The head of the family was called Shoshone Mike, and he was married to Snake, a Ute woman from northern Utah. For many years after he and his family fled the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in the 1890s, they wintered south of Hansen, Idaho, in the mountains just above where Rock Creek flows through the Charlotte Crockett ranch.
Although Mike and his family disappeared for long periods as they wandered in search of food, they would always return to their winter lodge along Rock Creek. The Crockett family knew them well. Old Mike taught the Crockett boys how to hunt with bows and arrows, and the white and Indian children played together as brothers. If the Indians needed money to buy certain necessaries at the Hansen store, they sold buckskin gloves and reatas that were in great demand amongst the local ranchers. They minded their own business and bothered no one.
For a month, in an effort to appreciate how Mike and his family had lived, I wandered that rugged wilderness area, living off the land, eating what I thought the Indians might have eaten. Now and then I would find a wet meadow blue with camas and would dig the bulbs. These I would put in layers in a pit, each layer of bulbs covered with a layer of grass, and on top of this I would build a fire. I would shape the baked bulbs with my fist and make a cookie which was as good as candy. In digging those bulbs, however, I got hold of a similar bulb, that from the white-flowered death camas.
A few minutes after eating the bulb in a cookie, I was ready to die. After two days, I staggered to the edge of a canyon and saw a ranch along the bottom. Seeking help, I banged on the door, but everyone was gone. I went to the chicken house and stole about two dozen eggs, which I wolfed down raw. Feeling a little better, I had started to leave the chicken pen when a rooster pecked me in the back of the calf. I grabbed that rooster by the neck, took him to the top of the rimrock, cooked him, and ate him.
Some months later, I flew into Twin Falls, Idaho, for a cattleman’s meeting, rented a car, and decided I would drive up Rock Creek into the mountains. I had just passed the ranch where I had stolen the eggs when I saw a horse tied to a fence. On the hillside above, a man and a woman were trying desperately to hold a bunch of wild cows. Every now and then a calf would break back, and they would nearly lose the bunch.
I was dressed in a business suit, with dress shoes, but I parked, got on the horse, and trotted up the hill to help. The people greeted me with as much enthusiasm as they would have shown any tourist. There was a rope on the saddle, and I took it down and shook out a loop. In vain, we dashed back and forth, trying to move the herd up the canyon toward a crossing on Rock Creek.
We were about to lose the herd when a calf squirted past me, tail over its back, with its cow chasing after. I made a desperation throw, caught the calf with a loop, took my dallies around my saddle horn, and dragged the calf up through the herd and down through Rock Creek. The calf bawled in distress as it bucked and pulled back on the rope, and the whole herd chased through the water after it. The dude in low shoes had saved the day.
More important to me was the fact that the woman who owned the cattle was Charlotte Crockett, who as a girl had played with the children of Shoshone Mike. I confessed to her that I had raided her chicken house and not only stolen a day’s gather of eggs but eaten her rooster. Charlotte and I became friends, and she helped greatly in gathering information about Mike and his band.
Mike and his family left Rock Creek for what was to be the last time in the spring of 1910. Looking for better hunting grounds and a safer place to raise his family, he led them south and west through northern Nevada, hunting for food as they went. Now and then they hired out as hay help on ranches, and even picked fruit in northern California.
The winter of 1911 was one of the worst winters in Nevada history; for weeks the passes over the Sierras were closed by heavy snows. Mike and his family were trapped in Little High Rock Canyon in northern Nevada, not far from the little ranching community of Eagleville. The band consisted of Mike, his wife, Snake, three grown boys, a young woman with a baby, and a few others, including four children.
To stave off starvation during the storm, the Indians butchered a cow belonging to an Eagleville rancher. They were camped on a hillside along the rimrock on the north side of Little High Rock Canyon, in a hut made of willow poles covered with hides and rags, when tragedy struck.
Four Eagleville livestock men, out checking the condition of their cattle and sheep in the storm, rode down off the rim past the Indian camp. Caught with stolen beef, the Indians panicked and killed the livestock men, then left their bodies in the snow at the bottom of the canyon.
Despite the snows, Mike and his band deserted their camp and headed east across northern Nevada, heading for the safety of Rock Creek. It was three weeks before the folks in Eagleville learned about the murders and a posse could set out on the Indians’ trail.
What took place was one of the wildest manhunts in Nevada history. Hysteria swept northern Nevada, and many a rancher moved his family to town and slept with a loaded gun beside him. Eventually the Indians were overtaken north of Golconda, Nevada, and were all killed except for a young girl and four little children. The children tried to escape by running through the sagebrush, but were roped by cowboys and dragged kicking and screaming up into the saddles.
A big hole was blasted into the frozen ground, and the dead bodies were thrown into the pit. When I found the grave some sixty years later, many of the bones had worked their way to the surface to be bleached by the desert winds.
According to records at Fort Hall Indian Reservation, the children died of tuberculosis soon after, and the story might have ended there for me except for a curious turn of events. In 1973, Dial Press published my story of those tragic events in a book called The Last Free Man. The book had not been long in circulation when I got a letter from a woman in Antioch, California, who related that she had attended teacher’s college in Washington State with a young Indian girl named Mary Jo Estep, who had confided that her family had all been killed by whites in northern Nevada. Mary Jo had been raised by the superintendent of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, a Colonel Estep. The woman in California had lost all track of Mary Jo, but thought I might be interested in trying to locate her.
It was a slim lead, but I started phoning long-distance operators in the state of Washington, asking for a Mary Jo Estep. Finally, the Yakima, Washington, operator said that she had a Mary Jo Estep in Yakima on Summerview Lane.
I sent Mary Jo a copy of my book, then waited in agony for her to agree to see me. Her adopted parents had kept most of the information about Shoshone Mike from her, and I wasn’t sure what her reaction would be. She had been born to wild, free-living Indians, survived the murder of her band, and been raised by white parents as a white girl. I was to learn that during her lifetime, Mary Jo had toured as a concert pianist and taught music in the Washington public school system.
I was as fearful of meeting Mary Jo as she was of meeting me, but I finally went up to Yakima to see her. She lived in a big house with a wonderful garden, with a devoted companion of many years named Ruth Sweeney. When Mary Jo’s shyness wore off, she let me pick fresh raspberries in her garden while we chattered away.
It was the beginning of a long friendship that lasted until Mary Jo moved into a rest home, was given some medicine meant for another patient, and passed on.
During a visit to the ranch in Oregon, Mary Jo showed me a child’s undershirt she had been given when she was captured, and her clothing was taken from her and burned. In the collar, written in indelible ink, was the name she had been given, Mary Josephine Mike. She remembered only a little of her capture. She was on a train bound for Fort Hall when she saw a black railway porter in the sleeping car and, thinking he was an Indian, grabbed him around the leg and would not let go.
I had long felt that some of the Indians in the camp at Little High Rock Canyon had been unaccounted for and that at least one had gone north to the McDermott Indian Reservation afterward. Mary Jo related that in 1914, she was living with h
er adopted parents at Fort Hall when there was a knock on the door. She ran to open it, and there stood an Indian clad in ragged buckskins. The man reached into his bundle and pulled out a tattered roll of paper money and offered it to her. “It belongs to you,” he said.
Colonel Estep came up behind her at that moment and told the man, “We’re taking care of her now. You can give her a dollar for candy and keep the rest.” Mary Jo never saw the ragged stranger again.
The Indian’s visit to Mary Jo gives credence to my theory that someone left Little High Rock Canyon after the murder of the livestock men and went to the McDermott Reservation to ask the reservation chief for help. The chief was on his way to Washington, D.C., which may explain why news of the murder reached Washington two weeks before the folks in Eagleville, California, knew what had happened to their loved ones.
In her years teaching music in Washington State public schools, Mary Jo touched a lot of lives. The book The Last Free Man brought her public attention, and she was a popular inspirational speaker for groups of Native American students. She had prospered in a white man’s world and left a trail for others to follow.
Chapter Twenty
WHEN THE ZX QUIT USING DRAFT HORSES and went to tractors, they had some fine animals that would have been slated for slaughter had I not bought the lot of them and moved them to Yamsi. There were some spoiled horses in the bunch, but I was determined to break them of their bad habits. I fed cattle with them, logged with them, and hooked them up to wagons to haul fence material. Whenever a team would get to be trustworthy, I would peddle it and start some of the others.
The market for teams wasn’t very good. Since the war, most ranchers and farmers had gone to tractors. The old teamsters by now were a thing of the past, and it was hard to find a man who knew how to harness a team and drive it. But there were still a few ranchers around who were sentimental about old ways, and I sold quite a few good teams through my enthusiasm. One little team of Shires which I unloaded on a stranger ended up being driven by Amanda Blake, Miss Kitty, on the TV series Gunsmoke.
I missed talking rodeo talk, but often some of the old gang would drop by to visit. Every so often, I would be awakened before daylight by shouting in front of the Yamsi house, and there on the lawn I’d see Slim Pickens on his way to some
movie location or another, often long-haired and bearded for a current role. We would spend a few days on the ranch, fishing and driving teams, while he studied lines or rested up from a movie.
One fall, I had caught up a fine young bay team and broke them to lead. We were busy getting a bunch of steers ready to ship to market, but I got up early and harnessed the team for the first time and tied them in the corral to let them get used to the harness. They were wild and woofy; the discipline of being tied to the fence would do them some good.
With my crew of hungover cowboys, I spent the morning gathering yearling cattle in the fields, then held the bunch against a fence while we cut out inferior steers and shaped up the herd for market. The days of shipping cattle by rail were long over. Cattle trucks were due to arrive that night at the ranch corrals, so I was under real pressure to get the work done.
What we didn’t realize was that Slim had arrived at the ranch. Finding the place deserted, he went over to the corrals and spotted that young team tied to the fence. Somehow he managed to get them hitched to a wagon. We had almost finished our day’s work when they came stampeding down through the field, panicking cattle as they ran. Slim had all he could do just to stay on the wagon. “Whoopee!” Slim hollered as the team ran through the bunch we were trying to hold, scattering animals across the meadows.
Everywhere I looked, there were steers running and saddle horses bucking.
“Hey, kid!” Slim shouted as he almost ran me down. “Why didn’t you teach these sons of bitches to whoa?”
I expected the cowboys to get mad and quit, but when Slim finally got the runaway team stopped and the cowboys recognized that great hulking figure as their favorite rodeo and movie star, all was forgiven. Slim had an unusual ability to make instant friends of the strangers around him. His big grin always put everyone at ease. When Slim took a shine to a per- son, he made him feel as though the guy was his best friend in the world.
The big cowboy always arrived at the ranch without warning. He had been making a pilot film on the Oregon coast for The American Sportsman when bad weather canceled the shooting. Slim arrived at the ranch with the crew and commenced shooting where they had left off.
We had spent a week on camera, trout fishing on the river and reminiscing about old rodeo adventures, when Slim began to complain about headaches, and got ready to head back to California to see a doctor. He must have sensed that the diagnosis would be serious. As I drove him in to Klamath Falls to the airport, he opened up to me as he never had be- fore. He had never mentioned my saving his life in the Cow Palace by pulling the Rowell bull Twenty Nine off his body so many years before. Now he thanked me for the extra years I had given him.
He phoned me one evening full of hope. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumor but had found a doctor willing to operate. I never heard his voice again. Slim lived his life at the edge of danger. The final irony was that the man who lived with violence in real life and rode the A-bomb in the movie Dr. Strangelove died of something he couldn’t control.
Slim’s memorial was held at his and Margaret’s beautiful home in the Sierras of California. It was an awakening for me. I sat looking about the congregation at rodeo stars I had known for years and was struck by how they had all aged. That night, when most of the folks who came to honor Slim had gone home, a few of us gathered in a small basement room and talked about old times. Rex Allen took out his guitar and sang some of the western songs Slim had loved, while rodeo announcer and master storyteller Mel Lambert told story after story about his long friendship with Slim. The party went on long after midnight, until Margaret heard noises in her basement and, assuming that her guests had long ago departed, came down to investigate.
During Slim’s life, one of his best pals had been Mel Lambert, and after the funeral Mel adopted me. As a story- teller Mel was able to switch from one voice and character to another at will. Not long after I got home from Slim’s funeral, I got a strange telephone call from an Italian truck driver who claimed, in fractured English, that he had a truckload of salmon from the Oregon coast he was supposed to deliver to me as a gift from a friend. He was having trouble finding the ranch, and the fish were beginning to spoil. He had already been kicked out of his motel because of the smell, and was desperate to find me and dump the load. I became just as desperate to head him off and tell him I didn’t need a load of rotting fish. He yelled at me in broken English, and I yelled back.
Finally, I felt so sorry for the poor truck driver that I was working on a solution when I heard a chuckle at the other end of the line. The truck driver was Mel Lambert.
Mel and I found we had a lot in common. He had grown up in the little town of Chiloquin, the biggest town on the Klamath Indian Reservation. Part Umatilla Indian from northern Oregon, he was a navy pilot during the war and never lost his love of flying. He did voices for the movie industry, and was a superb humorist who was often described as “the funniest man in Hollywood.” One movie part he did was that of the harbormaster in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Another was a role in Three Warriors. His career as a rodeo announcer spanned fifty years, and Mel is in the Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame, along with Slim Pickens and Montie Montana.
Mel ran a used car and airplane outfit in Salem, Oregon, and was never happier than when he was in the midst of a trade. One of my cherished possessions is a turquoise ring Mel gave me. Well, he didn’t exactly give it to me. I was staying with Mel and his wife, Pauline, in their ridgetop home, when Mel brought out a big tray of rings he had traded for from an Indian he had befriended in Arizona, and told me to pick out a ring as a gift.
I took one look at the tray and knew that, whatever the deal had been, the I
ndian had come out way ahead. They were the kind of dyed turquoise rings you didn’t want to wear in the bathtub for fear your body would turn blue.
Not wanting to hurt Mel’s feelings, I pretended to agonize over my choice. Right in the middle of the tray of a hundred rings was a gorgeous one of cobwebbed turquoise, a museum specimen. “I’ll take that one,” I said, slipping it quickly on my finger. Moments later I heard him in another part of the house berating Pauline for putting his best ring back in the wrong tray.
Mel, Montie Montana, and I were in the Rapid City, South Dakota, airport one day, waiting together for a plane. Montie had once roped President Eisenhower as part of his famous trick-roping act and had starred in many a western film. As usual, he was immaculately dressed and superbly handsome, while Mel looked as though he had just escaped from the local jail.
It wasn’t long before Montie’s fans discovered him, and he was surrounded by fifty or so strangers asking for autographs. No one cast a glance at poor Mel.
Finally a man came up to Mel and said, “And who are you? Should I be getting your autograph too?”
Screwing up his face and combing his hair sideways, Mel suddenly became the popular comedian Red Skelton, and launched into a Clem Kadiddlehopper skit.
“Oh, my God,” the man shouted. “It’s Red Skelton!” Montie’s fans deserted him and thronged around Mel,
who blithely began signing Red Skelton’s name.
Mel could always be counted on to help other Indians in trouble. In appreciation, the chief of the Klamath tribe made him a present of a huge ceremonial tipi, and sent some of the tribe to set up the structure on Mel’s ranch property overlooking the city of Salem, where it could be seen by everyone traveling the freeway.
The tipi was the apple of Mel’s eye until one day, as he was driving by on his way to his office at the Salem airport, he glanced over just in time to see a dozen big Hereford steers disappearing into the tipi door. Steers being volatile, there was no way he could get the animals back out the entrance. Each of the frightened animals made a different hole getting away, and there wasn’t much left standing.
The Pastures of Beyond: An Old Cowboy Looks Back at the Old West Page 16