their authors might be interested.

Guess what.

No Westerns category.

I emailed one of the men in charge of the competition, Joseph Dowdy, to ask why no Westerns Category. He said, quote: I can't say why because no one came up with it when we created the categories.

Then he went on to say: I'll ask Dan if we can create one. We'll need judges for this category . . . but you can't judge the category you are in.

A few hours later, Joseph wrote: Do you think you could post something about our competition so that we can get judges and more writers in our competition for this category?

Everyone take note. Some people in the industry are blind to Westerns. We can help change that. Here's the URL to the contest.

http://awardsforebooks.com/

Charlie

You bloggers. Spread the word, please

Read Vulture Gold

2011-05-26T14:25:00.001+09:00

Just a reminder. My novel Vulture Gold is available at SmashWords for just $2.99, and I guarantee that it's a good read. We are so lucky to live in an era when so much good reading is available for so little money. It almost feels like dime novels are back. Here's the blurb for Vulture Gold. The novel is also available at CreateSpace in trade paperback for $8.95.

Vulture Gold

Garet Havelock, Vulture City‘s marshal, attempts to stop the theft of $100,000 in bullion from the Vulture Mine headquarters.

An old nemesis, Barnabas Donovan, is responsible and leaves a trail of dead behind him. A kidnapping, gunfights with Indians, and chasing the gold bring the marshal to meet the one woman he can‘t forget and forces choices on him no man should have to make.

Now, Havelock must survive the Apache ―run of death,― and face Donovan‘s gunslingers to get back the gold.

Shakin' It Back

2011-05-05T23:39:00.000+09:00

This photo, taken by Tim Newfields, shows me reading my story Floating World, from the collection entitled A Matter of Tea. The event was Shakin' It Back, music and literature, held at What the Dickens in Ebisu, Tokyo. Nearly 100 people paid ¥2000 each to benefit the 3/11 quake victims, and all had a great time.

A Matter of Tea is available in eBook form or in printed form.

The way it was, March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m.

2011-04-24T16:59:00.002+09:00

The VIDEO was removed as it seems to have been a pirate of National Geographic images. As it was on Youtube, I assumed it was for general consumption. Such was not the case, and I apologize. Proceeds from A Matter of Tea still go to the victims of the quake and tsunami.

This video is 45 minutes long, and it takes you once again through the experience of Japan's recent earthquake and tsunami disaster. Nearly 40,000 dead or missing. 300 miles of seacoast devastated. 150,000 homes and buildings destroyed. 25,000 households driven out of their abodes by radiation. A disaster like this comes along once in a thousand years (last one was in the 9th century).

If you'd like to help me help out here in Japan. Spend a dollar and buy a copy of A Matter of Tea. Hundreds of people have purchased the book, and I hope the word will continue to get around.

Buy the eBook HERE

Or buy a printed version HERE

Buy this book. Help the victims of Japan's earthquake and tsunami

2011-04-09T17:08:00.004+09:00

A MATTER OF TEA

The title story of this collection is the same story that won the 2010 Oaxaca International Literature Competition. This is the first time the story has ever been published. And with it, other stories I have written that are set in Japan, plus a look at a brand new series called Chronicles of the Dark Mirror. A full chapter of the first book, The Seeker.

The only thing I do well is write. When the earthquake hit Kobe in 1995, friends and I hauled food and necessities from Tokyo to Kobe. But this time, the damage and the suffering makes Kobe look like a picnic. (I apologize to the people in Kobe for that simile but the destruction and the death toll and the homelessness in Tohoku is so vast, it defies description.) Aerial comparisons of before and after are shocking to say the least. And the only thing I can do is write.

So I decided to let you read these stories and help the people in Tohoku at the same time. Buy this book for a buck -- well, for 99 cents -- and I and my publisher will give all the income we receive from your purchases to worthy charities that are helping in Tohoku. I will personally pick the charities and I will personally report to you about what has been or is being done.

Help me out. Buy this book of stories about Japan. Get your friends to buy a copy, too. Spread the word. Help me help the victims of Japan's horrendous earthquake and tsunami.

If you'd rather buy from Amazon for your Kindle, the link is HERE. But be advised that the Kindle version is more expensive. Thanks.

Thank you. PURCHASE HERE

A story about Apache County Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens

2011-04-05T23:41:00.001+09:00

Clair Huffaker wrote about him, and there have been many stories in magazines and newspapers of Arizona, including microfilms of newspapers of the day. I have them. This story is as close to the truth as I can manage. The characters speak words the record of the events says they spoke. The story's been on the Internet before, but it's worth another read, I think.

Charlie

The Pleasant Valley War 
THE KID AND THE COMMODORE

Charles T. Whipple

Commodore Perry Owens rode in from the south, reining in his blooded horse atop the rise overlooking Holbrook. The Little Colorado below was an ocher ribbon fringed with gray-green willows. Far away to the northeast, the flat-topped hills of the Painted Desert spread pinks and blues across the horizon. He hooked a leg over the saddle horn and contemplated the rowdy cowtown. It looked peaceful that Sunday, September 4, 1887, but the Sabbath was about to be broken by gunfire. Sheriff Owens carried a warrant for the arrest of that kid Andy Cooper . . . much as he dreaded serving it.

Not that he was a coward. He'd proved he wasn’t. The Snider Gang lost nine men in the Round Valley gunfight, for instance. But he'd been in office since January and the Cooper warrant -- for stealing Navajo horses -- was still outstanding.

When Commodore Perry Owens drifted into northern Arizona in 1881, people soon learned the long-haired cowboy had iron nerves and an uncanny skill with horses. John Walker hired him to guard Wells Fargo and army remudas at Navajo Springs.

Navajos regularly tried to steal the horses, but many fell to Commodore Owens's Sharps .50. He could hit a squirrel a mile away with that gun. He reckoned he'd killed at least 50 Navajos by the time he became the sheriff of Apache County.

If the Indians got away with a few horses, Owens would raid them right back, often bringing back more mounts than he'd lost. Andy Cooper sometimes went with Commodore on those sorties. He was a cheerful young man, good with animals. But he had a hot temper and a quick trigger finger. If anyone in the territory could match Commodore Perry Owens with a Colt's, it was Andy Cooper.

When Owens inherited a warrant issued by the county court on March 26, 1886, accusing Andy Cooper of stealing 40 Navajo horses, he ignored it. To him, stealing Navajo horses was no crime. "Kid, I'm sheriff now, so you just stay out of town when I'm here," Commodore said to Cooper. "Or I'll have to serve that warrant on you."

The Sheriff took the warrant to Taylor, leaving instructions with the deputy in the town to serve it if Andy ever showed up. Owens put the warrant out of his mind because Zach Decker, the Mormon gunman, lived in Taylor; Andy would probably steer clear.

Now things had gotten out of hand. The Sheriff was forced to serve that damned warrant. He kneed his mount toward the crossing at Berado's store.

Much of the trouble began in 1884, when the Aztec Land and Cattle Company -- the Hashknife Outfit -- brought 40,000 cattle into Apache County. The Texans who came with Hashknife cows into Arizona were hard men. And they partook freely of other people's stock.

Mart Blevins settled on a rawhide ranch at the headwaters of Canyon Creek late in 1884. With him came four sons -- Hampton, John, Charles, and Sam Houston -- his wife Mary, and daughter Mesa. Mart had a fifth son, Andy, who took the last name of Cooper after a scrape in Llano, Texas. When Andy first came to Arizona, he drove a Hashknife chuckwagon.

In 1884, Commodore Perry Owens had a horse ranch at Cottonwood Seep, about 10 miles south of Navajo Springs. People came from all over to buy his blooded stock, and to see his skill with firearms. Someone would throw a tin can in the air and holler, "Commodore!" In an instant both his guns were out. Lead smashed into the can long before it hit the ground. Shooting with right-hand gun, then left, he'd keep the can moving until it was too shattered to roll.

Although the Commodore's blond hair reached nearly to his waist, no one kidded him. He spoke with a quiet Oklahoma drawl, but he decked anyone who disparaged his hair or the way he wore his guns butt forward. At five foot ten, he wasn't a big man, but once something started, he never said "quit."

Down in Pleasant Valley, the feud that would bury 28 men heated up.

Jim Stinson was the first cowman in the valley, settling on Cherry Creek with 1,200 head of cattle the Mormons traded him for his ranch at Snowflake. He was preceded by mountain man John D. Tewksbury and his three half-Indian sons -- John Jr., James, and Ed -- and followed by Tom and John Graham, natives of Iowa, who set up a ranch upstream from Stinson two years later.

At first the Grahams and the Tewksbury boys were fast friends. But a quarrel over stolen cattle ruined that friendship. After that, eyes narrowed and hands moved toward gun butts whenever a Graham and a Tewksbury passed on the trail.

Above the Mogollon Rim, the Daggs brothers ran thousands of sheep. But A-One Bar cowboys kept them off lush pastures among the San Francisco peaks, the Hashknife outfit barred them from ranges to the east, and Pleasant Valley ranchers guarded the passes off the Mogollon Rim so Daggs' woollies couldn't get in.

By 1886, the rift between the Grahams and the Tewksburys was common knowledge. And the Daggs brothers decided to take advantage of the feud. They offered the Tewksburys a lucrative deal to guard Daggs sheep into Pleasant Valley. They accepted, and the drive began.

The ranchers stood aghast as the woollies poured into Pleasant Valley. Suddenly the enmity between honest cowmen and rustlers evaporated. They faced a new, much larger threat. Andy Cooper was among the crowd that gathered at the Graham ranch one autumn day in 1886 to consider what to do about the sheep. So was Tom Pickett, who had ridden with Billy Bonner.

Andy wanted action. Kill all the sheep and every man with them, he said, but Tom Graham said no. "There must be no killing and no destruction of property," Graham ordered.

"Give them sheep a hold in the valley and there won't be enough grass left for a grasshopper come spring," Cooper countered. "I'll lead the boys. We'll make a raid that'll end it all, and damned sudden."

Graham ordered him to stay put, and faced the young gunsharp down, even though Graham himself had no reputation as a shootist.

Graham's brand of guerrilla persuasion -- shots in the night that holed coffee pots and frying pans -- didn't force the sheep out of the valley. Later, Andy led a rougher bunch. They stampeded sheep over cliffs, shooting any survivors. And they beat up the herders.

In Holbrook, sheepman Sam Brown and druggist Frank Wattron headed the citizen's committee that drafted Commodore Perry Owens into running for sheriff of Apache County.

Incumbent J.L. Hubbell's trading post was an important stop on the outlaw trail. Violence was rampant. Hardcases run out by the Texas Rangers flocked to northern Arizona for respite.
Even the Clanton gang, ousted from Tombstone by the Earps, moved back to their New Mexico ranch and started stealing Arizona cattle.

On November 4, 1886, 500 landowners voted for Commodore Perry Owens and his law-and-order platform; 409 voted for Hubbell. A pall of black-powder gunsmoke hung over Holbrook as the citizens celebrated Owens's victory. Friends organized a dance in honor of his election, with music by a Mormon band from Saint Johns.

Later, his chief deputy, Joe T. McKinney, recalled: "Commodore Owens had a great reputation as a brave man and many wonderful things were promised and expected after he was in the sheriff's office. Lawlessness was everywhere."

Owens moved into the Barth Hotel in Saint Johns and started as Apache County sheriff in January 1887. He appointed strong men as deputies -- Osmer Flake, Lon Hawes, Joe Hershey, John Scarlett, Frank Wattron, Joe McKinney, and the Tewksbury partisan who later turned the Pleasant Valley quarrel into a vendetta, James D. Houck.

The Pleasant Valley conflict turned bloody in February. Shots were fired at one Navajo herder early in the month, but he shot back. The cowboys left for easier pickings. Some days later another Navajo herder was found shot dead. The cowboy roughnecks had declared war.

The Hashknife outfit put John Payne, a big ruthless Texan, in charge of moving sheepmen off Hashknife range. Paine and his riders gave ultimatums to Tewksbury partisans: Leave, or else.
With the sheep out of Pleasant Valley, things cooled down a bit. One sheepherder was dead, but people felt he was just a Navajo. The dead sheep were another matter. They cost the Daggs -- and the Tewksburys -- money. But more than that, the brothers rankled at losing to the Grahams.

As the storm brewed, Commodore Perry Owens rode endless miles to uphold the law in his domain. He left the warrant for Andy Cooper's arrest gathering dust in Taylor, but served countless others. Lawbreakers went to jail, or left the country.

Then Mormon teamsters started losing horses. They would leave their teams hobbled at night and often wake up to find the horses gone, with the hobbles left behind to taunt them. Apache County Critic Editor Frank Reed wrote: "The leader of this gang of rustlers has been cited as one Andy Cooper, who was classed as being a horse thief desperado of the most daring stamp, and the boldest man in his operations as had ever cursed the west."

Nevertheless, Commodore Perry Owens ignored Andy Cooper. As he brought in lawbreaker after lawbreaker and collected license fee after license fee (he was liable for fees that went uncollected), Commodore's reputation grew. But horses and cattle continued to disappear, and the local papers continued to remind Sheriff Owens about Andy Cooper.

For months, Andy Cooper and John Payne ramrodded the wild bunch that harassed the sheepherders. The next casualties hit close to home. Ignoring the advice of his sons, Mart Blevins rode away from his Canyon Creek ranch one morning in late July 1887, looking for missing horses. He was never seen again. Some thought the Navajos killed him, others said horse thieves. Seven years later, a rancher on Cherry Creek found a human skull near a rusty rifle that had belonged to Mart Blevins.

Two weeks passed without word of Mart. The Blevins brothers were convinced sheepmen had killed the old man. Will Barnes, Arizona historian and owner of the Long Tom ranch, was at a Hashknife roundup camp south of Holbrook when John Payne, Hampton Blevins, and six others rode up on August 10. Payne announced they were headed for Pleasant Valley in search of Mart Blevins, and to "start a little war of our own." Barnes and the wagon boss tried to talk the riders out of violence, but Payne's job at the Hashknife was to get rid of sheepmen, so arguments against force meant nothing to the rowdies.

The horsemen passed the deserted Blevins ranch at the head of Canyon Creek -- the Blevinses had rented a house in Holbrook for their womenfolk -- and trailed down Canyon Creek, keeping an eye out for signs of the old man.

Finding none, they headed for the Middleton ranch, where John Payne had ordered everyone to "leave, or else."

Jim and Ed Tewksbury, Jim Roberts, and Joseph Boyer were at the Middleton spread when Payne, Hamp Blevins, Tom Tucker, Bob Glasspie, and Bob Carrington rode up. Payne repeated his ultimatum, saying the occupants hadn't left and they'd have to pay.

According to Jim Roberts, Hamp Blevins reached for his pistol. Jim Tewksbury, deadly with a saddle gun, shot Hamp dead. Jim Roberts fired at John Payne, clipping his ear and splattering the side of his head with blood. Another Tewksbury bullet killed Payne's horse. He jumped away from his mount, but took only two or three strides before Tewksbury bullets dropped him lifeless near the body of Hamp Blevins. Tom Tucker was shot through the lungs; Glasspie and Carrington escaped untouched.

After the Middleton ranch shootout, Andy Cooper and the Graham faction may have gotten the idea that the law had sided with the Tewksburys. Deputy Sheriff Joe McKinney refused to investigate, saying it wasn't his jurisdiction (The Tonto Basin is in Gila and Yavapai Counties; McKinney was an Apache County deputy). Deputy James Houck, a former state assemblyman from Apache County, was a Tewksbury partisan. William Mulvenon, sheriff of Yavapai County, led a posse into Pleasant Valley but failed to arrest a single Tewksbury, even though he had ten warrants. His posse met a group of Graham men led by Andy Cooper at the Perkins store. Andy saw the officers were empty-handed and told them the cattlemen would "take matters into their own hands" and exterminate the sheepmen if the sheriff did not arrest the Tewksburys.

Pleasant Valley being outside his jurisdiction, Apache County Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens still found no reason to serve the warrant outstanding on Andy Cooper.

The Pleasant Valley War is also known as the Graham-Tewksbury feud, but none of its first victims bore those names. The Grahams may not have been involved at this point, because of Tom Graham's orders against killing. Andy Cooper, though, was another matter. His father was missing, his brother dead. He wanted action. So he usurped leadership of the Graham riders every chance he got, hoping to get a Tewksbury in the sights of his guns.

Owens's own deputy pushed the battle past the point of no return. On August 17, 1887, Deputy James Houck killed young Billy Graham from ambush. Suddenly, a range war between cattle and sheep interests became a personal vendetta between Grahams and Tewksburys.

The warrant for Andy Cooper's arrest lay in Taylor, ignored. So the county board of commissioners called Sheriff Owens in for an accounting. Will Barnes was there. "...They asked him why he had not made the arrest. His reply was that he had not been able to locate Cooper." Barnes told the board that he had seen Cooper in Holbrook two days before. The board told Owens to arrest Cooper within ten days or be ousted from office.

Now, as his horse dipped its head to drink from the Little Colorado, Owens considered his odds.
In the few days since the board's command, more men died in Pleasant Valley. Tom Graham, who had been against a shooting war, now wanted to avenge his young half-brother. Graham, Cooper, and a group of riders descended on the Tewksbury ranch as dawn broke September 2, 1887.

They caught John Tewksbury and William Jacobs about a mile from the Tewksbury home, and killed them. The cowboys kept the remaining Tewksburys pinned down inside the house. Hogs came and rooted at the bodies. But when they started to maul them, Mary Ann Tewksbury, John's wife, couldn't stand it. She braved the Graham guns to bury her husband and his friend in a shallow grave she scraped out with an old shovel. Cowboy chivalry protected her.

Commodore Owens rode slowly down Holbrook's Main Street, south of the tracks. He stabled the sorrel at Brown & Kinder's livery. Frank Wattron walked over from his drugstore, a shotgun under his arm, to tell Owens that Andy Cooper had bragged of killing one of the Tewksburys and another man he did not know. He asked if Owens wanted help.

"I don't want anyone hurt in this matter," Owens said. "They've been telling all around the country that I was afraid to serve these Cooper warrants, and a lot of other stuff. I'll show them that I'm not afraid and take him single-handed or die a-trying. You just sit back and watch me do it, that's all I ask."

Owens was in the livery stable cleaning his pistol, when John Blevins came for Andy's horse. "Your man's leaving town," Sam Brown told the sheriff. Owens put his six-shooter back together and walked out of the livery stable with his Winchester .45-60 in his hand.

A few minutes later, Andy Cooper and Sam Houston Blevins were dead, Mose Roberts was dying, and John Blevins was wounded.

At the inquest, Commodore Perry Owens gave this testimony:
. . . I went and got my Winchester and went down to arrest Cooper. Before I got there, I saw someone looking out at the door. When I got close to the house, they shut the door. I stepped up on the porch, looked through the window and also looked in the room to my left. I seen Cooper and his brother (John) and others in that room. I called to Cooper to come out. Cooper took out his pistol and also his brother took out his pistol. Then Cooper went from that room into the east room. His brother came to the door on my left, took the door knob in his hand and held the door open a little. Cooper came to the door facing me from the east room. Cooper held this door partly open with his head out. I says, "Cooper I want you." Cooper says, "What do you want with me?" I says, "I have a warrant for you." Cooper says, "What warrant?" I told him the same warrant that I spoke to him about some time ago that I left in Taylor, for horse stealing. Cooper says, "Wait." I says, "Cooper, no wait." Cooper says, "I won't go." I shot him. This brother of his to my left behind me jerked open the door and shot at me, missing me and shot the horse which was standing aside and a little behind me. I whirled my gun and shot at him, and then ran out in the street where I could see all parts of the house. I could see Cooper through the window on his elbow with his head towards the window. He disappeared to the right of the window. I fired through the house expecting to hit him between the shoulders. I stopped a few moments. Some man (Mose Roberts) jumped out of the house on the northeast corner out of a door or window, I can't say, with a six shooter in his right hand and his hat off. There was a wagon or buckboard between he and I. I jumped to one side of the wagon and fired at him. Did not see him any more. I stood there a few moments when there was a boy (Sam Houston Blevins) jumped out of the front of the house with a six shooter in his hands. I shot him. I stayed a few moments longer. I see no other man so I left the house. When passing by the house I see no one but somebody's feet and legs sticking out the door. I then left and came on up town.

It was signed C.P. Owens.

Owens's version of the gunfight was seconded by several witnesses: C. O. Brown, Will C. Barnes, Frank Wattron, Frank Reed, and William Adams, among others.

The coroner's jury found no fault with Owens.

The Sheriff was a hero for but an instant. Often he served warrants on dead men. Deputy James Houck viciously lynched Jim Stott, James Scott, and Billy Wilson. The Saint Johns Herald wrote: "The common people are beginning to think that our territory has had enough of desperadoes as 'peace' officers, who parade about with abbreviated cannon strapped to their hips. ...The trouble with the desperado-class of officers is that they shoot whom they please, and are acquitted on the plea that their victim 'had it in for 'em' and the shooting was in self defense...."

The Board of Supervisors became antagonistic, often disallowing Owens's expenses. He once had to threaten them at gunpoint to get paid. He didn't run for a second term, choosing instead to become a guard for the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad. Later he was a Deputy U.S. Marshall under M.K. Meade.

Eventually, Owens moved to Seligman where he ran a saloon. At the age of 50, he married Elizabeth Barrett. She was 23. The couple had no children. In his sixties, Owens' mind failed. Born July 29, 1852, and named after the hero of Lake Erie, Commodore Oliver Perry, Owens died May 10, 1919. He lies buried in an unmarked grave in Flagstaff, Arizona.

The warrant for the arrest of Andy Cooper rests in the archives of the Apache County court in St. Johns, yellow with age. Across the back, Commodore Perry Owens had scrawled: "Party against whom this warrant was issued was killed while resisting arrest."

# # #

What about the West, then?

2011-03-30T23:27:00.000+09:00

Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey and Jack London either lived the West or listened to people who did. I'm a generation behind L'Amour, if you figure a generation to be thirty years. Still, I feel I knew many of the people who "won" the West. That's why I write about the West, and I'd like to let you all know about the sons and daughters of the pioneers that I knew. Let me tell you about Aunt Hat.

Aunt Hat's Chili

Aunt Hat and Uncle Jess lived on the bluff above Show Low Creek. Their house was small, stucco on frame, with one of those wavy galvanized tin roofs. But you'd be surprised how many people it could hold whenever Aunt Hat made chili.

There was always a string of chili peppers hanging in the kitchen. And whenever she'd run low, she'd send Earl over to Orlando Baca's place in Concho to buy another string.

Aunt Hat kept a stock pot on the back of her old wood-burning stove. She and Grandma Em were the only women I knew who still cooked with wood. Bones and meat trimmings went into that stock pot every day. And every morning, after a couple of chunks of juniper went into the stove to liven up the coals left over from the night before, Aunt Hat would fish the bones out of the stock pot, scrape the marrow out, pull off any strings of meat, and toss those bones in the dog pan. She'd skim the grease off the top of the stock pot and put it in a Mason jar. Never did figure out what she did with that grease, but every once in a while, that Mason jar would be empty.

Come time to make chili, Aunt Hat ladled a couple of quarts of stock into a big cast-iron dutch oven. She'd have a pile of meat trimmings, a couple of pounds at least, which would go into the dutch oven to boil with the stock.

"Go get the onions," she'd say to me. "Even a knee-high brat like you can cut onions." So I got to peel and chop a half dozen big ol' onions to put in that pot with the meat trimmings. Talk about tears.

Three or four of those hot chili peppers came off the string, and Aunt Hat ground them up on an old Anasazi metate Uncle Jess had found not far from the house. Grand Uncle Ned found the remains of a rudimentary cliff dwelling in that bluff above the creek. Carbon dating put a wooden beam from the dwelling at ca. 1200. The metate may have been from the same time. It sure made powder out of those chili peppers, seeds and all.

Some folks put the chili powder right in the kettle. Not Aunt Hat. She always roasted the chili powder in a frying pan and then mixed it with lard to make a kind of chili roux. "Rounds it off just a little," she'd say. Into the dutch oven it went, along with two or three grated carrots, a couple of tomatoes, and some roasted, skinned, and chopped California chiles -- mild, but flavorful.

The dutch oven sat and simmered on Aunt Hat's wood stove until the concoction was reduced to dark, reddish-brown liquor, thick with gelatin from the meat scraps. She'd soaked a quart of pinto beans overnight, and they were now plump and swollen. Aunt Hat dumped the beans into the dutch oven, water and all, and set it on the back of the stove where it would stew until the next evening.

Aunt Hat never tasted her chili until the morning of the second day. When she lifted the cast-iron lid of that deep dutch oven, steam rose and the unmistakable fragrance of chile con carne y frijoles filled the kitchen. She'd taste the chili and start adjusting things. Some cilantro. Black pepper. A little vinegar. A bay leaf or two. A touch of honey.

Satisfied, she hefted the big lid back on the oven and let it sit. There on the back of the stove, it wasn't hot enough to boil, but it was too hot to spoil. And all those ingredients just sat there and melded.

The men and boys would start coming just after noon. They'd put two loads of hay in the big barn just over the bluff, and they're ready for dinner. No one in Show Low, Arizona, eats lunch. It's breakfast, dinner, and supper, and the biggest meal of all is dinner.

Aunt Hat's ready. The chili is steaming in a huge bowl in the center of a table that seats twelve. She's cut inch and a half thick slices of the whole-wheat bread she baked on Thursday, and piled them on two platters, one at each end of the table. Pats of golden butter the size of an upside-down coffee cup stand ready for the bread. The deep color of the butter tells you one of Uncle Jess's cows is a Jersey. The apple pie is still in the pantry. After the bread and chili, it will be served with fresh cream and coffee.

In my end of Arizona, bread and chili go together naturally. You butter a slice of that homemade bread. Put in on your plate. And smother it with chili. My mouth waters just writing about it.

Aunt Hat's gone. So's Uncle Jess. Even Earl rides Old Blue in the great beyond. He never did get a driver's licence. Us kids that crowded Aunt Hat's on chili days grew up and moved away. Now we've got kids and grandkids of our own. And while our chili don't hold a candle to Aunt Hat's, we still try.

# # #

(c) Charles T. Whipple

Review of Hell Fire in Paradise

2011-03-25T23:34:00.001+09:00

Nik Morton, fellow Black Horse Westerns author and editor in chief of Solstice Publishing has reviewed my novel Hell Fire in Paradise.

And look here for an interview with my humble self by Jean Mead.

Earthquake, etc.

2011-03-17T23:32:00.001+09:00

March 11, about 3:30 pm, I was at the hospital for a regular checkup. I'd just paid my bill and received my chit for meds, which I took to the hospital pharmacy. The meds weren't ready. I started to sit down when the building started to shake. That's nothing unusual in Japan. Happens quite often. But the shaking didn't quit. I walked quickly down the hall and outside on the ground floor smoker's deck. The shaking increased. I had to grab an iron post to stay upright. The steel walkway between the emergency ward and the hospital wards twisted and crackled. The van parked in front of the open space where I stood literally danced. The shaking and dancing went on for a good minute. The hospital didn't fall on my head.

Back at the pharmacy, meds were all over the floor. Took the pharmacists another 15 minutes to put mine together. I was last for the afternoon.

Outside, my car was still in one piece. A broken sewer line was spewing water onto the parking lot at the south end. A line from the big diesel fuel tank was broken, too. Maintenance people rushed to attend to the leaking fuel.

I tried to call my wife, but Japan, for some reason, turns all cell phone carriers off when there's a major earthquake. I've never heard a convincing argument on what that happens. Hoping all was well at home, I started the 10-minute drive.

The hospital is located on reclaimed land, which stretches out into Tokyo Bay about five kilometers from the former shoreline. Lots of liquefaction. Some buildings canted. Water seeping out here and there. But the roads were open and the traffic lights worked. I drove over the overpass and up the hill to high ground. On the way, I pulled over once to wait out a strong aftershock. People were already crowding into 7-Eleven to start buying up supplies.

At home, some books were off shelves, one mirror was broken, but nothing major. It felt good to live on high ground.

I didn't sleep that night. Aftershocks were scary. Coverage of the problems at the nuclear plant was on all TV channels. Videos of tsunami washing away entire towns. People crying out, screaming as their houses were swept away with them inside, having thought going to the second story would keep them out of the water. Tsunami carrying ships of thousands of tons inland for two or three kilometers. Cars floating as if they were boats. Water covering the runways at the Sendai Airport, carrying away baggage tractors, trailers, everything.

Nonstop coverage continued the next day. I caught some Zs in the big chair.

Quake epicenters have switched around. The original one that registered 9.0 on the Richter scale was off northeastern Japan seacoast. The next day a 6.8 quake struck in Niigata. Slightly after that, a 6.0 in Nagano, where Japan's last winter Olympics were held. Yesterday, 6.4 on the southern flank of Mt. Fuji. Tonight, 6.4 off the Pacific coast of Chiba, the prefecture in which I live.

I type while watching NTV. They're chronicling the cleanup, the hunt for relatives, the lack of fuel and supplies in the 190 km strip of the Pacific coast that moved 2.4 meters closer to California because of the big quake.

We don't know what will happen with the nukes. We don't know if another monster quake or even a big quake will hit us again before things settle down. We just don't know.

Best course on PACING I've ever seen

2011-02-25T16:02:00.002+09:00

Mary Buckham knows her stuff. I'm posting this from her just in case some of you might want to fork over $30 and get sixty-five times that much in useful advice. Mary's really really good.

Charlie

March 1-25, 2011
Pacing: How To Create a Page Turning Manuscript
by Mary Buckham
$30 at www.writeruniv.com

What keeps a book intriguing enough to have fans turn the pages and not set it down? How can one author's books have you riveted and another's leave you feeling ho-hum? Ever wondered if there are key craft tips and techniques to balance fast-paced conflict, tension, suspense or mystery, action and emotion? In PACING: HOW TO CREATE A PAGE TURNING MANUSCRIPT you'll learn:

* The ingredients of a page turner
* What hooks are and how to maximize them
* The power of effective scenes: common pacing pitfalls to avoid
* The ten elements of strong pacing
* How to use subplots and secondary characters
* How to avoid a sagging middle
* What a beat is and how to use it
* Great beginnings and endings that have your readers wanting more!

Mary Buckham is co-author of BREAK INTO FICTION: 11 Steps to Building a Story That Sells and an award-winning Romantic Suspense author. She has hundreds of free-lance articles to her credit, a non-fiction book and is a former Magazine Editor. Currently she presents writing workshops online and around the country. Mary encourages you to visit her website at www.MaryBuckham.com for more information about her and her current writing projects.

Line Rider

2011-02-12T12:27:00.003+09:00

David Cranmer says some good words about my latest story -- Line Rider. Go take a look.

Demise of books vastly overstated

2011-02-10T11:08:00.001+09:00

Friend and fellow author Mattew Mayo sends word of a healthy book market. Happy reading.

Take a look HERE.

Letter from a reader of Vulture Gold

2011-02-07T20:41:00.000+09:00

Hello, Charlie san

I've just finished your book "Vulture Gold".
What a great story it is!
And I'm so glad Havelock made it.

This is the story you wrote last year, right?
I realized when Havelock survived in the desert.

Your stories are always different and I can't tell what's happen next until I've finished it.
That makes me excited.
But this time "Vulture Gold" was difficult to read for me.
There were lots of words I did not know, so I've read with my dictionary.
Even though it took long time, I couldn't stop it because of the characters!
The characters you wrote are always so attractive.
I wanted to make sure if Havelock is happy in the end or not.
So I'm so glad he made it!

And I wanted to say
Thank you so much
for letting me know this great story.

regards, (name withheld to protect privacy)

Chuck Tyrell book for pocket change . . . or for free

2011-01-27T22:27:00.001+09:00

Vulture Gold is now available at most online booksellers. Smashwords, of course, gives you a choice of formats.

Garet Havelock was a Cherokee half-breed and the marshal of Vulture City. But that wasn't enough to stop outlaw kingpin Barnabas Donovan from sending three armed men to rob $100,000 in bullion from the Vulture Mine headquarters, killing two people in the process.
Havelock set out to catch the thieves and recover the gold and in the unforgiving Mohave Desert, Jicarilla Apaches forced Havelock and Donovan's bunch together in a cave on Eagle Eye Mountain. Then there was Laura Donovan, half sister to the outlaw leader . . . .
Now Havelock must survive the Apache "run of death" and face Donovan's gunslingers to get the gold and the girl.

Buy at Smashwords.
Buy at Western Trail Blazers.

If you want a FREE copy, contact me for details.

2011-01-24T10:59:00.001+09:00

Snake Den trailer

2011-01-21T17:34:00.003+09:00

The Snake Den trailer is finally on my own account at Youtube. I get word of purchases from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. More power to eBooks. Let's make them live.

THE SNAKE DEN

BUY THIS BOOK
HERE
HERE
or HERE

Japanese reader comments on The Snake Den

2011-01-18T18:04:00.000+09:00

I received this email from a Japanese woman (dare I say housewife?) who I met on Twitter. Remember that she's reading The Snake Den in English, which is a second language for her.

Charlie san

I've just read this book, "The Snake Den".
I couldn't stop reading when I had my time.
Thank you for the good time.

This story is different from others which I've read.
The boy is only 14 when he entered in the prison, I felt like as if I were his mother at first.
So I was very worried about him but soon I noticed even though he was too young, didn't have physical strength, to survive there,
he had a strong mind, a strong will. His strength made him physically stronger during this hard time.
It was a tough story but I believed in this boy because of his character.
I'd like to know this brave and honest young man's next story. He's still so young.
And I like people around Shawn who took care of him, supported him, treated him as a human being.
There are lots of nice people in this story...

I'm so glad after I've finished it, I could send you email.
I can say thank you directly and it's so nice.
Thank you so much!

regards
(name withheld to protect the writer's privacy)

The Snake Den Final Trailer

2011-01-08T00:52:00.001+09:00

The Snake Den is born. It is now available for purchase and download at any of the following sites.

www.solsticepublishing.com
www.lulu.com
www.smashwords.com
www.scribd.com
www.booksonboard.com
www.allromanceebooks.com
www.bookstrand.com
www.1placetoreadebook.com
www.efictionbooks.com
www.fictionwise.com
www.amazon.com
www.coffeetimeromance.com

The final version of the trailer is here.

The Snake Den

2011-01-05T12:07:00.002+09:00

Read what Solstice editor Gary Dobbs has to say about The Snake Den!

Another Chuck Tyrell novel

2011-01-05T00:23:00.003+09:00

I just got word from Robert Hale that my latest manuscript, Dollar a Day, has been accepted for publication. it will probably see daylight in late summer or early fall 2011, In the meantime, I am hard at work on another western, this one featuring Matt Stryker, who you probably met in Guns of Ponderosa. At the moment, Matt is at the scene of a murder in Rimrock, Arizona, and hired gunhand Eg Larson is in town.

Meet the Clantons -- VII

2010-09-22T16:59:00.001+09:00

After Virgil Earp got wounded from ambush, Wyatt took a posse to the Clanton ranch to arrest Phin and Ike on a charge of assault with intent to murder. They were not successful.

The Clantons sent word that they were willing to answer to the charge, but would not surrender to the Earps, as the Clantons were sure the Earps would kill them.

Finally, a duplicate warrant was issued to John H. Jackson, who took a big posse commanded by Charlie Bartholomew and Peter Spencer to arrest the Clantons, who meekly surrendered. When the posse arrived back in Tombstone, Clantons in tow, Judge Stillwell adjourned his court so he could sit as an examining magistrate. The evidence against the Clantons was slim at best. It seems Sherman McMasters made a statement that he heard Ike Clanton say that he “would have to go up and do the job over again.” Right.

On the other hand, seven men testified that Ike was in Charleston on the night of the attempted murder. Case dismissed.

Ike then had the Earps and Doc Holiday arrested for the murder of Billy Clanton. They were released on a writ of habeas corpus and nothing ever became of the charges.

“Ranching” in Apache County

Phin and Ike moved to Apache County, taking out homesteads of 160 acres each. Sister Mary Else and her second husband Eben Stanley joined them. Notice that Phin and Eben were indicted by a grand jury on five, count them, five counts of improper branding and marking of calves and at least one trial was held. The verdict has been lost to history.

Still, the Clantons were continually in trouble. On the morning of June 1, 1887, Detective J.V. Brighton and Deputy Sheriff Miller carried warrants for Ike Clanton and others. The charges were cattle rustling. They rode to Wilson’s ranch on Blue River, where they saw Ike Clanton coming their way. Clanton recognized the lawmen and turned to ride away. As his horse turned, Ike drew his Winchester from its scabbard. The lawmen commanded Ike to halt. He did not, and Brighton fired, killing Ike Clanton instantly.

Phin Clanton served a prison term, and died on January 5, 1906, after suffering extreme exposure in a snow storm. The cause of death was congestive chills and fever. He was buried in Globe. His ranch was still in existence as of 1982, run by the son of Phin’s step-son.

From the files of the now-extinct National Association of Outlaw and Lawman History

International Award

2010-09-16T23:47:00.001+09:00

Charles Whipple, who writes Black Horse Westerns as Chuck Tyrell, won THE 2010 OAXACA INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE COMPETITION, AGAVE AWARD FOR LITERATURE for his short story A Matter of Tea.

The competition is held in conjunction with the Oaxaca International Film and Video Festival because cinema and literature have always been closely intertwined. This competition provides a forum for writers from around the world to display their talents.

Whipple's story was selected as the winner from a thousand entries. He will fly to Oaxaca, Mexico, to receive the award. The top ten stories in the competition will be published in a special commemorative edition.

Moving west

2010-08-27T17:25:00.002+09:00

I thought I post this list of what a husband and wife were suggested to take along when going to settle in the west.

1 3-1/2" (tire width) wagon with cover
2 yoke of oxen or teams of horses or mules
1 plow, harrow, or good scraper
2 extra chains
2 axes
1 shovel
2 hoes
1 rake
1 pick or crowbar
1 scythe or snath
1 hand saw
1 jack plane
1-1/4 and 1-1/2-inch augers
Brace and bits
1 hatchet
2 guns and ammunition
20# 8s and 10s nails
12 lights (8x10" glass)
Wash tub and washboard
Buckets, breadpan
Wash basin, milk pans
Milk strainer, lantern
Bake over, camp kettle, fry pan, tin plates
Cups, knives, forks, spoons
Bedding, blankets, clothing
Socks, boots and shoes
Thread, needles, pins
Upper and sole leather
1 cow, beef, steer
Shoe pegs and lasts
600# flour
100# bacon
30# dried apples
5 gal. molasses
40# sugar
10# butter
6# rice
5# candles
1# mustard
1# black pepper
Some spices
1/2# ginger
2# yeast powder
4# bicarbonate of soda
20# fine salt
20# soap
1/2# composition
12 boxes of matches
3 boxes of pills
1 bottle of sweet oil
1 bottle of castor oil
1 bottle of turpentine
1 bottle of pain killer
1 bottle of Jamaica ginger
2 oz of indigo
1 gallon of alcohol
40 feet of rope
Whip saw
Water barrel
4 bushels of seed wheat
1/2 bushel of seed corn
2 bushels of seed potatoes
Garden seeds: carrots, beets, turnips, squash
cabbage. onions, tomatoes, peas, beans, radishes. etc.

THIS OUTFIT IS FOR TWO PERSONS

Meet the Clantons -- VI

2010-08-16T20:13:00.004+09:00

The inquest into the shootings concluded that the three cowboys met their deaths by gunshot wounds.

Duh.

The Tombstone Nugget recorded this sarcastic article.

Glad to Know

The people of the community are deeply indebtyed to the twelcve intelligent men who composed the coroners (sic) jury for the valuable information that the three persons who were killed last Wednesday were shot. Some thirty or forty shots were fired, and the whole affair was witnessed by perhaps a dozen people, and we have a faint recollection of hearing someone say the dead men were shot, but people are liable to be mistaken and the verdict reassures us. We might have thought they had been struck by lightning or stung to death by hornets and we never could have told whether they were in the way of the lightning or the lightning was in their way.

Now listen to this.

Warrants were issued for the arrest of the Earps and Doc Holliday on the charge of murder. A hearing was held before Justice of the Peace Wells Spicer. It lasted for a month, and several witnesses testified that Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury were unarmed and that Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury were mortally wounded before they drew their pistols.

Wells Spicer

Still, Justice Spicer’s “opinion” was that the Earps acted in self defense. He sent on to say, however, that Virgil Earp “committed an injudicious and censurable act” in calling upon Wyatt Earp and J. H. Holliday to assist him in arresting and disarming the Clantons and McLaurys.

Then, Virgil Earp was wounded from ambush, and Wyatt went on a rampage in January 1882.

Meet the Clantons -- V

2010-08-15T11:35:00.001+09:00

The Tombstone Nugget reported the funeral of the slain cowboys.

The Burial of the Dead Cowboys – An Immense Procession, Etc.

While it was not entirely expected, the funeral of Billy Clanton and Thomas and Frank McLowry (sic), yesterday, was the largest ever witnessed in Tombstone. It was advertised to take place at 3 o’clock, but it was about 4 o’clock before the cortege moved, yet a large number had gathered at the undertaker’s long before the first time mentioned. The bodies of the three men, neatly and tastefully dressed, were placed in handsome caskets with heavy silver trimmings. Upon each was a silver plate bearing the name, age, birthplace and date of the death of each. A short time before the funeral, photographs were taken of the dead. The procession was headed by the Tombstone brass band playing the solemn and touching march of the dead. The first wagon containd the body of Billy Clanton, followed by those of the McLowry (sic) boys. A few carriages came next in which were near friends and relatives of the deceased, among whom were Ike and Finn Clanton. After these were about three hundred people on foot, twenty-two carriages and buggies and one four-horse stage, and the horsemen, making a line of nearly rtwo blocks in length. The two brothers were buried in one grave, and young Clanton close by those who were his friends in life and companions in death. The inscrip@tion upon the plates of the caskets stated that Thomas McLowry was 25 years of age, Frank McLowry 29 years of age, both natives of Mississippi, and that William H. Clanton was 19 years of age and a native of Texas.

It seems newspapers of the day did not believe in paragraphs.

One interesting sidelight. Originally, Billy Clanton’s headstone read: Sacred to the Memory of William Clanton Who Was Murdered October 26, 1881. Age 19 years. Now there is only a small marker that reads: Billy Clanton killed Oct. 26, 1881.

Meet the Clantons -- IV

2010-08-10T18:34:00.003+09:00

The Earps and the Clantons were like oil and water. Or, as they say in Japan, like monkeys and dogs.

The Arizona Daily Star, a Tucson newspaper, had this to say about the Clantons.

The Clanton brothers numbered three – Ike, Phineas (Phin), and Billy. They lived on a cattle ranch on the San Pedro River, about twelve miles from Tombstone, with their father. Old man Clanton was murdered in August by Mexicans with five others. The Clantons then fell heir to all of the old man’s cattle, and were pretty well fixed. They were fine specimens of the frontier cattleman. Billy, although only 17 years old (sic) was over six feet in height, and built in proportion, while Isaac and Phineas are wiry, determined-looking men, without a pound of surplus flesh. They lived on horse-back, and led a life of hardship.

From the deposition of Ike Clanton, taken by the court, this is how things started.

On the morning of October 25, 1881, Billy and Ike Clanton and the McLaury brothers ate breakfast at Chandler’s milk ranch. They then separated, with Ike and Tom McLaury riding for Tombstone and Billy and Frank heading off to round up some stock at the McLaury ranch.

Almost from the moment Ike and Tom arrived in Tombstone, the Earps and Doc Holiday seemed out to pick a fight. Doc Holliday roundly abused Ike verbally, and as Ike was unarmed, Morgan Earp told him to “heel” himself and stay that way.

Next morning, when Ike was standing on a street corner with a rifle in one hand, City Marshal Virgil Earp snuck up behind him and hit him with the barrel of his pistol, disarmed him, and took him to court. There, Justice Wallace fined Ike twenty-five dollars. In the courtroom, Morgan Earp taunted Ike again, and tried to force a pistol on him.

A. Bauer, in a deposition, outlined the next actions.

Wyatt Earp met Tom McLaury on the street and, for no apparent reason, pistol-whipped him. McLaury was unarmed.

About this time, Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury rode into town. A neighbor, Major Fink, accompanied them. They’d just settled down for a drink in a saloon when they heard what had happened to Ike and Tom. Frank said, “We won’t drink,” and they separated to search for their brothers.

Billy Clanton is the tall man in the back row

Billy Clanton ran into Billy Claiborne, and they went around to several livery corrals looking for Ike’s horse. In his deposition, Clairborne said Billy told him that he wanted Ike to go home. “I don’t want to fight anyone,” Billy said, “and nobody wants to fight me.”

The Gunfight at OK Corral

The two sets of brothers, Clantons and McLaurys, stood with Sheriff John H. Behan (they say Behan was trying very hard to avert a gun fight) in a vacant lot next to Fly’s Photography Gallery.

Here’s Ike Clanton’s version of the action, according to his deposition.

The Earps and Doc Holliday approached. Virgil said, “Throw up your hands!” The someone else, probably Wyatt, said, “You sons of bitches have been looking for a fight and now you can have one!”

Billy Clanton put his hands in the air and cried out, “Don’t shoot me” I don’t want to fight!”

Morgan Earp shot him, and he fell against the house behind him. Before he could draw his pistol, he was shot through the right wrist.

Seeing Wyatt’s pistol pointed at him, Ike Clanton grabbed Wyatt’s arm and held it a few seconds. While he was doing this, Wyatt fired. Ike released his arm and ran for the cover of Fly’s gallery. Several shots followed him.

Billy managed to draw his pistol with his left hand. He fought back, wounding Virgil and Morgan Earp. He tried to cock the pistol for another show, but lacked the strength.

Fly came from his gallery with a rifle. “Someone take that pistol away from that man or I will kill him,” he said, referring to Billy. He was told to do it himself. Fly wrenched the pistol from Billy’s weakened grasp. Billy said, “Give me some more cartridges.”

According to his deposition, Wesley Fuller saw the Earps and Holliday going down Fremont Street and tried to reach Billy Clanton to warn him of the impending trouble. He arrived too late, but was able to watch the gunfight from the shelter of an alley. Seeing Billy rolling on the ground in agony, Fuller picked him up and carried him into a small house on the corner of Fremont and Third streets.

“Look and see where I’m shot,” Billy said. Fuller found one wound in the left breast from which the lung was oozing, and one in the right side of the belly beneath the twelfth rib. Fuller told Billy he would live. “Get the doctor and give me something to put me to sleep,” Billy pleaded.

Dr. Giberson, who was there, said, “It’s no use to give him anything.”

About that time, Thomas Keefe, a carpenter, helped carry the dying Tom McLaury into the same house. He said he heard Billy screaming in pain. “They have murdered me!” he said. As curious onlookers crowded in, he again said, “I’ve been murdered. Go away. Give me some air.”

Keefe said Billy “turned and kicked and twisted in every manner with pain.” Dr. Millar arrived and Keefe held Billy while he injected two syringes of morphine near his stomach wound. Billy died about 15 minutes later.

An article in the Tombstone Nugget had this to say about the incident:

The firing altogether didn’t occupy more than 25 seconds, during which time fully 30 shots were fired. After the fight was over, Billy Clanton, who, with wonderful vitality, survived his wounds for fully an hour, was carried into a house where he lay, and everything possible was done to make his last moments easy. He was game to the last, never uttering a word of complaint, and just before breathing his last, he said, “Goodbye boys; go away and let me die.”

That evening Finn Clanton, brother of Billy and Ike, came into town, and placing himself under the guard of the Sheriff, visited the morgue to see the remains of his brother, and then passed the night in jail in the company of the other brother . . . .

. . . At the morgue the bodies of the three slain cowboys lay side by side, covered with a sheet. Very little blood appeared on their clothing, and only on the face of young Billy Clanton was there any distortion of the features or evidence of pain in dying. The features of the Two McLowery (sic) boys looked as calm and placid in death as if they had died peaceably. No unkind remarks were made by anyone, but a feeling of unusual sorrow seemed to prevail . . . .

The next day, a funeral was held for Billy and the McLaury brothers. We’ll talk about that next.

I’ll add the photos tomorrow.

Meet the Clantons -- III

2010-08-02T20:04:00.004+09:00

Last instalment, the year was 1877 and the Clantons had moved to a ranch 14 miles from Tombstone. About this time, oldest son John Wesley Clanton and his family went back to California.

In those days, the cattle business was good in southern Arizona, and the Clantons prospered. They soon met the McLaury brothers, Frank and Tom, young men who had a ranch in the Sulphur Springs Valley. The Clantons and the McLaurys became close friends and occasionally did business together.

Tom & Frank McLaury

This time frame was also the one in which the Clantons and McLaurys somehow made enemies of the Earp brothers, who were Tombstone gamblers and part-time lawmen. The enmity also included Doc Holiday, the dentist gunman.

No one really knows what started the feud, but a story often told says it stemmed from a robbery of the Benson stage on March 15, 1881. Apparently Billy Clanton saw Doc Holiday kill stage driver Budd Philpot. Also, some of the robbers were acquaintances of Ike Clanton. And, the story has it that Wyatt Earp, then running for Sheriff of Cochise County, approached Ike Clanton, asked him to set up those “acquaintances,” and offered Ike the reward money if Wyatt could kill them and “get the glory.”

The plot got curiouser and curiouser and ended up creating a burning hatred between the two factions.

Old Man Newton Clanton was ambushed and killed in Guadalupe Canyon, New Mexico, in August 1881, along with four other men. He had freighted supplies in his wagon to ranchers in Animas Valley, and was returning with a herd of cattle. The men were attacked at dawn, and some were still in their bedrolls. Two men escaped. The attackers were Mexicans, and the newspaper called it murder.

In the next instalment, we’ll get into the Gunfight at OK Corral.

Meet the Clantons -- II

2010-07-30T15:37:00.003+09:00

Sorry I don’t have any photos today. Instead, we’ll have to make do with some newspaper articles about the Clantons.

From the Tucson Citizen in 1873

Another New Settlement
Newman H. Clanton and family settled on the Gila Valley, a few miles above old Camp Goodwin, August 3rd of this year. He at once laid claim to water, located a line, and now has a ditch two and a half miles in length which carries 1880 cubic feet. There is one body of fully 25,000 acres of very rich land and Mr. Clanton feels sure that with proper management he has water enough to irrigate the whole tract. This year he has cultivated 100 acres and is now preparing and will sow and plant at least 600. He was in Tucson early this week procuring utensils and supplies. He says the settlement now consists of three families . . . in all, fifteen persons, and that more are coming. He is very anxious to have families settle there so that a public school may be opened just as soon as possible. Families will be supplied with a water privilege at the actual pro-rata cost of the ditch, and accommodated with all the information and assistance Mr. Clanton can afford. We have passed over the land and know it to be rich as can be found anywhere. The water of the river is of first quality and the locality is very healthy as far as known. The settlement is near Camp Grant, not very far from Camp Apache and Bowie, and within reasonable distance of the important mining camp of Clifton. All these places must have much grain, vegetables and all sorts of farm and dairy products.

Jump to 1874
Again, the Tucson Citizen

All who live in the Gila Valley near old Camp Goodwin and at Pueblo Viejo are enthusiastic in their accounts of the richness of the soil and the ease with which a man may make a farm.
. . . About 12 months ago, he (Newman Clanton) moved to a point near old Camp Goodwin and about 160 miles northeast of Tucson and within Pima County. The place is now called Clantonville.

The paper goes on to invite one and all to move to Clantonville and obtain “land abundant at government price . . .”

Also in this time frame, Newman apparently ran the Clanton House Hotel at Fort Thomas.

Clantonville did not thrive. In 1877, Newman and sons Phin, Ike, and Billy moved to a ranch on the San Pedro River near Charleston, some fourteen miles from Tombstone.

Terry “Ike” Clanton standing by the single adobe wall left from the old ranch house, ca. 1998. See the Clanton Family website for details.

Meet the Clantons -- I

2010-07-26T15:31:00.007+09:00

In the telling of the gunfight at OK Corral, the Clantons and the McLaurys are made out to be the baddies. From the files of the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History, let’s meet the Clantons.

Newman Haynes Clanton, often known as Old Man Clanton, father of John Wesley, Phin, Ike, and Billy, was born in Davidson County, Tennessee, in 1816. His father, Henry Clanton, is said to have fought in the Battle of New Orleans.

Newman married Mariah P. Kelso on January 5, 1840, in Callaway County, Missouri. She was 16. Newman and Mariah settled down on a farm, where their first three children were born:

Newton "Old Man" Clanton

John Wesley in 1841, Phineas Fay in 1845, and Joseph Isaac in 1847.
The family later surfaces in Illinois, where daughter Mary Elsie was born in 1852, and then in Dallas, Texas, where they were farming again. Poll tax records of the time show Newman owning from six to thirty-eight cattle during his Dallas years. Two more children were born there, Hester in 1854 and Alonzo in 1859.

Two years later, the family moved to Hamilton County, Texas, a wild unsettled area with many hostile Indians. Then the Civil War broke out.

A company of company of Home Guards was organized under Captain W. H. Cotton. Records show Newman Clanton as a private and John Wesley Clanton, 19, a first corporal. John Wesley lasted only about six weeks. He then left Ellis Country and enlisted in the Twelfth Regiment of Texas Cavalry. Four months later, he left and went home to Hamilton County, a deserter. He was caught and court martialed, but not hanged. He lost his pay and gained a dishonourable discharge . . . but he also enlisted in various other places. Once in Waco, March 1862. Once again in Ft. Herbert in 1863 (he went AWOL three months later). And yet again in his home county of Hamilton, where he served 23 days at two dollars a day. He claimed he was never paid.

Newton was not idle during the war, as Mariah gave birth to their seventh and last child, William Harrison Clanton, in 1862.

After the end of the war, Newman, John Wesley and Phin went west, and showed up on a list of people at Fort Bowie, Arizona, on route to California, who formerly belonged to the Confederate States Army. The list also included physical descriptions. Newman Clanton: six feet one inch, fair complexion, light hair, and blue eyes. John Wesley Clanton: five feet eleven inches, fair complexion, light hair, and brown eyes. Phin Clanton: Five feet eight inches, fair complexion, brown hair, and blue eyes.

Joseph Isaac "Ike" Clanton

The family left Fort Bowie and headed for California, but Mariah died some time in 1866, leaving Newman with seven children ranging from four to twenty-five years of age. John Wesley got married in California to Nancy Rose Kelsey, 17, and his brother Phin lived with them. Their first child, Mary, was born in California in 1870.

Clanton daughter Mary Elsie also married in California to John Franklin Slinkard. They had five children.

The next we hear of the Clanton family, they are in Arizona, and we’ll take up that story in the next instalment.

Meeting of the Western Union

2010-07-12T21:06:00.004+09:00

Fifty members of Western Union, an organization of Western fiction and movie buffs in Japan, met at the Chuck Wagon restaurant in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, on Saturday, July 10, 2010. It was the 10th meeting of the group, which was formed three years ago, in the wake of another organization (which I don't remember the name of). The "meeting" went on for three hours over TexMex food and pitchers of beer. Above is the commemorative picture of the bunch. I'm somewhere in the back in a brown straw hat.

Chuck Tyrell was a guest speaker. Black Horse Westerns in general and Guns of Ponderosa in particular received a rounding recommendation from Tyrell. Several of the members wanted specific information on how to purchase BHW, which I provided. I mentioned Amazon around the world and suggested The Book Depository.

Duke Hiroi is Western Union's gun expert. His amazing knowledge of guns of the west puts me to shame and would be a lesson to all writers of western fiction. I'll have more to say about Duke as we learn what kinds of model guns are available for the Western fan in Japan.

Remington New Model Army model gun

2010-07-12T11:25:00.004+09:00

In Japan, people are not allowed to own or carry handguns (except the police and the gangsters, of course) so a model gun industry has grown up to serve the men and women who like the feel of a gun in their hands.

I was at a meeting of the Western Union (more to come later) on Saturday, where friend Duke Hiroi showed me an article he'd written in COMBAT magazine. It was a review of a new model from Craft Apple Works, a replica of the 1858 Remington New Model Army six shooter.

Duke had high praise for the authenticity of the model. This CAW Remington is of cast zinc alloy, except for the brass trigger guard and certain internal parts that are milled steel. As a result, the weight is somewhat lighter than the real thing. However, weights and special cylinders can be ordered to put the model's weight at about 2.2 pounds.

The Remington New Model Army was a popular gun in the cap-and-ball era. It had a top strap to the frame that held the barrel firmly. Cylinders could be pre-loaded with paper cartridges and minie-ball-like conical bullets and four or five carried on the person. After six shots, the cylinder could be quickly and easily changed for another six rounds. The Colt dragoon and 1861 army and navy pistols had no top strap, which made replacing the cylinders a time-consuming job. Colt's six-shooters didn't come with a top strap until the Colt SAA Frontier and Peacemaker models came out.

I'm sure we'll hear more from Duke as time goes on.

Woman marshal in the Gateway to the West

2010-07-09T19:18:00.003+09:00

Saint Louis, Missouri, calls itself the Gateway to the West. In the late 1880s, the city was beset by a ring of counterfeiters. But an intrepid U.S. Marshal put an end to their activities -- U.S. Marshal Phoebe W. Couzins. And it was not the first time she had led her deputies in the pursuit and capture of criminals who broke federal law.

Phoebe was made a deputy marshal by her father, U.S. Marshal J.E.D. Couzins, in 1887. She was the first. Couzins was confident Phoebe could do the job because she'd already racked up a list of firsts. She was the first woman graduate of Washington University Law School in Saint Louis. She was the first woman to pass the Missouri bar exam. She was also the first professional woman lawyer in the United States. Becoming a U.S. Marshal by President Grover Cleveland merely added another first for Phoebe.

She was a well-known campaigner for women's rights, but died in 1913, seven years before the 19th amendment gave national suffrage to women. Rumor says she asked that her U.S. Marshal's badge be buried with her.

(From the files of the now-defunct National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History)
(Photo from www.picturehistory.com)

How profitable was it to rob Wells Fargo?

2010-07-03T18:21:00.003+09:00

In January 1885, J.B. Hume, chief of the Wells Fargo detective force filed a prepared statement on losses and casualties suffered by the company from 1870 to 1884.

The amount taken from Wells Fargo express shipments by stage robbers, train robbers, and burglars during those years totaled $415,312.

Rewards paid for the apprehension and arrest of the "bad guys", including a percentage of any money recovered, totaled $73,541.

Attorneys' fees paid for assisting in the prosecution of those apprehended came to $22,367.

Other "incidental" expenses incurred in connection with the robberies was $90,000.

Salaries of guards and special officers during these years totaled $326,517.

Thus, the total loss and costs for the fourteen years in question was slightly more than $927,700.

(From the files of the now-defunct National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History)

Little-known facts about outlaws

2010-07-02T18:43:00.002+09:00

How did Ella Watson hit the front page of the newspapers?

Better known as Cattle Kate, Watson was hanged on the Sweetwater for supposedly disposing of stolen cattle.

What famous Indian scout, plainsman, Pinkerton man, and Rough Rider was handed in Cheyenne for murder?

Tom Horn. He was hanged November 20, 1903, for allegedly murdering William Nickell, a young boy.

Who was uncle to the Ford boys, guerrilla raider with the Jameses during the Civil War, and later a gang member?

Jim Cummings, also known as "Windy Jim," the last of the raiders to die, in 1929, at Higgensville, Missouri.

When and where was Nathan D. Champion, who was slain in Wyoming during the Johnson County War, born?

September 29, 1857, near Round Rock, Texas.

Who was the man known in Texas as Billy Leroy?

Billy Leroy was William Henry Harrison Bonney, Jr., otherwise known as Billy the Kid.

How did Pat Garrett, the man who shot Billy the Kid, die?

He was killed from ambush by Jim Miller, but Wayne Brazel took the blame. The dastardly deed took place February 28, 1908. Brazel was acquitted and dropped out of sight.

How many men did J. Pinckney "Pinky" Higgins kill and what happened to him?

Higgins led a faction in the Horrell-Higgins feud. He killed 19 men. He died of a heart attack in 1893.

A well-known bandit, sometimes known as Buck, was tried for train robbery in Missouri and for murder in Alabama, and was acquitted both times. What was his real name?

Alexander Franklin "Frank" James, brother to Jesse.

Who was the famous gunman who rode through Old Mobeetie, Texas, in his birthday suit?

Robert Clay Allison

(From the files of the now-defunct National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History)

Review of The Killing Trail

2010-06-10T20:59:00.002+09:00

Ron Scheel has reviewed The Killing Trail. See details here.

The Killing Trail

2010-06-03T12:38:00.002+09:00

Robert Hale Ltd. informs me that The Killing Trail, my sixth Black Horse Western, will be published on June 30, 2010.

The Dylan brothers ride high in Ouray, Colorado, until they bully a drifter who leaves three of them dead in the street. Nat Dylan, the youngest, swears to hunt down the drifter, Jared Carter, and avenge his brothers. Carter’s trail leads into Arizona country where Dylan meets Wagonwheel owner Colonel Alton Jackson and hires on to kill Jared Carter. But the more he learns of Carter and Jackson, the more he finds himself on the wrong side. He meets Carmen Vasquez, who sees him as an honorable man, and he feels the mutual attraction. Still, on his honor he must call out Jared Carter, but can he survive a gunfight with the man who killed three Dylans by himself?

I think it's a good read. Anyone want to review it?

CTW

Meet the Apaches

2010-05-31T13:03:00.002+09:00

Taken from the book Indians of Arizona

The Apaches have few legends. The only thing I have been able to find in reference to their belief in creation is the statement of Geronimo, given in his autobiography in the first chapter, which follows:

“In the beginning the world was covered with darkness. There was no sun, no day. The perpetual night had no moon or stars.

“There were, however, all manner of beasts and birds. Among the beasts were many hideous, nameless monsters, as well as dragons, lions, tigers, wolves, foxes, beavers, rabbits, squirrels, rats, mice, and all manner of creeping things such as lizards and serpents. Mankind could not prosper under such conditions, for the beasts and serpents destroyed all human offspring.
“All creatures had the power of speech and were gifted with reason.

“There were two tribes of creatures: the birds, or the feathered tribe, and the beasts. The former were organized under their chief, the eagle.

“These tribes often held councils, and the birds wanted light admitted. This the beasts repeatedly refused to do. Finally the birds made war against the beasts.

“The beasts were armed with clubs, but the eagle had taught his tribe to use bows and arrows. The serpents were so wise that they could not all be killed. One took refuge in a perpendicular cliff of a mountain in Arizona, and his eye (changed into a brilliant stone) may be seen in that rock to this day. The bears, when killed, would each be changed into several other bears, so that the more bears the feathered tribe killed, the more there were. The dragon could not be killed, either, for he was covered with four coats of horny scales, and the arrows would not penetrate these. One of the most hideous, vile monsters (nameless) was proof against arrows, so the eagle flew high up in the air with a round, white stone, and let it fall on this monster's head, killing him instantly. This was such a good service that the stone was called sacred. They fought for many days, but at last the birds won the victory.

“After this war was over, although some evil beasts remained, the birds were able to control the councils, and light was admitted. Then mankind could live and prosper. The eagle was chief in this good fight; therefore, his feathers were worn by man as emblems of wisdom, justice and power.

“Among the few human beings that were yet alive was a woman who had been blessed with many children, but these had always been destroyed by the beasts. If by any means she succeeded in eluding the others, the dragon, who was very wise and very evil, would come himself and eat her babes.

“After many years a son of the rainstorm was born to her and she dug for him a deep cave. The entrance to this cave she closed and over the spot built a camp fire. This concealed the babe's hiding place and kept him warm. Every day she would remove the fire and descend into the cave, where the child's bed was, to nurse him; then she would return and rebuild the camp fire.

“Frequently the dragon would come and question her, but she would say, ‘I have no more children; you have eaten all of them.’
“When the child was larger he would not always stay in the cave, for he sometimes wanted to run and play. Once the dragon saw his tracks. Now this perplexed and enraged the old dragon, for he could not find the hiding place of the boy; but he said that he would destroy the mother if she did not reveal the child's hiding place. The poor mother was very much troubled; she could not give up her child, but she knew the power and cunning of the dragon, therefore she lived in constant fear.
“Soon after this the boy said that he wished to go hunting. The mother would not give her consent. She told him of the dragon, the wolves, and the serpents; but he said, ‘Tomorrow I go.’

“At the boy's request his uncle, (who was the only man then living), made a little bow and some arrows for him, and the two went hunting the next day. They trailed the deer far up the mountain and finally the boy killed a buck. His uncle showed him how to dress the deer and broil the meat. They broiled two hind quarters, one for the child and one for his uncle. When the meat was done they placed it on some bushes to cool. Just then the huge form of the dragon appeared. The child was not afraid, but his uncle was so dumb with fright that he did not speak or move.

“The dragon took the boy's parcel of meat and went aside with it. He placed the meat on another bush, and seated himself beside it. Then he said, ‘This is the child I have been seeking. Boy, you are nice and fat, so when I have eaten this venison I shall eat you.’ The boy said, ‘No, you shall not eat me, and you shall not eat that meat.’ So he walked over to where the dragon sat and took the meat back to his own seat. The dragon said, ‘I like your courage, but you are foolish; what do you think you could do?’ ‘Well,’ said the boy, ‘I can do enough to protect myself, as you may find out.’ Then the dragon took the meat again, and then the boy retook it. Four times in all the dragon took the meat, and after the fourth time the boy replaced the meat he said, ‘Dragon, will you fight me?’ The dragon said, ‘Yes, in whatever way you like.’ The boy said, ‘I will stand one hundred paces from you and you may have four shots at me with your bow and arrows, provided that you will then exchange places with me and give me four shots.’ ‘Good,’ said the dragon. ‘Stand up.’

“Then the dragon took his bow, which was made of a large pine tree. He took four arrows from his quiver; they were made of young pine tree saplings, and each arrow was twenty feet in length. He took deliberate aim, but just as the arrow left the bow the boy made a peculiar sound and leaped into the air. Immediately the arrow was shivered into a thousand splinters, and the boy was seen standing on the top of a bright rainbow over the spot where the dragon's aim had been directed. Soon the rainbow was gone and the boy was standing on the ground again. Four times this was repeated, then the boy said, ‘Dragon, stand here; it is my time to shoot.’ The dragon said, ‘All right, your little arrows cannot pierce my first coat of horn, and I have three other coats—shoot away.’ The boy shot an arrow, striking the dragon just over the heart, and one coat of the great horny scales fell to the ground. The next shot another coat fell, and then another, and the dragon's heart was exposed. Then the dragon trembled, but could not move. Before the fourth arrow was shot the boy said, ‘Uncle, you are dumb with fear; you have not moved; come here or the dragon will fall on you.’ His uncle ran toward him. Then he sped the fourth arrow with true aim, and it pierced the dragon's heart. With a tremendous roar the dragon rolled down the mountain side— down four precipices into a canyon below.

“Immediately storm clouds swept the mountains, lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and the rain poured. When the rainstorm had passed, far down in the canyon below, they could see fragments of the huge body of the dragon lying among the rocks, and the bones of this dragon may still be found there.

“This boy's name was Apache. Usen taught him how to prepare herbs for medicine, how to hunt, and how to fight. He was first chief of the Indians and wore eagle's feathers as the sign of justice, wisdom and power. To him, and to his people, as they were created, Usen gave homes in the land of the west.”

Usen is the Apache word for God. It is used here because it implies the attributes of deity that are held in their primitive religion. (“Apache” means “Enemy") The Apaches believed that when God, or Usen, created the Apaches, he also created their homes in the west, and gave to them such game, fruits and grain as they needed for their sustenance. He gave them different herbs to restore their health when disease attacked them. He taught them where to find these herbs and how to prepare them for medicine, and gave them, above all, a climate, with all needed clothing and shelter at hand. This was in the beginning, and accounts, perhaps, for the intense love the Apache held for his home in the west, for he believed that these ranges were provided for him and his posterity by Usen himself.

Geronimo says that when a child, his mother taught him the religion of his people; taught him of the sun and sky, the moon and stars, the clouds and storms. She also taught him to kneel and pray to Usen for strength, health, wisdom, and protection. They never prayed against any person, but if they had aught against an individual, they, themselves, took vengeance. They were taught that Usen did not care for the petty quarrels of men.

In gathering herbs and administering medicine, says Geronimo, as much faith was held in prayer as in the actual effect of the medicine. Usually about eight persons worked together in making medicine, and there were forms of prayer and incantations to attend each stage of the process. Four attended to the incantations, and four to the preparation of the herbs. Their life had a religious side. They had no churches, no religious organizations, or Sabbath day, or holidays, yet they worshipped. Sometimes the whole tribe would assemble to sing and pray. Sometimes a smaller number, perhaps two or three. The songs had a few words, but were not formal. The singer would occasionally put in such words as he wished instead of the usual tone sound. Sometimes they prayed in silence; sometimes each one prayed aloud; sometimes an aged person prayed for all. At other times one would rise and speak of their duties to one another and to Usen. Their services were short.

The Apaches recognized no duties to any man outside of their tribe. It was no sin to kill enemies or to rob them. However, if they accepted any favor from a stranger, or allowed him to share their comforts in any way, he became (by adoption) related to the tribe, and they must recognize their duty to him.

This probably accounts for the influence which Captain Jeffords exercised over Cochise's band. He had entered Cochise's camp alone; enjoyed his hospitality, and thereafter became, according to Jeffords' own statement, his brother.
When disease or pestilence abounded, they were assembled and questioned by their leaders to ascertain the cause, and what harm had been done, and how Usen could be satisfied. Sometimes sacrifice was necessary. Sometimes the offending one was punished. This was the case, undoubtedly, where the medicine man, having failed in his cure, denounced some old woman or old man as a witch, who was promptly sacrificed on the spot.

Mike Burns, in his writings about the Apaches, gives the following in reference to the medicine men, etc.:

“It was not every Indian who knew what plants and herbs were good for medicine, only the medicine men and the medicine women, who, it was believed, were influenced by a great spirit. It was also believed that some of the women were influenced by a great evil spirit, and those who have that power do not willingly attend anyone who is sick, unless forced to come and sing over the persons whom they have made sick. Usually a great medicine man claims that the interpretation revealed to him in a vision, points to a certain person as having brought the sickness to the patient, and she must come close or beside the patient and begin singing for the evil spirit to come out from the person's heart. They sing to the evil spirit to drive out the wormy things which are destroying the heart. Some men, too, are suspected of having an evil spirit influence them, and they will be strung up to a tree until they confess that they did the things complained of or of which they are suspected. When they confess they are asked if they are willing to go to the sick person and drive out the evil spirit, which they usually agree to do, and if the sick person has not gone too far, they generally recover. If, however, the sick person should die, then the man or woman who is influenced by the evil spirit, and who is singing over the patient, is usually killed on the spot. This killing of those who are suspected of possessing an evil spirit, has been the cause of many of the separations which occur in the Apache tribes, for the killing of one person on this account sometimes brings on the killing of others, and then families separate. Some days they would have the ghost dance, fixing themselves up like skeletons, their heads being so painted that they appeared to have no hair, and very small eyes.

“At one time there were fifteen hundred Indians sick at Camp Cottonwood, and it was believed that Dr. Williams had put something in the beef to make the Indians sick. Then a man died, and a medicine man in his visions had foreseen that a young woman in one of the camps was possessed of many evil spirits and had caused that man to die. So a brother of the dead man went to the woman and killed her. This woman had no mother, but had a father, and there was a young single man who lived with them. The father made no attempt to do anything after his daughter was killed, but the young man went over to the other camp and shot at the man who had killed the young woman. He missed his man, and killed another man, and then lit out for the hills. This left the old man alone in the camp, and the other parties came and killed him.

“In another camp a boy died; the father blamed the mother for the death of the boy, so he killed her. Shortly afterwards disease spread all through the camps, and family after family died. General Crook's favorite chief, Chemasella, died, and the whole camp turned out and killed eight women and four men. This created much confusion and the soldiers had to come in and stop the slaughtering of the innocents. The soldiers arrested some of the chiefs and the military interpreter for not informing them of the condition of affairs, and took them down to Camp Verde and put them in the guard house. Many of the Indians died of chills and fever, and other causes, and the medicine men blamed the evil spirited women, and many women and men were killed. From that day to this the singing by a medicine man or woman over a sick Apache has been stopped.”

If, however, an Apache allowed his aged parents to suffer for food or shelter; if he had neglected or abused the sick; if he had profaned their religion, or had been unfaithful, he might be banished from the tribe. The medicine man was, perhaps, the most influential person in every tribe. The chiefs led their bands in war, but the medicine man was the arbiter. He consulted the fates and every revelation came to him from Usen as to whether they should go upon any expedition; how they should be equipped, etc.

They had a firm belief in the merits of hoddentin, a flour made from the pollen of the tule. This, according to Bourke, was carried by every warrior on every expedition as a protection. A small sack of it was given to every child born into the tribe. It was used in their incantations to the sun, to the moon and to the stars.

AN ANCIENT WAR DANCE OF THE APACHES.

 It was believed that this hoddentin, scattered along the face of the heavens, formed the Milky Way. It was used to a very great extent in all their ceremonials.

Bourke, in the Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, of the Smithsonian Institute, for the years 1887–88, gives a very elaborate and succinct account of some of the Apache Dances, their customs, etc., but confesses that he has been unable to obtain anything much as to their religious beliefs. They never scalped their enemies, and they buried their dead in the crevices of the rocks, far away from human eye.

Captain Bourke's description of the dances follows:

“The spirit dance is called ‘cha-ja-la.’ I have seen this dance a number of times, but will confine my description to one seen at Fort Marion (St. Augustine, Fla.), in 1887, when the Chiricahua Apaches were confined there as prisoners. A great many of the band had been suffering from sickness of one kind or another and twenty-three of the children had died; as a consequence, the medicine-men were having the Cha-ja-la, which is entered into only upon the most solemn occasions, such as the setting out of a war party, the appearance of an epidemic, or something else of like portent. On the terreplein of the northwest bastion, Ramon, the old medicine-man, was violently beating upon a drum, which, as usual, had been improvised of a soaped rag drawn tightly over the mouth of an iron kettle, holding a little water.

“Although acting as master of ceremonies, Ramon was not painted or decorated in any way. Three other medicine-men were having the finishing touches put to their bodily decoration. They had an under-coating of greenish brown, and on each arm a yellow snake, the head toward the shoulder blade. The snake on the arm of one of the party was double-headed, or rather had a head at each extremity.

“Each had insignia in yellow on back and breast, but no two were exactly alike. One had on his breast a yellow bear, four inches long by three inches high, and on his back a kan of the same color and dimensions. A second had the same pattern of bear on his breast, but a zigzag for lightning on his back. The third had the zigzag on both back and breast. All wore kilts and moccasins.

“While the painting was going on Ramon thumped and sang with vigor to insure the medicinal potency of the pigments and the designs to which they were applied. Each held, one in each hand, two wands or swords of lathlike proportions, ornamented with snake-lightning in blue.

“The medicine-men emitted a peculiar whistling noise and bent slowly to the right, then to the left, then frontward, then backward, until the head in each case was level with the waist. Quickly they spun around in full circle on the left foot; back again in a reverse circle to the right; then they charged around the little group of tents in that bastion, making cuts and thrusts with their wands to drive the maleficent spirits away.

“It recalled to my mind the old myths of the angel with the flaming sword guarding the entrance to Eden, or of St. Michael chasing the discomfited Lucifer down into the depths of Hell.

“These preliminaries occupied a few moments only; at the end of that time the medicine-men advanced to where a squaw was holding up to them a little baby sick in its cradle. The mother remained kneeling while the medicine-men frantically struck at, upon, around, and over the cradle with their wooden weapons.

“The baby was held so as successively to occupy each of the cardinal points and face each point directly opposite; first on the east side, facing the west; then the north side, facing the south; then the west side, facing the east; then the south side facing the north, and back to the original position. While at each position, each of the medicine-men in succession, after making all the passes and gestures described, seized the cradle in his hands, pressed it to his breast, and afterwards lifted it up to the sky, next to the earth, and lastly to the four cardinal points, all the time prancing, whistling, and snorting, the mother and her squaw friends adding to the dismal din by piercing shrieks and ululations.

“That ended the ceremonies for that night so far as the baby personally was concerned, but the medicine-men retired down to the parade and resumed their salutation, swinging, bending, and spinning with such violence that they resembled, in a faint way perhaps, the Dervishes of the East. The understanding was that the dance had to be kept up as long as there was any fuel unconsumed of the large pile provided; any other course would entail bad luck. It was continued for four nights, the colors and symbols upon the body varying from night to night.

“There were four medicine-men, three of whom were dancing and in conference with the spirits, and the fourth of whom was general superintendent of the whole dance, and the authority to whom the first three reported the result of their interviews with the ghostly powers.

“The mask and headdress of the first of the dancers, who seemed to be the leading one, was so elaborate that in the hurry and meager light supplied by the flickering fires it could not be portrayed. It was very much like that of number three, but so fully covered with the plumage of the eagle, hawk, and, apparently, the owl, that it was difficult to assert this positively. Each of these medicine-men had pieces of red flannel tied to his elbows and a stick about four feet long in each hand. Number one's mask was spotted black and white and shaped in front like the snout of a mountain lion. His back was painted with large arrow-heads in brown and white, which recalled the protecting arrows tightly bound to the backs of Zuni fetiches. Number two had on his back a figure in white, ending between the shoulders in a cross. Number three's back was simply whitened with clay.

“All these headdresses were made of slats of the Spanish bayonet, unpainted, excepting that on number two was a figure in black, which could not be made out, and that the horizontal crosspieces on number three were painted blue.
“The dominos or masks were of blackened buckskin, for the two fastened around the neck by garters or sashes; the neckpiece of number three was painted red; the eyes seemed to be glass knobs or brass buttons. These three dancers were naked to the waist, and wore beautiful kilts of fringed buckskin bound on with sashes, and moccasins reaching to the knees. In this guise they jumped into the center of the great circle of spectators and singers and began running about the fire shrieking and muttering, encouraged by the shouts and the singing, and by the drumming and incantation of the chorus which now swelled forth at full lung power.

“As the volume of music swelled and the cries of the onlookers became fiercer, the dancers were encouraged to the enthusiasm of frenzy. They darted about the circle, going through the motions of looking for an enemy, all the while muttering, mumbling, and singing, jumping, swaying, and whirling like the dancing Dervishes of Arabia.

“Their actions, at times, bore a very considerable resemblance to the movements of the Zuñi Shálako at the Feast of Fire. Klashidn told me that the orchestra was singing to the four willow branches planted near them. This would indicate a vestige of tree worship, such as is to be noticed also at the sun dance of the Sioux.

“At intervals the three dancers would dart out of the ring and disappear in the darkness, to consult with the spirits or with other medicine-men seated a considerable distance from the throng. Three several times they appeared and disappeared, always dancing, running, and whirling about with increased energy. Having attained the degree of mental or spiritual exaltation necessary for communion with the spirits, they took their departure and kept away for at least half an hour, the orchestra during their absence rendering a mournful refrain, monotonous as a funeral dirge. My patience became exhausted and I turned to go to my quarters. A thrill of excited expectancy ran through the throng of Indians, and I saw that they were looking anxiously at the returning medicine-men. All the orchestra now stood up, their leader (the principal medicine-man) slightly in advance, holding a branch of cedar in his left hand. The first advanced and bending low his head murmured some words of unknown import with which the chief seemed to be greatly pleased. Then the chief, taking his stand in front of the orchestra on the east side of the grove or cluster of trees, awaited the final ceremony, which was as follows: The three dancers in file and in proper order advanced and receded three times; then they embraced the chief in such a manner that the sticks or wands held in their hands came behind his neck, after which they mumbled and muttered a jumble of sounds which I cannot reproduce, but which sounded for all the world like the chant of the ‘hooter’ at the Zuni Feast of Fire. They then pranced or danced through the grove three times. This was repeated for each point of the compass, the chief medicine-man, with the orchestra, taking a position successively on the east, south, west, and north, and the three dancers advancing, receding, and embracing as at first.

“This terminated the ‘medicine’ ceremonies of the evening, the glad shouts of the Apache testifying that the incantations of their spiritual leaders or their necromancy, whichever it was, promised a successful campaign. These dancers were, I believe, dressed up to represent their gods or kan, but not content with representing them, aspired to be mistaken for them.”

-----

Probably more than you ever wanted to know about Apache customs, but I thought I'd put it up anyway.

ctw

What's the truth about the Buntline Special?

2010-05-24T14:41:00.003+09:00

The Colt pistol called the Buntline Special was introduced in 1876 -- a .45 caliber SAA with a 12-inch barrel. But the gun didn't gain notoriety until 1931, when Stuart Lake, in his book Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal, wrote that dime novel writer Ned Buntline had commissioned the 12-inch Colts and given them to five frontier marshals whom he respected. The marshals were supposedly Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Neil Brown, Charlie Bassett, and Bill Tilghman.

Problem.

Colt keeps meticulous records of all guns, serial numbers, and who purchased them. No group of five 12-inch revolvers were sold, and none at all were sold to Ned Buntline, who died in 1886. Furthermore, Buntline never travelled in the west after 1876, the year Wyatt became deputy city marshal of Dodge City, his first job as a lawman.

Movies and TV show Wyatt Earp using a Buntline in the Gunfight at OK Corral. Not so. The gun Wyatt used is on display at thge Wyatt Earp museum in Tombstone, Arizona, and it's not even a Colt. It's an engraved and silver-plated Smith & Wesson American in .44 caliber.

No records exist to prove that any of the other lawmen received Buntlines, either. In fact, Colt's records say that Bat Masterson personally ordered eight Colt's revolvers between 1879 and 1885. None had 12-inch barrels.

Finally, among the famous, Bill Tilghman. George Virgines spoke to Bill's widow, Soe Tilghman, while she was still alive, and she "could not recall her famous husband possessing or mentioning a "Buntline Special" Colt, nor did she ever see such a gun."

Recorded history, not hearsay, indicates that the Buntline Specials were a construct of Stuart Lake's active imagination, as were, it turns out, many of the supposed facts he wrote about Wyatt Earp.

The Apache Kid

2010-05-16T21:40:00.002+09:00

One of the infamous fugitives of the old west really was a trusted scout and sergeant under Miles. Here is a good account of his life.

Wiley Haines, Deputy US Marshal

2010-05-10T16:35:00.007+09:00

Judge Isaac C. Parker, well-known as the "hanging" judge, held forth in Fort Smith, Oklahoma, from 1875 to 1896. Parker's court had only 200 marshals to police 74,000 square miles of territory; the Indian Nations where outlaws hid from the law.

According to Wikipedia, In 21 years on the bench, Judge Parker tried 13,490 cases, 344 of which were capital crimes. Guilty pleas or convictions were handed down in 9,454 cases. Of the 160 (156 men and 4 women) sentenced to death by hanging, 79 were actually hanged. The rest died in jail, appealed, or were pardoned.

Wiley Green Haines was born in Monroe County, Oklahoma, in 1860. My interest in him stems from a cattle drive from Oklahoma to Arizona in 1876. Haines, 15 at the time, was a drover for the operation, which delivered 150 head of cattle to the army at Camp Verde. This army fort shows up in my first novel, Vulture Gold, so I have a personal interest. Camp Verde was not one of the posts that took care of reservation Indians, so I can only surmise that the beef was for soldiers.

Haines then spend two years cowboying in Arizona before returning to his native Oklahoma. There, he graduated from college, spent some time actually teaching at Southwest Baptist College, which had been established by his father, and then moved to California. His heart, however, seemed to have remained in Oklahoma, because as soon as Indian lands were opened up for settlement, Haines was there, running a real estate agency.

He became a Deputy U.S. Marshal in 1890 at the age of 30. His career as a lawman continued for 38 years. Thanks to great grandson, Dr. Joe D. Haines, the marshal's diaries and some of his letters have been preserved.

Of the territory he was asked to cover, the Osage Nation, Haines said, "The country was teeming with whiskey peddlers and horse thieves. What few were not following this living were cowed by the lawless and many failed to cooperate with the officers. This made it hard for the officers to discharge their duties." Master of the understatement, Deputy Haines.

Here's how Haines handled horse thieves. Note that this time frame is much later than those we use in our novels (or at least what I use).

February 4, 1900 Am notified that horse thieves have again made a raid on Indian horses. Perry King tells me they are on a trail north of Hominy Post.

I go north of Hominy post about one half mile and strike the trail. Ho-ke-os-ah and Perry King follow the trail, being joined by Tom Gilliland. With some difficulty we follow the trail near J.L. Freeman's. He joins us. We follow about eight miles east of there and discover the parties have quit the trail. But two of them have come back, evidently on look out. We find the trail again and soon discover the horses.

After having ridden the trail 35 miles we advance afoot. I send Perry King across branch. Tell Freeman to watch to the left and Tom Gilliland to go to my right. We advance. I observe several objects through the brush of the blackjack trees. I call, "Hey there! Hold up your hands!" I see a commotion but no sign of obeyance to the order. I fire and advance two or three steps. Call again, "Hold up your hands!" Am not obeyed. I fire again and advance and see two persons with hands up.

I discover that I have fatally shot two horse thieves, one namde Aruther Brooksher and the other gave his name as Henry Myers. I send for Dr. Unick. He advises that we remove Myers to a house. We go to (the) house, but when we arrive Myers is dead. Brooksher having died very soon after being shot. I go with corpese to J. L. Freeman's place. Stay all night, next day.

February 5, 1900 Take bodies of parties killed yesterday to agency. Acting Agent Wm. Leonard had them taken charge of by undertakers. They had five head of Indian horses with them.

Haines served long and well, once being very severely wounded. Just off his sickbed, he arrested Walter McLain, the last of the famous Doolin gang.

The deputy died of a heart attach on September 24, 1928. His obituary in the Tulsa World said:

There was in the time of Haines, Bud Ledbetter, and Frank Canton, no elaborate law organization. An officer was then literally the law and nothing but his judgement and his trigger finger stood between him and extermination. He had nowhere to pass the buck, no alibi, no reinforcements. It was often a case of a lone man against a pack of cunning devils long used to the brush and the cave. These men of law had no brass bands, typewriter, or press agents, and they had to be deadly as rattlesnakes.

Haines, like most of the real officers of his time, was rather modest and unpretentious. Practically none of the old-time officers -- with the exception of Heck Thomas -- had the courtly manner, the dramatic look, or the towering presence. They were the forerunners of our civilization and the job was a grim one. They were just as far from the movie type of gunfighter as possible. They were direct representatives of the United States, and they acted directly.

The passing of these unromantic men constitues the passing of a romantic era. it was a rough and ugly era, but in the light of that which came after, it was heroic and exciting.

Arizona's immigrant law

2010-05-06T14:41:00.002+09:00

The United States probably accepts more immigrants than any other country in the world (That's what I feel, not what I know.). Yet the government has no idea who those immigrants are or where they live. I have been a legal resident of Japan for more than 30 years. When I arrived, I had three months in which to register at my local city office and receive an Alien Registration Card that attested to my legal right to be in Japan as a non-Japanese citizen. If asked by someone in authority, I must produce that card. It's not heavy. It doesn't weigh me down. And it does not contain information on my race or religion. It only has my name, my nationality, my current address, my place of birth, when I arrived in the country, when I last registered as an Alien, when I must renew the registration (this year), and my Alien Registration Number. Are Japanese bigots because they require me, a guest in their country, to carry proof of my situation in the country? I think not. And I think it is just as logical to require guests in the United States (people who are not citizens of the country) to register and to renew their registry, just like you would renew your driver's license.

I'm adding something that came from the older sister of a high school classmate because it explains the feelings of people in Arizona. I do not attest to its veracity. I don't know if a state senator actually wrote it. Still, the contents show what some people in Arizona feel.

* * *

I'm Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen. I want to explain SB 1070 which I voted for and was just signed by Governor Jan Brewer. Rancher Rob Krantz was murdered by the drug cartel on his ranch a month ago. I participated in a senate hearing two weeks ago on the border violence, here is just some of the highlights from those who testified.

The people who live within 60 to 80 miles of the Arizona/Mexico Border have for years been terrorized and have pleaded for help to stop the daily invasion of humans who cross their property . One Rancher testified that 300 to 1200 people a DAY come across his ranch vandalizing his property, stealing his vehicles and property, cutting down his fences, and leaving trash. In the last two years he has found 17 dead bodies and two Koran bibles.

Another rancher testified that daily drugs are brought across his ranch in a military operation. A point man with a machine gun goes in front, 1/2 mile behind are the guards fully armed, 1/2 mile behind them are the drugs, behind the drugs 1/2 mile are more guards. These people are violent and they will kill anyone who gets in the way. This was not the only rancher we heard
that day that talked about the drug trains.

One man told of two illegals who came upon his property one shot in the back and the other in the arm by the drug runners who had forced them to carry the drugs and then shot them. Daily they listen to gun fire during the night it is not safe to leave his family alone on the ranch and they can't leave the ranch for fear of nothing being left when they come back.

The border patrol is not on the border. They have set up 60 miles away with check points that do nothing to stop the invasion. They are not allowed to use force in stopping anyone who is entering. They run around chasing them, if they get their hands on them then they can take them back across the border.

Federal prisons have over 35% illegals and 20% of Arizona prisons are filled with illegals. In the last few years 80% of our law enforcement that have been killed or wounded have been by an illegal.

The majority of people coming now are people we need to be worried about. The ranchers told us that they have seen a change in the people coming they are not just those who are looking for work and a better life.

The Federal Government has refused for years to do anything to help the border states. We have been over run and once they are here we have the burden of funding state services that they use. Education cost have been
over a billion dollars. The health care cost billions of dollars. Our State is broke, $3.5 billion deficit and we have many serious decisions to make. One is that we do not have the money to care for any who are not here legally. It has to stop. The border can be secured. We have the technology we have the ability to stop this invasion. We must know who is coming and
they must come in an organized manner legally so that we can assimilate them into our population and protect the sovereignty of our country. We are a nation of laws. We have a responsibility to protect our citizens and to protect the integrity of our country and the government which we live under.

I would give amnesty today to many, but here is the problem, we dare not do this until the Border is secure. It will do no good to forgive them because thousands will come behind them and we will be over run to the point that there will no longer be the United States of America but a North American Union of open borders. I ask you what form of government will we live under?
How long will it be before we will be just like Mexico, Canada or any of the other Central American or South American countries? We have already lost our language, everything must be printed in Spanish also. We have already lost
our history it is no longer taught in our schools. And we have lost our borders.

(one paragraph edited out -- CTW)

Maybe it is too late to save America. Maybe we are not worthy of freedom anymore. But as an elected official I must try to do what I can to protect our Constitutional Republic. Living in America is not a right just because you can walk across the border. Being an American is a responsibility and it comes by respecting and upholding the Constitution the law of our land which
says what you must do to be a citizen of this country. Freedom is not free.

My hero

2010-04-23T21:13:00.002+09:00

Garet Havelock is the protagonist of Vulture Gold and Revenge at Wolf Mountain. Here's the study I did of him when I was just beginning to write the first novel. This must be nearly 30 years old.

How to be Garet Havelock

Never draw your gun unless you are going to pull the trigger
Never pull the trigger unless you are aiming to kill
Never go against the law
Love your woman to distraction
Drink your coffee strong enough to melt spoons
Take care of your horse first, then look after yourself
Always be willing to help a neighbor
You can lose a fight, but never give up
Make friends with stray dogs
Carry moccasins in your saddlebags
Hanker for canned peaches
Want to live
Be ready to die
Pay attention to the little things
Always give the other person the benefit of the doubt
Know about the birds and the bees (birds can warn of enemies and bees can lead you to water)
Always carry hidden weapons
Dream about owning a horse ranch
Be quick to accept a badge
Wear a steel brace on your left leg
Respect your Cherokee Ma
Respect your Ranger Pa
Stop your horse just to watch the sun go down
Push your horse to a canter so you won't be late for dinner at home
Don't be afraid to tell her you love her
Be true to your obligations
Hope for a son
Love a daughter
Work from daylight to dark
Blaze your own trails
Back down from no man
Practice with your handgun at least every other day

New Chuck Tyrell western out in August

2010-04-22T19:10:00.002+09:00

The Dylan brothers ride high in Ouray, Colorado, until they bully a drifter who leaves three of them dead in the street. Nat Dylan, the youngest, swears to hunt down the drifter, Jared Carter, and avenge his brothers. Carter’s trail leads into Arizona country where Dylan meets Wagonwheel owner Colonel Alton Jackson and hires on to kill Jared Carter. But the more he learns of Carter and Jackson, the more he finds himself on the wrong side. He meets Carmen Vasquez, who sees him as an honorable man, and he feels the mutual attraction. Still, on his honor he must call out Jared Carter, but can he survive a gunfight with the man who killed three Dylans by himself?

The Killing Trail, a Black Horse Western by Chuck Tyrell, can now be pre-ordered from Amazon UK.

Butch Cassidy’s Girlfriend

2010-04-14T17:44:00.002+09:00

For many years, John Stewart was the secretary of the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History, an association that is now defunct. He lived in Logan, Utah, where he was a professor of English at Utah State University. He wrote of meeting Josie Bassett Morris, who was a girlfriend of Butch Cassidy (Robert LeRoy Parker) and other outlaws of that era.

Stewart made a special trip to Diamond Mountain, a high plateau near Flaming Gorge, located midway between Vernal, Utah, and Brown’s Hole, a famous outlaw hideout.

According to Stewart, Josie lived in a lonely cabin far from the nearest ranch. Steward knocked on the cabin door, but there was no answer. He was about to leave when he noticed a silver-haired lady coming toward him, a rifle held in the crook of her arm.

Rumor had it that Josie had offed several husbands and disliked men in general, so Stewart was somewhat concerned to see her toting a rifle. She turned out to be warm and hospitable, and promptly invited Stewart into her one-room abode. To explain why she carried the rifle, Josie claimed to have been after a mountain lion that was bothering her cows.

Some said she was a rustler. Stewart chose to believe her mountain lion story. Stewart inventoried her furniture as a bed, a stove, a table and two chairs. The floor was a flat slab of native stone upon which Josie had built the cabin herself, she said.

Josie was born in the early 1870s, which put her in her 80s when Stewart visited – eighty, yet out hunting mountain lions! Or maybe rustling cattle.

The Bassett family lived in Brown’s Hole, where Josie was born, and she and her younger sister Ann were well acquainted with Butch, Sundance, Matt Warner, Elza Lay, Tom Horn, Isom Dart (the Outlaw Mail), and Speck Williams.

Minnie Crouse Rasmussen, a Brown’s Hole pioneer and friend to outlaws, believed the rumors that Josie was a rustler and a husband-killer. Minnie claimed to “know for certain” that Josie poisoned one of her husbands. Stewart, however, wrote that he was “well impressed with her and find it impossible to believe that she was a husband killer or a cattle rustler.” He goes on to say that if she did any of those things, it was for “good reason.”

Stewart signed off his account with “To me, on that lovely spring morning atop Diamond Mountain, Josie Bassett Morris seemed a beautiful. Gracious, queenly woman who had survived a difficult life in the rugged Old West, and who in her old age was still fiercely independent – a trait I particularly admire.”

The Mason County War

2010-04-09T13:30:00.004+09:00

Range wars are part and parcel of the west. So why is an Arizona boy interested in the Mason County War (also called the Hoodoo War), which took place in Texas?

Easy.

That’s where we first learn of Johnny Ringo.

Both sides in the war thought they were in the right. And throughout the fighting, no one was ever arrested. Dan Roberts, who led Texas Ranger Company D, said of the feud: “The reason that no arrests were made can only rest on hypothesis, and that is: the men supporting civil authority, needed no arrest, and those opposing it, urged equal claims of being right, but would not submit their grievances to law.”

According to historian Dave Johnson, the origins of the war were diverse and obscure . . . but the primary cause was greed over cattle. This was exacerbated by the friction between German immigrants and “American” residents of the county.

The Germans (18% of the population was “foreign born” in 1870), for the most part, had been loyal to the Union during the Civil War, and thus escaped much of the carpetbagging reconstruction tyranny of Governor E.J. Davis’s administration. This alone caused animosity.

The blood feud that backgrounds the Mason County War began with the shooting deaths of Tim Williamson on May 13, 1875, and Moses Baird on September 7, 1875.

And the death count kept climbing.

An young (20 years old) ex-Texas Ranger named Scott Cooley was the adopted son of Tim Williamson. Several men joined Cooley in his feud, including Johnny Ringo, as he tried to avenge his adoptive father.

In the 12-month period between February 1875 and January 1876, eleven men died in the Hoodoo War.

As the killing proceeded, Cooley and Ringo were arrested for threatening Sheriffs John Clymer and J.J. Strickland. They moved from county jail to county jail until a gang of cohorts broke them out of the Lampasas County jail in February.

Cooley soon died of brain fever (nothing to do with incarceration) and Johnny Ringo rode for Tombstone.

Read up about the Mason County War here.

Some good points about writing, if you're interested

2010-04-07T22:20:00.001+09:00

Look here.

Sharps, Remington & Winchester -- rifles that won the West

2010-03-29T14:22:00.007+09:00

The Pedersoli Sharps rifle. Sharps was the quintessential buffalo gun. Christian Sharps's first breech-loading rifle came out in the late 1840s. The British government kept him in business with an order for several thousands of the rifle in the 1850s. By this time, the rifle was a favorite in the west as well. Civil War sharpshooters preferred Sharps weapons, mainly model 1859. America's buffalo herds rued the day the big Sharps .50 was produced, for it, along with the Remington rolling block rifle, was the main cause of the animal's near extinction. Sharps Big Fifty was accurate to at least 1,000 yards.

Remington rolling block rifles, although single-shot breechloaders, became one of the most popular rifles in the westward movement. They were also used abroad by the armed forces of Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Mexico, Egypt, and others. Of course the U.S. Navy, Army, and several state militias used the rifles as well. The Remingtons were simple, reliable, and came in several calibers. One famous story about Remingtons is the cattle drive from Texas to Montana, ramrodded by Nelson Story. Somewhere between Fort Laramie and Fort Reno, a band of Sioux ran off some of the cattle. Story had a case of Remington rolling block, which were among the first in the West at the time. He broke the guns out, distributed them to the drovers, and set out to get his beef back. The Indians stopped at what they felt was a safe distance and butchered one of the cattle. Story found them there, outgunned them with the Remingtons, and retrieved all his cattle but the butchered one.

The first famous Winchester repeating rifle was the Yellow Boy, model 1866, with a bronze gunmetal receiver. It used .44-40 rimfire cartridges.

To back up for a minute, the first sort-of cartridge was patented by Walter Hunt in 1848. It consisted of a conical lead ball filled with powder and sealed with a primer disk. The ammunition was produced in Norwich, Connecticutt by Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson (Smith & Wesson), but the Volcanic ammunition didn't catch on.

Volcanic Repeating Arms Co. was founded in 1855. One of its investors was Oliver Winchester. Two years later, the company failed, and Winchester took over, taking the Volcanic patents to the New Haven Arms Co. New Haven produced the Henry repeater in 1860, which fired a .44 caliber rimfire cartridge. This is the gun that the Southerners said could be loaded on Sunday and fired the rest of the week.

The first Winchester came after the company changed its name to Winchester Repeating Arms Co., the famed Yellow Boy model 1866, which also used rimfire .44 cartridges.

The next big innovation came in 1873. Winchester model 1873, most often just called Winchester '73, starred in the movie of the same name, along with co-star James Stewart. All the guns were factory fired, and the most accurate were inscribed with One in a Thousand on the receiver. They would cost $100 where the run-of-the-mill '73 could be had for $20. But some thought the price well worth it. One in a Hundred Winchester '73 rifles sold for $40.

With the 1873 Winchester came the centerfire cartridge in .44-40. The final tally shows that 720,610 Model 1873 Winchesters were made and sold.

The Making of Guns of Ponderosa -- Part XI Final

2010-03-28T09:49:00.005+09:00

The hired gunslinger is nothing new in a western story. In Shane, Jack Palance nearly upstaged Alan Ladd as he played gunman Jack Wilson, one of the original men in black.
We saw the same kind of hired gunslinger in Crossfire Trail, too. And then John Wayne faced a bevy of professional gunmen in The Shootist.
I liked the way the late Robert B. Parker handled the professional gunmen in his novel Appaloosa and how Ed Harris did it in the film of the same name. Specifically, that guns for hire were known amongst those on both sides of the law, and that there was a kind of unwritten law between them that whatever shooting was to be done would not be from ambush or in the dark of night, but on mutually agreed killing fields and at a mutually agreed time. Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch faced two gunmen, Matt Stryker, Tom Hall, and young Dan Brady faced three. Tom, however, was not in the initial gunfight. To find out how the final face-off turned out, you'll have to read the book.
And that's how Guns of Ponderosa was made.

The Making of Guns of Ponderosa -- Part X

2010-03-27T16:18:00.003+09:00

Richard Wheeler wrote a western novel entitled Drum's Ring. The heroine, Angie Drum, is a frontier woman who took over her husband's newspaper after his death. She uses the paper to expose graft and corruption in the town, including that of her own son, the mayor.

My Prudence Comstock is a young Angie Drum. She has found her niche in the newspaper business, and loves writing scorching pieces about the town, from her viewpoint. In reporting happenings, she also climbs on the soap box to preach to her readers about the kind of town she believes Ponderosa can be.

Although Prudence did not come to the same end as Angie, she did come very close.

Women in the west were no pansies. Take Lee Whipple-Haslam, for example. (notice the last name, lol). She was hired by Wells Fargo to ride a frequently robbed stagecoach. She was to provide detailed descriptions of the robbers. That she did. Height. Size. Clothing. Blood seeping through one man's glove. Cataract in another man's eye. Lee's testimony convicted the robbers. Lee was a typical westerner. She wanted revenge, was very aware of class distinctions, hated Chinese, and was all in favor of linchings. Information about Lee and other women in the west can be found in So Much to Be Done, a book edited by Ruth B. Moynhan, Susan Armitage, and Christiane Fischer Dichamp. You can find the book here.

The Making of Guns of Ponderosa -- Part IX

2010-03-26T21:27:00.001+09:00

Lieutenant Amiel Whipple (died as a general in the Civil War) surveyed a railroad route across northern Arizona to California in 1853. This route was finally used by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railway, which eventually became the largest railroad company in the United States. In my part of the country, the AT&SF came through in 1881. They received a tremendous amount of land from the government to finance their railroad -- every other section on both sides of the track for something like forty miles (I'm writing this off the top of my head).

Until the railroad came in, the town on the Little Colorado river that eventually became county seat of Navajo County was called Horsehead Crossing. The railroad renamed it Holbrook. The spur line that ran from Holbrook south to Snowflake and on into the White Mountains to terminate in McNary (Ponderosa) was built by the AR&SF. It first hauled beef, sheep, and wool to eastern markets, then massive amounts of rough-cut lumber from Southwest Forest Industries.

The railroad brought the people, true, but it also carried out the produce and brought back the money. Because of that spur line and the stands of mighty Ponderosa pine in the White Mountains, the town of Ponderosa flourished.

Scatterguns

2010-03-25T23:54:00.003+09:00

Photo from Chuck Hawks' article on American Double Guns.

Shotguns played as big a role in the West as did rifles and sixguns. At the saloon, you could figure the barkeep had a scattergun behind the counter. More than one lawman carried a sawed-off shotgun as well as a pistol. Doc Holiday used a shotgun in the gunfight at OK corral. Wells Fargo had shotgun riders on every stagecoach carrying a strongbox. The list goes on.

Although Colt made a revolving shotgun in the pre-Civil War days, the side-by-side type were most often seen. In Appaloosa and Resolution (haven't read Brimstone yet), Everett Hitch carries an 8-gauge shotgun. The monster Vigo carried in the movie may well have been a W.W. Greener. The reason I think so is that certain Greeners cocked when the breech was broken to eject the spent shells and reload. It seemed when Vigo snapped the 8-gauge shut, there were no hammers to pull. Am I right?

The photo above is a Winchester 21, one of the fine American shotguns and a favorite. Other well-known scatterguns included Parker, A.J. Fox, Ithaca, LeFever, and L. C. Smith brands.

Where I tend to have my characters carry Greeners because I like the sound of the name, it might as well be an Ithaca or a Smith. I'll have to think about that.

Cowboy poet Paul Hatch, an old high school classmate

2010-03-23T10:50:00.002+09:00

Back in September of 2009, the graduating class of 1959, Snowflake Union High School, held its 50th anniversary reunion. I was there. Class president Joe Spear was there. VP Larry Butler, Secretary Kathy Rogers, and a bunch of class members that included Phyllis Carlyle, school teacher and rancher's wife, Johnny Gonzales, who was the coolest dresser in the class, Gary Bigler the singer, and Paul Hatch, the cowboy poet. Catch Paul's cowboy poetry right here.

The Making of Guns of Ponderosa -- Part VIII

2010-03-17T11:43:00.003+09:00

Let's talk about guns.

In fiction, Sam Colt's revolvers play a larger role than any other handgun. Clair Huffaker's Guns of Thunder Mountain featured Civil War era Joslyn side-hammer revolvers, but Colt's were by far the most popular. Louis L'Amour used a 12-shot revolver to save one protagonist's life, unfortunately I don't remember its name. Some gunnys used Remingtons and some Smith and Wessons, but Colt reigned supreme.

In Guns of Ponderosa, Dan Brady, the young deputy, uses Dragoon Colt, so I thought I'd talk about that type of revolver. Actually, the first Dragoon Colt was responsible for keeping Sam Colt in business.

War started with Mexico in January 1846. General Zachary Taylor's troops were armed with flintlock muskets and Model 1841 .54 caliber caplocks known as Mississippi or Jaeger rifles. Their pistols were caplock single-shot horse pistols and a few Paterson Colts. Mounted troops soon realized they needed more firepower, and a young captain named Samuel Walker, a former Texas Ranger, was sent north to negotiate with Sam Colt for a heavy repeating handgun similar to the Paterson. The result was the 1847 Whitneyville-Walker Dragoon in .45 caliber.

The 4-pound monsters reached American troops late in the war with Mexico, unfortunately after Captain Walker had died in the battle for Huamantla. These big pistols were carried by US Mounted Dragoon troops for the rest of the war, and the order for the pistols from the War Department put Sam Colt firmly in the repeating arms business.

Another smaller Colt Dragoon pistol was produced from 1848, but the one Dan Brady carried was a converted Whitneyville-Walker Dragoon from the War with Mexico.

This photo is from Age of the Gunfighter by Joseph G. Rosa and published by the University of Oklahoma Press. The top pistol is a Whitneyville-Walker Colt. The pistol directly beneath it is an 1948 Dragoon Colt. The partially visible pistol is an Model 1860 Army Colt, and the pistol fitted with a stock is a Third Model Dragoon .44. The guns are the property of the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum.

The Making of Guns of Ponderosa -- Part VII

2010-03-13T19:12:00.002+09:00

Ponderosa was a company town. Directly or indirectly, most of the townspeople earned their living from the Comstock Log and Lumber Company. In my boyhood days, the McNary general store is where even people from Show Low, 15 miles away, went for dry goods, especially work clothes. The only hospital in the area was in McNary (read Ponderosa), too, and I had a hernia repaired there in 1955.

Thus, when Matt Stryker starts making things difficult for Nate Cahill and his cohorts, Cahill naturally turns his attention toward the major company in town. A rat tells Nate of a large amount of money to be sent to Wells Fargo in Holbrook. So Nate decides to rob the train, as that's the logical way to send a big bunch of cash. Not.

Brand new start

2010-03-09T22:54:00.002+09:00

At last I'm started on a new BHW. The working title is A Man Called Breed. The story begins at La Paz on the Colorado River and moves out into the Mohave Desert. Breed is a man who shuns sixguns in favor of a 14-inch Bowie knife and a one-in-a-thousand Winchester '73.

In Arizona military history, there's a half-breed scout named Mickey Free. My man Breed is not based on Free, but the scout was a well-known breed. Another well-known half white, half Indian family was the Tewksburys, who lived in the Tonto Basin near the Mogollon Rim.

Now I have my character and his complication. A girl is in the equation all ready. We'll just have to see where it all goes.

Photo of Mickey Free: Sharlot Hall Museum.

The Making of Guns of Ponderosa -- Part VI

2010-03-07T23:36:00.005+09:00

What about the naming of Ponderosa? The town's not named after the Cartwrights' famous TV ranch. Actually, in the first draft the town's name was Sponsellorville. One of my readers said no one would remember the town's name, that it was too difficult. Well, Pete Sponsellor ran sheep on the mountain near the town, and his sheep were shipped to market on his own siding which we all knew as Sponsellor's Siding, so I naturally thought Ol' Pete wouldn't mind if I named my fictional town after him. After the reader complained, though, I renamed the town Ponderosa, after the tall pines that Comstock Log and Lumber cut into planks to help build the West.
The photo's from the Show Low Historical Society and is a little later model of engine than the one that would have run in Guns of Ponderosa, but the atmosphere is the same.

The Making of Guns of Ponderosa -- Part V

2010-03-04T14:53:00.004+09:00

The first thing a town-taming marshal does is publish a set of rules. Wyatt Earp did it. Bill Hickock did it. It's stock in trade.

I've never seen a set of "marshal's rules" that didn't include a "no one's to wear guns in town" restriction. That's one of the things Matt Stryker did with his "laws" in Ponderosa. And enforcing those rules led to a new lesson for Dan Brady. Enforcing them also led Prudence Comstock to periodically write blistering editorials against the star-bearing men of the law.

A well-known photo of Wyatt Earp

You'll also notice at each altercation, the man known as Breed seems to hang back a bit. He also voices his conviction that men should not hurt women early on. We'll get back to that later.

Matt gets the town quieted down, but feels uneasy about Nate Cahill's seeming lack of action. Then Comstock comes with a proposition.

The Making of Guns of Ponderosa -- Part IV

2010-03-01T23:33:00.003+09:00

Matt Stryker is just like the Magnificent Seven. Remember what happened after Eli Wallach ran the Mag7 out of town the first time? He gave them their guns and told them to leave well enough alone.

Nate Cahill heard that Matt Stryker was coming to tame his town. He paid a bunch of rowdy cowboys to partially castrate Stryker's Arabian stallion and to rope Stryker himself and bring him to Cahill's lair, the saloon Old Glory.

Cahill beat Stryker with a formed piece of lead in his right fist. The extra weight behind Cahill's punches crushed the bones in Stryker's face and tore it dreadfully, marring the bounty hunter's visage for life. Still, Cahill made a fatal mistake, just as Eli Wallach did. He didn't kill Stryker, he rode him out of town on his own Arabian stallion, sitting backwards in the saddle.

Matt Stryker was not a man who could be humiliated so; he would and did return to bring Cahill's card house down.

The Making of Guns of Ponderosa -- Part III

2010-02-25T19:44:00.003+09:00

I'll talk a bit about characters today. While Matt Stryker and Nate and Wynn Cahill seem to be the main characters, the book is actually about Prudence Comstock and Dan Brady. Nate Cahill is the same man when he dies as he was when he rode into Ponderosa through the mist. Matt Stryker underwent a physical disfiguration, but he also was basically the same man when he left Ponderosa as he was when he came.

Prudence embodies the newspapers who railed at Commodore Perry Owens in the days and weeks after his gunfight with Andy Cooper. The press even accused the sheriff and his deputies of wearing "abbreviated cannons" on their hips, a phrase I brazenly had Prudence use. She also kind of represented the gun control lobby, which says there would be no murder if there were no guns.

Dan shows how a man grows into his job. He starts off a young and slightly bumbling deputy and ends up the marshal of Ponderosa. Experience and the right role model made the difference.

Commodore Perry Owens, Sheriff of Apache County, Arizona, ca. 1886

The Making of Guns of Ponderosa -- Part II

2010-02-17T19:37:00.004+09:00

I guess the original character I came up with for Guns of Ponderosa was Matthew Stryker. I liked the name Stryker and thought at the time that he might make a lead character in a series.

My novel in manuscript – The Snake Den – is set in Yuma. I took a trip to Yuma some years ago when I first began that novel. I went through the Hell Hole, as the Territorial Prison was called, and saw how inmates were treated and how the system worked. I also visited the historical society and go lots of background information on the town.

The main cell block at the Yuma Territorial Prison

The country outside Yuma is forbidding to say the least.

Stryker brings a dead man to Yuma. He goes to its real (at the time) county courthouse where the sheriff’s office was. He saw and talked to the real sheriff, Andy Tyner. The amount Tyner was paid for riding to pick up a jailbreaker in Tucson is on the record. I used it because it seemed to make the reward Stryker got for Crazy Bill more significant.

Small note: most of the buildings in Yuma were adobe. The Colorado River once flooded and overran the town. Most of the structures melted.

Fletcher Comstock and Matt Stryker had an adventure together as younger men, and Comstock once saved Stryker’s life. Now he wants a favor, but Stryker doesn’t want to be a town tamer. But riding from Yuma to Ponderosa in the White Mountains put him in a situation that changed his mind.

The making of Guns of Ponderosa -- Part I

2010-02-09T16:27:00.004+09:00

McNary, Arizona, was a sawmill town. Although it actually sprang up as a mill town around the turn of the 20th century, one day I saw it as it might have been in the 1880s. A mist of rain fell, and five men rode into town in ankle-length slickers and turned-down Stetson hats. I saw the Cahill gang coming down main street and I knew they had come to take over the town. I couldn’t call it McNary, because it would not have existed. So I named my town Ponderosa, after the big Ponderosa pines that furnished planks for so many houses in the White Mountains and throughout the United States.

I wrote that scene first. I had no idea where the novel was going, but I knew the Cahills had come to town.

The Ponderosas grew thick and large, as you can see by the photo. This was probably in the 1950s.

The roads were mostly covered with cinders, as the area has many cinder cones that were easily mined for the wherewithal to keep the roads manageable. This photo would be much like the so-called Mormon Mail Road that went between Fort Apache and Saint Johns. In fact, most of the roads in and out of my fictional Ponderosa would have looked about like this. Not much like a John Ford movie, eh?

More about the making of Guns of Ponderosa in Part II. Coming soon.

The kid and the commodore -- 08-02-10

2010-02-08T21:19:00.000+09:00

Commodore Perry Owens rode in from the south, reining in his blooded horse atop the rise overlooking Holbrook. The Little Colorado below was an ocher ribbon fringed with gray-green willows. Far away to the northeast, the flat-topped hills of the Painted Desert spread pinks and blues across the horizon. He hooked a leg over the saddle horn and contemplated the rowdy cowtown. It looked peaceful that Sunday, September 4, 1887, but the Sabbath was about to be broken by gunfire. Sheriff Owens carried a warrant for the arrest of that kid Andy Cooper . . . much as he dreaded serving it.

Not that he was a coward. He'd proved he wasn’t. The Snider Gang lost nine men in the Round Valley gunfight, for instance. But he'd been in office since January and the Cooper warrant -- for stealing Navajo horses -- was still outstanding.

When Commodore Perry Owens drifted into northern Arizona in 1881, people soon learned the long-haired cowboy had iron nerves and an uncanny skill with horses. John Walker hired him to guard Wells Fargo and army remudas at Navajo Springs.
Navajos regularly tried to steal the horses, but many fell to Commodore Owens's Sharps .50. He could hit a squirrel a mile away with that gun. He reckoned he'd killed at least 50 Navajos by the time he became the sheriff of Apache County.

If the Indians got away with a few horses, Owens would raid them right back, often bringing back more mounts than he'd lost. Andy Cooper sometimes went with Commodore on those sorties. He was a cheerful young man, good with animals. But he had a hot temper and a quick trigger finger. If anyone in the territory could match Commodore Perry Owens with a Colt's, it was Andy Cooper.

When Owens inherited a warrant issued by the county court on March 26, 1886, accusing Andy Cooper of stealing 40 Navajo horses, he ignored it. To him, stealing Navajo horses was no crime. "Kid, I'm sheriff now, so you just stay out of town when I'm here," Commodore said to Cooper. "Or I'll have to serve that warrant on you."

The Sheriff took the warrant to Taylor, leaving instructions with the deputy in the town to serve it if Andy ever showed up. Owens put the warrant out of his mind because Zach Decker, the Mormon gunman, lived in Taylor; Andy would probably steer clear.

Now things had gotten out of hand. The Sheriff was forced to serve that damned warrant. He kneed his mount toward the crossing at Berado's store.

Much of the trouble began in 1884, when the Aztec Land and Cattle Company -- the Hashknife Outfit -- brought 40,000 cattle into Apache County. The Texans who came with Hashknife cows into Arizona were hard men. And they partook freely of other people's stock.

Mart Blevins settled on a rawhide ranch at the headwaters of Canyon Creek late in 1884. With him came four sons -- Hampton, John, Charles, and Sam Houston -- his wife Mary, and daughter Mesa. Mart had a fifth son, Andy, who took the last name of Cooper after a scrape in Llano, Texas. When Andy first came to Arizona, he drove a Hashknife chuckwagon.

In 1884, Commodore Perry Owens had a horse ranch at Cottonwood Seep, about 10 miles south of Navajo Springs. People came from all over to buy his blooded stock, and to see his skill with firearms. Someone would throw a tin can in the air and holler, "Commodore!" In an instant both his guns were out. Lead smashed into the can long before it hit the ground. Shooting with right-hand gun, then left, he'd keep the can moving until it was too shattered to roll.

Although the Commodore's blond hair reached nearly to his waist, no one kidded him. He spoke with a quiet Oklahoma drawl, but he decked anyone who disparaged his hair or the way he wore his guns butt forward. At five foot ten, he wasn't a big man, but once something started, he never said "quit."

Down in Pleasant Valley, the feud that would bury 28 men heated up.

Jim Stinson was the first cowman in the valley, settling on Cherry Creek with 1,200 head of cattle the Mormons traded him for his ranch at Snowflake. He was preceded by mountain man John D. Tewksbury and his three half-Indian sons -- John Jr., James, and Ed -- and followed by Tom and John Graham, natives of Iowa, who set up a ranch upstream from Stinson two years later.

At first the Grahams and the Tewksbury boys were fast friends. But a quarrel over stolen cattle ruined that friendship. After that, eyes narrowed and hands moved toward gun butts whenever a Graham and a Tewksbury passed on the trail.
Above the Mogollon Rim, the Daggs brothers ran thousands of sheep. But A-One Bar cowboys kept them off lush pastures among the San Francisco peaks, the Hashknife outfit barred them from ranges to the east, and Pleasant Valley ranchers guarded the passes off the Mogollon Rim so Daggs' woollies couldn't get in.

By 1886, the rift between the Grahams and the Tewksburys was common knowledge. And the Daggs brothers decided to take advantage of the feud. They offered the Tewksburys a lucrative deal to guard Daggs sheep into Pleasant Valley. They accepted, and the drive began.

The ranchers stood agast as the woollies poured into Pleasant Valley. Suddenly the enmity between honest cowmen and rustlers evaporated. They faced a new, much larger threat. Andy Cooper was among the crowd that gathered at the Graham ranch one autumn day in 1886 to consider what to do about the sheep. So was Tom Pickett, who had ridden with Billy Bonner.
Andy wanted action. Kill all the sheep and every man with them, he said, but Tom Graham said no. "There must be no killing and no destruction of property," Graham ordered.

"Give them sheep a hold in the valley and there won't be enough grass left for a grasshopper come spring," Cooper countered. "I'll lead the boys. We'll make a raid that'll end it all, and damned sudden."

Graham ordered him to stay put, and faced the young gunsharp down, even though Graham himself had no reputation as a shootist.

Graham's brand of guerrilla persuasion -- shots in the night that holed coffee pots and frying pans -- didn't force the sheep out of the valley. Later, Andy led a rougher bunch. They stampeded sheep over cliffs, shooting any survivors. And they beat up the herders.

In Holbrook, sheepman Sam Brown and druggist Frank Wattron headed the citizen's committee that drafted Commodore Perry Owens into running for sheriff of Apache County.

Incumbent J.L. Hubbell's trading post was an important stop on the outlaw trail. Violence was rampant. Hardcases run out by the Texas Rangers flocked to northern Arizona for respite. Even the Clanton gang, ousted from Tombstone by the Earps, moved back to their New Mexico ranch and started stealing Arizona cattle.

On November 4, 1886, 500 landowners voted for Commodore Perry Owens and his law-and-order platform; 409 voted for Hubbell. A pall of black-powder gunsmoke hung over Holbrook as the citizens celebrated Owens's victory. Friends organized a dance in honor of his election, with music by a Mormon band from Saint Johns.

Later, his chief deputy, Joe T. McKinney, recalled: "Commodore Owens had a great reputation as a brave man and many wonderful things were promised and expected after he was in the sheriff's office. Lawlessness was everywhere."

Owens moved into the Barth Hotel in Saint Johns and started as Apache County sheriff in January 1887. He appointed strong men as deputies -- Osmer Flake, Lon Hawes, Joe Hershey, John Scarlett, Frank Wattron, Joe McKinney, and the Tewksbury partisan who later turned the Pleasant Valley quarrel into a vendetta, James D. Houck.

The Pleasant Valley conflict turned bloody in February. Shots were fired at one Navajo herder early in the month, but he shot back. The cowboys left for easier pickings. Some days later another Navajo herder was found shot dead. The cowboy roughnecks had declared war.

The Hashknife outfit put John Payne, a big ruthless Texan, in charge of moving sheepmen off Hashknife range. Paine and his riders gave ultimatums to Tewksbury partisans: Leave, or else.

With the sheep out of Pleasant Valley, things cooled down a bit. One sheepherder was dead, but people felt he was just a Navajo. The dead sheep were another matter. They cost the Daggs -- and the Tewksburys -- money. But more than that, the brothers rankled at losing to the Grahams.

As the storm brewed, Commodore Perry Owens rode endless miles to uphold the law in his domain. He left the warrant for Andy Cooper's arrest gathering dust in Taylor, but served countless others. Lawbreakers went to jail, or left the country.
Then Mormon teamsters started losing horses. They would leave their teams hobbled at night and often wake up to find the horses gone, with the hobbles left behind to taunt them. Apache County Critic Editor Frank Reed wrote: "The leader of this gang of rustlers has been cited as one Andy Cooper, who was classed as being a horse thief desperado of the most daring stamp, and the boldest man in his operations as had ever cursed the west."

Nevertheless, Commodore Perry Owens ignored Andy Cooper. As he brought in lawbreaker after lawbreaker and collected license fee after license fee (he was liable for fees that went uncollected), Commodore's reputation grew. But horses and cattle continued to disappear, and the local papers continued to remind Sheriff Owens about Andy Cooper.

For months, Andy Cooper and John Payne ramrodded the wild bunch that harassed the sheepherders. The next casualties hit close to home. Ignoring the advice of his sons, Mart Blevins rode away from his Canyon Creek ranch one morning in late July 1887, looking for missing horses. He was never seen again. Some thought the Navajos killed him, others said horse thieves. Seven years later, a rancher on Cherry Creek found a human skull near a rusty rifle that had belonged to Mart Blevins.

Two weeks passed without word of Mart. The Blevins brothers were convinced sheepmen had killed the old man. Will Barnes, Arizona historian and owner of the Long Tom ranch, was at a Hashknife roundup camp south of Holbrook when John Payne, Hampton Blevins, and six others rode up on August 10. Payne announced they were headed for Pleasant Valley in search of Mart Blevins, and to "start a little war of our own." Barnes and the wagon boss tried to talk the riders out of violence, but Payne's job at the Hashknife was to get rid of sheepmen, so arguments against force meant nothing to the rowdies.

The horsemen passed the deserted Blevins ranch at the head of Canyon Creek -- the Blevinses had rented a house in Holbrook for their womenfolk -- and trailed down Canyon Creek, keeping an eye out for signs of the old man. Finding none, they headed for the Middleton ranch, where John Payne had ordered everyone to "leave, or else."

Jim and Ed Tewksbury, Jim Roberts, and Joseph Boyer were at the Middleton spread when Payne, Hamp Blevins, Tom Tucker, Bob Glasspie, and Bob Carrington rode up. Payne repeated his ultimatum, saying the occupants hadn't left and they'd have to pay.

According to Jim Roberts, Hamp Blevins reached for his pistol. Jim Tewksbury, deadly with a saddle gun, shot Hamp dead. Jim Roberts fired at John Payne, clipping his ear and splattering the side of his head with blood. Another Tewksbury bullet killed Payne's horse. He jumped away from his mount, but took only two or three strides before Tewksbury bullets dropped him lifeless near the body of Hamp Blevins. Tom Tucker was shot through the lungs; Glasspie and Carrington escaped untouched.

After the Middleton ranch shootout, Andy Cooper and the Graham faction may have gotten the idea that the law had sided with the Tewksburys. Deputy Sheriff Joe McKinney refused to investigate, saying it wasn't his jurisdiction (The Tonto Basin is in Gila and Yavapai Counties; McKinney was an Apache County deputy). Deputy James Houck, a former state assemblyman from Apache County, was a Tewksbury partisan. William Mulvenon, sheriff of Yavapai County, led a posse into Pleasant Valley but failed to arrest a single Tewksbury, even though he had ten warrants. His posse met a group of Graham men led by Andy Cooper at the Perkins store. Andy saw the officers were empty-handed and told them the cattlemen would "take matters into their own hands" and exterminate the sheepmen if the sheriff did not arrest the Tewksburys.

Pleasant Valley being outside his jurisdiction, Apache County Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens still found no reason to serve the warrant outstanding on Andy Cooper.

The Pleasant Valley War is also known as the Graham-Tewksbury feud, but none of its first victims bore those names. The Grahams may not have been involved at this point, because of Tom Graham's orders against killing. Andy Cooper, though, was another matter. His father was missing, his brother dead. He wanted action. So he usurped leadership of the Graham riders every chance he got, hoping to get a Tewksbury in the sights of his guns.

Owens's own deputy pushed the battle past the point of no return. On August 17, 1887, Deputy James Houck killed young Billy Graham from ambush. Suddenly, a range war between cattle and sheep interests became a personal vendetta between Grahams and Tewksburys.

The warrant for Andy Cooper's arrest lay in Taylor, ignored. So the county board of commissioners called Sheriff Owens in for an accounting. Will Barnes was there. "...They asked him why he had not made the arrest. His reply was that he had not been able to locate Cooper." Barnes told the board that he had seen Cooper in Holbrook two days before. The board told Owens to arrest Cooper within ten days or be ousted from office.

Now, as his horse dipped its head to drink from the Little Colorado, Owens considered his odds.

In the few days since the board's command, more men died in Pleasant Valley. Tom Graham, who had been against a shooting war, now wanted to avenge his young half-brother. Graham, Cooper, and a group of riders descended on the Tewksbury ranch as dawn broke September 2, 1887.

They caught John Tewksbury and William Jacobs about a mile from the Tewksbury home, and killed them. The cowboys kept the remaining Tewksburys pinned down inside the house. Hogs came and rooted at the bodies. But when they started to maul them, Mary Ann Tewksbury, John's wife, couldn't stand it. She braved the Graham guns to bury her husband and his friend in a shallow grave she scraped out with an old shovel. Cowboy chivalry protected her.

Commodore Owens rode slowly down Holbrook's Main Street, south of the tracks. He stabled the sorrel at Brown & Kinder's livery. Frank Wattron walked over from his drugstore, a shotgun under his arm, to tell Owens that Andy Cooper had bragged of killing one of the Tewksburys and another man he did not know. He asked if Owens wanted help.

"I don't want anyone hurt in this matter," Owens said. "They've been telling all around the country that I was afraid to serve these Cooper warrants, and a lot of other stuff. I'll show them that I'm not afraid and take him single-handed or die a-trying. You just sit back and watch me do it, that's all I ask."

Owens was in the livery stable cleaning his pistol, when John Blevins came for Andy's horse. "Your man's leaving town," Sam Brown told the sheriff. Owens put his six-shooter back together and walked out of the livery stable with his Winchester .45-60 in his hand.

A few minutes later, Andy Cooper and Sam Houston Blevins were dead, Mose Roberts was dying, and John Blevins was wounded.

At the inquest, Commodore Perry Owens gave this testimony:

. . . I went and got my Winchester and went down to arrest Cooper. Before I got there, I saw someone looking out at the door. When I got close to the house, they shut the door. I stepped up on the porch, looked through the window and also looked in the room to my left. I seen Cooper and his brother (John) and others in that room. I called to Cooper to come out. Cooper took out his pistol and also his brother took out his pistol. Then Cooper went from that room into the east room. His brother came to the door on my left, took the door knob in his hand and held the door open a little. Cooper came to the door facing me from the east room. Cooper held this door partly open with his head out. I says, "Cooper I want you." Cooper says, "What do you want with me?" I says, "I have a warrant for you." Cooper says, "What warrant?" I told him the same warrant that I spoke to him about some time ago that I left in Taylor, for horse stealing. Cooper says, "Wait." I says, "Cooper, no wait." Cooper says, "I won't go." I shot him. This brother of his to my left behind me jerked open the door and shot at me, missing me and shot the horse which was standing aside and a little behind me. I whirled my gun and shot at him, and then ran out in the street where I could see all parts of the house. I could see Cooper through the window on his elbow with his head towards the window. He disappeared to the right of the window. I fired through the house expecting to hit him between the shoulders. I stopped a few moments. Some man (Mose Roberts) jumped out of the house on the northeast corner out of a door or window, I can't say, with a six shooter in his right hand and his hat off. There was a wagon or buckboard between he and I. I jumped to one side of the wagon and fired at him. Did not see him any more. I stood there a few moments when there was a boy (Sam Houston Blevins) jumped out of the front of the house with a six shooter in his hands. I shot him. I stayed a few moments longer. I see no other man so I left the house. When passing by the house I see no one but somebody's feet and legs sticking out the door. I then left and came on up town.

It was signed C.P. Owens.

Owens's version of the gunfight was seconded by several witnesses: C. O. Brown, Will C. Barnes, Frank Wattron, Frank Reed, and William Adams, among others.

The coroner's jury found no fault with Owens.

The Sheriff was a hero for but an instant. Often he served warrants on dead men. Deputy James Houck viciously lynched Jim Stott, James Scott, and Billy Wilson. The Saint Johns Herald wrote: "The common people are beginning to think that our territory has had enough of desperadoes as 'peace' officers, who parade about with abbreviated cannon strapped to their hips. ...The trouble with the desperado-class of officers is that they shoot whom they please, and are acquitted on the plea that their victim 'had it in for 'em' and the shooting was in self defense...."

The Board of Supervisors became antagonistic, often disallowing Owens's expenses. He once had to threaten them at gunpoint to get paid. He didn't run for a second term, choosing instead to become a guard for the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad. Later he was a Deputy U.S. Marshall under M.K. Meade.

Eventually, Owens moved to Seligman where he ran a saloon. At the age of 50, he married Elizabeth Barrett. She was 23. The couple had no children. In his sixties, Owens' mind failed. Born July 29, 1852, and named after the hero of Lake Erie, Commodore Oliver Perry, Owens died May 10, 1919. He lies buried in an unmarked grave in Flagstaff, Arizona.

The warrant for the arrest of Andy Cooper rests in the archives of the Apache County court in St. Johns, yellow with age. Across the back, Commodore Perry Owens had scrawled: "Party against whom this warrant was issued was killed while resisting arrest."

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Chuck Tyrell

The Killing Trail -- 05-02-10

2010-02-05T18:52:00.000+09:00

New novel up for advance sales on Amazon UK. The Killing Trail, about a young man out for vengeance who finds out that may not be the right thing to do.

Wild West Weekend -- 31-01-10

2010-01-31T22:33:00.000+09:00

There's a hullaballoo going on over at the Tainted Archive. The master from western Wales, Gary Dobbs, vowed to put up 100 posts pertaining to things western, especially things about Black Horse Westerns, the Robert Hale brand. So hie on over and see what's going on. Lots of fun. Lots of information. Lots of . . . well, lots.

http://tainted-archive.blogspot.com/

Guns of Ponderosa -- 21-01-10

2010-01-21T18:30:00.000+09:00

Just got word from the publisher today. My rip-snorting Western novel, Guns of Ponderosa, will hit the bookstores -- brick-and-mortar and cyberspace -- on February 13. Amazon now offers the book on preorder; either the UK or the US version of Amazon, by the way. If you like good stories about taming towns and tossing out the baddies, read Guns of Ponderosa. Guaranteed to give an hour or two of pure escape.

Arizona -- 16-01-10

2010-01-16T13:54:00.000+09:00

I was born and raised in Arizona. My western novels take place in Arizona. So, if you wish to keep up with me, you'll need to know something about the state. Here's some information that may help.

Chuck Tyrell

Arizona

I sat down to write a long piece on the geography, flora and fauna of Arizona. Halfway through, I make a terrible mistake and erased everything I’d done. So, I’ll do it again, but from a slightly different angle.

Arizona is a big state, and of course, it was a big territory. One bill was introduced in 1860, trying to create an Arizona territory of the southern half of the then New Mexico territory. It failed to pass. Lieutenant Colonel John Baylor CSA, a Texan, declared himself governor of a de facto territory of Arizona in 1861. It would have occupied the current states of Arizona and New Mexico to the 34^th north parallel. Baylor defeated Union troops in the Battle of Mesilla and a skirmish at Canada Alamosa. The Confederate States of America officially organized an Arizona territory, which was declared by President Jefferson Davis on February 14, 1862. Baylor issued an extermination order against Apaches, which got him fired as governor. The CSA then lost the Battle of Glorieta Pass and its forces withdrew from the territory. The capital of Arizona in exile during the remainder of the Civil War was in San Antonio, Texas.

The Arizona Organic Act passed Congress in February 1863 and was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on February 24. The boundaries set are the same as the ones of the state today. Arizona’s border with New Mexico was set at 109°3’ West and its northern border with Utah at 37^o North. The western border with California is the Colorado River, and the southernmost point of Arizona’s border with Mexico is 31°20’ North. The state covers 113,998 square miles and is the 6^th largest state in the Union in terms of geographical area.

Governor John Noble Goodwin took his oath of office at the Navajo Springs stage station, the first stop in Arizona on the stage road west from Santa Fe, New Mexico. The capital of the territory was Fort Whipple just outside the current city of Prescott. There was no Prescott at the time, but after the town was founded, the capital moved there, where it remained until 1877. Tuscon was then capital for a few years, but the seat of government reverted to Prescott again in 1887 and thence to Phoenix, where it is today.

Geographically speaking, the lowest point in Arizona is at Yuma on the Colorado River, measured at a mere 70 feet above sea level. The highest point is Mt. Humphreys in the San Francisco Peaks, which are located between Flagstaff and the south rim of the Grand Canyon. In addition, the geographical provinces of the state are delineated by lines that run aslant of the state from the northwest corner to the southeast one, with a slight southward bulge in the center.

As mentioned, the Colorado River exits Arizona into Sonora, Mexico, at 70 feet about sea level. From that low point, the Basin and Range province fans out across the southwestern third of the state. Much of this area is part of the larger Mohave Desert, which by Saharan standards, is really no desert at all.

The Basin and Range province’s name stems from its inherent characteristics. Across the province, isolated mountain ranges poke their heads from the surrounding level plains, which are no more than basins between ranges that gradually filled with weakly cemented sand, gravel, and clay that washed down from the highlands. This province, some 200 miles wide at its base and more than 300 miles tall, running from the Sea of Cortez up the Colorado River to Hoover Dam, located where the river exits the Grand Canyon, is also home to 38 different mountain ranges with colorful names such as Tinnjas Altas, Growler, Sand Tank, Silver Bell, Castle Dome, Eagle Tail, Sierra Estrella, Buckskin, Harquala, and Big Horn.

This area was also home to the Yuman-speaking native Americans. Tribes included the Cocopa, Havasupai, Hopi (Mohave), Papago, Pima, Sobaipuri, Walapai, Yavapai, and Yuma. While most of the Arizona-based western stories we read that contain conflict with Indians name them as Apaches, we fail to learn that Hopi, Pima, and Yavapai warriors were instrumental in the Apache wars, fighting with white men against their hereditary enemies.

Actually, there’s an easy way to tell if you’re wandering around in the Basin and Ranges province. Joshua trees. In Arizona, if you see a Joshua tree, you’re in the Basin and Ranges province. Along with Joshuas, you’ll find mesquites, ironwood, and paloverdes, which I consider one of the most beautiful trees on God’s good earth. While the trees I’ve named at the larger species, smaller bush-like growths include catclaw, bursage, creosote, yucca, and jojoba. Actually, jojoba beans are prized as a chocolate substitute.

Remember that you’re traveling in the Mohave Desert (something like the heroes and heroine in the Story with No Name) where water is at a premium. But if you see towering cottonwood trees, you’ll know water is near. They only grow near permanent water. Willows also grow near water, but they are smaller and harder to see from a distance. By the way, willow bark tea will cure your headaches. Really.

The Basin and Ranges province also hosts the famous saguaro cactus. Found only in Arizona in the United States, saguaros grow throughout the Sonora desert area in Mexico and I saw them at the tip of the Baja California peninsula when visiting La Paz. Barrel cactuses also inhabit the area, and have saved more than one thirsty traveller (see The Three Godfathers for an example). Hedgehog and pincushion cactuses are mostly nuisances, but the fruit of the prickly pear is edible when ripe (it tastes quite good, actually).

Cholla cactuses come in several sizes and kinds – teddybear, buckhorn, staghorn, cane, chain-fruit, and diamond. Some, like the teddybear, look soft and fuzzy, but don’t let them touch you. Cholla (chain-fruit) are not called jumping cactuses for nothing.

Life in the Basin and Range province is multiple and varied. Insects, reptiles, mammals, avians – take your pick.

If you’re dying of thirst in the desert and a honey bee flies by, watch its direction. Bees don’t like to get far away from water.

Other insects include grasshoppers and crickets, termites, wasps, beetles, spiders – including both the non-poisonous tarantula and the deadly black widow and brown recluse.

The area harbors its share of reptiles, of course. Lizards, toads, frogs (where there is water), and a few snakes, the most famous of which are the sidewinder and western diamondback rattlesnakes. The horned toad is really a horned lizard, which we called horny toads when I was growing up. The only poisonous lizard is the Gila Monster, which is only rarely seen. And, wherever there is greenery to harvest, the desert tortoise may be sighted.

Mammals in the area can be divided into two major groups – those that eat aiplants and those that eat the plant-eaters.

Plant eaters begin with rodents – mice, rats, squirrels, gophers, porcupines. The famous ones are the packrats and kangaroo rats. In Vulture Gold, a packrat plays a bit role.

In the desert you often see jackrabbits, less often cottontails, even less often desert mule deer and whitetail deer. But they are there, along with desert sheep in the mountains and javelina wild pigs in the convoluted area near the Mexican border. All of these animals are plant eaters, though the ferocity of the javelina belies that fact.

The meat eaters start at the bottom with skunks and coati, ringtail cats and badgers, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, and the graceful, bashful mountain lion, which is sometimes called puma or cougar. None of these animals attack man, although coyotes have become bolder in recent years.

Arizona’s state bird inhabits the Basin and Range province – the cactus wren. Quail are numerous, and good eating. Perhaps they could provide a desert wanderer with a needed meal. Mourning doves, ditto. When I was a lad, my uncle regularly took his .410 shotgun out to get doves for the dinner table. More seed and insect-eating birds include woodpeckers, flycatchers, thrashers, flickers, kingbirds, hummingbirds, mockingbirds, swallows, and cardinals.

Raptors are a different story. Again, in Vulture Gold, an owl cut the life of a packrat short, waking the protagonist. Other desert birds of prey include hawks and eagles. Roadrunners prey on reptiles and insects, and crows, ravens, and vultures tend to prefer animals (or humans) that are already dead. How many western stories have you read where vultures signal a dead or dying animal (human or otherwise)?

The Mountain province parallels the eastern border of the Basin and Range province, wider in the south than the north. Most of Arizona’s mining and mineral wealth is found in the Mountain province. The area is immensely convoluted, consisting of large mountain masses, separated by canyons and valleys formed by the streams that traverse the province. The magnificent Salt River Canyon is in this province as are the huge copper mines of the Globe-Miami and Superior areas.

The province houses 24 mountain ranges. The famous ones are the Weavers, the Superstitions (where the Lost Dutchman’s gold mine is supposed to be), the White Mountains, where I lived as a youngster, the Dragoons, the Mule Mountains, and Dos Cabezas, where Mangas Colorados, Cochise, Geronimo, and the wily Nana had their Rancherias. The region is marked by a wide variety of plant communities, such as Chaparral, pinyon-juniper, Ponderosa pine, pine-fir, oak woodland, and desert grassland.

You might be interested to know that chaparral is not the name of a plant, but of a condition where most plants are low, brushy, shrubby, and broadleaved. The trees living in Arizona’s Mountain province chaparral communities include shrub live oak, squawbush, hackberry, hollygrape, manzanita, sotol, agave (from which tequila and mescal are made), and desert willow, among others.

Moving upland into the pinyon-juniper community, we find Utah junipers, one-seed junipers, alligator junipers, pinyon pine (the source of delicious pine nuts, which Arizonans call pinyon nuts), cliffrose, Arizona cypress.

In the southeastern part of Arizona, desert grasslands and oak woodlands predominate.

The animals of the Mountain province include nearly all of those found in the Basin and Range province. However there are many more animals because there is both more water and more cover. Deer, elk, and antelope are often seen in the Mountain provinces. Coming back from a White Mountain ski run in the early 1990s, we had to stop the car for a small herd of mule deer to cross the road ahead of us. Three or four bucks and twice as many does. It was not the season for fawns. The area is also known for black bears (one has a walk-on role in Hell Fire in Paradise, which will come out in the fall of 2010.

The birds also resemble those of the Basin and Range province. However, as one who lived in the province, the White Mountains host numerous robins, bluejays, woodpeckers, meadow larks, and killdeer plovers. The prevalent hawks were redtails and sparrow hawks. I don’t remember seeing an eagle. One night just above the Mogollon Rim, a mountain lion scampered across the road in front of us, brightly lit by our headlights. The one and only time I have seen that animal.

The Mountain province is crisscrossed with rivers and streams, and in them live several fish that can provide the intrepid fisherman with a good meal. In the lakes and ponds, bass, pike, crappie, bluegill, trout, and catfish. As a boy, I loved to fish in Show Low Creek, which ran through our town. I caught both perch and bullhead catfish. For trout, we had to go up on the mountain to Big Diamond creek, Paradise creek, White River, or some of the other streams stocked with rainbow trout from the hatchery in Pinetop. Still, even then, if I was lucky, I was able to catch an Arizona Native trout. Smaller than Rainbows and Browns, they still seemed to taste better somehow, because they weren’t hatchery fish.

The rim, which we call the Mogollon Rim in our part of Arizona, is the exposed edge of the great Colorado Plateau. In places it rises as much as 500 feet above the jumble at its feet. This jumble of hills and valleys is called the Transition province. It’s a wedge of a province that exists between the Mountain province and the Colorado Plateau. Jumbled is not enough to describe the area.

Now-famous Sedona red-rock country is part of the Transition province, as are the well-known army camps at Camp Verde (plays a small part in Vulture Gold) and Fort Apache. You can also read about Montezuma’s Caster and Montezuma’s Well in Vulture Gold, though I don’t use the names.

This province also houses agriculturally important valleys – Chino, Verde, the Tonto Basin, and the Gila River Valley. I have yet to locate a story in any of those valleys as I am not thoroughly familiar with the area.

Again, the rugged nature of the terrain and the large area covered by national forests today provide excellent food and shelter for the province’s wild animals. Here we begin to see non-poisonous snakes such as gopher snakes and Western hognozed snakes, blue racers, garter snakes, and the occasional diamondback.

The Colorado Plateau province is about the same size as the Basin and Range province, occupying about one-third of Arizona’s land and running from the Grand Canyon in the north to a point just more than halfway down the eastern border with New Mexico. The Colorado Plateau province was home to Arizona’s largest cattle and sheep domains. The Aztec Land and Cattle Company, better known as the Hashknife Outfit, ran some 33,000 head of cattle and 2,000 horses across the plateau from the 1884 until 1901. The Texan cowboys that brought the cows from Texas into Arizona, became an unruly, lawless element, and sided with the Grahams against the Tewksbury sheep faction in the Pleasant Valley War.

Arizona’s highest mountain, Mt. Humphreys in the San Francisco Peaks, sits on the northeast corner of the Colorado Plateau. Its second highest peak, Mt. Baldy, occupies a spot at the southwest edge of the plateau. In between, flat land broken up by gullies and canyons and the occasional cinder cone, such as Woodruff Butte, which pokes up from the surrounding plain about 15 miles south of Holbrook. The town of Woodruff now seems to be almost a ghost town. I spend much of my third-grade year at Woodruff, as my father was employed as a teacher there. The last I heard, there were 177 inhabitants. Never heard of a gunfight in Woodruff.

The Colorado Plateau contains Monument Valley, where so many John Ford westerns were filmed. Also the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, and the Navajo Indian reservation, all north of the Little Colorado River. Moving sound, the land gradually turns into juniper country, with thick stands of Utah and one-seed juniper choking out the grass. According to my father, who was born in 1906 when Arizona was still a territory, junipers were not so thick then and there was a lot more running water. He often pointed at a dry wash and said, “When I was a boy, water ran in that wash year round.¥

The plateau gradually slopes upward toward the south. The White Mountains, part of the Transition province, mark its southern extremity. In my home territory, just north of the White Mountains, cinder cones are prevalent, and the top soil is only inches deep before hitting a layer of lava. My uncle Orson had a field just south of Show Low Creek in which he swore he grew malpais rocks. Our pasture, 640 acres bought from the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe railroad, seemed to have more malpais than grass.

So there you have a quick glimpse of the tremendous variety in Arizona. If you locate your fictional town in Arizona, maybe some of these factoids can find their way into your writing and make things that much more convincing.

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Welcome to The Outlaw Journal

2010-01-15T23:38:00.001+09:00

Brand new blog. I'll be ruminating about outlaws, lawmen, cowboys, soiled doves, housewives, sodbusters, ranchers, natives, and all the other aspects of the stage they called The West. I'm new at this, but have several Western novels on the market, so I'm not entirely ignorant of the subject. Nough for today. It's a start. Back with more Western information soon. Books by Chuck Tyrell? OK. Vulture Gold, Revenge at Wolf Mountain, Trail of a Hard Man, and Guns of Ponderosa, with two in the wings -- The Killing Trail, and Hell Fire in Paradise. Talk with you all soon.