A Pocketful of History

by Jim Noles

  By 9:00 AM, F Troop had covered twenty-five miles and reached the banks of the Saline River. Spotting a group of seventy-five Indians— and the railroad crew’s stolen horses—Armes dismounted his troop and intrepidly, perhaps even rashly, attacked along the bank of the small river. Within a matter of minutes, as he began to receive fire from the bluffs overhead, he realized he was surrounded. Armes’s concerns grew when he realized that a herd of nearby bison was, in fact, actually another group of Cheyenne warriors creeping up disguised in buffalo robes.

  At that point, Armes realized that discretion would be the better part of valor. He ordered a withdrawal and, for fifteen miles, beat a fighting retreat, leading his horses on foot as charges of Indians repeatedly swept against—and at times, through—his command. Later, Armes estimated that his troop of thirty-some men battled between 350 and 400 Cheyenne warriors.

  In the fighting, one of F Troop’s sergeants, a soldier named Christy, was shot through the head as he organized a line of defense. Meanwhile, the company’s first sergeant, Thornton, had his own horse shot out from underneath him. Armes himself took a rifle shot to the leg and had to be placed upon his horse. By the time the Cheyenne finally ceased their attacks, many of Armes’s men had run out of ammunition. Adding to the misery, six of the troopers were so debilitated by attacks of cholera that they had to be strapped to their horses and led to safety as the fighting raged.

  In his memoirs, Armes candidly assessed his narrow escape: “It is the greatest wonder in the world that my command and myself escaped being massacred, as we had to retreat fifteen miles through a hilly country, full of canyons, rocks, and gullies, fighting our way foot by foot, the Indians dodging from one gully and rock to others and firing on us at every chance.”

  What became known as the Battle of the Saline River marked the Buffalo Soldiers’ baptism of fire. In the years to come, however, they would carry their regimental flag and guidons into combat many more times. Eventually, twenty-two officers, men, and Indian scouts assigned to the Buffalo Soldier regiments earned the Medal of Honor during the Indian Wars throughout the West and in conflicts further afield.

  Among their foes, the Buffalo Soldiers could count Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, Oglala Sioux, and Apache. They even battled white outlaws, such as when Sergeant Benjamin Brown, of the Twenty-fourth Infantry Regiment, helped fight off a band of robbers attacking a paymaster’s convoy in Arizona in 1889. Brown, shot in the stomach, kept fighting until shot through both arms. He survived to be awarded the Medal of Honor the following year.

  In later years, the Buffalo Soldier regiments, or companies of those regiments, also participated in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Insurrection, and the relief of the foreign legations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion. Several units of the Ninth Cavalry, along with a company of the Twenty-fourth, even garrisoned Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant (King’s Canyon) parks in California— arguably making them some of the nation’s first park rangers.

  By then, the Tenth Cavalry’s ranks included Mark Matthews. The Alabama native had met a detachment of the regiment’s troopers at a racetrack in Lexington, Kentucky, where he had worked in the stables and, inspired by their stories, enlisted into their ranks, even though at age sixteen, he was underage. His first assignment took him to Fort Huachuca, Arizona. From there, he and his regiment pursued Pancho Villa into Mexico.

  Matthews made a career of the army, eventually retiring in 1949. The days of a segregated U.S. Army had officially ended the previous year, when President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 9981 officially ordered the American military desegregated.

  The legacy of the Buffalo Soldiers lived on, however, and is particularly evident in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and in Junction City, Kansas, outside of Fort Riley, where monuments to the African American regiments now stand. But thanks to the Kansas state quarter— and the soldiers’ namesake buffalo that adorns it—a reminder of Buffalo Soldiers and their accomplishments may be closer than you think.

  35

  WEST VIRGINIA

  A Bridge Too Far

  The fifth quarter released in 2005 commemorates, on a total of 721.6 million coins, the state of West Virginia. Possible designs for that quarter included concepts entitled “Appalachian Warmth,” “River Rafters,” and “Mother’s Day/Anna Jarvis,” the latter celebrating the native of Taylor County, West Virginia, who was credited with inventing the idea of Mother’s Day. In all, more than 1,800 design concepts had been submitted to and considered by a committee of students at the state’s Governor’s School for the Arts.

  In the end, West Virginia Governor Bob Wise opted for a design entitled “New River Gorge.” On its reverse, it captures the scenic beauty of the self-proclaimed Mountain State with an intricate engraving of West Virginia’s New River and the New River Gorge Bridge, located a few miles north of Fayetteville, West Virginia.

  What the quarter fails to capture, however, is sheer excitement that has descended on—and leaped off—that same bridge every autumn since 1980 (with the post–9/11 exception of 2001) with the annual celebration known as Bridge Day, which draws as many as 200,000 spectators to Fayetteville, West Virginia, every third Saturday in October.

  There would, however, be no Bridge Day without the bridge, and until 1977, there was no bridge spanning West Virginia’s New River Gorge. Before then, local travelers had no choice but to snake their way along winding rounds on a dangerous forty-minute journey down into and then out of the gorge. In 1973, however, the West Virginia Department of Highways decided to remedy the situation. The department accepted a bid from the American Bridge Division of U.S. Steel Corporation and directed American Bridge to begin work on a structure designed by the Michael Baker Company’s engineers.

  In June 1974, construction began. Matching pairs of 330-foot-high towers were constructed on opposite sides of the gorge, with three-inch- thick cables running the 3,500 feet between them. Once the cables were secure, trolleys running on those cables began guiding the first steel into place over the gorge.

  Three years and $37 million later, American Bridge’s work over the New River Gorge was done, with the bridge opening for traffic on October 22, 1977. The result was a 3,030-foot-long steel arch bridge (with an arch measuring 1,700 feet in length, making it the longest in the Western Hemisphere) that soared 876 feet above the New River below. As such, it was the second-highest bridge in the United States, with top honors in that category remaining with Colorado’s Royal Gorge Bridge over the Arkansas River. Despite its second-place status, however, the New River Gorge Bridge could fit the Washington Monument underneath it and still have 325 feet to spare.

  With its completion, the New River Gorge Bridge joined the ranks of legendary American bridges. For example, the span length of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, completed in New York City the previous decade to connect Brooklyn with Staten Island, is so great that its suspension towers had to be designed to compensate for the earth’s curvature. At 4,260 feet, its span tops that of America’s second-longest suspension bridge, California’s Golden Gate, and dwarfs the 1,595 feet of the longest span of New York’s iconic Brooklyn Bridge.

  In other categories, the main span of Philadelphia’s Commodore Barry Bridge in Chester, Pennsylvania, at 1,644 feet, gives it top honors as the nation’s longest steel-truss girder bridge. Meanwhile, ongoing construction of the nearly 2,000-foot-long Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge (also known as the Colorado River Bridge) promises to give the United States its longest concrete arch bridge when completed in 2010. Not to be outdone, Louisiana natives continue to point proudly to their own Lake Pontchartrain Causeway outside of New Orleans. At over twenty-four miles in length, its champions claim that it is the longest overwater highway bridge in the world.

  Taking its place in such good company, the bridge, not surprisingly, quickly became not only a means of getting from one side of the gorge to the other but a destination in its own right. Three years after the bridge was completed, the local commun
ity held the first New River Gorge Bridge Day on November 8, 1980. The day’s events included two parachutists who jumped from a plane onto the bridge. Starting an even more enduring tradition, five other parachutists jumped off the bridge into the gorge below, free-falling for three to four seconds before deploying their chutes and enjoying the remaining thirty seconds of their descents.

  The latter daredevils were practitioners of a relatively new extreme sport called “BASE jumping.” BASE stands for “Building/ Antenna/Span (as in bridge span)/Earth,” and BASE jumpers’ sport—on paper, anyway—is a relatively straightforward one: to jump off such fixed points (as opposed to jumping out of an aircraft) and parachute to the ground below. Jumpers use special ram-jet parachutes—devices that resemble kites as much as conventional parachutes–and self-deploy the chutes by first holding and then releasing a pilot chute that drags out the main chute to deploy. In the few seconds of free-fall, jumpers reach speeds of seventy-five miles per hour.

  Arguably, the sport of BASE jumping can be traced to the summer of 1966, when two California skydivers, Brian Schubert and Michael Pelkey, scaled Yosemite National Park’s 3,000-foot El Capitan and, in an unprecedented feat of daring, parachuted off the great monolith.

  In the course of their descent and landing, Shubert suffered a broken ankle; Pelkey fractured several bones in his feet. Upon their landing, the National Park Service added insult to injury by searching for regulations that prohibited such conduct. That particular search was unsuccessful, although later legal penmanship would soon fill that regulatory void—so successfully, in fact, that events such as Bridge Day would one day represent one of the few legal opportunities for BASE jumping in the United States.

  As Bridge Day grew in popularity, so did the number of BASE jumps—and rappels and bungee jumps—from the bridge’s span. Bridge Day in 1981 featured a dozen parachutists; by 1984, the number had surged to 300 and, in 1986, to 400. Even a jumper’s death in 1987 did not deter the enthusiasm. In 1998, sixteen jumpers— twelve followed immediately by another serial of four—set a world record for a simultaneous BASE jump.

  In the autumn of 2006, however, an accident of tragic irony reminded the world of BASE jumping’s dangers. On that October day, some 400 jumpers made approximately 800 jumps off the bridge, much to the delight of the 175,000 spectators in attendance.

  BASE pioneers Brian Schubert and Michael Pelkey also attended that year’s event as an encore to their visit of the previous year. The year 2006 marked the fortieth anniversary of their leap from Yosemite, an anniversary that the two men intended to mark with ceremonial jumps from the New River Gorge Bridge’s steels spans.

  The sixty-six-year-old Schubert, a veteran of the Pomona, California, police force, jumped first, shortly before noon. He had 141 skydives to his credit but, according to the Los Angeles Times, it was his first jump in years, a gap in experience that perhaps proved fatal. He deployed his chute too late, failing to give it enough time to fully inflate and provide him with adequate deceleration before he slammed into the New River. The resulting impact killed Schubert— and convinced Pelkey to forgo his own jump.

  In the end, Schubert’s BASE jumping career spanned a continent— and two quarters. California’s quarter features John Muir gazing at Yosemite Park, where Schubert first jumped into fame. And West Virginia’s quarter offers the deceptively tranquil image of what became his last jump.

  “My father died with a smile on his face because he had so much passion for what he loved,” his daughter Cynthia Lee later told the Los Angeles Times. “And that’s our saving grace.”

  36

  NEVADA

  Horse Sense

  If Brian Schubert and the West Virginia state quarter offer one vision of courage, then Nevada’s Velma Johnston offers another—the courage of one’s convictions. And although Johnston is not featured on the Silver State’s quarter, it is difficult to imagine anyone who would have been happier with its imagery—a trio of wild mustangs, galloping in the foreground of a snowcapped mountain range, with the sun at their backs and sagebrush at their flanks.

  Johnston was born in 1912 into a family tree already intertwined with the wild horses and burros of the Old West. Johnston’s father, Joseph Bronn, had arrived in Nevada as a pioneer infant; according to family legend, the milk of a mustang mare succored the crying baby as his immigrant family crossed the region’s burning deserts in their covered wagon. Later, in Reno, he operated a freight service that relied on a large number of horses, including some of mustang lineage. It was not long before Johnston herself was in the saddle.

  In 1923, however, at the age of eleven, Johnston contracted polio. Sent to San Francisco for treatment, she spent months in a cast that, in the end, disfigured her terribly. At the same time, though, the experience engendered in Johnston a special empathy for confined or hurt animals. The taunting of cruel classmates made school a nightmare; in response, the softhearted Johnston turned her attention to drawing, poetry, and caring for the animals on her father’s ranch, the Double Lazy Heart, on the Truckee River.

  On the Truckee, one of the Bronn family’s neighbors was a strapping, kindhearted rancher named Charlie Johnston. He courted and eventually wed Johnston, and in time the couple took over the Double Lazy Heart. Unable to have children of their own, they found a place for children in their lives by operating an informal dude ranch for youth at the Double Lazy Heart. Many of the dude ranchers included troubled children from nearby Reno, where Johnston worked as a secretary for a local insurance company executive.

  Johnston’s life took a dramatic turn one day in 1950 when, driving to Reno for work, she pulled behind a truck crammed with frantic wild horses. The sight of blood dripping from the back of the trailer aroused both curiosity and concern. She trailed the trailer to its destination—a slaughterhouse where the horses were rendered into pet food.

  To Johnston, the truck and its gory destination unveiled an ugly truth about federal land use management in the mid-twentieth century. Some 85 percent of Nevada’s land was actually owned by the federal government and was managed for the most part by the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM. That same land was home to the BLM herds of wild horses and burros—some were wild mustangs of Spanish or Indian lineage, others simply equines that had been let loose from failed Depression-era homesteads—that it simply classified as feral. In the 1950s, it routinely issued permits to companies to round up horses and burros. The lucky ones found service as bucking broncos; the majority, however, were destined for rendering plants. Similar activities took place on state, county, and private lands.

  In Nevada, the roundups occurred with all of the efficiency of the modern age. Aircraft and trucks combined with cowboys on horseback and in jeeps to effect industrial-sized roundups of the wild horses. One hundred thousand horses were captured in the 1950s; those numbers had dwindled to 17,000 across nine Western states by the late 1960s.

  Spurred to action, Johnston quickly found herself fighting what seemed to be little more than a desperate rearguard action. Fortunately, however, she combined her passion for the horses’ plight with the organizational and communication skills of a talented executive secretary.

  Starting in Storey County where she lived, she charmed and cajoled local civic, community, and political leaders. At times, her cause put her at odds with many of her rancher neighbors who viewed the wild horses as simply pests. They disparaged her as “Wild Horse Annie.” In return, Johnston embraced the name as a compliment, and in 1955, she claimed her first victory when the Nevada state legislature banned aircraft and land vehicles from capturing wild horses on state lands.

  Unfortunately, the mustangs unlucky enough to roam the vast tracts of federally owned land in Nevada remained unprotected. But buoyed by her earlier successes, Johnston convinced U.S. Representative Walter S. Baring of Nevada to introduce legislation in Congress in 1959 that not only prohibited the use of any form of motorized vehicle to capture wild horses but also outlawed the poisoning of water h
oles. Recorded as Public Law 86-234, it was more popularly known as the Wild Horse Annie Act.

  However, stymied by episodes of lax enforcement, even P.L. 86- 234 seemed unable to promise that viable populations of the wild mustangs would remain on Nevada’s public lands. In response, Johnston launched her most far-reaching and vocal campaign yet to agitate for greater protection for the West’s wild horses and burros. Some have even said that Congress, in the 1960s, received more letters from constituents regarding the plight of the mustangs than on any other topic save the Vietnam War.

  In 1962, Johnston’s efforts began to bear fruit. That year, the government established the Nevada Wild Horse Range within the vast expanse of Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. BLM built watering holes throughout the area, and in the absence of competing livestock on the base, the horses grew in number from about 200 in 1962 to more than 1,000 by 1976. Similar sanctuaries would eventually include the Pryor Mountain refuge, established in 1968, on the Montana-Wyoming border, and the Little Bookcliffs refuge near Palisade, Colorado.

  Further legislative relief came in 1971, with the unanimous passage of the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act (P.L. 92-195). The new law gave the wild horses and burros protection on BLM and U.S. Forest Service lands “where found” at the time of the passage of the act—in total, 303 areas. Such animals, the act declared, are “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West and shall be protected from harassment or death.”

  Even with the passage of the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, Johnston’s work did not diminish. She established Wild Horses Organized Assistance (WHOA), designed to document horse locations through meticulous field notes, maps, and photographs of horse and burro spottings, witness affidavits, and other documents.

  Johnston’s final fight, however, was with her toughest foe yet— cancer. It was a fight she was destined to lose. On June 27, 1977, she passed away at the age of sixty-five, scarcely a year after the BLM implemented the nationwide Adopt-a-Horse program as part of its wild horse management efforts. Had Johnston survived, she would no doubt have taken great pride in knowing that by 1980, the public had adopted 20,000 wild horses and 2,000 burros. That same year, BLM estimated that on its lands, wild horse numbers exceeded 52,000 and burros 12,000, with some herds growing by 15 to 20 percent each year.