The Last Shootist
Page 30
Gillom’s first ride on the Southern Pacific out of Deming to Benson was typical of long-distance trains at the turn of the century, which were infested with cardsharps and their cheating cronies. Doc Davis was a notorious crooked gambler of the late 1800s known to ride those same rails fleecing suckers. The mighty S & P Railroad had to sell tickets to these card cheats, but the conductors were by then warning inexperienced travelers against playing cards with these devious gambling professionals.
When the Citizens Reform League got rolling in El Paso in 1904, by year’s end they had leaned on the city council to outlaw houses of prostitution and saloon gambling. Many of the resourceful pimps and whores and gamblers got on trains and headed west—to Bisbee, Arizona.
Bisbee was still a wide-open mining town with legal gambling in fifty saloons operating round the clock and prostitutes available in “the reservation,” the parlor houses and cribs and dance halls at the upper end of Brewery Gulch. Bisbee’s elected law enforcers were controlled by the three big mining companies, and nothing was allowed to interfere with their immensely profitable dirt digging. After the infamous Bisbee Massacre of December 1883, when the Goldwater & Castaneda General Store was robbed and five innocent people killed, the citizens formed their own Safety Committee of local vigilantes and caught and hanged all six murdering store robbers. The .45-.60 were thereafter in business and began to run troublemakers out of town after a formal warning, with the nonlegal approval of the county sheriff and the mining concerns. Gillom Rogers runs into these urban vigilantes, and they are the reason well-organized Bisbee suffered nowhere near the robberies, shootings, and murders of nearby wooly Arizona towns like Tombstone, Nogales, or Tucson. Sheriff Scott White (who ruled Cochise County at that time) explaining the local political situation to young Gillom and Ease after their two shoot-outs and how Arizona was trying so hard to become a civilized state in the Union separate from New Mexico is accurate regarding congressional frontier politics of those years.
The names of Bisbee’s saloons (except the Bonanza), restaurants, stores, and the construction of their showplace, the luxurious Copper Queen Hotel, are also factual to the town at that time. Traveling variety shows did pass through their big new Orpheum Theatre, which featured the fanciest restrooms in the whole Territory, a sight to see and enjoy. M. J. Cunningham was the cashier of the new Bank of Bisbee and owned the first automobile in town, although it was a big Stanley Steamer instead of a smaller Locomobile, because the bigger car would have been much more difficult for two men to push up a slippery dirt track.
The Arizona gunman known for making a “silhouette girl” out of his new wife after killing her husband over their affair was Buckskin Frank Leslie, thought by some to have also been the unknown murderer of his gunslinging pal, Johnny Ringo. Drinking and then tracing his wife’s profile in wooden siding with bullets was Buckskin Frank’s fun thing to do, but luckily their marriage didn’t last that long.
Dr. Frederick Sweet was Bisbee’s surgeon when Phelps Dodge built their first hospital in 1900 so that their company physician no longer had to operate on kitchen or barroom tables. C. E. Doll did operate his Atlantic and Pacific Portrait Studio north of Bisbee’s Castle Rock in 1901.
Ease Bixler and Anel Romero are fictional characters, representative of the young people who flocked to the booming towns along the Mexican border to make their fortune catering to the miners and ranchers creating this new wealth. Red Jean, though, is based on a famous prostitute, Irish Mag, whom one of the best copper claims in Bisbee was even named after. Irish Mag kept her small cottage up Mule Pass and her parrot in a scrub oak outside. The bird was known for its salty remarks the rowdy miners had taught it.
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The better histories of the great copper boom in Bisbee are History of Bisbee, 1877 to 1937 (University of Arizona master’s thesis by Annie M. Cox) and Bisbee, Not So Long Ago by Opie Rundle Burgess. Carlos A. Schwantes’s Bisbee: Urban Outpost on the Frontier (1992) and Bisbee: Queen of the Copper Camps by Lynn R. Bailey (2002) are filled with old photographs of the mines and businesses and unique mountainside houses, plus stories about the colorful residents’ lives in that famous copper camp. The only period novel set in these southern Arizona mining towns I found was Tacey Cromwell (1942) by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Conrad Richter. Richter’s descriptions of the turn-of-the-century social life in the old mining town are by a famous writer who obviously spent time there. I did, too, with a Scottsdale High School pal, Rob Uhl, and later my mother, Kathryn, on several trips to scout Bisbee’s old library and mining museum. Microfilm of their old newspapers, The Arizona Daily Orb, succeeded by The Bisbee Daily Review, as well as the weekly “Bisbee Jottings” in The Tombstone Epitaph, I read in the University of Arizona’s excellent library in Tucson.
The incorporation of the city Ease Bixler mentions took place in Bisbee in 1902, and their new council’s first act was to ban women from saloons. Gambling was outlawed in Bisbee in 1907, prostitution was banned there in 1910, Arizona became a state in early 1912, and Prohibition hit the newest state in America right between the eyes in 1915. Free-wheelin’ days in that famous old mining mecca were officially over.
Much less has been written about mining in remote eastern Arizona, although The History of Arizona’s Clifton-Morenci Mining District, Volume 1: The Underground Days by Ted Cogut and Bill Conger (1999) covers early copper mining there thoroughly. History of Clifton by James Monroe Patton (University of Arizona master’s thesis, 1945) was also enlightening. The descriptions of the saloons and businesses on Conglomerate Avenue and the incredible violence in the brothels and saloons along Chase Creek, from which “a body a day” was pulled in one three-month period in 1883, came from Patton’s later published graduate thesis. Clifton’s amazing level of murder and violence slackened but continued blazing through the 1890s. Henry Hill was the stable owner in South Clifton, and a new Shannon Copper smelter had been blown in along the San Francisco River just after the turn into the twentieth century.
Up-canyon, Morenci was just as rough and lacked water and sewage facilities during its formative years. Even into the 1950s, Phelps Dodge operated a private brothel for its miners in that isolated, totally company-run town. The Chinese were allowed to live in Clifton (unlike in Bisbee), and the only hostelry Gillom rooms in, the Clifton Hotel, did host an alarming number of scorpions. Fires and floods periodically wiped out parts of both towns, but the rival copper companies and their supporting businesses quickly rebuilt along the polluted San Francisco River to continue their lucrative operations. The mining must never stop was the copper companies’ motto and continues in Morenci to this day.
Luther Goose is fictional, but there were rough pimps like him investing secretly in parlor houses or operating them openly with equally tough madams. And a Blue Goose Saloon did exist in Clifton at the nineteenth century’s finish.
About the Author
Miles Swarthout is the son of bestselling novelist Glendon Swarthout, who wrote the original classic Western The Shootist. Miles Swarthout cowrote the screenplay of the film adaptation of The Shootist, which became John Wayne’s final film. Swarthout’s The Sergeant’s Lady won a Spur Award for Best First Novel from the Western Writers of America. He resides in Playa del Rey, California.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE LAST SHOOTIST
Copyright © 2014 by Miles Swarthout
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Michael Koelsch
Afterword photograph courtesy of the El Paso Public Library, Aultman Collection
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ISBN 978-0-7653-7678-7 (hardcover)
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First Edition: October 2014