Sacketts 00 - The Sackett Companion (v5.0) Page 10

BLIND SPRING: This one is tough to find. Four miles or so south of Cook’s Well. A watering place for stock, off the beaten track. (Readers must understand that in some cases I have not visited these spots in forty to fifty years. I could go right to them, but in that intervening period some springs may have ceased to exist, while others may have only occasional supplies of water.) The only trails have probably now been overrun by motorcycles or four-wheel-drive vehicles.

  PROVIDENCE MOUNTAINS: Probably so-called because in this desert region the pioneers found springs where they expected none. Several peaks are over five thousand feet. The Mitchell Caverns are here.

  HIDDEN VALLEY: Formerly one had to get down and crawl under some rocks to enter, but now the park rangers have created steps so anyone may climb easily over the rocks and go inside. Stolen horses were once hidden here until the chase was over, and then driven on to be sold. How they got into the valley is still a mystery, although possibly a huge boulder has blocked the entrance they once used. A search might require months, and prying into every nook and cranny in a place where there are thousands of them. An interesting visit.

  PEG-LEG SMITH: An historical character; a trapper, horse thief, and whatever it took to get whiskey money. Famous for claiming a lost “mine” that never existed. Peg-Leg stole some mules and murdered their drivers, and knowing nothing of gold ore, he emptied the sacks they were carrying on the ground, wanting the sacks. Later, when he discovered what he had dumped out, he could not find the place again. There is a story that the gold was found just a few years ago, and I believe it possible.

  BUFFUM’S: The best saloon and gambling house in Los Angeles during those wild days when the town was ceasing to be just a cattle town and supply center, and moving to become a city.

  LA NOPALERA: Literally, The Cactus Patch. Now Hollywood. In those early years a sea of prickly pear.

  TIBURCIO VASQUEZ: Mentioned earlier; California’s most noted outlaw, and from whom some of the details were taken to garnish the story of the fictional outlaw, Joaquin Murietta. The latter was a creation of a Cherokee Indian writer, John Rollin Ridge, who did a fictional piece for the old Police Gazette, which many believed, and still believe, was factual.

  Vasquez Rocks, seen in many movies and now in commercials, were named for him. He had a hideout in a canyon close by but often kept a man up in the rocks to watch for prospective “customers” or the posses that often hunted him. He was for a few years a very busy outlaw, robbing Anglos and Hispanics alike until captured just off what is now the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. He was hanged at San Jose.

  WASHINGTON GARDENS: An amusement park, zoo, and picnic grounds, very popular in Los Angeles, for a number of years. Long forgotten now.

  CALLE DE LOS NEGROS: Then called “Nigger Alley,” and the toughest street in the toughest section of Los Angeles, although the people who lived there were largely Chinese or a mixed lot from the rougher side of things.

  RANCHO RODEO DE LAS AGUAS: The area now known as Beverly Hills, California.

  BEN MANDRIN: He had been a pirate once, and he still had in him what it took to make men walk the plank. He also still had some of his ill-gotten gains stashed in the mountains that overlook Malibu and divide it from Hidden Valley. His friends did not know that, nor did his enemies.

  SANDEMAN DYER: He had been a coldblooded killer during the Civil War and why should he have changed? Tell Sackett had known him at Shiloh, and he wasn’t a man you forgot.

  NOLAN SACKETT: He was one of the so-called outlaw Sacketts, a descendant of Yance who settled in the Clinch Mountains. Was blood thicker than branch water? What would happen when Sackett found Sackett?

  WILLIE AND CHARLIE BUTTON: They were known men, horse thieves by reputation, hiding their stolen stock in Hidden Valley in what is now Joshua National Park. Well-known characters in their time and place.

  PICO HOUSE: It still stands in Los Angeles, once its best hotel, and built by Pio Pico, the provincial governor at Los Angeles, in 1870. In his time everybody in Los Angeles knew Pio.

  DAYTON AND OLIPHANT: The sort of men every town has to deal with, briefly at least. Supposed businessmen but prepared to cheat anyone for a dishonest dollar. They come and they go and usually the only ones who remember them are those they cheated or tried to cheat. They call it business but legitimate businessmen soon learn to recognize their kind.

  RODERIGO ENRIQUEZ: A grandson of old Ben Mandrin, a gentleman and a brave man.

  JOSEPH CHAPMAN: Only mentioned here; he came ashore from a pirate ship, was wounded and captured. Nursed back to health, he married, in the most romantic tradition, the girl who did the nursing. He was California’s first Anglo citizen, built a mill, and had a hand in building much else. He proved himself a good citizen and an honorable man.

  LOS ANGELES: A wild little town on the Los Angeles River, founded by the Spanish in 1781. It has since become a city. In the early days it was rough as Dodge City or Abilene or Tombstone. It had more than its share of “western”-type characters, and some famous gun battles, with the Carlisle-King fight being the most notorious. Several of its leading citizens were former mountain men who came west to develop cities after the price of beaver dropped due to the change in fashion that replaced the beaver hat with the silk hat. They were men with ideas who knew opportunity when they saw it. At one time they owned much of what is now the western part of the city.

  MUSTANG MAN

  First publication: Bantam Books paperback, May 1966

  Narrator: Nolan Sackett

  Time Period: c. 1875–1879

  Nolan Sackett was one of the fighting twins from the Clinch Mountain country of Tennessee. His branch of the Sackett family had been founded by Yance, to whom living in the mountains was like cider in the jug. He liked nothing better.

  When rich land down in the bottoms was being settled by late-comers, Yance and his descendants kept to the high country where the hunting was good. The Clinch Mountain Sacketts never did take to towns and hi-falutin’ ways. They took to long rifles and hound dogs.

  They were lion and bear hunters, but coon hunters, too. Generally speaking, when it came to the world’s goods, they were poor folks. Now and again they’d be scrapin’ the bottom of the cornflour barrel, but there was always meat on the table.

  When they needed cash money they hunted ginseng, “ ’sang” to mountain folks. Knowing the mountains the way they did, it was easy for them to come upon a patch of ginseng, which was worth real money down to the Settlements.

  Their feet were clever for dancing but usually they sat out the dances waiting for the fighting to begin. As soon as the ’shine had been circulating long enough to generate differences of opinion, there would be fighting.

  Nolan and Logan were never strong for dancing, or maybe they were too strong for it. They ate ramps.

  When a body eats ramps that keeps his dancing partners down to a minimum. Ramp-eaters are a special breed of folk. Nobody has ever discovered whether they make good neighbors or not because nobody ever gets that close unless it’s another ramp-eater. Back in the coves and hollows folks say a ramp-eater can take a bear just by breathin’ at him. I hold that to be an exaggeration. Maybe sometimes a coon, but not a bear.

  Wild onions and garlic will make for space around a man, but ramps? They’ll empty a room.

  The Clinch Mountain Sacketts were workers with wood. When they weren’t hunting or fighting or farming their side-hill acres they were making things. Of an evening they’d sit by the fire, talk to family or neighbors while they whittled and polished on axe handles, gunstocks, or shoe trees. Not that they ever used a shoe tree but down at the Settlements they brought a good price.

  It was not an easy thing to pin them down to it but they made the best cradles in the mountains and there were a lot of good cradlemakers around, as well as men willing to fill them.

  MUSIC IN THE HILLS: Back in the high-up hills in those days there was singing in the mountains, and folks made their own instruments or had them made by somebody
close by who was handy at it. They made fiddles, dulcimers, and banjos, or whatever was needed to make music.

  A fiddle had to stand the gaff. When they made music for dancing it was a boot-stomping, swing-your-partner sort of music, and a fiddle had to stand up to hard use.

  A big thing in those days was a “sing.” Word would get about that somebody was having a sing and folks would come from miles around to take part and to listen. Sometimes a fat hog was the prize, or a heifer, but it was not the prizes folks came for, but the music. Often they’d drive in a spring wagon or ride horse-or mule-back thirty or forty miles to take part, and just as often they’d been rehearsing and singing to be ready when the time came. Some made their own music to sing by, but often enough they just sang.

  Mostly it was ballads from the old country, dating back to Elizabethan times, or versions of their own built on the same tunes. They made songs of people they knew who were legends in the mountains, or about Andy Jackson, Davy Crockett, or somebody like Floyd Collins. If something happened, like a train wreck or a ship sinking or a gunfight, there’d be a song about it within the week.

  FLOYD COLLINS: He was a Kentuckian who found a cave on his property. He had known of it for years but believed it to be just a small sinkhole. One story is that he dropped his jackknife into the hole and went down to retrieve it, discovering an opening leading off from the hole. Hoping to have a cave that could be exploited, he began exploring and was trapped by a falling boulder.

  Efforts were immediately organized to get him out, but the affair turned into a three-ring circus with crowds gathering, and hotdog and balloon vendors making a killing. Some say the efforts to save Collins were deliberately stalled to keep the gravy train rolling for the vendors. In any event, Floyd Collins died in that cave.

  The story has been made into a movie with Kirk Douglas called Ace In The Hole and it was almost immediately made into a song called The Death of Floyd Collins. An almost forgotten chapter of the Nashville music business is that for a time they put out instant records. No sooner was there a disaster than a song was written about it and a recording on sale. It was so with the death of Floyd Collins, and with the sinking of the Vestris.

  I was in Oregon at the time, if I recall correctly, and remember that the record of the Death of Floyd Collins was being played on many music boxes or wherever there was a record player.

  Times have changed. The hills don’t sound with music as they once did and the singers have gone down to the Settlements like Nashville to make music or to listen. In the old days a boy or girl just couldn’t wait to have a broken heart just so he or she could make up a song about it.

  It’s like the coffee. Nobody parches their own coffee any more, and a good cup of coffee is hard to find. Why, the coffee you find these days won’t even take the silver off a spoon! Maybe that’s why the Sackett boys went west. They’d heard those cowboys out yonder drank good coffee.

  There was a song they used to sing in the mountains about “Black, black, black was my true love’s hair.”

  That was the way they liked their coffee, Black, Black, Black!

  NOLAN SACKETT: He wasn’t headed anywhere but away when he saw that wagon out in the middle of nowhere, and he didn’t quite like the look of things, but one of them was a right handsome woman, so he stopped. That was when his trouble began, and it carried him on for some distance. It seemed like a man couldn’t even ride across country without running into some kind of a difficulty.

  When he heard there was gold left near Rabbit Ears and that there were women involved, he knew he was riding right for trouble.

  YELLOW HOUSE CANYON: One of a series of canyons, including the larger Palo Duro Canyon, that stretch down the Panhandle of Texas. From some distance off there was, in the old days, no indication of their existence, the plains seemingly unbroken to the horizon. This was Comanche-Kiowa country for many years. Go to Lubbock, Texas, in the Panhandle. They will show it to you.

  PALO DURO CANYON: The bleak plains of the Panhandle are slashed suddenly by a truly amazing canyon. In the first place, you don’t expect it to be there. Indians used to raid and rob and then ride away. The soldiers following would see them and then they would vanish, dropping into their canyon hideout that the Army was some time in finding. Almost a thousand feet deep, it is anywhere from a few hundred yards wide to more than ten miles.

  Charlie Goodnight, one of the greatest of the cattle drivers and inventor of the chuck wagon, brought cattle to the canyon and established the JA Ranch. The main canyon was well-watered, as were most of the branch canyons; there was standing timber; and little fencing was needed. For generations the Comanches had come to the Palo Duro, fattening their ponies on the rich grass and hunting the buffalo that also made the canyons their home.

  JIM CATOR: An historical character who had his buffalo camp on the North Palo Duro, a three-or four-day ride from where Goodnight located. There was no town nearer than one hundred miles in any direction.

  SOSTENES L’ARCHEVEQUE: An outlaw and gunman, reported to have killed twenty-three men. When the Casners moved sheep into the area, some outlaws conspired to steal the flock and Sostenes was sent to kill them. Maneuvering one of the Casners into hunting with him, Sostenes shot him in the back of his head, then returned to camp and murdered the man’s brother. He was apparently working with outlaws from the Robbers’ Roost, off to the north. Sostenes was later killed by his brother-in-law simply to rid the country of a coldblooded killer. Goodnight and the Casners got along well and had established a good relationship with the Mexicans at Borrego Plaza and Romero. Goodnight had been assured that if Sostenes made trouble they would take care of him. He did, and they did.

  FORT GRIFFIN: A small military post and a town close by, the latter a supply point for buffalo hunters. The town catered to a rough, independent lot, and a great many of the men who became noted gunfighters first served their apprenticeship as hunters of the buffalo. Many renowned western characters passed through Fort Griffin at one time or another. One story has it that it was here that Wyatt Earp first met Doc Holliday, and Pat Garrett outfitted there for buffalo hunting.

  COMANCHEROS: New Mexicans who traded with the Comanches, supplying them with arms and ammunition and taking in exchanges horses, cattle, or other loot taken from Texas homes the Comanches had raided. A trade disapproved of by most New Mexicans, but one highly profitable at times.

  BORREGOS PLAZA: On the south bank of the Canadian River, roughly a mile from the site of Tascosa, which was built later. Borregos Plaza had been settled by former Comancheros led by Colas Martinez, a friend of Charlie Goodnight. It was a small, pleasant village inhabited by friendly people and strangers were welcome as long as they behaved themselves. There are several versions of the death of Sostenes l’Archeveque other than the one given here but the purpose was the same. The community wished to rid itself of a troublemaker.

  ADOBE WALLS: This spot is referred to in several of my stories and is without doubt one of the best-known places in Texas, although visited by few, comparatively speaking. It was the site of two battles with Indians, both decisive.

  Originally a trading post built by William Bent about 1842–43, it was eighty feet square with adobe walls nine feet high, and was situated in what is now Hutchinson County, Texas. The original fort was built under the directions of William Bent and Ceran St. Vrain in an area where the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapahoe, and Cheyenne were sure to be found, and the traders made periodic trips to the site for trading purposes.

  The First Battle of Adobe Walls took place on November 26, 1864. Colonel Kit Carson, leading the 1st Cavalry, New Mexico Volunteers, moved to attack a Kiowa village of some 150 lodges after a series of raids on outlying ranches and towns.

  Carson’s command consisted of 14 officers, 321 enlisted men accompanied by 78 Indians and 2 howitzer cannons. Upon nearing the village, Carson left his wagons, guarded by infantry, to follow, and advanced to the attack. They scattered the Kiowa and burned their village, but the Kiow
a alerted several Comanche villages that were also in the vicinity.

  Carson moved into the ruins of the trading post, underestimating the size of the force, which numbered several thousand Indians, that opposed him. There was sporadic fighting throughout the day and then Carson withdrew to protect his oncoming supply train. Despite the retreat, however, Carson had won a decisive victory.

  However, as Custer would do twelve years later, Carson seriously underestimated the size of the force that could be brought against him. Logic was on his side, but on this occasion, as with Custer, logic did not conform to the facts.

  Carson knew, as did Custer, that maintaining a large force of Indians in the field was beyond the abilities of the Indian. The American Indian had never thought of war in terms of a campaign, of a series of battles leading to a final victory. He thought in terms of raids or single battles, so had never organized a supply system. What food they had was carried with them or taken by hunting as they traveled, but when a large body of Indians came into an area all the game promptly left the vicinity and took to the hills for protection. Custer’s scouts had warned him of the size of the pony herd, judging by the dust cloud, but that dust might be accounted for in other ways and so he doubted the presence of so many Indians. With adequate reason he discounted the reports brought by his scouts. Carson had no such reports but had the same reasons for doubting the presence in the area of a greater number of Indians than those in the village he attacked.

  After both battles, the parties of Indians broke up and went their ways to hunt for meat.

  The Second Battle of Adobe Walls was ten years later, and seldom in history have so few men fought a battle more decisive.

  To be closer to the market, store owners Rath and Wright moved out from Dodge City a supply of ammunition, whiskey, and such other supplies as buffalo hunters might need, and located a store at Adobe Walls in the heart of the buffalo hunting country. There were several buildings, and outside the buildings was a covered wagon in which two men were sleeping. In all, on that fateful morning of June 27, 1874, there were twenty-eight men and one woman present at Adobe Walls. The one woman was Mrs. Olds, wife of a storekeeper.