Something Completely Different

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Cowboys. The word conjures up so many images, from playing cowboys and indians as kids, to western movies, cowboy play suits, and cowboy-themed events such as (shudder) line dancing. Most of us from a certain age have been brought up on the idea of desperados riding into town and causing trouble, the sheriff rounding up a posse and then giving chase, of gunfighters facing each other in the street - "Draw, you worthless son of a bitch!" - and trains being robbed. Most of what we have to go on comes of course from Hollywood, who made it their business to make what became known as the Wild West as romantic  and adventurous, and as exciting and attractive as possible. John Wayne saves the swooning girl from the nasty Indians, when in fact John and his people should never have been there, but Americans don't need Hollywood reminding them that their entire history is built on bloodshed, on rape and murder, on lies and betrayals, the forced resettlement of an entire race of people, ethnic cleansing on a vast scale before the phrase was even coined.
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And one thing Hollywood doesn't give the punters is that which they don't want. So a false, rosy picture of the Old West was created at MGM, Warner Bros and other studios, and men who knew nothing about the history of the time they were paid to portray grinned, spat, shot and glowered their way through countless western movies, always eager to assure the American public that they were God's chosen, they were in the right, and the enemy had to be defeated. So what if the Indians - now called Native Americans in these times of political correctness, a bit late if you ask me - had lived on these lands for generations? So what if by mining and building and hunting the white man was destroying the very livelihood of a people, angering their gods and condemning them to live on reservations for the rest of their lives, and those of their descendants? America was all about progress, and he who got in its way could expect no mercy.
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But this isn't just a dig at the way we white folks treated the Indians, though that will form much of the framework of certain parts of this history. I mention it only because, while I will be recounting and paying tribute to the courage and daring of the men and women who opened up the West, those who explored and discovered, those who settled, those who built towns and railroads and those who kept law and order, I want it understood that all of this development of a country came at a price, a high price, and it should be borne in mind that, like, I suppose, any real conquest or colonisation, the American West (as opposed, let's say, to the Indian West, or if you prefer, the White Man's West as opposed to that of the Red Man) is built on the bones of men and women who feared the arrival of the White Man, and with good reason; they knew dark things were presaged the first time moving clouds of dust resolved into caravans of covered wagons, bringing the new settlers into the West, the men and women who would take their lands, destroy their holy places, and reduce them to a footnote in the country's history.

Like most boys at the time, I was always interested in and fascinated by cowboys and the Wild West, and like most boys at the time, I swallowed the lies Hollywood and TV shows fed us, believing the "brave" cowboys were defending the towns against the "savage" Indians, and that really, as ever has been the case, white was right. It was only later, as I began to grow up and question things, that the true state of affairs began to make itself known to me, and then as now, a deep dark shame has always stayed with me over what my race did in the name of expansion, politics and power, and of course, greed. It's a familiar and oft-repeated tale in the history of exploration - which often goes hand in hand with conquest - and a good reason why strangers always spell trouble for the natives.
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But before anyone misunderstands me, I don't hold the Indians blameless. They were savage, they were cruel, they were warlike. Mostly, of course, they warred among each other (Indians are human, after all), tribe against tribe, but when their lands were threatened by the new invaders from the east, most - though not all - banded together to fight the common enemy. This was not good news for homesteaders, cattle barons or railroad workers, and in time of course led to the infamous Indian Wars, where there were certainly enough atrocities on both sides to go around. But if anyone was the aggressor, it was us (unless you're an Indian/Native American reading, and if so, apologies) - left alone, surely, the Red Man would have caused no trouble to the colonists of the east: he probably couldn't have. Even then, the technology, to say nothing of the sheer weight of numbers in the many cities along the eastern seaboard of America would have made it impossible for an Indian invasion. Nor, really, do I believe they would have wanted to have attempted such a campaign. Why would they? Their lands, the lands of their ancestors, their shrines and holy places, the very mountains and rivers they revered, all the resources they needed, the game they hunted for food and clothing were all abundant in the West. What would have been the point of riding east, to take on a far superior and well entrenched foe?

But when your land is under attack, most men and women fight back. Unfortunately, when your enemy vastly outnumbers you, has superior weapons and the technology and resources of a continent, you're bound to lose. America may once have been the land of the free and the home of the brave(s), but no longer. How the West was won was through all but total annihilation of the other side. Hitler would have been proud.

So this is what it's going to be like, is it? Moan, moan, moan, America murdered the Indians, grabbed their land, built on deceit, home of the brave etc etc? Nah. I try not to preach in my journals (can't really find room for the pulpit, you see) and all I wanted to do in this introduction was outline the fact that I will be, so far as possible, looking at this from both sides, not just that of my own race. Among the books I'm using to research this is one called The Harlem Renaissance in the American West: the New Negro's Western Experience by Cary D. Wintz and Bruce A. Glasrud and Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown, as well as selections from the series Legends of the Old West including biographies of such Indian figures as Sitting Bull (Ronald A. Reis) and Geronimo and Crazy Horse (Jon Sterngass). I hope, with some luck, to also delve deeper into the Indian story and unearth some lesser-known figures I can tell you about.
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But mainly I'm going to be exploring the Old West, not as Hollywood would have us believe it was, but as it actually happened. I'll be reading - and writing about - the lives of people both ordinary and extraordinary, those who "built the West" ands were feted for it in history, and those who were perhaps ignored. I'll be looking into relationships between not only the Indians and the settlers/army, but also the various Indian tribes, the Chinese, Irish and other workers who slaved (and many of whom gave their lives) to build the transcontinental railroads that would link up America, helping east meet West and finally and once and for all creating the United States of America in its fullest sense. I'll of course be sketching profiles of the gunfighters, train and bank robbers, cattle barons and the men who kept, or tried to keep law in a lawless land.

I'll be delving into the major battles - but only barely skirting the Civil War, as that's too huge a subject to tackle here - feuds, trade wars, rivalries and ventures such as gold mining and of course railroad building, examining the changing landscape as new routes were discovered and settlements became towns, then cities, and how major firms such as Colt and Jack Daniels made their name in this period. What was it really like to be a cowboy? Or a rodeo rider? Or a woman in these perilous times? What role, what importance was education given? How about religion? How bad was racism, and how blurred were the lines between "good" and "evil", on both sides of the divide? We've all heard of the US Cavalry massacring innocent Indians: what about the vile deeds perpetrated against the ordinary folk who came to settle the land? Did Indians really scalp people? Did showdowns take place out in the dusty streets after some bust-up about a card game? How much of what we know is fact, and how much made-up Hollywood fiction?

Saddle up, pardner, and make sure that horse you got is fresh, you hear? We got us a long trail ahead, and the prairie don't have no mercy for those who don't lay their plans mighty careful.

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Chapter I: Go West, Young Man: Taming the Wild Frontier

Timeline: 1788 - 1803 (very approximately)

Frontier: another word you'll hear associated with the West. Crossing the frontier. Pushing back the frontier. Exploring the frontier. Or, as in my example above, taming the frontier, wild or otherwise. Hell, they even called some of the trappers and hunters who made this place their own frontiersmen. Possibly women too. But what does it really mean? Frontier, I mean. Well, inevitably whenever I hear it I hear the voice of Captain James T. Kirk intoning that famous phrase on Star Trek: "Space, the final frontier." And so, mostly, it is. Space, that is. The final frontier. But for the people who moved out of the relative comfort and wealth of cities like New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, to seek a new life beyond what was then thought of as the civilised part of America, the frontier was something to be faced, something to be crossed, something to be dealt with.

A barrier. Not quite. But for me, this is what frontier has always meant. A demarcation line, beyond which lies, often, the unknown, or at least the very different. It's like the coach driver says to Jonathan Harker at the beginning of Dracula: "this far will I go, and no further." Although there is no physical frontier evident to Harker, he has arrived at one, and once he steps over it, passes it, and walks up to the dread count's castle, he is essentially in a new land (or in his case, very much an old one), another world entirely, a world of the unknown, the frightening, often the impossible. A wild frontier indeed.
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What the hell is that doing here? Oh. Right.

Some call the ocean floor a new frontier, and so it is. Space, too, as mentioned above, is indeed a further frontier, though not to correct Kirk or Roddenberry, but it may not be the final one. Talk of digitisation of the human brain, the literal exploration of the mind, may end up being our final frontier. Or we may find that there is more beyond that, who knows? However, for the people of America, the West was certainly the frontier they had to deal with. A formidable, if not actually entirely physical barrier, a path that led to a new life, possibly - probably - a dangerous one, maybe even a short one. But just maybe a profitable one, and one that would change their future and their fortunes forever. After all, a frontier is only a frontier until it's crossed, isn't it?

Imagine, then, the heady mix of excitement, anticipation, doubt and fear that must have beat in the hearts of these early pioneers as they loaded up all their valuables, their families, their entire lives onto a small wagon and headed West in search of gold, land, or just new opportunities. They would have known that the journey would be fraught with perils: far from the protective hand of their government, far from their friends, far from any kind of law enforcement; there was nobody to defend them from marauding Indians, or equally marauding bandits, both of whom roamed the prairie, searching for unwary travellers, unwelcome newcomers and plunder, be it material or personal. Many a hopeful journey would end up in shattered, overturned carts, blood, bones and brains spattered on the ground, stolen or butchered horses, and a life's meagre possessions scattered across the arid desert floor.
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So what was it that made these city folk leave the comfort and familiarity of their homes and strike out on a journey of several thousand miles, armed with little else than rifles and knives, with no real map or knowledge of their destination, across hostile territory, in the dim and vague hope of finding a new life?

Two things, really. The first was land. With so much unexplored and (to white men) available land up for grabs, a presidential decree promised an area of it completely free to anyone who would settle on it, cultivate it and basically colonise it. In a way, this perhaps mirrors the plantation of Ireland, especially Ulster, by Elizabeth I and James I, though that was more in an effort to disenfranchise and defang the Irish resistance to their rule. While the same could be said, in a way, of the Indians, pushing them off their native lands does not seem to have been initially the main idea behind this project; indeed, many tribes made treaties with the US Government which allowed them to remain on their lands, and held their holy places as forbidden to the settlers, provided the Indians reciprocated and did not attack the farms and holdings set up by the families who had moved there. Later, of course, as the Indian Wars took hold, all bets would be off and there would be incalculable suffering on both sides, resulting in the souring back home of the idea and romance of the new frontier, and eventually the subjugation and forced resettlement of the Indian tribes, an event which came to be commemorated by them as "the Trail of Tears".
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The other inducement? Oh yeah. Gold. Once gold was discovered in the hills ad mountains of the West, it precipitated a frenzy, a mad "dash for the cash" which we know as the Gold Rush, when anyone who had the resources, bravery and determination to do so headed west to try to make their fortune panning for gold, the dream being to set up a gold mine and become richer than astronauts. Unsurprisingly, the larger percentage of these ventures failed, and so you had people who had spent everything to come here, gambled it all on one unlikely throw of the dice, and inevitably lost. Like the Irish and others who had listened to tales of streets paved with gold, these people had literally believed these tales (or that they could make their own golden streets) and left bankrupt and with no future, unable to get home (perhaps unwilling to admit failure) they settled in the town in which they had come to make their fortune and tried to make a life for themselves and their families.

So towns grew up around settlements, some towns became mining towns, some ended up coining the phrase boom town, and later, when the gold had run out, ghost town, and some desperate people turned to crime to supplement their meagre income. Some excelled at this, and became successful and famous bank robbers, train robbers or guns for hire, while others failed miserably even at this and ended their days doing the hangman's dance, dangling from a noose. Frontier justice was swift and brutal.

You could argue, I guess, that a lust for adventure stemming from boredom in the cities, failing fortunes back east which forced a man to reinvent himself in the west, or even sometimes a medical need for a literal change of scene also pushed people westward, but money and the opportunity to own land, own their own farm, must have been uppermost in most people's minds when they decided to make that life-changing move.

Some, of course, had already headed out that way, for entirely different reasons.

Frontiersmen and Farmers: Take a Walk on the Wild Side

Since the successful ending of the American War of Independence, or Revolutionary War, tough hardened men had begun to move west, dissatisfied with the "easy living" in the cities of the east, and determined to strike out and explore this new frontier. With no support structure of any kind behind them, they had to be tough and resourceful, making most of their accoutrements themselves (no hardware shops in the wilderness!) and building their own shanty huts in which they would live while they hunted bear, buffalo and any other wild game they could eat or sell. A man had to be proficient with both gun and knife, as these could be the difference between survival and death, and there was no room for squeamishness. There was no blacksmith to tend to your horse if it lost a shoe, or treat it (or you) for illness. There was no way to preserve food, so everything had to be fresh; there could be no waste. You caught what you needed to make it through a winter, and no more.
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Some frontiersmen built relationships with the local native tribes, realising that they were on their own and would need to get along with their neighbours if possible - you can't fight a war on your own - and besides, the Indians could show them the territory, teach them where to go and where not to go, and by teaming up with the Indians, a trapper or hunter could avoid both stumbling on less friendly natives as well as keeping the risk of trespassing on holy ground minimal. Nothing angered an Indian more than if you went tramping heedlessly through the places in which he worshipped his gods, or which were sacred to his tribe. As a result of this burgeoning friendship and co-operation, there were many frontiersmen who, when the US Army began to sweep the tribes from the plains, rebelled against this wholesale destruction of the Indians and some even joined their allies, fighting against their own government, in effect "going native".

Others went the opposite direction, seeing the native Indians as enemies, obstacles to their path to power, glory and riches, and believing the land belonged to whoever could win it, wrest it from the control of the other. Like most of us, these men were driven by one of the oldest motivators in humanity: greed. The abundant natural resources, the huge swathes of land, the massive opportunities available spoke to their desire to better themselves, and become more than they were. Many would become better than they were, rising in status and power as the wilderness that was the frontier shrunk and began to join up with the more civilised parts of the newly-born nation, as boundaries fell and barriers to both trade, commerce and expansion collapsed, and those who were in on the ground floor, so to speak, could, again, so to speak, write their own cheque.
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On the other side of the coin were the settlers, the families. Those who would become known as homesteaders and pioneers, men who ventured out into the  West in the hopes of bettering their lives, putting bad luck behind them and re-establishing their families and rewriting their story, women who stuck by their men and were determined to tough it out right alongside them, and their children, who would, if all went well, grow up to become the next generation of citizens of the newly-opened West; who would, in time, perhaps become leaders, status figures, perhaps even legends in this brave new world. Drawn by the promise of gold or just a new life, they bid the cities goodbye and loaded up all their... yeah, I've done this already, haven't I? Well anyway, assuming they survived the dangerous journey, they would eventually found towns and cities, some of which would grow into the biggest and most famous in the USA, such as Phoenix, Houston, Seattle and of course San Francisco.

One of the main spurs that encouraged people to head west was the proclamation in 1862 by the government that anyone could have 160 acres of land, totally free of charge, anywhere in the West, provided they settled on and cultivated it. That's a lot of land, and back east would not only cost a pretty penny but be likely out of the reach of any ordinary person, so here was a chance to almost literally put down roots, to claim an area of land that was yours by law, and which nobody could take from you, which you had to pay nobody for, and which, presumably, you could in time expand upon. And all you had to do to get it was leave your old life behind and strike out for these pastures new.

Oh, and survive the many hazards along the route to your promised land.

In the light of all this, and considering that the Republican government was essentially robbing this land from its rightful owners, the native Indian population, it's almost funny, certainly ironic to read from the terms of the Treaty of Ghent (1814) which was agreed between the British Crown and the newly-formed United States after the War of 1812:

The United States, while intending never to acquire lands from the Indians otherwise than peaceably, and with their free consent, are fully determined, in that manner, progressively, and in proportion as their growing population may require, to reclaim from the state of nature, and to bring into cultivation every portion of the territory contained within their acknowledged boundaries. In thus providing for the support of millions of civilized beings, they will not violate any dictate of justice or of humanity; for they will not only give to the few thousand savages scattered over that territory an ample equivalent for any right they may surrender, but will always leave them the possession of lands more than they can cultivate, and more than adequate to their subsistence, comfort, and enjoyment, by cultivation.

Yeah. But we'll come back to this much later, when it comes up in the timeline. Incidentally, I should also point out that, like some of my history journals and unlike others, though here I will be following a timeline of course, I will be deviating from it to write articles, profiles, small mini-histories of various events usually before they come up in the timeline. This will, I hope, prevent the journal getting too boring as a simple timeline progressing through the formation of the American West, and also prevent important figures or events all piling up together, as many will have taken place or lived around the same time.

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Sold! The Louisiana Purchase

Eager to expand his new country, and more importantly, to gain control of the powerful and strategic Mississippi River, which would aid commerce and trade, flowing as it did to the Atlantic Ocean, President Thomas Jefferson negotiated what became known as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The territory of Louisiana was vast - comprising over 530 million acres (enough to settle, by the terms laid out in the Act of Settlement, up to five million families) or 828,00 square miles, over 2 million square kilometres - and containing what would be the states of Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, most of North and South Dakota, large amounts of Wyoming, Montana and Colorado; also areas of Minnesota, New Orleans and New Mexico, northern Texas and of course Louisiana itself. In addition to this, two Canadian provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, had portions of their territories enclosed within the territory of Louisiana, and so came as part of the package.

The entire area had been traditionally controlled by France as part of their colony in the New World, but in 1762, at the end of the French and Indian War (1754-1763), the territory was surrendered to Spain. However a treaty with Napoleon in 1800 returned control of the area to France, and he decided to sell the territory to the United States when his ventures in the Caribbean failed, and he was left with what was virtually a useless and expensive white elephant in Louisiana. While France controlled Louisiana it was native Indian tribes who populated it, and with which the US had to negotiate to purchase the land. Over two billion dollars sounds a lot, but considering that the Purchase doubled the size of the fledgling nation, it surely seems a bargain.

Originally only interested in purchasing New Orleans, Jefferson was convinced by other factions within his cabinet - as well as a French nobleman - that the better idea, the safer idea would be to try for all of Louisiana, thereby giving the French, a constant worry and war threat, no reason to remain in the United States. The president was against the idea, believing it overstretched the boundaries of executive power and reduced the rights of states, but he was convinced and on April 30 1803 the United States bought the territory of Louisiana for a paltry fifteen million dollars. This was of course only the price of purchasing the rights to the land from the French, not the land itself, the sale of which would have to be  negotiated with the individual tribes living there. The Louisiana Purchase merely allowed the United States the authority to talk to the Indians and make deals with them to buy their land; sort of an introductory fee, I guess, as the previous owners then backed completely out of any further dealings and ceded any claims to the territory.

With the completion of the Louisiana Purchase, despite much opposition from within Jefferson's government and elsewhere, the United States became exactly that. It progressed, almost in one seamless massive bound, from a loose collection of independent states scattered mostly along the north and eastern coasts of the continent, into a cohesive, powerful, fully ratified country, or, as Founding Father Robert Livingston put it: "From this day the United States take their place among the powers of the first rank." This vast new territory, however, (mostly named the Orleans Territory and the State of Louisiana) was unexplored, and so Jefferson sent three separate expeditions to map it, the most famous of these being Louis and Clark.

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Breaking the Chains: A Life of Slavery

Warning: some outdated and inappropriate terms used here, which may cause offence, but please remember this refers to a far different time, which is, thankfully, mostly now gone.

With the arrival of French refugee planters and their slaves in Louisiana, and others fleeing the slave revolts in Haiti, southern slaveholders demanded laws to be enshrined in the new territory making slavery legal, so that they could settle there and ensure that nothing similar to what had just taken place in Haiti (then known as Sainto Domingue) could occur. The French and Spanish had brought the concept of slavery to the United States in the early eighteenth century, taking captured African prisoners to the New World as slaves, and while an Act of Congress passed in 1808 banned the importation of slaves, northern slaveholders managed to sell their slaves locally to the slavemasters in the deep South, entrenching slavery in the southern states to the point where it could only be dislodged by all-out civil war, as happened in 1861.

It would be pointless, time-intensive and probably not actually that relevant for me to discourse on the entire history of slavery here, even were I to confine that treatise to the United States, but one point should perhaps be made, which often is either lost or ignored, and that is that up until the Civil War, slavery was in fact legal in ALL thirteen states of what was then known as "The Colonies". These included the likes of Maine, Massachussets, Rhode island and Connecticut, all of whom would fight on the side of the Union against (ostensibly) slavery in the coming war. Presidents of the United States, Supreme Court Justices and other high-ranking political figures all kept slaves. While the practice was certainly more overt and rife in the southern states (what became known as The Deep South) it wasn't as if there was some invisible demarcation line which, once crossed, meant you were free. Certainly, the northern half of the country moved towards abolition quicker and with more agreement than did the southern states, which depended on slave labour for the cotton industry, but there was no, if you'll excuse the bad pun, black and white about the issue. Some northerners believed passionately in the idea of slave ownership, even saw it as their right, and presumably some were just too used to it to envisage changing.
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It's hard to understand what it meant to be a slave in those times. Obviously, you didn't get paid, and were worked like, well, a slave, but that wasn't the worst of it. Your owner could use any excuse to beat you, imprison you, even sell you on if you "didn't work out", and if you were female, forget it: rape, beatings and misery would be your lot. And there would be nothing you could do about it. If you were owned in a slave state - one of the states where slavery was legal, which as I mentioned before the Civil War was all of them - your owner was not breaking any laws by punishing or even killing you. Yeah. You were property, and if you didn't perform then the owner had the right to destroy you. If you talked back, you could be whipped or even hanged, or if the slavemaster just happened to be having a bad day (or, more likely, was sadistically inclined) you could be beaten to within an inch of your life, and nobody would or could raise a finger to help you. Anyone who tried either ran the risk of getting the same treatment if they were a slave too, or if not, could be fined or imprisoned for having interfered with the lawful work of a slaver. Anyone who helped slaves escape would also be subject to prosecution, and if you became known as, excuse the phrase, a nigger-lover in a slave state, your life wouldn't be worth tuppence.

Little wonder, really then, that the South fought so hard to prevent the abolition of slavery. Economically, they stood to lose the most, and they also saw it as tradition, their way of life being taken from them. Worse, should slaves gain right as free men, they might even be able to legally fight back against the men who had been their owners. Fear of retribution for decades of repression and cruelty surely stood large in the minds of the southerners, as did fear of loss of earnings. If they had to pay men and women to do the work that they had heretofore performed free of charge, they could go broke very easily. Businesses in the South (and in the North, too, to some lesser degree) had made their money on the backs of forced unpaid labour; they were not about to let go of the whip just yet.

As for the North, I feel that while there were undoubtedly many who saw slavery as an abomination, more, especially those in government, regarded its abolition as more an expedient than a moral crusade. With countries from Britain to France and Spain outlawing the practice, the embryonic nation surely did not want to be seen as the "savage cousin", the unprincipled and uncivilised new country that clung to old, outmoded and in most lands by now illegal ways, that refused to give up its hold on the past and stride boldly and with confidence into the shining new future. America wanted to be part of that future, and it's hard to maintain relations with other, forward-looking states if they have already abolished slavery and you have not. Hard to make your voice heard over the sound of dragging chains and the cries of human misery.

To say nothing of all the extra votes that would be up for grabs when the blacks and other slaves were made free men. Who was it likely these newly emancipated men would cast their future with? The man who had freed them, or his opponent? There were certainly ulterior motives a-plenty behind the freeing of the slaves, and it would be naive in the extreme to believe that Lincoln passed the Emancipation Act simply out of the goodness of his heart. You can be sure, had he not the weight of popular opinion on his side, had other nations not abolished slavery by then, he would not have gone ahead simply because it was the right thing to do. Presidents and leaders seldom swim against the tide, because if they do they often end up drowning, at least in the polls. For something of this monumental nature to happen it has to be the will of the people, or at least, a majority of them.

The Men and Women Who Won the West
Important, infamous or pivotal figures in the development and history of the American West

It's a sad fact of life and a matter of history that, as much as anything else, what "won" the West was guns. Ironically naming their best-loved revolver the Peacemaker, Colt still had a point: as much as a gun could be used to kill it could also be a deterrent. In general, you'd probably be less likely to pick a fight with a guy who was packin' heat than you would with an unarmed one, especially if you had your own little friend nestling snugly in your holster. Of course, some people would fight with anyone, and the case can without question be made that carrying a gun actually made you a target.

However, it's a known fact, mostly ignored by movie bosses, that most towns in the American West required the surrender of weapons on entry to the town, with their return promised when you were ready to leave. Makes sense: deprive newcomers of their guns and there was probably less likelihood of them starting trouble, or at least killing anyone. So the stories of trigger-happy cowboys shooting each other down in the streets over a woman or a lost bet or perceived cheating in a card game are largely - though probably not entirely - fictional. Not to mention that in towns at least, there was some law, and you couldn't just go around shooting people without the authority to do so, whatever your reasons, and expect not to be arrested. The only man allowed to shoot was he who wore the badge, or his legal deputies.

While revolvers such as the Colt 45 are more exciting to talk about, easier to carry and easier to whip out if needed, the mainstay of the American frontier was in fact not a revolver, but a rifle. Used by homesteaders to hold off Indians or other attackers, both on the way to their new plot of land and once established there, by marksmen and sharpshooters and by the army, perhaps the most popular rifle in the west was the Winchester, often called "the gun that won the West."
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Oliver Winchester (1810 - 1880)

Oliver Winchester was a New York clothing magnate who purchased shares in the Smith and Wesson Company, and began to have one of the rifles they had been working on - and failing to sell, as it was quite unreliable - transformed into the Winchester with the help of the brilliant engineer Benjamin Tyler Henry. Henry looked at the design of the cartridges used in the rifle, designed new, .44 calibre brass ones, and the Henry Rifle was born. From what I read (and being no expert on firearms I could be wrong) it seems both the Winchester and its earlier predecessor the Henry Rifle were the first "repeating rifles", which meant they could be fired a number of times before having to be reloaded, unlike other rifles. This would no doubt have contributed massively to their popularity and success.

Winchesters also found a market outside of the United States, with France ordering six thousand and the Turkish Ottoman Empire using their delivery of fifty thousand to help them fight the Russo-Turkish War (1877) and take their more poorly-armed opponents by surprise. Winchesters were of course popular with hunters, especially the 1876 model, its famous adherents including President Theodore Roosevelt, Geronimo and Billy the Kid. Perhaps oddly, it was not unusual for a woman, especially one living alone or defending a farm while she awaited the return of her husband, to use a rifle, whereas few if any women would carry or use a revolver. This despite the disparity in weight and recoil, the bulkiness of the rifle and it comparative slow reaction compared to a pistol. Thus, Winchesters were also popular with female customers.

The end of the Winchester dynasty, as it were, is odd. Oliver died in 1880 and the company passed to his son William, who only lasted three more months, taken by tuberculosis, whereupon the fortune willed to him went to his wife, Sarah. She then moved out of Connecticut to San Jose, where she had a huge mansion built. Winchester guns are still manufactured and sold today, mostly under licence to other companies.

Little Big Town

I thought it might be interesting to look into the history of some of the towns - some of which may have grown into cities - that sprang up during the push westward in the 1800s, and to see how they were founded, how they developed over time and what they're like now. There are of course plenty of famous (or infamous) ones such as Dodge City in Kansas or Tombstone in Arizona, to say nothing of Cody, Wyoming and Deadwood, South Dakota, but I wanted to start this series off by going for something less obvious, and so this is where we begin.
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Virginia City, Nevada

Located in the Nevada Desert, this ain't no Las Vegas, with one of the smallest populations I've heard of - a mere 855 residents in 2010 - though at its height it boasted around 25,000 people. One of the original boom towns, Virginia City was founded on the basis of the discovery of silver, in what was called the Comstock Lode, after the man who made the discovery, although other accounts claim he merely bullied the discoverers into appending his name. The general agreement seems to be that the town was named for James Finnimore, nicknamed "Old Virginny Finney", said to be one of the most accomplished gold miners in the area. In 1859 a huge silver deposit, the first in the USA, was discovered just under the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, and the town quickly sprung up in its wake.

At the time, silver was attributed the same value as gold, and all product from the Comstock Lode mines was purchased by the US Government to mint coins. The income from the mines helped the war effort when the Civil War broke out, and also helped the town and the surrounding area grow, making Nevada a popular destination for fortune-hunters, and also allowing it to reach the population level required to attain statehood. In just one year the population more than tripled, and businesses flocked there to set up. The boom in Virginia was good news for nearby San Francisco too: having profited from the famous Gold Rush of 1849 this small town had grown into a major city, and now the wealth of the Comstock mines helped finance development and growth in what would become one of the most important cities on the west coast.

Immigrants, too, poured into Virginia, mostly miners from England and Ireland, and the population at its height was around 25,000, but the Great Fire of 1875 did over twelve million dollars' damage and left two thousand homeowners without a roof over their heads, precipitating the departure of many, followed by more when the seams began to run out and the mines dried up. Today, Virginia survives on its history, with museums, arts centres and places of interest all harking back to the boom town days when it was the silver capital of America. It has been immortalised in book, film and on TV, with the popular western show Bonanza set very close by.

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Chapter I: A Railroad to the Moon

I: Blowing off steam: Crazy Judah

The necessity that now exists for constructing lines of railroad and telegraphic communication between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of this continent is no longer a question for argument; it is conceded by every one. In order to maintain our present position on the Pacific, we must have some more speedy and direct means of intercourse than is at present afforded by the route through the possessions of a foreign power. (Report by the Select Committee on the Pacific Railroad and Telegraph, the US House of Representatives, August 1865)

Imagine what it was like back then. No roads at all. None. if you wanted to get anywhere you went by horse, through often hostile territory, taking your life in your hands, traversing prairies and wild fields and mountains, making a trip to the next town dangerous and a trip to the next state almost out of the question. If you couldn't or didn't want to ride a horse you had few alternatives: go in a wagon or on a stagecoach, but neither of these were any safer than going it alone, and in some ways less comfortable too. Stagecoaches were not known for their luxury, and the dirt tracks they bumped and jolted over on the often days-long journeys were as likely to turn a wheel or lame a horse and cause the vehicle either to crash or make an unscheduled stop. With the sort of folk out on the roads those days looking for easy prey, this was never a good idea.

There was a reason why no stagecoach driver would travel unarmed (this quite possibly giving rise to the term, "riding shotgun"), but even his best efforts would not matter much if the stagecoach was jumped by a bunch of bandits or desperadoes, or worse, a party of Indian warriors. Few of the passengers could be expected to defend the stagecoach, and a large proportion of those were women, who, really, back in those times did not carry guns, nor were they expected to. Even if they did, few knew how to use them and particularly under pressure. An attack on a stagecoach could very easily mean that nobody was ever going to reach their destination, especially as these often carried valuable items such as gold or silver, perhaps going from a bank in one town to another, or being delivered for a payroll.

Then there were the longer journeys, the ones that couldn't realistically be made even by stage, where sea travel was the only option. Ships were at the time still pretty much using sail - steam would not really get a grip on the world of shipping for another twenty or thirty years - and apart from the many perils with which such a voyage was fraught (Cape Horn at the tip of South America, a necessary transit point for shipping going from west to east, was notorious for its vicious weather, and many ships had been lost trying to navigate around it), these excursions usually took about six to eight months, depending on weather and other factors, so a man could theoretically spend a year going from, say, New York to California and back.

And in 1849, everyone suddenly wanted to go to California.

This was, of course, due to what became known as the California Gold Rush, when, in 1848, gold was discovered in Sacramento, then a sleepy little town, and triggered the exodus of adventurers and prospectors in search of their fortune. Few if any made it, but the journey still had to be made, and that meant either a very long and torturous overland passage to Panama, to catch a ship going north, or, as mentioned, braving the horrors of the Cape.
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There was, therefore, very much a need to find a safer way for folks to travel. While hardy pioneers, as related in previous posts, would pile all their worldly into covered wagons and set out for the new frontier, your average city-dweller preferred to travel in relative safety and if possible comfort. As early as 1838, even before the historic discovery of gold in the west, a railroad surveyor called John Plumbe had approached Congress with the idea of laying rail tracks from the east all the way to the Pacific. He was laughed out of the place, an unnamed member sneering that his proposal would be akin to "building a railroad to the moon."
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Asa Whitney (1797 - 1872)

Others tried to convince a skeptical congress of the benefits of, even the absolute necessity for, a railroad linking all of America. Asa Whitney was a merchant tradesman who made his fortune in China, where he emigrated after losing two wives and his general goods business. Returning a wealthy man, and marrying his third wife, he began considering how a transcontinental railroad would help shorten the long and tedious journey by sea to China, by allowing people to take a train across the east to the west coast and there board a ship for China, thus cutting the journey by sea considerably. He made detailed surveys and maps, proposed projects and wrote to congress in 1849, but possibly due to his emphasis on the railroad benefiting those who wished to sail to China, the government turned a deaf ear and was not interested.

Though he gave up in 1851, Whitney would live to see his idea come to pass, as the Central Pacific Railroad was built and was operating before he died. Whether he felt frustration at having been passed over by history, as one of the original progenitors of the idea, or not, is not recorded, but I guess he must have been happy for all those folks going to China at least.

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Congress had changed their tune not ten years later, when one member (again, so far as I can see, unnamed) declaimed the wonderful vision of what the Indians would know and fear as "the iron horse", a marvel of modern - and, importantly, of course, American - engineering and ingenuity.

The Iron Horse with the wings of wind, his nostrils distended with flame, vomiting fire and smoke, trembling with power ... flies from one end of the continent to the other in less time than our ancestry required to visit a neighboring city.

The Central Pacific Big Four: Men with a Dream

The Transcontinental Railroad was the amalgamation of three separate railroads: the Union Pacific, the Western Pacific and the Central Pacific. One of the first men to envision the idea of a transcontinental railroad was of course an engineer, and well versed in building railroads. He would become one of the leading figures in the attempt to cross America with slats of iron and sleepers of wood, but he would sadly not live to see the fruition of his life's dream.

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Theodore Judah (1825 - 1863)

To paraphrase Lyle Langley in The Simpsons episode "Marge vs the Monorail", Judah would have been well qualified to have said "I've built railroads in New York, Sacramento and Marysville, and by gum it put them on the map!" He learned the trade from an early age, remembering the words of his father, a minister, that a life without a goal was a life wasted. He was certain he wanted to be an engineer, and also had taken a great interest in trains, but he wanted to ensure he left some sort of legacy behind, something that would mark his life as having meant something, and make his father proud. He surely succeeded, when, at age twenty-seven, he became a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the next year went on to head the construction of the Sacramento Valley Railroad as its Chief Engineer.

Its president, Charles Lincoln Wilson, recruited him and he left New York to travel to California, where he presented his initial survey and report. Problems dogged the start of the project though, including the election of a new president and the position of  vice president going to one William Tecumseh Sherman, and it was not until a year later, 1855, that work began on the railroad. Funding ran out though, and the proposed line to Marysville terminated instead at Folsom. Nevertheless, the Sacramento Valley Railroad became the first incorporated railroad in America, and would later be part of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

In 1859 he was nominated by the California Pacific Railroad Convention to lobby Washington for the proposed Pacific Railroad, but rumblings in the south as America prepared to descend into one of its darkest chapters in recent history distracted Congress, and he got no traction. Sorry. In fact, he was so almost evangelical about his pet project, describing it, somewhat in the same vein as that sarcastic member of congress, but with absolute conviction and not a hint of humour, as a gateway to Heaven, he became something of a laughing-stock in California, where people began to refer to him as "Crazy Judah", but he would have the last laugh, and show them who was crazy.

II: Climb Every Mountain: The Rocky Barrier to the Railroad

While the idea of a transcontinental railroad had been in its infancy at the time of the Klondike Rush, the discovery of gold in Nevada reignited interest in a faster way to get to the lodes, and Judah was rehired by the Sacramento Valley to extend the railroad he had helped build, so that it now stretched from Folsom, its previous terminus, through the Sierra Mountains north of Lake Tahoe and on to the Nevada goldmines. It was while working on this that the engineer considered the major problem facing him concerning building what would become the Central Pacific Railroad, a route through those forbidding mountains.

Judah's experience in grading (the levelling of road before track could be laid), bridge-building and his almost supernatural knowledge of terrain - he could tell almost at a glance which ground was suitable for carrying rails and which was not - led him to go against popular belief that the best route for the railroad was across the flat Iowa plains to the Missouri River at Council Bluffs, then following the Platte River through the Rocky Mountains to the Great Salt Lake. Rails would then carry on westward from here towards the Sierras. This was to roughly parallel the Oregon and California Trails, which had been used for centuries.

But Judah found a shorter path through the Donner Pass and down the Truckee River to the Nevada mines. His plan was not without problems - the path he proposed entailed the rails (and the trains that would use them) climbing steep gradients and having to have massive (and expensive) tunnels bored into the bones of the mountains. Expensive, and dangerous work. In addition to this, construction would have to deal with massive snowfalls that would plunge down from the tops of the Sierras and threatened to bury them. Tapping private investors for the venture, Judah formed the Central Pacific Railroad Company in 1860, which did not impress Sacramento Valley Railroad, who fired him.

The Big Four: Making tracks for progress

Finding funds was not easy, and most of the wealthy San Francisco bankers laughed at him, as had Congress some years previous, but he managed to interest four other men, and these  became the Central Pacific Big Four: they were Leland Stanford, future governor of California, wealthy hardware merchant  Collis P. Huntington and his partner Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker, who had made his fortune in the gold rush, but not panhandling or mining: he had set up a shop to supply the miners and had quickly become rich off their labours. Coincidentally, it seems he lived as a child in the same district as Judah in Troy, New York, although there is no evidence the two men ever met.

The Big Four, in addition to the funding they brought to Judah's fledgling enterprise, had political clout, having only recently formed the California Republican Party, who had had an early and landslide success with the election of their candidate, some guy called Lincoln, to the presidency. At last, "Crazy Judah" was in a position to make people listen; he had the ear (and fat wallets) of four very influential Republicans, who also had a more or less direct line to that of the President, and could smooth the way for any legislation pertaining to the building, and funding, of their new railroad venture.

With the secession of the southern states and the outbreak of the Civil War, the need for a reliable mode of transportation for troops, weapons and supplies became more urgent and the project was quickly greenlit, though in a time of war such things as material, fuel, even labour were scarce, as every resource the Union had was being poured into trying to win the war. Critics were loud in their dismissal of the idea, citing such problems as the winter snows high in the Donner Pass, the difficulty of transporting machinery around Cape Horn to Sacramento, the unlikelihood of the track being able to support the carriages and predictions they would sink into the ground, and an overall doubt that such an enterprise could manage any sort of profit at all for its investors.
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Initially, it seemed some at least of these fears were well grounded, when Judah returned from his survey of the Donner Pass and glumly announced that he had seriously underestimated the cost of building the thing. The distance was longer than expected - 140 miles instead of 114 - and would require boring tunnels through three miles of solid granite, and he now estimated that his original budget would go over by fifty percent. This is not news any investor wants to hear, especially before the first hammer is even lifted, and in the face of so much opposition and lack of belief in the project.

Then, of course, there were, inevitably, the rivals. In the wake of the war, other companies had sprung up, eager to take advantage of the generous government grants, and controlled mostly by big San Francisco interests like Pacific Steamship Line and Wells Fargo, all hostile to the Central Pacific Railroad and eager to crush it before it had a chance to get going. However when one of the Big Four, or The Associates, as they preferred to call themselves, was elected governor of San Francisco, he was able to appoint Judah to the House and Senate Railroad Committees, giving him the power to lobby in favour of his railroad project. Much bribery of course went on, and Judah even managed to sway one of their competitors, the San Francisco & San Jose Railroad, striking a deal which removed their opposition to the CPRR's bid.
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Charles Crocker (1822 - 1888)

Born, as noted already, in Troy, New York, Crocker's family moved to Indiana when he was fourteen, and he quickly became independent, proving a diligent worker and an intelligent man, the sort of entrepreneur America would turn out in droves around this time. He took advantage of the gold rush of 1849 to set up his own business, again as already mentioned, selling tools and hardware items to the miners who came to California in search of gold. While most of them went home poor, (or more likely, stayed where they were, unable to afford passage home) Crocker made huge profits and was able to answer the call when Theodore Judah asked for investors in his new Central Pacific Railroad. He set up Charles Crocker & Co., a subsidiary of the company dedicated to getting the railroad built, and he spent over two million dollars on snow ploughs to clear the tracks of snow, but the ice derailed both figuratively his efforts and literally his ploughs. Learning from his mistakes, like all good entrepreneurs, he had snow sheds constructed to protect the rails through the Sierra Nevadas from snow in the harsh winters. These stretched for sixty-five kilometres.

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Leland Stanford (1824 - 1893)

Another native of New York, Stanford was called to the bar in 1848, whereupon he moved to Wisconsin. Here he was nominated as the city's district attorney, and in 1852 gold fever took him and he headed to California, where, rather like Charles Crocker, he resisted the pull of actual gold mining and instead opened a hardware store, making his fortune that way. He returned to New York in 1855 but was bored by the sedate pace of life there, a world away from the hurly-burly frontier life in California, and he moved back there, to Sacramento, the next year. Having invested in Judah's Central Pacific Railroad, he was elected its president in 1861.

With the others of the Big Four, Stanford acquired control of the Southern Pacific and became its president too. He ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 1859 but was triumphant in 1861, becoming the state's first Republican governor. The first Central Pacific train was named in his honour.

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Collis P. Huntington (1821 - 1900)

The only one of the Big Four, or five if you include Judah, not to have been born in New York, Huntington was a native of Connecticut, and was also the only one of them all to see the twentieth century. Like the others, he too made his money in the gold rush, but through commerce in a venture he set up with Mark Hopkins, who would join him as the last of the Big Four. He would in fact in time oust Leland Stanford from the presidency, and was well known for providing generous bribes and kickbacks to politicians and businessmen, earning himself the title of "the most hated man in railroad". He would, however, also be credited with many projects to educate black children and adults after the end of the Civil War.

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Mark Hopkins (1813 - 1878)

Hopkins arrived in California in 1849, just as the gold rush reached its height, and established a store in Placerville, but had little luck with that and relocated to Sacramento. It was, however, after meeting Collis P. Huntington that he had real success, the two men becoming fast friends and partners, a relationship they took to the formation of Theodore Judah's Central Pacific Railroad, of which Hopkins became treasurer. His opinion was highly prized by Huntington, and he was trusted as a true and decent man. He was the eldest of the Big Four, and perhaps appropriately died while aboard a company train in 1878.

Before war broke out, southern congressmen had lobbied to have the railroad cross the Mississippi at Memphis, and then turn west through the southwestern territories, running through Texas and New Mexico, hoping that the new towns which were expected to spring up along the route would all be southern towns, and thus in favour, as was all of the south, of slavery. At the outset of the war though, all southern representatives had abandoned the capitol, and therefore there was nobody to oppose the route favoured by what were now the Union states, which was Judah's proposed route, and which now got the green light. Naturally, construction was delayed due to the war, but a decision had been made, which in Washington is saying a lot.

The Pacific Railroad Acts

Congress passed a series of acts in 1862, unencumbered by opposition from the south, promoting the construction of the transcontinental railroad, otherwise known as the Pacific Railroad, and authorising funds through the issuing of government bonds and land grants to railroad companies. The whole thing proceeded under the auspices of the War Department, and the original rather long-winded act was titled An Act to aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from the Missouri river to the Pacific ocean, and to secure to the government the use of the same for postal, military, and other purposes. Right. The two companies to benefit from these bonds and grants, and thereby establish a monopoly on rail travel in the USA, were the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads. We'll be looking into the Union Pacific later; right now we're concerned with the other one.

The companies were granted contiguous right of way for their railroads throughout the United States, including all public land within thirty metres on either side of the track. They were given government authority to construct their railroads between the eastern side of the Missouri River, at Council Bluffs, Iowa and the navigable waters of the Sacramento River, thirty-year bonds which would guarantee a loan payment to them for each section of track as it was completed, in return for a lien on the section, to be returned when the loans fell due and were paid.

"Manuscript of the Railroad Act"

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From 1850 to 1871 the railroads were granted the sum total of land bigger in area than the great state of Texas, approximately 175 million acres, and were allowed, under the terms of the Railroad Acts, to sell some of that land to incoming settlers, who paid a handsome price for land close to the railways, desiring the convenience of nearby transport for cattle and/or goods. It was clear that though the railroad would eventually be a huge moneyspinner, it might take months or even years before the investors began to see appreciable profit, and so they took every opportunity to make cash for themselves, including double-dealing, controlling the contracts tendered for the various subsidiary projects, and keeping wages down despite the dangerous, often fatal nature of the labour.

They also built largely superfluous sections of railroad, building where their partner in the venture, Union Pacific, were also laying track, knowing that their sections would not be used as this was to be one integrated network, but determined to be paid, as they were, per mile of track, whether it was used or not. The passing of the Homestead Acts, as detailed in a previous article, encouraged settlers to head west, and ensured the newly-formed railroad would not be short of customers, thereby swelling their profits even more.

Having been scandalised by the money-grabbing and deceitful tactics of his investors (at one point, their mapmakers showed the Sierra Mountains to be twenty-three miles east of where they were, just so they could get the bonus for building on mountainous terrain, when in fact the land there was flat and even) and realising that they shared his dream but only for what they could get out of it, enriching themselves as much as possible, Theodore Judah decided  to buy out the Big Four, and assume control of the project. He made the trip back to New York to raise the necessary capital, but tragedy struck when he contracted yellow fever and died at the age of thirty-eight. The irony is that he had to go, as Asa Whitney had complained of twenty years ago, via Panama to get back to New York, and it is believed it was while crossing the Isthmus of Panama that he fell victim to the disease which claimed his life shortly after he arrived back in the city of his birth. Had Congress listened to the likes of Whitney and Henry Carver earlier, the transcontinental railroad might already have been in service by that time, and he would not have needed to have gone near Panama.

He was, of course, never forgotten, having a street in San Francisco named after him, and memorial plaques installed  in Folsom and Sacramento. Schools bore his name, and naturally, one of the first of the CPRR's locomotives was named in his honour. Most impressive of all, his name was given to a high mountain adjacent to Donner's Pass, which he had originally surveyed and which became part of the route for the Central Pacific Railroad. Mount Judah stands over 8,000 feet high, towering over Placer County, as indeed Judah himself loomed large over the dream of a transcontinental railroad that would link up all of America.

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For the Badge: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Law Enforcement in the Old West

(Note: For this section I am indebted to Candy Mouton and her Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the Wild West from 1840 - 1900, which is full of information, profiles and anecdotes.)

I: They Were the Law: The Men Who Kept the Peace

I know by now that if you've stuck with me this far you're already sick of being told how wrong, wrong, wrong Hollywood got it, but if that's the way you're feelin' pardner, I done got some more bad news a-for yer. Basically, you would have to realise that like just about every era, Hollywood writers, producers and directors let you see what they wanted you to see. The truth might have been shoe-horned in there somewhere, but chances were it would be mighty hard to find if you were to go take a looksee. In the parlance of the times, you could done send a whole goddamn posse after that there critter and still ride home empty. It's not surprising though: when the reality of the Old West was people ekeing out a living, or trying to survive another day in a harsh and hostile country, who the hell wanted to go to the movies and see that? If there were rarely gunfights, horse rustlers, desperadoes riding into, out of or through town, banks and trains being robbed a rare occurrence, where's the fun in that?

So western movies didn't quite make it up, but let's say they exaggerated a little, stretching the truth almost to breaking point in the name of entertainment, and in so doing set in motion a train of events that has forever made us see a very specific view of the American West. It's not necessarily all wrong, but most of it is. One thing that they got pretty much everything wrong on - for obvious and deliberate reasons, of course - were the profiles of the men who set out to do what few men dared in such a lawless and wild time, which was to keep the peace, lay down the law and protect their town. Let's see if we can extract the reality from the fantasy, shall we? Ah come on! Saddle up, son: it'll be fun.

Maybe.

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Here's a question for you: what do beavers have to do with American law? No, not those kind! The animals, the ones who build dams, you know, the guys with the flat paddle-like tails and big teeth, beloved of cartoonists for chewing down mighty trees in a few bites. Yeah, like yer man above. Well apparently the first ever law used in the Old West was called "The Law of the Beaver", and was a set of rules and regulations set up by the fur traders, to protect their commerce. These laws were English-made, but a relatively quick search does not yield any information, so I can't tell you what they were exactly. It's not all that important, as by the time the West began to open up, as we've already touched on in the piece on frontiersmen, this kind of trade was already sliding into something of a decline, so the only reason the Law of the Beaver is mentioned here is to show that it was the first proper legal framework in the west. And because it's funny. Yes, it is.

It was pretty soon superseded by borderlands law, and here we run into those jolly people who live mostly near a lake of salt and think the secret to a happy marriage is to have more than one wife. Yup, it's the religion that gave us - or inflicted upon us, depending on your point of view regarding the pop music of the 1970s - the Osmonds. It seems the Mormons were literally a law unto themselves. Within the limits of Utah, they did what they liked and bowed to no county, state or federal agency. Utah was at the time a theocracy, and the Word of God took very much precedence over the word of Man.
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There was of course vigilante justice. There has been vigilante justice all the way back to the Bible, and recently a type of vigilantism - no justice appended, you might note - was attempted on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington. But in places where there was no real law at the time, men did indeed take that law into their own hands, leading to such things as posse and necktie parties, as justice was meted out at the barrel of a gun or the end of a rope, without going through all that tedious nonsense of trial or establishing guilt. We'll be taking a look at this a bit further on.

There was military law too. If you lived near a fort or barracks, and committed a crime you would most likely come under the jurisdiction of the army, You might be held in a military jail awaiting transport to the proper authorities, or if you were a soldier your case may have been decided by a military court, and they would be the ones to mete out the sentence. If there was a sheriff or marshal in the town in which, or near which the fort was built, soldiers from the garrison might be seconded to help him in rounding up criminals, holding trials or keeping the peace. If a soldier broke the law, even in a town where  there existed law already in the shape of a marshal, deputy, sheriff or other law officer, his case would be handled by the army. If the sheriff or other law enforcement officer arrested a trooper he would most likely be handed over to the officer in charge of the fort. Where a sheriff or other peace officer existed though, military law would not apply to civilians, except perhaps in military matters (like maybe if they stole from the garrison or were found to be spies or something).

Cowboys riding on cattle drives were like sailors at sea, completely under the absolute authority of the foreman or cattle boss, at least while on the range. Just like the power a captain enjoyed aboard his ship, this was secondary to that of a sheriff or marshal if the cowboys rode into a town and there committed any crime. Miners had their own harsh system of judgement too, and this did not bode well for anyone not of a pale skin pigment. Spanish-Americans (although they had a greater claim to nativity than did the white settlers), Chilean, Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, all were considered as foreigners, and almost none of the laws set down by the miners assisted them or gave them any protection. Men unable to speak (due to the language barrier) to defend themselves were given no interpreters, no chance and no quarter. Most of the miners' laws related to claims and claim-jumping, and some of their provisions were adopted by the US Government.
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Anyone with the most basic knowledge of a western movie will know there were different types of law enforcement in the Old West. We're all familiar with the sheriff, who, along with his deputy/ies would keep the peace in a town, usually having been an ordinary guy elected by the people. Many western movies have as part of their theme a man - usually a stranger - riding into a town which has been having difficulties with bad guys and has lost its sheriff(s), either through their deaths at the hands of aforesaid bad guys or their dramatically throwing the tin star in the dust, effectively resigning their post before they end up being dead at the hands of the aforesaid bad guys. It seems to me unlikely this could generally happen. I'm not saying it didn't happen - life, and the law, was after all quite fluid in the Old West, and men and indeed towns had to be adaptable - but the usual idea was for the sheriff to be elected.

You've probably seen and maybe even participated in the election of a mayor, and it looks like the election of the sheriff would have been the same. Candidates put themselves forward, folks voted, and a sheriff was elected. So it seems unlikely the town or county would just hand the badge to anyone who they thought fit the bill. For one thing, people seldom agree, and the idea of a whole bunch of townsfolk nodding and saying "He's the man" seems, well, far-fetched at best. There may very well, of course, have been times when desperate measures were required, but as a general rule I would say not. The sheriff was elected, and if he for some reason ditched or was otherwise unable to do his job, well, that was what a deputy was for. So there would have been a reasonably reliable chain of command already in force, making it highly unlikely the town would ever find itself in the position of needing a sheriff post-haste and having no candidates, or subordinates at least.
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The top law enforcement officer though, against whom nobody would dare speak a word or try to assert his regional authority, was the US Marshal. Now so far as I know, this guy was different from the marshal who often seemed to be interchangeable with the town sheriff, but I'll check. This fella was appointed by no less a personage than the President himself (with the approval of Congress), and had wide-ranging powers and jurisdiction almost everywhere. The position was so coveted that at one point in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1882  there were over fifty applicants for the one job. The Judiciary Act, 1789, sets out the role of the US Marshal:

And be it further enacted, That a marshal shall be appointed in and for each district for a term of four years, but shall be removable from office at pleasure, whose duty it shall be to attend the district and circuit courts when sitting therein, and also the Supreme Court in the district in which that court shall sit. And to execute throughout the district, all lawful precepts directed to him, and issued under the authority of the United States, and he shall have the power to command all necessary assistance in the execution of his duty, and to appoint as shall be occasion, one or more deputies.

Which would then indicate there was to be a US Marshal for each state, or territory as they were known then. I'm not sure if the authority of a marshal in say Wyoming was good in Colorado, but I would imagine the marshal there would be ready to help him out if, let's say, he was chasing a fugitive from his territory who had crossed into that of his colleague. Although appointed by the President, marshals were typically patronised and kept in office by district judges, and weren't even paid a proper salary until 1896, which shows how much the position was respected, even if only paid by fee, as it was in 1882, in our example above. Marshals were allowed to swear in posses to make up a hunting party for a fugitive (we'll find out later how a posse was made legal, and how many unofficial ones there were, also whether a sheriff had the same authority when it came to them, as Hollywood would have us believe) and to make people deputies on the spot if needed, or even to second them from other law enforcement agencies.

As opposed to the sheriff, who was a local city or town or county official, marshals were employees of the federal government, and many had cut their teeth in the Civil War and were well able to handle themselves, however like most jobs that sound glamorous and exciting, the life of a marshal could be almost summed up in one word, that one most hated by all cops: paperwork. Marshals had many duties, including prisoner transfer, hire of staff for courts, disbursement of funds, serving subpoenas, summonses and warrants, and even renting the courtrooms and the jails.

But of course there were times when they could drag themselves away from the desk and the mountain of papers, and several well-known figures in the West were marshals, including Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Generally speaking, their deeds have not been embellished - that much - by the movies, and we will be looking at their careers individually later on in this section. Perhaps less glamorously though, marshals were also required - until the repeal of the law in 1864 - to assist in the return of slaves fled from southern states and were also used to break up strikes, usually by violence and intimidation. They could, and did, ride long distances when word came to them of a fugitive over whom they would have jurisdiction (an escaped bank robber who had plundered one of the banks in their territory, maybe, or someone who had shot someone in their state and evaded justice) turning up in another and being reported to them as being there.

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Wanted: Dead or Alive

It's interesting to note that there was a very good reason why this condition was often appended to notices seeking the apprehension of fugitives from justice. Like I said, up almost to the turn of the century marshals worked for a fee, and in general this turned out to be about two dollars per head per captive, which they would be paid upon returning with the prisoner(s). But unless the wanted notice had stipulated "dead or alive", should they bring in any of the criminals dead, they would not be paid. This probably showed how desperate states were to catch, or have killed, certain desperate characters: a marshal who knew he was not getting anything for a dead man would be mighty careful to ensure he arrived back at the jail in one piece and breathing, even if he may have had a chance to shoot him. If it was a "dead or alive" situation, on the other hand, well, prisoners are a lot less trouble when they're dead, I expect, so this might be why it was never "alive or dead", so that the first thing in a posse's mind was, kill the bastard: hell, you'll still get paid the two dollars, so why bother bringing him in alive? A sort of early form of subliminal messaging, perhaps, or a tacit approval of terminate with extreme prejudice?

As a representative of the US Government, a marshal could also try criminals if there was no judge present. As we'll see a little further on, judges did not live in towns, but travelled around (perhaps the origin of the circuit court? Perhaps not; we'll find out) and served a wide area, so the chances of there being a judge in town at the right time was, let's say slim. In that case, the marshal could deputise witnesses, hire a place as a courtroom (maybe a schoolhouse, saloon, house, I don't know: I'm learning this as I'm writing it and some of this is guesswork, to be confirmed or corrected later) and act as the judge in the case, dispensing justice to his prisoners. Whether that included hanging I don't know, but I would think not. If the offence was that severe, maybe the prisoner(s) would have to be taken to wherever the judge was sitting. The case I read about involved a marshal fining thieves, so I expect he had some latitude but not unlimited powers. He was, after all, an officer of the law and not above it.

You probably have heard in movies the word marshal and sheriff being used to more or less describe the same official, and the guy referred to had nothing to do with the tough lawmen we just spoke about. Called town marshals, these were in fact a step below the sheriff, who was usually responsible for the entire county, whereas this marshal, as you might have guessed from his title, took care of the town he was in and no more. Mostly he was a sort of functionary: collecting fees and taxes, maintaining the town jail, running health, fire and sanitation checks, keeping records and offering evidence at court hearings.
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And then, there were the Rangers.

Most will have heard of the Texas Rangers, but Arizona and New Mexico had them too. These were kind of the top guns of law enforcement, at least in the southeast, where their powers were vast and where justice meted out by them could be swift and often brutal. As Captain Burt Mossman of the Arizona Rangers put it:

If they come along easy, everything will be all right. If they don't,
well, I guess we can make pretty short work of them. I know most
of them and the life those fellows are leading in the mesquite shrub
to keep out of reach of the law is a dog's life. They ought to thank
me for giving them a chance to come in and take their medicine.
Some of them will object, of course. They'll probably try a little
gunplay as a bluff, but I shoot fairly well myself, and the boys who
back me up are handy enough with their guns. Any rustler who
wants to yank on the rope and kick up trouble will find he's up
against it.

Sounds like something out of a cowboy movie, but no, that's an actual quote. Shows how tough and determined these men were. Even today, Texas Rangers still operate  in that state and are feared as the oil state's most indefatigable lawmen. Nevertheless, one of their first and most famous captains, John "Rip" Ford, who later went on to the US Senate and served as the mayor of Brownsville, had a slightly different view of his force:

A large proportion ... were unmarried. A few of them drank intoxicating liquors. Still, it was a company of sober and brave men. They knew their duty and they did it. While in a town they made no braggadocio demonstration. They did not gallop through the streets, shoot, and yell. They had a specie of moral discipline which developed moral courage. They did right because it was right.
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Cold Justice: Law in the Frozen North

Look at the size of Alaska. Just look at it. And now figure in that around the time of the Klondike Gold Rush (1896) the entire territory had one judge, one marshal and ten deputies to enforce law. Further north, in Canada, the Yukon, there were the Mounties, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but as miners and speculators teemed across Alaska in search of gold, keeping law and order in that cold wilderness required firm and often deadly action.

When there weren't enough law enforcement officers to cover a case, bounty hunters might be used to supplement the force, and also detectives. Although the idea of a detective was quite new in the world during the latter half of the nineteenth century, in America the Pinkerton Detective Agency was set up and became known for their dogged, unflagging pursuit of criminals. They also provided security on trains against robberies, often taking would-be bandits by surprise, as the Pinkertons wore no uniform and could easily blend into the crowd, passing for passengers.
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Hang 'em High: Lynchings and Vigilante Justice

We spoke briefly about vigilantes before, and to be honest, the two words don't go very well together, as vigilantes, usually at the head of a mob, seldom wanted justice but revenge. To these people, the laws either protected the criminal when they should have dealt out swift justice to him instead, or just didn't allow the wheels of justice to turn quickly enough. When this happened, tempers boiled over, patience snapped and hotheads led fuming crowds to jailhouses or in pursuit of men who were seen to have evaded justice. The usual end of such a journey for the accused was kicking his heels in the air while he dangled from a rope.

I should clearly make the distinction here between vigilante justice and lynch mobs. The former did allow a semblance of trial, with the prisoner's crimes read to him and even a defence allowed, whereas with lynch mobs it was a straight, direct path to the hanging tree, with none of that annoying due process getting in the way. Lynchings were not sanctioned by law, but some territories turned a blind eye if feelings were running high enough. However lynch mobs had no real authority, other than their own, and were sometimes subsequently prosecuted for taking the law into their own hands, whereas vigilantes had often tacit, unspoken approval from the town or city authorities.

In vigilante justice, the mob's rule might be more easily accepted, or acceded to, as these were clearly the prevalent feelings and few sheriffs or marshals would dare to go against the general mood of the town. They also might unofficially see them as a blessing in disguise, so to speak.  For one thing, these folks had most likely only carried out the sentence the guy was going to get anyway, and in the process had saved the courts and therefore the government money.

One place vigilante justice began to come really into its own was along the route of the transcontinental railroad. As towns began to spring up along the line, there was no formal authority and so men would band together to keep law and order, using a variant of the old miners' law to prosecute those who had sinned against the town, mine or railroad.

In terms of lynch mob justice, here's a story (two really, but linked) that really illustrates the phrase "damned if you do, damned if you don't". A man accused of killing two lawmen, Charley Burris, was being transported to jail from Laramie to Rawlins, was taken from the train when it stopped in Carbon and a confession demanded of him. He refused, so they hung him from a telegraph pole. One year later another killer, "Big Nose" George Parrot took the same trip for the same crime and was stopped - perhaps by the same mob - in the same station. He too was asked to confess, but whether he had heard of Burris's fate or not, he took the option to make a clean breast of it, and was allowed to continue on to Rawlins, where he was sentenced to be hanged. But when he tried to escape, a mob (again, maybe the same one: maybe they had followed him for the trial to make sure he didn't retract his confession?) dragged him from the jail and hanged him. So no matter what he did, George Parrot's destiny lay at the end of a rope. Maybe he would have been better just getting it over with at Carbon.

On that occasion it seems the mob either overpowered the sheriff and his deputies, who were holding Parrot, or else the law officers were powerless to - or reluctant to stop them. However on occasion lynch justice was openly approved by the federal marshals. Candy Mouton tells us of another interesting example when, in Aurora,  Nevada in 1864, the hanging of six men accused of killing thirty settlers went ahead under the watchful eye of the US Marshal, Bob Howland, despite the governor being alerted to the illegal lynching by a concerned citizen. The marshal reported back to the governor that it was "All quiet in Aurora. Four men to be hanged in fifteen minutes."

There were also what was known as range detectives. These men were employed by the railroad, stagecoach companies and cattle barons to protect their interests, with deadly force if need be. You might be surprised to learn that legendary gunfighter William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, was a range detective himself. He worked for the Regulators, who kept the interests of rancher John Henry Tunstall as their top priority. Range detectives were highly paid for the time - sometimes clearing as much as 150 or 200 dollars a month (this in a time when, remember, the bounty on a live outlaw was two dollars and hotel rooms asked a few cents for a night's board), and had to be good fighters. The deadlier the reputation, the less likely anyone would mess with them, though Billy's rep did not stop the Lincoln County War from breaking out, but that's another story, for another time.

Range detectives worked first and only for their employers, If they got into trouble with local or even federal law enforcement while carrying out the orders of their bosses, they relied on those bosses to smooth things out for them with the authorities, whether with bribes, threats or via their connections in high places. Pat Garret was also a range detective, as was Tom Horn.
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Justice on Tour: Judges in the Old West

As I correctly surmised earlier, the phrase circuit court comes from the time of the Old West, when judges were basically of no fixed abode, almost like itinerant pedlars dispensing justice and punishment, or perhaps innocence and freedom, as they travelled across their territory. Each judge was responsible for a large area, as already mentioned, and this meant he was constantly on the move, going from town to town and city to city, a real case of bringing Mohammed to the mountain. A judge would arrive in a town or district, hear all the cases that had built up over the length of time since he had been there last (excepting, I assume, any which had been dealt with by the expedient of summary justice, by vigilantes or by lynch mobs, or that the sheriff or marshal could deal with himself) and then travel on to the next town. If a crime was committed the next day, tough: you'd have to wait till he managed to fit you into his schedule again, and that could be months, months you would spend most likely in the county jail awaiting the chance to have your trial.

Not only that, but while as a defendant you had the right to be tried by a jury of your peers, given the short amount of time His Honour would likely be in town before ridin' on into the sunset of justice, the chances of cobbling together twelve good men and true (or even twelve all right men who might occasionally play fast and loose with the truth) were slim, and what happened then? I really don't know. Whether the trial then got delayed until a jury could be assembled (and if that meant not before the judge left town you might end up back in a cell to await his later pleasure) or whether it went ahead with what they had, or even without a jury, isn't related in what I read. However it does appear that up until 1889 all a judge's decisions were final, as there was no official appeal procedure, but after that the way was clear for convicted felons to appeal their sentence to the US Supreme Court, and thus I guess began the often ludicrous back-and-forth that attends trials even today, particularly in the case of the death penalty.

II: The Face Behind the Badge: Famous Lawmen of the Old West

There are names of course that we all know by now, whether through movies or games or television, or even an accidental or otherwise encounter with history - Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, Tom Horn - but given the massive area these officers of the law operated across, and the timescale involved, it will come as no surprise that there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of men who upheld the law in a lawless time of whom we know virtually nothing. We can't talk about hundreds or thousands in this journal, but let's look at a few of the perhaps lesser-known ones.

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Bud Ballew (1877 - 1922)

I imagine almost every lawman, be he sheriff, town marshal, US Marshal or justice of the peace even, carried in them days. Ballew certainly did, gaining fame as both a gunfighter and a lawman. Born David Monticello in Texas in 1877, he acquired the nickname "Bud" from his father, Bryant Bellew having been called this himself, and his time as a young boy helping out on the family ranch gave him an easy familiarity with animals, especially horses, and with the handling of firearms too. Not one to hang around on the farm though, Bud left at the tender age of thirteen years and headed to what was then known as the Indian Territory, land which had been ostensibly set aside for the resettlement of the Native Americans, and which by 1890 had been reduced to what is now the state of Oklahoma. There he built his own ranch and was in fact joined there three years later by the rest of his family. Eight years after that he met the woman who was to be his wife.

The marriage was blessed with two sons, and by 1910 Bud's ranch was humming along so nicely that he began to get bored, and looked for other work. He found it in prosecuting and defending the law. When Buck Garrett, sheriff of Carter County and nephew of the famous Pat, offered him a job as his deputy, he accepted, beginning a career in law enforcement which would last over a decade. At the same time, he continued ranching and even had time to do some speculating in Texas Tea, or oil as we call it.

Bud Ballew presented the kind of image of a deputy that became almost a caricature of the type in the hands of Hollywood producers. Tall for his time - an inch off six foot - he wore a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, out of which burst his shock of fiery red hair, and he had a deep, booming laugh, wore cowboy boots, carried a pistol on each hip and was frequently seen in or around the environs of the local saloons and gambling dens. Anyone looking into his cherubic, good-humoured face though and taking him for a sap would be placing themselves very much in danger, as behind those twinkling eyes and the ready smile lurked a man who was ready to kill in the name of justice, and who would, by the end of his twelve-year career, have notched up eight kills to his credit. Not quite one a year, but for a lawman that's a pretty decent return, I think you'll agree.

Though himself shot in the stomach by outlaw Pete Bynum, he was not fazed and returned fire, killing Bynum and another man with the unlikely name of Alison (don't know if that was his first or surname) who was sleeping in the next room. I also don't know if this Alison character was allied with Bynum or if he was just an unlucky piece of collateral damage. Steve Talkington was next on his list, but when this guy tried to resist arrest, Ballew shot him dead. When he then tried to collect his pay from the town marshal, he found himself caught in the middle of a dispute. Highnote (where did they get these names, honestly?) had been fired but refused to go, and furthermore, told Ballew what he could do with his demand for his commission. So Ballew did what he did best, and shot and killed the ex-marshal. He doesn't appear to have paid any price for the killing, so I suppose it must have been seen as justified, though how refusing to pay a man could be grounds for shooting him I don't know. Well, it was the Wild West I guess. I suppose it's possible that Highnote was seen as acting illegally, both in refusing to step down and in failing to hand over the reward, so maybe the deputy was within his rights.

Another outlaw tried to outrun justice by jumping from the train by which he was being taken to trial by Ballew and another deputy, but both men fired at the prisoner as he ran off and Ballew's bullet found its mark. He later saved his boss's life when Garrett, engaged in a gunfight with one of two highway robbers, needed his help when he, Garrett, was busy with the first robber while the other tried to circle round and get a shot at him. Ballew, coming up behind him, forced him to turn his attention on the deputy, who shot him dead. Even other lawmen were fair game for Ballew. He had a long-standing feud running with Deputy US Marshal Dow Braziel, who was angry that neither Ballew nor his boss seemed too inclined to enforce the recent Prohibition laws. As he and Ardmore Chief of Police Les Segler responded to shots fired early in the morning of January 31 1919, they found Braziel in a cafe and for whatever reason he started firing at them. Ballew returned fire and shot him dead. End of feud.

Determined to preserve the law though, and show that it applied even to those who enforced it, the Chief of Police had Ballew arrested, though later on his (the Chief's) testimony it was made clear that Deputy Ballew had only been defending himself, having been fired at first, and he was released without charge. An interesting point here is that the account I read notes that Ballew "emptied his pistol, hitting Braziel six times". Assuming his gun was the usual six-shooter, that means that every single bullet the deputy fired hit its mark. What a shot!

Even this impressive feat though was as nothing compared to what happened  two years later, in November 1920. A wealthy oil baron known as Jake Hamon, slated for a post in President Warren Harding's cabinet, died of a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound he said occurred when he was cleaning his gun. Despite his dying confession though, suspicion quickly fell on his lover, Clara Smith, whom it was believed had shot him, either because he was abusive to her or because he wanted to break off their affair (one assumes Hamon was married, though it doesn't say). Accused of the crime (on what evidence, I don't know: circumstantial at best surely) she was tried and quickly found not guilty.

Well I thought that was going to be far from the end of it, but colour me surprised: that was the end of it. The point seems to have been that during the trial the reporters from various newspapers were almost more interested in the colourful antics of Ballew and Garrett, the latter of whom, though respected was not liked, mostly due to his habit of riding through the town shooting off his gun and yelling. Far from embarrassing the deputy though, the news reports seem to have made him determined to live up to the image, and he got worse. The end was already looming for Bud Ballew however, as he resigned in support of his sheriff when Garrett was investigated for, charged with and relieved of his post for the unlawful release of prisoners and what was called non-enforcement of the law, in 1922.

Time to go out in a blaze of glory then. Ballew, with other ex-Garrett men, was involved a few days later in a fistfight with their replacements, a fistfight that rapidly became a gunfight, and in which Ballew took a bullet in his thigh. But a mere slug in his leg was not going to stop the notorious Bud Ballew from raising hell, and he headed to a rodeo in Wichita Falls, Texas, with his son, where, after being reported by the captain of the Texas Rangers to the Chief of Police, he refused to surrender and come quietly, instead reaching for his gun in a domino parlour (I know, I know!) and was shot down dead, proving I guess that even if you're a lawman the old adage holds true: don't fuck with Texas.

A postscript however maintains that the story was embellished if not actually a lie, as the county coroner in Ardmore, to which Ballew's body was flown back, determined that all five shots that took the deputy down had been from behind, which disputed the official story. Nobody was ever charged, but to his dying day Buck Garrett maintained that his deputy had been murdered.

Raymond Hatfield Gardner (1845 - 1940)

Who ever heard of a lawman in the American West living to be almost a hundred? You would assume most if not all of them had short, violent lives, but this guy seems to have survived okay. Mind you, the odds were against him from the start. Kidnapped at only two years of age by Comanches, he would surely not have been expected to have survived, but for whatever reason the Comanches held on to him and then traded him to the Sioux, among whom he grew up. When he reached age fifteen he escaped (you'd have to wonder where he was escaping to and from what; at age two he surely couldn't have had any memory of his white parents, and so life among the Indians would have been all he remembered) and joined the US Army, riding for them as a courier and, later, for the Pony Express.

He rejoined, or joined properly, the army again when the Civil War broke out and served four terms, his knowledge of Native American ways and tactics proving invaluable later when he served as an Indian scout. He acquired the nickname "Arizona Bill" and fought against the Apache, and later joined another, more famous Bill in his Wild West Show. Later still he moved into law enforcement and served both as a US Deputy Marshal and as an Arizona Ranger. He even had his own radio show in the 1930s. He died after a long illness on January 29 1940 and was interred first in a pauper's grave (not sure what the pauper thought of it!) and later, when evidence of his extensive military service came to light, his body was moved to the Fort Sam Houston Military Cemetery, where he rests today.


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John Peter Gabriel (1838 - 1898)

No, no, I kid you not! His name really was Peter Gabriel. Well, John Gabriel, but that's not half as much fun is it? Anyway, it seems everyone knew him as Peter, or Pete. Another Arizona lawman, Gabriel was actually born in Germany, his family moving to America in 1847, when he was only nine years old, settling in Wisconsin. Luck was not with the family though and his father died only two years later, leaving his wife with six hungry mouths to feed and no way to feed them. I don't know whether she farmed them all off, or how it happened, or if he was the only one (seems unlikely: just as hard to feed five kids as six) but John was taken in by a lawyer who caught the gold bug and headed to California in 1849. When he was old enough to support himself, John moved to Arizona, where he worked at mining and in law enforcement on and off.

Pinal County Sheriff Peter Brady must have been kicking himself when, having appointed him as deputy in 1877 he was then defeated by Gabriel in the next year's elections, and his deputy took his job. Gabriel established himself as one of Arizona's finest and most successful sheriffs, taking no shit from lynch mobs, tracking down stagecoach and horse thieves, killers and cattle rustlers. Friends however became enemies when, having hired his old buddy Joseph Phy as his deputy, he had to fire him for being drunk and disorderly, and later had to arrest him for assault, The year Gabriel left office, 1886, Phy came back onto the scene, ran for the office (actually with Gabriel's initial support, though it was later withdrawn) and got the job, but the two friends-then-enemies-then-friends had once again become bitter enemies, and it would all end in the rising smoke from the barrel of a gun two years later.

The two met in a saloon in Florence, where an argument erupted between them and quickly spilled out, in true Hollywood style, into the street, where both men drew. Both were wounded, but Gabriel survived whereas Phy died from his wounds. Gabriel had to stand trial but was acquitted on the grounds of self-defence that then prevailed in the West. His own end would be much longer in coming, but equally tragic. Having spent the next ten years mining around Arizona and down as far as Mexico, it was in his old stomping grounds that the Grim Reaper came to collect. Having drunk some water laced with arsenic (used in mining) at the Monitor Mine on Mineral Creek he lay alone and in agony for a week in his cabin until finally his mining partner happened by and discovered him. He died the next day and was buried near the mine.

"Big Steve" Long

I subtitled this section "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Law Enforcement", and here's one of the bad ones. Steve Long (known as "Big Steve", don't ask me why but you can make some educated guesses I'm sure, some clean, some perhaps not so much) was said to have been a "Johnny Reb", which is to say he fought on the losing side of the Civil War, and after the defeat of the South he took up gunfighting, wandering from territory to territory until he ended up in Wyoming in 1866. There, with his half-brothers Ace and Con Moyer, who had founded the town of Laramie, and on their own authority proclaimed themselves justice of the peace and marshal, he was deputised to help his two siblings. But a gunfighter does not generally make a good lawman (though some might), and whereas our friend Bud Ballew killed eight men in twelve years, Long had notched up that many in two months!

The brothers proved more dictators than any kind of lawmen, ruling with an iron fist and crushing all who opposed them. They forced ranchers to hand over the deeds to their lands and miners to sign over their claims to them in literal backroom deals, where resistance or reluctance was met with a bullet, and the shrugged excuse that the man had gone for his gun. Well, who was going to say otherwise, when the men who ran the town's justice system said so? Other victims quickly followed, including those who objected to the rigged card games run by the brothers at the saloon, and within a year Long was claiming to have shot and killed thirteen men, suspected of another seven, though this could not be proven. The saloon in question began to acquire the epithet "The Bucket of Blood", and a local rancher, fed up, like most of the townsfolk, with the tyranny of Long and the Moyers, began to organise a vigilante group to take them on.

You've got to love these names. Long ambushed and killed a prospector called Rollie "Hard Luck" Harrison, intending to rob him, but got a bullet for his pains. As his fiancee treated the wound he confessed to her what had happened and, presumably sick of all the violence (given how brutal Long was, it doesn't stretch the imagination too far to reason that he often took out his temper on her) she reported to N.K. Broswell, the rancher mentioned above. Accordingly, the "Bucket of Blood" was stormed and an angry lynch mob dragged the three evil siblings out into the street, where they were strung up.

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John B. Jones (1834 - 1881)

Another who fought for the South in the war, Jones was born in South Carolina but moved with his family when four years old to Texas, where he would spend the rest of his life. He achieved great fame in the Civil War, rising to the rank of Adjutant in only a month and later Adjutant-General. He took defeat hard, not surprisingly, as his service was now seen more or less as an act of treachery and rebellion, and there was neither thanks nor glory awaiting him at the war's end. He left America, travelling to Mexico and Brazil with some half-baked idea of setting up a colony for Confederates, but it of course came to nothing and he returned to Texas, where he was elected to the State Legislature. As Texas was by now in the process of being returned to the Union, he refused to take the seat.

His chance to shine though came in 1874, when he was appointed by the governor as Major of a battalion of the Texas Rangers, and with six companies under his command he led attacks on Native American tribes such as the Apache, Comanche and Kiowa before being sent to Lampasas to try to deal with the Higgins-Horrell feud which had been going on for nearly four years at that point. Managing, in a sneak attack, to catch all the gang and arrest them, Jones then proved to be more than just a hard-headed tough old soldier, as he successfully negotiated a truce between the two clans. He next turned his attention to the apprehension of the notorious train robber Sam Bass and his gang, and after a four month chase he finally ran them to ground at Round Rock, where he shot and wounded Bass, who would die of the injury a few days later.

Jones died of natural causes in July of 1881, still in command of his Texas Rangers battalion, his exploits earning him a place in the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame.

"Big" Dave Updyke (c. 1830 - 1866)

Another bad lawman, Updyke was the black sheep of his family, and after a stint driving stagecoaches and another spent in Columbia, he returned to the USA to join in the gold rush that had sprung up in Idaho state. He was successful here, earning enough from his claim to allow him to buy a livery stable in Boise, which is where his life, which had up until now been law-abiding, took very much a left turn. His stable began to become a meeting place for all the local desperadoes - whether he courted them or just fell in with them I don't know - and before long he was consorting with some of the baddest men in that part of the country. His election to the post of Sheriff in 1864 did nothing to arrest (sorry) his slide towards criminality, in fact it had the opposite effect, as it put him in a position to turn a blind eye to, or often even participate in robberies orchestrated by his new friends.

So well known was his connection to the outlaws that they began to be known as "Updyke's Gang", though there was no proof that he was part of their enterprise. Realising that the only real threat to his power was a recently-formed vigilante group out of Payette River, about thirty miles outside of Boise, he vowed to disband it, to the anger of the citizens of Ada, who relied upon them - as they could not trust the sheriff to look after their interests - to keep them safe from robbers and murderers. Going completely against the wishes of the people he was supposed to protect, he in fact planned to have the members of the vigilante group (or vigilance committee, as they were often known) shot, claiming they had resisted arrest.

Word however was sent to the Payette folk of the planned treachery and they were ready for Updike and his men, outnumbering them two to one. Forced to negotiate, the corrupt sheriff allowed the Payettes to return to town to answer the charges against them, and allowed them to keep their weapons. The charges were dismissed, and the vigilantes went free, but Sheriff Updyke had, in the words of Charles Montgomery Burns, made a powerful enemy, and the Payettes, who had long suspected Updyke's involvement in the crimes that took place in the county, began to watch him closely.

They didn't have to wait for very long, as Updike and his criminal buddies were always on the lookout for easy prey, and they didn't come much easier than the local stagecoach, passing through Pontneuf Canyon on its way from Montana to Utah, which was known to transport gold as well as passengers. The gang was co-led by Updyke with a desperado called Brockie Jack, who was actually on the run, having broken out of an Oregon prison, while the third member of their gang, Fred Williams, had been detailed to ride along with the stage to ensure there were no slip-ups, and to make certain it carried the big strongboxes of gold that were being shipped down from the Montana mines. He would desert the coach when it stopped near the spot where later it would be ambushed. No doubt Updyke's experience as a stage driver in his younger days helped the gang plan their strategy.

The raid did not quite go according to plan, unless the gang intended killing everyone on the stage, and I have to believe they were more interested in getting the gold than slaughtering the passengers, but one of them was armed and put up a fight, leading to a sudden explosion of gunfire and when the smoke cleared all the passengers were dead. Nonplussed, the thieves collected their loot and headed off, but were pursued by the Payette vigilantes, who  caught two of them, one shot down when he resisted arrest, the other hanged. Both men were said to have been almost penniless at the time, leading me to believe either that they had received a smaller share of the haul or had spent it very quickly, as this was only weeks after the raid.

Updyke evaded arrest, skipping town and heading to Boise City, but he had no power here and the citizens were organising their own vigilance committee. He stayed there until spring but eventually fled, along with another outlaw, John Dixon. Unaware that a posse was hot on their heels, the men stopped to rest at a cabin along the way. Taking them by surprise in the night, the vigilantes took the two men prisoner and the next morning they were hanged. No trace of the stolen gold was ever found - Updyke had a mere fifty dollars on him when he swung - and its whereabouts remains a mystery to this day.

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Seth Bullock (1849 - 1919)

Canadian born, with an English father and Scottish mother, Bullock ran away from home at sixteen and went to live with his sister in Montana, but not for long, as she sent him back home to his parents. Two years later he was gone again, and this time to stay. Two years after that he was elected to the Montana Senate, and helped create the famous Yellowstone National Park. Elected sheriff of Lewis and Clark County in 1874, he went into business with another man as a hardware merchant, and though he married the next year he sent his wife home to Michigan when he and his partner headed to Deadwood, South Dakota, to try their luck there.

Arriving in Deadwood, the two men discovered it to be a lawless place, with rowdy miners, cowboys, outlaws and prostitutes running wild, and nobody in charge. On the day they arrived, the famous Wild Bill Hickok was killed, and the townsfolk were demanding someone pay. Law and order needed to be established in Deadwood, and so their first marshal was appointed, but he did not last long, gunned down in an ambush less than two weeks later. Deadwood was really just a mining camp at this point, but when it was incorporated into the newly-formed Lawrence County, Bullock was elected as its sheriff, with authority too over the territory of South Dakota.

Bullock proved to be different to most sheriffs of the time. Though he appointed fearless deputies who helped him clean up Deadwood, it's reported that he never shot a man during his time there, being able to, according to his grandson, "outstare a mad cobra or rogue elephant", and his calm, brooding manner usually unnerved most gunhands who surrendered without firing a shot. As Deadwood began to settle down, Bullock sent for his wife and daughter, meanwhile he was promoted to US Deputy Marshal, and in 1884 met future President Theodore Roosevelt for the first time. The two men got on great, and would remain lifelong friends. When his hardware store burned down ten years later, Bullock took the opportunity to replace it with Deadwood's first hotel, and the humbly-named Bullock Hotel quickly became the place to stay. It was certainly luxurious for the time, with three floors with a bathroom on each, steam heat throughout its sixty-four rooms. It still stands today.

Given his friendship with Roosevelt, it was no surprise that Bullock signed up with the Rough Riders when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, but the war was over so quickly that he never got to see service. He did however ride in Roosevelt's  inaugural parade in 1905 along with a group of fifty cowboys, including the legendary Tom Mix. Following his taking office, the new president promoted Bullock to the post of US Marshal for South Dakota. The two men would die within months of each other, both passing away before 1919 was out. Seth Bullock was buried alongside Wild Bill and Calamity Jane, in Mount Moriah Cemetery.

Warning: some outdated and inappropriate terms used here, which may cause offence, but please remember this refers to a far different time, which is, thankfully, mostly now gone. Also, these are quoted passages, which I'm not going to censor.

William Carr

US Deputy Marshal in Fort Smith, Arkansas, he hunted down and arrested outlaw Harris Austin, who was a Chickasaw Indian charged with murder. When Austin resisted arrest Carr shot him, then took him back to Fort Smith where he was hanged a year later. He killed one of a gang of whiskey runners in what was then known as Indian Territory, but the rest escaped back to Texas. He had his own run-ins with the law though, arrested in 1892 and charged with murder and arson pursuant a fire in Lexington which resulted in the death of one man, but he was cleared of the charges and returned to duty, in time to take on the famous Doolin-Dalton Gang two years later. In this battle he was shot three times and left for dead by the outlaws, but he survived, to face further controversy.

In June 1895 a bunch of outlaws broke out of the Oklahoma City jail, killing the Chief of Police in the process. As Carr was known to be friendly with two of the escapees, brothers Will and Bob Christian, he was suspected of having planned or assisted in their jailbreak, and stood trial. Most felt it was a fit-up, to cover the negligence of Sheriff C. H. Deford in allowing the men to escape, but Carr was arrested and indicted by a Grand Jury, but having raised bail he skipped out of the state and disappeared from history. His name did pop up in unsubstantiated reports and anecdotes, mostly in connection with the Doolin Gang, though none of these sightings were ever confirmed. Below are some of them.

(Note: No apologies for the language, out-of-date racial slurs or even spelling and capitalisation (or mostly, lack of it) in these accounts. As they said back then in those parts, I ain't a-changin' nothin'. These are authentic accounts of an authentic time, and gosh darn it, they gunna remain as they woz scribed down, pardner. Or Somethin'.)

"A man who don't know Carr should not be permitted to live in the Territory," Rowdy Kate Daniels used to say while holding court in the Red Light Saloon in Purcell, [Oklahoma,] in 1889.

"Never heard of Bill Carr?" says Jim Davis, who has been in the country "since their days of Sam Bass." "Wal, stranger, you'd better git acquainted with him. Jist now he's laying up at the Clifton House nursing a sore arm. One uv ther Rogers gang shot him last week.

"Who is Bill? He's a double-distilled rattler, a bunch of catmounts, a whole herd of Texas longhorns, and a grizzly bear all tied together with chain lightning. By profession, he's a Deputy Marshal in this yer district, and he's a killer from way up near the headwaters of Bitter Creek.

"You can jest yell that he is a daisy," continued the old man. "Bill civilized this heathen country. He's the chap who made angels of the Franklins and Washingtons and Christianized the Indians, and he dun it with cold lead, the only simon-pure religion of any use on the border.

"Is he the man they call the King of the Chickasaw Nation?" asked an interested tenderfoot, while the gang strolled up and took a drink of chain lightning.

Carr, the officer in question, is a handsome Pennsylvanian with a record as Deputy Marshal that is little short of miraculous. The story, as stated by old man Davis, would appear , in the vernacular of the border, "durned fishy" were it not backed up by the testimony of United States Marshals Nix and Walker.
Billy Carr came here before the Oklahoma boom" resumed Davis reflectively, as he shot a mouthful of saliva at a crack in the floor. "Yep! I believe he's called the King of the Chickasaw country. He first came into notice on the 4th of July in 1887. Down there in the bottom, a lot of sharks were fleecing suckers. A pretty girl was in one of the crowds trying to induce her foot brother to quit a brace game, but the grinning sharp only gave her the laugh and joked the fool boy into playing until all his money was gone.

Then he insultingly ordered them to 'clear out and let him alone." the girl cried bitterly over her brother's losses and the tough gang stood about and laughed. Nobody knowed Bill Carr them days, and so he didn't cut much figger. The man who had robbed the boy was 'Coyote Dave,' and he had killed a man or two, and had a private graveyard down in No Man's Land. Well, Bill, he sorter stood 'round awhile after the pretty girl and her brother had left, and then he began to play. 'Coyote Dave' won some his money and when Carr accused him of cheating, he said:
"'Course I did, tender. W'at you going to do about it, hey?'
"The camp turned out an' buried Dave next day," and her the old-timer's face took on a contented frown, as his mind traveled back to that delightful occasion.

"Yes, Billy put three holes in David's carcass inside a second, and as he walked away I heard him say, 'That's for that pretty girl with blue eyes; durn his ugly picture.'

"Well, a day or two after this a wild and wooly chap from the Brazos country plugged a hole through our City Marshal and then skipped out for Oklahoma. There wasn't any one to foller him, and no one wanted the job of Marshal till Bill Carr said he'd take it if he could have an assistant, and he chose Joe McNally. (Poor Joe was killed by Sheriff Throttler at Fort Smith a month or so ago.) while Joe held down the town Bill Carr mounted his horse and chased the murderer down to where Oklahoma City now stands. The skunk turned on Bill, and there was another killing. A durned foot United States Marshal arrested Carr and took him to Wichita for trial, but he beat the case, and when he came back to the Territory the boys lynched 'Horse Thief Johnny," a witness agin Bill, just to show their goodwill. Bill said he'd a-knowed their hearts was all right without this proof, but he couldn't bring Johnny back to life, so he helped plant him.

"Bill and Joe had their prison about three miles out of town, in the hills. They dug a hole back into a bank and staked their prisoners out in a pen till they had a load for Fort Smith. They made a camp up on a hill where they could overlook this pen, and if any of them durned murderers, horse thieves, whiskey peddlers, or outlaws generally thought they could skip out, they were usually brought to their senses with a bullet in their carcasses.

"About this time Harris Austin, a full-blooded Chickasaw Indian who had been killing people worse than the Bender family for about ten years did some new devilment, and the Fort Smith officers wanted him captured. The old heathen had the whole country 'buffaloed' except Bill Carr, and some of the boys said he didn't have sense enough to know when he was a fool. So Bill he got on his old sorrel pony and rode out to this Indian's lair in the mountains. He laid for him at daylight, and when the old red man came out to the spring for water Bill popped out and tried to arrest him, but the chief wouldn't have it that way and slid behind a tree. Bill and him banged away at one another from undercover for about an hour, and then Bill put three bullets into the old rascal. That night he landed him into town across his horse's back. The Indian recovered and was afterward hung at Fort Smith.

"But the very worst fight Billy ever had was with the Franklins and Washingtons. they was nigger hoss thieves, and lived in a cabin back in the hills. when Bill went after them he took a posse along, and when they reached the cabin a posse man, a personal friend of Bill's rode up and pounded on the door. Then those heathen niggers just opened a crack and stuck out their guns and killed that posseman. Bill vowed then and there that he would kill every one of them for murdering his pard. So he set fire to the woods back of the house, and when those heathens came running out with their guns in their hands he shot them all down. There were five in the party. Three he killed and two were taken to Fort Smith and hanged.

"Whisky peddling was one of the tough crimes about now, and a gang of outlaws along the Red River district took to sending in their red liquor by the gallon. You see, the boys rather liked the poison, and didn't think the traffic ought to be curtailed by law so that when Bill started in to stop the supply the boys were agin it. One night Bill corralled three members of a gang of smugglers near Dennison, [Texas.] They were Lewis Jackson, his brother, and Walter Keene, a full-blood Injun. Together with a Sheriff's posse, Carr sat down to watch a bridge. About dark, the posse went to supper, and Bill just staid on guard. While his friends were gone them chaps sneaked across the bridge, and when Carr halted them they began to shoot. Talking about hell a popping wasn't in it. When the Sheriff heard the firing and run back they found Bill wounded and two of the gang dead. The next day they followed a trail of blood and run into Lewis Jackson's body in a cave.

"As Carr was returning to Purcell, [Oklahoma] he was thrown from his horse and had a leg broken. He was carried into a ranch house, and who do you think he found there?" and Jim glanced eagerly into the faces of his interested audience. "Why the girl whose brother had been plucked by 'Coyote Dave." When Bill's leg got well his heart was gone to the girl, and he married her soon after. All the boys turned out to Bill's wedding, and after it was over he rode out to his ranch with his bride. While they were riding along in that moonlight one heathen coyote that had it in for Bill tried to shoot him, and they had a running fight, but Bill was too much for him, and Cherokee Ned was buried next day. Some of the boys found him along down the trail with a bullet between his cross-eyes.

"After Bill had been spliced a while and had been shot two or three times, his better half got him to quit and go down to violet springs, Oklahoma and buy a grocery. The idea of Bill Carr a-selling peas, and corn, and taters, like a common clerk!" and old Jim wiped his mouth and squinted up his eyes to show his utter contempt for such a proceeding. "Es I was a-saying, Bill turned clerk, but he didn't like it, and neither did the boys. Arter a little a papoose was born, and then Bill was happy. At this time Bill Dalton and Bill Cook and other tough gangs was a cavorting around, and I often said that if Bill Carr hadn't got married and settled down he'd made them fellers hard to ketch. Sure enough, Bill got into it last Spring year ago. Course you seen it in all the papers. Marshal Nix dun heered that Bill Dalton was down near Violet Springs, so he sends Carr a warrant for him and Slaughter Kid. Bill felt just like getting into the harness again. One afternoon along comes two galoots on horseback. Bill seen 'em a-coming and watched them hitch their horses to the old rack. His wife and kid were in the store when they came in and eyed Bill.
"'Be you Bill Carr?' asked on of the chaps.
"'Recon I be,' said Bill, bold as brass, as he slid along the counter toward a six-shooter. 'Who be you'ns?

"'I'm Bill Dalton, and this is Slaughter Kid,' said one of the strangers. 'Head you'd a warrant for us and thought we'd come in,' with a laugh.
"'Yes, she is red-hot and still a hottin,' said Bill, as he raised his gun. Just then his two-year-old kid run in atween them and his wife run in arter it. This spoiled Bill's aim, and afore he could pull a second time the two geisers begin to bore holes in him. But he was game and drove 'em out arter they had shot him three times. They got on their horses and escaped, but poor Bill lay about dead on the floor. When the outlaws heered that Bill wasn't dead they threatened to finish the works, so a lot of the boys from Oklahoma City went down and guarded his house till he got better. Shortly after this Dalton was killed. when Bill got well he sold out his grocery and since then he's making it hot for the balance of the gang. Someone shot him last week during the Rogers fight, but they can't kill Bill Carr," and old Jim took a drink with a tenderfoot and went off up to the Clifton House to see how the "King of the Chickasaw Country" was getting along.

Fred White

Linked with one of the most famous lawmen of the Old West, White was the first town marshal of Tombstone, Arizona (yes, it did exist) and partnered up with the deputy sheriff of the county, some guy called Earp or something. The two men also became friends, but Hollywood tried to twist the truth about White, turning him into a different man than he was in reality. He was in fact respected by cowboy gangs such as the Clantons and was particularly friendly with their leader, "Curly Bill" Brocius. One thing the movies did get right was that Tombstone, like many mining towns and railroad towns, was a lawless, raucous place where a man had to be handy with a gun or his fists in order to survive, and White was no shrinking violet.

However his easy manner with Brocius came to an abrupt and painful end when, demanding the CLantons hand over their guns, which they had been shooting and hollering with in the early hours of the morning of October 28 1880, the gang leader handed his pistol to the marshal barrel first and it went off, shooting White in the groin. Ouch! Enraged, Wyatt Earp began to pistol-whip Brocius before he and his gang were taken to the cells, but it was already too late for Fred White, who died two days later. The gang were only charged with violating city ordnance by shooting their guns in public, as at the time of the arraignment White was still alive and expected by the doctor to make a recovery. As Brocius had to wait to hire a lawyer, he was still in the town when White began to seriously decline, and as a lynch party was forming, Earp escorted him out of town as the marshal lost his battle.

Brocius was said to regret White's death, swearing it was an accident - a claim confirmed by the dying man's own testimony - but he resented Earp's treatment of him, which simmered and grew and would lead to a confrontation between his gang and the marshal and his brothers which would go down in the history of the West.

Tom Nixon (born c. 1837)

Hyperbole it may be, but if one man - one white man - could be said to be most responsible for the near-extinction of the buffalo from the West, Tom Nixon must be a prime contender for that title. He once killed 120 in just forty minutes (an event witnessed by a crowd and so irrefutable) and in the course of just over a month slew 3,200. Born in Georgia, he ended up in Dodge City, Kansas, where he set up a ranch and became a very successful buffalo hunter, the only man his equal being the man himself, Buffalo Bill Cody.

Luke Short, a, well, short man who was a gunfighter, trader and businessman - perhaps what we might call today an entrepreneur - having also crossed paths with Wyatt Earp, ended up in Dodge where he fell foul of the mayor when he opened up a saloon. Dodge was the shipping point for the Texas cattle drives, and if there's one thing thirsty, trail-weary and sex-starved range cowboys want it's booze, gambling and women. All right, that's three things. But they wanted them. So whatever saloon could attract the patronage of the Texan cattlemen stood to make a fortune. Trouble was, the mayor of Dodge City had his own saloon and had no intention of letting anyone else take his business. Being mayor he could of course make the laws, at least town ones, and he combatted the fact that Short was a Texan, and therefore the cattlemen were more likely to go to his saloon than that of the mayor, by passing an ordnance that prohibited music in saloons.

Of course, he did not intend the new law to apply to himself, and his saloon kept on jumping while Short's was silent. But when he realised the mayor was breaking his own rules, Short got his band going again, and they were all arrested while he was away visiting a sick friend. On his return, as he tried to get bail to release them, nobody would help him until he saw the officer he needed to deal with. This man, however, shot at him, missed and then ran when Short returned fire. The next morning he was placed under arrest and escorted that afternoon to a train bound for Kansas City. But if the mayor was exulting, thinking that was the end of his rival, he didn't know Luke Short.

Enlisting the help of Earp and other friends, and with tacit approval from the governor of Kansas, he returned to Dodge, but the reputation of the feared marshal - and the stated due arrival of Bat Masterson, another lawman nobody in his right mind wanted to face - convinced the mayor to allow Short to return and carry on his business without interference. A truce was called, and Earp went to the telegraph office to convey the mayor's change of attitude to the other two men. On his return to Dodge, Short issued his demands, including firing of the man who had shot at him without provocation, and those who had arrested him, as well as the revoking of the law prohibiting music. All were agreed to; not that the town had any choice, as they were literally under the gun.

The mayor was far from beaten though, and he now telegraphed the governor, requesting assistance in the shape of companies of militia. This request was flatly refused, the governor telling the mayor he had to handle the situation himself, that the militia would not ride to his rescue when it had been he himself who had started the whole affair. Finding himself without the expected reinforcements, and his support melting away, the mayor had to give in and allow Luke Short to ply his trade unmolested. Later Short moved on to Texas, but the bad feeling he had left behind continued to ferment.

Into this cauldron had already entered our hero, who had worked on the side of the mayor, and who also owned a saloon, which Webster allowed circumvent the music law. Nixon mustered a vigilante group to hassle Short and other saloon owners and drive them out of town. He ended up going head to head with the Assistant Marshal, the oddly-named "Mysterious Dave" Mather, who, you guessed it, opened his own saloon which was banned on the basis of his intending to make it into a dance hall. When ordinance left only Nixon's saloon untouched, a bitter feud raged between the two men, exacerbated when the city replaced Mather with Nixon as the Assistant Marshal. Nixon was now authorised to collect "licence fees" (read, I think, protection money) from saloons, gambling dens, brothels and even pimps.

When Nixon shot at Mather one night, "Mysterious Dave" lived up to his name, and mysteriously did not return fire, even though he had been wounded. The mystery was solved three nights later when Mather shot Nixon from behind, killing him. More mysteriously still, Mather was acquitted on the somewhat ludicrous grounds of self-defence!

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John M. Larn (1849 - ?)

A salutary tale showing why a good vigilante does not make a good sheriff, Larn was elected to the post in Fort Griffin, Texas, in 1876, and immediately set about abusing the trust of the people of the town in him. Looking back over his career to that date, it's obvious why he was never going to be a good upholder of the law, as he was mostly on the wrong side of it prior to this. When his boss, a rancher in Colorado, accused him of stealing one of his horses in 1869 he shot the man and fled to New Mexico, where, believing the man was after him, he shot and killed a sheriff. While working for another rancher, Bill Hays, on a cattle drive back to his old stomping grounds in Colorado in 1871, he shot and killed three more men, two of them Mexicans.

By now he was established in Fort Griffin and considered a pillar of the community, having married one of the local powerful family's daughters, and then he got involved with the vigilante group The Tin Hat Brigade (sounds like someone who believes the CIA are monitoring our communications and aliens are trying to infiltrate our brains, doesn't it?) and turned on his old boss, leading a posse against Hays on a charge of cattle rustling (true or not, I don't know) instead of bringing them in, killed every last one of them. Notwithstanding this - or who knows, maybe due to it - he was made sheriff three years later, and entered into a contract with the local garrison to supply them with cattle.

However he decided the least expensive way to fulfill this contract was to take cattle from the herds of other ranchers, and so became a cattle rustler, something of which he had been privately suspected prior even to pinning on  the tin star. He would not wear it long though, and whether due to pressure from the town or in order to concentrate fully on cattle rustling, he resigned the next year and with his ex-deputy went fulltime into the business of raiding herds. He continued to supply the fort, and stepped up his tactics of intimidation, waylaying ranchers and cattle men, shooting at their houses and shooting their horses, and generally prosecuting a reign of terror across the territory. Showing how little the authorities knew or cared about his extracurricular activities, he and Selman were made hide inspectors of Shackelford County, which gave them easy access to cattle - foxes in charge of the henhouse, indeed.

His crimes eventually came to light and he was arrested, though later released, but when he shot and wounded a rancher a warrant was issued for his arrest. Shackled to the floor of the cell to deter any attempts by his supporters to free him, it was in fact his old friends the Tin Hats who stormed the jail, not to set him at liberty but to hang him. As the chains made that impossible, they opted for shooting him instead.

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Edward "Ned" Bushyhead (1832 - 1907 )

A Cherokee miner, Ned was seven years old when his family joined the infamous "Trail of Tears" as the Native Americans were forcibly resettled as the West began to open up to the white man. They ended up in Oklahoma, where Ned took a job as apprentice on the local newspaper, The Cherokee Messenger, later moving to Arkansas where he worked as a printer. In 1850 he and his brother heard the call of gold and headed to California, but three years later Ned was running his own newspaper in San Diego. He became a fixture there, well respected, and after selling his interest in the paper he became deputy sheriff in 1875 and sheriff in 1882, a post he would hold for two terms.

In 1899, on the very cusp of the new century, he became Chief of Police, and remained in that post until four years before his death in 1907. He was described as intrepid, brave, courteous, patient and sagacious, all qualities very much required in any good lawman.

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Fred Dodge (1854 - 1938)

A man with an appropriate name for an undercover detective, Dodge worked for the Wells Fargo Company in such places as California, Arizona and Nevada. It was in fact while working in Tombstone that he recommended the services be sought of Wyatt Earp to guard the stage line. He became friends with Earp and stood with him and his brothers against the Clantons and was later himself elected constable of Tombstone, while still working undercover for Wells Fargo. He helped US Deputy Marshal Heck Thomas track down the famous Doolin-Dalton Gang. In 1906 he moved with his family to Texas, where he bought a ranch and to which he retired.

George Maledon (1830 - 1911)

Perhaps not strictly a lawman, it can't be denied though that the end of many a convicted criminal ended with the hangman, and Maledon, with a name like some sort of devil out of Goethe or something, was acknowledged as one of the best. As in the case of every practitioner of the deadly art, no real blame can be attached to Maledon, as he merely carried out the lawful orders of his master, Judge Isaac Parker, the so-called Hanging Judge of Arkansas, whose motto was "permit no innocent man to be punished, but let no guilty man escape" and "Do equal and exact justice". Of German descent, Maledon came to America with his family when still a child, and they settled in Detroit, Michigan. He moved to Arkansas as a young man, enlisting in the military when the Civil War broke out, having previously been a police officer there.

He cut far from the imposing figure you might associate with a hangman: short, with a little beard, dressed in black and very quietly spoken, not really the kind of person you would tremble before (for his own sake) on your way to the gallows. But soon after the war ended and he returned to Fort Smith, he was appointed as "deputy with special charge of the execution of condemned prisoners", in other words, the prison hangman. What surprises me is that, unlike later English hangmen such as Albert Pierrepoint and John Ellis, Maledon does not seem to have received any sort of basic training, needed no qualifications and was in no way any different to other turnkeys in the prison, so why he was chosen as the hangman is a mystery to me, particularly given his diminutive stature (five feet five inches). Maybe nobody else wanted the post, and because he was said to be a mild-mannered and quiet man, the authorities didn't expect any resistance from him?

At any rate, he soon became known as "the Prince of Hangmen" and this being a time when hangings were a public spectacle, his fame spread as more and more people attended the hangings at which he officiated. At one point, in September of 1875, he hanged six men at once, before a crowd of almost five thousand fascinated onlookers. The men had of course been condemned by Judge Parker, this event earning him his epithet, and bringing his court the unofficial title of "Court of the Damned". I'm sure they didn't, but someone could apparently just as easily have hung a sign over the door to the court reading "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." There certainly seemed to be no hope for anyone who went into Parker's court, as any man found guilty ended up dancing his last steps in air.

Though Maledon was famous, he was really more infamous, and people shunned him, as they would mostly with hangmen down the centuries, association with them being seen as an omen of bad luck, the stink of death believed to cling to them, and perhaps some of the blame for the deaths of the criminals too, as it had been he who had launched them into the afterlife, even if the decision was most decidedly not his and he was merely a tool of the justice system. If he had not done it, someone else would have.

In 1878, though hanging was very much still legal, and would remain so well into the next century, it became more a private affair, by invitation only, and a large fence was constructed around the gallows. Spectators were now limited to about fifty, usually the relatives and friends of those the criminal had killed, maybe his own family, officers of the court, dignitaries from the state and so on. Though dedicated to his art, Maledon did evince human feeling when he refused to execute his friend, US Deputy Marshal Sheppard Busby, who was accused and found guilty of shooting another marshal whom he had tried to arrest. Quite why this should be seen as a hanging offence, when it seems clear Busby was only carrying out his duty, I don't know, but he was sentenced to swing (maybe just unlucky that the Hanging Judge was in town) and Maledon would not drop him. It's not as if it saved the marshal's life: Maledon was just replaced for the hanging by another man.

After giving twenty years of his life to the prosecution of state killing, Maledon retired in 1894, but he was not to have a quiet retirement. His daughter, having fallen in with  a thief and cheat who turned out to be already married, was shot by the man, Frank Carver, and killed. Though Judge Parker passed the sentence of death upon him, by now the appeal process was in force and Carver's lawyer successfully argued the death penalty down to life imprisonment. As a man who had meted out final justice to what he surely believed to be deserving men, the overturning of the judge's verdict sickened Maledon, who believed the system was going soft on criminals. He took to the road with a sort of carnival of the dead, displaying his hangman paraphernalia, telling stories of those he had hanged and showing their pictures.

If, for most of his life, Maledon was a quiet, reserved and mostly unremarkable man, he died as he had lived really. He became seriously ill as he entered his mid-seventies and moved into an old soldiers' home in 1905, where he died six years later, in 1911.

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Thomas "Bear River" Smith (1840 - 1870)

Whereas I remarked earlier that the idea of a man chosen to be sheriff casting his badge down in the dust, for it to be left there until some stranger riding into town picked it up seemed to me to be nothing but Hollywood hokum, it appears I don't know shit, which will come as no surprise to most of you. How come I don't know shit? Well, because it happened, that's why, at least once, in the rough and dangerous Texas "cowtown" of Abilene. What was a cowtown? One of the stops along the way for the great cattle drives that took place every summer as ranchers drove or paid for their herds to be driven  up north to be sold in the cattle markets. Small towns, dependent on the passing trade from cowboys (literally, the guys who herded the steers and bulls were called cowboys, and that's where the name came from) and their trail bosses, hosted these cattle parties as the drovers passed through on their way north, availing themselves of gambling dens, brothels, saloons and dance halls. Things could, and did, get mighty rowdy when the boys were back in town, and it would be a brave or foolhardy man who would stand up to them and try to instigate, never you mind keep law and order there.

Such a man was Thomas "Bear River" Smith, one of the few who would take the job (another famous marshal having looked into it and said no thanks, heading out on the next train anywhere) and he would pay for it with his life. A professional boxer in his youth, Smith had served in the police force in New York but had to retire when he accidentally shot a fourteen-year-old boy, and took up a post with the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868, which took him to Bear River, Wyoming (presumably from which his nickname sprang). He soon became city marshal, and had to deal with vigilantes who had hanged a member of the railroad who had killed a man. A tense confrontation ensued and the army was called in.

Smith left Wyoming and made his way down south, ending up in Abilene. He took the job as the town's marshal, and quickly made his name known as "No gun marshal": having banned all weapons from the town, he utilised his boxing skills to subdue lawbreakers with his fists, but his edict of banning guns was unpopular in the rowdy town, where cowboys liked to ride around shooting off their pistols, settling disputes with hot lead, and generally raising hell. He survived two attempts on his life, but when he went to arrest a local man for having killed a farmer, he was ambushed and shot. His cowardly deputy fled, instead of standing to help him fight off two men. Unfazed, Smith returned fire, but the lawbreaker's partner grabbed an axe and buried it in Smith's head. He had lasted less than a year in the job, and would be succeeded by a real legend of the West, Wild Bill Hickok.

No less a personality than President Eisenhower himself later paid Smith homage, saying

"According to the legends of my hometown, he was anything but dull. While he almost never carried a  pistol he...subdued the lawless by the force of his personality and his tremendous capability as an athlete. One blow of his fist was apparently enough to knock out the ordinary 'tough' cowboy. He was murdered by treachery."

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Cowboys and Angels: Bringing the Word to God's Country

In Ireland it was once said, and quite truly, that even the smallest villages whose population numbered in the tens would always have two things: at least one pub, and a church. And so it was in the West too. While men and women - though mostly men - wanted saloons and whorehouses and gambling dens to allow them to blow off steam after a hard ride across the range, or day in the mines, or chasing bad guys in a posse, or even just serving customers in the general store, they also needed to be close to their god. I heard somewhere, I can't recall where, recently, the phrase "Saturday's for drinkin' and fightin', Sunday's for repentin'!" And that's very apt. For men, certainly - very few women would be drinkin' and fightin' - the idea of expiating their sins on a Sunday appealed; to many, it was essential. The biggest, baddest, meanest hombre in a cowtown would still believe himself a child of God, and want to beg forgiveness for all the trouble he had caused. Faith was one exceptionally strong thread running through, and binding together the tapestry of the lives of the folk who moved out into the West.

But a church without a preacher is just an empty building, the same as a saloon without a barkeep, so men had to be sent out to take control and ownership of these places of worship - in some cases, even build them or have them built - and tend to the souls of their flock where they were in the greatest need. No matter that I'm not a believer and have no time for priests, I can recognise the incredible bravery and fortitude of these men, sent forth by their bishop or church to act as shepherd to the lambs who had headed out into the vast unknown. Those pioneering families who had chosen to leave the towns of the east and head in the opposite direction had done so with the intention of starting up a whole new life, and the husband at least would have been armed for the journey. While a priest might certainly have carried a gun, or more likely travelled with a party who were armed, his magical cloak of protection, which constrained folks to treat him with honour, respect and even fear in the civilised towns, would be of little use to him out on the range.
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Bandits who attacked the wagon train might, possibly, baulk at hurting a preacher; indeed, his very presence might deter them from attacking at all. Not always of course; many desperadoes had as much respect for God's ministers as they had for the local sheriff or a rattler, but some would defer to his authority, perhaps in their ignorance feeling that they would actually be offending the Big Man himself were they to go after his preacher. But there was one group who were more likely to prey on the settlers, and they would have no respect for, nor fear of the man in black. Indians, to whom this man would be a natural enemy, mocking their sacred rituals and denying their gods, trying to convert them to his ways, would hate and loathe preachers, or else would see them as no different from any other invader. Threatened with the wrath of God if they were to touch him, they would most probably laugh, assuming they could understand him, which they probably could not: their gods were more mighty and powerful than the man on the cross whom this man wore around his neck for protection, and his admonitions would mean nothing to them.

Unlike the early disciples of Christ, it's doubtful the preachers of the Old West were in any great hurry to martyr themselves, and so if they were taken prisoner and tortured, while their faith may have sustained them for a time, they might certainly have cause to regret having travelled to the frontier. Amongst the savages, they could expect no better treatment than any other prisoner, and might indeed fare worse, their very presence seen as an insult to the native gods. As well as this, they would not on the whole have been fighting men. It's a rare thing when a priest has to break up a fistfight or draw his gun (if he has one) and back home, just about everyone gave way when the man in black appeared, or else ignored him. It would be a brave man indeed who would lay hands on a preacher, an action which would most assuredly have him watching the world through a grille of iron bars for at least a day.
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But out here, the priest was on his own. Well of course he would say he was not: everywhere he went, God went with him. But God could not pull a Colt 45 on assailants or cut the rope that tied the preacher to a stake as Indians danced around it, or stop his horse if it bolted after being spooked by bandits. Sure, if he wanted to believe God was with him, then technically he was not alone. But in reality, he was. He might have a wife, he might have children, but they all depended on and looked to him for their comfort and safety, and he would have nobody to speak for him. In time, yes, he would be welcomed by the community and become a valuable and respected member of it, but first he would have to earn that place, and while in general a preacher was welcomed, in some of the more lawless and dangerous towns, he would be about as welcome as a skunk in an outhouse.

Now here I think we need to make a distinction between two types of religious figures. While preachers generally stuck to their own people, tended to their flock or at least attempted to bring others of their own race over to their side from whatever heretical faith (Calvinism, Catholicism, Anglicanism etc) they held, missionaries were the type of people who couldn't or refused to keep their god to themselves, and had to go around trying to convert "savages" who had followed their own paths for thousands of years before the palefaces ever set foot on their land. Many of these were doomed to failure, and most did more harm than good. Which leads me to

My View on the Missionary Position (sorry)

Personally, while I can certainly acknowledge the bravery and dedication of men and women who went forth among the uncivilised masses to try to get them to back their horse rather than the one they were betting on, to vote for God V2.0 as it were, the new improved deity that everyone who was anyone was worshipping, I have never had time for missionaries. I don't see the point in anyone trying to force their philosophy, much less their religion on someone who hasn't asked for it. At a very basic level, it's rude and it's also arrogant. Why do these people think they're better than the people they call heathen? What gives them - us - the right to say to another race "Nah mate, yer doing it all wrong. Let me help you. Here's a god you can really get behind. I promise, son, stick with me and I'll see you right."

Isn't it strange that when white men visited any Indian tribe those tribes almost never tried to convert the white men to their religion? What stories or accounts exist of say a Sioux or Blackfoot or, hell, Seminole chief saying "Look, white brother, you got to worship the Great Spirit otherwise we no do business"? Never ever happened, did it? Because Indians and other so-called "savage" peoples didn't want white interlopers getting, to somewhat use the language of the street, all up in their shit. They didn't want the whites worshipping their gods, they didn't proclaim they were the only gods you could worship; they just said, tell you what, brother: you keep your gods and we'll keep ours, is that a deal?

But it wasn't a deal. For reasons that can only be traced to incredible arrogance and a sense of superiority and disdain, white men wanted - and still mostly want - everyone to kneel down at the altar of the Christian god. And even that wasn't enough, as we'll see further on: it had to be the right Christian god. If you were a Protestant, forget that stupid papist Catholic god, he's shit. Worship our good Protestant god and you'll be in clover. And of course, behind the encouragement, the carrot so to speak, lurked the stick. Reject our god (our good Protestant/Catholic/Presbyterian/insert stupid religious faction here god) and, well, we can't be held responsible for what happens to you. Almost a kind of religious protection racket: nice god(s) you got there. Be a real pity if you kept worshipping them. Yeah. Anything could happen. Oh sorry! Was that one of your sacred relics? How clumsy of me!

Of course, it wasn't quite that, as these tribes for the most part weren't meek and mild, and often laughed at, derided or sometimes plain ignored the missionaries. That's when they pointedly didn't ignore them, and some proud clan mother might have a new skull cup to drink out of. The point being that while the Native Americans might, and almost certainly would, have been happy to have shared the country with this new god, either welcomed him as one of the lads, or just put him in a corner, over there somewhere, don't bother us, just keep it buttoned, the reverse was definitely not true of us. We wanted one god, and it had to be our god.

And if they didn't play ball, things were going to get very nasty.

But before we start looking into these busybod - I mean, brave and pious missionaries, let's check out the kind of men who stayed on their side of the fence, so to speak, but were no less brave for all that.
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Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show: Keeping the Faith with Circuit Preachers

Just like judges in the Old West, preachers were constantly on the move, going from town to town dispensing the word of the Lord to people hungry for salvation as effectively as His Honour would dole out justice to the deserving. And just like trials and disputes would wait for the arrival of the Circuit Judge, so too would weddings, baptisms but obviously not funerals be timed to coincide with the arrival of the preacher. In the early days these men were real sort of gunfighters of the church, armed and usually quite young, single men, often without any religious training but plenty of fire in the belly. They would preach in houses, schools or barns, even fields, and occasionally those "dens of iniquity", the saloon and the dance hall, would be cleansed by a fire-and-brimstone sermon - no doubt returning to their sinful ways as soon as the preacher had packed up and left town.

Though these preachers could be of any religious denomination - or none - by far the largest percentage of them, at least around Texas, were Methodist. They had plenty to rail at: out here on the frontier people took what pleasure they could, and as per usual with the church, anything that gave the slightest bit of comfort was looked down upon by God, apparently. Drinking, gambling, lying, stealing, cheating, womanising, fornication and even the taking of snuff (the devils!) were all seen as affronts to God, and preached against. This of course would have hardly made the preacher popular, but in many ways this was not his job. He didn't particularly care if people liked him, as long as they did the right thing and followed God's laws. Perhaps slightly comparable to a doctor who you don't like but who makes you better as long as you follow his or her advice, although in this case it wasn't the person's body the preacher was attempting to save but their soul.

As per usual, too, it was sometimes do as I say, not do as I do, or to put it another way, some of these men literally did not practice what they preached. In Wilbarger County in 1899 George Morrison, a Circuit Preacher, fell in love with another woman and poisoned his wife. Whether, as he believed he would, God forgave him is unknown, but what is known is the law did not forgive him, and he hung for the offence. Murder was murder, regardless of what colour coat you wore or how close you were believed, or believed yourself to be to God.

"Ain't nothing out today but crows and Methodist preachers." - Old West saying

Preaching was not something you got into to make money. Like the early marshals we spoke of previously, payment was poor, and preachers often relied on the time-honoured collection plate to raise any sort of money on which to live. People were generally as generous as they could afford to be, but most of them having left everything behind to come to the West and yet to make their fortune, there was seldom much to go around. Most preachers died an early death, few making it into their thirties. Perhaps they received their reward in Heaven? Perhaps not.

One thing that sometimes drove preachers of the Methodist or other Protestant persuasion west was the increasing influence of Catholicism with the influx of Irish and Italian immigrants to America. Feeling somewhat marginalised in the bigger cities of the east, many preachers decided there were "better souls to save" out there in the wilderness, God's own country, and headed west either alone or with their families. One such was Joseph Powell, who came to Ohio with the image of Welsh Calvinists working in Jackson, Ohio smelting iron for the railroad. A native of the land of the dragon himself, Joseph believed these men would benefit from his preaching, but he ran almost headlong into a feud which was boiling towards a conflict that would spread out across the country and divide the newborn land in two, raging for six years.

Ohio borders Kentucky, one of the then-slave states, and escapees were constantly crossing over into the free state, on the run from their masters, who had not always as easy a time retrieving their absconded "property" as they might have wished. A cadre of white abolitionists had arisen in Ohio, and they faced down any slaveowner who tried to recapture escaped slaves, often leading to bloody clashes between both.

Circuit preachers also acted as a kind of messenger or news service, carrying information on births, deaths, accidents and diseases, and every other sort of titbit of reliable intelligence they could impart to the townsfolk, who had few other ways of knowing what was going on in the next town, never mind the rest of the territory. Sometimes he would carry copies of - by now well out of date - newspapers, and hand them out, and offer advice, perhaps also books for the edification of those who could read, and afford them. He would be given shelter by families, fed by them and would in return preach the word of God to them, offering them the biggest and best bargain he had in his saddlebags: absolution from their sins and acceptance into the good graces of the Lord - as long as they repented, of course.

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Rev. Ralph J. Hall (1891 - 1973)

A genuine Texas-born cowboy, Hall had a different approach than most ministers arriving in a new town. Aware that his appearance was likely to annoy and rile the cowboys rather than placate their souls, he kept his religious affiliations hidden, introducing himself merely as a cowboy, and earning his spurs, so to speak, by taming wild horses, roping steers, drinking and all the other things cowboys do. By the time he began to speak about God and his ministry, the men had got to know and respect him so much that they listened to what he said without discounting it right away, and so he converted, or ministered, by stealth. Many of his contemporaries back home, thinking "I'll try that" tagged along with him on his next visit, and were quickly disillusioned about the believed romantic and glamorous life of a cowboy. As they examined their rope-burned hands through which many a steer had pulled the harsh cord, or sat with aching backs or arms tired from herding cattle, they definitely had second thoughts, and a lot more regard for the man who had brought them there, and with whom they had ridden along, a man to whom such harsh and long work days were the norm. Clearly, not everyone could pull this off.

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Francis Asbury (1745 - 1816)

One of the first circuit riders in the United States, a sort of holdover from the original missions, most of whom legged it when the colony went to war against Britain, Asbury was born in the West Midlands, but moved to America - then still a colony - when he was twenty-two, and gave his first sermon at Staten Island. He worked as a circuit rider on behalf of the Methodist missions, continuing the work he had begun back home in England and assisting John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. When war broke out eight years later, only he and one other minister remained in America. His job was not easy, and he walked a religious and political tightrope as things shifted fundamentally in the former British colony:

"During his early years in North America, Asbury devoted his attention mainly to followers living on the eastern shore between the Delaware River and the Chesapeake Bay. Bishop Asbury was a good friend of the Melsons and was their guest many times on his rounds. When the American revolution severed the traditional ties between the American Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain, Bishop Asbury, in the interest of his religious tenets and principles and in an attempt to remain aloof from the political and military fervor that swept the country, announced he would, to keep the embryonic Methodist congregations neutral, refrain from endorsing either Great Britain or the newly formed United States of America government and urged all his followers to do the same. This request placed almost all of his followers, especially those living in Maryland, in an untenable position. The State of Maryland had enacted a law requiring all citizens to take an Oath of Allegiance to the newly formed American Congress. In addition to this, it stipulated all non-residents within its boundaries also had to take and sign an Oath of Allegiance. Those refusing were summarily incarcerated for treason. Asbury, after proclaiming his neutrality, fled to Delaware, where taking an oath of allegiance was not a requirement. His adherents in Maryland suffered the rancor of the proponents of the Oath."

As a result of this Asbury had to emulate Irish Catholic priests during the time of Cromwell and the Reformation, and go into hiding while the war of independence raged across the continent. By 1780 though things were calming down and he was able to venture forth again, and met "Black Harry" Hosier, a freed black man who would become a famous preacher in his own right, and the first African American to preach directly to a white audience. Hosier was able to memorise entire passages of the Bible despite being illiterate, and he became Asbury's driver and guide. In 1784 Asbury and Henry Coke were given the responsibility by Wesley of leading all the Methodists in America, work Asbury engaged in for a further thirty-two years, up to his death.

Asbury preached anywhere and everywhere he could: courthouses, public houses, tobacco houses, fields, public squares, and rode approximately 6,000 miles every year - that's almost twice the entire distance from eastern seaboard to west coast - but you can't keep that kind of pace up forever, and in 1814 he began to sicken, and so took two years off from preaching. He returned to give a sermon on March 24 1816, but it would be his last, and he died the following week, having increased the new Methodist Church membership from a mere 1200 to over 214,000 during his lifetime.

He had been, according to all sources, a powerful speaker and a dazzling preacher. One of his biographers noted raptly "If to speak with authority as the accredited messenger of God; to have credentials which bear the seal of heaven ... if when he lifted the trumpet to his lips the Almighty blew the blast; if to be conscious of an ever-present sense of God, God the Summoner, God the Anointing One, God the Judge, and to project it into speech which would make his hearers tremble, melt them with terror, and cause them to fall as dead men; if to be and do all this would entitle a man to be called a great preacher, then Asbury was a great preacher." Not in any way a vain man, he apparently hated publicity - other than for his church - and was not sold on the idea of personal popularity either, believing the message was its own reward. He suffered from bouts of depression and could be very sarcastic and cutting, even in his prayers.

"Lord, we are in thy hands and in thy work. Thou knowest what is best of us and for thy work; whether plenty or poverty. The hearts of all men are in thy hands. If it is best for us and for thy church that we should be cramped and straitened, let the people's hands and hearts be closed: If it is better for us; for the church,—and more to thy glory that we should abound in the comforts of life; do thou dispose the hearts of those we serve to give accordingly: and may we learn to be content whether we abound, or suffer need".

He rose at five every morning to read the Bible, and did not suffer fools gladly. He came to America with a heavy heart, leaving his beloved England behind, but said that the call of God could not be ignored. The many things and places named in his honour are too numerous to note, but as you might already have guessed, the town of Asbury, New Jersey, was named after him, as was the park made famous by Bruce Springsteen on his debut album.

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Spreadin' the Disease: If You Build It, They Will Come

While itinerant preachers arriving in town on horseback and preaching in fields or schools was all well and good, and possibly all the community could hope for at the time, the main aim of the church has always been to, rather like a foreign military power in a hostile land, establish a permanent presence, and it traditionally has managed that through the building of churches. Once a church existed, there was a physical reminder of God's presence, and of the power and authority of the Church (with a capital C); like a  stern parent overlooking the town, frowning down on the saloons and whorehouses, the church would be a moderating influence on the townsfolk, a warning that the punishment of perdition was always just waiting for those who slipped into Satan's unholy grasp, and that if the good citizens believed they had been tempted, or had succumbed to temptation by the evil one, there was only one place they were going to be safe, so they had better get down to the church double quick.

It stands to reason that the building of a church in a town or village also heightened its social status; a town with a church was a God-fearing town and didn't mind showing it, was proud to, in fact, and its inhabitants might look down on other towns not so similarly blessed. It also did away, of course, mostly with the need for travelling preachers, as a house could be built beside the church in which the preacher could stay, where he could live, and he would hold all his sermons, masses and celebrations in the newly-built church. It's possibly likely too that the building of a church by one denomination - let's say the Methodists, as they have been cited as being the busiest of them in this period - might dissuade or at least demoralise those of another, let's say maybe Mormons, who had planned to erect their own. The Methodist church might silently say "this is a Methodist town, move on, boy. Nothing for you here" to visiting preachers of other religions. Of course, conversely, it might have the opposite effect, and lead to determination by that other faction to build their church.

Whichever, it meant that churches began to pop up all over the frontier, as the power of God was demonstrated physically. Between 1887 and 1913 Methodist ministers built over 1,500 churches in rural America, nevertheless circuit preachers, now rebranded as mobile ministries and driving cars instead of riding horses, survived well into the 1950s, as preachers brought the comfort and absolution of God to those who could not get to church: the sick, the old, the weak and the disabled.

Hassling the Heathen: Missionaries in the Old West

But of course the problem with America was that there were those who just didn't want a church - of any denomination - unless it was built to worship the Great Spirit, and even he wasn't too fussed. Mountains, rivers, valleys, fields and plains were good enough for him; no need for some ugly squat building with a spire reaching up like a accusing finger to the heavens. Yep, the vast majority of the American West was inhabited by what white settlers - especially Christian ones - would refer to as "the heathen" or "savages", quite more often simply, and inaccurately, as "Indians".

And these guys needed to be converted. They just didn't realise it.

The boys to take on this job were an entirely different class to your itinerant wandering circuit preachers, or even your by-now-settled ones. The former had no real need to convert anyone; they filled a requirement for the people. The good folk needed a preacher, here was one, and each was happy with the bargain. But the heathen? They didn't want, or feel they needed God, and certainly had no time for His interfering messengers and errand boys, which made the mission of these men (and some women, as we will see) that much harder.

See, a missionary is called that for a reason. He - or she - sees saving souls as a mission, and a sacred duty that has been entrusted to them. They don't really take no for an answer, and with the already long established religions of the American West firmly entrenched in the peoples of the plains, their job was not going to be that easy.

But then, nobody became a missionary because it was a doddle, did they? It took special men and special women to face down an Indian tribe and tell them outright their gods were a load of Tottenham, a steaming pile of hotspur, and they should get with the programme and come over to the winning side. Men and women like these.

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Pierre-Jean de Smet (1801 - 1873)

A man who would be instrumental in brokering peace treaties among warring factions, and who would step in to negotiate on behalf of the Native American tribes, particularly the Sioux, De Smet was born in Belgium and came as a missionary to the USA when he was twenty years old, with the idea of converting the natives. After six years he was ordained as a priest and founded religious academic institutions, such as seminaries,  in Missouri, but in 1833 he had to return to Belgium due to poor health, and would not return to the United States until 1837. When he returned he settled in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which you may remember would become one of the main points along the transcontinental railroad, thirty years later. Seeing the danger the trade in whiskey with the Native Americans was wreaking, he set out to stop it and also helped map the upper Missouri River.

After certain tribes learned of Christianity, believing that the Christian God had the power to save their sick and dying children, they sent delegations to St. Louis requesting visitations from priests, or as they called them, rather appropriately, "black robes". For whatever reason, the first two requests were ignored, and the third delegation ran into the Sioux, their mortal enemy, who slaughtered them. Fourth time lucky, thought the indomitable Indians, and this time their party not only reached St. Louis alive, but managed to convince the bishop to send priests, who then met up with De Smet in Council Bluffs. Having obtained permission from the bishop to make this a missionary, he baptised over three hundred people. No records exist to tell whether or not he cured any sick children. Two years later he was back, and this time they founded the St. Mary Mission in Bitterroot Valley.

Having convinced more tribes to convert and invited them to his mission, he sent back word to St. Louis that supplies and housing were needed to stop these peoples from having to be wandering nomads, a state in which it made it tough to civilise them. Cattle, the tools needed to farm the land, seed and the necessity to gather them together in villages were all, he said, vital. Perhaps he hadn't heard that the US Government was already forcibly relocating thousands of Indians in hundreds of tribes to make way for their own white asses?

Not just a preacher but a true adventurer, De Smet then headed to the Rockies where he travelled extensively, meeting tribes such as the Cree, Chippawa and Blackfoot, crossing into Canada and returning in 1845 to Fort Edmonton, where he spent the winter. The next year he established missions in Montana and Idaho, ending up at Fort Vancouver, having covered over a thousand miles. Despite all these amazing achievements though, he is best remembered for being the first white man to successfully treat with the great Sioux war chief Sitting Bull, who had previously vowed to kill any white man coming into their territory. He so impressed the great chief that Sitting Bull was convinced to send a delegation to talk to the US peace commissioners, which led to the signing of the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868.

This was to be one of his last triumphs though, as he died in St. Louis in 1873. Almost a hundred years later, he had the honour of being one of the few preachers to be inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. He had streets, a school, mountain range and a lake named after him, and in South Dakota, his name was on the city and county seat of the birthplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who would go on to become famous through her Little House books, which would be later televised and loved as the series Little House on the Prairie.

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Henry Spalding (1803 - 1874)

Now there's a man who looks like a preacher! You can almost see the brimstone sparking behind his eyes, can't you, and that impressive beard, which might have made ZZ Top envious, would have added to his dramatic, almost dreaded aspect. I can just see him standing there holding court from his pulpit, thumping the bible and warning all of his congregation that they were going to Hell! Never quite got that: why go see someone rant on about how damned you were, how you had no chance and were going to burn in an eternal fire? Kind of ruins the atmos, doesn't it? But that's religion for you I guess.

Spalding was a Presbyterian minister, who worked, along with his wife Eliza, among the Nez Perce peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Spalding was a native New Yorker, and met his wife through a pen pals arrangement (ask yer da) before meeting her in person, with marriage quickly following as they realised they were both zealous about bringing religion to the heathen. Oddly, for such on the face of it sanctimonious people, Eliza was the daughter of cousins - her mother and father were first cousins - which seems a little, I don't know, unconventional for a man of the cloth to accept? But as I've said before, and will say again, what do I know? Times were different I guess, and maybe that sort of thing went on all the time.

In those days, it seems if you wanted to civilise someone you had to go through some red tape, and the holders of that red tape was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which seems something of an unnecessary mouthful, but again, WDIK? Applying, the Spaldings were assigned to the Osage tribe in Missouri, but on meeting Narcissa (seriously, now!) Prentiss Whitman and her husband Henry, they decided to go instead to what was then known as the Oregon Country, basically the same area wherein operated Pierre-Jean De Smet. These people were so devout that they even changed steamships in order not to have to travel on the Sabbath! Ah yeah, I've done the same thing myself hundreds of times. Not.

They travelled through much of the same region which De Smet would later explore, he remarking some years later that the Presbyterian way of preaching had not been altogether successful and made the Nez Perce wary of preachers, though that could of course have been merely his view of an opposing religion. Having travelled part of the way with traders from the Rocky Mountain Fur Company for protection, the Spaldings and the Whitmans split up, the former going on to Idaho while the Whitmans headed off to try their luck in Washington. This would turn out to be a very bad move for them, as we will see in the next section. But back to the Spaldings. Settled in Idaho, and making history as the first whites to live there,  they introduced the first ever printing press into the state, and despite the grumblings of De Smet later, Henry seems to have got on very well with the Nez Perce, converting and baptising many of their leaders, and even translating parts of the Bible into their own language.

Ah. No. I see. He wasn't actually that well liked, as he was, being a strict Presbyterian and all, down on liquor, gambling and other fun activities the Nez Perce, being human, enjoyed, and in fact they quite disliked and even ridiculed him. They surely disliked him mightily when he whipped them or (it says here) instructed them to whip each other for having broken God's laws. But his often brutal treatment of them was ameliorated by his wife, whom the Nez Perce loved, especially the women, who thought her very brave and strove to emulate her example. Henry's inflexible attitude towards his, um, flock, led to the American Board dismissing him in 1842. Not that he took a blind bit of notice, just continued doing what he was doing until, maybe with a sense of fatalism, realising there wasn't really any way they could stop him, him being out in the wilderness with savages and all, they shrugged and rescinded their decision.

When they learned of the massacre of their friends the Whitmans (see further) the Spaldings, thankful that their daughter, who had been staying at the mission, had survived, holed up at Fort Walla Walla (shut up, I'm serious) and, I guess to his credit despite what I said about him above, Henry petitioned the bishop to convince the army not to step in, as it was believed further Indian uprisings and attacks were expected. Oh but again, I should read all the way ahead before writing, as it seems once they reached safety Henry's attitude changed and he advocated for reprisals. So, just looking after his own skin then. Anyway, the Board decided the last thing they wanted was to get involved in a Pacific Northwest war with Indians - Indians whom, after all, they had gone there to convert, and I don't mean into piles of bones - and got the fuck out of there, ceasing all missions in the area.

Safe now in Oregon, and fuming that all his work was to go for nothing, Spalding decided to do what every good Protestant has done since Martin Luther nailed his Grievances to the cathedral door: he blamed the Catholics. Well, it made sense, didn't it? Didn't it? Of course it did. In a nineteenth-century version of the "stab in the back theory" that galvanised support for World War II and brought Hitler to power, Spalding decided that the bishop who had advised halting all missions in the area - and who was of course a Catholic - had somehow orchestrated the massacre of the Whitmans and their mission for reasons. I mean, come on! But though the bishop is reported to have thought him "most ungrateful", Spalding does not seem to have been censured or punished in any way for spreading his lies. How Trumpian, eh? Instead he settled in Oregon and became pastor of the Congregational Church, while his wife took a post as a teacher. She died in 1871 and Henry was married again in 1873, taking the sister-in-law of another preacher whom we'll be looking at too, John Smith Griffin.

Six years later he was back with the Nez Perce, though his mission seems to have only lasted less than a year, and once again he had Catholics in his sights, so much so that he travelled on the new transcontinental railroad back to the Big Apple and on to Washington where he testified before Congress as to the role they and the federal government had played - supposedly - in his failure. He died three years later, having founded a federally funded school for Indians and continued his missionary work in Idaho and Washington up almost to his death.

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Narcissa Prentiss Whitman (1808 - 1847) and Henry Whitman (1802 - 1847)

As we've seen in the account above, husband and wife joined up with Henry and Eliza Spalding to attempt to convert the Nez Perce Indians of the Pacific Northwest, but at one point in the mission their paths diverged from those of the Spaldings, as they headed for Washington with their friends going towards Idaho. This was the beginning of the end for the young couple, but where did it all begin? Like Spalding, Narcissa Prentiss was born in New York and at the age of twenty-eight decided she wanted to be a missionary. She was married the next year (1836) to Marcus Whitman, taking his name and also keeping her own, which I think may have been somewhat atypical for the time and may have shown her to be rather independent, though I doubt she was any sort of feminist. Marcus had wanted to be a minister but was unable to afford the school fees. He trained as a doctor but felt the pull of the west, as did his new wife. Marcus had already answered this call in 1835, travelling with fellow missionary Samuel Parker to northern Idaho and northwestern Montana where he ministered to the Nez Perce Indians.

The done thing seems to have been to have got married and then almost spent your honeymoon telling natives how great your god was, and why they should worship him. Worked for them anyway, and also the Spaldings, who set off on the same journey after having been only recently married too. The Whitmans, having crossed the Rockies with the Spaldings and thereby Narcissa and Eliza becoming the first two women to do so, they set up their mission in the hilariously-named Walla Walla, in Washington. Narcissa at least saw her role as not just converting the heathen, but teaching them white American values, such as chores, making candles and soap, and baking.

The typical white sense of superiority towards what were considered savage and uncivilised peoples shows in Narcissa's letters, where she declares the natives, the Cayuse, are "so filthy they make a great deal of cleaning wherever they go ... " and goes on to lament "we have come to elevate them and not to suffer ourselves to sink down to their standard." Thanks lady: I don't think they asked you to step in with your bloody wooden cross and your posturing and pontificating. Fucking Christians. The Whitmans further instructed the Cayuse to build a place of worship for themselves, and when the Indians wondered what was wrong with the one they had already, Narcissa muttered icily in her letters that "we could not have them worship there for they would make it so dirty and fill it so full of fleas that we could not live in it." Charming. Segregation already in their minds: one church for us, one for those "dirty" natives. That's how to convert them to the love of God, all right.

Samuel Parker had made promises to the Cayuse that they would be compensated for the land on which the white men built. When this payment was not forthcoming, their chief, Umtippe (sounds like an expectant bell boy waiting for a gratuity, doesn't it?), made dire warnings, especially when his wife fell ill. He told Whitman "Doctor, you have come here to give us bad medicines; you come to kill us, and you steal our lands. You had promised to pay me every year, and you have given me nothing. You had better go away; if my wife dies, you shall die also." Further tensions arose when the Catholic Church sent its representatives, including Bishop François Norbert Blanchet to compete with the Protestants for the souls of the Cayuse, and the natives, not surprisingly, played each against the other. Henry Spalding would later, as already related, blame the Catholics for the coming massacre, as well as the closure of all missions in the Pacific Northwest. No evidence exists to support or refute this, but historically the two denominations have always hated and tried to thwart each other, so I'd say it's perhaps not outside the realm of possibility.

Tragedy struck in 1839 when Narcissa's only child, her daughter Alice Clarissa, was drowned when she fell into a pool, but this did not stop her striking out on her own to visit other towns and settlements when her husband headed back home to gain reinforcements, but unbeknownst to him, the mission itself was on borrowed time, as were they. Like the Spaldings, Whitman believed that the alteration of the natives' nomadic habits, and settling them in villages while teaching them European-based agriculture would make them easier to convert, or perhaps to put it more bluntly, a stationery target is easier to hit.

The Cayuse shrugged and said they didn't see what the problem was, so to speak. They had been a nomadic people for thousands of years, and weren't about to change now. Incensed at their stubbornness and reluctance to change, that is, to remodel their lives to shape his vision and for his convenience, Whitman raged again against the Papists: "The novelty of working for themselves and supplying their own wants seem to have passed away; while the papal teachers and other opposers of the mission appear to have succeeded in making them believe that the missionaries ought to furnish them with food and clothing and supply all their wants." Complaints and accusations that were echoed in part across the water in England, and which led to the setting up of workhouses.

Rather oddly, it seems to me, in order to safeguard melon patches from which the Cayuse had been, cartoon-animal-like, stealing the fruits, William Gray, another pioneer who would go on to eventually more or less set up the provisional government of Oregon, had poisoned them. Just a little, not to kill but just to deter the Cayuse from taking the melons. Now, if you're already having problems with natives and are trying to gain their trust, I don't think poisoning their food, even a little bit, is the smartest move, especially when they've already accused you of bringing bad juju in the form of diseases into their community.

In 1847 an epidemic of measles swept through Washington, and the natives, having no natural immunity to the disease, died while the whites mostly survived. While Whitman and the other missionaries did what they could for them, things went from bad to worse when a half-breed Iroquois called Joe Lewis, who had recently joined the mission, spread it about that the white men were poisoning, not treating the patients. Given that they had suffered poisoning before - and deliberate poisoning too - this then was not hard for the natives to believe.

They did, and all hell broke loose.

Marcus was the first to go, taking an axe in the head when he was asked for medicine and taken by surprise, then shot in the neck. As the camp erupted in violence, Cayuse swarmed all over the mission and death was everywhere. Narcissa died soon after her husband, and so ended the mission of the Whitmans to civilise the Cayuse. Soon afterwards their mission was abandoned, and shortly after that the ABCFM declared there would be no more missions authorised into the Pacific Northwest. Neither Narcissa nor Marcus would live to see the results of their interference in a culture, as the Cayuse War exploded across the area, resulting in the decimation of the tribe and leading, along with other Indian wars, to the forced resettlement of the tribes on reservations while white people took their land. I'm sure God would have been proud.

America certainly was (which might be the same thing to some people). Not only was Whitman (Marcus, that is) commemorated in the name of schools and colleges, a forest and a glacier, he has (or had, until it was removed recently in the wake of BLM protests) a statue in the Capitol and even has a day dedicated to him, September 4 being Marcus Whitman day. There is also a hotel and conference centre with his name.

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Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814 - 1888)

At the extreme other end of the country, we have this guy. French born, he arrived in America in 1839, about the same time as the Whitmans and the Spaldings, but went to the mission in Cincinnati, and worked in Ohio and Kentucky until 1850, when he was appointed by the Pope as Bishop in New Mexico. This seems to have come as a surprise to him, and I can't say why he was chosen, whether it was due to reports of his good works or whether in fact it was a poison chalice doing the rounds at the Vatican that Pius XII had to unload on someone. Either way, he arrived way down south in Sante Fe in the summer of 1851, but though the governor welcomed him, the Spanish priests already there did not. They refused to recognise his authority, and he had to go personally to their bishop to confirm the diocese was now under his control. The Spanish priests probably said something similar to "We don' need no steenking Frenchman telling us what to do," but had to accept his authority, as their bishop had said "sorry hombres, is how it is," or something.

With his authority no longer in doubt - the Pope trumps any bishop you may care to name - Lamy set about reforming the New Mexico Church, building schools and making new parishes, and of course building churches. He made himself unpopular by ending the custom of concubinage, by which the local priests, forbidden to marry, could still get their end away with the local talent, and also broke up many brotherhoods, secret and exclusive religious societies. Let's just say he wasn't exactly Mr. Popular from the off. Nevertheless he was successful in moulding the Catholic faith in New Mexico, and he had the St. Francis Cathedral built, but he died in 1888 from pneumonia at the age of seventy-four.

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Thomas Starr King (1824 - 1864)

We've dealt with various religions in this section, from the obvious Catholics and Presbyterians to Methodists, but here's one we haven't come across before. Unitarians apparently believe that God is one being, not a trinity (sounds somewhat more logical than Christianity) and so while they are prepared to believe Jesus was a prophet, an emissary of God, they do not accept that he was God too. Which again I have to say makes far more logical sense, but probably made it hard for King to convince those who were not of his faith to switch. Oh, look! Unitarians also reject the idea of Original Sin and the infallibility of the Bible. I like these guys more and more. Another native of New York, King doesn't appear to have attended any seminaries or schools, leaving his education in fact at the age of fifteen to support his family, and taught himself to be a minister.

He made his name in Boston, in the church on Hollis Street, of which he was made pastor in 1849, and also on the lyceum circuit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyceum_movement), his speeches making him one of the most famous preachers in New England. An abolitionist and an environmentalist, he moved to San Francisco in 1850 and gave sermons on the beauty of Yosemite, for which he would lobby and eventually achieve the status of a national park. During the Civil War he was credited by Lincoln as "the man who saved the Union", by speaking fervently and at length as to why California should not secede.

"I pitched into Secession, Concession and (John C.) Calhoun (former U.S. vice president), right and left, and made the Southerners applaud. I pledged California to a Northern Republic and to a flag that should have no treacherous threads of cotton in its warp, and the audience came down in thunder. At the close it was announced that I would repeat it the next night, and they gave me three rounds of cheers." ... King covered his pulpit with an American flag and ended all his sermons with "God bless the president of the United States and all who serve with him the cause of a common country."

He set up the Pacific branch of the United States Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the Red Cross, which raised money for wounded soldiers, but the constant grind of the lecture circuit took a toll on his health and he died of diphtheria and pneumonia in 1864. Like other missionaries, he is commemorated in schools, parks, mountains, streets, even a giant Redwood, and he has his own statue in the Capitol, though it was replaced by Republicans in 2006 with one of Reagan. Right. Reagan. Okay.

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Buffalo Gals: Women in the American West

Part I: A Man's World: Where No Woman Had Gone Before

It took a special kind of woman to face the new frontier. Perhaps it could be said to have been at least partially responsible for a shift in attitude among women in America towards the middle of the nineteenth century. No longer would it be enough to be demure, elegant, soft-spoken and retiring, allowing men to direct every aspect of their lives. That might have worked in the big - and small - cities of the east, but out here in the West, out on the prairie or in the boom towns a woman would have to consider being able to look after herself. While she would almost certainly leave her home accompanied by a man, it was a long and dangerous journey, and there was no guarantee she would arrive at her destination with that man alive, if she reached it at all. But if she did reach it, having lost her man or men to anything from bandit raids or accidents to diseases or sunstroke or exposure, she would have nobody to fall back upon. Assuming she was not heading to already-established relatives, she would be alone and would have to carve out her own future in this brave new world. Nobody was going to help her, and if anything, any man she might encounter would be more likely to try to take advantage of her, so she would need to be able to take care of herself.

While the legend of the West does not lack entirely for female figures - who does not know Annie Oakely or Calamity Jane? - it kind of centres around those two figures, and if you ask anyone who isn't a student of either feminism or the American West for other names, most will scratch their heads in puzzlement. I know I did. Overall, women in the West seem to traditionally fall into two broad (no pun intended) categories: gunslingers and whores or madams. But of course there were many, many brave women who accompanied their husbands out to the new frontier and made their homes there, and many who made a name for themselves, names which have been all but erased and ignored by history, as generally speaking, the Wild West was a man's world, and its writers, to a very large degree, were and are men, and to be brutally honest, in these men's view, women don't belong on the range.
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But belong or not, ignored or not, pushed to one side and told to hush up, they stubbornly refuse to be forgotten, and many books have been written (mostly, unsurprisingly, by women) chronicling their lives and adventures, and trying to place their contributions to the legend and history of the west into context amid all the gunsmoke, thundering of hooves and whooping of injuns. While the above two ladies certainly deserve their place in history, as do the likes of Belle Starr, Susan Anderson, Eleanor Dumont and Cathay Williams (the first African American woman to serve in the US Army), and they will be covered and given their voice in other sections, here I want to concentrate on more unsung heroes (yes, even less sung than these women, who are at least remembered slightly grudgingly, but are still remembered for all that) who have been completely excluded from the story of the west.

But as Winifred Gallagher puts it in her book New Women in the Old West: From Settlers to Suffragists - An Untold American Story, the new frontier actually, almost paradoxically, provided and opened up new opportunities for women. "Women's status also benefited from conditions in the West's so-called settler society, which by definition was simpler, more forward-looking, and less encumbered by tradition, precedent, and an entrenched, oppositional establishment. During the hardscrabble settlement era, as in most of America today, it took two industrious partners to support a family, which increased women's work and its value. In agrarian areas, unmarried women had their pick of suitors among men loath to homestead without a wife to handle the house and garden and earn much-needed cash from her "home production," whether selling eggs and bread or taking in sewing or boarders.

 In mining towns, women used those same domestic skills to make what seemed like small fortunes by marketing hot meals and clean laundry to the overwhelmingly male population. Some settlers also increased women's civic profile by moving from the private into the public sphere as the "town mothers" who organized many of the West's first schools, churches, and charities. These homemakers and community builders could not achieve economic much less political parity with men in the patriarchal system, but their record of hard work and dedication won respect and made them a force, albeit nonelectoral, to be reckoned with."

In fact, equality for women would come sooner in the west than back in the east, where the worth of, and reliance on women was seen to be more important than was admitted by the comfortable city gents in their furnished houses with all their modern appliances and easy lifestyle. When you're facing a harsh winter or a bleak summer without food or provisions, it's surely an immense comfort to have the little woman there beside you, to share your tribulations as well as your triumphs. So why should they not be able to vote? Why should they be unequal? Despite the picture drawn by our old friend Hollywood of the woman of the west being a weak, ineffectual, often hysterical female who had no real role other than to be exploited or protected, depending on your protagonist(s) and the theme of the particular movie, respect for women grew exponentially in the west, leading to states such as Wyoming (the first in the USA), Utah (though later temporarily rescinded), Colorado and Idaho passing suffrage resolutions before the century was out.

The Homesteader Act, already mentioned earlier, did not differentiate between the sexes: man or woman could own land as long as they went to the west and cultivated it, and this was a huge step forward for women, who up until the passing of this act had been unable to own property if married. Another major development was the Morrill Land-Grant Act, passed a month later, which set up tuition-free colleges and universities, enabling women to study for careers traditionally dominated by men - law, medicine, journalism - and allowing them for the first time to be other than mere homemakers. This sudden influx of highly-educated and capable women (who could of course be, and were, paid less than their male counterparts) also opened up lucrative opportunities for employers, who had until then had to advertise all their positions for men only, and who probably, in most cases, found the idea of women working in their establishments a more attractive prospect.

A sort of reverse backlash in the east, too, meant that women who had until now been confined to the home could seek education in these new colleges and go into waitressing, work in factories, as secretaries and many other occupations previously denied to them for lack of education. The balance of power, work-wise, began to shift dramatically as women, almost en masse, entered the workplace and threatened the dominance of the male. In some ways, these two acts of Congress could be said to have galvanised a sort of female revolution, symbolically striking from them the chains that had held them imprisoned and restricted for so long, and, to carry the analogy slightly further, releasing them into the wild.
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Homesteaders, cowgirls, saloon keepers, all the women who kept the men on the straight and narrow (or failed to, or did exactly the opposite) and stood shoulder to shoulder with them against attacks and adversities. They deserve to be recognised and celebrated, and for my source on this I'm using Erin H. Turners's Wild West Women: Fifty Lives That Shaped the Frontier. Obviously I can't feature all of them, but I will try to give a reasonable and varied cross-section.

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Clara Shortridge Foltz (1849 - 1934)

Showing her streak of independence at an early age, Clara eloped with her lover when only fifteen years old, but as their family grew he found it difficult to support them. She, for her part, was able to do so by writing articles for newspapers such as The New Northwest and the San Jose Mercury. After thirteen years her husband abandoned her, leaving her with five children to support. She did so by studying law in a local judge's office thanks to the patronage of Sarah Knox-Goodridge, a local suffragette, and by giving lectures on suffrage. She managed to get a bill through which changed the requirement for lawyers to be white males, and so became in 1878 the first woman in California, indeed the first on the west coast, to pass the bar. However having been but poorly educated (given that she ran off to have babies at 15) she wanted to study to improve her knowledge of the law, and immediately ran into another obstacle set up by the male-dominated society.

Applying to Hastings College of Law, she was refused admission due to being a woman. With her ally, Laura deForce Gordon, she authored a bill which argued that if women could practice law (a right she herself had procured) then it made no sense for them not to be able to study it. Her bill suggested that "No person shall, on account of sex, be disqualified from entering upon or pursuing any lawful business, vocation, or profession." At a time when women's rights were beginning to be taken seriously, she was able to convince the judge and gain admission to the college for all women. Ironically, the long and protracted legal battle had exhausted her funds, and she was unable to attend the college herself, returning to practicing rather than studying the law. She practiced in San Diego, San Francisco and New York.

Originally a supporter (though not allowed to vote) of the Republican party, she spoke publicly for them in four elections, but switched her allegiance after 1886, lecturing now for the Democrats in Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa. She became a leading figure in the women's voting rights movement, working with the suffrage movement for over half a century and gaining many essential rights for women. In 1893 she suggested the radical idea of a public defender, a system which is now in use across the USA and most of the world, but which then wasn't even considered. This was certainly another first, and Foltz's life would be characterised by pioneering attempts and ideas and firsts.

She was the first female clerk for the State Assembly's Judiciary Committee (1880); the first woman appointed to the State Board of Corrections; the first female licensed Notary Public; the first woman named director of a major bank; and, in 1930, the first woman to run for Governor of California, at the age of 81. She also became the first woman deputy District Attorney, and authored the Women's Vote Amendment for California in 1911. Despite her heavy workload, she never neglected those five children (she did not marry and had no more) and again, despite her prominence in the women's suffrage movement, was keen to stress the importance of the domestic role in women's lives.

When she passed away in 1934 from a heart attack at the age of 85, her coffin was carried by federal and state judges, as well as the Governor of Los Angeles. Although she never got to study at Hastings, under pressure from its female members the college granted her a posthumous degree in Law in 1991. In 2002, the Criminal Court in Los Angeles was renamed in her honour.

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Susette La Flesche aka Inshata Theumba (1854 - 1903)

Born to the son of a French fur trader and his Ponca wife, Susette was educated at a white school in New Jersey after the Presbyterian mission school on the reservation closed. Her parents favoured assimilation with the white people, believing it held the best prospects for their children, and perhaps seeing the writing on the wall as the white man moved west. As regards education, their instincts proved right, as Susette's sister, Susan, was to become the first ever Native American physician, while her other sister, Rosalie, became a financial manager for her tribe. Susette though was more interested in politics and so ensured she could learn the English language, which would be vital if she were to pursue such a career. Having graduated, she returned to the reservation where she wished to teach the Omaha, whose chief, Big Elk, had adopted her father as his son and where her family now lived. She ran into problems of a legal and bureaucratic nature though.

She was told by the Indian Commissioner that she could not teach on the reservation without a certificate, in order to obtain which she requested permission to leave the reservation, was refused, left anyway, and got her certificate. On her return though she was further baulked when the Commissioner said she needed also a "certificate of good moral character". She got this from her school in New Jersey, but now the Commissioner was just simply ignoring her calls. She threatened to go to the newspapers about his intransigence and the clear impression that he simply did not want her teaching here, and he gave in, unwilling to be a part of any investigation, much less a scandal.

She travelled to Oklahoma, where her people, the Ponca, had been forcibly relocated and reported on the poor conditions of the camp, putting into action her earlier threat of using the newspapers to get her point across. Nearly one third of the tribe had already died due to the conditions and the journey to get to the reservation, and malaria was rampant while supplies were scarce, despite the government having promised to furnish them. Further, when the chief of the Omaha, Standing Bear, left the reservation for Nebraska to bury his son, who had died on the journey down, in his native land, he was arrested and put on trial. Susette interpreted for the chief, testifying as to the dismal conditions on the reservation, bringing media attention to the trial and confirming for the first time the rights of Indians as US citizens.

After he won his case, Standing Bear travelled throughout the eastern USA, accompanied by Susette as his interpreter, speaking about the rights of Native Americans. They later took their tour across the Atlantic to England and Scotland. Susette had by now married Thomas Tibbles, the editor of the Omaha Herald, who had been so instrumental in bringing the needed attention to her cause through his newspaper coverage. On their return to America, the couple wrote about the incipient Ghost Dance movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee, in which almost three hundred Lakota were slaughtered by the US Army in 1890. She also wrote and lectured about Native American women's issues. She died in 1903, having just barely seen the new century in, and eighty years later was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame, with entry to the National Women's Hall of Fame following in 1994.

Sarah Jane Cummins

You couldn't call it the ideal honeymoon, could you? Picture the scene: jammed in with the rest of your family and your new husband into a ten foot by three space, jolting and banging along the dirt tracks and across onto the prairie known initially as the Great American Desert, and later renamed as the Great Plains, up the steep inclines of the Rockies and across those mountain ranges, following the trail mostly laid down by Native Americans in earlier times that led to the New Promised Land, sleeping out under the stars because there was so little room in the wagon, and when forced by bad weather to endure the cramped conditions, sharing it with tools, meat, provisions and other worldly goods which had all been piled on and packed into the wagon at the beginning of the journey, and which would not be unloaded until the destination was attained. Sunup to sundown, constantly on the move; hot, sweaty, aching in every bone, apprehensive of bandits or Indians along the way, unsure of even arriving safely, or if you did, of making a success of your new endeavour, and homesick already for the life left behind.

Such was the situation sixteen-year-old Sarah Jane Cummins found herself in  when, along with her new husband of a few weeks, Benjamin Walden, she and her family set out from Missouri in search of a better life on the new frontier. Sarah found that she was forced to grow up very quickly during the journey, and traditional gender roles began to mix and turn fluid as everyone did what they could, regardless of sex, to ensure the success of the venture. Sarah had been used to travelling and moving, as her father had followed the opportunities in each territory as he saw them unfold, moving first to Ohio and then Illinois, but this was to to be the longest and most gruelling journey her father would ever take her on, lasting four months over wet, rocky, and at times arid and scorching terrain with no small amount of danger on the way. I suppose she must have thought that if she and Benjamin lasted through this ordeal, they would be together forever.

Sarah showed herself more than willing to do men's work, as she disdained the practice of ladies riding "side saddle" and rode her horse like a man as she guided her husband's wagon past ruts and pitfalls, also noting the vast wilderness as she rode, taking in all its rugged beauty and composing lyrical descriptions of the trail in her journal. However, as with most of the missionaries written about in the previous piece, there was no real regard for the Native Americans whom, by their incursions into what was their ancestral lands, Sarah and her family, along with all the other settlers, were displacing. Rather, she seems to have taken great umbrage - through her entry in her diary - at Cayuse and Walla Walla parties who caused "a night of terror" as they harassed the wagons trains passing through their homelands, only placated by strong coffee brewed by the invaders.

Sarah turned seventeen during the journey, and by the time they arrived in the Williamite Valley in Oregon and had staked their claim, it became clear that tough as the journey had been, the end point was not like arriving at a hotel or someone's house where you could stay for the holidays. There was nothing at the end of this particular dusty rainbow other than the land - precious though it was, and given free of charge - and everything that they wished to create there they would have to mould with their own hands, from building a home to tilling the land and raising cattle and other livestock. This was definitely a new life that came, to use a twentieth-century expression, with some assembly required. Hard work was the order of the day, and there was no time for rest, chiefly because all that awaited them at their destination was a pretty basic shack or cabin, and it would take real effort to turn it into anything resembling a home they could live in.

I began writing this piece, learning as I went and wondering what great contribution to American history Sarah Jane Cummins made. The answer, I found out, is nothing really, but then in another way everything. She didn't become a lawyer or a doctor (though she did dabble in real estate, something few women back east had the chance or opportunity to engage in) and she didn't single-handedly (so far as I know) hold off any bloodthirsty bands of native savages. Her husband lasted forty-odd years with her, so she wasn't left alone to fend for herself in the new wilderness. In many, indeed most ways she was nothing remarkable.

And yet, Sarah Jane stands as an example of the kind of eastern girl who very quickly became a western woman, adapting to her new life and the challenges of the frontier, making a home for herself and her family (she eventually had five children, though only two survived) and proving that women were more than the sum of their parts. She set, if not a trailblazing path, then at least a marker down for the women who would follow her and colonise the west, the women who would dare to dream of a better, more exciting, more profitable - both in terms of money and of personal betterment - life out beyond the fringes, over the Rockies and across the plains, and, as someone once said, into the West. Proof, indeed, that not all the women who went out to seek their fortune and make a new life were heroines, but they all had courage and determination, and sometimes that's all you need.

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Chapter II: Driving the First Spike: The Long and Winding (Rail)road

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"The day is not far distant when the Pacific will be bound to the Atlantic by iron bands that shall consolidate and strengthen the ties of nationality and advance with giant strides the prosperity of our country." (Speech by Governor Stanford, January 8 1863, Sacramento)

I: Fire-breathing demons from Hell

As in so much of history, it happens that before we can go forward we must look back, back to a time when America, a pretty fledgling nation at this point, was about to grapple with the idea of railroads. As pointed out in the introduction, most of America - at least, the West, the new frontier - was, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, devoid even of roads. Rude paths had been hammered out, mostly by humans or horses trampling down the grass in certain areas, and ultimately failed experiments had been made to introduce toll roads, or turnpikes as the Americans called them. A combination of ingenuity by those who wished to avoid paying the toll and dishonesty on the part of those entrusted to collect it ensured that turnpikes would never work, and the invention of the steam engine in England would herald a slower but no less impressive industrial revolution in the States which would, within a few short decades, see steam-powered paddle liners chugging up the Mississippi and a system of canals being dug to accommodate other routes.

It cannot, of course, be forgotten that not only the steam engine, but the steam locomotive, indeed the very first railway in the world owes its existence to British genius like Matthew Boulton, James Watt and James Stephenson, and that in this, as in so much else during the time of the Industrial Revolution, Britain led the way. America, by contrast, was slow to pick up on the advantages of steam for railway locomotives; truth to tell, English people had been hard enough to convince at the beginning, with dire warnings of sheep in the fields being turned black, the atmosphere itself being choked by the noxious fumes spewing forth from the thundering beasts as they hammered along at a breakneck twenty miles an hour down the iron rails, and the inevitable horror stories of engines exploding, some of which were, sadly true, but this is almost always the case when dealing with any new technology. Many brave men died before powered flight was achieved, and there were plenty of automobile accidents in the early days of the birth of the motor car.

So why, you may ask, if people feared it so much, did they readily consent to board steam ships with barely an eyelid batted? I think that has to do with the sort of idea that goes "out of sight, out of mind". Steam ships, paddle ships, were all rather large and luxurious, the internal workings of the engines that drove the vessel hidden in its bowels, where no passenger went, or needed to go, or see. The only real evidence that the ship was steam-powered were the plumes of black smoke furling out of the stacks, and there was little to no noise. In addition, these steamers, though faster than sailing ships certainly, moved at a rather sedate pace, ambling on down the river as if in no particular hurry to reach their destination. And they sort of weren't: steamers did not tend to build their reputation so much on speed as on luxury. You drifted, but you drifted in style.
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Now contrast that with the first steam locomotives. All shining steel, the engine (the locomotive itself being called the engine, or steam engine, something of a misnomer but it stuck) clearly visible in front of you, the comparatively harsh lines of the thing making it seem wild, untamed, dangerous. The steam from the stack would blow backwards over the carriages, most of which had no windows that closed, so the interiors would quickly fill up with thick black smoke, which, while it would disperse out the other open windows, was quickly replaced by more as the infernal engine manufactured a constant supply of the choking vapour, and the faster it went the more smoke it made, and consequently the more you breathed of the stuff.

Add to this the fact that America - sorry to keep saying it but - a fledgling country, had little in the way of heavy industry at this time. Unlike Britain, whose skies were thick with the excreta of the factories, particularly in the north, and also where heavy fog was commonplace, so smoke would not be seen as too much of an inconvenience by most (not to mention the fact that it rained so often, which would disperse and thin out the smoke), America was at that time unused to industrial pollution. So this was something new, and, like almost all new things, carried a certain amount of fear and trepidation with it. Some visitors, looking at the fearsome steam locomotive static on display, were in terror of it: : "The steam, the smoke, the sparks emitted from the belly of the monster were quite sufficient to invoke anxiety, if not downright terror, in timid souls who drew nigh the early demonstration trains."

Some feared them, yes, to others they were a nuisance. Witness the story of the maiden voyage of the first American-built steam locomotive, the Best Friend, which ran on the southern Charleston & Hamburg Railroad, when a fireman (I'm not sure if he was part of the crew or travelling as a passenger, though I suspect the former, to be in the position he was), annoyed by the whistling sound the safety valve on the steam engine made every few minutes, sat on it. Blocking the release of pressure, he caused it quickly to explode, losing his life and getting the engineer scalded into the bargain. Due to this - possibly apocryphal - story and others, and general fears engendered by scaremongering, perhaps put about by stagecoach companies and others who stood to lose business, even livelihoods if the railroads took over, most of the embryonic railroads that sprung up from about 1820 to 1830 tended to go the safer route, and have horses pull the wagons rather than steam locomotives.

You knew where you were with horses. You could talk to them (after a fashion), understand when they were scared or rebellious, quiet them down, force them onwards. There was a symbiosis, an understanding between man and beast that had existed for most of humanity's history. Steam locomotives did not respond to cajoling, punishment, threats or pleas. If they stopped, they stopped, and on general principles, horses tended to explode a lot less than steam engines were said to. No matter the technology, the new will always be treated with suspicion and fear. Many households refused to install the new-fangled electricity, preferring the "safety" and comfort of gas. Of course, much of this had to do with the war of words that had gone on between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, each claiming his product was safe while that of his rival was not, and even in the twentieth century, many balked or laughed at buying a personal computer in the early 1980s, believing them pointless and an expensive luxury. Even the "fad" of television was scoffed at in its infancy.

But of course, progress can only be made if the new technology is taken advantage of; horses could only pull wagons at a certain speed, and they tired, and had to be replaced, and could not cover long distances. True, they did not emit thick black smoke from their heads, but on balance the advantages of steam powered locomotives over horses were obvious, though it would take some time before the people, including those who ran the first railroads, could be convinced of this. There's even a story that, after the untimely demise of the Best Friend (due to no fault of its construction, operation or mechanics, but down entirely to human stupidity and stubbornness) passengers had to be reassured they were protected from future explosions by the addition of a "barrier car" to the train, packed with cotton. As if that would matter, but it seemed to set their minds at rest.

Understanding finally came when a small engine built by inventor Peter Cooper, the Tom Thumb, almost successfully outran a thoroughbred horse in a race to see which was faster, the locomotive only failing due to a mechanical failure which caused it to stop. Prior to the mishap though it had well outdistanced the horse and its rider, and railroad bosses were convinced that the future lay in steam, not (excuse me) horse power.
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While we are talking essentially about the wild West here, the term denotes pretty accurately the procedures anyone who wanted to start a railroad had to go through. There was little cohesion, the government was not initially involved and left it to individual states to sort their own railroads out, each state demanding a charter be applied for and issued before any work could begin or any land be allocated. This worked on the principle of "eminent domain", which essentially meant that, once a charter had been granted, if a railroad company wanted your land because it was about to build through it, they got it. You'd get compensated, but would not be able to refuse to sell. The right of eminent domain didn't just get handed out though: railroad companies had to lobby for it and fight for it in court, opposed by vested interests such as turnpike operators, steamship lines and stagecoach companies, as well as hostile farmers who weren't too happy about losing part of their lands, no matter what compensation might be offered. And then there were canal operators and tavern owners, both of whom stood to lose business if the railroad companies got their way.

But the opposing factions were destined to lose. Representing a fading way of life, an out-of-date and outmoded form of transport, they were about to be kicked savagely in the nuts by the bright new technological marvel of the century. As one court ruling in New York put it, "Railroads are not only of great public use in the ordinary business transactions of the citizen, but they may be more advantageously used than turnpike roads for national purposes; . . . they tend to annihilate distance, bringing in effect places that are distant near to each other: tending in their magic influence to the extension of personal acquaintance, the enlargement of business relations, and cementing more firmly the bond of fellowship and union between the inhabitants of the States. Next to the moral lever power of the press should be ranked the beneficial influence of railroads in their effects upon the vast and increasing business relations of the nation, and promoting, sustaining and perpetuating the happiness, prosperity and liberty of the people."

Start talking in glowing terms, in a newly-independent country, of the happiness, prosperity and most importantly liberty of the people, and you had the public on-side, anyone grumbling about the railroads now looking like a sore loser (which they were, mostly) trying to stand in the way of progress. And we all know what happens when you try to stand in the way of progress, don't we? Progress just rolls right over you and keeps going. There is no stopping it. And there would be no stopping it. Trains and railroads were the future, steam was the future, speed and power and convenience and comfort all beckoned from that shining twin silver track winding away into the distance of the American imagination, and the idea was decided forever.

Of course, the railroad companies still had to pay. Charters were expensive and hard to attain, but now that eminent domain had been enshrined in the history of the railroad, once they had the charter they had the right to take whatever land they needed, as long as they compensated the owner. It surely goes without saying that with state involvement (and, perhaps tacitly, or even covertly, federal too) the scope for corruption was widespread, from monopolies granted to certain railroads by their states to tax exemptions and lotteries to attract private investors. As the railroad later grew, and the transcontinental began to be more than just a pipe dream, this corruption would grow too, earning the railroad bosses the dubious reputations that had dogged cattle barons and later oil barons. Some of the larger states even supported or financed railroads in other states, but with strings attached. Boston sponsored the Western Railroad to the tune of nearly four and a half million dollars, while the Erie Railroad in Pennsylvania received three million from New York, but had to agree to route the railroad through a sparsely populated area on the border between the two states, which was hoped would stimulate growth. New York financed many other railroads, in fact being one of the biggest investors in the system, outlaying a total of nine million dollars to ten different railroad companies.

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Chains of Misery: The Dark, Infernal Engine of Oppression

In a typical attempt to rewrite history, most, though not all, books written on the railroad tend to gloss over or even ignore entirely the shameful practice prevalent in the southern states of America during the early years of its creation. While slavery had been a dark part of man's history for hundreds of years, by the nineteenth century most countries had outlawed and banned it, with a few exceptions, America of course being the most prominent. They must surely have known their time had come, but the southern states of America clung to their belief in, and their perceived right to slavery like the last ragged gasps of a hated old man dying, with nobody to miss him and nothing left to live for, refusing to die, holding on to life just for spite. It was, and had become, a way of life for them, and generations had grown up knowing no other way, but it would be churlish to suggest they resisted because they didn't know any better. Of course they did.

But without going into a whole treatise on the idea of slavery itself, as I already noted in another section, it seems to me that I owe it to the memory of all those brutalised, killed, raped and whose freedom was trampled on as if it were nothing to remember them and report the dreadful conditions in which they laboured. Seen as nothing but property of course, they were hired out to the railroad companies by the plantation owners, and hey, if they didn't return, who cared? The slave bosses could always buy more slaves. So there was really little to keep the construction foremen from working the slaves to death, all in the name of progress and, more importantly, profit. And, naturally (!), of showing the black man his proper place.
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This may account for the poor quality of the railroads built there, and their limited success. Quite apart from the misery of being a slave, I imagine it is hard to motivate one to work on a project on which they are forced to labour. In the northern states, men would work on the railroad with a sense of pride, a feeling of accomplishment, a desire to be part of history. And, of course, for money. Slaves would know that the railroad was for whites only, that they would never ride it, that it would never be of benefit to them, that all it would do, in essence, would be convey the fruits of their backbreaking toil to the ports for sale. Hard to get excited or patriotic about such an endeavour.
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Of course, there were the terrible working conditions to take into account too. White men on the northern railroads might think they were hard done by and poorly paid, but slaves weren't paid at all, and while free men could go on strike - or threaten to - to increase wages, such avenues were not open to the slave. Not that he needed them, since, as I've just said above, he didn't get paid. But that wasn't in any way the worst of it. With no regard for their safety and no care for their wellbeing, railroad bosses forced the workers to endure the harshest of regimes, feeding them food that was little better than offal (when they fed them at all), leaving them prey to attack by insects, snakes, wild beasts and diseases in the swamps and jungles through which they rammed their rails. Scarlet fever, cholera and malaria swept through the camps, which were not much to speak of in terms of accommodation. Here's an example.

The Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad kept the slaves "in a square pen, made of pine poles, through which one might thrust his double fists, [with] no shutter on the door . . . no chimney and no floor, no bed clothing and no cooking utensils." In fact, the conditions were known to be so bad that plantation owners often turned down large sums in exchange for hire of their slaves, not because they feared for their safety, but because they didn't want to lose their valuable property. Considering how bad life on the plantations was, it's telling that many slaves preferred (not that they had a choice) to remain there rather than go into the service of the railroad companies.

After they lost the Civil War, with the Emancipation Proclamation forcing them to free their slaves, southern states made covert deals among each other and had prisoners shuttled over borders and pressed into work gangs to labour on the railroad. They may have been treated marginally better than the slaves, though not much.

Although most railroads in the north crossed from state to state, it was a different matter down south, where each state ruled that its railroad stay within the boundaries of its own state. Most of these were short, slow and badly built, and serviced the cotton industry, running from plantations to ports, with not too much interest by the state in the line carrying passengers.

In the north (and presumably the south too) fears of the burgeoning new technology were allayed by almost homily-like dissertations on how the railroad would cure everything from poverty to homelessness, provide people a better life and a brighter future, and how everything good would come of it, and nothing bad. Of course, along with those promises came, as in the church, the outstretched hand, as people were asked to invest their paltry savings in this or that railroad, not all of which prospered, though many did.

A rather prescient prediction, however, that was to come true came in 1832 from a writer on railroad matters, Charles Caldwell, when he spoke in glowing terms of a state which was at the time little more than a mostly uninhabited swamp, and declared that the railroad would soon be ""enabling and inducing invalids, and people of feeble constitutions, to migrate from the south to the north, in summer, and from the north to the south, in winter." A man somewhat ahead of his time, it would seem. Railroads were to be seen, too, as the great leveller, as the rich and the poor should both be able to afford to travel on them (whether the idea of different classes of travel on the trains - a virtual segregation by class - was envisaged at this time or not I don't know), though it was quietly agreed that this situation might not suit the more well-off, who might be offended at having to share the same train as those below their social station, no pun intended.
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Ironsides and Bulls: Isaac Dripps, Matthias Baldwin and the birth of the American locomotive

American railroads owe much to a young engineer with the unfortunate name of Isaac Dripps, who, without any plans for one and without ever having seen such a thing before, assembled in a matter of weeks the John Bull, a Stephenson locomotive that had been shipped to the US in parts. He then became chief engineer of the Camden & Athboy Railroad, and set about improving the design of the John Bull, then designing his own locomotives. He added many features, including something unique to US trains, the cowcatcher. This, it must be said, was a heinously cruel attachment, originally intended to impale any cattle who wandered onto the unfenced track, and later to knock them out of the way, but whichever method was chosen, the cow or bull or sheep or ox was not going to survive the impact. The cowcatcher did not catch cows at all, but slew them, and its inventor had no interest in saving or protecting the cattle, merely ensuring that impact with them did not derail the train.

Another amateur engine designer, a jeweller by trade, Matthias Baldwin had put together an engine as a hobby, and  was asked by the owner of a museum to build a small locomotive to pull around some cars in a display in the museum. Local railroad bosses saw it, and approached Baldwin to make a locomotive for them. He produced "Old Ironsides", a big, heavy, slow machine that often needed the assistance of horses as it regularly rocketed around at one mile an hour, but he worked on it and made improvements, and was soon in the business of making locomotive engines. In a relatively short space of time, American locomotives took on distinctive characteristics that set them apart from the British and European ones, such as wide chimney stacks with sparkcatchers to reduce the likelihood of fires being started by stray sparks and cabs for the crew. The wider wheels too, vital for transport along the wider and heavier American rails, helped make the engines more robust, true workhorses, and they in time attained a grace of their own that bordered on their being seen as works of art.

Carriages, however, were another matter. The first ones were nothing more than old stagecoach bodies on flat trucks linked together by loose chains, and jerked and buffeted the passengers so badly that few early trips ended without bruises and the odd bout of concussion. People carrying umbrellas, in the hope they would protect them from the smoke, found them catching fire and also being whisked over the side by the violent motion of the train. One difference, however, between European and American carriages was the lack of any first-class, or other class segregation, as all carriages (called cars in America) were open and without compartments. This did not always suit passengers, as people liked their privacy, but one thing remained, even in the supposedly liberal north: black people had to travel in their own carriages and were not allowed mix with the whites.

In contrast to Britain and Europe, American railroads worked on the principle of "build 'em fast and cheap and get 'em earning", which meant inferior materials were used, less tunnels bored and less stations built, and of course little attention given to safety issues, something which would come back to haunt the American railroads down the line. Sorry. But while there were now railroads in operation in the US, it wasn't anything like a network, with small lines running from this town to that mine, and no further, or slightly larger lines serving one or two towns directly along its path. I suppose they could all but be called local or even internal lines; services that provided transport from a specific place to a specific place, often with no stops along the way, bringing to mind the vision of a child's toy train set running endlessly round in circles, or down a straight lenght of track, unable to go anywhere once it reached the end and having to be returned to its starting point, the locomotive version perhaps of a shuttlecock constantly going from one fixed point to the other, and back.

Although the railroad began to take America by storm between the late 1830s and the early 1840s, it was new technology, and like all new developments people weren't quite sure where it was going exactly. Many saw it as a novelty, a day out, somewhere to take the kids - wagon to the train station, ride the train to its terminus (next town probably, or some point within the same town even) and back, then hop into the wagon and home. Few actually envisaged it as any sort of potential replacement for their wagons, and almost nobody foresaw the idea of not only towns but cities being linked by the iron horse, much less a national network that would, in time, stretch right across the country from coast to coast. What happened in 1837 did not help matters.

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A Country in Crisis: the Panic of 1837

Any new economy is going to be slowly rising on shaky feet, and it should not be forgotten or underestimated that America was at this point less than sixty years old, counting from the time it became a nation independent of Great Britain. Several factors came together to plunge the country into a half-decade-long depression from which it struggled to recover. As is almost always the case, the crash was preceded by a time of booming economy, when slaves, land and cotton all commanded a high price, and business was good. Relying somewhat on loans extended from Britain, America was hit by a plague of Hessian fly, which decimated wheat crops and, as we've seen from the examination of the first Irish Famine in my History of Ireland journal, when the supply is reduced the demand is increased and as a result the price skyrockets, as it did, leaving many American families (presumably mostly poor ones) to starve.

Banks like to speculate. They always have done, and, despite the many many dire and terrible warnings served up to them from the Great Crash of 1929 to the Financial Collapse of 2008, they probably always will. After all, it's easy to gamble when it's not your own money you're risking. And so in the 1830s British banks had speculated in risky ventures, some of which included the American transportation networks, and as a result, as is always the case eventually, their reserves began to be depleted. And as always happens when this is the case, they began to call in their loans. The demand for cotton dropped (I don't know why) and as this was perhaps the largest export, America found itself in big trouble.
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Certain banking decisions made by the federal government exacerbated the problem, and eventually triggered a real estate crash, leading to something of a perfect storm as the American economy began to approach the U-bend. New York banks lost over one hundred million dollars (back then; around the three billion mark today) between them, and almost a third of the banks in the USA went out of business. States defaulted on their bonds to British banks, and America was for a time forced to withdraw from the international money market. Naturally, the fall in cotton demand was felt most keenly in the south, where many plantation owners, having spent their profits in advance, were forced to sell up. What happened to their slaves is, sadly, anyone's guess.

The crisis began to peter out around 1842, and with the discovery of gold in California and later silver in Nevada, the economy bounced back and America began to chart its own financial destiny, no longer reliant on other powerful countries such as Britain for loans. The Panic did however have the long-lasting and far-reaching effect of dinting people's confidence in banks and financial institutions, a nervous relationship between the two which has persisted to this day, and with good reason. As alluded to above, it does not seem that banks learn from their mistakes; when they overreach, and are about to pitch forward into the abyss, the hand of government is always there to catch them, and even when that hand was withdrawn in 2008 and some huge American banks allowed to fail, the others who were bailed out did not take this as a warning, but licence to continue on as they had been, a temporary blip on their entitlement to lose people's money and shrug, while pension funds and life savings vanished into an all-consuming chasm.

By the time the Panic of 1837 had faded to memory, American railroads were up and running, but even during that turbulent time, some managed not only to get built, but to expand, including the first ever proper rail network.
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Leading the way: The Erie Railroad

Proposed as an alternative to, and mirroring the route of, the Erie Canal, the railroad was of course opposed by the operators of that canal, quite aware they were going to lose business if it was built. But protests by locals, many of whom had no access to the canals and therefore no transportation, quieted them and the building went ahead. In 1832 the governor of New York granted the railroad the charter to lay track from the Hudson River at Piermont (north of the Big Apple) westward to Lake Erie at Dunkirk. Construction began in 1836 and in 1841 permission was granted for the railroad to cross over into Pennsylvania on the west side of the Delaware. At 450 miles in length, it was easily the largest railroad in America at the time. However, to paraphrase the Bard slightly, the course of the American railroad ne'er ran smooth, and the New York & Erie Railroad, as it was originally called, suffered many setbacks during its construction, and actually went bankrupt not once, but five times!

As in all such projects, while many may welcome the new pathway to other cities, there were those who, while not necessarily opposed to it, saw a chance to cash in on the great American dream and do what humans have been doing from time immemorial: make a fast buck. Land had to be bought from farmers and plainsmen, frontiersmen and hillbillies, and they all demanded as high a price as they could get. Even some Native Americans - with whom we will deal extensively later, as their role in this shining new venture has, like that of the slaves in the south, been mostly airbrushed from the history of the American railroad - were canny enough to make money out of it. A Seneca chief, demanding ten thousand dollars for the right of way through his ancestral lands, answered the bluster of the foreman, who claimed the land was good for nothing else and was not worth such a price, that whatever else it was not good for, it apparently was good for the railroad. Hard to argue with that kind of logic.

A more religious or superstitious person might have claimed God did not want this railroad built. After advancing a loan of three million dollars, the city of New York was beset by a terrible and tragic fire that razed the financial district to the ground, and bankrupted investors. As I say, the first time the railroad went bust, but by no means the last. When it rose again there was a new president in charge, and he took advantage of the labour of immigrant Irish workers, who had come to America on the infamous "coffin ships", fleeing the Great Famine and hoping to find a new life. Though wages were absurdly low, they were better than nothing, and if there's one thing an Irishman does well, it's backbreaking hard labour. As a result, Irish workers became part of the very structure of the railroad building, and would remain so as it developed across the nation into a coast-to-coast network.
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Of course, one other thing an Irishman does almost better than anyone else is pick fights, and if there's no foreigner to fight with, why then fellow Irishmen will do. Labourers from Ireland were divided into two camps, those who hailed for Cork and Munster, the south and southeast of the country, called the Corkonians, and those who came from Connaught, Galway and such places, basically the west of Ireland, who for some reason called themselves the Fardowners. When the Corkonians agreed to work on the railroad for twenty-five cents less than the going rate, the enraged Fardowners attacked their camp - mostly a big barn - toppled it and made every Corkonian swear not to work on the railroad. Then, still spoiling for a fight, they made for a group of German workers, but they, though outnumbered, gave the Irishmen a bloody nose, and the militia had to be called into re-establish order. Talk about Gangs of New York!

Irish or German though, Corkonian or Fardowner, the railroad worker's natural enemy did not discriminate or take  sides. The cruel icy snow that blanketed the tracks up to five feet in depth was hated by all, and in some begrudging form of co-operation the two crews would work together to clear the lines and allow further construction. This would become an increasingly difficult job in the years ahead, as the railroad network moved up into the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges, where the snowfalls would not be just irritating and inconvenient deposits to be cleared away by the sweat of one's brow, but deadly, constant and life-threatening blizzards that could destroy track and wipe out whole camps of labourers at a stroke.

Errors plagued the building of the Erie Railroad, which, given it was one of the first - if not the first - is perhaps understandable, but some of the decisions are hard to fathom, such as the refusal to take the opportunity to buy the Harlem & New York Railroad, necessitating a steamer ride downriver for the passengers, the decision deliberate, as it was envisioned that the people might enjoy a trip on the river! Also the gauge chosen for the track, in the mistaken belief it was the same as the one used in Britain, and the usage of piling to support the tracks, an endeavour abandoned after an outlay of a quarter of a million dollars showed it was useless.

Whether all states did this, or whether the southern states took their cue from that of New York, or whether, indeed, it was mere coincidence I don't know, but the Erie Railroad was expressly prohibited from crossing state lines so as to protect New York's jealously-guarded status as a trading port. This decision would later be seen to be wrong, and would have to be reversed, at massive expense for the state. The failure - not only on the part of the Erie, but all American railroads - to settle on a universal gauge standard meant that connections between different railroads were at first impossible, as the gauge (distance between the tracks) of one would be different to another, and the trains from the one could not roll on the tracks of the other, making each railroad isolated to its own route.

The odd thing is, most people wanted this, even the normal folks. Riding on a train to get somewhere was all very well, but nobody wanted to invite those from other cities into theirs, in communities that had been, until the advent of the railroad, largely isolated and from which people seldom if ever tended to travel, with a kind of innate distrust of "the world outside". Not to mention farmers and other traders, who, while they enjoyed using the convenience of the train to get their product to market faster, realised rather belatedly that this was a two-way street (or, to be more annoyingly accurate, a two-way rail) and that now people from outside of town could bring their produce to the markets these people served, up until now, as sole supplier. This mighty new sword, poised to cut through the previously inaccessible American countryside and open up new vistas and opportunities, was proving indeed to be double-edged, and sharp.

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Telegraph (Rail)Road

An almost by-product of the rise of the railroad was the sudden influence and acceptance of a system that had been frowned upon, mistrusted and even laughed at when first trialled. The spread of the telegraph would almost be down to one man, and he was in charge of the Erie Railroad.
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Charles Minot (1810 - 1866)

As would be proven time and time again, running a railroad was a tough business, and not for the faint-hearted. It required big men with big voices and big ambitions (and big pockets) who would be hands-on, banging the boardroom table or sometimes even banging, literally or figuratively, heads together to get things done. No shrinking violet, no man afraid to raise his voice or swim against the flow, or speculate where others feared to invest, was likely to ever have a successful business, so much more so in that of the new cattle drive, the railroad. Such a man was Charles Minot, a barrister-to-be, son of a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, but whose head was turned not by the law but by the locomotive. A man who got interested in engineering and worked for the Boston & Maine Railroad, where he got to grips with the telegraph, one of the first men to master it. He moved on from the Boston & Maine to the Erie Railroad, becoming its General Superintendent in 1850.

Minot had an odd way of dealing with insubordination. If he called a man to his office to chew him out, and another man looked in before him, his quick temper would explode and be expended on that man, leaving the - usually blameless - man in question wondering what he had done to deserve such treatment, and no doubt retreating in a hurry, while the actual focus of his anger, when he appeared, would be waved off without a word.

Minot was one of the first to work with the telegraph, as mentioned, and also possibly the first to see its potential for use in communicating with his trains. Prior to this, the only way of finding out whether a train was on the way or not was by looking out for the smoke from the stack, usually visible just above the horizon, and often only discernible through a telescope utilised by a station manager who had climbed up a special pole in order to get the necessary height to spot it. There was no such thing as switching and all trains ran on the same track, so for two trains to be on the same line at the same time, without adequate distance between them, could spell disaster. Often, trains would be required to pull in to a station and wait for the one due to pass before they could again use the track.
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Minot changed all this. He had long lines of telegraph poles built along the route at the side of the tracks, and though it took some coaxing, demonstration and bullying to get the drivers to trust the contraption, eventually his innovation was praised in 1855 by the state's Engineer and Surveyor in his report:

The telegraph has been in use on the Erie since 1852 [meaning practically]. By the concurrent testimony of the superintendents of the road, it has saved more than it cost every year. There is an operator at every station on the line, and at the important ones day and night, so placed that they have a fair view of the track. They are required to note the exact time of the arrival, departure, or passage of every train, and to transmit the same by telegraph to the proper officer. On each division there is an officer called train despatcher, whose duty it is to keep constantly before him a memorandum of the position of every train upon his division, as ascertained by the telegraphic reports from the several stations. The trains are run upon this road by printed time-tables and regulations. When they become disarranged, the telegraph is also used to disentangle and move them forward. When trains upon any part of this road are delayed, the fact is immediately communicated to the nearest station, and from there by telegraph to every station on the road. Approaching trains are thus warned of the danger, and accidents from this cause are prevented.

When one or more of the trains from any general cause, like that of snow storms, etc., have been retarded and are likely to produce delays on the other trains, the train despatcher is authorized to move them forward by telegraph under certain rules which have been arranged for that purpose. Having before him a schedule of the time of the passage of each train at its last station, he can determine its position at any desired moment with sufficient accuracy for his present purpose, and can adopt the best means of extricating the delayed trains and of regulating the movement of all so as to avoid any danger of collision or further entanglement. He then telegraphs to such stations as are necessary, giving orders to some trains to lay by for a certain period, or until certain trains have passed, and to others to proceed to certain stations and there await further orders.

To prevent any error or misunderstanding between the despatcher and the conductor of the train, he is required to write his order in the telegraph operator's book. The operator who receives the message is required to write it upon his book, and to fill up two printed copies, one of which he hands to the conductor of the train, and one to the engineman. The despatcher then transmits a message to the conductor, asking him the question : " How do you understand my message?" To which the conductor must make reply in his own words, repeating the substance of the message as he understands it, to detect any error which may be made by the operator, or of his own understanding of it. If this is satisfactory to the despatcher, he telegraphs, "All right, go ahead!" and until this final message is received, no trains can be moved on the road by telegraph. Time is saved by using abbreviations for stations and messages, trains, etc.

In this way, if a passenger train is delayed an hour or more, all freight trains which would be held by it at the several stations under the general rules are moved forward to such other passing places as they are certain to reach before the delayed trains could overtake them, and thus it frequently happens that in a single day the trains which would otherwise be delayed, are moved forward by telegraph, the equivalent to the use of two or three engines and trains.

Not surprisingly, soon after this the telegraph became the standard way of communicating with trains, of scheduling and dispatching them, and, in time (sadly) of communicating news of crashes or other delays that might occur along the line, as well as weather reports and other items of interest to the driver.
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Daniel McCalllum (1815 - 1878)

If Minot got it done, pushed it through, another man made sure it kept being done. Hailing from Scotland, Daniel McCallum came to America when his family emigrated to New York when he was only seven years old. Another civil engineer, he began his career designing buildings then moved on to bridges, where he pioneered a new concept which resulted in the McCallum Inflexible Arched Truss Bridge, able to take much heavier loads than other bridges of its time. In 1854 he succeeded Minot as General Superintendent of the Erie Railroad, where he had very specific ideas about management, explained in a report to the stockholders in 1856:

"A superintendent of a road fifty miles in length can give it's business his professional attention and may be constantly on the line engaged in the direction of its details; each person is personally known to him, and all questions in relation to its business are at once presented and acted upon, and any system however imperfect may under such circumstances prove comparatively successful.

In the government of five hundred miles in length a very different state exists. Any system which might be applicable to the business and extent of a short road would be found entirely inadequate to the wants of a long one. and I am fully convinced that in the want of system perfect in its details, properly adapted and vigilantly enforced, lies the true secret of their [the large roads'] failure; and that this disparity of cost per mile in operating long and short roads, is not produced by a difference in length, but is in proportion to the perfection of the system adopted..."

McCallum was the first, not just railroad man but businessman to see a way to delineate and delegate responsibilities to staff, so that certain people were authorised and tasked with certain areas of the business only, everything got done properly and, perhaps as importantly - leaving Charles Minot's rather novel approach to one side - when something went wrong, it was easy to apportion blame. He also invented what is generally believed to be the world's first organisation chart, and his model of business management set the standard other businesses across America were to adopt, so in some ways he could even been seen as the father of business organisation in America. He explained his chart thusly:

"By inspection it will be seen that the Board of Directors as the fountain of power, concentrates their authority in the President as the executive Officer, who in that capacity directly controls those officers who are shown on the Diagram at the termini of the lines diverging from him, and these in their turn, through all the various ramifications down to the lowest employee control those who terminate the lines from them.

All orders from the Superior officers are communicated in the above order, from superior to subordinate to the point of desired; thereby securing despatch in their execution and maintaining proper discipline without weakening the authority of the immediate superior of the subordinate controlled by the order thus transmitted. Each individual, therefore, holds himself responsible only to his immediate superior."

He had more ideas too:

"A system of operations to be efficient and successful should be such as to give to the principal and responsible head of the running department a complete daily history of details in all their minutiae. Without such supervision, the procurement of a satisfactory annual statement must be regarded as extremely problematic. The fact that dividends are made without such control does not disprove the position, as in many cases the extraordinarily remunerative nature of an enterprise may ensure satisfactory returns under the most loose and inefficient management..."

McCallum presented the following general principles for the formation of such an efficient system of operations, reprinted in Vose (1857)

First. A proper division of responsibilities.

Second. Sufficient power conferred to enable the same to be fully carried out, that such responsibilities may be real in their character.

Third. The means of knowing whether such responsibilities are faithfully executed.

Fourth. Great promptness in the report of all derelictions of duty, that evils may at once be corrected.

Fifth. Such information to be obtained through a system of daily reports and checks that will not embarrass principal officers nor lessen their influence with their subordinates.

Sixth. The adoption of a system, as a whole, which will not only enable the general superintendent to detect errors immediately, but will also point out the delinquent.

About the core principle of management, he summarized:
"All that is required to render the efforts of railroad companies in every respect equal to that of individuals, is a rigid system of personal accountability through every grade of service..."

Vose (1857, p. 416) added, that all subordinates should be accountable to, and directed by, their immediate superiors only. Each officer must have authority, with the approval of the general superintendent, to appoint all persons for whose acts he is held responsible, and to dismiss any subordinate when in his judgment the interests of the company demand it.[/I]
 
In 1977 business professor Robert Chandler had this to say about the man and his system:

"McCallum's principles and procedures of management, like his organization chart, were new in American business. No earlier American businessman had ever had the need to develop ways to use internally generated data as instruments of management. None had shown a comparable concern for the theory and principles of organization. The writings of James Montgomery [a British textile manager with American experience] and the orders of plantation owners to their overseers talked about the control and discipline of workers, not the control, discipline, and evaluation of other managers. Nor does Sidney Pollard in his "Genesis of Modern Management" note any discussion about the nature of major principles of organization occurring in Great Britain before the 1830s, the data at which he stops his analysis...Poor had McCallum's organization chart lithographed and offered copies for sale at $I a piece. Douglas Galton, one of Britain's leading railroad experts, described McCallum's work in a parliamentary report printed in 1857. So too did the New York State Railroad Commissioners in their annual reports. Even the Atlantic Monthly carried an article in 1858 praising McCallum's ideas on railroad management...

(all the above copied verbatim from Wiki, as I'm a lazy git and I don't really understand it anyway)

Other railroads were springing up, as the Erie proved the concept. The Pennsylvania Railroad ran from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, almost as long itself as its competitor (though strictly speaking they weren't, as the Pennsylvania Railroad was built to shuttle between the two cities, and no more) at 137 miles. Unlike the Erie though, the Pennsylvania was never in danger of going bust, returned fine financial dividends to its investors, and generally avoided many of the mistakes made by its predecessor. Much of that was due to one man; where the Erie had Charles Minot, the Pennsylvania had John Edgar Thomson.
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John Edgar Thomson (1808 - 1874)

A civil engineer like his father, who had built the first experimental railroad in America, John travelled to Britain, unlike many of his contemporaries, studying the railway systems there, and brought back invaluable knowledge and experience he would put into practice when building his own railroad. He worked for the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad and later for the Camden & Amboy, and was only twenty-four when he made his trip across the Atlantic. Two years later he was taken on as chief engineer for the Georgia Railroad, and his expertise soon made him a household name and much sought-after. By 1845 he had laid down the longest railroad of the time, at 174 miles, longer even than the Erie, and when he moved to take charge of the newly-chartered Pennsylvania Railroad he shone in the task, indispensable to the company, even creating the "horseshoe curve", a system of three curved tracks which greatly increased efficiency and safety. He was the first to switch from wood to coal as fuel for the locomotives, a move copied by every other railroad and which increased the demand for coal in the USA. You could say in some ways he virtually put Pennsylvania on the map, or at least returned it to what the state must have seen as its rightful place, after it had begun to lose ground to other transport operators and was in fear of being left behind.

He led a takeover of the railroad in 1852, becoming its president and setting about making it more profitable and efficient, his flair for figures and management style being imitated by other railroads, and other companies. Pennsylvania Railroad quickly became a powerhouse, and later it expanded beyond the borders of the state, moving into Ohio and then New York (surely a rival to Erie Railroad at this point?), on into New Jersey and eventually as far as Chicago. He negotiated for steel to replace the old wooden bridges and iron rails, making his railroad sturdier and able to bear heavier engines. Becoming one of the US's largest and most profitable railroads was not enough for Thomson though, who had his eyes ever on expansion, and with the nascent transcontinental in mind, bought an interest in the Union Pacific Railroad.

Benjamin H. Latrobe (1806 - 1878)

Another major figure in the evolution of the early American railroad, Latrobe was a native of Pennsylvania but it was in Baltimore, Maryland that he studied to be a civil engineer like his father, and to which he moved back after having completed his studies at Georgetown, Washington. In 1820 he was engaged by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to survey and plan the Washington leg of the route, and he designed the Thomas Viaduct, which at the time was the largest bridge in America. He was appointed chief engineer in 1842.

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Philip Evan Thomas (1776 - 1861)

Another one born in the year America won her independence, Thomas was one of the architects behind the Baltimore & Ohio, and has been called "the Father of the American Railroad". He was related by marriage to the founder of Johns Hopkins University, which is still in operation today. Along with other investors he attained the charter in 1827 for the Baltimore & Ohio, which would be America's first railroad, and one of the first in fact in the world. Construction began in 1828 and the first train was running two years later. He was one of the few railroad executives who did anything for Native Americans, heading the Society of Friends Indian Affairs Committee, and representing the Six Indian Nations in Washington.
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George Brown (1787 - 1859)

A native of County Antrim, in Northern Ireland, Brown emigrated at the age of 18 to Maryland, where he joined the militia and helped defend Baltimore against the British in the War of 1812, later joining the family business of investment banking, then started his own bank, which is one of America's largest private banks even today. Together with Evan Thomas and others, he proposed and then financed the building of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, being elected its treasurer. Another philanthropist, he was in charge of the House of Juvenile Offenders from 1849 until his death ten years later, and served as president of the Baltimore Association for the Improvements of the Conditions of the Poor.

Although the first American railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio was not the most progressive, being left well behind by the Erie and others as they refused to commit to the new technology of steam locomotives, insisting on relying on horse power for several years. It would take a demonstration, as already detailed, by Peter Cooper's tiny Tom Thumb to convince the bosses at B&O that steam was the way to go, though they would still take several years to implement the change. They would however be the first railroad to use the new technology of the telegraph, while it would be the Erie's Charles Minot who would use it to its fullest.

While we can - rightly and with full justification - deplore the southern states for their policy of slavery, it should not be forgotten or removed from history that slavery went on in the northern states too, at least until the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, and slaves from Maryland were said to have been transported on the railroad (probably in baggage or freight cars) to the southern states and anywhere else to which they were sold. As the railroad did not run as far as the south though, and as southern railroads were all restricted to operating within their own borders, slaves would be taken by rail to the terminus of the B&O, the Ohio River, and then transferred onto riverboats to complete their journey to a life of misery.

Further shame - seen through the lens of history and with hindsight - accrued to the B&O when it helped put down the insurrection of abolitionist John Brown, in 1859. Not only did the railroad telegraph details of the uprising to its head office, which then contacted the White House, but they allowed their trains to carry US Marines and guns to put down the rebellion, in which ten men died, and another seven were later executed after trial. It's somewhat telling, and should - and hopefully is, though I doubt it, more likely swept under the carpet of history - be a lasting subject of shame and dishonour that the main concern of president John W. Garrett after the uprising had been brutally put down was for his property: thank God there was no damage to his trains or equipment, he sighed. Cunt. 

What the Dickens! England's foremost author of the time gives his impressions

When the legendary Charles Dickens visited America in 1842, like his queen, he was not amused at the state of the American railroad, comparing it most unfavourable to that from his homeland. The idea of there being no compartments, as already mentioned, in the early cars annoyed him, as he was a private man and was forced to share space with about fifty other passengers, most of whom (being American, duh) spoke loudly on many subjects to each other. He did however approve of the provision of a special carriage for ladies, that they might not be subjected to such ignominy, nor have to breathe the foul fumes that swirled around the men's carriage, as almost every man smoked. He wrote about his experiences on the railroad, and other aspects of his American trip, in American Notes, published later that year. His observations ensured there would be a fractious relationship between the author and his American fans.

Dickens, who regularly criticised the government and the class society in England, deplored the mindless nationalism of Americans, who seemed to believe, then as now, that their country was the greatest in the world and could do no wrong. For a nation barely seventy years old at this stage, Dickens probably thought they were pushing it. The loud voices and strange accents (mispronouncing, as he believed, common English words) got on his nerves, as did the less than professional attitude of the conductors, who did not wear a uniform and walked with their hands in their pockets. He was shocked that black people were not allowed to ride in the same carriages as white people, and, too, at the "hulking box" that they were provided for their transport on the train.

He hated the habits of "uncultured" Americans who would chew tobacco and spit it on the floor, and probably loathed as well the vendors of sweets, cigarettes, newspapers and other items who roamed the carriages hawking their wares, something that surely was not cricket back in good old England. The crude heating system on the early trains was no more than a stove placed in the middle of the carriage, which meant that those who were closest to it were roasted while those furthest from it froze, and of course they were a safety hazard as the carriages, as already mentioned, tended to bump and jolt along the track, and though it's not said in the account I read, I can assume that the stoves were not bolted down in any way. Additionally, if the windows were opened stray sparks from the fire could be caught by the wind and set people's clothes on fire, while leaving the windows shut meant risking being suffocated.  Here's an extract:

There is a great deal of jolting, a great deal of noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek, and a bell. . . . Except when a branch road joins the main one, there is seldom more than one track of rails; so that the road is very narrow, and the view, where there is a deep cutting, by no means extensive. When there is not, the character of the scenery is always the same. Mile after mile of stunted trees: some hewn down by the axe, some blown down by the wind, some half fallen and resting on their neighbours. . . . Now you emerge for a few brief minutes on an open country, glittering with some bright lake or pool, broad as many an English river, but so small here that it scarcely has a name; now catch hasty glimpses of a distant town, with its clean white houses and their cool piazzas, its prim New England church and schoolhouse; when whir-r-r-r! almost before you have seen them, comes the same dark screen: the stunted trees, the stumps, the logs, the stagnant water.

The train calls at stations in the woods, where the wild impossibility of anybody having the smallest reason to get out, is only to be equalled by the apparently desperate hopelessness of there being anybody to get in. It rushes across the turnpike road, where there is no gate, no policeman, no signal: nothing but a rough wooden arch, on which is painted "When The Bell Rings, Look Out For The Locomotive." On it whirls headlong, dives through the woods again, emerges in the light, clatters over frail arches, rumbles upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and dashes on hap-hazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of the road . . . on, on, on—tears the mad dragon of an engine with its train of cars; scattering in all directions a shower of burning sparks from its wood fire; screeching, hissing, yelling, panting; until at last the thirsty monster stops beneath a covered way to drink, the people cluster round, and you have time to breathe again.

Other things that amazed the author were the fact that the railroad often ran down main streets, which was never the case in England, the rails always running parallel to any town or village, but never through it, and how few passengers waited at the equally few stations along the line.

Which brings us to...

A Hard Station: Europe vs America

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When we think of railway stations today, we think of grand, sumptuous buildings, often with several floors, lifts (or elevators for you Americans), majestic winding staircases, places where we can get a coffee, or even a full meal, perhaps an entire shopping mall. Naturally, in the beginning train stations were nothing like this, but it's a fact that the ones built in Britain and Europe were less geared towards function only and more to cater to comfort and service, whereas certainly in the early days at least, American stations, or depots, as they called them, were little more than sheds or barns through which a train would run and where the passengers could be offloaded and then fuck off. There were no amenities, no connecting transport, often no staff. It would almost be like getting kicked off the train for not paying your fare, with no particular thought or concern given to where you were forcibly disembarked.

This could have been due to many factors, most likely paramount among which was the class system in England, where railway passengers expected a certain degree of decorum, a modicum of comfort and that the railway people gave, or seemed to give, a damn about them. It was a case of ensuring the passenger became a regular one, and treating him as a customer rather than a piece of freight. The American way, on the other hand, was all about the dollar, and how few of them the railroad companies could spend compared to how many they could make. Stations cost money of course, and without such a thing in American history before, as the railroad was entirely new, unless someone had visited Britain or the Continent (and how few Americans ever left their home town, never mind state, and forget about crossing the ocean?) nobody was any the wiser.

So costs were kept to a minimum, and stations few. Even the ones that were built, as I said above, were the rudest of sheds, almost like the sides of a tunnel into which the train would go, stop and let the passengers off, and go on again. After they got off, how they got to their actual destination was their lookout: no connecting wagons, boats, anything like that. No service to call on, no telegraph unless they were very lucky, and nobody there to help them. A shed in the middle of nowhere, basically. A few had the luxury of (gasp!) doors, but even then it happened that trains would crash through them, so many did not. So they were mostly cold and cheerless, but even so, better than what some rail stops could offer; many times a train simply stopped on the corner of a street to collect or let passengers off, and might have to be waved down to be stopped anywhere else. Occasionally there was a ticket office built along the line, and here lucky passengers could shelter while  waiting for, or having alighted from, the train, though there would of course be no facilities for them.

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Contrast this with the graceful lines of stations in England like the terminal at Liverpool's Crown Street or Paddington Station in London, or the oldest surviving railway terminal in the world, Liverpool Road terminal, which still stands today. Bold lines, high vaulted ceilings, sturdy platforms and ticket booths made these places to be admired, to be happy to go to, to explore, to relax in. Not a simple dumping or loading point for passengers as if they were cattle on the way to market, these were proper stations, beautiful buildings, well designed and protected from the elements, offering all sorts of amenities.

As for the French, well, they were hardly going to be outdone by the British, were they? The old enemy? Mais non! France in fact boasts today some of the most stunning and beautiful architecture in the world, and much of it went into train stations built in the 1830s. The Saint-Lazare, the Gare de l'Est, the Gare de Lyons and especially the Gare du Nord, which has twenty-three professional sculptures, all show how Paris took the lead in the field. Other countries would not be left behind either, with stations more resembling cathedrals really in places like Antwerp, Budapest and Milan springing up in the latter parts of the nineteenth century. Americans would finally get it of course - witness Grand Central - but until the need for an actual building and not just a shed was realised, they'd had to put up with these rickety structures. Which, by the way, were made of wood and, well, when a steam engine hammers through a structure made of wood... The Massachusetts Eastern Railroad learned this to their cost in 1836 when, on the very first day of operation, their East Boston terminal burned down. Oops! An inauspicious start, to say the least.

It must have been fun trying to get a train in the 1830s and 1840s: no information on train arrival or departure time was initially available, no timetables, no signs announcing arrival or departure, so while the railroad were compelled to provide some sort of basic sustenance for their passengers at the "depots" - given the lengths of the train journeys and before the "newsbutchers", as they were called, the men and boys who walked the length of carriages selling such things as sweets and tobacco, started up, leaving passengers otherwise to starve - there was no announcement as to when the train was leaving again, and seats could not be reserved. This then necessitated bolting down the (not exactly wholesome) food and legging it to the platform in the hope of gaining a seat, leading to rather a lot of cases of indigestion and that sort of thing. But hey, at least these people had a terminal.

States had to fight to get the railroads to put up any sort of depot, as in general they seemed to be happy enough to take passengers at the first departure point and dump them at the terminus, without stopping in between. The kind of thing we call today "express services", except it was to be every one. Now consider the position of the hapless station agent. He was the face of the company at the depot, the man who sold tickets, dispatched the trains and looked after the passengers (as best he could), and as is always the case, he was the one who faced the wrath of those passengers when circumstances entirely outside of his control delayed trains, or when anything else went wrong. The conductor, on the other hand, was far from the smiling (or unsmiling) functionary who would go around asking for tickets, and checking same. No, this man was more of a drill sergeant, keeping a watch on the passengers, disciplining their children if they go out of hand (how that was carried out I can only imagine!), settling disputes and keeping control of his own people. He also sold tickets. Ah yes, tickets.
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Well now, the thing about tickets on the American railroad was that from the start, rather like almost everything else including railway gauge and mode of transport, there was little if any uniformity. Some tickets were sold at the ticket office (if there was one) some were sold on board. Tickets ranged from being coloured pieces of cardboard to metal discs, and, which might seem amazing to us today, none of them were numbered, so it was easy to scam people and pocket the money while handing over bogus tickets, or even none at all. This practice was called "knocking off". Right. As I mentioned, a ticket did not guarantee you a seat, merely passage on the train, and if you got on with a false one, issued due to no fault of yours by a scheming, unprincipled conductor, then tough. You'd have to buy a real one or get kicked off the train.

This practice was so widespread that an honest conductor taking over from a dishonest predecessor would face the kind of opposition and resentment that might attend the election of a union boss who wasn't interested in kickbacks, or a new police chief who refused to take bribes. Someone trying to "do the right thing" could put all the chancers and scammers under a glaring spotlight they would rather avoid, and so when Harry French took over as conductor on the Oregon Railroad & Navigation Company in the 1890s, he was warned that if he didn't keep up the accepted practice of knocking off he would make many enemies. He ignored the warning though and sure enough, due to his honest dealing with passengers and with his employers the railroad was suddenly taking in much more revenue that it had done up to then.

The railroad was delighted, but the scammers were not, and even the ticket agents became Harry's enemies, as they got no commission on tickets they sold, but due to his honesty were suddenly having to issue a lot more than they had been before. But there were more serious aspects of French's job on which he expounded in his book, Railroad Man, such as the time he got involved in a bank robbery. Having heard of three men who had robbed a bank in Roslyn, Washington, and had shot one of the cashiers dead, French noticed a warning on the wire, intended for the sheriff's office, that they expected the desperadoes to cross at Arlington, which was his route. And so they did. The robbers got on his train, and French, noting their suspicious behaviour, telegraphed the sheriff's office at the next stop, advising him that he had the robbers on board and that the sheriff should come loaded for bear, as it were.

Though expecting that he and his crew might be the next victims of the raiders, French waited in the luggage car with a gun belted on, ready for trouble, but when the train reached its next stop some passengers told him the three hoodlums had jumped, and the sheriff was disappointed when the train rolled into the station. The men were eventually caught, and French, known to have spent so much time with them on his train, was asked to identify them. He agreed - whether the fact that there was a two thousand dollar reward for bringing all three men to justice figured in his decision or not, I leave it to you to decide, though I feel he was a public-spirited man and would have made the identification in any event - and went with the detective to see if these were indeed the men who had ridden on his train that day.

They weren't.

Despite the fact that they had been indicted as suspects, these were the wrong men. French knew them well, and told the detective they were not the same men he had seen on the train. Delighted, the defence lawyer agreed that the three men were being framed, and told French his testimony had "removed the noose" from around the neck of one of the men, who had already been wrongly convicted of being the one who shot the cashier. The prosecutor was enraged, but there was nothing he could do. These men were innocent, and released. Some months later, the real robbers paid the ultimate price when they were shot during another attempted robbery, and one of them, believing himself to be dying, confessed that they three were the ones who had held up the bank in Roslyn.

There was, sadly, no happy ending for French though. Infuriated at losing his third of the reward money, the two grand he would have split three ways with French and his baggage man (who was nervous and jumpy and shit-scared, and had identified the men as being the robbers without really looking too closely, and probably blinded by the promise of more money than he could have made in years), the detective conspired to have the conductor fired, which he was, over the alleged theft of... thirty-six cents.
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Health and safety was all but unknown in the early days of trains, at least in the USA. People would sit wherever they pleased: in the caboose, in the luggage car, even in the locomotive itself. They would sit on the roofs of the carriages (imagine their surprise when a tunnel came along!), hang their arms and legs out of windows, and jump on and off the train whenever and wherever suited them. Many a passenger was left behind when they headed off to answer a call of nature at a scheduled stop, only to come back and find the train had left without them! There was no organisation, no counting of passengers, no warnings that the train was moving off, no way to ensure everyone was back on board. Truly, in at least a figurative sense, the wild West.

For a long time, they did what they liked: cursed, fought, abused the conductor, refused to pay for their passage. Believe it or not, it took state legislature to afford the conductor - or captain as he was initially known - the right to throw people off who had not paid, or refused to pay, or paid the wrong fare. Even the authority to issue tickets had to go through court. What the railroads were thinking I don't know: how can you expect to make money if you can't compel your customers to pay for the service you offer?

The first conductors seemed to prize politeness above all other aspects of their job. Eben E. Worden (a somewhat appropriate name, given how the conductor had to marshall and placate the passengers) was by all accounts a small, slight man with impeccable manners, and was the first conductor on the Erie Railroad, therefore we can assume the first conductor on a passenger train in America. Whether the job was too much for him, or due to other considerations, he only lasted two years in the position, dying two years after he retired, in 1844, of consumption (Tuberculosis). His replacement could not have been more different.

Henry "Poppy" Ayes (1800 - 1880)

A huge, bluff teddy bear of a man, Ayres (affectionately known as "Poppy") started work with the Harlem Railroad as a conductor and then moved to the Erie in 1842 on the retirement of Worden. His appointment initially was opposed by friends of John S. Williamson, a man who had been expecting the post when Worden was assigned, and on his departure could see no reason why he would not be his replacement. But Ayres shone so in his job that he became a legend among railroad workers, and passengers, and became part of the history of the American railroad.

Surprisingly perhaps, he wasn't even a native of the state, but came from Boston; nevertheless, he made himself a confidante and friend of everyone he came in contact with (Williamson's and his friends aside, I imagine) and there are many stories and anecdotes of his kindness and professionalism. One such relates the tale of an old lady who left a precious family heirloom, an ancient umbrella, on a steamboat and as she was returning on the train realised it was left behind, and burst into tears. Having ascertained the problem, Poppy Ayres assured her he could get it for her by the telegraph, in just a few minutes. The telegraph was entirely new then, and people had only the vaguest ideas about how it worked - probably seemed a little like magic to them, being able to send, and receive, messages to and from miles away - so Poppy must have decided to have a little gentle fun with the lady.

He knew from experience that when the steamboats were checked after passengers had alighted, stewards would forward any item left behind to the baggage car of the train, and of course this is where he found the old lady's umbrella. Producing it with a theatrical flourish, he amazed her, she believing it had somehow magically travelled there by telegraph!

A less enlightening story runs about a man who, having travelled to his destination via various trains on the one ticket, was told by Poppy that he couldn't travel on his, as it had been "punched" already. The man refused to budge and was put off the train. He then took Poppy Ayres to court for throwing him off the train (in which Ayres was only doing his job, following company policy) and was awarded 250 dollars against him. Judges, huh? Then there's the story of how, it would seem, he invented the emergency cord to be pulled when the train had to be stopped. At least, he was the first in America to work out the idea, and possibly the world, I don't know.
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How it went was this: when passengers became belligerent or refused to pay the right fare, had no ticket or for some other reason Poppy saw the need to eject them from the train, there was no way to signal the driver. So he set up a length of twine and ran it up to the engineer's cab at the front, connecting it to a piece of wood. When he wanted the train to stop he would pull on the string, the wood would be raised and the engineer would know to stop. Except, at first, he didn't. Not that he didn't know, but he wasn't going to take orders from a conductor! So said Jacob Hamel, and he ignored the bell pull twice, cutting the twine so as not to be bothered. Poppy warned him if he cut it again, they would duke it out when the train arrived at its destination. And so he did, and so they did, and Hamel, refusing to come down out of the cab and face the much burlier conductor,  received a punch that knocked him from the cab. After that, he paid attention when Poppy Ayres wanted him to stop the train. Ayres worked for the Erie for over thirty years, hardly making a single enemy, and passing into the history of both that railroad and American railroads in general.

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Blood on the Tracks: Early Fatalities

In the very early days derailments were common, but as the trains hardly ever reached a speed of more than twenty miles an hour, these were mere inconveniences and did not result in any loss of life or serious injury. In most cases, a general call would be put about the train to have the male passengers haul the car back onto the track, and away the train would go. The first real death on the railroad, excepting those who blundered out in front of the trains, occurred on the Camden & Amboy line, when a train broke an axle and two people died, everyone else on the train including actor Tyrone Power (yes, that one) was injured, the only one to escape unscathed being former president John Quincy Adams. Future railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt broke his ankle and swore never to ride on the railroad again. He obviously changed his mind, considering how much money the railroad would end up making for him.

Once trains began running at night, or overnight, the problem of how the driver was supposed to see the track in front of him became an issue. Crazy as it may seem, an early idea, proposed - and used for a short time by - the South Carolina Canal Railroad Company, was to set fire to a wagonload of sand and wood and strap it to the front of the locomotive. Unsurprisingly, this was quickly ditched as being too damned dangerous. Next various lamps were tried out, first oil and then kerosene, which proved better suited to the purpose, with large mirrors to reflect the light. In Britain, with the railway enclosed by fences and running on their own track, not through any town's main street, these were not so much a priority, and only came into use much later. But in America, where the oft-sung phrase "don't fence me in" held sway, and animals and sometimes people could wander in front of the train - especially hard to see at night - it was vital the driver be able to see ahead of him through the dark.

Animal magic: Farmers on the warpath

While animals were by far the largest percentage of casualties on the early railroads, and could easily derail a train, railroad companies fought a running battle with farmers who had developed an instinct for making money off them. The idea was that they would be paid generously by the railroad if any of their livestock was killed by their trains (despite the fact that it could only have been the fault of the farmers) and so they decided to start taking their least healthy and oldest animals closer and closer to the tracks, sometimes even feeding them on the rails themselves. Then, when the animal was hit and killed by a train, they would claim handsome compensation from the railroad company. What happened if there were human fatalities, or damage to engine or cars, I don't know, and it seems the farmers didn't care as long as they got paid.

But as time went on, like all schemes this one began to unravel, as the railroad bosses became wiser to the tactics of the unscrupulous (and, it must be said, cruel and heartless towards their cattle) farmers, and reduced the amount they were prepared to pay for animals killed on the railroad. This infuriated the greedy farmers, who began a running war with the railroad. They obstructed the lines, tampered with the switches and threw stones and rocks at the trains, and were in the process of plotting to set fire to one when the railroad, having infiltrated their ranks, caught them in the act and had them arrested. Twelve men were sentenced and jailed.

Sleep on it: George Pullman, inventor of the first proper sleeping carriages
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George Pullman (1831 - 1897)

Early railroad travellers had a lot to thank George Pullman for. Even travellers today owe him a debt of gratitude, as they ride in the luxury sleeping cars that bear his name still. Until he came along, sleeping on a train was a dangerous and uncomfortable business, and unlikely to yield much in the way of rest. The first of the lines to provide any sort of sleeping accommodation for their passengers was the Cumberland Valley Railroad, and all it did was split a normal day car into two, add some basic padding and throw in a stove to heat the place. There was no bedding - bring your own with you or sleep in your clothes - and the stove was, of course, not fastened down or secured in any way, so you had a pretty good chance of burning to death if the train rounded any sudden curves or stopped suddenly. Carriages of this sort were, it will be readily understood, for men only, as there was no privacy and several men would sleep to a car. Americans would endure discomfort and sleeplessness for another thirty or so years.

I read a little ahead and see this man was no saint. In fact, not to put to fine a point on it, he appears to have been a heartless, tyrannical bastard who cared more about his bottom line than the people who worked for him. So, a typical American businessman then. Let's be fair, and remove that word. A typical businessman of the time, like so many others, out to make a profit and piss all over anyone who got in his way. But his achievements and his contribution to the history of the railroad can't be ignored, so let's not do that, while at the same time let's throw his despotic behaviour and his shameful treatment of his workers into the harsh light of non-revisionist history.

As a young engineer, only in his twenties, Pullman arrived in Chicago and immediately set about creating a reputation for himself by working out how to raise hotels and other buildings off the ground, for foundation work or to just raise it to a new street level. Apparently he did this using thousands of jacks, hand-operated by hundreds of men, raising the building an inch at a time. Taking his cue from the packet boats he used to travel as a kid on the Erie Canal, Pullman designed the first proper sleeping car, though history says he was not its inventor, that honour going to a Theodore Woodruff. However such cars have borne his name right up to this day, and he may as well be said to be the father of the sleeping car.
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Pullman cars, as people quickly came to know them, stood for two things: luxury and comfort. And a third, of course: expense, but then, you don't get the finer things in life without paying for them, and people were very much prepared to pay up to FIVE TIMES as much for a Pullman coach as for a normal one. The difference was staggering, and you'd have to say the extra outlay, if you could afford it, was certainly worth it. Lush carpeting, comfortable bunks, gilded ornamentation, chandeliers - these cars were as close a relative to the early sleepers as the Wright Bros flyer is to a 747 Jumbo Jet. Improved suspension, a quieter - and above all, safer ride, the Pullmans would have been worth it on these improvements alone.

But there was more.

Pullman decided his sleepers should be like mobile hotels, and to that effect engaged recently freed black men to serve as combination porters, stewards, valets and waiters. They would show the passenger to their carriage, have the bed made (no cold plank for resting your head on here, and forget bringing your own bedding: all provided for, and the best quality too), settle them as they wished, call them when dinner was ready... oh yeah, there was an attached kitchen! These men, though better paid than they had been as slaves, obviously, were reportedly not that well paid, and made up most of their income via tips from the wealthy passengers, which they were allowed to keep.

Although there was of course no union, Pullman porters were still required to contribute to  "group insurance policy", which so far as I can see was of no benefit to them at all, as there was no compensation forthcoming for any who died or were injured in the service, and there was no retirement or pension plan. They were required to turn up for work two hours before the train departed, but did not get paid for this time, as their working period was seen to begin only when the train departed. Moreover, every Pullman porter had to be assigned to a car - there were none who were entitled to one regularly - so they could stand around for a whole day waiting to be given one, and if it didn't happen, they went home without being paid. In some ways, these men must have felt almost as if they were still slaves.

Still, membership of the Pullman Association did carry with it some benefits, if only in terms of recognition and reputation, and the porters had a high social standing in their own black community, where many ex-slaves (or freedmen) struggled to secure any sort of employment after the war. Pullman's fortune, basically, was made with the assassination of President Lincoln, which seems a harsh thing to say, but when the president's body was toured throughout the States on a train, so that everyone could get a chance to pay their respects to the great Emancipator, it was in a Pullman car he made his last trip, and the fame of the car - and its maker - spread far and wide. Soon, everyone who could afford to do so wanted to emulate the president (though without the inconvenience of being dead, obviously) and demand for the Pullman cars peaked, as did prices, following the indefatigable law of supply and demand. By 1875, ten years after the first one was produced, Pullman had over seven hundred cars in operation with the railroads.

And then came Pullman, Chicago.
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I can't say if this was the first company town ever, but it seems to have been one of the first. Pullman bought 4,000 acres in Chicago near Lake Calumet on the Illinois Central Railroad and set an architect, Solon Spencer Beman, to design a town in which his employees could live. It proved to be one of the most successful towns of the age, with good housing, indoor plumbing, with shops, theatres, parks, hotels, but pointedly no bars, no casinos, no whorehouses, nowhere where "undesirable behaviour" could flourish. It was his hope to avoid the violence and drunkenness prevalent in many American towns, and which led to unrest and trouble. And mostly it did.

But Pullman wanted complete control over his new town, and prohibited independent newspapers, town meetings, public speeches or open discussion. All the inhabitants - his workers and their families - had to conform to rigorous standards set down by him, behavioural and hygienic, and anyone who did not come up to the mark could be fired and ejected from the town. He also banned charitable organisations and, as nobody would pay rent to use the church, it was an empty shell. His running of the town was compared to the iron grip of Count Otto von Bismark in Germany, or, as one anonymous Pullman employee put it: "We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell."

Quite contrary to his intentions, or expectations, such total repression was only going to fuel the fires of unrest and rebellion, and when, as a result of falling demand for his cars during the Panic of 1893 (yes, another one; there were quite a few, it seems) he cut wages, but did not lower rents in his town, or the price of any of the amenities, the stage was set for bloody confrontation.

Comments on Pullman's inhuman tactics ran to "I have seen men with families of eight or nine children crying because they got only three or four cents after paying their rent."

Another described conditions as "slavery worse than that of Negroes of the South".

Many of the workers joined the recently-formed American Railway Union, which instigated a boycott on Pullman's cars, refusing to allow trains to carry them or their workers to work in them. The Great Pullman Strike of 1894 had begun.

Pullman was not interested in negotiating with the strikers. On the day the strike began he locked up his home and business and left town. One of his contemporaries thundered at his refusal to even talk to his workers: "The damned idiot ought to arbitrate, arbitrate and arbitrate! ...A man who won't meet his own men halfway is a God-damn fool!"
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Three days into the strike things began to go bad. Strikebreakers, many of them black, had been enlisted by the railroad to take the place of the striking workers, and at a meeting to rally support for the strike things exploded. It was supposed to have been a peaceful meeting, but like most of these things, agitators within the crowd shouted the loudest and buildings were burned, a locomotive derailed, and other transport workers came out in sympathy, enlarging the strike and calling it to the urgent attention of the authorities. They of course responded with peace mediators and offers of recompense, and everyone sat down around the table and worked it... yeah. Right.

The President himself gave the order for an injunction to be issued, commanding the workers to return to their posts, and when that was ignored, sent in the troops. Thirty strikers were killed and fifty-seven wounded. Support among railroad workers other than those in the ARU was divided: many wanted their trains to run, many saw the workers' grievances as legitimate. The public, as is usually the case, didn't care; they just wanted to be able to travel on the trains, and besides, weren't all these men black, recently-freed slaves? How ungrateful! The newspapers played on this, calling the workers "aliens" and "immigrants" (which in a lot of cases was true, but irrelevant to the reasons for the strike) and ignoring the very real fact that this was more a clash of rich versus poor, big business versus the little guy, and very much a case of playing politics with people's lives.

In the aftermath, Pullman was ordered to sell his town and it became just another suburb of Chicago, if one with a chequered past. He did not survive long past the infamous strike, his reputation destroyed by his intransigence and the memory of the workers who had been killed by the troops. He died in 1897, and his family were so concerned that vengeful employees might dig his body back up that he was buried in a lead-lined coffin sealed in a block of concrete, and surrounded with more concrete, a network of steel bars and yet more concrete. The entire burial process took two days. Twenty-eight years later, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters became one of the first, and most influential  African-American unions in the USA.

By George! That's not my name!

Oh, hilarious history looks us in the face once again and sticks its tongue out at us, though in this case it's almost more tragic-comic. The practice on slave plantations had been to call every male slave by the given name of the slavemaster or owner. So if they were called, for instance, Tom, every slave would be known as Tom. When Pullman began recruiting porters, whether with or without his knowledge or approval, passengers called every Pullman porter George, after him. This obviously irritated the porters, but it was not their place to speak up and correct the white folks, so they had to take it. Eventually, there was a placard placed on each Pullman car advising the name of the porter, and the practice died out.

However (and this is the funny/tragic part) other people named George took offence at their name being used for Pullman porters, and the Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters George was born. No, really. Well, initially apparently it was a joke, but at its height it boasted over 31,000 members, including (it was claimed) Babe Ruth and King George V. Apparently you could join the SPCSCG as long as your first or last name was George. Nobody in the society (all exclusively white of course) cared about getting a measure of dignity for the porters, just that their names not be used (presumably if they had all been called James none of the Georges would have cared - whether a new society might have sprung up called SPCSCJ or not is another matter) but their efforts did obliquely change the practice, and soon porters were being referred to by their given name. Oh, white privilege! What lessons you teach us!

One man who swam against the flow though was the famous comedian Jackie Gleason, as related by Biggs, son of a sleeping car  porter, in the book The Pullman Porters: From Servitude to Civil Rights: "One of the most remarkable stories I liked hearing about was how when Jackie Gleason would ride ... all the porters wanted to be on that run. The reason why? Not only because he gave every porter $100.00, but it was just the fun, the excitement, the respect that he gave the porters. Instead of their names being George, he called everybody by their first name. He always had like a piano in the car and they sang and danced and had a great time. He was just a fun person to be around."

However, historian Greg LeRoy describes how most customers, and the company, saw them:  "A Pullman Porter was really kind of a glorified hotel maid and bellhop in what Pullman called a hotel on wheels. The Pullman Company just thought of the porters as a piece of equipment, just like another button on a panel – the same as a light switch or a fan switch."

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Crossing the Rubicon. Or, if you prefer, the Mississippi: Rivermen strike back

It was mentioned earlier that the railroad had its enemies from the beginning, and most staunch among them were those who stood to lose the most, the canal operators and the riverboats. When the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad built a bridge into Iowa over the Mississippi, despite strong protests from Mississippi riverboat men, a steamer rammed into it at full speed, destroying the bridge. It was likely no accident, as a banner soon appeared proclaiming "Mississippi bridge destroyed! All rejoice!" The case over who had precedence over the river went to court, and the railroad's position was argued by a young, unknown lawyer who faded out of history, some guy called Lincoln.

An ex-pilot himself, Lincoln knew the river and walked a legal tightrope to prove his case, which was that while he acknowledged (while surely knowing it was nothing of the sort) that the collision had been an accident, the needs of Americans to have free passage into the west was paramount, and he won the case. Or rather, the Mississippi boatmen did not win it, the jury being tied, and the later decision of the Supreme Court was that the bridge did not constitute a hazard to navigation, and must remain. This was more or less the end of any organised opposition by the rivers to the railroad, and the future rode forward on the shiny rails and puffing smokestacks of the iron horse.

Engines of war: the role of the railroad in the Civil War

How naive we can be! When railroads first appeared they were lauded (mostly, it must be said, by their creators and supporters) as the device by which war would be forever removed from the landscape of America. With stunning lack of foresight and understanding, and a sense of almost painful innocence, quotes as far off the beam as the one which called World War I the war to end all wars abounded: Henry Poor, author of the American Railroad Journal, gushed that the railroad would be "the agent of national peace" and that "the certain prevention of foreign war . . . will be one of the numerous advantages of the railroads." What his reasoning for this was is known only to himself. A joint project to link the railroads of Cincinnati, Charleston and Ohio promised that "the North and South would, in fact, shake hands with each other, yield up their social and political hostility, pledge themselves to common national interests, and part as friends and brethren." The Cincinnati Daily Chronicle saw the railroad "dispelling prejudices and cementing friendships, calculated to perpetuate the institutions under which we have risen from a mere handful."

Right. This was in 1843. Less than two decades later, as the railroads reached their height, the country would be at war. Not just at war, but at war with itself, in the bloodiest conflict the USA had seen in its short history, making the War of Independence and the War of 1812 seem good-natured fist fights between friends in comparison. By the time it was over, the south would be in ruins and almost a million Americans would be dead on both sides, military and civilian, free and slave, Union and Confederate, and the country would suffer from a divide in its politics whose legacy it is still struggling with today.

And trains would be right up there in the thick of it, helping to bring death, destruction and misery to millions. So much for the metal harbingers of peace.
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As is almost always the case, the military got involved with railroads early in their history, the trains ferrying troops to Harper's Ferry and to Pullman, but the first time they really saw what the new technology could do for the war effort was during the Mexican-American War of 1846, when they were able to use trains to transport troops to Texas. However this had limited success, due mostly to the poor state of southern railroads and the fact that Texas had none. But when war broke out between American and American, they had a proper chance to test out this new system as a prosecutor of war.

It did not disappoint.

In fact, it's true to say that without the railroads the Civil War might have ended sooner, had a shorter reach and resulted in less deaths. The possibility of moving troops and weapons and supplies around from state to state in relatively fast order made the waging of the war much easier, at least for the Union, who had the better railroad lines. In addition to this disadvantage, the south had less lines, and the ones it had were all, as has already been noted, kept separate from each other, operating in their state only. There were few if any lines connecting to one another, and even if there had been, the south was also behind the north with regard to wheel gauge, some states using one and some using another, so there was no standard and anyone wanting to go from one state to another would most assuredly have to change trains, which is not something you want your troops worrying about.

The south was also severely lacking in entrepreneurs. No people like Pullman, Vanderbilt, Minot or Huntington to aggressively promote the railroad there. In fact, their only real pioneer and supporter of a networked railroad (he envisaged one line linking Charleston to Memphis) died suddenly in 1839, and with his death nobody else seemed willing to take up the torch he had dropped. The insular mindset of the south, the distrust of the railroad and the worry about slaves escaping or being taken to safety perhaps on these new engines of freedom kept each state protecting its own small railroad and rigidly restricting its limits, cutting it off from other railroads, even ones which were ostensibly friendly. This told very much against them during the war, when the Union, whose two major lines, the Erie and the Pennsylvania, possessed more rolling stock than all of the south put together, unleashed the power of their new war machine.
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If only they had listened to the words of Frederick Law Olmstead, architect of Central Park: "There is nothing that is more closely connected, both as cause and effect, with the prosperity and wealth of a country than its means and modes of travelling." Many northern workers had come to the south to build roads (and, possibly, though I'm not sure, railroads) and of course once war broke out they went back home to fight, leaving the south with a critical shortage of labour. The south's intransigence towards central government told against them too, as they were unable or unwilling to instigate a unified policy of operating their trains for the military effort, unlike the north, where Lincoln passed legislation to create the United States Military Railroads. This mean that certain strategic, important or powerful lines came directly under the control of the government, assisting the war effort and making things like movement of troops easier. In the south, the USMR repaired broken lines, laid track and took control of operational railroads in captured enemy territory.

However incompetent and pig-headed the southern effort may have been with regard to the railroads, it shouldn't be taken that they failed utterly. In fact, at the Battle of Bull Run, one of the first major conflicts of the war, southern railroads helped turn the tide of a battle the Confederacy should have lost, when troops were sent via the tiny Manassas Gap Railroad to relieve the siege of Richmond, allowing the rebels to win the day. But not only that, the unexpected victory for the south shook the confidence (some might say overconfidence) of the Union, who had expected to win a quick victory and bring the war to a speedy conclusion. The setback showed them they were in a proper one, and it would drag on for years.

However much of the failure of the south to prosecute, never mind win the war was down to the stubborn self-interest of individual states and the fear of acceding to a centralised government, even their own, rebel one. An extract from The Great Railroad Revolution illustrates this perfectly: "Early in the war, William A. Ashe, who headed the Railroad Bureau, demanded that the Western & Atlantic, which was owned by the State of Georgia, supply six locomotives and seventy wagons to move freight out to eastern Tennessee. However, not only did Georgia's governor, Joseph E. Brown, turn down the request, but he threatened to send troops to fight any Confederate officials who tried to commandeer the rolling stock.

Farther south, the head of the Florida Railroad, David L. Yulee, was no more helpful. Although his railroad was unable to operate because it had suffered damage, he refused to allow its rails to be lifted and redeployed to create a connecting line between Florida and Georgia, which was essential to keep the Confederate army supplied with beef. In yet another failure of wartime cooperation, promises made by railroads to provide transportation for free soon proved to be empty. The Richmond & Petersburg, for example, immediately raised its charges when the company realized the line was a vital part of the military buildup for the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. "
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But nobody ever said stupidity and naivete was restricted to the rebel side. Listen to this: having captured a stretch of line around Wheeling, on the Ohio River, General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson told the Union they could continue to run their freight trains on it, but only between the hours of 11 am and 1 pm, using the laughable rationale that the passage of the trains at any other hour would wake his troops. 11 am, all right, maybe, but what in the hell did the Union Army think the Johnny Rebs were doing sleeping from noon into the afternoon? Yet, they fell for it, and deservedly reaped the rewards of colossal stupidity as Jackson led what was known as the Martinsburg Raid on June 14 1861, trapping the Union trains by destroying the track before and behind them, his men then  destroyed 42 locomotives and 386 freight cars, then attacked the machine shops and warehouses in Martinsburg, taking 14 locomotives and forcing the closure of that section of the Baltimore & Ohio, which was a big blow to the Union war effort.

Perhaps with something of a slight lack of foreplanning though, they had to transport the stolen engines by road as, well, there was no track, since they themselves had torn it up. Unfortunately for Jackson though, the raid angered the citizens of Maryland, who had seen the B&O as their railroad, and they switched sides to the Union, which helped keep the rest of the Baltimore & Ohio open. Lincoln, aware, unlike most of his contemporaries in government, of the power of the railroads and how vital they would be to the war effort, appointed Daniel McCallum, of whom we have already read, as military director and superintendent of the railroads. McCallum, as we've seen, was a man who could get things done, and, crucially for a commander in times of war, took no shit from anyone. His military rank, though only honorary and only to last till the termination of the war, ensured he had the authority to order the Union forces to carry out his commands. With him was Herman Haupt.

Haupt, about whom we have also heard, as in collaboration with McCallum he helped design the "horseshoe bend" for the Pennsylvania  Railroad, actually had had a military commission, having passed through West Point, but resigned his commission in order to pursue a career in engineering and bridge-building. His skill, intelligence and understanding of engineering concepts made him the perfect man for the job, and earned him the title of the "war's wizard of railroading." His skill in repairing broken bridges and torn-up rails earned him the admiration of the President when Lincoln visited to survey the bridge he had built across the Potomac, erected in just nine days: "That man Haupt has built a bridge across Potomac Creek . . . and upon my word, gentlemen, there is nothing in it but beanpoles and cornstalks." Haupt was not a happy man when his trains were delayed, especially when this was due to the arrogance of certain officers.

On finding that four trains had been delayed arriving in Piedmont, Haupt discovered that the trains had been held up because one was blocking the line. This turned out to be because the general in charge had wanted his wife to get a good night's rest in a nearby farmhouse, and so held the train overnight, preventing others from using the line. Haupt was livid when he visited the scene and saw the lady responsible make her way back to the train. "I did not display extra gallantry on the occasion, nor even offer the lady assistance. She had detained four trains in three hours in a period of urgency, and I was not in an amiable mood." Know what you mean, mate. I'd have given her a slap. Him, too. Because of this, and other unacceptable incidents where officers treated trains as if they were their own personal property, an order was issued that declared "No officer . . . shall have the right to detain a train, or order it to run in advance of schedule." Nevertheless, some officers persisted: one had to be kicked out of a car he had set up in a siding as a personal office rather than send it back to be reused.

Haupt's knowledge of bridge-building techniques allowed him not only to erect better ones, but to more easily and quickly destroy existing ones. He developed a system whereby a single trooper, carrying what were called "torpedoes", eight-inch long cylinders filled with gunpowder, could drill holes in the supports of a bridge, insert the torpedoes, wind out the two-foot-long fuse and light it, giving him time to retreat before the bridge came down. A popular phrase in the war had been "the Union can build bridges faster than the Johnny Rebs can blow them up". Now, they could destroy them faster and more efficiently too.

But let it not be said that the south had no heroes. William Fuller, a conductor on a train known as The General, foiled a plan by the Union to sabotage the main line at Chattanooga (yeah, yeah I know) by chasing after the locomotive which the Union forces had hijacked - wait for this, it's like something out of a cartoon - on foot for two miles until he got hold of one of those railroad trolleys (you know the ones, push up and push down and they move along like a pump on wheels) till he came to a gap where the track had been broken, managed to find a locomotive, steamed this up and pursued the General until he again came to broken track, got off and ran again until he saw a train going the other way, stopped it, commandeered it and kept up the chase. Eventually the General ran out of fuel, and the Union raiders, thwarted, jumped off and disappeared across the fields. Later they were caught and hanged. Th-th-that's all folks!

As we approach our return to the unfolding history of the transcontinental railroad (forgot what you were reading, did you?) the state of all America's railroads at the time of the Civil War, not just those of the south, can be summed up in this passage detailing troop movements in 1863, the largest single movement of men during the war: "At Culpeper, on the Rappahannock River, the troops took the Orange & Alexandria to Washington and then the Baltimore & Ohio to the Ohio River just below Wheeling. A ferry ride over the river to Bellaire in Ohio connected them with the Central Ohio Railroad to Columbus, then the Indiana Central to Indianapolis, and then the Jeffersonville, Madison & Indianapolis Railroad to Jeffersonville on the Ohio, opposite Louisville. Having recrossed the river using a pontoon, a combination of the Louis ville & Nashville and the Nashville & Chattanooga took them to their destination."

General William Sherman, one of the heroes on the Union side, understood entirely the role the railroad had played in the war, as he recounted in his memoirs years later: : "That single stem of railroad supplied an army of 100,000 men and 32,000 horses for the period of 196 days, from May 1 to November 19, 1864. To have delivered that amount of forage and food by ordinary wagons would have required 36,800 wagons, of six mules each . . . a simple impossibility in such roads as existed in that region."

Though they greatly facilitated the loss of huge numbers of lives, the railroads saved many thousands too, being used as ambulances to ferry the wounded out of enemy territory and back to friendly bases. However this process was very much in its infancy, and such things as mobile hospitals amounted often to injured or even dying men being dumped on the floors of freight cars, with no medical attention possible until - if - they reached their own side. But mostly the trains were used as weapons, armoured against attack and/or carrying mounted guns, and certainly helped the Union win the war, but also by default led to the deaths of more men and women than would have been possible in a war without them.

The Civil War ended in 1865, but almost before the dust had cleared, a new struggle was manifesting itself. This would, however, entail not conflict but co-operation, bring the country closer together than ever before, and finally unite the disparate states of America.
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Well I'll Be a Chinaman! Following the Yellow Railroad

In the event, those who had put down the chances of the railroad succeeding must have been smiling smugly to themselves as many of their predictions came to pass, including the huge expense incurred of transporting machinery, locomotives, material across from the east via first train and then steamer, but none of these, even a heavy downpour of rain that morning, could dampen the party atmosphere that attended the gala opening of what would be the Central Pacific Railroad as the first spoke was hammered in on the morning of January 8 1863. Significant events had also unfolded that week, with the Emancipation Proclamation going into effect, freeing slaves in the southern states (although it was ignored, as it had been passed by a government now seen as the enemy and with which the south was at war) and, perhaps less encouragingly, a major defeat being dealt to the Union cause at Fredericksburg in Virginia.

Construction would not begin for another ten months, the opening ceremony largely symbolic, as most of the material was still being shipped from the east, and in addition to this, nobody wanted to work on the railroad and labour was in short supply. Any able-bodied men who had emigrated to California had done so in search of gold, not wooden sleepers in the Sacramento dust, or the freezing snows of the Sierras. Labour was not available in the west, and in the east men had an annoying habit of dying all the time: the war, which never touched California, was extracting a brutal toll on the flower of American manhood, on both sides, and there was none to spare to pursue the late Theodore Judah's dream.
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Worse was to come. Despite the obvious need for diversifying their work force, the railroad refused to hire any but white men, believing that only they had the necessary intelligence and strength of character (as well as of physique) to undertake such work. But white entitlement is not something new: even in the mid-nineteenth century, white men and women believed themselves superior to other races. Perhaps not as much as southern people did, certainly when concerning blacks, but they still maintained they were God's chosen, the "true Americans", and by virtue of this, better than other peoples. This entitlement translated to a lack of loyalty to, or even professional pride in, the railroad, and when silver was discovered in Nevada, most of the workers simply downed tools and headed for the new dream of wealth and fortune.

Desperate, Charles Crocker, then the head of construction, floated the idea of bringing in Chinese workers. About forty-five thousand Chinese had come over to California in search of gold, but unable to compete with the ruthless native whites, they had had to settle for basically the scraps that were left behind when the others had finished. In order to supplement their tiny incomes (no Chinese person - or Chinaman, as they were somewhat racistly called at the time - had ever struck it rich in the gold mines) they took menial jobs as house servants and odd job men, and basically became slaves in all but name, earning a pittance for their work and also the enmity of the locals, who refused to live beside them and drove them into what were all but ghettos.

Crocker's foreman, James Strobridge, was dubious, believing the Chinese too weak and frail for the hard work of railway building, and also doubting their moral character, but he could see there was little choice. Things of course went smoothly, and the white workers welcomed the new Chinese with open arms. Well, not quite. The Irish were the most vociferous in their protest - typical, really, as they would have suffered the same prejudices as these new workers, but hey, there's always room for some more deep-seated racism, right? And few people do racism like we do. Luckily, hardly any of the Chinese spoke English, though surely the gestures needed no interpreting. At any rate, they ignored the insults, smiled and worked on. Considering the tension between the two groups, it was thought best to keep them working in separate gangs.

Despite Strobridge's doubts, the Chinese turned out to be excellent workers. They toiled without pause or complaint, drank only a sip of lukewarm tea - the whites drank water, which was often contaminated and led to sickness among their crew - and in fact laid more track in the same time as the whites did. This led to a race between the two gangs, as the Irish and other whites refused to be outdone by a bunch of "chinks", all of which of course benefited the railroad. Though it had not been his plan to create competition between the gangs, it seemed that Crocker's foresight had been good, and the Chinese workers, who were of course paid less than the whites but more than they could get at the other jobs they did, were happy to work harder than any railroad worker ever had.

The Chinese workers were canny, demanding their payment not in dollar bills, but in gold, and insisting the railroad bought their food, which  gave their brothers in San Francisco extra business, as the railroad dealt with them in such items as bamboo shoots, dried oysters and cuttlefish. Their uncomplaining, industrious nature soon won them favour, other than that of the white workers on the railroad of course, and led Leland Stanford to declare, in April 1865 that "The greater portion of the laborers employed by us are Chinese. ... Without them it would be impossible to complete the western portion of the [transcontinental railroad]. As a class they are quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious, and economical—ready and apt to learn all the different kinds of work required in railroad building. ... They soon become as efficient as white laborers."

However, plagued by debts, both from uncooperative stockholders who did not wish to honour the payments due on their subscriptions, and grandiose plans designed by Judah, which siphoned off money from the railroad funds for such things as bridges which turned out to be unstable, culverts that the rain destroyed and washed away, and majestic stations that were surely too soon, with hardly any track laid, the Central Pacific, first to begin the mammoth task of constructing the transcontinental rail network, did not have an easy time of it. Judah's death in November removed some of the problems the Big Four were wrestling with, and allowed them to put into practice schemes he would have had major problems with, but which helped finance and keep the railroad growing.
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The first CPRR locomotive, the Gov Stanford, carried its first passengers and freight eighteen miles from Sacramento to Roseville in April 1864, and two months later the track was completed as far as Newcastle, linking up with the Comstock Lode (the silver mines in Nevada) by way of the Dutch Flat Toll Road, a toll road for wagons which both provided transport for stock and materials and also connected with the growing rail route. By the summer of 1865, the railroad had advanced fifty-five miles east of Sacramento, when it came up against the most formidable of barriers, the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Cuts had to be dug, gullies and ravines filled in, and most time-consuming and dangerous of all, tunnels had to be blasted through the mountains, the longest of which measured over one and a half thousand feet. Here again, Crocker's inspiration in hiring Chinese workers would pay off, as the Chinese were far more used to hanging off cliffs with gunpowder, having had, in their ancestry, built clifftop fortresses for warlords. And, of course, gunpowder had been invented by them, so every Chinese boy was familiar with it, unlike the whites, who handled it gingerly and with not a little fear.

The Chinese wove baskets out of reeds, which they then climbed into and had lowered over the cliff face so as to work in them more safely. Of course, safety was not a word you associated with such work, no matter the precautions taken, and it only took one of these baskets to snap, or hit a rock, or any of a hundred other reasons that would send it and its passenger tumbling down the cliff and into the mighty river. Won over finally by the bravery and ingenuity of the Chinese, the whites began to afford them grudging respect, and even work with them, and the two sides became more or less integrated, as white men took lessons from Chinese on how best to blast the cliffs without blowing themselves to Kingdom Come.

But up in the high Sierras, falling to your death or being blown to bits was not the only hazard, and one of the greatest enemies was the cold. Winter that year was particularly severe, so much so that construction had to be halted. Snow covered the camp to its rooftops, and fierce blizzards were known to wash away entire populations, whose bodies would not be found until the spring thaw. But that spring held both promise and threat. In April 1865 the Civil War finally came to an end, which, while it freed up more labour from the east, also allowed the resurgence of efforts by the Central Pacific's great rival, the Union Pacific Railroad. As Washington paid by mile of track laid, the profits the CPRR had expected to make looked likely now to diminish, as the Union Pacific began its efforts in earnest. It was now a race to the finish line.

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How the West Was Lost: Those Who Tried and Failed to Save It

I certainly don't have to explain to any of you, I'm sure, how badly treated the Red Man was by ourselves as the settlers moved West, and how their lands were taken, promises to them broken like bottles made out of papier mache, how they were cheated, lied to, confused, derided, murdered and raped, and all but made extinct as a race, all in the name of white expansionism. As a white man myself, though I wasn't born for another century and even then was many thousands of miles from the scene of such savagery and betrayal, I nevertheless consider myself to bear a small part of the shame this sin stains, or should stain, every one of my race, and so I don't point the finger and say "they did it" while smugly looking down from on high, but try, in so far as I can, to use the collective "we" and accept my part of the blame.

As a nation historically oppressed by others, and as one torn apart by differences both political and religious, I should be able to say I know what it's like to be on the receiving end, but the truth is I don't. I'm the equivalent of a man living, during the time of the West, in say Canada or New York, well removed from the carnage and the massacres, in no danger. While my people (Catholics) were being killed and driven out of Northern Ireland by the Protestants, I was safely in the Republic, where the population was overwhelmingly Catholic, and so never faced any kind of oppression for my religion, never mind that I don't even believe. On the streets of Londonderry or Belfast or Armagh, pleading not being a practicing Catholic was no excuse and offered no escape; to Protestants (well, to the loyalist paramilitaries and their supporters) if you were baptised as a Catholic, or "Papist", then that was what you were.
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Naturally, this worked in reverse too. A Protestant caught in a Republican area, or picked up by the IRA, would not get out of it by saying he (or she) was non-religious. To each side the other was the enemy, and it didn't matter if you were a mother of five or a old man, a schoolchild or a priest; there were only two sides, and if you weren't with them, you were against them. Not to mention that if you somehow did escape your fate by declaring against your own side, or purporting to be outside of the conflict, the chances you would be seen as a traitor by your own side and punished by them were not inconceivable. Again, on both sides, you were either with them, or us, or against them, or us. No middle ground.

But if anything positive can be said about the sectarian conflict between Catholic and Protestant that raged for over thirty years over the border (and it really can't), it can at least be admitted that there was a kind of brutal honesty there. Loyalist paramilitaries did not trick you into believing they were your friends, Republican punishment parties never pretended they would be all right with you living in their area. You were the enemy, you knew you were the enemy, they knew you were the enemy, and everyone knew where they stood. Or, quite possibly, knelt, with their hands on their head, waiting for the bullet that would end their life.
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One of the greatest hypocrisies (and there are many) of the treatment of the Indians, as they were then called, in the American West is that the US Government and Army did not come right out from day one and say "we hate you, we have no use for you, there is no room for you in this new world we are going to force upon this land, and we are going to kill you all, or at worst, shove you all into ghettos." Had they done so, it would not in any way have lessened the horror of what happened, but at least the tribes would have known what to expect. When Hitler had the Jews herded into ghettos prior to being transported to the camps, it's a safe bet that none of them thought they would be allowed live. They knew where they stood. But with the Indians, it was so much more insidious and underhand.

Much of this, of course, came from political exigency. As settlers moved West and, to be blunt, wanted the lands that belonged to the Indian tribes - had been promised them by their government - the president and his cabinet had to renege on their promises, or part of them, pushing back the demarcation line which was supposed to encompass what were to be known as Indian Territory, until finally the borders of that land shrunk to a few reservations, while the white people trampled all over the Indians' sacred ancestral hunting grounds. As in all things, the white man came first. It had been so from the time when the first white man had stepped onto the land that was later to be known as America, and imposed his and his country's, and his race's values upon what he saw as "savages". White America wasn't really that bothered about imposing values on these savages, they just wanted their lands, and if they had to kill a few million of them, well they had no problem with that.

The pages of the history of the American west - but mostly, not the silver screens of movie theatres, for obvious reasons - are filled with massacre after massacre of Indian tribes, and not just the men. The US Cavalry seems in general to have made little to no distinction between warriors or braves, and their women and children. All were cut down with the same lack of human compassion or regard, families slaughtered in bloodbaths the likes of which we would not see again till World War I, and which had been recently witnessed through the dripping, scarlet eye of the Civil War. Nobody cried over these innocents, at least, nobody that counted. Often there was nobody left of the tribe to mourn them, as they were all wiped out together. And these were no orderly military campaigns either; at best, Indians could muster rifles, but usually defended themselves (assuming they got the chance to; many of these were sneak attacks, which would have been loudly proclaimed as underhand and cowardly in the US Senate had they been carried out by the Indians) with axes, bows and arrows and spears. The US Army had artillery, rifles and the precursor of the dread of the trenches, the machine gun, in the Gatling gun, which could kill many men at a distance like some chattering goblin of destruction.
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There was no comparison, and no chance for the Indians, even assuming they knew what was coming and could prepare for it. Fire, too, was used by the white man, as the Indians almost to a man lived in hide-covered tepees or wigwams, hungrily devoured by flames in an instant, and like the thatched cottages and shacks callously burned by the Normans and others down through history, one man with a single torch could realistically destroy an entire settlement, camp or village in moments. Once the panicked denizens rushed out, seeking safety, weapon fire would cut them down, or else brave cavalrymen would ride in and slice them to pieces, taking, it should be noted, scalps often as trophies, emulating the practice of some of the more warlike tribes.
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Sadly, but a single example of such a massacre, but so rooted in not even misunderstanding, but a sense of entitlement, arrogance and pure good-old-fashioned violence in response to a reasonable request was the account below that I feel it incumbent upon me to relate it. To place it in context, it came as the result of a horse-race was disputed by the Navajo tribe, who believed - and it seems correctly - that they were cheated. Approaching the fort to air their grievances, one man was shot and then all hell broke loose. The below report is by Captain Nicholas Hodt of the US Army.

"The Navahos, squaws, and children ran in all directions and were shot and bayoneted. I succeeded in forming about twenty men .... I then marched out to the east side of the post; there I saw a soldier murdering two little children and a woman. I hallooed immediately to the soldier to stop. He looked up, but did not obey my order. I ran up as quick as I could, but could not get there soon enough to prevent him from killing the two innocent children and wounding severely the squaw. I ordered his belts to be taken off and taken prisoner to the post .... Meanwhile the colonel had given orders to the officer of the day to have the artillery [mountain howitzers] brought out to open upon the Indians. The sergeant in charge of the mountain howitzers pretended not to understand the order given, for he considered it as an unlawful order; but being cursed by the officer of the day, and threatened, he had to execute the order or else get himself in trouble. The Indians scattered all over the valley below the post, attacked the post herd, wounded the Mexican herder, but did not succeed in getting any stock; also attacked the expressman some ten miles from the post, took his horse and mail-bag and wounded him in the arm. After the massacre there were no more Indians to be seen about the post with the exception of a few squaws, favorites of the officers. The commanding officer endeavored to make peace again with the Navahos by sending some of the favorite squaws to talk with the chiefs; but the only satisfaction the squaws received was a good flogging."

Now consider that the above massacre - you can't really call it anything else - was sparked by one of the men asking for reparations, for justice, not to be cheated, and when the gate of the fort was rudely slammed in his face, trying to force entry. He was immediately shot. I mean, it's somewhat overkill, isn't it? And then it led to a total slaughter as what I suppose cops today in America might call an "unlawful gathering" were treated with the full, terrible and repressive hand of the law of the West, American law, white law. I suppose that could as easily have been a bunch of black people today.
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Of course, there are worse, some famous, some not, many hushed up, excused and in some cases even gloried in, but the one above does serve to show just how little the white soldiers and their commanding officers thought of these people who mistakenly believed they were dealing with friends, kindred spirits, reasonable men. While in my History of America journal I can and do go on at length about the various tribes, their customs, deeds, achievements, daily lives, this is all before we white men set foot on the continent, and since then, the story of the American Indian, or the Native American, whichever you prefer, has been slowly and then with increasing speed charging down a hill like a stampede of wild buffalo, heading for extinction. In a very real way, the appearance of the white man in America can be likened to the unwelcome intrusion of Satan into the Garden of Eden. Of course, Indians would not make that comparison as they're not Christian, which just shows how most allegories don't hold up very well to close examination. But it's certainly true to say that the second half of the nineteenth century sounded the death knell of the freedom of the Red Man, the end of his ownership or guardianship of the plains, the severe dwindling of the buffalo and the first chapter of his own personal version of Paradise Lost.

While there are huge names in Native American lore, giants who stand like titans astride the history of the West, so compelling and memorable that they cannot be stricken from the record or buried with the dead, men who fought against the might of the white man's army - and in some cases, at least temporarily, won - these people will be dealt with where they deserve to be, in the annals of those who contributed to the history of the West. They can't be relegated to a section on Indians, these names that call to us down through almost two hundred years and remind us of our sins. Red Cloud. Tecumseh. Crazy Horse. Geronimo. And of course, Sitting Bull. These men's resistance to the white ethnic cleansing ring loudly through the lore of the West, and should make us shrink from their courage and their determination to preserve their people, even if this proved to be a hopeless task.

No. Here, in this section, I want to look at some of the lesser-known names, those who have been forgotten by or erased from history. The ones who stood up and said no, the ones who gave their lives to save their fellows and their families, the ones who refused to move off their land, granted to them by their gods and the spirits of their ancestors. There are many, many stories of heroism and bravery, rugged determination and stubborn resistance buried in the bones of the mountains and the soil of the earth, drowned in the rivers and looking down from the hot skies, and while we can't bring them back, they should not be allowed to be forgotten.

Part I: Spirits in the Material World: Ghostdancing on the Precipice of History

"If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same way with many Indians."
--WAMDITANKA (Big EAGLE) of the SANTEE SIOUX
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Little Crow* (Ta-oya-te-duta)

A chief of the Mdewkantons, a branch of the Santee Sioux, itself part of the great Sioux Nation from which Indian legends like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse would emerge, Little Crow was not a happy man. He it was who had signed two treaties on behalf of his people, giving away almost ninety percent of their land along the Minnesota River in return for which his people continued to be cheated by the white man, refusing to pay up. The Mdewkantons had been reduced to basically living on a sort of almost welfare set up by the white agency traders who now all but controlled the land. These men stiffed them on every count, and made them feel interlopers in their own country. Big Eagle* once noted "Many of the whites always seemed to say by their manner when they saw an Indian, 'I am better than you,'" and it was indeed typical of the way white men (and possibly, probably in fact, women) looked down on the Indians as beneath them.
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In fairness to this proud warrior chief, he had done everything asked - or demanded - of him by the white man. He had dressed as they deemed fit, converted to Christianity and become an Episcopalian, built a house and begun to farm, but still it wasn't enough. Still the Great Father (President Buchanan) continued to trick and cheat him and treat him as if he were a small child. The Civil War was taking a huge toll on America, and when Little Crow and his people went to collect their annuities at the Upper Agency on Yellow Medicine River they were told their payment had not yet arrived, and possibly might not, as the coffers of Congress were somewhat bare from having had to fight the war. Little Crow asked the trader chief, agent Thomas Galbraith why they could not have some of the provisions already in the warehouse? Their money was due; could he not supply them on credit? In response Galbraith had soldiers guard the warehouses.

Incensed, and starving, Little Crow sent his own men, outnumbering the whites five to one, to take what they needed, and Galbraith, at the insistence of and persuasion by the captain, who did not want a bloodbath on his hands over some flour, to which the Indians were in any case entitled, refused to fire upon them. Little Crow persisted though until Galbraith promised to also supply the chief's people at Lower Agency, further down the river, where his own camp was. Whether in retaliation for being, as he saw it, humiliated while the Indians emptied his warehouse and made a mockery of his efforts to protect the merchandise, the agent kept Little Crow waiting for days, and when it became clear he had no intention of supplying the Mdewkantons, Little Crow issued this warning: "We have waited a long time. The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores, filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving. When men are hungry they help themselves."
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Showing complete contempt for the hungry Indians, the traders were immovable and one of them even went so far as to suggest they could eat grass, or their own shit. Not surprisingly, this ended the council and Little Crow departed in anger. Revenge for this grave and callous insult would soon be visited upon this man, when later he would lie dead on the ground with his own mouth stuffed with grass. I suppose he was lucky that was all it would be stuffed with! Even so, Little Crow knew he was bound by the treaties he had signed not to make war upon the white man, and while that white man seemed to care about as much for the truth as the eagle cared about the rabbit, Native Americans had their honour, and their word was their bond. He found events moving faster than he had anticipated though, and carrying him along on a wave of resentment and hostility as he learned that some of his men had killed white men and women in a futile game of who's-the-bravest, and his council advised him that it would be best to strike first, as history showed that when one of his number was killed by an Indian, the white man did not make any distinctions between Indians, and all were seen as guilty. To make things worse, women were among the casualties, and this would only inflame the white men more.

Still Little Crow pushed for calm, and peace, even though he knew his men were right: the white man would exact a terrible toll for this day's work, and he would spare nobody. But when the hated word "coward" was shouted out, Little Crow faced his people sternly: "Ta-oya-te-duta is not a coward, and he is not a fool! When did he run away from his enemies? When did he leave his braves behind him on the warpath and turn back to his tepee? When he ran away from your enemies, he walked behind on your trail with his face to the Ojibways and covered your backs as a she-bear covers her cubs! Is Ta-oya-te-duta without scalps? Look at his war feathers! Behold the scalp locks of your enemies hanging there on his lodgepoles! Do you call him a coward? Ta--oya-te-duta is not a coward, and he is not a fool. Braves, you are like little children; you know not what you are doing.

"You are full of the white man's devil water. You are like dogs in the Hot Moon when they run mad and snap at their own shadows. We are only little herds of buffalo left scattered; the great herds that once covered the prairies are no more. See!--the white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one--two--ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. Kill one--two--ten, and ten times ten will come to kill you. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count.

"Yes; they fight among themselves--away off. Do you hear the thunder of their big guns? No; it would take you two moons to run down to where they are fighting, and all the way your path would be among white soldiers as thick as tamaracks in the swamps of the Ojibways. Yes; they fight among themselves, but if you strike at them they will all turn on you and devour you and your women and little children just as the locusts in their time fall on the trees and devour all the leaves in one day.

"You are fools. You cannot see the face of your chief; your eyes are full of smoke. You cannot hear his voice; your ears are full of roaring waters. Braves, you are little children--you are fools. You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon of January.

"Ta-oya-te-duta is not a coward; he will die with you."

And so Little Crow was committed. He had already lost face in the eyes of his people by signing the treaties and giving away the land of the Mdewkantons, and had elected another to speak for them in his place. If he did not fight, despite his reservations (sorry) he would bear up the charge of being a coward, and perhaps a traitor too. Yet he foresaw dark times for his people if they did attack. There was however no choice at this point, and so, while some of the Mdewkantons went to the trading post in the morning to warn those they had come to regard as friends, and save their lives, most were slaughtered and so began a war between Little Crow's people and the oppressors who had tricked them out of their land. As the survivors fled back to the fort they met a company of soldiers who ignored the warnings of the priest, Reverend Hinman, who advised them to turn back, and they were ambushed and half their number killed.
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Flushed with their success, Little Crow's people marched on Fort Ridgeley itself, their numbers swelling as other chiefs, tired of their mistreatment and of watching their people starve, joined the attack. Discipline, however, proved a problem, as most of the warriors just went where they liked and did what they wanted, some heading off to a nearby village, and the proper assault on the fort was delayed to the next day. It was quite quickly seen that taking a US Army fort was next to impossible: the Indians' favourite tactic of shooting fire-arrows into the building in order to burn it down would not work, as the fort was constructed of stone, and though they shot at and through the windows, there was no real way to know if their shots hit the targets, while the men in the fort could see the attackers clearly, and were of course better armed.

With reinforcements, a second attack the next morning was more successful, as the warriors used camouflage to creep close enough to the fort to set the thatched roofs of the stables on fire, causing great confusion. But again they were driven back, and with such losses that Little Crow worried they would not be able to mount a third assault. In addition to this, word had come of over 1,400 reinforcements on the way from St. Paul, fresh fighting men who would bolster the defence of the garrison and vastly outnumber the decimated Santee. Wounded, Little Crow lay in his tent while Manako, another war chief, led an attack against the village which the warriors had tried to take the previous day. Again they were repulsed, though they did kill over a hundred men and retired with twice as many prisoners in women and children. By now the US reinforcements had arrived, and the Santees found it expedient to withdraw to the mountains, where Little Crow, recovered from his wounds, tried to enlist other war chiefs to his cause.

But due to the lack of discipline exercised by his men in the indiscriminate slaying of not only soldiers and traders but blameless civilian settlers, and more to the point, his failure to take the fort, he had few takers. Nobody wanted to join the losing side. Nevertheless, what had been put in motion could not now be stopped, and Little Crow knew he had two choices: hide and wait for the Army to find and kill him and his people, or go out fighting and taking as many of them with them as they could. He decided to go on the offensive, and take on the army led by Colonel Henry Hasting Sibley, an ex-trader who was now a cavalry officer. Indiscipline again reared its ugly head though, as many of his warriors, particularly those who had seen how difficult trying to take Fort Ridgeley had been, wanted to go for softer targets, attacking the villages and settlements where there were few if any soldiers. Little Crow, believing the Santees' beef was only with the army, refused to allow this and his force split into two along the lines of those who remained with him to attack the soldiers (the lesser of the two) and those who decided to go their own way and take down the civilians. From that point, the Santees' attempts were doomed to failure.

Big Eagle had more success, and killed many soldiers, but it was all mostly as a rearguard action and the Santee disappeared into the forests, unable to make any real gains. Sibley tried to force Little Crow into a parley, demanding he return the prisoners he had taken, but the Santee were worried about the edict of extermination that had gone out from Governor Ramsey, and though Little Crow left a note to explain why the Santees had made war on Sibley's men, he refused to bring back the prisoners, distrustful of the man. Many of his contemporaries were for suing for peace though, believing the return of the prisoners would be the end of it. Another Indian, who held the same views as Little Crow, voiced his opinion thusly:

"I am for continuing the war, and am opposed to the delivery of the prisoners. I have no confidence that the whites will stand by any agreement they make if we give them up. Ever since we treated with them, their agents and traders have robbed and cheated us. Some of our people have been shot, some hung; others placed upon floating ice and drowned; and many have been starved in their prisons. It was not the intention of the nation to kill any of the whites until after the four men returned from Acton and told what they had done. When they did this, all the young men became excited, and commenced the massacre. The older ones would have prevented it if they could, but since the treaties they have lost all their influence. We may regret what has happened, but the matter has gone too far to be remedied. We have got to die. Let us, then, kill as many of the whites as possible, and let the prisoners die with us."

And every word he said was true. But as ever down through history, such matters are often settled by treachery, and so this one too. Washaba, one of the other chiefs, sent a secret message to Sibley, anxious to end the war and obtain forgiveness for his people. He arranged to meet the colonel and hand over the prisoners. After a final assault had again failed, Little Crow withdrew and Sibley marched into the Santees camp, aided by Wabasha and took back the prisoners. He then made every remaining Santee his prisoner, and began a kangaroo court which ended in death sentences for many, though these were held off while President Lincoln was requested to ratify and authorise the sentences, which he refused to do. Ramsey and General Pope, Sibley's immediate superior, to whom he had passed the responsibility of pronouncing deaths on what was said to be over three hundred Indians, were angered by the President's delay, and swore to take revenge themselves with or without his permission. Lynch mobs also attacked the prisoners as they were marched to a new prison camp.

In the end, Lincoln's explicit orders saved the lives of most of the Santees, as he declared that only thirty-odd of the warriors should be executed, those who could be proven to have been guilty of murder. The rest were to be imprisoned. Among them was Big Eagle, and the son-in-law of Wabasha, who had betrayed the tribe, was hanged, though he had not taken part in any violence, and had tried to stop the war. Little Crow tried to rally reinforcements from the other tribes, showing them what the white men had done, but they were not interested, believing their best option was to move out of the way. Little Crow crossed over the border into Canada, to seek the help of the British there, but had no luck, and when he decided to go back to Minnesota and take horses from the white men in recompense for the land he had signed away, and never been paid for, he was shot and killed by bounty hunters.

*  Little Crow, Big Eagle: you have to wonder if there was a Medium Raven or an Enormous Buzzard knocking around in that tribe, don't you?