Shirley Lesure, a retired nurse living in New River, Arizona, had just found out a painting she thought might be worth $100,000 would not even qualify for that as a down payment.
She gasped when she heard its estimated value: between $600,000 to $900,000. Bob Nelson, of Manitou Galleries in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, gave her that surprise of her life on Arizona Collectibles, which aired on PBS on October 1, 2015.
The painting, a Charles M. Russell oil called Indian with Bow, had been given to Lesure’s great-grandfather as a Christmas present by his brother, a rancher in Montana, a state that the cowboy artist also called home.
Russell painted “Grizzly at Close Quarters”, 1901 watercolor, $800,000.
The appraisal held true: the painting hammered down for $800,000 at the Russell benefit auction held in Great Falls on March 19. The auction’s top lots were all Russells, with one exception, an oil by Thomas Moran. It hammered down at $3.6 million, the highest price ever paid for artwork at the auction, surpassing the $1.5 million record in 2015 for the Russell oil For Supremacy.
Both Russell and Moran died the same year, 1926. The two even met, through an introduction by artist Edward Borein. Known for his landscape artworks, Moran has commanded the highest bid at auction, for another oil of Wyoming’s Green River, dated 1878, for $15.8 million, at Christie’s New York in 2008. Coeur d’Alene Auction holds the auction record for Russell, at $5 million, for the 1918 oil Piegans.
Even at his namesake auction, a Russell oil cannot match Moran’s in the eyes of art
collectors. But his paintings still tell the greatest stories. Wish we all could be so lucky as to find family heirlooms like Indian with Bow.
In 1852, the month of May started off seeing the birth of Martha Jane Canary, who became Calamity Jane. Fittingly, she shared her birth month with James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok, who was born May 27, 1837. May 1st is also the date in 1880 that the first issue of the Tombstone Epitaph was published by John Clum, who said “every tombstone should have its epitaph”, and it’s the day in 1883 that William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody staged his first Wild West Show. It was a May day in 1875—the 4th to be exact—that Wyatt Earp made his first arrest, bringing W.W. Compton to jail in Wichita, Kansas as a horse thief. It was May 6, 1877 when Chief Crazy Horse surrendered 900 warriors, women and children to Fort Robinson in Nebraska. And when did the only horse to survive Custer’s massacre arrive in the west? The horse Comanche reached Fort Leavenworth, Kansas from St. Louis on May 10, 1868.
Exactly a year later, a golden spike was driven to finish the nation’s first transcontinental railroad in Promontory, Utah. And who can forget that it was May 10, 1878 when a murder warrant was issued for William Bonney in Mesilla, New Mexico Territory—the guy better known as Billy the Kid. May 14 turned out to be a deadly day in Montana Territory—on that day in 1864, they opened Boothill in Virginia City after hanging five men.
But May 20, 1862 was one of the most hopeful days in American history—the day President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act that allowed men and women to claim for free, 160 acres of federal land, repaid by the sweat of their brows over a five-year period. The day has to share its moment in history with 1874, when Levi Strauss began marketing blue jeans with copper rivets.
May 22nd seems to be a great day of robberies: First, in 1867, the James-Younger gang rode into Richmond, Missouri to rob the Hughes and Wasson Bank, making off with $4,000 they stuffed in a wheat sack; then in 1868, the Great Train Robbery in Marshfield, Indiana saw the Reno gang ride off with $96,000 in their saddle bags from robbing a train that had stopped to take on water. May 30, 1899 holds the honor as the day Pearl Hart and her boyfriend, Joe Boot, pulled off the last U.S. stagecoach robbery when they flagged down the Benson-Globe stage in Arizona Territory. A year and a day later, Carry Nation went on her first saloon wrecking rampage in Kiowa, Kansas. Thirty years to the day later, on May 31, 1930, actor Clint Eastwood was born.
The hanging of Tom Waggoner probably looked much like this dramatized hanging of a horse thief by Oregon cowboys circa 1900. – True West Archives –
Somewhere around 1890, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association decided to take deadly action against men they regarded as rustlers. Tom Waggoner was the first to bear the brunt of that decision.
The big ranchers who made up the Association were determined to keep their grip on the region’s cattle industry, says John W. Davis, author of Wyoming Range War: The Infamous Invasion of Johnson County. Smaller operations were cropping up, taking over the former open range and claiming unbranded calves that the cattle barons considered their own.
Davis identifies the Association’s assassination team: gunfighter-lawman Frank Canton, Fred Coates, Billy Lykins, Joe Elliott and Mike Shonsey. They all worked for the Association as stock detectives or inspectors.
Waggoner, around 35 years old, was an unlikely target.He dealt in horses, not cows, and had accumulated a herd estimated at more than 1,000 head. The German native was not well-liked, as he preferred to stay to himself instead of making friends or acquaintances of his neighbors. He was cheap and sharp in his dealings of horseflesh.
Folks wondered how he had gotten so many horses when he lived in virtual poverty in a cabin with no beds or furniture.Maybe he stole some of the animals, although no evidence supported the notion.
Three men showed up at Waggoner’s door on June 4, 1891. Davis says they were probably Elliott, Coates and Lykins, while Wyoming historian Roger Hawthorne identified them as Elliott, former deputy U.S. marshal Tom Smith and horse thief George Burns. Calling themselves deputies, they claimed they were arresting Waggoner for rustling and taking him to Newcastle.
Waggoner’s wife heard nothing for a dozen days. On June 16, a search party went out to look for the rancher and found a body hanging from a tree in a remote gully.Waggoner looked like he had been strung up and allowed to slowly strangle in what must have been a tough death.
The widow Waggoner could not identify the men who had taken her husband.The big cattlemen accused rustlers of the lynching; the small ranchers charged that the stock growers were behind it.Nobody was ever arrested or tried to the murder.
Alarmingly, when Waggoner’s estate went into probate, Coates, one of the alleged killers, was named administrator, demonstrating the power held byAssociation members.
Although Waggoner’s killing took place farther away and in another county, Johnson County did feel the repercussions soon enough. Waggoner’s name was among 15 on the group’s hit list, claimed Hiram Ijams, secretary of the stock growers. The assassination squad went after some of them, including Nate Champion that November. But in the ensuing shoot-out, Lykins was mortally wounded and Champion was unharmed.
The first shots of the infamous Johnson County War had been fired. The Frank Canton assassination squad would chalk up victims, and the stock growers attempted an invasion aimed at ridding the region of their enemies.
But the first victim was Waggoner. His lynching truly kicked off the Johnson County War.
In Blood on the Marias: The Baker Massacre (University of Oklahoma Press, $29.95), Paul R. Wylie has given us an outstanding look into a tragic chapter in Montana history. From traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company and explorers Lewis and Clark, Wylie carefully unravels a delicate weave of events that progressed over several decades. The peacemakers on both sides could not overcome those who disagreed with them. The proximity of the Canadian border added to the misunderstanding of cultural differences between factions. Wylie has translated his exhaustive research into an engaging saga culminating in the annihilation of over 200 peaceful Piegans in their winter camp of 1870.
—Jefferson Glass, author of RESHAW—The Life and Times of John Baptiste Richard
Prescott’s Courthouse Plaza was established in 1864. On July 3, 1907, nine years before the current courthouse was built, the Solon Borglum-designed Rough Riders statue, was dedicated (below) in honor of Spanish-American War hero and former Yavapai County Sheriff Buckey O’Neill, who was killed in action a decade before. – Courtesy City of Prescott/True West Archives –
Arguably the most historic town in Arizona sits in the central highlands, sheltered by forested mountains yet easily accessible to visitors seeking traces of the Wild West. Prescott has the rare distinction of twice being the Territorial capital—from 1864 to 1866, and then again from 1877 until 1889.
“This is where Arizona Territory got started,” says Fred Veil, executive director of Sharlot Hall Museum, named for a pioneer woman who became the Territory’s first historian.
The museum she began in 1928, now considered one of the finest in the state, features the first governor’s mansion, a 2,000-square-foot log home. It still stands on its original site and includes period decorations and furnishings.
Visitors step inside the beautifully tended building and say, “Wait, this is a mansion?” Veil says it qualifies as regal, when compared with the tents and shacks that ordinary settlers lived in, which illustrates his lesson in the hardships of frontier living.
The four-acre campus has three other historic structures: Fort Misery, where settlers met to establish the town, the Bashford House, a stunning 1875 Victorian home that now serves as the museum gift shop, and the Frémont House, home of the fifth territorial governor, John Charles Fremont and his wife, Lily, from 1875 to 1881. The house was built in 1875. Local preservationists prevented its demolition and moved it to the Sharlot Hall campus from downtown Prescott in the early 1970s.
Gurley Street, named after John A. Gurley, who died before he could take office as the first territorial governor, has been Prescott’s “Main Street” since the town was founded in 1864. – Courtesy City of Prescott –
A short walk from the museum brings visitors to downt own’s Courthouse Plaza, home to the stately Yavapai County Courthouse, the charming park surrounding it, and Whiskey Row on Montezuma Street, one of the West’s most famous addresses.
From its start in 1864, the Row has boasted saloons with names like Nifty, Eclipse and Petrified—the latter, we suppose, a description of the condition serious revelers hoped to achieve.
Was Whiskey Row as violent as its legend?
“Even more so,” answers Brad Courtney, author of the 2015 book, Prescott’s Original Whiskey Row. “From 1868 to the mid-1870s, it was so lawless the whole town was in jeopardy.”
The Palace, with its historic photos and gorgeous cherry-top bar, anchors modern Whiskey Row. Courtney says it opened in 1874 as the Cabinet Saloon and later merged with another bar called the Palace, becoming the Palace we know today.
Little-known Palace fact: U.S. senator from Arizona and 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater once said: “My only regret is that I didn’t buy The Palace when I had the chance.”
Most accounts say the Palace Saloon opened in 1877. But Whiskey Row historian Brad Courtney believes it opened in 1874 as the Cabinet Saloon, where Doc Holliday was sure to have been a patron. – True West Archives –
The great old stories of the Row still echo…and some of them actually happened.
Here’s one: Two men in a horse-drawn carriage, two more on horseback, chase an outlaw along Montezuma Street while a lone deputized citizen runs after them carrying a Winchester.
The lone man? Virgil Earp. He ended up killing bad man Robert Tullos. Virg lived in Prescott from 1877 to 1879 and later called it “the only place that seems like home.”
In late June and early July, Prescott comes alive for the Frontier Days celebration. The main event is a July 4th rodeo that began in 1888 and today draws some of the country’s finest riders, ropers and racers. Other activities include a parade and dance, specialty acts and livestock demonstrations.
Also on the Plaza, check out the statue of Buckey O’Neill, former Yavapai County sheriff-turned-Rough Rider killed alongside Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill in 1898. The piece was sculpted by Solon Borglum, brother of Mount Rushmore’s designer.
The Phippen Museum, Prescott’s home for cowboy art, keeps Solon’s work on permanent display. A stunning life-sized bronze by Frederic Remington, created in 1895 and titled The Bronc Buster, stands at the Phippen’s entrance.
The Smoki Museum explains the lives of the region’s Native Americans through exhibits, lectures and annual events. The building, built of stone in 1935, resembles a Hopi pueblo. Don’t miss the photos and paintings of Kate Cory, who lived among the Hopis from 1905 to 1912 and served as a consultant on Hollywood Westerns.
After touring the historic sites, don’t bypass the city’s famed downtown antique district; you might just find a little piece of Prescott’s past to take home and remind you of your mile-high adventure into yesteryear.
September 27, 1864. Seventeen-year-old Jesse James puts the first notch on his gun.
He, his brother Frank and other members of Bloody Bill Anderson’s Confederate guerrillas had just ransacked Centralia, MO (and executed 23 unarmed Union soldiers). A federal force led by Major A.V.E. Johnston went after them.
Jesse and others charged the Union force on horseback. It’s said 123 out of 155 bluecoats died, many as they tried to surrender. Frank James later claimed that Jesse himself shot and killed Major Johnston. It would not be Jesse’s last victim.
The question comes up from time to time: Was Wyatt Earp carrying a Smith and Wesson American revolver at the OK Corral Gunfight?
That story has been going around in some circles for years. Let me quote from the late Lee Silva, author of Wyatt Earp: A Biography of the Legend. “The myth that Wyatt Earp used a Smith & Wesson during the 1881 shootout was perpetuated by the late Earp historian John Gilcrease, who owned an engraved Smith & Wesson American Model revolver with homemade wood grips that he claimed was the gun Wyatt used in the shootout. But two other early Wyatt Earp historians saw this Smith & Wesson when Gilcrease first bought it from descendants of the John Clum family, when the gun had original pearl grips presentation-inscribed to John Clum. This evidence establishes the gun belonged to Clum not Earp. By 1881 the American Model and its ammunition were obsolete, and it is doubtful Wyatt Earp would have trusted his life to such a gun. Based on the description by butcher Apollinar Bauer of the gun Earp used to buffalo (hit over the head) Tom McLaury on the morning of the shootout, the gun was probably a 10-inch-barrel Colt Single Action.”
She’s remembered in history as Big Nose Kate and as Doc Holliday’s on-again-off-again girlfriend. And sure, she had a large nose, but she also had the grit and spirit that let her survive on her own most of her almost-90 years. She was born Mary Katherine Haroney in Hungary on Nov. 7, 1850 to a prominent family. Her father moved them to Mexico when he became personal surgeon to Emperor Maximillian in 1862, but when that empire fell, Dr. Haroney took his family to Davenport, Iowa. Sadly, Kate lost both her parents when she was a young teenager and went into foster care.
Whatever happened in that foster home is unknown, but Kate ran away and headed for St. Louis, getting help from a ship’s captain who befriended her. She went to a convent school and married a dentist named Slias Melvin, having a child. Again, tragedy struck and both her husband and child died. By 1874, she was working at a “sporting house” in Kansas, and would spend decades as one of the “soiled doves” who traveled throughout the west.
Along the way, she met another dentist, Doc Holliday, and they became lovers and often lived together. It can’t be forgotten that she saved his life in 1877 in Fort Griffin, Texas, when Doc was arrested for killing a bully named Ed Bailey during a card game. Although Doc claimed it was self-defense, he was thrown in jail and the town seemed primed to grab him for a necktie party. But Kate interceded. She set a fire that got everyone’s attention as she and a gun convinced a jailer to set Doc free. They ended up in Dodge City, but that didn’t last. They split up, only to be reunited in Tombstone in 1880 and stayed together a while until Kate, in a drunken state, signed an affidavit saying Doc had been involved in a stage coach robbery and murder. When she sobered up, she recanted and Doc went free, but he’d had enough and moved on without her.
Kate moved to Colorado, where Doc spent his last years, but it’s unknown how much contact they had. In 1888 she married a blacksmith named George M. Cummings and the two moved to Bisbee, Arizona. She left her husband after a year and lived in various towns in Arizona Territory. She eventually moved in with a man named Howard and stayed with him until his death in 1930. In 1931, she wrote to Arizona Gov. George W.P. Hunt, asking that she be admitted to the Arizona Pioneer Home—fudging that she wasn’t foreign-born at all, but had been born in Iowa. She was granted admission to the home in Prescott and that’s where she died on Nov. 2, 1940—just five days shy of her 90th birthday.
Ranger Frank Hamer made a name for himself along the U.S.-Mexico border in West Texas where he rode and fought hard. – Illustrated by Bob Boze Bell –
Texas bred tough men, and none came any tougher than Frank Hamer.
He was to the Lone Star State what Wyatt Earp was to Arizona and what Wild Bill Hickok was to Kansas.
His iron strength was hammered on the anvil of his father’s blacksmith shop. His iron will was molded in 40 tumultuous years as a peace officer. His iron character was honed by his struggles against horseback outlaws, Mexican smugglers, the Ku Klux Klan, corrupt politicians, the Texas Bankers Association and Lyndon B. Johnson. His iron courage was forged in the flames of 52 gunfights with desperadoes. In an era when crooked police were a dime a dozen, he could not be bought at any price.
He was the greatest American lawman of the 20th century.
Hill Country Hero
Hamer was a son of the Hill Country, that undulating expanse that stretches through central Texas from the Balcones Escarpment north and west to the Edwards Plateau. In the 1840s-50s, settlers from the mountains of Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee poured into the Hill Country, long the domain of Apaches and Comanches. Their battles against Indian raiders would, for generations to come, help define the character of Texans as fierce and unrelenting warriors. After the Civil War, the Hill Country became consumed by local violence. With fewer Indians to fight, Texans had turned on each other.
During the 1870s, Texas was wracked by infamous vendettas, such as the Horrell-Higgins feud in Lampasas County, the Mason County War and, most notably, the Sutton-Taylor feud, the longest and bloodiest of them all. It lasted 30 years and left at least 78 men dead. Notions of personal honor, coupled with an armed citizenry, excessive drink, lack of strong law enforcement and a belief that social problems were best solved by individuals instead of government, all contributed to the plethora of feuds in frontier Texas. These concepts and conditions continued into the 20th century.
The Hamers were relative newcomers to Texas. In 1874, Frank’s father enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army in Pennsylvania and was assigned to the 4th U.S. Cavalry, stationed in Fort Clark, Texas, commanded by Col. Ranald S. MacKenzie and assigned to stop raids by Comanches, Apaches and Kickapoos from their hideouts in northern Mexico.
Born in Fairview on March 17, 1884, Frank inherited from his father a dry, sardonic wit and learned to speak in colorful and sometimes profane language. His father’s heavy drinking was an attribute that the eldest son, Estill, inherited, and that Frank was careful to avoid.
Frank’s most vivid memories as a young boy involved his maternal grandfather, L.J. Francis. The old man, a jagged scar down the side of his face, regaled the youth with stories of his adventures on the frontier. In 1840, at age 22, he had accompanied an overland trade caravan from Texas to Chihuahua in northern Mexico. The traders were set upon by Indians, who killed seven of the party before shooting Francis in the head with an arrow. He was captured and almost killed, but soon escaped. In later years, he became a Presbyterian minister, and young Frank was inspired to follow his grandfather’s religious life.
Most rural Texas families owned but one book, the Bible. Frank was then not much of a reader, but in addition to the Bible, he devoured Josiah Wilbarger’s Indian Depredations in Texas. The 1889 book was hugely popular among Texans, for it detailed how their ancestors had wrested the country from wild Indians. Hamer was fascinated by the tales of Comanche fights and Texas Rangers. But instead of being inspired to emulate the Rangers, the youth was most impressed by the underdogs—the Indians.
“I made up my mind,” he later recalled, “to be as much like an Indian as I could.” His admiration for the underdog and his concern for those too weak or too outnumbered to protect themselves molded his character.
That 1890s America—of Frank Merriwell, knickerbockers and celluloid collars, of baseball, pretzels and beer, of tripping the light fantastic with Mamie O’Rourke—was utterly foreign to young Hamer. Instead, his boyhood in the Texas Hill Country was firmly grounded in the Old West. His heroes were not John L. Sullivan, Gentleman Jim Corbett, Cy Young or Christy Mathewson—they were Capt. Jack Hays of the Texas Rangers, 4th Cavalry Col. Ranald MacKenzie and the Comanche war chiefs Buffalo Hump and Quanah Parker.
First Brush with Death
While working as a sharecropper for Dan McSween at a ranch along Spring Creek in 1900, Hamer had his first brush with death. After the 16 year old refused to kill a local rancher for McSween and warned the marked man of the danger, McSween shot the youth in the back and left side of his head on June 12.
With the help of his brother, Hamer made it into their wagon. A black field hand raced to bring a doctor to the Hamer home. Hamer had high praise for him: “A colored man was the best friend I ever had in my life. That colored man caused me to be living today.”
Though Hamer plainly did not possess modern-day notions of ethnic sensitivity, he never forgot the black man who helped save his life.
In 1903, Frank took part in an incident that he deeply regretted, telling Walter Prescott Webb, “Had I not gone with the law, I would have gone against it.”
Hired to help drive a remuda of horses to a buyer in San Angelo, Frank and the other herders were regaled with tales of quick money by an older hand. He explained how they could easily hold up a bank and escape into Mexico where they could use the loot to start their own ranch.
Fascinated, Hamer and the wranglers agreed to take part. They were about to make their play when the foreman rode up and ordered them to drive the horses to the corral. As Webb explained, “This interruption no doubt saved the man who has left his mark on the tradition of law enforcement in Texas.”
Frank realized he had been a fool. Said Hamer, “It was the adventure, and not the money, that appealed to me. Had I gone into it, things would have been different.”
In 1905, Frank hired on at the Carr ranch, located between Sheffield and Fort Stockton. When two horses were stolen, Frank took the trail alone and, for several days, followed the meandering tracks eastward. Finally, he closed in on two riders. Dropping into a gully, Hamer circled around in front of them, leveled his Winchester and took the thieves by surprise. Hamer delivered his prisoners to the sheriff of Crockett County and returned the stolen mounts to his grateful boss at the Carr ranch.
Hamer had tasted his first manhunt, and it was exhilarating—just like hunting animals, but far more exciting and dangerous. The adventure, the adrenaline rush from taking his men alive and the sense of pride and accomplishment in outwitting the horse thieves overwhelmed him. He wanted more of the same, and he would get it. Hamer was far too bright to be satisfied with the simple life of a drover.
Frank Hamer (at left) stands with veteran Texas Ranger Oscar Latta in 1908, the year they investigated the murder of stockman Aaron Johnson near Geneva, Texas. They outwitted a mob and got their murderer, Robert Wright, convicted and legally hanged.
Becoming a Ranger
One night in October 1905, he overheard a call from Pecos County Sheriff Dudley S. Barker in Fort Stockton. Barker was asking his former deputy, Charlie Witcher, to intercept a horse thief who was headed that way on a stolen mount.
Hamer knew the horse thief wouldn’t reach the Carr ranch until daybreak. The only water on the route was at the Carr windmill, and Hamer was sure the rider would have to stop there to water his horse. He awoke at 3:00 a.m., buckled on his gunbelt and six-shooter, saddled his mount and, with Winchester in hand, rode out to the windmill.
At daylight, when a stranger dismounted, Hamer placed him under arrest. Within moments, the horse thief was back in his saddle, headed toward Fort Stockton, with Hamer following 20 feet behind.
Recalled Frank, “I sure felt good that morning going up and down the long slopes with that thief ahead of me. Finally, after riding sixteen miles, I saw Dud Barker top out on a hill two miles off.”
As Barker handcuffed the prisoner, he said to Hamer, “This is the second time you’ve done my work. You did a mighty fine job of catching this man, Frank. How’d you like to be a Texas Ranger?”
“I never gave it too much thought before,” Frank answered. “It sounds pretty good, though. What do I have to do to get in?”
“You let me take care of that,” replied the sheriff. Barker, 31, had served three years as a Texas Ranger and achieved repute for his role in breaking up the San Saba Mob in 1896. He recognized a good Ranger recruit when he saw one.
On February 26, 1906, Sheriff Barker wrote to Texas Adjutant Gen. John A. Hulen in Austin and recommended Hamer, praising Hamer’s capture of the horse thief and noting he “has the ability to grasp the situation quickly.”
Soon after, John H. Rogers, captain of Company C, instructed Sgt. Jim Moore to have Hamer report for duty in Sheffield. At that time, Company C was headquartered in Alpine, in the Big Bend Country, 70 miles southwest of Fort Stockton. In keeping with the state’s failure to adequately fund the Rangers, Moore’s detachment did not have housing. The lawmen slept outdoors, four miles outside of Sheffield, in canvas Army tents and cooked on open fires.
In mid-April, Hamer rode into the Ranger camp looking for Capt. Rogers. But the captain was busy at his headquarters in Alpine, so Frank loitered about the camp, getting to know Sgt. Moore and Pvt. E.S. McGee. Moore was an experienced Ranger, having served five years under Capt. Rogers before being promoted to sergeant in 1905. McGee had been a Ranger only seven months, and Capt. Rogers had become dissatisfied with his performance.
Tom Mix and Frank Hamer lean on the Capitol in Austin, Texas, in 1927. The two were polar opposites—Mix, a flamboyant, talkative cowboy actor; Hamer, a quiet, modest real-life cowboy—but became fast friends. – Courtesy Taronda Schulz Collection –
On April 15, the Rangers got a report that a Mexican had taken a horse “for the purpose of forcing the collection of a debt without any authority of law.” McGee and Hamer started in pursuit and quickly caught their man.
Wrote the captain, “They recovered the horse and delivered him to the rightful owner but not being able to make a case of theft…against said Mexican they did not put him under arrest. The owner of the horse was entirely satisfied with the recovery of his horse.”
On April 21, Capt. Rogers arrived in Sheffield to interview the gangly young recruit. Rogers, impressed by Hamer’s volunteering to help the Rangers, was soon satisfied with Barker’s recommendation, and Hamer took the Texas Ranger oath.
Every red-blooded white boy in the Southwest dreamed of being a Texas Ranger. The new recruit, just 22, was bursting with pride.
Though his enlistment had been entirely coincidental, he was a Ranger born. His rugged life in the saddle had steeled him against hardship and privation. His massive size, physical power, superb marksmanship and raw courage melded to create a deadly adversary. A deep religious faith imbued in him strong notions of right and wrong. His lonely years in the wild country had made him so independent and self reliant that he cared little for what others thought of him. His natural curiosity, his quick, analytical mind and his near-photographic memory would mold him into a brilliant detective.
Quiet and humble, rigid and unyielding, Hamer began his long ride into the halls of Texas legend and lore.
This edited excerpt is from Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde, by John Boessenecker. The author of numerous Old West tomes, this book is his most recent, published this April by Thomas Dunne Books.
Frank Hamer, below right, poses with dead raiders at the Norias Ranch near Kingsville, Texas, on August 9, 1915. The Ranger on the left appears to be Jim Dunaway. They are holding the captured battle flag between them. This battle was among those fought on American soil during the Mexican Revolution.
In 1859, Arizona’s first newspaper, The Arizonian, reported on a duel in Tubac, Arizona. An estimated 1,000 men from the area showed up, including sporting men from Tucson, farmers from the Santa Cruz River and “almost everybody connected with the various mines.” An eyewitness is quoted as saying: “Everybody, as a matter of course, was ‘en grand toilette,’ i.e. two six shooters and a bowie knife around the waist.”
Russian Bill has been described as a man who wanted to be an outlaw in the worst way and that’s what he became after he arrived in Arizona in 1880. Tall and handsome, he dressed in fancy clothes, had elegant manners but he was more than a bad outlaw…he was a terrible outlaw.
In his historical novel The Legend of Russian Bill; Based on the Real-life Story of William R. Tettenborn (Five Star Publishing, $25.95), author Richard Lapidus takes us on an enjoyable and humorous journey back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, where we meet the famous and infamous, as he cleverly mixes fiction with fact. I don’t want to spoil the ending but I have to admit the fictional Russian Bill is more interesting.
—Marshall Trimble, author of Arizona Outlaws and Lawmen
She was a 23-year-old pioneer woman in 1882 when she and her husband arrived in a covered wagon in Arizona Territory from Utah. With a group of 18 other members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Rachel and William Berry had endured a three-month trip over the tortuous Mormon Trail, bringing with them all their earthly belongings, along with a large herd of cattle and 50 horses. They settled in St. Johns.
Her first house was a tent. Her second was a log cabin. Her third was the first brick house in Apache County, where the couple raised seven children. And the fourth house that would welcome her in was the Arizona House of Representatives, where Rachel Berry was one of the first women in the United States to win election to a state legislature.
She had been among the Mormon women who joined forces with Anglo suffragettes to convince Arizona men to vote for women’s suffrage on November 5, 1912. A month later, on December 5, the governor signed the election results and Arizona women joined many of their western sisters in getting the vote. (December 5, by the way, is the date many years later that the author of this blog was born, and Nov. 5 is the date my mother was born. Coincidence, I think not!)
It was a hop, skip and jump before newly enfranchised Arizona women decided to run for office, and Rachel Berry led the way. She was elected to the Arizona Legislature in November of 1914 and took office on January 11, 1915. She represented not only her hometown of St. Johns, but all of Apache County.
Arizona’s state flag—say thanks to Rachel Berry, who was one of the strongest voices for its adoption She fought for bills on education and child welfare and chaired the Good Roads Committee. Not all her campaigns were successful—she couldn’t get the all-male-but-her legislature to ban cigars and chewing tobacco.
After her term, she went home to St. Johns where she continued her political activism with the local Relief Society. And then in 1928, she purchased a home in Phoenix for winters, when the weather is mellow. But she returned to her St. Johns home for the summers, when Phoenix is an inferno.
Rachel Berry died in her Phoenix home on Thanksgiving Day, 1948. And to the end, she stayed sharp and observant.
“I like to keep up with the fashions,” she said in her last years, “but I had enough of long skirts when I was a girl. My dresses suit me fine when they’re just a little below the knee, and I hope sincerely that styles never take the hemline to the ankle again.”
Rachel Berry has been inducted into the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame as one of the state’s “remarkable women.”
On June 28, 1897, O’Day and four other outlaws (Harvey Logan, George Currie, Walt Punteney and perhaps the Sundance Kid) held up the Butte County Bank of Belle Fourche, SD. The robbers were amateurs, the job was botched and O’Day was nabbed in an outhouse. The local jail had recently burned down—so officials held the bad man in the bank’s vault.
O’Day later escaped, was recaptured but acquitted at trial the next year.
When Lucia St. Clair Robson learned she was being honored with the Owen Wister Award at the 2016 Western Writers of America Convention, she confessed, “Even after all these years, I still think of myself as a librarian who writes novels as a sideline.” Robson’s first foray into Western literature was her 1982 historical novel about Cynthia Ann Parker, Ride the Wind, a Spur award-winning novel she wrote while working as a librarian in Maryland. She has written eight other historical novels, including another Spur winner, 2010’s Last Train from Cuernavaca.
The most influential writer I read in high school was William Shakespeare.The Bard’s humor, syntax and vocabulary were a great help 30 years later when writing 1638-era dialogue for Mary’s Land.
The best advice my mom gave was that if I chose a career doing something I loved, I would never work a day in my life. I always wanted to be a librarian and work surrounded by books, but I never thought I’d write them.
My childhood in Florida in the 1940s and 1950s was idyllic.It was Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver set in the subtropics.
Sallie Ratliff Taylor, my college English instructor,taught me how to write. Twenty years later, I visited her in the hospital and said I was dedicating my as-yet-unnamed novel to her.Her sister said Sallie told her about that a few days before she died of cancer. The dedication in Ride the Wind reads, “To Sallie Ratliff Taylor, teacher and friend, who said she’d wait on the other side.”
John F. Kennedy announced the formation of the Peace Corps in 1961 when I was a freshman in college. I got an application then and mailed it off when I graduated in 1964.
Living for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the semi-rural barrio of Los Cerritos in the small town of Caripito in Monagas, Venezuela, was not exactly a semester abroad.In the mid-1960s, Cuban communism and anti-American sentiment were prevalent, but our neighbors were protective, generous and kind.Ironically, my machete scar was inflicted by a nun.
The Peace Corps gave me the first taste of life in a foreign culture and inspired more traveling. When friends asked if I wanted to go to Ecuador and Peru with them, I said “Yes.” Ditto the Orinoco jungle (with Sister Mercedes), Surinam, Mexico, Trinidad, Grenada, Costa Rica and, oddly, France.
I got started writing Western novels after I mentioned Cynthia Ann Parker to an editor I met at a Science Fiction convention and observed that someone should write her story. He told me I should do it, and I said, well to be honest, I said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” But eventually I said, “Okay.”
In 1968, I married a U.S. Army officer. When he was sent to Vietnam, I spent the year in Japan. I chose Japan because I loved Samurai movies and because a Japanese friend of a friend lived there. She cajoled a family into renting me their traditional teahouse (see the above photo of me in my kimono at the teahouse). When the sun shone through the shoji screens every morning, I couldn’t believe I was living a James Michener novel.Travels all over Japan that year inspired The Tokaido Road.
The next Army posting was Fort Huachuca, in Arizona’s Apache country. While the rest of the Army wives were attending teas and luncheons and fashion shows, we were camping out from Kaibab to Cochise Stronghold.
The Western movie I never grow tired of is 1971’s Red Sun. I go to YouTube to watch the scene where Toshiro Mifune bounces Charles Bronson all over the landscape.
My favorite word book is the unabridged 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, subtitled: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence.
In 1874, newlywed Martha Summerhayes accompanied her soldier husband on a grueling three-month journey from Fort Russell, Wyoming, to Arizona, where he had been transferred. The couple traveled by train to San Francisco, California, by packet to Cabo San Lucas and Guaymas, by steamer to Yuma, Arizona, and Fort Mohave and finally by wagon (he walked) to Fort Whipple, Fort Verde, up the Mogollon Rim and on to the lonely outpost called Fort Apache. Pregnant with her first child, Martha unpacked, then ventured out to see what the other wives were doing. To her surprise, she found a young lieutenant’s wife playing tennis. Yes, tennis in the wilds of Arizona in 1874. Smashing!
One of the West’s most unusual gunfights occurred on the streets of Benson, Arizona on February 27th, 1907. It was between Arizona Ranger Lieutenant Harry Wheeler and a stalker named J.A. Tracy and ended in a rock fight. Although his name isn’t as well-known as some, Wheeler was as good as they come with both pistol and rifle. Turns out he wasn’t bad with rocks also.
Trouble began when a man named Silverton arrived on the Southern Pacific Railroad with his wife, a tall, pretty lady with a questionable past. Apparently part of that past had something to do with Tracy, whom she referred to as a “jealous crazy” suitor who had been threatening her in Tucson.
Mr. and Mrs. Silverton decided it might be a good time to take a trip, so they boarded an eastbound train. At Vail Station, east of Tucson, she saw Tracy standing on the platform. When she pointed him out to her new husband he jumped off the train and the two men got into a brief argument. When the train left the station Tracy attempted (unsuccessfully) to climb on board. That night he jumped a freight and headed for Benson.
Armed with a .45 Colt, Tracy announced he’d come to town to get the pair who were staying at a nearby hotel. As luck would have it, Arizona Ranger Lieutenant Harry Wheeler was also in town. Silverton told him about Tracy’s threats and the Ranger headed towards the station where Tracy was waiting for the couple to appear. About that time they emerged from the hotel. Tracy drew his pistol and resumed his threats.
“Hold on there,” Wheeler yelled as he moved towards the gunman. “I arrest you. Give me that gun!”
Tracy then fired a shot that went through Wheeler’s coat. Wheeler drew his weapon and both men commenced firing. Tracy shot three times, his last one hitting the Ranger in the upper thigh. Wheeler, an excellent marksman, fired five bullets, hitting Tracy four times.
Tracy lowered his weapon “I’m all in. My gun is empty.” Wheeler’s pistol was empty but as he approached, Tracy fired twice more, one round hit Wheeler in the foot.
Having no other weapon at his disposal Wheeler grabbed a handful of rocks and began hurling them at his adversary. Tracy must have been distracted as he ducked and dodged the stone-throwing Ranger. Tracy’s arm dropped and Wheeler came over and relieved him of his weapon. Someone brought Wheeler a chair. “Give it to him,” he said. “He needs it more than me.”
Wheeler turned his prisoner over to a local police officer then extended his hand, “Well,” he said it was a great fight while it lasted, wasn’t it, old man?”
The two men shook hands. They put Tracy on a train to Tucson but he died on the way. It turned out he was wanted for a couple of murders in Nevada and there was a $500 reward. Wheeler refused the money saying he was a “poor man” but didn’t want money for killing a man. Instead he gave the reward money to the widow of one of Tracy’s victims.
Can you shed some light on a photo of Red Cloud’s wife in a cabin featuring a Japanese katana sword on the wall?
Dan Dancer Salem, New Hampshire
All I can share with you is that three members of the Japanese Imperial Army visited the Red Cloud Agency in September 1876. Historians are unsure if they met with Chief Red Cloud, but if so, presenting him a high-quality samurai sword would have been proper etiquette. Mounted in handachi fittings, this katana was the type worn in battle.
Alternatively, Red Cloud could have picked up the sword during one of his trips to Washington, D.C., or another official could have given it to him.
The sword must have meant a great deal to the chief and his wife, Pretty Owl, as it held a prominent place on their cabin wall in the 1890 photograph.
Red Cloud’s wife, Pretty Owl, sits at home near a prized katana sword on the wall (below right) in this 1890 photograph. – Image True West archives –
Around 1860, Diltche was captured by another tribe and sold into slavery, taken far away from her home in north-eastern Arizona. She ended up at a hacienda in Baja, Mexico. She probably started planning her escape from day one. And looking back, she never really had much of a chance.
History tells us she hoarded food, but how much can one small woman carry on a journey that could take months? She left the hacienda with a couple other women who also wanted their freedom, but those women were captured and returned to the hacienda. Diltche used her Apache skills to escape.
All she knew was to keep going east to the Sea of Cortez, then turn left to go north. She didn’t have a compass, but she had her Apache knowledge of the rising and setting sun and stars.
It’s said she ate bugs to survive, hiding out during the day and traveling by night.
When she got to what is now Yuma, Arizona, she found herself facing a wide and deep river, with no idea how to get across. It was the Colorado River. Diltche didn’t swim.
But she found help again, this time with an elderly Mexican man who told her about a sandbar upstream here she could get across. On the way, she met other native women and they traveled together until they were attacked by Yavapai Apaches. The other women were killed, but Diltche survived again.
She walked past what is now Gila Bend. She walked past Phoenix, which then was barely a settlement. She walked through the East Valley and Globe. She just kept walking, day after day, week after week, covering about a thousand miles.
Until she stumbled into a hunting party. And one of the men was her brother-in-law. One can only imagine the joy of that reunion.
Her relative took her the rest of the way home. Home to her children and grandchildren. Home to her friends and relatives. Home to the places she’d known since a child. Home to freedom.
John Wesley Hardin’s older brother Joe was lynched on June 6, 1874. At least part of the reason: Wes’ killing of Brown County Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb the month before in Comanche, TX.
But other factors were in play. Joe Hardin, a lawyer, had made a fortune in fraudulent land deals and previously had run-ins with Brown County authorities over some disputed cattle. According to some reports, Joe made comments about killing Deputy Webb.
In any case, the elder Hardin had made plenty of enemies of his own, even before Wes killed the lawman.
The opening two sentences of John Boessenecker’s Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, The Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde (Thomas Dunne Books, $29.95)sums up its subject: “Texas bred tough men, and none came any tougher than Frank Hamer. He was to the Lone Star State what Wyatt Earp was to Arizona and what Wild Bill Hickok was to Kansas.”
Boessenecker, one of the handful of current great Western historians, delves deep into Hamer’s life and finds a superior lawman who surmounted the prevailing prejudices of his time by enforcing the law for Hispanics and blacks as well as whites. Colorful and comprehensive, Texas Ranger is a fitting tribute to a man who “helped drag Texas—kicking and screaming—into the 20th century.”
—Allen Barra, author of Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends
