Legends and Tales of the American West

by Richard Erdoes

  “Sir,” said Roy, “yore speakin’ the language of my tribe.”

  They downed quite a few and got jolly, calling each other by their first names. “Say, Roy,” said the drummer, “I just come from your place. That bear of yours is dead.”

  “What?!” screamed Roy, deeply shocked, spilling his drink. “It’s onpossible. Bruno was fine when I left him a week ago.”

  “Gone over the range, I tell you. I saw him laying there. Poisoned, they told me.”

  “Pizened!? I’ll kill the skunk who done it, kill him with my own hands.”

  “Tell you what, Roy. Seeing you was so fond of the brute, wouldn’t it be grand to have him stuffed, so you could still see him standing by the swinging doors, drawing customers even in death?”

  “You have a p’int thar, Sam. It would be a nice touch. An’ he would bring in customers, like you say.”

  “There you are. Why not send a telegram to forward his skin. I know a great taxidermist. Cheap too. It could be done while you’re here in town. Then you could take him home with you, nice and stuffed.”

  Roy sent a telegraphic message:

  OSCAR

  LANGTRY TEXAS STOP AT THE JERSEY LILLY

  STOP SKIN BRUNO AND SEND SKIN TO JUDGE

  BEAN AT RUBY SALOON EL PASO STOP

  Oscar never questioned an order by his master. He put two double-O charges of buckshot into the poor bear, skinned it, and sent off the hide with the next train.

  Roy returned with a magnificently stuffed, erect Bruno. His first words to Oscar were “I want to get my hands on that varmint who pizened my bear.”

  “Whaddayamean?” exclaimed Oscar. “He warn’t pizened. I shot him like you told me.”

  “Like I told you, you addle-brained bastard?!”

  “Like you said in your telegram.”

  “In my telegram, you locoed feather-headed nitwit!?”

  “Shore. I couldn’t skin him afore he was dead, could I?”

  Slowly, the awful truth sank it. Fortunately for Sam Betters he never ran into Roy again.

  This story is contradicted by an equally suspicious one, namely that Roy Bean on his deathbed bequeathed an alive-and-well Bruno to his idol, Lillie Langtry. And lo and behold, it came to pass that the famous actress traveled from El Paso to San Antonio to play Desdemona to a local Othello, and that her train stopped at Langtry, and that she alighted from her compartment in all her finery to visit the abode of her late lamented admirer. And lo, Bruno was entrusted to her to love and to cherish. But bears were not the haughty actress’s cup of tea and coldhearted Lillie took Bruno far out into the wilderness, and there left him amid the chaparral, mesquite, and creosote bushes, then hitched up her skirts and ran like hell to catch the next train before Bruno could catch up with her. And for years the cowboys in their bunkhouses, trembling with fear, could hear the bear’s ghost howling, howling, howling, crying for his beer.

  Judge Barker, Old Zim, and the One-Eyed Mule

  Jim Barker, a well-known character of the mountains, whose latchstring hangs out at the head of Blue Lizard Gulch, was duly elected a justice of the peace of El Paso County at the September election, and Mike Irving, a companion of Jim’s, was empowered to officiate as the executive officer of his court. Last week Jim convened his first court, to hear the complaint of Elder Slater, a traveling missionary, who had caused the arrest of Zimri Bowles, a resident of the foothills, upon the charge of stealing the elder’s one-eyed mule. Zimri had been arrested by Irving, the constable, while in the act of easing the descent of the mule down Mad Gun Mountain, with his lariat fastened to the tail of the animal. The proof against Zimri was conclusive. Accordingly, the Justice, after much legal perplexity of mind, proceeded to sentence Zimri to one year’s confinement in the Territorial penitentiary, which sentence he concluded as follows: “An’ now, Zim, seeing as I’m about out of things to eat, an’ as you will have the costs to pay, I reckon you’d better take a turn among the Foot Hills with your rifle, an’ see if you can’t pick up some meat before night, as you can’t start for the Big Canyon before morning.”

  Which marketing duty was performed by Zim, bringing in one blacktail fawn and a rabbit within the time prescribed as a postscript to the sentence.

  On the following morning, the constable, mounted on his broncho, accompanied by the prisoner astride of the mule which the Elder kindly loaned him, started through the mountains for the penitentiary, where they arrived the second day out, their animals loaded with a deer, two antelopes and a small cinnamon bear, which they sold to the warden of the prison. After dividing the money the Constable proceeded to hand over Zimri on the following mitimus which is carefully preserved and may be seen in the possession of the warden:

  To the hed man of the Colorado prison, down at the foot of the Big Canyon on the Arkansas.—Take notice:—Zimri Bouls, who comes with this here, stole Elder Slater’s one-eyed mule, and it was all the mule the Elder had, and I sentenced Zim officially to one year in the Colorado prison, and hated to do it, seein as Zim once stood by me like a man when Injuns had me in a tight place an arter I sentenced Zim to one year for stealing the Elder’s mule, my wife, Lizzy, who is a kind o’ tender-hearted critter, come and leaned her arm on my shoulder, and says she, “Father, don’t forget the time when Zim, with his rifle, covered our cabin from Granite Mountain, and saved us from the Arapahoes, and Father, I have heard you tell that arter you was wounded at Sand Creek, an helpless, it was Zimri’s rifle that halted the Indian that was creeping in the grass to scalp you.” And then there was a tear fell splash upon the sentence I was writing and I changed my mind sudently as follows: seeing the mule had but one eye, an warnt mor’n half a mule at that, you can let Zimri go at about six months, an sooner if the Injuns should get ugly, an, furthermore, if the Elder shud quiet down and give in any time, I will pardon him out instanter.

  Witness my official hand an seal,

  James Barker, J.P.

  El Cuatro de Julio

  “Stand up, Señor Don José,” said his Honor. “You stand charged with having filled your ugly corpus with tanglefoot whisky, willfully, deliberately, and from a premeditated design to disturb the peace and quiet of a day that is held sacred by every patriotic American.”

  “Los Americanos son carajos,” interrupted the prisoner.

  “Shut up your ugly mug,” said the Judge, “or you will be committed for contempt. You got drunk, and kicked up a row on the Fourth of July, and then finished spreading yourself out on the street to broil, and started a barbecue for blue-tailed flies, do you consider that a proper way to celebrate the glorious Fourth?”

  “El Cuatro de Julio no vale nada, que viva Guadalupe Hidalgo.”

  “Five dollars and costs,” said his Honor.

  “Broke es de Banke,” replied José, as he sorrowfully took up his line of march towards the jail.

  A Drink’s Worth of Punishment

  Yesterday we were informed of a “muss” that took place in one of our fashionable saloons. A man called for a drink and swallowed it before going down in his pockets to see whether he had the wherewith to pay for it. He didn’t find it, after a careful search, and told the man behind the bar to “mark down on the slate.” This the bar keeper refused to do on the ground that he “didn’t do credit business,” whereupon the honest customer “skinned off” his clothes and passed them over the counter to be held as security for the drink until morning, when he promised to call and redeem them. The tumbler wrestler became very angry at this, swore he didn’t keep a pawnshop, and finally jumped the counter and kicked the poor fellow out, following him to the sidewalk and part of the way home, laying on vigorously all the time. The abused man took it all without a word or an attempt at resistance, until he thought he had received about a drink’s worth, when he turned round and gave the enraged saloon keeper one of the most exhaustive thrashings that ever human frame was subjected to!

  CHAPTER 14

  Sky Pilots

  Many of the West’s early mi
ssionaries and preachers were as eccentric and uneducated as the early judges. Often they were handier with a shooting iron than with a sermon. Some were itinerant horsemen or mule riders, trotting from one tiny settlement or helldorado to the next, spending a day or two at a single log cabin or sod house, preaching the Lord’s Word in return for a square meal, a rasher of bacon, or a scrawny chicken. In the words of the famous pioneer preacher Peter Cartwright: “We had little or no education, no books and no time to read or study them if we could have them. We had no colleges, even a respectable school within a hundred miles of us.… We could not, many of us, conjugate a verb, or parse a sentence, and murdered the King’s English almost every lick.”

  As the saloon was always the first building to be put up in a new mining camp or cow town, so it also served initially as church, courtroom, and schoolhouse, Sermons were held, eulogies delivered, and marriages sanctified in many a whiskey mill.

  The mule-riding “gospel sharks” and “sin-busters” were fierce specimens of devil-rasslers, with strident, earsplitting vocal cords, preaching the Word not only with their lips, but with their whole bodies, writhing in holy ecstasy, waving their arms, dancing on their tiptoes, sometimes giving the impression of suffering from epileptic fits. As Abraham Lincoln once said, in order to get the attention of his rustic flock, a good preacher should look as if he were fighting bees.

  Religion in the Wild West had its own distinctive flavor. Often the preacher exhorted his flock during his hellfire-and-brimstone sermon: “Get down on yer knees, sinners, and yell!” And yell they did, making the windowpanes (if there were any) rattle and the floor shake. At Las Vegas, New Mexico, two itinerant gospel sharks, accompanied by two lady missionaries, invaded Close and Paterson’s drinking establishment, turning, with the owners’ consent, the bar into a pulpit, sermonizing and baptising fifteen hurdy-gurdy girls and three cardsharps. The twice-born sinners were led to the bar-altar by two “soiled doves” named Lazy Liz and Nervous Jessie. Amid the hurrahs of an enthusiastic crowd of alcoholic onlookers, the penitent salvation seekers vowed to forsake “King Faro, Prince Stud Poker, Bacchus, Gambrinus and lustful Queen Venus, for the Prince of Heaven.” Religion, in the Old West, was like the men and women who inhabited the new land—rugged, ebullient, and highly individualistic.

  Preachin’ One Can Understand

  Cowhands ain’t much fer goin’ to church, mostly ‘cause they can’t understand all them fancy sermonizin’ words. Saddle stiffs ain’t got much savvy outside of cows. But thar war one gospel shark they loved listenin’ to, ‘cause he spoke their lingo. He’d been a cowman oncet, as square a cowman as ever crossed leather, but then the Lord had lit into him like a blast of buckshot. He’d seen the lite, and had been granted a revelation, an’ turned preacher man. As I mentioned afore, he could explain things to the buckaroos like nobody else. Take, fer instance, how he made palatable to ’em the story of King David an’ Bathsheba.

  Dearly beloved, cowboys an’ cow gals. Thar’s allus a lot of sinnin’ an’ furnicashiun goin’ on. You knows it. I knows it. I done some of it myself. But the Lord has pity an’ forgives the sinner providin’ he repents. Yea, brothers an’ sisters, the Lord forgiveth all, ‘xcept cattle rustlin’ an’ hoss stealin’. He knowest we are only hooman. Yea, even the great men in the Bible do a heap of sinnin’, yea, even a feller like King David hisself.

  Waaal, Ole Davy, he war the bossman, the top dog in Israel, had himself a ranch at a place called Jerusalem, a million acres, thousands of longhorns, dozens of buckaroos doin’ the herdin’. Joab war the ramrod and a feller called Uriah war the segundo. This Uriah was a feller like a forked stick with britches on, but he had himself a wife, beautiful to behold, and her name war Bathsheba.

  An’ it came to pass that Bathsheba took a bath in the creek an’ Ole Davy chanced to come a-ridin’ on his palomino an’ he saw Bathsheba frolickin’ thar in the water, mother-nakkid, an’ the sight hit him like a mule’s kick, like a ‘Pache arrer in the heart an’ below whar he felt a mighty stirrin’.

  Boys, you all know what I mean. A right purty gal mother-nakkid! It does somethin’ to a feller, even unto King David, even unto a sky pilot like yours truly. Natcherally, it’s wrong. Whaffer do we have sech feelin’s? We have ’em for to marry, an’ beget, an’ be frootful in holy wedlock, an hon’rable estate an’ pleasin’ in the eyes of the Holy Bossman up thar, but it don’t allus work out that way.

  Boys an’ gals, Ole Davy, he sinned. He committed addleterry. He coveteth his segundo’s wife an’ dealt from the bottom of the deck like a common kyardsharp. And it was so. Now Davy was a most handsome gent. Kain’t no wummin get away from him. He had a soft curly baird an’ when he bussed a gal, an’ she felt that soft baird acrost her cheek, her legs started saggin’ under her an’ one thing led to ’nother.

  An’ Davy could play the harp. Larned it from an old Mex. He could play “Turkey in the Straw,” an’ “Barb’ry Allen,” an “The Gal I Left Behind Me.” A wummin nary resists a good harpist or a sweet-singin’ sedoocer.

  An’ don’t forgit: Ole Davy was the bossman, the ranchero, the gent who owned the big house with the pianner, an’ all that cattle. He was the man with the mucho dinero. Wimmin go for that. Ole Davy held the winnin’ hand. An’ when he saw Bathsheba’s nakedness, it smote ’pon him like a slingshot of great potency. An’ he plumb adores her. He goes loco o’er that li’l woman’s blue eyes. He goes ravin’ mad at the thot of her cute li’l behind. He watches her frolickin’ an’ swimin’ an’ splashin. He sees her goin’ home to a low-slung ’dobe house.

  Arter that he ast Joab, his ramrod: “Wist thou who’s livin’ thar in that li’l ’dobe?”

  An’ Joab sez: “Verily, it is Uriah, thine segundo.”

  “An’ doth that Uriah keep a purty li’l heifer in thar?”

  “His wife, Bathsheba. She’s a looker, for shore.”

  “Has Uriah got his brand and earmarks on her?”

  “They wuz married in church, proper-like.”

  “I wish I’d-a run my brand on her,” sez Old Davy, her bein’ married hittin’ him hard. He rassles with his conscience an’ the conscience loses out. He starts coyotin’ ’round that li’l ‘dobe whenever Uriah is out brandin’ calves or roundin’ up steers. It war remarkable how many things Davy could think up fer Uriah to do, mostly jobs that kept him way out on the range, farthest from the ’dobe house. An’ Davy is like a rooster arter a hen. He allus manages to run into Bathsheba, accidentally like, an’ gets acquainted. I reckon he ropes at her more’n a dozen times. He rides his pony to death jest to have a look at her. She’s like sunshine in the woods fer him. He gets so loco o’er that wummin, he takes to makin’ po’ms on her:

  Your eyes are beautifool like those of a longhorn.

  You’se the purtiest gal ever born.

  Like slim cornstalks are your legs,

  An’ for a li’l kiss I begs.

  Yore bosoms are as white as snow,

  The nicest ones I ever saw.

  An’ from yore rose-red ruby lips,

  Bushels an’ bushels of honey I sips.

  He had a gift for makin’ po’ms, Old Dave had, a fact born out by his psa’ms in the Good Book. He was hankerin’ after Bathsheba ‘til his tongue hung out like a calf rope. She drove him to talkin’ to hisself.

  And it came to pass that Joab, his ramrod spake unto him: “I might be feedin’ off my range, boss, but I gotta ask, what aileth thee?”

  An’ David answered unto him: “That lissome lassie Bathsheba got me locoed. I jest got to drop my rope o’er her. But that goldurn Uriah is in the way.”

  Joab sez unto him: “Patrón, I’ll send Uriah out visitin’ line camps, way out yonder, an’ I’ll bring that corral bunny unto you.” An’ it war thus.

  Ole Davy pretended to make friends with Uriah, an’ called him pard an’ compadre, an’ made him a present of a barrel of the finest bug juice. An’ that chucklehead Uriah wuz blind as a snubbin’ post, an’ fell for it, an’ go
t as drunk as a blind hawg, an’ arter that went out to the line camps. An’ Joab, Davy’s ramrod, brung Bathsheba unto him. An’ she lay with David an’ he knowed her carnally. They went at it like jackrabbits, oncarin’ that it war onpleasin’ to the Lord.

  An’ Uriah never wist that Ole Davy war hornin’ in on his pasture. He never could read David’s kyards. An’ Bathsheba got big with child an’ it warn’t Uriah’s.

  An’ it came to pass that David jined unto him Joab, his ramrod, and spake unto him thus: “Next cattle drive, don’t make straight for Dodge or Abilene by the Chis’m Trail, but make thee a li’l detour through ‘Pache country an’ mebbe you’ll run into them red fiends. Iffen you do, set ye Uriah in the forefrot of the hottest battle, an’ retire from him, that he may be smitten and die. Thar’ll be a nice fat bonus in it for thee.”

  An’ Joab an’ Uriah an a dozen buckaroos gat themselves up, an girded their loins, to drive cattle to Abilene. An’ neither did Joab take the Chis’m Trail, nor the Goodnite Trail, but cut acrost ’Pache country. And it was so.

  An’ Joab, the ramrod, had Uriah ride p’int far ahead, while he and the buckaroos tarried behind, an’ the ’Paches got to Uriah. An’ the red varmints smote Uriah with their tommyhawks, an’ let fly at him with their cap’n’balls, an’ made a pinchusion outa him with their arrers, an’ Uriah was daid.

  An’ Joab an’ his men turned back to the Chis’m Trail and sold David’s cattle at a profit in Abilene. Wherefore they rioted in the streets of that town and did what war onseemly within the gates of the city, an’ made a noosance of theyselves in the dance halls an’ cathhouses. An’ arter they had drunk all the saloons dry, they returned to their boss David.