(Preface: I once heard the Sons of the Pioneers explain the difference between country music and western music. Western music is about the outdoors—the trails, the mountains, the clean air; country music is about indoor stuff—fightin’ and lyin’ and dyin’)
Funny how things are connected.
A few days ago I was writing a new episode of Across Our Wide Missouri about Big Nose Kate, the girlfriend of Doc Holliday. She once lived in St. Louis and there is some story, legend, myth or whatever that while she was there in 1872 she met a fresh graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Dental School, John Holliday, who was there visiting a classmate during the summer.
What’s ahead is another example of how historians start pulling on a loose string and before long there’s a tangled heap of interconnected threads. Hang on because we’re going to unravel a whole historical sweater today.
Part of Kate’s story has her in Dodge City, Kansas working at Tom Sherman’s Barroom in some capacity or another. She already had a reputation of selling her services, if you will.
In the vicinity was a young Iowa native named Frank Maynard, who wrote poetry to keep himself occupied in slow times. His poetry isn’t bad. One of his works reminded me right off of the writings of Robert W. Service who authored the great poems of the Yukon—The Shooting of Dan McGrew, The Spell of the Yukon, The Land God Forgot, and the Cremation of Sam McGee:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
One of Maynard’s poems begins:
There’s a wild and rocky canyon
Where the panther rears its young
And where somber, gloomy shadows
By the Cedars are flung.
There’s no signs of human presence
How e’er closely you may scan.
Yet within its dark recesses,
Dwells an exiled, ruined man.
Sorry, folks, one of the dangers of researching and writing is how easily one is distracted. That’s one of the joys of doing research—and one of the frustrations because sooner or later you have to get back to what you came for.
Tom Sherman was a great big guy, even in our times—six feet-six or seven—and apparently at times as mean as a snake—as on the day that he killed a man named Burns (first name maybe Charley) at his bar in Dodge City, Kansas.
Young Frank Maynard noted the incident briefly in his journal for March 13, 1873 and later wrote in his memoir, “I could see some fellows gathering and I could discern a man down and moving his legs & arms. Possibly he may have had consciousness enough to feel that he was fleeing from his pursuer with whom I almost collided. This was Tom Sherman, a big blubbery fellow, who ran with a limp. He had a large caliber revolver in his hand which he was emptying into the boy that was down…Tom, panting for breath, said to those gathering, ‘I’d better shoot him again, hadn’t I boys?’ He stepped at once to where he lay struggling, stood over him holding the big revolver in both hands, aimed at his forehead and fired. The bullet went a little high and scattered his brains in his hair…All I could learn was that Sherman had killed a friend of Burns and thought it would be safer to have him out of the way.”
The incident led to the creation of a poem that became one of the most famous songs to come out of that frontier era.
A few years ago, Maynard’s memoir and his poems were put into a book by folklorist Jim Hoy, an English Professor at Emporia State Univeristy and published by the Texas Tech University Press.
Maynard was an Iowa City, Iowa boy who headed west of the Missouri River when he was sixteen and wound up in Towanda, Kansas, a town then of fifty people or fewer southwest of Kansas City (just off I-35 today). He soon was a buffalo hunter and later he and his father (the rest of the family had moved to Towanda) ran a freighting business between Emporia and Wichita. He became a real “cow boy” in 1872 when he was part of a crew that drove a herd of horses from Kansas to north central Texas. When he went back to Towanda, he became one of the drovers on a cattle drive.
Three years later he witnessed the killing in Dodge City.
In 1876, Maynard was wintering a herd of horses on the Kansas-Oklahoma border until the Wichita market opened. “I had often amused myself by trying to write verses, and one dull winter day in camp, to while away the time, I began to write a poem which could be sung to the tun of ‘The Dying Girl’s Lament’ in which a dying young woman says her lover did not tell her he had syphilis.” It began:
When I was a young girl I used to seek pleasure
When I was a young girl I used to drink ale.
Out of the ale house and down to the jailhouse
Right out of a bar room, shown to my grave.
Its 18th century antecedent, perhaps dating back as far as 1740, was The Unfortunate Rake, an English folk song about a young soldier also dying of venereal disease. It began:
“As I was walking down by the “Lock” (the hospital)
As I was walking one morning of late,
Who did I spy by the own dear comrade
Wrapp’d in flannel, so hard is his fate. “
In one version the rake tells his friend:
“Get six jolly fellows to carry my coffin
And six pretty maidens to bear up my pall.
And give to each of them bunches of roses
That they may not smell me as they go along.
Muffle your drums, play your pipes merrily
Play the death march as you go along
And fire your guns right over my coffin
There goes an unfortunate lad to his home.”
Maynard explained to young newspaper reporter Elmo Scott Watson for the Colorado Springs Gazette and Telegraph edition of January 27, 1924, the poem, called “The Dying Cowboy” that he “sang it to the boys in the outfit. They liked it and began singing it. It became popular with the boys in other outfits who heard it and after we had taken our herd to market in Wichita the next spring, and from that time on I heard it sung everywhere on the range and trail.”
It began:
“As I rode down by Tom Sherman’s bar-room,
Tom Sherman’s bar-room so early one day,
There I espied a handsome ranger
All wrapped up in white linen, as cold as the clay.
‘I see by your outfit that you’re a ranger,’
The words that he said as I went riding by.
‘Come, sit down beside me, and hear my sad story,
I’m shot through the breast and know I must die.”
The chorus was:
“Then muffle the drums and play the dead macrhes;
Play the dead march as I’m carried along;
Take me to the churh-yard and lay the sod o’er me,
I’m a young ranger and I know I’ve done wrong.”
Maynard’s ranger was a cowboy who rode the range tending and herding cattle.
He wrote that other trail herders changed the lyrics over time and replaced “Tom Sherman’s Barroom” with “Streets of Laredo” and the song evolved into the more familiar version we hear and sing today.
In 1949 Ray Evans and Jay Livingston wrote a version as a theme song for a motion picture, Streets of Laredo¸ starring William Holden, McDonald Carey, William Bendix and Mona Freeman. The three were outlaws who rescue Freeman’s character from a racketeer. Two of them later joined the Texas Rangers while the third continued his outlaw ways. The movie ends in a big showdown in which, as one source put it, “loyalty, love, and vengeance collide.”
Doc Holliday died at in Glenwood Springs Colorado at age 36 in 1887. He and Kate never got together again. It is said that when he died, he had a derringer given him by Kate later acquired for a large sum of money by the Glenwood Springs Historical Society. But its authenticity has been seriously questioned and the society offered to give back donations used to buy the weapon.
Big Nose Kate died in 1940, within a few days of her 91st birthday.
As for the young cowboy poet—
Maynard was “weary of the hardship and the tragedy incident to life on the plains” when he headed home to Towanda in 1877. ‘it is not to be supposed that I had wandered all these years heartwhole and fancy free, for I had had my dreams of love and home that ended with a rude awakening, and now at the age of twenty-four I was growing cynical and I had often exultantly declared to myself, ‘I will die as I have lived, a wild free rover of the plains.’”
But he was invited to a party and found “one pair of eyes that held a strange fascination for me. They seemed to wear a far away expression, and in their luminous depth there seemed to be a touch of ineffable sadness. Somehow the thought came to me, ‘Here is a woman that I might love, that might save me from the reckless life I have been drifting into.’” Her name was Flora Longstreth.
However, “When I finally screwed up my courage to put the question, which would have such a bearing on my future, I did not get a direct reply.” When she refused his invitation to a party, he wentt back to cowboying in the spring of ‘78, finally concluding the relationship would never work. He wrote her a farewell letter and spent the season herding cattle, fighting a prairie fire, and having some brushes with Indians unhappy with the encroachments on their lands.
But he never forgot Flora and eventually he convinced the girl with the faraway eyes his cowboy days were over. They were married April 24, 1881, moved to Colorado Springs six years later where Maynard made a good living as a Carpenter. He probably started compiling his reminiscences about 1888. He died March 28, 1926. Hoy notes the headline on his Denver Post obituary read, “Plains Bard and Pioneer of Earliest Cowboy Days is Dead.” Flora, born three years after Frank, outlived him by five, dying in 1931.
Frank’s reminiscences include his early days as a buffalo hunter, days in which hundreds of the animals were killed for their hides. He wrote without pity about those times although by the end he laments to the fate of the buffalo and the people who relied on them for so many purposes.
Names of people who are now legends drift in and out of his thoughts and his life; Dave Rudabaugh once was a herder with him and later a member of Billy the Kid’s gang in New Mexico. Bat Masterson, Bill Tighlman, and the Earps are part of the narrative as are Buckskin Joe, Colorado Bill, Prairie Dog Dave and Tiger Bill, whose barroom murder he likened to the death of Wild Bill Hickock; the Northern Cheyenne chief Dull Knife and many others forgotten or only words in history books were part of his world. .
He wrote of the ending of his era:
On Boot Hill they’ve built a schoolhouse
And the W.C.T. U.
Holds an annual convention
Where once corks and stoppers flew;
There are sermons, there is singing,
Where was pistol rack and flame.
Dodge, the erstwhile wicked city,
Has built a better name,
And the lamb now skips and gambols
Where was heard the grey wolf’s wail,
The survival of the fittest,
Marks the ending of the trail..
As with so much of the story of Doc and Kate, the real story of the free range west is part of legend and Western myth and preserved history. The only thing that seems certain is that a young cowboy named Frank Maynard witnessed a killing on a Dodge City street at a tavern where Kate once worked and he wrote a poem about it. It was included in a book of his poems published in 1911. His poems and some other writings are in the Texas Tech book.
One of the joys of studying history is the people you meet along the way, the people who kept diaries or wrote memoirs in which we see how those we see in movies or on television really were—just people in a gritty time when law was tenuous and life sometimes was cheap. But in those writings, they’re alive in their time with never a thought of being a legend. Good or bad, they become real and the mental images of their days carry with them new understandings of the humanity of our ancestors.
One string leads to another and to another, and one beyond that and maybe more. And in the end, a historical sweater of many colors becomes a pile of string. But oh! What fun the unraveling has been! And how richer we have become in the unraveling.
(Photo credits: Kate and Doc: Tom Kollenborn Chronicles; saloon—facebook; Book—Barnes & Noble; album Tower Records; Flora—the book)
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