I, Tom Horn

by Will Henry

  The natural thing to come of such finger-pointing at a well-known local figure sure enough did come. In this regard, some will say the paper never printed Isam's name. Or that Deputy Sparks didn't give it and was misquoted.

  Sparks was a damn fine man. I wouldn't say against him in any such matter. But the difference would never have saved Isam Dart. If Sparks or the paper didn't name him, everybody else in Routt County did.

  Including the Craig Empire-Courier, October 5, 1900:

  There was company at the lonely Summit Spring ranch of the I-D Bar. Owner Isam Dart, the well-known Brown's Park pioneer, had with him for a hearty bunkhouse breakfast the following visitors; George Bassett, Sam Bassett, J. Dempshire, Alec Seger, and the popular Griff Yarnell.

  Unknowing of any danger, the six men sauntered from the Dart ranch house, going to the corral to get their horses. They went spread out and in a single file. George Bassett was in the lead. Isam Dart came second. He was laughing at some joke the younger Bassett had told him when the first bullet struck him in the face.

  In this way the Courier learned from Griff Yarnell, one of the witnesses, of the ambush execution of the notorious Negro "character" Isam Dart. Dart, known in Brown's Hole as Nigger Isam, spelled with an "a," was an ex-slave, from Arkansas, freed by his owner during the late war.

  Dart was shot two times by a man posted behind a large ponderosa pine less than one hundred feet from the ranch house door and but seventy-five from the corral. It was in broad daylight, but such was the fear of the others that no one of them saw the assassin fire or flee.

  Indeed, as Mr. Yarnell is big enough to admit:

  "We was all so panicky we collided at the cabin door trying to stompede back into the house. Young Bassett was so inspired he did two full laps about the place before he found the door. I think the lad might be sprinting yet but that Alec Seger stuck out an arm and snared him going by the third time."

  The men stayed in the house all the day, sawed their way out through the back of it by dark that night, and came away.

  Deputy Sparks being out of the county, the Brown's Hole people made up their own posse to go up to the Dart place. Josephine Bassett, of the prominent settler family, is said to have led the investigators up the mountain. Now Mrs. Josie McKnight, the Bassett woman said she believed the killing was the work of the same man who murdered Madison Rash. This man, both she and her sister, the noted "Queen Anne" Bassett, have maintained from the beginning, was the Two Bar employee, Tom Horn. Hi Bernard, Two Bar spokesman and resident manager for owner Ora Haley, labels such "wild charges" as ridiculous and unsettled.

  Dart was shot twice, the second time while still falling with the fatal head wound of the first bullet. He was dead instantly. The date was October 3, two days past. Two .30-30 shell casings were found at the base of the pine tree. There was no trail going away, and no other clue was found. The Bassett sisters have insisted that Tom Horn is known to have the only .30-30 rifle in that part of the country. Tom Horn could not be contacted for his view of the matter.

  Dart was buried on the place.

  His coffin was a blanket. The sermon was said by Anne Bassett, who prayed for the hand of God to strike the guilty.

  Well, all right, and bless the Courier.

  People will believe what they read in a newspaper. I make no comment against that, except that I will say my facts and theirs are viewed from far apart.

  Like so:

  On the eighth of July, when I was supposed to have killed Matt Rash, he got a letter with that date on it from Jim Hicks, mailed in Denver over three hundred miles away. Might not the friends of Tom Horn take that to mean a man still can't be in two places at the same time? Maybe someday my enemies will explain it better for me.

  Coming to October 3, where all them "witnesses" saw not a damned thing come out from the back of that ponderosa pine but two .30-30 blasts that they say blowed away the top of Nigger Isam's black head, it was the same thing of me saying I was somewheres otherwise. Put exactly, I was the very next day—and early—in line over to the county seat, at Hahns Peak, Colorado, swearing to an affidavit for a complaint charging the same Isam Dart with altering brands on Jim McKnight livestock. That was of course October 4, not third. A day's difference they will yell. You had time to slip into the Hole, shoot the nigger beforehand, and still be first in line next morning over to the county clerks office. Well, maybe. But I would like to see any of those fat-seat newspaper reporters make it by horse back from Summit Spring Mountain in Brown's Hole, to the clerk's office, in Hahn's Peak, from morning to morning of October 3 to October 4. Yes, and turn the ride without leastways a dozen witnesses seeing them along the way.

  The hell, mister.

  If I done it, there's not even a top-riding cowboy alive to tell you how, nor to equal the trip on his own horse stock.

  Meanwhile, that document of affidavit is yet on file in Routt County, Colorado, and it is signed with a "Tom Horn" never questioned but being mine.

  Yet, demanding "prove it" of those that accuse me of killing Isam Dart is not the same as claiming any false sorrows over Isam's sudden judgment day; I am grateful to whoever done the nigger in.

  Like the Steamboat Springs Pilot put it:

  Immediately following the murder of Isam Dart, several Brown's Holers discovered they had urgent affairs elsewhere. Young Sam Bassett put a great deal of distance between himself and Mr. Hicks— he went to Alaska!

  He hasn't returned to northwestern Colorado, even for a visit.

  Joe Davenport, who helped track down Harry Tracy, also took his departure on a "Horn's Holiday," concerning which Joe says, "It got too tough in those parts with Tom there. Many of us left. I went to Missouri for the winter."

  Old Joe had it right.

  And the Steamboat Pilot, likewise.

  But there was another clipping I saved from the papers that hit it even closer:

  Mr. A. G. Wallihan of Lay, Colorado, reports as follows regarding his (Jim Hicks) subsequent movements (fleeing Brown's Hole):

  "Horn stopped here at my roadhouse on his way to Juniper Springs. He had got cut pretty bad in a fight (with Newt Kelly) in the Bull Dog Store Saloon, Baggs, Wyoming, and he thought the springs might help him.

  "He wasn't a bad appearing fellow to me. Whenever he looked at you, he always looked down, though. If you spoke to him, he would look at you a moment, then his eyes would fall again.

  "I didn't like him.

  "My wife had lived all her life on the frontier, and she was not afraid of God, man, or devil, but she was scared to death of Jim Hicks."

  Well, that was the business of a stock association range detective. Fear. That is what he sold. Delinquent accounts were treated accordingly. They was all warned once, then went after. We never had a bad debt, Jim Hicks or me.

  Which was why, I reckon, the Rock Springs paper printed this finish to it:

  Following a period of recuperation at Juniper Springs on the Middle Yampa, Tom Horn rode out of Colorado never to return. Horn, alias Hicks, knew whereof he spoke. His system never failed, and it surely will put an end to the old large-scale rustling of cattle in northwestern Colorado for all time.

  It also put an end to Jim Hicks.

  He quit the Two Bar, and Hi Bernard, and Ora Ben Haley, and truly was never seen again.

  His horse, Old Pacer, showed up the following spring at the John Coble ranch, Iron Mountain, Wyoming. His rider was an old cowboy and cavalry scout from Yavapai County, Arizona. He wanted work, and Mr. Coble put him on. He was a fair-tall man, getting bald, with a bad knife scar shoulder to chin. He said his name was Tom Horn.

  Big Pasture

  That spring and summer were easy doings. The work fitted me, and the life was good.

  I stayed up at the main ranch house with Mr. John C. Coble. He wanted me there and it was all right with the other hands, as my employment did not send me with them. Mr. Coble was an easterner of some substance who loved the western way and country. He had started in the range
cow business with $10,000 borrowed off his mother, which he paid back with all the interest in under two years. This was some fifteen on more years back. He had owned spreads at Plum Tree, Nebraska, and Powder River, Wyoming. The winter of 1886-87 wiped him out, like every other big outfit in the north. He then moved down to Iron Mountain and went into horse ranching but switched back to cattle when "he got his nerve back." Lately, after doing right good, things in that business had got tight for him again.

  It wasn't blizzards this time, but buzzards.

  And them, we could do something about.

  But John Coble held me off.

  "Not yet," he kept saying. "They are bound to see the light, if we just keep after them."

  So I kept on riding the "pasture line" and letting the "people" see me doing it.

  It was some pasture that I covered. Look on your map of Wyoming and find a place called Fort Laramie. It is on the Platte River, over near the Nebraska line. Now you will see that the Laramie River empties into the Platte there. Follow the Laramie up and you will see it breaks into a spider web of forks and various creeks with names like Fish Creek, Bluegrass Creek, Richeau Creek, and then two bigger forks, more like rivers, called the Sybille and the Chugwater. Ponder the space twixt Sybille and Chug, east to west and north to south. Then figure my work also took me up and down both banks of both streams, and you will have some little idea of the miles rode under by me and my main two saddle mounts, Cap and Old Pacer.

  Those horses deserve some mention.

  Both was gifts of Mr. Coble and his general foreman Duncan Clark, who knew my job and what it required of an animal. Cap was a black bay, big, flat-boned, rangy, like all my horses. He took his name from the brand CAP burned on the forequarter. He would go close to 1,100 pounds, all of it lungs and heart girth. He was a doing horse, and the one I rode on the darkest ride of my life.

  Pacer had once been the private mount of Mr. Coble. He was a big-barreled snorty horse. Very dark bay or brown horse. Handsome appearing. Had a kind of racking shuffle of a gait up to when he would strike his run, in which no horse could hold to him. He had a very high life to him and always acted like he had got himself a little touch of the jimsonweed. You might call him kind of crazy, snorty, or flighty, but you would saddle him for risk work every time.

  Him and the Cap horse, both, was the using kind.

  Pacer was a TY-branded horse, out of the remuda of Duncan Clark.

  The two mounts figured in what was left of my life as that summer of 1901 wore on; it is fit that they be remembered as the horses of Tom Horn.

  There is one thing sure: the people of the valleys of the Chug and the Sybille remembered them. Whenever I would appear in a vicinity on either of those "dark horses," you could practically hear the slamming shut of cabin doors and window shutters. I would be met fair enough if it was day and there was no reasonable getting away from me. They would treat me decent, and many times I stayed with various ones of them for the night. But a man knows when people are afraid of him, just like an animal knows it. It's a smell, almost. With some, the ones with cause to sweat cold, it was a rank stink.

  Some of them stinked to hell.

  Kels Nickell was one.

  He was a small cattleman who had brought in sheep and was hated for it for fifty miles around. He was a mean bastard. His wife, though, was different. Mary Nickell had a sad look to her, but I liked her, and she was a good kind. Of the two boys, Fred was all right. Slow, but his mother's blood. The other, the older one, took after Kels. Willie Nickell was the kind of kid you would want to kick the whey out of for his own good. But in his case he would need to wait his turn, as his pa was such a son of a bitch before him.

  Kels Nickell went back ten years with my friend John Coble. The Cheyenne Daily Leader for July 24, 1890, puts it better than I might, who wasn't there. Mr. Coble had the clipping and give it to me. I put it under the band of my hat, for remembering. It said:

  J. C. COBLE CUT: SLASHED WITH KNIFE BY KELS P. NICKELL: TWO QUITE SERIOUS WOUNDS ARE INFLICTED: BADLY SLASHED. . .

  J. C. Coble of Iron Mountain was seriously stabbed at that place yesterday by Kels P. Nickell, another ranchman, and is under treatment of Dr. Maynard at the physicians Cheyenne residence. Sheriff Martin has the assailant in jail.

  Nickell and George Cross, a foreman for Mr. Coble, quarreled over the trespassing of some cattle. Nickell, without a word, dashed at Coble with the knife and made two effective slashes. The wounds are ugly cuts in the abdomen, and while they are serious, Mr. Coble will recover. Nickell was arrested by another ranchman and brought in on Sheriff Martin's instructions. . . .

  Maybe it was my own knife scars from the rascal Newt Kelly that was burning me when I looked at Mr. Coble's long red wounds done by Nickell ten years gone. Whatever the reason, they rankled inside me. I always hated the man with a knife.

  Yet I don't say that Kels Nickell was a rustler.

  I didn't find him stealing Iron Mountain, nor any other cattle. Likewise, I deny it was his sheep led to what happened. Roundabout, it was the feud. That was the fight him and his neighbor Jim Miller had going. It came out of the bad blood between the Miller boy, Victor, and the mean Nickell kid, Willie. But that was only the back scenery of it. Direct on, the cause of it was that Kimmell foreigner woman. Hadn't she come to live with the Jim Miller family, teaching at the Iron Mountain School, Tom Horn would never have rode into the trap he did—the trap that was swung wide for him when Willie Nickell opened his father's pasture gate.

  But that was down the road.

  And the schoolteacher wasn't; she was only down at the "railroad." She had just arrived from the east and was waiting at Iron Mountain depot, on the U.P.R.R., for some Samaritan to come and get her.

  Guess who was the Christian that I-M foreman Dune Clark handpicked to take the Coble company "spring wagon" and go fetch her out to the Miller place?

  That's right; you may shine the teacher's apple.

  It was Tom Horn, the famous stock detective.

  Naturally.

  Miss Kimmell

  It was the fifteenth of July that I set out to get Miss Glendolene Kimmell at the Iron Mountain waterspout station on the U.P. line. I had got a little late due to disliking the kind of work and wanting everybody concerned to know it. Especially the schoolmarm. I had her in my head for having metal-rim specs and a flat bustle, with a walk like a mud-hen coot with the strain.

  I seen her standing trackside from afar and weakened a tad. She looked so small and total alone. Which you can't be any more alone than to be left trackside in south Wyoming. But when you're likewise fresh out of the East, never west of, say, Kansas City, it can show you spooks out there. Particularly it can in a late dusk like the one I came through toward Miss Kimmell.

  Well, she was that glad to see anybody that I feared she was going to cloud up and rain all over my good shirt.

  But crying wasn't her style; style was.

  I could see it on her the same as you see it on a leggy filly or good-backed heifer, as far off as they can be made out. But this was only a little ways out on the Iron Mountain road, just near enough to the depot to show my eagering eye that this "little girl" down there had a set of eating titties on her that would water the mouth of a ninety-year-old mummy and a backside that was all hers and no part bustle. I tucked in my damn shirt and whistled up Buck and Becky. I dug in my pants pocket for my Sen-Sen. I scuff-shone my boot arches on the legs of my Levi's and set up in that nifty rig straight as a Sundaymorning pecker. Of a sudden that hot sagebrush smelled like French perfumery. The sunset was no redder than my woke-up blood. I wasn't pushing forty-one years old but was young as the summer night.

  I swooped those damn mustangs up to that trackside like Ben Hurt cutting his chariot short on the last corner. I stepped down out of the rig whiles it was still moving and swept off my four-gallon stetson and bent her a bow that would have broke Sir Walker Rawley's back.

  Then I rared back upright and took my handclose look.r />
  It hit me hard, and I spit out my Sen-Sen.

  She was a damn slant eye.

  Miss Kimmell sat beside me. There was still a lingering green twilight of the luminous sort that summer brings in the West. The red of the sun is gone, but there is yet this lovely pale gloom all about, peaceful and calm and still as trout-pool water at the foot of the riffle. It is a time of day to stir the soul of a rock, or soften the heart of a damned fool.

  "Ma'am," I said, "are you all right?"

  We had not either of us spoke a word since introducing ourselves back by the U.P. water tank spout. I had packed her duffle into the trunk of the rig, let her climb in by herself, whipped up the mustangs, and built a dustboil away from the tracks that I could still see, looking back.

  Now she turned those Jap or Chinky eyes on me and answered in a low and husky voice, "Yes, thank you, Mr. Horn. I will never forget this night, this twilight. You cannot know what it means to me."

  She talked in that manner. Like a schoolteacher. Each word set apart from the other, careful, somewhat slow, as if fearful she wouldn't be understood. She had some kind of foreigner accent, too. Just a small touch of it, but it was an odd one. Sort of made you quit thinking she wasn't white, was maybe even part nigger. Got you to listening to her. And more. Got you to taking a second, sidelong look at her there on the seat next you. Then deciding you were right, you had been a damned fool to put off on her as you'd done back to the depot.

  "Well, Miss Kimmel," I said, "maybe I do know how the country hits you. I can tell it in your voice that you've dreamt about coming out here. I done it myself. There was whole nights of my life that I never closed my eyes for thinking about being 'out west.' I didn't know nothing whatever about it. But I was born wanting to go west. 'Out there,' I called it." I shook up the team to cover a dip down and up out of a cross-gully. "Folks mostly don't comprehend what it means—'out there.' You would know it, though," I said. "I seen you from the top of Four Mile Mesa, coming in. You was standing looking off south, and all around, while there was yet sun. You was looking 'out there,' wasn't you, Miss Kimmell?"