by Tim Slessor
And what about Butch? Certainly, there is a lack of any solid evidence that he was killed in Bolivia. Equally, there is a lack of solid, 100 % evidence that he came back. Nevertheless, it is surely difficult to fault Larry Pointer’s comment at the top of this chapter in which he asks if that collection of Wyoming old-timers back in the 1930s were just a bunch of “gullible old hayseeds taken in by some imposter”. Maybe I am guilty of the same wishful thinking of which, in the preface, I accuse others: writing not merely about what I think happened, but writing about what I want to think happened. Yes, I want to think that Butch came back. It makes a much better story...
But there are still a few more questions: if Butch came back, did he really live out his days as William T. Phillips? If not, then Phillips must have been an imposter. In which case, one must ask once again, how did an imposter fool all those old-timers?
And what about the beautiful Etta? The short answer is that, beyond what we know about her during those few years that she was with Sundance (which is not much), everything else is an enticing mystery. One theory is that, before Sundance came along, she was a Texas call-girl; another says that she was a schoolteacher. While the two professions are not mutually exclusive (though difficult to practice simultaneously), most people seem to prefer her to have been a schoolteacher. Everyone who met her seems to have thought her “a lady of class”, educated and very well spoken. Could that support the contention that she was the daughter of a George Capel, the illegitimate son of the 6th Earl of Essex? After all, her surname, Place, is an anagram of Capel. If so, how did she wind up in Texas where she met Sundance? One of the few certainties about the lady is that before Butch and Sundance had moved on to Bolivia, she had returned to the US. Some say that she returned to Denver to have a baby; others say that she shipped out from Chile to San Francisco and was hardly off the boat when she was killed in the famous earthquake. The fact is that we will never know where Etta Place came from and where she wound up. Maybe she would want it that way.
One last question: if that really was Butch Cassidy traveling around Wyoming during the 1920s and 30s, he was surely taking a very considerable risk that someone who knew who he really was would not report him to the authorities. After all, although his crimes against those banks and the UP Railroad dated from 25 or more years before, he could not assume that the banks, the railroads and Pinkertons would have forgotten or forgiven him. They certainly would not have looked the other way if he had found that loot in the Wind River Mountains, and the news had become known. Nor would he have been protected from criminal prosecution by the 7-year Statute of Limitations; that Statute (in both Federal and State law) can apply in civil cases, but it does not apply in criminal cases, nor if deception has been involved. The fact that Butch had been using a false name would have been more than enough to constitute that deception. This, to me, is the weakest link in the “Yes, Butch-did-come-back” thesis...
So, a summary: Sundance was most likely killed in South America; Butch Cassidy most likely died in Spokane in 1937. Finally, may I invoke the thought with which this book began? I believe that everything in this chapter is true; and even if it isn’t, it could be.
The Union Pacic’s “rapid response unit” ready to chase after Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch
The Sod-House Frontier
When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie. Not a tree or a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions.
From The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, set in Kansas, and written in 1900 by Frank Baum
***
Explorers, trappers, miners, soldiers, and cowboys might be the criss-crossing pathfinders out ahead, but out on the Great Pains it was the farmer who was always the agent of actual settlement. He and, perhaps even more, his wife or his woman were the would-be home-makers; they became, to modify a cliché, “the domesticators of someone else’s wilderness” - the “someone else” being, of course, the Native American.
The pattern had begun Way-Back-East more than two centuries earlier. With a few animals and some simple tools - an axe, a plough, a mattock and a gun - the first settlers had cleared an acre or two along the edge of the forest, built a crude cabin of logs, shot or trapped game for meat and hides, gathered wild fruits, scattered pumpkin and corn seed in the early spring, and then hopefully waited through the summer for a crop. In time, if things went well, the family might buy a second cow, another mule or a brace of oxen, and some more chickens. They would plough more land; they would split more logs to build a barn and to lay some fences.
Then, after a few years, they would watch other people moving past to open up new land further west. For some, the temptation might be too much, and, if they could find a buyer, they would sell out and join those other pioneers on their way to the greener and more fertile lands which always seemed to lie “on the far side of the hill”. It was a creeping process that had taken the frontier of settlement a third of the way across the continent. Then in the middle of nineteenth century there was a pause; the pattern faltered.
The convulsions immediately before and during the Civil War had a good deal to do with the slowing down; so did the prevalence of malaria along the flatlands of the Missouri. But there was something else; it was as if the yeoman farmer and his family became afraid of pushing on much further. In fact, they were afraid or, at the least, they were apprehensive. Behind them lay the familiar forests and clearings through which they had come during the preceding 200 years. True, the trees had been a nuisance which first had to be cleared, but, once felled, they gave timber for shelter, fuel and fencing; the clearings and riverine meadows were fertile (for a while) and the soil could be turned with a mule or ox-drawn plow. The farmer’s musket had range enough for shooting forest game. It was a life hard in its simplicities, but at least the pioneer farmer and family understood their environment and were reasonably easy in it. They and their tools were adapted to the habitat. They worked.
Before the Civil War, some hundreds of farmers had crossed the Missouri River and reached into what would become the eastern margins of Kansas and Nebraska. This was still a fertile, reasonably watered terrain; it had enough trees to give the settlers what they needed, but not enough to make life too tedious. But now, more than 1,000 miles from the sea where the whole process had started, a different and very unfamiliar land began. It was as simple as that. Westward, the trees thinned and gave way to the Great Plains; they were as endless and windswept as an ocean. Out there, there was very little timber, no easily turned soil, no shelter, no fuel. With less rain (under 20 inches a year), the grass became shorter and more wiry; the summers grew hotter; the winters longer and colder. Even today, once away from the now-irrigated margins of the few rivers, the transition is as clear as it ever was: just drive north-west across Nebraska from Grand Island along State Hi-way 2 and, somewhere beyond the 99th meridian, one crosses a visible natural frontier―from the trees and green of the Mid-West (corn-belt country) to the short-grass land of the Great Plains. And, of course, 150 years ago there were the still feral tribes. At best they were irritable, at worst they were deadly. After all, this was their land.
So, in the face of this alien and windswept geography, the farmers hung back; they were worried about things they did not understand. Maybe, they thought, this is as far as the business of farming and permanent settlement was meant to go. After all, some of the maps showed that these almost treeless plains ran out into what was marked on the maps as a desert. One doubts that people literally turned to each other to ask, “What now?” But the result was as if they had. They hesitated, waiting for answers.
Just as the problems were varied, so, when they came, were the solutions. But they did not all come at once. The first, not only in its timing but in effect, was the Homestead Act. Signed by President Lincoln in 1862, it gave land, in 160-acre lots (a quarter of 1
square mile), to anyone who wanted it. All you had to do was to find a 160-acre plot that was not already claimed by someone else, stake your boundary out with markers or a plowed line, pay a small registration fee at the nearest Land Office and then live on the land for the next five years. Or say that you had lived on it for five years. Free land, especially for emigrants from Europe, was a dream. (Until a few years ago it was still possible to “homestead”, though the only free land left was in Alaska, the very last frontier.)
A Homestead Bill had been talked about for years, but it had long been opposed by the southern states; they feared that it would entice droves of non-slave-owning northerners to settle the new land in the West, particularly in Kansas. Kansas would then, they argued, be quickly admitted to the Union and thus upset the delicate balance between “free” states and “slave” states. The southerners were right. Bloody Kansas was one of the incendiaries that would ignite and then burn right through the Civil War.
Lincoln’s signature was not long dry when, at a minute or two past midnight on New Year’s Day 1863, the door of one of the first western Land Offices opened for just three minutes: long enough to allow one man to file the very first claim for a homestead under the new act. He was a Union soldier on furlough; he had “located” on a stream near the small Nebraskan settlement of Beatrice (pronounced Bee-atriss). One wonders how much his being a Union soldier and, even more, his name, Daniel Freeman, had to do with his selection. Was it a deliberate flaunting by the local Unionists aimed at the Confederates a few miles to the south in Kansas?
Today the farm is a national monument with neat displays of implements, frontier furniture and journals. Despite my supposition that Freeman’s name had something to do with his selection, there was no official confirmation of it. The curator smiled and thought that it was a “neat” idea - one, he said, that had occurred to any number of people before me. Of course.
After the Civil War it did not matter much what southerners thought; hundreds more would-be homesteaders moved to “locate” beyond the Missouri. The lure of free land was powerful enough to overcome their earlier hesitations. But as they pushed onto the plains of Nebraska and Kansas, alongside the advancing railroads, they soon found that a farm of 160 acres was not nearly big enough to support a family in this new, drier land. Back in the more fertile country that they had left behind, 80 acres was sometimes sufficient. But here, on the climatically uncertain plains, a family needed at least 300 acres. Even if a man illegally registered his wife for her own 160 acres, and thereby managed to accumulate a larger holding (a fairly standard procedure), there was then the question of how one man, his wife, some growing children and an ox or two could cultivate even a part of so much land. (To plow one acre with a single furrow, a farmer would need to trudge backwards and forwards behind his team for something like 6 miles.) Even if somehow the family did manage, there was little they could grow that could compete with the produce coming off farms back east; not only were those farms on better land, but they were much nearer the growing urban markets. Out west, it was at best subsistence farming - not what those first pioneer farmers had hoped.
For those who persevered, the Homestead Act had its share of legal loopholes, and the small-town lawyers were quick to come up with their interpretations of the small print. There was the “commutation” clause under which a farmer did not have to wait the full five years to gain absolute freehold of his land. Any time after the first six months he could, by paying a little over $1 an acre, take full possession. Now crafty men came along and, seeing an over-ambitious settler or one in difficulty, would quietly offer to lend the cash necessary to complete payment on the homestead. But there was always a catch: the interest rate would be almost impossibly high, with the farm held as collateral in the event of the farmer failing to meet that rate. Or there might be an “arrangement” whereby the speculator came into partnership with the farmer. Later, the cuckoo might take over the nest - to rent the holding back to the original homesteader. So, in the very regions it was meant to populate, there were problems with the Homestead Act. Some families managed to struggle through the first most difficult years; but for others, debt and the harsh environment were too much. By the late 1870s, a steady trickle of broken families were going back eastward across the Missouri.
Collecting “meadow muffins” for fuel
Nevertheless, as time went by, whatever its failings, what really mattered about the Homestead Act was its seductive promise. And there were other inducements. Through the early 1870s, the Union Pacific Railroad (through Nebraska) and the Kansas Pacific and the Santa Fe (though Kansas) were trying to populate their massive grants of government land. They set up “colonization bureaux” and, back east, the newspapers carried their advertisements extolling the easy life on the plains. “An invitation is here extended to everyone desiring a choice home in the Finest Country in the world. Come to Kansas and locate in the State that is always in front. Bring your family to the State that offers you Fertile Lands, Prosperous Towns, Plenty of Churches and Schools and no Saloons.” Enticing. But the truth was rather different.
Once onto the treeless plains, farming in ways the newcomers brought with them did not work. Ordinary plows were almost useless in coping with the matted grass sod whose tangle of roots, looking for moisture, could reach down 2 feet or more. Surface water was scarce and, until a well could be dug, had to be hauled from the infrequent streams. There were few trees to provide timber for building homes, or for fences, or for feeding the settlers’ stoves through the long winters. The more determined newcomers struggled as best they could; they probably had no money to get back home anyway. So they built their one-roomed, dirt-floored dwellings with what they called “prairie marble” - slabs of earth cut out of the prairie. They would stretch a canvas wagon cover for a roof until they could make the journey to a railroad town for a few lengths of timber to make a ridgepole and rafters, to support a roof of sod and thatch. They dug wells and then put together crude wooden windmills to draw up the often-brackish water. They scratched with mattocks until a scrap of land was broken for sowing some vegetables. Then they went into debt to buy one of the new-fangled plows devised by an Illinois blacksmith called John Deere; its sharp point and its smooth steel meant that it could cope with the matted prairie - something quite beyond the older, blunter wooden or cast-iron plows they might have brought with them. They planted thorn hedges or built walls of sod to keep the cattlemen’s herds off their windblown seedlings, because, of course, they were pushing into the domain of the cattlemen.
They collected sun-dried droppings of cattle or buffalo, “meadow muffins”, for fuel. They watched and waited to see how their first year’s crop would come through. If there was spring hail, or summer drought, or grasshoppers, the plantings would fail and everything would have been wasted. Some had not the resources, mental, physical or financial, to start all over again. That was the time when some friendly fellow would come by and offer to buy out the homesteader. Often it seemed better to cut their losses for those few dollars; at least they would pay the way home. It was a recurring pattern. “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.”
If the settlers who hung on were not hardened when they started, they soon got that way. For the women, the real home-makers, life was particularly difficult. Almost always, sometimes for years, there was a lack of almost everything that would go to make even the most rudimentary home. There was the loneliness, the seemingly vicious climate, puddles on the floor when it rained and, just as inevitably, dirt and dust between times. There were coyotes, snakes, mice, cockroaches and flees. The children might be crying, sometimes merely fractious, sometimes sick or even dying of dysentery, measles, whooping cough, pneumonia or diphtheria. No advice, no doctors, no companionship. Their men were often away for days or even weeks at a time trying to earn a few extra dollars: digging someone else’s well or working on the railroad. And over all, there was the starkness of the plains, th
e constant wind, the awful emptiness of the sky. These things tightened on their undernourished minds, and some of them became deranged. They called it “cabin fever”. Sometimes, despair or sheer heartbreak led to suicide.
If one looks at early photographs of families standing outside their “soddies”, one hardly ever sees a smile on their bony faces. They look tired; the women particularly seem pinched and hungry, like people who have not quite given up but are forlornly waiting for something, anything, better to turn up. For the photographer, they have brought out their most treasured possessions: the family Bible, a sewing machine, an accordion, even a bird in a cage. The children are often barefoot. No Hollywood Western was ever like this; John Wayne or Kevin Costner never played an early Kansan or Nebraskan homesteader; no dimpled starlet looks right as a pioneer wife; the heroics were altogether too gray, too grim.