the Sackett Companion (1992) (17 page)

The Hole was well-sheltered from the worst winds, and had water, fuel, and good range.

BENTON HAYES: A man who found hunting wanted men paid better than hunting buffalo or bear. Only trouble was, sometimes you believed you were trailing a small black bear but at the end of the trail you discovered you had cornered a grizzly. Up to this point Benton Hayes had tracked down a number of small black bears. He wasn't prepared for what he found in his trap this time.

ALBANI FULBRIC: A man with a sense of history, and a memory of his own family's story. Like many of his generation he had grown up reading Sir Walter Scott.

DOLORES ARRIBAS: A lady of Spanish-Indian ancestry, a lady who was quite a woman and she had it where it could be seen. Wherever she went she turned heads. She took in washing and it was said she entertained a little on the side, but it was very selective entertainment and she did the selecting. A woman of independence and courage, as well as beauty.

CHOWSE DILLON: An occasional outlaw of small calibre; a good hand with stock, not so good at choosing the right companions.

WILL SCANLAN: He had a sister named Zelda and a house by the side of the road where travelers sometimes stopped. He ran a few head of cattle, owned a few moth-eaten broncs, and Zelda could cook, so he made out.

JERK-LINE MILLER: A teamster, a passerby, a man not unwilling to pick up a few dollars of blood money as long as he was out of shooting range.

SIWASH: A crossroads with a store, a saloon, and a half dozen houses, a place born to die, and like many another it did.
The new highway passed it by and when I last saw the place there was nothing left but a stretch of concrete floor and a rusted gas-pump, a few charred timbers and a stone foundation.

Dolores Arribas? One of the gentlemen she entertained passed on, leaving her a house in the city and considerable wealth. When we last talked she was a quiet, elderly lady with gray hair who sponsored the ballet, the opera, and a few aspiring young people who never knew their fairy godmother.

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THE SACKETT BRAND

First publication: Bantam Books paperback, June 1965 Narrator: William Tell Sackett Time Period: c. 1875--1879

News had a way of traveling in western country. Somebody told a stage driver and he told a bartender and the bartender passed the news to some friend over the bar, and the story was on the grapevine.

When the Lazy A riders started hunting Tell Sackett in the Mogollon Rim country the story started from Camp Verde and Globe, but within the week they were talking about it in Fort Worth and Ogalalla, in Dodge and Tombstone. And wherever the story reached a Sackett, that Sackett headed for the Mogollon on the run.

When Tell found Ange in the mountains of Colorado he found a girl as lonely as he himself. Long ago, back during the Civil War, there had been another girl, but that had come to nothing, and when he found Ange they knew it was forever. With gold from their mining claim they bought cattle and headed for the Tonto Basin. Trails were few and they were finding their way, with Tell scouting ahead, and then he was attacked without warning and Ange murdered.

It was a wild and broken country known only to the Apache, miles and miles of forest and running streams bordering on the half-desert lying to the west and south, a country in which a man could both run and hide.

What chance did one man have against forty? One man, already badly hurt and without weapons?

Then the Sacketts began to come from wherever they heard the news. Some were near, some far, but a Sackett was in trouble so they asked no questions. They came running: Nolan, Orlando, Flagan, Galloway, Tyrel, Orrin, and Falcon. Even Parmalee, the Flatland Sackett. Riding for the Mogollon from wherever the news found them, and as has been said, even one Sackett was quite a few.

Van Allen treated all women with contempt but this time he had gone too far. His own men deserted him, and what he hired to replace them was, by and large, the riffraff of western saloons. Even some of those refused to follow when they discovered the truth, that he had attacked and murdered a decent woman.

SWANDLE: A cattleman whose investment entangled him in a web in which he had no part. All he wanted was out, hopefully without losing his shirt.

ANGE SACKETT: Born Ange Kerry. Her story is told in SACKETT, of how Tell Sackett followed a strange trail to a hanging valley in the Colorado mountains and found not only a lost mine of the Spaniards but a lovely girl, left alone after her grandfather died, a girl he subsequently married.

BOB O'LEARY: A bartender who found himself in the middle. He had seen it all in bars from Dodge to Deadwood and wanted no part of a fight in which he had no stake.

There were many such bartenders. Like the gamblers and the gunfighting marshals, they followed the boom camps, drawn not only by the ready money but by the flavor and color of the camps themselves. You found them in the end-of-track towns, places that were born and died within weeks or months as the railroad moved on. You found them in the sudden cattle and mining towns until half the faces in any boom camp were faces you remembered even if you did not know the people.

New ones appeared, lasted a camp or two, and disappeared, but by and large they knew each other, talked over the other camps, and went their ways.

Not only the gamblers, saloon-keepers, bartenders, and gunfighting marshals but the women as well followed the excitement and the promise of easy money from El Paso to the Yukon. Bat Masterson, for example, who ended his days as a sportswriter for a New York newspaper, was at the Battle of Adobe Walls; he was sheriff of Ford County where Dodge City was; and he showed up in Denver, Leadville, Tombstone, and Trinidad. And they included Luke Short, Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Doc Holliday, Dave Rudabaugh, Mysterious Dave Mathers, Rowdy Joe Lowe, John Wesley Hardin, Silver Heels, Poker Alice, Calamity Jane, and dozens of others, names forgotten now but known to all that crowd in the rough old days before the country began to settle down.

DANCER: A good man riding for the wrong brand.

AL SEIBER: 1844--1907. A German who scouted Apache country for the army. A Union soldier, he fought at Gettysburg, among other battles, and was wounded twice. That was only the beginning, as he was wounded many times by bullet, arrow, and knife in his fights with the Apache.

The scouts he led were also Apache, and he was respected both by the Indians he led and those with whom he fought as a decent, honorable man whose word was good.

He was one of the many men, referred to in my stories, that the gunfighters left alone, if they were smart. As I have written elsewhere, for every gunfighter of whom one heard there were a dozen just as capable of whom you heard little or nothing at all. Al Seiber and Major Frank North were two such.

AL ZABRISKY: A gunman for hire; a warrior to handle gun trouble who did not ask too many questions.

SONORA MACON: Another such, and the man who shot Tell Sackett off the cliff, a man with a gun for hire, but one who had his own standards. He was a fighting man who fought for fighting men, not for the killers of women. Badly shot up, he survived.

LORNA: A lady of uneasy virtue who was sent to lure a man to his death for money. Her first thought was for what the money would buy in San Francisco, but she had second thoughts.

BRISCOE: A young man who was suddenly scared, suddenly realized he could die, so he got on his horse and rode away into many sunsets and sunrises, and with every one of them he remembered how easy it would have been to lose them all in exchange for a little piece of lead near his heart.

WILLIAM TELL SACKETT: A tall mountain boy who lived out the Civil War fighting for the Union; who found the great love of his life during that war and lost her almost as soon as he found her. Who rode away to the West when the war ended and drove cattle over the Bozeman Trail to Montana, a lonely man with a lost dream who found a girl alone in a cave and married her. Part of it was love and part of it was because she was lost and alone and needed taking care of, just as he was lost and alone and needed someone to watch over and care for. All he had was a horse, a saddle, and a gun and with it all a wistful longing for something more, something he had known briefly, then lost forever.

NOLAN SACKETT: One of the so-called outlaw Sacketts from the Clinch Mountains. It was said those Clinch Mountain Sacketts were so rough they wore their clothes out from the inside first and Nolan was one of the roughest. When he heard a Sackett was up against long odds he got up in the middle of a horse and started west.

FALCON SACKETT: One-time sea captain, adventurer, father of Orlando, and married to Gin, formerly Virginia Locklear. He was traveling by stage when he heard the news. Somebody had a Sackett treed up in the Tonto Basin country so he didn't waste around.

ORRIN SACKETT: Politician, singer of Welsh songs, peace officer, cattleman. A handsome, smooth-talking man who was good with a gun when the situation demanded.

FLAGAN AND GALLOWAY: Brothers, cousins to Orrin, Tyrel, and Tell, cowhands, cattlemen. Two long-tall mountain boys who come when needed.

PARMALEE SACKETT: A Flatland Sackett whose home was in Grassy Cove; a Sackett with money, a sometime actor, cattleman, gambler, a man good with a gun but who preferred other methods when possible. Has property near the Highland Rim, as well.

VANCOUTER ALLEN: Forty years old, a strong, arrogant man who rode roughshod over anything that got in his way. Brutal and uncaring with women, he suddenly found himself
guilty of an ugly murder and in a panic tried to cover it up and destroy the evidence. Tell Sackett was a part of that evidence and he wasn't easy to get rid of.

CAP ROUNTREE: A salty old customer, a mountain man, trapper, cowboy, all-around western man. Dry as alkali dust and twice as bitter. A tough old mountain man who had hunted gold and fought Indians and had the scars to prove it. You will find him in THE DAYBREAKERS, SACKETT, LONELY ON THE MOUNTAIN, and others. A man to ride any river with.

DODIE ALLEN: Cut from the same pattern as Vancouter, only younger. The pattern was wrong and the time was wrong so Dodie would never get any older.

CAMP VERDE: The post was established under the name of Fort Lincoln in 1861 to protect travelers from the raids of the Apache. Under the command of Captain C. Porter of the Eighth Infantry, the fort had a force including two companies, A and D of the Eighth Infantry and one company, A, of the Sixth Cavalry. First occupied by volunteers, the post was taken over by regulars in 1866, when Porter took command.

MOGOLLON RIM: Although the name is Spanish, the pronunciation is not. Usually known in the area as the Muggy-own. A bold escarpment marking the edge of the plateau, the Rim runs from a spot near Ash Fork through the Blue Range and joins the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico. It is approximately two hundred miles long, but the heart of the Rim country lies from Strawberry across the Tonto Basin and Pleasant Valley. The canyons, mesas, and such mentioned in this story can all be found there. The Natural Bridge is a tourist attraction and the cave in which Tell Sackett took shelter is there.

It is without doubt one of the most beautiful areas in the West, with fine forests of pine, fir, and aspen and many running streams.

It is an interesting thing that the highways through the West seem always to miss the most delightful places, and those
most worth seeing. One can travel through Arizona or Nevada on the highways and never realize there are such places as the White Mountain country of Arizona or many of the finest sights in Nevada. The same is true of a half dozen other western states. Highways are built where it is easiest, and such routes do not take one into the forests and the canyons except where they cannot be avoided.

GLOBE: A mining town, first settled in 1876 as a result of a silver strike, beginning as a few tents and buildings on the banks of Pinal Creek. Its most famous mine was probably the Old Dominion.

TONTO NATURAL BRIDGE: An arch of travertine some 180 feet above Pine Creek. The caves beneath are extensive and supposedly were discovered by Dave Gowan when he was trying to hide from Apaches.

PLEASANT VALLEY WAR: This area was the site of the famous Tonto Basin War, the feud between the Grahams and the Tewksburys. The fight lasted for several years and the last survivor was Jim Roberts, later marshal of Jerome and at one time of Clarkdale.

KNIGHT'S RANCH: A famous stopping place in traveling from Arizona into New Mexico. Billy the Kid was well known there.

WILD RYE: In the time of this story, a scattered settlement centering around the tiny village of Rye.

FOUR PEAKS: A wild region just south of Rye where several lost mine stories have their focal points. It was well known in the years of the Apache wars, and a number of battles were fought within a few miles.

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THE SKY-LINERS

First publication: Bantam Books paperback, April 1967 Narrator: Flagan Sackett Time Period: c. 1875-1879

When Flagan and Galloway went to Tazewell to pay off a debt their father had incurred they were not looking for trouble. They hoped to simply pay the debt and return to the West where their future seemed to lie.

They had heard stories about Black Fetchen but did not expect to meet him and were not eager for the opportunity. Neither did they like being almost run down in the street, but one thing led to another and Black Fetchen and his crowd found themselves dropping their weapons into the street and then at the behest of two strangers, singing Rock of Ages, and demonstrating to all who watched that they were not as tough as they had assumed.

Flagan and Galloway had no idea of taking any freckle-face girl west with them, not until they heard the arguments Laban Costello offered and saw the horses he was giving them, along with money enough for a roadstake.

All they wanted was to get back to the buffalo range but they did need horses. What they did not need was to ride herd on a girl who had it in mind to marry Black Fetchen.

Flagan knew very well that a freckled-face girl with romantic notions could get a man into more trouble than three lawyers could get him out of, but there was no help for it. Galloway had already made up his mind.

What Flagan and Galloway were never to realize was that when they rode into the Greenhorn country they were riding a trail blazed three hundred years before by another Sackett.

Our history as a nation and as a country is largely a family history, but succeeding generations often have little knowledge of the previous generations or their activities. Even when a genealogist has traced a family history, it still deals largely with the high spots, and few such stories recount the day-to-day lives of those involved.

Jubal Sackett went west in the 1600s and was lost to his family. Occasionally there was a rumor, but it was like a leaf blown on the wind. Jubal was gone west, and as in many such
cases, after his own generation has passed on, the others occasionally wondered, but nobody thought to discover his trail.

Jubal had, they believed, found his way to the Shining Mountains, and had married an Indian girl he met en route. That much they believed, but beyond that, nothing. Each generation had its own troubles, with wars, migrations, local politics, and illness.

GREENHORN INN: A place frequented by Kit Carson, among others, and named as was the nearby mountain for Cuerno Verde, or Greenhorn, a Comanche chief. The Inn still stands.

There are legends that fabulously rich gold mines once existed near the Spanish Peaks, near here. If such was the case, the mines and their workings have long since disappeared, and the gold was taken away to Mexico as an offering to the ancient gods of the Aztecs. Certainly the Aztecs possessed gold in great quantities and much was offered to Cortes when he first came to Mexico. No doubt little of that gold came from so far away, for there was, and is, plenty of gold in old Mexico itself. Carrying gold over such immense distances without pack animals other than man seems impossible, yet who can say?

BUZZARD ROOST RANCH: Tom Sharp settled there, building his trading post in 1870. An old Ute trail led through his ranch to the Sangre de Cristos by way of Badito and the Greenhorn country. As in my story, Sharp was one of the first to bring thoroughbred horses into the West, occasionally crossing them with wild mustangs for stamina.