by Amy Reading
Norfleet told at least three different stories of how he met Mattie Eliza Hudgins, the future Mrs. Norfleet. There’s the version steeped in the romance of the western frontier: he rode into Palo Pinto County to scout for fence posts, and there he watched, enchanted, as a young girl rode by on a quarter horse, handling her mount with expert grace. “It seemed after that,” he would say, “that the only good posts in Texas grew on Keechi Creek in Palo Pinto county.” There’s the melodramatic version: a young girl stood on the banks of a shallow creek in Texas, about to be baptized. Just as she stepped into the waters, she heard the pounding of hooves, and from within the crowd of onlookers emerged a cowpuncher, who dismounted and waded into the stream next to her. “I’d like to be baptized, too, parson, if you’re willin’,” he drawled. After the brief ceremony, the man waved at the girl and rode off as abruptly as he’d arrived. And then there is the likely version: as manager of the Spade Ranch, Norfleet had been away from civilization for two solid years. He traveled to Epworth to pick up his mail at the Hesperian Hotel, run by Eliza’s sister and brother-in-law. Eliza recalled that when he walked in, he was the “ugliest thing I ever saw until he bathed and duded up a bit.” She turned him down when he asked her for the first dance at a ball in Epworth. In all three versions, though, Norfleet was an unrelenting suitor, and the couple were married at her family’s home by the Reverend Horatio Graves, the first permanent settler of Hale County, on June 13, 1894.
Norfleet swore to his wife that she was the prettiest woman in four counties. “I was the only woman in four counties,” she later recollected (meaning, presumably, the only white woman). Norfleet was proud of his accomplishment: “I got her cut off from brush country … and never let her get back to the cedar post breaks. It was the most important event in my life, getting Eliza for my wife.”
Eliza could ride as well as any ranch hand, and she joined Norfleet on his rounds at the Spade until their daughter Mary was born in 1894. In March 1895, Norfleet filed a claim as a homesteader under the same act by which his grandfather had become a landowner in 1854, which entitled him to 160 acres after a three-year residency. Frank and Eliza saved enough to buy another sixteen sections of adjoining land, over 10,000 acres, which the Pre-emption Act priced at a mere $1.25 an acre. Over 4.8 million Texas acres were converted from public land into private homesteads under these acts.
Eliza and Frank got right to work making a home: they dug a big hole, covered it with poles, and then piled on layers of hay, tow sacks, and dirt, leaving a gap at the back end for a chimney. This was a dugout, the Texan prairie version of a proud and ancient architectural form, and though it might not have looked like much, it was near impervious to weather. The occasional herd of cattle might run over the roof and crash through, but after they had finished laughing, they’d simply build a new dugout and resume their business. The Norfleets’ second child, Frank Elwood, known as Pete, was born in the dugout in 1899. By the time Robert Lee came along in 1905, the Norfleets had upgraded to a frame house, and Ruth was born in 1908 in a dwelling that anyone would recognize as a home, with several full rooms. Upward progress continued outside with the construction of a windmill to pump water from deep under the prairie. Then they began amassing a herd of cattle, until finally Frank left the Spade Ranch and struck out on his own, and he would never again work for an employer. The Norfleets’ lives were twice riven by tragedy, when Mary died of diphtheria at age seven and when Robert Lee drowned at age two, but Frank and Eliza never dwelled on these sadnesses when recounting their early years. Their narrative was always one of steady material improvement. “From this time on, it seemed that everything to which we placed our hands prospered and multiplied,” Frank would recall.
Their home was always open to visitors. One time Eliza woke up to find every bed in her house taken and sixteen pallets spread out on her yard. Another time she gave up her own bed and slept on the dining room table. One day, the family had just finished eating the noon meal when a man knocked on their door and asked for something to eat. Eliza made him up a plate, and when he was finished, he took off his wide belt, which had a pouch that hung down almost to his knees. He opened the pouch and spilled out gold dollars onto the table. He urged Eliza to take some, but she steadfastly refused. The man packed up his gold, went out back to the pasture, and spent the night under the mesquites. He was gone the next morning.
Yet by the time Norfleet was in his forties, he’d become a businessman with a keen eye for the main chance, someone not typically given to passing up gold dollars. In 1907, the Panhandle Short Line Railroad surveyed a proposed track between Vega and Big Spring that would run right through his property. That July, Norfleet and nine other men formed a corporation and platted a town ten miles west of the town of Hale Center, and they named it Norfleet. They hauled in a post office and a schoolhouse from nearby hamlets, and the postmaster built a general store. Norfleet began building a new house so that his children could attend the school. Pete, who was then seven years old, knew how to read every cow brand in the West but didn’t know the alphabet. Norfleet had just gotten the framework up when he heard that the railroad had lost its financial backing and wouldn’t be laying any more track. As quickly as they had arrived, the buildings were carted off. Norfleet loaded the frame of his house onto a wagon and moved it to a draw south of Cotton Center, where he finished it in time for the family to move in on Christmas Eve. Norfleet officially became a ghost town in 1913.
J. Frank Norfleet as a young man (photo credit 1.2)
Norfleet continued adding horses, mules, and cattle to his ranch and breeding them with a discerning eye, so that in addition to selling them in the city by the carload each fall, he supplied breeding stock to nearby ranchers. And he continued to amass ranch land. By 1919, the year of his swindling, Norfleet was wealthy, the West Texas equivalent of landed gentry.
Looking back on how he had accumulated and then lost his fortune, J. Frank Norfleet considered his swindling to be entirely commensurate with his other business dealings. “Quite frank”—as he put it—“I was gullible.” But he argued that his gullibility was only business instinct by a different name. “With us of the Plains country, a man’s word was his bond. Our cattle deals, our land sales—transactions running into many thousands, frequently—were often completed ‘sight unseen,’ the whole agreements being based on verbal representations and verbal understandings. We never doubted each other; in fact, no graver insult could have been passed upon a neighbor than to demand legal formalities in dealing with him. If I was gullible, I was simply following the reasoning habits I had acquired in my lifetime of experience.” It was a cowboy code of honor, and it persisted because it worked—not to mention that if it didn’t work, if you ran a blazer on someone, you’d get shot, buried, or hanged.
But in their descriptions of this code, Texans dwelled less on the ever-present threat of violence and more on the generosity and largeness of heart that enabled all those handshakes. One Panhandle lawman in the late nineteenth century, a man named Jim Gober, the first sheriff of Potter County, a man tough enough to fatally wound the crooked town constable in a saloon fight, wrote down his version of the code in his autobiography, Cowboy Justice. “It’s the degree of confidence and trust one places in me that measures my interest in them. If anyone comes to me in trouble and confides their grievances to my keeping, I immediately reciprocate with sympathy to the value of their spirit of confidence.” Gober’s words are practically an instruction manual for how to swindle him, and that is exactly the source of his pride in his ethics. He would rather be wrong than be distrustful.
Of course, we shouldn’t be entirely taken in by the chest-pounding rhetoric in the cowboy code of justice. Mrs. Cicero Russell, the daughter of a Texas pioneer and cattle rancher, remembers that the code was only selectively in effect. “I tell you every[one] in this country stole cattle. Even my father has stolen nice heifer calves and nobody, even the big cattle men, ate their own cattle. When they wanted beef, they
found a fat beef animal belonging to somebody else.” Or take the testimony of Matthew “Bones” Hooks, a Panhandle horse wrangler. He was called before a judge who was also a prominent cattleman to testify in a dispute. “Bones, do you know anyone who has stolen cattle—” the judge started to ask, but just as Bones opened his mouth to answer, the judge caught the glint in his eye and hastily added, “—now?” He knew Bones was about to tell the courtroom the story of how he and the judge got their start in the ranching business by stealing a calf together. Cattle rustling was as easy as one snip to the barbed-wire fence that Isaac Ellwood had worked so hard to develop and Norfleet to install.
If we take Norfleet at his word, his code of justice was so thoroughgoing it prevented him from returning to life as usual after it was violated, just as his father could not rest until the schoolteacher had made restitution to him. Everything he and his father had built in their combined sixty-five years as western pioneers vanished on that November day in 1919, except the conviction that dishonesty and deception could not be tolerated. The fabric of Norfleet’s worldview was so thoroughly rent that he would put his entire life on hold to repair it.
Yet in his quest to patch the hole in his world, Norfleet ripped many new holes in it. He told his tale many, many times over the course of his long life: to the Texas legislature in 1921 to ask for reimbursement for his vigilante quests, to a subcommittee of the Sixty-eighth U.S. Congress in March 1924, to Max Bentley for a magazine serial in McClure’s later that summer, to Gordon Hines for a newspaper serial that ran throughout Texas in 1927 and was republished as a book, to audiences around the nation in a lecture tour that retraced the steps of his hunt. His tale was worked up into a radio drama. Norfleet Productions began but never finished a silent film, starring J. Frank Norfleet as himself and supposedly directed by a relative of D. W. Griffith’s, but what film existed has been lost since the 1920s.
The foundational text of Norfleet’s story is his autobiography, Norfleet: The Actual Experiences of a Texas Rancher’s 30,000-Mile Transcontinental Chase After Five Confidence Men. He wrote it in conjunction with an uncredited ghostwriter said to be the mother of Leif Erickson, who would later portray Big John Cannon in the Western television series The High Chaparral, and he published it with a regional press in 1924. Norfleet’s gruff, no-nonsense voice comes through loudly, but other voices can be faintly heard behind his. In many ways, Norfleet’s true-life story follows the literary conventions of the dime novels that he and his ghostwriter might have been reading at the time. Cowboy stories from Bret Harte to Zane Grey had already carved out a template for the adventures of a principled outsider who takes justice into his own hands to defend a preindustrial social order. Detective stories such as the Deadwood Dick tales portray operatives who infiltrate criminal gangs by passing as one of their members. Both kinds of popular novels were written specifically in opposition to urban capitalism, with their heroes as scrappy entrepreneurs of the lawless frontier. Norfleet’s memoir prompts the question: Was his book shaped to fit these successful literary formulas, or did dime novels shape Norfleet’s choices for how to live his life?
At the barest minimum, we can say that Norfleet did not alter the outline or details of his story as he repeated it. In almost every particular, Norfleet’s autobiography precisely tallies with the many other versions of his story circulating through the media in the 1920s. Discrepancies, such as the dueling accounts of what happened in that Fort Worth hotel room when he pulled a gun on Spencer and Furey, are few. Perhaps this consistency is what makes Norfleet trustworthy.
Or perhaps it makes us his marks, because his story of what happened just after he realized he’d been conned snags on improbable coincidences, split-second timing, and clues that surface a bit too conveniently. In fact, the first two inductive leaps he made when beginning his hunt for Furey are so eyebrow raising that we never even have a chance to suspend our disbelief. Norfleet does not take the time in his autobiography to gain our confidence and soothe our ruffled suspicion. He plunges into the narrative as heedlessly as if, well, as if he were a hotheaded cowboy charging with an outstretched pistol into a den of thieves. His adventures are just too spellbinding. He must be putting us on.
CHAPTER FOUR
Humbug
When Norfleet asked himself where in the whole blessed country to begin looking for five men skilled in the arts of subterfuge, the image of a little red notebook floated up before his mind’s eye. He hadn’t consciously noted it before, but now that he thought about it, he remembered it as Furey’s address book. He turned it around in his head, put it back down on the imagined hotel bed where he first saw it, and then on impulse picked it back up and opened it. The mental trick worked. Inside, he “saw” a long list of names written in different hands, and one in particular stuck out to him, a Mr. S. N. Cathey from Corpus Christi. Norfleet knew Cathey well, had hired one of his relatives on the Spade Ranch thirty years earlier, and though the name hadn’t stirred anything in him when he first encountered it, he suddenly realized its potential significance. Cathey was now a landowner like himself, and his name was surely in the little red book because he was on Furey’s sucker list. A flood had recently devastated Corpus Christi, and Norfleet could easily imagine Furey persuading Cathey to liquidate his already sodden real estate in pursuit of more durable coinage. Norfleet’s first trip was to Corpus Christi to see if his old friend had encountered the gang of five, but he was told that Cathey was away in California on a prospecting trip.
While he was at it, Norfleet spent a night in San Antonio. He figured that since it was a sporting town, Furey’s crew might have stopped over to spend some of the money they’d just lifted from him. He knew that detectives always start with hotel registers, so he headed to the St. Anthony Hotel and asked the clerk for the “tattle-tale.” He saw that a certain “J. Harrison” had checked in a few days ago, and the J was written with the same flourish by which J. B. Stetson, a.k.a. Joseph Furey, had signed his bid sheets in the Dallas and Fort Worth stock exchanges. The clerk described Harrison as “about two hundred, great big fellow, good dresser, usually wore a black derby, good mixer and never drank.” Norfleet thought, “There was no doubt now about him being Stetson,” but J. Harrison had checked out and left no clues on his future destination.
Norfleet returned home to brainstorm the matter further, but it was Eliza who gave him his next lead. As they sat together one day, talking over the case while Norfleet cleaned his rifle, she mused that when Spencer had visited their ranch to survey it for the Green Immigration Land Company, he had spoken learnedly and amusingly of his travels all around the country—everywhere except the state of California, all mention of which was conspicuously absent in Spencer’s conversation. Could it be, she wondered, because that is where the gang hides out? “You’ve hit it! You’ve hit it! That’s it! That’s the very reason they never yipped a word about the Golden State,” Norfleet shouted, leaping up from his chair. His mind instantly made all of the connections. “It all comes to me now. See! they made a getaway from here the minute they got my money,” he conjectured. “Sure as shooting, they gathered up Cathey at Corpus Christi and the whole outfit hit it straight for sunny Cal.” The story felt so right to him that he wasted no time. Eliza helped him pack, and within two hours he was on his way to California.
This very thinnest of leads shot him all the way across the plains and deserts to San Bernardino. Why San Bernardino? Simply because he had to get off the train somewhere, and he decided to work the state from the bottom up. Norfleet later offered no other explanation for charging forth, as if this explanation sufficed. It was dusk when he arrived, and the decorations strung around the town reminded him that it was Christmas Eve; the holiday had utterly fled his mind when he’d had his revelation. As he walked around the neighborhoods, imagining the families inside and wondering what his own family was doing back at the ranch, he experienced the first—and really the only—moment of doubt in his quest. He longed to get right back on
the train and return home before he exposed himself as a fool. But as he walked, the sights before his eyes began to meld with the thoughts constantly looping through his mind. He caught himself imagining Furey and Spencer squeezing down chimneys, scooping up the presents, and fleeing the way they had come. Norfleet laughed to discover that he’d become inescapably obsessed, then turned in for the night.
On Christmas morning, lonely and sheepish but still resolute, Norfleet went to the sheriff’s office and met Walter Shay. Norfleet spilled his entire story to Sheriff Shay, sparing none of the details of his own gullibility and describing his enemies as precisely as he knew how. Shay let him get all the way to the end of his speech before replying. “The Sheriff’s office doesn’t make a general practice of giving every stranger in town a Christmas present,” he said, “but I may have one for you!” It took a moment for the words to register with Norfleet. The sheriff beckoned him over to the cells and pointed: there, in adjoining cages, sat Ward and Gerber, the fraudulent secretaries of the Dallas and Fort Worth stock exchanges.