The Pastures of Beyond (20 page)

Slim Pickens was getting well known as an actor. He was the cowboy who rode the bomb in
Dr. Strangelove,
and later would play a sheriff in Mel Brooks's
Blazing Saddles
. With every successful part, his studio was more and more reluctant to let him risk his neck clowning. He held the clowning contracts at some major rodeos and offered them to me, since he was now unable to honor them. It was a chance of a lifetime, but not something I could abandon the ranch for. I hadn't practiced with my cape in months and knew I had to come to grips with reality. Sooner or later I would face a smart bull I couldn't handle, and I'd end up injured or even dead. Also, if I went back to clowning, I would have to get funnier in order to endear myself to a crowd. With his big, round, chinless face, Slim was a natural comic. The audience was bound to be disappointed if I appeared in place of the great Slim Pickens. Rodeo would require a full-scale investment of time and money, and there would be little room for other interests. I knew that I wasn't ready for big-time rodeo responsibilities.

Slim found other clowns to take his contracts, and so the rodeos went on without me. The champions made money; lesser cowboys spent their meager winnings on travel, doctor bills, and entrance fees, and soon disappeared like me from the rodeo scene.

Looking back, I was lucky to quit when I was in one piece. Through the years the rough stock got rougher and the bulls more savvy and dangerous. Ranchers began breeding superior bucking bulls and pairing talented bucking mares with talented bucking stallions. For a contestant, the margin between winning and coming up empty was often measured in split seconds, and how long you could take that beating and keep your body healthy.

More and more bull riders were tying themselves on the beasts using what became known as the suicide wrap and were often hung up, bucked off with their hands still caught in their riggings. I was a cape fighter, and the cape would only be in the way of my getting a bull rider's hand out of his bull rope fast enough to save him.

I suddenly found myself with only two real choices, paying money to sit in the stands and watch or, what was easier, just staying away. I loved the ranch, and wanted to become a writer and a family man. The friends I had in rodeo would always be my friends, and maybe I could become better at other jobs than I had ever been in the rodeo arena, where I'd had my moments but was never great. I could look back on some real adventures, like coming out of a chute on such great horses as Coburn's Cheyenne or Harry Rowell's Sontag, producing and starring in the first American rodeos in Arles, France, fighting bulls and clowning with Slim in San Francisco's Cow Palace, and winning honors with my rodeo photography.

I moved back to the ranch for good. Maybe it wasn't the Yamsi I loved back before the war, but it was a good life, and I still had lots of friends there and things to write about. Like Toy Brown, one of my Indian friends from Beatty.

Toy was a huge man with a head the size of a basketball, and he could have stolen his gap-toothed grin from a jack-o'lantern. He worked behind the bucking chutes at many a rodeo, and producers like Mac Barbour claimed they couldn't put on a rodeo without him. Toy was a master at tightening the flank straps on bucking stock and could make you get bucked off or let you ride and maybe win.

Properly tightened, not too tight but not too loose, a flank strap makes an animal kick back. Toy knew his rough stock and how to get the best performance out of every one of them. When a cowboy got bucked off and staggered back to the chute, Toy Brown's ear-to-ear grin was often the first thing he saw.

The Browns were a ranching family who had a good cattle ranch just east of the Beatty, Oregon, rodeo arena, and Toy had a reputation for being a good man with horses and a steady hand on a haying crew. He seemed always glad to see me, and I counted him as being a good friend.

One day as I was driving through Beatty in my pickup, I saw Toy sitting on the front porch of the general store and stopped to visit. He was holding his great moon face in his brown hands, and for the first time ever, he failed to grin at me as I approached.

“What's the matter, friend Toy?” I asked. “You look down in the dumps.”

The big Indian motioned me down beside him. In the distance on the hillside we could see the ranch house where old Toy had been born.

“You've known me a long time,” Toy said. “I always worked hard, didn't I?”

I nodded, wondering where this was headed.

“I saved my money and made something of the old family ranch, didn't I? Never bothered anybody or raised hell like some of my neighbors. I married a woman with a grown daughter, and I was happy, and worked hard to give them a good life. Well, them two went through all the money I had, even cost me my ranch. This morning the daughter told me she was going to pack Mama's bags and take her away. You know what I told her?”

“What, Toy?” I asked.

“I told her if she tried to take Mama away from me, I

was going to shoot them both. That's what I told her.”

Poor, kind, gentle, old Toy. He tried to light a cigarette, but his hands were shaking so much most of the pack slid out and fell in the dust.

I struck a big kitchen match on my thumbnail, and when I lit his cigarette for him, I was surprised to see he had tears in his eyes. He lumbered to his feet and went off toward his pickup without even saying good-bye.

I was at the ranch the next day eating lunch in the kitchen when the phone on the wall rang my ring. It was Toy. He was in the Klamath Falls jail and wanted me to bring him a carton of smokes. He had done just what he had promised. When the girl tried to take her mother away from home, he shot them both.

Toy had flanked his last bucking horse. For several years he was a trusty at the Oregon State Penitentiary, and grew flowers in the gardens. His hair grew white with age, and he could have been granted a parole anytime he wanted, but he stayed on to the very end. Knowing Toy, I'm sure there was never much sense of remorse over what he had done. He had warned the women ahead of time, and that was that.

Soon after Toy left the rodeo scene, I lost another old friend, an aging Indian saddle bronc rider named Jerry Choctoot. Jerry was an institution at Mac Barbour's rodeos. More often that not, Jerry would win some money in the saddle bronc riding the first day of a rodeo, but the other cowboys would make sure he was too drunk to ride the next day.

I was in the arena that year in Klamath Falls, Oregon, when Jerry showed up drunk to ride his second horse, which was already saddled and ready in the chute. I cornered Mac Barbour behind the chutes and told him that Jerry was in no condition to ride, and that I was going to unsaddle his horse and turn him out. Mac seemed to agree and went over to talk to him, but suddenly I saw Jerry crawling down on his horse, and Mac Barbour pulling the pin to let him out into the arena. One moment, the horse was bucking hard; the next, Jerry Choctoot had ridden his last bronc and lay dead of a broken neck. The rodeo went on, of course, but that was the last Mac Barbour show I ever went to.

During the long winters at Yamsi, I had plenty of time to do what I had long dreamed of doing, and that was to write books about wildlife and the West. I was wandering through northern Nevada one day, looking for something in the way of history that I could write about, when I stumbled upon the story of an Indian family who had fled the reservation system and gone back to living wild and free. Whenever I could shake myself loose from the ranch, I would rent a room in Winnemucca, Nevada, and spend a few days in the local library, reading anything I could find in old newspapers about the family. Oddly enough, there was plenty to read.

The head of the family was called Shoshone Mike, and he was married to Snake, a Ute woman from northern Utah. For many years after he and his family fled the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in the 1890s, they wintered south of Hansen, Idaho, in the mountains just above where Rock Creek flows through the Charlotte Crockett ranch.

Although Mike and his family disappeared for long periods as they wandered in search of food, they would always return to their winter lodge along Rock Creek. The Crockett family knew them well. Old Mike taught the Crockett boys how to hunt with bows and arrows, and the white and Indian children played together as brothers. If the Indians needed money to buy certain necessaries at the Hansen store, they sold buckskin gloves and reatas that were in great demand amongst the local ranchers. They minded their own business and bothered no one.

For a month, in an effort to appreciate how Mike and his family had lived, I wandered that rugged wilderness area, living off the land, eating what I thought the Indians might have eaten. Now and then I would find a wet meadow blue with camas and would dig the bulbs. These I would put in layers in a pit, each layer of bulbs covered with a layer of grass, and on top of this I would build a fire. I would shape the baked bulbs with my fist and make a cookie which was as good as candy. In digging those bulbs, however, I got hold of a similar bulb, that from the white-flowered death camas.

A few minutes after eating the bulb in a cookie, I was ready to die. After two days, I staggered to the edge of a canyon and saw a ranch along the bottom. Seeking help, I banged on the door, but everyone was gone. I went to the chicken house and stole about two dozen eggs, which I wolfed down raw. Feeling a little better, I had started to leave the chicken pen when a rooster pecked me in the back of the calf. I grabbed that rooster by the neck, took him to the top of the rimrock, cooked him, and ate him.

Some months later, I flew into Twin Falls, Idaho, for a cattleman's meeting, rented a car, and decided I would drive up Rock Creek into the mountains. I had just passed the ranch where I had stolen the eggs when I saw a horse tied to a fence. On the hillside above, a man and a woman were trying desperately to hold a bunch of wild cows. Every now and then a calf would break back, and they would nearly lose the bunch.

I was dressed in a business suit, with dress shoes, but I parked, got on the horse, and trotted up the hill to help. The people greeted me with as much enthusiasm as they would have shown any tourist. There was a rope on the saddle, and I took it down and shook out a loop. In vain, we dashed back and forth, trying to move the herd up the canyon toward a crossing on Rock Creek.

We were about to lose the herd when a calf squirted past me, tail over its back, with its cow chasing after. I made a desperation throw, caught the calf with a loop, took my dallies around my saddle horn, and dragged the calf up through the herd and down through Rock Creek. The calf bawled in distress as it bucked and pulled back on the rope, and the whole herd chased through the water after it. The dude in low shoes had saved the day.

More important to me was the fact that the woman who owned the cattle was Charlotte Crockett, who as a girl had played with the children of Shoshone Mike. I confessed to her that I had raided her chicken house and not only stolen a day's gather of eggs but eaten her rooster. Charlotte and I became friends, and she helped greatly in gathering information about Mike and his band.

Mike and his family left Rock Creek for what was to be the last time in the spring of 1910. Looking for better hunting grounds and a safer place to raise his family, he led them south and west through northern Nevada, hunting for food as they went. Now and then they hired out as hay help on ranches, and even picked fruit in northern California.

The winter of 1911 was one of the worst winters in Nevada history; for weeks the passes over the Sierras were closed by heavy snows. Mike and his family were trapped in Little High Rock Canyon in northern Nevada, not far from the little ranching community of Eagleville. The band consisted of Mike, his wife, Snake, three grown boys, a young woman with a baby, and a few others, including four children.

To stave off starvation during the storm, the Indians butchered a cow belonging to an Eagleville rancher. They were camped on a hillside along the rimrock on the north side of Little High Rock Canyon, in a hut made of willow poles covered with hides and rags, when tragedy struck.

Four Eagleville livestock men, out checking the condition of their cattle and sheep in the storm, rode down off the rim past the Indian camp. Caught with stolen beef, the Indians panicked and killed the livestock men, then left their bodies in the snow at the bottom of the canyon.

Despite the snows, Mike and his band deserted their camp and headed east across northern Nevada, heading for the safety of Rock Creek. It was three weeks before the folks in Eagleville learned about the murders and a posse could set out on the Indians' trail.

What took place was one of the wildest manhunts in Nevada history. Hysteria swept northern Nevada, and many a rancher moved his family to town and slept with a loaded gun beside him. Eventually the Indians were overtaken north of Golconda, Nevada, and were all killed except for a young girl and four little children. The children tried to escape by running through the sagebrush, but were roped by cowboys and dragged kicking and screaming up into the saddles.

A big hole was blasted into the frozen ground, and the dead bodies were thrown into the pit. When I found the grave some sixty years later, many of the bones had worked their way to the surface to be bleached by the desert winds.

According to records at Fort Hall Indian Reservation, the children died of tuberculosis soon after, and the story might have ended there for me except for a curious turn of events. In 1973, Dial Press published my story of those tragic events in a book called
The Last Free Man
. The book had not been long in circulation when I got a letter from a woman in Antioch, California, who related that she had attended teacher's college in Washington State with a young Indian girl named Mary Jo Estep, who had confided that her family had all been killed by whites in northern Nevada. Mary Jo had been raised by the superintendent of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, a Colonel Estep. The woman in California had lost all track of Mary Jo, but thought I might be interested in trying to locate her.