Dear Reader,

As a Substack columnist, I have often wondered if the Substack platform might be a good place to introduce readers to my books. The thought occurred to me that perhaps serializing or posting a few chapters of the first book in my Finding Billy Battles series might be an effective way to acquaint readers with my work.

So, beginning today and continuing once a week for the next few weeks, I will be sharing, at no cost, several chapters of Book #1 in the Finding Billy Battles series.

My objective in writing the Finding Billy Battles series was to tell a compelling story by weaving fact and fiction into what I call “faction.” Therefore, many of the events, places, and people in Billy’s life are real, and I have attempted to be as accurate as possible with those facts.

I am proud to say that each book in the series has won several literary awards. You can read about some of those awards and read reviews of each book on my Amazon book page, https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001KHDVZI/?ccs_id=24ac3875-21a9-421b-9a04-ec9dcb645d14, or my website, https://ronaldyatesbooks.com/

If you choose to follow Billy Battles on his rousing and sometimes perilous journeys—and I hope you will—I welcome your thoughts about the book. Feel free to drop me a line at jhawker69@gmail.com.

Today, I am publishing Chapters One and Two of Book #1 in the Finding Billy Battles series. During the ensuing weeks, I will post a new chapter each succeeding Saturday.

Last Saturday, I published the Preface, Prologue, and Introduction to Book #1. If you missed that post, you can access it on my website at https://ronaldyatesbooks.com/.

I hope you will join Billy Battles on his incredible 100-year-long journey through life.

Finding Billy Battles: An Account of Peril,

Transgression and Redemption

(Book 1 of a Series)

Copyright © 2014 by R. E. Yates

Published by California Times Publishing,

Los Angeles

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013921605

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or using any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is an original work of fiction. However, some names, characters, places, and incidents described in this book are based on facts. Others were invented by the author, and any resemblance to persons living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

 

CHAPTER 1

I don’t remember much about my life before I was around eight or nine years old. Most of what I do recall comes from conversations with my mother and her memories. There were also some old letters and my mother’s diary. But mostly it’s me piecing people, places, and events together as best I can to describe the foundation for all the years that followed. It was a strong foundation laid down by many people whom I will discuss later.

Of course, the person who was most responsible for laying a sound foundation for my life was my mother. She was born Hannelore Kluge, April 6, 1836, on a farm in eastern Illinois at a time when Illinois was still considered the frontier. Her parents were German immigrants from Germany’s Harz mountain region. Mother was tough as buffalo hide, with strong hands that never seemed to stop working. I can still hear that little poem she used to recite whenever she thought I was behaving like a shirker:

Each morning sees some task begun,

Each evening sees it close;

Something attempted, something done,

Has earned a night’s repose.

I found out later that it came from Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith,” but as far as I was concerned, the sentiment belonged to my mother, who never stopped working until the day she died.

I was born around nine o’clock at night on February 28, 1860, in a three-room wood plank and sod house in what is now Ford County, Kansas. I was named after Fitzroy James Henry Somerset, otherwise known as Lord Raglan.

My father, who was born in England, thought Lord Raglan was one of England’s greatest heroes. Raglan was with the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo in 1814, where he was wounded. His right arm had to be amputated. At the end of the surgery, which was performed without any anesthesia, he told an orderly to bring him his amputated arm so he could remove a ring that his wife had given him. Later, he commanded the British troops during the 1854 Crimean War, where he died.

My mother remembered that the night I was born, it was so cold out that the door froze shut and my father had to climb out a window to get to the well. When he did, he had to hack through a good four inches of ice with an iron pick to get to water. He found three of our hens frozen flat against the outdoor privy. They had gotten out of the coop during the night and couldn’t figure out how to get back in.

Our house was on about 160 acres of hardscrabble prairie land near the Cimarron Cutoff of the Santa Fe Trail. In those days, there was nothing around there but prairie dogs, Kiowa, and Cheyenne. And of course, wagons moving southwest over the cutoff from the Santa Fe Trail. Most folks who traveled through the area called it the Great American Desert because it was so barren. In 1859, my father and my mother were part of a wagon train moving west from Westport, Missouri.

They had met and married in Lawrence, Kansas, sometime around 1857, as I recall. My father’s family settled on some fairly good land along the Kaw River around 1852. My mother and her family had moved to Lawrence from Illinois around 1856. Lawrence was founded in 1854 by the New England Emigrant Aid Society to keep the Kansas territory free from slavery. It is said that Lawrence is one of the few cities in the United States founded strictly for political reasons. My mother and her family were ardent abolitionists, as were most of the folks who moved to Lawrence around that time. As a teenager, my mother was actively involved in the Underground Railroad that moved slaves to freedom through Lawrence.

Like most people back then, my father’s family was seeking a better life, and the West was the place to find it. Moving west meant more land to farm because, in those days, your wealth was most often measured by how much land you owned. The Battles were not folks who liked to stay in one place for long. It’s a trait that I no doubt inherited. There was always something better over the next hill, some new opportunity. So, less than a year after my father and mother were married, the Battles decided to sell out and head west.

My father used $175 of the money from the sale of his share of the family farm to buy a new Studebaker wagon. He and mother loaded up their belongings and hooked up with a wagon train that had started from Westport. As they got deep into western Kansas, most of the train went north along the banks of the Arkansas River toward Colorado, but my father didn’t want any part of the mountains. He and a few others chose to head southwest toward the Cimarron instead.

My mother and father didn’t get very far. They busted an axle and wheel on what turned out to be some decent land, which is saying a lot because land out there is mostly rolling prairie grass, bluffs, and sand hills. In those days, you could go for miles and never see a tree. Our land had timber on it—not a lot, but enough cottonwoods and box elders to make life easier. Most important of all, though, was the underground spring that supplied us with good freshwater. I learned later that the spring was fed by the Ogallala Aquifer, which lies under parts of Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

My father and mother planted vegetables, potatoes, wheat, and some corn, although growing corn was a challenge out there. My father had ideas about raising cattle, and he collected enough longhorn range stock to start a cow camp. He traded with the always-unpredictable Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne Indians, and when the weather cooperated, we had enough to eat and wear.

Our place became a kind of stopover for many of the fur traders and buffalo hunters who roamed Kansas and Colorado in those days. They always brought us meat and hides in return for my mother’s home cooking. Soon our house grew into a kind of outpost, with folks stopping by and trading for grain, hides, and other necessaries. Our farm became known as Battles Gap because to get to it, you had to pass through a long, narrow valley flanked by eighty-foot limestone bluffs. To leave, you had to pass along a small rivulet that ran through another ravine.

I am pretty sure a couple of hundred wagons passed through Battles Gap during the time we lived there. But even with all the wagons coming through, it was hard on my mother. The nearest neighbors were about fifteen miles away. My mother was a sociable woman, and she missed the more civilized kind of life she had back in Lawrence. I think those folks stopping by probably kept my mother from drifting into madness. It gave her something to look forward to, and most of all, it allowed her to catch up on the news, no matter where it came from. In those days, you didn’t find out anything for months after it actually happened. We didn’t learn about William Quantrill’s 1863 raid on Lawrence, in which almost two hundred people (mostly men and boys) were shot down by Quantrill’s four hundred bushwhackers, until three months after it happened. That’s when my mother learned one of her brothers and his son were two of the victims.

It was about that time that my father went off to war. He fought on the Union side. He never came back. We learned from a letter written by an officer that he had been killed just as the war was ending in 1865. He had made it through two years of fighting, including Gettysburg, only to die when a rebel sharpshooter shot him in the back while he was currying his horse. I guess that was the final blow to my mother.

Even though she had managed to keep the farm going in the two years my father was gone, by 1866, it was all too much for her. I was no help, being only five or six at the time. So she packed up what she could, and we headed east in our old Studebaker wagon. Our destination was Lawrence, where my mother’s sister, my Aunt Em, lived. We had three mules and two horses. She sold off the longhorn stock to some of the wagons that came through and to the U.S. Army, which had put up an outpost in 1865 that later would become Fort Dodge, about a day and a half ride from our place, just off the Santa Fe Trail.

My mother later told me that we stopped off at Fort Dodge. The reason was that after about two days on the prairie with that wagon and those mules, my mother could see that it was all too much for her. At the fort, she asked the captain if there was anybody around who would be trusted to help us get back to Lawrence. The captain had a better idea. Why not stay at the fort and help operate the small sutler’s general store?

Years later, my mother recalled her conversation with the captain—Pierson or Pearce, I think my mother said his name was.

“We could use an educated woman’s touch around here, Mrs. Battles,” the captain told my mother, who had attended a small college for women back in Illinois. “Why, the men out here are barely more than savages themselves— lawless miscreants without a spattering of propriety and civility. A fine, cultivated woman such as yourself would be a considerable good influence on them.”

My mother was flattered, even tempted. But while considering the captain’s words, she looked at me, barely six and already showing signs of turning into a little savage myself. She was also keen on getting to Lawrence, where the rest of her family lived, including my aunt, who was now a widowed lady because of Quantrill and his band of Missouri bushwhackers.

“I couldn’t possibly stay,” my mother said. “You see my boy there? Look at him. Why, he already has the makings of a coarse and rude savage, and if I stayed here, that’s exactly what he would become. No, sir, I will have none of it. My man was lost in the war. I don’t want to lose my son to this rough country. I want him to be an educated gentleman.”

When the captain couldn’t convince my mother to stay on at Fort Dodge, he agreed to find a reliable man to accompany us east across the prairie to Lawrence. In those days, no woman would dare make such a trip alone, with just a boy at her side.

That man was Luther Augustus Longley. Luther was a buffalo hunter and had spent the past year or so hunting and scouting for the army. The colonel informed my mother that Luther had resigned from his position and wished to return to Lawrence, Kansas, where he had family. Luther’s activities before his work with the army were sketchy. I don’t recall what Luther looked like back then, but I came to know him very well during the next several years.

Luther was a black man—the first I had ever seen. And I can recall he scared me. He had a wild look to him. His hair was frizzled, and he had hard black eyes that looked like they had been dropped into two pools of milk. He had big, almost perfectly formed white teeth that he took good care of. He brushed them after every meal, as I recall. He was a big man—probably six feet five inches tall, and maybe 230 or 240 pounds. I had never seen anybody so big in my life. Like most men in those days, he was polite to all women and elders. He had arrived with his mother and father in Kansas City in the 1840s, which at the time was known as Westport. They had moved west from Pennsylvania and were, in that part of the world in those days, rare free black folks in Missouri, a slave state.

In the 1850s, he and his folks moved to Lawrence, Kansas. Antislavery Jayhawkers from Kansas frequently fought with proslavery Bushwhackers from neighboring Missouri. The conflict grew in 1861 after war broke out and Kansas chose to become a free state. Lawrence, the headquarters of the Jayhawkers, was the scene of several bloody encounters, including Quantrill’s raid, in which about two hundred men and boys in Lawrence were shot down like dogs, and some seventy-five business buildings and one hundred private homes were burned to the ground. Luther’s family managed to survive that raid because they were well outside of town to the west, and Quantrill and his boys came from the east and then retreated to the southeast after they finished their butchery.

I don’t recall much about our trip from Fort Dodge to Lawrence, but my mother often talked about it, so I have some recollection of what happened. I know some folks at Fort Dodge thought it was mighty peculiar that a white woman and her boy would be accompanied on the lonesome trail east by a big black man. A few of the ladies tried to talk my mother out of going, telling her that to do so would most certainly lead to some horrible kind of violation of her person.

The captain would hear none of it. “Luther is a good man—why, I would trust him with my own wife and child,” he told my mother. “You needn’t worry about what any of those clucking hens say.”

Years later, my mother told me that the trip from Fort Dodge to Lawrence—a distance of almost three hundred miles—took about two weeks. Along the way, we linked up with a few other folks who were traveling east to Kansas City. One of those families was the Tilghmans, who were on their way to Atchison, Kansas, where they had a farm along the Missouri River.

Now, I don’t recall anything about that trip, but it’s notable to me because of the friendship my mother had with Mrs. Tilghman. When we got to Lawrence, the Tilghmans stayed with our family before heading out for Atchison. It would be a friendship that would have a significant impact on my life later on.

Lawrence, Kansas, in 1866, wasn’t much to look at. Sure, the town had been rebuilt, and the new buildings were bigger and better than the ones Quantrill and his raiders had burned down. But the town still had a “wild, unsettled look about it,” my mother always said. Still, Lawrence was where she decided to put down roots.

One reason my mother put down roots was that, up on a hill overlooking Lawrence, a single fifty-foot-square building housing what would eventually become the University of Kansas had been built in 1866. It wasn’t known then as the University of Kansas but as North College.

Lawrence lies in the Kaw Valley, bordered on the north and south by the Kansas (Kaw) and Wakarusa rivers and overlooked by Mount Oread, the hill on which the University of Kansas campus is built. Early settlers called the hill Hogback Ridge, but it was later renamed after the Oread Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts. The word Oread comes from the Greek, meaning “mountain nymph.”

The town is smack between the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails. The Oregon Trail ran through what is now the city and the University of Kansas campus, while the Santa Fe Trail ran just south of the city, along what are now county roads and farmland.

The streets were named after the states in the order they came into the Union, beginning with Delaware. Massachusetts Street was designated the main street because Lawrence’s founders were from Massachusetts. But any resemblance between Massachusetts and Kansas was purely imaginary, my mother used to say.

When we got to Lawrence, we settled in with our relatives. Eventually, my mother took up sewing and made women’s dresses for the local general store. Her dresses were popular with the ladies of Lawrence—almost as popular as the store-bought dresses they could get in Kansas City, which was just about forty miles away.

My childhood years were uneventful as things go. I didn’t get into much trouble, though I did cause my mother quite a bit of difficulty with a few pranks now and again. Along with a few friends, I tipped over some outhouses, stole apples from Mr. Bimbrick’s orchard, and got caught smoking cigars Bobby Kummel swiped from Filsinger’s tobacco shop. I was rightfully punished for those misadventures.

Nevertheless, by the time I was eleven or twelve, my mother was barely able to contain that little savage she was convinced was eating away at my soul. I suppose I was pretty incorrigible, being without a father and all. My mother was no pushover, but she also wasn’t a father who could take a son to the woodshed when events required it.

The closest person I had to a father was Luther. When I got out of hand, my mother would have me spend time with him. He wouldn’t lecture me, but he would take me out into the countryside for a day of hunting or fishing. During those times, he somehow managed to set me straight about my behavior and my responsibilities to my mother.

“You know what a hobbadehoy is, Billy?” Luther asked me one day while we were fishing. I had threatened to run off one day after an argument with my mother. I was probably fifteen at the time.

I shook my head.

“That’s a young man who has ceased to think of himself as a boy but is not yet regarded as a man. That’s what you are, a hobbadehoy. It’s a right hard time for a young man like yourself. Me, why, I am between hay and grass—that is, somewhere between youth and old age. So, you see, we are never anywhere for very long. We are always moving toward something. And that’s what you’re doing. Moving toward being a man. You ain’t there yet, but you want to be. And of course, most mothers are dreadful fearful of losing their young ‘uns. Your mother is specially dreadful because you are all she has. Can you understand that?”

I nodded. “I guess so. I wouldn’t shin out, but sometimes I feel my tether is too short.”

“You will lose that tether soon enough, and then someday, when you are in a heap of hurt and trouble, you are going to reach for it and wish your mama was on the other end.”

Luther was right.

Luther taught me to shoot a rifle and a revolver. I especially looked forward to shooting Luther’s Big Fifty Sharps .50 caliber buffalo rifle. It had a powerful kick to it, and my shoulder would be pretty sore after firing a few rounds. But it was a fine piece of weaponry. Some hunters said you could hit a target at five miles, and Luther said you could fire it today and kill something tomorrow. Of course, both claims were just a load of prairie chips.

My mother wasn’t much pleased with my shooting lessons, but she relented because she knew Luther was shoving sense into my skull. She was hard-pressed to keep me in school. It was difficult for a boy like me to concentrate on school when every day I could see wagons moving west along the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails. I longed to join them, and there were a few occasions when I almost did. But then I thought about my mother and how it would hurt her, and I stuck it out. My mother was a stickler for school. She made sure I studied and learned my letters and numbers. But what she did most often was read to me when I was very young. It taught me to appreciate literature and writing, and it activated my imagination quite a bit.

By 1877, I was almost seventeen, and I was eager to set out on my own. I planned to go to Fort Riley, Kansas, to join the Seventh Cavalry. It was just a year after George Armstrong Custer and his command had been wiped out at the Little Bighorn, and like a lot of young men at the time, I felt a strong need to avenge that slaughter. It wasn’t until I was much older and more experienced that I understood the deeper political and economic undercurrents of the so-called Indian Wars and the issues that led to what the world today calls Custer’s Last Stand.

Go to Fort Riley and join the cavalry? My mother wouldn’t hear of it. “You will do no such thing. You will receive an education. I didn’t spend all those days and nights sewing dresses so you could turn out to be some coarse ruffian.”

I argued. I sulked. I threatened to run off. But that was that. I spent the next two years taking classes on Hogback Ridge. I must admit, it was good for me. I learned some Latin, algebra, English literature, German, philosophy, a little history, and geography. But most of all, I learned that having an education back then in the West was a little like being the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. Those who could read and write and reason things out with logic had a leg up on just about 80 percent of those you ran into back then.

Then one spring day in 1879, after classes ended for the semester, I was called into the editor’s office of the Lawrence Union, where I had been employed part-time as a printer’s devil and sometimes as a reporter. The editor was a beefy, round-bodied man named Horace K. Hawes. A thick crop of shaggy white hair covered his head and spilled over his ears. Fierce blue eyes peered at you from under graying russet eyebrows that resembled sheaves of wheat. The left side of his ruddy, pinched face was creased by a threadlike crimson scar, the result of a Confederate sniper’s bullet at Antietam.

“William, I have a proposition for you,” he said. Hawes sat behind a small wooden desk at the back of the two-room Union office. As usual, his white sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and secured with garters to keep them free of printer’s ink. He wore a dark brown vest and a blue bow tie around a high white collar.

I looked at Hawes, not knowing what to expect. Was I being sacked?

Hawes cleared his throat. “I have already discussed this with your mother, and she is in agreement, up to a point.”

He paused, and I was sure my mother had asked Hawes to sack me, fearing that I might waste my life as a no-account, deceitful scrivener, which was the way many newspapermen were viewed in those days.

Hawes cleared his throat once again.

“That is to say, she feels this opportunity would benefit a lad like you. But there are some conditions.”

I was fully confused now. What was he talking about?

“Judging from your mute demeanor, I must assume your mother has not mentioned this to you, is that correct?”

I was still standing in front of Hawes’s desk, holding my hat and a book strap that held a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets, an algebra book, and a digest of geographic maps.

“No, sir, she hasn’t,” I said.

“Well, my boy, sit down,” Hawes said. “We have some important things to discuss.”

It would be a discussion that would alter my life in ways I could never have imagined.

***

***

CHAPTER 2

When I walked out of Horace Hawes’s office, I felt as though I had been set free from prison. I wasn’t fired. Instead, I was offered a grand opportunity. Hawes had decided to open a newspaper in Dodge City—the notoriously wild cow town some three hundred miles southwest of Lawrence. And he wanted me to assist.

I was to travel to Dodge City along with Hawes and one of his typesetters. We would be transporting a new Potter drum-cylinder press along with several California job cases, composing sticks, and several barrels of ink—all on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad.

Dodge City in 1879 was still a booming cow town. It was a terminus for the cattle that were brought up from Texas to the railhead. From there, they were shipped off to the stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago. While it was true that the place had a wild reputation, it was also a town of businessmen and others who saw its potential for growth beyond the cattle herds and free-spending cowhands who brought them north.

And of course, that was precisely why Mr. Hawes wanted to open a newspaper in the town. There was money to be made in Dodge City. As businesses boomed, a newspaper could sell advertising and grow along with the town.

I was excited beyond all imagination. Dodge City. And to get there, I got to ride on a train. What an adventure. I had never been on a train, even though I had seen plenty pass through Lawrence heading west to Topeka or east to Kansas City.

Mother wasn’t as excited as I was. She could see the potential, but she could also see the dangers and temptations that awaited a boy going on nineteen.

“You be careful of those rowdy drover boys from Texas and their bad habits,” she warned me.

“What bad habits?” I asked, perhaps teasing her a bit. I knew what she meant. There was the cowboys’ well-known proclivity for gunplay, but even worse from my mother’s perspective, there was the gambling, the consumption of hard liquor, and, of course, there were the soiled doves that haunted the dens of iniquity, otherwise known as saloons and brothels.

“I won’t tolerate any unseemly behavior, William,” she said. “And I mean it. I will be receiving reports back from Mr. Hawes.”

Another reason she allowed me to go with Mr. Hawes to Dodge City had to do with our property. We still owned 160 acres of land southwest of Dodge City, and one of my tasks, in addition to working for the newspaper, was to explore the possibility of selling it. Mr. Hawes would help with the transaction, and the money would be sent to my mother in Lawrence.

I was eager to see the place where I was born and wondered what happened to the house and the outbuildings my father had built. I couldn’t really remember much about our old Kansas homestead, but I felt a powerful pull to go back to it.

After a week of preparation, Horace Hawes, Benjamin Minot (the typesetter), and I boarded the train west for Dodge City. My mother was at the station to see me off.

“I brought you all the way back here twelve years ago from that godforsaken part of Kansas, and now you are going back,” she told me while we were embracing. “Don’t make me regret letting you go out there again. Be careful and be mindful of Mr. Hawes. He is an experienced man and much wiser than you in the ways of men.”

“Don’t worry about me, Mother. I will be fine.” But as I said those words, I felt a sudden lump in my throat and a plummeting feeling in the pit of my stomach. This was not some overnight camping trip. This was a major relocation, even though I had promised my mother that I would return the following fall to Hogback Ridge for my third year at college. For now, I wasn’t thinking about that, however. That was five months down the trail, and I had a lot of life to live before then.

I can recall sitting back in the velvety greenish seats of the AT&SF passenger car as the train pulled out of Lawrence heading west toward Topeka. Horace Hawes and Ben Minot sat across from me. My mother stood on the station platform with Mrs. Hawes and Mrs. Minot and waved goodbye as the train lurched forward.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. Things were going to be happening now. Great and wonderful things, I was sure of it. My life, I was convinced, was about to start.

“Well, William, how does it feel to be leaving home for the great wilderness of western Kansas?” Hawes gave Minot a short poke in the ribs with his elbow, and both men chuckled.

“Fine, I guess.” I was not about to let on that I was so excited I could have wet my trousers.

“Fine, you guess?” Hawes roared. “Is that all? Why, boy, this is a wonderful opportunity for a young man like yourself. You should be jumping out of your hide with excitement.”

In fact, I was, but I would be damned if I was going to let on one bit. I debated whether to ask Mr. Hawes if he thought our train might be robbed by Jesse James, whose gang was known to be active in northeastern Kansas around that time. As the train moved away from Lawrence, I wondered out loud if the James gang might stop our train at some point.

“Ha, now that would be an adventure, wouldn’t it?” Mr. Hawes said, looking over at Ben Minot. “Imagine that… And here we are, a couple of scribblers and a typesetter right in the thick of things. Why, we could set up the old Potter press and right away put out a special edition about the matter.”

Ben Minot was frowning. “I wish to hell they would try to rob this train,” he said. “I would like to get a crack at just one of those bushwhacking rebs for what they done to my family in ’63.”

Ben was away in the Civil War when Quantrill and his men rode into Lawrence to massacre and burn. During the raid, Ben’s father, uncle, and two brothers were among those gunned down. He always maintained that the James boys took part in that slaughter. As with Mr. Hawes, Ben returned from the war a man scarred in both mind and body. He walked with a noticeable limp, the effect of a rebel Minie ball that tore into his upper leg, shattering bone and muscle.

But he was also an angry man—definitely not someone to be trifled with. During the war, he had been a sharpshooter in the Eighth Regiment, Kansas Volunteer Infantry. The Eighth served in Tennessee, and Minot was wounded in 1863 at the Battle of Chickamauga. Six months later, he was back in Lawrence in time to help clean up the carnage left behind by Quantrill’s marauders.

Ben was about thirty-six at the time and stood a little over six feet tall. He was a rawboned man with large, fleshy hands that looked as if they never could be nimble-fingered enough to hand-set type. His eyes were a soft green that belied his hard-as-nails character. He might have spent most of his time before a type drawer with a composing stick in his hand, but Ben was deadly with a firearm, especially a rifle.

“Well, I reckon we won’t have to worry about the James boys on this trip,” Mr. Hawes said. “Before we left, the sheriff showed me a telegram from Kansas City saying that the gang had gone to ground, probably in Tennessee or Kentucky.”

I admitted to being a bit disappointed by this news, but as I was about to learn, there were plenty of bad men in and around Dodge City.

As engine number 47 got up to speed, I was awestruck by how fast the corn and wheat fields flew by outside my window. The train travelled only about fifty miles per hour, but at the time, that was as fast as most people had ever moved in their lives.

In less than an hour, we were in Topeka. An hour after that, we were in Osage City; then in quick succession, Emporia, Florence, and Newton. In Florence, the train stopped for lunch at the Harvey House, where we were served by a couple of those famous Harvey Girls in their black dresses and full-length white aprons.

I must admit I was enthralled by one of the girls, who, like most of Fred Harvey’s girls, had been hired back east and brought west. I recall she was from Boston and had a distinct Bostonian accent that a young Kansas boy like me had never heard before. Had I stayed in Florence, I might have fallen in love with that accent and married the girl.

“Well, what do you think about that?” Mr. Hawes asked as we boarded the train after lunch. “Quite a pleasing collection of womanhood to gaze upon, eh, young William?”

“I reckon so.” I recall being a bit chagrined that my thoughts were so transparent.

“Never you mind. You will have plenty of time to curry the favors of the fair sex,” he said.

Ben nodded in agreement. “Never get into a rush with such matters. You don’t want to hitch up with the wrong filly.”

I turned my gaze to the passing terrain, not wanting to engage in a conversation about womanhood and thereby expose my glaring ignorance of the subject. Outside, I could see rolling hills burnt amber by the sun and dry from lack of rain. In those days, only a few trees dotted the plains, not like today. As the train moved farther west, away from the more cultivated lands of eastern Kansas, I could see why. Vast stretches of grasslands, seemingly deserted, extended as far as I could see on both sides of the train.

Occasionally, we might spot a small cluster of buffalo, but only occasionally, and then only a dozen or so. By 1879, most of the buffalo that once occupied the Kansas plains had been exterminated—wiped out by buffalo hunters, railroads, and settlers. As I was to learn later, this wholesale annihilation of the buffalo was not simply an accident or a mistake. It was intentional.

When the buffalo herds were gone, the southern plains Indians—Kiowa, Cheyenne, Comanche, Jicarilla, Kansa, and Arapaho—would be forced to settle on government-administered reservations. Equally important was the fact that with the elimination of the buffalo, the Kansas grasslands would be available for domestic cattle production and crops such as winter wheat.

I settled back in my seat, closed my eyes, and dozed off. Within minutes, it seemed I was awakened by Mr. Hawes shaking my shoulder.

“Come on, we’re going back to the freight car to inspect the press.”

Walking through the passenger cars of a nineteenth-century train was an adventure. The cars tossed and turned you every which way, often throwing you into the laps of fellow passengers. That was how I met a man who was already becoming a legendary figure in Kansas and elsewhere. His name was William B. Masterson. I didn’t know it at the time, but Masterson was the sheriff of Ford County, the county in which Dodge City is located. He was returning from a trip to Topeka, where he had gone on some kind of official business.

“Watch it, kid,” he said. “These are new boots!”

I apologized for treading on his boots and immediately backed across the aisle and into the lap of a woman, who quickly punched me in the back with her fist.

“Why don’t you be more careful, young man?” she said. “I normally charge money for someone to sit in my lap.”

That last remark elicited loud guffaws from several of the male passengers, including Mr. Hawes.

“Come along, William, there will be time for that kind of mischief once we get to Dodge,” he said. I looked at Masterson as I stumbled past. He winked. A few months later, he would lose a bid for reelection as Ford County sheriff, and I would make a friend for life.

I wasn’t sure what I expected when the train pulled into Dodge City an hour later. But it certainly wasn’t what I saw. You could hardly call it a city. There were about 1,500 full-time residents, and the place was bisected by the Santa Fe railroad tracks running east and west.

To the north of the tracks was Front Street, where most of the “legitimate” businesses were located; to the south, there were something like twenty-four saloons and other businesses licensed to sell liquor. This stretch of railroad track was what people called “the Deadline.” Guns were not allowed to be carried north of it, but almost anything went south of it.

Front Street was a wide dirt thoroughfare interlaced with wheel ruts, mud holes, and a jumble of wagons, buggies, and horses. Piles of “horse apples,” as we called horse manure back then, littered the road. As we stepped off the train at dusk, the distinct stench of thousands of Texas longhorn cattle waiting to be loaded on the next eastbound cattle train assaulted our nostrils, and we could hear wagons creaking and bumping along Front Street with an occasional snap of a whip or trace lines, and the sound of a driver cursing at his team of horses.

North of the Santa Fe Depot were several businesses, including the Dodge House Hotel, Mueller’s boot shop, the Long Branch Saloon, Hoover’s Liquor and Cigar Store, and Zimmerman’s Gun and Hardware Store.

Mr. Hawes had arranged for us to stay at a boarding house a few blocks north of Front Street. The woman who owned the place was his wife’s cousin—an imposing woman named Martha Kimmelmann. She was what you might call an opulent woman, full-bosomed and standing almost six feet tall. She wore a long, dark dress, the color of a stormy Kansas sky, and black shoes to match. Mrs. Kimmelmann was a widow in her early forties, and like most widows of that era, she never wore anything but that dark gray cotton mourning dress.

While Mrs. Kimmelmann was a rather intimidating figure when one first met her, her house was anything but menacing. It was a two-story building with eight rooms, five of which she rented out. The windows were trimmed with white lace, and her furniture was a light tan color, unlike much of the heavy, formal chairs and sofas of that era. She and an eighteen-year-old Mexican girl named Aida did all the cooking and cleaning.

“Much more agreeable than one of those flea-infested hotels,” Mr. Hawes said. “And there is little doubt that we will get much better vittles here than in town at one of those dreadful beaneries or dog holes.”

He was right. But it wasn’t just the food that was good at Mrs. Kimmelmann’s boarding house.

***

Next Saturday:

Chapter Three

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