The year 1873 saw the introduction of two game-changing firearms—the Winchester Model 1873 lever-action rifle and the Colt M1873 Single Action Army (aka “Peacemaker”) revolver. What set them apart from the array of available arms was that they were among the first chambered for center-fire metallic cartridges to be used in tandem.

Each firearm initially used its own proprietary round. The Model 1873 was chambered for the .44-40 Winchester cartridge, which went on to become one of the most popular rounds in firearms history. Purpose-built for the U.S. Cavalry, the Peacemaker was initially designed with a 7½-inch barrel, for accuracy at longer ranges, and chambered for use with the hard-hitting .45 Colt round. Not to rest on its own laurels, Colt then offered civilian versions of its revolver chambered for Winchester’s increasingly popular .44-40 cartridge, as well as the latter’s .38-40 and .32-20 rounds, thus sparing anyone who owned both firearms from having to carry two different calibers of ammunition. As attested by the images on the following pages, everyone from lawmen and outlaws to everyday cowhands and shepherds to headline entertainers were soon snapping up both manufacturers’ Model 1873s.

Another aspect that set apart the 1873s was shrewd marketing, including testimonials from famed Westerners of the era. Winchester and Colt each advertised its guns through such motivated Western dealers as E.C. Meacham, of St. Louis, and Carlos Gove, of Denver. Winchester’s 1875 catalog featured praise from Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody, who wrote the company on behalf of prospective buyers, “For hunting, I pronounce your improved Winchester the boss.” Writer Ned Buntline, whose florid dime novels birthed many of the legends associated with Buffalo Bill, tirelessly hyped both the Winchester ’73 and the Colt Single Action Army. For much of his career Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, the man who in 1934 brought outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow to ground, carried a Colt Peacemaker he dubbed “Old Lucky.” Bill Tilghman, the famed U.S. marshal out of Oklahoma, was known to carry both a Winchester ’73 and a Peacemaker, as did notorious outlaws Billy the Kid and Pearl Hart, though clearly not to either manufacturer’s detriment. 

Winchester produced a whopping 720,000 Model 1873 rifles through 1923, while Colt rolled out more than 357,000 first-generation Single Action Army revolvers through 1940. By then both companies had claimed the title “The Gun That Won the West” for their respective Models 1873. The Peacemaker is still in production, and modern-day replicas of both firearms remain popular among present-day cowboy action shooters. They’ve certainly earned their reputation. 

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Director John Ford went on inactive status from the navy in 1944 to film an adaptation of They Were Expendable, William Lindsay White’s book about PT boats during the opening months of the war in the Philippines. The movie starred Robert Montgomery, who had joined the navy after Pearl Harbor and, like the character he plays, commanded a PT boat. John Wayne, who had not served in the war, was billed second. Back on a film set, Ford remained the same cantankerous needler he had been before the war and he zeroed in on “Duke” Wayne, one of his favorite targets. In Print the Legend, his Ford biography, author Scott Eyman relates how Montgomery watched the director rake Wayne over the coals. “Can’t you manage a salute that at least looks like you’ve been in the service?” Ford asked in front of the cast and crew. Eyman related what happened next. “Finally, Robert Montgomery walked over, placed his hands on both sides of the director’s chair and said, ‘Don’t ever talk to Duke like that. You ought to be ashamed.’ The set fell silent. A break was ordered, and Ford ended up in tears.”

Despite the turmoil on set, They Were Expendable ended up being one of Ford’s finest films, a melancholic love letter to PT boats and to the navy in general. 

When the film opens in Manila on the eve of war in 1941, Lieutenant John “Brick” Brickley (Montgomery) wants to demonstrate the potential of the PT boats he commands. His admiral is dismissive (“In wartime, I prefer something more substantial,” he says). So is his second in command, Lt. (j.g.) Rusty Ryan (Wayne). Rusty wants a transfer to destroyers. 

Then the war comes. 

In one early scene, Rusty receives a finger wound that becomes infected and Brick orders him to the hospital on Corregidor. There he strikes up a brief romance with nurse Sandy Davyss (Donna Reed). Like everything else in the movie, the romance is realistic and understated. Rusty invites Sandy for dinner at the hut serving as the officers’ club, where sailors hidden in the crawl space beneath the building serenade them. It’s a touching scene, but Ford understands that romance is impossible under these conditions. The last time the two speak is over a field telephone as Rusty prepares to depart on a mission and Sandy remains on Corregidor as the Japanese move closer. The conversation gets cut off abruptly when higher-ups commandeer the line. Rusty—and the audience—never learn Sandy’s fate. 

Ford uses his own naval experience to create a sense of authenticity. There’s no place for cinematic heroics. Earlier in the film, as Brick chafes at the limited role his boats have been given, the admiral compares the situation to a baseball game. If the manager tells you to hit a sacrifice bunt, that’s what you do. “You and I are professionals,” he says. At the end, when Rusty decides to give up his seat on the last plane out to Australia so he can join the guerrilla fight against the Japanese, Brick calmly reminds him that they have their orders. Rusty sits back down. 

Brick’s PT boats do see combat and those who like watching these speedy plywood craft in action will enjoy those sequences. They also get one vital mission when they spirit “the General” out of the war zone so he can continue the fight from Australia. Although the General remains nameless, audiences certainly recognized him as Douglas MacArthur. In real life, John D. Bulkeley, the Medal of Honor recipient on whom Montgomery’s character is based, did transport MacArthur and his family south to safety on Mindanao, where B-17s then flew them to Australia. 

One of the movie’s greatest strengths is its eye for detail—when Brickley grabs a pair of scissors to estimate the distance on map; the terrified faces of wounded soldiers on Corregidor as Japanese bombs fall; the cook’s instructions to use a pinch of salt in the pancake batter; the way Sandy brushes her hair and puts on a string of pearls before sitting down to dinner with the officers; the fact that Rusty demands aviation fuel (PT boats used Packard engines adapted from airplanes). It is also beautifully filmed, with haunting shots of the shadowy and wet tunnels of Corregidor and some pulse-pounding sequences of PT boats dodging shell bursts. 

They Were Expendable turned out to be one of John Ford’s best films, but it was not a huge box office success when it was released at the end of 1945. It is a war movie in a minor key—subdued and somewhat melancholy. It matches the film’s subject matter: the American experience in the Philippines at the start of the war did not go well, either. No doubt, audiences who had just seen the terrible war come to an end were not eager to relive its grim early days, no matter how beautifully photographed.

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These are ten of the most interesting Westerners who spent time in the Centennial State.

Bent Brothers 

William and Charles Bent partnered with Ceran St. Vrain in the best known trading post west of the Mississippi. Established in 1833 on the Santa Fe Trail in what today is southeastern Colorado, Bent’s Fort was a gathering spot for travelers, trappers and traders. The Bent brothers forged lasting relationships with the Cheyennes and Arapahos. 

Kit Carson 

Christopher “Kit” Carson began his career trapping beaver in the Colorado Rockies and hiring on as a hunter at Bent’s Fort. In the 1850s he served as an Indian agent, working for peace on behalf of his friend Ute Chief Ouray. Late in his career he commanded Fort Garland before taking up ranching in the San Luis Valley. Carson died at Fort Lyon on May 23, 1868, and was initially buried beside wife Josefa at their home in Boggsville. 

Chief Ouray 

Born in 1833, the year of the shooting stars in tribal lore, the Ute chief sought peace with the U.S. government and preservation of his tribe’s hereditary lands at the height of the Indian wars. By life’s end he and wife Chipeta lived in a six-room house on a 300-acre farm along the Uncompahgre River near Montrose. Following his death on Aug. 24, 1880, despite Ouray’s best efforts, the government relocated the Utes to reservations in Utah.

Buffalo Bill Cody 

William Frederick Cody earned his reputation as an Army scout, his nickname as a buffalo hunter for the railroads and fame for touring worldwide with the best known Wild West show in American history. At age 13, however, he’d reportedly earned little during the 1859 gold rush to what would become Colorado. In later life he repeatedly visited his sister in Denver, where he died on Jan. 10, 1917. Cody is buried atop Lookout Mountain near Golden. 

Doc Holliday 

Tubercular dentist turned professional gambler and gunman John Henry Holliday came West for his health. After risking his life in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, backing the Earp brothers in the O.K. Corral fight and aftermath, Holliday made his way to Colorado, where he gambled in Trinidad, Pueblo and Leadville. The reputedly curative waters of Glenwood Springs failed to remedy his tuberculosis, and he died there on Nov. 8, 1887.

Baby Doe Tabor 

The beautiful Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt divorced her worthless first husband in 1880, moved to Leadville and met silver magnate Horace Austin Warner “Haw” Tabor, who left his wife of 25 years to marry Baby Doe. Alas, Horace died destitute in 1899, leaving the widowed Baby Doe penniless once again. Her body was found frozen to her cabin floor in 1935.

Alferd Packer 

Self-proclaimed wilderness guide Packer and five fellow travelers suffered in the San Juan Mountains during the harsh winter of 1874. The only one to emerge alive, Packer later confessed to cannibalism. Though he denied having killed the others, evidence suggested otherwise. Convicted of manslaughter, he served 18 years before being paroled in 1901. Packer died on April 23, 1907, in Deer Creek and is buried in Littleton Cemetery, a stone’s throw from this writer’s house. 

Margaret Brown 

A celebrated survivor of the 1912 sinking of RMS Titanic, this Colorado socialite, activist and philanthropist is best remembered as the “Unsinkable Molly Brown.” Known to family and friends as “Maggie,” she married mining engineer James Joseph Brown in Leadville in 1886, and in 1894 the successful couple bought a Victorian mansion in Denver preserved today as the Molly Brown House Museum. Maggie died in her sleep on Oct. 26, 1932.

Tom Horn 

He served at times as a scout, soldier, range detective and Pinkerton agent, but Horn became notorious as a paid-for-hire killer. In 1900, while working for the Swan Land & Cattle Co. in northwest Colorado, he gunned down suspected rustlers Mat Rash and Isom Dart. In 1902 Horn was convicted of having murdered 14-year-old rancher’s son Willie Nickell near Iron Mountain, Wyo., and on Nov. 20, 1903, he was hanged in Cheyenne. His brother brought Tom’s body to Boulder for burial.

Ann Bassett 

The first white child born in Browns Park, an isolated northwest Colorado valley notorious for rustling and illegal land grabs, Ann Marie Bassett was in the thick of the action for much of her life. After Tom Horn’s 1900 killing of Mat Rash, her fiancé, Bassett sought vengeance against Horn’s employer, cattle baron Ora Haley. Tried twice for cattle rustling, she was found not guilty both times. In an interview given just before her death on May 8, 1956, Bassett said, “I did everything they said I did and a helluva lot more.”

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On the afternoon of December 7, 1941, director John Ford and his wife were attending a luncheon at the home of Rear Admiral Andrew C. Pickens in Alexandria, Virginia. The host excused himself to take a call from the War Department. When he returned, he told his guests that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. “We are at war,” he said.

Ford was ready.

He had been born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, on February 1, 1894, the son of Irish immigrants who had settled in nearby Portland, where the elder Feeney operated a bar. Young John played on the Portland High School football team and graduated in 1914. His high school nickname, probably because of his football prowess, was “Bull.”

When Feeney’s older brother Francis headed west and found work as an actor and director in California, young John followed—and assumed his brother’s stage name of Ford as well. Eventually John Ford began directing his own films. By the time of Pearl Harbor he was one of Hollywood’s most respected directors, with a resume that included The Iron Horse (1924), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and even a Shirley Temple film, Wee Willie Winkie (1937). In his 1939 Western Stagecoach, Ford turned a relatively obscure actor named John Wayne into a star. That was also the first movie Ford shot in the Southwest’s Monument Valley, a setting he made iconic in his postwar Westerns.

Yet for all his talent, John Ford was a flawed human being with a strong streak of pure New England cussedness. “Actors were terrified of him because he liked to terrify them,” said John Carradine, who acted for Ford in several films. “He was a sadist.” Ford became known for the way he needled his actors, especially Wayne, during filming and for his tendency to go on drunken benders between projects. According to one acquaintance, “It was as though God had touched John Ford at the beginning of his life and said, ‘How would you like to be a very unique man—like no one else. However, you may scare some people.’”

Ford had always nursed a love for the sea, perhaps inspired by his youth on Maine’s Casco Bay. In the 1930s he enlisted in the Navy Reserve with a commission as a lieutenant commander, and as tensions with Japan increased, he sometimes used his yacht Araner to shadow any Japanese vessels he encountered off the California coast. He started the Eleventh Naval District Motion Picture and Still Photographic Group in 1939 as a means of documenting the navy’s activities in the impending war and began recruiting friends from all aspects of the film industry to help. As he later said, “They are writers, directors, some actors, but mostly technicians, electricians, cutters, sound cutters, negative cutters, positive cutters, carpenters, and that sort of thing.” The navy called the 47-year-old Ford to active duty in September 1941 as a lieutenant commander and he went to Washington, where his photographic unit was assigned to work under William J. Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.

In his new role Ford visited Iceland and Panama to survey the military situations there. After the attack on Pearl Harbor he received orders to head to Hawaii to film the aftermath. He and a crew embarked on the trip west on January 4, 1942. Twelve days later he was at Pearl Harbor, which he found “in a state of readiness. The Army and the Navy, all in good shape, everything taken care of, patrols going out regularly, everybody in high spirit[s]…”

On April 18, 1942, Lt. Col. James Doolittle and his raiders took off in twin-engine B-25 Mitchells from the carrier USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo. Although the Doolittle Raid did little physical damage to Japan, it dealt a psychological blow. Shocked by the American attack on its mainland, the Japanese military decided to move aggressively across the Pacific to prevent any more raids. One of its targets was a tiny atoll with an airstrip 1,110 miles northwest of Hawaii called Midway. It was little more than a speck in the vast Pacific, populated mostly by a species of albatross that people called gooney birds, but Midway was also the U.S. Navy’s westernmost base and home to a Marine detachment. Pan American World Airways had used Midway as a base for its Clippers, and navy submarines fueled there, too. A pair of Japanese destroyers had shelled Midway on the night of December 7, 1941, and the Japanese speculated that perhaps Doolittle’s men had taken off from the atoll for their attack. Furthermore, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack, believed that if he threatened Midway, he could draw the U.S. Pacific Fleet under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz out from Hawaii and into battle.

The U.S. Navy had cracked Japanese codes and knew that Midway was in the crosshairs, and Nimitz wanted Ford to photograph the fighting once it erupted. Sometime in late May 1942 he summoned Ford to his office at Pearl Harbor, said he had a dangerous assignment for him, and told him to report to Admiral David W. Bagley. Ford and cameraman Jack Mackenzie Jr. were soon zipping across the harbor in a speedboat for a rendezvous with a destroyer that was already underway. “Hadn’t the slightest idea what I was doing, where I was going,” Ford said. “I found out when I got on board the destination was Midway.”

All was quiet on Midway when Ford and Mackenzie arrived. “All the year around it’s the same out there on that little Pacific island,” Mackenzie told American Cinematographer magazine. “The grandest place in the whole ocean to find absolute quiet and peace—if that’s what you want.” Ford spent time photographing the island’s gooney birds and the PT boats that had accompanied the task force. He remained doubtful that the Japanese would really attack but, forewarned by the codebreakers, the navy had been scrambling to bolster the atoll’s defenses by flying in more aircraft and reinforcing the ground forces. “By June 4 there were 121 combat planes, 141 officers and 2,886 enlisted men on the atoll,” noted Samuel Eliot Morison in his history of naval operations during the war. 

On June 3, Ford said, Commander Massie Hughes invited him aboard a PBY Catalina flying boats for a patrol. At first they saw nothing, Ford claimed, but then they got a glimpse of enemy vessels through a break in the clouds. When a couple of Japanese airplanes appeared to spot the PBY, Hughes headed into the clouds, and then descended for a wave-hugging return to Midway. 

Something, Ford realized, “was about to pop.” Another Catalina spotted what appeared to be the Japanese invasion fleet and the commander of Naval Air Station Midway, Captain Cyril T. Simard, sent out B-17s and Catalinas to attack the vessels, with little result. Simard expected the Japanese to attack the next morning and suggested that Ford place himself on top of the powerhouse, where he would have a good view of the impending action as well as a telephone link to headquarters. Ford and Mackenzie set up and went to bed.

Simard was right about the attack, although the morning of June 4 started off calmly enough. “Everything was very quiet and serene,” Ford said. He and Mackenzie shared the powerhouse with some Marines who had also stationed themselves on the roof. The filmmakers had a pair of 16mm cameras loaded with color film. Sometime around 6:30 that morning Ford was scanning the sky with binoculars when he spotted the first black dots that meant incoming Japanese aircraft. There were 108 airplanes in all, including 36 Nakajima B5N “Kate” bombers, 36 Aichi D3A “Val” dive bombers, and 36 Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” fighters, and they had been launched from four carriers about 200 miles out to sea. Midway’s radar had already picked them up and the defenders were braced for the onslaught. “Everybody was very calm. I was amazed, sort of, at the lackadaisical air everybody took,” Ford said. It was  as though this kind of thing happened all the time.

The Japanese planes roared in to attack. According to Ford, the lead pilot shocked everybody by flipping his Zero on its back and flying upside down about 100 feet off the ground in a show of bravado. “Everybody was amazed, nobody fired at him, until suddenly some Marine said, ‘What the Hell,’ let go at him and then shot him down,” said Ford. “He slid off into the sea.”

Then the attack started “in earnest.” Bombs exploded nearby, shaking the cameras. A plane dropped a bomb on the garrison’s hangar, which exploded. A piece of concrete struck Ford in the head and briefly knocked him out. “Just knocked me goofy for a bit, and I pulled myself out of it.” Recovering, Ford continued to film despite also receiving an ugly, three-inch shrapnel wound in his arm. 

Mackenzie, who kept a lucky rabbit’s foot in his pocket, had also been knocked down by the blast, and he regretted missing a shot of the explosion because he had been reloading film when it happened. He recovered and scrambled down a ladder to the ground and resumed shooting. “By this time [the Japanese] had riddled the hangars and set them on fire,” he recalled. “The hospital too was smashed and on fire, and the commissary was all busted up and burning fierce and one of our oil tanks was on fire sending a plume of heavy black smoke up into the atmosphere. It was a merry little hell all around.”

It appeared to Ford that the Japanese avoided bombing the runway, perhaps, he thought, because they hoped to capture the island and use it later. They did bomb alongside it, and they focused a lot of attention on an airplane the Americans had left out in the open as a decoy. From what Ford saw, the enemy wasted a lot of effort to destroy it. “[T]hey lost about three planes trying to get to that fake plane, as it came into a cone of fire that was pretty dangerous,” he said.

One incident that angered Ford happened as he peered through his binoculars and saw a Zero attack and kill a Marine who had bailed out of his airplane. “This kid jumped and this Zero went after him and shot him out of his harness,” he said, and then the Japanese pilot returned to strafe the water where the Marine had come down. 

Ford told his debriefers how impressed he had been by the Marines around him. “They were kids, oh, I would say from 18 to 22, none of them were older. They were the calmest people I have ever seen. They were up there popping away with rifles, having a swell time and none of them were alarmed.” He added, “I was really amazed. I thought that some kids, one or two would get scared, but no, they were having the time of their lives.”

But not all of them had escaped with their lives. Forty-nine of the atoll’s Marine defenders had been killed. Their aircraft—F4F Wildcats and obsolete F2A Brewster Buffaloes—were outmatched by the Japanese Zeros, and attacks flown from Midway against the Japanese vessels proved inconsequential at best and resulted in the loss of more aircraft. 

The attack on the atoll lasted only about 20 minutes. The Japanese did not return to follow it up with an invasion because they ran into difficulties out to sea. Yamamoto had accomplished his goal of drawing the Pacific Fleet into battle, but the results were not what the Japanese had desired. American carrier-based dive bombers pounced on the Japanese ships and sank four of its aircraft carriers—and one reason the American airplanes found the enemy ships at a disadvantage is because the carriers had to recover, refuel, and rearm the aircraft that had returned from the attack on the island. Although the U.S. lost the carrier Yorktown, the Battle of Midway at sea proved to be a disaster for Japan and a turning point in the Pacific war.

Ford returned to the United States with the raw footage from his small portion of the fight as well as footage shot by another of his cameramen, Lieutenant Kenneth M. Pier, who had been aboard the carrier Hornet at sea. He began shaping the footage into a short film with the assistance of some Hollywood friends—Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell from The Grapes of Wrath provided voices, Donald Crisp from How Green Was My Valley added narration, and Alfred Newman, who oversaw music for Twentieth Century-Fox, wrote the score. Ford insisted that his editors include a brief shot of Major James Roosevelt, the president’s son, in the final cut. If he did that to curry favor with Roosevelt, it worked. After screening the 18-minute short at the White House, the president told his chief of staff, “I want every mother in American to see this film.” The Battle of Midway began appearing in theaters, as a short before the main feature, in September. Critic James Agee called it “a brave attempt to make a record—quick, jerky, vivid, fragmentary, luminous—of a moment of desperate peril to the nation.” 

“Even now, far removed from Midway and the war, The Battle of Midway resonates,” wrote Ford biographer Scott Eyman. “It remains one of Ford’s great achievements.”

Ford had a bumpier experience with another film from his unit. Cinematographer Gregg Toland had taken the lead in putting together a documentary about the Pearl Harbor attack, but the military men who previewed the work gave it scathing notices. They objected to the way the filmmakers had recreated events for their cameras, the film’s virulent portrayal of the Japanese, and the way it left the “distinct impression that the Navy was not on the job,” in the words of Admiral Harold Stark. Ford had it recut from 85 minutes to 34, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted December 7th best short documentary at the 1944 Oscars. 

Ford continued his work for the navy. He ventured into harm’s way again in late 1942 when he oversaw shooting in North Africa. One person he encountered there was Darryl F. Zanuck, the production chief of Twentieth Century-Fox, for whom Ford had made The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. Zanuck had received a commission in the Signal Corps and was working on his own documentary. “Can’t I ever get away from you?” Ford grumbled to him. “I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut that if I ever go to Heaven, you’ll be waiting at the door for me under a sign reading, ‘Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck.’”

Ford later went to Asia to film activity in Burma and China, and in June 1944 he supervised filming of the D-Day landings, activity marred when he went on an epic three-day bender in mid-June. Once he sobered up, Ford spent time aboard a PT boat commanded by John D. Bulkeley, who had rescued Douglas MacArthur from Corregidor in March 1942 and was the centerpiece of William Lindsay White’s book They Were Expendable, an account of PT boat crews in the Philippines. (See “Battle Films,” page 76.) When Ford returned to the United States to start work on the film version of White’s book, his time in the war zones were over. 

After the war, Ford continued his film career, directing a series of classic Westerns with John Wayne. (Ford enjoyed needling Wayne over his lack of service in the military.) Those films included Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and The Searchers (1956). The director is now considered one of the great artists of Hollywood’s Golden Age. When filmmaker Orson Welles, no slouch behind the camera himself, was asked who his three favorite directors were, he answered “John Ford, John Ford, John Ford.” 

For the rest of his days, until he died in 1973, Ford remained proud of his navy service and was “shameless” in his pursuit of official medals and ribbons. Befitting a man who had a character in one of his movies say, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” Ford often burnished the legend of his experiences at Midway and elsewhere. In truth, he had no need to embellish.

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Canyon de Chelly, in the Four Corners region of northeastern Arizona, is among the most spectacular natural wonders of the American Southwest. It is also one of the longest continuously inhabited places in North America. Archaeologists estimate humans have lived in the canyon for more than four millennia. By the late 17th century Navajos had made their home there, and in the 19th century they waged two battles in Canyon de Chelly central to tribal history.

The canyon floor is anywhere from 100 to 300 yards wide and flanked by sheer red rock walls up to 1,000 feet high. About 3 miles from its east entrance the canyon splits into two main branches, with Canyon del Muerto running off to the northeast. Five miles up Canyon del Muerto is another junction at a prominence called Fortress Rock. Black Rock Canyon splits off due east, while Canyon del Muerto courses another 15 miles northeast.

In January 1805 a force of 500 Spanish soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Antonio Narbona entered Canyon de Chelly in response to a Navajo raid against the Spanish military post at Cebolletta. In the resulting battle near the northeast end of Canyon del Muerto the Spanish claimed to have killed 115 Navajos, including 90 warriors, while taking 33 women and children as slaves. Navajo tradition relates a different story—that most of the warriors were away hunting that day, and almost all of those killed were women and children. As the Spanish troops approached, the Navajos sheltered in a cliff dwelling high on the canyon wall, where they were trapped and picked off by Narbona’s marksmen. The only Spanish casualty was a soldier tackled by a Navajo woman while he was scaling the cliff. Both fell to their deaths. Narbona ended his career as the fifth Mexican governor of New Mexico.

Fifty-nine years later the Navajo fought another battle in Canyon de Chelly, this time against the United States. While the Civil War was raging east of the Mississippi, the U.S. government sent troops to the Southwest to put an end to persistent raids by emboldened Navajos. In 1864 Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton, commander of the military Department of New Mexico (which spanned what today comprises New Mexico and Arizona), ordered Lt. Col. Kit Carson of the 1st New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry to clear the canyon of Navajos and relocate them to a reservation at Bosque Redondo, nearly 400 miles southeast at Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory.

That January 12, in the face of a blinding snowstorm, Carson led 389 troopers into Canyon de Chelly. The Navajos, under the leadership of Chiefs Barboncito and Manuelito, skillfully used skirmishing parties to fight delaying actions while their main body withdrew into Canyon del Muerto. On reaching the junction with Black Rock Canyon, they scaled Fortress Rock with the help of ladders prepared ahead of time. By the time Carson’s force reached the far end of Canyon del Muerto, it had destroyed the tribe’s camps, crops and supplies and taken more than 200 captives. But more than 1,000 Navajos had evaded to the top of Fortress Rock, where they had stockpiled food. It wouldn’t be enough.

Biding his time, Carson withdrew from the canyon to wait out the Navajos, who were bereft of the necessities to survive winter. The strategy worked. By that summer Carson had accepted the surrender of some 8,000 Navajos, the largest such capitulation in American Indian history. In its wake the Navajos were forced to make what they recall as the “Long Walk” to Bosque Redondo. But the tactical success for the U.S. government turned out to be a strategic failure in the end. Some 3,000 Navajos died at the meagerly supplied reservation before they were finally allowed in 1868 to return to their homeland in the Four Corners region.

Present-day Canyon de Chelly (pronounced “de SHAY”) National Monument lies entirely within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation, thus all visitors to the canyon floor must be accompanied by a licensed Navajo guide. Its sheer walls are pocked with the ruins of centuries-old cliff dwellings and etched with pictographs. A particularly striking 200-year-old pictograph on the wall below Massacre Cave depicts the invading Spanish cavalry force, replete with lances and cross-bearing tunics. The North Rim Drive provides a number of spectacular overlooks, including Antelope House Overlook (directly across from Fortress Rock) and Massacre Cave Overlook, while the South Rim Drive ends at an overlook of the 750-foot sandstone spire known as Spider Rock. There is just no substitute, however, for exploring the canyon floor with a knowledgeable guide, one for whom it is especially personal hallowed ground.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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On April 14, 2023, a new museum about Amelia Earhart opened in Atchison, Kansas, the town where the aviator was born in 1897. The Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum features interactive exhibits intended to celebrate the legacy of the first woman to fly across the Atlantic (as a passenger in 1928 and solo in 1932) and inspire young people to perhaps follow in her footsteps. “We want people to take away the fact that she truly is relevant today,” says Karen Seaberg, the museum director and the founder and president of the Atchison Amelia Earhart Foundation.

The museum’s centerpiece is the last remaining Lockheed Electra 10-E, the same type of aircraft Earhart was flying on an attempted round-the-world flight when she disappeared over the Pacific in July 1937. In other exhibits, visitors can get a sense of what it was like to rivet an airplane, experience how aviators from Earhart’s time navigated by the stars and explore the Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines that powered the Electra. They can also hear recordings of Earhart’s voice and climb into a life-size reproduction of the Lockheed’s cockpit.

Listen to Seaberg talk about the museum and take a look at the facility in this video.

More than a decade before sharpshooter Annie Oakley joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, dancer Giuseppina Morlacchi garnered headlines performing with Cody in the traveling Western stage drama Scouts of the Prairie. Dime novelist and entrepreneur Ned Buntline, who hastily wrote the three-act Western script in December 1872, had the Italian-born prima ballerina play an Indian princess named Dove Eye. The male stars of Buntline’s theatrical company were Cody and John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro, notable Army scouts who played themselves onstage. Landing Morlacchi was quite a coup for Buntline. Since making her U.S. debut in New York City in 1867, she had become the most sought-after dancer in the country, introduced the can-can to American audiences and earned the nickname “The Peerless.”

Photo collector Tony Sapienza said that when graceful Giuseppina performed the “grand gallop can-can” on Jan. 6, 1868, in Boston, where this photograph was taken, her interpretation of the high-stepping dance left the audience breathless. In Scouts of the Prairie she not only remembered her lines better than her co-stars, but also found romance with one of them. On Aug. 31, 1873, she married Omohundro at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Rochester, N.Y. Morlacchi continued to perform with her dance troupe and star with her husband in Western dramas. But tragedy was to strike the young couple when 33-year-old Texas Jack died of pneumonia in Leadville, Colo., on June 28, 1880. With that Morlacchi stopped touring. A scant six years later, on July 23, 1886, she died of cancer at age 49 in Billerica, Mass.

(For more on both Omohundro and Morlacchi, see Matthew Kerns’ Wild West feature article.)

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Photographer Robert Hanley “Bob” Willoughby parlayed his beloved boyhood hobby into a kaleidoscopic career as a maker of indelible images. He was born in 1927 in Los Angeles, Calif., shortly after his parents, Cyril and Antoinette, divorced. Nettie Willoughby raised her son in West Hollywood. Cyril, a doctor, was not much present, but for the boy’s 12th birthday he gave his son a 35mm Argus C-3 rangefinder camera that quickly became a prominent fixture in Bob’s life. A neighbor taught the youth darkroom basics in exchange for babysitting. The sole class at school to hold his interest was art. When he was in junior high, a stroke disabled his mother, who never relented in her support for her son’s photographic ambitions. He converted the home garage on Marvin Avenue into a darkroom functional only at night owing to light leaks. He processed film and made prints to the tune of jazz broadcast by a San Francisco radio station whose AM signal reached southern California after sunset. Upon graduating from Louis Pasteur High in 1946 he apprenticed with a series of Hollywood photographers, earning $5 a week sharpening and expanding his skills. In night classes at USC, he studied under film designers and artists Saul Bass, Slavko Vorkapich, and William Cameron Menzies. He dove into LA’s vibrant music scene, photographing jazz and R&B performers. Dance magazine ran his pictures. He was 22 when his portrait of model Ann Baker graced the cover of the January 1950 US Camera; later that year eclectic label Fantasy Records recruited him to provide LP cover art. In 1951 he signed with Globe Photo, which wrangled assignments from feature and fashion periodicals. To analyze and absorb clients’ unique styles, he haunted used periodicals stores, assembling an archive in which to steep himself in technical and aesthetic nuance. Mixing faith and commerce, he shot for Catholic magazine Jubilee; it would be easier to list the mainstream publications he did not work for than those he did. Under the spell of master magazine photojournalists Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, and Irving Penn, he took on ever more fashion and feature work, at the same time establishing a toehold in and eventually a remarkably strong and creative grip on the arcane and demanding specialty of photographing Hollywood productions as they were being made, recording candid moments and scenes as shot. He first worked on contract with magazines seeking to illustrate stories about actors and coming attractions and eventually came to be relied on by studios for his unobtrusive expertise. To facilitate these efforts, he developed innovative camera brackets and electronically controlled flash systems. His facility at documenting decisive moment upon decisive moment led a commentator to label him “the man who virtually invented the photojournalistic motion-picture still.” In 1957 he visited Ireland for the first time, forging a connection that lasted all his life. Through work he and Audrey Hepburn became long-time friends. At Elizabeth Taylor’s request, he photographed her and Eddie Fisher’s wedding in 1959. Soon after, he met Scottish flight attendant Dorothy Quigley aboard a transcontinental flight she was working. They fell for one another, wed, and raised three sons and a daughter, sometimes traveling and living abroad en famille thanks to Bob’s movie work. Over the decades, he photographed 100-some feature films on sets and at locations around the world. In 1973, he retired. Seeking a pastoral routine away from the high life, the Willoughbys relocated to County Cork, Ireland, where they bought a castle and began a 17-year stay during which Willoughby produced books of verse and photos, including a 2001 memoir. Bob Willoughby was 82 when he died in 2009 in Vence, France. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, among many others. Now, with an introduction by son Christopher, Chronicle Books has published a rich and varied survey of his oeuvre titled Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life. —Michael Dolan

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This portfolio is excerpted from the new, comprehensive monograph of Bob Willoughby’s work, Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life published by Chronicle Books in November 2022.

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In January, Mecum Auctions put rocker Elvis Presley’s 1962 Lockheed 1329 JetStar on the block. The winning bid was $260,000, but when the bidder backed out, businessman/entrepreneur James “Jimmy” Webb stepped in and made the purchase for $234,000. Webb, who operates the YouTube channel Jimmy’s World, had the airplane disassembled and trucked to Florida, where he has plans for the jet’s next incarnation.

“The short version is I’m going to convert the fuselage into an RV so it can travel around the country for the rest of the world to enjoy,” he says. Webb’s analysis indicated it could cost nearly $6 million to get the JetStar airworthy again. 

The King of Rock and Roll had purchased the four-engine craft in December 1976 for $840,000 and sold it shortly before this death on August 16, 1977. Its last owner was a Saudi Arabian company. The plane had suffered from weathering during the nearly four decades it spent parked outside at the Roswell International Air Center in Roswell, New Mexico, and its engines and some of its cockpit instrumentation had been removed. It still boasted some unique features, including a red velvet interior and a working cassette deck and VCR player. Also included in the sale was a copy of the airplane’s aircraft security agreement, signed by Presley and his father, Vernon.

The swept-wing JetStar made its first flight in 1957 and entered service in 1961, establishing itself as one of the world’s premier business jets. The earlier versions were powered by four Pratt & Whitney JT-12 engines, with two each in pods mounted at the rear of the fuselage. (Later versions acquired quieter Garrett TFE731 turbofans.) Presley actually owned two of the airplanes. He purchased the first, a 1960 version, in 1975, the same year he bought a Convair 880 that he named Lisa Marie after his daughter. Both those airplanes are on display at Graceland, Presley’s home in Memphis, Tennessee.

Webb estimates it will take about a year to convert the fuselage into an RV. In the meantime, he plans to take metal from the wings and other parts of the airplane and fashion it into memorabilia that he will sell to fund the project, and he will donate any surplus revenue to two of Elvis’s favorite charities, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. “We’re trying to do everything we can to keep his legacy alive and to do what he would have wanted done,” Webb says. In the meantime, he will post about his progress on the Jimmy’s World YouTube channel.

The Wild West. It is the fundamental mythology of the United States of America, the iconography and imagery we have chosen to tell the story of who we are as a people and as a country. It is a mythology so enduring that depictions of it stretch from the yellowed pages of dime novels written while the West was still being won to the controllers and keyboards of gamers playing Red Dead Redemption 2. On film, from Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery in 1903 through Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall in 2021, the splendor and danger of the American West has captivated the imagination of generations.

The iconic figures of the American West are just as familiar. There are such stalwart lawmen as Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp and the outlaws they faced, like Jesse James and Billy the Kid. There are gamblers like Doc Holliday, scouts like Buffalo Bill Cody, and warriors like Crazy Horse (Tasunke Witko) and Geronimo (Goyahkla). Such names—such men—have become more than historical figures, as fiction trumped fact and their legends were superimposed over their lives. Each was a real man, but in the telling and retelling of their tales they have taken on the status of folk heroes, as much Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill as William Frederick Cody or James Butler Hickok.

Yet when we take a step back from the individuals and the individual stories woven into the tapestry of the American West, a curious theme emerges. Picture a meeting of these great Western men. Standing there are the scout Buffalo Bill, the lawman Wild Bill, the gambler Doc Holliday and the outlaw Jesse James. How are they dressed? Is Wild Bill wearing a marshal’s hat? Does Jesse James have on outlaw boots? Of course not. The wide-brimmed Stetson shading their eyes from the sun is a cowboy hat, and on their feet are tall leather cowboy boots. If the great men of the American West weren’t cowboys, how did the cowboy become the single most iconic figure of the American Western?

The truth is there was a famous cowboy who stood beside these men in real life and whose legacy is just as enduring, though his name has been all but forgotten by the casual student of American history. In 1873, when Buffalo Bill convinced Wild Bill to join a traveling stage show called Scouts of the Plains, their co-star was a real-life cowboy named John Baker Omohundro. Friends called him “Texas Jack.” Born on July 27, 1846 in Fluvanna County, Va., Jack served as a Confederate courier and scout during the Civil War, for a time under vaunted cavalryman Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, before drifting west to Texas and the life of an open-range cowboy.

Onstage Cody and Hickok impressed crowds with tales of buffalo hunting on horseback and gunslinging in frontier towns, while in his baritone Virginia drawl Texas Jack thrilled with stories of wild stampedes and cattle rustlers. He entertained packed halls, auditoriums and theaters as he whirled his lasso overhead, the first to turn that tool of the cowboy trade into an object of entertainment for fascinated audiences. Texas Jack was the first cowboy to rise to prominence in the American popular imagination, and his stage persona provided the foundation on which the cowboy trope in literature and film would be built. To understand the impact of Texas Jack, and just how unlikely it was the open-range cowboy should achieve such status and permanence in American pop culture, we should reflect on the history of the cowboy, both the word and the profession.

For much of American history it was an insult to call a man a “cowboy.” During the American Revolution the term referred to British Loyalists who stole livestock from local farmers and delivered them to British troops. On Jan. 22, 1779, New Yorkers hanged Claudius Smith, alias “Cowboy of the Ramapos,” for his guerrilla raids after Governor George Clinton posted a $1,200 reward for his capture. The word cowboy remained unflattering as late as 1881, when San Francisco’s Daily Exchange deemed cowboys “the most reckless class of outlaws in that wild country…infinitely worse than the ordinary robber.” The editors were referring to the infamous Cowboys of Cochise County, an especially ruthless band of rustlers and outlaws then operating near Tombstone, Arizona Territory, whose criminal activities were curtailed by the Oct. 26, 1881, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and subsequent Earp Vendetta Ride.

The passage of time and other factors have shaped our present-day view of the cowboy. The mid-1880s saw the expansion of the cattle industry from Texas across the entire West. American businessmen and wealthy European investors built vast ranches, bought cattle and hired cowboys, leading to one of the biggest economic booms in history. Their investments provided a foundation for U.S. dominance of the world economy while simultaneously funding the development of cities and infrastructure across the West. Books like Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian began to mythologize the cowboy, and literary giants from Zane Grey to Louis L’Amour followed suit. 

Hollywood gravitated to the cowboy and Western locations from its earliest films well into the late 20th century. Westerns dominated movie house screens following World War II, and cowboy stories dominated Westerns. Leading actors across multiple generations starred in Westerns, from William S. Hart and Tom Mix to John Wayne and James Stewart, Burt Lancaster and Clint Eastwood to Idris Elba and Benedict Cumberbatch.

After the devastating loss of both his mother and wife to illness on Valentine’s Day 1884, Theodore Roosevelt escaped west to start a cattle ranch north of Medora in what would soon become North Dakota. He was indelibly shaped by Western ranch life and the cowboys he befriended. Returning to Medora by train in 1900 on a campaign swing for incumbent President William McKinley, the vice presidential candidate told locals, “I had studied a lot about men and things before I saw you fellows, but it was only when I came here that I began to know anything or to measure men right.” It was Roosevelt’s time out West that would shape and refine the New York City boy into the “Cowboy President.” He wouldn’t be the last politician to exploit the cowboy image of rugged independence to improve his standing with American voters.

Film stars, authors and politicians aside, nobody has had more of an influence on the popular perception of the cowboy than one man—Buffalo Bill Cody. From its May 1883 inception as Cody & Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition (a short-lived partnership with sharpshooter William Frank “Doc” Carver) until Cody’s 1917 death, no entertainment was as prevalent or as successful as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The imagery and iconography of Buffalo Bill are indelibly tied to the profession of the cowboy, the rare occupation Cody—messenger, scout, soldier, teamster, buffalo hunter, showman, town planner and hotel proprietor—never held. “Cody plowed his theatrical profits into ranching,” author Louis Warren explains in Buffalo Bill’s America, “but like most ranch owners, he was an absentee owner who was never a cowboy.”

Yet central to Cody’s vision of the Wild West, indeed the defining icon of the Western man, was the cowboy. For more than two decades the culminating act of the show was listed in the program as “Attack on a Settler’s Cabin by Hostile Indians. Repulse by Cow-boys, Under the Leadership of Buffalo Bill,” or similar wording. With civilization at stake and the fate of the emblematic family of white settlers on the line, the group of heroes riding to the rescue did not comprise professional soldiers but cowboys, of course led by Buffalo Bill. When Cody, who scouted for the military well before taking to the stage, rode into actual engagements with hostile Sioux or Cheyennes on the Great Plains and Dakota Territory hills, he did so in the company of trained soldiers, never cowboys. Why then did Cody present the cowboy as the savior of the settler—of civilization itself—from the threat of savagery?

The answer is the man Buffalo Bill would eulogize as “one of my dearest and most intimate friends”—Texas Jack Omohundro.

Texas Jack rode into Buffalo Bill’s life as a cowboy in 1869. Cody had been placed in charge of the government’s livestock at Fort McPherson, Neb., kept on the payroll between scouting assignments, when Omohundro rode into nearby North Platte trailing a few thousand head of Longhorns. The men were soon inseparable. They hunted together. They drank together. They scouted together. They even hung wallpaper in Cody’s North Platte home together. When Buffalo Bill spent long weeks away scouting for the 3rd U.S. Cavalry, Texas Jack stayed in a spare room at the Cody house to ensure the safety of Bill’s wife, Louisa, and their children. “Pards of the Plains for life” is how Cody defined their relationship.

On April 25, 1872, Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack set out from Fort McPherson in pursuit of Minneconjou raiders who the night before had stolen seven horses from nearby McPherson Station, on the Union Pacific Railroad. Guiding 46 troopers and an Army surgeon under the command of 3rd Cavalry Captain Charles Meinhold, they tracked the horse thieves. The next afternoon, after a brief skirmish on the Loupe Fork of the Platte River in which Buffalo Bill was injured and three warriors were killed, the party recovered two horses, while the surviving raiders escaped. In his after-action report Meinhold singled out four men for mention. The first were Sergeant John H. Foley, who “charged into the Indian camp without knowing how many enemies he might encounter,” and 1st Sgt. Leroy H. Vokes, “who bravely closed in upon an Indian while he was fired at several times and wounded him.” Next was Cody, whose “reputation for bravery and skill as a guide is so well established that I need not say anything else than but he acted in his usual manner.” The last was Omohundro, “a very good trailer and a brave man who knows the country well, and I respectfully recommend his employment as a guide should the service of one in addition to Mr. Cody be needed.” Cody, Foley and Vokes each received the Medal of Honor for “gallantry in action.” It is uncertain why Texas Jack did not, though his past service to the Confederacy might have given Meinhold pause.

Clippings from local papers expand on the day’s events. A reporter for the North Platte Democrat wrote that after Cody began firing at the Minneconjou raiders, “the remainder of the command, hearing the fire, came up at full jump—‘Texas Jack’ at the head.…[He] immediately let drive and brought his Indian down.…Beside enjoying the reputation of a ‘dead shot,’ he is well skilled in the ways of the red man, and we are glad to know that his services have been retained by the government.”

Cody also described the fight in his autobiography. “Two mounted warriors closed in on me and were shooting at short range,” he wrote. “I returned their fire and had the satisfaction of seeing one of them fall from his horse. At this moment I felt blood trickling down my forehead, and hastily running my hand through my hair I discovered that I had received a scalp wound.” Another paper picked up the action with rhetorical flourish. “[To Texas Jack] was Buffalo Bill indebted for his life,” it noted. “The red thieves were pursued and overtaken by Bill and Jack, who each killed an Indian. A third redskin had just drawn a bead on Bill, when Jack’s quick eye caught the gleam of the shining barrel, and the next instant ‘the noble red’ was on his way to the happy hunting ground, his passage from this sublunary sphere being expedited by a bullet from Jack’s rifle at a distance of 125 yards.”

If the latter account is to be believed, Texas Jack quite literally saved Buffalo Bill’s life that April afternoon. What is certain is that Omohundro was his best friend, the first man Cody telegrammed when the latter’s 5-year-old son, Kit Carson, died on April 20, 1876. For three years on the Nebraska prairie Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack rode, hunted, scouted and camped together. For four years on theatrical stages from Maine to Texas they appeared together in more than 550 performances, not counting matinees.

Onstage Texas Jack was the picture of the cowboy. His costume included the ever-present Stetson, tall black cavalry boots and a fringed buckskin jacket worn open to reveal the Lone Star of Texas emblazoned on his shirt. He carried a lasso, rifle, revolver and bowie knife, prepared for any danger that might come his way. More often than not that danger took the form of hostile Indian warriors. These captivating stage encounters—Texas Jack locked in deadly combat against a tomahawk-wielding brave—were the genesis of “cowboys and Indians” backyard games for generations to come.

The concept of cowboys fighting Indians on the outskirts of civilization is so firmly ingrained in the collective consciousness as to seem clichéd, but the reality of the cowboy stands in stark contrast with such romantic depictions in print and on-screen. By the time of the big Texas cattle drives of the late 1860s herders meticulously avoided conflict with Indians. After all, ranch owners entrusted them with the care of their valuable stock. Ensuring the safe conduct of their charges during transportation made cowboys more akin to present-day truck drivers than buckskin-clad knights. The era of cattle drives along the Chisholm Trail, Goodnight-Loving Trail and countless others lasted from 1866 until the 1890s when the expansion of rail lines and laying of hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fence rendered the job of open-range cowboy obsolete.

During those scant 30 years of cowboy primacy, swift streams swollen by rain, lightning strikes, falls from horseback and disease accounted for the majority of cowboy deaths. A cowboy was more likely to draw his gun on a farmer than a card sharp across a town square at high noon, and more likely to fire his rifle at a coyote than a Comanche raider. Dust and tedium were the rule of a cowboy’s work, as was enduring the worst of conditions to ensure top dollar for beef. Unlike the fiction, the real cowboy’s life was far from romantic. “By all rights,” Lonn Taylor wrote in The American Cowboy, “he should have joined the hunters of Kentucky, the whalers, the flatboatmen, the plainsmen and all of the other American types who briefly caught the popular imagination, were popularized on the stage and in song, and were then forgotten. But the open-range cowboy was never forgotten.”

The reason the cowboy endured while all those other professions were forgotten is that after the death of his cowboy friend Texas Jack, Buffalo Bill Cody refused to let the public forget. Once, a lone cowboy rode with Buffalo Bill across the prairies of Nebraska. Now, hundreds of cowboys followed his lead in the spectacle of the Wild West. Where once a single cowboy stood onstage and twirled his lasso, now a legion of men demonstrated cowboy skills for audiences worldwide. Buffalo Bill enshrined Texas Jack’s experience as a cowboy in show programs handed out to millions of men, women, and children visiting the Wild West at stops in cities across the United States and throughout Europe. From the inaugural performance in 1883 and in long stands at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1886–87, Queen Victoria’s 1887 Golden Jubilee in London and the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Wild West programs contained a section titled simply “The Cow-Boy,” written by Texas Jack in the spring of 1877.

“The cow-boy!” began the piece that introduced the profession to so many eager spectators. “How often spoken of, how falsely imagined, how greatly despised (where not known), how little understood? I’ve been there considerable.” With descriptions of stampedes and storms, cowboys singing to restless steers at night and “cow sense,” Omohundro outlines a profession requiring the patience of Job and peopled by ambitious, adventurous and rebellious young men, “taught at school to admire the deceased little Georgie [Washington] in his exploring adventures, though not equaling him in the ‘cherry-tree goodness.’” Signing with a flourish as both J.B. Omohundro and Texas Jack, the author concludes on a wistful note:

How many, though, never finish, but mark the trail with their silent graves, no one can tell. But when Gabriel toots his horn, the “Chisholm Trail” will swarm with cow-boys. “Howsomever, we’ll all be thar,” let’s hope, for a happy trip when we say to this planet, adios!

In searching for an archetype of the kind of man Buffalo Bill—soldier, scout and buffalo hunter—would elevate above all other professions in his simulacrum of the real West, presented as absolute historical truth to huge audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, one need look no further than John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro, cowboy. 

Perhaps the breadth of cowboy adventures in literature and on film can also be attributed to the well-publicized exploits of Texas Jack. Years before Lakota warriors traveled with the Wild West, Omohundro led the Pawnees on their 1872 penultimate summer buffalo hunt in Nebraska. Before Cody defiantly erected his tents opposite the exclusive 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Texas Jack set up a Western-themed hotel, saloon and shooting gallery opposite the 1876 Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. Before Cody and Doc Carver launched the Wild West extravaganza in 1883, Omohundro and Carver displayed their skills with rifle, pistol, and bow and arrow at a series of exhibitions in 1878.

If the life of the average cowboy was trail dust and tedium, Texas Jack’s was never short on excitement, adventure and romance. In 1873 he married his beautiful co-star “The Peerless” Giuseppina Morlacchi, an Italian-born prima ballerina who was among the most famous dancers of the era, having introduced the can-can to the American stage in 1868. In 1874 Texas Jack guided Anglo-Irish noble and adventurer the Earl of Dunraven through newly established Yellowstone National Park. Three years later he blazed a new trail into the park from the southeast and rescued tourists from marauding Nez Perces as the latter fled Army troops through the park. Jack led Western hunts for such aristocrats as Dunraven, Sir John Reid and Count Otto Franc, all significant figures in the coming boom of the American cattle industry. He scouted for Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry in pursuit of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake) in the aftermath of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s June 25, 1876, defeat at the Little Bighorn (Greasy Grass). One night in 1878 Texas Jack surprised Thomas Edison in a Wyoming hotel, shooting a weather vane atop a freight depot from the window of Edison’s room to prove he was “the boss pistol-shot of the West.” It is little wonder it took scores of cowboys to replace this one man in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. 

“William Cody seldom spoke of death or of people who had died,” biographer Warren notes. “In all his correspondence there is barely a mention of any deceased friends or acquaintances. He wrote no poignant words about Wild Bill Hickok, Sitting Bull or [Wild West manager] Nate Salsbury. No matter how tragic their deaths, he seldom spoke of the loss.” But Buffalo Bill did write multiple dime novels about his late cowboy friend Texas Jack. Omohundro, stricken with pneumonia, died in the high Rocky Mountain town of Leadville, Colo., on June 28, 1880, a month shy of his 34th birthday. On Sept. 5, 1908, almost three decades after Texas Jack’s death, Cody gathered the cast and crew of the Wild West around Omohundro’s grave in Leadville’s Evergreen Cemetery. There he delivered an impassioned eulogy for the man he called “one of my dearest and most intimate friends…one of the original Texas cowboys, when life on the plains was a hardship and a trying duty.” Buffalo Bill purchased the permanent gravestone that marks the Texas Jack’s final resting place.

Nearly a decade later, on Jan. 6, 1917, an ailing Cody rode through Leadville for the final time on a return visit from Glenwood Springs to Denver. Too weak to leave his train car, he sat up in bed when told he was in Leadville, telling his daughter about the grave of Texas Jack, his friend and partner. Four days later Buffalo Bill was dead.

Few men are truly remembered in the way the world remembers Buffalo Bill. Yet Americans largely forgot about Texas Jack Omohundro, the cowboy who first popularized the profession and introduced the lasso to the stage, and whose description of his life on the open range spoke to millions of spectators from programs handed out at each stop of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Americans recall the names of the legendary lawmen and outlaws, of the braves and bandits, the soldiers and the scouts, but we forgot the name of our most important open-range cowboy. Americans forgot, but Buffalo Bill remembered. And because Buffalo Bill remembered Texas Jack, the world remembers the American cowboy. WW

This article, published in the April 2022 Wild West, received the 2023 Western Heritage Award for best magazine article from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Matthew Kerns, who writes from Chattanooga, Tenn., is a historian, web developer and digital archivist who manages the Texas Jack Omohundro Facebook page and has written many articles about Texas Jack. His 2021 book Texas Jack: America’s First Cowboy Star is recommended for further reading, along with Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, by Louis S. Warren, and The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal and the Creation of Buffalo Bill, by Julia Bricklin.

It was just after 7 p.m. local time on August 15, 1935, a frigid day of patchy fog on the far northwest coast of Alaska. Famed flier Wiley Post and his good friend and fellow Oklahoman, the celebrated humorist Will Rogers, were sloshing around the shallow waters of Walakpa Lagoon on the Chukchi Sea coast some 15 miles southwest of Point Barrow. Tiny, remote Barrow, on the most northwesterly point of the North American continent, was to be the jumping off place for their planned flight to Siberia and beyond.

They were behind schedule and anxious to get started. Because of poor visibility, Post had gotten lost on the six-hour jump from Fairbanks to Barrow and had been forced to put the floatplane down in the lagoon to get his bearings. The pair had landed near an Inuit family headed by Clare Okpeaha, who had closed his summer seal hunting camp and was waiting for a boat to Barrow. After Rogers explained they were lost, the Inuit, despite his broken English, pointed to the northeast and guessed the town was about “twenty or thirty miles” away—his concept of “English miles” was limited at best.

Post was loathe to lose another day waiting for better visibility, the marginal takeoff minimums be damned. He had come to think of himself as a master of any situation and his assuredness must have swept Rogers into the moment. After a half-hearted attempt by Okpeaha to dissuade the men from attempting to take off in such poor weather, Post and Rogers climbed back into their single-engine Lockheed Orion. Post started the engine and taxied the awkward, nose-heavy machine across the lagoon and positioned it nose-to-wind. Following a hurried engine run-up check, Post throttled up the 550-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine and lifted off in such an abrupt, steep manner that even Rogers must have been startled. With that last bit of recklessness, Wiley Post condemned them both to a trip into eternity.

Wiley Post is arguably the most unlikely of all the great aviation pioneers. He was a poverty-stricken, one-eyed ex-convict from Oklahoma who never finished junior high school but nevertheless went on to become a parachute jumper in a flying circus, a test pilot, discoverer of the jet stream, inventor of the pressurized flight suit, pioneer of the first autopilot and the first man to fly solo around the world. How did a man with such a checkered past and almost nonexistent formal education make his astounding engineering accomplishments? 

Post was born November 22, 1898, in a modest farmhouse near Grand Saline, Texas, though Oklahoma, where he moved as a child, later claimed him as a “favorite son,” as it did Will Rogers. He quit school at 11, having decided he was “old enough to decide matters for himself.” He saw his first airplane at a county fair at age 14, when a Curtiss Pusher was the hit of an airshow. To top off the day, on the trip home Wiley rode in an automobile for the first time. Armed with his new-found love for machines, he took a seven-month auto mechanic’s course, graduating as a chauffeur and mechanic.

Post attended the U.S. Army’s radio school during World War I and went to France but saw no action. After his discharge, he drifted, winding up as an Oklahoma oil field roughneck, leading to his own unsuccessful attempt at becoming an “oil baron.” Unemployed, discouraged, but still fiercely ambitious, Post succumbed to desperate financial temptation and began hijacking automobiles in Grady County, Oklahoma. On April 2, 1921, the weekly Chickasha Star newspaper’s headline read, “Bandit Captured and Lodged in Jail.” Wiley was convicted of robbery and sentenced to ten years in the state reformatory. For reasons unclear, however, a sympathetic prison physician came to Wiley’s defense, and Post received parole on June 3, 1922. 

Relieved, Post decided it was time he finally made good. He joined the Texas Topnotch Fliers, a flying circus, and became their star parachute jumper for $200 a jump. During this period, he gained a reputation as an utterly fearless aviator. But the work was intermittent; by 1926 he was back on an oil rig. Fate intervened when a roughneck’s sledgehammer sent an iron bolt into his left eye, which had to be removed. He used the settlement money he received to buy an airplane, but struggled mightily to gain his pilot license, no small feat with such a disability. Finally, after accumulating 700 hard-earned probationary flying hours, Wiley Post was awarded air transportation license number 3259 on September 16, 1928. When Texas oilman Florence C. Hall met Post, he was im-
pressed enough by his ability to hire him as his pilot. After that, flush with a new confidence coming from the association with Hall, Post began seeking the main chance.

Now began his incredible breakthrough into the national consciousness. Part of his motivation no doubt had to do with a desire to impress his new bride, 17-year-old Mae Laine, with whom he eloped in 1927, but most had to do with his own burning ambition. The opportunity he had been seeking presented itself in late 1928 when Hall sent Post to the Lockheed factory in Los Angeles to exchange his company’s Travel Air for a new Lockheed Vega. Hall named the sleek ship Winnie Mae after his daughter. Post was overjoyed, as it was an airplane designed to “go places and see things.” The coincidence of the name echoing his new wife’s must have been equally gratifying.

Unfortunately, that joy was short-lived. A downturn in the oil business forced Hall to give up the luxury of a private airplane and pilot and he sold the Winnie Mae back to Lockheed. Post received a break when Lockheed unexpectedly hired him as a test pilot. In June 1930, Hall re-hired Post and asked him to order a new Winnie Mae Vega, a seven-passenger monoplane with a 420-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine. Hall also approved Post’s entry into a 1,760-mile National Air Races Derby between Los Angeles and Chicago. Flying with famed navigator Harold Gatty, Post won the race—his first brush with national fame.

That was all it took for the always ambitious Wiley Post to up his game. Boldly, he announced plans to fly around the world in record time. Hall was in favor of the plan; the Depression had slowed his business, Post had plenty of time on his hands and the publicity couldn’t hurt. During the spring and summer of 1931, Gatty mapped out the
journey while Post got his machine in tip-top shape. He made many modifications, especially the addition of extra fuel tanks and a special folding hatch atop the fuselage to enable Gatty to make critical celestial observations. The two men departed Roosevelt Field, New York, on June 23, 1931. After a series of incredible adventures, any one of which could have stopped them dead in their tracks, the duo arrived safely back at Roosevelt Field after eight days, 15 hours and 51 minutes—a new world record.

In less than three years, Wiley Post had been transformed from an unknown barnstormer into the world’s most famous pilot. And writing the foreword to Post and Gatty’s book about their flight was the world’s most famous humorist, Will Rogers, a “cowboy philosopher” who had become a beloved star of stage, screen and radio as well as a widely read newspaper columnist. Post and Rogers had met in 1925 and they had bonded almost instantly.

In 1932, subject to bouts of melancholia and worried he was sinking from public view—his one real avenue to financial success—Post settled on the idea of flying solo around the world. Incredibly, he somehow pulled that effort together, telling the newspapers in February 1933 he would do it with help from a new “robot” or “automatic pilot.” Post had a Sperry autopilot installed in the Winnie Mae and dubbed the new contrivance “Mechanical Mike.” He received permission to use this “risky” device on condition he not carry passengers, which of course was the whole idea. After modifications that included increasing the Winnie Mae’s fuel capacity, beefing up the range on his two-way radio mast and installing a more reliable ignition harness, Post was ready.

Early in the morning of July 15, 1933, Post took off from New York’s Floyd Bennett Field. He was wearing a white eye patch after having suffered severe headaches when his glass eye froze over Siberia two years earlier. His last words to his wife were a rather grim, “See you in six days or else.” Fortunately, the “or else” never materialized, though he didn’t make the six-day goal. Once again, Post’s combination of skill andluck held. Other highly capable aerial competitors were hot on his heels, but the “one-eyed superman” arrived triumphant back in New York on the evening of July 22, 1933. He had broken his own speed record by more than 21 hours—a total of seven days, 18 hours and 49.5 minutes. 

The nation could not seem to do enough to express its delight in Wiley Post’s feat. The honors, awards and accolades continued for months; even President Franklin Roosevelt personally thanked him for his “courage and stamina.” New York mayor John P. O’Brien pinned a new gold medal on Post’s coat and compared him to globe-girdling explorers Ferdinand Magellan and Sir Francis Drake. Still, Post’s dream of great wealth remained elusive and, while he did make decent money endorsing such products as Camel cigarettes, it was not enough; he hungered for new ways to win acclaim. In particular, his use of the Sperry autopilot on the solo world flight had whetted his appetite for state-of-the-art scientific investigations.

He turned his attention to testing the “thin air”—the unexplored stratosphere, beginning around 30,000 feet. An opportunity came with the announcement of the 1934 MacRobertson Race from England to Australia, with a first-place prize of £15,000. Post intuitively understood his only chance to win the 12,500-mile challenge was to take advantage of the high-altitude winds that had recently been discovered by stratospheric balloon flights. It was clear the plywood-built Winnie Mae could not be pressurized; Post would need something like a deep-sea diver’s suit to protect him. With the help of the B.F. Goodrich Co., he developed a pressurized flight ensemble, dubbed at the time, “a man from Mars” suit. It was constructed from a rubberized parachute material, including a plastic vision plate encased in an aluminum helmet. After getting mixed results from the tests of several suits, Post reached 40,000 feet on September 5, 1934. He was the first person to fly in a pressure suit, as well as the first to use liquid oxygen for breathing. Post had proved operating in the stratosphere was “a definite reality, with practical equipment.”

By this time, Post’s adventures and headlines about his proposed stratospheric dashes across the continent were galvanizing the public, subsuming his push to enter the MacRobertson Race. Additionally, to Post’s delight, Will Rogers had renewed their friendship, having become increasingly interested in his activities. As it happened, Rogers had been present when a pressure suit-equipped Post attempted a high-altitude, 375-mph flight from Burbank to New York on February 22, 1935. Post had to make a forced landing shortly after takeoff, with engine sabotage strongly suspected—Post was picking up jealous competitors along with his growing commercial endorsements. Rogers wrote: “[Saw] Wiley Post take off.… He soon had to land. He brought her down on her stomach [the gear had been dropped on takeoff for streamlining], that guy don’t need wheels.”

After a failed second attempt at the transcontinental speed record on April 14, Rogers suggested the aging Winnie Mae be retired and Post given tangible help in his scientific pursuits: “Wiley Post…cant break records getting to New York in a six-year-old plane, no matter if he takes it up so high that he coasts in.… So when Wiley gets ready to put her in the Smithsonian we all want to give him a hand.” The appeal worked, Congress appropriated $25,000 for the museum’s purchase, but the money went to Hall, the airplane’s owner. Meanwhile, the impulsive and always resourceful Post had somehow pulled together the necessary additional financing to purchase a new airplane. 

Post did not give his new airplane a name, but experienced pilots and mechanics had taken one look at this one-of-a-kind “unusual-looking” plane and dubbed it “Wiley’s Orphan,” or alluding to its rather illegitimate origin, “Wiley’s Bastard.” Painted “Waco Red” with silver trim, it had a second-hand Lockheed Orion 9-E Special fuselage married to an orphan Lockheed Explorer wing and a 550-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine. Its retractable gear could fit into the low Lockheed wing, but the airplane could also be fitted with pontoons. The design’s chief advantages were greater speed and a high load capability. The chief disadvantage, by far, was a too-far-forward center of gravity, causing nose heaviness and a built-in tendency to assume a diving attitude. With pontoons attached, the problem was exacerbated. A Lockheed engineer had even warned Post, “you’ll be in trouble if there is just a slight power loss on takeoff.” Increasingly overconfident, even complacent, Post ignored him, keeping the plane’s imbalance a secret when applying for an air worthiness certificate on July 23, 1935.

A hint of what Post planned to do with his new machine emerged when a reporter apparently overheard a conversation and wrote a story that Will Rogers and Wiley Post were secretly planning a trip to Siberia via Alaska. It rang true to many; Rogers had long expressed a desire to visit the Far North. In addition, Post had obtained financing to survey potential air routes from Alaska to Russia. 

Meanwhile, Will Rogers was at his ranch in Pacific Palisades, California, dithering over whether to commit to this Alaskan “vacation,” as he called it. His wife, Betty, opposed the trip out of fear the men would get lost over the trackless Siberian wastes. Will calmed her with assurances that he was only committing to visiting Alaska. Probably, he said, he would say goodbye to Post there and return home. Betty could see how badly her husband wanted to go, so she acquiesced.

The two men kept a public silence about their proposed venture as Rogers put the finishing touches on his last movie, Steamboat Round the Bend. By August 4, the secret was out; national headlines announced that beloved humorist and movie star Will Rogers would fly to Alaska with Wiley Post. Their journey began with a takeoff from Seattle’s Lake Washington, adjacent to Boeing Field, on Wednesday morning, August 7, 1935. Post and Rogers landed on Juneau’s Gastineau Channel a thousand miles and eight-and-a-quarter hours later. There an old friend of Post’s, famed Alaska pilot Joe Crosson, greeted them. A Juneau newspaper noted the reaction of the local bush pilots, “[who shook] their heads in doubt…at the plane.” Rogers was the soul of hospitality when asked about their plans. “Wiley and I are like a couple of country boys in an old Ford—don’t know where we’re going and don’t care,” he said. Post, however, was irritable, snapping at reporters, “We’re going to stay [in Juneau] until we get ready to takeoff!”

When weather finally allowed the journey to continue, a local airline mechanic observed, “Post was not a good seaplane pilot…too abrupt on takeoff and pulled up too steep.” Following goodwill stops at Dawson, Aklavik and Anchorage, the two tourists departed Fairbanks on August 15, bound for Point Barrow. Post continued to exhibit erratic flying behavior, especially regarding fuel management and dangerous scud running—all of which Rogers understood nothing. Or cared; he was loving every minute of his time in Alaska.

On the takeoff from Fairbanks, Post had made another dangerously steep departure. One bush pilot noted that “if the engine [had] quit, he’s a goner.” The weather was forecast bad all the way, but Post forgot his pledge not to fly Rogers “in or above cloud or fog bank.” He was now “making his own weather.” In fact, it was only due to his great skill and continued good luck that he’d made it as far as Walakpa Lagoon.

After a hurried conversation with the Okpeahas, Post and Rogers got back into the red Orion and took off into the fog and mist, with Post once again, inexplicably, hanging by the propeller in a steep ascent. He banked sharply at two hundred feet and there was an explosion “like the sound of a shotgun,” as Okpeaha testified. The engine stopped, very possibly due to fuel stoppage induced by the twisting takeoff. In their book Will Rogers & Wiley Post: Death at Barrow, Bryan and Frances Sterling wrote that the airplane “continued to somersault, tumbling downward, [then hitting] the shallow water [and] shearing off the right wing, breaking the floats, and falling on its back.” Both men were instantly crushed to death, their bodies so mangled their wives were told white lies about their actual condition. Okpeaha set out running to Port Barrow and arrived there with news of the crash five hours later.

Tributes poured in from all over the disbelieving world. The newspapers concluded that the cause of the accident was carburetor icing resulting in “the engine stalling.” The truth was the airplane should never have been licensed to fly in the first place. The government investigation, the Sterlings wrote, became “a travesty” that covered up the regulatory negligence of the Bureau of Air Commerce. The government’s secret rationalization: If the famous Wiley Post was not flying safe, was anyone? Despite that contemporary, and successful, coverup, sufficient documents survived for later researchers to at last reveal the real cause: pilot error. Wiley Post’s luck had finally run out.  

Davy Crockett

No, not that Davy Crockett. A reputed bully in Cimarron, this Davy — either a grandson or grand-nephew of the Alamo legend — gained infamy for having murdered three U.S. 9th Cavalry buffalo soldiers at the bar of the St. James Hotel in 1876. Acquitted, but fined $50 for having carried a gun in town, he rampaged through Cimarron, often riding his horse into saloons and firing into the ceiling. Townspeople soon tired of his antics. On Sept. 30, 1876, Sheriff Isaiah Rinehart and posse shot and killed Crockett after the bully refused to surrender.

Billy the Kid

Orphaned at 13, William Henry McCarty struggled to live in the adult world. Slight in stature, he compensated with his pleasing personality, charming wit and, when pushed, his gun. A natural leader, he hung around Lincoln and became a Regulator. The Kid’s short life ended on July 14, 1881, when shot by Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett.

Clay Allison

Known for extreme violence, and implicated in many vigilante jail break-ins and lynchings, the notorious gunman reportedly once rode through Mobeetie, Texas, wearing nothing but his six-shooter and gun belt. Allison homesteaded near Cimarron, where on Nov. 1, 1875, he prevailed in a shootout at the St. James Hotel, killing Francisco “Pancho” Griego.

Black Jack Ketchum

Outlaw Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum partnered with older brother Sam, robbing businesses and trains. The brothers later joined the notorious Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. In 1899 Tom foolishly attempted to rob the same train at the same spot brother Sam had held it up weeks earlier (to Sam’s demise). This time the engineer recognized Tom and shot him from his horse. Captured and convicted, Black Jack went to the gallows on April 26, 1901, in Clayton, which had never hanged anyone before. The rope proved too long, and as Ketchum had gained weight in prison, his head snapped off when his body dropped through the trap. All of him is buried in Clayton’s cemetery.

Pat Garrett

Best known as the Lincoln County sheriff who killed Billy the Kid, Garrett was also a buffalo hunter, bartender, Texas Ranger captain, promoter of irrigation schemes near Roswell and U.S. customs inspector. Appointed Doña Ana County sheriff in 1896, he was tasked with tracking down the murderers of Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain and his 8-year-old son, who’d gone missing earlier that year. He never did — officially, anyway. Garrett himself was murdered en route to Las Cruces on Feb. 29, 1908. His killer(s) were never brought to justice.

Lew Wallace

Author of the bestselling 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Wallace was also the governor of New Mexico Territory (1878–81) who promised Billy the Kid a pardon and then reneged. Wallace then served (1881–85) as U.S. minister to the Ottoman empire. The only fond memories he had of New Mexico, he admitted, was the time he devoted to painting landscapes in an alley behind the Palace of the Governors when not busy writing. 

Doña Tules

A woman of refinement and fashion, María Gertrudis Barceló was a prominent saloon owner and professional gambler in Santa Fe. Known as Madame La Tules, she was charming with a sharp business acumen and became an influential member of society during the Santa Fe Trail heyday. Tules reportedly contributed freely to families in need, the Catholic Church, charities and the government. She still died with a fortune on Jan. 17, 1852.

Colonel Albert Fountain

An attorney in Mesilla, Fountain was perhaps best known for having represented Billy the Kid in 1881 — though he lost, and the Kid was convicted of murder. Following a stint in the Union Army during the Civil War, Fountain settled in Texas where he served in the state Senate and as lieutenant governor. In 1873 he moved to Mesilla, where he served as a lawyer, probate judge and court clerk. He founded the Mesilla Valley Independent newspaper and the Mesilla Valley Opera House, known today as the Fountain Theater. On Feb. 1, 1896, he and son Henry disappeared near White Sands. They had been ambushed, but their bodies were never found, and no one ever paid for the crime.

Juan Maria (Giovanni) Agostini-Justiniani

This eccentric son of Italian nobility left home in his late teens to wander France and Spain and later trekked all over South, Central and North America. At age 62 he walked with a wagon train from Kansas to Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, and then south to Mesilla. Considered a mystic by many, El Ermitaño (“The Hermit”) reportedly healed people and prophesied. Living in a cave in the nearby Organ Mountains, he promised Mesilla residents he would light a fire every Friday evening to signal he was fine. On April 17, 1869, not seeing the fire, investigating villagers discovered he’d been killed. His murder also remains unsolved.

Sadie Orchard

Strong-willed Sarah Jane “Sadie” Creech Orchard (1859–1943) wore many hats in the gold and silver mining camp of Kingston in the 1880s. Flamboyant Sadie established a brothel on ironically named Virtue Street, owned and drove a stagecoach line, ran a hotel and restaurant, and rode horses as well as any man. A philanthropist, she helped build a church and aided those stricken during a smallpox epidemic.

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The USS Missouri has borne witness to some of modern military history’s most monumental events, but its role in one affair involving Cher gyrating in a fishnet G-string left the Navy blushing over the “Mighty Mo.”

In 1945, after the mammoth 45,000-ton battleship helped defeat the Axis powers in hallowed places such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and his glum-faced delegation surrendered aboard the ship. In 1950, it was the first American battleship to slice through Korean waters.

And in 1989, the Navy, flush with the notion that a singer, songwriter and actress of Cher’s caliber would aid in recruiting numbers, permitted the singer to film the music video of her latest hit, “If I Could Turn Back Time,” on the storied ship in front of throngs of eager, cheering sailors.

The video “was an opportunity for us to get national exposure and reach the lucrative recruitable youth audience that watch MTV,” one Navy official told the Washington Post in 1990.

One would bet that the Navy wishes it could “Turn Back Time” on that decision.

While the Navy had reviewed the music video’s story line — Cher’s producers had originally proposed a video about a sailor who gets a “Dear John” letter aboard ship — whoever approved of the recruiting plan clearly didn’t know much about Cher and her zany love to dare to bare.

The Navy had neglected to ask about one crucial tidbit: exactly what (or if) the songstress was planning to wear.

They assumed (and you know how that goes) that she would be sporting a Navy coverall.

Instead, at 2 a.m., Cher rolled up to the Mighty Mo wearing what can only be described as two slips of black fabric covering the bare essentials, a black and gold belt holding up approximately nothing, and a “transparent net body stocking and two posterior tattoos the size of pancakes,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.

But the surprises didn’t stop there.

Upon seeing the ahem, massive, stiff guns aboard the battleship, Cher seemingly couldn’t help herself and, um, hopped on top.

The guns that were once active off the coast of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were suddenly being ridden by a bare-bottomed Goddess of Pop.

Oh, how the “Mighty” had fallen.

“One can only imagine how retrospective the Navy brass was to see Cher riding the guns like Debra Winger on a mechanical horse and undulating in front of a sea of 150 real sailors,” the Washington Post later wrote of her performance.

The Navy wasn’t the only one displeased with the performance. MTV initially banned the video from playing on its platform, but later rolled back that policy and aired it only after 9 p.m.

In hopes of placating the Navy, Cher extended an olive branch and filmed portions of the music video with a modicum of more clothing on.

For the Navy, however, it was too little, too late. The branch decreed that no musician would ever be allowed to film music videos on U.S. ships ever again.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Meanwhile, we still have this:

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Born on Feb. 22, 1962, John Ethan Morrison (known professionally as Ethan Wayne) is the youngest son of the late Western film icon John Wayne (birth name Marion Robert Morrison and known to friends as “Duke”) and wife Pilar Pallete. Memorably, as a boy Ethan appeared on-screen with his father and older brother Patrick in Big Jake (1971). In the wake of his dad’s death from stomach cancer at age 72 on June 11, 1979, young Wayne turned a stint doing stunt work, then returned to acting on both the big and small screen, including a co-starring role in the police drama The New Adam-12. When older brother Michael Wayne died in 2003, Ethan took the reins as president of the family-run John Wayne Enterprises and director of the John Wayne Cancer Foundation.

Wild West recently caught up with Ethan to discuss the various Wayne family endeavors, including the new museum, John Wayne: An American Experience, in Fort Worth, Texas.

What was the genesis of the new museum?

In the last few years the team at John Wayne Enterprises and I hosted a series of successful interactive pop-up exhibits in both Nashville and Las Vegas. After seeing the impact my father still has, our family decided we wanted a more permanent location. Through my good friend Patrick Gottsch I was introduced to Craig Cavileer of Majestic Realty, and they brought me down to the stockyards in Fort Worth. Once we saw Cavileer’s vision for the stockyards, we knew it was the right place for John Wayne.

What undiscovered treasures did you turn up in the family storage facility?

When they packed up my father’s house, it looks like they emptied the contents of every drawer and just wrapped the whole thing up in brown packing paper. While unwrapping all of it, we stumbled on everything from unread mail to his Oscar he won for True Grit. We also found some really good old whiskey, which is what inspired our collaboration with Duke Spirits. It really was like a step back in time.

What are your favorite aspects of the museum and items on display?

For me personally it’s the wardrobe display in the “Life on Screen” section. All the costumes he wore in the most iconic films, set up on mannequins exactly how they appear on-screen. It’s very impactful.

How does it feel to be named for both a Western film icon and arguably his greatest character role (Ethan Edwards of The Searchers)?

It’s a great legacy. I’m proud to carry that moniker.

What was life with your dad like, at home, on the set and aboard his converted World War II minesweeper Wild Goose?

My dad was happiest out on the water or on location; he loved projects and stories. On set, he was all business—very focused on the project. At home, he was warm, but consistently busy with the day-to-day, as you could imagine. On Wild Goose, though…he really was in his element with friends, family and lots of laughter and adventure.

Truth be told, i’m still absorbing the impact he had on the world

When were you first aware of your dad’s celebrity?

It was always there—I don’t really have a specific story to point to on that. I suppose as a teenager I understood his influence a little more, but truth be told, I’m still absorbing the impact he had on the world.

What other celebrities were in your family’s orbit? Did you have any favorites?

I was a little too young to really know them, but I have fond memories of Dean Martin and Maureen O’Hara. Those two stick out as favorites.

What do recall about your debut speaking role in Big Jake, in which you played Jacob “Little Jake” McCandles, the kidnapped grandson of your father’s title character, Jacob McCandles?

Growing up, I was on location all the time, but really wasn’t a part of the team. On Big Jake I was on the team. I loved the whole cast, and it was an amazing experience.

Do you have favorites among your father’s films, Westerns or otherwise?

Right now, The Cowboys. The Wil Andersen character is probably the most similar to how my father was with me in real life. Watching it now, it makes me feel very nostalgic.

How did you get into stunt work?

After my dad died, Gary ”Whiz Kid” McLarty hired me to do stunt work on The Blues Brothers and gave me some direction at a rudderless time in my life.

What were your most memorable moments as an actor and stuntman?

Meeting John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. That was amazing as a young man just starting out. I also really enjoyed working on The New Adam-12, because it was a pretty fast-paced production. I had a terrific co-star [Peter Parros] and really enjoyed the experience.

Did you have any qualms on inheriting older brother Michael’s mantle as head of the family enterprises and the cancer foundation?

Yes, Michael was very smart and a great businessman. Though I wish we had had time to discuss the business a little more before he passed, I was excited by the challenge and the privilege of the position.

Our job is to share his positive influence with the country again…to bring his core values and character back to the people

What do you hope to accomplish through John Wayne Enterprises?

The main objective is to keep John Wayne’s name and essence alive. We’re hard at work on the John Wayne: An American Experience exhibit in Texas, fine tuning a retail line and creating partnerships with other companies that live his values. I think our job is to share his positive influence with the country again. So, basically, trying to bring his core values and character back to the people.

What are your goals for the John Wayne Cancer Foundation?

When my father was dying, he asked us to use his name to help doctors find a cure, so that’s the big one. We’re working toward that by raising money for cancer research, funding a kids skin care program called Block the Blaze and creating John Wayne Fellowship Programs at a couple of great universities—the University of California, Irvine, and Texas Tech—so doctors can continue their surgical oncology education. There is actually a whole room dedicated to this work at John Wayne: An American Experience that I would encourage people to check out.

Do you have a favorite personal keepsake of your father’s?

Of course I do. But if I told you, it wouldn’t be personal anymore.

What lessons did he teach you that stay with you?

The first thing that comes to mind is “red, right, returning.” I’ve always been fascinated by anything I could drive, so I especially loved learning about Wild Goose and how it worked. Any fellow watermen reading this will know about that rule.

What is your last clear memory of your dad?

I was right there with him at the last part of his life, and I’ve got to say, he showed a lot of courage. The man had grit all the way to the end.

How would you like him to be remembered?

Well, he said himself how he’d like to be remembered: “Feo, fuerte y formal,” which translates to “ugly, strong and dignified.”

What is John Wayne’s greatest legacy?

There is no arguing that his film career was one of the greatest of all time, but I’d have to say the greatest legacy is the work we’re doing at the John Wayne Cancer Foundation. He’d be very proud of the strides we’re taking in the fight against cancer. WW

Dave Lauterborn, based in historic Harpers Ferry, W.Va., has been the managing editor of Wild West since 2008. For further reading he suggests John Wayne: The Life and Legend, by Scott Eyman, and Duke in His Own Words, with an introduction by Ethan Wayne.

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Every aficionado of Hollywood Westerns produced from the 1930s to the ’70s has experienced the commanding screen presence of American actor John Wayne (May 26, 1907—June 11, 1979). His innumerable fans miss him, of course. Now, in addition to watching small-screen airings of such classic Wayne films as Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), The Searchers (1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and The Shootist (1976), they can revel in memories of him at John Wayne: An American Experience, a 10,000-square-foot exhibit space that opened in Fort Worth, Texas, on May 26, 2021, the 114th anniversary of his birth. Wayne’s youngest son, Ethan (see related interview), founded the museum, which provides an intimate look at the life of the man born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, who became celebrated worldwide as “Duke” (a nickname inspired by a beloved Airedale terrier Wayne had as a child).

Visitors begin their experience with an introductory video at the in-house theater, enjoying clips from Duke’s many films while narrator Ethan maps out the museum. Spanning nine rooms, the exhibit delves into Wayne’s career and personal life and features more than 400 artifacts, making it the largest collection of the actor’s memorabilia on public display.

Wayne grew up in Southern California. Discovered by director John Ford while working as a prop boy in Hollywood, Duke was doing stunts and appearing in bit parts by his early 20s. Lining either side of the main exhibit space are eight larger-than-life lighted monoliths depicting Wayne in various films, from his first starring appearance in The Big Trail (1930) to The Shootist, his final role before his 1979 death. On the reverse of each is background information about his various roles. Monitors attached to four monoliths and along an adjacent wall show iconic moments from his scores of films. Wayne appeared in upward of 140 films, including 80 Westerns. He took his craft seriously and later produced and directed films in which he and other leading Western actors starred. One panel deals with his approach to acting. Myriad artifacts, including scripts, props and costumes, will please the fans of a man who once said, “Nobody should come to the movies unless he believes in heroes.”

Wayne, who stood a strapping 6-foot-4 and spoke with an unmistakable drawl, certainly played the hero while defining the role of the American cowboy. He upholds law and order in such films as Rio Bravo (1959) and its reprise, El Dorado (1966), both directed by Howard Hawks. Wayne serves his country in uniform in Ford’s “cavalry trilogy”—Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950). In his 1960 directorial debut, The Alamo, he plays frontier legend Davy Crockett. In several notable instances Wayne’s heroic character shows his flaws—in The Searchers he evinces a hatred for Indians, while in Red River he descends into paranoid mania during a cattle drive and nearly kills his adopted son, played by Montgomery Clift. Even as U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969)—the role that finally earned him a best actor Oscar, which holds a place of honor in the exhibit—he is ornery, drinks too much and seems all too eager to pull the trigger on badmen.

Wayne wore many hats on-screen, and 16 of them, from Stetsons to fedoras, are on display in the interactive “Step Into My Shoes” gallery, which allows visitors to “co-star” with him in three scenes. The “Walk the Walk, Talk the Talk” gallery captures Duke at the height of his stardom as both a full-fledged American hero and an international film star. Featured footage includes praise of Wayne from some of film and television’s greatest stars. A video cabinet presents 38 pop culture clips, including cartoons and comic strips, that reference the screen legend. Another gallery celebrates him as “A Man of the People,” one who interacted warmly with fans, service members and presidents alike. The most personal display centers on the Wayne family, which chose photos and correspondence that further illumine the Western icon.

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday

Headstone epitaph, John Wayne (1907–79)

Open seven days a week, John Wayne: An American Experience is at the heart of the Fort Worth Stockyards, in the Historic Exhibits Building near the corner of Rodeo Plaza and East Exchange Avenue. For more information call 628-224-0956. WW

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In each print edition of Wild West we tie the lead reviews to the cover story. For the Autumn 2022 issue that meant finding a passel of books and films relating to Billy the Kid or his adopted New Mexico (a territory at the time, as the “Land of Enchantment” didn’t gain statehood until Jan. 6, 1912, more than 30 years after Billy met his end at the muzzle of Sheriff Pat Garrett’s gun in Fort Sumner). New Mexico native author and Wild West contributor Melody Groves was up to the challenge, and below is her list of books with a New Mexico angle. Forgive our inclusion of a few works of fiction with a contemporary setting, but historical and cultural references make them worthwhile reads. Let us know if we missed any. WW

Mariana’s Knight (2017, by W. Michael Farmer)

Beautifully written and based on a real-life murder mystery, this novel follows the February 1896 disappearance of well-known New Mexico attorney Albert Jennings Fountain and his 8-year-old son, Henry. Ambushed on Chalk Hill near White Sands, father and son vanished, leaving nothing behind but a blood-soaked buckboard wagon. Author Farmer takes speculation one step further—what if Henry survived? Other novels in his Legends of the Desert series include Knight of the Tiger and Blood-Soaked Earth.

Spider Woman’s Daughter (2013, Anne Hillerman)

This first Leaphorn & Chee mystery novel, written by the late Tony Hillerman’s daughter, Anne, derives its title from American Indian legends. The story is set in the Four Corners, where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado meet, an area encompassing 500 Indian tribes on 318 reservations. The novel won a 2014 Spur Award from Western Writers of America and landed on The New York Times Best Seller list. Spider Woman’s Daughter, a reviewer wrote in the on-
line New York Journal of Books, “continues the Hillerman tradition, providing likable heroes against despicable villains coming together in unusual and intriguing situations in a glorious, little-understood world.”

Blood and Thunder (2006, by Hampton Sides)

n Sides’ retelling trapper, scout and soldier Kit Carson understands and respects the Western Indian tribes better than most, yet he must follow orders and participate in the final devastation of the Navajo nation. Richly detailed and spanning more than 30 years of history, the narrative captures the West as it really was. The dusty town of Santa Fe is the epicenter around which swirl politicians, government officials and military. Sides sweeps the reader along, telling stories with intimacy and immediacy. It reads as if he were there.

The Hi-Lo Country (1961, by Max Evans)

Evans considered northeastern New Mexico, where it borders Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas, Hi-Lo Country. Growing up in that area as a young artist, Evans used the land as the setting for his best-known writings. At the center of this tale set after World War II is the story of friendship between two men, their mutual love of a woman and their commitment to the harsh, dry high-desert grassland. The Hi-Lo Country was adapted into a 1998 film starring Woody Harrelson, Billy Crudup and Patricia Arquette.

The Milagro Beanfield War (1974, by John Nichols)

The first volume of a New Mexico trilogy, this novel is set in the early 1970s in fictitious Milagro, N.M. Recurring themes of water rights and developer vs. small farmer lead this story. Milagro farmer Joe Mondragon sets off the conflict when he illegally irrigates his beanfield. “I learned so much about New Mexico,” says one recent “Land of Enchantment” transplant of reading the novel. The writer’s sense of humor and love for northern New Mexico are manifest. A film based on the novel and directed by Robert Redford was released in 1988. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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hollywood victory

The Movies, Stars, and Stories of World War II

By Christian Blauvelt. 228 pp. Running Press, 2021, $30.

When America marched off to war following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, so did Hollywood. Actors, directors, screenwriters and movie moguls did their part by producing morale-boosting movies and documentaries, entertaining troops, selling war bonds and even serving in combat roles. “Hollywood Victory: The Movies, Stars, and Stories of World War II” by journalist Christian Blauvelt chronicles the industry-wide effort to support the nation’s fight against Germany, Italy and Japan.

Thoroughly researched with material from nearly 80 books and other sources, as well as richly visualized with hundreds of archival photos, “Hollywood Victory” describes how stars like Jimmy Stewart, Robert Montgomery and Henry Fonda set down their scripts and volunteered to defend the nation. Stewart, an Army Air Forces pilot and squadron commander, flew B-24 Liberators on 20 bombing missions over Europe, while Montgomery drove ambulances for the American Field Service in France and later joined the navy, serving on a destroyer supporting troops at Omaha Beach on D-Day. Fonda, who enlisted in the navy as well, survived a kamikaze attack off Okinawa aboard the USS Curtis.

Prominent directors also joined the fray: John Ford was wounded by shrapnel while filming actual battle for his 1942 Oscar-winning documentary short, “The Battle of Midway.” Though his contemporary Frank Capra remained stateside for most of the war, he won an Academy Award in 1942 for the first installment of “Why We Fight,” a documentary series that detailed how the United States was drawn into World War II and why it was important to continue in its bloody struggle.

Blauvelt devotes significant space to industry giants, but his book also includes a wealth of fascinating trivia of how more obscure Hollywood figures joined the cause. Philip Ahn, the actors on of Korean independence activist Ahn Changho, willingly played so many Japanese bad guys onscreen in films like “Back to Bataan” (1945) and “Across the Pacific” (1942) that he received death threats. Meanwhile Conrad Veidt, who portrayed Major Heinrich Strasser in 1943’s “Casablanca,” fled Germany in 1933 with his Jewish wife and was so staunchly anti-Nazi that he had it written into his contracts that he would play Nazi parts only if they were “foul, snarling villains,” according to Blauvelt.

Some stars gave more than their careers to the war effort: Carole Lombard, often considered the first female American casualty of World War II, was killed when her plane crashed in Nevada in January 1942 after the actress had just sold $2 million worth of war bonds at a rally in Indiana. (Her husband Clark Gable was so overcome with grief that he enlisted in the Army Air Forces at age 41 and volunteered to fly missions on B-17 Flying Fortresses as a .50-caliber machine gunner.) English actor Leslie Howard, who starred as Ashley Wilkes in 1939’s “Gone with the Wind,” went on to direct anti-Nazi films in Britain; he died in 1943 when German fighters shot down his commercial flight just off the Spanish coast.

Thoroughly enjoyable for history and film buffs alike, “Hollywood Victory” includes many more behind-the-scenes stories and photos of those in Tinseltown who went to war or otherwise supported those in combat. Whether taking up arms or using their talent and influence as weapons, their service helped the United States through one of its darkest moments.

— David Kindy is a journalist, freelance history writer and book reviewer who lives in Plymouth, Massachusetts

This article first appeared in World War II in April 2022.

IN EARLY 1944 I was 17 years old, in my senior year at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn, New York, and, after several summers spent working as a comic at Catskills resorts, knew that I wanted to go into show business. But Hitler had started a war.

One day a U.S. Army recruiting officer came around and said that if anybody in the class scored high enough on an aptitude test, they could join the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program, the ASTP Reserve. If you were accepted, you would graduate early from high school and be sent to a college paid for by the government. Then when you turned 18 and joined the army, you would be in a better position to choose your field of service. This sounded great to me. I knew I was destined to be drafted anyway. So I took the test. I think they really wanted everybody they could get. Some of the questions were not too difficult, like “2 + 2 = what?” Needless to say, I passed. I was sent to college at VMI, the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, for special training.

Life there was wonderful and terrible. The terrible part was getting up at 6 a.m. to shave, shower, and have breakfast. And having to make my own bed with hospital corners. The wonderful part was that the VMI cadets were so welcoming to us ASTP Reserve trainees. They never resented our sharing the school with them. VMI was not just an academic college. Founded in 1839, it was known as “the West Point of the South.” In addition to my academic studies of electrical engineering and learning all about cosines, tangents, slide rules, and such, they also trained you to be a cavalry officer. So I learned to ride a horse and wield a saber—something I had never seen any kid from Brooklyn do.

When I turned 18, I was officially in the army. They sent me to Fort Dix in New Jersey, which was an induction center. And even though I had spent a semester studying electrical engineering at VMI, the army in its great wisdom decided that I should be in the field artillery. They shipped me out to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center. When reduced to its initials, it spells FARTC. (Which somehow lingered in my subconscious and later made its way into a comedy scene in my film Blazing Saddles. Waste not, want not.)

Fort Sill is in the southwest corner of Oklahoma. It’s cold, it’s flat, and it’s windy. If you ever have a chance, don’t go there.

Having gone to VMI, basic training at Fort Sill wasn’t that difficult. You learn how to carry a rifle, how to drill with a rifle, and how to shoot a rifle. And we’d go on long marches—5, 10, occasionally 20 miles—with only 10-minute breaks. That was tough. Then there’d be the infiltration course, where they tested your skills and used live ammunition while you kept your head down and crawled on your elbows and your knees. That was scary.

The more reassuring part was that I was trained to be a radio operator. That was going to be my job when I went overseas with a field artillery unit.

No ‘Shortcutting’ the jam

THE REGULAR ARMY was an education. A really rough education. I’d never gone to the toilet before with 16 other guys sitting next to me. I would go crazy waiting for the latrine to be free of people so I could rush in, do my stuff, and rush out. It took a lot of getting used to.

Sitting with 12 other guys having breakfast was another new experience. Everything was “Pass the butter! Pass the milk! Pass the sugar! Pass the jam!” There was a strict code. When somebody said, “Pass the jam,” you weren’t allowed to stop the jam and put any on your own plate. That was called “shortcutting” and was not allowed. You had to pass the jam to the person who said “Pass the jam,” even though the jam looked good, and you wanted to take a little on the way. It was forbidden.

When we were on bivouac—a temporary campsite away from the barracks—we’d stand in the chow line with our mess kits. Mess kits were two small oval aluminum trays with indentations for food and an aluminum knife, fork, and spoon attached. You waited with your mess kit, and they’d throw some beef stew in one of the indentations. Then came the mashed potatoes, and even though there were other indentations for the mashed potatoes they always threw it right on top of the stew. Then—you won’t believe this—for dessert there were usually sliced peaches. Which of course, you expected they would put into one of the remaining empty places in the mess kit. But what did they do? They hurled it right on top of your potatoes and beef stew. They simply didn’t care. And we were starving so we gobbled it down. (For some reason, to this day I’m vaguely nostalgic for some sliced peaches on top of my beef bourguignon.)

After chow, you waited in line once again to clean your mess kit. First you swirled it around in a garbage can bubbling with hot soapy water. Then you moved it to the next garbage can of rinse water, still filled with the remnants of soap. And then the last garbage can with clear hot water. That did the job. It never occurred to me to ask my sergeants and officers: Why do we have to do all this stuff? Isn’t there a better way? Couldn’t we have a little more time for reading a book we liked, or maybe taking a nap once in a while? And then I realized: That’s why the army likes 18-year-olds. No questions asked. You do what you’re told.

When I finished basic training at Fort Sill, I was shipped back to Fort Dix for overseas assignment. I was lucky to get a weekend in New York so I could see my mom, my grandma, my aunts and uncles, and the few friends who were also in the service but hadn’t shipped out yet. I stuffed as much of my mom’s delicious food as possible down my gullet. She made me things I loved like matzo ball soup, potato pancakes, and stuffed cabbage—things I knew were hardly ever served on an army chow line.

Seasick and sleepless

AND THEN ONE NIGHT—I think it was around February 15 or 16, 1945—together with three or four hundred other guys, I boarded a troop transport at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the SS Sea Owl. I remember going down below to the third or fourth deck, and I was greeted with the sight of rows and rows of stacked metal bunks. Each row was six beds high. It looked like hundreds of bunks. Unfortunately, in my row I got the third one, which was right square in the middle of the stack with what looked like a 200-pound G.I. above me.

Things were fine until the ship got to the open sea. Nobody told me about the North Atlantic in February. Huge waves slammed us from side to side and then, like a corkscrew, moved us way up and plunged us way down. And I realized there was no way to stop it.

Soon the throwing up began. It quickly became a cacophony of puking that never stopped. I was strong and brave for about eight days, but then I could no longer take sleeping down in the incredible stench that permeated the lower deck. Not only were we weathering a stormy North Atlantic in late February, we were also zigzagging every few miles to avoid German U-boats.

It occurred to me that even though the sinkings of Allied ships were getting dramatically lower in early 1945, there was still the bad-luck chance of a U-boat deciding to sink our troopship. So I decided to take my chances sleeping on the top deck. With $20, I bribed a merchant marine sailor to let me put my sleeping bag under a lifeboat, and he was nice enough to give me some all-weather tarps to cover me against the sea spray. It was rough up on deck, but so much better, both smell-wise and torpedo-wise, than sleeping down below.

Reassigned again

Fortunately I only had to do it for two nights, for on the third night, there it was—the rugged coast of France. Soon we were moored at the port of Le Havre. But even though I was sent overseas as a radio operator in the field artillery, the army once again decided that I should be something else. This time it was a combat engineer. The army moved men to various units as needed; I was transferred with some of my shipmates to the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion. We were put on long troop transport trucks and sent further inland in Normandy for combat engineer training. Small groups of men were deposited at different villages.

Eight men, including me, got off at a little farmhouse with a sign on the entrance that said “Mon Repos.” It occurred to me that Mon Repos—“My Repose”—was a rather grandiose name for, maybe, the summer home of a retired nobleman. But it turned out to be just a country farmhouse. It was in the village of Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie. The village was near a larger town called Offranville, not far from the fairly big and busy port of Dieppe on the English Channel.

We were taught to safely unearth land mines. Some of them were big, and some of them were smaller. The big ones were called Teller mines. They carried a lot of explosives in them. You would have to probe the earth lightly with your bayonet and if you heard Tink! Tink! Tink! you knew there was something dangerous underneath. You had to be very careful. So you would clear away the dirt and then ask the help of the one guy in your platoon who was an expert at defusing mines—who really knew what and where all the wires were. He would take out a whisk broom and lightly dust away the earth surrounding the mine and proceed to disengage the fuse. I couldn’t really see exactly what he was doing, because we were a good 20 yards away hunkered down beneath our steel helmets. Lucky for me, our expert always defused them without a mistake.

Other land mines were trickier. They were set up with tripwires. Soldiers could be walking, hit the tripwire near them, and then you’d hear a click and an S-mine—a canister filled with all kinds of shrapnel nicknamed a “Bouncing Betty”—bounced up about chest high and, for a radius of 20 feet, destroyed anything around it. If you heard that click, you knew that the mine was in the air, and you hit the ground as quickly as you could and buried your face in the earth because it exploded in a conical manner. The closer you could get to the ground, the safer you were. Running was not an option.

We were also taught to search and clear unoccupied houses of booby traps. What’s a booby trap? Well, for instance, if you were sitting on the john and pulled the chain behind you, sometimes instead of the flushing sound you might hear a loud explosion and find yourself flying through the air. Which would mean that a booby trap had been positioned in the water closet above the toilet. So before troops could occupy a domicile, we had to be sure it was cleared of booby traps.

To this day, even though I’m not a soldier and I’m not in Germany and I’m not in a war, if I enter a toilet with a pull chain behind the commode, I have a tendency to stand on the bathroom seat and peer into the tank above to see if there is a booby trap—which hardly makes any sense in a restaurant in New York. Needless to say, I never saw any, but I still breathe a sigh of relief every time I look in and just see water.

In addition to clearing mines, combat engineers were taught to build makeshift structures to span small rivers or creeks. They were called Bailey bridges. It’s like a giant erector set: the bridge is constructed on one side of a river or a creek, and then swung over the water and dropped down on the other side. They were light, practical, and strong enough to support the weight of 6×6 trucks or even a Grant or a Sherman tank.

When our training in Normandy was over, we boarded more 6×6 trucks and made our way through Belgium down to France’s Alsace-Lorraine region, on the German border. I was lucky to get through Belgium on my way to Germany a couple of months after the Battle of the Bulge. Had I been born six months earlier, I probably would have been fighting in that and who knows what would have happened? Anyway, luck was with me, the Germans were finally in retreat, and life got a little better and a little safer.

fortune favors the brave

We were stationed in the German city of Saarbrücken, right on the border with France. The 1104th Combat Battalion was attached to the Seventh Army. Our job was to use our combat engineer training in land mine and booby trap detection to clear the dwellings in newly captured territories. It was hard work, not to mention scary work, but we went over everything with a fine-toothed comb.

One day I was out on patrol with my platoon and we found a case of German Mauser rifles near an old railway siding. They were beautiful sharpshooting rifles with bolt action. Sure enough, there was a box of ammunition right next to them. So we had a contest. There were these white ceramic insulation things up on the telephone poles, and any man who shot one down won a dollar from each of the others. I was pretty good at that, and I’d made about $21 when suddenly we got a strange call on our command car radio: “Get back to the base immediately!”

When we arrived back to our base there was a lot going on. Platoons of men were moving rapidly all over the place. My company commander told us that army communications had been severed. It seems that some telephone and telegraph wires had been destroyed. Uh-oh!

I quickly realized that we were the destroyers. Those white ceramic insulators were the wrong things to make a target-practice game of. So knowing that we were really not in danger, I gallantly offered to take my men out again and search for the enemy snipers that had sabotaged the phone lines. My company commander gave me permission and sent us off with a salute that connoted something like, “You men are a brave bunch.” We never let on.

‘Is there anybody who can tell a joke?’

IT WAS THE BEGINNING of May 1945, and it looked like the war in Europe was rapidly coming to a close. My unit was then stationed in a German town called Baumholder, in the southwest part of Germany. We occupied a small German schoolhouse. There was a fellow soldier with me named Richard Goldman, who later became a well-known tax lawyer. He had been with me on the boat coming over, with me when we were transferred from the artillery to the combat engineers, and generally slogged through the mud by my side as we tried to stay alive during the war. Richard was very smart. A lot smarter than I was. Because on V-E Day, that glorious day that the war ended in Europe, he marched me down to the cellar of the schoolhouse and showed me some K rations and a bottle of wine that he had procured for us.

I said, “Dick, what’s this all about?”

He said, “Even though the shooting ended today, tomorrow is the official announcement of V-E Day. Everyone will go crazy. They will be joyously firing their weapons into the air. No one in that state of euphoria will realize that what goes up must come down, and the bullets will surely come raining down on what’s below. So that’s why we are going to spend the next 24 hours in this cellar, trading the joy of victory for the tired cliché of just staying alive.”

So thanks to the savvy thinking of Richard Goldman, I’m still here.

The war was over, but I didn’t go back to America immediately. We became part of the Army of Occupation. It was much safer, but kind of dull.

One day, a lieutenant from Special Services who was touring army installations in our area said, “Is there anybody in this unit who can sing? Dance? Tell a joke or play an instrument?”

I immediately raised my hand. He said, “What can you do?”

I said, “All of the above! I can sing, dance, tell jokes, and play the drums.” I told him all about what I had done from age 14 on in the Borscht Belt—an affectionate term for the area of the Catskill Mountains about 90 miles north of New York City replete with Jewish summer resorts—where I’d discovered I was a comedian. He asked my CO if he could borrow me for a few weeks. So I joined his Special Services unit and became one of the comics in a variety show touring different army camps. Needless to say, I was an exceptional addition to his staff. As a result, the lieutenant asked my CO if he could permanently transfer me to Special Services. Permission was granted, and I was an entertainer once again.

I reported to Special Services in Wiesbaden, Germany. I was made an acting corporal and put in charge of the entertainment at non-com and officers’ clubs. It was a great gig. I was busy putting together German civilian talent with American G.I.s who could sing, dance, and play instruments for variety shows that I would MC. I was almost disappointed when I was told my time in Europe was up and I would be going back to the USA.

The journey back to America in April 1946 was a lot faster and safer than the journey to Europe. We were on the Queen Elizabeth, a beautiful boat and a big step up from the Sea Owl. It was seven or eight in the morning when we entered New York Harbor. At the sight of the Statue of Liberty smiling down at us, many a G.I. broke into tears. I think I was one of them.

I was sent to Fort Dix for a month or two before processing my reentry into civilian life. I did some camp shows with Special Services while there. I exercised my songwriting skills by writing parodies. For instance, instead of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” we’d sing, “When we begin to clean the latrine.” And for “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” we rolled up our pants legs and became the Andrews Sisters.

I was discharged—honorably, I might add— in June 1946. Being a civilian once again was wonderful and terrible. I didn’t have to eat in a mess hall anymore; I could eat Chinese, Italian, or deli anytime I wanted to. But what to wear? In the army it was easy. You put on the same clothes every day. But I had actually grown about an inch and put on about 20 pounds while I was overseas, so I had to get a whole new wardrobe. My favorite wing-tipped black-and-white shoes were heartbreakingly too small to wear anymore. I had grown up.

The army didn’t rob me of my youth; it really gave me quite an education. If you don’t get killed in the army, you can learn a lot. You learn how to stand on your own two feet. ✯

From the book ALL ABOUT ME! My Remarkable Life in Show Business by Mel Brooks, published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Mel Brooks.

No matter where you served in Vietnam in the 1960s, the slashing rock ’n’ roll guitar of James “Jimi” Hendrix was heard on radios, record players and eight-track tape decks. Electric Ladyland, the critically acclaimed album released by Hendrix in 1968, sold millions of copies and showcased Hendrix’s incredible talents.

More than a few GIs soon came to think that “All Along the Watchtower” was really Hendrix’s tune—and not a cover of a song by Bob Dylan. “Purple Haze” and “The Wind Cries Mary” also were played over and over. Rolling Stone magazine considers Hendrix to be the greatest guitar player of all time.

But many who served in Vietnam and admire Hendrix’s skill with a guitar do not know that he was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division. They also do not know that Hendrix figured out how to cut short his three-year enlistment to launch his career as a musician by exploiting prejudices against homosexuality.

Trouble with the law

Hendrix, born in Seattle the day after Thanksgiving 1942, grew up poor and dropped out of high school. Some of his African American male friends, who like him had few job opportunities, joined the armed forces. Hendrix also considered enlisting, especially after he was arrested by the local police for riding in a stolen car.

After being arrested again just four days later for riding in another stolen car, Hendrix knew he would be prosecuted this time and could go to jail for 10 years. Yet he also knew that prosecutors in Seattle often were willing to make a deal—a plea bargain—with a young male defendant if he would leave town and join the Army. Hendrix went to an Army recruiter in Seattle and asked if it was possible to join the 101st Airborne Division. He had read about the “Screaming Eagles,” as the division’s soldiers were called, and wanted to be a paratrooper.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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On May 16, 1961, a public defender representing Hendrix struck a plea bargain with the local district attorney. Hendrix received a two-year suspended prison sentence on the condition that he enlist in the Army. The following day, he enlisted for three years as a supply clerk and shipped out to Fort Ord, California, for basic training.

At first, the young private liked military life. After two months at Fort Ord, he received orders for Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He arrived there on Nov. 8, 1961, and immediately began airborne training. “Here I am,” he wrote to his father, “exactly where I wanted to go. I’m in the 101st Airborne . . . [it’s] pretty rough, but I can’t complain, and I don’t regret it . . . so far.”

Becoming a Screaming Eagle

Hendrix made his first jump out of an airplane that winter. “The first jump was really outta sight,” he later told a friend. Like many paratroopers, Hendrix feared that his parachute might fail. He overcame it, made five jumps and earned his parachutist badge, along with the extra $55 a month that came with being on jump status. Hendrix was promoted to private first class in January 1962 and completed the requirements to wear the Screaming Eagle patch. He was so proud of that patch that he bought extra ones to send to his family.

Only a few months later, however, Hendrix decided that he liked the Army—and soldiering—less and less. The military was interfering with his true love: rock ’n’ roll music. Hendrix had his guitar with him and recruited friends for a band that got weekend gigs in Nashville and at military bases as far away as Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Hendrix knew that he could not simply quit the Army, and if he went AWOL he might be court-martialed and sent to prison. In April 1962, having finished just 10 months of his 36-month enlistment, Hendrix spoke to an Army psychiatrist at Fort Campbell and told him that “he had developed homosexual tendencies and had begun fantasizing about his [male] bunkmates.” On a subsequent visit, Hendrix told the doctor that he was “in love” with a male member of his squad.

Those were fabricated claims about his sexuality that Hendrix knew could get him out of uniform. Under Army regulations then in force, a gay soldier was subject to separation because his presence in the Army was thought to impair morale and discipline.

Being Gay Meant Being ‘Unfit’

According to the regulation, this “unfitness to serve” was attributed to the Army’s then-reasoning that “homosexuality is a manifestation of a severe personality defect which appreciably limits the ability of such individuals to function effectively in society.”

In practice, that meant a soldier who demonstrated “by behavior a preference for sexual activity with persons of the same sex” could be discharged with a general or an undesirable discharge—although an honorable discharge might be given in exceptional cases. Hendrix was sufficiently familiar with the regulation. He knew what he needed to say.

In May 1962, Capt. John Halbert, a doctor, gave Hendrix a comprehensive medical examination. Halbert concluded that Hendrix suffered from “homosexuality” and recommended he be discharged because of his “homosexual tendencies.” He was discharged for “unsuitability” on July 2, 1962.

Hendrix must have received at least a general discharge under honorable conditions, as his final paycheck included “a bonus for twenty-one days of unused leave.” Had he received a discharge under “Other Than Honorable” conditions, there would have been no bonus.

After his discharge, Hendrix embarked on a red-hot career as a musician. He never admitted how he had used his knowledge of Army regulations to obtain an “early-out” and return to civilian life. Instead, he told his friends that he had broken his ankle on his 26th jump and was discharged for that physical disability. However, his Army record contains no evidence that Hendrix was discharged due to an injury.

Dying a rock star at 27

Had he lived longer, Hendrix likely would have been surprised at the changing attitudes about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in America—and in the U.S. Army. Unfortunately for Hendrix, his “reckless mixing of drugs and alcohol,” as Charles R. Cross described it in his 2005 biography Room Full of Mirrors, resulted in his death in London on Sept. 18, 1970. He was 27 years old.

Hendrix is not the only musician or celebrity from that era who served in the armed forces. Johnny Cash served in the Air Force from 1950 to 1954, and Elvis Presley was in the Army from 1958 to 1960. Only Jimi Hendrix had the distinction of being a paratrooper, and it seems his knowledge of law and regulations got him back into civilian life earlier than might have otherwise been expected.

Fred L. Borch is a retired judge advocate colonel who serves as the regimental historian for the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps. He is the president of the Orders and Medals Society of America and the author of several books on American military decorations.

This article appeared in the June 2022 issue of Vietnam magazine.

What follows is an account of frontier scout Tom Tobin (1823–1904) and his pursuit of the Espinosa family of killers, as told to and related by Christopher Kit Carson III, a grandson of both Tobin and legendary frontiersman Kit Carson (1809–68). The younger Carson (who was born on June 30, 1883, and died at age 91 on Nov. 28, 1974) shared this account in a Dec. 30, 1968, taped interview with Robert Leonetti, then a graduate student at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colo. The original transcript was never published. Daniel Sanchez-Leonetti, Robert’s brother, recently listened to the interview and cleaned up the manuscript for publication in Wild West. The editors have made only minor corrections to syntax and punctuation. Click here to listen to the original recorded interview.

On May 1, 1900, Tobin’s 77th birthday, he shared his exploits with then 16-year-old grandson Kit while the two were out looking for lost horses, and the latter never forgot his grandfather’s narrative. Tobin was justly heralded as the man who finally tracked down and killed Felipe Espinosa and nephew José in Colorado Territory in October 1863.

SO Many Stories About Tom Tobin

Kit Carson III: There have been a lot of stories written about Grandfather Tobin, and especially about him having killed them two desperadoes, the Espinosa brothers. There have been so many stories now that several times fellows came there to the ranch, located about 3 miles southwest of Fort Garland [Colo.]. Grandfather Tobin was a buddy of my other grandfather, Kit Carson, who was commander of Fort Garland at one time.…There used to be fellows that would come to interview him about the Espinosa deal, and when they would publish it, they published a whole lot of stuff that wasn’t true, things that he hadn’t told them at all. And he got so [angry], that was the last [they] came to interview him. He wouldn’t give them an interview, because they wouldn’t put down what he told them. They sent him a copy of their story, and [there] was lots of stuff in there that he hadn’t told them at all, so he quit interviews.

But what I got from him was right from him. It happened this way: My grandfather used to raise horses and some cattle, but his hobby was racehorses. He used to sell lots of these horses to buyers from New York and Eastern towns…and train them for polo ponies.…When we rounded them up in the fall, most of them would come in by themselves, but this time a bunch of mares and one stallion didn’t come in. So, the next spring [1900] my brother and I made two or three trips into the mountains looking for these horses…but we couldn’t find them, so grandfather and I went out to see if we could find them. And we were up Indian Creek, that little creek that comes up into the Sangre de Cristos just a few miles above Garland, but the head of it is between La Veta and Fort Garland. Well, we didn’t find them, and he was 83 years old [77] at the time. It was getting late in the evening, and he was getting pretty tired. We started back, and I happened to think when we were up on Indian Creek, and I says, “Grandpa, wasn’t it up in here that you killed the Espinosas?”

And he said, “Yes.”

And I said: “Where about? Do you remember?”

He said: “That’s been a long time ago, and I don’t know as I could go to the exact spot anymore. Maybe I could.”

But his eyesight was failing him, and he was getting old, and it was getting late in the day.

Tobin had a reputation among the old fellas that he…could track a grasshopper through the sagebrush

THe Bloody espinosas

Robert Leonetti: What time of year was this when you were up at the creek with him?

Carson: That was sometime in May or June. But we stopped, and he showed me about where. He said: “Now Indian Creek goes up here. Up here a little ways there is another creek come into Indian Creek from the north.…[It] was about probably 2 miles north of the junction of this little creek and Indian Creek.”

Now, this is the way it had happened. These two outlaws of the Espinosa brothers [Felipe and Vivián] had come up from New Mexico [Territory], and they [had] been terrorizing this part of the country from New Mexico clear into the South Park here in Colorado. It was said that they had killed about 23 [Felipe claimed 32] men on the rampage and had a grudge against the Americans. There had [been] so many different stories about it that nobody seemed to know just what it was, but it seems like it stemmed from the Mexican War. [They] traveled through the country here, and any white man that they [saw], they’d kill. Posses had been after them for eight years [actually two].…[Scouts] and old soldiers from Fort Garland been after them, but couldn’t get them. They never come out into the open. They just traveled in the mountains from north to south of the Sangre de Cristo Range. The state had ordered a reward of some say $1,500 and some say $2,500 for the capture of the Espinosas.

So, it happened that at this time these Espinosa brothers had killed a man [Leander Philbrook actually escaped their ambush unharmed and fled to Fort Garland] between La Veta and Fort Garland.…He was coming over into the valley. He was married to a Spanish woman [Philbrook’s passenger, Dolores “Lola” Sánchez of Trinidad, was not his wife]. He was driving a buckboard [buggy] with two mules, and just as he came over the top of Indian Creek pass [Sangre de Cristo Pass] into the valley, one of the mules was shot from ambush. Of course, the fella couldn’t get any further. He had to stop.…They kept the woman captive for three or four days [actually a matter of hours]. During the day they would go away while she was held captive, but they [would] tie her to a tree until they got back. One day she got loose, and she started down the road toward Fort Garland.…She met a bunch of soldiers on patrol, and they brought her down to Fort Garland. She told the commander at the fort [Lt. Col. Samuel F. Tappan] her story and gave the location…as well as she could.

Well, this commander, he didn’t know what to do, because he’d been trying to get at these fellas a long time, so he thought of Tom Tobin. He sent after him at the ranch and [said], “Tom, I wish you’d go and see if you can get these fellas. We know they’re in this part of the country, and I think that you’re the man that can track ’em down.”…Tobin had a reputation among the old fellas that he…could track a grasshopper through the sagebrush.

He didn’t want to go at that time. He said he couldn’t leave, because they were expecting a baby at the house…and he thought he better not go. But the commander insisted…so he decided to go. He went back to the ranch to change horses, and the commander at the fort had said that he would give him all the men and equipment that he wanted.…But grandfather said: “What would I do with a bunch of soldiers? I couldn’t handle them. Besides, they’ve been after these fellows for a long time and haven’t caught them, and they couldn’t get ’em this time either.” So, he went to the ranch…and a Spanish family working for them at the ranch had a boy [Juan Montoya] about 15 years old, and he took this boy with him.

The next morning they started out early, and they came to the place where the buckboard [buggy] was. They took the mule that they didn’t kill with them, these Espinosas. So, Grandfather started to track ’em, and their tracks were headed south. Well, he followed the tracks south for a little ways [and] figured that they had backtracked and went north instead. So, he went back to where he had started.…Well, they only went about a mile, maybe 2 miles, north, and being he was a tracker, he figured that he wasn’t very far behind. [When] the tracks got pretty hot, he left the boy with the two horses. He told the boy: “Now, you see the shadow of this tree across the gulch, there across the creek? When that shadow points to that point of rocks on the other side…and I’m not back, you take the horses and go back to the fort, because I won’t be back.”

Tom TObin Finds the Bloody Espinosas

So, he went, and the further he went, the hotter it got. So, pretty soon he located ’em. They had a little fire going, a small fire.…It was only one brother that was left then. Before that time [the] Espinosa brothers had held up a stagecoach up in South Park, and some fella had killed one of the Espinosa brothers [Vivián was killed in a shootout with a citizens’ posse]. He killed him, so the other one that was left [Felipe] went down to New Mexico and got his nephew [José], a boy about 19 or 20 years old [actually 14], and he got to be worse than his uncle.

So, Grandfather had a muzzleloading rifle—you know, a Hawken rifle…that you used to have to pour the powder in and then ram the bullet in and put a cap on the tube before you could shoot. So, he put two bullets in his mouth, and he snuck up behind a fallen tree. He had to get close because them rifles didn’t carry as far as our modern rifles do. And one shot, and if you missed, you was a goner. So, he snuck behind this log, and the uncle, the old man [Felipe], was cooking some meat on this campfire. [They] killed some animal [a stolen ox], and they had some of the meat hung up on the willows to dry. The young fellow [José] was off a little ways, taking care of the horses, something. And Grandfather got within range, and he said this old fella was like an animal. He could sense danger. He hadn’t seen grandfather or heard him, but Grandfather said he’d stoop over to stir his meat. But he’d straighten up right quick and always reach for his revolver, but he didn’t take it out of his scabbard at all. Then he’d go ahead with his meal. Grandfather didn’t want to shoot him until he got the two of them together.

Pretty soon the young fella came, and he started to unpack some sacks that they had, and they were talking, but Grandfather was too far to hear just what they were saying. But he could have understood ’em, because he [could] talk Spanish.…So he got ready, and the old man stooped over again to take care of his meat, and the young fella dumped something out of his sack. And Grandfather took a crack, and the old man pitched over into the fire, but he wasn’t dead. He rolled out of the fire. It only singed his whiskers.…Grandfather said he had never seen a more horrible looking thing than that old man. Probably hadn’t had a bath in years or shaved or anything. He was dirty, and his fingernails were so long that they curled over his fingers. But anyhow, he cracked down on the old man.…The young fella started to run, and Grandfather called to him in Spanish and told him to stop, and he stopped long enough to fire his revolver at Grandfather, but he missed, and he started to run again. Just as he got to the edge of the timber, Grandfather cracked down on him, and he went down. So, Grandfather walked over to the fire. The old man was laying on his back. He wasn’t dead, but he had his revolver in his hand, and he waved [it] over his face once or twice and said, “Damn the Americans.” He didn’t know who shot him. He hadn’t seen anybody. And then Grandfather went over to the young one, the nephew, and he was dead. He broke his back.…

Verifiable proof

Grandfather came back to the camp and wondered what he should do. He couldn’t take the bodies to Fort Garland. He had to take some evidence, and he only had the two horses, and it was a long ways [to the fort]. So, he took his hunting knife and cut off the old man’s head and then went and cut [off] the young one’s head…and put them in a sack that the young one had emptied [and] walked over to where the horses were. And when he got there, the horses were there, but the boy…had taken off afoot and had hidden in some rocks. But he finally found him and tied the heads on behind the saddle.

the commander says, ‘Tom did you have any luck?’ and Grandfather went behind the door and picked up a sack and dumped the heads out. He said some of the women fainted…[and] men turned green

[Grandfather] came to the fort…and there was an orderly in the commandant’s office, but all the officers [and their wives] had gone down the road toward San Luis for a [ride].…So he sent the orderly after them. And they all came in, and the commander says, “Tom did you have any luck?” and Grandfather went behind the door and picked up a sack and dumped the heads out. He said some of the women fainted…[and] men turned green.…The commander says to the orderly, “You take these things out of here and bury ’em someplace.”

So Grandfather went home. And see, when he went after these fellas, he didn’t know that there’d been a reward offered by the state [territory]. And the reason he went was like all these old-timers done. He done it for humanity sake and to protect mankind that these fellas were killing all over the valley, all over the place.…When [he] got to the home, the baby he was expecting was already there.…

After he learned there was a reward out for ’em, he didn’t claim it until a few years later. He put in a claim to the state, and the Legislature hopped back and forth, and they didn’t have no funds for [those] things.…Eventually they paid him [$500 from Territorial Governor Edward Moody McCook, followed 30 years later by $1,000 from Governor Davis Hanson Waite].

Leonetti: And it was supposed to be a reward of $1,500 to $2,500?

Carson: Fifteen hundred or $2,500. Some said $1,500, others said $2,500.…Some say that he got $1,500 dollars, but, you know, Grandfather couldn’t read or write. He could write his name, but that was all. Now, if they ever paid $1,500 or $2,500 dollars, whoever does his correspondence for the state probably got the balance of it.…

Making History

Carson: One time I was in Colorado Springs, and I met with the historical society of the Pikes Peak region, and they were talking about Kit Carson—my other grandfather. And eventually someone brought up this Espinosa deal, and they started to ask me about names and dates. I said, “My gosh, I have such a poor memory that I don’t remember dates or names either.”

Well one of them said, “Do you remember what time of year it was when your grandfather got these Espinosas?”

And I said, “Yeah, in October.”

And he says: “What year? Do you remember that?”

“Yeah, 1863.”

He says, “Well, I thought you didn’t remember dates?”

“Well, I have reason for remembering that date.”

And he says, “Why?”

“Well, when he got home, that baby born that day…later became my mother [María Pascualita Tobin]. And so I remember that date of her birth and the year. So, it was October 1863.”

Gory Details

Leonetti: I wanted to ask you about the old man [Felipe] Espinosa. You said he [your grandfather] shot him first, and he rolled over the fire.…Did he just die there?

Carson: No, Grandfather seen him wave the revolver past his face, and then [he] passed away. Grandfather didn’t have to shoot him again, because he seen he was too far gone to do any damage.…He went to see about the boy. [When] he got back…the old man was dead.

Leonetti: And you said they had great big, long fingernails. I could just imagine those dirty long fingernails and big beards.

Carson: Long fingernails, long black beard, and fire had singed part of his [Felipe’s] beard away, so he was an awful looking sight.

Leonetti: Were they in buckskins?

Carson: I suppose they were in buckskins. Now, lots of people say in stories that [have] been written that…some museums has souvenirs.…Some say they kept a diary and the names of the fellas that they killed. Now, tell me, how would these guys keep a diary when they were illiterate? [The brothers were actually found with letters and a diary written in fluent Spanish]. They couldn’t write, they couldn’t read, and they didn’t know who they [had] killed. Now, they weren’t going to ask a man what his name was and then kill him. They killed all these fellas from ambush.

Leonetti: Do you think they, according to your grandpa, killed people here because they had such a dislike for Americans?

Carson: That’s right. Because it wasn’t for robbery.…[The] men killed, most of them…were timbermen, prospectors or things like that. They [Felipe, Vivián and José] couldn’t think that they had any money with them. Besides, what good would money do the Espinosas? They didn’t go to town.…They would swoop down on some village…change horses, take what horses these fellas had and provisions. And of course the Spanish people—most of them, not all—they were in sympathy with the Espinosa brothers, naturally. Lot[s] of them around [Fort] Garland [in] later years, they had a dislike for my grandfather…on account of [going after the Espinosas.]

Back at Fort Garland

Leonetti: Do you remember who the commander was at the time at the fort?

Carson: No, I don’t remember.…I was born in the same house where Grandfather [Carson] had his headquarters as commandant of Fort Garland. I was born in that same house.

Leonetti: During the time he was commandant?

Carson: No, Grandfather Carson was commander at Fort Garland in 1852 [actually 1866–67], and I wasn’t born until 1883. But I was born in the same house [in which] he had his headquarters, which is still there.

Leonetti: How was your father related to the original Kit Carson?

Carson: My father was the original Kit Carson’s eldest son. His name was William.…William married Tom Tobin’s youngest daughter…the one that was born when Grandfather killed the Espinosas.

Leonetti: And that was your mother?

Carson: My mother. WW

Author Daniel Sanchez-Leonetti, whose hometown is Trinidad, Colo., found the 5-inch reel audiotape of the interview brother Robert recorded in 1968 with Kit Carson III in Robert’s shed, where it had lain undisturbed for 52 years.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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