TOMBSTONES Chapter Two

 

I know the last thought that flirted through the brain of Apache chief Irigoyen, just before 7:00a.m., the day after Easter - Monday, 5 March, 1858 - just outside the little desert village of Janos, Chihuahua. He was asking Ussen, the giver of life, to protect the women and children of his band and  praying the Governor of Chihuahua would uphold the treaty he had signed, guarantying the Apache safety to trade in the town. Indeed, at that moment the merchants of Janos were secreting desperate Apache women and children in their shops and homes. 

But the treaty made no difference to the 400 Mexican Lancers galloping down on the unarmed old man confronting them. I hope Irigoyen had hope as the iron lance blade pierced his chest and the shaft drove his thin red body backward, pinning him to the ground. He deserved at lest that last hope, because the Apache called what followed the Kas-Ki-Yeh massacre.

Captain Juan de Sosaya, the officer commanding in Janos (above), protested the atrocity, but the attackers' commander, Colonel Jose Carrasco, from the neighboring state of Sonora, outranked him. Colonel Medina, the military commander in Chihuahua, later protested the "intrusion" into his state, but did not condemn the breaking of the treaty, or the murder of women and children. 

The Chihuahua government protested the Lancers lack of "military discipline" as they left bleeding corpses on doorsteps and in store rooms, but that was as far as they went to defend their own treaty.

By noon Colonel Carrasco boasted of killing at least 16 Apache men and 5 women. And he drove 52 Apache children back to Sonora, to be sold into slavery.

The never ending war with the Apaches killed 4,000 Sonorans during the 1860's. But it was the response to this violence that twisted Sonoran society. The state paid 200 peso for either the scalp of an adult Apache or the capture of Apache children. This created an industry of raiders who randomly murdered, and claimed all scalps and all Indian children as Apache. Any doubts could usually be relived by a quick bribe. And the scalping parties insured there were always more Apache raids in response. One warrior, He Who Yawns, lost his mother, his wife and three children in the Kas-Ki-Yeh massacre. Over the next 30 years his revenge alone killed so many Sonorans the Mexicans called him by a new name - Geronimo.

To defend against the Apache, all Sonorian males were required to either serve 2 years in the Rurales - the Rural National Guard or police - or pay a 3 or 4 pesos a month exemption tax. Effectively only the poor served. The Rurales uniforms, weapons and food were supposed to be paid for by heavy Sonoran import/export duties.  But these merely fueled smuggling, made easier by the Basin and Range topography.  Burros were plentiful and could carry everything from flour to perfume to liquor to silver ore over the narrow mountain tracks.  Canyons, like Guadalupe Canyon which spanned the Mexican-American border, hid the smugglers.  Houses along both sides of the border usually had back gates to facilitate smuggling. And the success of the smugglers meant the Rurales salary remained so low 1 in 4 recruits deserted every year. One platoon of Ruales, assigned to protect the village of Ures, northeast of the state capital of Hermosillo, grew so desperate they opened the jail cells and together, the Ruales and their prisoners, looted the town.

Every 15 days escorted convoys of burros and wagons carried goods between the Gulf of California port of Guaymas (above) to the state capital of Hermosillo, in the interior. One fairly honest government official noted that although no sombreros had paid import duties through Guaymas in 2 years, the shops in Hermosillo had no shortage of  hats. The local price of wheat or corn was kept high because of the profits Sonoran farmers made smuggling their produce north of the border. And although Sonora had some of Mexico's most profitable mines, silver and gold leaked from the state to purchase these smuggled goods. This created a liquidity crises in Sonora, reducing the entire state to a credit economy, supplied by the top 1% of land rich Sonoran blancos - white Sonorans - who comprised a few dozen of the richest families in the state.

Beyond these lucky winners of the gene pool, the majority of the population were forced into "debt peonage", to work when, where and at what their debt holder directed. The peons who murdered Frederick Brunckow in 1860 were debt peons. During the following decade desperation and lack of opportunity drove 8,000 Sonoran men to migrate to California and another 7,500 to cross the border into Arizona. By 1871 the population of the second largest state in Mexico was declining. In 1875 the population grew so frustrated with the hemorrhaging of Mexico's  population and money, they supported a revolt by General Porfiro Diaz against President Lerdo de Tejada.

One of President Diaz's first actions was to send General José Guillermo Carbó (above) north to the First military Zone, headquartered in Torin, southern Sonora, Mexico.  Besides dealing with the rebellious Yaqui Indians, he was to handle the prickly Americans, and the incompetent local authorities. He began by removing Governor Pesqueira (the son of the original) and replaced him with three men...

...Romon Corral (above), who served as Secretary of State for Sonora,  under new Governor Rafael Izabal. 

The third man, was Louis Torres (above), who smoothed things over with the Federal bureaucracy. As Miguel Salas Tinker explains in his invaluable book "In the Shadow of the Eagles", "...the triumvirate established a network of patronage which included merchants, hacendados (large houses), and government functionaries...Marriage into notable families and extended family relations cemented ties within this broader alliance."  But for the debt peons, nothing changed. If they stayed in Sonora they were held hostage to the never ending war with the Apaches.

Still, by the middle of the 1870's the Sonoran blancos (above) remained the only "job creators", in Sonora. And increasingly the state became the supplier to the Americans -  usually through smuggling - for which they were paid in manufactured goods - usually smuggled south. The third largest town in Sonora was Magdalena, near the border and half way between Hermosillo and Tuscon, Arizona. Magdalena reaped the profits as a way station in the smuggling trade. But that was not unmitigated good news for Magdalena. When the largest land owner in the district, Manuel Mascarenas, was arrested and charged with stealing his neighbors'  cattle and selling them in Arizona, his patrone, Louis Torres, made the charges disappear.

The lack of liquidity and of order also drove many Sonoran businesses to take on silent American partners, a practice called "petate del muerto" - the repose of the dead. These relationships were used for legal as well as illegal businesses. American butchers, supplying beef to Nevada miners, showed no hesitation when they could increase profits by stealing, or rustling cattle from Sonoran ranchers, rather than buying them.  And every once in awhile Mexican frustrations boiled to the surface, as was exemplified by the experience of Galeyville, Arizona butcher Miller McCallister.

The story goes that Miller had gone south with enough silver to buy 80 head of cattle. But opportunity presented itself on the moon lit un-fenced scrub land 10 miles south of the Sonoran village of Fronteras.  McCallister and 4 of his partners - George Turner, John Oliver, H.A. Garcia and William "Curly Bill" Brocius  - stumbled upon 500 head of cattle.  And without bothering to notify their owner, the Americans drove the herd north. After slipping through the twisting Guadalupe Canyon and safely across the border, the Yankees were drove the cows across the San Simon Valley, to the west face of the Peloncillo Mountains. Their next goal was to pass through the confines of Skeleton Canyon (above) on the border between New Mexico and Arizona..  But as they approached the watering hole of the San Simon Cienega or marsh, just at dawn on Thursday, 13 May, 1880,  the weary rustlers were confronted by a determined wiry dark man with a double barreled shotgun resting in his arms.

Standing in the half light, the man challenged the startled Americans in accented English, "I am Senior Jose Juan Vasquez," he declared, "and these are my cattle. You are free to go home, to your own side of the border. But my cattle stay here." Instead of simply riding away, one the Americans rashly opened fire.  Instantly 40 vaqueros began blasting away from rocks. When the gunfire finally slowed and stilled,  not only was McCallister dead, but so were Turner, Olvier and Garciea. There were reports some of the cowboys had not been killed by the fulsade, but tortured to death by the Mexican ranch hands after they realized their boss, Senior Vasquez, had also been killed.

Shortly thereafter a report in the newspaper "The Southwest",  published in Silver City, New Mexico,  claimed that local physician Dr. Henry Woodville had treated the sole American survivor of what came to be called the Skeleton Canyon Massacre - William "Curly Bill" Brocius (above). And the life of Brocius was emblematic of the anarchy on the American and the Mexican side of the border.

The story was that Curly Bill and another man had robbed a stagecoach in Texas, killing the driver and a passenger. During their trial both bandits had escaped, and in 1878 Curley Bill reappeared in Southern New Mexico and Arizona, where he fell in with an older desperado, Robert E. "Dutch" Martin, who made his living stealing silver and cattle in Sonora and selling them in the United States. Curly Bill became Dutch Martin's second in command over the outlaw Cow Boys.  Martin mostly stayed in New Mexico, while Brocius spent considerable time in Arizona. When he was sober, Curly Bill was maybe the best shot on either side of the border. But when he was drunk, which was often, he was dangerous.

In late October of 1880, 5 months after the Skeleton Canyon Massacre, a recovered Curly Bill was in the mining town of Tombstone, Arizona to do a little drinking. Having picked up his horse and gun at a stable, he was headed out of town when he spotted a few friends in a vacant lot on Toughnut Street, "shooting at the moon".  Knowing it was illegal to wear a gun in Tombstone, Brocius got down to try and calm his friends. But before he could, town Marshal Fred White appeared and demanded that the cow boys hand over their guns. Curly Bill volunteered to give his up first. But while doing so, the gun  went off, wounding Marshal White in the groin. Deputy Marshal Wyatt Earp (above)  then pistol whipped the drunken Brocius into submission. While being led off to jail Curly Bill had whined, "I didn't do nothing you can arrest me for."

Geologist Raphael Pumpelly, who was familiar with mining regions from Michigan to Japan, said that in the San Pedro River towns surrounding Tombstone, Arizona (above) - Fairbank, Charleston and Milltown, where,  "Murder was the order of the day...everyone goes around armed to the teeth." In Charlestown it was not unusual to find another dead body on the street every morning,  These deaths were not investigated as a murder if  "the wound was in the front or a gun was found nearby",  And if the victim were a 'nigger' African American, a "greaser" Hispanic American, or a "Chink" Asian American, not even then. 

It seemed to justify Pumpelly's description of the Tombstone district as having little "pretense of civilization".  There was anarchy north and south of the border.

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TOMBSTONES Chapter One

 

I know William Williams was anxious as he approached the cabin after midnight on Thursday,  26 July, 1860. He could see the adobe and the outbuildings in the dim quarter moon light, but the silence worried him. No smoke issued from the chimney where 15 men had cooked their meals and smelted their ore for the last year. There was not a sound from the corral where the burros and horses should have been responding to the pack animals he was leading. 

Motioning the Indian boys, Billy and Charley Ake, to hold back, Williams approached the cabin alone, calling out his cousin's name. "James? James?" Something unseen in the pitch blackness made him stop short. William struck a match. And in a ragged breath he saw that the cabin's front door was ajar, and stretched on the ground he saw James, face down, his head split wide open and small clumps of gray-white brain trailing away into the dark.

This story begins after North America had been sailing westward at 2 inches a year for about a hundred million years. Then about 25 million years ago the continent's northwestern edge slammed head on into the Juan de Fuca plate. And like 2 cars colliding head on, left headlamp to right headlamp, the collision sent 250 sextillion tons of continental rock buckling and twisting. The wrenching spun Baja California loose from Mexico and, about 17 million years ago, switched on the San Andreas fault.

Telling the boys to stay back, William edged past his cousin's corpse, and pushed the door wider. The small room was was pitch black. Holding the match high, William took two steps inside and stumbled over the heavy body of John Moss. William stumbled out of the cabin, yelling at the Ake boys to gather the mules, and get the hell out of here.

As the west coast twisted, the crust behind was pulled out, stretching a hundred miles and more, until it was so thin it cracked into 400 blocks roughly 25 miles across, each dropping down at a 60 degree angle on the west end with eastern escarpments tilting up to 10,000 feet into the sky. 

They formed a rhythmic series of north-south mountain islands, appearing on maps like "an army of caterpillars marching toward Mexico".  With every 1,000 feet in elevation up in each range, the temperature dropped down 4 degrees, and rainfall increased by 4 inches. Thus each mountain range became a sky island, biologically isolated by the 120 degree desert seas between them .And in this 500 by 1,500 mile Basin and Range Province lay most of North America's accessible rare metal wealth.

The 3 shocked souls hurried 35 miles south along the San Pedro River to Sonoita Creek, then west up it's canyon to Fort Buchanan. The outpost's commander, Captain Richard S. Ewell, recognized William as the panicked man rode up,  not long after dawn. 

The two had crossed paths just the day before, and, as Ewell wrote his sister back in Virginia, he immediately realized, "..something bad had happened." The story spilled from William like a desert gully-washer. "He said he had arrived at the mine about midnight, and no one answering, struck a light and saw his cousin lifeless with his head split open. They did not wait to see more...." Ewell dispatched as many of his malaria ridden dragoons as he could spare to accompany William back to the cabin. The Captain's assumption was that the Apache must be responsible. But Ewell kept the Ake boys at the fort to question them, as to what they had seen and heard.

As the crustal blocks tilted they lifted ancient hydrothermal vents,  where super heated brine had split the bedrock. As the vents cooled they left behind precipitate, veins of quartz,  tinted occasionally with gold, but more often with lead - galena - or sulfur - agentite -  or even chlorine - horn silver (above). 

And by the middle of the 19th century, some humans had learned to read such rocks, the way a hunter reads a trail. A bit of fur caught on a bramble, a leaf nervously nibbled but left on the branch, tells of a furtive buck hiding nearby. Quartz stained with chalcopyrite tells of veins of copper sulfide hiding below. Gelena hints at lead sulfide (above). Should you find both, if you were educated, diligent and lucky, you might find silver as well.

The soldiers found the mechanic James Williams, "ravaged by animals", on the ground between the 3 room adobe cabin (above) and the empty supply shed. All the horses and mules kept in the corral and their tack were gone. Inside the adobe was the body of chemist John C. Moss. He lay on the front room floor, stabbed multiple times. The contents of the cabin had been ransacked, and some of the assaying equipment was missing. But there was no sign of the cook, David Brontrager, nor of the 11 miners recruited from Sonora Mexico, nor the tents they had occupied, nor their boss, the head of the St. Louis Mining Company, Frederick Brunckow.

Silver is an odd metal. You never pan for silver in a stream, or dig it out with your bare hands. Silver is found only in veins running through hard rock, where it forms thin flakes or plates and occasionally crystal clusters (above). But it takes an educated eye to recognize silver ore. In 1858 an educated mining engineer tracked a quartz trail across the hot deserts of the Sonora, until he found a 6 foot wide vein of silver chloride, a mile east of the north flowing San Pedro River. He filed a claim and named his mine "The Bronco". His name was Frederick Brunckow.

Frederick had been born in Saxony in 1830, of a Russian father and a German mother. He was trained as a mining engineer at the University of Westphalia. He was fluent in German, English, French and Spanish. At 20 years of age he emigrated to the United States, where he worked his way down the Mississippi as a steamboat deckhand, all the way to  Texas. There, in 1854, his mining degree earned him an $1,800 a year salary with the Sonora Exploration and Mining Company. And after 2 seasons tracking minerals in the New Mexico basin and range providence, Frederick decided to strike out on his own.

They found Frederick Brunckow not far inside the mine shaft (above). Like the others he had been dead for several days. But his death had been more violent, in part probably because he was Jewish. 

His corpse had a 10 inch long hardened steel hand-held drill bit driven into this abdomen. Because of the violence of all the attacks, and because the bodies had lain in the Arizona heat for 3 days, the dead were buried in hastily dug and poorly marked graves. The next morning the nervous soldiers returned to Fort Buchanan.

Frederick had found financial backing in the immigrant community of St. Louis, Missouri. He found his first four employees there, as well. Pharmacist John Moss invested in the Bronco and would serve as chemist. Machinist James Williams agreed to keep the mine's equipment running and his cousin William offered to serve as the Bronco's supervisor. Another German American, David Brontrager, signed on as the mine's cook. The plan was to gather equipment in St. Louis, sail down the Mississippi to New Orleans, then across the Gulf of Mexico to Texas, and make their way overland to Arizona and Sonora, where Frederick would hire peons to do the heavy work because they were cheaper than Americans.

The soldiers returned to Fort Buchanan on Sunday, 29 July, 1860. Their opinion, as Captain Ewell told his sister, was "the Mexican employees had risen, murdered the Americans and robbed the place and run off for Sonora" Having negotiated with the Apache, Ewell agreed. "This is much worse than would have been done by the Indians," he wrote, "who don't betray confidence in this manner." A few days later, this version was seemingly confirmed when the cook, David Brontrager, reappeared 15 miles closer to the Mexican border, at Camp Jecker, on the San Pedro River.

The first task in hard rock mining is simple back-breaking labor under very dangerous conditions. In "single-jacking" an individual miner used a 5 pound hammer to drive a 4 foot long drill 3 feet into the rock, rotating the drill a quarter turn after every strike. 

When there was enough space 2 or 3 men would "Double Jack", one holding the drill and the others wielding 10 pound hammers, The completed holes were then filled with black powder, which was set off to crack the rock into pieces. The debris was then "mucked out" and carried to the surface in buckets or carts.

If Broterager's story was to be believed, just hours after William and the Ake brothers had left the adobe on Monday, 23 July, to buy flour at Fort Buchanan, the Sonoran peons had rebelled. They murdered Brunckow because he was the boss and because he was Jewish, James Williams and John Moss because they were witnesses, and the peons kidnapped and released Broterager at the Mexican border because, as they told him, he was "a good Catholic".  

The peons primary motive was theft. What they stole speaks to their poverty in feudal Sonora. They took firearms, boots, shoes, underwear, and several dozen pairs of pants, and a small amount of silver ore which had been refined through the use of an arrastra.

The method had been brought to the new world by the Spanish 300 years earlier. An axle was vertically driven into the center of a pit, lined with stones (above). Large flat bottom rocks were then tied to the axle so that as the axle turned, the stones would be dragged (arrastra) across the ore, slowly grinding it into pebbles. This "Chilli Mill" meant more back breaking labor, this time under the killing Arizona sun.  But without abundant water, it was the only way to "refine" the ore.

In the America of 1860, Catholics were still suspect, and Ewell could not prove Broterager's innocence. So the German American remained in the fort's brig while the Arizona mining community panicked.  Meetings were held among investors, committees formed, outraged expressed, and a list of the "murdering greasers" was compiled. Captain Ewell forwarded these expressions of outrage to Governor Ignacio Pesqueira of Sonora, Mexico (above). The murderers were never arrested, but some of the mining equipment was returned, along with enough validation of Broterager's story, that he was released. 

And then the outbreak of the Civil War gave the Americans something else to worry about. Captain Ewell would rise to Lieutenant General of the Confederate States of America, and command 1/3rd of the Army of Northern Virginia. And the German immigrant community of St. Louis would enlist in large numbers to help defeat the Confederacy.

But the violence which had butchered 3 men in a lonely cabin in 1860, would eventually lead to the 30 most iconic seconds of violence in the history of the American frontier, just 8 miles from that dark and bloody adobe, in a town to be called Tombstone.

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AMERICAN MURDER Part Eight

 

I said at the beginning that I don't believe Priscilla Grinder. She claims that about 3:00am  (or “the middle of the night”) she heard a shot. She heard a man call, “Oh, Lord”. Then she heard a second shot. Then, sometime later she heard a scratching at the door of the kitchen cabin, where she and her two girls were sleeping. Then she heard her guest Meriwether Lewis pleading for water. She said she did not open the door, but she knew it was Lewis because she peeked through the open chinks in the wall and saw him wandering between the cabins.

According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, on the night of 10/11 October, 1809,  there was a new moon. This meant there was no light to illuminate Lewis for Priscilla Grinder to see him. Was Lewis carrying a candle or a lamp? If so Priscilla did not mention it. And any light inside the cabin would have blinded her to anyone moving around outside in the dark.

Worse was the improved version Priscilla told thirty years later, in 1839. This time, she said, "About dark two or three other men rode up and called for lodging. Mr. Lewis immediately drew a brace of pistols, stepped towards them and challenged them to fight a duel. They not liking this salutation, rode on to the next house, five miles." Now why would Lewis pick a fight when outnumbered? And why did neither servant in the barn cabin hear this confrontation? 

The only thing we know with any certainty  is that someone shot Governor Meriwether Lewis that night, allegedly once in the head and once in the side, and the pool of suspects is pretty shallow.

Major General Wilkinson might have dispatched agents to murder Governor Lewis. But why not waylay him while he was camped in the wilderness?  And how could they expect to recognize him in an age before photographs?  Also, remember, Grinder's Stand was suffering a loss of business because of the toll road by-pass. How would an assassin even know Lewis had stopped at Grinder's Stand?  

There were also  highwaymen men along The Trace - whites and Indians. They would have been interested in the five or six horses Lewis' party rode on - worth about $25 each - about $2,000 today.  But come the dawn, the none of the hobbled horses were missing.

If we eliminate, at least for the time being, these unlikely suspects, we are left with the four adults who were at Grinder's Stand that night - Priscilla Grinder, Lewis' servant John Pernier and James Neeley's servant, and Lewis himself. There was also Priscilla's husband Robert, but if he had been present why did neither John Prenier or Neeley's servant mention him, then or later? No, Robert Grinder also fails as a suspect. 

Now, John Pernier was described as a “free mulatto”, meaning he had “negro blood”. Given the racism of the age, and the elitism of Lewis' Virginia heritage, no one asked Pernier to write down his version of what happened that night.   

But Pernier did share his story of that night with Meriwether Lewis' mother Lucy Marks (above),  and her reaction was to accuse him of killing her son. And Pernier cannot be ruled out as the shooter. But he died just 5 months later, in April of 1810, of an apparent suicide through an overdose of Laudlum. But  he neither said nor left any indication he killed himself because of guilt about killing Lewis.  More likely he felt guilty because of his failure to save Louis.     

As to Jame's Neeley's servant, we don't know his name or age or his version of events. However I suspect that James Neeley's letter detailing Lewis' death to President Thomas Jefferson was based in part  on what this man or boy  told him about that night.  And it seems likely we can eliminate both servants as possible shooters because either one could have easily implicated the other, but neither did.

Priscilla Grinder must have had at least one weapon to defend herself and her daughters, else her husband would never have left her alone.  Her weapon was probably a blunderbuss (above), also called a “coach gun”,  a muzzle loading shotgun with a short barrel and relatively lite in weight. They were a superb weapon for intimidation and required no marksmanship. They fired a hand full of lead balls, but could also be loaded with whatever metal or stones were within reach. 

Priscilla was probably proficient as well with a musket or her own pistol. Self defense is one of the skills required for running a small business in a rough neighborhood. 

We know that Governor Lewis himself (above) had four weapons. He had a hunting knife and a smooth bore flintlock musket. The size of the long gun ( about 5') makes it impossible that Lewis shot himself in the head with this gun, then reloaded and shot himself a second time.

But Lewis also had a “brace” of pistols, meaning two. The ones he was most likely carrying were called “horse pistols” because they were too large (9 inches long) and too heavy (three pounds each) to wear in your belt. These fired the same .69 caliber lead ball as the long rifle, with a muzzle velocities of about 600 feet per second. If Governor Lewis shot himself, he used the horse pistols, which would account for the two shots Priscilla supposedly heard. Of all the possible assassins of Meriwether Lewis, the most likely was Meriwether Lewis.

According to modern multi-cultural studies, although suicide can affect anyone, those at the greatest risk are single white males from an affluent background who are moderate alcoholics and/or drug abusers, with few friends, and who are also dealing with a health problem while suffering from a diagnosable mental-health disorder such as depression. Emile Durkheim, the Frenchman who established the field of Sociology, described this condition as “excessive individuation”. Applying this description, Meriwether Lewis was the poster child for suicide.

I wish we had John Prenier's version of events that night. I wish experts could exhume Governor Lewis' body, to determine exactly what his wounds were. But honestly, I do not think either of those missing pieces of evidence are likely to ever be supplied. So we are left with the death of a man who was far from perfect even when judged by the standards of his own time, but who was still more than an American hero. Meriwether Lewis was an American Archetype, even in his mode of death - self murder.

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