Augusta Metcalfe: Sagebrush Artist

Augusta Metcalfe's illustration of a neighbor

In 1886 when Augusta Corson was three years old, her family moved from Marshall County Kansas to “No Man’s Land,” a desolate, windy, sagebrush covered region that Texas relinquished claim to in 1850. This strip of land, which bordered Kansas, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado, had no governmental authority; it was not a part of any state of territory. And, there was no law, which is probably why many referred to the region as Robber’s Roost. Today, this strip of land is the western most part of the state of Oklahoma—the Oklahoma Panhandle. It was in this remote place where Augusta Corson Metcalfe lived. She captured her life and the culture of rural western Oklahoma in her sketches and paintings. Her artistic endeavors began when, as a little girl, she sketched on rocks and the white stones of an abandoned farmhouse. As she grew, so did her talent and by the 1950s, the world knew her as the Sagebrush Artist.


Augusta working in her studio

Augusta’s family, like many who kept moving westward in the late nineteenth century, was in search of better grazing and farming land. After Augusta’s father found the right piece of land on which to settle in 1886 in western Oklahoma, he built a 10ft by 12ft shack, and the family called it home. Eventually they moved from this adobe to a three-room sod house dug into the side of a ravine, which was close to deep spring ponds. The shady springs provided the family and their small cattle herd with relief from the summer heat. In 1893, her family moved to a homestead on the Washita River near Durham inside the newly-opened Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation.


Painting entitled "First Home in Day County."

Augusta was the youngest of four children and like her brothers and sister, she spent her days learning the skills that would help in contributing to the families economic welfare. But, when Augusta was not helping her mother or helping her brothers with the cattle, she found entertainment by sketching the life around her.






Annie Dimmock in the mail hack


Prairie fire was of particular interest to Augusta and her numerous paintings of the fires perhaps demonstrates the common occurrence of brush fires in rural western Oklahoma.








In 1908, Augusta married Jim Metcalf and they had a son whom they named Howard. Within a couple of years, husband Jim abandoned Augusta and her son leaving her to raise Howard alone. It was then that Augusta added an e to Metcalf, showing her independence. She did not marry again.

Like western artist, Charlie Russell, Augusta started demonstrating her talent in illustrating the letters and envelopes that she sent to friends. Her reputation as an artist began to grow as she sold painting to friends and neighbors. She exhibited some of her art as early as 1911 and won prizes at state fairs in Oklahoma and Texas. She eventually exhibited her work at the Grand Central Galleries in New York City, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa Oklahoma. In 1968, three years before her death, Augusta Metcalfe was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.


Augusta Metcalfe


Augusta playing the violin

Hugo Oklahoma, Circus Town, U.S.A.

Tom, a friend, proudly told me once that he grew up in southeastern Oklahoma in a small town named Hugo. I thought about that a minute thinking how different Tom’s childhood was from the one I experienced growing up in Detroit, Michigan. I concluded that our lives were certainly shaped by different influences. But Tom and I share two things, we both play bridge, he is a pro, I am an amateur. And, we both love music and play an instrument. Again, Tom is a pro, and I am an amateur. But, what really caught my attention about Tom’s early life in Hugo was when he told me that Hugo Oklahoma was the wintering home of the circus, and that circus people quartered the Elephants in the empty lot next to his house, where they reached their long trunks over the fence to steel peaches from Tom’s tree.

As a kid I loved to go to the circus, which regularly played in Detroit. I can still see the three rings in the large arena and the spot light focusing on the different acts working in those rings.


There was always a dusty haze through which we looked down from our seats in the bleachers. And peanuts, I can remember the bag of warm peanuts we bought from the venders hawking their wares up and down the isles.


Of course I never gave a thought to where the circus went when it left Detroit. I for sure didn’t think that when winter set in the circus headed for warmer climates to “winter.” Florida seems like a logical place to winter and in Sarasota Florida the Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey circus have made the town their winter home since 1927. But Hugo Oklahoma? This rural town of 6,000 in Choctaw County does not seem like the logical winter home for the circus. But since 1941 over 20 circuses have made Hugo their winter home, and today there are four circuses that operated out of the rural Oklahoma town.


The first quarter of the twentieth century was an exciting time for circuses throughout the United States. In 1911, there were over 32 circus shows touring the country. For the most part, they traveled by train, which enabled them to transport all their regalia and animals to selected destinations.


In 1923 the country’s largest circus, Ringling Brothers, toured with one hundred rail cars transporting big top tents that could hold more than ten thousand spectators. Such big shows could require fourteen acres of land to accommodate the equipment, animals and people. The Economic Depression of the 1930s caused many circuses to go out of business. By 1933, there were only three railroad circuses traveling in America. Economic necessity brought a lot of changes to how the circus operated, and truck circuses began to grow with the organization of the Miller Brothers Circus in 1939.


The Kelly-Miller Brothers Circus was a scaled down model of the Ringling Brothers show. The Kelly-Miller circus, and others that took to the road, never reached the status of the bigger shows of the 1920s that traveled by rail. By the mid-twentieth century, the circus, as an entertainment venue, took a back seat to the popularity of movies, television and amusement parks. But, the circus is not dead. The Kelly-Miller circus, one of the biggest to winter in Hugo, has 65 people and 33 vehicles.

Oklahoma is a convenient place for the circus to call home; the state is centrally located, which makes for easier travel plans. When the Kelly-Miller people start their season, they head into Texas in February and work their way north to Massachusetts, then swing southwest to Chicago and eventually back to Oklahoma. In 2008, a quarter of a million people attended the Kelly-Miller Circus.

Hugo is not only the home of several circuses; Showman’s Rest in Mount Olivet Cemetery is the last home and final resting place for many circus people.



In Showmen’s Rest the graves have tombstone with etchings of elephants and statuary of different circus people and animals.





For a really good read about the circus in the 1930s, I recommend the novel, Water for Elephants. The book is extremely well researched and written.

The Billy The Kid Tintypes

Who ever coined the phrase, “lawless frontier” must have had been referring to New Mexico Territory in the late 1870s and early 80s, especially in Lincoln County. The lack of law enforcement in Lincoln County created an environment where ranchers, businessmen and outlaws cheated, stole, fought and killed one another in a series of clashes that eventually caught the nation’s attention. News from this bloody frontier motivated the president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, to remove the New Mexico governor and appoint a new governor, a Civil War general, Lew Wallace, to “clean up” the territory. (At the time, Lew Wallace was writing the epic novel Ben Hur.)

Many authors have written about what happened in Lincoln County, referring to different deadly clashes as the Lincoln County War. As intriguing as the history is of the Lincoln County War, what readers remembered most is one allusive character who sought refuge in the lawless county, and who participated in the fight; a murderer by the name of Billy the Kid.

Billy the Kid has been a part of the cultural lore of the American West since his reputation as a murderer emerged from the details of what happened in Lincoln County. Today books are still being published with new information and new perspectives on the Kid’s life. What follows on Western Americana Blog is a look at Billy the Kid through the lens of a camera. It has been generally known that there is only one photograph of Billy the Kid, one where he is standing holding the barrel end of a rifle. His pose is casual. A six-shooter hangs in its holster loosely around his hip. He is decked out with a vest, scarf around the neck, and a black top hat; His baggy pants are tucked into his boots.



Other than this picture, researchers claim that no others exist. But, It appears that the aficionados of Billy the Kid photographs are wrong. Not long ago an historian, Steve, who is a Billy the Kid enthusiast, was rummaging through an antique shop in Bend Oregon. In one of the displays he found a tintype that looked a lot like Billy the Kid. On further investigation throughout various nooks and crannies in the antique shop, he found tintypes of individuals that Steve believed could have been personalities who participated in the infamous Lincoln County War. If the photographs were authentic, Steve knew he was looking at sought after images that had never been publish. Steve relates his discovery in the article that follows. But first, if you are not up to snuff on your Billy the Kid history then here is a brief synopsis:

The best historical sources have it that Billy the Kid, or Henry William McCarty was born in the early 1860s to Catherine McCarty. Authors assume that McCarty is her married name, but there is no evidence that a Mr. McCarty fathered Henry or his brother, Joe. When the Kid was in Arizona, he took the name, William Bonney. A plausible explanation from one source for this name change is that William Bonney was actually Catherine’s first husband and the father of Henry. As the theory goes, when husband Bonney died, she married McCarty. For some reason, not clear to anyone, the Kid reverted back to his father’s name when he started down the criminal trail.

Explaining why the Kid became a murderous outlaw is difficult. He did grow up in some pretty rough mining camps, was the prototype of an urchin or street kid. But his mother was very hard working and managed to set aside money to invest in land while living in Wichita. In the mining camps in Arizona, where they lived for awhile, she continued her industry and gained the respect of her fellow townspeople. And, the Kids brother, Joe, did not turn to outlawry; he died a somewhat respectable citizen in Denver in 1930. But, an outlaw the Kid became. He killed his first man when he was eighteen while living around Fort Grant in Arizona Territory. After an altercation with the town’s blacksmith, F. P. Cahill, who had a habit of bulling the Kid, a fight ensued, Billy pulled a gun and shot Cahill, who was unarmed. Realizing that he was in jeopardy, the Kid managed to steal a fast horse and quickly left Arizona for New Mexico, where John Chisum, one of the largest landowners, was hiring cowboys; many of whom had sordid past, but Chisum never asked.

John Chisum is a central character in the Lincoln County War. He owned a large cattle ranch in the Pecos Valley known locally as South Spring Ranch. Chisum was the Cattle King of New Mexico, but he had competition from a firm called L.G. Murphy and Company. Murphy, and partner Dolan, owned a general store and trading post in the small town of Lincoln. The men had territorial legislators and the local sheriff in their back pockets. Murphy and Dolan made a fortune by unscrupulous and illegal means. Their biggest financial boom was their contracts with the United States Government to provide beef to the Apache Indians. Their financial return was great because they stole the cattle from the herds of John Chisum. Also in the Pecos Valley were English Businessman, John Tunstall, and Lawyer, Alexander McSween. These two, in silent partnership with John Chisum, established a general store and bank in Lincoln, in direct competition to Murphy and Dolan. So, we have two opposing camps, Tunstall, McSween and Chisum vs. Murphy, Dolan and the local sheriff, Brady.

In 1877, the raids on Chisum’s herds by Murphy’s thugs escalated and Chisum decided to fight back. In discovering evidence that his beef passed through a ranch owned by a fellow named Beckworth, Chisum sent his brother, Pitzer, and Forman Jim Highsow to investigate. A confrontation ensued , where one of Beckworth’s men was killed. This was the beginning of a series of conflicts that became known as the Lincoln County War.

Now, enter Billy the Kid. The Kid was in Lincoln County with other outlaws laying low from the law. He worked at various ranches and was working at the Tunstall (on Chisum’s team) ranch when an 18 man posse, instructed by Murphy set out to deliver legal papers to Tunstall. There was trouble,(Murphy knew there would be) when the posse overtook Tunstall and his men, which included Billy the Kid. Tunstall’s men headed for cover, but Tunstall was too late, he was shot and killed. His partner McSween avenged the killing by sending his posse, which included the Kid, to arrest Murphy’s men. After a shootout, they apprehended two men and rode to Chisum’s ranch, where they spent the night. They locked their two prisoners in one of the bedrooms. After they left the next day, the Kid and his men killed their prisoners and left their bodies beside the road. Sheepherders found and buried the men.

This posse, now referred to as the Regulators, consisted of Dick Brewer, Billy the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Tom O’Folliard, and cousins, Frank and George Coe. Their actions compounded the antagonisms from both sides and escalated the war. Shortly after Tunstall was killed, the Regulators went after a guy by the name of Buckshot Bill Roberts, who Billy the Kid thought was out to kill him. There was a shoot out at Buckshot’s cabin, Buckshot went down fighting, killing Dick Brewer and wounding several more. Billy the Kid now took over the leadership of the Regulators. After Sheriff Brady (a Murphy man) heard about Buckshot’s murder, he wrote out warrants for the arrest of the Kid and his men. On April 1, 1878, the Kid ambushed Brady and killed him. Without a sheriff, lawlessness prevailed, with the kid leading the pack. It was at this juncture that an official, with no love loss for the governor, took the issue to Washington D.C. and President Hayes.

The most significant and penultimate battle of the “War” was in July 10, 1878 when a posse of forty cattlemen and cowboys, with warrants for the Kid’s arrest, converged on Alexander McSween’s house, where the kid was holed up. After a three day siege, and seven men dead, the house burned to the ground and the Kid et el ran for the hills, where they hid out with occasional raids for horses. During one raid, the Kid killed a bookkeeper at the Indian agency, who had tried to stop the men from stealing the horses. The Kid with his gang of thieves and murderers continued to steal horses and stand as examples of complete lawlessness in New Mexico Territory until the new Governor, Lew Wallace, arrived and the citizens elected a new sheriff, Pat Garrett, in the fall of 1880. Garrett apprehend Billy the Kid in the spring of 1881, he was sentenced to death. However, the Kid escaped. Garrett, humiliated and more determined than ever, caught up with the Kid at Fort Sumner in July 1881; Billy the Kid was shot dead by Garrett, who at first thought the Kid was an intruder, but in recognizing his voice, knew it was the Kid for whom he had been looking.



Steve’s narrative on finding The Sallie Chisum Collection of Ferrotypes


It was three days after Christmas 2006. Outside it was five degrees and blowing twenty knots, yet I was perspiring. I was standing in the nick knack cluttered Glenroe antique shop in Bend Oregon. I was mesmerized by a face that looked out at me from a little tintype; a ferrotype really. The photo, still in its original paper frame was of a young man, probably still a teenager. His cheeks had been tinted slightly pink. He seemed to peer nervously at me from inside that red bordered oval. His expression looked as if staring into that yawning camera lens made him feel uncomfortable, as if he was looking down the barrel of a Colt .45.

I stepped to the glass topped counter and spoke to the owner of the shop. Her name, it turned out was Mary Davis. She is a great fan of tintypes. I showed her the picture. She had seen it before. I said to her, “This is Billy the Kid!”. She replied, “That’s nice, he’s six dollars and fifty cents.”

Initially I bought just the photograph of Billy. At the time, I noticed a few other likely tintypes in the pile, but I was so taken aback by finding that first photo that all I wanted to do was to buy it and leave. I paid cash. I drove home. My wife was working in the kitchen. I walked up to her and gently removed the photo from my shirt pocket and presented it to her. I said, “Look, I’ve found a picture of Billy the Kid!“ She glanced at it and said, “Sure you did.” My first of about a hundred rejections.

After a few days I went back to the Glenroe antique shop to see if I could find more tintypes. I sifted through the shelves, bins, and stacks of photos, old cards, sheet music and stereographs. I noted a few dozen tintypes that seemed similar in style, lighting, pose, age and condition. Almost all of them were busts. Some were damaged, a few badly so; but many were nearly like new, maybe a third retained their paper frames. All but one were small, about 2 x 3 ½ inches square. If still in their paper frame they were about the same size of a playing card. I had yet to understand that these photographs belonged to Sallie Chisum and that in all, there were over 70 of them.

Sallie Chisum, her father James and her two younger brothers Walter Pitzer and William James Chisum, along with their cook Mary, arrived in New Mexico in the Fall of 1877. They moved onto James’s brother’s ranch. He was the famous, and in some quarters infamous, John Simpson Chisum. He was a pioneer in the cattle business in East and Central Texas and Southeastern New Mexico Territory. When Sallie and her family arrived they moved into the adobe ranch house along with everyone else in the clan. The Lincoln County War was just over the horizon. It didn’t officially break out until February 18, 1878 when Dolan/Murphy men murdered Billy the Kid’s employer, rancher, store owner, and banker John Tunstall.

Not long after Sallie arrived on her uncle John Chisum’s ranch, she met William Bonney, who worked as a cowboy on various ranches in the Pecos Valley, including John Chisum’s ranch. Sallie and Billy were friends, perhaps more than that. Of Billy, Sallie wrote: “He was brimming over with light hearted gaiety and good humor…He always looked as if he had just stepped out of a band box. In a broad brimmed white hat, dark coat and vest, gray trousers worn over his boots, gray flannel shirt and black four in hand tie, and sometimes-- would you believe it?--a flower in his label and quite the dandy.” She paints quite a picture of the fun loving young fellow. Truth be known, Billy was probably more taken by Sallie than she was of him. To Sallie Chisum, Billy the Kid was probably just another cowpoke vying for her attention. As a matter of fact during 1877-78 and most of 1879, Sallie Chisum was the apple of every cowpoke’s eye from Ruidoso to central Texas.

If the Kid and Sallie had been an “item” their relationship cooled quickly, because a year and a half before Billy was killed Sallie Lucy Chisum married George William Robert, pronounced (Row bert). He was an educated and relatively well off Danish immigrant. In Sallie’s eyes William must have appeared to be a much better match and certainly superior husband/father material than the Kid.


The Tintypes

I have grouped the tintypes into three groups. The first and most numerous are Sallie and William Chisum’s family, another group is Sallie’s Chisum family, the next group is the smallest and consists of Sallie’s women friends, and the last are participants in the Lincoln County War. Sallie understood the Lincoln County War and the forces that caused the conflict. Her uncle John S. Chisum was one of the leaders of the Tunstall/McSween faction. Some of the battles were fought in Sallie’s back yard, or close by. Sallie knew the players on both sides. Her collection includes fighters on the Tunstall/McSween and on the Dolan/Murphy sides. When the posse that called themselves the Regulators arrived at the South Spring ranch with two captives in tow, each suspected in the killing of John Tunstall, Sallie gave the two frightened men her bedroom for the night. It was the only room in the house without a window. The men slept very little. They wrote letters to their families. They suspected that their number was up. It was. The following day while on their way to Lincoln, they were murdered by Dick Brewer’s posse. A posse that included Billy the kid.

The Search For Authenticity

I trust Sallie Chisum’s ability to gather a meaningful group of photographs. She was obviously dedicated to the task. When I consider that these tintypes were about to be lost and that I found them; I must admit that I sense an eerie connection with Sallie. She and I have/had a similar mission. She collected the pictures to remember her family, and to record the visage of her friends, including men who were participants in the Lincoln County War. I am doing the same thing and with the same pictures. In a strange Twilight Zone sort of way, Sallie Chisum and I are partners.

I was thrilled to find these photographs. I wanted to share them with known Billy the Kid scholars. Therefore, I contacted either through email or personally many of the experts. I emailed the English writer, Fred Nolan; considered by many as the living expert on Billy the Kid. I met with Dr. Harwood Hinton, the well known and respected authority on the Chisum family. I visited Bob Boze Bell in his office at True West magazine. He said the images were intriguing. I took the pictures to Lincoln New Mexico, Billy the Kid’s old stomping grounds. I showed them to the director of the museum there. No real interest. We drove to the Billy the Kid Museum in Fort Sumner and displayed the pictures for Tim Sweet the man who runs the private museum there. He found them interesting. I visited the Historical Societies in Lincoln, Roswell, Carlsbad, Silver City and Ruidoso, everyone who saw the photos were intrigued by them. What! I thought. intrigued? interested! How about; wonderful!, enlightening!, or a great and amazing and amazing find! I was a bit disheartened and bewildered. But I kept saying over and over to myself, “These pictures are the real deal, I’m positive of it!” An expert can discount just one photograph, but how about the entire group? I have after all, not only Billy, but many of his Regulator pals as well as Sallie’s family and her Chisum relatives. I have Sallie’s friends, including: Lily Casey, Matilda Davis, Helena Coe, Phoebe Brown Coe, Eliza Jane Hester and a women named Angie Clouse. There are sixty tintypes in all. Then, of course I have William Robert’s European family. Forget Billy the Kid for a moment, consider all of the others!

Everyone to whom I showed the photos, asked me the same question. What is your provenance? I had to honestly reply, that I had none “Aren‘t the pictures enough? Can’t they speak for themselves? I asked. In a word - no.

Consider my plight. I had to find out where those pictures came from and who owned them and how they got to the antique store. What are the chances of discovering an old tintype and then finding out who it was and how it got there? Mary Davis said that a picker brought the tintypes in a year or so prior, but she didn’t recall the individual. People are coming in all of the time giving her things to sell. She said that at the time she was undergoing chemotherapy and the drugs muddled her memory. So I can’t chase down the person who brought them to Mary’s store.

I started an email search. I contacted a fellow who makes old west documentaries. He said that I should contact Steve Sederwall who is a Billy expert and lives smack dab in the middle of Billy Country. Sederwall is one of a group of fellows who wanted to dig up the Billy the Kid grave site in Fort Sumner, and the supposed one in Hico Texas, and Billy’s mother’s grave in Silver City. He wanted to compare DNA to find out who was related to whom. Steve Sederwall is an amazing, larger than life fellow. He told me to contact a well-known and published old west historian who he used to work with. The man wishes to remain anomalous. I contacted him via email. He told me that Sallie Chisum had a favorite niece, whose name was Ara Phillips. He said she was buried in the Hope Cemetery in Oregon.

I Googled Hope Oregon. It’s in eastern Oregon. My wife and I drove out there. We found where Hope Oregon had been, but today there is no Hope. There is an abandoned general store and an old brick schoolhouse that had been turned into a private dwelling.

In a nearby historical society, I met a woman named Betty Elliot. She is the president of the local genealogy club. I told her I was looking for Ara Phillips’ family. She knew them. She told me how to find Ara Phillips’ two sons. Both are octogenarians. One’s name is Fred and the other is Wayne. I called Fred. He picked up during he first ring. “Hello!” He said in a big full voice.

“Mr. Phillips?” I asked.

“Yep, that’s me.” He replied. I explained who I was and that I was studying the Chisum family. I asked him if he knew or had ever heard of Sallie Chisum. He thought for a moment and said slowly, “noooo, I don‘t think so.” Then he hesitated and exclaimed, nearly shouting, “Oh, do you mean Aunt Sallie?”

Fred and Wayne are descendants of Sallie Chisum’s brother, Walter . Walter married Inez P. Simpson. They had three children, James, Oscar and Ara. After Ara’s father died in 1919, Ara and her mother Inez moved to Troutdale Oregon and lived with Ara’s brother, James W. and his wife Effie. In Troutdale, Ara enrolled in a business college and met and married Wayne E. Phillips. They moved onto the family ranch and raised two boys—Fred and Wayne, the men that I interviewed.

Fred and Wayne inspected the photographs. When Wayne came to the cart de visite of the blond headed little boy, who is Fred Robert, Sallie’s son. He demanded to know where I got the picture! He exclaimed with some rancor, “I know this picture! I’ve seen it before! Where did you get this?!” I answered saying that I found it in a store in Bend. I’m not sure that he believed me. I gave him a nice copy. ( Cart De Visite is a type of small photograph patented in Paris in 1850. It was usually made of an albumen print, which was a thin paper photograph mounted on a thicker paper card. The size of a carte de visite is 2⅛ × 3½ inches mounted on a card sized 2½ × 4 inches.)

Why, I wondered did Ara’s two boys only recognize pictures of children in their family? Why not the famous people? Then I found out. They were never shown the pictures. They recalled seeing only children who were also their relatives. I decided that I needed to know more about Ara Phillips, who died in 1974. I was told by her family that Ara seldom discussed her past. They knew that they were Chisum’s and that their family had known Billy the Kid but Ara’s boys did not recall many details.

As far as I could tell all of the Chisum relatives are ashamed of the family’s loss of their New Mexico cattle empire. Certainly Sallie Chisum would never discuss her past, at least after she aged. Dr. Harwood Hinton, the Chisum authority told me that when asked about the old days, Sallie would say, “Talk to Frank.” Frank Chisum was an ex-slave who John Chisum purchased for $6,200 worth of cattle to the Confederate forces stationed in and around Vicksburg in 1862. He became a Chisum and was very much loved by the family.

I was shown some Chisum family photos by members of the Phillips family. Walter Pitzer Chisum, Sallie’s brother, had been their grandfather. Their picture archive contained unknown pictures of the South Spring ranch, as well as Sallie Chisum, young and old, and her children and Inez, among others. I was also shown an early edition of Walter Nobel Burn’s book The Saga of Billy the Kid. It is inscribed to Inez by her Dodge City brother, Dr. Oscar H. Simpson. The family I met in Oregon are real, died in the wool relatives of Sallie Chisum.

They agreed that the photographs that I found in the antique shop in Bend were legit, but they could only actually recall seeing two. I asked them how they could get from their ownership to mine. I was told that after Ara died that her daughter in law held a large yard sale and that she sold everything that she could that had been owned by Ara. Apparently she cleaned out her attic. The women who sold Ara’s things died in 1995.

I believe that the collection of tintypes were sold in the yard sale sometime after Ara’s death. However there is a 30 year gap. There are other branches of the Chisum family living in Oregon who owned and sold Chisum artifacts. They hail from Ara’s two brothers, Oscar and James Chisum, who lived in Troutdale and eventually moved to Gresham, where their mother, Inez is buried. I spoke with a woman who had been married to James. They divorced before James died. She said that Ara’s two brothers fought over the sale of Chisum artifacts to the point that they became estranged and never spoke again. Both are gone today. Maybe the pictures came from them. But I think the yard sale is a more likely source.

The weakest link in this story is how Ara Phillips happened to take possession of Sallie’s tintypes. In 1890, Sallies separated from her husband, and he took their two boys. She married John Sleigman and moved to Artesia, New Mexico. The two divorced in 1905. Sallie, Sleigman, her brother Walter and Ara’s mother Inez ranched for awhile around Artesia. As already stated, after Walter’s death Inez took her daughter and moved to Oregon. It could be that Ara become the owner of the tintypes at this time. For the last 14 years of Sallie’s life, she lived with her grandson. She died in 1934 and is buried in Roswell, New Mexico.

That’s my story. I have left out some details about the Oregon side of the Chisum family in an effort to protect their privacy, but they live here and not far from where I live. The most disappointing aspect of this entire episode has been the non-response by so-called, experts. Some have been quite terse and rude. Others have been patient and respectful, but still skeptical. They center their attention upon the pictures of Billy. It is hard to match mine scientifically with the known image, because that image is in bad condition and indistinct. You can look at the pictures and decide for yourself, but as you are matching things up remember to match up the collection as a whole. What are the chances, after all; of finding not just one picture that looks like a famous Old West scoundrel, but of finding a few score of them, and all of them related to a single place, event, family and time? Many known pictures of these people show them as elderly men and women. Sallie’s collection shows them when they were in fighting trim. Now you can see that Billy the Kid was indeed a nice looking young fellow. He did have blue eyes with little brown specks in them.

Billy the Kid

The two tintypes of Billy appear to have been taken three years apart. The first is a young man, teenager really, nicely groomed, sitting quite posed for the picture.


The second is an older and wiser Billy the Kid. He was posed very close to the camera. The background is pure flat dark gray. He is cooperating with the photographer and is looking slightly down and to one side. He is intently staring at something next to and slightly below him. The picture is, therefore; very clear.


While scratched and slightly damaged it is a beautiful tintype. In style and clarity it looks nearly modern. I think the picture was taken in the Santa Fe jail after the Billy was captured at Stinking Springs on a cold December day in 1880. Billy appears more drawn than in the earlier photo that I think was taken about three years earlier. It looks as if the intervening three years have been hard on him. He is wearing a new suite. After the kid was captured Mike Cosgrove spent three dollars and fifty cents to buy a new suits for his prisoners. The kid got one. Apparently sheriff Pat Garrett wanted Billy to be presentable while he was being sentenced to hang. Billy’s gold watch chain dangles from his button hole, but the watch is hidden from view. Both of my photos are tinted, as are many in the collection. This latter picture of the kid shows his eyes and string tie tinted a light blue. I enlarged the image. I centered on his left eye (His real left eye. I reversed the tintype from the original mirror image.) Yep, Billy’s eyes were light blue with little brown specks, just as Billy’s friend, Dr. Hoyt described them.



Dirty Dave Rudabaugh.

Rudabaugh was another outlaw who road “the outlaw trail” from Kansas across the Soutwest. He and his gang, referred to as the Kansas City Gang, rode into Lincoln County New Mexico just in time to join forces with Billy the Kid and his followers and engage in a rampage of crime across the Territory.

In the tintypes it is amazing to see a tintype of another young man who is wearing a new suite. The young man was also posed near the camera, and was sitting in front of what looks like that same plain gray wall as Billy the Kid.



While Billy appears calm and even friendly, this man’s picture is sinister. His face is a nightmare. He is newly shaven. He glares at the camera. This person doesn’t appear to be too wild about having his picture taken. If this is indeed the person, whom I believe him to be, then this is the only known photo of him - living that is. There are two other possible pictures of this evil looking man, but they are incomplete. They are pictures of his decapitated head. In one, the head is being held between the hands of a gristly looking man, as if he is about to take a two handed set shot with it. In the other it’s perched on top of a long pole. The glaring man in my picture must be Dirty Dave Rudabaugh.


Rudabaugh’s brown hair turns up at the tips, just as it has been described. He appears to have a split lip, as if he had been in a fight. It was reported that he gave up easily at Stinking Springs, but when he arrived in Las Vegas, on his way to the Santa Fe jail an enraged lynch mob tried to get at him. He had killed a popular deputy sheriff there. He looks like he caught a right cross. He has a inexpertly trimmed and sharply angled mustache, a heavy brow and square jaw. After his capture Rudabaugh was jailed in the same jail and at the same time as was the kid. He was also given a new suite. In the photo it appears that his new suite did not suite him. He has torn open the paper collar as wide as he could. He appears to be unhappy, uncomfortable and very angry. The photos of Dirty Dave’s lopped off head are grim. Dirty Dave Rudabaugh was a very grim fellow. His claim to fame was that he is the only man who was arrested by Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp and Pat Garrett; quite a pedigree. People wonder why the Kid tolerated him, it seems unlikely that the two men would get along; their personalities were so different, but they did spend several months together while they were on the run. They were, after all; partners in crime.


The Regulators Photographs in the collection

I found the Coe cousins, George Washington Coe, and Benjamin Franklin Coe. Both men were fellow Regulators and fought along side of Billy the Kid in the Lincoln County War.

George Coe


Frank Coe

The photos were probably taken in 1879, about when they were married. They are relatively young men; shown when they were in fighting trim. I also found beautiful images of their wives, Helena Tulley Coe and Phoebe Brown Coe. I sent these photos to Carl Robert Coe, the Coe family historian. He replied that he was amazed that I had indeed found never before seen images of the famous Coe cousins who had lived on their Glencoe estate near Lincoln, and fought along side Billy the Kid. George lived to 1941; Frank to 1931. The only other pictures of them show them as old men.

Tom O. Folliard
This Photo Shows Tom at about the time he was killed, in December 1880. He was killed by the same man who killed his pal, Billy the Kid.



Sherrif William Brady

The photo of Sheriff William Brady is loaded with clues, and although the image is small; he is not more than two inches tall, it is quite clear. The Sheriff is shown standing on a grassy lawn. He is bordered on two sides by a tall canvas, obviously hung up to be a reflector.



He is standing almost at full length but with his hand leans lightly on the back of a little ornate stool. He obviously wanted to steady himself for the six second exposure. He looks to be an athletic man. He his raw boned , square jawed and appears healthy. He is not the portly man that we see in other supposed pictures of the Brady, but when matched against newly discovered pictures of Brady one can see that my picture is William Brady. He wore a full mustache that put Groucho Marx’s to shame. He appears to be a bit of a dandy. He combed his hair with a prominent and unique swoopy doopy wave that laid on his forehead. Other pictures of him show this same hair style. He is wearing an overly large almost clown like bow tie. He dons a dark suit and wears dusty boots. He has pulled his trouser legs over his boot tops. His square belt buckle has caught the light as has a half dollar sized Masonic Emblem that dangles at his waist. Brady was active Mason. So were most of the Dolan men in Lincoln. So, for that matter, were the Chisums. The Lincoln County War was at least partially a race war. Since the Hispanic population, which outnumbered the Anglos by about 40 to one where Catholic they could not become Masons, but the Anglos who wanted to dominate business in Lincoln could.

Jimmy Dolan, who was Catholic changed to a protestant denomination so that he could become a Mason. (He changed back just before he died. He wanted the Last Rights before he died. He was obviously remained a Catholic at heart.) The white population being Masons could hold their meetings in secret from what they called “The Mexican” population.

Juan Patron was the leader of that Mexican population. He was a friend of the Kid. His picture is part of Sallie’s collection. Juan was shot in the back by Jimmy Dolan who was using a Sharps buffalo rifle. He survived, only to be shot again, and this time killed in 1884.



The Chisum Family

Most of the Chisum family collection are of Sallie and her husband’s family, the Roberts. They include four pictures of Sallie herself.


Young Sallie


Sallie in 1930

One shows her sitting next to her first husband.



Others include s half a dozen photos of the Sallie and William’s two boys, John and Fred. I see them as toddlers, young boys and teenagers. I have a copy of a verified and unpublished photo of the Robert family that I purchased from the Haley Memorial Library in Midland, Texas. Jim Bradshaw, the very helpful and skilled archivist there told me that Mr. Haley met John Robert when the man was living in North Hollywood, California in 1929. He gave Haley the photo and identified himself and his parents. He did not identify his young brother, Fred; who is sitting next to him on his tricycle. John may have purposely ignored his younger brother because by1929, the two boys had become estranged and lived far apart. They didn’t speak.

Charlie and Will

After western artist Charles Marion Russell died in 1926, his wife Nancy asked Will Rogers to write the foreword for a book of Charlie’s illustrated letters entitled Good Medicine. In this introduction, Rogers disregarded celebrating Charlie Russell the artist and concentrated on Charlie Russell the man. “Charlie didn’t have a single earmark on him that we associate with the “artists.” Why he could think twice as straight as he could draw a line with a brush. He was a Philosopher. He was a great Humorist.” This was high praise coming from a man who was easily the most beloved and most popular man in the early twentieth century; so popular with the America people that it concerned Franklin D. Roosevelt that Rogers might heed the call and run for president of the United States in 1932. In reading about both men it is easy to see why they were great friends; they once had worked and lived in the “Old West,” they lamented its passing, and they knew they were symbols of a bygone era.


Will and Charlie

Will Rogers was only one year old when Charlie Russell left his affluent home in St. Louis, Missouri in 1880 to live the life of a cowboy in Montana. Russell was born in 1864 into a wealthy family who had settled on the outskirts of St. Louis in 1803. Charlie’s grandfather James Russell, along with his second wife Lucy Bent, grew vegetables for the St. Louis Market on their large estate called Oak Hill. It was also on this property that they found coal and the avenue to wealth. James and Lucy had four children, their son Charles Silas married Mary Elizabeth in 1858, Charles Marion Russell was their third child.

Both the Russell and Bent Families left an historical legacy; they were pioneers who forged the frontier and helped settle the American West. Lucy Bent’s family is, perhaps, the most colorful, especially her brothers, William and Charles, who are significant characters in the history of the American West.


William Bent

Both Charles and William participated in the growing western fur trade. Charles Bent, ten years older than William, joined the Missouri Fur Trading Company in 1822 and explored the upper Missouri River and the Yellowstone country. In 1827, 18 yr. old William followed his brother into the West; he also worked for various fur companies. In 1829, the brothers helped to establish and promote the Santa Fe Trail, which became a commercial link from St. Louis to northern Mexico. In 1833, William established Bent’s Fort at the confluence of the Arkansas and Purgatory Rivers, a way station and trading center on the Santa Fe Trail.


Bent's Fort

In Toas, at one end of the Trail, Charles opened a store and married a Mexican Woman. Meanwhile, back at Bent’s Fort, William married a Cheyenne woman(Owl Woman). After the Mexican War when United States took possession of New Mexico in 1846, Charles Bent became the first Governor. Soon after, however, a gang of Mexicans and Indians murdered him in his adobe house, body mutilated and scalp pinned to the door.

When the federal Government tried to seize Bent’s Fort, William burnt it to the ground; after that he had great animus toward the U.S. Government. He eventually rebuilt the fort down stream. William had two sons, Charles and George. Both boys were in the Civil War, fighting for the confederacy. After the war, the boys lived with their mother’s people, the Cheyenne, and joined the warrior Dog Soldier Society. They lived the life of full blood Cheyenne; they participated in buffalo hunts, they fought in Indian wars, they took white scalps, and they fought with the Cheyenne at what became known as the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864. The atrocities at Sand Creek by U.S. Army Troops, the killing and mutilation of Cheyenne women and children turned Charles against all whites, including his father’s people. He engaged in many atrocities against whites on the Plains, and became the most wanted outlaw in the West. In 1868, Charles was wounded in a fight with the Pawnee, caught malaria and died. At that time, his cousin Charles Marion Russell was four years old.

Even though the Russell and Bent families disowned Charles and George,the exploits of Grandma Lucy’s brother’s families were nothing but exciting stories of adventure to a young boy growing up; it is little wonder that Charlie Russell left home at sixteen to seek his own adventure on the Montana frontier.


George and Magpie Bent

While Charlie Russell had to leave home to become a cowboy, Will Rogers came by it naturally. William P. Rogers (they called him Willy) was born in 1879 on the Oklahoma Frontier near the present town of Oologah, Oklahoma.


Will Roger's Home

He was of Cherokee decent, his ancestors moved to Indian Territory before President Andrew Jackson forcibly removed the Five Tribes from their eastern homes and resettled them on the western lands in 1832. Will Rogers grandparents Robert and Sallie Rogers, first settled in Indian Territory in a fertile valley overlooking the Ozark Mountains near the Arkansas border. They were prosperous cattle ranchers (and slave owners) who raised horses and grew corn, wheat and fruit. Will’s dad, Clem, was born in 1839. Clem grew up to be a very ambitious and ultimately successful rancher and politician, he won political office as a district judge in 1877, a seat in the Cherokee Senate in 1879, and in 1907, he was a delegate to the constitutional convention for the new state of Oklahoma.

Like many mixed-blood Cherokees, Clem sided with the slave holding faction of the Cherokees and fought for the confederacy during the Civil War. After the war, he invested in cattle and built a sizable ranch near the present town of Claremore Oklahoma. Will Rogers grew up on the ranch, where riding and taking care of horses was the center of his life. Cowboying came natural to Rogers and as a young man he was fascinated with the “art” of calf roping. His horse, Comanche, was a good roping horse and Rogers became a very efficient roper. He especially picked up on roping techniques adapted from Mexican Vaqueros. Lariats were common equipment for any cowboy and much of their leisure time was spent refining their roping skills. It was this skill that enabled Rogers to make a living as a young man when the wanderlust took hold of him and he started traveling the world in Wild West Shows. His trick roping finally landed him a job in Vaudeville, where his roping act expanded to include chatting and joking with the audience, and making humorous comments about the politics of the day. In 1918, he performed in the Ziegfield Follies, which started him on his way to a successful career as an entertainer. From Ziegfield he moved to the new art form of motion pictures. He eventually moved with ease from silent films to talkies. During his lifetime, he made over 71 movies. He was easily the most popular man in America in the late 1920s and early 1930s.



Will Rogers the performer

There are various stories on how Charlie Russell and Will Rogers met. One suggests that they met at the 1906 St. Louis World Fair, (Louisiana Purchase Exhibition celebrating the centennial of the Louis and Clark Expedition). They were both participants in the Fair; it was a very successful exhibition for Charlie Russell. At the turn of the twentieth century, Charlie Russell was no longer riding the range in Montana. He loved the life of a cowboy, but even as a cowboy he carried a sketchbook often recording the Montana where he lived and worked, or he sculpted a figure out of clay that he customarily carried in his pocket. By 1906, Russell had a following, a catalogue of paintings, and a wife, Nancy, who was good at marketing his work. Nancy understood the growing enthusiasm in America and Europe for the culture of the American West. She interpreted this fascination as nostalgia for a by-gone era and saw correctly that her husband’s paintings were popular because of the romantic image he depicted of the nineteenth-century West.

Will Rogers was in St. Louis the same time that Russell’s exhibition opened at the Fair. Rogers was performing with a Wild West Show out of Oklahoma called The Mulhall Congress of Rough Riders and Ropers—the show ran concurrent to the Fair. The Mulhall cowboys were asked to be part of the Wild West show at the Fair, which included the once sought after renegade, Geronimo. It is recorded that Will saw Russell’s Paintings exhibited at the Palace of Fine Arts, he commented, “He is the only Painter a cowboy can’t criticize—Every little piece of leather or rope is just where it should be.”

If Will Rogers and Charlie Russell did not meet at the St. Louis fair 1906, then it was soon after. By 1910, they were good friends and part of a growing group of westerners looking at New York City as a place to get their “start.” To be an artists or entertainer in America at the turn of the twentieth century would inevitably lead to New York City. Both Will and Charlie landed in New York soon after the World’s Fair ended in 1907. Will was trying to sell a few jokes and Charlie was trying to sell a few paintings.

In New York they hung around with other westerners who were in the City hoping to advance their respective careers. But, they never gave into the influence of the eastern culture, they hung tenaciously to the Old West; they were bastions against the modern advances of the twentieth century. These bastions would meet at the apartment of Ed Borein, a friend of both Will and Charlie.

Ed Borein (1872-1945) was from California and was a self-taught artist.



He went to art school in San Francisco for a short period of time, but left to work as a vaquero at one of the Spanish ranches in Northern California, where he learned to rope, herd and brand cattle. He settled in New York City in 1907 working as an illustrator for Sunset and Colliers magazines. He found fame as an artist and as an interpreter of the Old West. His flat became a gathering place for those who sought opportunities in the East but longed to be in the West. Ed’s third-floor loft was a museum of western artifacts, Mexican blankets, rugs, costumes, hats, ropes, and saddles. But, perhaps, most familiar to those who walked in the front door was the smell of cowboy beans that was always simmering on the back burner of Ed’s stove.

Others who gathered at Ed’s flat or at Charlie’s studio were stage actor; Leo Carrillo (1880-1961)


Leo was born in Los Angles and raised in the San Diego area. During his acting career, he appeared in 15 stage plays and 90 motion pictures. He is, perhaps, most remembered for his part as Poncho in the T.V. series, the “Cisco Kid.” Fred Stone (1873-1959) was also a regular. He began his career at the age of ten when he started performing high-wire acts in the circus. From the circus he moved to vaudeville to Broadway to motion pictures. During his time in New York with will Rogers and Charlie Russell, he started on Broadway in ”The Old Town.”

Charlie and Nancy Russell’s home was in Great Falls Montana, but since the big art shows were in New York City, and the East held many consumers of all things western, the Russell’s started for New York each winter transporting a fresh supply of Charlie’s paintings. During this period, Will Rogers was becoming more popular with each show he performed, eventually garnering star billing in the Ziegfield Follies. When movie opportunities became more numerous, He packed up his family and moved to California in 1918, first living in Beverly Hills (before it was THE Beverly Hills) and then to his ranch in Pacific Palisades in 1929.


The gang at Harry Carey's Ranch in California. Will is missing, but Charlie Russell is in the front row and behind him is Will's wife, Betty, and their two children. Also along side the Roger's clan is Nancy Russell.

Both Russell and Rogers continued to gain fame in the 1920s and both were getting high dollar for their work. But, as busy as they were building their careers, they continued to get together with each other and with those who shared cowboy beans in New York. The “westerners” were now living in the West where they perhaps looked less conspicuous in their cowboy boots and hats. Among their friends were Ed Borein, Fred Stone, William S, Hart,(1964-1946) Harry Carey(1914-1998), Russell protégé, Joe De Yong(1894-1975) and Charlie Lummis.(1859-1928).

In 1925, Nancy contracted to have a home built in Pasadena, California called “Trails End" The home would give Charlie a respite from the Montana winters. By this time Charlie had numerous ailments and Nancy hoped that the southern California sun would be good for him. This was also a very busy period in his life. Nancy had lined up more work than an ailing Charlie could complete. His health continued to deteriorate through 1925 and he died before he could settle into their new home. Russell died on October 24, 1926 at his home in Great Falls, Montana. Russell left a legacy of paintings that captured his longing for the Old West, a West of which he had only a fleeting acquaintance.

And Will Rogers. In 1920s Will Rogers became more popular with every passing year. He was fortunate to live in California at a time when there was still a lot of space to develop a ranch, to have his horses, and to have his steers to rope. He was never without his rope and when bored with nothing to do, he would go out to his corral and rope a steer or two. As the prosperous Twenties moved into the Depression of the Thirties, Rogers endeared himself even more to the America people with his observations of the Economic Depression and his commentary on personalities in government and society, who either helped of hindered economic recovery. But, he was always the adventurer and kept an extremely busy life, including his love of flying. Nine years after the death of Charlie Russell, Will Rogers , along with pilot Wiley Post, died in a small plane accident near Point Barrow, Alaska.


Will Rogers and Whiley Post

Will Rogers’ and Charlie Russell’s popularity in the early twentieth Century grew out of the fascination Americans held about the American West being the “last frontier.” It was a romantic notion that incorporated the ideal of frontier independence, a place where “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” type man lives. Art consumers could see it in Charlie Russell and his art and theatre patrons could see it in the persona of Will Rogers.

Unbridled Cowboy--Book Review

The best kind of western history is a history written by an author who can draw upon his own experiences to relate a good authentic story. Such is the case with Joseph B. Fussell who wrote Unbridled Cowboy. Fussell was born in Tyler, Texas in 1879. As a young man, he worked as a cowboy in the Southwest and Northern Mexico. Fussell also worked as an undercover agent for the Texas Rangers. In Unbridled Cowboy, Fussell describes what life was like in the West at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Fussell died in 1957.



Unbridled Cowboy
(Truman State University Press, May 1, 2008)

The Autobiography of Joseph B. Fussell

Synopsis


Unbridled Cowboy is a riveting firsthand account of a defiant hell-raiser in the wild and tumultuous American Southwest in the late 1800s. At the age of fourteen, Joe Fussell hopped trains to escape from school and the authority he scorned. Joe became a roving cowpuncher across the Texas territory, tilling the land, wrangling cattle, and working in livery stables, moving on whenever his feet began to itch. In a time and place with no law, the young cowboy exacted revenge on those who trespassed against him or those who abused authority. Joe recounts tales of cowboy adventures, narrow escapes, and undercover work as a Texas Ranger. Even after marriage, a spark of his wild cowboy spirit remained during the rise of the railroads in the Southwest when he worked as a switchman and yardmaster. Joe's unadorned prose is as exposed and simple as the wide open Texas plains. His unpretentious and unique voice embodies the spirit of the Wild West.


J.B. Fussell

Dorothy Johnson's American West

"Bert Barricune died in 1910. Not more than a dozen persons showed up for his funeral. Among them was an earnest young reporter who hoped for a human-interest story; there were legends that the old man had been something of a gunfighter in the early days. A few aging men tiptoed in, singly or in pairs, scowling and edgy, clutching their battered hats—men who had been Bert’s companions at drinking or penny ante while the world passed them by. One by one they filed past the casket, looking into the still face of old Bert Barricune, who had been nobody. His stubby hair was white, and his lined face was as empty in death as his life had been. But death had added dignity. One great spray of flowers spread behind the casket. The card read, “Senator and Mrs. Ransome Foster.” There were no other flowers except, almost unnoticed, a few pale, leafless, pink and yellow blossoms scattered on the carpet steps. The reporter, squinting, finally identified them: son of a gun! Blossoms of the prickly pear.”

So read the opening of Dorothy Johnson’s short story, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”(1949) To the true western aficionado, the opening should sound familiar. But yet it differs considerably from the story adapted by Hollywood writers and made into a movie starring Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Lee Marvin and Vera Miles.

Along with “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” Dorothy Johnson’s “The Hanging Tree”(1957) and a “Man Called Horse”(1949) became successful western films. Even though Johnson approved of the movie scripts, and was somewhat of an advisor during the filming, the movie versions of her short stories lose some of the realistic, and at times dark nature, prevalent in most of Johnson’s writing. Hollywood’s adaptation of Dorothy Johnson’s stories reaffirmed the mid-twentieth century romantization of all things western, an image that defined western expansion in the American mind for many decades. But in her stories, Johnson presented the West as a tough unforgiving place occupied by desperate people who had hoped to better their condition by moving westward. It is ironic that while Johnson strove to create a realistic West for her readers, Hollywood changed the very elements in her stories that gave the West authenticity.




Dorothy Johnson was born December 19th 1905 in McGregor Iowa. When she was six years old her family moved to Montana, first settling around Great Falls but eventually moving to Whitefish in northwest Montana. After high school graduation, Johnson studied creative writing with English Professor H.G. Merriam at the University of Montana in Missoula, graduating in 1928. But like many writers, instant success was not in the cards. After graduating from college with a Degree in English, she held various office jobs in Washington D.C. and worked for a publisher in New York City for fifteen years. She worked by day and wrote by night eventually selling her first short story in 1930 to The Saturday Evening Post for $400.00. But, it was another eleven years before she sold another story. Johnson returned to Missoula in 1950, where she worked as a secretary-manager for the Montana Press Association, a teacher in the School of Journalism at the University of Montana, a speaker, and a writer. Recognition for her work came in 1959 when Hollywood bought the rights for two of her short stories, “The Hanging Tree” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” During her sixty-year writing career, Dorothy Johnson wrote 17 books, 52 short stories, and countless articles.


Dorothy Johnson and fellow Montana, Gary Cooper

“The Hanging Tree” was the first of Johnson’s stories to be made into a movie. The story written in 1949 is about the desperate life of characters in a nondescript mining town in the Old West. The story opens with Doc Frail,( played by Gary Cooper) on foot, leading his horse into Scull Creek. The trail leads him under “the out thrust bough of a great cottonwood tree.” Doc immediately noticed a rope hanging from the tree: “his muscles went tense, for he remembered there was a curse on him.” As the story evolves the reader finds out that Doctor Joe Frail was, in really, Dr. Joe Alberts; a man embittered by a scandal in Missouri involving his wife and his brother. The reader is to believe that whatever happened in Missouri it made the doctor cynical; he saw only the worst in men.

The doctor had little to do with others in Scull Creek until the Lost Lady, or Elizabeth Armistead, arrived in town. While in route to Scull Creek, road agents robbed the stage that carried the nineteen-year old woman and her father. The two had hoped to settle in Scull Creek, a last resort for the father who had dishonest dealings in other towns where they had lived; their financial fortunes were gone and their luck had run out. On the stage with the Armisteads were travelers who, like Elizabeth and her father, were at the end of life’s options; they had no other place to go. As Johnson described them, “A tramp printer named Heffernan was dreaming of the riches to be got by digging gold out of the ground. A whiskey salesman beside him was thinking vaguely of suicide, as he often did during a miserable journey.”
Road agents held up the stage and shot the father and driver. The gunshots spooked the horses resulting in a run-away stage with Elizabeth inside. Three days later a search party found Elizabeth, the lost lady, in the desert blinded from the sun and dying of thirst. Her rescuers took her to Scull Creek, where Doc Frail helped her to recover her sight. The ordeal caused the lost lady to lose her self-confidence; she would not leave the security of her cabin. But Doc Frail, now in love with the woman, believed that Elizabeth needed to leave Scull Creek, a place not suited for her or any “civilized” person.

The Lost Lady became an object of the town’s gossip, especially her association with Doc Frail, who never endeared himself to the town’s people. The story climaxed over the inflammatory rhetoric of an itinerant preacher who used the town’s gossip to incite the crowd against “sinful” behavior. Doc, hearing the preacher’s ranting about Elizabeth, confronted him and when things got out of hand, Doc killed the preacher. The angry crowd hauled Doc to the hanging tree. These circumstances forced Elizabeth to leave her cabin and walk through the gathered crowd at the hanging tree. She boldly stepped forward out of her closed-in world to offer the men holding the rope all of her gold (gained from an investment in a gold mine) if they would free the doctor. They agreed. In the end, Elizabeth helped herself by helping the doctor.

The movie version the “The Hanging Tree” (1959) differed considerable from Johnson’s novella; the characters are not depicted as forlorn and desperate. In the opening scene, the viewer sees the hustle and bustle of wagons, horses and people. All against a back drop of Mountains and a rushing stream.



The immediate impression is of a successful progressive West, although the limb of the dead cottonwood tree dominates in the foreground as if to foreshadow events to come. The most apparent change between Johnson’s story and the movie adaptation is the transformation of the characters. The female character, Elizabeth, is not the sad helpless female depicted in the original story. In the movie version, Elizabeth is the image of a pioneer woman; she is strong and showed her independence when she invested in a gold mine and worked along side her partner, Frenchy. She asked that he treat her like a man. But, Doc had to come to her rescue when she was attacked by Frenchy, who made no secret of his attraction to her. When Doc heard her scream, he raced into the cabin and shot Frenchy. (In the novella, Doc shot the preacher). The town’s dislike for Doc, along with the venomous rhetoric of the preacher, produced an angry mob, who marched Doc to the hanging tree. The ending is the same as in the Johnson’s short story; Elizabeth bought Docs freedom with gold produced from her partnership in the mine.



In “ The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” and “A Man Called Horse,” Johnson used a familiar construction that was typical of the western genre of the 1950s; easterner goes west and ultimately wins against the savage nature of people and environment. But, Johnson’s resolve is quite different. In Johnson’s stories the harsh nature of western society defeats the civilizing agents as is represented in her male lead characters.



Ransome Foster in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” was an educated Easterner from a wealthy family, who escaped to the West after quarreling with the executor of his father’s estate. Johnson depicted Foster as a weak unworthy man who was full of self-doubt and lacked what it took to survive in the West. Two other main characters, a waitress named Hallie, and her somewhat worthless boyfriend, Bert Barricune, are portrayed in contrast to the greenhorn, Rance Foster.

The reader first meets Ransome Foster after Bert Barricune found him wandering around on the Prairie; he had been beaten severely by Liberty Valance. It is in this scene that the author sets the tone of story:

When Barricune found him on the prairie, Foster was indeed a tenderfoot. In his boots there was a warm, damp squidging (sic) where his feet had blistered, and the blisters had broken to bleed. He was bruised, sunburned, and filthy. He had been crawling, but when he saw Barricune riding toward him, he sat up. He had no horse, no saddle and, by that time, no pride.

Begrudgingly, Barricune offered Foster a hat full of water, a bedroll, and food, but then left the tenderfoot to fend for himself. The two met again in the sheriff’s office three days later, after Rance Foster walked into town to lodge a complaint against those who attacked him. The Sheriff, however, saw no crime and dismissed the matter.

Foster then saw that he would have to be the one to kill Liberty Valance. This realization seemed to change him. Johnson depicted Foster as a pathetic character filled with hate. He was, “haughty, condescending, and cringing all at once. He spoke with a jaunt sneer as if he expected to be kicked.” To survive he begged for food or stole it off the plates of others at the Elite Café, where he met Hallie. The waitress had sympathy for Foster and helped him to get a job. She also suggested that he start a school; she was one of his students.

This is basically all the reader knows about the relationships between Hallie, Foster and Bert Barricune until the end of the story when Ransome Foster meets Liberty Valance in the street for the shootout. Ransome is prepared to die, killing Liberty Valance will redeem his manhood, it is all he could ask. There are three shots fired, Valance is dead and Foster is hit in the shoulder and knocked unconscious. When he regains consciousness in the back room of the Elite Café, he sees Hallie attending him and Bert in the background. When Foster and Bert were alone, Bert told Foster that it was he who shot Liberty Valance. Foster was dejected; “ That is all I had to be proud of.”

Bert Barricune was the hero of the story. He was Foster’s backbone, his inspiration to pursue the Law, and to become a judge, a state legislature, a governor, and a United States senator. Foster had to live with the fact that he owed all in his life to Bert Barricune: “Bert Barricune, who never amounted to anything, but never intruded, was a living, silent reminder of three debts: a hat full of water under the cottonwoods, gunfire in a dusty street, and Hallie, quietly sewing beside a lamp in the parlor. And the Fosters had four sons.”

When script writers rewrote Johnson’s story for the movie they made Ransome Foster, (now Ransome Stoddard) a hero, who, when confronted by the lawless Liberty Valance, insisted that the law was to be upheld, it is what is expected in a civilized society. And although Bert, (now Tom Doniphon)



shot Liberty Valance so that Rance could bring law and order to the West, and steal his girl in the process, Doniphon shared the hero status with Stoddard.



Dorothy Johnson was known for her meticulous research, this was especially seen in her stories about Native Americans. “A Man Called Horse,” is one of her many stories that centered on Native American life.



The story depicts a white well-to-do young man from Boston who goes West in the 1840s to try and put meaning to his life. But his real journey begins when he is taken captive by a band of Crow Indians. Johnson does not sugar coat her narrative concerning the cultural life of the Crows. Written before the era of political correctness, which dictates most writing today, Johnson is refreshing in her accurate portrayal of the rituals, customs and daily life of Native Americans. In describing the capture of the easterner:

He heard gunfire and the brief shouts of his companions around the bend of the creek just before they died, but he never saw their bodies. He had no chance to fight, because he was naked and unarmed, bathing in the creek, when a Crow warrior seized and held him. His captors let him go at last, let him run. Then the lot of them rode him down for sport, striking him with their coup sticks. They carried the dripping scalps of his companions, and one had skinned off Baptiste’s black beard as well, for a trophy.

Johnson made it clear throughout the story the white man’s status among the Crow: “They took him along in a matter-of-fact way, as they took the captured horses. He was unshod and naked as the horses were, and like them he had a rawhide throng around his neck. Once in the Crow camp, the man of no consequence is given to an old shrew of a woman, he would be her slave. She used him like a pack horse, a beast of burden.”

The old woman, named Greasy Hand, treated the white man as she treated her dogs; he fought along with the dogs for scrapes of meat, and a place to sleep. He understood his tenuous position in the tribe, and the wrath of the old woman:

Just how fitful her temper was he saw on the day when she got tired of stumbling over one of the hundred dogs that infested the camp. This was one of her own dogs, a large, strong one that pulled a baggage travois when the tribe moved camp. Countless times he had seen her kick at the beast as it lay sleeping in front of the tepee in her way. One day she gave the dog its usual kick and then stood scolding at it while the animal rolled it’s eyes sleepily. The old woman suddenly picked up her axe and cut the dog’s head off with one blow.

Over time, the white man learned the Crow language and understood that he needed to acquire status in the tribe if he was ever to escape. His opportunity came when he was playing “hunting” with the young boys. Away from camp they came upon two Indians from an enemy camp. The white man was the first to kill the men, count coup, and take their horses. It pleased the people back in the Crow camp that the white man had shown the bravery of a warrior--With this new status, the while man’s conditions improved. By the end of the story, he is in high regard, and he found that he now had what he needed to leave the Crows. But, he could not bring himself to leave Greasy Hand; she had lost all her sons in battle; she had no one to take care of her. In the Crow culture, an old man or woman who had no relatives, and who could no longer take care of themselves, would be cast aside, no food, no lodge, and no protection. The white man was Greasy Hands only provider. He stayed with the Crows until she died, then he left and traveled back to Boston where he said very little to any one about his time in the West.

The Movie version of “A Man Called Horse” filmed in 1969 closely followed the book in depicting Crow Culture. It is so realistic that it is difficult to imagine that the movie would be filmed with such authenticity today. Without the book narrative, cultural rituals are little understood and subsequently reinforce the nineteenth century view of the savagery of Native American Society. For example, the movie depicted the barbaric ceremony practiced by the Crows that celebrated a young man’s bravery, and their ability to receive a vision. In the movie scene, Crow men prepared the easterner( Now from England, played by Richard Harris) by piercing his chest with sharp sticks. Then a rope is lowered from the Lodge smoke hole and tied it onto the “skewers” in the man’s chest. The rope is pulled upward suspending the man while participants take turns swinging the body back and forth.



The viewer flinches with the thought that the skin is being ripped apart as the man swings.

The ceremony tested of the man’s strength to withstand the pain, and receive visions, his success initiated him into the tribe. As a member in good standing, he could now find a way to leave and return to his home. But, he stayed to protect the old woman. At the end of the story, he rode off into the sunset with the other warriors; the viewer is left with the impression that he prefers Crow society to the one he left in England. Hollywood recast the easterner, now Crow Warrior as the hero.

Besides these three stories, Dorothy Johnson wrote two other books of note, The non-fiction, The Bloody Bozeman,(1971) and the novel, Buffalo Woman. (1977) In both books, Johnson utilized her understanding of Native culture to write excellent accounts of the conflict between two cultures, and the effects of conquest on the Native people. In The Bloody Bozeman, Johnson detailed the reasons and logic behind the creation of the Bozeman Trial, the short cut route that left the Oregon Trail around Buffalo Wyoming and traveled north to the Montana gold fields. Unfortunately for many pioneers and military, the trail went through the Powder River Country, the favorite hunting grounds of the Cheyenne and the Sioux. The clash of two cultures over occupation of the Trail and the Powder River Country ultimately forced the United States government to close the trail and abandon the three military forts.



And, finally, Buffalo Woman. Not only is this book an excellent narrative of Native culture, it chronicles Indian life during the transition from an independent people to a dependent and dispossessed people on the run. Dorothy Johnson received the prestigious Spur Award from the Western Writers of America in 1956 for Buffalo Woman.



Dorothy Johnson’s West little resembled the West created by writers who adhered to the Western Genre of the 1940s and 1950s. Her research and knowledge of the West helped her to create realistic stories, where there were few heroes and where conflict with Native Americans bought out the worst in men, Red or White.

Salt Warriors--Review

SALT WARRIORS: Inesurgency on the Rio Grande.
By Paul Cool.
Texas A&M University Press, 384 pp. $24.95.



In the minds of many Texans, El Paso is an afterthought. So far from the political and commercial epicenters of the state (actually closer to California than to Louisiana), residents of this distant and ancient community often identify themselves more with the desert Southwest than with the rolling prairies and plains of the Lone Star State.

At no time was this more true than in the 1870s, when El Paso (originally named "Franklin") was a remote outpost with no telegraph or railroad. Travel from Austin could take a month. Even urgent communications took weeks to exchange. Perched across the river from Ciudad Juarez, El Paso served for centuries as a crossroads for Indians, conquistadores, missionaries, settlers, armies and outlaws. Blessed by a flowing river watered by the snow melt from mountain peaks, it produced fat cattle and the "finest wine in the world."

Salt was another valuable area "crop."

About 100 miles north of the tiny communities along the river, there for the taking, lay a vast field of salt derived from prehistoric lakes. In hard times people could gather and transport the mineral for sale in Mexico, where it was used in silver production. The "Salt Lakes" had been more or less ceded to the locals for free use under Spanish rule, a tradition continued under the Mexican and Republic of Texas flags. Following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which established the border between Mexico and the United States, people assumed the practice would continue.

Certain entrepreneurs didn't agree. George B. Zimpleman, an Austin lawyer and businessman, acquired rights to the fields and demanded payment from the Paseños, or valley residents, who routinely gathered the salt under the hostile threat of Mescalero Apaches and border bandits. Zimpleman's son-in-law, Charles Howard — crack shot, El Paso legislator, jurist and businessman — tried to enforce those rights, which brought him into conflict with Louis Cardis, an Italian-American and political champion of the Paseños.

This clash of wills resulted in what came to be called "The Salt Wars," which lasted roughly from 1873 until 1878 and led to the deaths of hundreds. The conflict saw assassination, corruption, political maneuvering, the exile of hundreds of American citizens, ruthless vigilante justice and what nearly became an international incident leading to a second war with Mexico.

Summarizing the particulars in a few sentences is impossible. Nevertheless, Paul Cool, a Social Security administrator, has admirably unraveled the constantly changing details, and done so in a fashion any professional academic historian could admire.

Cool's account of the background of the armed conflict that erupted in 1877-8 is clear and straightforward. He spends about half the volume setting the scene. He notes that the area around El Paso was at best confused as to national identity — a majority of the locals still regarded themselves as culturally, if not politically, Mexican — and was the scene of general lawlessness and frequent fights.

He describes the chaos that came in the wake of Reconstruction, a migration of carpetbaggers, entrepreneurs, political hacks, felons and villains of every stripe, joined by powerful ranching and business interests, cattle rustlers, road agents and hired guns. Indians constantly harassed the community. The final ingredient was a Hispanic population heavily influenced by a firebrand priest who stirred the Paseños into a state of unrest and discontent.

The center of the conflict was not El Paso itself. In the winter of 1877 the tiny town of San Elizario became the site of an all-out shooting war between what was variously called a "mob" or "insurgency" and a makeshift company of Texas Rangers who were trying to maintain some vestige of law and order, although some of them were themselves notorious criminals and gunmen.

Key players in the unfolding tragedy are too numerous to name. Suffice to say that in addition to the Paseños and the Rangers, there were U.S. Army troopers led by a cowardly and ineffective commander, outlaws, including desperate thieves and murderers from New Mexico, corrupt sheriffs and state and federal agents, and dissembling Mexican officials.

Cool's account reads with sprightly concision, although he occasionally drifts into the melodramatic before checking himself. Well-documented and chronologically well-organized, the narrative keeps who's who and what's what foremost in the reader's mind. Given the amount of name similarity, inaccurate or incomplete documents and other points of complexity, this is no small accomplishment.

More maps would have helped. A single small, crude chart appears on Page 179, long after geographic references are needed.

The Salt War is more or less a forgotten chapter of Texas history. In many ways it's an embarrassing revelation of ineptitude and bigoted political heavy-handedness on the part of Texas political, judicial and police officials, and of incompetence and sometimes disgraceful behavior on the part of the Army. But at the same time, it's a reminder that Texas, like much of the West, was carved out of a raw frontier in a frenzy of struggle by men even the best of whom were deeply flawed.

Clay Reynolds is professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. His recent books include Of Snakes and Sex and Playing in the Rain and Sandhill County Lines.
Comments