Journal Notes

Frontier adventurer Wild Bill Hickok was the West’s most famous gunfighter. He was a tall man with an athletic physique. Residents in Ellis County, Kansas used to say that Hickok was “so tall he had to wear short stirrups to save his boot soles.” He didn’t play at being tough, he was tough. He overheard an outlaw threatening to drag a store owner out into the street and beat him if he didn’t turn over the money in his register. Hickok stepped forward and told the desperado, “There will be one less son-of-a-bitch when you try that.” The outlaw quickly changed his mind. Wild Bill was a dead shot with a pistol. He never grabbed for his gun and shot quickly. He eased the weapon out of the holster, carefully took aim, and then fired. On September 28, 1869, some drunk teamsters led by Sam Strawhim got to tearing up a beer joint in Hays City, Kansas. The riotous times stopped when the Ellis County Sheriff, Wild Bill Hickok, coolly shot Strawhim in the head. Contrary to rumors started by Calamity Jane, she and Hickok were never romantically involved. In late 1886, Jane was telling everyone that Hickok was the father of a daughter she had. Hickok was a bit too deceased to object to the tale. Outside of Bill Tilghman, Hickok was the most impressive lawman in the history of the Old West. I don’t envy lawmen. They are people who leave every day for work not knowing if they’ll come home alive. I couldn’t do the job. I don’t have the temperament. The first time some Chiclet-brain I pulled over for a traffic ticket gave me that “Hey, I pay your salary” rap, I’d be too tempted to flip him a quarter and say, “Here’s a refund, jerk,” and then I’d drag his behind out of the car and start beating him like he was a Hitler piñata at a Mossad picnic. Eighty percent of the time, my allegiances lie with the men and women in blue. The rights of the criminals should never supersede the rights of good, decent, hardworking people. On the other hand flashing a badge, stating you’re with the F.B.I. , and threaten a 62 year-old woman shouldn’t be allowed either. I believe the man that did that is named Brian Stone – the 62 year-old woman was my mother. Sure, I think law enforcement agents can be brutal sometimes, because it’s a brutal world we live and make them work in. I just wish Hickok was around to take care of the bad cops and make short work of the outlaws – particularly those outlaws who falsely accuse people of crimes.

Gunslinger, shootist, pistoleer, hired gun. Such terms conjure up an image of a western hero protecting lawful citizens on America’s uncivilized frontier. Yet the romanticizing of the Old West has clouded the precise meanings of these words over time. None of these terms are synonyms for lawman or outlaw, because in the Wild West, gunfighters frequently worked both sides of the law. Jesse James belonged in that category. On this day in 1872, James shot a little girl in the leg during a scuffle over a cash box that Jesse was trying to pilfer from Ben Wallace at the Kansas State Fair. Those people who lived in the Missouri counter where Jesse was raised were convinced Jesse was not an outlaw excused his actions away. The trouble with differentiating outlaws from the lawmen hasn’t changed much from the days of the Old West. I’d throw lawyers into the mix of professions the average citizen can’t determine if the individual is for upholding what is good and right and true or just wanting to make a name for themselves by racking up a series of so-called wins using any mean to get a conviction. I thought lawyers would be like the character Ransom Stoddard from the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I never imagined they misrepresented themselves for political gain. Watching the trust I had in the legal system disappear has been a sad, confusing experience, like watching smoke from a book-burning taint a cloudless sky. In the past, I revered the legal system as the backbone of democracy. Now I quite frankly fear it – its linguistic fog, the casualness of the brutal transactions, the sheer density of its unconcern, their lack of desire to really find the truth. Somebody has their thumb on the scales of justice, folks. “And he’s out of order, I’m out of order, the whole system is out of order.”

It’s so nice to be home again among my own things. Travel is tiring. But the trip was necessary. On the plane ride back from Norborne, Missouri I was thinking how we don’t hear much about the childhood homes of legendary Old West figures or the mothers that raised them. My brother Barry and I are working on a book to remedy this very subject by the way. As the plane took off from the Kansas City airport I considered the life and hard times of Wyatt Earp’s mother, Virginia Ann Cooksey. Virginia Ann had eight children – Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil being the most famous. She died in 1893, living long enough to see one of her sons gunned down and killed, another crippled by gunfire, and a third wrongly accused and tried for a crime he didn’t commit. I’m sure she was devastated by the events that followed the gunfight at the OK Corral. All this led to thoughts of my own mother. She has been through a hundred kinds of hell on earth since my brother was falsely accused of a crime, convinced to take a plea, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. She sat in a courtroom and listened to poisonous lies about her son from the true criminals in this matter. She’s been the subject of ridicule and abuse at the hand of the ignorant in the small Missouri town where she lives – just this past week she was informed that a resident near her hoped her son would be put to death. I wish I could ease her pain. Erase the toll this has taken on her, the years of worry and torment she has endured. I think Wyatt Earp helped do that for his mother with his vendetta ride. I’m sure Virginia was concerned for her son but I’m sure she was also rooting for Wyatt to track down the bastards that cost her so much. I’m on a legal vendetta ride for my brother, mother and every other mother of a person falsely accused of the things my brother was accused. I won’t stop until I see them pay for what they’ve done. And even when I’m gone I’ll leave someone from the next generation to carry on the mission. It will never be over – not for the accuser or her mother or the next generation of people they bring into the ugly scene. I live to hear the words the attorney played by Paul Newman in The Verdict issued. “You know, so much of the time we’re lost. We say, ‘Please, God, tell us what is right. Tell us what’s true. There is no justice. The liars win, those that don’t know the system are powerless…. We become tired of hearing people lie. After a time we become dead. A little dead. We start thinking of ourselves as victims. And we become victims. And we become weak…and doubt ourselves, and doubt our institutions…and doubt our beliefs…we say for example, `The law is a sham…there is no law…I was a fool for having believed there was.’ But today you are the law. You are the law…And not some book and not the lawyers, or the marble statues and the trappings of the court…all that they are is symbols of our desire to be just… All that they are, in effect, is a prayer – a fervent, and a frightened prayer. In my religion we say, `Act as if you had faith, and faith will be given to you.’ If. If we would have faith in justice, we must only believe in ourselves. And act with justice. And I believe that there is justice in our hearts.” Hold on, mom, justice is not far off.

More traveling is in the forecast for me. I’m off to Missouri tomorrow. The fight for my brother has been a long and hard one but progress has been made and the truth of the matter will be revealed in the not too distant future. I’ve been looking forward to this for so many years. If my life were an Old West movie I’d be at liberty to say something more profound and memorable about the changes yet to take place. Western films have the best lines. Lines movie goers will never forget. For example: From the 1958 movie The Badlanders: “Unless you want to see your own gravestone on your way to hell, you’ll be on the next stage.” Town marshal and ex-con Peter “Dutchman” Van Hock (Alan Ladd). From the 1970 western The Ballad of Cable Hogue: “Honey, you were smelling bad enough to gag a dog on a gut wagon.” Said by prostitute Hildy (Stella Stevens) to Cable Hogue (Jason Robards, Jr.). From the 1969 western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: “Boy, I’ve got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.” Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) to the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford). One of my favorite bits of dialogue is from the 1939 film Jesse James: “We’re going to try and hang our lawless friend, of course!” “Before or after the trial?” Prosecutor Mr. Clark (Willard Robertson) and Marshal Will Wright (Randolph Scott). From the 1958 western The Law and Jake Wade: “How many times have I told you – if you let your hate get the upper hand, it’ll throw your timing off.” Outlaw Clint Hollister played by Richard Widmark said that to the young outlaw Wexler played by DeForest Kelley. One of the best western ever made was written by Dorothy Johnson. It was called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Lee Marvin played Valance and he was brilliant. Of course John Wayne who played Tom Donovan was better. Donovan was the only man Valance was truly scared of and Donovan knew it – as proof in the following exchange of dialogue. “You looking for trouble, Donovan?” “You aiming to help me find some?” No one played a cowboy like Wayne. I’ll return to the website next week at this time. As Wayne said in the Angel in the Badman when he rode out of town, “I’ve got places to go and country to put behind me.”

Nevada’s contribution to the western United States is much more than Las Vegas. Old West towns such as Rhyoltie, Goldfield and Pioche have a significant place in the history of the frontier. Take for example Pioche.   Bartender Faddiman had been warned often enough. Friend told him, “Don’t take that job at Pioche.”…”You’re as good as dead if you go to work in Pioche”…”No bartender ever lasted longer than a year there. Not one of Faddiman’s well-wishers wanted to see him go to certain disaster but his reason was simple, his need urgent. “I need a job and I don’t care where it is. I can take care of myself.” He did go to the most notorious town in Nevada – and stayed there. In his second week a drunk ordered a drink. “You don’t need another drink,” Faddiman told him – and those were his last words. The customer objected to them, simple and straightforward as they were, took out his six shooter and Faddiman set up no more drinks. The killer walked calmly behind the bar, stepped over the barkeep’s body and stripped the till. Then he went next door to the butcher ship of buxom, “Negro Liza” and for variation, slit her throat with his knife. He emptied her till too but by this time the sheriff knew about the bartender’s slaying and met the murderer at Liza’s door with a rattle of lead. And this was the way the single row of unmarked graves in Pioche’s Boot Hill grew so long, so fast. Piochee, pronounced Pee-oche with accent on the last syllable, was developed by Frenchman F.L.A. Pioche, although original deposits of lead-gold-silver were discovered by William Hamblin in 1863. Hamblin had it easy. Instead of spending years at prospecting, his Paiute Indian friends led him to the highly colored ledges that were to produce $40 million in ore. Hamblin had little money for developing and later sold the claims to the French banker from San Francsico. By 1870, the camp was considered the wildest in the West, the gun being the only law. The climate was fine enough to keep people dying of natural causes, unnatural being most popular, the first 75 deaths being from “lead to head: or violence of some sore. Not only did bad men drift into town to bully and shoot residents by mine owners imported their own bad men at the rate of 20 a day to fight encroachments. Death rate of these assassins was high and they got the camp’s Boot Hill off to a good start, with special editions for various categories. Today Pioche is no longer wild. Many relics of the old days remain, such as the Lincoln County Courthouse. Built of brick in the lat 1860s, it cost more than half a million, was condemned as unsafe as in 1933, three years before it was paid for. I’m exhausted from the Vegas trip and anxious to get back to work on the book about women outlaws of the mid-west and the love lessons women learned in the old west. I was absolute amazed at how short and tight the dresses worn by the 20 something crowd roaming through the casinos. Why are stores only selling half dresses? I couldn’t wear anything that short. I’m 50. I doubt anything wants to see that. I’m not ashamed of my body, I just don’t see any reason to not cover it up as much as possible. I’m one of those people who think those garments the Amish women wear are a great idea for everybody, regardless of their religious affiliation. I’m someone who considered becoming a nun, for the outfits.

The attorney admits he put an innocent man in prison and used his sister to persuade the falsely accused man to take a plea. It’s too late to make things right however. A long period of time in solitary confinement, beatings, and multiple rapes have left the once vibrant human being sullen, broken, and without hope. The people who once called him father do not miss him. Indeed they loathe him for something he didn’t do. Something only one says happened – one that has lied most recently about a child’s paternity. There were no witnesses – only the word of a known liar. The falsely accused shakes all the time now – his tremors are more pronounced. He can’t hold silverware. Eating anything is difficult. He needs teeth. He’s needed teeth for years. His eyesight is bad. The discount card from the eye glasses store in the mall sent out a reminder that it’s time he had new glasses. Without a doctor to diagnosis his need it won’t happen. And the ones who used to call him father do not miss him. Indeed they loathe him for something he didn’t do. They send out emails that read “until you get over your hatred toward my family I will not friend you.” Ironic since they helped kill a man because of their own hate and have had a cousin send death threats. I’m not without guilt. I’m the sister used to persuade the falsely accused man to take a plea. I wasn’t bold enough to take a stand. I let my brother down. I miss him and always will. I’ll fight to make it right but the damage has been done. And the ones who used to call him father do not miss him. They do not grieve for him. A great miracle is needed. It will take all I have and more to fix this. Still no amount of money can bring back the one I used to know as brother. That man is gone now. What can I do to make it right? I’m buried above ground.

Sheriff Perry Owen had learned long ago that reputation had its limits. It could help keep greenhorns from gunning for him. But sooner or later someone else would try. Owen, like other gunfighters, had developed a reputation he didn’t want. On a Sunday afternoon in Holbrook, Arizona in 1887, Owen was again headed for trouble. It had become his job since he had acquired his position as Apache County, Arizona sheriff. But today would be especially dangerous. He was on his way to arrest Andy “Cooper” Blevins who was suspected of murdering John Tewksbury and William Jacobs two days past. Andy Blevins was no ordinary suspect. He was at the center of a major Arizona feud at taking place at that time. A few years back two small time ranchers, John Tewksbury and Samuel Graham, and their families, developed a working agreement. They cut out mavericks from larger ranchers around them to develop their own stock. At this time this wasn’t always thought of as rustling. It was more like enterprising. Or at least that was the way small ranchers thought about it. The cattle the two families rounded up were grazed on Graham’s land. Part of the agreement said the Tewksburys could cut out their share anytime they liked. This worked for a while. It wasn’t long, though, before something went sour. One day Sam Graham secretly registered his brand and claimed all the cattle was his. The next time the Tewksburys tried to cut out their share, the Grahams stopped them and told them the new situation. The Tewksburys didn’t cotton to that. John Tewksbury took the next step. He encouraged the Daggs brothers to bring sheep into the Pleasant Valley area where Graham’s ranch was located. This got serious real quick. Sheep would trim the grass to a nubbin, leaving nothing for cattle. The small feud between the Grahams and the Tewksburys now turned into a major land war between cattlemen and sheepmen. Hashknife cowboys such as George Smith, Tom Pickett, Tom Tucker, John Paine, Buck Lancaster, Bob Glasspie, and George McNeal along with others interested in cattle joined with the Grahams. This included the Blevins family, who had long been suspected of rustling cattle. Other small landholders who had no interest in cattle joined with the Tewksburys. By February 1887 the first victim of this war died. A sniper shot and killed a Navaho sheepherder. Later some would suspect Tom Horn did the killing since he was in the area and knew the Tewksburys. In July Mart Blevins disappeared. Most believed him to be another victim of the war. August 10 Hampton Blevins and John Paine were killed. Tom Tucker, Bob Glasspie and Bob Charrington were injured. They had all been fighting the Tewksburys at the Middleton ranch. A week later a sheepman, James Houck, shot and killed one of Graham’s sons, William, age 18, in a horseback duel. Houck was also an Apache County deputy sheriff. Friday morning, September 2rd, Tom and John Graham along with Andy, Charles, and John Blevins plus others attacked the Tewksburys. That’s when John Tewksbury and William Jacobs were killed. So Sheriff Perry Owens had no illusions about what he was stepping into. But he had little choice. He represented the law of the land. His duty was to enforce it. And that’s what he intended to do on this day 125 years ago in the afternoon. It was nearing 4 p.m. It wouldn’t be the first gun battle he’d been in. He hoped it wouldn’t be his last. He’d left home when in his teens and worked as a cowboy for 10 years before ending up in Arizona working at a stage station. By then he’d already been tagged with a reputation as a dead aim shot against Indians. Later he’d started a horse ranch at Navajo Springs. The reputation that preceded him got him elected the Apache County Sheriff . He decided to dress up to fit the reputation. Some say his appearance rivaled that of Wild Bill Hickok. Owens let his curled blond hair grow long. He wore a wide-brimmed sombrero, fringed and hand-tooled chaps, a wide gun belt ribbed with two rows of ammunition, and a Colt .45 hung butt forward on his left side. But appearance as well as reputation didn’t hold water when it came to a showdown. And that’s what Owens was now facing. He arrived in Holbrook at 4 p.m. and left his horse at Brown and Kinder’s Livery Stable. He unsheathed his Winchester and carried it as he walked toward the Blevins’ clapboard cottage. One version of what followed says Owens walked up to the front door and knocked. Andy Blevins opened the door. “You’re under arrest,” Owens stated matter-of-factly. Andy slammed the door, drew his gun, and fired through it at Owens. Owens returned fire with the Winchester, the lead slamming Andy Blevins back across the room. Another version says Owens walked up to the house and spotted Andy Blevins with a drawn six-gun. Both men shot simultaneously but only Owens’ shot found its mark, knocking Andy back into the arms of his mother inside. One way or another Owens finished off Andy Blevins. John Blevins then fired at Owens from another door. Owens shot back hitting the second Blevins in the right shoulder. Owens then ran to the side of the house as Mose Roberts, a Blevin brother-in-law, leaped out a back window holding a gun. Owens drilled him with another shot, then wheeled around in time to nail 16-year-old Sam Houston Blevins in the heart. The youngster had run on to the front porch with gun in hand. John Blevins was the only one of the four to survive. This would not be the end of the Pleasant Valley War but it would put a damper on it. On Wednesday, September 21, Sheriff Perry Owens along with 16 posse members would shoot it out with both sides. John Graham and Charlie Blevins both died in this battle. The lawmen took in a number of members from both sides. This would stop the fighting for at least a year. Owens turned in his badge on December 31, 1888. He later worked as a detective for the Santa Fe railroad, then as an express messenger for Wells Fargo, before settling down in Seligman, Arizona, where he died on May 10, 1919. There’s nothing better or more satisfying than frontier justice.

More than 125 years ago the famous London resident author Oscar Wilde was touring the Old West and giving lectures in saloons and stage stops. Wilde loved the west and the people who settled it. He was well liked by most everyone he met but the rough frontiersmen did not know quite what to make of Wilde. His manner of speaking and the way he dressed confused them. Not many men outside of Boston wore shirts with lace collars and cuffs. “To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and dandy merely –it is not wise to show one’s heart to the world-and as seriousness of manner is the disguise of the fool, folly in its exquisite modes of triviality and indifference and lack of care is the robe of the wise man. In so vulgar an age this we all need masks.” So wrote Oscar Wilde in 1884, long before his crowning achievement, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened in London. And for most of his life the Irish-born playwright’s cheerful, witty façade held up quite well. It has held up even better since he died, which probably is why Wilde still regularly shows up on lists of favorite historical Old West dinner guests. But in his last years Wilde was welcome at no tables in England. Though married and the father of two children, Wilde was for years involved with a younger man, Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde’s double life proceeded without incident until soon after Earnest opened, when he received a calling card from Douglas’s eccentric father, the Marquees of Queensbury. It read, “To Oscar Wilde,” posing as somdomite [sic].” To maintain his mask Wilde felt he had to charge the Marquees with libel. And when the trial began in April 1895, Wilde charmed the jury with his punchy testimony. But the Marquees had hired private detectives, and when the evidence began to be presented Wilde abruptly dropped the suit. Later the same day he and Douglas were arrested for immorality. Wilde’s new play continued its successful run, but his name was removed from the program. At his own trial Wilde again maintained his witty upper lip. The first jury could not reach a verdict. But the second jury convicted him, and Wilde was sentenced to two years’ hard labor. He spent the time in solitary confinement, where he was poorly fed and slept on a wooden plank bed. He was put to work sewing mailbags. When he was released in May 1897, Wilde was bankrupt, his manuscripts had either been auctioned or stolen. Friends paid his way to France, where he finally settled in Paris. He wrote a little about prison life, including the famous Ballad of Reading Gaol, and continued to whisk his way through dinner engagements. But he confessed, “I don’t think I shall ever really write again. Something is killed in me.” He picked up boys more frequently than before and began drinking large amounts of absinthe, though doctors had told him it would kill him. Wilde laughed off the warnings, as did his constant worry about money, quipping, “I am dying beyond my means.” In October 1900, Wilde developed a painful ear infection from an injury he had suffered in prison when he fainted one morning in chapel and perforated an eardrum. Doctors performed surgery, but the infection spread and caused him to develop encephalitis, swelling of the brain. He was taken back to his hotel room, the last in a series of cheaper and cheaper rooms that he could barely afford. The legend is that his last words were “It’s the wallpaper or me-one of us has to go.” But Wilde did not depart with a clever remark. He grew delirious through the month of November. On the thirtieth two close friends near his bed could hear only a painful grinding sound from his throat. A nurse regularly had to dab blood that was drooling from his mouth. Slowly his breathing and his pulse weakened until he died at about 2 p.m. that afternoon.

Not everything of note that took place in the Old West involved six-shooters or gunslingers.  Some of the most important events that took place on the brave new frontier were quiet, unassuming advances that barely made the papers at all.  In late August, 1856, Gail Borden, recognizing the plight of mothers and their children on long sea journeys, worked on a progress for ‘the concentration of milk.’  The patent he received for the process, led to condensed milk, later used by the Union Army in the Civil War.  Also on this day in 1891, an early attempt at rain-making is successful in bringing rain to Midland, Texas.  The area had been dry for three years.  There won’t be much out of the ordinary for me today.  I’ll continue to work on two new books Love Lessons Learned by Women of the Old West and Women Outlaws of the Mid-west.  I’ll be on the road a lot next month researching and signing books and doing various video shoots for my new website which will be launch in October.  I received quite a few letters this past weekend from people anxious to read the story about my brother Rick.  That’s encouraging.  I promise the release date for The Plea is not far off.  Perhaps that is the reason the attorney I initially hired to help my brother several years ago has been viewing my site.  Not to worry.  I can assure him he will be portrayed as he presented himself.  In thinking of him right now I’m reminded of a joke that fits him perfectly.  What’s the difference between a lawyer and a vulture?  The lawyer gets frequent flyer miles.  Now, back to the Old West I go.