VIII
The Old Man with a Beard
Since the red day in Skeleton Canyon when Curly Bill and his outlaws had sent to death all the Mexicans of a smuggler train except one stripling youth, the cry for vengeance had run along the border.
“Death to the gringo robbers!”
Sound cause for deep and bitter hatred had the dusky little people below the line. They had been treated like dumb beasts by the desperadoes who had come riding gaily across the border to plunder and murder at free will and gone riding gaily back again. Stealing Mexican cattle had been as simple as rifling a bird’s nest in a garden. It was so nowadays among these murderous bandits that to kill a Mexican was no more than to kill a yellow coyote in the hills; it was not a crime to be punished by any law; it lay lightly on the gringo conscience; it was even too contemptible a thing to count in the notched gun-handle records of bad men.
The Skeleton Canyon atrocity had fired the Mexicans with new determination and courage. They would submit tamely no longer to the cutthroat depredations. They themselves had some skill in war-trail strategy, death traps, and ambuscades. Their watch fires hereafter would burn on the mountains. Their gathering signals would fly among the valleys. They would fight to the last man. Woe to the gringo spoilers who in the future should come raiding across the border, unprepared for desperate battle.
The sixteen-year-old boy who had escaped from the Skeleton Canyon hecatomb leaving three brothers murdered upon the field burned from that day of death with a white-hot fire of hatred and became an apostle of vengeance among his people. His brothers, foully slain, cried out to him from the ground. He heard their voices in the mountain streams, in the winds that talked among the pines. They called him to a vengeance of life for life and blood for blood, which, according to the mystic sybils of the border, is the law of the dead.
Looking back as he fled from the massacre, this boy had seen along the top of Skeleton Canyon’s wall a line of fierce, demon countenances glaring death among flashes of rifle fire and snakelike wisps of smoke. But the quick vision was a blurred nightmare in his mind. Only one devil face remained in his memory with distinctness. That was the bearded face of an old man—a full beard as white as snow, hard wrinkled cheeks tanned as yellow as saddle leather by the winds and suns of years, blue eyes blazing fiercely. The boy did not know who this old man was, but some of the boy’s kinsmen knew at once by the description. The gorgon head of fear and death that haunted the boy’s dreams was that of Old Man Clanton.
Old Man Clanton was a fiery, lawless, ruthless old wolf of the frontier. He was a Texan and, it is said, made the ox-team trek to California in the gold-rush days of ’Forty-nine. He failed to wash a fortune from the sands of Feather River, drifted back eastward into Arizona in the early ’seventies, and took up a ranch near Fort Thomas.
“Old Man Clanton’s wife was dead in 1875 when I first knew the family,” said Melvin Jones of Tucson. “He had four children—Phineas, known as Finn, Ike, Billy, and Mary. The girl married Jack Slinkard and went to live on the Little Colorado River. My father bought Old Man Clanton’s ranch, and the Clantons moved to the San Pedro Valley near Charleston. Ike, Billy, and Old Man Clanton died with their boots on. Finn was the only man of the family who came to a peaceful death in bed.”
Mr. Jones’s Arizona memories date back only to 1875. That isn’t so long ago. But Arizona then was almost empty. On his way overland from Kansas, when he left the steel-end of the Santa Fe Railroad at Las Animas, Colorado, in 1875, he did not see a railroad again until 1881 when Southern Pacific trains began to run across Arizona. His wife, who was Laura Frame, born at Gila Bend in 1867, was the second white child born in Arizona and missed being first by only a week or so—lost the honour by an eyelash, as racing people might say.
The ruins of the old Clanton home on the San Pedro, twelve miles or so from Tombstone, are still eloquent of outlawry. Roofless now and with great breaches in the crumbling walls, the old adobe house stands on a hill commanding a wide prospect of the San Pedro Valley. West are the Huachucas, southeast the Mules, north the Whetstones, and straight up the valley across the line in old Mexico the San José Mountains. The San Pedro River brawls among its cottonwoods at the foot of the hill. Charleston was five miles north. The little town of Lewis Springs is on the railroad a quarter of a mile away across a fine vega where many a stolen horse once pastured. On its commanding hilltop the house was a castle, its thick adobe walls bulletproof and pierced with portholes. With a pair of field glasses the Clantons could sweep the valley up and down for seventy-five miles and appraise every man on horseback, every bunch of cattle, every stagecoach. No enemy could approach unseen. One may be sure that every stranger who came to the Clantons’ door had undergone careful scrutiny at long distance.
Old Man Clanton turned over his San Pedro ranch to his boys, and in the latter part of 1880 moved to the Animas Valley in New Mexico. To show his contempt for any possible danger from Mexicans whom he robbed and killed, his Animas Valley home was only a mile from the Mexican border.
Old Man Clanton took part a month before his death in the Skeleton Canyon atrocity. His ranches were places of rendezvous and refuge for stage robbers, cattle thieves, and all manner of fugitives from justice. Though his white hair and beard gave him a benevolent aspect, Old Man Clanton, even to the end, was a tough, rapacious, merciless fellow, quick on the trigger and not squeamish about blood. Ike and Billy Clanton were active members of Curly Bill’s banditti and suspected of many stage robberies. They were intelligent men, pleasant to meet, rather genial, but of a geniality that smiles with the hand resting on a six-shooter. Misfortunes and tragedy have given their fame a halo of picturesque pathos, but the Clanton boys were true sons of their father, born and bred to outlawry, and in their desperate calling, as bold and unscrupulous men as ever rustled cattle across the line or murdered Mexicans from ambush in a lonely mountain pass. Finn Clanton was reputed the mildest of the lot, but he served a ten-year sentence in Yuma for cattle stealing.
Six of Curly Bill’s outlaws set out upon a cattle raid into Sonora in the summer of 1881. They were Milt Hicks, Alex Arnett, Jack McKenzie, John McGill, Bud Snow, and Jake Gauze. A hundred miles south of the line they rounded up three hundred head. When they had rushed the herd through San Luis Pass out into the Animas Valley, they felt they were out of danger and allowed the beeves to drift and graze. At Cloverdale ranch three miles north of the boundary, where were good grass and water, Milt Hicks was left to guard the herd while the others rode to Curly Bill’s Roofless Dobe ranch only five or six miles away, where they found the outlaw chief and a dozen other members of his band.
Smoking a cigarette at the Cloverdale ranch house, Milt Hicks could see the mouth of San Luis Pass southeast across the valley. The wide low gap through the Animas range between the Playas and Animas valleys was swathed in blue mist. Magic water and verdure of mirage trembled in the heat waves over the intervening alkali flats. Gazing at the canyon’s mouth, Hicks noticed a certain movement in the misty blueness, a certain shifting of colour from delicate azure to whitish yellow of dust. A shadowy colossal figure came surging across the shimmering silver leagues of a mirage lake. Then the giant dwindled into a Mexican in a steeple hat on a pony. Other Mexicans in steeple hats on ponies materialized until there were perhaps thirty. All came careering across the valley at a run.
Milt Hicks climbed on his horse and split the wind for the Roofless Dobe.
Far down in Sonora, when the news of the gringo raid had spread, the Mexicans had quickly foregathered and taken the trail. In the distance they saw a dust cloud travelling along the horizon. That was the stolen herd. For three days the dust beaten to the sky by the stampeding hoofs was like a pillar of cloud to guide pursuit. The Mexicans had been only a few miles behind when the cattle plunged bellowing through San Luis Pass.
The Mexicans, all old vaqueros, rounded up the cattle left by the outlaws at Cloverdale ranch and, quickly lining them out into a column, rushed them close-herded across the valley. When they passed Double Dobe ranch, owned by Charlie Green and Charlie Thomas, they added to the herd two hundred more cattle belonging to these two men. The Mexicans had lost three hundred cattle; they were taking five hundred back into Mexico.
As soon as he had been informed by Milt Hicks of the coming of the Mexicans, Curly Bill got what men he had at the Roofless Dobe ranch into the saddle. His company mustered all told sixteen. He could have gathered more. There were others of his band at Lang’s and Clanton’s ranches and at the little town of Gillespie not far away. But if these cattle were to be saved from the Mexicans, it was necessary for Curly Bill to make every move as well as every man count. So, with his sixteen men, he set out in pursuit of thirty. He did not lose time by going to Cloverdale. He guessed what had happened there, and he figured that the Mexicans were pushing the herd hard for San Luis Pass. He set his course for this gap in the mountains.
The battle opened in the wide-flung jaws of San Luis Pass. With the cattle streaming through the canyon at a run, urged on by three or four vaqueros, the other Mexicans deployed as a rear guard. Without slacking pace, Curly Bill out in front, the rustlers rushed upon them. Out of the padding thunder of hoofs rang a few scattering rifle shots as prelude to the blaze and crackle of gunfire across the canyon’s mouth. Mexicans began to tumble from their ponies. Under the whirlwind attack, the Mexicans were seized with panic. They turned tail and set out in wild flight after the cattle. Hard upon their heels pressed the outlaws, pumping lead among them. The Mexicans left the canyon and took to the hills, and many were killed as their ponies floundered among the gulches. For six or eight miles the running battle continued. When the last Mexican had disappeared over the ridges, the outlaws got the cattle under control and headed them back for the Animas Valley ranges. Fourteen Mexican saddles had been emptied. All the wounded were ruthlessly killed when Curly Bill took the back trail. The casualties on the side of the outlaws were three men slightly injured.
“I had the story of this fight from Milt Hicks and several others of Curly Bill’s men when I met them in Gillespie a few days afterward,” said Rube Hadden of Paradise. “All the accounts agreed that fourteen Mexicans were left dead in the pass. Besides the six men who had been on the raid into Sonora after the cattle, Curly Bill had with him John Ringo, Joe Hill, Jim Hughes, John and Charlie Green, Charlie Thomas, and Tall Bell, and one or two more whose names I have forgotten. The two hundred cattle stolen by the Mexicans from the Double Dobe ranch were returned there and the three hundred brought out of Mexico on the raid by Milt Hicks and his bunch were bought by Old Man Clanton at fifteen dollars a head.”
Fifteen dollars a head was not all these cattle were to cost Old Man Clanton. These three hundred stolen beeves stampede in wild border story from one red romance to another, costing nineteen human lives before they attain their final phase as sirloins and roasts on comfortable home tables somewhere in the world.
Though the Mexicans were eager to avenge the Skeleton Canyon tragedy, fortune so far had been against them. The game of death stood thirty-three to nothing. Nineteen of their people had been left dead in Skeleton Canyon and fourteen in San Luis Pass and not a single gringo ghost had been sent to the nether shades in blood atonement. The boy who had escaped from the Skeleton Canyon massacre had apparently preached his gospel of vengeance in vain. But wraithlike he still haunted the frontier line. Border men told of seeing a horseman watching in lone vigil on the hilltops and melting into thin air at any attempt to approach or follow him. When Old Man Clanton decided to drive the three hundred cattle to market at Tombstone, his plan was known across the line in Mexico almost as quickly as among his own rancher neighbours. The Old Man with a Beard—Bewhiskered Old Devil Face of Skeleton Canyon—was to take the road. For this the boy had been waiting these long days. Here was his opportunity at last. The voices of his three dead brothers might now be answered. He laid his plans swiftly and cunningly. He would make the trail to Tombstone for Old Man Clanton the trail to death.
With Old Man Clanton when he set out on the drive were Dick Gray and Billy Lang, his neighbours, Bud Snow, Harry Ernshaw, and Jim Crane—the Jim Crane who with Bill Leonard and Harry Head made the murderous attack on the stage on the Benson road. Their route, as planned, was to pass from Animas Valley through Guadalupe Canyon across Guadalupe Mountains out into San Bernardino Valley, and then northward through Sulphur Springs Valley past the southernmost buttresses of the Dragoons to Tombstone. They made their first camp six miles within Guadalupe Canyon and a half mile below the line in Mexico.
Harry Ernshaw was on night herd when next dawn came gray and dim in a drizzle of rain. The cattle were bedded down; Ernshaw was standing on guard in the shelter of a bluff; his pony was grazing a short distance from him. Suddenly, the cattle got to their feet in an excited scramble and, facing toward camp a quarter of a mile away, began to sniff the air and give throat to low moaning bellows. Ernshaw saw nothing and heard nothing. He fancied the herd scented a coyote or a bear.
He walked back toward camp to see if he might discover the cause of this strange panic. The camp was astir. Through the rain which made a gray mist in the faint half-light of daybreak, he saw Dick Gray and Jim Crane kindling a fire for breakfast. A little blaze began to flicker up among the wet faggots. Old Man Clanton, who had made his bed in the bottom of the chuck wagon, rose from his blankets and stood upright, a shadowy figure that in the moist twilight seemed to tower above the sodden earth. He stood half awake for a moment and swept his snowy beard with a paw-like hand.
The sloping canyon walls, which went darkly up to the leaden skies, sparkled on the instant with leaping flames, and the detonations of ambushed rifles drowned the swishing whisper of the rain. Old Man Clanton plunged over the side of the wagon in a staggering fall and crashed upon his face in the mud. Gray gave a death shriek that echoed up and down the canyon as he fell. Crane measured his length across the camp fire and extinguished it. Bud Snow, aroused by the hubbub, lifted himself for a quick moment at arm’s length on his blankets and sank back into them lifeless—asleep, awake, and dead in a twinkling. Billy Lang sprang from his bed and rushed upward among the giant rocks along the canyon wall. Sheltered behind a boulder, he began to churn his rifle. Bullets crashed about him as thick as raindrops. His foes remained hidden, but he fired at the flashes of their guns. But several of his enemies circled across the canyon and worked in above and behind him. Kneeling, he fired his last shot, toppled over, and lay still.
Ernshaw, at the first volley, had taken to his heels. Through the canyon he fled in the wake of the cattle that stampeded in headlong flight, his pony racing away in the midst of the herd. Half a mile from the camp, Ernshaw plunged into thick brush on a hill. Here he remained hidden. When the firing ceased, a dozen Mexicans rode past his place of concealment, talking excitedly in Spanish. Among them was a slight, youthful figure, looking hardly more than a child. This was the boy. He rode in silence, a glow of happiness on his face. Vengeance at last was his. He had paid his debt to his three dead brothers in gringo blood.
Next day, cowboys at the Cloverdale ranch saw through the mists of mirage over Animas Valley a solitary pedestrian approaching from where the blue Guadalupes shut in the horizon to the south. Haggard, exhausted, his clothes ragged from cactus and briars, Ernshaw staggered up to the ranch house with news of the tragedy.
“The Cloverdale boys rounded up a gang of thirty to bring out the bodies,” said Rube Hadden. “I went with a bunch of nine fellows from Gillespie. John Ringo and Charlie Green were at Roofless Dobe ranch, and they went along. We found the five dead men where they fell. There were a dozen empty rifle shells around Lang’s body. He had been shot in the back by the Mexicans who had worked around behind him. The hammer of his rifle was down on a cartridge that had been fired. We didn’t look for the cattle. The Mexicans had rounded them up and taken them on down into Mexico.
“We brought the dead men out across our saddles to a little mesa in Animas Valley midway between the ranches of Lang and Old Man Clanton and about ten miles east of Cloverdale. There we buried ’em in a row and heaped stones over the graves. I heard that the Clanton boys later took Old Man Clanton’s body to Tombstone and buried it in the cemetery there.”
The five graves on the little mesa in the Animas Valley represented the sum total of Mexican vengeance for the Skeleton Canyon tragedy. Thirty-three to five—that was the final score. But the murder of their father in Guadalupe Canyon inflamed the Clanton boys with hatred for the entire race of Mexicans. Within the next month or two, five dead Mexicans riddled with bullets were found from time to time in the San Pedro Valley near the Clanton ranch south of Charleston. No one ever knew who killed them. But it was generally believed in Tombstone that they gave their lives in vicarious atonement for Old Man Clanton’s death.