The North was one country and the South another. But the men of the wooded seaboard valleys said A Plague On Both Your Houses.
These were slaveless yeomen who never saw the sense, with a continent of game stretching before them, in breaking their backs in other men’s fields. They were rifle-and-fishing-rod folk whom other whites called “white trash” and Negroes called “po’ buckra.” Seeking neither to bind the labor of other men to themselves nor permitting their own labor to be so bound, they came to town only now and then.
Yet came often enough to perceive that the proscriptive rights of master over man had been transferred whole from plantation to mill. And when, between the landed gentry of the South and the proprietary interests of the North, war at last broke out, they didn’t come to town anymore at all.
But went deeper and deeper into the forests until hiding became a way of life with them.
Yet among red roses their women had planted about their cabins, a shadowed bloom sometimes gleamed whitely.
They did not take it for a sign. They took it for a forest flower and paid it little mind. Not knowing that the soil upon which their cabins rested had been waiting, volcanic aeons gone, for a certain seed.
The ultimate price the huntsman paid, for mistaking a field fiber to be a forest flower, was having to take what the cotton planter offered him for his trees and streams. Caught between the reaching greed of Northern industry and the equal greed of the planters, the slaveless yeoman was pressed from his woods into a wobbly old wagon piled high with the junk of a dying frontier.
As the wagon began to roll, through woods once his, already ringing with axes in the hands of bound men, the sense of loss the huntsman endured must surely have been hard.
The loss his descendants were to sustain would be yet harder. Unwanted by Southern agriculture and unneeded by Northern industry, he was taking his hunters’ skills to a frontier already lacking use for them. By the time his wagon ferried the wide Missouri, he was already a drifter of no trade: master of no man to be mastered by none. A landless illiterate; already a kind of outlaw.
“I’ll bet you didn’t know the world was so wide,” he might have told his son when the wagon reached the Great Plains.
“No,” the son might have replied, “but I always knew what I’d have for breakfast.”
For though he might belong to a woman or a faith or just to his hounds; to a passion, an aspiration or a hope, after the buffalo the hunter would never again find his own true country.
For what The West was all about was not whether Man should be free, but who should be Man’s master. The issues which were joined in The Making of the West were whether gold or silver should be the standard of money; whether timber or mining should own this or that range; whether oil or railroads should govern this or that state.
After the buffalo, when the hands that had gotten the gold had gotten the silver and copper as well, when timber and railroads became single empires and governors found that there were enough mines and wells and rails to go around, the frontiersman was left with a couple hounds and a string-tailed mare in a shanty on a claim.
The banks were now the hunters; the hunter was their prey. For the flower that was not a flower had severed him at his roots.
Small wonder that the huntsman’s sons said a plague on all your houses.
If the Border War didn’t, precisely speaking, breed bad men, it certainly turned them loose. “Jayhawkers,” “nigger-stealers” and “bushwackers” were commonly men whose skills in hunting game had been transferred, by the slave-vs.-free controversy, to hunting men:
They rode in one morning at breaking of day,
They came to burn Lawrence they came not to stay;
With guns all a-waving and horses all foam,
And Quantrell riding his famous big roan.
The boys they were drunken with powder and wine;
They came to burn Lawrence just over the line.
After the buffalo, the frontier hunter might move from ranch to ranch; follow the oil booms or the wheat; drive spikes or mules. But he wouldn’t be banking the silver and he wouldn’t be riding in Pullmans. His name would be on no government contract for meat or wool. And all his songs celebrating the great outlaws of the Southwest would be variations of a sense of having been deeply wronged:
Now as through the world I wander,
I see lots of funny men;
Some rob you with a six-gun,
Some with a fountain pen.
The trickle of wagons and walkers moving west became a dispersion.
Came now the Sleep-by-day-fly-by-nighties, Get-rich-quickies with W’s on their foreheads, hiders, escapers and St. Louis whoremongers with many a lightfoot whore.
The fugitive slave had headed north. The Bad Nigger fled west.
John Henry was a Good Nigger because he died with his hammer in his hand; having nicely killed himself for a white section boss. John Hardy was a black gambling man but this didn’t make him a Bad Nigger. He didn’t make that till he shot a white man down on the West Virginia Line.
Another black wonder was Po’ Laz’rus, who’d always been a Good Nigger. He was a Louisiana levee-camp big-timberman who endured being worked from dawn to dark. It was worms in the grits that cut it with Po’ Laz’rus.
He came down the middle of the mess-hall table wielding a brace of blue-steel revolvers and taking care to put his big muddy boots in every man’s plate. Then, by way of saying good-bye to the white boss, he stuck up the commissary and got away with the payroll. When dem cot-ton bolls turns rotten you cain’t pick very much cotton in dem old cotton fields down south.
When his face was posted in every post office—WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE—Laz’rus, pleased at his widening fame, sent one of the posters back to his levee-camp comrades inscribed: How do I look boys dead or alive?
How do I look boys, dead or alive?
How do I look boys, dead or alive?
Dead or alive boys, dead or alive?
It’s a hard road, dead or alive.
* * *
New sheriff sent me my pitcher,
“Come up and see me, dead or alive.”
“Come up and see me, dead or alive.”
New sheriff sent me a letter,
Said he’d clothe and feed me,
Dead or alive, dead or alive.
It’s a hard road, dead or alive.
I’m sorry I cain’t come sir,
Dead or alive, dead or alive.
Got to go see my sweet little thing,
Dead or alive, dead or alive.
How do I look boys, dead or alive?
Nobody knows who Po’ Laz’rus was any more than anyone knows who Jesus Christ was. All we know is that both were poor men who defied armed authority; were betrayed, taken; and died wounded in the side:
O then they taken Po’ Laz’rus
An lay him in the commissary gallery.
He said, “my wounded side, Lord,
Lord, my wounded side.”
From Jesus Christ to Jesse James, an innocent insistence that the outlaw is a kind of saviour pervades the celebration of all their names. As in the song Woody Guthrie used to sing to the tune of Jesse James:
When Jesus came to town,
Poor workin’ people,
They followed him around.
He sent to the preacher;
He sent to the sheriff;
And told them all the same;
“Take all your money
And give it to the poor.”
So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.
The people held their breath When they heard of Jesus’ death,
And wondered how he ever came to die.
Twas the landlords and the soldiers Who nailed him in the sky,
And laid poor Jesus in his grave.
Shades of great outlaws crossed the Atlantic to haunt the Appalachians and the Ozarks:
A brace of loaded pistols,
He carried night and day.
He robbed not from the poor,
But on the King’s Highway.
Bold, gay and undaunted
Stood young Brennan on the moor —
Like John Henry, John Hardy, and Po’ Laz’rus, Young Brennan remained a shade. But the opening of the American Southwest brought the photographer to make shades tangible. Outlaws became living realities. The chronicle of the just man who, by stamina, guile and courage outwits authority armed in its hundreds, becomes tangible history with the flight and pursuit of Gregorio Cortez.
On a summer morning of 1901, Sheriff Brack Morris, of Karnes County, Texas, rode up to the tenant farm of the brothers Romuldo and Gregorio Cortez, accompanied by two deputies. The brothers understood little English. What little they understood now sufficed: they were being charged with horse-theft. And Karnes County justice was served, when a Mexican was charged with horse-stealing, by hanging the nearest Mexican.
And as the only crime the brothers had committed was that of being Mexicans, Gregorio said he would not permit himself to be taken.
A deputy translated this as “I refuse to let a white man arrest me.” Brack Morris then shot down Romuldo and fired at Gregorio. Gregorio shot and killed Morris. The deputies fled.
By the time they returned with a hanging posse, Gregorio had gotten his family and his dying brother off the farm and into the hands of friends.
Thereupon began a chronicle of flight and pursuit sufficiently heroic to set a pattern for all subsequent manhunts in the Southwest. In all theannals of Texas there had never been a Mexican fugitive who hadn’t ridden hellbent for the Rio Grande. Gregorio Cortez headed straight north—walking! While Texas mounties were covering every three yards of the Rio Grande, Cortez was taking a leisurely breakfast in the dead sheriff’s home town.
What methods Sheriff Bob Glover, of Gonzales County, may have employed in interrogating the women and children of Cortez’ family is not known; yet he learned that Cortez was hiding out at the home of one Robledo.
Glover’s posse attacked the Robledo home from all sides, with the Napoleonic Glover leading the assault on horseback. Cortez shot him off his horse, cold-stone-dead, with a single shot. Then ran, barefooted, for the brush.
Convinced that they were now engaged by a gang of banditi, Glover’s troops kept answering their own fire until one constable was dead and several wounded; as well as Robledo’s wife and one of his children. They then hanged Encarnación, Robledo’s thirteen-year-old son, and left the field triumphantly. Cortez came back for his shoes.
He had walked a hundred miles in the two days since he’d killed Brack Morris. Now he borrowed a mare that he rode to her death; and carrying the saddle, continued walking north. Not until then did Cortez commit the crime of which he’d been accused. He stole a horse; and turned at last for the border. The law picked up his trail. Both bloodhounds and press began baying for blood.
“Since Glover was killed,” The San Antonio Express complained, “Southwest Texas has swarmed with men in pursuit of him. Some of the best trailers in the country have been following him and he has thrown them all off. His methods are peculiar. He travels a great deal at night and never follows the trails. He stays in the brush as much as possible. His trail runs along straight and smooth for several miles, convincing the trailers he is following a certain general direction, when the trail starts at right angles. Then it doubles back. Another trick of Cortez is to stop, walk around in a circle, then reverse, then cross his circle and stop in a grassy place. This trick gives the trailers the most trouble as they lose hours picking up the trail once more.”
Special trains, bearing men, horses and bloodhounds, were now moving east and west across Texas, keeping in touch with one another by telegraph and telephone. Whenever Cortez was sighted, a posse with fresh horses would be transported by rail to the scene. The trail would be lost once more; the pursuers would board another train and resume the search. An anonymous guitarrero began singing—
They let loose the bloodhound dogs;
They followed him from afar.
But trying to take Cortez
Was like following a star.
The Major sheriff
said As if he were going to cry,
“Cortez, hand over your weapons
As we want to take you alive.’’
Then asked Gregorio Cortez,
His pistol in his hand,
“So many mountain Rangers
To take one Mexican?”
Como decimos asi es,
En mil novecientos uno
El dia ventidos de junio
Fue capturado Cortez.
(As we say, so it is;
In nineteen hundred and one,
On the 22nd day of June
Cortez was captured.)
Otro dia por la manana
El solo se presento:
“Por la buena si me llevan
Lo que es de otro modo no.”
(He surrendered on the next day, in the morning
He surrendered of his own accord;
“You can take me if I am willing,
But by no other way.”)
With his pistols concealed in a bag slung across his shoulder, Cortez had walked into a sheep camp near the town of Dolores on the north bank of the Rio Grande. Mistaking one Gonzales for a friend, he gave him his pistols to be reloaded. With a thousand-dollar reward on his head, one Gonzales took the pistols to a captain of the Texas Rangers. But as the reward depended upon Cortez’ conviction for murder, Gonzales’ betrayal earned him only two-hundred dollars.
The pursuit had only begun. Cortez was taken to Gonzales, Texas, where, strangely, he was tried for the killing of the constable during the fight at the Robledo ranch; though it was already known that the constable had been killed by one of the posse. Yet feeling against Cortez was running so high, he barely missed being hanged for the shooting.
One juror, A.L. Sanders, held out against the death penalty. Cortez was, instead, sentenced to fifty years.
Ten days later an attempt was made to take him from his cell and lynch him; but Sheriff F.M. Fly stood off the mob. Meanwhile his brother, Romuldo, died of the wound inflicted by Morris.
In 1902 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the verdict of guilty found against Cortez in the shooting of the constable. By then Cortez had been sentenced, in Karnes County, to be hanged for the murder of Morris.
Eight months later the Court of Criminal Appeals threw this verdict out on grounds of prejudice.
He was then tried in Pleasanton for the horse-theft, sentenced to two years, and the verdict again reversed.
He was tried at Goliad, again for the murder of Morris. The jury disagreed. At Corpus Christi a jury finally found that Cortez had shot Morris in self-defense while the sheriff was making an unauthorized arrest.
Cortez was then tried at Columbus for the murder of Glover, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. He entered the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville on January 1, 1905.
After serving twelve years and nine months he was offered a full pardon. But because of his recalcitrance before the court, the pardon was made conditional.
“Deep regret I have always felt for the sad occurrence,” he explained to the board, “but repentance I have never felt. For I could never bring myself to the hypocritical state as to so plead to gain an end that was my just due.”
Three years after his pardon, at the age of forty-one, Gregorio Cortez died during his own wedding ceremony. His place among American outlaws is memorable because, of them all, he was the most innocent. No other sustained the right of a man to his own life with such uncompromising dignity.
A female elephant named Raji escaped from a circus near Lansing, Michigan, several years ago. She attacked nobody. Raji simply walked off the circus grounds and began wandering the outskirts of town. Four thousand men, women and children turned out with squirrel guns, World War II bayonets, rakes, barrel-staves, bows and arrows, BB guns, baseball bats and housebricks for The Great Elephant Hunt.
They pelted, hacked, slashed, stoned and tore the defenseless brute all around Lansing, until someone had the simple decency to shoot her through the head.
The lynching of Raji was scarcely more degrading to the people of Lansing than the defamation the people of Dallas worked on the bodies of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow on their own killing-ground.
Before officers had arrived to control the crowd, Bonnie’s hair had been clipped off, her bloody dress had been tom to shreds and her purse rifled. Somebody was prying off her rings and someone else was trying to cut off one of Clyde’s ears when a doctor got there. Bonnie’s last request, made to her mother, that she be brought home after she’d been killed, could not be fulfilled because of the multitude thronging the streets around the funeral home. They would have hacked the wooden casket to splinters for the sake of having souvenirs. Hot-dog and soft-drink vendors turned a pretty penny.
Denied dignity in their lives, the press denied it to them in death as well. Thus the manner of their lives was more nearly that of two terrified foxes than that of a man and a woman. And the manner of their deaths evoked a roar of approval from the Texas press.
Clyde Barrow apparently took to his heels long before he had gained a pursuer. For the immediate use to which he put his first car—a stripped-down speedster—was to get himself chased purely for the sake of pursuit.
“It’s so much fun to go fast,” he told his sister, “it’s easier to run away.” A policeman had given him a whistle, so he’d stepped on the gas and a lifelong flight had begun.
He fled on foot, he fled by car; he hid behind bams and slept in woods; one escape he attempted on muleback.
When he wanted to see his kinfolk he drove past their home and threw a pop bottle, with a note concealed inside, advising them of a safe meeting-place. If the depth of a man’s fear may be measured by the violence with which he reacts when cornered, then the dread Clyde Bar-row contained literally propelled him.
He was born on the run. His chief preoccupation thereafter was in arranging chases. Poor Bonnie.
That Barrow’s deep dread was of women is one of those Freudian simplifications convenient to writers of introductions to books about people they never knew. This is nicely verified by another writer of introductions, Mr. John Toland, in a volume of conjectures, surmises and easy assumptions called The Dillinger Days.
“He [Clyde Barrow],” Mr. Toland writes, “was a small twenty-three-year-old man of medium build with wavy, dark brown hair slicked down in the middle. He had pixie ears, a weak chin, soft hazel eyes . . . and homosexual tendencies.”
Since this sounds as if Barrow was bom twenty-three-years of age with his hair parted in the middle, we wonder whether he may have parted it differently after he grew up. It’s credible that he did; as small men of medium build customarily parted their hair in the middle in this era. As well as large men of medium build.
I can accept his having “pixie ears”—whatever they are—upon the assumption that if you have one pixie ear you’re likely to have a pair. But as tendencies are infinitely more difficult to discern than pixie ears —even by people who know the suspect intimately—one can only marvel at this hack’s presumption. Clyde Barrow might have been a latent heterosexual without even his mother knowing.
Mr. Toland also assures us that Barrow’s drivers, Wm. Daniel Jones and Henry Methvyn, were hired “not only to assist in the robberies but to help satisfy Bonnie’s sexual aberrations.” Again one wants to ask, “Vas you dere, Sharlie?”
Or is making love in an automobile aberrative? Nothing was commoner in the thirties; it is only the congestion of traffic on the throughways and accessibility of motels that make it less common today.
What if Bonnie did take off into the woods with one of the kids? That still doesn’t verify Mr. Toland’s implication that Clyde was peeking from behind a bush. That Clyde was catching up on his sleep in the back seat is more likely. And when, on waking, found the front seat, a blanket and the kids missing, may have not minded greatly. Exhausted as he must have been, he was, possibly, relieved.
“All in all,” Clyde’s sister avers, “Bonnie Parker was the answer to a sister’s prayer for a wife for a best-loved brother.” Assuming that Sis might be unperceptive about the relationship, my own inclination is still to give Bonnie and Clyde the benefit of the doubt.
For the myth of monstrousness, so assiduously circulated by the press when the pair were being pursued, is the source of Mr. Toland’s assumption that Bonnie and Clyde were both perverted.
This myth was assisted by fantasies contained in a twenty-eight-page confession made by W.D. Jones. W.D. asserted that he was chained to trees by Barrow in order to prevent his escape; that he feared for his life every moment with them.
The confession was made when he was truly in fear of his life; he made it in exchange for a life sentence when charged with the murder of Doyle Johnson at Belton, Texas. Given a chance to lie himself out of the electric chair, one can hardly blame a teenager. But that it was himself, and not Barrow, who murdered Johnson, as Clyde’s sister claims, is highly likely. After all, Clyde Barrow didn’t do all the gunning-down. W.D. did his share.
And so did another “quiet country boy with clear blue eyes”—to employ Mr. Toland’s description of both W.D. and Henry Methvyn. Methvyn, too, escaped the chair by a repetition of W.D.’s fantasies. It is too hard to believe that Barrow was able to keep a revolver pointed, day and night, at a driver’s head, while being pursued by federal, state and municipal police all over the Southwest.
We can assume that neither of those blue-eyed youths was any too bright. Nor was Barrow. And surely Bonnie must have been dealing with only half the deck.
Was her unfaltering devotion to Clyde or to herself? Was it herself or Barrow with whom she was sufficiently fascinated to expiate her life proving such devotion? Her earliest aspirations to be a tightrope walker, an actress or an operatic star, are not unusual in a little girl. Yet one wonders whether these hopeless ambitions might not have been later sustained by becoming the cynosure of multitudes. Might she not have been acting out a True Confessions epic that could end no other way than in death beside her dying lover?
Nonetheless, devotion there was; and awesome devotion at that. What comes through is an old-fashioned loyalty you don’t get any more: the loyalty of Buck Barrow, blinded, delirious and dying, calling for someone to take Blanche to safety. The loyalty of Clyde Barrow, creeping through a battalion of possemen to find Bonnie, wounded in the brush; or W.D., himself wounded, fording a river with Bonnie on his back. Nor did either Bonnie’s family or Clyde’s ever fail to accept the pair, at any hour of the night, regardless of risk to themselves.
Lynching a defenseless person’s name is even easier than stoning a befuddled elephant. The newspapers indulged themselves freely in making monsters out of Bonnie and Clyde. I have never seen a newspaper,magazine or book about these two that took into account their beginnings and the climate of their times.
Neither Barrow’s forebears nor Bonnie’s had performed gallant deeds for ladies in farthingales against a background of trellised honeysuckle and the scent of magnolia. Their homes had not been pillared mansions bearing Greek entablature. Their homes had been cabins and shanties and wagons. Yet it had not been the gentlemen of the Old South, but these wilderness castaways, among whom the myth of the cavalier persisted most strongly.
Driven out of England by Cromwell, the myth found sanctuary in the American South. And flowered its finest amid cotton-mill waste. And in those small grubby towns where Main Street was rutted by wagon-wheels; and the last gas-lamp on the outskirts looked tired all night long.
A myth sustained, during the Civil War, not by Southern commanders and politicians, but by the Southern farmer, hillman and tradesman of the rank and file. These were the ones whose savagery in battle kept alive a myth as unreal as a dream: a dream that they were fighting and dying in defense of white-columned mansions; although their own fences were sagging and unpainted. A Quixotic belief, though their own lives were brutal and mean, that they fought to save their honor. And it was this fantasy, when the war was lost, which informed their refusal to accept defeat:
I’m a good old rebel soldier
And that’s just what I am;
And for this Yankee nation
I do not give a damn.
I hate the starry banner
That’s stained with Southern blood;
I hate the pizen Yankees
‘N fit ’em all I could.
Followed old Marse Robert
For four years nearabout;
Got wounded at Manassas
And starved at Point Lookout.
I cotched the rheumatism
From fightin’ in the snow;
But I kilt a chance of Yankees
’N wish I’d of kilt some mo’.
Three hundred thousand Yankees
Are stiff in Southern dust;
We got three hundred thousand
Befo’ they conquered us.
They died of Southern fever
And Southern steel and shot;
I wish we’d of got three million
Instead of what we got.
I hate the Yankee nation
And the uniform of blue;
I hate the constitution
Of this great republic too.
I hate the Freedmen’s Bureau
With all its mess and fuss;
O the thievin’ lyin’ Yankees
I hate ’em wus ’n wus.
I cain’t take up my musket
To fight ’em any mo’;
But I ain’t gonna love ’em
’N that is sartin sure.
I don’t want no pardon
For what I’ve done around;
’N I won’t be reconstructed
’N I do not give a damn.*
It was such Fight-Till-The-Last-Dog-Dies boys, some of whom had never mounted a horse before the war, who became the nuclei of the guerrilla warfare; which was to afford the tradition in which the James boys, Quantrell and Cole Younger continued to ride after the war was done.
To what this preposterous tradition had degenerated by the nineteen-thirties may be gathered by the spectacle of Clyde Barrow bumping about a cornfield in a Ford V-8; and abandoning it to attempt an escape on a mule.
Who were Bonnie and Clyde? They were outcasts of the cotton frontier. They were children of the wilderness whose wilderness had been razed; who came to maturity in the hardest of times. Clyde might have survived to a sad old age by chopping cotton. Bonnie might have knocked about as a sharecropper’s wife or a prostitute until worn out by hard use. The two chose, instead, to give everyone a run for their lives. And, having once committed themselves, made a run which verged upon the uncanny.
As a true desperado, Barrow never had the class of John Dillinger. Yet, when Dillinger was killed nobody doubted that he was dead. But Bonnie and Clyde created a myth of invincibility which survived their deaths. They are the only American outlaws, other than Jesse James, who achieved an aura of the supernatural.
Kings’ Daughters Hospital in Perry, Texas, looked more like an armory than a hospital when Buck Barrow lay dying there within a locked and guarded room. The hospital corridor was lined with police, and police surrounded the hospital grounds.
Bonnie and Clyde, crazed with pain and bleeding from their wounds, were miles away hiding in a ditch.
Yet nurses, policemen, doctors and citizens all over town were certain that Bonnie and Clyde would come racing up the hospital drive, machine-gunning everyone in their way, fight their way up to Buck’s room, take him off his deathbed and make a getaway.
Bonnie herself had known better than that for many months. She concluded one of her simple poems:
Some day they’ll go down together
They’ll bury them side by side;
To a few it’ll be grief
To the law a relief—
But it’s death to Bonnie and Clyde.
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were not gunned down simply because they were outlaws. They were killed because their outlawry was so profitless. There are no payoffs, no kickbacks, no graft and no fees involved in rawjaw robbery. Had they had the enterprise—as others had—to arrange fake bank robberies for a percentage of the take, they might have become respectable and prosperous members of a business community.
But their methods belonged to a time that had passed. They were bow-and-arrow people in an age of the fountain pen. One way or another they had to be disposed of.
Ultimately they weren’t disposed of simply because they had disposed of others: they were killed because they kept getting in the way.
* As sung by Frank Warner, The Unreconstructed Rebel, Elektra Recording jh504b.