A look of horror passed across the tall ranger’s face. He pulled the trigger and the gun misfired. “Glanton sprang up, a huge Bowie Knife flashed in the candlelight, and the tall powerful young Ranger fell with a sickening thud to the floor a corpse! His neck cut half through. Glanton, with eyes glaring like a wild beast, jumped over the table and placing one foot on his victim said, ‘Strangers! do you wish to take up this fight? If so step out, if not we’ll drink.’ ”
Chamberlain’s painting of the scene shows Glanton standing over his victim, eyes wild, his finger pointing in warning at the motley assemblage standing near the bar. In his other hand he holds his bloody bowie knife. The caption reads, “John Glanton settles a controversy,” above a death’s-head framed by two bowie knives, extending outward like antlers.
All present simply turned back to the bar, some even touching glasses with the murderer; sawdust was sprinkled over the bloody floor. The lesson Chamberlain took from this encounter was simple: he immediately acquired a bowie knife. After an unfortunate altercation involving that knife with his erstwhile gambling partner, Chamberlain found himself in jail among “a very select society of Negroes, Indians and Texans, Horse thieves, murderers and the vilest characters of the lawless frontiersmen.” The accommodations were not pleasant. After his release and a period of convalescence in the care of an amorous young German girl and her family, he reenlisted, this time in the First U.S. Dragoons under General John E. Wool. His enlistment records exist, and Captain Enoch Steen describes him as fair-haired, six feet two inches tall. Chamberlain describes the Battle of Monterrey and paints vivid, realistic depictions from the campaign, though his most recent editor, William Goetzmann, points out that according to army records he was in San Antonio at the time. Chamberlain did fight in the Battle of Buena Vista, which he also describes. He also describes in great detail his affairs with a variety of Mexican women. In 1849, Chamberlain marched with the army across Mexico into Arizona. Somewhere between Tucson and Los Angeles, disgusted with his drunken and abusive commander, he deserted. In My Confession, Chamberlain does so after meeting “Crying Tom” Hitchcock, who takes him to the camp of John Glanton.
Their first meeting is violent. Glanton reaches out to shake hands upon meeting Chamberlain and gives his nose a painful twist. Chamberlain strikes him in the face and attempts to flee before being lassoed and pulled to the ground. Glanton places a revolver to Sam’s head, thinks for a moment, and then welcomes him to the company. “Real grit stranger!” he says. “Ya strike like the kick of a burro.” The next day Glanton and ten other men leave to collect their scalp bounties. Chamberlain remains behind, along with Glanton’s second-in-command,
a man of gigantic size who rejoiced in the name of Holden, called Judge Holden of Texas. Who or what he was, no one knew, but a more cool blooded villain never went unhung. He stood six foot six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull-tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. Always cool and collected, but when a quarrel took place and blood shed, his hoglike eyes would gleam with sullen ferocity worthy of the countenance of the fiend. His desires was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name in the Cherokee nation and Texas. And before we left Fronteras a little girl of ten years was found in the chaparral, foully violated and murdered, the mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed out him as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, no one charged him with the crime.
Holden, Chamberlain writes, was the most educated man in all of northern Mexico, speaking with everyone in their own language, whatever it happened to be, including “several Indian lingos.” He would play the harp or the guitar at fandangos and charm everyone with his dancing and was “acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy.”
Glanton’s men, together with Chamberlain, soon go on a rampage through northern Sonora, pretending to be Apaches, killing and raping and scalping. “Our life was indeed a merry one,” Chamberlain writes. “And there is real enjoyment in a lawless, vagabond life on the Frontier. I liked it.” At one point they come to the rim of a great canyon filled with magnificent sandstone formations, whereupon Judge Holden mounts a large rock for a rostrum and delivers a scientific lecture on geology. “His lecture no doubt was very learned, but hardly true, for one statement he made was ‘that millions of years had witnessed the operation producing the result around us,’ which Glanton, with recollections of the Bible teachings his young mind had undergone, said ‘was a d——d lie.’ ”
After a fight with a large band of Apaches, four of the scalpers are so wounded they cannot travel. The men draw lots from a quiver of arrows to determine who will put the wounded out of their misery. Chamberlain was relieved to be spared that grim task. A similar scene occurs in Blood Meridian, and the nameless kid of that novel, based loosely on Chamberlain, draws one of the unlucky arrows.
Finally, they come to the Gila and follow the river to its confluence with the Colorado. In Chamberlain’s telling, it was the Yumas who were operating the ferry. The scalpers seize control of the operation, along with nine of the prettiest Indian girls. There follow days of “hellish orgies,” scenes of “shameful licentiousness and outrages on the defenseless maids.” As in other accounts, Chamberlain has Glanton leave for San Diego and return with a keg of whiskey and several pounds of biscuit. After another night of orgies, four of the men decide they have had enough and plot their escape to the goldfields of California. The next morning, while putting their plan into action, at some distance from the fort, they look back to see Indians swarming across it. When they later encounter Holden in the desert, he tells them that Glanton had been drunk out of his mind, “tied hand and foot, as usual when on a spree to prevent him from doing mischief,” when the Indians attacked.
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The most objective account of the events at Yuma can be found in two depositions that were given at Los Angeles in 1850 before the first alcalde, Don Abel Stearns. A man who swore his name was William Carr said that he, Marcus L. Webster, and Joseph A. Anderson were gathering wood at the junction of the Colorado and the Gila on April 23, about three hundred yards from the encampment above the ferry, on the California side, when fifteen or twenty Yuma Indians showed up saying that John Glanton had sent them out to cut poles. The Americans grew suspicious, and a pistol was drawn, whereupon the Indians ran away. The three men were returning to their camp when they came under fire from at least forty guns. The description of the fight is hard to follow, but the results are easy to state: the Indians killed almost everyone. Carr claimed to have seen Glanton’s dead body and that a Mexican woman told him Glanton and Dr. A. L. Lincoln were asleep when the attack came. She was sewing in Lincoln’s tent, and the Yuma chief came in “and hit the doctor on the head with a stone, whereupon he sprang to his feet, but was immediately killed with a club.” Glanton was killed in a similar fashion. Another Mexican woman saw it. The witnesses told Carr that the bodies of all the dead men were burned, along with their dogs, who were burned alive.
Carr testified that the ferry company at the time of the massacre was in possession of fifty thousand dollars in silver and perhaps thirty thousand dollars in gold, the proceeds of less than two months of business. He denied that Glanton or any of the other members of the company had robbed or mistreated anyone at the ferry. He justified the high charges of ferriage, claiming that expenses were high and the site was remote. He admitted that an Irishman named Callahan who had worked with the Indians on their ferry had been found shot dead, floating in the river near Glanton’s ferry, but he said he believed the Indians had done it. He could not account for the Indians’ hostility, saying that they had always been friendly with the company and had been treated with great kindness. He warned that the Indians were a danger to American emigrants, including women and children, and recommended that the public authorities do something about it.
Two weeks later, a man named Jeremiah Hill gave sworn testimony for the same court that he was a member of a party that crossed the Colorado after the massacre. Hill and his companions were several days away from the Colorado when they received word from one of their companions, who had been traveling ahead, that a massacre might have occurred at the Yuma ferry. As a result they approached the river with caution. They approached within six hundred yards of Glanton’s ferry and could see that it had been abandoned. There was no sign of a boat. They went about six miles farther to where the Indians were maintaining their ferry and made camp nearby. There they sent for the chief of the Yumas, saying they wished to give him some presents and have a talk. The chief came and received gifts of “shirts, handkerchiefs, jewelry, pinole, etc.” They asked about the massacre of Glanton, and the chief told them what had happened.
The chief said that he had received a boat from an American general named Anderson, who as it happens was the same commander of whom Chamberlain complains in his Confession. A large number of Mexicans had crossed using the Indian ferry but no Americans. One day Glanton’s men came down from their ferry and destroyed the Indians’ boat, killing an American who had been working there. They threw his body into the river. The chief went to see Glanton and offered to split the traffic across the river to their mutual advantage, but Glanton beat him over the head with a stick and drove him away. So the chief held a council, and it was decided that all the Americans should be killed. Glanton meanwhile went to San Diego, so the Indians waited until he came back. The chief went to the Americans’ ferry and found that Glanton and his men were all drunk. They waited until the Americans were asleep and then killed them all, except for three who escaped by floating down the river. Most of the Americans, the chief said, were killed with clubs, except for Glanton, “who was killed with a hatchet.”
The introduction to these depositions, which were printed in the annual publication of the Historical Society of Southern California in 1903, gives a little background. It seems that Dr. A. L. Lincoln was a relative of President Abraham Lincoln and established the ferry on the Colorado in January 1850, after visiting the mines in California. Glanton and his gang showed up in mid-February. After reports of the massacre arrived in Los Angeles, the governor sent a punitive expedition against the Indians, who fled. The force of Indian fighters camped on the banks of the river and “vigorously attacked their rations.” After three months of this campaign, during which time no Indians were punished, the Gila Expedition, also known as the Glanton War, was concluded at a cost of $120,000 to the young state of California. Depredations by the Yumas continued for several years.
In Blood Meridian, when the Indians attack the ferry, they swarm up the hill, faces blackened and their hair caked with clay. First they enter the chambers of Dr. Lincoln, from which they emerge carrying his dripping head by the hair, dragging his dog along behind. The chief splits Glanton’s head with an ax. Inside Judge Holden’s quarters they find a cowering twelve-year-old girl and an idiot, both naked. The judge stands naked “holding leveled at them the bronze barrel of the howitzer,” a lit cigar poised over the touchhole. The Indians, in a slapstick moment, fall over themselves in retreat. In McCarthy’s imaginings, as in Chamberlain’s, Judge Holden emerges triumphant.
Although Chamberlain might have embellished or made up large portions of My Confession, his portrait of life and death among John Glanton’s scalpers remains a neglected masterpiece of America’s frontier literature. His Confession is the sole historical source for the character of Judge Holden, who seems to have emerged from hell fully formed, playing a fiddle and dancing on small nimble feet. He will never die.
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According to our family tradition, my great-great-great-grandmother Welmett Adamson Wilson perished somewhere along the wagon trail near Yuma. Did she make it to Yuma, or did she die in that last terrible stretch of desert across Gila Bend? There’s no telling.
I got back in my car and drove across the Ocean-to-Ocean Bridge into California to wander around in the suburban fringes of the great and terrifying Colorado Desert. Even worse than the desert, and in some ways more fearsome, was the corporate landscape through which I passed. Every national chain was here: McDonald’s, Denny’s, Circle K, Wingate, Best Western, Marriott, KFC, Holiday Inn Express, Chevron, and Home Depot, as well as the Yuma Palms mall. Generic Americana, plus RV World. That Montana model is pretty sweet.
Was I driving over Welmett’s final resting place, even now, or was she back there on Gila Ridge, that broad mesa overlooking the bottom where the Gila River once flowed? Or were her remains out there in the fields, irrigated with captured water, a desert transformed into a patchwork of light and dark green fields, a low range of banal mountains in the distance, a few peaks sticking up here and there, dust hanging on the horizon.
I was driving in circles. I found myself at the site of old Fort Yuma, established after the Glanton War to protect emigrants from the depredations of Yuma Indians, now part of the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation. The oldest buildings have been converted for tribal usage. There is a police station there. Down below, I saw a casino. I supposed that’s what all the hotels are for.
I pushed out into the desert, heading toward San Diego, though I knew I would not make it that far. In fact I did not make it very far at all. I saw a sign for Felicity, California, and took the exit. Apparently, some of the inhabitants of this place believe it is the center of the world. There is a shrine in Felicity to that effect, a museum, and a small chapel on a hill. If you have a mobile home, you can stay at the Pilot Knob RV Resort just across the highway. They have palm trees there.
I could not believe the desolation of the landscape. Nothing grew, not even any creosote, really. The ground was hard and bare, almost paved. I could see old weather-beaten trailers out in the desert. The Mexican border was very near, but I could not imagine anyone trying to make a crossing here. I suspect the Border Patrol agrees, because there was no sign of them anywhere. In the distance I could see sand dunes.
Close to the Mexican border, near Felicity, California
I went down a road that turned out to be a spur. The pavement just ended; beyond here lies nothing, nothing but sand. Sand and one other thing: a yellow road sign that said END. I took the sign as a sign and turned around. On my way back to Yuma, I wondered about Welmett’s last moments. Did she suffer? Did she die hard? She was only sixteen when Perry went back to Missouri and married her. Four years later she was dead.
I went back to the old Yuma territorial prison, because it had the best vantage in town. I parked and watched a man in a Vietnamese hat scrubbing the sidewalk. How futile, I thought. Didn’t he know that dust storms may exist? I got out of my car and walked up a nearby rise, and then I noticed the prison cemetery on the south side of the hill. Just then a Border Patrol vehicle passed by, and I heard a train whistle as it crossed the Colorado, heading north and then, presumably, west. Inside the cemetery were dozens of unmarked graves, mounds of stone dating from the late nineteenth century. A bronze plaque there memorializes these men in the odd grammar of some nameless and forgotten functionary. “In memory of the inmates who lost their life while serving their sentence at the Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma. Of the 3,069 convicts, 111 met their death. Disease, accident, murder, suicide, and escape attempts were the causes of their demise. The remains of 104 unfortunate souls are interred in the cemetery.” There followed a list of names, the known dead. Included was a man named Henry Wilson. Known dead and unknown dead. Another collection of graves.
In 1858, Perry buried his sweetheart, the mother of his sons, covering her grave with rocks, and continued to San Diego with two babies. He was never able to find her again in later years. For other emigrants, cattlemen, voyagers across the southern route to California, her small rough tomb, a mere pile of rocks, was simply another bad omen, if they saw it, a warning, a mute testament of suffering. I thought of Ruth Shackelford, kneeling before the remains of Rachel Drain
, feeling so sad, and crying over the death of a stranger. It was not a lovely place to spend eternity. It was just another grave.
Cemetery near the Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park
CHAPTER 7
MOTION OF LIMBS
Perry came back to Texas with his boys after spending two years in California, engaged in the mining business, or so says T.A. in a brief autobiographical narrative that has come down to us. Perry married again, to a woman named Nancy Hodge Rowland, who eventually bore him twelve children. He resumed his cattle business in partnership with his brother Levi. One history of the West Texas frontier locates the brothers’ ranch in Clay County at the mouth of the east fork of the little Wichita River, though the range was not yet fenced in those days, and cattle would have drifted. Some sources suggest that Perry and Levi made their homes and kept their families back in Montague, about thirty miles east, which was presumably less exposed to Indian raids. T.A.’s little brother, William, who made it all the way to California and back, was buried in Montague in 1863.
One local historian writes that Perry was among the first to build a home in Henrietta, where in 1860 an election was held to name county officials. Those rolls list Perry Wilson as tax assessor and collector. He was doing his part for the community. That year the U.S. Census found that the population of Clay County was 107 whites and 2 free Negroes.
Texas Blood Page 33
