Journal Notes

One of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever visited is a ghost town called Bodie. The gold camp is not far from the booming metropolis of Bridgeport, California. Bodie has more than one hundred buildings standing in a state of arrested decay. There you can see what life was really like in the mid-1800s. I’ve spent a lot of time at the cemetery there. I learn a great deal about history wandering around old cemeteries. At the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Bodie there is a demur marble angel that sits among the faded wooden crosses and weather-ravaged rock grave memorials. The three-foot cherub holds a flower wreath in her left hand and rests her hand on her right elbow. The lone angel watches over the burial site of a three-year-old little girl named Evelyn Meyers. Evelyn was the joyful, precocious daughter of Fannie and Albert Meyers. Born in Bodie on May 1, 1894, the child had a ready smile for everyone she saw and a particular fondness for an elderly miner who was a dear friend of the family. Fannie would take Evelyn with her when she went to do the weekly shopping. The little girl played outside with the other children in town and sat with the old miner friend and listened to the stories he would tell. Evelyn would follow the man everywhere he went, from the blacksmith shop to the church. The miner was taken with the little girl’s devotion. In the spring of 1897, Evelyn spotted the miner on Main Street and took out after him. Unaware that the child was following him, the man made his way to his claim just outside the town. Evelyn crept quietly behind. Whistling and preoccupied with the job of searching for gold, the miner raised a pickax up and back to begin chipping away at a rock wall. He still did not know Evelyn was behind him as he began to work. The top of the pickax caught the girl in the head, killing her instantly. The miner was devastated. The girl was laid to rest on April 6, 1897. Thousands of Bodie visitors have passed by the angel tombstone in the one-hundred-plus years it has been standing in the cemetery. Vandals have broken the top of the wings on the statue as well as the left foot. The inscription at the base of the marble is still clearly visible and reads Beloved Daughter. If you’re interested in reading more stories like this, please read Tales Behind the Tombstones: The Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen. Written by yours truly, the book is available everywhere.

In every good western, whether it’s a book or a film, the bad guy more often than not get’s what’s coming to him in the end. That’s what makes westerns so attractive to me and hundreds of thousands of others. There’s something satisfying about a bully getting humiliated, a thief getting tossed in jail and a murderer being gunned down. I can’t help but think that’s part of what motivated inventor Samuel Colt to patent the revolving-camber pistol. Colt had a rough childhood. His mother died young from tuberculosis, he lost a sister to the same disease, and two of his other siblings committed suicide. At the age of eleven Colt was forced to work for a farmer who treated him cruelly. As soon as he was old enough he ran away. He went to work as a sailor and spent long hours staring at the ship’s wheel. He used this principle to invent a gun that could shoot multiple bullets without reloading. He excelled at both invention and marketing and today would be considered a compulsive workaholic. He struggled with a way to produce his guns cheaply but was forced to find a method of mass production after he received and order from the U.S. government in 1847 for 1,000 revolvers. By the time he died of exhaustion at age forty-seven, Samuel Colt had produced more than 400,000 Colt .45 revolvers. At his funeral in 1862 it was said of the Colt .45 he invented: “God created man, but Sam Colt [the Colt .45] made them all equal.” In 1873 the Colt SAA sold for $17.50. The complete kit with a holster and some ammunition could be covered by a $20 gold piece. The $20 Double Eagle of 1873 contained 0.9675 ounces of pure gold. Today an ounce of gold is about $1,090 and a new Colt SAA can be special ordered from Colt’s custom shop for about $1,500. It is fair to say that the invention of the Colt revolver changed the course of American history. It aided the westward expansion of America and the simplicity and effectiveness of the Colt revolver design is evidenced in the fact that they are still made and used today, both in the armed forces and in the private sector. Many have called the Colt repeating pistol the finest gun ever made. It was referred to as “law and order in six-finger doses.”

Ask any little girl what she wants to be when she grows up. Chances are she won’t say president or astronaut. Chances are she’ll say “Supermodel.” What does it say about our culture when Einstein’s original draft of the theory of relativity fetches less at auction than what a flat-line electroencephalograph Giacometti statue gets to stroll down a runway? And for goodness sake, isn’t it about time we passed an absolute edict forbidding these women from uttering the words “Modeling is hard work.” I think it would have been a thrill to have been Sacagawea. What a life she had. She was the young Shoshone Indian woman who served as Lewis and Clark’s translator on their 1803 expedition to explore the uncharted western regions of America. She made the entire journey to the Pacific, and the return trip, with a newborn baby on her back; many believe that without her aid, the journey, commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson, would have ended in failure. Some accounts say she died in 1812 at age twenty-five of putrid fever, while others believe she died in 1884 on an Indian Reservation in Wyoming. The child she carried in a papoose was Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, nicknamed Pompy, meaning first-born, who eventually attended St. Louis Academy with tuition paid by Clark. Pompy later met Prince Wilhelm of Germany while on a natural history expedition and traveled back to Europe with him, where Pompy learned to speak four different languages. But by the time he was twenty-four Pompy was back in North America living as a mountain man. When the Gold Rush of ‘49 started, he got caught up in the fever and died from too much time wading through cold rivers panning for gold. His cause of death was bronchitis at age sixty-one, and his portrait is the only one of a child on any U.S. coin. What supermodel can boast a legacy like that?

I live vicariously through the tales of the men and women of the Old West. From the research I’ve done many of the families that came over the plains cared deeply about one another and would sacrifice anything for the happiness of their loved ones. And then there’s the family I was born into. Whether or not these individuals married into the family or were brought about by the natural process of things, the majority of them have one thing in common and that’s to hurt. Making a family member bleed and watch them writhe in pain over their actions is a sport to them. I begin my Monday on the battle field of this family trying to deal with another crippling shot fired by a person whose idea of love is more akin to the actions of a character from a horror film who wants to wipe out everyone in their sight than someone who insists their behavior is motivated out of goodness or what’s best. If I couldn’t lose myself in the Old West today I’d want to hurl myself into a trash compactor. It’s seems only fitting that I’d be writing today about a man who knew how to stand up for his family but who had no regard for any other human life, Jesse James. James is perhaps the most beloved murderer in American history. He and his gang shot bank clerks in cold blood, killed passersby who looked the wrong way, and derailed trains and robbed the passengers as they lay injured. But none of that mattered. To many alive at the time James was a post-Civil War hero, satisfying the thirst of many defeated Confederates to get in a few last shots after the war. James, a handsome bearded man with blue eyes and a narrow face, was fashioned as a modern-day Robin Hood, though later historians were at a loss to find any evidence of charitableness. As a Confederate guerrilla and later as a bank robber, James came close to a violent death several times. But as long as he had his own guns, he always seemed to survive. During the war he was badly wounded in the leg and his horse was shot out from under him. Just after the war federal soldiers shot James in the lung and left him for dead. He lay on the ground for two days until a farmer aided him. When he was ambushed robbing the Northfield, Minnesota, bank in 1876, three of his gang were killed, three were shot and captured, and only Jesse and his brother, Frank escaped. His luck ended in 1882, after a local sheriff got 21-year-old Robert Ford, a less notorious outlaw, to join James’s gang to try to capture him. Ford and his brother easily joined up and were staying with James and his wife in St. Joseph, Missouri, that April, planning their next bank robbery. Early on the morning of April 3, James, who had just come inside from feeding the horses, took off his jacket and, because he trusted his friends, his gun belt. He had climbed up on a chair to pull some cobwebs from a picture when he heard the cock of a pistol. As he turned unarmed, Robert Ford shot James in the head with a .44-caliber pistol that James had given him as a present. James’s body was put in a $260 casket-paid for by the sheriff who had recruited Ford-and sent by train the few miles to his hometown of Kearney, in Clay County, Missouri. His open casket at the Kearney Hotel drew thousands, jamming the small town with their horses, and even passengers from the trains that made unscheduled stops on their way through. A collection to benefit James’s wife and two children gathered lass than $10, but that was only the beginning. Personal effects of the house were sold for about $250. The owner of the house, a St. Joseph city councilman who thought he had rented it to Thomas Howard (an alias of James’s) sold bloody floor splinters for 25 cents apiece. A year later James’s mother opened her home to visitors, also for a quarter. Of the more than twenty movies made about Jesse James, the first was financed by his descendants in 1920. Meanwhile, Robert Ford was pardoned by the governor, Ford toured Eastern cities reenacting the shooting, but the show was booed in the Midwest. Later, in a mining camp in Colorado, Ford was shot in the neck and killed by a man with a sawed-off shotgun seeking revenge for the death of Jesse James.

When news hit the airwaves about my late brother back in 2005, the reporters got everything wrong. They weren’t interested in making corrections either. Bad reporters have been around for centuries. There are very few Woodward and Bernstein style journalists. Newspapers and television news report rumors, facts are not important. Some of the worst reporters in the world work at KMBC-TV in Kansas City, Missouri. Wild Bill Hickok battled with Missouri reporters too, but he was able to convince them to make the necessary corrections. Amid widespread reports that he had been shot to death at Fort Dodge, Kansas, in 1873, quick-draw lawman Wild Bill Hickok wrote this letter to the St. Louis Missouri-Democrat: “Wishing to correct an error in your paper of the 12th, I will state that no Texan has, nor ever will ‘corral William.’ I wish you to correct your statement, on account of my people. -P.S. I have brought your paper in preference to all other since 1857.” Stories about James Butler Hickok were legendary in his own time. As a deputy U.S. marshal over much of the Plains territory, Hickok developed such a reputation as a fast shooter that other men would follow him around looking for a showdown. Hickok, a tall, a broad-shoulder man who carried two pistols in his vest and a pair of .36-caliber Colt revolvers around his waist, took to walking down the middle of the street and avoiding open windows. The former Union spy even sat in the barber’s chair with his shotgun in his lap. Still, Hickok relished his dangerous job. In fact, some say he used his deputy’s badge simply as a license to get involved in gunfights. He once advised, “Young man, never run away from a gun. Bullets can travel faster than you can. Besides, if you’re going to be hit, you had better get it in the front than in the back. It looks better.” As the frontier grew more settled and hired their own lawmen, Hickok was called on less and less. He performed in some of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West stage shows, but mainly he wandered the West in search of some action. In 1876, Hickok was in Deadwood Gulch, where gold had been discovered in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory. He had gotten married that March and hoped to strike enough gold to settle down. But meanwhile Hickok pursued his passion for gambling. On August 2, Hickok walked into the Number 10 Saloon just after noon to join a poker game. He always sat at the table with his back to the wall. But this time when he asked one player to get up and give him that stool, the other players just laughed it off, and Hickok finally took a seat that faced the front door but didn’t give him a full view of the barroom. At about 3 p.m. Jack McCall entered the saloon and walked to the end of the bar behind Hickok. Hickok had played against McCall the day before, and had even given him money for dinner after McCall went broke, so the former deputy continued to concentrate on his cards. Suddenly, McCall pulled a pistol, fired and a bullet struck Hickok in the back of his head, exited through his right cheek, and then lodged in the wrist of the card player across from him. Hickok, killed instantly, fell off his stool and slumped on his side on the floor. McCall, who said later he shot Hickok for killing his brother, ran out of the saloon and jumped on a horse. But he was caught when the saddle fell over, and he later hanged. Hickok, meanwhile, left part of his legend on the poker table. The cards he was holding – a pair of aces and a pair of eights – are known as the “dead man’s hand.”

A well known western figure I’ve long since wanted to write about was Geronimo. Growing up at Fort Huachuca I heard a lot about Geronimo and always admired him for so enthusiastically fighting back against the bad guys. He fought with a woman warrior I wrote about in the book She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. She didn’t live long standing up to a government that lied. But I guess she’d rather be a dead hero than a live coward. Geronimo waged war for twenty-five years against both U.S. and Spanish armies to protect his tribal lands. Born with the name Goyathlay, he had a violent life from the beginning with the death of his father during a war, followed by the murder of his first wife, three children, and mother during a raid by Spanish soldiers. “St. Jerome!” is what the Spanish settlers yelled when they saw Geronimo preparing to attack, asking for help of the patron saint of translators, for some reason. Some linguists believe that is how “Geronimo,” the derivative of Jerome, became a name synonymous with a wild assault. He and a band of thirty-eight remained the very last to elude U.S. troops, until he finally surrendered in 1886 and was sent to a reservation. Toward the end of his life he embraced his celebrity status and appeared at country fairs to sign autographs and even rode in President Teddy Roosevelt’s inaugural parade. He died of pneumonia in 1909 at seventy-nine. His grave was allegedly robbed by members of Yale’s Skull & Bones Society, and Geronimo’s skull is used today in initiation rituals of the secret club to which both Presidents George W. and George H. W. Bush once belonged.

The following story is a Cherokee Indian tale about fair play and takes place in the Blue Ridge country of what is now western North Carolina. Playing by the rules a big part of “how to play the game,” both on and off the field. I wanted to include this tale today in honor of Cherokee frontier lawman Sam Sixkiller and the book that is set to be released about this incredible men. And now, The Boy Who Went to the Sky. There was once upon a time a boy who was a fine ball player of his village of the Cherokee nation. He could catch well, run swiftly to the goal, and almost never did he lose a game for his side. And one season it was decided that his village should play a ball game with the village of the Cherokees on the other side of the Ridge. So the two teams met not far from Pilot Knob, and the game began. This boy was anxious, just as a boy of today would be, to help win the game for his village, and for a while the game seemed to be going against him. Time and time again the players from the Indian village on the other side of the Ridge ran and made goals. This made the boy discouraged, and it also made him forget his honor. His village must make the goal, he thought, so he did a thing which was forbidden in the rules of ball playing. He picked up the ball in his hand and tried to throw it to the goal. The Indians kicked the ball. It was not considered fair to touch it with their hands. He thought that no one had seen him, and he was successful. The ball went straight to the goal, but it did not stop there. He boys and girls and the braves who sat in a wide circle on the grassy field to watch the game saw a strange thing. Bounding away from the goal, the ball went up into the air. Following the ball went the boy who had forgotten the rules of the game. His feet left the ball field. He seemed to be leaping up towards the sky to try and bring back the ball, but neither he nor the ball stopped. Up, up, higher and farther through the blue air they went until the ball was out of sight, and then the boy could no longer be seen. It was magic which had happened, and the people rubbed their eyes with their wonder, and then they silently went home to their villages. It seemed to them to have been a lesson, for the boy’s wrong play had been seen, not only by the Great Spirit of the Cherokee People, but by some of the ball players. They knew why the boy had been taken away from his friends. The was the ancient days before the Moon had appeared in the sky, but that night a strange thing happened. Sitting late beside their campfires the braves of all the villages of the Cherokee country saw a huge, round ball of silver rise in the sky and then hang there, lighting the forest trees with its wonderful, pale light. And on the surface of this ball of silver could be seen the face of the boy who had not played fair in the ball game. It was the ball which had been taken from the ball field up to the sky, and fastened there. In its light could be seen the boy had been taken from the earth with it. The Moon had some to the heavens, a ball taken from the game field. Sometimes it was seen that the Moon was smaller. It was sometimes eclipsed. Everybody was amazed at an eclipse of the Moon, for the night would suddenly darken and the tribes would gather and fire guns and beat a drum. The eclipse came about because of a great Frog, who tried to swallow the Moon, and the drum frightened him away. But the oddest thing about the Moon was its way of waxing and waning. From night to night it would become so large that the Indians could see the face of the Boy-in-the-Moon, and then it would be nothing but a silver thread in the sky above the pine tree. This happened, the Boy-in-the Moon told them, to remind ball players never to cheat. When the Moon looked small and pale it was because someone had handled a ball unfairly. So it came about in the Cherokee country that they played ball after that only in the full of the moon. Sam Sixkiller: Cherokee Frontier Lawman is currently available through Amazon.com. Register to win a free copy of the book by sending an email to www.chrisenss.com

All the Tombstone luminaries were dwarfed by the presence of the Earp family. Less than two years after their arrival to the town referred to as “too tough to die,” Virgil Earp was ambushed by the cowboys and was left crippled for life. The same cowardly group that shot Virgil then shot Morgan. At 10:50 p.m. on March 18, 1882, Morgan was playing pool at Bob Hatch’s Billiard Parlor. Wyatt watched as his bother chalked his cue. Suddenly, from a crowd of men standing behind a back door, two rifle shots blasted into the room. The first barely missed Wyatt, but it crushed Morgan’s spine. He died before midnight. Three men were seen running from the pool hall – an unidentified Indian, a lawman named Frank Stillwell, and Pete Spence. Wyatt wanted blood. If they were my brother’s I would have wanted the same. On the morning of March 22, a portion of the Earp posse including Wyatt, his brother Warren, Doc Holliday, Sherman McMaster and Turkey Creek Johnson rode into Spence’s woodcutting camp in the South Pass in the Dragoon Mountains, looking for Spence. Unknown to the Earp posse, Pete Spence was in jail, but at the wood camp, the Earp posse found Florentino “Indian Charlie” Cruz. The Arizona Weekly Star had previously identified “Florentino Saiz as “the 1878 murderer of two U.S. Marshals”, and Earp strongly suspected he was one of those involved in the shooting death of his brother Morgan. According to witnesses in the wood camp, as the Earp posse arrived, Cruz ran and the Earp posse chased him, firing several shots, then a final shot. Earp told his biographer Stuart Lake that he got Cruz to confess to being the lookout, and that he identified Stilwell, Hank Swilling, Curly Bill and Johnny Ringo as Morgan’s killers. After the confession, Wyatt Earp shot Cruz, telling Lake that he had given Cruz a pistol, and told him to draw. The coroner’s inquest identified him as Florentino Cruz. Dr. George Goodfellow testified that he found that Cruz had a minor wound to his arm, a wound in his thigh, a serious wound in his groin and pelvis, and a shot in the side of his head. The coroner thought either of the last two shots would have been fatal. Rumor has it that before Cruz got what was coming to him he insisted that he had done what he had to do and should be allowed to have some peace now. I was recently informed that the cowards who took my brother’s life were asking for the same thing. If Cruz wanted peace he shouldn’t have been involved in a murder. If the cowards who took my brother wanted peace they shouldn’t have falsely accused him of a crime and they shouldn’t post obscene things about a dead man on their blog. They should prepare themselves for the fate that awaits all cowards – unrest, to be haunted. A coward will die many times before their actual demise. No one knew that better than the cowboys Earp tracked to their death.

For more information:
Laurie Kenney
203/458-4555
laurie.kenney@globepequot.com

SAM SIXKILLER: Cherokee Frontier Lawman

A riveting biography of a little-known Native-American who shaped history—and a story complete with shootouts, romance, intrigue, and a little politics.

Sam Sixkiller was one of the most accomplished lawmen in 1880s Oklahoma Territory, and, in many ways, he was a typical law-enforcement official: minding the peace and gunslinging in the still-wild West. What set Sam Sixkiller apart was his Cherokee heritage. Sixkiller’s sworn duty was to uphold the law but he also took it upon himself to protect the traditional way of life of the Cherokee. Sixkiller’s temper, actions, and convictions earned him more than a few enemies, and in 1886 he was assassinated in an ambush. TwoDot, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press, is proud to announce the June 12, 2012, release of Sam Sixkiller: Cherokee Frontier Lawman, by Howard Kazanjian and Chris Enss, a new biography that takes a sweeping, cinematic look at the short, tragic life of of Sam Sixkiller and his days policing the streets of the Wild West.

Howard Kazanjian is an award-winning producer and entertainment executive who has been producing feature films and television programs for more than twenty-five years. While vice president of production for Lucasfilm Ltd., he produced two of the highest grossing films of all time: Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. He also managed production of another top-ten box-office hit, The Empire Strikes Back. Some of his other notable credits include The Rookies, Demolition Man, and the two-hour pilot and first season of J.A.G.

Chris Enss is an award-winning screen writer who has written for television, short subject films, live performances, and for the movies, and is the co-author (with JoAnn Chartier) of Love Untamed: True Romances Stories of the Old West, Gilded Girls: Women Entertainers of the Old West, and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon: Women Patriots and Soldiers of the Old West and The Cowboy and the Senorita and Happy Trails (with Howard Kazanjian). Her most recent books include Buffalo Gals: Women of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and How the West was Worn.

Sam Sixkiller: Cherokee Frontier Lawman
by Howard Kazanjian & Chris Enss
ISBN 978-0-7627-6075-6 • TwoDot • $14.95 • Paperback • 176 pages • 6 x 9 • June 12, 2012

I’m been working on a couple of western books this morning and humming a Stephen Foster tune. Many people don’t know who Foster was and I thought I’d make him the subject of the journal entry today. He was no great composer, but Stephen Foster had a way with sentimental words and catchy melodies that had kept his songs popular for more than a century. There is something pleasantly wholesome and irresistibly old-fashioned about songs like “Jennie with the Light Brown Hair” and “Oh! Suzanna.” Two have been adopted by states, “My Old Kentucky Home” and Florida’s “Old Folks at Home.” (Swanee River) What is ironic is that the composer of such unabashed sentimentality – born on the fiftieth birthday of the nation – ended up so miserably. Forster, who grew up singing but had very little musical training near Pittsburgh, was successful almost from his first published songs in 1848. He earned more than $1,000 a year in royalties and married in 1850. But he always spent more than he made and the marriage was unhappy. He wrote fewer songs each year until he left his wife and daughter in 1860 and moved to New York City. There, desperate for cash, he churned out 105 songs – more than half of his entire work – in the last three and a half years of his life. Most were soon forgotten, and his previously lucrative publishing arrangement deteriorated to the point that Foster was selling songs outright for a quick $25. The composer, who drank heavily and suffered symptoms of tuberculosis, grew bitter and lonely as he lived in a series of rooming houses. On January 10, 1864, bedridden with fever, Foster got up to wash himself. Apparently as he stood over the washbasin he fell, shattering the porcelain bowl, which cut his neck deeply. He was found by a chambermaid delivering towels later that day. George Cooper, one of his few friends, was summoned to hear Foster whisper, “I’m done for,” and plead for a drink. Foster was taken to the city-run Bellevue Hospital, where he died, alone and unrecognized, three days later. The hospital, which had registered the 37-year-old composer as Stephen Fosters, put his body in a morgue for unknown corpses until Cooper retrieved it. Unlike nearly all that he wrote in his final years. Foster’s last song, which he penned just a few days before he died, joined his earlier classics: Beautiful dream, wake unto me. Starlight and dew-drops are waiting for thee. Sounds of the rude world heard in the day. Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away.