Emerson Hough, again

Here's the last word about Emerson Hough before I move on to his fiction. Wrapping up my own notes on his book, The Story of the Cowboy (1897), I thought there might be interest in a subject he covers in one chapter - the range wars of the frontier - and two in particular, the Lincoln County War (c1880) and the Johnson County War (1892).

Lincoln County War. Having lived for a time in central New Mexico, Hough had heard plenty about the Lincoln County War. Little is really known for sure about that conflict, he admits. It took place in a time and place without modern news gathering as it existed in 1897. But he passes along what he’s heard and gives it his own spin. It was a time, he says, when the bravery of hardy and determined men confronted the savagery that lies at the heart of human nature

According to him, this “war” resulted in the deaths of 200-300 men. The villain at the center of it all was Billy the Kid, who gets painted by Hough as one mean desperado. Dead at the age of 23, he was credited with the killings of 23 men. He and his gang were said to have mercilessly shot seven Mexicans, “just to see them kick,” though it’s not clear whether Hough counts any of these among the 23.

This reign of terror developed into open warfare when Billy took on wealthy cattleman John Chisum, who defended himself and his property with a band of armed men of his own. Hostilities finally reached a flash point in the streets of Lincoln, where Billy eventually escaped from a burning house.

All of which is only somewhat accurate.

Hough makes no mention of the actual antagonists in the Lincoln County War. These were Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan on one side and John Tunstall and Alexander McSween on the other. We now know that Billy became directly involved in this conflict of interests when Tunstall, who had hired him, was murdered.

Hough provides his own version of events right up to Pat Garrett’s shooting of Billy. It is a scene told in detail that corresponds closely to the accounts of modern historians. It’s interesting that Billy’s final moments were known so well at the time, even while much of his story was the stuff of legend and hearsay.

There’s no mistaking where Hough’s sympathies lie. He portrays Billy as a scoundrel and a ruffian, who’d murdered his first man when he was only fourteen. Historical records show that he was actually sixteen at the time and he never killed more than nine men – maybe as few as four. He was also just 21 when he died.

Hough would surely have been appalled to know that Billy was to become a folk hero, still admired 130 years later. For him, the hero of the story is Pat Garrett, who as sheriff put an end to the young criminal. Pat Garrett, he reports, “is a respected ranchman, as pleasant a man as one would ask to meet” (p. 309).

The Round-Up, F.W. Schulz, 1907

Johnson County War. This range war had taken place more recently in Wyoming. Though only two lives were lost in the conflict between cattlemen and rustlers, it was covered extensively by the national press. Still, Hough chooses to put more confidence in the oral accounts given to him from individuals directly involved on both sides.

And both sides were in the wrong, he argues. The rustlers, with their own duly elected sheriff in Buffalo, were no better than a loosely organized form of organized crime. But the band of vigilantes with their death list of 125 names were more to be scorned, for their foolhardy and cowardly behavior.

For the most part wealthy men from the East, they knew nothing of the plains. The twenty cowpunchers from Texas they hired as mercenaries should have been in charge. Stupid mistakes would not have been made, and the vigilantes wouldn’t have ended up besieged in a ranch house and requiring rescue by the troops from a nearby Army post.

Worse yet, these men fled to the protection of the law, which they had so openly flouted. And with their money and influence were able to escape justice for the killing of the two “rustlers,” Nate Champion and Nick Ray. Hough even portrays these two men sympathetically. He reports the content of a letter found on Champion’s body, describing his last hours in the house where the vigilantes have held him under siege.

Hough points out that there were cowboys on both sides of this conflict, living by the code of the West. And only among those can be found men who acted honorably in this “unpleasant” matter – for such a man shows true courage: "Misguided and impulsive perhaps, he was always eager to be where the fighting was thickest, and there he conducted himself as a man according to the creed under which he had been reared” (p. 323).

Photo credit: Billy the Kid, wikimedia.org

Coming up: More cowboy memoirs and Emerson Hough's Heart's Delight (1905)

Book: Pasó Por Aquí

There’s a playful mood throughout Eugene Manlove Rhodes’ Good Men and True and Bransford of Rainbow Range. This novel, Pasó Por Aquí is pretty thoroughly serious.

Adobe Church, Cordelia Wilson, New Mexico, c1920

It is a study in qualities of character, as it seems to have been understood in the West. And it boils down simply to the Golden Rule. Do unto others. This is Rhodes’ story most often regarded as his best. Though not his last work (it was first published in February 1926 in Saturday Evening Post), it feels like a writer in middle-age looking back over his career.

In 1926, Rhodes was 57 and returning to New Mexico after an absence of twenty years. It’s said that coming back was a disappointment for him. The New Mexico he’d known was gone – gone with Pat Garrett, killed on a lonely road in 1908.

The story. There are familiar Rhodes elements in this story – a man being pursued by the law, detailed descriptions of long rides on horseback, an intelligent and articulate woman, and characters pretending to be someone else, with an assumed name. The location is also familiar, the Tularosa Valley.

Main Street, Hope, New Mexico, c1900

Like Good Men and True and Bransford of Rainbow Range, the novel starts with a conversation. This time it’s a scene of idle badinage between a young woman and a young man who is trying to court her. She is a nurse at the Alamogordo Hospital. He is an Easterner, of no particular talent and subscribing to no particular work ethic.

They learn of a robbery that has taken place in Belen, far off in central New Mexico, near Albuquerque. The robber held up a storekeeper at the point of a shotgun, which later turned out to be not loaded. About to be apprehended by a posse, he threw down the money he’d taken and escaped again.

The hero. There’s a comic touch to all this, but the tone turns more serious as the point of view shifts to the young man on the run. His name is Ross McEwen and he’s riding, riding, riding south, until he’s passing through the Tularosa Valley on his way to Mexico.

Yucca, White Sands, New Mexico

It’s not easy going because the valley has become settled with ranches. He marks his progress by the windmills he steers clear of, staying out of sight of riders he sees in the distance.

He’s hungry and thirsty and his horse is wearing out from the long ride. Eventually, he ends up on foot, crossing the White Sands. There he comes upon an isolated cabin where a Mexican family has fallen sick with diphtheria. And without a second thought, he stays with them, tending to them in a desperate and exhausting attempt to keep them alive.

Pat Garrett

A signal fire eventually draws to them none other than Sheriff Pat Garrett, who sends his deputy to Alamogordo for food, water, and medical help. Seeing the exhausted young man, he tells him to get some sleep. Though the young man calls himself by another name, it’s clear Garrett knows who he is.

The story resolves itself (again, no spoilers; read it) in a way that’s a lesson in integrity. The black-and-white world of standard brand morality loses traction out here in the West. What we get is a man on the wrong side of the law who behaves heroically, while a law-abiding one (the Easterner) is little better than a jerk.

Western melancholy. Reading about the West, you often find under the can-do surface a deep current of melancholy – a sense of loss. It takes many forms. For some it is about promises unfulfilled, and the West has surely seen as many dreams dashed as fulfilled. Maybe more.

Long before there were environmentalists, westerners lamented the loss of the wilderness, the demise of the buffalo and other wildlife, the loss of the open range and the freedom of the frontier.

It was said of Rhodes that he was a melancholy man himself. It’s not hard to think of reasons. His life was not easy. As the oldest of his siblings, he went to work at an early age. And while people remembered him fondly, he was the kind of person who found solace in books. One gathers that he would have gladly stayed on in college to complete his education if there’d been the money.

After the Snowfall, Cordelia Wilson, New Mexico, c1920

In his novels, he seems to create a hero like himself, but who lives in a world cut more to his size. It’s filled with loyal friends, and when he falls in love, the girl has a temperament that suits him, and she loves him back. It’s a comic world, where difficulties are overcome with wit and intelligence. And all is grounded in the New Mexican landscape that he loved.

The melancholy, alas, emerges in Pasó Por Aquí. What is past beyond retrieving, Rhodes seems to be saying, is the West where a person’s character counted. Like Wister in The Virginian, he puzzles over what makes a person “good.” But he comes up with another answer.

In this novel, self-sacrifice while coming to the aid of the undefended is the evidence of true worth in an individual. To give all where it’s needed is the true test of moral integrity. It matters more than reputation, which may be either good or bad, and it outweighs any misdeeds that may get someone into trouble. What this resembles is the unwritten Code of the West, which existed before the arrival of the law.

Maybe it’s a sentimental view – the good-bad man we often find in westerns. But Rhodes frames it in a much larger vision. The perspective is that of not just a single lifetime but of time itself. Surely the vastness of the western landscape invites this point of view.

El Morro, western New Mexico

Summing up. The title of the book, as one of the characters explains, can be found among the inscriptions on a sandstone bluff in western New Mexico. Since Spanish colonial times, it’s been known as El Morro (The Headland). It stands today on the Ramah Navajo Indian Reservation.

Inscription, El Morro, 1709

For centuries, travelers who have stopped there for water have left their mark on the stone. Pasó por aquí. I passed by here. In the novel the phrase becomes the summing up of a life. Everything we do adds up to this simple fact. We come, we go, and in the meantime, while we are here, we can choose to give more than we take.

Rhodes lived only a few years in New Mexico and then moved on with his wife to Pacific Beach, California, near San Diego, where he died in 1934. He had been in poor health and was penniless. At his request, he was buried on the site of his old ranch in the San Andres Mountains. On his gravestone are the words, Pasó por aquí.

A few of Rhodes stories were made into films. This novel was adapted and released in 1948 as Four Faces West, with Joel McCrae as Ross McEwen and Charles Bickford as Pat Garrett. I'll be getting back to this story when I've had a chance to see it.

Meanwhile, anyone wishing to do some in-depth research on this well-deserving western writer will find what sounds like a truckload of his papers, letters, photos, and manuscripts at the Huntington Library in San Morino, California.  The catalog mentions seven boxes of material, with a total of 1,433 items.

Further reading:
WPA interviews with people who knew Rhodes as a young man

El Moro inscription written by Juan de Oñate in 1605

         

Picture credits:

1) Adobe Church, Cordelia Wilson, New Mexico, c1920

2) Hope, New Mexico, c1900, freepages.family.rootsweb.ancestry.com

3) Yucca, White Sands, wikimedia.org

4) Pat Garrett, wikimedia.org

5) After the Snowfall, Cordelia Wilson, New Mexico, c1920, wikimedia.org

6) El Morro National Monument, Ramah Navajo Indian Reservation, NM, wikimedia.org

7) Inscription at El Morro, nps.gov/elmo

Coming up: Rex Beach's story collection, Pardners (1906)

The Left Handed Gun (1958)

Here’s another one of many screen versions of the story of Billy the Kid. Based on a teleplay by Gore Vidal, this first film by director Arthur Penn may or may not be faithful to Vidal. It surely is not faithful to history.

This time, thirty-three-year-old Paul Newman plays the nineteen-year-old Billy. Like The True Story of Jesse James (1957), the film gives us a painfully confused young outlaw as a protagonist. Two other films from the same period come to mind, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Young Stranger (1957), about alienated young males.

Must have been something about the 1950s. I felt a twinge of it even as a farm boy in Nebraska.

The concept of the film had some promise. What if you forgot about all the previous Hollywood versions of Billy and portrayed him instead as he probably was – an adolescent boy who never had a real father, a lost young soul who was also quick with a gun.

Then let the murder of his father-like employer, John Tunstall, be the motivation to kill the four men who ambushed him. Cast him as an avenging angel, serving his own sense of justice. Alas, taking the law into his own hands gets him deeper and deeper into trouble. First he is badly burned in the torching of a house where he has taken refuge. Then his old friend Pat Garrett goes after him.

The result is a kind of melodrama that’s supposed to feel like a tragedy. Which is OK, but a half century later, Paul Newman’s portrayal of this beautiful loser seems more than a little heavy-handed. The broadness of Billy’s goofy playfulness with his buddies and the scenes of adolescent angst seem styled for the stage. But they feel overdone for the camera.

The film offers an interesting example of how the past gets mythologized. The messiness of historical fact is simplified and understood in terms of the present day. So we get Billy as an alienated youth of the 1950s. While the real Billy might be flattered to be portrayed by the likes of Paul Newman, he’d surely not recognize most of his own story.

History vs. Hollywood. The film portrays the Lincoln County War as a conflict between rival cattle barons – a range war. This is a Hollywood shortcut that sidesteps the complexity of the competing business interests that fought over economic control of the region.

The actual “war” in the streets of Lincoln, New Mexico, was a day-long affair and involved Army troops from a nearby fort. The McSween house, where Billy and the other men were under attack, was a large adobe structure that burned slowly. Billy escaped unscathed under cover of darkness – not badly burned in a sudden conflagration and believed dead, as the film tells it.

The Sheriff Brady killed by Billy was not one of the men who ambushed Tunstall. Billy had killed him in younger days after a heated dispute in a saloon. So when he signed on with Tunstall, he had already killed a law officer – not a street drunk who once insulted his mother, as the film suggests.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

There are two or three versions of this film, depending on how you count them. According to film historians, it was rushed into theaters by MGM in 1973 before receiving a “fine cut.” In 1988, there was another version put together by Turner Entertainment, meant to restore director Sam Peckinpah’s vision of the film.

Then 2005 saw yet another attempt to create a definitive version. These last two of the three are currently available on DVD. If you want, you can put them side-by-side on two laptops and let them duke it out.

I saw the original in 1973 and found it unmemorable, so I can’t say today that its vision is much different from the latter two. But it’s probably safe to say that all three attempt to (a) portray the Old West realistically and (b) make an angry statement about corrupt and oppressive power structures. It was, after all, the year of Watergate.

History vs. myth. The film tells a story about Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid that is more or less accurate in some details. Billy’s breakout from the Lincoln County jail follows historical accounts fairly closely. But it shouldn’t be taken as a reenactment.

Neither should Garrett’s shooting of Billy at the end of the film. The writers had read their history, then “dramatized” it. Garrett sits outside the room where Billy has a lovemaking scene, and listens to the sound of what seems to be soul-satisfying sex. Then while Billy goes out to bring back something to eat, Garrett slips inside, where he is waiting when Billy returns.

In real-life that fateful night, Garrett and Billy happened by chance to meet in a darkened room. Garrett was probably surprised. Billy probably never knew what hit him. And he hadn’t come from lovemaking but from the nearby rooms of friends, where he’d shown up for a late night meal.

Mark Lee Gardner’s To Hell on a Fast Horse portrays both men as simply that – men whose lives took them in directions that finally converged. Billy was both a thief and a killer; Garrett as sheriff of Lincoln County had taken on the job of stopping him.

Peckinpah’s film prefers the myth. Not only is his Billy a free spirit at odds with unscrupulous cattlemen, speculators, and businessmen. Garrett is portrayed as corrupted by serving their interests. “It’s just a job,” he says, justifying himself. But to Billy (and Peckinpah, one gathers) he’s a man who has sold out.

Book: To Hell on a Fast Horse

New Mexico was no land of enchantment during 1870-1910. After the Civil War, it was the frontier beyond the frontier, where the West was still wild and woolly. Territorial officials, duly elected and otherwise, were corrupt right up to the governor. Honest men with any power or authority were a rarity.

The murderous efforts of those outside the law kept them even rarer. Pat Garrett, a gambler, speculator, one-time buffalo hunter, and part-time lawman was one of the few with the determination to take on some of the criminals – and one of them in particular, Billy the Kid.

Mark Lee Gardner has written a well-researched book about both men. He claims that everything he has to say about them, including the words he attributes to them, are recorded and documented. His account is a happy mix of history and good storytelling. While he writes in a conversational style, his scholarship is evident from the 50 pages of notes and bibliography, plus a lengthy index.

Pat Garrett. Gardner finds both men engaging but keeps a historian’s distance. If anything, he may wish that events after the shooting of Billy had been kinder to Garrett. What made him a fearless man-hunter did not serve him in his later pursuits. He tried various business ventures that didn’t pan out. And he made enemies among people who were unscrupulous enough to want him dead.

He also had a love of gambling and drinking (not uncommon in the West) and a tendency to make the wrong friends. While a supportive husband and father of eight children, he let it be known that he kept a mistress. During most of his years, he was either poorly paid or in debt. He was finally murdered with a shot to the back of the head while stopping to take a leak at the side of a road near Las Cruces in 1908. His murder, like others at the time in New Mexico, was never satisfactorily solved.

The irony of Garrett is that today he is scarcely remembered, while the outlaw he killed has been mythologized and celebrated for over a century. For the hundreds who visit Billy’s grave in Sumner, New Mexico, its only the rare soul that seeks out Pat Garret’s in El Paso. Even today, there are renewed efforts afoot to have Billy the Kid pardoned by the state governor, and descendants of Pat Garrett continue to defend their grandfather.