The California Gold Rush. The very words evoked the strong reaction of an American populace driven by adventure and a lust for easy riches. Drawn inexorably west in the wake of the Jan. 24, 1848, strike at Sutter’s Mill were argonauts from every walk of life—shopkeepers, former soldiers, fallen women and those willing to parade their talents onstage for bemused hardscrabble miners. Among the latter was the Robinson Family, a husband-and-wife acting duo with four kids in tow. The youngest of the brood would become one of the most celebrated performers in the annals of Victorian theater in the American West. With her onstage portrayals Sue Robinson brought to a viewing public the humor, angst and subtle realities of everyday life in that time and place.

The “Fairy Star”

Born in suburban Chicago on Jan. 14, 1845, Robinson moved west at age 6 with her parents and siblings, who were soon performing for Gold Rush audiences composed primarily of young men starved of family life. The Robinson Family trouped the length and breadth of the mother lode settlements, from northernmost Georgetown south through Coloma, Angels Camp, Murphys and countless other hamlets since lost to history, their names—Bottle Hill, Poverty Bar, Limerick, etc.—reflecting both the struggles and humor of the era.

The touring life held little of the perceived glamour of the entertainment world. On July 4, 1855, the Robinsons found themselves performing atop a giant sequoia stump for a raucous crowd in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Three years later the family drew such a throng to Poverty Bar’s Treadway Hall that its main stringer and floor joists gave way. Even when performances fell short of expectations, Sue in particular garnered flattering notices from the various camp presses, which regularly lauded her as the “jewel” of the family troupe. One reporter ascribed her popularity to a combination of factors:

“She is only 8 years old, yet she appeared to understand all the fascinating qualities of her sex of a more experienced age. This in connection with her sprightly and graceful dancing, as well as her natural beauty and sweet disposition, is sufficient not only to make her a favorite among us, but also to endear her to the hearts of all with whom she is acquainted.”

Recognizing the appealing innocence of their star attraction, Sue’s parents billed her alternately as the “Fairy Star” or “La Petite Susan.” Yet, the endless trouping in the rough-hewn mining camps scarred the young girl’s psyche. At age 8 she was severely injured while exiting a stage in Grass Valley when she brushed past the open flame of a footlight and caught her clothes on fire. Rushing to her rescue, her parents themselves were scorched in the effort. Fortunate to have survived, the Fairy Star was soon back onstage, though from then on she was prone to fleeing the stage at the mere hint of trouble.

From an early age the youngest Robinson recognized the importance even a few coins could mean to the survival of her struggling theatrical family. One evening, as she completed the Scotch lilt for an appreciative audience of Placerville miners, the men showered the stage with coins. Ignoring a bouquet of flowers thrown to her, Sue didn’t exit till she had retrieved every last coin, even filling her shoes with them.

The multitalented young girl’s singing embraced everything from sentimental ballads to grand opera, while her dance specialties included jigs, flings, clogs, the cancan, “La Cachucha” (performed with castanets), “Fisher’s Hornpipe” and a double “Sailor’s Hornpipe” performed with older brother Billy. Among her most popular numbers was a burlesque of Irish dancer and actress Lola Montez, who had reportedly taught both Sue and contemporary child star Lotta Crabtree the infamous Spider Dance, during which Montez would writhe and cavort to rid her flimsy costume of spiders, to the delight of appreciative male audiences.

Tragedy and a Rivalry

Sue was only 10 when her mother fell ill and died on Aug. 22, 1855, while on tour in Diamond Springs, sending the family fortunes into a tailspin. Economic uncertainty was and remains a stressor in the acting profession, but his wife’s death pressured Joseph Robinson to take dire measures to provide for his children. In addition to trying his hand at theater management, Sue’s father opened a dance school in Sacramento, advertising his daughters, “La Petite Susan” and Josephine, as potential dancing partners for gentlemen customers. As survival took precedence over propriety, father Robinson—characterized by one period newspaper as a peripatetic “bilk,” a Victorian-era term for an untrustworthy individual—appears to have abandoned any feelings of paternal responsibility for his daughters’ welfare.

Another formative factor in Sue’s childhood was an ongoing, unspoken competition with Crabtree, who rose to become a nationally known actress and variety star. Both girls experienced insecure childhoods spent relentlessly touring the mining settlements to perform before mostly male audiences. They occasionally crossed paths. Sue played the hand organ in a troupe that supported Lotta’s first professional performance, and in the mid-1850s Robinson performed in a saloon opposite Crabtree in a neighboring saloon. In a painful memory for Sue, the miners abandoned her performance, crossing the street en masse to watch the charismatic, slightly younger Lotta. Dressed in green and wielding a miniature shillelagh onstage, Lotta became the darling of the newly immigrant Irish then fueling the labor force in the camps.

While both girls learned the basics of stage presence, Robinson struggled with less emotional and financial support than that afforded the more celebrated Crabtree. The disparity prompted one contemporary actor to remark that had Sue been given proper theatrical training, she would have equaled any other actress of the time. Yet, the multitalented Robinson persisted in the face of adversity. Celebrated as a “child of extraordinary promise,” she sang, danced, played the banjo and, as she matured, excelled in the genteel comedy pieces and farces that followed the featured melodramas. By age 14 Sue was receiving top billing in show posters promoting the Robinson Family.

Growing Celebrity

In 1859, after remarrying a captivating performer scarcely 10 years older than his oldest child, Joseph Robinson moved his family to the Pacific Northwest, where recent gold discoveries augured a new gold rush. Playing their way through Oregon and Washington by 1860, the family spent a year in Victoria, British Columbia, headquartered in a building Joseph leased and converted into a theater. Trouping back to Portland, Sue appeared onstage with the handsome Frank Mayo, a regional actor and comedian who went on to national fame. Like Sue, he had come West as a young hopeful during the gold rush.

In some ways Sue’s life was typical for a member of an acting family prone to chasing the next theatrical opportunity and dollar. Generally ostracized from polite society, actors were clannishly protective of their own. On May 4, 1862, 17-year-old Robinson married fellow thespian Charles Getzler in Walla Walla, Wash., where she soon gave birth to Edward, the first of their two sons. Though Getzler was 12 years Sue’s senior and not her first love, he professed his adoration for her. Seeking stability and a parental figure to help assuage both the loss of her mother and her father’s veiled exploitation, Robinson almost certainly hoped for a stable married life. Sadly, it was not to be. Much as the Fairy Star had been the breadwinner for her vagabond gold camp family, so Sue shouldered the support of her husband and boys as a young adult.

Complicating matters was her growing status as a celebrity, which carried its own perils. A few months into the couple’s marriage a smitten theater patron approached their home, threatening to kidnap Sue. As Charles wrestled the deranged fan to the ground, a concealed gun in the man’s clothing discharged, killing the would-be kidnapper. On another occasion, when fistfights and gunshots erupted in a theater audience composed of enamored Union soldiers and citizens desiring decorum, a panicked Sue ran offstage. “Susie never seemed quite the same afterward,” recalled one eyewitness to the fray. “A slight commotion in the audience would attract her attention in the midst of her best song, and in her best play she always looked as though she was just a little afraid someone was going to shoot.” That nervous strain hovered just beneath the surface. When an earthquake struck during a performance of The Soldier’s Bride at Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, Nev., Sue bolted from the stage, only returning when the aftershocks had subsided. The tremulous quality of her closing song betrayed her lingering fear.

In her best moments, absent such disruptions, Robinson exuded a calm, professional demeanor—quiet by theatrical standards. Feeling more comfortable onstage than off, her pursuit of acting as an adult after a childhood spent before the footlights was her most logical, if not only, career choice. Empowered by her celebrity status and the ability to earn a living, Sue continued performing even after marriage and the birth of sons Edward and Frederick. As a dramatic actress she often executed men’s “breeches” roles, perceived in that time and place as both sensational and erotic. Clearly, Robinson didn’t feel hemmed in by conventional gender boundaries.

For Victorian-era actresses the theater was a paradox. By entering what was traditionally a male space, they breached societal norms, a transgression that discredited their work. Yet, the theater was a place where women could earn an income equal to that of a man and maintain a degree of autonomy over their lives. The theater also had the power to overturn prevailing gender stereotypes that bound women to domesticity, keeping them indoors, protected, frail and helpless.

Stardom in San Francisco

Sincerity was a hallmark of Victorian ideology, and Robinson’s realistic acting—deemed “finished, truthful and good” by one critic—continued to reap positive reviews. Another critic found the “young but promising actress possessed of far more real talent than many who are lauded before the public as stars of the first magnitude.” Though the charismatic Crabtree had outshone Robinson in childhood, Lotta never grew beyond the song and dance routines that were her bread and butter. Sue attained a higher level of recognition as a legitimate actress in classic dramatic roles opposite the leading male actors of the day.

During her tireless theatrical career Robinson is thought to have played more than 300 different roles and performed before tens of thousands of people. Her first stage appearance in the growing entertainment mecca of San Francisco was at the Union Theater in 1855. Sue was praised for her Ophelia, played opposite the Hamlets of Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough and Edwin Adams, three of the era’s best tragedians. She appeared for almost two seasons as Sacramento’s leading lady, executing Desdemona, Lady Macbeth and Portia in other Shakespearean plays, as well as comedies, melodramas and farce. In December 1868 Sue accepted a one-year contract with Maguire’s Opera House in San Francisco, and by the early 1870s she was regarded as one of the best, if not the best, comedic actresses in the West.

Still, mainstream Victorian mores inevitably seeped into the life of the successful, assertive actress, who was often billed under her husband’s last name. Getzler accompanied his career wife to San Francisco, where in 1869 a domestic dispute led to violence. A year later she filed for divorce. Sue’s accolades may have threatened the insecure, underperforming Charles, whose job as saloonman also may have contributed to alcohol abuse. The divorce papers charged that “without cause or prevarication…he committed a violent assault and battery…by beating and bruising her severely, telling her at the same time that she was only a thing to use for his own convenience.” In colorful testimony Getzler accused Sue of being unchaste, called her a “bitch and strumpet” and insisted “all actresses are whores.” In an era when courts weighed a woman’s chastity, the judge accepted his assertion the couple’s younger son, Frederick, was not his and split custody. Sue kept Frederick, Charles kept Edward.

On the Move

After the divorce, though the loss of the companionship of son Edward grieved her, Sue continued to tour with her own theatrical company. Three women and five men constituted the Sue Robinson Company, which closed its run in Virginia City, packed up a mud wagon and pushed on to Reno. Actors were challenged to find paying customers, and the quest kept them constantly on the move. A ticket speculator in Reno charged theatergoers 75 cents to take in Robinson’s performances and pocketed a tidy profit, while the troupe lost money on the deal, having covered the hall rental. After performances in Truckee and Dutch Flat, Calif., the troupe performed on dusty stages in gold rush towns long past their heyday, out of necessity skipping town with unpaid hotel bills.

The company’s luck changed in North San Juan, a Sierra Nevada hydraulic mining camp where Sue had performed as a child 12 years before. On July 4, 1870, the day of the troupe’s arrival, the settlement suffered a devastating fire. Without hesitation, two of Robinson’s leading men manned a fire hose from the vantage of the hotel roof. Thanks in part to their efforts, the blaze was confined to a small section of town, and that night the company’s performance of Camille set a new theater attendance record in North San Juan. Grateful townsfolk rewarded the troupe with several ovations and curtain calls.

Though Robinson reportedly earned more than $80,000 ($1.5 million in today’s dollars) in the 1860s—largely while touring through Washington, Oregon and Idaho—and though she had announced her retirement on several occasions, each time she was compelled to return to the stage in support of her family. One biographer blamed her “worthless” husband for having forfeited her earnings on faro tables across the West. When not touring, Sue performed menial labor to supplement the family income.

According to friends, such persistent financial concerns, coupled with overwork and continued threats by Getzler that she’d never again see son Edward, contributed to her decline in the summer of 1871. Uncharacteristically, Sue canceled several performances, calling in sick. In early June her vindictive ex-husband sent her sheet music to a song entitled “You’ll Never See Your Boy Again.” Whether the sentiments of the lyrics pushed her over the edge is uncertain. Regardless, on June 17 Robinson succumbed to an unspecified illness while on tour in Sacramento. The epitaph on her tombstone in that town’s New Helvetia Cemetery reads, A fallen rose, the fairest, sweetest but most transient of all the lovely sisterhood, suggesting the fleeting nature of the acting profession and the ephemeral status of the characters she’d portrayed onstage.

Sue’s career had been in ascendance, as she had recently agreed to appear as leading lady at McVicker’s Theater in Chicago, one of the nation’s leading playhouses. Though just 26 at the time of her death, she had already spent 20 years in show business, her career having paralleled the glory years of economic prosperity with professional highs before appreciative audiences.

“Not All Sunshine”

Much of Sue Robinson’s life has been lost to the greater drama of the California Gold Rush and its substantial effect on the settlement of the American West. Forced into a performing life by her parents, she made the best of her significant talents, as both a child entertainer and as a stellar adult comedic and dramatic talent. Her early theatricalities before rough, mostly male audiences provided them welcome respite amid dangerous, demanding lives. She was rewarded with a successful career. Fittingly, her last role was in a play called Ambition, an emotion that had driven her to persist through many trials and setbacks.

Ironically, in their time the Old West figures that today capture the lion’s share of popular interest seldom captured headlines beyond their immediate locales, while the popular actors of the Victorian era were familiar to untold thousands nationwide. The male and female celebrities of their day, such performers informed behavior, fashion, society and politics. Robinson herself often starred in melodramas steeped in morality and devoted to the Irish experience, thus helping homesick immigrants deal with the realities of a new world. Her dramatic choices underscored her fame, earning her the adoration of audience members, though on occasion the latter’s emotions got the better of them. For example, years after Robinson’s death a deranged fan, still distraught over the loss of the cultural icon, tried to dig up her grave in the New Helvetia Cemetery.

Among Robinson’s many mourners was Gold Hill News editor Alf Doten, an ardent fan and returning audience member for many of Sue’s Virginia City performances, who in his notice of her death correctly surmised, “Her path through life was not all sunshine.” On learning of her death, Doten rushed to a local photographer’s studio to purchase three pictures he’d taken of Sue, taking comfort in the images of the actress he’d admired from the flip side of the footlights. His gesture was a fitting tribute to a woman who had been thrust into the challenging life of a performer in the American West and risen to the top of her profession.

California-based writer Carolyn Grattan Eichin adapted this article from her 2020 book From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West. For further reading Eichin also recommends Troupers of the Gold Coast: The Rise of Lotta Crabtree, by Constance Rourke.

Originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

Of all the city slickers ever to venture into the 19th century American West, Oscar Wilde towered above the rest, preening like a peacock with his ostentatious wardrobe, his philosophy of art and his knack for spilling printer’s ink across the pages of Western newspapers. In the parlance of the cowboy, Wilde exemplified the “swivel dude,” a gaudy fellow worthy of a second look or a tip of the hat. The flamboyant poet and playwright not only turned heads with his eccentric outfits, but also left Westerners scratching their noggins over his esoteric lectures on “The Decorative Arts” and “The House Beautiful.” For the better part of two months in 1882 Wilde pranced his way across the frontier, a wholly different breed of pioneer.

Arriving in New York City on Jan. 3, 1882, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde spent 51 weeks touring the United States and Canada, traveling 50 of those days west of the Mississippi River. Twenty-seven years old when he arrived, he had accomplished little beyond graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, self-publishing a play and a thin book of poetry, and ingratiating himself into London’s high society with his quick, sardonic wit. During college and afterward Wilde evolved into both a disciple and a proponent of aestheticism, a philosophy best summarized as “art for art’s sake.” Proponents, or aesthetes as they were called, valued form over function. Aestheticism countered the function-intensive machines of the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian belief that literature and art should provide moral and ethical lessons and restraints on society.

While other aesthetes made greater contributions to the philosophical movement, none was more visible than Wilde, largely due to his extravagant dress and a peculiar fixation on sunflowers and lilies as “the most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decoration—the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire and perfect joy.” Wherever he spoke in America, runs on florist shops depleted the supply of those two flowers, as fans and skeptics alike were eager either to laud or mock Wilde with them.

Among the skeptics, dramatist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan parodied the aesthetes with a “fleshly poet” named Reginald Bunthorne, the lead character of their 1881 comic opera Patience—the follow-up to their hit comic operas H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. On the back of the duo’s latest success, their producer, Richard D’Oyly Carte, decided to take Patience across the pond to North America. Doubting that Americans would understand the play’s satire, Carte sought an “advance poster” of aestheticism to promote it. Wilde was the natural choice, as Carte was already serving as the poet’s booking manager.

Likely massaging Wilde’s ego with a suggestion his poetry was also popular in the United States, Carte persuaded the Irishman to assume the mantle of the fictional Englishman Bunthorne for a lecture tour. The clincher was Carte’s offer of half the net profits.

What Wilde excelled at most in his young adulthood was self-adoration and self-promotion, often erasing the line between fame and notoriety. When he arrived in New York, the young nation’s biggest celebrity was dime novel hero Buffalo Bill. By the time the aesthete returned to Britain, Wilde—if not eclipsing the future Wild West showman as a household name—had certainly drawn more news coverage than William F. Cody. At very least Wilde was the first celebrity who became famous merely for being famous, launching the superficial celebrity culture that permeates American popular culture to this day.

“lord of the lah-de-dah”

Wilde stood 3 inches over 6 feet. Protruding from his elongated, colorless face was a prominent nose over coarse lips that sheltered greenish-hued teeth, discolored from too many Turkish cigarettes and too few toothbrushes. His thick eyebrows shaded attentive eyes, and a long mop of tawny brown hair brushed against his shoulders. “He looks better in the dark, perhaps” quipped one St. Louis journalist. A portrait of Wilde printed in the competing Leavenworth Times prompted Kansas’ Emporia Daily News to observe, “If it is anything like correct, there will be no chance for Oscar to get a wife in this neck of the woods.”

What Wilde lacked in looks, he made up for with a voguish wardrobe that ranged from dark formal suits to gaudy shirts and cravats in vibrant purples, greens and yellows. For his first appearance west of the Mississippi he chose a more subdued outfit, his trademark knee britches in black over black silk stockings and patent leather pumps with large silver buckles. Above that he wore a white shirt and white waistcoat topped with a long-tailed black coat and white kid gloves.

His presentations, though, were neither as bright nor as entertaining as his attire. Wilde read his speeches in a monotone voice with a verbal quirk accentuating every fourth syllable. In advance of his February tour date in St. Louis the Globe-Democrat reported, “Curiosity to see Oscar Wilde is greater than to hear him.” Following his lecture there to an audience of 1,500 a subhead in the paper’s coverage pronounced, A Large and Fashionable Audience Bored by His Talk on Art. The reporter, like many other Western newsmen, christened Wilde “the lord of the lah-de-dah.” Others just labeled him an “ass-thete.”

After St. Louis and side trips to Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota, Wilde on March 20 took the transcontinental railroad for talks in Sioux City and Omaha before lecturing the philistines of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento and Stockton. Aboard the westbound train Wilde enjoyed the company of actor John Howson, then traveling to San Francisco to play Bunthorne in the West Coast production of Patience. Whenever Wilde wearied of facing the applause or jeers of spectators who thronged train stations to gawk at the aesthete, he’d send out a costumed Howson to greet the folks instead.

After nine days in California, during which he stayed in San Francisco’s luxurious Palace Hotel, Wilde headed back east, stopping first in Salt Lake City, where a Herald reporter attended his lecture and penned a scathing review:      

“What is the attraction about this strange specimen of humanity? Oscar is not handsome and is strikingly awkward; as an elocutionist he violates every rule of rhetoric and is painfully dreary in his manner of expression.…Only in the matters of exhibiting decidedly vulgar front teeth and displaying an abundance of not even wavy hair is he a success.”

Wilde then moved on to Denver, Leadville, Colorado Springs, Kansas City, St. Joseph, Topeka, Lawrence, Atchison and Lincoln before wrapping up on April 29 with a whirlwind tour of five Iowa communities. In June he returned west for appearances in Fort Worth, Galveston, Houston and San Antonio. By the time he ended his Texas swing, Wilde had cleared $5,605, or nearly $170,000 in present-day dollars. That total did not include the money he personally charged admirers to attend their local functions.

Puzzling the Press

Wherever he went, Wilde made time for newspaper reporters, receiving them in his hotel suite after they had properly provided their calling card to his manservant. Describing his audience with the apostle of aestheticism, a San Antonio Light reporter “found Mr. Wilde taking the world easy in his room at the Menger; he was dressed in drab velvet jacket, blue tie, white waistcoat, light drab trousers, scarlet stockings and slippers. A table covered with books, a lemonade—with a stick in it—and a huge bunch of mammoth cigarettes made up the array that confronted our aesthetic reporter.”

Wilde flattered reporters to their faces and then demeaned them behind their backs, prompting Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star to observe, “The average reporter may not have a very exalted idea of art, but he knows human nature too well to stick himself in knee breeches and call it brains instead of brass.” In the end, Wilde and the press used each other—the aesthete to enhance the fame he craved, the reporters to sell papers.

Audiences either revered Wilde for his intellect, even if they didn’t understand it, or ridiculed him for his eccentricities. “Oscar Wilde, the apostle of the beautiful, is here,” The Topeka Daily Capital gushed, “and there is no doubt that he will have a full house. Topeka is essentially aesthetic, and to hear the great exponent of true culture is an opportunity which may never occur again.” Nebraska’s North Bend Bulletin was considerably less flattering in its report of the lecturer’s forthcoming stop in nearby Fremont: “Oscar Wilde is coming. It’s just awful.”

Besides his dry, droll delivery, Wilde’s standard topics on art and beauty seldom resonated with people scratching a living from the earth. For instance, as decorative flourishes in the home the aesthete recommended tiny porcelain cups over their heavier crockery cousins—this to listeners who set tables with often little more than tinware. Further, he prescribed tiled, not carpeted, floors; porcelain, not cast-iron, stoves; and wainscoting, not papered walls. Such advice might have had greater application east of the Mississippi, but out West, to people living in adobe jacals or log cabins, it lacked pertinence.

Less forgivable was lord lah-de-dah’s condescension toward people unable to broaden his fame and wealth, conduct that grated on Western sensibilities. “Oscar Wilde was more bother than all the women who ever rode in a railroad car,” one Chicago-based train conductor recalled. “He had an idea that he was the greatest man America had ever seen.…He was the vainest, most conceited mule I ever saw. He wouldn’t drink water out of the glass at the cooler, but sipped it out of a silver and gold mug he carried with him.”

High Times in Leadville

Wilde’s impromptu April 13 visit to Leadville, Colo., endured as the most colorful of the aesthete’s stops across America. Though it was not on his original itinerary, Wilde squeezed in an appearance between lectures in Denver and Colorado Springs after no less a figure than Lt. Gov. Horace A.W. Tabor, the “Bonanza King of Leadville,” offered the poet a tour of his Matchless silver mine.

Wilde recalled the silver boomtown as “the richest city in the world…[with] the reputation of being the roughest, and every man carries a revolver. I was told that if I went there, they would be sure to shoot me or my traveling manager. I wrote and told them that nothing they could do to my traveling manager would intimidate me.”

When he reached Leadville (elev. 10,158 feet) after a bumpy 150-mile, six-hour train ride, he felt understandably lightheaded, nauseous and short of breath. A doctor called to his Clarendon Hotel suite identified his malady as “a case of light air,” or altitude sickness as it is known today. The doctor prescribed medicine and rest while Leadville anticipated his appearance.

The aesthete eventually recovered enough to dress in color-coordinated knee britches, stockings, shirt, fancy cravat, dress coat and a broad-brimmed hat. Before striding across the covered bridge that connected the hotel’s third floor with the ritzy Tabor Opera House, Wilde unpacked his copy of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, reasoning that if he were too weak to deliver his lecture, he could read passages from it to attendees. What could be more appropriate? he thought, for like the hardscrabble miners in the audience, the great Renaissance artist also worked in silver.

As the minute hand slipped well past Wilde’s scheduled appearance, the Leadville Daily Herald recalled, “a whole house of curiosity seekers,” some having paid as much as a $1.25 for reserved seats, fidgeted impatiently. When the lecturer did finally show, the Herald reporter wrote, he “stumbled onto the stage with a stride more becoming a giant backwoodsman than an aesthete.” Placing his speech and the Cellini autobiography on the podium, Wilde launched into a variation on his decorative arts spiel.

As the lecture dragged on, the audience grew noticeably restless, so Wilde turned to the autobiography, drawing a reprimand from a boisterous miner questioning why Wilde hadn’t invited Cellini to speak for himself.

“He’s dead,” Wilde explained.

“Who shot him?” replied the curious miner.

Somehow the lecturer made it through his talk without taking a bullet, though the Herald reporter took a potshot at Wilde in print, writing, “The most notable feature of Mr. Wilde’s lecture was the rather boisterous good humor of the audience.”

After the lecture Wilde returned to the hotel to change into more practical clothing and grab a coat for his tour of town and the Matchless. With Mayor David H. Dougan and select Tabor employees acting as guides, the lecturer stepped into the crisp night air, which seemed to revive him. Wilde saw and heard Leadville’s nightlife, a cacophony of drunken carousers, brass bands, tinkling pianos, spinning roulette wheels, screeching women proffering nocturnal delights and boardwalk barkers for saloons bearing such colorful, albeit sometimes misleading, names as the Red Light, Silver Thread, Tudor, Little Casino, Bon Ton, Board of Trade, Chamber of Commerce and Little Church, the latter of which boasted a mock chapel as its entrance.

The tour was an eye- and earful for Wilde, who followed his guides into Pop Wyman’s rollicking saloon. Rumor had it Wyman had killed several men in his younger years and carried a change purse made from a human scrotum. Wilde complimented the saloon owner for a sign over the piano reading, Please Do Not Shoot the Pianist; He Is Doing His Best, calling it “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” He later elaborated on the message, writing, “I was struck with this recognition of the fact that bad art merits the penalty of death, and I felt in this remote city, where the aesthetic applications of the revolver were clearly established in the case of music,
my apostolic task would be much simplified.”

From Wyman’s the mayor had the party loaded in wagons and driven 2 miles to the Matchless, where mine superintendent Charles Pishon accompanied Wilde down shaft No. 3 in a metal ore bucket lowered 100 feet into the pitch black by a cable-and-pulley system. A dozen miners greeted their guest, showing Wilde silver in its natural state and letting him drill the start of a new shaft they dubbed “The Oscar.” Quipped Wilde, “I had hope that in their grand, simple way they would have offered me shares in ‘The Oscar,’ but in their artless, untutored fashion they did not.”

The mining soiree ended with an early morning supper, Wilde wrote tongue in cheek, “the first course whiskey, the second whiskey and the third whiskey.” By the time those gathered had emptied all the bottles, their foppish guest had impressed his hosts for his ability to hold liquor without any visible signs of inebriation. Finally re-emerging from the mine, Wilde returned to the hotel for a brief rest before boarding a train to Colorado Springs to deliver a speech just 14 hours later. He was no worse for the wear.

Heading for Home

On writing about his experiences out West, Wilde largely mocked the “barbarians” he had striven to enlighten. “Infinitesimal did I find the knowledge of art west of the Rocky Mountains,” he recalled, illustrating his criticism with the story of a miner who had struck wealth beyond his education and turned to culture to flaunt his riches. After ordering a replica of the Venus de Milo from Paris, Wilde wrote, the nouveau riche miner “actually sued the railroad company for damages because the plaster cast…had been delivered minus the arms. And, what is more surprising still, he gained his case and the damages.”

Americans likewise found fault with Wilde as he prepared to leave the States that December. Wrote one acquaintance, “He is guilty of all sorts of petty meanness, such as perpetually begging cigarettes from acquaintances and never offering any himself; eating dinners with indefatigable industry at other people’s expense, sneaking out of paying cab fares; and ‘working’ his friends shamelessly for whatever he can get out of them.”

Yet, for all his snobbery, Wilde still found a noble quality among the Westerners, observing, “The West has kept itself free and independent, while the East has been caught and spoiled with many of the flirting follies of Europe.”

By the time he left New York City for home, Wilde had traveled some 15,000 miles through 30 of the 38 United States, leaving in his wake more than 500 major newspaper features and countless Westerners scratching their heads at what they had seen and/or heard. His fame briefly surpassed that of Buffalo Bill, at least until Cody started his Wild West show the next year. Nine years after returning home Wilde finally attained the literary notoriety he’d craved with publication of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Unlike other city slickers who visited the American West, Wilde conned more folks than outwitted him, and he left with more money than he had yet earned. Despite the Irish peacock’s biting condescension, his annoying arrogance and his numerous faults—or perhaps because of them—Wilde could claim the title of the Wild West’s all-time slickest dude.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine. For further reading, author Preston Lewis recommends Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity, by David M. Friedman; Oscar Wilde Discovers America (1882), by Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith; and Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann.

Odds are there isn’t a Civil War buff living who hasn’t seen a copy of this remarkable pencil sketch (above) by special artist Edwin Forbes, which Forbes labeled as “William J. Jackson, Sergt. Maj. 12th N.Y. Vol.—Sketched at Stoneman’s Switch, near Fredricksburg [sic], Va. Jan. 27th, 1863.” The young noncom has gazed back at us across the years from countless publications and exhibits. Rendered with camera-like honesty, it is arguably among the best drawings of a common soldier done during the Civil War. Writing about his work in general, Forbes assured viewers, “fidelity to fact is… the first thing to be aimed at.”

In fact, once Forbes completed his drawing of Jackson, the sketch went virtually unseen for more than 80 years. The drawing was among several hundred illustrations Forbes made while covering the Army of the Potomac for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper from the spring of 1862 to the fall of 1864. Approximately 150 of Forbes’ wartime sketches were engraved and printed in the illustrated newspaper during that period, although his drawing of Jackson was not among them.

After the war, Forbes retained most of his original illustrations. Many he reworked into more polished drawings; some into oil paintings. He fashioned scores of them into award-winning etchings. Many appeared in his books, Life Studies of the Great Army (1876) and Thirty Years After: An Artist’s Story of the Great War (1890). Again, the poignant sketch of the beardless sergeant major from the 12th New York Infantry was not included.

Following Forbes’ death in March 1895, his wife, Ida, maintained his portfolio of original artwork, where the Jackson sketch was catalogued, “Study of an Infantry Soldier — The Sergeant Major.” She eventually sold the entire collection for $25,000 to financier J.P. Morgan in January 1901. Eighteen years later, on the heels of World War I, Morgan’s estate donated the collection to the Library of Congress, its current home. The sketch of William Jackson remained out of the public eye for another quarter-century until it resurfaced during World War II, thanks to the efforts of a U.S. Army private.

Private Lincoln Kirstein, however, was not your ordinary ground-pounder. Born into wealth, the Harvard educated Kirstein was well-connected socially, channeling his “energy, intellect, and organizational skills to serve the art world.” By age 36, when he was inducted into the Army in early 1943, Kirstein had already published several books, co-founded The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, and later, The School of American Ballet in New York City with renown Russian choreographer George Balanchine.

Following his basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., Kirstein was posted at Fort Belvoir, Va., charged with writing training manuals. “I am an old man,” he confided to a friend, “and find the going very hard.” To fill his idle hours, he conceived an idea to collect and document American solider-art. “[M]uch of their work is interesting,” Kirstein wrote, “and some of it is beautiful.” He soon expanded his survey to include “U.S. battle art through time.” His plans included a “large-scale exhibit and a book.”

Aided by some influential friends, including Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and then Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, Kirstein gathered material from various sources, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and, of course, the Library of Congress. Thanks to his efforts, Forbes’ sketch of “Sergt. Maj. William J. Jackson” emerged from obscurity.

The efforts culminated in the exhibition of American Battle Art at the Library of Congress staged from July 4 through November 1, 1944. Three years later, the Library of Congress issued the book that Kirstein had envisioned. Titled An Album of American Battle Art, 1755-1918, the heavily illustrated volume “took its origin” largely from the wartime exhibit. Forbes’ portrait of William J. Jackson appeared in print for the first time, captioned “a solemn lad with his arm resting on his rifle…toughened by campaigning.”​

A Perilous Start

Jackson may have been “toughened” early in life. The son of Irish immigrants, he was born in New York City’s Greenwich Village on June 8, 1841, the first of four boys. His father, also named William, worked as a mason. The family grew in time, and moved from tenement to tenement, though always remained in proximity to Washington Square. The surrounding web of narrow streets flanked by a tumble of brick and framed dwellings and small businesses was an Irish enclave in the city’s 9th Ward facing the Hudson River.

It was a tough neighborhood. “Boys were primitive in those days,” wrote one of Jackson’s contemporaries. “They were like the old time warring clans. Every avenue was arrayed against the other.” Tensions bubbled within the city’s growing Irish immigrant population where clashes were common.

One notorious encounter erupted within a stone’s throw of Jackson’s home when he was 12. On July 4, 1853, streets echoed “the popping, fizzing, whirring and banging sounds” of fireworks as crowds of green-clad Irish revelers celebrated Independence Day. They ended up battling one another. “At one time several hundred men were…hurling stones and other missiles…” trumpeted The New York Herald next day. Platoons of policemen from nearby precincts aided by two fire companies “succeeded in subduing the riot…” Nearly 40 Irishmen were arrested, reported the Herald, “all of whom bore the strong evidences of an impression made on their heads by a contact against the policemen’s clubs.”

Battles of another kind rocked William’s world when civil war erupted on April 12, 1861. The 19-year-old left his parents and his job as a clerk a week later, on April 19, to enlist in the 12th Regiment New York State Militia, Company F. A recruiting office was just blocks from his home.

Tendered for immediate service by its commander, Colonel Daniel Butterfield, the regiment also included in its ranks the future Maj. Gen. Francis C. Barlow when it sailed from New York on April 21, bound for Washington, D.C. Though fully armed, the unit lacked enough uniforms to go around. Raw recruits like Jackson wore “their ordinary clothing with military belts and equipment,” giving them, by one account, a “guerrilla like,” appearance. Appearances changed when a new Chasseur uniform was issued to the regiment at Camp Anderson in Washington early in May 1861. The militiamen were also mustered into Federal service for three months while there, and received a “severe course of drilling.” Barlow was mustered in as a first lieutenant in Company F.

One of their Camp Anderson instructors also distinguished himself later in the war. Emory Upton, fresh from graduation at West Point, would achieve the rank of Brevet Maj. Gen., and eventually become superintendent of U.S. Military Academy. Upton found that tutoring the 12th New Yorkers was tiresome. “I do not complain,” he wrote, “when I think how much harder the poor privates have to work.”

Their crash course in soldiering quickly paid off. Before dawn May 24, the 12th New York led Union forces over Long Bridge to occupy Alexandria, Va., and fortify Arlington Heights in the wake of that state’s secession from the Union the day before. Jackson was among the first Union infantrymen to set foot on Rebel soil.

Jackson continued his trek through enemy country when the regiment joined Maj. Gen. Robert Patterson’s army at Martinsburg, Va., on July 7, 1861. The men patrolled and picketed environs of the Lower Shenandoah Valley until their expiration of service on August 2, when the unit returned to New York. Following a march down Broadway and Fifth Avenues on Monday August 5, the regiment formally mustered out at Washington Square, near Jackson’s home.

Quick Return to the Fray

Jackson’s homecoming was brief. He reenlisted October 1, 1861, and mustered into Federal service for three years, a member of Co. F, 12th New York Volunteer Infantry. Dubbed the “Onondaga” Regiment, its ranks had originally been filled with short term volunteers from near Syracuse and Elmira, N.Y., in May 1861. After the Union debacle at First Bull Run in July 1861, the regiment recruited around the state including in New York City where Jackson signed on. Perhaps showing potential from his recent militia service, William was immediately appointed sergeant.

Recruits ferried over the Hudson River from Manhattan to Jersey City, N.J., and boarded trains for the trip south to join the regiment then on duty in defenses outside Washington, D.C. Recalled another New York volunteer who made the trip about the time Jackson did, “the cars were crowded and the ride was slow, cold and tedious.”

From Washington, the novice soldiers crossed Chain Bridge over the Potomac River into Virginia. Union Army engineers had fortified the landscape to defend the Capital. “Every mile is a fort,” marveled Private Van Rensselaer Evringham, Co. I, 12th New York. “There is thousands of acres here that have been cut down & left on the ground to prevent the Rebels coming by surprise…it would take 50 years to bring everything back to its former state.”

The 12th New York, given the moniker “the durty dozen,” according to Evringham, joined scores of other raw regiments manning fortifications throughout the fall and winter 1861–62, while they trained for combat ahead. Jackson’s Co. F, with four other companies from the 12th garrisoned Fort Ramsay, located on the crest of Upton’s Hill, about a half mile east of Falls Church, Va. They also furnished a daily guard “to protect the guns in Fort Buffalo” nearby. The regiment’s remaining companies manned Fort Craig, and Fort Tillinghast. They occasionally traded shots with Rebel forces, “but to little effect,” wrote a New York diarist.

On March 21, 1862, Jackson and tent-mates were ordered off Upton’s Hill to Alexandria, Va. Next morning, boarding the transport John A. Warner to the strains of Dixie, they steamed down the Potomac River to Chesapeake Bay. In a letter to his parents, Private Homer Case, of Co. I, confided: “We did not know where we was a going.”

After two days aboard ship, Jackson and “the durty dozen” landed at Hampton, Va., embarked on Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s offensive to take the Confederate capital at Richmond. Hard marching through steaming pine thickets and swampy bottom lands on narrow, crowded, often rain-mired roads marked the campaign. Private Sid Anderson, Co. H, quipped of “mud clear up to the seat of our unmentionables.” While Private Evringham claimed, “Virginnie is 2/3 woods or swamps.”

Under Brig. Gen. Fitz John Porter’s command during the fruitless Union thrust up the Peninsula, the 12th New York saw action at the Siege of Yorktown, the battles of Gaines’s Mill and Malvern Hill, and numerous skirmishes in between. Afterward, the New Yorkers languished at Harrison’s Landing until mid-August when they trudged to Newport News. From here they traveled by steamer to Aquia Creek; then by railroad to Falmouth, and on by foot to join Maj. Gen. John Pope’s ill-fated Army of Virginia near Manassas, Va. “We marched thirteen days…with little rest,” wrote Private Robert Tilney, Co. F., “part of the time on half rations…”

At the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Onondagans engaged in bloody afternoon assaults on August 30, against Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s position astride the railroad cut. “We poured volley after volley into the concealed enemy,” recalled one New Yorker. Rebel return fire shredded the Union foot soldiers, “woefully thinning” their ranks. Nearly a third of the 12th New York became casualties.

Facing Lee’s army at Sharpsburg on September 17, Sergeant Jackson likely had mixed emotions while he and his regiment stood in reserve with Porter’s 5th Corps, mere spectators to the bloody Battle of Antietam. The Sharpsburg area remained Jackson’s home through the end of October 1862, when the regiment advanced via Snicker’s Gap and Warrenton, to the Rappahannock River where the Army of the Potomac arrayed opposite Fredericksburg. The boyish-looking sergeant would earn three more stripes during the ensuing battle.

Jackson’s regiment with Brig. Gen. Charles Griffin’s division occupied Stafford Heights when the Battle of Fredericksburg opened on December 13. They crossed the lower pontoon bridge in early afternoon, struggling through debris in Fredericksburg amid what one New Yorker described as “a shower of aimless bullets.” The regiment advanced to a shallow fold in the ground about 500 yards from Rebels posted at the stone wall on Marye’s Heights. “[T]his position,” reported brigade commander Colonel T.B.D. Stockton, “was much exposed to the cross-fire of the enemy’s guns…”

Stockton’s Brigade charged the stone wall just before sundown. The 12th New York missed the bugle signal to advance in the din of battle, though soon recovered, sweeping forward. They met a maelstrom of shot and shell “on both front and side,” wrote Stockton. The New Yorkers piled into the tangled mass of bluecoats already stalled at the foot of Marye’s Heights and went no farther. Ordered to hold their exposed position under enemy fire throughout the night Stockton’s men were bait for Rebel sharpshooters and artillery until relieved about 10 p.m. December 14. It was “all a person’s life is worth to go to or come from there,” wrote a newspaperman. Young Jackson suffered a gunshot wound to his left leg below the knee that day.

When Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside ordered his battered army back to its old camps north of the Rappahannock on December 16, Jackson returned as a sergeant major. He had been promoted the day before, likely to fill a vacancy caused by the battle.

Jackson saw little combat after the Battle of Fredericksburg. The 5th Corps wintered in a small metropolis of timber and canvas huts near Stoneman’s Switch, a supply depot along the railroad several miles north of Fredericksburg, where the 12th New York engaged in an “uneventful round of camp and picket duty.” It’s uncertain whether Jackson’s injured leg kept him from chores, or prevented him from joining Burnside’s inglorious “Mud March” in pitiless wind and rain storms January 20–24.

By January 27, however, the 21-year-old Jackson, with bayonetted rifle, his greatcoat tightly gathered at the waist, was able to stand still long enough for special artist Edwin Forbes to capture him on paper. The artist clearly shows that Jackson placed his weight on his right foot. No evidence has surfaced to indicate Jackson and Forbes knew each other, or ever met again after the drawing was completed, though Forbes remained in the area depicting numerous scenes around the Stoneman’s Switch camps that winter.

In late April 1863, the 12th New York was reduced to battalion-size when five “two-year companies” were mustered out of the army. Jackson and the remaining companies with the 5th Corps followed Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker to Chancellorsville, Va., in early May. During the battle there, the New Yorkers were employed “making rifle-pits and abatis” on the fringe of the fighting. “[I]n this position,” recalled a private in Company D, “we saw the fires in the woods which the artillery had kindled, and heard the cries of the wounded.”

Expiration of service further reduced ranks of the regiment after the Battle of Chancellorsville. Jackson and other “three-year” men were then consolidated in a two-company provost guard. The contingent moved with 5th Corps headquarters when the Army of the Potomac pursued Lee’s Rebels toward Pennsylvania. “Our troops had been on the march for many days,” wrote the Company D soldier, “bivouacking at night in the open air, and were dirty and travel-stained with the heat and sun of late June.” This ordeal ended abruptly for Jackson on June 30. On the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg, at a camp near Frederick, Md., Sgt. Maj. Jackson was granted an early discharge from the army “by reason of being rendered supernumerary…” (surplus due to the consolidation).

​​Battle With Postwar Bureaucracy

Jackson returned to New York City and married in 1865. Employed as a clerk/salesman, he and his wife, Maria, set up housekeeping in Brooklyn. Over time, they were blessed with three daughters. Elizabeth, their first child, born in 1866, suffered from an unspecified disability and likely remained homebound until her death in April 1891. Margaret, born in 1869, worked as a file clerk, remained single, and passed away in 1920. Ellen, or Nelly, Jackson, who was born in 1871, was also employed as a clerk, and unmarried. She lived well into the 20th Century, passing away in October 1945.

Outside his family and job, William Jackson had enrolled in the Old Guard Association of the Twelfth Regiment N.G.S.N.Y., and in “The Lafayette Fusileers,” antecedents of the units he served with during the war. The rigors of his army service eventually took a toll on Jackson’s health later in life.

At age 51, Jackson filed his first claim for an Invalid Pension in June 1892. The former sergeant major supplied a laundry list of disabilities on his application form: “[A]lmost constant superficial pain in right chest & some in legs…pain & violent beating in heart…weakness – can’t lift anything.” His “gunshot wound of left leg” was cited. In sum he was “Physically unable to earn a support by manual labor.” Military medical records also show Jackson had been treated for “Gonorrhoia” [sic] on November 13, 1861. (Perhaps the result from a visit to one of the hundreds of brothels around Washington, D.C., while his regiment was on garrisoned duty.)

Jackson’s claim was rejected, “on the ground of no pensionable disability…under Act of June 27, 1890.” It wasn’t until President Theodore Roosevelt had signed an Executive Order for Old Age Pensions declaring all veterans over the age of 62 to be eligible for a pension that Jackson was finally granted $6 per month beginning May 10, 1904.

The reward would be short-lived. On April 11, 1905, following Maria’s death that January, William J. Jackson died. He and his wife rest with their three daughters under a single headstone at Cedar Grove Cemetery in Flushing, N.Y.
​
​George Skoch, a longtime contributor, writes from Fairview Park, Ohio.

On December 18, 1860, John J. Crittenden of Kentucky introduced a compromise plan to the U.S. Senate. Just two days later, South Carolina would become the first state to secede from the Union, and within six weeks, six more Southern states would follow suit. But while Dixie fire-eaters were driving their states pell-mell toward disunion, Senator Crittenden and other moderates were working to broker a sectional adjustment — one that could, they hoped, soothe Southern fears about Abraham Lincoln’s election and stay the secession tide in the South. 

The Crittenden Compromise would be central to these efforts during the winter and spring of 1860-1861. It represented an attempt to settle the slavery question once and for all, drawing on the tradition of grand settlements like the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850. Indeed, the cornerstone of Crittenden’s plan was a constitutional amendment that would divide the remaining Western territories along the old Missouri Compromise line, barring slavery above and protecting slavery below the 36º 30’ parallel.  

Moderates like Crittenden hoped that this might be enough to secure the loyalty of the remaining Southern states to the Union. This might, in turn, make Republicans more willing to let the secession crisis play out, and it might eventually make the seceded states more willing to return to the Union. Yet most Republicans, including Lincoln, refused to countenance any further extension of slavery into the territories. Attempts by moderates to push through the Crittenden Compromise repeatedly foundered against this opposition. 

Compromisers struggled, too, against the opposition of Southern secessionists, who argued that it did not do enough to protect slavery from the threat of an empowered Republican Party. Over the course of the secession crisis, it became clear that the leaders of the seceded states had no interest in negotiation or returning to the Union. Southern rights advocates in the states that had not seceded also complicated the project of compromise; their demands for more concessions meant there was no consensus around Crittenden’s or any other compromise measure even in those states.  

One such antagonist was Virginia’s John Robertson, a prominent Democrat and judge from Richmond. The state legislature sent him as a commissioner to the seceded states in early 1861, and he returned with assurances of the new Confederate States’ sympathies with Virginia. They are “bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh,” he reported. 

The outbreak of fighting at Fort Sumter on April 12 provided the push for which many Southern hardliners had been hoping. Abraham Lincoln responded by issuing a call for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion in the South, and in short order Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee seceded and joined the new Confederacy. The start of the war seemed to signal triumph for militants like Robertson and disaster for moderates like Crittenden. Yet neither man would accept this as the outcome of his labors. 

Robertson wrote a letter to Crittenden near the end of April that highlighted just how uncertain the future appeared in that moment. Robertson refused to believe that the collision at Fort Sumter necessarily meant war —and rejected, moreover, the idea that war would accomplish the ends of either side in the conflict. He thus suddenly and unexpectedly found his own goals aligned with Crittenden’s, and Robertson begged the old Kentuckian to renew his efforts at conciliation.  

From Robertson’s point of view, civil war did not seem inevitable, even when armies were massing on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The situation represented a dramatic escalation, to be sure, but in the context of the decades-long sectional crisis over slavery (one that had at other points erupted in violence), observers like Robertson could imagine outcomes other than intestine war. 

John Robertson to John J. Crittenden, April 28, 1861

Dear Sir,
No man could have more earnestly striven than yourself to [resolve] the feuds, whose increasing fury, already advanced to the stage of murderous conflict, threatens to involve thirty millions of men in the horrors of civil war. However I may have differed with you, looking from a Southern view, as to the acceptability of the terms of adjustment you proposed, I never doubted that you regarded them as just, or, at least, as preferable to the evils otherwise to ensue, and as the best which could possibly be obtained. The event has proved that, moderate as they were, the ruling faction [the Republican Party] would be content with none but such as would degrade the South. Wellnigh desperate is the condition to which that faction has reduced this country. The fact now stares them in the face that the Union is dissolved beyond all hope of restoration, at least, in our day. Yet they are threatening to preserve the Union by force. They read the riot act to millions of men, nay, to sovereign States, who are to be coerced into friendship by their foes at the point of a bayonet. But, waving all recrimination, not insisting on the absurdity of the idea, or the impossibility of reducing the South to an ignominious submission, or the certainty that their subjugation, if possible, would defeat the very object their enemies profess to desire (namely, the preservation or restoration of the Union), by converting States into vassal provinces (in that character alone can they remain or enter into it), let us inquire if there are no means by which the anticipated consequence of our family jars (now an accomplished fact), the separation of the States, may be recognized by the ruling faction at Washington, without deliberately repeating the most atrocious crime, and steeping their hands still deeper in the blood of their brethren. A word from the long-eared god [Lincoln], who now holds in his hands (as he imagines) the destinies of the country, would be enough. He has only to say, “Let there be peace,” and there will be peace. But he and the murderous gang whom he consults already cry ‘Havoc!’ And let slip the dogs of war. And yet the star of hope still twinkles in the clouded firmament. Preposterous as is the idea of peaceful union or reunion, there may still be a peaceful separation; and it is to yourself, sir, who, if allowed to do so, I will still regard, notwithstanding the marked difference of our political sentiments, as a valued friend,—it is mainly to you I look for effecting so glorious a consummation. I do not desire that my name should be connected with an effort which you may, most probably, consider utterly idle, and which, should you think worth trying, be more apt to succeed without it. Before going further at present, permit me to inquire whether it will be agreeable to you to entertain the thoughts which, after much anxious reflection, have entered into, and taken firm possession of, my mind.

It is proper to say that my appeal to you is wholly without the sanction or knowledge of any constituted authorities, State or federal. It has been suggested even but to two individuals; in the judgment of one of them you would yourself repose great confidence. I have received decided encouragement to make it.

An immediate answer, if convenient, will greatly oblige me. 

With great and respectful regard, yours,
John Robertson

For all of their disagreements, Crittenden must have found some encouragement in Robertson’s kindred desire for peace. Robertson still seemed to hope that secession could be accomplished peacefully, but Crittenden saw peace as a means to promote compromise and reunion, as well. A month after the former’s letter, Crittenden would preside over a convention in Frankfort, Kentucky, which would renew calls for Crittenden’s compromise as a basis for sectional adjustment. “Whether any such constitutional guarantees would have the effect of reconciling any of the seceded States to the government from which they have torn themselves away we cannot say,” the convention declared, “but we allow ourselves to hope that the masses in those States will in time learn that the dangers they were made to fear were greatly exaggerated, and that they will then be disposed to listen to calls of interest and patriotism, and return to the family from which they have gone out.” 

In the meantime, Crittenden would also be instrumental in the effort to keep Kentucky neutral in the Civil War. He would tour the state advocating this policy, arguing that it would leave Kentucky well-placed to act as a mediator in the conflict. Kentuckians might not be able to stop the ensuing fight, but it certainly seemed a better alternative to him than active involvement in war. 

A week before the Frankfort Conference on May 20, 1861, Kentucky’s governor would issue a proclamation declaring the state’s neutrality; in it, he claimed that this course would help promote peace. Such hopes obviously failed to stop the onrushing war that would rage for four years and kill hundreds of thousands of people. No one could foresee what would come, but Kentucky’s neutrality in 1861 — and the efforts of men like Crittenden and, to some extent, Robertson — stood as a monument to their different visions for the future in that moment. Those different visions informed their behavior during the conflict, and at least in the case of Kentucky, those ideas helped shape the broader contours of the Civil War. 

Jesse George-Nichol is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia.

To this day virtually everyone in the United States has heard of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Even those not expert or passionate about the Western frontier era recognize him as one of the most iconic figures of American history. Buffalo Bill also remains fairly well known throughout Europe, for the Iowa-born scout turned showman extraordinaire brought his Wild West across the Atlantic Ocean eight times—four times between 1887 and ’92, and four more between 1902 and ’06. In arenas across the Old World honored guests and paying patrons alike filled the stands to thrill at buckskinned cowboys taming wild horses, warbonneted Indians attacking stagecoaches, soldiers on horseback waging mock battles, and eagle-eyed women and men showing off their shooting prowess. Among the countries to embrace Cody was Italy.

Judging by period newspapers, photographs and the surviving statements of spectators, quite a few cities on the Italian Peninsula were afflicted by “fever of the West.” Buffalo Bill’s Wild West came to Italy twice—during his second European tour, in 1890, and during his third European tour, in 1906. The first time his caravan of wagons bearing hundreds of employees and animals made just six stops. Popular demand swelled the second tour to 119 performances in 37 towns. The basic ticket cost 2 lire, or slightly less than $11 in today’s currency. For the best seats one paid 8 lire, or about $45, not a paltry amount. Most venues hosted two shows a day—one in the late morning, another in the evening. Seldom was there an empty seat in the house.

On its first Italian tour Buffalo Bill’s Wild West debuted in Naples on Jan. 26, 1890, for a 22-day run. Journalists were astounded at the appearance of Indians who until very recently had been at war. “That which may seem to the everyday Neapolitan to be a kind of game, an idle display of skill,” one Neapolitan newspaper wrote with a flourish, “is nothing less than a common necessity of everyday life in a country where acrobatic agility, boundless audacity and prowess are conditions for survival.”

The highlight of the tour was the 18-day run in Rome, the “Eternal City,” ancient capital of Italy. Its leading citizens welcomed Cody into the most elegant salons, where he impressed with his gentlemanly manners and “romantic grace.” He set up camp in the Roman meadows, near Vatican City, after reportedly declaring the crumbling Colosseum unfit for his show. Vatican authorities initially rejected Buffalo Bill’s request for an audience with Pope Leo XIII, as his entourage was too large. The showman offered concessions, and on March 3 he and a handful of select employees and performers were granted entrance to the Sistine Chapel and met the pope.

An article in the next morning’s New York Herald described the meeting as “one of the strangest spectacles ever seen within the venerable walls of the Vatican,” adding it took place “in the midst of the scene of supreme splendor, crowded with the old Roman aristocracy and surrounded with the walls immortalized by Michelangelo and Raphael.” American Indians with painted faces, clad in blankets and feathers and carrying tomahawks and knives, must have been an engaging if disconcerting sight as they knelt and made the sign of the cross while the pope blessed them. The newspapers presented Cody’s Indian performers, most of whom were Catholic, as “civilized,” though one Sioux woman reportedly fainted from the excitement as the “medicine man sent by the Great Spirit” passed by. Other accounts had one of the Sioux greeting the pope with a war whoop, kneeling to receive the blessing and then rising again with a whoop, enough to either “make the pope slightly pale” or “wrest an intrigued smile from him.” The parties then exchanged gifts. Buffalo Bill presented Leo a bouquet and a garland of flowers mirroring his coat of arms, while the pope gave Cody rosaries and medals bearing his pontificate. Leo’s gifts may have had the desired effect, as on Jan. 9, 1917, the day before his own death, Buffalo Bill converted to Catholicism.

“It has been a much greater success than we had hoped for,” Cody said of the stopover in the capital. “They said they had not had so great excitement in Rome since the days of Titus.”

On March 12 the Wild West began an eight-day run in Florence, where, despite poor weather, ticket holders from towns as widely scattered as Sienna, Empoli, Livorno, Pisa, Pontassieve, Prato and Pistoia packed the amphitheater. The show also hit Bologna, Milan and Verona. One day in mid-April Buffalo Bill and his top billing sharpshooter, Annie “Little Sure Shot” Oakley, hired a carriage and went to Venice, where an uncharacteristically nervous Oakley balked at riding a gondola. An Indian remained ashore with her as a bodyguard while Cody and others hopped aboard to take in such timeless sights as the 11th century St. Mark’s Basilica (a cathedral housing the remains of the namesake evangelist and gospel writer) and the 14th century Doge’s Palace (a onetime residence for the dukes who ruled Venice between 726 and 1797 and whom Cody compared anachronistically to U.S. presidents). Back ashore the reunited party ate fried fish.

After performing in Paris in 1905, Cody’s globe-trotting show, rebranded as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West & Congress of Rough Riders of the World, opened its second Italian tour in Genoa on March 14, 1906. Other tour stops included Rome, Florence, Milan, Naples, Bologna, Turin, Livorno, Pisa, Parma, Ravenna, Verona, Como and two dozen other towns. For one day only, April 27, the troupe performed in Asti, this author’s small hometown. The tour closed May 11 in Udine (some may argue for Trieste four days later, but that Italian town on the far northeastern border was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1918).

Promoters in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of northern Italy, put up a massive poster to advertise the show’s April 11 tour stop. It worked like a charm, drawing a crowd of more than 10,000 to the two-hour performance. On April 21 the show stopped in the Piedmontese town of Alessandria, again bringing a flood of spectators eager to see the drama of the American frontier come to life. Though Alessandria’s population numbered just 7,000, the two Saturday shows packed the stands with 30,000 ticket holders.

Weeks in advance of the show’s arrival in Turin, capital of the northwestern Piedmont region, local newspapers ran daily dispatches about the Wild West. “Colonel Cody spared nothing to let the people of Turin know that the arrival of his crew and the staging operations constituted an interesting spectacle in themselves,” wrote La Gazzetta del Popolo on April 5. Two weeks later the paper shared another breathless tease:

“The celebrity of the plains, the king of all, will reproduce among us the deeds accomplished across the American continent, will show himself in the ability to kill the Sioux and will end the show with the apotheosis of peace and the dance of the nations.”

When the show finally rolled into Turin on April 22, the wagons, livestock and most performers encamped on a sprawling tract of 40,000 square acres, while Cody himself and other troupe members stayed in town on via dei Pellicciai (“Furriers Street”). The latter district’s delighted residents took to singing a rhyming refrain in Corsican dialect: “Alé, alé, anduma a balé, ch’a j’é l’America an via dij Plissè!” which roughly translated means, “Come on, come on, let’s go dance now that America is in Furriers Street!” Buffalo Bill reportedly liked the tune so much that he sang it during the final performance in Turin.

After wrapping up its tour of Italy in mid-May, the Wild West headed east to Austria, the Balkans, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine before returning through Poland to Bohemia (the present-day Czech Republic), Germany and Belgium. By the time Buffalo Bill gave his farewell performance of the 1906 season in Ghent on September 21, he’d become an international celebrity, and kids on street corners across Europe were playing cowboys and Indians.

Buffalo Bill’s tours of Italy certainly had a profound and lasting influence on the Italian vision of the American West (think “spaghetti Westerns” and replica firearms). Cody himself, however, had only tenuous connections to Italy. On March 6, 1866, the 20-year-old Union Army teamster had married Missouri native Louisa Frederici (1844–1921), but her family had its roots in the Lorraine region of northeastern France. Buffalo Bill did name his favorite Springfield Model 1866 trapdoor rifle “Lucretia Borgia,” but that is thought to have been a lark. The illegitimate daughter of a future pope, the namesake Italian noblewoman rose to prominence during the Renaissance. Rumored to have poisoned several lovers, Lucretia Borgia was both beautiful and deadly. Likely hearing her name in passing, and doubtless regarding his Springfield as beautiful and deadly (at least to elk and bison), Cody had Borgia’s name inscribed on the rifle’s lock plate. (What remains of the rifle is on display at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo.)

When he set out in the entertainment world, Cody appeared onstage with Giuseppina Morlacchi (1836–86), a celebrated prima ballerina and popular dancer from Milan, who made her American debut in New York City in October 1867. By December 1872 she had joined the cast of dime novelist Ned Buntline’s touring Western melodrama Scouts of the Prairie, co-starring Buffalo Bill and fellow scout John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro, whom Morlacchi would marry the following summer. Another Italian, Naples-born photographer Carlo Gentile, snapped and sold promotional cartes de visite of cast members, while his adopted Apache son appeared onstage. In 1873 Buntline left the troupe, and Cody enlisted friend James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok to join the aspiring showman, Morlacchi and Texas Jack in a new touring play called Scouts of the Plains. The productions served as a training ground for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and his later success across the ocean blue.

Wild West aficionado and artist Lorenzo Barruscotto hails from Asti, in the Piedmont region of northwest Italy. For further reading he recommends Four Years in Europe With Buffalo Bill, by Charles Eldridge Griffin, as well as the Italian language books Buffalo Bill in Italia, by Mario Bussoni, and Quando Buffalo Bill venne in Italia, by Nicola Tonelli.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West.

Arthur James Lyon Fremantle left Great Britain aboard a ship on March 2, 1863, headed for the northern border of Mexico. After a long voyage, the young British army officer finally arrived on April 1 “at the miserable village of Bagdad” on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. Despite considerable speculation at the time, Fremantle was in America only as a tourist and not as an official governmental observer of the United Kingdom—the widespread uncertainty of his status undoubtedly caused by Fremantle’s choice of daily attire, a full British military uniform resplendent with a corresponding bright red jacket.

Initially, Fremantle was inclined to side with the North in the Civil War, as were many of his fellow English citizens because of an inherent disapproval of slavery. He would soon switch his allegiance to the South, however, partly because he admired the Southern reputation of gallantry and determination, and also because “of the foolish bullying conduct of the Northerners.” As Fremantle would note: “I was unable to repress a strong wish to go to America and see something of this wonderful struggle.”

As he attempted to cross onto Texas soil, Fremantle was briefly detained and questioned by a half-dozen Confederate officers. Ever the keen observer, the British citizen noted that the troopers—all from Colonel James Duff’s “Partisan Rangers,” the 33rd Texas Cavalry—were similarly attired in “flannel shirts, very ancient trousers, jack-boots with enormous spurs and black felt hats ornamented with the lone star of Texas.” Despite their unkempt appearance, the Texans treated Fremantle with inestimable kindness.

While conversing with Fremantle, Duff’s troopers lamented that they were currently unable to visit some friends across the Rio Grande, alluding to a clandestine foray they had made about three weeks earlier that now put them in jeopardy. One particularly boastful Texan excitedly divulged that “he and some of his friends made a raid over there three weeks ago and carried away some ‘renegadoes,’ one of whom named [William W.] Montgomery, they had left on the road to Brownsville.”

Fremantle could tell by the smirks on the Texans’ faces that something disagreeable had clearly happened to this individual named Montgomery.

Meeting “Ham”

About noon, Fremantle left the officers and, along with a companion, headed toward Brownsville. The foreigner noted the country was mostly flat and contained an abundance of mesquite trees. Everyone they met, it appeared to Fremantle, carried a six-shooter, although he felt there seldom seemed a need for one. The duo had traveled about nine miles when they encountered an ambulance. They were informed that one of the passengers was Confederate Brig. Gen. Hamilton P. Bee, commander of Brownsville, to which Fremantle handed over his letter of introduction originally intended for Maj. Gen. John Magruder. Upon perusing the papers, Bee disembarked from the vehicle and formally presented himself to the British subject.

Bee had a famous brother, Barnard E. Bee Jr., who had been killed at the First Battle of Manassas and immortalized by giving then-Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson the sobriquet “Stonewall.” The younger Bee, “Ham,” had accompanied his parents to the Lone Star republic decades before, and his father became part of the fledgling Texas government.

Seeing limited military service in the Mexican War, “Ham” used his political connections to secure the rank of brigadier in the Texas Militia and subsequently the Confederacy not long after the Civil War began. Bee plied the two travelers with “beef and beer in the open.” Fremantle recalled that they all talked politics for more than an hour while getting further details on the Montgomery affair. Bee elaborated that the episode was conducted without his authorization and that he was regretful it had happened.

Soon, Fremantle and his companion were on their way and, not quite 30 minutes later, came upon Montgomery’s final resting place. The victim, Fremantle wrote, “had been slightly buried, but his head and arms were above the ground, his arms tied together, the rope still around his neck, but part of it still dangling from quite a small mesquite tree. Dogs or wolves had probably scraped the earth from the body, and there was no flesh on the bones. I obtained this my first experience of Lynch law within three hours of landing in America.”     

A Cross-border Conflict

The origins of the raid across the river into Mexico began with feuding Texans. Montgomery, along with Texas transplant Edmund J. Davis, had fled south of the border to start a cavalry unit composed of Unionists from the Lone Star State. Located in a foreign country, they could safely recruit members under the protection of the Mexican authorities. The Unionists became emboldened that the Texans could do nothing without illegally crossing the border to apprehend them. The Yankee sympathizers, The Tyler Reporter noted, “had just stood over the river” and “begun a series of indignities which were very provoking” and eventually “their cowardly natures—prompted them to peer at and insult our brave boys.”

Davis’ exodus to Texas had come in 1848, after the Mexican War. Ironically, one of his earliest friends was Hamilton Bee. They both sold cattle to the U.S. Army, and the future Southern general was the best man at Davis’ wedding. Before the Civil War, Davis had been elected district attorney and then district judge. His popularity and organizational skills helped get him duty as a colonel and then brigadier general of cavalry in the Union Army, followed by a postwar stint as governor of Texas.

Montgomery’s background was more shady, and he had even been acquitted in a shocking murder trial—his lawyer none other than Andrew Jackson Hamilton, future military governor of Texas during the war. Montgomery had started out as a horse and sheep rancher before elevating his portfolio to capital crimes.

Meeting in Union-held New Orleans, Davis and Montgomery were assigned to send loyal men from Matamoros to the Crescent City as recruits for the proposed Federal cavalry unit.

In 1864, when Fremantle had his notes published in a book, he identified the leader of the murderous gang who had captured Montgomery and Davis and had killed the former. And though his publisher refused to print the name of the culprit in the text, Fremantle’s details about the perpetrator were included in the volume. A few days after his discovery of Montgomery’s remains, the Englishman jotted down: “We were afterwards presented to ________, rather a sinister-looking party with long yellow hair down to his shoulders. This is the man who is supposed to [have] hang[ed] Montgomery.”

Frustrated by the “despicable” behavior the Unionists had displayed, the Confederates vowed revenge. One of Duff’s men, a self-described Mexican-American Confederate named Santiago Tafolla, recalled, “about midnight, Col. [George William] Chilton came from Brownsville with a small group of men. They immediately woke us up and told us to go across the Rio Grande to capture certain men there who had been harassing us daily.” The Southerners secreted themselves across the river in three small boats after receiving specific instructions from Chilton that they were not to harm anyone, especially Mexican nationals. With Chilton in the lead, the small group stormed the customs house along the riverside and pulled out Davis and “a man named Montgomery who, according to what people said, was an evildoer.”

Another of Duff’s Partisan Rangers, an Englishman named R.H. Williams, remembered that on their way to Bagdad, Chilton explained to the group that their mission was to capture Davis and other leaders of the 1st Texas Cavalry (U.S.). Noted Williams: “Now these deserters and their boasting talk…had riled the boys very much, and they were ‘blue mouldy’ to get at them.”

A correspondent accompanying the insurgents wrote: “Surrounding the house in which Col[onel] Davis was said to be, [they]…ordered [him] to surrender, and I regret to say, he did so.” But Montgomery “fought like a wild cat and wounded two of the men badly with his bowie-knife before he was overpowered.”

The Yankee sympathizers being hunted had been alerted by the accidental discharge of a Confederate’s weapon. As Tafolla revealed:

“The day was dawning and at the sound of the shot, we saw men pop up from different directions. As it was now daylight and we were on Mexican soil, we were ordered back. To do that we had to pass through the village, which by this time had been totally alarmed. So as we approached the houses, we were greeted by a rain of bullets from the houses, from the windows and from the doors. But we had received orders not to fire. Before we could reach the Rio Grande, the local judge came out to ask us why we had crossed over to Mexico. We told him we were supposed to take certain Americans prisoner, but that we had strict orders not to violate any Mexican laws.”

At the time, Chilton was swiftly moving his force back across the Mexican border; the Kentucky native was serving as Bee’s brigade ordnance officer. He gave orders to transport the prisoners to Brownsville with Montgomery’s hands tied behind his back astride a horse, while Davis was allowed to mount his ride unrestrained. To his captors, Montgomery stated, “All I ask is that I be treated as a prisoner of war.” Chilton replied that he would be treated as he deserved, a foreshadowing of Montgomery’s deadly fate. Along the route back to Brownsville, the despised Montgomery was hanged, or as The San Antonio Herald documented, “immediately went up a tree.”

De-escalation

Davis’ wife had swiftly contacted the Mexican governor, Albino Lopez, who was in the area, and explained that her husband had been abducted. Lopez immediately called for the men’s return. Bee found himself amid a potentially major international incident and feigned ignorance of the incident. A month before, Bee and Lopez—together with Confederate agent Jose Quintero—had negotiated an extradition agreement. The particulars of the accord assured the extradition of persons accused of murder, embezzlement, theft, and robbery of cattle or horses without any previous notification of the authorities on the other side of the border. Furthermore, if a pursuit of a criminal began on one side of the border and continued on the other side, the posse had permission to continue to follow them.      Unfortunately, these kidnappings were not covered in the aforementioned document. The news of the situation provoked great rage in Matamoros. Groups of protesters paraded down its streets angrily shouting anti-Confederate slogans. When it was discovered that Montgomery had been killed, the Mexicans became even more upset. Lopez was so furious that he threatened to close the border and arrest all Confederate officers currently in Matamoros. Lopez followed up on his stance in a missive to Bee complaining not only about the Davis kidnapping but other less publicized incidents. He also requested a battalion of sharpshooters from the military and began organizing his own local militia in case of a martial confrontation with the Texans.

Finally, Bee relented and returned Davis to Mexico, which at least de-escalated the tensions. Quintero fired off a dispatch to the Confederate capital in Richmond, Va., informing his superiors of the peaceful resolution. He also notified Santiago Vidaurri, another governor in northern Mexico, of the incident crossing the border. Vidaurri had treasured his alliance with the Confederacy, as it greatly assisted his impoverished area.

“The bitter enemy of our cause,” Quintero reported, had been removed to Brownsville, where Montgomery would be “permanently located.” Vidaurri only seemed curious as to why it had taken the Confederates as long as it did to act on the situation.

Blame for the hanging of Montgomery continued to be debated on both sides of the river. Davis identified Sergeant H.B. Adams of Duff’s command as the person in charge of the lynching detail, and a Unionist in Mexico, Captain William H. Brewin of Yager’s Texas Cavalry Battalion, as a participant, though that accusation could not be confirmed by a corroborating witness. The Confederates tried to justify their actions in hanging Montgomery by claiming he led the forces that had killed a citizen named Isidro Vela, along with some cotton teamsters. This raid, carried out under a U.S. banner, happened in December, however, while Montgomery was busy recruiting in New Orleans.

Other Southerners accused Montgomery of murdering two men near Corpus Christi. They described Montgomery as being “of Kansas notoriety” and was considered a “noted jayhawker and murderer.” In all likelihood, Montgomery’s only true crimes were antagonizing the Confederates across the river and wounding two Confederates during his abduction.

Months later, the Federals controlled the area in which Montgomery’s remains were located. One member of the burial crew remembered: “I found the bones of Capt. Montgomery interred about one foot in the ground, except his right arm, which I found in the fork of a tree, some distance from the tree on which he was hanged.” At 3 p.m. December 19, 1863, Montgomery was given a proper military funeral in Brownsville. A soldier with the 19th Iowa Infantry witnessed the funeral procession and a stirring eulogy by Hamilton, Montgomery’s former attorney and now governor. He recalled a list of those condemned as having a part in Montgomery’s death, including Bee, Philip N. Luckett, Chilton, Brewin and Richard Taylor, who was field commander of Confederate forces in Louisiana.

Chilton was later publicly condemned for actually joining in Montgomery’s hanging, but his true crime was commanding the expedition, and in ordering the heinous execution that caused such a fiasco with the Mexicans. Both Fremantle and Tafolla positively identified Chilton as the ringleader of the hanging. Although Fremantle didn’t mention Chilton specifically by name, a glance at Chilton’s photograph would confirm he certainly matches the description the British soldier had made.

Fremantle returned to England after having achieved the adventure he sought by his travel through Texas and by witnessing the Battle of Gettysburg. His account of his trip was published the ensuing year. Seeing the writing on the wall with Vicksburg’s surrender, Tafolla deserted the Confederate Army in March 1864 and headed for the safety of Mexico. His memoirs were not published until 2010.

Richard H. Holloway, who writes from Alexandria, La., is a senior editor of America’s Civil War.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

Who was Etta Place?

She was the lover and perhaps wife of Pennsylvania-born Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, aka the “Sundance Kid,” and a peripheral associate of the Wild Bunch, the outlaw gang headed up by Robert LeRoy Parker, aka “Butch Cassidy.” But little is known about her origins and less about what happened to her after Sundance and Butch were killed in South America.

Larry Pointer, author of the 1977 book In Search of Butch Cassidy, wrote that Etta’s identity is “one of the most intriguing riddles in Western history.”

Place was likely born in 1878 and as an adult was described as having “classic good looks,” with a nice smile and a refined bearing, a description confirmed by a full-length portrait of her and Longabaugh—some say the couple’s wedding picture—taken in February 1901 at Joseph B. De Young’s photo studio at 815 Broadway in New York City. She spoke in an educated manner and knew how to handle a rifle.

She had met Longabaugh a year or two earlier and may have been involved in some of the Wild Bunch robberies, scoping out a bank in advance or holding the group’s horses during a heist. But the New York City picture, historian Thom Hatch wrote in his 2013 book The Last Outlaws, “hints of proper high teas, Central Park carriage rides and evenings at the theater.”

Even her name is probably false. “Place” was the maiden name of Longabaugh’s mother, Annie, and Sundance sometimes used the alias “Harry Place.” It has been suggested she took to using the first name “Etta” in South America after Spanish speakers mispronounced “Ethel,” which may or may not have been her actual first name. The Pinkertons variously referred to her as Ethel, Eva, Rita, Etta and Betty Price.

In a letter to friend David Gillespie shortly after the gang’s June 2, 1899, train robbery near Wilcox, Wyo., Longabaugh enclosed a copy of the portrait of himself and Place, whom he described as his wife and a “Texas lady.” The Pinkertons, who spent a lot of time and effort pursuing the Wild Bunch, always believed Etta was from Texas, which fits with her noted skills with horses and firearms. In 1906 William Pinkerton, his detectives having traced Place to Fort Worth, asked that city’s police chief to “find out who this woman is.”

Based on the theory Etta’s real name was Ethel and she hailed from Texas, researcher Donna Ernst compiled a list of all women named Ethel born in or around Fort Worth and San Antonio between 1875 and ’80. Over time she eliminated each as a contender for the youthful Etta Place.

Except one.

That one was Ethel Bishop, who resided with four other women in what was probably a brothel near notorious madam Fannie Porter’s San Antonio pleasure palace, a known Wild Bunch hangout. Another oft repeated story suggests Butch rescued Etta from a brothel when she was 16. Longabaugh biographer Ed Kirby believes Place was the daughter of one Emily Jane Place of Oswego, N.Y., who was related somehow to Sundance’s mother. Still others have suggested Etta was in fact Colorado rancher Ann Bassett, a Wild Bunch associate known to have vied with sister Josie for Cassidy’s affection.

Could Bassett have won Sundance’s attentions as well?

Probably not. By 1903 Bassett had married Hirum “Hi” Henry Bernard and that same year was arrested (and later acquitted) on a charge of cattle rustling while Place was in South America.

On Feb. 20, 1901, after posing for their portrait, Place and Longabaugh boarded HMS Herminius in New York, disembarking in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 23. Traveling with them was Cassidy, using the alias “James Ryan” and claiming to be Etta’s brother. In 1902 Place and Longabaugh returned briefly Stateside for Etta to seek treatment of an unknown disease, and again in 1904, when Pinkerton operatives believed she visited family in Texas. In 1906 Place returned Stateside for keeps, possibly due to her illness. Sundance returned to South America, where most historians believe he and Butch died in a 1908 shootout with soldiers in Bolivia.

Meanwhile, Etta vanished.

Several researchers have suggested she became a brothel operator in Fort Worth under the name Eunice Gray. But in an article in the October 2010 Wild West Donna Humphrey-Donnell noted she’d seen an alleged portrait of the young Gray, and the woman in that photo definitely “was not the same woman seen in the famous New York City portrait of Etta Place and the Sundance Kid.”

In 1909 an unidentified woman fitting Etta’s description asked a U.S. diplomatic official in South America for help in obtaining Longabaugh’s death certificate. But she never returned to his office. At most, however, the incident only proves Place was alive in 1909.

Other theories have since surfaced: that Etta was the wife of legendary boxing promoter Tex Rickard; that she relocated to Paraguay and remarried; that Longabaugh had survived the 1908 shootout in Bolivia and lived happily ever after with Place in Alaska; that Etta died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; or that she was either killed during a domestic dispute or took her own life in Argentina in the 1920s. In 1970 Cassidy’s sister, Lula Parker Betensen, told Los Angeles Times reporters that her brother had not been killed in Bolivia as thought, and that Etta had lived out her days as a schoolteacher in Denver.

In the end, speculation, guesswork and coincidence aside, we only know for certain she was a pretty woman who once carried on a romance with the Sundance Kid and then disappeared from the pages of history.

Nothing more.

To this day similarly incredible tales circulate about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, stories relating their escape from the Bolivian gunfight and their subsequent lives of anonymity in various locales out West or in South America.

Like the theories surrounding Etta Place, though, they are unsubstantiated and probably false.

But tempting. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

Adding insult to injury, a Pawnee scout for the U.S. Army shot in 1869 by a member of his own command was for decades denied a marker reflecting his Medal of Honor for the same action. What makes the oversight worse is that Sergeant Mad Bear (Co-Rux-Te-Chod-Ish) was the first American Indian ever awarded his adoptive nation’s highest honor. Thanks to the diligent research of Wild West contributor Jeff Broome, the scout may finally have his day in the sun. 

In the summer of 1869 Major Frank North and his company of Pawnee scouts were in pursuit of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers under Chief Tall Bull along Kansas’ Republican River. On July 8, according to Mad Bear’s citation, the sergeant “ran out from the command in pursuit of a dismounted [Cheyenne]” when badly wounded by the bullet fired by a fellow scout. But when North’s brother Luther wrote a memoir mentioning his own stint as a commander of the scouts, he recorded Mad Bear’s name as Traveling Bear, and the confusion lingered. 

Enter Broome. During research toward his 2003 book Dog Soldier Justice, relating the captivity ordeal of Susanna Alderdice amid the same conflict, he discovered the misattribution of Mad Bear’s medal. The Medal of Honor Historical Society of the United States notified Veterans Affairs of the error, and the latter ultimately concurred. A private marker stands atop Mad Bear’s grave at the North Indian Cemetery in Pawnee, Okla. The Pawnee Nation must first remove it before the VA will place a military marker designating him as a Medal of Honor recipient. So it appears Mad Bear’s luck is about to change.

Those who study warfare will inevitably run into the so-called “great man theory” of history. Simply put, it denotes the study of individual leaders and their abilities. In earlier times, scholars adhered to this school of thought as explaining the entirety of military history to the myopic exclusion of all other factors.

Over time the “great man theory” became less in vogue, and in the present day is looked upon by many scholars as nonsense; they choose to interpret military history purely through the lenses of more abstract factors such as society, technology, gender or economy, for example.

Give the ‘Great Men’ A Chance

While it goes without saying that military leaders can neither exist nor function in a void of social, technological or economic factors, I feel it is worth pointing out that the “great men of history”—notable male leaders, that is—deserve a fairer hearing.

Today, historical focus on notable men tends to be regarded in a dismissive manner, like something old-fashioned or awkward. It seems to me that this is partly due to the fact that the leaders being studied are men, and mostly because many people have apparently lost belief in the potency of individual human achievement. New trends in scholarship suggest that there has been too much focus on men in war history altogether. That is a gross oversimplification. While it is true that the roles of women have been overlooked, that does not make the achievements of men in military history any less deserving of attention.

Importance of Leadership

What is manifest in the lives of the “great men” is a quality universal to all human beings: the power of the individual to change world events. Social factors and technology make for interesting studies but these arenas do not shape themselves. People need leaders, and leaders don’t simply materialize out of nowhere. They come from among us. It is worth looking at who they were, what they did and how, and above all, whether we consider them to have been effective or not. Only by doing so can we educate ourselves.

Why is such an education important? The world is suffering from an acute leadership crisis. I believe there is currently a dearth of good male role models for young people. This deficit is real and troubling. However, there is another critical factor producing this discord. There is a complete lack of focus and discussion in society on the qualities that make good leaders and on the true potential of individuals.

Political and popular culture today encourage us to think in terms of groups with rigidly codified principles of belonging that seem to predestine our behavior, instead of encouraging us to recognize our individual ability to choose our own destiny and change the world around us. 

Need For Future Leaders

This magazine contains a diverse array of military leaders. They were and remain controversial. Whether we decide to admire or dislike them, their actions are worth studying. We at Military History Quarterly (MHQ) invest time in evaluating leadership. In my book “Bernard Montgomery’s Art of War,” and series about Erwin Rommel, I analyze these two battlefield captains. My colleague Jerry Morelock has delivered a masterful study of military leadership in his excellent book, “Generals of the Bulge: Leadership in the U.S. Army’s Greatest Battle,” which tackles competent and incompetent leadership in one of the U.S. Army’s most complex battles. We believe these studies will be of use to future leaders.

It is a fallacy to think that the destinies of “great men” of military history, or leaders of any kind, are written in the stars and that we who read about them are mere mortals who have no hope of ever changing the world for the better. I close with an excerpt from the poem, “The Man From the Crowd,” by Sam Walter Foss. The poem is worth reading in whole; in it, Foss illustrates how people tend to fall into set patterns of behavior, while a leader will show willingness to break the mold and stand out to meet a challenge or fulfill a call to action.

He reminds us that the world needs great men. So let us not hesitate to continue to study and reflect on the lives, strengths, weaknesses and decisions of notable men in military history. 

                     
“Men seem as alike as the leaves on the trees,
As alike as the bees in a swarming of bees;
And we look at the millions that make up the state
All equally little and equally great,
And the pride of our courage is cowed.
Then Fate calls for a man who is larger than men—
There’s a surge in the crowd—there’s a movement—and then
There arises a man that is larger than men—
And the man comes up from the crowd.…

And where is the man who comes up from the throng
Who does the new deed and who sings the new song,
And makes the old world as a world that is new?
And who is the man? It is you! It is you!” 

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, Muslim Sultan of Egypt and Syria, known to the west as Saladin, is certainly one of the most durably famous historical figures from the period of the Crusades. His political and military skills won him the admiration of the Muslim world. Unifying the forces of Islam, he struck the heaviest blows against the Crusader kingdoms, shattering a massive Christian army at Hattin and wresting Jerusalem from their control in 1187.

But he is also remarkable as an historical rarity—a champion on one side of a bitter contest who was also admired by his opponents. His ferocity in battle and generosity to his enemies secured him a great reputation in Europe as a chivalrous knight, an esteem that has largely endured in the Western mind. 

Saladin was born in the city of Tikrit in 1137, emerging into a world rife with divisions, both political and religious. Part of Saladin’s durability in historical memory can be attributed to the similarities between his world and our own, for some of the same divisions still fester. The Muslim world is still divided by the fundamental Sunni-Shia schism and a multiplicity of sects quarreling about both theological and worldly matters. Pope Urban II had issued the call for the First Crusade some 40 years before Saladin was born, and the arrival of Christian armies created the fundamental division that would shape his world. The First Crusade (1096-1099) captured Jerusalem and saw the creation of Christian states along the coast of Palestine. As resilient as they were, they remained outposts requiring continual support from Europe to be maintained.

They also clearly benefitted from the disunity of Muslim rule and the lack of unified a military opposition. After their initial success, the task of the crusaders became defensive—to hold what they had won. Saladin was to be their greatest challenge.

The Making of A Leader

Little is known about Saladin’s early years other than the lingering reputation of a studious and thoughtful nature tending to greater zeal for religious than military training. He was well-placed for advancement. His father, Ayyub, was Governor of Damascus, and his uncle, Shirkuh, commanded the armies of Nur-al-Din, the ruler of Syria. Positioned for close observation, Saladin conceived a great admiration for Nur-al-Din’s piety and capable rule and, in later years, would draw inspiration from his ambition to unite the Muslim peoples between the Nile and the Euphrates to create a united front against the Crusaders. But Saladin was not yet a warrior. In the wake of the Second Crusade’s (1145-1149) attempt upon Damascus, Nur-al-Din sought to stir up martial fervor among his people and asked for volunteers in the Holy War. Saladin did not respond. 

Saladin’s formal career began when he joined the staff of his uncle, Shirkuh, accompanying him on an expedition to Egypt, which would lay the foundations of his future success. In 1163, Shawar, the deposed Vizier of Egypt, appeared in Damascus promising one-third of the revenues of Egypt for Nur-Al-Din’s aid in restoring him. Though in theory subject to the Caliph, a vizier of Egypt was virtually a king. The potential benefits of intervening on his behalf were too good to pass by. Shirkuh was dispatched with an army, and he took a reluctant Saladin with him.

In the background lay complex rivalries between Muslims and Christians, and among Muslims themselves. While Syria recognized the religious authority of the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Egypt walked a different path. The origins of the split lay early in the history of Islam. In 655, the succession to the religious and political authority of the caliphate was contested over a dispute as to whether the leader of Islam must be a direct descendant of the Prophet. This view was advocated by Ali, who had married Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. Ali and Fatima lost the contest, but their supporters maintained their allegiance to their various descendants, giving rise to a distinctive form of Islam called Shi’ism—in contrast with the majority of Muslims, the Sunnis. In the tenth century, the Shi’ites established the Fatimid dynasty of caliphs in Cairo. To the orthodox Nur-al-Din, the heretical Egyptians were almost as contemptible as the infidels. But this distaste was tempered by the realization if the Christian Franks were able to dominate Egypt, Syria would be ruined and Islam seriously imperiled.       

To Egypt

But by the time the expedition had reached Egypt, the Vizier had recovered his office and had no use for Shirkuh’s army. He refused to pay them. When Shirkuh showed no inclination to leave without his compensation, Shawar appealed to Amalric, King of Jerusalem for aid. A complex three-way struggle then ensued in which Saladin gained valuable military experience. When the dust had settled, the Christians had been expelled, Shawar was dead, Shirkuh was the Vizier of Egypt—and Saladin was his executive officer. How precisely Shirkuh would have navigated the politically and religiously awkward position he now inhabited is not clear. Three months later he was dead, and the Fatimid caliph appointed Saladin as his successor.

Saladin now inhabited a position of power, but it was beset with difficulties. He was bound to three masters and two versions of Islam. He owed allegiance to Nur-Al-Din in Damascus, and through him the Sunni caliph in Baghdad, as well as Egypt’s Shia Fatimid Caliph. In addition, the quick, successive shifts in power had left Egypt unstable. Unhappy with the new regime, various groups plotted against Saladin, and internal divisions invited challenges from the Byzantines and the Crusaders. Saladin navigated the difficulties with great skill, gaining firm administrative and military control of the country while strengthening his army and navy. But his very successes caused problems of his own, for the stronger he became, the more Nur-al-Din worried about the reach of his ambitions.

In 1171, at the risk of rebellion, Saladin deposed the Fatimid caliph in favor of the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad. Two days later Cairo’s caliph died, and Saladin was the master of Egypt. While Egypt’s return to orthodoxy pleased Nur-al-Din, Saladin’s increasingly successful empire building did not. Tensions between the two men continued to rise.

When Nur-al-Din died in 1174, Saladin was not only relieved of the burdens of a jealous superior, but the power vacuum in Syria also presented him with an opportunity for expansion. By this time Saladin was a determined holy warrior, but he knew he would first have to unite the Muslims as a foundation for war against the crusaders. Long years of struggle lay before him, but he captured Damascus, Aleppo, and Mosul from other Muslim rulers.

Facing the Crusaders

In May 1180, Saladin signed a treaty with Baldwin IV, who had become King of Jerusalem in 1174 at 13 years of age when his father, Amalric died. It made sense. After a period of draining and indecisive clashes, both sides were suffering from internal disorders that made a respite of peace agreeable. But the underlying conflict remained, as did the militant purposes of both sides, and provocations wore away at the agreement. One provocateur, Renaud de Châtillon, did more than any other to erode the peace.

The relentless raids he launched on Muslim caravans from his impregnable castle, Kerak of Moab, incited Saladin’s rage. He appealed to Baldwin, but the king, suffering from leprosy, did not have the strength to restrain the firebrand. Hostilities were renewed. Saladin took Aleppo in 1183 and besieged Kerak. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, weakened by a faltering king, internal quarrels, and a disputed succession felt the weight of Saladin’s growing power. 

By 1186, Saladin had united the Muslim territories of Syria, northern Mesopotamia, Palestine and Egypt under his rule. Saladin’s dedication to jihad and singleness of purpose were in sharp contrast to the dissensions and rivalry that had hampered Muslim resistance to the Crusaders in the past. Saladin had forged a powerful weapon, and he was ready to wield it. In that same year, Guy de Lusignan, a man unsuited by temperament or skill to clash with Saladin, became King of Jerusalem. As the Crusaders faced their greatest threat, they were led by an improvident adventurer whose only claim to power lay in his marriage to Baldwin’s sister. Plagued by divided counsels and self-seeking ambition, they would soon pay a terrible price.

Having gathered a massive army of 30,000 troops, Saladin invaded Galilee and besieged the city of Tiberias, baiting a snare he hoped would lure the enemy onto ground of his choosing. Guy mustered his own army around Saphorie, fielding around 20,000 infantry and 2,000 knights, half of whom were members of the famous religious orders, Knights Templar and Hospitallers. Count Raymond III of Tripoli, whose own wife and children were confined within the city, counseled Guy not to march.

The Horns of Hattin

Between their position and Tiberias stretched an arid plain, sizzling in the July heat, where they would find little or no water. In such conditions, Saladin’s lightly armed cavalry would have the advantage, and he prophesied the destruction of the army if they walked into Saladin’s trap. But Guy was swayed by others, Renaud and Gérard de Ridefort, Master of the Templars, whose violent aggression was impervious to prudence.  

Leaving at dawn, the army marched across the plain in the sweltering heat up into the hills on the western shores of the Sea of Galilee. With no water-carts, the leather bottles they carried were fast depleted. The hot sun fell upon them like a hammer upon an anvil, and the knights sweltered in their armor. The miseries of the march were compounded by harassment by the enemy, who loosed clouds of arrows upon them before racing away far too swiftly for the weary and parched crusaders to respond. These tactics combined with attacks on the rear guard, only prolonged the miseries of the hellish march.

Exhausted, the army camped just below an outcrop above the Sea of Galilee, known as the Horns of Hattin. It was bad ground, a dried-up lava flow from an extinct volcano strewn with black basalt rocks hidden beneath scrub grass, dangerous to horses. They would spend a miserable night tormented by thirst, an experience made worse by the glimmering fresh water of the lake beneath them. But the way was barred by the stretching encampment of Saladin’s army.

With the morning of July 4, 1187, the Christian army would try to carve its way to the lake. But Saladin had advanced his men during the night, and they now set fire to the dry grass, sending choking clouds of smoke into the crusader camp. Maddened by thirst, the foot soldiers rushed ahead blindly, only to be thrown back. The knights charged, wheeled, charged again, but they could not pierce the Muslim lines. All that day the battle raged, the crusaders finding reserves of strength that impressed even their enemy. But to no avail. Raymond III of Tripoli did finally succeed in breaking through with some of his heavily-armored knights and, escaping the battlefield, proceeded to Tripoli. His withdrawal had been approved by the king, lest none survive to fight future battles. The next day, the remaining crusaders made a last stand, but, with the remnants of the Christian army strewn about the hills, exhaustion compelled the handful of survivors to surrender. 

The concept of chivalry involves a combination of fierceness and gentleness that can be difficult to grasp in theory, much less to achieve and maintain in practice. Saladin was to have a chivalrous reputation in the Christian West, but there was little gentleness toward the Christians he defeated at Hattin. The surviving infantrymen were all sold into slavery. Saladin killed Renaud with his own hands, as he had sworn to do, and had his head impaled on a lance as an ornament to embellish his triumphant return to Damascus. The remaining knights were executed by the mullahs and religious teachers accompanying his army. He also sent an order to Damascus condemning all of the knights held captive there to immediate death.

On the other hand, he did show compassion when he did not have to, offering the countess of Tripoli safe-passage with all her people and possessions to rejoin her husband and paroling Balian of Ibelin to return to Jerusalem to look after his wife, a former queen of Jerusalem. He spared Guy along with a handful of others, imprisoning them in Damascus. The medieval mind was not overly troubled by such stark contrasts, and many a Christian knight was deemed chivalrous who did not do as well. 

Securing the Coast

Desirous that his great victory at Hattin be used to its greatest potential, Saladin moved to secure the coast of Palestine against future incursions and isolate the inland castles. He moved first upon Acre which, inadequately defended, surrendered. From there his forces marched along the coast, as well as through Galilee and Samaria. Christian strongholds rapidly tumbled into his hands through surrender or after brief sieges. After Hattin, they had no strength to resist. Saladin displayed much of his customary mercy and forbearance with the conquered. By September, only Jerusalem and Tyre remained in Christian hands.

Tyre, with admirable defenses and under the command of the newly-arrived Conrad of Montferrat, a man of great ability and determination, held out against assault. Saladin left it unconquered. Strategically, this was a mistake, as it left his enemies a crucial foothold on the coast and a beachhead for another invasion. Even some contemporary Muslim commentators, while praising his many admirable qualities and achievements, reproached him for underestimating the danger. Nonetheless, leaving the prospect of months of grueling siege behind him, Saladin turned toward Jerusalem. The struggle for the Holy City was the source of the crusading movement and its possession the ultimate prize. Now, it lay within his grasp.

Balian of Ibelin took command of the Christian forces, such as they were, defending Jerusalem. As a prisoner on parole after Hattin, he wrote to Saladin, apologizing and asking him to spare the city. Saladin forgave Balian but would not give up Jerusalem. Balian had little to work with. While the city was strongly fortified, it was swollen with refugees, with one man to every 50 women and children, and had only 14 knights. Nonetheless, Balian girded for battle. He knighted every boy of noble descent and 30 common citizens. He seized all the treasure he could find, including silver from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, hastily brought in provisions from the surrounding villages, shut the gates, and prepared to endure the storm.

Arriving on Sept. 20, Saladin’s siege engines bombarded the Tower of David and the surrounding walls for five days. Failing to make much of an impression on the fortifications, he then shifted northeast to the Mount of Olives, the location from which the Crusaders had launched their attack nearly a century before. While 40 mangonels battered the walls, torrents of arrows swept them clean of defenders, and sappers worked to undermine their foundations. After three days, the masonry crumbled, opening a breach. The city was doomed.

Officials from the city came to negotiate terms. But, remembering the bloodshed when the Christians took Jerusalem in 1099, Saladin would not negotiate. He had sworn he would take the city by the sword. On Sept. 30, Balian himself appeared in Saladin’s tent. He knew there was no chance of holding the city, but he presented Saladin with an apocalyptic vision: the Muslims would have the city, but it would be a city of ash. As a last resort he would set Jerusalem on fire, demolish all the holy places including the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque, destroy all the treasure, and kill every living thing. He would reduce the Holy City to wreckage, scorched with flame and drowned in blood. His description must have been vivid, for Saladin relented, agreeing to accept ransom: 10 dinars for every man, 5 for every woman, and one for every child.

Richard the Lionheart

The capture of Jerusalem was not the end of Saladin’s struggles. His tremendous success caused the caliph to fear his ambition would reach to overturning the Abbasid dynasty. There were also those who doubted the wisdom of Saladin’s generosity toward the Christians. By allowing them to leave Acre, Ascalon, and Jerusalem, he only strengthened Tyre, fortifying a Christian outpost to be relieved by additional forces from Europe. Word of Jerusalem’s fall reached Europe quickly with appeals for aid. Pope Gregory VIII called for a new crusade. The response was enormous in volunteers and monetary contributions (not always voluntary), called in England the “Saladin Tithe.”

The Third Crusade (1189-1192) would be led by kings: Richard I of England, Philip II of France, and Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa) of Germany. Great armies mobilized and headed for Palestine. The Christians already there made trouble of their own. Though hampered by division between King Guy, who Saladin had released from prison in 1188 and Conrad of Montferrat, who desired the crown of Jerusalem, the crusaders besieged Acre. A stalemated double siege lasted for two years, with the besiegers themselves hemmed in by Saladin’s army, which was not strong enough to drive them off or destroy them.

In June of 1191, King Richard I of England arrived in the Holy Land. Richard stands out from the pages of history as a glamorous figure: tall, good-looking, fearless, and immensely strong, he was known as Richard Coeur de Lion (the Lionheart). Richard assumed leadership of the crusade after Frederick perished en route and Philip departed for Europe. The strategic duel between the two champions, Richard and Saladin, captured the medieval European imagination and solidified Saladin’s lasting reputation. Though their battle was bitter, they saw each other as worthy opponents. 

Richard fell upon the Holy Land like a thunderstroke, but did not have the power to retake Jerusalem. Saladin parried him with both blade and diplomacy. They agreed upon a truce under which the Christians retained the coastal zone from Jaffa to Tyre and were permitted to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem. The Holy City itself remained in Saladin’s hand. Richard departed, disappointed, to deal with troubles at home.  

Saladin did not live much longer. He died in March 1193 at 54 years old. He was Islam’s greatest champion, master of the east, bringing an unparalleled unity and wielding a victorious sword, honored by Muslim and Crusader alike. The unity he had forged collapsed after his death. The fame he won lives on.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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On a cloudless, deep-blue sky afternoon, I drive 45 miles south of Nashville to Columbia for a visit with one of my favorite people, Campbell Ridley. He’s an 80-year-old semi-retired farmer, U.S. Army veteran, rock & roll devotee, and storyteller with a wit and sense of humor as sharp as the tip of a new bayonet.

“How are you feeling?” I ask my friend minutes after arriving at his farm office.

Aside from mourning the recent death of Barney—his nine-year-old barn cat—Ridley feels fine, a fact he attributes to “clean living and cheap beer.” He wears tan Carhartts, brown work boots, a blue-checkered shirt and, appropriately, a baseball cap with the words “Life Is Good” across the front.

Ridley’s roots run deep here in Maury County, one of the wealthiest counties in the state before the Civil War. He’s the great-great-grandnephew of Gideon Pillow, the Confederate brigadier general, Mexican War veteran, politician, lawyer and, before the war, one of the foremost slaveholders in the county. Ridley’s paternal great grandfather, who depended on mules for farming and was one of the county’s leading citizens, earned the nickname “Mule King”—Columbia, in fact, has long been touted as the “Mule Capital of the World.”

When I need my history fix and a good laugh, I visit Ridley. We’ve sat together inside magnificent St. John’s Church—a slave-constructed plantation church built under the direction of Leonidas Polk and his brothers. It stands roughly a mile and a half southwest along Mount Pleasant Pike, across the road from the mostly empty field where Polk—an Episcopalian bishop and future Confederate lieutenant general—lived in a mansion called Ashwood Hall. There, we have admired the two massive gingko trees Polk imported eons ago from Japan and have poked about what little remains of brick kitchen for the mansion, destroyed by fire in 1874 and never rebuilt.

Today, though, we will explore far more humble construction. Near Ridley’s farm office and the east fork of Greenlick Creek stand three ramshackle slave cabins. “The Quarters,” Ridley calls the property, which is owned by his daughter, who lives in New Mexico, and a friend.

“I’ll take care of this until she puts me in a nursing home,” he says, half-jokingly.

In a way, these cabins are as much a part of Ridley as the land he has farmed for decades in Columbia. As late as the 1990s, he tells me, these humble structures served as homes for poor Black farmhands and others. Many of them worked for the Ridleys.

“The woman who raised me lived here,” Ridley says as we examine one of the rickety cabins. Her name was Katie, a “wonderful” lady who had a gift for cooking fried chicken. The Ridley family employed her for more than three decades.

At another cabin yards away, ancient white paint clings to exposed exterior logs. Four modern wooden posts strain to prop up its porch overhang above two large, well-worn walkway stones. On an exterior wall, a half-dozen old hangers dangle from a rusty nail. Above us, a corrugated tin roof keeps nature at bay.

“That’s been there as long as I can remember,” Ridley says.

What a contrast these antebellum structures make with Clifton Place, the brick manor house on the hill 750 yards away. In rich late-fall sunlight, the mansion almost seems to glow. Peek through trees from the road leading to Ridley’s farm office and you’ll spot its imposing Ionic columns and impressive limestone porch.

From 1839 until the early years of the war, when the U.S. Army confiscated the property, the mansion served as centerpiece of Clifton Place, Pillow’s plantation that encompassed hundreds of acres. His slaves—most of whom lived in cabins at “The Quarters”—generated his wealth by planting and harvesting cotton, hemp, corn, and other crops as well as tending to his cattle, sheep, and hogs.

As one of Tennessee’s leading citizens and one of the wealthiest men in the South, Pillow moved in elite social circles. He counted James K. Polk, the 11th U.S. president, among his friends. Following the end of his presidency in 1849, Polk dined at Clifton Place with Gideon and his wife, Mary. Pillow himself dabbled in national politics, opposing secession initially in 1861 before relenting.

As a military man, though, political general Pillow failed to measure up. During the Mexican War, the twice-wounded Pillow angered superiors—including Winfield Scott—for his self-promotion. No surprise, perhaps, given a massive painting of a heroic Pillow in military uniform greeted visitors in the front entrance of Clifton Place.

During the Civil War, Pillow abandoned his post at Fort Donelson in February 1862, sneaking away from the beleaguered garrison under the cover of darkness before the Union Army under Ulysses S. Grant accepted the Confederates’ surrender. At the Battle of Stones River nearly 10 months later, Pillow led a brigade with mixed results. True or not, a story of the 55-year-old officer cowering behind a tree during the battle has stained his résumé ever since.

Unsurprisingly, Scott—overall commander of the U.S. Army when the Civil War broke out—did not count himself among Pillow’s fans. In his 1864 memoirs, “Old Fuss And Feathers” described Pillow as “amiable, and possessed of some acuteness, but the only person I have ever known who was wholly indifferent in the choice between truth and falsehood, honesty and dishonesty; ever as ready to attain an end by the one as the other, and habitually boastful of acts of cleverness at the total sacrifice of moral character.”

As we walk from cabin to cabin, Ridley reflects only briefly on his connection to Pillow and the slaves who toiled for him.

“Just part of history,” he says.

Ridley and I gingerly step into a cabin, home for Pillow’s field slaves. More than a year ago, he had brush and other vegetation cleared from around these remarkable survivors, giving us easy access.

Each cabin is roughly 15-by-15 feet with a small loft accessed by a rickety ladder. Each has a post-Civil War room out back. I’ve visited the site a half-dozen times but see something new each time.

Steps ahead of me, Ridley shines the narrow beam from his flashlight on a fireplace, revealing bricks and small dirt piles in an otherwise barren room. Fragments of newspaper—used as insulation by postwar inhabitants—speckle the walls. A dour-looking baseball player stares from a March 1937 newspaper sports section. A decrepit floor, victimized by time and nature, crunches beneath my feet.

In another cabin, we find more reminders of the 20th century: a swinging blade, peeling wallpaper adorned with blue- and aqua-colored floral designs, a chipped ax handle, and a barren clothes hook on a door. Pasted to the back wall is a fragment of The New York Times from decades ago.

“Life in America,” the partial headline reads.

From the era of slavery, though, we find no visible evidence they were here. No fragments of 19th-century pottery or shards of glass. No messages etched on bare, wooden walls.No privy to mine for secrets. Much is left for our imaginations.

And so, I wonder: Who were these men, women, and children?

What treatment did they receive from Pillow?

What were their names?

Perhaps the 1870 U.S. census provides us hints. “Sarah” and “Randall”—listed as farm hands for the Pillow family in that census—appear on deeds as far back as the 1840s.

I wonder what ultimately became of the slaves who toiled for Pillow. Were they buried in the nearby cemetery in the woods—the remote graveyard at the base of Ginger Hill that Ridley showed me months ago? Or were they buried in St. John’s Church Cemetery, far in the back, away from the final resting places of the White folks? Or perhaps they ended up in one of the scores of family cemeteries that dot the county.

And I wonder what will become of these historic treasures near the east fork of Greenlick Creek. Ridley wants to save the cabins, but that probably would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and more expertise than he has.

What would a professional archaeologist unearth here?

I also wonder what will happen to Clifton Place, where Ridley’s paternal grandfather lived until 1949. It remained part of the Ridley family for years afterward.

“I watched television in there for the first time in my life,” Ridley says. He recalls family gatherings in the 12-room Greek Revival-style mansion and 16-foot-high ceilings.

In 1972, a Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate named John R. Neal purchased the property from the Ridley family. He and his wife, Linda, aimed to restore the mansion, but their yearslong effort proved daunting. “We saw the white columns, the Gone With The Wind atmosphere,” she told a reporter in 1986. “We didn’t see the cracks, the structural problems.”

The Clifton Place grounds include the original detached kitchen, carriage house, ice house, law office, spring house, blacksmith, and quarters for “house” slaves. In the Pillow-era smokehouse stands the original poplar chopping block and “ham logs”—hollowed out poplar logs for the salting of hams. The smoky aroma in the small brick building still tantalizes.

“The most complete 19th-century plantation complex anywhere,” a researcher once called Clifton Place.

John Neal died in 2018, but Clifton Place remains with his family. The mansion, however, has stood unoccupied (and inaccessible to the public) for more than a decade. Like the nearby slave cabins, it too could become nothing but a memory without significant preservation efforts.

Time may not be on the side of people like us who relish places like this. In an empty field across Mount Pleasant Pike from Clifton Place, developers have plans for residential housing. “750 houses on 450 acres,” Ridley says.

Oh my, what will I see here a decade from now?

John Banks is author of three Civil War books. Check out his latest, A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing). He also can be visited on Facebook at John Banks’ Civil War blog.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Civil War Times.

When one hears the name of a Civil War general named Bee, the first reaction for most is the Confederate commander from South Carolina who shouted to his men at the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861: “Look men, there stands Jackson like a stone wall. Rally behind the Virginians!” That Bee was Barnard Elliott Bee Jr., who would be mortally wounded on Henry Hill shortly after uttering that immortal cheer.

But Barnard Bee had a younger brother who also served in the Confederate Army during the war, Brig. Gen. Hamilton P. Bee.

“Ham” had moved with his parents as a teenager to Texas. He later leveraged his father’s political standing in the Texas government to get a spot as a brigadier general of Texas Militia in a 10-county area along the coast. In March 1862, he was elevated to the same rank in the Confederate Army.

In the early stages of the 1864 Red River Campaign, Bee and a large cavalry force were sent to fight in Louisiana. Generals Richard Taylor and Edmund Kirby Smith met at Bee’s campfire the night after the Confederate victory at Mansfield, La., on April 8. The next day, Bee was injured leading a charge at Pleasant Hill.

Although Bee was generally complimented for his personal bravery, he apparently lacked a capacity for military leadership. His ultimate failure came on April 23, 1864, when he pulled his men out of position at Monett’s Ferry, allowing the Federals to escape unchallenged to Alexandria, La.

Taylor soon dismissed him from service. According to one subordinate, Bee was “the poorest excuse for a Gen that I ever saw.”

Much has been written about the July 13, 1882, death of Arizona Territory gunfighter Johnny Ringo, most of it wrong. Writers have inserted their assumptions as facts. Thus, the story often goes that Johnny found himself alone in a trackless waste on a hot day in mid-July without water. Despondent, his horse having run off, left without water, Ringo committed suicide.  

In fact, Ringo died within 20 yards of a well-traveled road, having just reached Turkey Creek, the first available water source within many miles. He was within a quarter mile of the ranch of B.F. Smith, in the western foothills of the Chiricahua Mountains, and those on the ranch heard the shot that killed Johnny. Furthermore, July is a month of monsoon rains. In Arizona that means the wind comes from the southwest, from the Pacific and Gulf of California, bringing almost daily thundershowers that fill ponds and cause washes and streams to run. The rain cools the land, which at Turkey Creek is at 5,400 feet elevation—a far cry from the blazing desert around Phoenix, at 1,100 feet.   

As the Epitaph account reveals, Yost estimated that within a quarter hour 11 men were on the scene. They comprised a “coroner’s jury.” That term may mislead present-day readers. These were 11 everyday men who reported their findings to the coroner in Tombstone by letter. They had no forensic training. They were in a hurry to be done with the affair and get back to work, to bury a body already starting to stink. They did not wish to be called to Tombstone, miles distant, for lengthy court proceedings.  

Ringo was known to several of the men. The Epitaph published their findings. Johnny was found in a seated posture leaning against a tree. His boots were missing. “He was dressed in [a] light hat, blue shirt, vest, pants and drawers. On his feet were a pair of hose and an undershirt torn up so as to protect his feet.” He wore two cartridge belts, one for pistol and one for rifle. The revolver belt was upside down. There was no holster for a pistol, nor was it a Buscadero rig. His rifle propped against a nearby tree, his pistol clasped in his right hand. There was a bullet hole atop the left side of his skull. “A part of the scalp [was] gone,” the paper noted, “and part of the hair. This looks as if cut out by a knife.” There was no mention of powder burns or stippling on his head.

Black powder burns slowly and keeps burning as the bullet emerges from the barrel. In his 1966 song “Mr. Shorty,” Marty Robbins sang, “The .44 spoke, and it sent lead and smoke, and 17 inches of flame.” This isn’t far off the mark. A close-range pistol shot with muzzle held to temple likely would have ignited Ringo’s hair and left an awful mess. The coroner’s jury might have left such details out of their report to spare family members and the public, or perhaps because they simply didn’t think it important. After all, the effects of close-range pistol shots was common knowledge in that era.  

The Epitaph report surmised the circumstances:  

“The general impression prevailing among people in the Chiricahuas is that his horse wandered off somewhere, and he started off on foot to search for him; that his boots began to hurt him, and he pulled them off and made moccasins of his undershirt. He could not have been suffering for water, as he was within 200 feet of it, and not more than 700 feet from Smith’s house. Mrs. Morse and Mrs. Young passed by where he was lying Thursday afternoon, but supposed it was some man asleep and took no further notice of him. The inmates of Smith’s house heard a shot about 3 o’clock Thursday evening, and it is more than likely that that is the time the rash deed was done. He was on an extended jamboree the last time he was in this city.”  

The following Tuesday Ringo’s horse was found with one of his boots still hanging from the saddle. The Chiricahua folks were mistaken. Johnny hadn’t, while searching for his horse, taken off his boots because they hurt. He still had the horse when he took them off. The strips of undershirt wrapped around his feet were clean, not dirtied by any walking about. He was close to water and aid, not helpless and alone in a desert. The newspaper also noted Ringo was subject to frequent melancholy and had abnormal fear of being killed. He was paranoid, but that doesn’t mean people weren’t pursuing him with the intent to do him harm.  

What Really Happened on Turkey Creek?

The spot where Ringo was found, sitting beneath an oak tree on the banks of upper Turkey Creek, is idyllic, shaded and alive with the sound of trickling water. Though peaceful, it was not at all secluded. It was on the road to Galeyville, which passed a nearby pinery and sawmill. Several passersby spotted Johnny’s body, each believing he was only resting.

In his 1927 book Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest author Walter Noble Burns added several details. “[Ringo’s] six-shooter, held in his right hand, had fallen into his lap and caught in his watch chain,” Burns wrote. “Five chambers of the cylinder were loaded; the hammer rested on the single empty shell.” Of course, Burns was writing an adventure tale and not a history. Nonetheless, some four decades after Johnny’s death he did conduct research in Tombstone and Cochise County, speaking to people who had direct knowledge of the events.

The spent cartridge may mean Ringo had fired the fatal shot. However, it could easily be symptomatic of resting the hammer on a spent cartridge for safety. As a young Wyatt Earp once learned to his chagrin, resting the hammer on a live cartridge could lead to accidental discharge of the weapon; in his case, as he leaned back in a chair, his revolver tumbled from the holster and landed on the floor. That Johnny’s pistol was resting in his lap, tangled in his watch chain, is more intriguing. It’s hard to imagine the pistol, had he shot himself, falling in that position instead of at his side. Forensic studies show that suicides often continue to grip the weapon, so that by itself is not evidence of postmortem tampering by a third party. As Ringo lacked a holster for his pistol, he must have worn it tucked beneath his cartridge belt. Thus, in a seated position, it might well have become tangled as he tried to draw.

There is much peculiar in how Johnny was clad. He’d taken off his boots and hung them from the saddle of his horse, which wandered off. He’d also taken the time to strip off cartridge belts, vest and shirt, then removed and torn up his undershirt to bind his feet. Walking barefoot in Arizona is a painful experience at best. Stones, cacti and stiff grass, not to mention various critters and the hot ground, make such barefoot forays ill-advised. Cowboys do not, as some have written, hang their boots from the saddle to keep out scorpions. On reaching a destination, they remove the saddle from the horse, placing it on the ground, and then wipe down the horse with dry grass. Moreover, Johnny had re-dressed himself, buckling on his cartridge belts (one upside down) and binding his feet as if preparing to pursue his horse.

That leaves the question of why he took off his boots in the first place. Let’s consider his situation. He’d been on an extended spree in Tombstone. When friend Billy Breakenridge met Ringo at South Pass in the Dragoons, Johnny had two bottles of whiskey and offered Billy a drink. By the time he was approaching Turkey Creek, Ringo had crossed many dry miles and was either severely hungover or still drunk. He and his horse both needed a drink of cool water. It seems likely Ringo took off his boots and hung them from the saddle to keep them dry while he waded into the creek to cool his feet and splash water on his face. Likewise, the horse would have waded in for a drink.

What came next is an educated guess. The horse panicked and broke away at some sound in the dense brush. It might have been a bear or someone stalking Ringo. In any event, Johnny had to chase down his horse and didn’t care to do that barefoot. He climbed the steep bank to the tree where he was found, undressed himself to remove his undershirt and then re-dressed, wrapping his feet in preparation for a long walk.

At that moment one of two things occurred. Suddenly despairing of catching his horse, Ringo resolved to kill himself. He must have been certain succor would not have been available at Smith’s ranch or from the many passersby. Alternatively, the noise from the brush that had startled his horse might have been someone stalking him. That someone climbed the bank while Ringo was distracted with his clothing. Hearing the approach of a stranger, Johnny reached for his pistol. The stranger, still only partway up the slope, fired upward from a distance of 10 feet or more, striking Ringo in the temple, the bullet emerging from the top of his skull. The stranger then took out his knife and carved off part of Johnny’s scalp as a trophy.

Who Could Have Done It?

The above proposed scenario for Ringo’s final hour accounts for all the evidence, providing a logical explanation for much that was odd in how he was found. As to whether Johnny suddenly decided to kill himself after losing his horse or was killed by a third party, who can say? Murder seems plausible, maybe likely.

There are many candidates for Ringo’s murderer. Some think Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday might have been responsible. They could have been there. If Constable Fred Dodge, acting as their spy in Tombstone, had telegraphed that Johnny was on a binge and would soon return to Galeyville and his San Simon ranch, there would have been time for Earp and Holliday to travel over by train, especially given Johnny’s circuitous ride home. Even taking an indirect route, the pair could have made the trip by train. The mouth of Turkey Creek was a choke point, by which Ringo would have passed within a few hundred feet. However, a secret only remains a secret if only one person knows it. Wyatt and Doc surely would have been recognized as they left the train. Many co-conspirators would have to have been brought in on such a plan.

Most other candidates seem even less likely, due to implausible motives. Except for Buckskin Frank Leslie.

Leslie appears nowhere in the historical record before 1878. He arrived in Tombstone in 1880, a man in his late 30s who had adopted the persona of an Army scout, which he claimed to have been for more than a decade. Yet, there is no evidence he was a scout before moving to Tombstone. Buckskin Frank was a congenial sort of fellow around the campfire, which probably accounts for his acceptance as a scout on later expeditions. In 1885 he was hired to guide Captain Emmet Crawford’s command in pursuit of Geronimo but was, according to Los Angeles Times reporter Charles F. Lummis, “directly discharged because of his inability to tell a trail from a box of flea powder.” Leslie also served as a dispatch rider, bringing “wildcat dispatches” to Tombstone, his presumed skill scoffed at by Crawford’s superior, Brig. Gen. George Crook.

Lummis, who met Frank in Tombstone, probably had the right of it in his 1886 Times article:

“Leslie is a peculiar case—one of the types of a class not infrequently met on the frontier. A man apparently well educated, gentlemanly and liked by all who know him; with as much “sand” as the country he ranges—but a novelist who can make a little truth go as far as anyone in the territory.”

In the spring of 1880, a few weeks after Cosmopolitan Hotel chambermaid Mary Jane “May” Evans married, she took up with Leslie—neither, apparently, being respecters of the sanctity of matrimony. That June 22 May’s husband, Mike Killeen, was mortally wounded—probably by Frank, though under confusing circumstances—and scarcely a week later May was Mrs. Frank Leslie. The marriage was not a happy one, as Frank, a womanizer, strayed. Perhaps May had seen through the false front and threatened his he-man persona. That might explain the abuse she suffered at his hands.

In 1881, while Earp and friend Holliday temporarily cooled their heels in jail after the gunfight near the O.K. Corral, Doc’s longtime companion Big Nose Kate twice gave Ringo a tumble. Johnny, too, was no respecter of other men’s territory, and the following spring he and Frank were at loggerheads over a woman.

In July 1882, as Ringo returned from his extended spree in Tombstone, witnesses spotted Leslie trailing him near Turkey Creek. That November 14 Johnny’s friend Billy Claiborne, who’d fled from the O.K. Corral fracas, picked a gunfight with Leslie after Frank ejected him from a saloon for obnoxious drunkenness. Claiborne ended up dead in that fight. At the time some said Billy had accused Frank of killing Ringo, while years later multiple sources claimed Leslie boasted of having killed Ringo. Taking a scalp trophy would have fit right in with his persona.

Leslie’s life only took a downturn from there. By 1889 he and May had divorced, and Frank had absconded to his ranch in the Swisshelms with former prostitute “Blonde Mollie” Edwards, a younger woman. That July 10, on returning home after a spree, Frank entered the ranch house to find Mollie and a young ranch hand in discussion. Drawing his gun, Frank killed Mollie and wounded the ranch hand. No motive was given, but Mollie had mentioned wanting to return to “city life” in Tombstone, and perhaps 40-something Frank was feeling his age and believed she was sweet on the boy. Though no respecter of other men’s prerogatives, Frank was jealous of his own. Pleading guilty to first-degree murder, he was transported to Yuma Territorial Prison in January 1890. On Nov. 17, 1896, having serving nearly seven years behind bars, Leslie was pardoned by Arizona Territory Governor Benjamin J. Franklin.

In 1916, after two decades of further adventures and failed marriages, Buckskin Frank Leslie was interviewed by a reporter from The Seattle Daily Times. He stated his age as 74 and said he was planning a trip to Mexico. When and where he died is anyone’s guess, as he vanished from the record as suddenly as he’d appeared on it.   

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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For further reading, author Doug Hocking recommends “Buckskin Frank” Leslie, by Don Chaput; They Called Him Buckskin Frank, by Jack DeMattos and Chuck Parsons; and John Peters Ringo: Mythical Gunfighter, by Ben T. Traywick.

Passengers riding the Orange & Alexandria Railroad in early 1864 witnessed a bleak landscape disfigured by nearly three years of war. “Dilapidated, fenceless, and trodden with War Virginia is,” Walt Whitman recorded on a trip from Washington, D.C., to Culpeper, Va., that February. “Virginia wears an air of gloom and desolation; no fences, no homes—nothing but the debris of destroyed property and continuous camps of soldiers,” seconded a U.S. Christian Commission representative. “There was nothing,” opined a newspaper correspondent, “absolutely nothing but the abomination of desolation.”

The Union Army of the Potomac’s winter camps surrounding Culpeper depended on the railroad for provisions, munitions, and forage. Keeping the army supplied required 40 locomotives running daily along the 70-mile stretch of tracks that were vulnerable to floods, prone to accidents, and often attacked by Confederate cavalry raiders. Yet such was the efficiency of the U.S. Military Rail Road’s management that when 22 miles had been destroyed by retreating Confederates the previous fall, the line was restored within days, and the high bridge over the Rappahannock River was rebuilt in 19 hours.

On March 10, a special train comprised of a locomotive and two cars chugged its way south. Aboard the first car was a detachment of soldiers, but riding in the other was the United States’ new general-in-chief, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, and a small party that included staff officers, his son Fred, and his principal political sponsor, Congressman Elihu B. Washburne. Grant had formally received his promotion the day before from President Abraham Lincoln in a ceremony attended by the Cabinet. There was awkwardness—Grant was unfamiliar with Washington and nearly all its officials, including Lincoln, whom he had only just met, and the general-in-chief was a stranger to them. More discomfiture lay ahead at his destination—the winter camps of the U.S. Army of the Potomac.

No one recorded details of that six-hour trip aboard a vulnerable train traversing a terrain rendered even sadder by heavy, cold rain, but the trip’s significance could hardly have been lost on Grant. The man who less than three years before had worked as a clerk in his father’s dry goods store in Galena, Ill., now commanded more than 800,000 soldiers in 19 departments in all Union states and several in the Confederacy.

Over the last two years, Grant had won victories at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga and demonstrated tenacity, audacity, ingenuity, and adroitness. But his character was what most impressed his closest friend, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, who had recently told him that he was “as unselfish, kind-hearted and as honest as a man should be.” Sherman added that Grant’s most outstanding quality was his “simple faith in success you have always manifested, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in a Savior.”

Grant would call on those strengths as he faced a more complex challenge than any he had yet faced. He knew he would be directing armies in a year that would see a wartime presidential election that could itself determine the war’s outcome. The new general-in-chief also recognized that winning victories in the coming campaigns would be key to winning at the polls in November.

Rolling Toward Brandy Station

Grant had been promoted to provide a more vigorous prosecution of the war. That Grant, on his first full day as general-in-chief, left Washington to meet the principals of the Army of the Potomac underscored how closely was its success tied to the Union cause. Moreover, Grant’s plans had changed. Whereas he had intended to exercise his new overall command while headquartered in the West, he now understood that he needed to be near Washington to shield the Army of the Potomac from political intrigue and that Lincoln specifically intended that he provide close command oversight. He knew he would soon deliver a mixed message to the army’s leadership.

Grant fully recognized the risks his promotion posed. After his victory at Vicksburg, newspapers had reported that Grant would replace Maj. Gen. George G. Meade as the Army of the Potomac’s commander. The report first appeared in a little-known New York paper, the Express, and might have originated with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. In addition, some, perhaps Congressman Washburne among them, advocated Grant transporting his army to the Eastern Theater and superseding Meade. Talking Stanton out of it was then General-in-Chief Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, Grant’s departmental commander earlier in the war, and Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, who had observed Grant at Vicksburg.

Once it became clear he would not be transferred, Grant expressed relief. It was “a matter of no small importance,” he wrote Washburne, that the change not take place. In that letter and in an earlier missive to Dana, Grant explained the reassignment “could do no possible good.” Noting that the Army of the Potomac was led by “able officers who have been brought up with that army,” the general anticipated that they would resent having an outsider placed over them. Commanding the Army of the Potomac, he continued, meant, “I would have all to learn.”

Even in mid-February 1864, with his promotion to general-in-chief all but certain, Grant remained reluctant, telling a West Point classmate that he was “thankful” that he had not been transferred. Commenting to his wife, Julia, that same week, the general intimated that were he to receive the top command, he would not be confined to Washington. Grant mused they might see more of each other as he would be traveling regularly between his Western headquarters and the Eastern Theater and could stop to see her wherever she elected to live.

But now Grant was about to begin his acquaintance with the most prominent, and unlucky, of U.S. armies. The Army of Potomac was quite unlike the usually victorious forces Grant had led in the West. Still looming over the army that winter was the shadow of its creator, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. Though dismissed 17 months before, McClellan’s influence endured, most notably among the army’s senior generals, nearly all of whom had received their first promotions while under McClellan’s command. To many of these men, McClellan bequeathed his caution and lack of urgency that hampered its operations. He also left an army culture of political engagement with Washington that undermined its effectiveness. Grant’s suspicions were correct—he was bringing a new style, and he and those he brought with him would be regarded as outsiders.

Since McClellan’s dismissal, three men had commanded the army—Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and Meade. Burnside and Hooker were dismissed for their battlefield and command failures and, partly, because their subordinates had lost faith in their leadership. The army had won but one clear-cut victory, and it on the home ground of Gettysburg, and had repeatedly been manhandled by the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia led by General Robert E. Lee.

For his part, Meade had been so criticized after his victory at Gettysburg that he had repeatedly offered to resign. Five days before Grant arrived, Meade had testified before Congress refuting false allegations made by several generals and an array of political opponents who sought to have him replaced. His hold on command was tenuous, and Meade would not have been surprised if Grant was bringing word that he would be sacked.In short, Grant was about to engage an army that was, in the words of Bruce Catton, “badly clique-ridden, obsessed by the memory of the departed McClellan, so deeply impressed by Lee’s superior abilities that its talk at times almost had a defeatist quality.”

At 3 p.m., Grant’s train pulled into rain-soaked Brandy Station, Va., the army’s principal supply depot, described as a “vast domain of smoke, guns, and mud-stained soldiers.” There, on the platform surrounded by barrels of beef piled high around the tracks, were two of the army’s principal staff officers, chief of staff Maj. Gen. Andrew A. Humphreys, and quartermaster Brig. Gen. Rufus Ingalls. Humphreys was substituting for Meade, his “slightly indisposed” superior, while Ingalls was presumably along to greet his old friend and West Point roommate. Meade’s absence might have appeared to a more protocol-conscious general like a slight, but there is no record of Grant taking offense.

After the train rolled to a stop, guards disembarked from the first car while officers and civilians detrained from the second. Among them was Grant. The only thing remarkable about him, thought Dr. E.W. Locke, was that he was smoking. “His dress is very plain, eyes half closed, he takes little or no notice of anything,” Locke continued, observing that a “very few officers, and as many men, came, took a hasty glance, and have now gone back to their quarters, most of them shaking their heads, and some saying, ‘Big thing.’”

The party rode a four-horse spring wagon to Meade’s headquarters three miles away, where they were greeted by the camp guard consisting of details from four regiments. One of the army’s finest bands struck up “Hail to the Chief” and other tunes, but rain prevented a more elaborate ceremony, which was just as well. The new general-in-chief never learned how to make an entrance, and if he took note of the welcome, no one noticed. Worse, his hosts could not have known that their new commander was tone-deaf and sometimes found the sound of music excruciating. Grant once confessed—or joked, we know not which—he knew but two tunes, one that was “Yankee Doodle” and one that was not.

Meade, clad in a common soldier’s jacket, opened his tent door to greet his new chief. Exactly what occurred during that meeting is muddled. Most historians have accepted Grant’s account in his Memoirs that Meade offered to step aside in favor of someone Grant knew better, suggesting specifically Sherman. Grant wrote that he was so impressed by Meade’s selflessness that he immediately assured Meade that he had “no thought of substituting anyone for him.” Meade’s more immediate account, written the evening of the meeting, is cryptic, mentioning only that Grant had been “very civil, and said nothing about superseding me.”

But Grant had considered sacking Meade. One of Grant’s aides recorded in his diary on March 10 that Grant had considered replacing Meade with Maj. Gen. William F. “Baldy” Smith, who had impressed the new general-in-chief in Chattanooga, but that there was now to be “no change.” Many published rumors had predicted that Meade would be fired, mentioning several different generals, and Smith was listed as among the leading candidates. Meade, who knew and disliked Smith from their time serving together earlier in the war, could not have been comforted by knowing that Smith had accompanied Grant on his visit to the army.

In Smith’s telling, Grant had found that the War Department preferred to keep Meade in command and that he accompanied Grant to Brandy Station only at the latter’s insistence. He discreetly spent the night not with Grant’s entourage but with old Army friends. Grant had lobbied for Smith’s promotion to major general and would later assign him to lead a corps in the Army of the James.

Grant recalled that there was “prejudice” against Smith in the Senate and that only after he persisted had the promotion gone through. As he ruefully recorded in his Memoirs, however, “I was not long in finding out that the objections to Smith’s promotion were well founded.” Meade continued to fret; as late as March 17, he was still worried that Smith would take his place.

First Impressions

Just when and how Grant decided to retain Meade is elusive. Grant was apparently surprised to learn in their initial meetings that Lincoln and Stanton were not looking for a change. Meade hailed from a politically important state, Pennsylvania, and was the only army commander who had bested Lee, making him difficult to fire.

Given the infighting that had raged for months among many in the Army of the Potomac, the administration must have noted that most Army generals continued to support Meade. Moreover, Grant knew he was an outsider in an army that did not treat outsiders well, and replacing Meade would only compound that problem. Finally, both Lincoln and Grant recognized that much of the effort to oust Meade came from those whose bad-faith motives ought not to be rewarded.

Because Meade’s frequent letters to his wife survive, we know much about his frame of mind during the months preceding Grant’s arrival. Replying to his wife’s late-1863 question, Meade wrote that he knew Grant slightly from the Mexican War, where he was considered a “clever young officer, but nothing extraordinary.” Judging from the then-common usage of the adjective “clever,” the army commander apparently thought of Grant as amiable or well-mannered rather than intelligent.

After explaining that Grant had been compelled to resign his commission because of his “irregular habits”—a reference to Grant’s drinking—he listed Grant’s strength as his energy and “great tenacity of purpose.” Still, he could not resist observing that there was little basis for comparison between the U.S. armies in the East with those in the West, claiming that his army had faced an adversary that was better led and composed of better troops.

Meade followed up his brief March 10 letter four days later. In that missive, Meade gave a longer description, saying he was “much pleased with General Grant,” and that he had shown “much more capacity and character than I had expected.” He told his wife that he had offered to step aside as army commander if Grant wished to replace him with a general he knew better. Meade related that Grant replied with a “complimentary speech,” and disavowed any intention to replace him. Then Grant delivered the less welcome news: He intended to accompany the army during the spring campaign.

“So that you may look now for the Army of the Potomac putting laurels on the brows of another rather than your husband,” Meade concluded, a strikingly prescient prediction. Meade returned to his impression of Grant in a March 16 letter, saying that he was “most agreeably disappointed in his evidence of mind and character. You may rest assured he is not an ordinary man.”

If Meade’s words are condescending, hinting at being pleasantly surprised by Grant’s abilities, that view was shared by top subordinates. “Agreeably disappointed,” although a curious phrase, seems to have reflected a consensus. The army’s senior corps commander, Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick, wrote to his sister that he had “spent an evening with [Grant], and was most agreeably disappointed, both in his personal appearance and his straightforward, common-sense view of matters.”

Despite news that Grant might command the army directly, Sedgwick noted, “[G]ood feeling seemed to exist between him and General Meade.” General Humphreys agreed, telling his wife in a March 10 letter that he was “agreeably disappointed in Genl. Grant’s appearance,” describing the new general-in-chief as having “an intellectual face and head which at the same time expresses a good deal of determination.”

Striking a discordant note was Maj. Gen. Gouverneur Warren. Grant, he said, “seems much more vivacious than I supposed and did not look at me with any apparent eye to discerning my qualities in my face.” Warren perhaps did not mean it this way, but he seemed to fault Grant for failing to perceive his brilliance, an early sign of a personal conflict to come.

The weather having not improved, Grant abandoned plans to visit the various corps, and returned to Washington on March 11. He spent much of that afternoon conferring with Halleck, now his Washington-based chief of staff, and then with Lincoln and Stanton. When Grant said he intended to depart for Nashville that evening, Lincoln implored him to stay for dinner at the White House. Grant declined, citing the urgency of returning to the West, adding that he had “enough of the show business.” Besides, he added, “a dinner to me means a million dollars a day lost to the country.” Lincoln ruefully told the gathering of senior generals and Cabinet officials arriving for dinner that Grant had to leave unexpectedly, and therefore, the evening was “the play of Hamlet with Hamlet left out.”

Grant had earlier promised to stay the night, so there was something precipitous in Grant’s immediate departure for the West. It may be that after a stressful 48 hours, and now knowing he would soon return to the Army of the Potomac’s camps, Grant urgently wished to see familiar surroundings and subordinates. Ahead, he now knew, lay a complex relocation for his staff and family and the transfer of his departmental command to Sherman. He now had a firmer sense of how much there was yet to learn and do.

Nevertheless, he had achieved a favorable first impression, demonstrating that he was a quick study who had quietly impressed strangers with his intelligence, determination, humility, common sense, and what Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells noted was a “latent power.” In adjusting to Lincoln’s preferences to base his command in the East and accompany the Army of the Potomac still led by Meade, Grant showed a quick willingness to follow without complaint his civilian superior’s priorities. That augured well for their future partnership.

Official Washington seemed not to mind that Grant’s visit was brief, with several observing approvingly that Grant was “all business.” Still, as the train chugged away, Grant, again alone with his thoughts and cigars, could not know that he had taken his first sure steps on a momentous road that would, less than 400 days later, end in a stillness at Appomattox.

William W. Bergen, an independent historian based in Charlottesville, Va., has had essays published in the University of North Carolina’s Military Campaigns of the Civil War series. He also has worked as a paid guide at Monticello.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

On the first page of Conflict of Command, George Rable posits, “People have largely made up their mind about George McClellan—and not in the general’s favor; nor do they seem amenable to rethinking their position.” He then spends 336 pages essentially proving the point. Uninterested in “refighting the military campaigns,” he instead sets out to examine the relationship between Lincoln and his ill-starred general.

The two men, both ambitious, shared a deep commitment to the Union’s preservation and possessed different, but potentially complementary abilities. An adept politician, Lincoln lacked the military know-how of McClellan, who contrariwise proved to be consistently obtuse politically. Although the two men met 57 times over a six-month period early in the war, their potential for an advantageous partnership went unrealized.

On one hand, that failure rested on fundamental strategic disagreements. McClellan advocated one big, meticulously planned campaign to win the war with overwhelming force—hence his Peninsula Campaign of 1862. He opposed emancipation and confiscation, and proved unwilling to spend the number of lives ultimately paid for Union success. Lincoln, pressured by the Radicals for quick military successes, was ever-conscious of the political costs of a general he and many others came to see as far too cautious and secretive.

But the two men, wary and reticent with one another, also failed to connect on a personal level. The well-born McClellan’s frequent excoriations of Lincoln as an uneducated rube in his letters to his wife reveal a deep disdain for his commander-in-chief, as did his frequent refusal to share his military thinking. Lincoln, for his part, was often indecisive, especially early in the war, and nettled the general with his often-unannounced visits to discuss strategy.

But McClellan did some things well. Adept at organizing the Army of the Potomac, he endeared himself to his troops by displaying genuine concern for their well-being. He also insisted on humane treatment for civilians entrapped by the war. Furthermore, Rable notes, whatever his shortcomings, “The replacements for McClellan as both general in chief and commander of the Army of the Potomac proved less than satisfactory.”

The general’s greatest moment may have been the manner in which he accepted Lincoln’s decision in November 1862 to replace him with a reluctant Ambrose Burnside. Rather than accede to credible talk among his junior officers of marching on Washington to force his restoration to command, McClellan quashed such plans and withdrew, amid considerable fanfare, never again to lead Union troops.

Perhaps one of his contemporaries best understood why a man of such promise came to be seen as a failure. “The critics of McClellan do not consider this vast and cruel responsibility,” observed former President Ulysses S. Grant in 1878. “McClellan was a young man when this devolved upon him, and if he did not succeed, it was because the conditions of success were so trying. If McClellan had gone into the war as Sherman, Thomas, or Meade, had fought his way along and up, I have no reason to suppose that he would not have won as high a distinction as any of us.”

Conflict of Command

George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War

By George C. Rable, LSU Press, 2023

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When Military History sought an interview with Buzz Aldrin, he initially demurred. The second human being ever to walk on the surface of the Moon—on July 21, 1969, as a crew member of Apollo 11—he finds that journalists seldom want to discuss anything else. But Aldrin’s career spans much further. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he was commissioned into the Air Force at the outset of the Korean War. Flying the North American F-86 Sabre for the 16th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, Aldrin completed 66 combat missions and downed two MiG-15 jets. After the war he earned a doctorate in astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Aldrin walked in space as a Gemini astronaut before flying to the Moon with Apollo. Today, the 93-year-old Air Force brigadier general remains a strong advocate of the space program, particularly of planned missions to Mars.    

What made you select the Air Force after graduation from West Point?  

I wanted to fly and had always wanted to fly. I took my first flight at age 2 with my father and never looked back. Flying was exhilarating. We [graduates] knew the nation would need pilots, so we signed up.  

What was it like flying the cutting-edge F-86 Sabre?  

Fast in a dogfight—and I was in a couple of those—and gratifying, because the plane handled well, although my gun got jammed in one encounter, and on another occasion I had a frozen fuel line. But the plane was a jet, and we liked the idea of flying jets. They got you higher and faster, and we all liked that.  

How did the MiG-15 match up in your two recorded Korean War shootdowns?  

The MiG-15 was a fast plane, and they had good pilots. The pilot ejected in the first one, which was filmed by the nose camera [of my Sabre].  

Your second kill entailed a difficult dogfight. Tell us about that.  

Not a lot to tell, but you can see photos of it. My gun jammed on my first lock, so I had to be steady, stay with him, get the lock again and then fire. He, too, ejected, which was good for him. Dogfights are all-consuming—they happen fast. Nothing about a shootdown is easy, but when you return alive you feel glad you returned, glad you could do what you were supposed to.  

What was it like flying the F-100 Super Sabre equipped with nuclear weapons?  

I will just say, those times—perhaps a bit like these times—were about being prepared. There was tension, but we were always well trained, ready for what might come. We signed up to protect the United States, and so we did. It was as simple as that. We all thought freedom mattered, and we flew to protect it.  

A fighter jock with a doctoral degree?  

Yes, before selection to NASA’s third group of astronauts, I earned my doctorate from MIT. I wrote a thesis called “Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous.” An understanding of that topic and orbital mechanics proved fortuitous when Jim Lovell and I flew Gemini 12, the last Gemini mission, which required proving the efficacy of orbital rendezvous. As fate would have it, we actually needed to manage part of that process manually, due to computer problems, so the thesis came in handy after all.  

How excited were you to join the space program?  

Very. And looking back, I was just fortunate to be selected for Gemini 12 and Apollo 11. I was also blessed to have great crewmates—Lovell in Gemini 12, and Neil Armstrong and Mike Collins in Apollo 11. What can you say? We were all blessed.  

Describe the sensation of your free-flight space walk for Gemini.  

My longest EVA [extravehicular activity], or space walk, of Gemini 12 was surprising for the beauty and sense of accomplishment that came with it—and because my heart rate apparently stayed low. Someone asked me why, and I really could not say, except that I was honestly having fun.  

We must ask, what was it like to walk on the Moon?  

In many other venues I have discussed the answer to that question, but suffice to say we had a job to do, and we worked very hard to do it. We did not want to let others down, since so many had worked to make Apollo 11, mankind’s first Moon landing, a success.   I called it “magnificent desolation” at the time, and that remains a good description. It was also an honor, and while we trained hard for it, the actual event was exhilarating in small and unexpected ways. We saw our shadow landing, which never happened in simulation. We had to test one-sixth gravity, since that could not be simulated. We had to get experiments out, and one required waiting for a small BB to settle in a cone, which took a while with one-sixth gravity. Neil and I worked together to get the American flag in, which was harder than you might think with only about an inch of Moon dust to plant it in.  

On May 5, 2023, you were promoted to brigadier general. What did that mean to you?  

Well, it was humbling, gratifying, and I was really honored. I stepped out of the normal advancement sequence flying for NASA. Afterward, I continued to serve, fly and believe in the U.S. Air Force. To be recognized for that—for what I did during and after that special time—was gratifying. I thank all those involved. It meant a lot, and I am happy still when I think about that day.  

You continue to advocate for a manned mission to Mars. Why?  

Simple, really: The United States is the leader in human space exploration, and we need to keep reaching outward, expanding and enriching the human experience. That means not resting on our laurels, but going out to Mars, exploring and swiftly creating permanence there—not a touch-and-go, but staying on Mars.  

How do you reflect on your achievements in the military and as an astronaut?  

We all have our stories and our journey, and mine has been exciting. It was an honor to serve in Korea, with NASA and thereafter with the Air Force. This nation is one of a kind—both a great and good country. Those opportunities came from tens of thousands of other dedicated Americans, and I feel forever grateful for what they did to make my journey possible. So, how do you reflect on all that? You just remind yourself each dawn is precious, and you stay grateful. You keep trying to do whatever you can to keep the greatness and goodness going.

This interview appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Military History magazine.

In the end William “Billy” Dixon cared far less about being a legend or hero than he did about the vibrancy of life he had experienced on the Great Plains. Death had flirted with the famed frontier scout and buffalo hunter on more than one occasion, but it was in those harrowing moments he had felt most alive.  

A reflective Dixon recalled one of those life-defining episodes in his autobiography, dictated shortly before his death and published in 1914. His mind drifted to his days as a young buffalo hunter at Adobe Walls, a remote outpost of hunters, skinners and tradesmen in the Texas Panhandle. There, in the predawn hours of June 27, 1874, Dixon caught a glimpse of a large body of shadowy objects near a timberline beyond the settlement’s grazing horses. They were moving toward the outpost. Dixon strained his eyes but couldn’t define anything in the murky light. Suddenly, the advancing body “spread out like a fan” and unleashed a collective, thunderous war whoop that “seemed to shake the very air of the early morning.”  

Hundreds of mounted Comanche, Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne warriors then burst into view, charging furiously in full regalia. The fearless Comanche Chief Quanah Parker led the pack. Dixon described the scene with vivid, romantic prose—splashes of bright red, vermillion and ochre on the warriors and their horses…scalps dangling from bridles…fluttering plumes of magnificent warbonnets…and the bronzed, half-naked bodies of the riders, glittering with silver and brass ornaments as they emerged from the fires of the rising sun. “There was never a more splendidly barbaric sight,” Dixon confessed. “In after years I was glad that I had seen it.”  

Dixon had witnessed one of the last great thrusts by the Plains tribes in defense of their way of life—an ancient, nomadic existence tethered to the once mighty herds of buffalo. By the time of the 1874 Second Battle of Adobe Walls, however, the herds were vanishing at an alarming rate. Dixon, like the buffalo, miraculously survived. He emerged from battle that day as the “hero of Adobe Walls,” having dropped a warrior from his horse with a legendary rifle shot of more than 1,500 yards. In the ensuing decades Dixon became increasingly cognizant of the unique history he had experienced on the Great Plains. Above all he came to appreciate the magnitude those events had had on the development of the American West.

“I fear that the conquest of savagery in the Southwest was due more often to love of adventure than to any wish that cities should arise in the desert, or that the highways of civilization should take the place of the trails of the Indian and the buffalo,” Dixon said. “In fact, many of us believed and hoped that the wilderness would remain forever. Life there was to our liking. Its freedom, its dangers, its tax upon our strength and courage, gave zest to living.”

Memories of that life flooded Dixon’s mind. Fortunately, Billy’s greatest champion—his wife, Olive—convinced him to preserve his remembrances for future generations in an as-told-to autobiography. Starting in earnest in the fall of 1912, she faithfully recorded Billy’s running narrative on notebooks scattered throughout their homestead in Cimarron County, Okla. She even kept a notebook in the corral in case her taciturn husband became reflective about the past, ever mindful of his reluctance to fuss over his adventures. Sadly, Billy never read the final manuscript. He caught pneumonia during a winter storm and died shortly afterward at home on March 9, 1913, at age 62. Fellow members of his Masonic lodge buried Billy in the nearest cemetery on Texas soil, in the Panhandle town of Texline.

“Little did we suspect that Death—the enemy from whom he had escaped so many times in the old days—was at hand,” Olive wrote in the preface to his autobiography, “and that the arrow was set to the bow.”

Having inherited her husband’s hefty mantle, Olive faithfully labored over the next 43 years—until her own death—to preserve and promote his legacy. Her love and unwavering dedication to Billy, a man 22 years her senior, is consistently evident in her private letters, published articles, lectures and memorial projects. In the immediate aftermath of his death she dedicated her efforts to publishing his life story. First, Olive enlisted the services of Frederick S. Barde, the “dean of Oklahoma journalism,” to compile Billy’s remembrances into an orderly manuscript originally entitled Life and Adventures of “Billy” Dixon. She then borrowed $500 at 12 percent interest to pay for the printing—a mighty sacrifice for a widow of seven children. Twelve years would pass before Olive finally paid off her banknote, but any hardships proved worthwhile where her husband’s legend was concerned.

Historians and old-timers alike declared the book an instant frontier classic. University of Oklahoma history professor Joseph B. Thoburn, who became one of Olive’s closest friends and confidants, viewed the timing of her work on the book as “almost Providential.” In one letter to Olive he declared, “Posterity will always owe you a debt of gratitude for your persistence in persuading your husband to tell his life story for publication. So much valuable historical material of this class had been lost in the West because the story of a man’s life was permitted to die with him.”  

Thoburn spoke truth. If not for Olive’s perseverance, large swaths of Billy’s remarkable life story would never have been recorded. The autobiography alone provided Dixon’s firsthand accounts and context for two of the American West’s most thrilling episodes—the June 27, 1874, Second Battle of Adobe Walls, and the Sept. 12, 1874, Buffalo Wallow Fight.  

Buffalo Wallow

At Buffalo Wallow—a sideshow of the Sept. 9–14, 1874, Battle of the Upper Washita River—Dixon, fellow civilian scout Amos Chapman and four enlisted men of the 6th U.S. Cavalry defended a patch of naked ground against a large band of Comanche and Kiowa warriors. For their actions Dixon and the others received the Medal of Honor. Billy’s blunt but gripping narration of the battle to Olive provided the backstory behind the medals.  

Dixon described how he and his companions were carrying dispatches from McClellan Creek, in the Panhandle, to Camp Supply in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), some 150 miles to the northwest. They’d been sent by Colonel Nelson A. Miles, then commanding the 5th U.S. Infantry and the 6th Cavalry, whose rations were running dangerously low amid the Red River War, the ongoing campaign to subdue the southern Plains tribes. At sunrise on September 12, their second day out, the small party crested a knoll within plain sight of the Comanches and Kiowas. The warriors quickly encircled the men.    

“We were in a trap,” Dixon recalled. “We knew that the best thing to do was to make a stand and fight for our lives.” As the men dismounted, Private George W. Smith gathered the reins of their horses, only to be shot a moment later. He fell face down. At that the horses bolted. A fierce, close-quarters firefight ensued, as Dixon, Chapman, Sergeant Zachariah T. Woodhall and Privates Peter Roth (or Rath) and John Harrington fended off an estimated 125 warriors.  

Scanning the open plains for any shelter, Dixon spotted a depression some yards distant where buffalo had pawed and wallowed. As the men sprinted for it under fire, one shot dropped Chapman, who fell with a moan. Roth, Woodhall, Harrington and Dixon kept running till they reached the wallow, then desperately stabbed and clawed at the earth with their knives and hands to throw up a crude earthwork around its perimeter. “We were keenly aware that the only thing to do was to sell our lives as dearly as possible,” Dixon said. “We fired deliberately, taking good aim, and were picking off an Indian at almost every round.”  

Chapman and Smith—the latter presumed dead—remained where they had fallen. One of the men cried out for Chapman to make a dash for the wallow, but the scout replied that a bullet had shattered his left knee. Dixon refused to leave Chapman stranded. Despite intense volleys by the enemy, he finally reached his fellow scout, hoisted Chapman on his back and bore the larger man to the safety of the wallow. Chapman later told a dramatically different version of who saved whom that day, a claim the reserved Dixon never contested publicly while alive, much to Olive’s dismay.  

Around 3 p.m. merciful fate intervened, as sheets of cold rain provided the defenders with welcome water and pelted their assailants, prompting the Comanches and Kiowas to retreat for warmth and cover out of rifle range. By dawn the next day the warriors had vanished. The break came too late for Smith, who’d been mortally wounded with a punctured lung. In the dark of night Dixon and Roth had manhandled the private back to the wallow, where he died without complaint. Decades later Billy spoke of the cool courage displayed by every man that day and mournfully told his wife that Private Smith still lay buried out on the windswept plains.  

Tireless Work

The knowledge that Smith’s grave, as well as the battle site, remained unmarked overwhelmed Olive with a sense of responsibility to honor the memory of Billy and his contemporaries. With that singular mission in mind she leapt from one project to the next. She wrote to magazines and newspapers, often to correct details in published articles about Billy’s life. In 1922 she became a charter member of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Society and two years later spearheaded the society’s efforts to mark the 50th anniversary of the Second Battle of Adobe Walls.  

On June 27, 1924, more than 3,000 celebrants descended on the remote Adobe Walls battlefield, by then part of the Turkey Track Ranch in Hutchinson County, Texas. They arrived in automobiles, wagons and on horseback, all to pay homage to the memory of a heroic and successful last stand by 28 men and one woman (Hannah Olds, the wife of cook William Olds) against “the flower and perfection” of the Plains tribal warriors.  

Andy Johnson of Dodge City, Kan.—one of two living defenders—attended the celebration with a pistol fastened to his waistband. He later regaled the crowd with a stirring account of the battle as airplanes circled overhead. Naturally, Johnson’s story of Dixon’s legendary long shot received prime treatment, though the claim later drew skepticism in some quarters. Olive also made brief remarks, crediting others for the historic occasion. The crowd cheered lustily when a 10-foot-tall monument of the finest Oklahoma red granite was unveiled. Inscribed on it are the names of each Adobe Walls defender.  

The successful event only fueled Olive’s commitment to her cause. She had already begun lobbying the society to mark the site of the Buffalo Wallow Fight while simultaneously searching for a publisher to reprint Billy’s book. Despite the book’s critical acclaim a decade earlier, Olive’s hunt for a publisher proved slow and unnerving. In a Dec. 27, 1925, letter to Thoburn, she went so far as to declare that if she couldn’t secure a publisher soon, she would be forced to “sell my land in Cimarron County.”  

Two years passed before Olive celebrated those two signature achievements—the release of a revised edition of Billy’s autobiography, by Dallas-based P.L. Turner Co., and the placement of a monument at the Buffalo Wallow battleground, 22 miles south of Canadian, Texas. She even successfully lobbied the U.S. War Department to provide a grave marker for Private George Smith.  

Still, Olive couldn’t rest. Two years later she made the intensely personal decision to have her husband’s remains reinterred to Adobe Walls. On June 27, 1929—55 years to the day after the storied battle with allied warriors led by Quanah Parker—a police escort led a funeral procession three hours from Texline to the battleground. Reverent spectators lined the route, removing their hats as the caravan passed. A headline in the Amarillo Daily News proclaimed, Col. Billy Dixon Gets Last Wish: Buried at Site of Adobe Walls. Never mind that Dixon had no military rank; he didn’t need one to be remembered.  

Immortalized in Print

The model of a devoted widow, Olive ensured her husband’s name would echo through time. She did so tirelessly, lovingly and with humility. Recognizing her immense contributions to the history of the Texas Panhandle, author John McCarty sought her permission to write a biography about her life with Billy, and his vision culminated in the 1955 publication of Adobe Walls Bride: The Story of Billy and Olive Dixon. Initially, Olive had balked at the idea. “Throughout the time when interviews and research were bringing out the story of her life,” McCarty wrote, “Mrs. Dixon steadily maintained that there was nothing distinctive about her or her experiences; she even protested that there would be no interest in a story of her life, as she had done nothing out of the ordinary. All her disclosures were slanted toward one recurring theme: ‘My husband was a great man.’ But she took no credit for Dixon’s achievements.”  

Olive died in Amarillo a year later, on March 17, 1956—43 years and eight days after her beloved Billy left this earth. Death stole her swiftly. That evening she had joined daughter Edna and son-in-law Walter Irwin for dinner at a popular barbecue restaurant. On the drive home Olive quietly slumped over on her daughter’s shoulder. She never regained consciousness.  

As a child growing up in Virginia, Olive had dreamed of a time when she could “mingle with people who were really doing things in an unusual way.” Stories of the expansive cattle ranches on the Great Plains fueled her imagination, until in 1893, at age 20, she boldly joined brother Archie King in Texas for the adventure of a lifetime. He worked as a cowhand for a Hutchinson County spread, living with wife and child in a crude log-and-sod structure dug out of a bank on Johns Creek some 20 miles from the ranch headquarters. She also visited brother Albert, who wrangled for a neighboring spread.  

Olive instantly fell in love with the West, and soon after with one of its icons. Her childhood dream was realized. She’d sought adventure, embraced the pioneer spirit and then married the love of her life. Olive, like her husband, had lived a life worth remembering.   

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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Ron J. Jackson Jr. is an award-winning author from Rocky, Okla., and a regular contributor to Wild West. For further reading he recommends the autobiography Life and Adventures of “Billy” Dixon, as well as Adobe Walls: The History and Archeology of the 1874 Trading Post, by T. Lindsay Baker and Billy R. Harrison; Adobe Walls Bride: The Story of Billy and Olive King Dixon, by John L. McCarty; and Billy and Olive Dixon: The Plainsman and His Lady, by Bill O’Neal.

“[Robert E. Lee Jr.] is off with Jackson & I hope will catch Pope & his cousin Louis Marshall,” General Robert E. Lee wrote to his daughter Mildred on July 28, 1862, not long after Maj. Gen. John Pope had been given command of the Union Army of Virginia. Marshall was his nephew, the son of Lee’s older sister, Anne. “I could forgive the latter for fighting against us, if he had not joined such a miscreant as Pope.” (Lee would send a similarly worded letter to his wife, Mary, asking that she tell their son to “bring in his cousin” the next time she wrote him.)

Born in Virginia in 1827, Louis Henry Marshall followed the path of his famed uncle in attending the U.S. Military Academy. Commissioned a second lieutenant with the 3rd U.S. Infantry after graduating in 1849, he served on the frontier, and by 1860 was a captain in the 10th U.S. Infantry. While his uncle, cousins, and other family members in the extended Lee family chose to side with the South, Marshall put his country before kin.

In February 1862, he was appointed an acting aide-de-camp on General Pope’s staff. Brigadier General David S. Stanley recalled that Pope, then commander of the Army of the Mississippi, was “a very witty man and often turned the laugh on his staff officers and others.” He had once poked fun at Marshall’s “demotion” when the soldiers of the Benton Cadets, Missouri Infantry reportedly elected him colonel, then lieutenant colonel, then major after three successive elections. “Why Lou,” Pope remarked in jest, “if those fellows had given you another promotion, they would have landed you in the penitentiary.”

When President Abraham Lincoln appointed Pope to take charge of the Army of Virginia in June 1862, Marshall headed east, pitting him against his uncle and cousins on their home soil.

Marshall was with Pope during that summer’s disastrous Northern Virginia Campaign. In fact, when Captain John Mason Lee, a cousin serving with the Confederate army, encountered Marshall after the Battle of Cedar Mountain, he reported back that he looked to be in a wretched state. Pope had Marshall verbally deliver orders to Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks inquiring whether Banks planned to hold or attack during the eventual Confederate victory. When General Lee heard that Marshall was not in the best of spirits, he wrote Mary: “I am sorry he is in such bad company, but I suppose he could not help it.”

Marshall escaped Virginia without being captured but was banished west with Pope after Second Bull Run and spent the rest of the war in the Department of the Northwest. He remained in the U.S. Army postwar, serving in Washington, Idaho, and Oregon—notably at the Battle of Three Forks against the Snake Indians—before resigning in 1868, a major in the 23rd U.S. Infantry.

Marshall followed his father to California and lived a humble life as a rancher until his death in Monrovia on October 8, 1891, at age 63. He is buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

“Rommel, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!” shouts a triumphant U.S. Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. (as played by Best Actor Oscar winner, George C. Scott in 1970’s Best Picture, Patton) while watching the March-April 1943 Battle of El Guettar in Tunisia, North Africa. This “gotcha!” exclamation implies the American general gained the key to victory over the German-Italian Axis forces he mistakenly thought were then commanded by Rommel from reading Rommel’s own impressive account of his development as a daring, tactically-innovative troop commander fighting French, Romanian, Russian and Italian units in World War I.

An avid reader of all things military history—his extensive, personally-annotated military history library was donated to the West Point Library—the real Patton probably did read Infanterie greift an, published by then-Lt. Col. Erwin Rommel in Germany in 1937, two years before World War II began and four years before Rommel earned his nickname, “The Desert Fox”. But the first English language edition—heavily abridged and edited by (understandably) anti-German wartime military censors only initially appeared in 1943.

What is certain, however, is that Patton never read this excellent, insightful, and revealing new English translation—which is much truer and exceedingly more faithful to Rommel’s highly nuanced, original German account than the extremely poor, indifferently translated wartime 1943 and 1944 English editions. Comparing Zita Steele’s (pen name of award-winning writer-historian-editor, Zita Ballinger Fletcher) brilliant new translation of Rommel’s classic book is akin to comparing Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a fourth-grade “Dick and Jane” grammar book. Steele’s deft translation finally does justice to Rommel’s original German text.

Bringing the Original Text To Life

Rommel’s original text comes vividly alive through Steele’s superb German-to-English translation and his account of how he reacted to and developed his innovative small-unit tactics to consistently defeat the forces arrayed against his own unit is exceptionally well-revealed in her new book. Usually outnumbered and outgunned, German mountain ranger assault troops under the young Rommel, time and time again overcame their enemies’ superior numbers and greater firepower to achieve their often daunting objectives. Steele consistently, and much more correctly, translates “German alpine troops” as “mountain rangers,” thereby better capturing the true nature of these, in effect, early versions of what would eventually be known as “special operations forces”.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Rommel describes how and why he developed the tactics he used to prevail in each engagement, revealing his constant development as an innovative troop leader. This excellent new translation traces the gradual but proceeding development during combat in France and in the mountains of the Eastern Front of the young Rommel whose later operational genius would suddenly burst forth upon the Belgian, French and North African battlefields of World War II. This translation demonstrates the roots of Rommel’s operational genius, showing “how Rommel became Rommel.” 

Rommel As A Person

Steele also reveals Erwin Rommel as a person, with the all-too-human flaws he possessed. Although the enduring image of Rommel was that of a homebody “family” man, a devoted, doting husband to his wife Lucie (they married in 1916), his relationship with another woman produced an illegitimate daughter, Gertrud, in 1913, whom he manfully acknowledged and for whom he provided financial support.

Additionally, Steele presents a convincing argument—based on Rommel’s admitted life-long insomnia and recurrent nightmares—that he suffered from PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. Given his WWI wounds, the nightmarish combat he endured in that war, and the loss of many close friends, that diagnosis seems completely credible. Coincidentally, Patton’s best biographer, Carlo D’Este, concludes—very convincingly—that Patton also suffered from PTSD. This reviewer strongly concurs with both authors’ “diagnoses.”

Was Rommel A Nazi?

Steele also delves into THE question involving Rommel: Was he or was he not a “Nazi?” Although it is a historical fact that Erwin Rommel was never a member of the Nazi Party, his promotions by Adolf Hitler always beg the question of was Rommel a “secret” Nazi, whether an official member of the Party or not? Steele concludes—correctly in this reviewer’s opinion—that Rommel was definitely not a Nazi. Clearly, Rommel personally benefited from Hitler’s support and indulgences, but so did other non-Nazis if they served Hitler’s interests when that service was beneficial to the Nazi dictator. Rommel was enough of a non-Nazi that he paid the ultimate price—Hitler’s toadies forced the field marshal to commit suicide on Oct. 14, 1944 in the wake of the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler of which Rommel knew but of which he was not an integral part.

Zita Steele’s new book which is based on her new, insightful, nuanced and authoritative English translation of Erwin Rommel’s classic of military history 1937 book, Infantry Attacks, is a hands’-down, “must-have” book in any military history enthusiast’s library. It not only makes earlier English translations of Rommel’s book obsolete, it’s a “classic” account of World War I combat. Above all, it’s an insightful preview of one of the most famous commanders of World War II—and how he learned his trade! Buy it! Read it! Enjoy it!

ERwin Rommel: First War

A New Look At Infantry Attacks
By Zita Steele

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There’s an element of truth to the maxim “the hat makes the man.” In the 19th century West, for example, certain headgear served to identify their wearers at a glance. Soldiers had the shako, firefighters the leatherhead, Indians the warbonnet and vaqueros the sombrero. But perhaps no other topper in history has symbolized a people and their region in such a defining way as the cowboy hat. See it stamped on a box, in neon outside a storefront or in a popular present-day email “emoji,” and one immediately thinks of the American West.

Yet, the cowboy hat wasn’t the most prolific lid of its time or place. In a 1957 editorial headlined The Hat That Won the West, in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, writer-historian Lucius Beebe disputed that the cowboy hat was ubiquitous out West, a notion he deemed an invention of artist Frederic Remington. “The authentic hat of the Old West,” Beebe wrote, “was the cast-iron derby, the bowler of Old Bond Street and the chapeau melon of French usage.” He then pointed to such derby wearers as lawman Bat Masterson, stagecoach robber Charles E. “Black Bart” Boles, Wells Fargo chief detective James B. Hume and, tellingly, “Remington and his imitators” as proof of his assertion.

Regardless, the cowboy hat remains the iconic symbol of the West. And the name that has become synonymous with it is Stetson. Ironically, John B. Stetson was an Easterner, and the factory that initially steamed, shaped and shipped tens of millions of hats bearing his name was in Philadelphia, though the company that produces them under license today is, fittingly, in Texas.

Stetson (1830–1906), the son of a New Jersey hatmaker, was diagnosed with tuberculosis as a young man and resolved to close up the family shop and venture West for the climate and to see its vaunted beauty before dying. In 1861 news of the Pikes Peak Gold Rush drew him and fellow hopefuls to the Colorado goldfields. Stetson arrived, so the story goes, amid heavy downpours and so crafted a beaver felt hat of his own design to keep dry. It featured the trademark wide brim, high crown and waterproof lining since associated with his name. The style proved so popular among the Western outdoorsmen Stetson encountered that the emboldened entrepreneur returned East in 1865 to resume hatmaking.

The first design off the line in his Philadelphia factory was the “Boss of the Plains” (see above). It proved instantly popular and dominated the market for the next couple of decades. As Stetson owners took to adding personalized touches—a dent here or a curved brim there—the company took note and rolled out additional styles.

Stetson got a big boost in the 1880s with the advent of international celebrity in the person of William Frederick Cody. Cody was already a fan of Stetsons, custom versions of which he wore onstage in the early 1870s in touring productions organized by dime novelist Ned Buntline. Within a few years of launching his own Wild West arena shows in 1883, Buffalo Bill was plastering his Stetson-capped image on signboards from San Francisco to Saxony. The hatmaker couldn’t buy better advertising.

The birth of the silver screen and its Western stars further amplified the popularity of the Stetson, one of which the company named for the actor who made it popular—the Tom Mix.

Today the cowboy hat endures, and scores of hatmakers big and small continue to craft styles that symbolize the Old and New West. We trace its history below.

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