Roy Bean, page 4
Among those present was a very large, very bad man who figured he was about as tough as they came and who frequently described himself as “the bloodiest man in the Cherokee nation.” It seemed to him that this was a good chance for a little humorous byplay, so he swaggered over to the little man, announced himself loudly, and shouted, “I’m going to kill you if you just open your mouth!”
Roy saw the beginning of trouble and shouldered his way up.
“Here,” he said, “stop it! This boy is patronizing my bar and I’ll protect him.”
The little man now spoke up for himself. “I thank you,” he said politely to Roy, “but the gentleman is not dangerous, in my opinion, and won’t hurt anybody.”
Then he whipped out a small pistol with one hand and held the bully up, while with the other he lit a cigar. When the stogie was going, he made his man stand still while he shoved the burning end up his nose.
It turned out that the little fellow was Joe Stokes, a brother of the man who later shot railroad magnate Jim Fisk.
“Little Joe Stokes was the Napoleon of the San Gabriel Headquarters,” says Major Bell, “until a late hour of the day when he and myself rode into Los Angeles.”
Major Bell’s picture is the last we get of Roy at the crest of his early career. The next time he appears is at the establishment of his brother Sam at Mesilla, New Mexico, four or five years later with all signs of prosperity gone. No red-topped boots now; no silver-hilted bowie knife—he was a derelict with hardly enough clothes for decency.
What had happened?
Well, for one thing his luck had changed as did that of hundreds of other Californians. About the time Joe Stokes put on his act at the Headquarters the boom began to play out in California and there were many bankruptcies. Roy was shrewd but he was no Wall Street financier. He must have suffered like everybody else.
The reason he himself gave for his departure was more romantic. It seems, as usual, that there were a Mexican girl and a Bean mixed up together. In this case there was also a Mexican officer who meant to marry the girl. She being unwilling, Roy came to the rescue and carried her off himself. The officer dared him to the duelling ground. Accustomed as he was to duels, Roy killed his rival, but soon found he had started something he couldn’t finish. The dead man’s friends took the matter up, waylaid Roy, and hanged him to the nearest tree. The rope stretched, however, allowing his toes to touch the ground and giving him a chance to hold onto life until the girl he had rescued appeared and cut him down. After such a narrow squeak he decided he had better make tracks.
Whether it was woman trouble or bankruptcy or both that chased Roy out of California, one last fact should be mentioned. For the rest of his life he carried a red mark around his neck where the rope had burned his hide. Usually he covered it by tying a bandanna over it, but he showed it to his friends. As a result of the same episode his neck was always stiff as a board and he had to turn his whole body when he wished to turn his head. Usually he looked out of the corner of his eye at anything approaching from the side, not shifting himself unless he had to, a mannerism which made him seem like a much stealthier character than he really was.
WAR IN NEW MEXICO
IF ROY BEAN could come back to New Mexico today he would recognize Old Mesilla. In eighty years it has given up much of its life but none of its character. Forty miles from El Paso and two from Las Cruces it is a hundred years from them both in point of time. A handful of venerable brown adobes dreaming under the great alamo trees, the church in the middle, are all that remain of what was once a capital city, but History stands on every corner and peeps from every window.
When Roy’s horse limped down the dusty main street in 1858 or ‘59 Mesilla was a lively place. It was the halfway station where the east-bound and west-bound stages met as they went jouncing across the continent. It was the trading center of a vast area just opening up for development. Its streets and saloons were crowded with teamsters, miners, Indians, gamblers, prospectors, settlers, fugitives from justice, and just plain people.
Roy liked Mesilla at once. It was the sort of place the Bean brothers always headed for—a frontier community on the make where pushing Americans could get theirs without too much regulation and interference.
Sam was easily located. His loud voice, audible for half a mile when the wind was right, would have given him away in the absence of other signs. Roy did not have to rely on his ears, however, for Sam was an important person in Mesilla and ran one of the biggest places in town. It was a combination store, eating house, saloon, hotel, and gambling den, and his business netted him, he said, two hundred dollars a day in flush times (it is admitted by all that he loved a good story). Besides his store, he operated a freighting and hauling business, carting people, building material, food supplies, furniture—anything—as far as his customers could desire and pay for.
And that was not all Sam had to be proud of. Like his brothers he dearly loved to shine in public office, and when Roy arrived Sam was draped in an official toga big enough for a dozen ordinary men. He was serving his second term as Sheriff of Dona Ana County. That doesn’t sound extraordinary, but it was. This was just after the Gadsden Purchase and Dona Ana County stretched hundreds of miles to the west into what is now Arizona. And Sam was the boss of it all, or should have been.
It was really a job for a dozen men. Sam complained that he was almost powerless as an officer of the law because by the time he was able to reach the scene of a crime in the remote corners of his county, the criminals had crossed the border and spent two pleasant weeks in Mexico.
Sam was a pretty bright fellow, perhaps the best of the Bean brothers mentally, and he did the intelligent thing. He allowed the laws of Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest to operate in his territory. He didn’t even carry a gun.
For the third time in ten years Roy somersaulted from destitution into prosperity by means of a brother. Sam said later that Roy was “practically naked” when he arrived at Mesilla and didn’t even have an extra shirt.
“But he was my brother,” said Sam, “so I got him some clothes, had him shaved and cleaned up, and gave him some spending money.”
Some responsibilities came Roy’s way too. With his experience at the Headquarters he was able to make himself useful and the brothers began to be spoken of as partners. In 1861 they decided to expand the business and picked out Pinos Altos as a promising site.
Pinos Altos was a bonanza mining camp in the mountains above Silver City and a hundred-odd miles from Mesilla. It sprang up in 1861, boomed briefly, and then went into a decline for the period of the Civil War. Roy and Sam were there early and set up in business on Main Street. Copies of the Mesilla Times for 1861 carry their advertisement as dealers in “merchandise and liquors,” adding the further lure of “a fine billiard table.”
There was money in it for a few months. Then the Civil War broke out. The miners began leaving to enlist in one army or the other. The Indians crept closer and the boom petered out. In the fall of 1861 the Apaches made an especially fierce attack on Pinos Altos. Fifteen Apaches and three miners were killed, and only a few white men were willing to remain after that to risk their scalps for gold. Among the heroic souls who stayed Roy and Sam Bean were not numbered.
There was enough to keep them occupied back in Mesilla, what with one thing and another. They had five lawsuits on their hands that fall—attachments and replevins—and then there was more and more feeling about the war. It took some time for the county to get worked up to serious action, but hot words were spoken and blows were struck. Then there were riots and street fights. Eventually a Confederate flag flew in the main street, the Union men were invited to go elsewhere, and Mesilla was proclaimed Territorial Capital of what the organizers called Arizona.
Nothing could have pleased the Bean brothers better. Sam told his friends long after the war that he had tried to be neutral in the interest of business, but of course nobody could be neutral and besides the Beans were from Kentucky.
Roy was actively partisan and did some unofficial military service for the South. Major Bell, who kept up a correspondence with him for forty years and is usually reliable, says that Roy “assisted in organizing a company of Confederate sympathizers that called themselves the Free Rovers. Others called them the Forty Thieves. After the failure of the Texas campaign in New Mexico, the Forty Thieves disbanded.”
The Free Rovers had no muster roll, no formal organization, and no connection with the enlisted forces of the Confederacy. There is no record of their activities, and the natural deduction is that they were a very informal group welded together by love of country and of portable property belonging to somebody else.
A year before his death Roy loosened up a little and discussed this part of his life with a well-known collector of Texana, A. J. Sowell. He was “identified with the forces of the Confederacy under General Canby,” reported Sowell in the San Antonio Express.
Roy Bean was attached to the command of General John R. Baylor as spy and scout and was present when General Baylor, through stratagem, captured 800 Federal troops in a deep canyon where they had been located by Bean, and demanded their surrender, stating that the balance of his men, 1000 in number with artillery, were in sight. These men, 250 in number, were scattered over several miles of country coming in squads and raising a great dust. The Federal officer surrendered, but after the arms were stacked and the fact of the small force of Baylor disclosed, his chagrin and anger knew no bounds. He cursed and raved and, as the saying is, tore his hair. Bean speaks in high terms of General Baylor and says that while he was rough and to some seemed to be over-bearing, his judgment was good, his bravery and confidence in himself to accomplish things were sublime. The artillery of General Baylor as mentioned above consisted of one swivel gun mounted on a mule which always knocked the mule down when it was fired.
In spite of the shrewdness and heroism of Bean and Baylor, New Mexico could not be held for the Confederacy. The little army from Texas won the battle of Glorietta and then retired southward, taking a backwash of Confederate sympathizers along. Included in this backwash were the Beans.
Roy seems to have left first, and there is a story about that. Sam Bean told it to his friend Joe Dwyer one time when Mr. Dwyer was resting from his labors as customs inspector on the International Bridge between El Paso and Juarez.
“I had to go to Santa Fe on business,” said Sam, “so I showed Roy how to open the safe, told him to put the money in it every night, and give the gamblers their little sacks in the morning. Well, I got back a few days later and Roy wasn’t there. The safe was locked and those gamblers were about ready to cut Roy’s throat and mine too. I opened up the safe and it was plumb empty—not a penny inside—and maybe you think I didn’t have to find some money quick to satisfy those gamblers!
“There was a good horse and saddle missing too. I never did see much of Roy after that.”
Roy gave his own version of the flight from New Mexico, omitting mention of locked safes and missing saddle horses, to A. J. Sowell:
“Judge Bean was in several Indian fights in New Mexico and finally started with a wagon train to Texas. Following the train was Mr. Van Riper with 300 head of mares, which he was trying to get to Texas. On the way the Indians attacked them, coming from the rear. Van Riper saw them coming and rushed his stock up to the wagons and the battle was fought with no loss to the whites except in animals, four of Van Riper’s mares being killed. After the train moved on, the Indians had a feast on the dead bodies of the stock, building large fires and roasting them, meanwhile dancing and singing, all of which could be seen and heard from the train in camp at night. On the next day the Indians overtook the train again and had another fight and as before were beaten off, but killed some more of Van Riper’s stock and had another feast. This was the last seen of them.”
Roy went to earth in San Antonio which was thoroughly Southern and a beehive of Confederate business. The Yankees were blockading the coast and a great deal of exporting and importing was carried on through Old Mexico. The hauling business looked good to Roy. Soon he was running cotton down the river to the British ships ready off Matamoros, and bringing back supplies to the Confederate soldiers and civilians. For the rest of his twenty years in San Antonio he combined the occupation of teamster with several less laborious ways of making a living.
Sam Bean spent the war years in San Antonio too, but when the fighting was over he made up his mind to go back to New Mexico. Back he went and found that his glory had departed. His property had been libelled for treason; Union men had bought life interests in the “Rebel estates,” including his; he had nothing left.
One story survives showing how a Bean, even a Bean by marriage, could meet such a situation. When Mrs. Sam Bean found her house occupied by Union squatters, she put on a sad face, knocked on the door, and asked if she might come in and look at the old home where she had lived so long and in such happy days. Of course she might come in. And when once she got inside they never got her out till the place was hers again.
Still things were not the same for Mr. and Mrs. Sam Bean. After a while they moved to Silver City and then to Las Cruces, where Sam died nearly forty years later and where his memory is still green. He was a peace-loving man compared with Roy, but was pugnacious in argument and could be heard all up and down Main Street when he ran into tough opposition. He used to go to the Methodist church in his later years and functioned as a sort of ministerial alarm clock, yawning loud and long when the usual time limit for sermons was passed.
He wrote down many of his memories, some of which he published. Among his unpublished papers are versions of several of the Roy Bean yarns. One of them begins: “You may have graduated at Yale or Harvard and carry a number of diplomas, but if you have not seen or heard of Judge Roy Bean of Texas you are groping in darkness and there yet remains a large space to be filled in your classical head.”
It appears that neither empty safes nor missing horses nor years of separation could destroy the bond between one Bean and another.
“THE DEFENDANT, ROY BEAN—”
SAN ANTONIO is today the closest thing to an old Spanish town in the United States. Seventy-five years ago it was as Mexican as chili peppers. Patriarchal clans with melodious names ran the commercial and social life of the place in the old-fashioned way. Politics was a family matter. There were a great many Germans and Frenchmen and Americans who moved in their own tight little circles, but everybody picked up the Spanish language and slid into Spanish ways.
Roy Bean liked that. He liked the way people loafed half a day at a time on the shady side of an adobe house telling stories. He liked the smoke and clatter of the cantinas in the evening. He liked the green, mesquite-studded Texas landscape on which the town sat so comfortably—the clear streams of water puttering cheerfully along the busiest streets—the lavanderas washing clothes on the banks—the small boys scandalizing the washwomen by swimming naked under their noses.
He liked the people—the proud men and the beautiful girls with their brilliant eyes and the soft, dark bloom on their cheeks.
He liked the Mexican view that every man had a right to his own vices.
And so he left the Frenchmen and the Germans and the Americans to enjoy their own society while he went Mexican. He naturally lost caste by it when the Mexican element gave up its predominance, and he is not spoken of with much respect by the few surviving Americans who knew him in those days, but for the first few years, at least, he got along all right. There wasn’t so much race prejudice then, and besides the war kept people from worrying too much about minor matters.
Everything seemed to come his way at first. Next to running a saloon he liked best to work with horses and wagons, and freighters were just then in great demand. The railroad was still many years off and every day the monstrous, white-topped freight wagons rolled majestically off to Laredo or Brownsville or Brazos Santiago.
Perhaps the business wasn’t quite what it had been when the caravans pulled out regularly for El Paso. There weren’t any soldiers for escort duty now, and the Comanches lurked hungrily all along the western road, hoping that God would send them just one wagon train. Still business was pretty good, for the Yankee blockade off the Gulf coast made hauling from Mexico necessary and profitable.
All in all Roy found blockade running a very good way of making a living. For one thing every bale of cotton which got to England was a trick won from the North and Roy always enjoyed putting something over on the Damyankees. There was also the money. How it rolled in! In a remarkably (you might say suspiciously) short time he had accumulated several thousand dollars’ worth of property in teams and wagons. He bought good clothes and smoked expensive cigars and strutted to his heart’s content. He used to brag, in leaner times, that in those early and prosperous days he had been in the habit of lighting his cigar with a five dollar bill.
Anybody who knew him will be sure that he found a way to burn his bill and have it too.
Women and timid men were afraid of him. His body was thicker now and he had the burly bulk of a prize fighter. His beard was black and thick and his sharp eyes glittered through the underbrush of hair and whiskers. To these natural advantages he added a mastery of the great game of bluff and a hair-trigger temper which could make him really dangerous sometimes. On the whole he wasn’t as bad as he acted. He was just an ambitious American without much conscience, trying to get ahead in the only way he understood. So he outdrank the dryest, outswore the toughest, and outguessed the smartest.
It took several years for his victims to get stirred up enough to fight back, but the time came when they had put up with enough. As a result Roy broke out, in the year 1866, in a rash of lawsuits. Three separate times in the fall term of court he was brought to the bar of justice and three separate times he beat the rap.
