Another lapsed Quaker named Charles Pancoast set out from New Jersey in 1840, the year before Perry was orphaned by that mob, and made his way to Missouri. Years later he wrote down his adventures, and through his eyes we can see the world Perry Wilson inhabited. Pancoast traveled by rail and mule-drawn packet boat, then took the steamer Boston down the Ohio to Cincinnati and from there took a western boat to St. Louis. Although the waters were often shallow, the great boats were able to jump sandbars by running full steam, bucking and twisting until clearing the obstacle. A young pharmacist out to make his fortune in the drug trade, Pancoast was naive and trusting and soon fell victim to sharpers. He went bust and started anew, traveled up and down the Missouri and the Mississippi and even the Osage on his mercantile adventures, narrowly escaping a Mormon mob at the baptismal pool in Nauvoo, Illinois. Pistol shots were exchanged, and stones were flung, but no one perished.
Practically all business activity at that time was speculative: Gamblers made their bets with cards and dice, and so with the tools of their trade did slave traders, farmers and planters, merchants and boatmen. Every transaction was a wager, because credit was uncertain and the exchange value of banknotes was in constant fluctuation, with notes from the State Bank of Illinois or perhaps the Shawneetown Bank of Illinois being discounted against those of the Dubuque Bank of Iowa, or some other wildcat bank, at one time or another. Bad money and good money were engaged in a constant war of depreciation.
Religion itself was closely allied with commerce. Mormons tended to keep to themselves, nursing their grudges and preparing their exodus, and they had a reputation for sharp, some might say dishonest, trading. Hard-shell Baptists, Campbellites, and Presbyterians all preached the dogma of the heaven-born institution, declaring both love and slavery to be divine. Methodists tended to waver on that point. Morals were said to be poor in Ray County, home to Jesse James and other wild children who were raised on farms by pioneer wives, fed from the land. Many had never seen a town or store or even the Missouri River. Regulators and “slickers” and kindred vigilante groups roamed the counties with their bowie knives. Townspeople had no theaters, but they were able to make a fair sound with the banjo, mouth organ, fife, or tambourine.
After settling for a time in Warsaw, a pro-slavery township that was nonetheless burned by rebel mobs in 1862, Pancoast sold his shop and became a partner in a steamboat in 1846, moving freight up the shallow Osage. He became a prolific river pilot and freight speculator. Small fortunes could be made and lost in the course of a single run. On one trip he carried a thousand barrels of pork at a dollar per barrel from Weston to an army warehouse in St. Louis; upon arrival, an officer came aboard and shipped it back to Fort Leavenworth for $1.25, thus shipping one load of pork twelve hundred miles for a net distance of five. Pancoast and his partner cleared $2,000 on the trip.
In the spring of 1849, when America’s argonauts began massing in Missouri, preparing their wagon trains for the long overland journey to the goldfields, Pancoast, broke again, resolved to go with them. After a harrowing trip up the river to St. Joseph aboard a cholera boat laden with westering emigrants, Pancoast joined a ragged group of Peoria pioneers and left Fort Leavenworth in late April as part of a train of forty-four wagons, two hundred men from many different states and countries, together with women and children and thousands of animals. Among the party were preachers, doctors, lawyers, druggists, pilots, farmers, Mexican War veterans and West Point graduates, mechanics, farmers, laborers, and sailors. It’s possible that Jacob Adamson and Perry Wilson were among them. A Millerite preacher used the Sabbath to undermine the gold fever, sending more than one man homeward, only to be killed by Indians on the plains. One gold seeker weighed three hundred pounds when they set out; he was not so heavy when they arrived in California.
By the end of the first day the train had already passed through villages of Wyandot and Delaware Indians, who raised scrawny pigs and ponies and scratched at the prairie to bring forth a few vegetables. The prairie was lovely in spring, a gently rolling landscape of flowing grass cut by gentle streams and small hollows filled with rocks and woods. The argonauts lunched on antelope and jackrabbits and paid $2.50 a wagon to a ferryman on the Kansas River who was making his fortune off Santa Fe traders, the U.S. Army, and the argonauts. The Mexican War had brought him very good business indeed. Pottawatomie Indians might appear before them suddenly, stepping forth casually from the tall grass, curious about their purposes. They came upon graves of men they had met in Missouri just a few days before, a pair of consumptives hoping to find a healthier climate in the West.
At Council Grove they met degenerate white men as well as Delaware and Wyandot, but also fierce, proud Pawnee with painted faces, nose and ear rings, adorned with bear and wolf teeth.
As a guide the company hired a mountain man named James Kirker, giving him a good horse and a fifty-dollar deposit, with a hundred dollars to come when they arrived in California. Kirker persuaded his clients to follow the southern route, which dropped south along the Rio Grande from Santa Fe and westward along the Gila River, claiming he had taken the shorter northern trail with John C. Frémont and that water and grass would be a problem for so large a train. He was probably lying, for there’s no evidence he ever traveled with the Pathfinder or that he had taken that route. He would not have been much of a guide on a trail he had not traveled, and men naturally stuck to the trails they knew. The same was no doubt true for Perry, and we know he took the southern route in 1858 and again thirty years later. Kirker had spent decades in New Mexico and northern Mexico, so he knew that southwestern country well. He could track errant livestock at a gallop and was an experienced Indian fighter, but he was not necessarily an asset to the forty-niners, as they soon discovered.
According to custom, the members of the company elected a captain and a lieutenant, and they passed rules requiring men to walk if they were able instead of riding in a wagon, in order to preserve the teams of mules and horses and oxen. Walking also conveyed the benefits of exercise and good health. At night they made a circle with the wagons and drove the cattle and other livestock inside for protection. Cattle guards were named and camp guards, and so they passed along the prairie, usually without incident. Indians were met occasionally; small bands who would appear suddenly and seek to trade. Buffalo were seen as they passed westward, and they were pursued with a great galloping, and some were shot by these amateur pioneers and eaten with enjoyment. Only Kirker was experienced with prairie life, and on the first buffalo chase one of the greenhorns managed to put a rifle ball through his own shoulder; another shot his horse through the neck. One day, in the vicinity of a stream known as Cow Creek, one of perhaps ten thousand so named in the American West, the pioneers spotted a row of poles from which a number of caps dangled in the breeze. Upon closer inspection, the caps turned out to be scalps, left by Pawnee after a battle with Arapaho and Cheyenne.
The identity of the scalps was revealed several days later when they came upon an army of fifteen hundred Arapaho and Cheyenne warriors traveling east to fight the Pawnee. The pioneers were terrified at the spectacle of the warriors and prepared for battle. Fortunately, Kirker was there to advise the pioneers, and he cautioned them not to fire; the Indians were carrying peace blankets. A meeting was arranged, and the Indians’ leading men assembled; all cried out “Kirker!” when the old scalper let himself be seen. He was among the most hated of all white men.
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James “Don Santiago” Kirker was born in Antrim, north of Belfast, Northern Ireland, on December 2, 1793, into a family of refugee Lowlanders from the borderlands of southern Scotland. The Kirkers, like many of their fellow borderers, had suffered under both the English and the Highlanders, prey to rustlers and reivers as well as soldiers, and their migration was part of that great eighteenth-century movement of the Scots-Irish, as we call them, over the sea to America. Kirker left his family’s grocery business in Northern Ireland at age sixteen to avoid the British draft and a
rrived in New York harbor in 1810. He took a familiar job as a grocery clerk but soon sailed aboard the Black Joke, a privateer, during the War of 1812. Upon the conclusion of the war, Kirker returned to find his old employer dead, so he married his boss’s pregnant young widow. More Kirkers arrived from Ireland, and soon James left his wife and children for the West, descending the Ohio and arriving in St. Louis by 1817. He went to work for the McKnights, an Irish family with interests across the western and Spanish borderlands.
Within a few years, Kirker established his own business, first as a grocer and then in partnership with the McKnights in the Santa Fe trade. Kirker’s interests soon expanded into the fur trade, and he was spending most of his time trapping in New Mexico, though he would occasionally reappear in Missouri on business. In 1826, he showed up at Fort Osage with a young Kit Carson, headed for Mexico. He passed through Santa Fe, turned south, and soon found himself in Apache country, trapping along the Gila River and establishing his headquarters at the copper mines, owned by Robert McKnight, of Santa Rita del Cobre, about fifty miles west of the Rio Grande. The Mexican government strictly regulated trapping, and Kirker had no license, so although he had a permit to carry on trade between Santa Fe and Chihuahua, he was obliged to smuggle his furs.
Relations between the Mexicans and the Apache nation, which had rarely been peaceful—Spanish friars complained of Apache raiders as early as 1672—were deteriorating rapidly, and Kirker began providing security for the mining trains on their way from Santa Rita to Chihuahua. He acquired a reputation. Before long, he lent his name to a style of warfare that was nothing if not genocidal and of which he was the consummate practitioner: quirquismo, or Kirkerism. Quirquismo was bounty warfare, a war of extermination directed at the Apaches. Borderland historians sometimes refer to this period as the War of Apache Scalps.
Kirker did not start the War of Apache Scalps. In 1837, an American mercenary named John James Johnson did so with an ambush near Santa Rita. Johnson operated a trading post in Sonora, and he fell in with a group of Missourians who were looking to purchase some mules, but the only mules to be had were in the possession of the local Mimbreño Apaches, who were led by a chief named Juan José Compa. Compa was a clever bandit who had spent time in a Spanish school and could read. He and Johnson were on friendly terms, so he suspected nothing when Johnson invited Compa and his men to share a meal. Johnson fired on them from a hidden cannon, variously described as a “blunderbuss” and a “six-pounder,” loaded with shrapnel, killing about twenty men, including three chiefs. One account says four hundred were killed. Ben Leaton, who later settled at La Junta, was there as well. Johnson, Leaton, and their compadres scalped the dead Indians instead of simply taking their ears, as was then required for bounty payment under Mexican law, an innovation that led to legislation in Chihuahua, a proyecto de guerra, a law or plan of war, financed by the state’s leading men, offering a bounty of a hundred dollars for each male Indian scalp, fifty dollars for each female, and twenty-five dollars for each child prisoner. The proyecto called for establishing “a permanent company for hunting Indians and making the activity lucrative so that it may be effective.” Kirker was well known in Chihuahua for his work along the copper road from Santa Rita, and it was hoped he would take charge of the plan.
Several months later, the national government declared the proyecto unconstitutional and immoral, yet the idea of a scalp bounty remained popular along the frontier. Kirker, meanwhile, had taken up arms trading with the Apaches, finding it more profitable than fur trapping or security work. The next year, Apaches overran the mines in southern New Mexico, and Kirker, apparently with the backing of Mexican authorities, took steps to reestablish the proper order of things. In Missouri he assembled a company of Shawnee warriors, including a chief named Spy-Buck, and brought them down the Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico. They came upon a village called Galeana, where they found 247 Apaches, and totally destroyed it. They killed fifty-five warriors, took nine women prisoners and four hundred head of livestock. The Apache wars were now commenced and would not end until 1891.
In Chihuahua City a group of wealthy citizens formed the Society for Making War Against the Barbarians and authorized a new campaign against the Apaches. Its inaugural conference called on “Don Santiago Kirker, a citizen of the United States of the North and a resident of El Paso,” to make a contract “about the method, expenditure, gratifications and other matters relative to the campaign which he and some Shawnees are going to make for the Society.” Kirker was promised 100,000 silver pesos to solve Chihuahua’s Apache problem. The society was responsible for raising the money, and a pamphlet was circulated promising a “war unto the death of the Apaches.”
The authorities in Chihuahua appointed a committee to examine the mercenaries’ scalps, which were required to pass certain tests. Each scalp had to be about one hand wide, with two ears naturally attached; each had to be positively identifiable as an Indian. This business was complicated. The Mexicans also entered into bounty agreements with Indians; they paid Apaches for Comanche scalps, and they paid Comanches for Apache scalps. “The appearance of the scalp itself depended on whether the taker intended for it to be a trophy for display or a pieza for reward,” writes Ralph Adam Smith in his strange and disturbing biography of Kirker. “Comanches took both kinds. For a trophy, one of the warriors would take the crown or the center of the head skin about the size of a silver dollar or peso. After stretching it on a circular willow twig to the size of a saucer, he would allow it to dry. Not being consistent scalpers, Apaches took scalps only for revenge.”
Kirker was not a reliable ally and in that sense was a typical mercenary, and his clients in Mexico seem to have been almost as worried about his behavior as they were about the Indians’. Over the next several years Kirker slaughtered hundreds of Apaches—he told a newspaper in 1847 that he had killed 487 Apaches “in the service of the state of Chihuahua”—though he often seemed to ignore them, or to travel outside the boundaries of this contract to hunt Comanches and Kiowas, and before long it was rumored that he was submitting counterfeit scalps from Mexican peons. His activities, as far as can be determined by the historical record, make little strategic sense, except insofar as he was always pursuing whatever seemed to be his own narrow material interest at any given time. George Wilkins Kendall, editor of the New Orleans Picayune, who was imprisoned with a group of Texas filibusters and authored the two-volume Narrative of the Texan Santa Fé Expedition, repeats the story but suspects, for no good reason that he mentions, that it was fabricated by Kirker’s enemies. The governor of Chihuahua had his own suspicions and put Kirker on a per diem rather than a bounty. Disputes arose, and Kirker quit. It is telling that when Kirker was absent from the borderlands for three years, the Mexicans and the Apaches were able to establish a fragile peace. When the raids worsened, and the Mexican authorities grew desperate, they hired Kirker once again, despite deceptive whispers that he was now the supreme chief of the Apache nation.
When the Mexican War came upon the southwestern borderlands in 1846, Kirker abandoned his former clients and his adopted country and entered into a conspiracy with a Santa Fe trader named James Magoffin, who had been recruited by President James Polk to facilitate the quick and easy conquest of northern Mexico. Magoffin succeeded in engineering the bloodless surrender of New Mexico to General Stephen Kearny’s Army of the West, which had marched from Fort Leavenworth, Missouri, directly to Santa Fe. Then Magoffin traveled to Chihuahua, ostensibly as a trader, to attempt the same feat. He was arrested and very nearly executed. The Chihuahuans were hoping that Kirker, a naturalized Mexican citizen, would lead the defense against the yanqui invaders; instead, he left his Mexican family behind and slipped out of Chihuahua, riding north through the wilderness to avoid Mexican troops, and joined the Missouri Mounted Volunteers under Colonel Alexander William Doniphan in Santa Fe. The governor of Chihuahua put a ten-thousand-dollar bounty on Kirker’s head.
Kirker knew the border country bet
ter than any non-Apache; he knew all the trails and all the water holes and where shelter and forage could be found and when. He led the Missouri Mounted Volunteers south to El Paso, where he had often resided, and entertained them there with the local “pass wine” and charming young señoritas. Then he guided Doniphan south to conquer Chihuahua, serving again as an advance scout and guide. According to his biographer Smith, who seems strangely concerned to rehabilitate the historical reputation of the most prolific scalp hunter in North American history, Kirker was a model of bravery and patriotism. Through his feats of daring and especially a courageous charge at the skirmish of Sacramento, Kirker led Doniphan’s forces to their victory in Chihuahua City.
Kirker continued eastward with the Americans across Mexico and eventually joined the main body of troops. At the completion of the war, he took passage to New Orleans. He was on his way back to New Mexico from Washington, D.C., where he had lobbied Senator Thomas Hart Benton for payment for his war services (and almost succeeded in getting legislation introduced in Congress to appropriate funds for that purpose), when he joined up with the band of forty-niners that included Charles Pancoast.
The Arapaho permitted Kirker’s forty-niners to pass without molestation, but only after trading for paints, moccasins, buckskin clothing, tobacco, whiskey, and looking glasses. They wanted to trade for horses and weapons, but the pioneers refused; they had none to spare. Indians and forty-niners competed in footraces, and a blacksmith from Illinois was able to outrun every Indian who challenged him. The chiefs were so impressed they asked to keep him as a pet.
The pioneers continued on to Bent’s Fort, and then to Santa Fe, braving stampedes of buffalo and long days of blistering sun and prairie thunderstorms that flooded their camps. Pikes Peak appeared, shining on the horizon, and Pancoast was caught up in the magnificence of the scenery, when suddenly all the animals in their train bolted and began a wild rush, a stampede, as if some magic signal had been given. Men and goods were thrown here and there, and a wagon was smashed before the emergency passed and the beasts were brought under control. Other stampedes vexed them as they traveled; men and animals died as a matter of course. A fat man suffered and lost weight. Mountain lions fed on cattle. Like most pilgrims on the great overland trails, the forty-niners amused themselves on occasion by shooting prairie dogs, marveling at their coexistence with rattlesnakes, which also invaded the men’s tents. Horses disappeared at night, probably taken by Ute Indians. Cattle were lost to some poisonous weed, which caused them to swell up and die, splitting their sides and spilling their guts in the dust. Men gave up and turned back to Missouri, only to be murdered on the plains by Indians. Others followed a Delaware Indian who promised them a faster route through the mountains for fifty dollars and a good horse. They were abandoned in rugged mountains after twelve days. They wandered southward and then quarreled and divided. A few made it to California eventually, and so their story became known. Others perished, miserable and alone.
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