The Legend of Bass Reeves, page 1
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DR. FRANKLIN’S ISLAND, Ann Halam
THE CANNIBALS, Iain Lawrence
HOW I FOUND THE STRONG, Margaret McMullan
With utmost respect
for his focus and resolve
this book is dedicated to
peace officer
David Thomas.
FOREWORD
Think of the American West as the Wild West. These phrases conjure up a vision of our past filled with mountain men and Indians, cattle drives and cowboys, desperadoes and gunfighters. But the Wild West lasted only a very short time, from perhaps 1830 to 1890. At most, sixty years.
Yet that era has had a powerful effect on our culture. Clothing, speech and the frontier mentality of that time are widespread and popular to this day. Every year, it seems, Hollywood produces a new crop of films and television programs that draw from the myths and legends of the Old West. There are even social clubs where members dress as cowboys and practice quick draw, mimicking what they believe gunfighters did.
The men of the West we now regard as legendary figures loom large in our culture, many as daring criminals, some as heroes. But actually, there weren’t very many of them.
There was Kit Carson—mountain man, trapper, explorer—who was said to have been one of the first white men to reach the Rocky Mountains.
Jeremiah Johnson—another mountain man, trapper and supposed explorer—was the inspiration for dime novels of the time and a popular film in which Robert Redford starred a hundred years later.
William F. Cody, known as Buffalo Bill—scout, Pony Express rider, hunter—was another subject of popular novels of his day. He originated the famous Wild West Show, a huge hit in America and Europe.
Wyatt Earp—a lawman who became a legend in his own day—was also a character in adventure books of his time. Ned Buntline, who wrote many of those little melodramas, commissioned the Colt firearm company to make a special long-barreled handgun that he could present to Mr. Earp.
Wild Bill Hickok—so well known back then that Buffalo Bill tried to make him a star of his show—was the focus of dime novels that featured his prowess with a gun and his courage in upholding the law. Numerous films were later made about his heroism.
William Antrim—called Billy the Kid and known for fighting in the Lincoln County War of 1878 to 1881 in New Mexico—was supposed to be a master gunfighter and tragic hero who was gunned down at the age of twentyone. Publishers and Hollywood loved his story too.
Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and the Hole in the Wall Gang were a group of train and bank robbers. Because of Hollywood, Robert Redford and Paul Newman, they’ve become known as raffish, almost lovable scoundrels.
The American West stretched from St. Louis, Missouri, to California and the Pacific Ocean, from Canada down to Mexico. Physically, the West was huge. But it was very small in terms of population. When it was time to look for heroes, people had to take what they could get. This might be one reason that most of these figures lose credibility when examined more closely.
Much of Kit Carson’s fame came from mercilessly attacking Native American people during battles in which he led groups of poorly trained and poorly disciplined men notable for committing atrocities. He had such a big ego that he insisted on being called Colonel Carson, though he’d never been in the army.
In reality, Jeremiah Johnson was completely insane. He was known as Liver-Eating Johnson because he hunted Crow Indians and, after killing them, ate their livers raw.
Buffalo Bill Cody came closer to living up to his legend. He was a scout, an explorer and a hunter and had ridden for the Pony Express as a boy and scouted for the army in the Indian Wars, during which he truly did face a Native American warrior in man-to-man combat. But his fame was largely built on his tracking down often helpless Native Americans with the army and killing them. As a hunter, he slaughtered hundreds, if not thousands, of defenseless buffalo that stood in herds on the wide-open plains. He spent his later life starring in his own show, posing for portraits, life masks and hand molds, and promoting his legend.
Wyatt Earp could be the classic case of the legend having little to do with the truth. He had been a sort of lawman in Dodge City, Kansas, and in Tombstone, Arizona, but he was no hero. He went to Dodge City because he was a fugitive horse thief from back East. At the time, this was a hanging offense. In Dodge, he gambled and managed a string of prostitutes for the cowboys who came up there on trail drives. He stole from almost every drunk he ever arrested (and there were many) and was finally “asked” to leave town because he was known to mistreat and offend even the rough trailhands who came up with the cattle drives.
Seeking his fortune in Tombstone, Arizona, Earp engineered a showdown with a group of men who were in financial control of the little boomtown and shot them down in the famous gun battle at the OK Corral. He had arrived thinking they were unarmed and helpless, but it turned out they had weapons. Once again he gambled and managed prostitutes. He spent the last years of his life in Hollywood, manipulating his legend into a more favorable light by courting movie stars like William S. Hart and Tom Mix and publishing his own versions of the truth.
Wild Bill Hickok was a chronic alcoholic and gambler who was only in one true gunfight in his life, during which he killed a man because the fellow had won Hickok’s watch in a poker game. Hickok was so incompetent that one dark night, in an alcoholic stupor, he shot and killed his own deputy, thinking the man was sneaking up on him. Hickok died drunk, shot in the back of the head while gambling in a saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota.
Billy the Kid was a shiftless coward who shot men in the back, murdered his own friends and killed a deputy who was guarding him as the man pled for his life. Billy was so afraid of being captured and punished that he wrote a letter to the governor of New Mexico saying that if the governor would pardon him, he would turn against all his friends, his so-called gang, and testify against them. He was a horse and cattle thief, a drunkard and a merciless killer who was reputed to have shot an unarmed clerk simply because Billy wanted his horse. When he was finally gunned down in Fort Sumter, New Mexico, by Pat Garrett, many thought it was a rightful end to a brutish, short and squalid little life. Today he’d probably be called a sociopath and a serial killer.
Butch Cassidy and the Hole in the Wall Gang were criminals, plain and simple, not the easygoing clan of Robin Hood–like characters we know from films and folk legend. The real men robbed banks and trains and stole cattle and horses. They were thugs who attacked unarmed men and innocent women and children. They blew up a railway express car with so much dynamite that they maimed and crippled everyone inside. Hunted and driven out of the United States, they were shot down during a grubby attempt to rob a bank in South America.
All in all, poor stock to consider when looking for role models from our frontier.
And yet …
And yet …
There was a man who truly qualified as legendary and heroic.
He was born in 1824, lived until 1910, and was the most successful federal marshal in the history of the United States. Working in the Indian Territory, he brought out thousands of fugitives. He was involved in fourteen gunfights that resulted in the deaths of his opponents. True to the mythical code of the West, he never drew first and most often let the other man shoot before he returned fire. He would ride alone into hideouts containing whole gangs of fugitives to get his man. In these attempts he was the target of hundreds of rounds of gunfire. His hat and clothes were riddled with bullets, his horses were killed, his gun belt shot off his body, boot heels shot clean away, rifles shot to pieces.
Miraculously, he was never wounded.
This man was honest and honorable. He rejected countless bribes, and when his own son killed his wife, he tracked his son down, brought him to justice and sent him to prison for life.
His name was Bass Reeves.
He was an African American.
And this is his story.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Ever since I first heard of Bass Reeves, I have wanted to write about him, and make Bass come alive to readers.
This book moves back and forth among three sections that discuss the facts of Bass’s life and times, and three imagined sections that follow him from his boyhood until he was an old man. I shaped the book this way because there was so little written about Bass Reeves in his day. Most information about him in books is based on word of mouth. There aren’t many accounts to refer to beyond a few newspaper articles and records of the arrests he made. The fictional sections are based on events in Bass’s life, as well as my own experiences riding, hunting and living rough in the West. The part about his boyhood is the longest because to me it was the most important part of his life, the fire that forged him.
1
SPRING 1834
The Witch Dog
The boy lay under a mesquite bush to get shade from the Texas sun and watched the cow intently.
She was a longhorn with horns a full five feet across. He’d seen horns that size cut men and kill horses, so he waited. She was about to go into labor, what he called getting calf sick, and when she was actually having the calf she couldn’t attack him. Then he would run up, drop a noose arou
The cow moved and he studied her with a knowing eye. She was huge for a cow, with flat sides and many scars from running through brush and fighting other cows.
It would be another half hour, at least, before labor. She wasn’t even hunched yet.
“You take the rope and the log,” the mister had told him. The boy never thought of him as the master, though legally he was, like all white men who owned slaves. The boy’s mammy had told him:“Your name is Bass, and ain’t no man your master. Not now. Not ever. We got to do what we got to do ’cause of the white man’s law. But that don’t make no man your master in God’s eyes.”
Bass studied the horns. They came around so fast, and sharp, sometimes you almost couldn’t see them move. Once he moved in too close on an old brindle cow and just the tip of a horn caught his trousers. Cut them open like a knife.
“Zzzzzttt!” The cloth almost sang. They were no-’count pants anyway, handed down from the mister, all patches and held up with a piece of tow over his shoulder. He knew his mammy would sew them up, but he didn’t like the feel of the horn swinging by that close.
Another inch and I’d have been looking at my guts, he thought, squinting in the sun. Pulled out on a horn like wet rope. He’d seen cow and pig guts when they slaughtered, horse guts once when a bull hooked a mare that wasn’t paying attention. He did not want to see his own.
Now he heard movement in the mesquite off to the right and waited. Might be the mister sneaking to see if he was working. Make sure he was doing.
No need at all, he thought. I work all the time. Not for the mister. I work because it makes the time pass.
It was two coyotes, low on their bellies. They knew there would soon be afterbirth for them to eat.
Bass watched them. They did not know he was there, back in the shady hole where he’d had to scare out a rattlesnake. The snake had buzzed some and then left when he pushed it with a stick. He didn’t like snakes. He wasn’t afraid of them—how could you be scared of something that couldn’t crawl faster than a slow walk?—but they were always mad. Seems like they bit just to be mean. His mammy told him of one that crawled in a cradle and bit a baby and killed it. Why? Baby wasn’t doing a thing. Sometimes Bass killed snakes, especially around the house where they could get a dog or cat or baby pig or a chicken. But when he was out in the mesquite or down at the creek bottom, he let them be. If, he thought, they let me be. He didn’t like killing things without a good reason.
The mister, now, would take his percussion pistol and shoot anything. Lizards off a rock, songbirds off a rail. Or try to. Whenever he got hold of a whiskey jug, he couldn’t hit the ground, let alone a bird on a fence.
Now, it was something, how the coyotes knew when a cow was ready. Maybe the smell, Bass thought, or they might be witch dogs. His mammy told him that, back in New Orleans where she was from, there were witch dogs that could tell you things if you knew how to understand them. She didn’t know how to talk to the dogs but her mammy could do it, could give a witch dog molasses, and when it wrinkled its lips to lick the molasses off its tongue, she could tell if someone was going to die or when they would have a baby, and was it a boy or a girl.
“Mammy said the power skips,” Bass’s mammy told him. “Didn’t come to me, but maybe to you, to read the witch dogs. Mostly women have it, but I didn’t have a girl and won’t be no more chirrun. So if it happens, it will have to be you.”
Bass was seven when his mammy told him that, better than three years ago come fall. He had lifted a jug of blackstrap molasses from the pump house and tried it on one of the mister’s old tick hounds. He tried it so often the dog took a liking to it and followed him around all day, waiting to have his tongue wiped with molasses.
Problem was, Bass remembered now as he watched the coyotes move toward the cow, problem was it gave the hound the black skoots. Dog messed the yard and the pump house and all over the porch, and Bass had to quit because the mister said he was going to shoot the hound if he didn’t stop messing.
Bass never learned anything from the hound but that it liked molasses and had a straight pipe for a gut. It was a good dog and Bass felt bad when one day a snake cooling itself by the pump house bit it between the eyes. Killed that hound. After that, whenever Bass saw a snake in the yard, he would get a hoe and chop it and feed it to the pigs.
There. The cow hunched. Her labor was starting. Bass gathered the rope and the log. The coyotes saw him and one looked straight into Bass’s eyes and moved its lips.
At first he couldn’t believe what he saw. The coyotes were thirty-five yards away, just past the head of the cow, but when Bass shook his head, the coyote was still looking at him, straight up into his eyes. And the animal’s lips moved.
Things will change.
Bass wasn’t sure if he heard it or felt it like a touch on his skin, but the phrase was there. In his head. As clear as if somebody had said it aloud. And it came from the coyote.
Things will change.
“What will change?”
He said it so loud that the coyotes both jumped and the cow started and turned to see him for the first time, though she didn’t move, couldn’t move now that her labor had begun.
The coyotes didn’t answer him, either aloud or in his head, but they didn’t run. Instead they stood, one looking at the cow, the other staring directly at Bass.
“Are you a witch dog?” Bass said.
The question hung there until the coyote turned slowly and deliberately to look at the cow.
The cow.
It was time. The mister said Bass had to get one cow a day on a tangle rope, and the sun was going down fast in the west. He held the log under his arm, readied the rope, and just as the cow started to push the calf out, he rose and ran past her head, dropping the noose neatly over her horns as she swung to hook him, but missed him because she couldn’t move her body fast enough to match the swing.
The loop tightened and the hemp bunched at the bottom of her horn, against her head. It would stay and tighten when she tried to move through the mesquite later.
Still the coyotes did not run. They waited for the afterbirth, or the calf if it was born dead. Bass walked up the small rise, heading toward home.
Evening sun was coming, and though it was still hot, he could feel a coolness through the heat. Off a mile was the mister’s homestead—five adobe mud huts with sod and grass roofs laid out in a rough circle. There was a mesquite fence around the outside to hold stock in, or Comanches out if they came to raid. Bass had never seen them, but had heard talk. Everybody feared them, even the mister with his rifle and pistol.
It wasn’t much of a ranch. His mother had told him of plantations around New Orleans where even the slave quarters were better than the mister’s adobe shack. But this was all Bass knew. The mister had won Bass’s mother in a poker game in Austin when she was pregnant with Bass, and she had come here with the mister a month before her due time. Something had gone wrong and she had nearly died when Bass was born. Now she could have no more children. Luckily Bass had been born healthy and big.
The mister only had one other slave, Flowers, an old man who was nearly blind. There was something wrong in his head because he couldn’t talk. He spent most of his time splitting wood and fixing harnesses. Sometimes, when a harness didn’t need fixing, he would tear it apart and put it together again. He was nice enough to Bass, but mostly ignored him like he ignored everything.
As he walked into the small yard, Bass saw Flowers splitting wood. Then he trotted to the pump house near the mud hut where he and Mammy and Flowers lived and slept.
Bass drank with the slave dipper. The water was cool from the well, almost sweet, and he drank until his stomach was tight and full. Then he went to the mister’s hut and called into the door.
“Mister, Mister, it’s Bass.”
