Low on credibility but a lot of fun
Charlie Siringo was a colorful character
of the old West. I mentioned him recently when reviewing the movie Siringo (a picture which, by the way,
has nothing to do with the real Charlie). Best known as a Pinkerton detective,
he also wrote a memoir of his youth as a cowpoke, A Texas Cowboy, or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish
Pony, first published in 1885 when Charlie was only 30. Later we’ll be
reviewing other books by or about Siringo but today let’s have a look at his
years as a cowboy.
Siringo was a great self-publicist. He
states his object in writing the book bluntly in the very first line:
My excuse for writing this book is money – and lots of it.
History does not record if his ambition
was realized and the cash came flooding in from royalties. I doubt it, somehow.
Siringo had a very meager grasp of the
rules of English grammar, punctuation and spelling, and no editor seems to have
been engaged, so the read will make any passing English teacher blanch. But in
fact I found it rather endearing, and the prose underlines the youth and naivety
of the author. In fact his last paragraph raises a smile:
Now, dear reader in bidding you adieu, will say: should you not be pleased
with the substance of this book, I’ve got nothing to say in defence, as I gave
you the best I had in my little shop, but before you criticise it from a
literary standpoint, bear in mind that the writer had fits until he was ten
years of age, and hasn’t fully recovered from the effects.
It also smacks of tall tales, and
Siringo is free with mentions of personages of the West whom he claims (though often
without details or corroboration) to have met. This is especially true of Billy the Kid, to whom he devotes chapters – and in fact he later expanded this part
of the memoir into a full book on the famous outlaw. But ‘historical facts’ are
given without any evidence or citations and you are left with a definite impression
that his whole account is based on hearsay. He does state at one point that one
of his sources was Bonney himself, but as he never recounts in the text their
meeting (which he certainly would have done had it been real) the readers
remains skeptical.
Charlie in his detective days
Siringo starts, logically enough, with
his boyhood days. He gives his birth date as 1856, whereas it appears in
reality to have been 1855. He was born “at the extreme southern part of the Lone
Star State, on the Peninsula of Matagorda”. His father died when he was only a
year old and evidently his mother had trouble bringing him up. He was by his
own account a very naughty boy. As a young lad he found the fighting of the
Civil War in the area exciting.
“About a year after the war broke out
the rebels gathered up all the cattle on the Peninsula and drove them to the
mainland, where they were turned loose with thousands upon thousands of wild
cattle already over there.” When the war ended “all of the men and boys who
were large enough” went to recover the cattle but it appears that Charlie was
not large enough (he was nine or ten) for he was not allowed to go. But later a
certain Mr. Faldien, a cattleman, rented part of the family home and persuaded
Mrs. Siringo to let Charlie go with him to Matagorda “to learn to run cattle”.
A mere child, Charlie was now a cowboy.
He covered thousands of miles
His adventures as a cowpuncher – and, to
hear him tell it, soon to be a trail boss – took Charlie all over the South and South-west.
One of the ranches he worked for was owned
by ‘Shanghai’ Pierce and his brother Jonathan who had “come out there from
Yankeedom a few years before poorer than skimmed milk”. They sold out “for the
snug little sum of one hundred and ten thousand dollars.” Charlie adds, “That
shows what could be done in those days, with no capital but lots of cheek and a
branding iron.”
Siringo often shows evidence of a
then-common but today unpalatable attitude to those he calls “colored” or “negroes”.
Sometimes he mocks the language they used and paints a ‘comic’ picture of such
folk. At others he is guilty of a casual brutality. When a ranch manager leaves
Siringo says, “Some of the boys hated to part with Mr. Nie but I was glad of
the change, for he wouldn’t allow me to rope large steers nor fight when I got
on the war-path. I remember one time he gave me fits for laying a negro out
with a four-year old club.”
Often Siringo worked for apparently good
wages only to have so many deductions made for board that the entire pay
disappeared. It was certainly not an easy life and young boys were clearly
exploited by unscrupulous bosses. Charlie started to brand “Mavricks”, as he
calls them, on his own account, building up a small herd “which began to make
me feel like a little cattle king”. But he adds, “The only trouble was that
they were scattered over too much wild territory and mixed up with so many
other cattle. When a fellow branded a Mavrick it was a question whether he
would ever see or realize a nickel for it.” But he was working “on my own hook”,
branding mavericks and also skinning dead cattle. “To give you an idea how
badly cattle died that winter will state that, at times, right after a sleet, a
man could walk on dead animals for miles without stepping on the ground.”
“That spring,” says Charlie, without
naming the year, “there was a law passed prohibiting the carrying of pistols
and I was the first man to break the law, for which they socked a heavier fine
to me than I was able to pay.”
Of course like all cowboys of the time
Charlie tells of wild goings-on in the trail towns. Chapter XIV, for example,
is entitled “On a Tare [sic] in Wichita, Kansas”. He says that in Dodge City
while “whooping ‘em up” he ran into “an old friend by the name of Wess Adams
and we both had a gay time, until towards morning when he got severely stabbed
in a free-for-all fight.” He also often brags of the girls he wooed. In Indian
Territory he tells of a big horse race after which “the whole mob were
gloriously drunk, your humble servant included. There were several fights and
fusses took place.” Charlie says, “It being against the laws of the United
States to sell, or have whiskey in the Indian territory, you might wonder where
it came from: a man by the name of Bill Anderson – said to have been one of
Quantrell’s men during the war – did the
selling.” As Bloody Bill was killed in an ambush on October 26, 1864 it was
unlikely that he was selling liquor in Indian Territory in the 1870s, but that’s
Charlie for you.
But just as often he describes the
loneliness of the cowboy life as he was sent on long missions to round up
strays, for example. Chapter XV’s heading is “A Lonely Trip Down the Cimeron
[sic]”. On these journeys he shows signs of being either singularly accident-prone or very improvident, being without matches to light a camp fire, for
example.
According to Siringo’s account, rancher
Moore was disappointed by the cowardliness of Frank Stuart, who had been hired
by the Panhandle cattlemen to put a stop to the rustling of their cattle by
Billy the Kid, among others, who were running them over to the Fort Stanton
area, and so Moore put Siringo in charge of a party to do the job properly.
This group included Big-Foot Wallace, the celebrated Mexican war soldier and
Texas Ranger. This seems a very tall tale.
“From Roswell we went to John Chisholm’s
ranch [he must mean John Chisum] on the head of South Spring River; and got
there just in time as he was rigging up his outfit for spring work. They were
going to start down the Reo Pecos to the Texas line, next day, to begin work
and I concluded we had better work with them, in search of Panhandle cattle
which might have drifted across the Plains.” Of course Charlie would have to
work with John Chisum. He also ran into Ash Upson, the bibulous journalist
friend of Pat Garrett.
The story comes to an abrupt end when on
the very last page Siringo gives up cowpunching to run a store. He doesn’t
really say why beyond the fact that he “fell head over heels in love with a
pretty little fifteen-year-old black-eyed miss, whom I accidently met.”
If you read this short book you’ll
probably enjoy it. A certain infectious youthful enthusiasm shines through it
and you do get interesting detail on cowboying in the 1870s and 80s. But you
would be wise to take it with a large pinch of salt.
No comments:
Post a Comment