Buzzard Bait

by Brett Cogburn

  Geronimo promised that they would return to San Carlos soon but claimed they needed time to try to find Charlie McComas to ease the Americans’ hard feelings over his kidnapping and to gather up other Apache scattered and hiding in the mountains of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua. What Geronimo and the other warriors actually wanted was to buy time. They had tricked General Crook into lightening their burden of women and children and old men, leaving them free to raid the Mexican settlements and to have a last wild spree. And raid and plunder they did, throughout the summer and long into the fall and winter.

  Most of the remaining Apache General Crook desired eventually honored their promise and showed up at the border ready to go back to the reservation by October 1883. Granted they showed up with herds of stolen livestock, counting on an army escort to help protect the spoils of victory taken from Mexico. Those Apache following Geronimo held out the longest and did not show up north of the border until February 26, 1884, when they arrived at the east end of Skeleton Canyon in the Animas Valley of New Mexico Territory driving hundreds of stolen Mexican cattle and horses. Mexican soldiers were out in force after them, and they quickly put themselves in the custody of a U.S. Army officer, although they did not surrender their arms. That officer was Britton Davis, a marginal character in my novel who appears briefly at the beginning as the officer taking roll call at San Carlos, and who is also present when the Widowmaker and the Apaches he is traveling with get back across the border.

  Geronimo and others within the Apache party refused to give up the cattle, which they considered to be fair prizes taken from their traditional enemy. Davis acquiesced to those wishes and they all started back to San Carlos. But to throw more fuel on the fire, law enforcement officers or customs officials from Arizona Territory showed up on the way and wanted to impound or collect fees on the cattle. Davis, with only a few soldiers to help him, got the soldiers drunk so that another officer and Geronimo’s people could sneak away with their livestock. It was that flight, however less hair-raising than it seems, that was the inspiration for the expanded and fictional run to the border within this novel.

  2. JUH—Historians can’t seem to agree on how Juh, pronounced more like “Whoa,” died. Juh was an admired leader of a group of the Nednhi Chiricahua. But he was a heavy drinker later in his life. During the fall of 1883 he is said to have had a heart attack while crossing a river near Casas Grandes and drowned, or according to others, he was so drunk that he fell from his horse into the river and struck his head on a rock. The uncertainty of how he met his demise and that tiny bit of historical mystery was something I could not resist, and I placed the Widowmaker at that crossing and involved him in Juh’s death.

  3. The idea of the PHOTOGRAPH of Billy Redding saving the Widowmaker from death by Apache torture is based on an actual event.

  Dr. Michael Steck was the first Indian Bureau agent for New Mexico Territory and the Apaches. Charles Poston, sometimes known as the “Father of Arizona,” was a pioneer, explorer, mine developer, land speculator, town builder, and in his later years a writer and an influential proponent of forming the Arizona Territory. In July 1856, Dr. Steck took Poston to meet Mangas Colorados and other Apache leaders at the old presidio at Santa Rita de Cobre.

  Poston had a few Texas frontier toughs with him who served as guards and teamsters for the two wagonloads of corn that were to serve as a gift to the 350 Apaches that eventually showed up for the meeting. The corn was soon made into tiswin, an alcoholic drink favored by the Apache. Poston and his Texans, not wanting to be rude, imbibed freely with the Apache warriors. A drunken target shooting contest between the Americans and the Apache warriors ensued. The Apaches were greatly impressed by the Americans’ Sharps breech-loading carbines and Colt cap-and-ball revolvers, and Poston noticed them digging spent bullets out of the trees, so short of ammunition were they.

  Other gifts besides corn were also in the wagons Poston brought to the meeting—cloth, beads, and other miscellaneous trade trinkets—but what the Apache liked were the matches. It would seem that we could learn much about the Apache of that era by the things from that meeting that they valued most, repeating firearms and matches.

  But there was another thing in the wagonload of gifts that would have a long-lasting effect, especially for Poston. He gave away tintype photographs of himself as a gesture of goodwill and so that the Apaches might remember him. Little did he know, but one of those tintypes would later save his life. In the years following the meeting at Santa Rita de Cobre, Poston rode into an ambush unawares. The Apaches looking down on him were about to fire at him, but one among their number had one of the tintypes of Poston from the meeting back in 1856, even though he hadn’t been there himself. He told the other warriors that Poston was known to be a good white man and for them not to shoot him. Poston never knew that the Apaches had the drop on him, for the warriors faded away without revealing themselves. It was years later before Poston heard from another Apache how he was almost killed but saved by a photograph.

  Not pertaining to the photograph, but also relative to one of the themes of this novel, during that 1856 meeting Dr. Steck noted that the Apaches were already declining in numbers due to the constant warfare with Mexicans.

  4. TOM HORN—The formula for many western novels tends toward an almost invincible male lead character who has worked at many trades, is good at everything, can vanquish his enemies with utmost skill, and leads a life of adventure and danger. As that stereotype of the rugged American frontiersman and bigger-than-life tough man goes, perhaps no other historical participant in the days of the Old West fits the bill better than Tom Horn.

  Horn fled his home in Missouri when but a boy because his father beat him. He worked his way west on his own, hired on as a teamster with the army when still only a teenager, trained under the legendary white scout and Indian fighter, Al Sieber, and became a mule packer and sometime scout during the Apache Wars. He fought in several skirmishes and battles with the Apache, and participated in major army expeditions into Mexico against Geronimo in both 1883 and 1885–1886. He eventually left the army to turn rancher, and in 1891 won the steer-roping contest at a rodeo in Globe against some of the best cowboys in Arizona. He hunted rustlers and outlaws, was at times a lawman in various capacities, claimed to have fought in the feud that turned into the Pleasant Valley War, served as Pinkerton, and ended his far-flung career and became a legend in Wyoming working for big ranchers who hired him to shoot stock rustlers with his Winchester rifle.

  Throughout Horn’s life, he was known as a talker and a storyteller, and sometimes he was not above stretching the truth for the sake of story or bragging a little. He was convicted for killing an innocent sheepherder’s boy and hung at Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1903.

  5. CHARLIE MCCOMAS actually existed. The general details of the death of his family and his capture are basically as I have told it within the novel. The rest of his life, well, it may be stranger than any fiction I could create about him. His body was never recovered, and many different stories supposedly tell the real “truth” of what happened to him. Did he die at the hands of a rock-wielding Apache woman, or did he live into adulthood among the last wild Apache as many legends claim?

  What is fact is that a few small bands of bronco Apaches remained hidden in the mountains of Mexico long after the Apache Wars were over and most of the world moved on to automobiles, radio, silent movies, and world wars. An Apache woman captured by Mexican vaqueros in 1915 claimed to have lived with a band that contained a white man with a red beard. In 1924 a tiny war party of these broncos killed a cowboy in the Animas Mountains in the southwestern corner of New Mexico and raided several ranches. The posse that went after them was unsuccessful, but days later two cowboys in Sonora supposedly did get a glimpse of the leader of the raiding party. That leader was a tall white man with long hair and a beard. Rumors and legends of such a white Apache were told from the 1890s well into the 1930s.

  Another one of the McComas legen
ds says that in 1940 a bronco Apache woman was captured and interrogated about the white Apache and claimed that he had been killed with a knife in a fight with another Apache man over a woman. The same legend tells that she guided her interrogators to a place near the Arizona line where Charlie’s body had supposedly been thrown into a pit. The Americans found a skeleton in that pit and took it back to Douglas, Arizona, for examination. According to the examiners and the medical theory and techniques of the time, the bones were determined to belong to a white man.

  6. GERONIMO—What can I say about this iconic and controversial warrior from the Apache Wars? Historians have already covered him well, and like all such famous men from the past, there is little to be said that hasn’t already been beaten to death and that will not cause controversy among those who like to argue about such things. I admit to taking creative license with him for the sake of this novel, but as always with such a historical character, I tried to base him on what I learned of him from many years of reading—not only the events and dates of his known life, but his actions. I make no judgments about him, for I did not live in his time, nor as the old Indian saying goes, did I walk in his moccasins.

  Geronimo did suffer the loss of his mother, first wife, and three children at the hands of Mexicans at Janos, Chihuahua, in his younger years. His refusal to give up the warpath against Mexicans has often been attributed to this event. In his own words, Geronimo said that, “I have killed many Mexicans; I do not know how many, for frequently I did not count them. Some of them were not worth counting.” He also bragged that he used rifles to fight American soldiers but only needed rocks to kill Mexicans. That hatred and the long warfare between the two cultures was a steady thread throughout the novel.

  As in the novel, Geronimo is also seen as having lost face among his people, thus leading him to have to seek help from the Widowmaker and Horn to get the children back. Many Apache that were resigned to making the best of reservation life came to dislike Geronimo for his raiding and his recruiting of young warriors to go on those raids with him, many of which died under his leadership. Geronimo’s kidnapping of Loco and forcing his band at gunpoint to flee to Mexico in April of 1882 resulted in Crook’s campaign below the border one year later, and that manhandling of Loco turned even more of the Apache against Geronimo.

  Perhaps the final straw came during a bloody attack and ambush by Mexican soldiers under Colonel Garcia at Alisos Creek. Many warriors and women and children were killed or wounded in that fight, and the Chiricahua were put afoot while still under attack. Geronimo was so infamous among the Mexicans by then that the soldiers called to each other to get that devil Geronimo. And Geronimo proved his prowess on the battlefield that day, fighting like a madman and shooting a captain through the head at the perfect moment to stop a rush by the Mexican soldiers. But Geronimo showed another, less admirable side of himself that day. He was a perfect fighter, maybe, but by no means a perfect man.

  The soldiers set fire to the countryside around the dug-in Chiricahua band in an attempt to flush them out, and it was during that fire that Geronimo suggested that the surviving infants be strangled so that their crying did not alert the soldiers while the warriors and the other people in the band strong enough to travel fled under the cover of the smoke. He also said that they should leave the women if they disagreed with strangling the children. Geronimo’s own cousin, the famous warrior Fun, threatened to shoot him if he said such a thing again.

  Geronimo seemed to have a dichotomous nature, to say the least. He was a man that loved his family so much that he declared war for life on all Mexicans; a man that had many wives and children that he was known to dote on in his elder years. Yet, he was also a man that would do anything to keep up the fight and to win, whether that meant kidnapping his fellow tribesmen, killing them, or strangling their children. He was a man who could be magnificently honorable and a liar at other times. It is that two-sided man who gave me the plotline of a Geronimo going after a kidnapped niece and to try to portray him in a way that the reader could not tell if he was doing it to regain status among his people or because he was heartbroken at her loss.

  I wanted him to be as cunning and as wily as he really seemed to have been, and I wanted him to be the mystical and superstitious warrior shaman of great power that he was also known for among many of his people. Foremost, I wanted him to be as imperfect as I saw him, for perfect, flawless people do not exist nor do they interest me as a writer. Whether my fictional presentation of him is fair or not, or accurate or not, I will leave to the reader. I make no excuses for my work and can only say the one thing that I know for sure about the man. He was interesting, to say the least. Look at a photograph of him. Look into those eyes of his and tell me it isn’t so.

  TURN THE PAGE FOR AN EXCITING EXCERPT!

  From the great-grandson of famed U.S. Marshal

  Rooster Cogburn comes an authentic new

  “True Grit” Western classic.

  With a bag full of gold dust, Newt “Widowmaker”

  Jones is set for life. Then he makes his first

  mistake, trusting a cheerful stranger. By dawn

  the stranger—Javier Cortina, the son of the

  famous Texas border bandit, Juan “Red”

  Cortina—is gone. So is the gold. So are

  his horse and even his fearsome Colt .44.

  It’s enough to make a man want vengeance.

  And vengeance will be Newt’s.

  Newt chases Cortina into Mexico, where the man

  is legendary for the horses he’s stolen, the

  women he’s bedded, and the men he’s killed.

  As for Newt, he has a unique talent for choosing

  the wrong partners, from an angry, addled judge

  named Roy Bean to a brother-and-sister pair of

  circus gypsies, Fonzo Grey and Buckshot Annie.

  The more Newt pursues the cunning and deadly

  Cortina, the angrier he gets, until somewhere on

  the border the whole crazy journey explodes into

  an all-out battle of bullets and blood . . .

  WIDOWMAKER JONES

  by BRETT COGBURN

  On sale now, wherever Pinnacle Books are sold.

  Chapter One

  The night was so pitch-black that not a single star shone overhead, and the wind howled like a banshee through the mesquite brush. Maybe that was what had Newt Jones feeling so edgy, or maybe it was the poke of gold tucked away in his saddlebags.

  Either way, he was a careful man, and the sound of what he thought was a horse coming was enough to give him pause. He held the coffee to his lips and squinted through the steam lifting from the mug, cocking his head one way and then the other, trying to hear again whatever it was that was out there. The hissing, whipping flames of his campfire lit his pale blue eyes above the scarred knots of his cheekbones, and he set his coffee aside and took up his rifle, his thumb hooking over the Winchester’s hammer, and the walnut forearm fitting into his other palm as comfortably as an old friend.

  Behind him on their picket line, his horse and pack mule lifted their heads and cocked their ears forward in the direction of the sound of shod hooves clattering over the caliche rock ledge that banked the near side of the river crossing. Whoever it was, they were making no attempt to be sneaky.

  When the horseman finally appeared in the edge of the firelight, he was a tall, broad Mexican; almost as tall as Newt, but wearing a wide-brimmed sombrero and with a set of pearly white teeth shining beneath his thick mustache.

  “Buenas noches. May I warm myself at your fire?”

  It was the middle of summer and far from a cold night. Newt’s eyes searched the blackness beyond for signs of anyone else. When he was semiconfi-dent that the Mexican was alone, he motioned with a lifting of his chin for him to dismount.

  The Mexican noticed the rifle in Newt’s hands and the careful watch he kept on him. He chuckled and nodded slightly as if he approved, and made a point to tur
n his horse and dismount where Newt could see him plainly, loosening his cinch and dropping his reins on the ground. “¿Un hombre cauteloso, eh?”

  “Hmm?” Newt was so focused on the Mexican’s every move that he only half heard him.

  “You gonna take no chances.”

  “Always cost me when I did.”

  The Mexican’s horse was well trained to ground tie, and even in the poor light, Newt could see that it was a good horse—big and strong, and a better mount than any he had ever owned. But that was nothing. The fancy saddle on its back was worth more than Newt had ever sunk into a piece of horseflesh. He grunted to himself and hunkered down again on the far side of the fire with his rifle laid across his thighs.

  “¿Con su permiso?” The Mexican gestured at the coffeepot sitting on top of some hot ashes raked out of the flames.

  “Help yourself.”

  The Mexican pulled his own enamel coffee mug from the long saddlebags behind his saddle and walked to the fire with his spur rowels rattling and raking the ground. They were the big Chihuahua kind, with the wide, heavy bands overlaid with silver and rowel spokes half a finger long. They left lines in the sand where they dragged, like tiny snake tracks.

  “Muchas gracias, amigo.” The Mexican took up the coffeepot and poured himself some. “I have far to go tonight, and some coffee will help.”

  Newt merely nodded while he noticed the clean white shirt underneath the Mexican’s embroidered and brocaded vest, and the row of silver conchos laced with ribbon that ran down each leg of his pants. A real dude, a man of means, or a man who cared a lot about how he looked and spent everything he could on his outfit.