Legends and Tales of the American West

by Richard Erdoes

  Luck, so far, had been with Tubbs. The longest he had ever had to wait for the red was five whirls of the wheel. His unique kind of betting constituted his only fixed income—one dollar per day. Even had he stacked all his sixty-two dollars, his winnings would have been only one lone smackeroo. But that was all he wanted. The little clicking ball coming to rest on the red was the daily bread that sustained his 250-pound corpus.

  On the evening in question, the cherry-nosed colonel, as always, strode into the Golden Nugget, ignoring the hectic gamblers busy at their various games of chance, ponderously settling down at the roulette table, greeting the croupier with a genial: “Good day ter ye, Pierre. Jest hand me the brandy, for et’s a scandalous fac’ thet I heven’t hed more’n half a dozen snorts this hull blessed day.”

  With a great amount of fuss he emptied the heavy bag, containing all he owned in the world, spreading the the coins out before him, and then stacking them up in six neat, precisely aligned columns. Then he placed a single silver dollar on the red, propped his elbows on the table, cupped his chin in his hands, and said: “Jumpin’ crockerdiles! Give her a whirl!”

  Other players made their bets. The croupier exhorted one and all: “Come down, gents, come down! Make yer play! Odds or even, red or black, manque or passe! Make a fortune on yer fav’rite number! Come down! Come down! Rien ne va plus! Here we go!”

  The wheel began to turn, fast at first, and then slowing down, until the little ball came to rest—on the red!

  Tubbs watched impassively, Contrary to his usual practice, he let the bet stand, not picking up his two dollars. There was a slight murmur. Nobody had ever seen old Tubbs do this before. The wheel whirred around once more, and again the red came up. Tubbs’s expression did not change. Four dollars now were lying before him. And he let them stand. Then the incredible happened. Against all odds, against all the rules of mathematical probability, the red came up, again and again, ten times in a row. Not a muscle in Tubbs’s face moved. Not the slightest twitch betrayed his emotion. He let his bet stand as before. His winnings had increased by leaps and bounds. The coins before him had grown into a glittering mound. Still he sat there, stolidly, without blinking, chin in hands, oblivious to the mounting excitement around him. And still one more time the little ball stopped at the red. Now all was absolutely quiet inside the Golden Nugget. One could have heard a pin drop. A crowd had gathered around the roulette table, watching in awe. Madame Dumont had descended from the high seat from which she surveyed all that was going on within her gambling emporium. She talked to the croupier, who examined his machinery to see whether it had been tampered with and who also checked the wheel’s alignment. But everything was working properly. If Tubbs was offended by this scrutiny, which implied suspicion, then his face did not betray it. He just kept sitting there as if rooted, making no move to rake in his loot.

  Word got around that the old coon was on an unbelievable winning streak. Whoop-Up was in an uproar. Denizens of the Golden Nugget rushed to witness the miracle, among them Tubbs’s old and trusted friends Deadwood Dick and Calamity Jane.

  “Whoopee!” the famous Wildcat of the Plains shouted as she took her place beside the red-nosed child of fortune. “Whoopee! I’m Calamity Jane and the drinks are on the house. Hooraw fer the cunnel. Let her rip!”

  Before Tubbs now rose a veritable Pikes Peak of coins—fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars or more.

  “Yer tarnal old fool,” Deadwood Dick whispered into the old miner’s ear, “take yer money an’ run afore the black comes up, an’ come up it will, or ye can hang me up fer grizzly meat!” But Tubbs ignored him. Once more the little clicking ball rested on the red. Madame Dumont stood up, waving her beringed hands, and announced in a loud, ringing voice: “Gents, messieurs, ze bank, it is broken. Rompu, bustaid. Mon Dieu, je suis desoleé, and sorry, but zee Goldain Nuggette, she eez closed until I shall get monnaie from ze bank in Deadwood. In ze meantime, mesdames et messieurs, you are all invited to belly oop to ze bar. Champagne for everybody. Champagne on ze house!” There was no question—La Belle Dumont had class.

  “Com’on, ye old galoot,” Deadwood Dick admonished Tubbs, “take yer loot. I’ll get a wheelbarrow to help ye carry it off.”

  “Yea, let’s go, old hoss,” Calamity chimed in, nudging the old fellow. Then the dreadful and unexpected happened—Tubbs toppled from his seat, all 250 pounds of him, landing with a resounding thud on the sawdust-sprinkled floor. He was lying there, belly up, glassy eyes wide open, with an odd smile on his ruddy face. For a while everybody kept staring silently at the old man lying on the floor. Deadwood Dick bent down, slid his hand under Tubbs’s frazzled shirt, and felt for a heartbeat. He found none. The horrible truth dawned upon him that Tubbs had gone to play roulette in a better world. The ancient miner had finally cashed in his chips. “He’s dead,” Deadwood Dick said at last, stumbling over the words.

  “His heart must’ve stopped when he made his fust bet,” Calamity exclaimed, tears streaming down her face. “That’s why he didn’t simply take his two dollars and quit. That’s why he let his bets stand.”

  “Pore old hoss,” Deadwood Dick added, “to miss his greatest strike. To have finally hit the mother lode an’ never know it! But it was a nacheral way for him to go. I’ll shore miss the old galoot.”

  “Zee monnaie,” inquired Madame Dumont, “zeese zousands of dollairs, vot shall vee do viz zem? Who are Monsieur Tubbs’s heirs?”

  “He had no heirs,” said Calamity. “Ole Tubbs here was all alone in this world.”

  “Quel malheur! Vot shall vee do?”

  “Thar’s plenty folks around hyar who’re down on their luck,” said Calamity. “Women whose men got their hair lifted by the red varmints, kids whose fathers were plugged by road agents. Poor suckers whose claims have been jumped by thimbleriggers. Old down-and-out painted cats who cain’t find a feller to give ’em a tumble. I suggest distributin’ this whole caboodle among them. Old Tubbs would have wanted it that way.”

  “Old Calam here has hit the bull’s-eye, as always,” said Deadwood Dick, ending the discussion.

  Good for Our Entire Assets

  A story, supposedly true and often embroidered, tells of a Denver bank teller faced with three worn-out-looking citizens when he opened the bank one morning, one of them clutching an envelope to his breast.

  “I want to negotiate a loan,” declared the man with the envelope.

  “Upon what collateral?” asked the teller.

  The man explained that he had sat in at an all-night poker game with the other two. There were almost five thousand dollars in the pot with everybody holding a good hand. He had run out of money and been given half an hour to raise five thousand dollars to “see” the others. He wanted to get the loan on his hand, which was in the envelope. The teller could have a peek, but of course not his fellow players, who had come along to watch that the cards in the envelope were not monkeyed with.

  “What an idea, my dear sir,” objected the bank clerk, “we don’t lend money on cards.”

  “But you ain’t goin’ to see me raised out on a hand like this,” moaned the gambler, letting the teller have a peek at his cards—four kings and an ace. “These gents think I’m bluffing, and here I could clean them out!”

  “That’s too bad,” said the teller. The sad gambler was about to leave when the bank’s president walked in and inquired about his lamentations. Being shown the cards, he immediately authorized a bank loan of five thousand dollars.

  “Don’t you have any sense?” he lectured his cringing employee. “Don’t you ever play poker?”

  “No, sir,”

  “Ah, I thought so. If you did, you’d know what good collateral was. Remember now, four kings and an ace are always good in this bank for our entire assets, sir, our entire assets!”

  The One-Eyed Gambler

  A little game of draw was in progress in Omaha, and among its participants was a one-eyed man. He was playing in rather remarkable luck, but no on
e could very well find fault with that. Presently, however, there came a jackpot, and it was the one-eyed man’s deal. He opened the pot, and while he was giving himself cards a certain bellicose gentleman named Jones thought he detected the one-eyed man in the act of palming a card. Quick as a flash, Jones whipped out a revolver and placed it on the table in front of him.

  “Gentlemen,” he said decisively, “we will have a fresh deal; this one doesn’t go.”

  The players were surprised, but as none of them had bettered his hand save the opener, who made no sign of disapproval, they willingly consented.

  “And now that we started on a new deal,” pursued Mr. Jones, carelessly toying with his revolver, “let me announce that we are going to have nothing but square deals. I am not making any insinuations or bringing any charges, and I will say only this, that if I catch any son of a gun cheating I will shoot his other eye out.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Lady Wildcats of the Plains

  It is said that the female of the species is deadlier than the male, and while the shady ladies of the West could not compete with the likes of Billy the Kid or Joaquín Murieta in the killing business, not a few of them were as handy with a gun as with a pair of loaded dice, or a branding iron used on other men’s heifers. Some combined prostitution with various forms of banditry and were the type, at least in their youth, of which Mark Twain said that he would rather behold their nakedness than General Ulysses Grant in full dress uniform with medals.

  There was pretty Jenny Stevens, known as “Little Britches,” a four-foot-nine bundle of violence who, together with “Cattle Annie” McDougal, joined the Doolin gang of holdup men, cattle rustlers, and train robbers.

  There was Belle Starr, the “Bandit Queen,” who on her forty-third birthday was wafted into eternity by a blast from a double-barreled shotgun.

  Nor should we forget “Cattle Kate” Maxwell, who ran a “hog ranch” and had unorthodox ways of increasing the size of her herds, resulting in her demise due to “hemp fever.”

  Mention must be made also of Pearl Hart, the “Pearl of Arizona” and “Queen of Lady Road Agents,” who held up stagecoaches and, as a highly respectable elderly lady, showed up in Yuma, Arizona, to visit once more the cell in the local calabozo in which she had languished for two long years.

  And there was glorious Lola Montez, long-time mistress of King Ludwig of Bavaria, who lavished his country’s treasures upon her and was, as a consequence, forced to abdicate. Known as “the Countess,” because her royal paramour designated her “Gräfin von Landsfeldt,” a somewhat faded Lola wound up entertaining California miners and gamblers with her famous “spider dance.”

  And a toast to the lady gamblers, such as “La Belle” Siddons, also known as Madame Vestal, the “Goddess of Chance,” who gained fame as a Confederate spy and cashed in her chips in that place of legends—Deadwood.

  Another gambling queen was cigar-smoking “Poker Alice” Ivers who, after having learned manners and diction in an English ladies’ academy, won and lost fortunes at poker in the American West. Her favorite curse was “You cheatin’ bastard, I shoot you in the puss,” a threat she carried out on at least one occasion. Prudish to the last, she ran a bagnio in which her established rule was “Never on Sunday.”

  Alice had a rival in Simone Jules, alias Eleanor Dumont, who won immortality under the moniker “Madame Mustache,” because of a superfluity of hair on her upper lip. As owner-operator of a gambling den, she killed two men, not without reason. When her mustache finally became too luxuriant, she ended it all with a draft of prussic acid.

  Also deserving more than just a footnote is “Big Nose” Kate Elder, soiled dove of the prairie and bedmate of Doc Holliday, dentist, gambler, and shootist. Kate came to an untimely end in a Bisbee, Arizona, saloon, the unintended victim of a drunken shoot-out.

  The most famous of all lady wildcats is, of course “Calamity Jane” Cannary, the “Beautiful White Devil of the Plains,” a professional live tourist attraction and fairy-tale character. Legends about her are like grains of sand on a beach, still proliferating in books, poems, plays, and movies.

  Born Before Her Time

  Martha Jane Cannary, better known as Calamity Jane, became notorious for wearing pants, smoking, drinking, skinny-dipping, being sexually promiscuous, and telling all to whoever would listen, which would not make headlines today, but was enough in the good old days to make her into a fabled frontier character and dime-novel heroine—“The Beautiful White Devil of the Yellowstone.” She lived according to her motto: “Never go to bed sober, or alone, or with a red cent left in your pocket.”

  She was, or rather claimed to be, a bushwhacker, mule skinner, Pony Express rider, Indian fighter, army scout, stagecoach guard, nurse, angel of mercy, and the West’s foremost femme fatale. She doubled as a part-time prostitute and could drink most men under the table. But more than anything else “Calam” was a self-promoting tourist attraction. She was “married” several times, had many lovers, and children in and out of wedlock. This seems surprising, as she had a face like a horse, skin like sandpaper, and a body resembling that of a down-and-out wrestler. Her popularity with the opposite sex is, however, easily explained by the fact that during her heyday, men in the West outnumbered women by about twenty to one. Early photographs show her in a slouch hat, coarse pants, and a stained, fringed buckskin jacket, rifle in hand, a bowie knife stuck in her belt, chomping on a big cigar.

  Calamity Jane was born in 1852, on a Missouri farm. Her family moved west while she was still a child. The “undeodorized lass” progressed from Independence to Julesburg to Cheyenne to Virginia City and to Blackfoot, Montana, where her mother opened a joyhouse called the Birdcage. Her foremost days of glory, however, were spent at Deadwood, South Dakota, where she acquired her reputation for drinking, brawling, gambling, swearing, and whoring. Eastern fabulists loved her because “she was so colorful,” climbing the very heights of imagination in the process. Dime-novel writers made her a heroine in the East among aficionados of penny dreadfuls. On her own home ground she was considerably less admired. The editor of the local Deadwood paper complained: “As far as real merit is concerned, she is a fraud and a dead giveaway. A hundred waiter girls or mop squeezers in this gulch are her superiors in everything; her form and figure are not only indifferent but repulsive. It makes me tired to see so much written about such a woman.”

  She was, however, good copy. What a scoop it must have been when one journalist discovered that she had joined the Indian-fighting army disguised as a soldier until, one hot day, she went skinny-dipping with the boys. An officer passing by noticed that one of the bathers had “two things too much and one thing too little,” which abruptly ended her military career. She made a habit of striding into saloons, firing her pistol at the ceiling, banging on the bar, and shouting raucously: “I’m Calamity Jane and the drinks are on the house. I sleep where, when, and with whom I want. Let her rip!”

  In a Tucson cathouse, the irrepressible “Calam” opened fire with her cap ‘n’ ball at “greasers” for aspiring to obtain her favors. Her body was for white Anglo-Saxons only. She also unloosed her artillery inside Denver’s famous Windsor Bar, whose boniface refused to “serve whiskey to a lady.” She smoked up a Bozeman, Montana, saloon whose bardog, who had served her enough booze to sink a battleship, refused to let her have any more because, in his opinion, “she had more than enough.”

  On the other hand, “she was generous when sober, which wasn’t often,” bought candy for kids, nursed soldiers and miners suffering from smallpox back to health and, when in the mood, entertained barroom customers with her own rendition of “It’s a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

  In Deadwood she shared the spotlight with another living legend—Wild Bill Hickok, King of the Pistoleers. She always talked about what close friends they had been, hinted that she had shared his bed, even that she was married to him. By the time she spun these yarns, he was already dead, gunned down at Nuttal a
nd Mann’s Number Ten Saloon, and therefore unable to contradict her. She also claimed to have personally arrested and brought to justice Hickok’s murderer, Jack McCall, in a butchershop, subduing him with a meat cleaver, because she had absentmindedly left her six-gun at home. A bibulous writer improved upon this by claiming that Calamity had once saved McCall from being hanged, but after the low-down varmint had shot her darling Bill, she personally placed the halter around his neck, saying, “I gave ye yer life oncet, I’ll take it back now!”

  She went on a so-called “lecture tour” at the 1901 Pan-American Exhibition, where she got “ramsquaddled” and claimed to have killed Crazy Horse. Her last years were spent in an alcoholic haze. She got the better of a clergyman who rebuked her for being drunk and wanton, by shouting at him, “Shucks, you can kiss my butt, yer holiness, I don’t take preachin’ from an old billygoat I’ve slept under the same blanket with for more’n a dozen times.”

  She died on August 2, 1903, at Terry, South Dakota, on the twenty-seventh anniversary of Hickok’s demise. Her last words, it is said, were: “Bury me next to Bill.”