When Arizona’s wintry weather improved sooner than they expected, the group hurried back to Flagstaff and the imminent start of the trip lifted Grey’s spirits:
I am positively quivering with joy at the prospect of the trip. I have lost all my blues, and I’m actually happy. I need this wild life, this freedom, and I’ll come home to love you to death. The spirit of my ancestors is dominant in me at this time. I don’t want to kill. I simply want the broad open free wilderness, to be alive, to look into nature, and so into my soul.36
Other problems had to be settled first. Grey learned that Jim Emett was being tried for stealing cattle and could be jailed. Since 1896, when Mormon Church elders appointed him to supervise the Colorado River crossing at Lee’s Ferry, Emett had been embroiled in disputes with local cattle and sheep ranchers. The most recent one involved a 1906 charge of rustling cattle from the Bar Z Ranch. Emett maintained that the cattle were actually his. Luckily, key witnesses for the plaintiff were elsewhere when the trial started and Emett had strong support for his claims. The two-day trial ended with a verdict of not guilty and gave Grey a memorable introduction to the rough-and-tumble of life in the West.37
Jim Emett, ca. 1907. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)
On April 12, Grey, Jones, Owens, Emett, and several Mormon elders departed Flagstaff for Lee’s Ferry. “You ought to see this crowd of Mormons I am going with,” he boasted to Dolly. “If they aren’t a tough bunch, I never saw one. They all pack guns. But they’re nice fellows.”38 In an earlier letter, he had reassured her, “Do not worry about me. I am at home in the woods. I’ll take to the thing like a duck takes to water.”39 On the second day, when the party reached the Moenkopi Wash, he was already stiff and sore. His lips were cracked, his tongue swollen, and his eyes burned painfully. The alkali water made him sick. Two days later he wrote in his journal, “I am a sight to behold. Never thought I would get so dirty, or hungry, or cold.”40 A discussion of religion with a Mormon president and bishop went so poorly he resolved to keep his mouth shut. The final sixteen miles to the Colorado River were “hell,” and the ferry crossing even worse. The run-off swollen river did not crest until June, but it was already a chocolate torrent when Grey arrived. He did not bother to record the details of his crossing because “I shall remember—rather I shall never forget” (21).
During the group’s two-day stay at Lee’s Ferry, Emett told Grey about his predecessor, John D. Lee, who started the ferry when he was exiled there for his involvement in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. On September 11, 1857, Lee led a group of Indians and fifty Mormons in an attack upon a wagon train of California-bound settlers that left all 120 dead. Until Lee was finally executed in 1877, he maintained and operated his ferry. In 1898, Mormon elders approved Emett’s petition to take over and restore the abandoned crossing.41 Grey was intrigued by the hard lives of Lee and Emett. He learned that Emett came from Mormon parents who settled Utah, and was born in a wagon during a desert crossing. His mother had climbed steep trails three days later, and lived to be ninety-three. By the time Grey met him, Emett had broad shoulders, a great shaggy head, and a bushy white beard that emanated dignity and virility. He was also a polygamist with two wives and twenty children. In 1890, when his first wife, Emma, was thirty-eight, he married Electra Jane Gruell, who was eighteen. In 1893, when Electra had their first child, Emma gave birth to her eleventh and final one. Despite his large family, Emett slept out in the open most nights and possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the surrounding area.42 To the impressionable tenderfoot, this resourceful, strong-willed, self-reliant outdoorsman was as impressive as the Zanes and Wetzels and presented him reassuring proof that hearty settler stock still existed.
Dee Wooley, who was among the “crowd of Mormons” accompanying him, likewise impressed Grey. Zane learned that Wooley was a polygamist and told Dolly, “Mr. Wooley wants me to go to Kanab to study the Mormons. He has two families and 15 handsome unmarried girls.”43 When he visited Kanab several weeks later, he did not mention whether he met Wooley’s families, but he encountered another Mormon there who had five wives and fifty-five children, and so fascinated Zane that he told others about the man for years afterward.44
When the group finally arrived at the House Rock Ranch on April 19, Grey’s legs were so sore from riding he could not sit down. When he recovered, he explored a primeval forest near the Persia sheep camp and discovered some Indian pictographs at Snake Gulch, but confessed to his journal, “I am afraid that I am not getting as much out of this trip as I might get” (34). Days later, he beheld a big white mustang racing ahead of a pack of wild horses. On April 29, the group established its hunting camp high in the Siwash with an expansive view of the Powell’s Plateau and the distant San Francisco peaks. Though the Grand Canyon itself was not visible, Point Sublime was nearby and offered one of the most dramatic views from the North Rim. The next day Jones treed his first mountain lion, but it escaped. Grey dropped another one weighing 350 pounds with what Jones called “the finest shot I ever saw.” He gloated, “My first lion was the King” (59–60).
Since the group’s North Rim location was three thousand feet higher than the South Rim, the weather was cold with frequent snow squalls. On May 6, the hunters awoke to falling snow that evolved into a blizzard and left them frozen and disoriented. Wallace returned from the long day “torn, ragged, bloody, and haggard,” and Jones’s leg was injured when his horse fell. Five lions were sighted, but all escaped. The group finally captured a female lion, but the bound, helpless beast left Grey feeling dejected. “And I could feel for her,” he wrote in his journal. “Give me liberty or give me death” (103).
On May 9, the men broke camp and headed west for a return to El Tovar and the South Rim. Exhilarated by his experiences, Grey was confident that he had gained a wealth of material and was eager to resume his writing. To his surprise and dismay, the trip’s greatest ordeal lay ahead and, for some reason, he never published a word about it. A person familiar with the Grand Canyon today would expect the group to have headed down the Kaibab trail, crossed the river, and ascended the historic Bright Angel Trail. However, in May 1907, this route was not yet possible. Prior to leaving for Los Angeles, Jones and Grey met with David Rust, the son-in-law of Dee Wooley, about guiding them. Grey informed Dolly that Rust “was to have charge of our trip.”45 Unfortunately, Rust had to withdraw in order to complete a trail on which he had been working all spring. This was the Kaibab trail, which was initially named after him, and the high water of the spring runoff stalled his cable crossing over the Colorado River and kept him from completing his trail until June, long after Grey’s trip was over.46
When Rust had to withdraw, he informed Jones about another trail further to the west that had been established the year before by William Bass. The north side of this trail, called the Shinumo, was little more than an intermittently marked route, and no one in the group had ever taken it. Several times during the descent, the trail disappeared and the group had to dispatch scouts in different directions to locate the way. About halfway down, Grey left his horse to explore and arrived at a dead-end precipice. He was so hot and exhausted when he returned, he had difficulty remounting. When the terrain became treacherous again, he was too fatigued to dismount and his overburdened horse fell. Luckily he escaped unharmed. A cliff outcropping provided a view that confirmed that the group was on course, but it sent them along a perilous, foot-wide shelf of loose shale. Further on, the horses had to make a series of dangerous jumps ranging from two to four feet. “The sheer drop was tremendous,” Grey jotted in his journal, “It was appalling. Once, my heart stopped beating.” A gushing spring furnished badly needed water and prompted a decision to follow the drainage that proved to be the worst stretch so far. “When I say bad, I mean BAD,” Grey noted (111–14).
Acknowledging that his nerves were shot and his body was spent, Grey relied on grim determination to continue. With a ragged scrawl that graphically registered the toll of the ordeal, he imagined that Ba
ss might not be there. “What on earth could I do?” he speculated. “I could not get over this horrible monstrous river and I could not go back.” When they finally did reach the river and spied the cable, no one was there. Reflecting later on his devastation, Grey wrote, “How I hated the river, the place! I cursed it” (116). Before he and the others could muster energy to discuss their plight, they heard a shout and spotted Bass waving to them from the other side. Later they learned that Bass never saw the fire that was supposed to signal him because they positioned it in the wrong place. Minor repairs and sheer luck had carried Bass to the river that day.
Back in Lackawaxen by mid-May, Grey worked feverishly developing his notes. The opening pages of The Last of the Plainsmen, his completed account, effectively convert the novice fisherman of the Tampico articles into a dude tenderfoot, and present him so that the reader expects change and improvement. Grey reduced the many hardships in his journals and associated them with this potential:
So I sat down and wondered what Jones and Emmett,47 and these men would consider really hazardous. I began to have a feeling that I would find out; that experience for me was but in its infancy; that far across the desert the something which had called me would show hard, keen, perilous life. And I began to think of reserve powers of fortitude and endurance.48
This thinking reconfigures his suffering into a series of tests that make him stronger and more skillful. His persistence against adversity effectively closes the gap between his deficiencies and the prowess of his companions.
Over the course of his narrative, Grey develops into a confident, capable hunter. During his first lion chase, he finally understands when to rein in his horse and when to let him run (91). Several chases later, he confidently asserts, “Here I wore out my soreness of muscle, and gradually overcame my awkwardness in the saddle” (106). These advances diminish his outsider status, and he finally gains the group’s acceptance when he spots a prank intended to embarrass him and turns it against the perpetrators (194–98).
This progress dissolves his self-conscious sense of alienation, and soon afterward he ceases to be merely a detached observer of his surroundings: “I started to run as if I were a wild Indian. My running had no aim; just sheer mad joy of the grand old forest, the smell of pine, the wild silence and beauty loosed the spirit in me so it had to run, and I ran with it till the physical being failed” (209). This transformation qualifies him to hunt Old Tom, a lion legendary for his elusiveness (232–33). When he finally bags a wolf (substituted for the lion he actually killed) with a perfect shot (248), he is so pleased with his accomplishment that he jubilantly proclaims, “If you want fame or wealth or wolves, go out and hunt for them” (249).
Personal development was neither Grey’s only theme nor even his main one. Frequently in his account, he presents animals so that they upstage him. The herds of buffalo and wild horses exhilarate him and leave him feeling fortunate. They grace the scenery and animate it, especially the mountain lions that bound effortlessly across the treacherous terrain and adroitly blend in. His highest regard is reserved for animals that are not wild. He is awed by the horses and dogs that are so integral to the hunt. He truly cares for the horse that transports him long distances and charges through dense underbrush after the quarry. Though smaller and less endowed for combat, the dogs inspire Grey with the way they spring to life at a fresh scent, race howling after lions, and then fearlessly attack.
Buffalo Jones is the centerpiece of the story, the person behind the title, and the outdoorsman that Grey admires most. Throughout the trip and afterward, Grey was continually reminded of Jones’s defects,49 but he decided that an accurate record of Jones’s faults and deficiencies was inappropriate and chose instead a romantic depiction, a choice of momentous importance for his future novels: instead of presenting the actual person who created so many problems, he crafted a slick portrait of an accomplished hunter and leader. He reconfigured the facts of his personal experiences so that his reader was presented with a figure that was larger than life, and the result was more than a little contrived. Jones was sixty-three years old at the time of the trip, but Grey presented him as spry enough to ride long distances, to climb trees after lions, and to endure rude camps and adverse weather. Grey made him equal to the heartiest member of the group and the best hunter. The Jones in his story assesses situations and issues commands. He is deadly serious and aloof, indisputably the group’s leader. Frank, Jim, and Wallace are subordinates who interact comfortably with each other, but are indistinguishable.
One consequence of this ennoblement of Jones was Grey’s elimination of Jim Emett. Except for the long description of his compound at Lee’s Ferry, Emett is mentioned only in passing and the reader is wrongly led to believe that he remained there when the group departed. In a 1926 article entitled “The Man Who Influenced Me Most,” Grey memorialized this rugged Westerner who outfitted his earliest trips and inspired many characters in his Westerns. This account clarifies Grey’s deep indebtedness to Emett on this outing and was undoubtedly meant to correct his slighting in the original account. Grey states that he had “the marvelous good fortune” to have had him as a “constant companion.” Emett is commended as a knowledgeable guide, an accomplished hunter, and an adept tree climber. Grey credits Emett with securing his sighting of Silvermane, the leader of a pack of wild horses that would reappear in several of his Westerns. Unlike Jones who was preoccupied with subduing animals, Emett is presented as a lover of animals and scenery, and an enormous influence upon Grey’s high regard for both.50 When he was writing The Last of the Plainsmen, Grey realized that any such acknowledgment would have diminished Jones’s stature and kept Emett offstage. The same fate befell Jim Owens, who was as adept as Jones at hunting mountain lions.
Grey also aided Jones’s exploitation of Buffalo Bill Cody. His appropriation of “Buffalo” in his name communicated the fact that he too had killed many buffalo, but also signaled an important distinction. Buffalo Bill Cody had achieved wealth and renown for his Wild West show celebrating construction of the railroad and settlement of the West; he killed buffalo and Indians in order to pave the way for civilization. Buffalo Jones preferred to think of himself as an enlightened visionary who recognized the wanton destruction of Cody’s actions and dedicated himself to saving the buffalo from extinction. As Grey explained in his preface:
For years necessity compelled him to earn his livelihood by supplying the meat of buffalo to the caravans crossing the plains. At last, seeing that the extinction of the noble beasts was inevitable, he smashed his rifle over a wagon wheel and vowed to save the species. For ten years he labored, pursuing, capturing and taming buffalo, for which the West gave him fame, and the name Preserver of the American Bison (v).
Grey conspired to make Jones’s hunt an extension of his Yellowstone work in his quest to capture mountain lions alive and relocate them to zoos. (Ironically, the difficulties of transportation killed most of the lions they caught).
Grey and Jones presumed Cody’s outlook to be mercenary, old-fashioned, and behind the times. Cody’s dedication to progress blinded him to the defects in his cause and its disastrous consequences. Unlike Cody, Jones represented those pioneers who appreciated the value of the undeveloped West, and campaigned to preserve it. Grey’s first three novels memorialized his ancestors as virile, resourceful, self-reliant outdoorsmen. Believing at the time that these kind of men disappeared with their deaths, he tentatively entitled the final novel of his Ohio trilogy The Last of the Bordermen. However, his exposure to Jones, Emett, and Owens persuaded him that men like this did exist, even if they were an older generation and lived only in remote, desolate areas like Arizona, which was a “territory” until 1912, the last of the contiguous states to be granted statehood. To Grey’s perception, they and their adventures made them as threatened as the buffalo, and his account consciously strove to preserve their stories. However, the title he transferred from his Ohio novel and applied to these living examples caused a
problem. Ned Buntline earned Buffalo Bill his first fame back in 1869 with a serial entitled “Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men” that became a popular dime novel.51 Grey needed a title that would sharpen, rather than blur, the important distinction between Buffalo Jones and Buffalo Bill. This modification of The Last of the Bordermen to The Last of the Plainsmen may seem slight, but it expresses Grey’s developing perception of the West.
At the time that he was writing his account of Jones, Grey worried that he and his book might be condemned and dismissed as harshly as Jones was at the time of his lecture, and this fear added another dimension to his depiction of Jones as an endangered species. Critical indifference to his first two novels had strained his commitment to writing. Following his difficulties with Betty Zane, he arranged for Daniel Murphy, the son-in-law of the poet Edwin Markham, to become his literary agent, and Murphy’s advice and encouragement moved Grey to write this letter of gratitude:
Pawnee Bill, Buffalo Bill (seated), and Buffalo Jones (standing), ca. 1909. (Courtesy of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming.)
You wrote in your last letter “D—the critics!” … To be sure I was as much surprised as delighted, and told my wife so. She didn’t believe it so I had to prove it to her, and then she expressed her sorrow, not only that you could use a cuss word, but because of my unholy glee. … These critics have the power. They know it; they are proud of it,—and in my instance if they do recognize something latent and powerful, it does not move them to encourage me. I know you will take exception to my view, and perhaps you will be right. I think already you have tempered and softened my rebellious spirit, and I may say earnestly that I have got so I do not care at all.
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