Education of a Wandering Man Page 4

  “Look,” I told him. “Night after night I’ve kept the fire going and you’ve slept. Several times you told me you’d wake up and you haven’t. Now I’m dead tired. I’m ready to drop. Tonight you’ve got to wake up.”

  He promised he would. I added coal to the fire and we lay as close to it as we could without burning.

  At four o’clock in the morning I awakened, my teeth chattering. The fire was out, and the ashes were cold. Neither of us had another match, but he slept peacefully, blissfully. For a moment I thought of kicking him awake and knocking him down when he started to get up, but then I was afraid he would follow me when I went away. So I left him sleeping peacefully and walked away through what there was of the silent town, and headed down the road toward Tucson, somewhere far off to the west.

  I never saw him again, and never wished to. It was many years before I visited Stein’s Pass again, and on that occasion it was just after my wife and I had left the film set of Heller in Pink Tights, a movie made from one of my stories,*2 with Anthony Quinn, Sophia Loren, and Steve Forrest.

  Wishing to see again the area I had written about in Shalako, Kathy and I drove east into New Mexico, and stopped briefly at Stein’s Pass. The street was empty, the buildings falling down, and nobody in sight. Almost thirty years had passed, so I did not expect to see my former traveling companion. No doubt, wherever he is, somebody is building fires for him, or maybe he took the time to grow up and become a man.

  When I walked away from Stein’s Pass, I had never considered writing a western story. At home I had been brought up on stories of Indians and Indian fighting but writing about them had not entered my mind. I did plan to write, to tell stories, but the nature of those stories was something that remained to be seen.

  However, I was used to listening to older people talk, and enjoyed their stories. Moreover, I had an insatiable curiosity about places and people, so I was never content to just pass through a town. I wanted to know about it, how it came to be where it was, and who was responsible. I wanted to know about the country, and had read just enough in geology and botany to know something of land formations and plants.

  Education, as I have said, takes many forms and there are many ways to knowledge and awareness. From the very beginning of my knocking about, I tried to learn about the country I was seeing, and soon discovered that in any hamburger stand or restaurant, in any barbershop or filling station, there is somebody who knows the area, or can direct you to somebody who does.

  Usually a question was all that was needed. If the one questioned did not know, someone was sure to overhear and respond.

  Before I was ever to read of them in books or diaries, I heard stories of John Wesley Hardin, John Selman, Jim Gillette, and Jeff Milton. The stories were told in the places where they happened, although often details or dates were mistaken, to be corrected later.

  Too often, though, in the places where travelers or tourists stopped, I would hear men boast only of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen. I must say that is less true today, but for many years people were enthralled with distance covered, not what country they had passed through or what they had seen.

  Every road in the United States, or any other country, has its places of interest. There was an evening in Colorado when we walked into a restaurant just as a man we had seen that morning was paying his check.

  “What happened to you?” he asked. “Saw you this morning when we started. Just get in?”

  “We stopped to see the old stage station,” I told him.

  He looked blank, then curious. “What stage station?”

  “You drove right by it. Interesting old place. Jack Slade, the gunfighter, used to hang out there.”

  They are out there by the thousands, wonderful stories. Many have never gotten into the histories, although occasionally told by local newspapers or in privately printed booklets. Stories of wagon-train massacres, buried treasures, gun battles, cattle roundups, border bandit raids—no matter where you go, east, west, north, and south, there are stories. People are forever asking me where I get my ideas, but one has only to listen, to look, and to live with awareness. As I have said in several of my stories, all men look, but so few can see. It is all there, waiting for any passerby.

  There was an old man in Kingman, Arizona, who would tell stories to anybody who would listen. People around town scoffed. “Aw, he’s full of hot air. Don’t pay any attention.” Or, “He’s an old liar.”

  Well, I listened. True or not, they were good stories, and years later nearly every one checked out. Here was a rich repository of history and legend, and nobody was listening.

  Stein’s Pass was right in the middle of what had been Apache country, and not far from there was Doubtful Canyon, of which I would write. Getting kicked off that freight train gave me a chance to see some of that country for the first time.

  It had been bitterly cold during the night but as day broke I found myself walking down a gravel road in lonely desert and mountain country with lots of distance everywhere and nothing that might be a roadside filling station or a ranch. If I did not get a ride I was going to be in serious trouble for water. My only hope was to keep going and hope this untraveled road merged with a highway somewhere ahead.

  When I had walked at least five miles I heard a car coming up behind me, and I stopped, looking hopeful.

  The driver was a big old man, neatly dressed and wearing a white hat, a white mustache, and perhaps the sharpest eyes I had seen in years. He asked if I wanted a lift, which we both knew was an idle question.

  “I’m heading for Phoenix,” I said, hoping he might be going there himself.

  “Thought you might be from one of the ranches. How’d you get out here?”

  So I explained about being put off the freight train, and added that I had a chance of a job in Phoenix. Then I commented, “I hate to leave here without seeing Doubtful Canyon.”

  He almost stopped the car. “What do you know about Doubtful Canyon?”

  So I told him about working with an old man in the Panhandle of Texas who had been raised by Apaches, a white boy who had ridden with Geronimo and Cochise as well as Nana. He had told me about his first war party, which was an attack on a stage in Doubtful Canyon.

  He questioned me about where and how I had known the man and what he had told me. “Boy,” he said, “you had a piece of history right there with you. That was a famous fight.”

  He looked at me again. “You had breakfast, son?”

  “No, sir. I started out of Stein’s Pass before daylight.”

  “We’ll eat breakfast,” he said. “I want to hear more about this Indian.”

  He was not an Indian, I told him, except by training and feeling. He was a white man who had been captured as a boy. He believed his family was Swedish but he wasn’t even sure about his name anymore.

  We stopped at Bowie, eating breakfast at a roadside restaurant. People there knew the man who was driving me. The waitress looked at me and asked him: “You got you a prisoner?”

  “He’s a friend.”

  “Are you the Law?” I asked him.

  “In a way. Have you anything against the Law?”

  “My father was an officer up in North Dakota,” I said. “He was a veterinarian but was a deputy sheriff too. And the man who taught me how to use a six-shooter was an officer. He was one of the old-time gunfighters.”

  “Who might that be?” He was skeptical.

  “Bill Tilghman,” I said. “He was a friend of my brother’s in Oklahoma City.”

  “Heard of him. Heard he was a good man.”

  We talked our breakfast away and then drove on. He was going as far as Tucson, he told me, and would carry me that far.

  We discovered we had both read Porter’s Scottish Chiefs and Scott’s Marmion. He knew a lot about gunfighters and talked of John Wesley Hardin. “I knew him,” he added, “and the man who killed him.”

  Now I was skeptical, and he explained. “I was Chie
f of Police in El Paso, and before that I was a Texas Ranger.”

  Any conversation reproduced after years is a matter of guesswork, but that was the gist of it.

  I told him of baling hay in the Pecos Valley and of meeting Tom Pickett, who was spending a few weeks there, and of meeting George Coe and Deluvina Maxwell, all of whom had known Billy the Kid.

  The old-timers I’d met were men he had either known or knew of. He had strong opinions, with some of which I did not agree, but I was not there to argue but to learn. Young as I was, I had learned that gunfighters themselves had definite opinions about others with such reputations. Those whom they had known were generally respected; those they had not known were apt to be disparaged.

  He dropped me off on a corner in Tucson.

  “If you’re up this way again, son, look me up. I enjoyed the talk. You just ask for Jeff Milton. Folks will know me.”

  *

  The dogs bark, but the caravan passes on.

  —ORIENTAL PROVERB

  *

  THIS IS THE TALE as it was told to me by the smoke of a cow-chip fire, at night on the Panhandle plains of West Texas. I was sixteen, passing as twenty-two, and the old man was pushing eighty but did not remember his actual age. Nor did he know his white-man’s name.

  We had been hired by a wolfer and trapper who had made a deal to skin cattle killed by drought on a big ranch. Around every windmill dead cattle could be found, numbering from fifteen to thirty-five, and saving their hides was a job only for someone with a strong stomach.

  The wolfer was named Peterson, and when the old man heard the name he said he thought it was his own. Anyway, the name was familiar.

  His father, he said, was a brute, a big, raw-boned man who worked his son like a slave and treated him worse. Once his mother died, the boy was taken from school, where he had spent just one year, and put to work. When the Apaches raided their homestead, his father fought like a tiger, but was killed.

  When a warrior was about to kill the boy, another Apache stopped him. “I take,” he said. “You fight like him, you my son.”

  Peterson, as he now called himself, had never looked back. From that time on he was an Apache and wished to be nothing else. His life as a white boy had been hard and cruel; among the Indians he was better treated and he worked hard to be one of them. He believed he was almost seven when taken by the Apache, and five years later he rode on his first war party.

  He was not allowed to fight. He went with others of about his age to care for horses, to gather wood for fires, to cook meat for the braves, and to learn by watching and listening.

  They were going after a stage said to be coming from the east, and they would attack near Stein’s Peak, which marked the entrance to what white men called Doubtful Canyon.

  The canyon was eight to ten miles long, depending on who was measuring, and its name resulted from the fact that, during Apache days, if you went in, it was doubtful you’d get out.

  On this day, Apache signals had made them aware the stage was coming soon after it left Cooke’s Spring near Deming, New Mexico. Cochise and even the chief Mangas Colorado, had gathered their warriors to attack near East Garrison Station at the entrance to Doubtful Canyon.

  It was a hot, still day, his first war party. Peterson remembered it well. Crouched among the rocks atop a canyon wall, he watched the stage approaching, his heart pounding. No warriors were in sight until the stage entered the canyon. Then, like magic, the canyon walls were lined with them. The only location that offered a chance for defense was a rocky knoll at one side of the trail.

  Watching from the rocks, the boy saw a sudden splash of crimson across a horse’s shoulder and saw the animal stumble, then go down, piling up in a mass of struggling horses and a tangle of harness. The pursuing stage overran the horses and overturned, the men spilling out, rifles in hand.

  At once they began to shoot, while some struggled to haul boxes from the stage. From high on the cliffside he could see it all, bright in the sunlight.

  There were seven men. He counted them. They had rifles and pistols, and the boxes must contain ammunition. They fell into position and began shooting. The Apaches went to cover, leaving several of their number dead upon the rocks.

  The watching boy moved into the shade of a rock. There was no shade for the fighting men on the knoll, and the sun was blistering. They ranged themselves around the rocks to cover all approaches. It was not a good position, for many parts of the knoll were exposed, but the stage itself helped. It was no protection against bullets but it did protect against the iron-tipped arrows.

  One of the white men was down. He must be dead, as there was no effort to pull him closer, although another man did take his rifle and ammunition belt.

  The Apaches did not know it then, and the Peterson boy, if that was his name, only learned it long after, but the Free Thompson Party, the men in that stagecoach, had thousands of rounds of ammunition. What they did not have was food. Even more important, they had no water, and there was no water hole nearer than Stein’s Peak, several miles away.

  From where the boy watched, he could see it all, but the distance was too great for a rifle to fire with accuracy.

  The rocks were hot to his touch—blistering, in fact. It must be pure Hell down in that oven of a canyon where no wind blew and no air stirred. All day the fighting went on, and the canyon walls echoed with gunfire. When night fell, the guns were silent, but the Apaches—who did not like to fight at night because, they were reported to believe, if one was killed in the dark, his spirit must forever wander in darkness—still gathered close around. Peterson knew there was no chance for the white men to escape, and they knew it as well.

  Down there among the scattered rocks and the wreck of the stagecoach, men would be smoking, chewing tobacco, watching, and resting.

  They had no hope of escape. No cavalry would be coming to their rescue, for the pony soldiers had gone east to fight in the War Between the States. They would be bandaging wounds down there, holding pebbles in their mouths to alleviate thirst, and piling rocks to make their position more secure.

  Beside the smoky cow-chip fire, the old man told the story of that desperate fight so long ago, the first one he had witnessed. He told of the coming of light which showed how well the white men had worked during the night, gathering rocks to fill spaces between boulders, making their position more secure. The bloating bodies of the dead horses were a protection, too, but there were only five men moving about now, and hundreds of Indians.

  The boy did not know how many Apaches there were, for both Cochise and Mangas Colorado had brought warriors, while his group had come from Nana’s band.

  There was only sporadic fighting now, for the Apaches had suffered. Bodies lay stretched on the sand and hanging over rocks to indicate the accuracy of the white-eyes’ shooting. A half hour might go by without a shot, and then some ill-advised Indian would show himself and die for his carelessness.

  Searching fire from Apache rifles sought hidden targets, chancing shots into the stagecoach in hopes some man might be using it for shelter, but the thin walls and floor of the stage were no protection against .44 caliber bullets, which could penetrate several inches of pine.

  Occasionally a group of Apaches would attempt an attack and there would be a burst of firing.

  The boys watching from the ridge could see little movement now. Were more men dead? Or were they guarding their strength? Boards had been pulled from the splintered stage in an effort to make some sort of a shield from the sun. Again the day passed, and again night came with no shooting, and only a waiting time until the morrow.

  There is no way I can tell that story as it was told to me beside the smoky fire on the plains of the Panhandle, told to me by the old man who remembered it so well, a white man who had become completely an Apache, and was in his heart and mind an Apache still.

  The third day dawned, a third day of terrible thirst and gnawing hunger, a third day of desperation. How many were left
? The boys watching from the crest could not tell, but whenever an Apache moved, a rifle spoke from the rocky knoll.

  At last, midway in the third afternoon, the shooting ended, and after a long time Apaches began to expose themselves. When there was no more firing they went down, one after another, until hundreds of them were gathered.

  The ammunition was all gone. One of the last men had broken the extra rifles so they would not be available for use by the Apaches.

  Apaches carried their dead away and rarely admitted their losses, but the reports were that between 130 and 150 Apaches died in that three-day fight. All seven of the defenders died, the last one, or perhaps two, dying by his own hand with his last bullet, rather than suffer the torture that awaited him if taken alive.

  Long after, in Chihuahua, Cochise was said to have told of the battle and declared they were the bravest men he ever knew.

  If that was true, I do not know. I only know the story that was told to me that night by the dim light from a smoky fire.

  It was the first of many stories told over fires, tales of swift attacks and long pursuits by the pony soldiers and the tactics the Indians used. Years later, some of it was to appear in Hondo, some in Shalako and in The Lonely Men. But at the time I had no idea of ever writing about what I was experiencing then, or of what I was hearing.

  Yet there was no better time to learn about what the West had actually been. Many of those who lived it were still alive, and as the years of their future grew fewer, they were more willing to talk of what had been. Old feuds were largely forgotten, and time had given the past an aura.

  The old cowboy might appear to be as dry as dust, he might scoff at some of the stories, but he was a figure of romance in his own mind (although he would never have admitted it) or he would not have become a cowboy in the first place. As the years slipped away, he began to want to tell his stories, and I was often there, a willing listener, knowing enough to sift the truth from the romance.

  In every town there was at least one former outlaw or gunfighter, an old Indian scout or a wagon master, and each with many stories ready to tell.