Which Way to the Wild West?

by Steve Sheinkin

  Early the next morning a Lakota man named Dewey Beard heard an army bugle slice through the cold air. “I saw the soldiers mounting their horses and surrounding us,” he remembered. “It was announced that all men should come to the center for a talk.”

  About five hundred American soldiers had the Lakota surrounded, with big guns pointing into camp from all directions. The soldiers demanded that the Lakota give up their weapons. Most quickly gave up the guns. While searching for more weapons, soldiers found a rifle hidden under a blanket worn by a young man named Black Coyote.

  Black Coyote wriggled free and pulled out his rifle and held it above his head.

  Soldiers yelled at him to drop the gun. They had no way of knowing he was deaf.

  “If they had left him alone he was going to put his gun down,” Dewey Beard later said. But soldiers charged Black Coyote. He shot into the air as they grabbed him.

  Then there was a huge explosion of gunfire from the soldiers. Lakota warriors tried to fight back, but they had given up most of their weapons.

  “We tried to run,” remembered one Lakota woman, “but they shot us like we were buffalo.” In less than an hour of fighting, more than 150 Lakota men, women, and children were killed.

  Walking through the Wounded Knee camp that night, an American soldier counted the bodies frozen to the icy ground. “It was a thing to melt the heart of a man, if it was of stone,” he said. Black Elk also saw the twisted bodies lying in bunches. He was haunted by the sight for the rest of his life.

  “And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried there in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”

  Wounded Knee was the last major fight between American soldiers and Native Americans. All the Indian groups of the American West had now been driven onto reservations. The Indian population of the United States stood at 237,000—the lowest total since the arrival of European settlers. (The Native American population of the United States today is about 2.5 million.)

  Black Elk

  The Cowboys Retire

  In contrast, the population of the United States zoomed toward 70 million. And more than 17 million Americans were now living west of the Mississippi River.

  The United States government now declared that the West was officially “settled.” Before, there had always been a frontier in the West—a line separating settled land from unsettled land. But in 1892 the government reported: “There can hardly be said to be a frontier line.”

  How do you know the West had really changed forever? Simple: the cowboys started retiring.

  “From now on I wasn’t a cowpuncher anymore,” said Teddy “Blue” Abbott. The huge open plains the cowboys had used for cattle drives were gone, divided into farms and ranches and towns. And there was no need to drive cattle north now anyway. New railroads ran through Texas and the other southern states, so trains could pick up the cows right there.

  Teddy Abbott settled in Montana and found work as a guard at a gold mine. He saved up money, married his sweetheart, Mary, and then did something truly shocking: he became a farmer! “I took a homestead,” he said, “kept milk cows and raised a garden.”

  Nat Love’s story was similar. “With the march of progress came the railroad and no longer were we called upon to follow the long-horned steers,” he said. Love tried working at a big fenced-in ranch, but it just wasn’t the same. “I bid farewell to the life which I had followed for over twenty years,” he said. “It was with genuine regret that I left the longhorn Texas cattle and the wild mustangs of the range, but the life had in a great measure lost its attractions and so I decided to quit it and try something else for a while.”

  With a new century ahead, Love turned to his attention to new adventures and new challenges. So did the rest of the country.

  What Ever Happened to … ?

  “I had always worked for big cow outfits and looked down on settlers,” remembered the cowboy-turnedfarmer Teddy “Blue” Abbott. “Now I was on the other side of the fence, and finding out how damn hard it was to start out poor and get anywheres.” With years of hard work, Teddy and his wife, Mary, did get somewhere—they built a two-thousandacre farm and ranch, and raised eight children. He always enjoyed meeting up with old cowboys and swapping stories about life on the trail. “Only a few of us left now,” he said in 1938, when he was seventyeight years old. “The rest have left the wagon and gone ahead across the big divide.” Abbott crossed the divide himself a year later.

  When the newly independent Republic of Texas held its first presidential election in 1836, Stephen F. Austin was pretty sure he’d get the gig. “The prosperity of Texas has been the object of my labors,” Austin said. “It has assumed the character of a religion, for the guidance of my thoughts and actions, for fifteen years.” But then, two weeks before the vote, the war hero Sam Houston jumped into the contest—and clobbered Austin (5,119 to 587). Later that year Austin developed pneumonia and died at the age of forty-three. Over time, Texans started to appreciate him more—they even named their capital city for him.

  After spending eight years as a Crow chief, the African American mountain man James Beckwourth turned to other adventures: army scout, wagon driver, trader, hotel owner, guide, gambler, gold miner. He slowed down just long enough to dictate his autobiography, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, a big hit when it came out in 1856. (Beckwourth was supposed to get half the profits; he never got a dime.) The book is still famous for its priceless descriptions of real life in the Wild West. Beckwourth eventually returned to Crow territory, where he died in 1866, at the age of sixty-eight.

  After the defeat of the Lakota, Black Elk remained a highly respected healer and holy man. Like Sitting Bull, he was offered a job with a traveling Wild West show. “My relatives told me I should stay at home and go on curing people,” he remembered. But he wanted to see a bit of the world. The show took him across the ocean to London, where he performed for Queen Victoria. (“She was little but fat and we liked her,” he recalled.) In 1931, when he was an old man and nearly blind, he told his life story in a book called Black Elk Speaks—an all-time classic account of the traditional life and religious beliefs of his people.

  Upon returning from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, William Clark settled in St. Louis, ran a successful fur company, got married, and had five kids. While serving as territorial governor of Missouri, Clark was accused by some of being too friendly to Indians. He responded with an opinion that would be largely ignored in the decades to come (forgive his spelling and grammar): “It is to be lamented that this deplorable situation of the Indians do not receive more of the humain feelings of this nation.” When Missouri joined the Union in 1820, Clark ran for governor. He lost. He kept busy, though, constantly updating his beloved maps of the West until his death in 1838.

  After working for a while at a Nevada newspaper, Samuel Clemens realized he had a talent for writing funny stories. “It is nothing to be proud of,” he told his brother, “but it is my strongest suit.” Calling himself Mark Twain, he settled far from the Wild West (Connecticut) and wrote some of the most famous books in American literature (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and many more). His humor turned bitter as he aged, as you can tell from one of his later jokes: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” When a story spread in 1897 that Twain was on his deathbed, he responded with a classic line: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” He died for real in 1910, at the age of seventy-five.

  Henry “Old Pancake” Comstock and his partners may have discovered a $400 million gold and silver mine, but as usual with major strikes, the real money was made by wealthy investors. Comstock sold his share of the mine for $11,000, invested the money in a store, lost everything, and shot himself. His partners fared no better. One got drunk, fell off his horse, and died of a cracked skull. The other began hearing voices, was sent to a hosp
ital for the insane, and died there. Careful what you wish for.

  After George Armstrong Custer’s death at Little Bighorn, Elizabeth Custer packed up, traveled back east—and found out the whole country was arguing about her husband. Some called Custer a fearless hero who died defending his country. Others said he was a reckless gloryseeker whose thirst for fame had led to disaster. What really stunned Elizabeth was President Ulysses S. Grant’s opinion: “I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops brought on by Custer himself.” Elizabeth Custer spent the rest of her life (and she lived another fiftyseven years) trying to rescue her husband’s reputation. It worked. “General Custer’s name was a shining light to all the youth of America,” remembered Theodore Roosevelt, a teenager at the time of Little Bighorn. In more recent years (without his wife around to defend him) historians have been much tougher on Custer.

  As a lead builder of the transcontinental railroad, Thomas Durant had bragged that he would “grab a wad of money from the construction fees—and get out.” And that’s exactly what he did. He “got out” just in time too, leaving the Union Pacific shortly before the New York Sun ran the huge headline “THE KING OF FRAUDS—COLOSSAL BRIBERY.” The story exposed the fact that Durant and friends had handed out cash and stock to members of Congress in exchange for laws helping the railroad. Durant shrugged and moved on to a new project—building a railroad through New York’s Adirondack Mountains. He bought up 700,000 acres of wilderness, planning to slice it up and sell it for development as soon as the railroad was done. Luckily for hikers and canoers of the future, he built just sixty miles, then ran out of cash. Today, much of his land is part of Adirondack Park, the largest park in any state except Alaska.

  Percy Ebbutt, the ten-year-old pioneer from Britain, left his family’s Kansas farm when he was fourteen. “Good-bye, Jack,” he wrote to his brother. “Don’t wait for me, for I’m not coming home anymore.” He spent a couple of years traveling and working, then headed east. When a Philadelphia con man tried to steal his hard-earned cash, Ebbutt used a trick he’d learned in the Wild West. He put his hand into his pocket, “as though I had a revolver,” he explained. “Look here,” he told the crook, “if you don’t hand over my coins in about two shakes, I’ll let daylight into you.” Ebbutt got his money. Then he boarded a ship and sailed back to London.

  After getting fired in Abilene, Kansas, the gunfighter and lawman James “Wild Bill” Hickok was desperate for money. He drifted east, took a job in a Wild West show, hated it, and quit. Back in the West he married a former tightrope walker named Agnes Lake. “My eyes are getting real bad,” he admitted. “My shooting days are over.” Hickok’s new plan to support the family: win money gambling. But he’d make lots of enemies over the years, and while he was playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, a man snuck up behind him and shot him in the head. (Poker fans may know that Hickok was holding two aces and two eights—forever after known as the “dead man’s hand.”)

  After leading Texans to victory in their war for independence, Sam Houston was elected president of the Republic of Texas in 1836. He later served as a U.S. senator from Texas, and then governor of the state—the only person ever to be governor of two different states (Tennessee and Texas). As tensions between North and South threatened to explode into Civil War, Houston pleaded with both sides to avoid disaster. “I see my beloved South go down in the unequal contest,” he predicted, “in a sea of blood and smoking ruin.” Texas seceded anyway, and Houston was removed from the governor’s job for refusing to swear allegiance to the Confederacy. He died during the Civil War, at the age of seventy.

  When you read short biographies of Thomas Jefferson, they usually start by saying that he’s the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But right there with the Declaration is his Louisiana Purchase, which changed the whole course of U.S. history. It was popular too, and Jefferson was reelected by a landslide in 1804. He served his second term in the White House, lost pretty much all the popularity he once had, then retired to Virginia and spent seventeen much happier years gardening, renovating his house, founding the University of Virginia, and writing letters (as many as 1,200 per year). He died at home in 1826.

  In 1879 Chief Joseph traveled to Washington, D.C., to try to get the government to honor its promise to let the Nez Perce settle on a reservation in their traditional territory. “I only ask of the government to be treated as all other men are treated,” Joseph said. Six years later, the Nez Perce were allowed to return to the Northwest—but Joseph was denied the right to live on the reservation in Nez Perce land (the government still considered him dangerous). In 1904, on a reservation in northern Washington, Joseph lay in his tepee, dying. He asked his wife to bring him his old chief’s headdress. “I may die at any time,” he said, “and I want to die as a chief.” She went to get it, but Joseph passed away before she returned. The American doctor on the reservation reported an unusual cause of death: “Chief Joseph died of a broken heart.”

  Meriwether Lewis had a much shorter, sadder career than his old partner, William Clark. Appointed governor of the Louisiana Territory, the brilliant explorer proved to be a terrible politician. Struggling with depression and alcohol abuse, Lewis fought with everyone and was slow to answer official letters. So many people complained that in 1809 he decided he’d better go to Washington, D.C., to defend his reputation. On the way, he stopped at a tavern in a clearing in the woods in Tennessee. The innkeeper, Priscilla Grinder, later said that Lewis behaved strangely at dinner, and that he “had eaten only a few mouthfuls when he started up, speaking to himself in a violent manner.” Later that night Grinder heard a gunshot. Then she heard Lewis cry, “Oh, Lord!” Then another gunshot. Lewis was found lying on his bed, with a hole in his skull so big she could see his brains. He was just thirty-five. Both Thomas Jefferson and William Clark believed Lewis had committed suicide. But Lewis’s family was convinced he was murdered, either by political enemies or robbers (he had been carrying $125; it was never found). No one knows what really happened.

  When most people think of Abraham Lincoln they think of the Civil War, or ending slavery, or that crazy beard—not the West. Lincoln always thought of himself as a westerner, though (Illinois was the West when he was a young man), and he had a major impact on western history. As president, Lincoln pushed hard for construction of the transcontinental railroad. He also signed the Homestead Act, under which the government gave people 270 million acres of western land—that’s 10 percent of the entire United States. After he was assassinated in 1865, a train carried his body back west to Illinois, where he was buried.

  “After quitting the cowboy life I struck out for Denver,” remembered the newly retired cowboy Nat Love. “Here I met and married the present Mrs. Love.” Then he looked for a job. When city life proved too boring, Love found work as a porter on Pullman railroad cars—one of the few decent jobs open to African American men in those days. He had a bit of trouble on his first day: “I succeeded in getting the shoes of passengers, which had been given to me to polish, badly mixed up,” he recalled. “This naturally caused a good-sized rumpus the next morning. And sundry blessings were heaped on the head of yours truly.” Love figured out the job, worked fifteen more years, saw the country, and retired in Los Angeles, where he wrote his amazing autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love.

  Biddy Mason, the formerly enslaved woman who won her freedom in a California court, settled in Los Angeles, where she began working as a nurse and midwife. In 1866, after ten years of hard work and frugal living, Mason bought her first piece of L.A. real estate (it cost her $250). With a few more years of smart buying and selling, Mason built a fortune, becoming one of the richest women in the West. She built a day care center and a church, and gave so much money to local charities that hungry people, black and white, heard about her generosity and often lined up outside her house to ask for help. Mason died in L.A. at the age of seventy-three.

  While running for president in 1
844, James K. Polk promised that if elected he’d serve only one term. Polk accomplished his major goals of securing American control of Texas, Oregon, and the rest of the West. Then he did something truly amazing—he kept a campaign promise. Refusing calls to run for reelection, Polk retired to his home in Tennessee in 1849. Exhausted and sick (turns out he had cholera), Polk died later that year—giving him the sad distinction of enjoying the shortest retirement (104 days) of any president in American history.

  “Red Cloud, the famous old Sioux Indian chief, is dead.” That was the first sentence of a small article in the New York Times on December 11, 1909. Though he had led the most successful war ever fought by Native Americans against the United States, Red Cloud was unable to win lasting freedom for his people or himself. He lived the last thirty-five years of his life on reservations. Still a respected leader, Red Cloud spent much of that time arguing passionately against the U.S. government’s plans to break reservations into smaller and smaller pieces. “They made us many promises, more than I can remember,” Red Cloud said of the government. “But they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”

  The thirteen-year-old Donner Party survivor Virginia Reed settled with her family in California. When she was sixteen she fell in love with a young man named John Murphy. They wanted to marry, but Virginia’s father vowed, according to a newspaper report, “that he would shoot Murphy if he dared attempt a marriage.” “Sir, you may shoot me,” Murphy responded. “But I shall marry your daughter.” One night soon after, Virginia told her mother she was going across the street to a friend’s house. There she met Murphy and they were secretly (and very quickly) married. And it worked out—they had nine children. Virginia Reed died in 1921, at the age of eighty-seven.