Ben talked this McNamara into teaching him to box. The lessons took place at night after work in the blacksmith’s shop. To build himself up, Ben lifted weights with barbells McNamara forged out of scrap iron. I went along to watch my ribby brother and this hefty Irishman stripped to the waist, all greased up in sweat and the sweat shining in the lantern while they sparred. The training went on for a long spell, more than a month, and that proved that Ben, who had a habit of skipping from one endeavor to another, could sure be of one mind when it came to getting even.
He was crafty, too. When he figured he was ready, he did not walk up to Brophy and challenge him to a fight; he waited until everything could be in his favor. It was on a Saturday afternoon, after the day shift, and Ben borrowed a horse from the blacksmith and rode over to the saloon where Brophy was tying one on. This saloon wasn’t like the ones in the westerns. It did have swinging doors, but it was otherwise a kind of giant tent, like a circus tent thrown over a wood platform. I went along to make sure my brother didn’t get himself killed.
Well, I need not have had any worries about that. All of a sudden Ben let out a wild yell, like an Apache war whoop, and jumped his horse up the steps and through the door and crashed smack-dab into Brophy. He was pretty drunk and you probably could have knocked him over by blowing on him, so you can imagine what happened when he had a head-on collision with a horse. Hit the floor like he’d been poleaxed. Ben jumped from the saddle on top of him and commenced to whale on him with everything he had. Managed to bust both hands and make Brophy so his mother would not have recognized him.
I don’t have a lot in the way of formal education. I, too, never graduated high school, quit in my last year, when my mother took off for California. But I put great stock in education and have tried to teach myself lessons I missed in school. I read a lot, and I recall reading an essay by a historian name of Frederick Jackson Turner. It was written in 1893 or around then, and it was Mr. Turner’s idea that the figures from the United States census of 1890 showed that no clear line could be drawn between the settled and the unsettled parts of the West. That was also the year of the Battle of Wounded Knee up in the Dakotas—the last of the Indian wars. In so many words, the frontier that had existed for more than three centuries was gone, and the old Wild West a thing of the past.
The reason I bring this up is, first of all, Ben was born in 1890, and second of all, the Wild West might have disappeared from Kansas and Colorado and such places, but it lived on down here in this border country for a good long time. Sure, the Apaches were whipped and penned up on reservations, but we had outlaws and rustlers and gunfighters raising hell in Arizona and New Mexico damn near into the 1920s. Pancho Villa got his start in life as a cattle rustler. The whole reason the Territorial Rangers were formed was to clean up Arizona so it would be respectable and fit for statehood, which as you know it didn’t get until 1912.
I am not off on a side trail, like you might think. You are not the first person to ask me about Ben, him being the legend he was, and so I have spent some time trying to figure his life out. I come back to the words a newspaper friend of Ben’s, Tim Forbes, spoke at Ben’s funeral ten years ago. He said something like “Benjamin Erskine was the last ember of the true Old West,” and that he was like the Old Testament Hebrews in his fierce, unbending beliefs because he grew up in a desert and lived among his herds and the harshness of nature, just like those Old Testament folks.
Of course, I grew up the same way in the same times, but Ben and I were completely different, like we weren’t born of the same man and woman. Ben was an adventurer, a soldier of fortune, and a lawman, and he put about twelve men in the ground—the ones he didn’t put in jail. I consider myself a businessman, and except for a couple schoolboy scuffles, I have never been in a fistfight. What made the difference was … well, I guess you’d have to call it fate. Ben was a lightning rod for trouble; sometimes he looked for it and sometimes it found him.
It was in ’07 that we got laid off from the mine. We didn’t know it then, but there had been financial panic way off in New York, and the prices of silver and copper had gone down the drain, so the mines cut back on production or shut down altogether. For about a year Ben and I were saddle bums, working ranches in Arizona and in Mexico. Then we teamed up with a vaquero name of Martín Mendoza capturing unbranded bulls. They were wild animals and were hard to find, hiding out in the brushiest, most remote country they could get into. The three of us spent days tracking ’em down in the mountains, and when we finally got one cornered, we’d ride in and rope him, taking turns heading and heeling. That Martín could throw a loop like I’d never seen a man throw one—his riata would shoot out from his hand like a rawhide snake. He hardly ever missed, which was a good thing, because if you did miss, you stood a fair chance of being charged and knocked off your horse by one of those bulls, and then he was likely to gore or stomp you to death.
It was dangerous, exciting work, but it wasn’t exciting enough for my brother, so for a spell he apprenticed himself out to a professional hunter that ranchers had hired to get rid of cattle-killing mountain lions. The hunter ran them down with a pack of dogs, big, rangy red-bones and like breeds, and Ben often said there was no sound to quicken your blood like their cries when in pursuit, unless it was the baying they made when they’d treed or cornered the lion. The hunter and Ben would ride hell for leather to catch up with the pack, and if the cougar decided to fight, they would come upon a scene of bloody mayhem, three or four dogs mauled or gutted, the others lunging in to snap at the cat’s hindquarters and the lion hissing and snarling and lashing out with its forepaws. That’s when Ben and his boss would dismount and wade in through those bloodied-up, howling dogs and finish the cougar with their revolvers.
It was said of Ben that he could have given an Apache lessons in tracking. He learned how from his days hunting wild bulls and mountain lions.
Along about 1910 I had saved enough money to buy a few head of corriente steers down in Mexico. Ben’s wildness did not extend to whiskey and women, the two things that empty a cowboy’s pockets the quickest, so he had saved up some himself and chipped in. I filed for a quarter section of rangeland up here in the San Rafael under the Homestead Act and leased another ten sections, and that was the start of the San Ignacio. We were old-time rawhiders and lived like rawhiders in a tent with a wood-burning stove and were in the saddle most every day. Fall of that year, we drove our first herd to market, pushing them to the railhead at Sonoita.
Ben and I had some differences—he had this habit of disappearing on me for days on end, riding down into Sonora for I don’t know what reasons. Spring of the next year he and a hand we had working for us, a T.J. Babcock, up and left me to go fight in the Mexican Revolution. To my mind, it was the screwiest thing any two gringos could do, but this Babcock had been raised mostly in Mexico, in Cananea, where they had that big miners’ strike in ’05. I think he picked up a lot of foreign ideas there, the man was practically a damn Red, and I believe he talked my brother into joining him and those revolutionary thugs like Pancho Villa. Ben was a man of few words, so I don’t know much about what he and Babcock did in the Revolution. If Babcock is still alive and you can track him down, you can ask him. I did gather, from the little my brother told me when he got back that summer, that he saw some right terrible things and was party to them besides.
I thought, or maybe it was hoped, that seeing and doing those things had got something out of his system, but if anything, he was more restless and thirsting for action than before. That man craved it like a drunk does his whiskey. He wasn’t of much help to me, running the ranch.
I don’t recall what year this was—sometime after I got married to Lilly in 1912 and built a little house for us—it’s just up the road from this one, still standing—that Ben got himself in a little trouble with the law. He captured a mustang, a blue roan stallion that had been running loose in the Huachucas and that had become like a famous outlaw because he gave the slip to e
very cowhand who tried to catch him. Ben and Martín spotted him one day and went after him. Martín’s throw missed—must have been the only time in his life he did miss. Ben’s did not. He brought the roan to the ranch, branded him, named him Spirit for his ghostly color and for his temperament, and broke him to the saddle.
There was a law on the books prohibiting the appropriation of maverick horses. They were considered public property and were to be turned over to the county court for auction. Word of Ben’s capture spread, and when the county attorney in Nogales heard of it, he issued a court order for Ben to surrender that horse.
No way was he going to. The prosecutor sent a mounted posse to take the animal. Ben got forewarned, I don’t know from who or how. He got Spirit out of the corral and waited for the posse up on an oak ridge. When he saw them, he rode out from hiding and waved his hat and let out a vaquero’s yell. The chase was on. He led the posse into the mountains where he and Spirit knew every canyon and trail. It was no contest, so he decided to make it one by taunting the posse. He’d ride to the crest of a hill and wait there in full view. When the posse got to within fifty yards or so, he’d spur Spirit into a run. The game went on for an entire morning, until the posse quit. Ben rode on for another thirty miles, to a ranch in the low desert country near Tucson, where he left Spirit in the care of a rancher we’d worked for years before. Then he hopped the next train heading south. About a month later, he retrieved the stallion and rode him back down here, proud as could be.
I mention these hijinks because they and other wild things he did went a long way into making his legend. Not that he was a legend like Wyatt Earp was, but he’d become a kind of hero to certain folks in Santa Cruz and Cochise and Pima counties. You see, Arizona had finally got admitted to the union—the curtain had come down on the hell-roaring territorial days. That was okay with most people, including myself—about time Arizona caught up with the twentieth century. But down here on the border, there were other people who weren’t so happy with progress and civilization. They felt life was getting to be a little too regulated, you know, like they were being fenced in, and somebody like Ben reminded them of the old days of the open range and doing what you damn well pleased and poking your thumb in the eye of the law. It’s passing strange when I think about it. Ben wasn’t yet twenty-five, he ought to have belonged to the future, not to a time gone by. It seemed to suit him, though, and he did his best to live up to the picture folks had of him.
Capturing wild horses and leading posses on breakneck chases, even that got to be too tame for him. In 1915 he up and disappeared on me again. Found out later that he and Mendoza and his old sidekick Babcock had joined up with Yaqui Indians running guns into Old Mexico. Mexico was a damn mess back then. One general would take power, then another general would overthrow him and be el presidente till another general threw him out. To go running guns into that madhouse seemed just crazy to me. I was getting worried that my kid brother was going to turn into one more border renegade and end up behind bars or dead. I recollect—it must have been in 1916—sitting him down and saying to him, “Ben, either you’re my partner in this ranch or you’re not. If you don’t want to be, say so, and I’ll buy you out. But if you are, then dammit, you’ve got to stick around and do the work and not go running off on these harebrained adventures.” Ben promised he’d be more steady, like a business partner should.
I had a talk with Lilly about him, and we decided to be matchmakers, calculating that if Ben met the right gal and took on the responsibilities of married life, he might be more reliable and live longer besides. I reckon we were sticking our noses where they didn’t belong. Still and all, we felt that it was our duty to nudge him, kind of, into a more regular life. It so happened that Lilly knew of a single young lady, Ida Barnes. She was seventeen, the only child of Merle and Ellen Barnes. They were middling-prosperous folks who ran a lumberyard and sawmill near to the town of Canelo. One day I drove the wagon over to their place to buy some boards I needed for a new corral, but really I wanted to see their daughter for myself and more or less to find out how things stood with her, you know, if she had her a boyfriend or fiancé.
When I drove up and hitched my team, I heard this female voice call to me from the yard, “Good day, sir. If you have business with my father, he is up in the mountains sawing timber with his crew, but my mother should be able to take care of you.” The voice was coming from above me, and there was Ida, sitting on a tree branch in a spotless white muslin dress and a straw hat. Her feet in high-button shoes were crossed at the ankles, and she was smiling to beat the band and looked relaxed, like she was sitting on a porch swing instead of a tree branch six, seven feet off the ground. I thanked her for her information and then asked her what she was doing up there, and she said she liked the view.
A while later, as I was loading up my wagon, the mailman rode in. Ida jumped right out of that tree and without so much as a stumble ran over to the mailman, asking if he had a letter for her. He did not. She was right disappointed. “You never bring any mail for me,” she said, like it was his fault. I thought that a gal who would climb a tree dressed like it was a Sunday and then jump to the ground light as a cat was just the gal for Ben. When I got home, I told him about Miss Barnes and said that she was hoping someone would write her a letter. I left it at that, hoping he would take the hint, and he did.
She wrote him back, and pretty soon he got an invitation to Sunday dinner. I’ll never forget how my brother looked when he drove off in our carriage, bathed and shaved and dressed to make an impression. Beaver-hide Stetson, corduroy jacket, starched white shirt, bandanna with a silver clasp, handmade Mexican boots. You add to his appearance his reputation as a dashing fella, which had gone before him, and you can see why he just bowled that impressionable young gal right over.
They courted all that summer and in September Ben proposed. Ida said yes but told him he would have to ask for her father’s approval. As the story has come down to me, Ben stopped by the following day and sat out on the front porch jawing about horses and cattle prices with Merle Barnes. Ida stood inside with her ear pressed to the door. There was a break in the conversation, and Ben asked, “What would you say if Ida and me got married?” in a way so offhanded the old man didn’t hear the question. Ben repeated it in the same casual way. “Reckon that would be all right,” Merle answered, and then him and my brother went back to talking about livestock.
So they got married a couple of weeks later, by a justice of the peace in Tucson. I’ll say this for Ben—he tried real hard to follow my advice to settle down and break himself to the saddle of marriage and family responsibilities. He got a job managing the store at the Yaqui reservation at Xavier del Bac, south of Tucson, and earned side money turning out bits, spurs, and horseshoes for sale. He even took a correspondence course to earn a high school degree.
But he wasn’t cut out for a life like that. Ida wrote Lilly a letter one time and mentioned that Ben had become subject to what she called “spells of cloudy weather.” Lilly and I knew what she meant—we’d seen those spells ourselves. Ben would sull up all of a sudden, and for no reason we could figure out, act like he was mad about something but wouldn’t say what, and then just as quick, he’d snap out of it. But we got the feeling from Ida’s letter that these storms were becoming more frequent. I’m no philosopher, sure as hell no psychologist, but I reckoned that Ben was trying to be somebody he wasn’t and it was getting to him. He looked up to me—I say that without bragging. He admired men who were even-tempered and thought things through and were steady of purpose, and he wanted to be that way himself. Hell’s bells, I wanted him to be that way. But he couldn’t be.
In 1917, after the U.S. got itself into the First World War, Ben declared that he was going to enlist. Said that with his battle experience in Mexico, he could be of valuable service to the army. Maybe so. But I wonder now if he was looking to jump the fence, I mean get away from a dull job and a way of life that fit him like a shirt two sizes too s
mall. In the end Ida talked him out of joining up. She was pregnant—she would miscarry that child—and Ben, rightly so, I think, decided his place was at her side. I believe he always regretted not going to the war. In years to come I would hear him say that he felt he missed out on something terrible and grand.
What he did do was to become a cattleman in his own right. He quit the store job and filed a claim for a section of undeveloped land under the Homestead Act. If he proved up, the land would be his in five years. He named his place after Ida’s initials—the IB-Bar. It was at the foot of the Huachuca Mountains, which wasn’t ideal cattle country, full of tight canyons and steep hillsides, but it had a spring, which was a thing of value in our dry country. A tumbledown log cabin built by an early settler stood below the spring. Ben fixed it up, and Ida and he lived in it for a year or so. Then, on the slope of a south-facing ridge, low enough to be out of the wind but high enough to be safe from flooding in the summer monsoons, he built an adobe-brick house with my help and the help of his old partner, Martín Mendoza. Martín hired on and moved into the cabin with his wife, Lourdes. Ben dug a well, fenced the property, put up a corral and a barn. Ida planted a vegetable garden and ordered a new cast-iron stove with a warming oven and water-heating compartment from the Sears Roebuck catalog. It came by ox-drawn wagon from the train station in Nogales, along with a bed to replace the one Ben and Martín had built out of oak trees they’d cut down themselves. There they were, almost twenty years into this century, living like pioneers. Ida was happy. Just eighteen years old, and she had a place she could call her own.
And my brother? He wasn’t cut out to be a cattleman either, even though he was good at it. He worked that ranch off and on till ’38, when he sold out and incorporated the IB-Bar into the San Ignacio and once more became my partner. When I say “off and on,” I mean more off than on. He was a deputy sheriff for about ten of those years, and he continued to go soldier-of-fortuning down in Mexico. It was that craving of his for action, for danger. Just like he used to disappear on me for days and sometimes weeks, he did the same to Ida and their two kids, Frank and Grace. Because of the way he lived his life, there were all kinds of men who came after him, looking for revenge. One time he and Martín fought a gun battle with a pair of desperadoes right in the backyard, in full view of Ida and the children. Ida died early, you know, she was just shy of fifty-two years old, and there were some people, his own daughter was one and my Lilly another, who thought that the strain of living with a man like Ben was what killed her. Personally I think that’s nonsense, but I do know he put his family through an awful lot, and that if I’d been a woman, I would not have wanted to be married to my brother.
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