Epilogue

EPILOGUE

Thank you for sharing this story with me. At the base of it, and to the very heart of it is the truth, which is very important to me. There are plenty of novels with no base in reality, which add little if anything to our search for wisdom. Like Isa tai's visions, they often only feed our preconceived ideas and our preferred paradigm. Many of the people in this story actually lived and played a part in history, and their lives went on. And their stories live on too, and we can learn from them. Many of them you probably recognized, whose names have become common to everyone. But I thought you might be curious about some of the others, who are less famous, and you might want to know how their stories played out, far beyond the confines of this book.

FYI, Some historians might question how so many real characters might have crossed paths in one story, but I make no apologies or excuses for this, and I do not have to. Diligent research brought them to the same table, like a large family, and it took no stretch of the imagination to incorporate them into this story. What amazed me was how the ordered travels of a single young man in those days could have similarly exposed him to this pantheon of the American West, but it truly was a smaller world in those days... and it was the truthfulness of the story which gave it its cohesiveness and brought all of these members of this extraordinary family of western fame back together to reenact their parts in the drama.

Father Swineberg, the chief of “soul rustlers,” in this story and one of the inspirations for the title, was a real person. He was almost forgotten to history, if not for a couple of glowing paragraphs in an obscure history of Dodge City by one of its founders, Robert M. Wright. But so impressed was Wright, who was a friend and contemporary of his, that he threw him into the kitchen sink of his ramblings among a great deal of other unindexed information in his priceless book: Dodge City, The Cowboy Capital, and the Great Southwest in the Days of the Wild Indian, the Buffalo, the Cowboy, Dance Halls, Gambling Halls and Bad Men... since reprinted. But he did cap those paragraphs off too suddenly for me, after piquing my interest by saluting the man, saying that he later died of yellow fever tending to others who were suffering from the disease.

Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Quanah Parker, Bat and Edward Masterson, James Butler Hickok, Dull Knife, William F. Cody, William Pinkerton, George Bent, Squirrel-tooth Alice and “Timberline,” Little Robe, Agent Miles and Col. Miles, (often confused with one another) are all historical personalities about whom some has already been written or even portrayed on the screen. If anything I merely tried to present them as human beings, and not the typical over-exaggerated caricatures shaped by lazy writers in many Hollywood scripts. In these early days of the West they had not evolved, even in their own minds, as American legends.

Noteworthy are the facts often lost in most film renditions of these larger than life characters, whose stories are often abbreviated. Bat Masterson entered into the sporting world, acted as a boxing promoter in Colorado, then spent the rest of his life as a sports writer in New York. Squirrel Tooth Alice married and moved to Big Spring, Texas, where she and her husband ran a saloon. Quanah Parker retired his war lance and was made a district court judge in the Indian Territory, and became a fairly wealthy man. He visited Texas and met most of his White kin, and even went hunting with President Theodore Roosevelt. Few other men ever rose so high in two such different cultures.

More significant to this novel are the persons whose names are vaguely known to history, but about whom very little detail has been preserved. All we have are the parenthesis after their name, the dates of their existence, and a few major facts. Here is the novelist's honey-hole of raw material, an opportunity to fill in the blanks with their art. Wild Horse, Whirlwind, Little Robe, Dull Knife, and other Plains Indians in the novel have been portrayed in the roles they are known to have played in the events which led up to the Red River War. An effort here was made to make each of them distinct individuals, and possessing their own minds. Still, since they left little or none of their thoughts and words behind for us to read, admittedly they all speak from my viewpoint, based on research, my observation of human nature, and probably my sympathy with their plight.

For instance Isa Tai, or “Coyote Droppings/ Dung/ Bowels/ Entrails/ Whatever, the much castigated Comanche medicine man, is an example where the novel takes a real person, about whom little is actually known, and using an artist's soul and a lifetime of observation and research, tries to put flesh and blood into his somewhat tarnished legend. History is never kind to the losers in a conflict, and especially its vanquished generals, and Comanche history has been no different. But I found his story to be especially tempting, and wondered what had happened to him after Adobe Walls. How does one re-assemble their life and more importantly, their self-respect after such a debacle? Maybe someday his true story of personal recovery will emerge and be venerated for the lessons it might teach, but in the meantime, my curiosity has been salved with this pure fantasy. Bottom line, we know that it did heppen. History does record that Coyote Bowels did bounce back, and regained his status in the Comanche Nation, and served as an important leader on the Reservation, even challenging Quanah Parker at times for his management of tribal affairs. Unfortunately, in Comanche culture your name was awarded to you by others... and he had to live the rest of his life with the worst name in the West.

Bill Martin, the baddest of the bad, was another real person whose follow-up was difficult, as there were only isolated facts here and there. Mostly convicted by the Media, and released without a trial, his legacy has been extrapolated in The Soul Rustler, using newspaper accounts of the time. There is no doubt in my mind, or any students of the subject, about his contributions or those of the outlaws within his influence. And there is little doubt that they were a significant cause of the Southern Plains Tribe's sudden jumping of their reservations like gnat-maddened deer, and their attacking of those Whites whom they suspected caused the itch, with unmitigated rage.

Not long after his patriotic service in the Red River War, in 1875 Hurricane Bill Martin was arrested and finally convicted of something in Ft. Worth, Texas. He and a couple of whores were fined for operating a “disorderly house,” the term for brothel used in those days in newspapers so as not to offend its more sanctimonious readers who defended the language standards set down by Queen Victoria. Many a blissful wife probably read those ambiguous reports, clueless to what abominations they were referring to, or that their husbands were more than familiar with them, if not those persons and places described. But Martin ran with good company, as Doc Holiday appeared on the same docket with him and his girls, answering charges of illegal gambling and discharging of firearms. All of them were instructed to leave Hell's Half Acre, and to never come back.

Martin moved his headquarters to Ft. Griffin, Texas, which was established at the base of the Texas Panhandle, to supply the Red River War. After he served as a Scout for the army during the war he helped to inspire, he set up a horse-rustling operation in the Texas Panhandle where he married a whore called, poetically if not appropriately, “Hurricane Minnie.” Her real name was Jessie Tye, and their winds never got in sinc, or she evidently did not please him, or him her, as their stormy relationship did not last long, until she took up with another Texas criminal legend, John Selman, the man who later assassinated John Wesley Hardin in El Paso.

Bill Martin was begrudgingly acknowledged by one Panhandle observer as a “wise old wolf”; a captain among outlaws, in a town infested with lawlessness, and was recorded in Ft. Griffin's short history as a major participant in two memorable gunfights. Still infamous as a rustler, pimp and ruthless opportunist, he also became a world-class tattle-tale, when he told the names of many of the town's vigilante committee, who had turned on the Shackleford County Sheriff and murdered him in cold blood. We can only wonder how he knew, unless he ran with them. But Martin was a man who was primarily for himself, and without qualms about serving his own interests, to the misery of others, the law be damned. Of such the Texas Panhandle built a very successful culture of raptors until the regular folk moved in and took over.

Jack Gallagher, one of Bill Martin's most famous henchmen, abandoned the region and migrated to the Montana Territory, where soon after he joined the most famous corrupt sheriff in Montana's history- Henry Plummer. They were both suspected of various crimes and and hung by vigilantes along with many others for operating a similar ring to that of Martin's in the Indian Territory. A notorious series of robberies, murders, and general chaos seemed to terminate after their demise.

Billy Brooks is always associated with Martin in most accounts of the time. He was arrested and jailed for stealing mules from a stage line which competed against the rustling ring's interests. The Kansas citizens were disgusted by this time with the routine arrests and releases of these kinds of men, always an inch out of reach of “the law,” and this time they left nothing to chance, and in late July, dragged Brooks and another man to the nearest tree limb and hung them until dead. Persistent to the end, it was said that Brooks took longer than most to give it up.

Jim French was hated and excoriated in the papers, but given their racial bias and pervasive lack of accurate information, and a constant desire to inflame the population, I read between the lines and discerned a different story. What if the allegations against him were all true, but Jim had good reasons to turn on his race? And for readers today, it is not hard to relate to his actions if he did.

“Jim” or “S.” French of the mid-1870's has required more research, and ultimately more poetic license than any of the real characters in the book. There were no less than five distinct men in the Southwest during his lifetime who carried that name, or something similar. But this Jim French was the first to hit the headlines... and then disappeared while a “Captain A. J. French, ” a railroad surveyor and Indian “expert” of sorts came on the scene five years later, (1879) as part of an official escort of Cheyenne renegades who were being tried for murders and war crimes. A deputy in a posse led by Bat Masterson, A. J. French supposedly could communicate with the Cheyenne suspects, and claimed they knew English but would not speak it to the authorities. His affinity or relationship with the hostile Cheyennes and knowledge of specific tribesmen certainly rings a bell with the one so maligned in the newspapers five years before. But a captain? A captain of what? If A. J. was my Jim, he certainly made an amazing recovery with Kansas law enforcement.