The Man Who Walked Backward

by Ben Montgomery

  “I had to come over here from Enola,” a man said.

  “I'm from Hummelstown,” said another.

  “Well, pal,” said another. “I would have had to sell what little furniture I have in my home to get enough to eat if it weren’t for this Welfare Restaurant, and I live right here in this city. Harrisburg is represented here same as your towns.”

  There was a family, too, a man and woman and child.

  “Here and there it seemed as though a job would be worth more money than Henry Ford owns,” said the man. “We moved from town to town. If either of us did get work, it is only for a day. And there weren’t many of those days.”

  By and large, the country was tired of hearing the empty promise that relief was coming. One of Hoover’s biggest critics had made that brand of disdain his platform for what would turn into a run at the presidency.

  “You can’t bring back prosperity by psychology,” said Oklahoma governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray. “Saying that better times are just around the corner won’t bring them. If the doctrine of telling the people that good times are just around the corner continues for another decade with the same policy of laws, this republic will go into the revolution with bloodshed unprecedented in the history of the human race.”

  Plennie found it hard not to worry about his mother and dad, and about Della and Vivian. He also found it hard not to feel terrible that he was sleeping on hotel linens and eating free chicken and biscuits while they were presumably scratching by, facing the storm of a chaotic and unknown future without him. For every story about a bank closing there was one about some robber sticking up a clerk, scaring the hell out of the customers and making off with a few thousand dollars. Heavy guns and affordable automobiles had given rise to gangsters and getaways and cops fiddling for their pistols in clouds of red dust. Made you wonder what was happening in the world. The Kimes brothers had left a trail of bloodshed all over Oklahoma and Texas and the last of them had just been rounded up. No jail could hold William Underhill, the man they called the Tri-State Terror. The Barker-Karpis gang was knocking over banks in Plains and stashing cash in every cranny they could find. Two troubled and tattooed Texas kids named Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker had just fallen in love.

  But if there was ever any evidence of the irritableness spawned by these hard times, Plennie was coming up on it at the Red River, that 1,300-mile rust-colored rio rojo that ran like a rattlesnake from the redbed lands of the Llano Estacado to meet the Atchafalaya and the Mississippi River at Louisiana. The Red was the second river he would cross after the Trinity.

  Long since ended was the Red River War of 1874, when the US Army removed the Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians from the Southern Plains, forcing them onto reservations in Indian Territory. And it was sheer coincidence that Plennie approached the Red River on April 22, the exact day on which, forty-two years before, the US government opened for white settlement the Indian Territory—land promised for eternity to the tribes who had agreed, albeit at gunpoint, to relocate. It was also sheer coincidence that the motion picture making box offices ring in the spring of 1931 was Cimarron, which would win the Oscar for Best Production for offering the splendid white man’s perspective of events surrounding the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. Its opening slide sets the stage for what amounts to a celebration of genocide, the social degradation of indigenous people, and capitalistic environmental destruction: A NATION RISING TO GREATNESS THROUGH THE WORK OF MEN AND WOMEN…NEW COUNTRY OPENING…RAW LAND BLOSSOMING…CRUDE TOWNS GROWING INTO CITIES…TERRITORIES BECOMING RICH STATES. The Indians in the film kowtow. The whites rape the land for oil and shoot one another and get rich. The critics loved it.

  Now, in the real world, the white man was about to fight the white man over a bridge.

  For decades, thousands of immigrants from the East looking to settle in Texas took their wagons across Indian lands using the Texas Road, which ran from Joplin, Missouri, southward across the territory to the waters of the Red. There they paid a toll to get across the river via Colbert’s Ferry. Frank Colbert was half Chickasaw and had the Chickasaw Nation’s trust, and he operated first the ferry, then a toll bridge, peacefully for a number of years, then formed the Red River Bridge Company with Denison businessmen to oversee operations. By the age of the automobile, the private two-lane toll bridge connecting Texas and Oklahoma put towns along the road north and south in the running for one of the cross-country car routes every city was after. By 1930, the year before Plennie arrived by foot, more than half a million travelers would follow the King of Trails Highway to the Red River bridge, where they’d pay a toll of seventy-five cents to cross.

  Meanwhile, working under the idea that crossing a river should be free and that business interests on both sides would benefit, Texas and Oklahoma worked amiably to sidestep the Indians and build a public bridge, paid for with tax dollars.

  When the new bridge was all but complete, the Red River Bridge Company sued, claiming Texas had agreed to pay the company some $60,000 when the new free bridge put the old toll bridge out of service. As a result of the lawsuit, the Texas governor ordered the free bridge barricaded and closed until the legal issues were resolved. This pissed off the governor of Oklahoma to no end. He pointed to Louisiana Purchase documents from 1803 that showed that both sides of the water belonged to Oklahoma, and he ordered men from the highway department to destroy the barricades on the Texas end. When the Texas governor made three Texas Rangers rebuild the barricades and enforce the federal injunction, the Oklahoma governor deployed his National Guard, destroyed the approach to the toll bridge, declared martial law, and came to the site with a pistol on his hip.

  The standoff made national news. The New York Times and the Washington Post treated readers to daily updates on each side’s political maneuvers while armed militiamen patrolled both banks and locals brought their picnic lunches to the muddy river to watch the fireworks. The news spread like prairie fire and was said to have reached the eyeballs of Adolf Hitler, a rising German politician, who pointed to the trouble as proof of a weak American capitalist union. A headline in the Bakersfield Californian ran across eight columns: OKLAHOMA, TEXAS NEAR CIVIL WAR. “Fiery governor of Western state carries out his own ideas and makes others like it,” wrote the Rochester Times-Union in New York.

  “The free bridge is open,” Alfalfa Bill Murray told reporters. “If people are fools enough to want to pay seventy-five cents to cross here, let ’em do it.”

  No shots were fired in the Red River Bridge War, but Oklahoma sort of won. A federal judge dismissed the toll bridge company’s suit, declaring Texas’s contract with the bridge company illegal. Oklahoma’s squirrelly, big-eared, cigar-chomping governor would ride the attention during a presidential run the following year, and at times he would seem to have the Democratic nomination in hand. He would draw ten thousand in Weatherford a few months after the bridge war, and fifteen thousand in Dallas, where the Dallas Morning News would remark, “He is a master of the appeal to the masses.” Texas governor Ross Sterling would lose his next election and all but disappear. “He may be a good man,” the New York Times would declare of the millionaire Texas governor, “but not for public office during these times.”

  But the three-month dispute had only just begun when Plennie Wingo, bundled against the frigid prairie winds, crossed the Red River on April 22, 1931. There were no militiamen or looky-loos pacing the banks, just a man walking over water dividing two states. He strode backward alone across the cold span and wondered how many more rivers he would cross. He thought about how he had learned to get along with people, and how folks reacted to him when they first saw him. He thought about how friendly most people were, even if they were up against the wall. “It seemed to make me feel assured of success,” he would later write.

  He crossed his 110th mile as the stage for the Red River Bridge War faded before him.

  9.

  Just Human, Same As You

  He was on a backward
tear through the eastern Oklahoma ragweed when the “gypsies” caught him.

  Plennie had spent his first night in the Sooner State at Hotel Main in Durant, Oklahoma, for fifty cents, drank a cup at the Bryan Coffee House with a new friend named Ollie James, then backed up Highway 75 through Caddo and Caney, and up the new Jefferson Highway, nearer every day to the geographical center of America, past sparse forests of black dalea, shortlobe oak, and Ashe juniper, through Stringtown and Chockie and Kiowa and other little towns destined to dry up and fall off the map.

  It was easy for a man to feel small and insignificant here. To the east lay the Cookson Hills and the Boston Mountains and the Ozark Plateau and then the Mississippi River Valley, all regions where families were packing their belongings to head west toward possibility. While the dust storms in the Plains had already begun uprooting farmers out there, southeastern Oklahoma, through which Plennie now walked, would produce the majority of western wanderers—Okies, they were derisively called. They’d been struggling to grow crops on marginal land, and the depressed market made profitable agriculture nearly impossible. In the next two years, 10 percent of all Oklahoma farmers would lose their land to foreclosure. When the government began paying them to not raise crops, landowners took their tenants’ plots out of production. Tenant farmers, who made up 60 percent of the state’s growers, had no reason to work difficult land and endure terrible prices when they could head someplace better. Besides, they had a migratory habit and they hadn’t been here long enough to grow roots themselves. They’d come for opportunity, and when reality set in, they loaded what they owned on flivvers and navigated gravel roads until they intersected with a new highway called Route 66, which would deliver them all the way to the promised land, Santa Monica, California.

  No small number would’ve wondered about the skinny Texan walking backward down the shoulder of the highway.

  When Plennie made it to McAlester, where the big penitentiary held some of the meanest outlaws alive behind barbed wire and concrete, a reporter got his story and took several photographs. Another man wanted to make a sketch of Plennie, so he obliged. Plennie sold a few postcards, but this part of Oklahoma was mostly sandstone hills and Indian grass and oil derricks.

  Somewhere south of Checotah, he noticed a colorful roadside camp coming into view in his mirrors, like a sunlit prism. He couldn’t make out what it was until he backed up on the camp and saw the wagons and dangling lanterns and smoldering bonfires. Before he could scoot on past, two women set upon him, hustling across the road and asking for matches. Plennie didn’t smoke and had no matches. He told the women as much. Alas, they offered to help him search, and before he could object they had their hands in his pants and were feeling around inside his pockets. It dawned on him that they were trying to lift his wallet.

  He’d started in Fort Worth with no money, but the postcard sales had worked and he happened to be carrying a healthy chunk of cash. When the jig was up, he began to object and slap at their hands, and he tried hard to back away, but the women wouldn’t let him leave. Soon two men rushed out and they, too, wanted to know if he had any matches, and they, too, began feeling around on his person, eight foreign hands now touching him without permission or decency. The whole time, he tried to assure them he had no matches and worked to break free. He felt anger rising up in his chest. He demanded they unleash him immediately. He realized if something didn’t give soon things were going to get ugly.

  As if on cue, an automobile came burning up the Jefferson Highway and Plennie threw his hands in the air to get the driver’s attention. The car barked to a stop and the four slunk toward the weeds, back into the shadows of their colorful caravan.

  Plennie ran a quick inventory of personal effects and found nothing missing. He chatted with the driver long enough to catch his breath, thanked him, then hustled north again.

  Down the road a stretch, he told an old man about the “gypsies” and the frisking. The man, J. C. Dabbs, owned the most beautiful home Plennie had seen so far in Oklahoma and graciously invited him to stay the night. He told Plennie his family was visiting Tulsa and he’d enjoy some company. The sun had set, besides.

  Dabbs was a fine cook and asked a hundred questions about Plennie’s walk so far and his plans for the rest. How did he propose to get across the Atlantic? Wasn’t he afraid of getting lost? That sort of thing. The old-timer also spun his own yarns about growing up in the Cookson Hills, about the Indians and wild animals and outlaws, about Hanging Judge Parker and the capture of Cherokee Ned Christie at Rabbit Trap, about the bandit Ford Bradshaw and Belle Starr, the sharpest sidesaddle shooter who ever lived. She was buried nearby, God rest her soul, and after dark you can still hear her mare pawing the ground at her grave.

  This little spot on earth was curious, a microcosm of the tensions of American expansion, a windswept cauldron boiling with the unholy broth of progress. It was the end of the Trail of Tears, yes, a place where the last of the faith was broken and the land was soaked in blood and oil. It was inhabited by men quick with their Bibles and breechloaders, and they fought over polygamy and slavery and whatever else.

  It was the birthplace of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, when the government men came a decade before Plennie did to investigate the murders of Osage Indians, who had wisely held on to mineral rights for the land they owned atop the largest oil deposits in the United States. They had become the richest people per capita in the world, and then they had become dead. It was in many ways the end of the frontier, the last gasp of manifest destiny, having been settled long after the West.

  It had filled with people, and the people had built homes and filled those homes with goods purchased on credit, and now those bills were due, and they were either on the move again or staying put and joining the wretched revolution, like Pretty Boy Floyd or the Kimes brothers or the Barker boys. These Cookson Hills seemed almost like a hive of bank robbers and outcasts. Even as Dabbs and Plennie traded stories, sheriff’s deputies were transporting outlaws Ed Davis and Paul Martin to Dallas for questioning about their alleged involvement in the murders of two constables in Marlow and the police chief in Beggs, and the robbery of the Lincoln Bank & Trust Company in Nebraska, where bandits made off with $1 million, the largest heist on record in the West.

  The state’s favorite son, Will Rogers, born just north of here, put it right in a newspaper column welcoming 1931. “The man talked so nice when he sold it to us, we had no idea he would ever want it back,” he wrote. “You see in the old days there was mighty few things bought on credit, your taste had to be in harmony with your income, for it had never been any other way. I think buying autos on credit has driven more folks to seek the revolver as a regular means of lively-hood than any other one contributing cause. All you need to make a deferred payment on anything now is an old rusty gun.”

  While the killing was objectionable, the concept itself—the getting, the survival—wasn’t completely foreign, nor unthinkable. The floor had dropped out of the market; did anyone expect it to hold firm under ethics and decency? How thick was the moral membrane between pulling a pistol on a bank clerk and leaving your family to walk backward around the world?

  As they finished their meal, J. C. Dabbs told Plennie he was lucky that car pulled up when it did. Who knows what might’ve happened? These hills have always been wild and dangerous.

  “Now there are gypsies,” the old man said, “and people coming through walking backwards.”

  They both laughed at the thought of it.

  * * *

  While Plennie slept in J. C. Dabbs’s spare room, newspapers across the United States and Europe received via the ACME Newspictures agency a series of photographs showing Mr. Plennie L. Wingo of Abilene, Texas, in various stages of backward walking. There were close-ups of his grinning face, hat removed for a better view of his glasses, and wider shots of his full body navigating a highway shoulder, his little sign hanging from a string that ran over his shoulders and crossed at his sternum. Th
e photos and accompanying paragraphs would be printed the next morning and evening in newspapers across the country, in places like Dixon, Illinois, and Oakland, California, and Ogden City, Utah. It was his first massive wave of publicity, run alongside stories about the bootlegger Jack “Legs” Diamond dying in a Catskills hospital and New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt dismissing misfeasance charges against New York City mayor Jimmy Walker.

  In the Daily News Standard of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the photos and caption ran adjacent to a story that spoke, perhaps, to the trying era, one headlined MANIAC BINDS TWO BOYS TO TRACKS. The Spoutz brothers, the story said, had been gathering clovers for their pet rabbit when an armed madman abducted them and tied them to railroad tracks. They told police he mumbled the entire time, saying, “There is no reason for you living while I am starving.” They were freed by their sister, thankfully, as police searched the area for the assailant. Then there was the retrograde wayfarer.

  McALESTER, Okla., April 28. (UP)—Plennie L. Wingo walked backward out of McAlester today bent on circling the globe in that manner.

  He wore a periscopic device which enabled him to see the direction in which he was going to avoid automobiles.

  Wingo backed into town late yesterday after several days of backing from his home in Abilene, Texas, where he started his tour. He “headed” north for Joplin, Mo., from where he will turn eastward toward New York.

  This ACME photo, taken outside McAlester, Oklahoma, on April 23, 1931, ran in newspapers across the country. (Courtesy of Acme News Photos)

  Papers as far away as London and Paris introduced the world to the backward-walking champion. France’s Le Matin ran a story about Plennie above the fold on the front page, headlined UN AMÉRICAIN VEUT FAIRE LE TOUR DU MONDE À RECULONS.

  Go around the world backward, this is the ambition of Mr. Plennie Wingo, a resident of Abilene (Texas), says a dispatch of this city. Equipped with a kind of periscope that lets him see what’s going on behind his back, this globetrotter of a new genre has already covered distance between Abilene and McAlester (Oklohama). He’s gone again today, all days backwards, to New York, via Missouri.