What anyone in 1882
knew for sure about Lorenzo Bliss and Charlie Whitelaw didn't begin to stack up to the lore.
It hasn't gotten any better. Every year, it seems, someone publishes a new book about one or the other or both, and all it does is embroider upon the malarkey that appeared in every journal from the old Indian Nations to Dakota, and as far east as New York and Boston. If you took it all for gospel, you had to wonder why the authorities in four territories had so much trouble locating a pair of killers ten feet tall riding at the head of an army of a thousand men.
After four decades of dime novels, saloon ballads, “real-life” memoirs, and one jerky photoplay featuring Broncho Billy Anderson and an unbilled William S. Hart, I haven't learned anything more than I knew when I read four columns in the
Fort Smith Elevator
written by a journalist named Fairclough in August 1881. His account was based on interviews with Bliss and Whitelaw's acquaintances and eyewitnesses to the gang's depredations.
Lorenzo Bliss, the accidental issue some twenty years before
of a business transaction between an Irish federal quartermaster sergeant named Bliss and a Mexican whore called Cincuenta Maria, or Fifty Times Mary, had fled Amarillo around age thirteen after taking off the head of one of his mother's customers with a shotgun. Like other desperadoes before and after him, he sought sanctuary in the Nations, but did not behave himself there, either. He had been arrested twice for smuggling whiskey and escaped both times, the first by setting fire to his jail cell in Cherokee and slipping out during the confusion; the second time he managed to work himself free of his manacles while riding in the back of a wagon driven and escorted by deputy United States marshals bound for the federal court in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and used them to cave in the head of a deputy. With the deputy's pistol he shot two more officers, killing one and crippling the other, and made his way to freedom aboard one of their horses.
One of the other prisoners in the back of the wagon was Charlie Whitelaw, whose history up to that point made Bliss's read like Tom Brown's. He was the son of civilized Christian Cherokees who had hacked his parents and his younger brother to death with a splitting maul when he was eighteen, then burned down their cabin on the Canadian River in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the evidence. When a warrant was issued for his arrest he shot the constable who came to serve it, using his father's old cap-and-ball Navy .36, shot him again in the head when he was lying on the ground, and took off on the man's horse. There was another shooting incident at a Guthrie whorehouse when the constable's horse was spotted tied up in front and a pair of city patrolmen went in to investigate; Whitelaw, who was in an upstairs room spending the money he had stolen from a peach tin in his parents' cupboard, set fire to the mattress to create a diversion and went out the window, where he was
seen by a third officer stationed in the alley. Slugs were exchanged, the policeman fell, and Whitelaw made his getaway on another stolen horse.
A posse was convened. They tracked him to an abandoned cabin on the Cimarron, surrounded it, and forced him to surrender. He spent a month in the city jail, where deputy United States marshals took him into custody and loaded him in chains aboard a wagon bound for Fort Smith. Lorenzo Bliss was one of the prisoners already on the wagon. When Bliss made his break, Whitelaw accompanied him. They had been together ever since.
It was a match made in hell. Neither man had a future or a conscience, and they both liked burning things. They quickly assembled a band of like-minded individualsâthese were never in short supply in the Indian territoryâand spent the next five years laying a path of blood and ashes north to Canada.
The military precision of their raids led to speculation that some of their people were guerrillas trained during the late Southern Rebellion, but this might have been only the wish-dream of journalists who had missed the best days of Frank and Jesse James and the Youngers. Certainly they were well led, or they would have broken apart in confusion during their encounters with the law. They had sprung traps in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, and suffered only one casualty, a Creek half-breed named Swingtree; a slug from a sharpshooter's Remington fired from the roof of the Miner's Bank in Butte took off his right arm and deposited him in the territorial prison at Deer Lodge for life. If Swingtree had been a member of the James gang, the columns would have been full of stories of the leaders' attempts to rescue their loyal minion in the face of withering enemy fire, but no such blanket got stretched for Bliss and Whitelaw. They were exciting press, but they were not heroes. Their chief claim to notoriety, at a time when it seemed you
couldn't throw a dead cat between St. Louis and the Barbary Coast without hitting a daylight bandit, was the targets they chose. The Jameses and Youngers only robbed banks and trains. Bliss and Whitelaw destroyed whole towns.
What's more, they enjoyed it. Thirty or forty dead was the official estimate of the human cost of their spree before the mess on the Saskatchewan, but when you figured in the amount they'd stolen, it came to less than three hundred dollars per corpse. Even the medical students in Chicago were offering better than that.
I began my preparations for Canada by arranging transportation. I enjoyed this just a little more than I did the idea of spending the winter north of Montana. Shoot me, I hate horses. I had bite scars on my backside that were older than some of the deputies I rode with and a broken leg going back to my cowpunching days that still gave me hell whenever the weather turned; and on the frontier it turned faster and more often than a jackrabbit. If my contribution could speed up the Great Northern's efforts to lay track across the territory and give me the chance to trade my saddle for a first-class Pullman ticket, I'd have been on my way to the Dakota line with a sledgehammer over my shoulder a long time ago.
Ernst Kindler ran the livery, but he only reported to work three days out of the week. He wasn't lazy. It hadn't taken him long to learn that he did his best business when one of his part-timers took his place. Ernst had been Judge Blackthorne's hangman until he laid down his ropes for his first love, which was tending livestock. But a lot of people were superstitious; those five years of service on the scaffold had put something in the old man's eyesâor taken it out, no one was sure whichâthat made them decide they could get along without a horse or a trap for another day or two until Lars Nördstrom or Cracker Tom
Bartow reported for work. I was under no such constraint. I trusted Kindler's knowledge of animals as I did Blackthorne's understanding of statute, and anyway there were people who said the same thing about my eyes that they did about his. Also I liked to watch him tie knots.
I found him doing just that next to the barrel stove in his reeking little office. It took him all of five minutes to enter his day's transactions in the ledger, giving him the rest of the twelve hours to pluck his prodigious eyebrows, read the Bibleâhe was not God-fearing, but during his tenure as executioner he had made it a point to attend every trial that might end in hanging, and claimed that nothing but Kings I and II could compare to the testimony he'd heard for sheer harrowing detailâand practice his sailors and squares. Today he was sitting stooped over in the burst horsehair swivel next to his cracked desk, putting the finishing touches on a Gordian masterpiece nearly as big as his head. It must have consumed ten feet of tarred hemp.
“You wouldn't even have to put that around his throat,” I said in greeting. “Just hit him in the head with it, and his criminal days are over.”
He looked up with that dead gaze under his thatched brow and grinned. Those customers who got along all right with his eyes tended to lose their resolve when he smiled. It wasn't that he had bad teeth; in fact, he took better care of them than most men in the higher professions, which may have been why they made you think of bleached white bones half hidden in the wiry tangle of his beard. The starched white collar he insisted upon wearing even when he cleaned out the stables contributed to the overall impression of a dressed corpse.
“Good morning, Mr. Murdock. I thought at first you was a half-growed bear standing there. They only come into town when they're starved.”
I didn't resent the bear remark. I had on a bearskin I'd taken off a big black I shot in the Bitterroots in '77, with a badger cap pulled down over my ears. It was the “half-growed” I didn't care for. You can only be told you're not as big as Jim Bridger so many times before it starts to tell on your good disposition. “Why do you bother to keep in practice, if you don't intend to go back to work for the Judge?”
He sat back, turning the great twisted ball around and around in his hands. He had long, elegant fingers with callus between them; the fingers of a painter or a concert pianist. He had been an artist in his way, never having had to hang a man twice because it didn't take the first time or left one to strangle slowly. The neck had snapped each time, clean and crisp as a shot from a carbine. “You can always trust a knot if you tie it right,” he said then. “Knots ain't people.”
I told him I needed a horse.
“You got a horse. You owe me two weeks' board on that claybank you brought back from New Mexico.”
“That's a desert horse. I need to trade it for one that's good in snow. You know you can count on me for the bill.”
“No horse is good in snow. What you need is one that ain't as bad as most. I got a mustang I can let you have for the claybank and fifty bucks.”
“How is it a short-legged animal like that comes so high?”
He grinned and started pulling apart the knot. “I got it and you don't.”
“How much mustang is it? I need a horse with bottom.”
“Oh, it's a regular mongrel. Fellow I got it from said if he had his choice he'd be buried with it, because he was never in a hole it couldn't get him out of.”
“Why'd he part with it?”
“He sunk every cent he had into a shaft that turned out to
be full of water. Traded me the animal for the board he owed on it and ten bucks, took himself a room at the Merchants, and blew his brains out with a Sharps pistol.”
“Let's have a look.”
He set the ball of rope on the desk, got up, pulled on a stiff canvas coat, and led the way to the stalls, where a barrel stove identical to the one in the office glowed fiercely with each gust of wind that knifed its way through the chinks in the siding. The horses standing between the partitions stamped and blew clouds of steam in the lingering chill, but the fumes from the fresh manure and the animal heat itself kept the temperature above freezing. We stopped before a stall containing a scrawny-looking sorrel with a squiggly blaze on its forehead that reminded me of a snake. It had a black mane and a red glint in its eye I didn't like by half.
“Fellow called him Little Red,” Kindler said.
“If I called it anything I'd call it Snake. But I don't name horses and mosquitoes.” I took a fistful of its mane to steady it and peeled back its upper lip. In a lightning flash the mustang broke my grip and snapped at my hand. I snatched it back in time to avoid losing a finger, but the beast took off the top of a knuckle. “Son of a bitch.”
“Teeth are fine,” said the old hangman.
The horse nickered and showed its gums. Its grin reminded me of Kindler's.
I dug my bandanna out of the bearskin and wrapped it around my hand. The blood soaked through the cotton immediately. “I'll give you the claybank and ten. We'll forget about what Doc Schachter's going to soak me for the lockjaw treatment.”
“You won't get lockjaw. He's clean. Fifty's the price.”
“I suppose it's gelded.”
“I don't traffic in stallions. I like to keep the boards on my stalls.”
“Twenty.”
“Talk around town is you're headed north,” he said. “You can't take an ordinary horse up there this time of year unless you figure to cook and eat him when he lays down on you. An animal that will fight you is an animal that will save your life.”
I looked at him. He was heartier than his gaunt frame and lifeless eyes suggested. He seldom shook hands with anyone because all those years working with ropes and counterweights had made his fingers as strong as cables, and he was afraid he'd forget himself and crush bone.
“You're selling hard for the price,” I said. “If you're that keen on getting rid of it, you need to budge.”
He looked away. That never happened; it was always the other person who lost in a staring contest. He ran a finger down a fresh yellow post holding the stall together. It hadn't been up more than a few weeks. “Bastard knocked down a partition last month and killed my best stepper.”
“Not the gray.”
“It was Parson Yell's favorite. He ain't been around to rent the calash since. Thirty-five, and I'll throw in what you owe me on the claybank's board.”
“Done.”
He turned back toward the office. “Let's splash some whiskey on that knuckle.”