Part 9

Seth Bullock--

Sheriff of the Black Hills Country

SETH BULLOCK--SHERIFF OF THE BLACK HILLS COUNTRY

With the death of Captain Seth Bullock, of Deadwood, South Dakota, there came to us who were his friends not only a deep sense of personal loss, but also the realization that one of the very last of the old school of frontiersmen had gone, one of those whom Lowell characterized as “stern men with empires in their brains.” The hard hand of circumstance called forth and developed the type, and for a number of generations the battle with the wilderness continued in bitter force, and a race was brought forth trained to push on far beyond the “edge of cultivation,” and contend in his remote fastnesses with the Red Indian, and eke out a hard-earned existence from the grim and resentful wilds. In the wake of the vanguard came the settler and after him the merchant, and busy towns sprang up where the lonely camp-fire of the pioneer had flared to the silent forest. The restless blood of the frontiers pressed ever onward; the Indian melted away like “snow upon the desert’s dusty face”; the great herds of game that formerly blackened the plains left the mute testimony of their passing in the scattered piles of whitened skulls and bleached bones. At last the time came when there was no further frontier to conquer. The restless race of empire-makers had staring them in the face the same fate as the Indian. Their rough-and-ready justice administered out of hand had to give way before the judge with his court-house and his jury. The majority of the old Indian fighters were shouldered aside and left to end their days as best they could, forgotten by those for whom they had won the country. They could not adapt themselves to the new existence; their day had passed and they went to join the Indian and the buffalo.

Captain Seth Bullock, however, belonged to the minority, for no turn of the wheel could destroy his usefulness to the community, and his large philosophy of the plains enabled him to fit into and hold his place through every shift of surroundings. The Captain’s family came from Virginia, but he was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1849. Before he was twenty he had found his way to Montana, and built for himself a reputation for justice which at that day and in that community could only be established by cold and dauntless courage.

One of the feats of his early days of which he was justly proud was when he had himself hung the first man to be hung by law in Montana. The crowd of prospectors and cow-punchers did not approve of such an unusual, unorthodox method of procedure as the hanging of a man by a public hangman after he had been duly tried and sentenced. They wished to take the prisoner and string him up to the nearest tree or telegraph-pole, with the readiness and despatch to which they were accustomed. To evidence their disapproval they started to shoot at the hangman; he fled, but before the crowd could secure their victim, the Captain had the mastery of the situation, and, quieting his turbulent fellow citizens with a cold eye and relentless six-shooter, he himself performed the task that the hangman had left unfinished. The incident inspired the mob with a salutary respect for the law and its ability to carry out its sentences. I do not remember whether the Captain was mayor or sheriff at the time. He was trusted and admired as well as feared, and when he was barely twenty-two he was elected State senator from Helena, the largest town in the then territory of Montana.

It was in 1876 that the Captain first went to the Black Hills, that lovely group of mountains in the southwestern corner of South Dakota. He came with the first rush of prospectors when the famous Hidden Treasure Mine was discovered. On the site of what is at present the town of Deadwood he set up a store for miners’ supplies, and soon had established himself as the arm of the law in that very lawless community. That was the Captain’s rôle all through his life. In the early years he would spend day and night in the saddle in pursuit of rustlers and road-agents. When he once started on the trail nothing could make him relinquish it; and when he reached the end, his quarry would better surrender without drawing. He had a long arm and his district was known throughout the West as an unhealthy place for bad men. Starting as federal peace officer of the Black Hills, he later became marshal and sheriff of the district, and eventually marshal of South Dakota, which position he held until 1914. As years passed and civilization advanced, his bag of malefactors became less simple in character, although maintaining some of the old elements. In 1908 he wrote me:

I have been very busy lately; pulled two horse thieves from Montana last week for stealing horses from the Pine Ridge Indians. I leave to-day for Leavenworth with a bank cashier for mulling a bank. He may turn up on Wall Street when his term expires, to take a post graduate course.

In 1907 he told me that he was going off among the Ute Indians, and I asked him to get me some of their pipes. He answered: “The Utes are not pipe-makers; they spend all their time rustling and eating government grub. We had six horse-thieves for the pen after the past term of court, and should get four more at the June term in Pierre. This will keep them quiet for a while. I am now giving my attention to higher finance, and have one of the Napoleons--a bank president--in jail here. He only got away with $106,000--he did not have time to become eligible for the Wall Street class.”

It was when the Captain was sheriff of the Black Hills that father first met him. A horse-thief that was “wanted” in the Deadwood district managed to slip out of the Captain’s clutches and was captured by father, who was deputy sheriff in a country three or four hundred miles north. A little while later father had to go to Deadwood on business. Fording a river some miles out of town he ran into the Captain. Father had often heard of Seth Bullock, for his record and character were known far and wide, and he had no difficulty in identifying the tall, slim, hawk-featured Westerner sitting his horse like a centaur. Seth Bullock, however, did not know so much about father, and was very suspicious of the rough, unkempt group just in from two weeks’ sleeping out in the gumbo and sage-brush. He made up his mind that it was a tin-horn gambling outfit and would bear close watching. He was not sure but what it would be best to turn them right back, and let them walk around his district “like it was a swamp.” After settling father’s identity the Captain’s suspicions vanished. That was the beginning of their lifelong friendship.

After father had returned to the East to live, Seth Bullock would come on to see him every so often, and whenever my father’s campaigning took him West the Captain would join the train and stay with him until the trip was finished. These tours were rarely without incident, and in his autobiography father has told of the part Seth Bullock played on one of them.

When, in 1900, I was nominated for Vice-President, I was sent by the National Committee on a trip into the States of the high plains and the Rocky Mountains. These had all gone overwhelmingly for Mr. Bryan on the free-silver issue four years previously, and it was thought that I, because of my knowledge of and acquaintanceship with the people, might accomplish something toward bringing them back into line. It was an interesting trip, and the monotony usually attendant upon such a campaign of political speaking was diversified in vivid fashion by occasional hostile audiences. One or two of the meetings ended in riots. One meeting was finally broken up by a mob; everybody fought so that the speaking had to stop. Soon after this we reached another town where we were told there might be trouble. Here the local committee included an old and valued friend, a “two-gun” man of repute, who was not in the least quarrelsome, but who always kept his word. We marched round to the local opera-house, which was packed with a mass of men, many of them rather rough-looking. My friend the two-gun man sat immediately behind me, a gun on each hip, his arms folded, looking at the audience; fixing his gaze with instant intentness on any section of the house from which there came so much as a whisper. The audience listened to me with rapt attention. At the end, with a pride in my rhetorical powers which proceeded from a misunderstanding of the situation, I remarked to the chairman: “I held that audience well; there wasn’t an interruption.” To which the chairman replied: “Interruption? Well, I guess not! Seth had sent round word that if any son of a gun peeped he’d kill him.” (Autobiography, p. 141.)

Father had the greatest admiration and affection for the Captain. It was to him that he was referring in his autobiography when he wrote:

I have sometimes been asked if Wister’s Virginian is not overdrawn; why, one of the men I have mentioned in this chapter was in all essentials the “Virginian” in real life, not only in his force but in his charm.

When we were hunting in Africa father decided that he would try to get Seth Bullock to meet us in Europe at the end of the trip. I remember father describing him to some of our English friends in Khartoum, and saying: “Seth Bullock is a true Westerner, the finest type of frontiersman. He could handle himself in any situation, and if I felt that I did not wish him to meet any particular person, the reflection would be entirely on the latter.”

The Captain wrote me that he was afraid he could not meet us in London because of the illness of one of his daughters, but matters eventually worked out in such a way that he was able to go over to England, and when he met father there he said he felt like hanging his Stetson on the dome of Saint Paul’s and shooting it off, to show his exhilaration at the reunion. He thoroughly enjoyed himself in England, and while at bottom he was genuinely appreciative of the Britisher, he could not help poking sly fun at him. I remember riding on a bus with him and hearing him ask the conductor where this famous Picalilly Street was. The conductor said: “You must mean Piccadilly, sir.” The Captain entered into a lengthy conversation with him, and with an unmoved stolidity of facial expression that no Red Indian could have bettered, referred each time to “Picalilly,” and each time the little bus conductor would interpose a “You mean Piccadilly, sir,” with the dogged persistency of his race.

The major-domos and lackeys at the Guildhall and other receptions and the “beefeaters” at the Tower were a never-failing source of delight; he would try to picture them on a bad pony in the cow country, and explain that their costume would “make them the envy of every Sioux brave at an Indian dog-dance.”

When my sister and I were in Edinburgh, the local guide who took us through the Castle showed us an ancient gun, which instead of being merely double-barrelled, possessed a cluster of five or six barrels. With great amusement he told us how an American to whom he had been showing the piece a few days previously had remarked that to be shot at with that gun must be like taking a shower-bath. A few questions served to justify the conclusion we had immediately formed as to identity of our predecessor.

The summer that I was fourteen father shipped me off to the Black Hills for a camping trip with Seth Bullock. I had often seen him in the East, so the tall, spare figure and the black Stetson were familiar to me when the Captain boarded the train a few stations before reaching Deadwood. Never shall I forget the romance of that first trip in the West. It was all new to me. Unfortunately I had to leave for the East for the start of school before the opening of the deer season; but we caught a lot of trout, and had some unsuccessful bear-hunts--hunts which were doomed to unsuccess before they started, but which supplied the requisite thrill notwithstanding. All we ever found of the bear was their tracks, but we had a fleeting glimpse of a bobcat, and that was felt amply to repay any amount of tramping. Our bag consisted of one jack-rabbit. The Captain told us that we were qualified to join a French trapper whom he had known. The Frenchman was caught by an unusually early winter and snowed in away off in the hills. In the spring, a good deal to every one’s surprise, he turned up, looking somewhat thin, but apparently totally unconcerned over his forced hibernation. When asked what he had lived on, he replied: “Some day I keel two jack-rabeet, one day one, one day none!”

The Captain and I took turns at writing my diary. I find his entry for August 26:

Broke camp at Jack Boyden’s on Sand Creek at 6.30 A. M., and rode via Redwater Valley and Hay Creek to Belle Fourche, arriving at the S. B. ranch at two o’clock; had lunch of cold cabbage; visited the town; returned to camp at five P. M.; had supper at the wagon and fought mosquitoes until ten o’clock.

Broke camp and rode via Owl Creek divide and Indian Creek through several very large towns inhabited chiefly by prairie dogs, to our camp on Porcupine Creek. Fought mosquitoes from 3 A. M. to breakfast time.

I had long been an admirer of Bret Harte, and many of the people I met might have stepped from the pages of his stories. There was the old miner with twenty-two children, who couldn’t remember all their names. His first wife had presented him with ten of them, but when he married again he had told his second wife that it was his initial venture in matrimony. He gave a vivid description of the scene when some of the progeny of his first marriage unexpectedly put in an appearance. Time had smoothed things over, and the knowledge of her predecessor had evidently only acted as a spur to greater deeds, as exemplified in the twelve additions to the family.

Then there was the old lady with the vinegar jug. She was the postmistress of Buckhorn. We had some difficulty in finding the post-office, but at length we learned that the postmistress had moved it fifteen miles away, to cross the State border, in order that she might live in Wyoming and have a vote. We reached the shack to find it deserted, but we had not long to wait before she rode in, purple in the face and nearly rolling off her pony from laughter. She told us that she had got some vinegar from a friend, and while she was riding along the motion exploded the jug, and the cork hit her in the head; what with the noise and the blow she made sure the Indians were after her, and rode for her life a couple of miles before she realized what had happened.

What could have surpassed the names of the trails along which we rode and the canyons in which we camped? There was Hidden Treasure Gulch and Calamity Hollow, and a score more equally satisfying. That first trip was an immense success, and all during the winter that followed whenever school life became particularly irksome I would turn to plans for the expedition that we had scheduled for the next summer.

When the time to leave for the West arrived I felt like an old stager, and indulged for the first time in the delight of getting out my hunting outfit, deciding what I needed, and supplementing my last summer’s rig with other things that I had found would be useful. Like all beginners I imagined that I required a lot for which I had in reality no possible use. Some men always set off festooned like Christmas-trees, and lose half the pleasure of the trip through trying to keep track of their belongings. They have special candles, patented lanterns, enormous jack-knives with a blade to fulfil every conceivable purpose, rifles and revolvers and shotguns galore; almost anything that comes under the classification of “it might come in handy.” The more affluent hunter varies only in the quality and not the quantity of his “gadjets.” He usually has each one neatly tucked away in a pigskin case. The wise man, however, soon learns that although anything may “come in handy” once on a trip, you could even on that occasion either get along without it or find a substitute that would do almost as well. It is surprising with what a very little one can make out perfectly comfortably. This was a lesson which I very quickly learned from the Captain.

The second trip that we took was from Deadwood, South Dakota, to Medora, North Dakota. I had never seen the country in which father ranched, and Seth Bullock decided to take me up along the trail that father had been travelling when they met for the first time.

We set off on Friday the 13th, and naturally everything that happened was charged up to that inauspicious day. We lost all our horses the first night, and only succeeded in retrieving a part of them. Thereafter it started in raining, and the gumbo mud became all but impassable for the “chuck-wagon.” The mosquitoes added to our misery, and I find in my diary in the Captain’s handwriting a note to the effect that “Paul shot three mosquitoes with a six-shooter. Stanley missed with a shotgun.”