by Lou Bradshaw
Some early traveler had found it easier to follow the flat bottom of that arroyo than the ground above, so that’s where the road was for a couple of miles. We climbed out on the same side we went in on at a place that was probably a waterfall or rapid during wetter times. Down in that arroyo I couldn’t see much of the surrounding landscape, but when we came out of there I could see that the mountains to our right were closer and that there was a lot of snow up there.
Coming out of the gully, we stopped to give the animals a blow. I walked up to Andy and to get a look at what was ahead of us, so I didn’t have any more surprises. He told me to stay back a little farther so that I could get a better look at things. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that.
We drove for miles on end along that arroyo and then moved away into open country. There were plenty of rocks, ridges, and ditches. We found a good place to spend the night in a little cove where we could pull up some dead falls to keep the mules where they wouldn’t be roaming around and we could keep the critters off ‘em. The next morning was more of the same – fairly open but hilly country. The trail got a good deal rougher by evening. It was broken by ridges and lots of arroyos.
About noon on the third day, we reached Espanola. It wasn’t much of a town, but it was all they had. Sheep, cattle, and cantinas were what the place thrived on. For every pair of high-heeled boots there must have been fifty pairs of sandals. My guess was for every cow critter there were probably fifty woolly critters.
The shed boys at Espanola weren’t nearly as hard working as those in Santa Fe because by the time the freight agent and his boys had the stuff unloaded and had loaded some things on that were headed up the line it was almost nightfall. We decided to take off early in the morning and had ourselves a good meal at one of the numerous cantinas. We left the wagons in the freight shed and found ourselves a hotel of sorts.
Espanola was where the trail met the river, which meant that the rest of the trip would be along the river. That sounded fine until we got a few miles out of town and found that the country was down right rough. I could see why Gomez had estimated eight or nine days for the trip. For miles, we would drive along the Rio Grande just a few yards from the churning water. The next thing you knew we were climbing to the top of a bluff that stood five hundred feet above the river. Then we would travel along a wide-open valley for a while before winding up next to the water again. Yep, it slowed us down. I figured whoever laid out that trail had either been hitting the tequila a little too hard or just liked to roam around when they traveled.
Taos was an old town, but it didn’t have near the refinement and civilized bearing that Santa Fe had. Actually, it was a wide-open hootenanny of a town. There were as many high-heeled boots as there were sandals, and every pair of boots was about a foot and a half below a gunbelt. If the Judge Poke were looking for a nest to roost in Taos was sure a likely place.
The next few days were spent just rattling around town while we waited for the freight agent to make up return loads. He was only able to get enough goods for one wagon, so we split it between the wagons so that neither team was overworked. While we waited, we weren’t near as idle as we seemed to be. We spent our days between the 2 saloons, with a visit to the sheriff mixed in.
The sheriff was a little help, in that he knew a little and cared none at all. He said that any trouble there might have been was over now and that he’d shoot anyone who kicked that door open again. He was a man who liked things nice and easy. A bank robbery, a gunfight, or drunken vaqueros were things he could deal with. Land grabs and range wars were things he didn’t want any part of.
I can’t say that I blamed him much. If it was my job to keep the peace in a chunk of territory as big as Taos County, I don’t suppose I’d want anybody messing things up.
The saloons were a little more informative. Sometimes you can get an old timer talking about the old days, after a few drinks you can move the conversation right into some of the not so long ago days. All you have to do is say, “Uh hu. Then what happened?” Those old guys are worse gossips than a bunch of old biddies at a quiltin’ bee.
We were able to find out that there were two likely candidates for the title of Judge Poke. They were both men who had seemingly come to the area with high hopes of gettin’ rich in a land grab. When the court in Santa Fe sorta took the wind out of their sails; they both bought into the area and became respectable ranchers. Each man was about the right age and general description, and each had a Segundo that had come into the area with them. Well, it was a place to start – again.
Chapter 24
It’s hard to believe that nearly four and a half years have passed since we drove those first freight wagons into Taos. A lot has happened in those four years. We learned some things that were good to know, and we learned some things that we probably shouldn’t have known.
I stayed with Senor Gomez and his freight wagons, but Andy took a riding job on the S bar S one of the ranches near Taos, after about a year of mule skinning. I don’t think he cared much for lookin’ at asses’asses. I didn’t mind it too much, but I sure got lonely setting up in the seat, with no one to talk to except eight mules’ butts. It was bad enough, when Andy and me were going in separate directions, but more often than not we were on the road together. After he left the freight company, we didn’t cross paths more than once every couple of months.
We had our heads so full of getting by; we kinda lost sight of our goal of trackin’ down Judge Amos Poke and his cousin, Clyde Gentry. Oh, we didn’t forget about ‘em and we kept our ears open for any information. We had two possible names of men, who could fit the shoes of the judge, but both were solid citizens and there wasn’t a thing that would make either of them Poke except timing, age, and general looks. Neither man showed anything that would make a fella suspicious.
There was a rancher named Abraham Pickering, and another named Matthew Barkley. Both men had brought their own foreman with them. Barkley or maybe it was Pickering came from Ohio, and the other one came from Virginia. If either one of them was the infamous Judge Poke they sure didn’t show any sign of it.
Nothing much was said about it, and after a few months it wasn’t mentioned at all. It was as if we didn’t have any idea why we had come there. Maybe we were just tired of movin’, maybe we were plumb discouraged by the loss of trail, or maybe we were done. I had a notion that Andy may have been running low on hate. I sure hoped so because he didn’t need to carry around all that extra weight.
When Andy moved on out to that ranch job, we split up the money I’d been holding. It came to a tidy sum. I put my half in a bank in Santa Fe, and Andy put his half in his pocket – for the time being anyway
The exploits of Hickory Jack Moore hadn’t reached Taos, so we thought it would be wise to leave ol’ Hickory Jack back in Texas. Andy was using his first name in our new home, and it seemed to suit him just fine. He had taken to leading a fairly quiet life and staying out of scrapes. Folks were looking at him as just another cowpuncher, who did his job sun up to sun down and then some, but he kicked up his heels a bit on payday, which only came once a month.
To say that Andy stayed out of scrapes may be stretching the truth a little bit. There was an instance when he and his boss, Sam Stellers, came across three fellas sneakin’ off through the cedars with about thirty head of beef. Mr. Stellers, an oldish gent, told Andy to keep ‘em in sight while he went back for help. Andy trailed ‘em for a couple of miles and got bored, so he worked his way around the herd and got in front of it.
When those men got to where he was sittin they found him doing just that… sittin’. There he sat with a pistol in his hand and another one in his belt.
He told them to throw down their guns and get off their horses, but one of them decided he could get his gun out and shoot before a man who already had his out and pointed could. Two shots, two dead, and another buckin off through the cedars and brush on a horse gone crazy. And beef going every which way. That hombre on the bucker
ran himself right into that crowd coming up from the ranch with Mr. Stellers. All they had to do was help with the buryin and the collectin of cows.
That one on the buckin horse didn’t fare much better than the other two. He tried to tell those boys that he was just a workin man, down on his luck, and somebody offered them some quick money to take those cattle. Unfortunately, for him one of the dead ones had made the deal, and he didn’t know who the “somebody” was. Since he couldn’t give a better name than “somebody”, the crew just decorated a cottonwood with him and left him swaying in the breeze.
Andy played it down as a couple of lucky shots, but the bunkhouse boys made a lot of it and bragged him up pretty big. I heard the story in Santa Fe, and since I was headed for Taos, anyway I thought it best to go out to the ranch and visit a little, just to see how he was. I worried that the shootin’ might bring Hickory Jack out of Texas and into New Mexico. As it turned out, it was one of those random moments when violence happens. Andy had only defended himself and his employer’s property without any kind of malice. I was satisfied that he hadn’t killed those men just because he could or wanted to, but because he had to. Andy was changing, but he was changing for the better, or maybe he was just growing into full manhood. It wasn’t the kind of manhood of getting whiskers on your chin or hair on your chest. It’s the kind of manhood that isn’t so easily seen, it‘s more like just doin’ the right thing and taking responsibility for what you do. Some men become that kind of man early, some take a little longer, and some never do and those are the ones you have to worry about. I quit worrying about Andy’s mind and his soul that day.
I did, however, worry about him getting hurt working with cattle and horses, but I suppose he worried that I might run a wagon full of freight off a bluff or some such thing. It was the kind of worrying that brothers do, even if they aren’t really brothers.
A couple of years back, I began thinking about what I wanted to do with my life other than drive a bunch of smelly hard headed mules. I thought I’d like to go into the business of ranching, so just for fun I started looking at this or that area as I’d drive those wagons hither and yon. I’d see a little valley with grass and water and think about how nice that would be. But to get a place like that, I’d have to be rolling in double eagles, which I wasn’t. Oh well, I was doin’ more daydreaming than actual planning.
As time went on, I saw more and more places that had possibilities, if not probabilities. Finally, I decided to take my horse up to Taos and leave him there, since I really didn’t need a horse in Santa Fe. That way he could get some regular work while I was laying over there, as I often did. There were some rawhide outfits back in the hills that I wanted to get a closer look at. So I made a couple of trips up into that country just to see what could be seen.
Over the next six or eight months, I must have covered a thousand square miles. About a year ago, I found a couple likely places. They were homesteads, which were doing poorly…almighty poorly. Each place had all it needed, but each was owned by a farmer from back east who didn’t realize that farming in this country was never going to pay off. It was ranch land and that’s all it was meant to be. Neither of those worthy gentlemen wanted to sell out, so I kept on looking.
Most of the bigger ranchers and nearly all the cattlemen were settled on the plateau west of the river northwest of Taos. The sheep herders were around the edges and back in the canyons. There wasn’t much chance of getting any of the flatter land for what I could afford to pay. So I had worked my way up along the fringes of the mountains where the more established owners would be less likely to bother. Besides, I kinda liked the broken high up country better.
One morning, I pointed my horse up a mighty steep slope toward a gap looking right at a big snow capped mountain. It was a long gradual climb, but when we got to where it leveled off at that gap we were about a thousand feet higher than the plains below. Going through the gap, I found myself in a high mountain valley about fifteen miles long and seven or eight miles wide. The surrounding mountains were tree covered on their flanks, but the valley itself was covered with mixed grass, sage, and stunted trees. But there was a lot of grass. Everything was green, so there was water, and that was what was important. Due east was over eleven thousand feet of a mighty big mountain.
Riding on through the gap and towards the mountain, I turned to my left and to the north. In a short while, I spotted a column of smoke that looked like it was coming out of a chimney, so I went toward it. Going around an outcropping of rock, I spotted a small cabin that looked as if it was all but abandoned. Now abandoned may be fine for some folks, but I wanted a clear deed to whatever I settled on. I didn’t want someone coming back to me in fifteen or twenty years and saying, “Wal I just took a little vacation, and now I’m back. Oh, thanks for fixin everthin up.”
I just rode up to that little homestead and asked the man if he ever thought about selling out. He broke into a big grin and said, “Well, I should smile, I been thinkin about it a lot. So’s my brothers.” He pointed to the neighboring homesteads both left and right. Each was about a half mile away.
The homesteader, whose name was Willum Clements, asked me to shoot off three shots to call his brothers. So I pulled my pistol out and banged her three times. In about fifteen minutes, two riders, Burle and Mason Clements, showed up from opposite directions. To say these boys were close kin would be a gross understatement. I’d never seen three peas in a pod look so much alike. They had come out of Kentucky, where their older brother had inherited the family farm, leaving them with nothing but a name and some experience at farming.
They had tried to grow corn, wheat, and oats, but the crops just didn’t do any good at all. Now they wanted to sell out and go onto California or Nevada where it was warmer and look for gold. It was their belief that the gold was just, “layin around out there waitin for folks to find it.”
I asked them what they thought those farms were worth and, Burle who was acting as spokesman for the family said that I could get all three for three thousand dollars. I said, “I reckon I could if my name was Vanderbilt, but my name is Blue, and Blue didn’t have near enough letters in it to have that kind of money.” I countered with nine hundred dollars for the whole kit and caboodle. Willum went inside and brought out a jug of cider, and the race was on.
After about an hour of haggling and counting pennies and splitting two bit pieces, I told them that I could give them cash on the barrel head today if they’d take twelve hundred dollars for the claims, and they could keep their stock. I also told them that they could stay on for a couple of months till they were ready to head for the gold fields. That would give them time to get rid of their milk cows and chicken and such. Burle was pumping my hand like it was hooked to a well. Willum and Mason were noddin and grinnin’. They signed over the deeds and I counted out three stacks of four hundred dollars each. There was more handshaking and more grinnin, and another jug of cider was brought out. I couldn’t tell who was happier, the Clements’s or the Blue.
For the first time in my life, I had something that was mine and mine alone. Oh, there was the old Blue farm back in Missouri, it was technically mine, but I was just a kid and never thought of it as mine. I didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was going to do with my new property. It would take some time to get enough cattle or sheep in here to make it self supporting. But I had plenty time…I hoped.
The first thing I needed to do was to see Andy. So I rode on over to the Stellers ranch, where he worked, to give him the good news… well the news, anyway. I was starting to have twinges of misgiving. I had just spent a biggest part of what I’d saved over the last five or so years. Then I thought, well what was I saving it for? It seemed like I never spent any money since I’d stopped growing. I slept most nights in the open or in the wagon. Half the time I was in Santa Fe I slept on a cot in the freight company’s tack room. Most of my meals had been of my own making over a campfire. So what did I want a big bank account for?
When I rode into the S-S ranch yard the first person I saw was Patty Stellers, Sam Stellers’ granddaughter, and that was a mixed blessing. On the plus side of the blessing she was a lot of fun to look at. At about 15 or 16 she was fillin out those frocks like a woman, but she was still pretty much just a cute little girl. On the minus side of those blessings, she took a lot of pleasure in tormenting me. She teased and kidded me like I was a simple minded goober… well I was kinda like a simple minded goober. If I counted the birthdays right, I was 19 or 20 going on 11, and Patty never let up. At least she was having fun and meant no real harm.
“Hey there, Mr. Red Topped Blue. Whatter you doin’ out here?”
I howdied her back and told her that I was hoping to catch up with Andy, for a family visit. I asked if he was around anywhere.
She said, “Why you big overgrown silly goose. You won’t likely find him or none of those boys around on payday. They’re all likely in town at the Silver Dollar saloon dancin with those naughty ladies. Now, you better take me in with you, so you can wait on the boardwalk while I go in and fetch him for you.”
She got the results she was looking for because I could feel my ears turning hot, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to come back at her with.
Then she laughed, and it was a merry little laugh, like she was having more fun than Christmas… all at my expense. But I didn’t care, It was a good laugh.