by Donna Ingham
Back in the early days of Texas, when there was a full moon folks called it a “Comanche moon.” That was a time, they reasoned, when the Comanches and Kiowas and other Native People were likely to be out raiding, when the light was good. And I always say here, to be politically correct, that the Indians probably thought they had every right to raid and pick up a few head of cattle or horses from the settlers because those settlers were coming in by the wagon loads and taking over the Indians’ traditional hunting grounds.
Nevertheless, Bigfoot Wallace did not intend for them to get any of his livestock, especially his horses. So, any time there was a Comanche moon, Bigfoot would bring his horses up next to his cabin and put them in a stake corral—just cedar stakes driven into the ground and tied at the top with a long string of buckskin.
Except for one horse. He’d put that one horse in a lean-to attached to his cabin or stake her out in a clearing all camouflaged with brush and trees about 200 yards from his house.
Probably because of that precaution—plus the fact that Bigfoot was a light sleeper and he had that reputation as an Indian fighter and he had a pack of mongrel dogs with pretty good noses on them who would sound an alarm if anyone came within smelling distance, much less seeing distance—he’d never lost a single head of livestock. Until this one November night, not long after the Civil War.
When Bigfoot got up the next morning and looked outside, it was a little foggy, but he could see clear enough that all his horses were gone. He walked around to the back side of his cabin; sure enough, someone had cut through the buckskin string holding the corral stakes together at the top, then pulled enough of those stakes out of the ground and laid them down so that every one of Bigfoot’s horses was out and gone. He could see their hoof prints in the soft ground, scattered among moccasin prints.
Bigfoot went to check on White Bean, the horse he’d staked out in the nearby clearing, and she was still there. The Indians hadn’t found her. As he was leading White Bean back to the corn crib to throw his old saddle on her, he was puzzling about why his dogs hadn’t even so much as whimpered, much less barked. And then he remembered. Those Comanches knew how to mesmerize a dog, and that must have been what happened.
Well, Bigfoot wasn’t going to let them get away with it. He was going to track those Indians and get his horses back. He wasn’t quite sure how since there was only one of him and, from the looks of the tracks, quite a number of Comanches. He cinched his saddle on White Bean and decided he’d figure something out when the time came. He had his long rifle with him. He called it Sweet Lips. And he had his horn full of powder and his bullets pouch full of bullets and wadding and flint. Strapped on his belt was his big old Bowie knife. He called it Old Butch.
Good tracker that he was, Bigfoot set off at a gallop, easily following the trail left by the Indians and his horses. He rode along the trail there until he finally topped a little rise and could see, maybe a mile or a mile and a half on down the way, what looked like a clearing. It was surrounded by trees all right, but Bigfoot could see smoke drifting up over the tops of those trees, like smoke from a campfire.
“I reckon those Indians have stopped to have breakfast,” Bigfoot said to himself, “and they may be having one of my colts for breakfast.” Oh, the thought of that made him mad.
Still, he didn’t know exactly what he was going to do, just one man against a bunch of Indians. That’s when his eye fell upon a little neck of the woods that was full of hickory trees. And it was hickory nut season. The trees were covered with hickory nuts, and the ground was covered with nuts that had already ripened and fallen off. Bigfoot had an idea.
He told one story about having been in an Indian fight one time and wanting to protect himself with some kind of armor. He’d found a couple of old window shutters, he said, and tied one window shutter on in front and one window shutter on in back, and they sure enough did deflect the arrows. But he didn’t have any window shutters the day his horses were raided. What he did have was hickory nuts. And, as you may know, hickory nuts have a really thick shell—not much meat inside.
Well now, Bigfoot always wore buckskins—leather britches and shirt trimmed with long fringe—and he liked his buckskins big and roomy. He pulled some leather strings out of his pocket and began to tie up the cuffs of his shirtsleeves and the cuffs of his britches right above those big feet. Then he started picking up hickory nuts and stuffing them down in his shirt and down inside his britches. He even took off his hat and put hickory nuts in it before he put it back on his head.
He said he picked up hickory nuts until he thought he’d go blind, but when he finished, there wasn’t a cubic inch between his skin and the buckskin that wasn’t fortified with hickory nuts. He said you couldn’t get a finger in there anywhere. By this time, of course, he looked sort of like a frontier Santa Claus, so when he moved toward White Bean she began to shy away, thinking he was a bear or something. He had to talk to her right soothingly to get her to calm down and allow him to catch her. Then he had to mount up, and he could hardly bend his knee, much less get his foot up in the stirrup. So he led White Bean over to a fallen log so he could step up on the log and get his foot in the stirrup. When he sat down on the saddle, he did so rather gingerly because, even though he was a tough-hided old pioneer, those hickory nuts did chafe a little.
Bigfoot rode over to the edge of the clearing and more or less rolled off of White Bean and then managed to squat himself down—as much as the hickory nuts would let him—and approach through the tall grass until he could part some of the bushes and look through the trees enough to count the Indians. There were forty-two of them, including the ones watching his horses.
Now what was he going to do? Still just one man against forty-two Indians. He decided to try to scare them off. He loaded Sweet Lips, his long rifle, and fired. That got the Indians’ attention for sure, but they didn’t run. No, they were looking around trying to see the smoke from his black powder. He loaded again and fired.
And this time the Indians did run. They had seen the smoke from his rifle, and they headed right toward him.
Bigfoot had time to load his rifle once more, but he knew if he fired that shot it might be his last. He decided to save it for harder times. So Bigfoot did the only thing he knew to do: He just stood up in all his stature, in all his majesty, in all his hickory nuts. And the Indians stopped and stared. They didn’t know whether he was a beast or a spirit—or was it just old Big? For they knew whose horses they’d stolen, and he’d been on their trail before.
They talked among themselves and decided it was just old Pie Grande, old Bigfoot, and they started running again, right for him. Only this time they were reaching back, pulling arrows out of their quivers, and nocking them in their bows. The arrows came flying, hitting the hickory nuts, splitting them, and falling to the ground. Bigfoot said it wasn’t long until there were so many arrows piled up in front of him that he could step up on them and be three inches taller.
Pretty soon the Indians saw that frontal attack wasn’t working, so they moved around for a right flank attack. Same thing for those arrows. Hit a hickory nut, split it, fall to the ground. When the Indians saw that the right flank attack wasn’t working, they moved the other direction for a left flank attack. Same thing. Hit a hickory nut, split it, fall to the ground. Finally, in desperation, they tried a rear assault. More of the same. Hit a hickory nut, split it, fall to the ground. Bigfoot said he did have to laugh when one of those arrows hit a hickory nut right behind his knee because it tickled.
Bigfoot turned around just as the last Indian fired the last arrow from the last quiver, and he said all the Indians just stood there puzzled. They knew every arrow had hit its mark—those Comanches were good marksmen—yet there he stood. Then, without saying a word to one another, they all turned and stampeded for the Rio Grande, seventy miles away.
“I just stood there,” Bigfoot said, “like a statue until they
were all out of sight. Then I untied those strings from around the cuffs of my shirtsleeves and untied the strings from around the cuffs of my britches, and all those hickory nuts just came rolling out. And every last one of them was shelled. Yes sir, you can beat me to death with a grasshopper leg if that ain’t the truth. There must have been two bushels if there was a peck.”
Bigfoot gathered up all those nut meats to take home for fattening up his hogs, he said. He put them in the bag he’d made out of the coltskin left over from the Indians’ breakfast, tying it at the top so he could loop it over his saddle horn. He and White Bean gathered up his horses and drove them all home before dark.
“And that,” Bigfoot would say, “was probably the most remarkable adventure I ever had with the Indians.”
The Life and Times of Pecos Bill
Nearly every region of the country has its folk heroes. I grew up reading stories about the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan and his big blue ox, Babe, from up in the north woods, and about river boatman Mike Fink, from along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and about John Henry, that steel-driving man from West Virginia, among others. But here in Texas our folk hero would naturally have to be a cowboy, and he was the rootin’est, tootin’est, sure-as-shootin’est cowboy of all time.
I’m talking, of course, about Pecos Bill. The truth is that Pecos Bill is as much a literary hero as he is folk hero. It was Edward “Tex” O’Reilly who came up with the name and the character. O’Reilly was writing for The Century Magazine back in the 1920s when he decided to write some Texas-style whoppers for his readers. He wanted one central hero to unify the tales and invented Pecos Bill. Since then Pecos Bill stories have made their way in and out of the oral tradition and the written word. When I started telling stories, I read all the versions I could find, picked my favorite parts, and embroidered them together to create this version.
Way back, when little Bill was just a baby, his ma and his pa decided it was getting a might too crowded where they were because some new neighbors had moved in just a mere hundred miles away. So they loaded everything they owned into one of those Conestoga wagons—one of those covered wagons—and headed west with little Bill and his sixteen brothers and sisters in the back.
Some folks say little Bill was having a fine time bouncing along in the back of that wagon when he just bounced right out as the wagon was crossing the Pecos River. Others say no, that’s not right. What happened was that Bill decided as long as they were crossing a river, he’d just throw him a fishing line in and see if he couldn’t catch something. Sure enough, one of those big old Texas catfish came along, grabbed Bill’s line, and jerked him into the river. Well, whichever way it happened, there he sat on the banks of the Pecos River watching his whole family still moving west. They didn’t even miss him for several weeks until they finally took a head count.
Meanwhile, Bill was about lower than a gopher hole, and his prospects didn’t look too good. But lucky for him, about that time along came a mama coyote, and she picked little Bill up and took him to her den to raise, just like one of her coyote pups. You know, he made a pretty doggone good one, too.
Years later, after he’d outgrowed his britches and was wild as his coyote brothers, he was back down by that Pecos River again, just scouting around. And he came across the strangest-looking critter he’d ever seen in his life—because he hadn’t never seen no cowboy before. Bill, he kind of sniffed the air and sidled around, coyote-like, you know. Meanwhile, the cowboy was pretty flabbergasted, too, but he finally came to himself and said, “What in tarnation are you doing out here, boy, naked as a jaybird?”
Bill sort of bristled up at that and said, “I ain’t no jaybird. I’m a coyote.”
“Oh, horsefeathers!” the cowboy said. “You ain’t no more a coyote than I am. You don’t have a tail do you?”
Bill looked down along his backside, and, by doggies, he didn’t have a tail. Still, he wasn’t clear convinced. He said, “But I’ve got fleas and I howl at the moon every night.”
“That ain’t nothing,” said the cowboy. “So does every Texan I know.”
Well, that convinced Bill, and he took the offer of a spare pair of duds the cowboy had in his saddlebags and set off to make his way in the world as a Texican cowboy.
Nearly nigh the first thing he run onto out there on the prairie was about a forty-two-foot-long rattlesnake. Oh, I’ve heard tell it was a fifty-foot-long rattlesnake, but I don’t want to exaggerate here.
That old snake was all stretched out, sunning itself on a hot rock. But when it saw Bill, it got all coiled up and started rattling that tail. And when Bill got close enough, that snake struck. But there still must have been enough coyote left in Bill that he was able to dodge those fangs. Then the rattler started coiling itself around Bill and was going to squeeze the very life out of him, just like a boa constrictor. Well, Bill wasn’t having none of that either, so he just grabbed hold of the snake and started squeezing back.
He squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until he had squeezed every last drop of venom out of that snake and it was so tame it wouldn’t bite a biscuit. By this time it was skinny as a rope, so Bill just coiled it up and decided to use it for his lariat.
Now that he had a rope, he needed something to ride, and the only thing he could find up there in the foothills was a mountain lion. I’m telling you, that mountain lion was meaner than a mama wasp. Why, when Bill jumped on its back, it went to ripping and snorting across the mesas and in and out of the arroyos until it kicked up quite a dust storm. Finally Bill rode it down. Or maybe they just got so tired they quit.
So it was like that—riding a surly, snarly old mountain lion and twirling a rattlesnake for a rope—that Bill rode into a cowboy camp one evening. Those cowboys looked up and saw this fellow riding a wild beast and twirling a poisonous snake, and they were speechless until one of them remembered his manners and called over to the camp cook: “You better put another cup of water in the son-of-a-gun stew; we’ve got company.”
Bill asked, “Who’s the boss around here anyway?”
A fellow named Gun Smith stepped up, still looking at the mountain lion and the rattlesnake rope, and said, “Well, stranger, I was, but I reckon you may be now.”
“So what do you fellows do around here?” Bill asked.
“Oh, not much. We ride and eat a lot of beans and son-of-a-gun stew and sourdough biscuits. Things are pretty quiet around here, if you want to know the truth.”
Bill looked around and saw lots of longhorn cattle. “What do you do with all them cows?”
“Oh, not much,” Gun Smith said. “We’ve got so many of them we don’t know what to do with them, and they’re so ornery they won’t let us do much with them anyway.”
“Pretty ornery, are they?” Bill asked as he picked out the biggest, meanest-looking bull in the herd and sort of eyeballed him. Well, the bull eyeballed Bill back and decided he would just run this little nuisance off. The bull lowered its big old head with those great long horns and pawed the ground, the way a bull will do. Then he headed right toward Bill.
Bill was still mounted on his mountain lion. He shook a big old loop out of his rattlesnake rope and waited until the bull was almost even with the mountain lion. Then Bill flipped his loop around the bull’s horns and over his head and pulled back, and that’s when cattle roping got invented.
Then Bill said to the cowboys, “I tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to round these cattle up and take them to Kansas. Maybe those folks will use them for pets or something. Anyway it will give us something to do.” So there you’ve got your first cattle drive.
On the way up to Kansas the cowboys started roping those longhorns and riding those longhorns. Some even tried to wrestle those longhorns. And that was your first western rodeo. You can clearly see that Bill was quite an innovator all right, but to tell you the truth, he was getting plenty tired of riding that old mount
ain lion because its disposition hadn’t gotten one bit better.
The cowboys had been telling Bill about a horse they’d seen in those parts. Oh, they said, this horse was fast and strong and beautiful.
“That’s the horse I want then,” Bill said.
“But there’s one other thing we need to tell you,” the cowboys said. “Nobody’s ever been able to ride him. A lot of men have tried. A lot of men have died. That’s why they call that horse Widowmaker.”
“Still,” Bill said, “that’s the horse I want.”
It wasn’t long until they spotted Widowmaker, and it was true: He was fast and strong and beautiful. So Bill kicked his mountain lion into a gallop and got in behind Widowmaker. They chased him all the way up to the Arctic Circle and then back down until they cornered him in the Grand Canyon. They didn’t catch him, now—he was too fast. But they did finally corner him. Bill remembered enough of his coyote lessons that he could sidle up close enough to jump on that horse. But I’m telling you, when he did, that horse might near exploded—because, you know, they say he ate barbed wire and nitroglycerin for breakfast instead of hay.
Well, Widowmaker bucked across about five states and might have kept bucking still if Bill hadn’t remembered another one of his coyote lessons and started singing to that horse—in coyote, of course. He sang about how much he admired Widowmaker for his speed and strength and beauty and how he wanted to partner up with Widowmaker and ride off into the sunsets. That sure enough did calm old Widowmaker down, and then Bill tried a bold thing. He did. He offered that horse its freedom so that it was Widowmaker’s choice to partner up with Bill for the rest of his life.
