The Mammoth Book of the West

by Jon E. Lewis

  Now I had to march across a 200-yard open space to reach the Gem mill and I had to take chances of being shot at by both sides.

  On reaching the “scab” forts – high ricks of cordwood with port holes — I was halted by a voice behind the woodpile which said: Drop that gun you — and walk up here with your hands up.” I replied that I was a friend. He answered: “It don’t make a d—d bit of difference; if you don’t drop that gun your head goes off.” I dropped it, and with both hands raised, I walked up to the port hole which was made by a stick of the wood being pulled out. The fellow then told me to pull off my hat so he could see my face. I did so, and he said: “Are you that detective who came to our camp last night?” I replied yes. Then he told me to hurry and get behind the fort before the union — took a shot at me. It was a relief to get behind the fort and shake hands with the Thiel guards there.

  Siringo’s evidence convicted 18 union leaders, who received terms in penitentiary.

  Labour matters continued to preoccupy the Denver offices of the Pinkertons. The new Western Federation of Miners battled mine-owners in Leadville (1894), Telluride (1901) and, most bitterly, at Cripple Creek (1894–1904). A dynamite attack on the Cripple Creek railroad station by union terrorist Harry Orchard left 13 strikebreakers dead. In 1905 the former governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, was killed in a bomb attack, seemingly as punishment for calling in federal troops against striking miners at Coeur d’Alene. Pinkerton agents extracted a confession from Orchard, who in turn implicated officials of the Western Federation of Miners. A jury found Orchard guilty of the bombing, but other defendants, among them noted labour radical William “Big Bill” Haywood, were freed.

  The charismatic Haywood went on to be a founder of the revolutionary labour union, the International Workers of the World (“Wobblies”), which garnered support far and wide across the West. Particular bastions of support were the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest and the mines of Montana, but the Wobblies organized many types of worker, including hop-pickers. A Wobbly-led hop-pickers’ strike in 1913 in Wheatland, California, produced a gunfight between sheriffs and workers which left five dead. Two years later in Butte, Montana, a confrontation between the Wobblies and mine-owners resulted in Wobbly leader Frank Little being murdered. Little was one of the last victims of Western vigilantism. He was swung from the trestle at the end of a rope.

  Pinkertons were involved in many of the conflicts, as guards, as union-busters, and as spies. The Agency’s willingness to act on behalf of management was occasioned by its belief that unions were unpatriotic and did the workers more harm than good. But the mood of the public shifted, and the Pinkertons’ somewhat heavy-handed methods (there were allegations of framing and forced confessions) set it behind the times. In 1937 Pinkertons abolished its industrial division, after Congress ruled that industrial spying was illegal.

  Wild, Wild Women

  Women were tamers of the West, not shoot-’em up perpetrators of wildness. When women began to arrive in raw cow towns and mining camps in significant numbers the invariable consequence was an outbreak of peace. “Streets grew passable, clean and quiet,” recalled one prospector in Helena, Montana, on the coming of women, and “pistols were less frequently fired.”

  Women brought with them the perfume of civilization, the prospect of families and settlement. Respectable women worked as cooks, laundresses, schoolteachers and, above all, wives and mothers. By the mores of the time, they were not lumberjacks, railroad builders, doctors or miners.

  And yet some women were not satisfied just to be “the Missus”. To them, as to men, the West was a land of promise and possibility, the chance to fulfil long-damped aspirations. Thousands homesteaded their own land, and a few vied for jobs normally filled by men. Minnie Mossman captained steamboats on the Columbia, Nellie Cashman worked the West as a prospector, and the African–American Mary Fields, an ex-slave, drove a US mail coach.

  And some women chose – or were obliged – to pass beyond all bounds of respectability into the demi-monde, or even into full-scale outlawry.

  Most women who inhabited the demi-monde did so as prostitutes. Outside of St Louis, San Francisco and other large towns, the fabled maison de joie hardly existed. Nearly every settlement had a Painted Lady or two, but most prostitutes worked the women-hungry, wide-open, cow, mining, rail and garrison towns. Attitudes to prostitution in the West tended to be that it was an evil necessity; the ratio of males to females was hugely unbalanced. San Francisco was a prime example. Before the Gold Rush the population of the town consisted of 459 people, of whom 138 were women. After the discovery of gold, the migration of 1849 brought 65,000 men to the city – but just 2,500 women. Not until towns and regions had been settled for some time did births reduce the disproportion between the sexes. In the meantime, there was prostitution on a large scale; in 1880, Leadville, Colorado was recorded as having a brothel for every 129 inhabitants.

  Prostitutes had lives of hardship and tragedy. Many were forced into prostitution by poverty, or by abandonment by their husbands. Suicide and disease were commonplace. So was violence. In consequence, many prostitutes went armed with knives or Derringer-type pistols. A gun made a prostitute a formidable combatant. “Soiled dove” Martha Camp chased a customer out of a brothel in Bodie, California, in 1881 and fired five shots at him. According to the local paper, the man’s “hair stood on end, as he expected any second to be reduced to a state of perfect utility.”

  Elenor Dumont also worked Bodie as a prostitute, although she began her career as a gambler in Nevada City in 1854, where she was employed as a dealer in the largest gambling establishment in town. The novelty of a woman gambler created a sensation, and customers flocked to her table. But Dumont was possessed by a wanderlust, and joined the miners in the rushes to British Columbia, Montana, the Black Hills and Idaho. She committed suicide after losing $300 she had borrowed from a friend in a faro game.

  The most celebrated woman gambler in the West was “Poker Alice” Tubbs. Born in England inn 1851, the daughter of a schoolmaster, she came to America when she was 12 and at 19 married engineer Frank Duffield in Colorado. After he was killed in a mining accident, Alice took up teaching, and a more profitable dealing of cards in a saloon on a percentage basis. With a cigar in her mouth and a pistol about her person, she was to be seen in many a boom town. She was working for Bob Ford, assassin of Jesse James, when he was shot dead in Creede, Colorado, at which she moved on to Deadwood, working in a saloon alongside another gambler, William Tubbs. One day a drunken miner pulled a knife on Tubbs, but before the blade could be wielded “Poker Alice” shot the miner in the arm with her six-shooter. Inevitably, the pair of gamblers then married. When William Tubbs later died of pneumonia, Poker Alice tried sheep farming before drifting back to the card tables. In 1912 she opened a club near Fort Meade, South Dakota. This was successful until drunken soldiers tried to break in after hours. Fearing she was to be robbed, Poker Alice shot through the door, killing one of the men. At her trial, the judge let her go, declaring: “I cannot find it in my heart to send a white-haired lady to the penitentiary.” She retired to a farm, dying at 79 during a medical operation.

  With her cigar dangling from her mouth, Poker Alice was not the only unconformist woman to adopt male mannerisms or conventions. A number took to wearing male clothing, even impersonating men. Not the least reason for doing this was expressed by Elizabeth Jane Forest Guerin (“Mountain Charlie”), who periodically disguised herself as a man: “I could go where I chose, do many things which while innocent in themselves, were debarred by propriety from association with the female sex.” At the minimum, the donning of male garb placed a woman so far outside expected standards that there was a kind of safety in eccentricity.

  Martha Jane Canarray or “Calamity Jane”, was a habitual wearer of male clothing, and according to her own account was an army scout (for the army’s premier Indian fighter, General George Crook) and an army teamster. More likely her connection with
the army was as camp follower or prostitute, employed at E. Hoffey’s “hog farm” near Fort Laramie. She was also an alcoholic and notorious liar, who claimed to be married to Wild Bill Hickok. This is unlikely, although she probably knew him in Deadwood. She does seem to have married a Clinton Burke, by whom she had a daughter. Her tendency to vagrancy and brawling saw her arrested several times in mining camps around the West. Her origins are as obscure as the reason for her nickname. She was born anywhere between 1844 and 1852 in Missouri, and her explanation for her soubriquet is that she once rescued a wounded officer, who hailed her as “Calamity Jane, heroine of the Plains.” Her bravery as a nurse is a matter of record; during an outbreak of smallpox in Deadwood she was one of the few to stay behind and help tend the sick. Towards the end of her life she was discovered down and out, working in a brothel in the appositely named Horr, Montana, by Josephine Blake, who persuaded her to take part in the Pan-American Exposition in New York as “Calamity Jane, the Famous Woman Scout of the Wild West.” In 1903, Canarray died in Terry, South Dakota. Friends claimed that her last wish wish was: “Bury me next to Bill [Hickok].” And she was.

  Another cross-dresser was Flo Quick, who called herself “Tom King” and rustled cattle in Indian Territory in the 1880s. Quick was a genuine outlaw. After rustling, she became the mistress of bank robber Bob Dalton, working as the Dalton gang’s spy. As Eugenia Moore or Mrs Mundy, Quick befriended railroad employees, obtaining from them the information about trains the gang intended to hold up. It was Quick who rustled the horses the Daltons used in the Coffeyville disaster in 1892 in which Bob Dalton was killed. Quick then organized her own band before disappearing, although some reports told of her death in a gunfight.

  Indian Territory in the 1880s and 1890s saw something of a flowering of women outlaws. The myth-covered Rose of the Cimarron – her real name seems to have been either Rosa Dunn or Rose O’Leary – became an outlaw to share the life of lover George Newcomb (who so frequently sang “I’m a wild wolf from Bitter Creek / And it’s my night to howl” that he was nicknamed “Bitter Creek”). They met when Rose was 15. Allegedly she helped Newcomb escape from a gunfight in Ingalls, Oklahoma, in 1893, when the Doolin gang of which he was a member was trapped by a posse. Realizing that Newcomb was out of ammunition, she hid a gun and cartridge belt beneath her skirt and sneaked them across to where Newcomb was waiting. Newcomb was killed in a gunfight two years later, the assailants being Rose’s brothers, who killed him for the $5,000 reward.

  Jennie “Little Britches” Stevens and “Cattle Annie” McDougal were also female associates of Bill Doolin’s gang of “Oklahombres”. They started their careers in crime selling whiskey illegally to Indians in the Osage nation. After that, they tried cattle rustling and horse stealing, and aiding the Doolin gang in their bank robberies. Stevens and McDougal were finally arrested by deputy marshals Bill Tilghman and Steve Burke at a hide-out near Pawnee. The girls resisted arrest, Stevens grabbing a Winchester and jumping on a horse. Tilghman chased after her, ducking shots. Since the Code of the West did not allow Tilghman to shoot the female fugitive, he downed her horse, and fought Stevens to the ground.

  The West’s most infamous female outlaw was Belle Starr, the “Bandit Queen”, also a denizen of Indian Territory. She was born Myra Belle Shirley in Missouri during the troubled era of the border wars. Her first lover was Cole Younger, of the James–Younger gang, who fathered her daughter, Pearl. Soon after, she had another child, Edward (“Eddie”), by Jim Reed. Like Younger, Reed had served as a guerrilla during the Civil War, and had developed a taste for plunder and the illegal pursuit of wealth. He had taken part in at least three of the James–Younger gang’s raids. In 1873 Reed, accompanied by Shirley and another thief, journeyed to Oklahoma, where they tortured a Creek chief until he revealed the whereabouts of $30,000, this being the government’s subsidy to the tribe. Such misdeeds brought the law onto Reed’s trail, and he was obliged to leave Shirley.

  When Reed was killed for the $4,000 bounty on his head, Shirley organized her own gang of outlaws in Indian Territory, mostly for the rustling of cattle and horses. In 1876 she took up with Native American outlaw Blue Duck and then with the part-Cherokee Sam Starr, whose surname she adopted, living with him on his small ranch – named by her Youngers Bend – on the Canadian River, which became a refuge for outlaws “on the dodge”.

  Belle Starr’s first brush with infamy came in 1883, when she was charged by Judge Parker at Fort Smith with being the “leader of a band of notorious horse thieves.” This was the first time a woman had ever been tried for a major crime in the Western District of Arkansas. Newspapers luridly raised her to celebrity status as “The Petticoat of the Plains” and “The Lady Desperado”, and she played the part, posing for photographs in a plumed hat sitting on a horse (side-saddle), with a pistol strapped around her waist. Parker found her guilty as charged, and sentenced her to nine months’ imprisonment.

  On release, she carried on her illegal trade in horses, and graduated to robbery. In 1886, Belle Starr was again brought before Parker for horse-stealing, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. That same year, Sam Starr was killed in a drunken gunfight with an Indian deputy. After Sam Starr’s death, Belle took another common-law husband, the Creek Indian outlaw Jim July. At one point, Belle Starr’s banditry was of sufficient stature to have a $5,000 reward placed on her head “dead or alive”.

  Belle Starr was shot in the back by an assassin in 1889. The culprit was probably a neighbour, Edgar Watson, with whom she had quarrelled over land. The other suspect was her son, Ed. According to R. P. Vann, a former member of the Indian police, it was local knowledge that there were “incestuous relations between Belle and her son and that she complicated this with extreme sadism.” By this version, Ed killed his mother to be free of her tyranny.

  Belle Starr’s career in crime was long, lasting almost 20 years. That of Pearl Hart was brief and absurd, but she gained fame for participating in the nation’s last stagecoach hold-up. In 1898, while working as a cook in a mining camp, she was persuaded by a drunken miner, Joe Boot, to aid him in the robbery of the stage near Globe, Arizona. They grabbed $431 but then got lost, and a posse caught them three days later. Boot was sentenced to penitentiary for 35 years, Pearl Hart for five. After serving two and a half years, she was released – for good behaviour.

  Part IV

  The Indian Wars

  5. The Indian Wars

  Prologue

  . . . these tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizens. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement. They must necessarily yield to the force of circumstance and, ere long, disappear.

  President Andrew Jackson (1832)

  There were 10 million Native Americans living in the Americas when the White man landed in the 1490s. The diseases he brought wiped out entire villages, even tribes. The Indians had no immunity to the Europeans’ microbes (or even any indigenous, epidemic diseases to give back to the invader). When the explorers Lewis and Clark met the Mandan at their earth-lodge villages on the bluffs above the Missouri in 1805 the Indians had already suffered one smallpox epidemic, communicated by Indians in contact with the White settlements to the East. In 1837, another smallpox holocaust descended on the Mandan. There were 39 bewildered survivors. The Mandan, to all intents and purposes, had ceased to exist. Other tribes suffered similar catastrophes.

  There was more. The White man wanted the Indians’ land. Sometimes he bought it, usually he just took it. Thousands of Indians were killed by war and the famine which resulted. For three centuries, the Indians suffered pestilence, war and hunger, and fell back and back before the tide of White civilization.

  By 1840, there were only 400,000 Indians left in North America. All the eastern tribes had been annihilated, subdued or forcibly removed to Indian Territory, west of the Mississippi. This was to be a permanent Indian domain, inviolable.

/>   No sooner had the permanent Indian frontier been declared than it began to crumble. The westward movement of White settlement had a momentum behind it that could not be stopped by declarations. In 1843 the emigrant trains began crossing the West, invading the “permanent” Indian lands. The discovery of Californian gold sent thousands more stampeding through the Indian hunting grounds in an endless stream of covered wagons and carts, which devastated the grasslands and scared away the buffalo so necessary to the life of the Plains Indian. Angry and despondent, the Indians began to harass the emigrant trains, or exact tributes for the right to pass through their lands.