The Hill – 21 July 1992
The Hill is a major piece of my childhood memory and mythology and a major part of middle age experience ─ and mythology. The Hill ─ it was always called The Hill and still is by my family ─ is the southernmost of the range that runs north of Talpa, cuts south toward Highway 67, almost touches the highway six miles from Talpa and four miles from Valera and then heads on north of Valera toward Coleman. Where those hills almost touch the highway, that’s The Hill. The Hill takes up a sizable portion of my grandparents’ old pasture. Their houses, one called The Old House, and the other, The New House (bought from south of Talpa and moved-in years ago after a tornado shifted The Old House around a bit) both sat just under the point of The Hill, The Old House much closer. Till I was three, my parents lived with my grandparents in The Old House. It was a T-model house with a long front porch facing east. In the first of my memories, I am on the porch in early evening. Cows and sheep are calling, blue Santa Anna Mountain is in front of me and to the southeast, much closer, another major mythological place of my childhood, Bead Mountain. After my parents moved to Talpa, I still spent much time with my grandparents and early evenings on the front porch are among the best of my memories.
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And right there, to the north, just across the road to the cow lot, was always The Hill. The Hill was rugged and close, always in my sight, drawing me the way hills and mountains have always drawn human beings. I was both fascinated and afraid. The fear, I expect, had much to do with my family. I was warned against The Hill. They were afraid I’d climb up and fall on the rocks along the rim and they were afraid I’d meet a rattlesnake. Still today, when I go to The Hill ─ and I do often to the house I’ve built on the point ─ my grandmother warns me to “Watch out for rattlesnakes.”
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But there was more than relatives’ warnings. Mystery was about the place. All human beings have always found mystery in high places. The mystery was undefined to me. But once in a while, it took shape. Once, this after my grandparents had moved into The New House, I was there with my great-grandmother. In old age, she’d moved, from White Chapel, in with them. My grandparents were gone to some function in the Valera Community Center and, with darkness, I realized I’d forgotten to close the chicken house door. My grandmother’s chickens were being wiped-out by varmints and I guessed I’d best overcome any nervousness of darkness and close the chicken house door. The chicken house was very close to The Hill. I’d already closed the door when I became convinced I was being watched, watched from The Hill. I looked up to the point and I still today swear I saw human forms there, or forms of humans that were no longer alive. They were to me, that night, Indians and I have never had reason to change my opinion.
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My grandmother raised turkeys that ran loose and sometimes they wouldn’t come home. So she’d go looking and take me. I remember sitting with her on the side of The Hill, her looking out over the pasture trying to spot renegade turkeys. She used to say she’d climbed that hill so many times she wishes someone would just knock it down. Someone tried. When the highway people rebuilt 67 in the late ‘40’s, I guess, and later in the ‘50’s, they opened a caliche pit there, a huge, gaping pit mine. That became The Caliche Pit. Open pit mines are not supposed to be good. This one became a wonder.
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Hidden back up from the highway, it surprises the visitor. My friends who come to visit from England can’t believe it is a man-made eyesore. To them, it looks like the American West, a miniature Grand Canyon with cragged walls and tumbled boulders, mesquite and willow trees growing beside the lake that half-moons around the west and north walls, a profusion of cattails, and now-and-again a bobcat or gray fox running off into the boulders.
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I always loved it. I’d beg my grandmother to take me. She’d boil eggs for a picnic and we’d eat by the water. When I was older, I’d spend summer afternoons swimming and riding the raft I made with some Huckleberry Finnish feeling of a river far away. Now my kids like to go there at night. Rocks glimmer in moonlight; animals scurry. My older son killed a deer one afternoon at the water. I came once within five feet of a gray fox kit that just sat and looked at me. I called my younger son to come see and the fox never ran. The Caliche Pit did not hurt The Hill. In some way not at all planned by the men who dug it, it made The Hill into something more.
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I have friends from England on The Hill because I have written for English magazines and made record albums in England and made friends who come to visit. They come to The Hill because of the house I built there. Actually “house” may not be the right word. I wrote in an English magazine that it is a hybrid of a house, hunting camp, sculpture and western movie set. My wife, two sons and I have worked on it for most of a decade. We tore down The Old House, what was left of it after years of an unpatched roof and wind and rain, and moved the usable lumber up the hill. Our house is built on the point of The Hill, at the place I saw Indian ghosts. We have neither electricity nor running water. My younger son, Quanah, was about three when we began. Because it was on the hill, he called it The HouseUp. We still call it that. We spend as much time as we can there, amongst ghosts and other mysteries and memories and a south wind that blows forever.
Bead Mountain – 28 July 1992
My grandfather said he used to have a little glass jar of beads he’d found on Bead Mountain. He thought maybe they were in some drawer in the back room. I used to hunt for them. My grandmother called that prowling. I never found the beads. He said Bead Mountain was called Bead Mountain from little clay or rock beads that used to be scattered about on top. I did see some in the gas station in Valera. For years, I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than a bead or two from Bead Mountain. I expect the beads came from Comanche graves in rock crevices on the east side of the mountain. Comanches buried their dead, usually in a sitting position, in rock crevices on mountain sides, facing east to face the rising sun. At Bead Mountain, the sun rises over Santa Anna Mountain and Santa Anna Mountain is said itself to have been a sacred place for the Comanche. Several accounts say a meteorite fell on Santa Anna Mountain and was seen and found by Comanches. They kept it in a sand cave with a constant, attended fire burning beside. The meteorite is supposed to now be in the University of Texas Memorial Museum in Austin.
Anyone crossing that country would have camped on Bead Mountain for lookout. After my great-grandfather built The Old House in 1901, his father came up from San Saba to visit. The old man disappeared one day, and they thought maybe he’d gone off and fallen or even died. He came walking back at sunset and explained. He said he’d been sitting on the porch and recognized Bead Mountain as a place he’d camped years before with the Rangers. So, he’d walked the three miles to see the place again.
From the names and scratching carved on the sandstone cliff at the south side (once used, I’m told, as the wall for a dugout house), you can tell generations have visited Bead Mountain. My grandmother says the only time she ever played hooky from school, she (and I think most of the rest of the school) spent the day at Bead Mountain. During the depression, the families that lived there had social events, neighborhood dances. My grandfather played harmonica sometimes and my wife’s father played guitar and harmonica and sang. One night, my father-in-law (having perhaps a little too much to drink) busted his guitar over some guy’s head (that guy seems to have had a bit too much, too) because the guy requested “El Rancho Rio Grande” several times in a row.
When I was in high school, I went down into the hole on the east rim. The hole is perhaps twelve or fifteen feet deep, straight down through solid rock. It is maybe four feet across. My grandfather always attributed it to treasure hunters. He said western Coleman County was infested with treasure hunters. He had one story of treasure hunters who were digging somewhere around Bead Mountain when they noticed a couple of people were watching them on horseback from a good distance away. Finding no treasure, they roped a dead calf, drug it to the hole and buried it. The watchers, still watching, were convinced they’d seen a man being buried. They took off for the sheriff in Coleman. According to my grandfather, the unrecognized treasure hunters lounged around saying they indeed smelled a human body as they watched the sheriff, and the watchers spend the afternoon digging up a dead calf.
I never thought the hole on top of Bead Mountain was dug by treasure hunters. I never believed they would have dug that big hole straight down through solid rock. When I was perhaps sixteen, I went into the hole. Being always warned of rattlesnakes, we poured gas down and lit it. When it burned out, two of my friends lowered me on a rope. I had a little German pistol in my pocket. At the bottom, I discovered one fairly new pork-and-bean can and I found the hole made a right angle at the bottom and headed back south. But rocks had caved-in, and I couldn’t crawl through. My flashlight showed it went quite a ways.
I have a friend in Australia who is married to an Australian Native woman. He is an artist, and we once did a project together. He sent me a box of ancient Australian beads and I scattered them on top of Bead Mountain. I took photos and the photos were shown in Australia as part of the project. If someday, some archaeologist finds those beads on top of a hill in West Texas, I bet he’s going to be one confused archaeologist.
In 1982, I wrote a short story called “Pilgrims” based on a story I’ve heard is more-or-less true. It is about an old Comanche who brings his son, daughter-in-law and grandson back to Bead Mountain from Oklahoma during the depression. The story was published in a magazine in North Carolina, in a collection of my stories, etc. and in an anthology of short Indian fiction from Navajo Community College Press. The anthology is used in several Indian Studies programs around the country. So Bead Mountain gets around.
Six or seven years ago, my friend Roy Hamric and I decided to do a book about medicine places in Texas. We went to Bead Mountain and we went to Santa Anna Mountain. Then we went to the Medicine Mounds, south of Quanah, Texas. The Medicine Mounds are four mountains sitting on the plains alone much like Bead Mountain sits southwest of Valera. They were famous as Comanche vision-quest and medicine places ï€ and, they say, for Comanche horse races. We asked the man who owned the place if anyone still did medicine there. He said no, not in all the years he lived there. On one mound, on the east, we found medicine. A tripod of limbs held a feather hanging, a name scratched on a rock below. Pieces of cloth were tied in a tree nearby, like prayer cloths in the trees on the Fort Belknap Reservation where I used to live in Montana. I asked my friend, Minerva Allen, who lives at Fort Belknap and does medicine, what it meant. She said she thought it was an offering for somebody going off to the service. I guess people had sneaked there without the owner knowing. And not far from the tripod was a hole, an almost identical hole to the one on Bead Mountain. It seems to me that two such holes on two such east sides of Comanche holy places, must have meant something, must have been for the same reason. But in reading and asking, I have found no answer.
The Old House – 4 August 1992
I often dream of The Old House, the house I tore down to build the hilltop camp-house - The HouseUp - between Talpa and Valera. In my dreams, The Old House is always repaired and my grandmother and sometimes my grandfather, who died in 1973, are living there. Sometimes I live there with my wife and kids. I don’t think The Old House wanted to be torn down. During its destruction, it tried to kill me.
My great-grandfather came up from San Saba County in 1899 to locate a place in Coleman or Runnels County. My grandfather thought that was because he’d been here earlier as a Ranger and then later to cowboy and break horses. They spent New Years, 1900, camped in a wagon yard in Ballinger, still closing the deal on the place. The Old House was built in 1901. Tearing grayed wooden siding off in the mid ‘80’s, I found penciled numbers, wall measures written on the boards below - a strange message from all those years ago, from when the house was beginning instead of ending.
My grandfather said the back room was already built, that the rest of the house was added. The back room did indeed look much older, much more weathered. The ground around was littered with what looked to be very old bits of glass and other refuse. I found many shot pistol and rifle cartridges of archaic caliber. I wanted to believe those proved some sort of gun battle. My grandfather supposed they were signs of target practice. Strangely, I found numerous parts of harmonicas. Old square iron nails were scattered about. My grandfather assumed the back room had been built with square nails. But when I tore down the back room, I discovered only round nails. There must have been some older structure there before.
My grandfather thought the back room had once been a stagecoach inn. Maybe the earlier, square-nailed structure had been the inn, Oak Vale, operated by John Averitt. That inn was somewhere close on the Fort Worth-Yuma, Arizona route. My grandfather thought there had been a stage station down in the corner of a field in front of the house. There were once signs of a rock foundation, he said. He showed me the route of the old road. It ran through the pasture and north of The Old House instead of south where now runs 67. I could see outline of a road, a swath of fewer trees. Mrs. Berryman, the neighbor to the south, told my grandfather two men were buried somewhere in the pasture by the old road. I used to look for sign of graves and found none. Sometime in the ‘70’s, my father got a metal detector and we took it out to check the old road. The metal detector went crazy, and we found, buried in the road, a whole wood cookstove, collapsed, but the whole stove − six inches underground. I spent a good deal of time imagining that road. When I was in high school, I bailing-wired an old farm wagon together and, by hand, pulled it over part of the road to hear how wagon wheels sounded turning almost a century before.
My grandfather gave me The Old House several years before he died, said do with it whatever I pleased. I lived in Austin and then moved off to New Mexico and had no opportunity to do anything. After moving to Dallas in the late ‘70’s, I decided to start. My wife, Judy, and I spent, several weekends cleaning it, finding forgotten objects from the ‘50’s and ‘40’s and before, things I remembered as always being part of The Old House. The birth of our younger son got in the way of finishing, and we didn’t get back at it till the ‘80’s.
I thought - and dreamed - I should be repairing instead of tearing it down. But it was way beyond repair. It was almost beyond tearing down. A neighbor asked my mother why I was tearing it down from the bottom instead of from the top. That was because it was too far gone to climb; it had to be brought down.
That’s how The Old House tried to kill me. I was working by myself, just at dusk, trying to bring down the front porch roof. I was on a ladder leaned up against the roof, prying with a wrecking bar, when something shifted. I’d done my job too well, too quickly. The front of the house shifted toward me and with it, the whole brick chimney came falling directly at me. Of all directions it might have fallen, it fell straight at me. I saw it coming. While it was still in the air, I took to the air, jumping off the ladder backward. I landed on a pile of lumber with who-knows-how-many nails sticking out and missed everyone, the lumber breaking my fall. Clumps of mortared brick fell all about me, one cutting my head a little, one bouncing off my shoulder. Well, House, I thought, you tried and missed. Not so. The next day, I ran a rusty nail all the way through my boot sole, through my foot and out the top of my boot.
Maybe now The Old House has forgiven me ï€ even if, by dreams, I still feel guilty for destroying it. I did, after all, build something new from the parts. By building The HouseUp, I brought new life back to old lumber that would have soon fallen on its own and rotted like most such houses across the countryside. Instead of gradually disappearing like the old stage road, The Old House has given birth to new generations of use by living human beings, family and friends - good times and ongoing life.
I expect to live out my life at The HouseUp and thereabouts and I expect my kids to have it then.
Ghosts ─ 11 August 1992
Oklahoma Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe and I wrote a play in the mid ‘80’s. It is called “Big Pow Wow.” The three major characters are a white woman, an Indian woman and a 600-year-old Indian ghost. When the white woman discovers the ghost, she announces there’s a ghost in the house. The Indian woman tells her there’s always a ghost in the house. My father and his parents and his brothers and sisters once lived with a ghost in the house. That was on the Kelly Place four or five miles southeast of Novice.
Minerva Allen, of my Assiniboine family on the Fort Belknap Reservation in northern Montana, told me twenty years ago to never look at a ghost. She said when you hear something following you at night, don’t look back. If it is a ghost, it will turn your face. Your face will literally go sideways, your mouth and nose twisted. I knew one man up at Belknap who had such a twisted face. I told Minerva I would always look at a ghost. She herself has such a story about the man who raised her, Andrew Gray, a medi-cine man. One night many years ago, Andrew ran out of gas in Ghost Coulee, a place known for ghosts. Andrew left a friend in the car and went walking for gas. A ghost came to the car and terrified his friend. When Andrew came back with gas, his friend asked if he’d seen the ghost. Andrew said sure. Andrew said any ghost on Fort Belknap was likely a relative and would mean him no harm. Andrew said the ghost helped him get the gas.
My father says he was never afraid of the ghost on the Kelly Place. She always came with a blue-green light which was in the southeast corner of the ceiling. She came to my father three or four times, always wearing a flannel nightgown with ruffles at her wrists. She had very long hair, as did my grandmother, and at first he thought it was his mother. But then he realized she was standing at the head of the bed and that was impossible. The head of the bed was next to the wall. And anyway, he could hear his mother asleep in the next room. The ghost rubbed his cheeks.
This was about 1940. My father had been away at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp when his folks moved into the Kelly Place. Almost twenty years later, at a family reunion, his two brothers, Wade and F.A., said the same things happened to them in that room. The three of them had never before mentioned it to one another. F.A. looked for the source of light and never found it. One day, F.A. was at the well, an old hand-dug well they used to water the cows. A man walked up and told him he’d pay a gold piece if F.A. would go down into the well and find a watch lost there. The man wore khakis. F.A. said he looked down into the well then back to the man and the man was gone. My father said he went back to that house years later and found the corner where he saw the light had been torn out. Someone had torn into the ceiling hunting the source.
The people who owned the place wouldn’t live in the house. They lived in a little shack down the road. And dogs wouldn’t stay there. My father says a dog would yelp at night as if something hurt it. The next morning, the dog would be gone. My grandmother said later she wouldn’t enter that room without a lit lamp. My father thinks maybe his parents knew about the ghost, but never mentioned it, not wanting to scare the kids.
When I was in high school I told my friend, Gerald Canady, about the Novice haunted house. He told his father, Harry. Mr. Canady knew all about that house. A woman, Harry said, had been dying there. She’d said a star would fall toward the house at her death and the clock would strike thirteen times. According to Mr. Canady, the clock did strike thirteen times at her death and her nurse threw the clock into well. Harry Canady said he was in that neighborhood that night, going somewhere in a buggy. Mr. Canady said he saw a star fall toward the dead woman’s house.
Gerald Canady and I decided we’d spend the night in the haunted house. We got directions. Only the porch and the haunted room were left. The haunted room had floral wallpaper. A single, long dead lightbulb hung from a cord in the middle. We sat till well past midnight. No old lady appeared. We felt silly. We decided beds at home sounded good.
But I always wanted to see a ghost. I’ve seen several things I might call ghosts. To say I’ve seen them is not quite accurate. It was not my eyes that seemed to be seeing. Before we were married, Judy and I were on the west side of Bead Mountain one night just as the moon came up. It came up over the hill, huge and blood red. Without prompting, we both felt at the same time, some presence. We saw nothing but the Comanche Moon. And later, leaving, we saw an owl which dove straight toward the car windshield. That was before we went to the reservation, and I did not yet know owls are themselves, messengers from the other side.
I was one time in the pasture sawing up an old telephone pole to use for fence corner posts when I began to think someone was watching me. It was summer and very hot and heat was shimmering. I began to think I could see some figure in the rising heat. While in fact, I could see no human being, I began to formulate a person. He was short and stocky and very dirty. He had long, tangled black hair and he wore almost no clothing. I think he was an Indian from long before Indians were called Indians. While he watched me, I saw him, but never really saw anything except the shimmering heat.
The Indian songwriter and poet Buffy Ste. Marie wrote once, “You think I have visions because I am an Indian. I have visions because there are visions to be seen.”
Adopted ─ 18 August 1992
In July, 1991, I was adopted into the John and Minerva Allen family of the Assiniboine Indian tribe at the Fort Belknap Reservation in far northern Montana. I had known John and Minerva and their kids for over 20 years. Judy and I first went to live at Fort Belknap in the spring of 1968. John is on the Tribal Council and has been Tribal Chairman. Minerva is an educator and poet.
I was adopted and named at the traditional Assiniboine Sundance. The Sundance is a major ï€ perhaps the most important ï€ ceremony of plains Indian religion and culture. It is ancient and still performed much as it was long before the whitemen came. Whites, considering it un-Christian, banned the Sundance for years. During that time, many tribes lost their Sundance. The Assiniboine preserved theirs. The Assiniboine are of Sioux ancestry and live at Fort Belknap, Fort Peck (Montana) and in Saskatchewan.
John and Minerva’s son, Little John, got the Sundance medicine in Saskatchewan. An old man up there felt he was too old to continue and interviewed several people before choosing Little John to receive the medicine.
The Assiniboine Sundance ground at Belknap is spectacular. It is in the north side of the Little Rocky Mountains, a grassy plain just at the foot of the mountains. You can see Canada to the north, the Bear Paw Mountains to the west. This is rolling, green Montana grassland punctuated by mountain ranges here and there. These are, by Texas standards, huge mountain ranges.
The first day they were setting up the grounds, measuring off for the lodge. I went up with John to take some water. After the measuring was finished, the elder in charge held a pipe ceremony. We sat in a circle and he prayed and lit a small fire and passed the pipe around.
The Sundance items were stored in the bedroom where I slept at John and Minerva’s house in Lodge Pole. There were boxes and bags and a full buffalo hide with head and tail, the hide bent at the back to look much like a standing buffalo. It was between the bed and the wall. Minerva warned me strange things happened in that room. Strange noises came out at night. Little kids were afraid to go in.
The tribe gave the Sundance people two buffalo and a lot of money to buy food. I helped distribute food. We fed everybody. People came from all over, from as far away as Arizona and California, several from Canada. Not all danced. Most came to camp for the event. Each morning, we divided frozen buffalo meat and cans of food and coffee and sugar and such into individual portions for the day for each camp. We delivered that out of the back of a pickup.
The Sundance lasts four days. Four is an important number in Indian life. The dancers fast the days they dance and they dance much of the time. They dance to pay debts to the powers that be, or they dance to ask for something for someone else. They dance inside a round brush arbor. They ring the wall, their backs to it. They stand side-by-side, men on one side, women on the other. They dance in place with a bending of the knees. They blow eagle-bone whistles. The drummers are inside the arbor, drumming on drums and on a buffalo hide. They sing.
Piercing comes on the next-to-last day. Eleven people pierced. Men pierce through their chest muscles, women through their arms. Wooden skewers are placed through double cuts on each side of the chest or each arm and attached by rope to the top of the Sundance Pole ï€ which is in the center of the lodge. The point is to pull against the rope until the skewer rips out. One man from Fort Peck had his shoulder muscles pierced and dragged, from attached lines, buffalo skulls around the lodge, adding one more each time he passed the entrance. He was dancing to pay for his brother’s leg, saved by a medicine man after white doctors had given it up to be amputated. He ultimately dragged nine buffalo skulls before they ripped out.
The naming ceremony was the last day, Sunday. Naming has to be done before noon. I helped my new sisters-to-be cook buffalo meat, buffalo tripe and beef tripe. Minerva was still back down in Lodge Pole and she let the time slip away. She was to be there for the naming. She got to camp just after noon, and we went over to the Sundance Lodge. Little John came out and said it was too late. Minerva said something like she didn’t care if he was a chief, he was also her son, and she would tell him when it was too late. John took me and a grandbaby into the lodge. We put our hands on the Sundance Pole and an elder did the ceremony. I was named Tu Ga Juke Juke Gan Hok Sheena. That means First Coyote Boy, First Boy because I’m a bit older than Little John, John and Minerva’s oldest birth son, and Coyote because I’m from south of Montana and the Coyote is the animal of the South. The elder prayed in Assiniboine. I do not speak Assiniboine and could barely follow him. They told me later he prayed for me to have a long life. My brand-new sisters liked that a lot. They teased me, saying I would live to be so old and ugly that girls wouldn’t like me anymore.
After a big buffalo feed in the middle of the afternoon, everyone broke camp and went home. John and I stayed to clean up. A cloud of seagulls, seagulls there in northern Montana, helped us, swarming down to pick up anything edible.
I expect I am double-blessed. I have a home and family in western Coleman County, Texas, and I have a home and family in northern Montana.
Five years ago, over 15 years after I’d lived at Fort Belknap, I was up there and went to the Lodge Pole general store. This is an old-fashioned general store with all the goods behind the counter. You ask for what you want. I was waiting and a tall, old Indian came in. Schoolboard elections had been held that day. The old man waited beside me. “Well,” he asked me, “did you vote?” I said, “No, I couldn’t. I don’t live here anymore.” He squinted at me. He asked me, “Where do you live, now?” I said, “Texas.” He looked a bit puzzled. “When did you move?” he asked me.
Arizona ─ 25 August 1992
The drought and the war came about the same time. That was World War I and the famous 1918 drought. Talpa was still a farming center then. A lot of cotton fields were income to a lot of people. That year, with no rain, the cotton wasn’t making. Copper miners were needed in Arizona for war effort. My grandmother says most of Talpa took to work in Arizona. Her sister, Mallie, and Rube Bouldin, went. Sometime in the summer, her whole family went, leaving her and Deely to get the cotton picked. My grandmother was seventeen. Deely was Mary Audelia Cotton. Deely was about my great-grandmother’s age and had been with the family for years already. She’d come to live with them down in Bell County. She spent the rest of her life with the family, living with my great-grandmother, Nancy Bedell, near White Chapel until they were both old ladies, living there until Deely broke her hip.
Grandma’s family had gone to Miami, Arizona. She was anxious to follow. Not wanting to wait until all the cotton was in, she hired Mrs. George Broyles and her family to finish picking. The crop made $90. That was not bad for western Coleman, County in 1918.
Grandma traded Mrs. Broyles a dresser for a trunk to pack for Arizona. They borrowed Andy Broyles’ wagon to make the exchange. With the dresser and mirror in the wagon, they passed Charley Brown working in the field. He came over to the road and pretended to primp in the mirror as they passed.
Miller Brown took Grandma and Deely to the railroad depot and then moved with his family into their house. He later took their cotton to the gin. Grandma and Deely made it to Sweetwater the first day and spent the night in a hotel. The hotel was supposed to awaken them and didn’t. They were already late when Deely went to a store so they could eat during the trip. The conductor held the train for her, but the trunk didn’t make it. They got to El Paso that day. Grandma asked the depot agent for a hotel and he showed them a well-lit building. But, he said, there was a room in the depot, and they could stay there.
They changed trains at Bowie and got into Miami at dark. The train stopped on Hill Street, stopping where they wanted like a city bus might now. The family had rented a house in the next canyon. Miami was a city of mountains and canyons. The next day, Grandma’s brother, Lovic, took her around to see the mines. None of it looked much like Talpa.
Her father, Edd Bedell, had sold his stock off the Coleman County place. But after they’d been in Arizona only six months, the drought seriously broke. That winter and spring became one of the wettest years anyone could remember. During those six months, my great-grandfather and his sons, Edd and Lovic, worked in the mines. Another son, Clay, was off fighting in France. And during those six months, the infamous 1918 flu struck. Lovic and my grandmother and her little brother, Walter, took ill. Their mother nursed them. Lovic was sickest. Against his mother’s wishes, they took him to the hospital. He died there and was buried in Miami. So many died so quickly, Lovic is buried between a man and his wife.
My great-grandfather bought a Model T with curtains for the trip back to Texas. They left their bedding for Rube and Mallie to ship. That was the spring of 1919. The whole family piled in and they made it over cow trail roads to the Gila River where they burned a bearing. My great-grandmother was a great dipper of snuff, so my great-grandfather repaired it with a snuff can. They went on to Globe for repairs and then back to Miami for the night.
Next day, they made the Gila again and stalled in the river. The motor died and they stuck in mud. An Indian put a rope on the radius rod to pull them out. The rod broke. On the other side, started again, the car wouldn’t steer. My great-grandfather made a new rod from a mesquite bush. He borrowed an ax from a traveling widow who was in the country picking cotton. The car fixed in the next town, they went on down cow trail roads with not much idea of their route. They stopped a man on horseback, a man who could speak little English, and asked for directions. He gave them the wrong road and they took half-a-day to find their way back. They stopped for the night two or three times, staying in hotels. In one town, the kids spent the evening playing ball with some local old men. Near Big Lake, Texas, the rains became too much.
So the women and baby took to the train at Big Lake and the men went on with the car. The road ran beside the railroad, and they saw each other all the way to San Angelo. After spending the night in San Angelo, the women went to Talpa. My great-grandfather and Edd made it to Benoit where mud finally stopped the car. They walked to Talpa. Alvin Norris had a garage there and he rescued the car. They moved back out to the place and made a huge cotton crop.
Last Saturday afternoon, I sat on the porch and listened to my grandmother, Sarah Bomar, tell one more time of the trip to Arizona. To me, as a child hearing that story, Arizona was far away in time as well as distance. Now these years later, I’ve been in and out of Arizona many times. It hardly seems the same Arizona. And certainly a Talpa of wagons and cotton fields seems like another Talpa. Yet through her stories and the stories of other relatives, I’ve been to those places and other places. Stories have always been part of my life. I recently filled-out a questionnaire from a place in California publishing some writers’ directory. They asked why I first wanted to write. I said it was because of my storytelling relatives. Through my grandmother in the summer of 1992, I can still go to a long-gone Arizona of 1918.
A Taste of lndian Culture ─ 1 September 1992
Five or six years ago, I went up to the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana to do some work in the school system. We were sitting, one morning, in the bilingual education area drinking coffee. Eagle feathers and a beaded-handled stone ax hung on the walls. Aides were making breastplates of an upcoming elementary school powwow. The aides giggled while my friend Minerva Allen told me about the whoopee cushion. These were middle-aged Indian women.
Minerva explained they used to have a whoopee cushion there in the bilingual room. They’d leave it in a chair they expected some unsuspecting teacher might use. These are usually young, white teachers drawn to the reservation by high starting salaries. They rarely stay long. Minerva generally likes them, though letting a young teacher out of her car one late night at their house in slushy snow, she said to me, “These teachers, they’re such sissies.” Minerva is in charge of the bilingual program; they teach English-speaking Indian kids to speak Indian. She also works for the government as an educational development specialist and flies around in airplanes to places like Alaska or Albuquerque.
Minerva told me the whoopee served well. It did what it was supposed to and one day, it did more than it was supposed to. It did the psychologist up good. The psychologist worked for the state. She came around to check Indian kids and came into the bilingual room at lunch. Frank Cuts The Rope, an old artist, saw her coming and moved the whoopee cushion chair away from her. But the psychologist, in high heels and hose, came for it anyway, pushing other chairs out of the way to get right to that special chair. The aides all made for the door, their faces serious like they had serious business somewhere else. But poor Frank Cuts The Rope was trapped and couldn’t get out. And the high-heeled psychologist sat down.
I can imagine her back in Helena or wherever, telling her psychologist buddies about these Indian ladies who were teaching Indian kids how to live in the real world, about how they were sitting around drinking coffee, doing beadwork and playing with a whoopee cushion.
But the whoopee cushion died, Minerva said. It wouldn’t hold air anymore, so the young teachers got off the hook. They got off that hook anyway; they didn’t have to sit on a whoopee cushion anymore. And then, Minerva said, the young teachers wanted to eat dog.
Those young white teachers wanted to taste of real Indian culture. Rabies was running wild on the reservation and all the dogs were vaccinated and you don’t eat pup from a vaccinated mother. But the teachers had a feed and wanted dog. So Minerva sent somebody out to kill a rabbit. She cut its head off and skinned it. Minerva said its little tailbone looked just like puppy. They boiled it up and left it floating whole in the pot. The teachers all came and stared stricken but took, every last one of them, at least one little bite.
I asked Minerva, “Did you ever tell them?” she said, not quite smiling, “Nobody ever told them.”
I imagine those teachers back home in Minneapolis or wherever, telling their relatives and college friends about their year helping Indian kids, telling how they got into the real America, how they knew people with names that sounded like zoological descriptions, about how they forgot their white skins and swallowed a bite of dog.
And I do seriously wonder if they tell their relatives and college friends about the whoopee cushion. I’d really like to know how the folks back home get their story of Indian culture.
Heck ─ 10 September 1992
I saw True Grit, the old John Wayne movie, on TV last night. I saw that movie first in Los Angeles, when it first came out. I thought it to be the best John Wayne movie. Several years later, my friend Lonn Taylor, who works for The Library of Congress, told me the Rooster Cogburn character, John Wayne’s character, is based on an Oklahoma Federal Marshal named Heck Thomas. Lonn also told me that Heck Thomas was the inspiration for Heck Ramsey, a Richard Boone television series in the ‘70’s. Heck Thomas was my great-grandfather’s first cousin.
I grew up knowing about Heck Thomas. My grandmother has a photo of him and his sons in her picture box. Several years ago she was staying at my house when I bought a copy of Glenn Shirley’s book about Thomas. It is called Heck Thomas, Frontier Marshal. My grandmother read the book and said to me, “He wasn’t anything but a killer.” And so he was. I can’t get an accurate count of his killings from the book, but I read somewhere he killed over twenty men. The twenty were, of course, on the other side of the law. Grandma said her father had about the same opinion of Thomas, that he was a killer.
Heck Thomas was born and raised in Georgia. As a very young man, he fought in the Civil War. Then he was an Atlanta city policeman. He came to Texas to work security for the railroad. He helped track down the train and bank robber, Sam Bass. He went to work in Oklahoma for Judge Isaac Parker, the famous hanging judge of Fort Smith, Arkansas. That court had jurisdiction over the Indian Territory and Thomas was a Deputy Marshal in the territory. He was known as one of the Three Guardsmen. The other two were Cris Madsen and Bill Tilgham. The three of them became the most effective and famous of the Territory marshals.
I often go to Oklahoma. My mother keeps telling me which towns my relatives live in, but I don’t know those relatives. My mother doesn’t know them, either, and my grandmother has lost track of them. So I never make any effort to locate them. But I was, a year ago, telling my friend David Hill about Oklahoma relatives. And we made a strange connection.
David is a Choctaw who lives near Sasakwa, Oklahoma. He was around near the beginning of the American Indian Movement. He went to Washington, D.C., with the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan that seized the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in the early ‘70’s and was at the occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. That was in 1973 when the American Indian Movement made headlines for several weeks because of their seizure of the little town where the American army massacred Big Foot and his band of Sioux at the end of the Ghost Dance scare in 1890. I met David through the movement to free Leonard Peltier. Leonard is an Indian activist who has been in the federal prison system for sixteen years. He was convicted of the murder of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. I have been convinced for years that Leonard killed no one. Robert Redford made a documentary movie about the case. The movie, Incident at Oglala, presents convincing proof that Leonard is not guilty. At least three books have made the same point.
When I played the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1989, I met several people from Dallas who were heading a Leonard Peltier support group. Through them, I met David Hill. David came down to visit. We decided to write a long poem together about the beginnings of the American Indian Movement and David’s part in it. David likes to talk a lot. So do I. We spent several days talking about that and everything else in sight. I told David about my Oklahoma relatives and he told me about his.
It turns out, David is kin to the famous Doolin family. The Doolins were from a non-Indian side of his family. The Doolins, along with the Daltons, did a good job of robbing banks, railroads and stores in Oklahoma. We talked about the Doolins and about my almost-relative, Black Jack Ketchum, who did some serious train-robbing, including one at Coleman Junction, and was hanged in Clayton, New Mexico.
Suddenly I began to realize what David was saying. Bill Doolin was his relative. I was pretty sure Heck Thomas killed Bill Doolin. I checked Shirley’s book. Heck Thomas did indeed kill Bill Doolin. One of my relatives killed one of David’s relatives in Oklahoma in 1896.
We talked about that and everything else in sight for the rest of the afternoon. My wife, Judy, got home late and we told her what we’d discovered. David grinned and said, “Roxy and I just talk each other to death.”
Yellowtail ─ 29 October 1992
Pie Glen flew into Albuquerque from Montana and called me from the airport. I didn’t know him but we had some common friends in Billings. He said he’d be the only Indian at the airport wearing a choker and he was. Pie was a big cowboy. He didn’t look too Indian, but he had a movie star quality about him. And in fact, he’d had some small role in the movie Little Big Man and was right then at the airport carrying in his wallet a worn hand-written note from Dustin Hoffman saying Pie was a good guy and ought to be in movies. He’d spent some time in Hollywood, but had ended up bartending, so he’d gone back home.
I don’t remember why Pie was in Albuquerque. Some kind of business, I guess. He stayed at my house a few days and told a lot of stories and jokes. Most of his jokes defamed Texans.
Pie was riding rodeo and he’d come back every few months to Albuquerque with his horse trailer in tow and his pretty new wife. We decided to go into business together.
Pie wanted us to come to Crow Fair, the big Powwow they have every summer up on his reservation. So, Judy and I went. Pie’s family, the Yellowtails, was among the most powerful on the reservation. We stayed in a tipi in their camp. Pie’s grandfather, Robert Yellowtail, was an old man of considerable fame. He had spent his life serving the Crow Tribe and in fact, the reservation’s very existence was in some ways due to him. In 1917, Senator T.J. Walsh of Montana was attempting to open Crow to white settlement under the Homestead Law. A delegation of Crows, including the famous Pleanty Coups, went to D.C. to argue against such before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. A young Robert Yellowtail spoke for the Crows and won. Crow was not opened.
Now in 1973, Mr. Yellowtail held court every day at the picnic table in the center of his family’s camp. He wore a buckskin outfit. He was surrounded by a crowd of old Indians and quite a few white people. He was, at the time, supporting and promoting the John Birch Society. I really didn’t hear much of what he said, but once, going past to the outhouse, I heard him say, “...and all they live for is their dope.”
The San Francisco writer Richard Brautigan was staying in a motel over near Livingston and he wanted to powwow. He never had. So we drove over and picked him up. With his long hair and mustache, everybody at the powwow thought he looked like General Custer. In fact, he did. Pretty young Indian girls would approach him and he’d think they wanted his autograph, but they’d just tease him about looking like General Custer. Richard decided the family camp was too loud for him to sleep that night, so he pitched his pup tent in a parking lot ï€ the parking lot where the 49 went on all night. A 49 is an after-hours powwow with drumming and singing. They kept Richard awake most all night. The next morning he came red-eyed and not in a real good mood for breakfast. The Camp Cryer went by announcing in Crow. Pie asked Richard, “You know what he’s saying?” Richard said no. Pie said, “He’s saying, ‘Come running you Indians, we got Custer cornered over here in the Yellowtail camp.’” I don’t think Richard ever quite forgave me for taking him to that powwow.
Pie didn’t have patience to just sit around camp, so he’d take me out riding around the reservation in his pickup. One night, driving, he was telling me stories of his grand¬father. He said that Mr. Yellowtail had first successfully defended the Indian who was arrested for possession of peyote that led to the establishment of the Native American Church, the Peyote church.
I began to make a connection. I’d recently read an article in the New York Village Voice that tried, as some people did back then, to tie the hippy movement to Indians. A well-known poet had written a piece which explained that the same Indian Mr. Yellowtail defended later gave peyote to a white man in Canada who in turn introduced it to Aldous Huxley.
According to this account, Aldous Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception because of that experience. And, in a fairly large leap, this account explained the book was a foundation of the hippy movement.
So, it occurred to me, if one bought that theory, then Old Robert Yellowtail, back in camp wearing buckskins and holding forth on John Birch ideas, was responsible for the establishment of hippies in America.
None of that was exactly true, of course, but I told Pie and we laughed a lot.
Minnesota ─ 9 February 1993
Two independent radio producers in New York did a National Public Radio series on non-traditional Indian art. One of them really liked my last tape and used three pieces off it. Then she called and asked me to do a live show in Fort Worth. She was booking for a convention of independent radio producers from all over the United States and some other countries.
The convention was in a big new hotel out north; the placed looked like a fortress. Those producers like us. After the show, we sat eating their fancy-free food while people from places like North Carolina and Idaho said we should plan those places. We said we’d be glad to if they’d pay enough.
One guy was from Minnesota. He asked if I ever went out of state. I said some; I told him I’d done a lot of stuff in Kansas. I’m not sure why I picked Kansas, maybe because it’s between here and Minnesota, and maybe because I’d been up there. The guy laughed. He seemed to think I didn’t know much about Minnesota. But I do remember Minnesota.
In the summer of 1968, Judy and I lived in a one room log cabin at Lodge Pole on the Fort Belknap Reservation in northern Montana. For reasons best understood only by people as young as we were, we decided to spend two weeks driving to New York and back. I’m not sure we ever really looked at a map. We sure didn’t grasp how far it was to New York. And for some other strange reason, we thought we could make it in the cheap little English Ford we owned. We left about dark one night. We crossed the North Dakota border just after dawn. I was driving through the badlands at good light. We passed Medora off to the north; that’s where Teddy Roosevelt once ranched. That’s where I began to go to sleep. I don’t expect the car was following too straight a line. I expect the highway patrolman behind me noticed that. Seeing him in the rearview mirror awakened me quite well. He passed finally, giving me a good looking-over and speeded on. We spent the day crossing North Dakota. Middle of the afternoon, we were approaching the Minnesota border. Within sight of Casselton, just out of Fargo, a radiator hose blew up. I took off walking toward Casselton.
An old man in a wrecker saved me. He owned a gas station in Casselton. He replaced the hose. The English Ford wouldn’t even consider starting. The old man, who had one eye which seemed to care not which direction the other eye looked, said don’t worry, go get something to eat. He’d have it fixed. We did; he didn’t. In fact, he managed to break the distributor cap. You didn’t buy an English Ford distributor cap in Casselton, North Dakota; you waited a week for one to arrive. Next morning, I called the Coleman County State Bank; they loaned me $300. The old man bought the English Ford for $175. We bought a well-used ‘62 Chevrolet and took off for New York.
We crossed Minnesota. I never saw so many lakes, so much water. We spent the night in a motel outside Minneapolis and finally looked at a map. We decided to spend the week in Minneapolis. We knew not a living soul in all of Minnesota. We didn’t have much money and our fairly good motel cost $10. We were used to rundown motels in Montana for $5. We went looking. Every motel in Minneapolis, St. Paul seemed to cost $10. We decided to alternate nights sleeping in the car with nights in a motel. We went to movies and bookstores. We were ejected from one bookstore because we hadn’t realized it was a porno store and didn’t allow women; Judy couldn’t stay.
We wandered around the down-town mall and The University of Minnesota. Not having a TV in Montana, we enjoyed motel TV nights. Car nights, we’d drive outside Minneapolis and find dirt roads to sleep beside. It never occurred to us such might be dangerous. One morning, we were awakened at light by roosters crowing. We were surprised to find we’d spent the night just down the road from a farm house. Just then, the side door opened and a woman stepped out. We could hear a radio playing from her open door. She threw something to the chickens. She saw us and stared with some curiosity but no hostility. Then she went back inside.
I think that is my defining memory of Minnesota.
Horses ─ 16 February 1993
I guess the horses belonged to someone, or likely to several people. They ran loose in Lodge Pole, Montana. These were little horses, called Indian ponies because they were pony size and because virtually everyone in Lodge Pole was Indian. Twelve- or thirteen-year-old boys would catch a few to ride. The Birdtail and Longfox girls would bring horses to us. The little girls were delighted that Judy, from far away Texas, could ride so well. Actually being from Texas was something of an asset on the reservation. A Texas cattle outfit once leased reservation land and brought Texas cows and cowboys north. A few Texans stayed and married. The local story had all Texans great ropers; thank goodness no one there ever watched me rope.
My mother brought my grandparents from Texas to visit. To my grandparents, it was a step back in time. Life on the rural reservation was something like life in the early part of this Texas century. My grandmother was especially taken with the horses. She saw those little girls playing horseback, usually three or four on one horse at a time, and it took her back to the way she and her sisters and brothers and friends played 60 years earlier.
Her brother, Clay Bedell, was the cowboy in the family. He was older than my grandmother but he lived to be very old and died only a few years ago out in the Big Spring country where he spent most of his life. He always wore one side of each pant leg stuffed into a boot top. When stovepipe boots came into fashion and it was hard to get boots with deep scallops in front and back, he’d use his pocket knife to cut slits so the boots would hold the side of the pant leg. He always wore western shirts and cowboy hats.
Uncle Clay broke horses for J.T. Davis at Sterling City. He sometimes had Bill West or Neugent Hilburn help. Each spring they would break around 60 horses to bridle and to ride. He told me he and Bill West, one spring, broke more horses than anyone else ever had or still has in that country.
Clay was on a pitching horse in Sterling City once and rode it to a standstill. A man watching asked Clay if he might be Booger Red. That was likely a joke; Booger Red was a famous bronc buster and rodeo rider. Clay said, “No. I’m Booger Red’s daddy.”
All of Grandma’s horse memories aren’t so heroic. When she was 12 or 13, she thought herself much a rider. Her older sister, Mallie, had some friends from Talpa and the community over to visit. They sat on the front porch. Grandma decided to show off. She ran Old Paint to water in a tank so the older kids could see. On the way back, in full view of the kids, Old Paint pitched her so high she said she saw him below her as she was coming down.
When the Bedell family went to Arizona a few years later, Grandpa Bedell sold all his horses. Upon his return, he discovered the end of the First World War meant surplus cavalry horses were for sale at Camp Travis in San Antonio. He bought some. But being cavalry horses, they wouldn’t work with women.
But there was the horse that saved Grandma from the Valera boys. Her father sent her to Valera in a buggy to buy dynamite and caps for a well he was digging. When she left Valera, two boys followed horseback. She had to stop and open the gate near the old rock ranch house that’s still east of Valera and they almost caught her. She got through the gate and trotted across the pasture toward where Highway 67 now runs. Several houses were there and she felt safer to slow down. The boys rode up. One, she said, was short and the other, long-legged. One she never knew. The other she knew for many years. He became a businessman in Coleman and she’d rather not use his name. He pulled off his hat and said, “Sure is hot.” She said his horse was foaming. Hers wasn’t. The boys went back to Valera.
So Grandma was happy with the reservation those years later, happy that horses were still so much a part of life. She hadn’t been on a horse in years.
Judy has arthritis in her spine. It hurts seriously sometimes. A few months ago, she got on a horse down at the Spreen Ranch south of Benoit. Her brother, Johnny, more-or-less runs that place now. She rode north of the barn to drive in some stock. Afterwards, she told me she thought if she could ride more often, the arthritis would go away.
Colorful ─ 11 March 1993
I was accused of being colorful twice this past week. Minerva Allen, my adopted mother in the Assiniboine tribe, was down from Montana with my sister, Wanda and Camey Doney, Robert and Bernard, who work for the school system on the reservation. We were sitting around the kitchen table the other morning talking about what happens now. Minerva has me booked for some school events in Montana. I was telling her about all the schools I’ve done in Texas, about how I seem to be in demand in certain schools. She said she wasn’t surprised; she said, “You know, you’re colorful.” I wasn’t so sure that was a compliment.
Then Arthur Anderson came from England. Arthur is a big Scottsman I hadn’t seen for eleven years. He’s a recording engineer and producer; he’s part owner of a studio outside London. The last time he was here, we went to Coleman County and fooled around a few days. He hasn’t changed much except to get bigger. We were sitting at the kitchen table talking about the dozens of musicians we know in common. I told him I wasn’t sure how I came to know all these people. He said the same thing Minerva said. He even called me a guru. Colorful I may be, but a guru I think I am not. I wrote years ago that I would not follow anyone to the corner for a cup of coffee and I would not trust anyone who followed me.
Okay, I may be colorful, but I learned it all at home. I heard the stories of the horseback riders. I know the story of my grandparents’ neighbor who was a socialist and made whiskey. I’ve been told everyone in the Talpa dance hall was taken to jail one night in the ‘30’s. I’ve heard stories of the Texas Rangers and train robbers and at least one man who was both.
My old friend, Dave Hickey, teaches art history at the university in Las Vegas. Years ago he said if you had long hair in West Texas and wore boots and a cowboy hat, nobody at a gas station would bother you. They’d figure you were a West Texan mean enough to wear long hair. I had long hair as long ago as the ‘60’s. I roamed all around the American west with it. I was confronted only one time. That was in the old Santa Anna truck stop that later burned. We were eating chicken fried steak when some kid stood up and announced he was going home for scissors. That was toward the end of the war in Vietnam. Long hair then seemed to mean peace protester. And to tell the truth, I was one of those. I quit ROTC more-or-less over that war. But on the other hand, I have a photo of Bloody Bill Anderson who finished his life north of Santa Anna, somewhere on Jim Ned Creek. He rode with Quantrill in the Civil War and he had long hair and he killed many people. Look at pictures of Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. None of those were exactly peace lovers.
Sometime in the ‘70’s, Judy and I were in Austin and needed to be in Albuquerque. We packed up late in the afternoon. I hate to admit this (it was the ‘70’s), but I was wearing leather bell bottom pants with silver conchos and a fancy purple, ruffled-front shirt. My hair was shoulder-blade length. I didn’t take time to change. We hit Justiceburg south of Post about dawn. The gas gauge showed totally empty. I realized I looked like someone our parents warned us against. I have kin in Justiceburg, but I don’t know them and I wouldn’t have thought they would want to see me that morning. The only station open was an old fashioned one, the kind that are mostly closed now because of leaking tanks. We stopped. No one came out. I dreaded going in there wearing my costume. But I did. An old man sat toward the back in semi-darkness. He wore a buckskin outfit, fringed and beaded. His long gray hair was braided; he had a beard down to here. He looked at me; I looked at him. He said, “Can I help you?”
Late Winter ─ 18 March 1993
Day before yesterday, it hit 90 degrees in downtown Dallas. The rain set-in last night. Today dawned wet and cold; not a good sign, I thought, for C.J. He is undergoing triple bypass surgery in San Antonio today. He rightfully has assumed he might not make it. He’s already had bypass and, as he says, it blew-up in October. I think he’ll make it. The sun came out around noon and I decided the signs were better.
Judy, Quanah and I were going to drive to Coleman County tonight, but then they forecast snow and sleet and 23 degrees, so we decided to wait until morning. Now I am sitting in late winter early afternoon wondering if the phone will ring for C.J. He wants me to be a pallbearer at his funeral. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want C.J. to die.
C.J. Berkman is from Victoria, Texas. He’s lived in San Antonio for a few years; he teaches school there. He’s one-eighth Choctaw Indian and is enrolled in the tribe. His Choctaw great-grandfather, John Thorn, once killed two men in a Louisiana timber dispute. Another great-grandfather, David Garrison Berkman, was an Indian scout, trail driver, cattleman and preacher.
C.J. wears amazing clothing. I have his latest book of poetry here. In the photo on the back, he’s wearing the biggest cowboy hat I ever saw. He’s wearing a waist-length Mexican jacket, or maybe cavalry jacket, I can’t really tell. The front is decorated with either conchos or metal buttons. His boots are knee-high with huge stars on the front.
C.J. knows every song writer and musician in Texas and more than a few in such places as Tennessee. He also knows cowboys and wildcatters. He calls himself a redneck poet. He identifies with the cowboy poet’s movement and is a director of the Texas Cowboy Poet's Association. In a blurb for his last book, I wrote, “He considers himself a cowboy poet. He’s better than that. C.J. Berkman is an all-kind-of-poet.” Elmer Kelton, the San Angelo novelist, wrote, “A lot of his poetry hits you in the gut and makes you think in ways you may not be accustomed to. It comes raw, with the hide and hair still on.”
Later - middle of the afternoon: Still no call about C.J. A lady called from Montana to book me for an Indian education conference up there in June. I jumped when the phone rang.
C.J. and I have done several college events together and he’s booked me many times in the Leon Springs Cafe. C.J. is quite a performer. The first time I performed with him, Kathleen Hudson booked us at Schreiner College in Kerrville. The audience was almost totally college age, Kathleen’s students. C.J. read about working in the oilfield. He wasn’t so sure the students were reacting correctly, so he stopped reading and spoke to them, telling them, in so many words, that they were all a bunch of spoiled rich kids who didn’t understand what working on an oil rig might mean.
C.J. and Kinky Friedman and some other people and I did a thing at Schreiner sometime later. Among other things, we were asked to name the writer or performer who most influenced us. C.J. named Richard Brautigan. Richard was an old friend of mine in San Francisco. He managed to commit suicide in the early ‘80’s. He arrived in San Francisco in the ‘50’s and gravitated to the beatnik literary scene around North Beach. When the hippies arrived a decade later, he became a hippie hero from his books such as Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar. The poet Lew Welch was a founder of the beatnik movement and also managed to commit suicide; poets, I guess, tend to be emotional. Lew once told me Richard was the youngest beatnik and the oldest hippie. That’s hardly who you’d expect to be a role model for a South Texas cowboy-redneck poet. But C.J. is C.J.
Later still - late afternoon: near sundown, the sun is shining. The snow and sleet never came. No call about C.J. has come. Perhaps late winter has turned to early spring.
Townes ─ 8 April 1993
Judy and I borrowed my parents’ pickup in the summer of 1967 and took it to New Mexico. We put a tarp on the back like a covered wagon and roamed from Roswell to Taos. We weren’t too sure we wanted to go back to Austin and getting back was depressing. The next day we went to a folk festival at Zilker Park. A skinny guy who looked Indian played. Listening to him, we felt a lot better about being in Austin. He reminded me of Hank Williams. His name was Townes Van Zandt.
A year later, we were in Billings, Montana, on some business for the reservation and went to a record store where I found a Townes Van Zandt record. I remembered him and bought it. It was called Our Mother the Mountain. It had too many strings, but the song writing and singing knocked us out. Judy learned the songs and played them for little kids on the res. We wore that record out.
About a year later, we were in a Berkeley, California, record store and I found a used copy of his earlier record. I became a big time Townes Van Zandt fan. On the way back to Texas from California, we went through Denver. Jack Steele and I, thinking from the songs he might live there, tried to find him. He didn’t and we couldn’t. I bought the third record another year later when we were living in El Paso and couldn’t pay the rent and sure couldn’t afford a record, but bought it anyway.
A year later, we bought the next record. It was called The Late Great Townes Van Zandt. Townes wasn’t dead; that album, in fact, contained his first version of what would become his major meal ticket. It was a song called “Poncho and Lefty” which was ultimately recorded by a number of people, notably Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, that version becoming a major radio hit.
I finally met him when he played a little joint on McKinney Ave. in Dallas. He asked me if I wanted to go to his motel room and gamble. Townes has always been famous for gambling. I went. We didn’t have anything to gamble with, so we flipped quarters. For a while, I owned his suit (he wore a tied rope for a belt) and $300 of his money. His road manager looked worried. When the night finally ended, I owned $50 of his money and he owned my belt.
Townes and I share the same birthdate. Judy and I went to Nashville a few years ago for a common birthday party. It was also a press party to announce his return to Tennessee from Texas. Townes and I got up about dawn and drove around in his van. We went by a liquor store and he bought a fifth of vodka. He stuck it under the seat. His friend and sometimes road manager, Harold Eggers, was living at his house writing some book. That afternoon, as the party got close, Townes’ wife, Jeanine, decided he needed to shower and get ready. He sidled over to me and said, “Would you go get that bottle of vodka?” I couldn’t imagine why he wanted me to get his bottle of vodka. Then I figured it out. Harold and a sax player named Irvin stopped me in the yard. They told me this was an important press event and Townes couldn’t be drinking. I told them I didn’t know either of them and Townes was my friend, and besides, he wrote some of the best songs in North America and they didn’t. He’d bought the bottle of vodka and they were going to have to be fairly physical to keep me from giving it to him. They backed off. Townes took a shower, drank some of the vodka and just absolutely charmed the press that night.
Townes ran away from home this past week. This wasn’t permanent, just spring fever. He showed up at my house and wanted to listen to Hank Williams. He’d picked up some hitchhiking kid in Arkansas. He didn’t shaved all week and we traded war stories, music wars from the past twenty-five years. We made a deal to go off to the reservation in Montana. My adopted mother, Minerva Allen, is putting together a show up there next month. Grown people are going to hear Townes do the songs Judy sang for them as children. Circles are the Indian way and this one is about to happen.
Machine Gun Kelly ─ 13 April 1993
On July 22, 1933, George “Machine Gun” Kelly and Albert Bates kidnapped Oklahoma City oilman Charles Urschel. Urschel’s friend, a Texas ranchman named E.E. Kirkpatrick, delivered the $200,000 ransom at sundown, July 30, on the fashionable Kansas City street, Linwood Boulevard. Kirkpatrick never expected to see his friend alive again. He certainly never expected to see any of the money again. Charles Urschel was returned home on July 31. Machine Gun Kelly seemed to be a man of his word.
Machine Kelly’s wife, Katherine, was close kin to some Coleman County folk. When speaking with my father about writing this, he told me I shouldn’t mention names. I said I wouldn’t. You all know who you are, anyway. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Me, I’m proud of my hanged and imprisoned relatives. They might not be folks I’d want living at my house (or maybe I would), but at least they weren’t boring. And, anyway, some of my relatives got into this one, too.
The F.B.I. put agents Ralph Colvin and Gus Jones on the case. Within ninety days, sixteen people had been arrested. They were given sentences ranging from two years to life.
My grandparents, John and Sarah Bomar, were living in the North Texas oilfields. The company sent my grandfather down to Coleman County with a crew. Grandma couldn’t come. The crew stayed in a boarding house behind the post office in Coleman. My grandfather said the place felt very strange. People wouldn’t speak with one another; they all seemed extremely nervous. He went home and heard later Machine Gun Kelly and Katherine were staying there at the time. Most of the other boarders had made them.
They were in Coleman to hide ransom money. They contacted one of her relatives. According to my father, that’s where my relative became involved. Instead of hiding the money on his own farm, her relative hid it on my relative’s farm.
On September 22, the two federal agents and Kirkpatrick arrived in Coleman and went to Katherine’s relative. He led them to the hiding place. The money was hidden in thermos jugs and an old molasses can. It was $73,250. Her relative was sentenced to Leavenworth Prison. My father thinks my relative was never indicted. Apparently, he never knew the money was on his place.
Kelly and Bates were given life sentences in Oklahoma City Federal Court. They were sent to Alcatraz Prison. Katherine was also given a life sentence.
November 1934, the feds arrested Clara Bates, Albert’s wife, as well as her son, sister and brother-in-law. They found $1,500 of the ransom on her brother-in-law, Alvin H. Scott. That was after he was almost killed in a car wreck near Medford, Oregon. Her son, Eddie Feldman, led them to another buried $8,500.
Clara Bates agreed to reveal where more money was buried. Urschel, F.B.I. assistant chief Harold Nation, Agent Spears of the Portland F.B.I. office and E.E. Kirkpatrick followed her into a canyon thirty-six miles northwest of Portland. She showed them a rotted log. They dug. They asked her what it was buried in. She said a big thermos. They asked her how much money was there. She said she didn't know; she hadn't counted. She’d brought a suitcase full from Denver. They found it. The thermos contained $28,640.
Clara said she knew where more was buried. They looked for hours and she was unable to locate it. A forest fire had changed the scenery. They asked her who actually buried the money. She told them Alvin Scott. Scott had a five-inch crack in his skull from the automobile accident. He seemed disoriented. He showed them a spot to dig and they found nothing. He walked around, his hands on his head. He pointed to the spot where Charles Urschel was standing and said dig there. Urschel moved and they dug up a fruit jar containing $5,700.
They never found another penny. Approximately $78,000 was missing. We can wonder if some might still be in Coleman County.
Austin ─ 22 April 1993
Nobody believes me. It’s that old joke about running into a door. I didn’t run into a door. I ran into the sidewalk. That was Friday night. I was in Austin to perform at a festival. First night, we stayed for a while and decided to go across the street to Karen X’s hotel room. Karen is an old friend and she was to perform with me the next night. I met Karen 15 years ago when she came to my table in a restaurant and told me I looked interesting. She worked with Judy and me for a while. She was writer and vocalist for one of the first new wave bands in Dallas. Karen decided we needed to run across the street, needed to beat oncoming cars. I was wearing new boots. They still had slick soles. I hit the first step to the sidewalk and those boots decided they didn’t want to go. Two college kids picked me up and offered a ride to the emergency room. I said no thanks. I’ve had worse. And besides, I was glad it wasn’t a smashed nose bleeding instead of a cut on my cheek.
We went to see Jesse Taylor. He has a new band and they were playing the Continental Club on South Congress. It was rock-and-roll blues. Some guy who used to play with Los Lobos and The Blasters was playing with him. We listened a long time and I bled. I had a bandana Georgia Stafford gave me at least eight years ago. I know it was that long ago because she shot herself to death eight years ago. I used it to mop up the blood and thought it fairly ironic I was using a bandana she gave me. We went to Jesse’s house.
Next morning, I wasn’t sure I wanted to look into a mirror. I’m going to have a scar, but I didn’t look too awful to do the show coming up that night. Jesse decided to play guitar with me. My kid Quanah played his new stand-up bass and played fiddle. Judy used a shaker and Indian drummed. I Indian drummed, Indian sang, and did my songs. Karen drummed and did some vocals. We did a pretty good show and talked to people afterwards, old friends and people I couldn’t at all recognize. Nobody mentioned my face. We got back to Jesse’s about dawn and slept till noon. We should have started back for Dallas then. But Judy wanted to see the Texana Dames.
The Texana Dames go back a long way with us. They used to be part of The Supernatural Family Band, and before, The Tommy Hancock Swing Band. Actually, most of the Dames were hardly born when Tommy had the swing band. His vocalist, Charlene, married him and they had kids. Two of their daughters, Connie and Traci, are two-thirds of the Dames - along with their mama. Tommy was, first the house band, then later the operator of the Cotton Club south of Lubbock. Everyone on earth played there. Then the ‘60’s came along. Tommy and Charlene bought the whole concept. They dropped out. When I met them in the early ‘70’s, they were living in a northern New Mexico cabin and playing hippie bars.
They got into an eastern religion that took them to Denver. I didn’t see them for several years. Then they moved to Austin. Judy and I saw them there. They were playing a honky-tonk on North Lamar. Tommy was barefoot. He explained boot soles kept him from feeling the earth below him. So far as I could tell, it wasn’t earth he was standing on, but a dirty bar floor.
Tommy and Charlene met Coleman’s Dean Beard in San Angelo. Tommy told me they used to always go through Coleman, when they could, to see him. I never met Dean Beard. I remember people pointing him out to me when I was a kid. They explained he’d been to California playing music and had something to do with The Champs, the band that did “Tequilla.” In the late ‘70’s, my friend, the English magazine publisher Peter O’Brien came to visit. We went to Coleman Saturday afternoon. Merchants were having sidewalk sales. Dean Beard was fooling around and spotted us. I guess he decided we didn’t look like the rest of the folks. He kept looking as if he wanted to speak. I was too shy. My parents told me when he died. I’ve always been sorry I didn’t speak with him. He was dressed all in black that day. In honor of their old friend, and for Judy and me, The Texana Dames played “Tequila” the other night.
And speaking of Coleman, another Lubbock-ex playing with the Dames was wearing, on stage, Bill Kennedy’s hat ï€ that’s the Bill Kennedy who once owned the fuel company that still bears his name on the Valera highway. When he passed away, my father got his hats. My father couldn’t wear them, so he gave them to me. When the Dames played Dallas a few weeks ago, they all came to my house and John Reed spotted one of those hats. He wanted it. I own about ten hats so I gave it to him. He wore it Sunday night.
The Texana Dames played a popular Mexican restaurant called La Zona Rosa. I knew half the people there. Jesse Taylor’s ex-wife, whom I didn’t know, talked about people we’d known in common 25 years ago. The Lubbock ex-accordion player Ponty Bone played.
The Texana Dames play Tex-Mex. They sometimes sing in Spanish. My friend Kathleen Hudson has booked them in Texas and in Europe. Judy and I listened and talked to folks. I talked with Tommy. He was barefoot. He told me he teaches flying now. This has nothing to do with airplanes. He teaches people to fly without planes. I talked with Jesse and his mother. Jesse, who is big, looks like a biker and is covered with tattoos, kissed me on the cheek as we were leaving. Nobody said a word about my face.