by Ron Hansen
And Emmett Dalton spent his last years in Hollywood, California, or walking the streets of Coffeyville, Kansas, with a crowd shoved around me, adults and children gaping at the picket fence with pea vines on it where getaway horses were once tied to a pipe, and then at peach crates stacked at the rear of a restaurant that had been the barn where my brother Bob lay dying.
Bob is dead; that’s what I’m sorry about. Sometimes it seems I return for him over and over again.
2
All the notorious Dalton boys served as peace officers in the Indian Territories at some time. The best of us was my brother Frank who was murdered by whiskey runners on a Sunday morning in November of 1887. He was a marshal working for Judge Isaac Parker in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations of what would become Oklahoma, and he was paid a paltry two dollars for every criminal he hauled into the federal court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, with any necessary burials being deducted from his paycheck. So he could not have been anticipating much extra spending money when he and Deputy Jim Cole got word that the Bill Smith bunch were selling hard liquor to the Indians out of a nester camp in the Arkansas River bottoms.
They rode through canebrake from three in the morning till five. Marsh fog splashed away from the horses’ shoes. Then the sun lifted and they saw in the green morass a white tent with walls of mud and hickory logs. My brother Frank and Deputy Cole picketed their horses and crept up so close to the camp they could burn their hands on the cooking embers, and there espied the bootlegger Lee Dixon in a sleeping bag and Baldy Smith himself, in a black suit on a stained mattress with a chub whore out of Tupelo who called herself Mrs. Smith. The officers did not notice young Bill Towerly squatted down near the horse tie-ups drinking a cup of grainy coffee.
Frank stood up and walked toward the tent with a warrant in his hand that charged Smith with larceny and introducing. He stomped his boot heel on the board floor and Smith raised up his head from sleep and the two men talked for a minute and Lee Dixon got up on his elbow and rubbed his eyes and stared at Jim Cole.
Then Smith fired a derringer at my brother’s stomach. Frank groaned and dropped down to his knees, holding the front of his coat, and he cocked his Peacemaker and shot Smith in the neck, and cocked it again and shot Smith’s whore in the heart and Deputy Cole shot the man in the sleeping bag as he was hunting for the Dragoon he kept hidden under his pillow.
Blue gun smoke hung in the trees and Dixon was writhing with pain in his sleeping bag and Cole walked up to the tent with his pistol hanging by his leg, and out of nowhere that teenaged kid, Towerly, shot a hole in the deputy’s chest just above his right nipple, knocking Cole backwards over a tent rope. Cole bellied through sump mud into the trees and slumped against his saddle. My brother Frank was on his knees and so bent over in his agony that his face was in the dirt and Cole thought Frank was dead until Towerly walked up to the tent in his gray long Johns and hip waders and pushed Frank over to his back.
My brother had tears in his eyes as he rasped, ‘Don’t. Please don’t shoot. Let me be.’ But Towerly cocked his pistol and shot Frank in the mouth, and he cocked his pistol again and blew the top of my brother’s head off.
I mention that miserable episode because it meant a lot to my brother Bob. He was seventeen years old at the time and he’d just been hired as a Cherokee policeman under the half-breed John W. Jordan, and it was Bob who escorted the body home in that mahogany box filled with ice.
He hunkered down out of the cold next to my brother’s coffin, which was transported in a slat-sided cattle car. Bob wore a sheepskin coat and a broad hat that was pulled down and tied close to his ears with a wool scarf, but he didn’t have gloves so when the train stopped for water and coal somewhere south of Chelsea, my brother got off and poured a brakeman’s coffee on his fingers to take the bite away. And when he returned a railroad inspector had the coffin lid unlatched and leaned against a slat wall, and the man gazed at Frank’s corrupted remains with a cheek of tobacco that he was spitting on the floor. ‘Lookit the fearsome holes in this man,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it pitiful?’
So my brother stared at the body of a man with no more face than a plate of food and he puked into the straw and swore God’s own vengeance on the wicked, much like a boy steeped in the romantic adventures of The Wide Awake Library and Beadle’s Half-Dime novels. But I think he also made some other resolutions because he was very different after that.
I can recall very little about Bob from childhood when he and I slept in the same white iron bed. I’d see him call sooey at the pig trough with a basket of black apples and table garbage; see him combing his hair in the speckled mirror in the kitchen, experimenting with parts; see him in a wool shirt and knickers at the front of a one-room schoolhouse, parsing sentences on the blackboard. I remember him sitting on a milk pail stabbing a bowie knife at a plank between his boots. I remember him trying to stand on his hands and older brother Frank squinting from tobacco smoke and holding Bob’s feet, saying, ‘Up! Up!’ I remember that he pissed against the barn in the cold and the gray steam floated up like seaweed. Those must not seem very special recollections of the Dalton who was to become the most famous, but Bob was the brother next to me, barely two years older than I was, and I envied him too much to pay close attention to his various attainments.
Bob was as handsome as Hamlet was when played by an actress (which was the fashion in those days), and he got tapped for Lady’s Choice every time it occurred at hoedowns. His brown hair was cut very short and his sideburns were shaved off at the top of his ear. He had blue eyes that slanted a bit and white teeth that he took good care of, brushing them with baking soda four or five times a day. He remembered whatever he read and he could multiply like a banker and spell any word backwards, and one of the schoolmarms had it in her head that he’d attend Cornell Medical School. He paid attention to what women said; he listened so hard he frowned; and if he couldn’t think of a proper answer he’d come up with something charming. He was six feet tall and maybe one hundred sixty pounds in his boots, all hard sinew and skeleton under his clothes, with skin as white as library paste. He was considered under the standards of that day to be friendly and suave and dashing. You cannot tell it from John Tackett’s authentic photograph of Bob Dalton bootless and dead.
Soon after Frank’s funeral my older brother Grattan was named to replace the bereaved hero. Grat was glorified in legend for a while because a rustler named Felix Griffin shot him in the stomach as Grat attempted an arrest, but my brother kept walking at him unvexed and used his hat to slap the man down to his knees. The bullet had split a wooden button on his shirt and Grat squeezed the slug out of his belly like a cinder. Some people claimed Grat had it in him to become as great a lawman as Heck Thomas and the talk about him became so exaggerated that when the Osage Indians created a tribal police force, they selected the great man’s younger brother, Robert Renick Dalton, then eighteen, to be the new police chief, the youngest in the history of the West.
That year I was a cowpuncher at the Bar X Bar ranch near Pawnee where I mixed with bad company in the bunkhouse—Dick Broadwell, Bill Powers, Bill Doolin—and my brother Bob soon got the inspiration to save my soul by hiring me as his posseman.
I was the ninth son in the brood of fifteen kids who were Lewis and Adeline Dalton’s, and when I left that measly, cramped, hardscrabble farm for sixteen-hour days on a horse, kicking cattle into pens, I was as happy as I’ll ever be, like I’d been released from sufferance and began my life all over again.
But there was a pull to be with my brothers again that lured me away from that ranch. And I can recall the grin on the face of the sixteen-year-old Emmett Dalton who stood on the steps of the Methodist church for his official swearing-in. I was six-feet-two inches tall and long for my clothes and twenty pounds to the better of Bob, wearing a cardboard collar and a paisley tie and big-roweled spurs on my boots. My hair was slicked back with rose oil and cut close about my ears with a bowl so that the white of my scalp showed through. And my
father, who was then seventy-three, sat on a split-bottom chair in a knee-long velvet-trimmed coat he wore over the scrubbed gray top of his long underwear, staring at me and smoking a corncob pipe, trying to place me among his children while the wind blew his white hair around.
Grat stayed on in the Cherokee legislative territory with an office in Tahlequah, and Bob worked the northern Osage nations out of an office in Pawhuska, the capital, with his warrants originating from the federal court in Wichita, Kansas. He hired twenty Osage men as peace enforcers; murderous, brown-looking men with black-looking hands, who wore greasy buckskins and feathered black hats and smelled worse than city sewers. I had rank over them and a desk job for a couple of weeks, but I got tired of that and soon I was riding with Bob, taking schooner wagons of criminals up to the federal court.
Bob and I walked down the mud alleys of boom towns with serious faces and hands on our pistol butts and older men sat on onion crates smoking pipes outside of their tents, snickering at us like we were children, like we ought to be wearing short pants. Bob stopped a lumber truck on a main street to check the driver’s bill-of-sale and the carpenters hammering up the storefronts quit work to nudge each other or straddle a roof peak and shout jokes down at the brand-new marshal. But there was never a nineteen-year-old as sure of himself as Bob was. He seemed to think he already had Wyatt Earp’s mean reputation. He pushed giant men out of his way on the streets; he shut down a saloon on a Saturday night because there was gambling going on; he was a stickler for licenses and paid-up fees. He arrested every drunk he saw; he’d handcuff a woman for stealing potatoes; he’d walk against a man’s drawn gun and twist it out of his fist like nothing bad could happen to him. He was as unscared as a lawman can be.
He was dedicated then. I’d wake in the morning before sunup and see Bob crouched by the fire drawing up law enforcement inventions in his diary: gloves with hinged metal fingers, a contraption that locked a man’s legs to his saddle, a mace; a vest of a hundred pockets that would hold a hundred iron plates so a lawman couldn’t be gutshot. In his right boot he carried a .32 caliber pistol on a heavy .45 caliber frame so he could quick-draw on a miscreant simply by lifting his knee. Sometimes he’d lag behind me and I’d turn to see him muttering arguments with someone imaginary. Then he’d slap his pistol up.
‘Keeping amused, are ya, Bob?’
‘Heck, they don’t have a chance against me. We’re almost out of work.’
After the Louisiana Purchase, displaced eastern Indian tribes were moved west of the Mississippi to the Indian Territory, which then took up most of the plains states. Farmers and railway companies worked on Congress to reduce the land area over the years until it was only the Ozarks and badlands of what is now Oklahoma. The property was considered inviolable and owned ‘until the rivers cease’ by a strange collection of Indians, but chiefly by what were called the Five Civilized Tribes: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole; nations with their own executive, legislative, and judicial bodies, their own laws and schools. The Indians leased their grassland to cattlemen for grazing and they traded with sutlers, but otherwise ignored the pioneers and immigrants as much as they could.
So if a cowhand woke up one morning with blood on his knife and sleeve, or if a boy stole the receipts from his uncle’s cooperage, or a woman poleaxed her husband as he snored with a two-dollar chippy, the territories were where they got away; a vast, rugged section in the middle of the United States where your name was what you called yourself at the time, where a man could ride a horse for three or four days and not see another human being.
But Bob’s Osage deputies could stalk a man who’d spent a week sloshing up rivers. They could root a child out of muskrat pits and smell a woman in the leaves she’d brushed against. I once locked ankle clamps on a man who’d been on the run so long he never stopped gasping, and another time I walked into a cave to discover a convict still in his prison stripes, squatted down and scratching himself, the smell of vomit near him. ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes,’ he said. ‘Only thing I’ve tasted for a month now is gopher. And I got chilblains from the cold.’
I’d drive an ox team with a stern Osage riding shotgun, and Bob would crouch in the back of the police wagon interviewing prisoners like that was his occupation. He’d ask, ‘What got you started in crime?’ ‘What was your crucial mistake?’ ‘Why aren’t you repentant?’
He asked, ‘Did you like the life of a cowboy?’
The man said, ‘Yes sir, I did.’
‘Emmett seems taken with it.’
‘Well, it’s outstanding education for the youngster and it’s a worthy and stable livelihood. Cowboys are going to be riding herds for eons. I’ve got myself a bunk and three squares a day and I’m paid thirty dollars a month, and by God that’s enough for a howl on a Saturday night and a savings account in a bank if I want it.’
‘Then why were you rustling livestock?’
The waddy scratched his chin. ‘Forgot my upbringin’, I guess.’
Bob sat next to me on the bench seat. ‘I hope you heard that,’ he said.
Or my brother Bob would ride through undulating prairie grass on patrol and he would rhapsodize: ‘When Dad first came to the territories, he was swapping brood mares and Army mules under government contract and this whole countryside was wild savannah and savages and prairie chicken and bears. There were buffalo then by the hundred thousand. Ground would shake nine miles away whenever they stampeded. Indians would climb inside the bleeding hides and skulk right into the midst of them, spear bulls so big it took two men just to carry the head. Twenty years later and his Great Plains were chockablock with sod houses and barns; squaws had all turned into oily nags; weather went sour and rivers dwindled; snakes dangled from branches of trees. Dad used to claim he traveled the entire Louisiana Purchase on twenty cents a week and he recalled neither hunger nor want. He was refreshed like the Israelites. Now he sits in a chair and forgets himself and the Army sends him six dollars a month in pension for duty in the Mexican War.’
I said, ‘I onetime put salt into the sugar bowl just so’s it would ruin his coffee. I once put a note in his shaving mug that said, “Why don’t you die!” I used to shove his left boot under the sofa and watch him thump through the house hunting it down. You never seen anyone so creased.’
And Bob said, ‘Must be that you and I have different ideas about the Fourth Commandment.’
The two of us would camp at sundown and he’d chop brush with a machete while I cooked pinto beans and sorghum in an old lard bucket. Then I’d lie with my head on a saddle, learning songs on the harmonica, while Bob rubbed his deputy marshal’s badge with silver polish and made entries in his diary with a carpenter’s pencil.
Mostly he commented on sunrise and sunset, the direction of the wind, and the relative temperature: ‘balmy and pleasant,’ or ‘chilly, frost on the grass until late morning, could see my breath when I talked.’ About every two weeks he’d take stock of himself and then there’d follow a list of commandments: ‘Resolved: to be more charitable in my speech; to be generous to those less fortunate than I am (for example, a meal, or an unexpected gift); to conduct myself like the knights of yore; to sit tall in the saddle.’ He wrote on January 11th: ‘Why am I so quick to ridicule and criticize others, yet so eager to hear flattery and praise of myself? Am I trying to deprive them because my need is so great? How can I mend the fences I’ve broken? These questions revolve in my brain as I gaze up at the galaxy of stars, and I have no satisfactory answer.’
In many ways my brother was a stranger to me and for several months working with him I wasn’t sure that I liked him very much. But there was an innocence and good faith to him that was convincing. He could be very sincere and intense about things and you discovered yourself seeing the world through his eyes and forgetting everything else. Sometimes we’d leave the Wichita jail and pound down a board sidewalk with suit pants stuffed inside our boots and Bob would announce, ‘I picked out a hotel room and got
us a table at the Ambassador Grill; then we’ll go play snooker. How would that be?’ And I’d try to object but my mind would go blank; there didn’t seem any alternative. If a night went his way he’d reward me with fantastic smiles and charitable speech; if he saw me bridle a bit he’d say graciously, ‘But why don’t you do the thinking, Emmett. No reason I should have the vote on every dang thing,’ and like as not I’d botch it, the night would be miserable.
He was paid at the same rate that Frank was, a pissant two dollars a prisoner and six cents per mile traveling expenses, from which he paid room and board for himself, his assistants, and his suspects. After he rendered his accounts to the federal court, thirty-five percent was deducted as the marshal’s fee and the bill sent on to Washington where the money could be delayed for months; so some weeks the only meals we had were what we took at farms we visited, and I scrounged a quarter a day sweeping out a saloon in Pawhuska or stacking cords of firewood for some widow in Ponca City. The two of us were stung so bad at times that we started administering our own fines for the smaller infractions and we put the money straight into our pockets.
I discovered two of the cowpokes I’d known at the Turkey Track ranch were rustling cow ponies for a racehorse trainer named Charlie Pierce, and I caught them in a copse of sycamores burning alterations on the brands. That would’ve been Bitter Creek Newcomb and Blackface Charley Bryant. Newcomb threw his hands up but Bryant extended a pistol at my face and I nearly cashed in right there but for the fact that we started conversing. I told them I couldn’t see jail for them since they were buddies, but they convinced me they ought to be penalized something just to keep my conscience unsullied, and they paid me thirty dollars in silver coins that I split with my brother that evening.