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One Hundred Years
of Solitude, Struggle,
and Violence along
the US/Mexico Border
One Hundred Years
of Solitude, Struggle,
and Violence along
the US/Mexico Border:
An Oral History
By
John Thomas
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Struggle, and Violence
along the US/Mexico Border: An Oral History
By John Thomas
This book first published 2017
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2017 by John Thomas
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-5275-0301-1

ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0301-4
To everyone who, in the course of history, has ever set foot upon that
scrap of earth now known as the Lazy Y Five Ranch in Cochise County,
Arizona.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword .................................................................................................... ix
David T. Ives
Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi
Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii
Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1

The Devil’s Highway
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27

How the Devil Got His Highway
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 61

Traffic on the Devil’s Highway Respects neither Fence nor Law
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 81

“A Path Lined by the Dead”
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 127

“My ceiling is the sky, my floor is the grass”: Familias Ganaderas
de Sonora, Mexico (Ranching Families of Sonora, Mexico)
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 179

“O bury me not on the lone prairie, where coyotes howl and the wind
blows free”: Ranching Families of Cochise County, Arizona
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 239

“Sense of Place” Disturbed: “Thrown against a sharp white background”
Index ........................................................................................................ 265

FOREWORD
The issue of immigration is one of the hot button topics globally, but
especially in the United States, and especially in its southwest! The author
of this book, John Thomas, has written a remarkable volume. He spent
much of his youth living in Cochise County Arizona, right next to the
border between the United States and Mexico. Cochise is the name of a
famous Apache chief and warrior and the name resonates with United
States citizens (Estadounidenses). I remember the name from an old TV
show that aired in the 1960’s, I think.
My comments on this seminal book are based on my days as a Peace
Corps Volunteer in Central America and working quite closely with
Rigoberta Menchu, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate from Guatemala.
As a Peace Corps volunteer, I worked in a small town called Los Chiles,
Costa Rica, about two kilometers from the border with Nicaragua, as a
community vegetable garden promotor. Doોa Rigoberta, who supervised the
gardeners, opened up her connections to me with community leaders in
Guatemala to do the same sort of work there, and to build school
classrooms. Both situations allowed me to meet many people who lived on
the edge of existence, as they did not have enough food nor anything that
could be called a house. It was obvious to me that one of the main
alternatives for economic success for these families to survive was to head
north to the United States and send back remittances to their families. John
Thomas’s book resonates with me because he delves deeply into the
psyche of those individuals on both sides of the immigration issue, but
especially the motivations of those desperate people yearning to breathe
free in the United States.
John Thomas shows us on a deeply personal and passionate, yet
intellectual level that things regarding immigration are complicated, but
resolvable so long as one recognizes that there is no such thing as an
illegal human being in the eyes of God. Anyone reading this book, no
matter what their political views are, should be able to recognize that were
they in the economic situation of most poverty-stricken people in Central
America and Mexico, they would also take the aptly named Devil’s
Highway to the north.
This book is deserving of your time and reflection, especially as we
seem on the verge of wasting a lot of money on a wall along our southern
x Foreword
border, when a small percentage of the money for the wall could be
targeted at the reasons for which poor human beings flee their home
environment. It will help you understand the issues we face regarding
immigration and accept the richness of cultural difference.
David T. Ives
Executive Director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute
2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee
Senior Advisor, World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates’ Permanent
Secretariat
Chairman, USA Board of Directors for the Arias Foundation for Peace
and Human Progress
Member, Board of Directors, Centers of Compassion for Children
Member, Board of Trustees, Pax Natura
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This story begins and ends at a section of land in Cochise County,

Arizona, known as the Lazy Y 5 Ranch. My story, too, began on that ranch
and, I suspect, will end there, when I take my place alongside my
grandmother and mother in the family cemetery. I am grateful for having
spent my formative years at the multicultural, multiethnic, multinational
borderlands crossroads. Living where 15,000 years of history are visible—
from Clovis tips, to Apache burial mounds, to the footprints of coyotes,
bobcats, and mountain lions—stirs the imagination and enriches the soul.
Living that close to the ground inspired me to reach for the sky.
I am grateful to all who were willing to share their stories with me.
Your honesty, courage, and grace provided immeasurable depth and
perspective to this tale. Thank you Antonio, Susie, Louise, Humberto,
Javier, Victor, Enrique, Manolo, Lupita, Abram, Rigoberto, Raphael,
Charles, Mike, Jack, Victoria, Janet, Ana Teresa, and everyone who
offered me shelter, literal and figurative, during my pilgrimage to finding
myself, my family, my country, and my world.
I thank my wife Dorothy for gamely supporting my journey that took
me south of the border, off the grid, and beyond the reach of the usually
omnipresent magical rays that somehow power cellular phones. Dorothy
also suggested the book’s title!
I thank my sister Sally for joining me on part of my journey and for
transcribing some of my English interviews. I thank my friend Lancia
Blatchley for assistance in translating my own Spanish interviews. It turns
out that knowing a language well enough to ask a few questions isn’t a
guarantee that you’ll be able to comprehend the nuance in the answers!
I thank my student Leah Mantei for proof reading, a knack for the em
dash and Oxford comma, good cheer, and a critical eye. She’s not only
wise beyond her years; she’s wise beyond my years.
The Albert Schweitzer Institute awarded me a fellowship in support of
my borderlands journey. I hope that this book reflects at least some
measure of Dr. Schweitzer’s “reverence for life.” I offer a special thanks to
David Ives, the Institute’s Executive Director and a 2016 Nobel Peace
Prize nominee, for his thoughtful and articulate foreword to this book.
I wish that I could express my gratitude to my grandmother, Grace
McCool. Thoughts of her accompanied me on every step of my journey,
xii Acknowledgements
and her life informs every page of this work. She most certainly would
have had advice to offer me, and I would have enjoyed losing to her in at
least one more round of verbal jousting.
Mostly, I am grateful for the good behavior of any unseen beings
whom I may have irritated along the path that led to this book. My
grandmother often warned me against disturbing the spirits of the dead.
Unfortunately, I never thought to ask her what to do to appease an angered
inhabitant of the world beyond.
PREFACE
Estadounidense
Fig P-1: Lazy Y 5 Ranch, Cochise County Arizona, 2017.
Translated from the Spanish, literally, this word conjures the

nonsensical, “Unitedstatesian.” Nonsensical because the expression does
not exist in the English language. Scour the dictionaries of your choice—
Oxford English, Webster’s, even the Urban Dictionary. You’ll find no
such word.
Type “Estadounidense” into Google Translate and that most Unitedstatesian
of decipherers spits out, “American.” Substitute the particularized Spanish
designation of a citizen of any other country of the Americas—North,
South, or Central—and Google spawns an equally particularized English
label. “Peruano” yields “Peruvian.” “Ecuatoriano” yields Ecuadorean.
“Mexicano,” “Mexican.” “Chilean,” “Chileno.” “El Salvadorian,” “El
Salvadoreño.” “Colombian,” “Colombiano.” “Canadian,” “Canadiense.”
Given “Estadounidense,” though, Google produces the word that lays
claim to all three of the Americas. Given “America,” the Urban Dictionary
xiv Preface
generates a cheeky, if inaccurate, explanation: “A country that claims the

name of an entire continent to itself alone for no compelling reason.”1 The
name actually claims two continents, and three for those who view Central
America as the globe’s eighth continent.
Others, of course, have commented on this linguistic curiosity. In his
2002 essay, From Columbia to the United States of America: the Creation
and Spreading of a Name,2 Pascale Smorag chronicles the process that
would culminate in a country embracing a multi continent appellation. The
story begins on July 4, 1776 with Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues
declaring the independence of “the United States of America,” a name
derived from one of its supposed discoverers, Amerigo Vespucci. Not all
members of the public appreciated Jefferson’s choice of title of their new
nation. Some objected to its multi-word form. Others thought “Columbus”
or “Columbia” a proper way to honor its true founder. Still others believed
“Fredonia” or “Freedonia” suitable to announce new won freedom.
Washington Irving argued for the geographic specific “United States of
Appalachia” or “Alleghania.” “United States of America” carried the day,
most likely because it “sounded more rational and was eventually
preferred to poetic and grandiloquent designations.”3 That multi-word title
was almost immediately shortened to a single word, much to the
consternation of Mr. Irving:
In France, when I have announced myself as an American, 1 have been
supposed to belong to one of the French colonies; in Spain, to be from
Mexico or Peru, or some other Spanish-American country.4
Irving was not alone. As Henry Louis Mencken recognized in his 1947
essay, Names for Americans, “The right of Americans to be so called is
frequently challenged, especially in Latin-America.”5
That challenge, of course, has failed. The over-inclusive nature of the
name is the very reason for its appeal. To its defenders, the multi-word
alternative is but a “spiritless, generic fabrication, useful for conciseness in
news reports but otherwise meaningless.” 6 Objectors to the linguistic land
grab should simply “deal with it.”7
It is ironic that at the same time that US residents cling to a name that
incorporates the three Americas, they are fighting to make sure that
inhabitants of the other two Americas stay out of “our America.”
Sentiment about immigration is more polarized than ever in the US,
splitting along political and generational lines, with older, conservative
members of the public more likely to oppose immigration.8 Moreover, in
many, racism fuels anti-immigration sentiment.9 It’s ironic, too, that a
country built upon an invitation to “your tired, your poor, your huddled
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Struggle, and Violence xv
along the US/Mexico Border
masses yearning to breathe free” claims that it is through playing host to

such people.
The US is not thrashing about alone in the deep end of the irony pool.
Immediately upon Britain’s stunning “Brexit” vote to succeed from the
European Union, Twitter was abuzz with the meme, “Colonizes half the
world, complains about immigrants.”10
Concern over immigration is grounded, in part, in anxiety about
economic, cultural, and other changes catalyzed by the increase in
population and demographic transformation that accompany migration.
But, in the US, as in UK, a central force behind anti-immigration fervor is
White fear about losing majority status. As political scientist Samuel
Huntington predicted in his 2005 book, Who Are We? The Challenges to
America’s National Identity, incursion on racial and cultural dominance
has bred fear, anger, and backlash:
The various forces challenging the core American culture and creed could
generate a move by native white Americans to revive the discarded and
discredited racial and ethnic concepts of American identity and to create
an America that would exclude, expel, or suppress people of other racial,
ethnic, and cultural groups. Historical and contemporary experience
suggest that this is a highly probable reaction from a once dominant
ethnic-racial group that feels threatened by the rise of other groups. It
could produce a racially intolerant country with high levels of intergroup
conflict.11
In the 2016 Presidential sweepstakes, Donald Trump gave voice to

those otherwise unwilling, or having no platform, unable to articulate the
sentiments that Huntington forecast would rise to national conversation.
Within his first one hundred days in office,12 Trump promised to marshal
forces to seal our borders, complete the design of the “big, beautiful
wall”13 that will bar the Mexican government from “sending people that
have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems. They’re
bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I
assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they’re telling
us what we’re getting.”14
Trump initially promised to round all twelve million, or so, of the
undocumented and to strip birthright citizenship from children born to the
undocumented.15 In his first post-election interview, however, President
Trump reduced his immediate goal by eight or nine million:
What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have
criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people,
probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of
xvi Preface
our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of
our country. They’re here illegally.16
And, that big, beautiful wall? It will not be big, nor beautiful, nor,
even, a wall. In that same interview, President Trump committed, instead,
to (more) fencing.17
Oh, and he promised to institute “a total and complete shutdown of
Muslims entering the United States,” including US citizens returning from
abroad. (Or, maybe not.18) He also characterized Native Americans as
lazy,19 mocked the speech of Asians,20 and hailed “my African American”
upon seeing a dark face in the very white crowd at one of his campaign
events.21
Why would someone hoping to win a national election hurl insults at
racial and ethnic groups comprising nearly forty percent of the nation’s
electorate?22 How can one harboring such a dim view of so many
Unitedstatsians hope to make good on a promise to “Make American great
again?”23 Because, Trump does not consider members of groups he
denigrates to be Americans.
Donald Trump appeals to his audience by the near-constant use of the
rhetorical, “We.” “We are going to put America First, and we are going to
make America great again.” “[W]e can come back bigger and better and
stronger than ever before.” We “Americans are the people that tamed the
West, that dug out the Panama Canal, that sent satellites across the solar
system, that built the great dams, and so much more.”24
But, when Trump refers to members of those groups he often maligns,
he slips into the third person:
We’re going to have great relationships with the Hispanics. The Hispanics
have been so incredible to me. They want jobs. Everybody wants jobs. The
African Americans want jobs. If you look at what’s going on, they want
jobs.25
There apparently is no cure for ethnic or race-based, non-American

status. Trump accused US District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the jurist
presiding over the case in which the plaintiffs allege that Trump
University and its namesake defrauded them, of bias because “he is a
Mexican.” When informed that Judge Curiel had been born in Indiana,
Trump remained resolute that the judge’s “Mexican heritage” rendered
him incapable of rendering a fair decision in a case in which the defendant
plans to build a wall between the US and Mexico.26 Yet Trump considers
himself, the son of an immigrant mother, the two of his three wives who
emigrated from European countries, and his own children born to those
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Struggle, and Violence xvii
immigrants 27 to be among the “we.” Geography, no matter how many

generations removed, remains destiny.
Distinguishing as “they” those not of white European ancestry,
unsurprisingly, made Trump popular among white Unitedstatsians,
especially among males without college educations.28 Indeed, some of
those supporters could be heard chanting “Go back to Africa”29 when the
occasional Trump’s African American wandered upon the scene. A white
majority, sensing its majoritarian status at risk, embraced Mr. Trump’s
notion of “we” and a few of them struck out at the “they.”
Trump’s “we” won the election, and on his post-election victory lap,
the President elect thanked “they” who did not vote. A month after the
election, at a rally Pennsylvania, where he was the first Republican to win
the Presidential vote in over thirty years, he remarked on the downturn in
minority vote. African American voters, who comprised thirteen percent
of the state’s voters in the 2012 election, represented only ten percent of
the electorate in 2016. “They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary, they
didn’t come out,”30 he exhorted. “And that was the big thing, so thank you
to the African-American community.”31
The “we” most certainly voted. Trump garnered sixty-three percent of
the white male vote and fifty-three of the white female vote.32 Voters split
as definitively by educational background as they did by race. Hillary
Clinton carried voters with college degrees by fifty-two percent to forty-
three percent, while Trump carried those without a college degree by fifty-
two percent to forty-four, thus representing the widest voter education
voting gap since Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election.33 The disparity increases
when both education and race are considered. Trump won the votes of
two-thirds of whites without college educations and carried whites with
college educations by forty-nine percent to forty-five percent.34
Although other factors played a role—in particular, “working-class
fears about globalization, immigration and the cultural arrogance of the
‘progressive’ cultural elite”35 —ultimately, Trump rode to victory on “an
enormous wave of support among white working-class voters.”36 That
support was “largely about Caucasian fears of the browning of America.”37
That fear of losing majoritarian status is justified. The week after
Trump announced his candidacy for President of the US, the country’s
census bureau announced that non-Hispanic whites had become a
demographic minority among children under five years of age.38 The
Census Bureau has also predicted that by 2020 non-Hispanic whites will
be a minority among those under the age of eighteen and that by 2043 non-
Hispanic whites will be a minority among the population as a whole.39
xviii Preface
White reign in the Americas will have been fleeting. Humans arrived
in the Americas in the form of the Clovis People some 15,000 years ago.40
These first hominids likely originated on the African continent and trekked
to the New World over the Behring Strait or somehow floated across the
Atlantic.41 However they journeyed to the Americas, the Clovis preceded
Columbus and other Europeans by some 14,500 years.
Estimates of the human population of the pre-Columbian Americas
vary dramatically from a few million to over one hundred million,42 with
ten or twelve million likely living north of what is now Mexico.43 What is
clear is that Columbus and his fifty, or so,44 fellow non-Hispanic whites
represented a distinct minority when they stepped from the Niોa, Pinta,
and Santa Maria.45 The ratio between whites and others changed rapidly,
of course, as more Europeans teemed into the continent and disease and
violence diminished the native population.
It is difficult to pinpoint the moment in history when immigrating non-
Hispanic whites first outnumbered the native population. Article I of the US
Constitution mandates a decennial census, but excludes from the count
“Indians not taxed”46—those “living on reservations or those roaming in
unsettled areas of the country.”47 Thus, the census takers made no effort to
tally natives until 1890 and full effort wasn’t made until the 1930 census,48
the first to occur after Native Americans became Unitedstatsians courtesy
of the 1924 enactment of the Indian Citizenship Act.49 By then, and
subject to almost certain undercounting of Native Americans due to census
taker limitations and bias,50 “Indians” numbered 332,397 and represented
three tenths of one percent of the population.51 Whites numbered
108,864,207, accounting for 88.7 percent of the population.52
The tipping point? Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of one
hundred years before that 1930 census. Growing demand for land by the
growing number of European immigrants motivated the US military in the
early 1800s, under the direction of Major General Andrew Jackson, to
remove the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and other tribes from what is
now the Southeastern US.53 When Jackson became President, he was able,
via the enactment of 1830’s Indian Removal Act,54 to provide legal
support for his Indian-free policy. Perhaps not coincidentally, that year the
White population had reached ten million,55 or about the same as the
number of Native Americans present in what would become the United
States when Columbus and his crew reached the New World. After a
respite called the Civil War, the US eagerly re-engaged in Indian
Removal. Assisted by a malaria epidemic that between 1830 and 1841
eliminated up to ninety percent of the Native population in the northeast56
and the completion of the transcontinental railroad and attendant devastation
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Struggle, and Violence xix
of the West’s herds of buffalo,57 non-Hispanic whites soon achieved

dominion over the continent’s native residents.
Assuming that the US Census Bureau proves correct in its prediction,
non-Hispanics whites will have held their majority status for about 200
years before relinquishing it in 2043. Those two centuries represent just
over one percent of humans’ presence in the Americas – just enough time
for Clio, the Greek goddess of history, to blink an eye.
Fig. P-2: Circa 1956 on the Lazy Y 5 Ranch. Left to right: my sister, Sally, my
mother, Sarah, me, my Aunt Guenn, my mother’s younger sister.
In some places, White dominion will last but half a blink. I grew up in
the 1950s and 1960s on a ranch in southern Arizona located but a few
miles from the Mexican border. There, legendary Apache leader Geronimo
did not surrender to the European settlers until 188658 and armed
skirmishes between colonizers and Apaches continued until 1924,59 just a
couple of years before my family settled in that parched, high desert. In a
place where those still living may have witnessed immigrant and native
conflict, one might expect the land’s current occupants to view their
dominion as fortuitously achieved and transitory. But, ranchers like
Nevada militant Cliven Bundy claim that their “ancestral rights,” if but a
century or so old, are immune not only to the claims of those displaced
decades earlier, but even to the federal government’s claims to any lands
on which their European immigrant predecessors ever walked.60 My own
family, still on our “ancestral lands,” have expressed the same sentiments.
During my childhood, there was no border such as we would recognize
today. We crossed from Douglas, Arizona, to Agua Prieta, Sonora with
little thought and certainly no paperwork. Everyone spoke both languages;
xx Preface
we were distinguishable primarily by our preferred idiom and, perhaps,

skin pigment. My family bought building supplies, durable foods, liquor,
and, often, medicines in Mexico, where prices were cheaper and good
restaurants plentiful.
Life in the borderlands has changed. My relatives and other US
ranchers speak with anger and fear about their neighbors to the south. My
friends on the Mexican ranches rue the carnage, literal and figurative, that
a drug trade fueled by northerners’ demand for chemical enjoyment has
wrought upon their lives.
This incongruity between recent past and present moved me to embark
on this project. We’ve got immigrants complaining about immigration,
recent displacers anxious about displacement and lambasting the morality
of those who might trod upon their land, a people whose preferred
appellation lays claim to the three Americas who focus their anger on the
potential incursion by the inhabitants of the other two Americas.
I realized that I no longer recognized the people of the lands where I
spent my formative years. “If you don’t know where you are …, you don’t
know who you are,” says Wallace Stegner, paraphrasing Wendell Berry.61
“Like Thoreau, Burroughs, Frost, Faulkner, Steinbeck—lovers of known
earth, known weathers, and known neighbors both human and nonhuman,”
Berry is a “‘placed’ person.”62 I found myself displaced. I didn’t know
where I was, or more correctly, where I came from. How could I know
who I was? How could I know who my people were?
So, I set a course for self, family, and, hopefully, a nation’s discovery.
I believed that the journey would necessarily be both bi-national and
bilingual. I also believed that I’d understand the mission and the result
only if I traveled alone. I began reaching out to people on both sides of the
border and working at regaining my long-lost Spanish language skills.
Regarding the first effort, I sought out people who had lived the
border’s vicissitudes: older members of families that had long lived in the
borderlands. These folks, I hoped, might be able to recall what their
grandparents had told them, providing a century’s worth of oral history.
I began my language acquisition journey by matriculating in a year of
university-level, intermediate Spanish. I then moved up to a year of one-
on-one tutorials via Skype with a Peruvian Spanish language specialist
before heading to South America to spend a month with her, my Maestra
en Espaોol.
Prepared as best I could, I moved to the borderlands for the fall of
2015, alternatively living on ranches and in small communities in the
Mexican State of Sonora and the corresponding territory in the US that
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Struggle, and Violence xxi
stretches from Tijuana on the California border to Agua Prieta on the

Arizona border.
I lived, dined, and talked with Mexicans and Unitedstatsians, Sonorans
and Arizonans. Americans.
Notes
1
“America,” Urban Dictionary, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=America.
2
Pascale Smorag, “From Columbia to the United States of America: the Creation
and Spreading of a Name,” in American Foundational Myths, eds. Martin Heusser
and Dudrum Grabher, Gudrum (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag), accessed July 23,
2017, file:///C:/Users/thomas/Downloads/spe-001_2002_14_a_005_d.pdf.
3
Ibid, 80.
4
Ibid, 72, quoting Mencken, Henry Louis Mencken, “Names for Americans,”
American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage (22 Dec. 1947), 241-256, 243.
5
Henry Louis Mencken, “Names for Americans,” 241.
6
Chris Kirk, I’m From America. Stop Complaining, South America. SLATE, Aug.
19 2013, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/a_fine_whine/2013/08/america_t
he_continent_vs_america_the_country.html.
7
Ibid.
8
Bradley Jones, Americans’ Views of Immigrants Marked by Widening Partisan,
Generational Divides, Pew Research Center, April 15, 2016, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/15/americans-views-of-immigrants-
marked-by-widening-partisan-generational-divides/
9
Esther Yu-Hsi Lee, Poll: Americans’ Anti-Immigrant Attitudes Are Fueled by
Racism, THINK PROGRESS, July 7, 2016, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2016/07/07/3795723/americans-anti-
immigrant-sentiment/
10
“Colonizes half the world, complains about immigrants,” Twitter, accessed July
23, 2017, https://memegenerator.net/instance/49836532.
11
Samuel P. Huntington, Who are We? The challenges to America’s National
Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), as quoted in Derek Thompson,
“Donald Trump and the Twilight of White America,” The Atlantic, May 13, 2016,
accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/donald-trump-and-the-
twilight-of-white-america/482655/.
12
Patrick Healy, “‘President Trump?’ Here’s How He Says It Would Look,”
Salon, May 4, 2016, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/05/us/politics/donald-trump-
president.html?_r=0.
13
Ben Shapiro, Trump Wants to Build a Big, Beautiful Wall to Keep American
Businesses In, DAILY WIRE, April 11, 2016, accessed July 23, 2017,
xxii Preface
http://www.dailywire.com/news/4825/trump-wants-build-big-beautiful-wall-keep-
american-ben-shapiro.
14
Suzanne Gamboa, Donald Trump Announces Presidential Bid by Trashing
Mexico, Mexicans, ABC NEWS, June 16, 2015, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/donald-trump-announces-presidential-bid-
trashing-Mexico-mexicans-n376521.
15
Dolia Estevez, “Debunking Donald Trump’s Five Extreme Statements about
Immigrants and Mexico,” Forbes, September 3, 2015, accessed July 23, 2017,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/doliaestevez/2015/09/03/debunking-donald-trumps-
five-extreme-statements-about-immigrants-and-mexico/#2586c9741e81,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/doliaestevez/2015/09/03/debunking-donald-trumps-
five-extreme-statements-about-immigrants-and-Mexico/#7f31c96a7076.
16
Amy B. Wang, “Donald Trump Plans to Immediately Deport 2 Million to 3 Million
Undocumented Immigrants.” Washington Post (Washington, DC), November 13,
2016, accessed November 2016,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/13/donald-trump-
plans-to-immediately-deport-2-to-3-million-undocumented-immigrants/.
17
“Trump Says “Certain Areas of Border Wall with Mexico Could Be Fence,”
Reuters, November 13, 2016, accessed November 14, 2016,
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-border-idUSKBN1380MX.
18
Jill Colvin, “Trump’s Shifting Position Muslim Ban Causes Confusion,
Associated Press, June 28, 2016, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/8c410a249dce4759afd0a8b7bb649427/trumps-
muslim-ban-simple-clarity-plain-confusion.
19
Simon Moya-Smith, “Trump’s Casual Racism toward Native Americans,” CNN,
June 29, 2016, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/21/opinions/donald-trump-elizabeth-warren-native-
american-moya-smith/.
20
Celeste Katz, “Donald Trump Mocks Asians with Broken English While
Speaking about China, Japan Relations at Campaign Rally,” NY Daily News,
August 27, 2015, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/donald-trump-mocks-asians-broken-
english-speech-article-1.2338344
21
Jeremy Diamond, “Donald Trump on Black Supporter: ‘Look at My African-
American over Here,’” CNN, June 6, 2016, accessed July 23, 2017,
www.cnn.com/2016/06/03/politics/donald-trump-african-american/.
22
“Population Distribution by Race/Ethnicity,” Kaiser Family Foundation, accessed
July 23, 2017,
http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-raceethnicity/.
23
“About,” Donald J. Trump, accessed July 23, 2017,
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/.
24
“Full Transcript: Donald Trump NYC Speech on Stakes of the Election,” CNN,
June 22, 2016, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/transcript-trump-speech-on-the-stakes-of-
the-election-224654
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Struggle, and Violence xxiii
25
David A. Graham, “How Donald Trump Speaks to – and About – Minorities,”
The Atlantic, May 3, 2016, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-way-donald-trump-
speaks-toand-aboutminorities/481155/
26
Scott Bixby, “Donald Trump Says Judge in University Court Case Biased by
‘Mexican Heritage,’” The Guardian, June 2, 2016, accessed July 23, 2017,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/03/donald-trump-judge-curiel-
university-case-biased-mexican
27
Chris Frates, “Donald Trump’s Immigrant Wives,” CNN, August 24, 2015,
accessed July 23, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/24/politics/donald-trump-
immigrant-wives/
28
Heather Digby Parton, “Donald Trump Represents an America that is Literally
Disappearing,” Salon, January 22, 2016, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/22/donald_trump_represents_an_america_that_is_l
iterally_disappearing/.
29
David Love, “Bigots are Yelling for Black People to ‘Go Back to Africa!’ – But
What Does It Mean? And Is It Possible to Return?” Atlanta Black Star, June 12,
2016, accessed July 23, 2017, http://atlantablackstar.com/2016/06/12/bigots-are-
yelling-to-black-people-to-go-back-to-africa-but-what-does-it-mean-and-is-it-
possible-to-return/.
30
Sophia Tesfaye, “Donald Trump delivers ‘thank you to the African-American
community’ who ‘didn’t come out to vote,’” Salon, Dec. 16, 2016, accessed July
23, 2017, http://www.salon.com/2016/12/16/donald-trump-delivers-thank-you-to-
the-african-american-community-who-didnt-come-out-to-vote/.
31
Ibid.
32
Tyson, Alec, and Shiva Maniam. “Behind Trump’s Victory: Divisions by Race,
Gender, Education.” Pew Research Center, November 9, 2016, accessed November
14, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-
divisions-by-race-gender-education/.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
35
Kotkin, Joel. “The Improbable Demographics behind Donald Trump’s Shocking
Presidential Victory.” Forbes, November 9, 2016, accessed November 14, 2016,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2016/11/09/donald-trumps-presidenti-
victory-demographics/#725e1b3579a8.
36
Nate Cohn. Why Trump Won: Working-Class Whites. New York Times,
November 9, 2016, accessed November 14, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/upshot/why-trump-won-working-class-
whites.html?_r=0.
37
Bailey, Issac J. “How Trump Exposed America’s White Identity Crisis.” Politico
Magazine, August 22, 2016, accessed November 14, 2016,
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/trump-race-white-america-
identity-crisis-214178
38
Sandra L. Colby and Jennifer M. Ortman, “Estimates and Projections Current
Population Reports,” US Census Bureau, March 2015, accessed July 23, 2017,
xxiv Preface
http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p25-
1143.pdf.
39
Ibid.
40
Amelia Templeton, “Oregon Archaeologists Discover 15,000-Year-Old Knife,”
Oregon Public Broadcasting, March 5, 2015, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-archaeologists-discover-15000-year-old-knife/.
A recent study suggests that humans may first have appeared in the Americans between
120,000 and 140,000 years ago. Steven R. Holen, et. al, “Letter: A 130,000-year-
old archaeological site in southern California, USA,” Nature, 544 (2017):479-486.
“However, many of the world’s leading experts in American archaeology already
have expressed some form of skepticism to the paper’s claims. Some have rejected
it outright.” Michael Greshko, “Humans in California 130,000 Years Ago? Get the
Facts,” National Geographic, April 26, 2017), accessed May 15, 2017,
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/mastodons-americas-peopling-
migrations-archaeology-science/.
41
Gloria Dickie, “Ancient Native Americans Ate Pachyderms; Site Challenges
Theory of Where New World Culture Began,” National Geographic, July16, 2014,
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140714-clovis-elephant-
archaeology-ancestor-science/.
42
Lewis Lord, How Many People Were Here Before Columbus? U.S. News &
World Report, August 18-25, 1997, pp. 68-70, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.bxscience.edu/ourpages/auto/2009/4/5/34767803/Pre-
Columbian%20population.pdf.
43
Jeffrey Ostler, “Genocide and American Indian History,” Oxford Research
Encyclopedia, March 2015, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0
001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-3. Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the
Americas before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005) provides an in-depth
discussion of the population estimates.
44
“Between 86 to 89 men accompanied Christopher Columbus on his first voyage.
There were 20 on the Niña, 26 on the Pinta, and 41 on the Santa María. After the
Santa María sank, 39 men were left to establish a fort, La Navidad (the Santa
María sank on Christmas eve), in the village of the Taino cacique Guancanagari.”
“Christopher Columbus,” Florida Museum of Natural History, accessed July 23,
2017, https://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/caribarch/columbus.htm
45
OK, the child’s poem – “The Three Ships/The Niña, the Pinta, the Santa
Maria/Three little ships from Spain” -- isn’t accurate. The Santa Maria
shipwrecked before reaching the New World and the Pinta wasn’t actually named
the Pinta. Christopher Klein, “10 Things You May Not Know About Christopher
Columbus,” History Channel, Oct. 5, 2012, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-christopher-
columbus.
46
US Constitution, Article I, Clause 3.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Struggle, and Violence xxv
47
James P. Collins, “Native Americans in the Census, 1860–1890,” Prologue
Magazine, summer 2006, Vol. 38, No. 2, National Archives, accessed July 23,
2017,
http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/summer/indian-census.html.
48
“Indians and the Census 1790-2010,” Native Heritage Project, May 14, 2013,
accessed July 23, 2017, https://nativeheritageproject.com/2013/05/14/indians-and-
the-census-1790-2010/
49
8 United States Code § 1401(b).
50
US Population in the 1930 Census by Race,
http://www.genealogybranches.com/1930census.html.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid.
53
“Indian Treaties and the Removal Act of 1830,” Office of the Historian,
Department of State, accessed July 23, 2017,
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/indian-treaties.
54
4 Stat. 411 | 21 Cong. Ch. 148.
55
“Historical racial and Ethnic Demographics of the United States,” Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_
United_States#Historical_data_for_all_races_and_for_Hispanic_origin_.281610.E
2.80.932010.29.
56
Jeffrey Ostler, “Genocide and American Indian History.”
57
Gilbert King, “Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed,” Smithsonian, July 17,
2012, accessed July 23, 2017, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-
buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/?no-ist
58
David Roberts, Once They Moved Like the Wind: Cochise, Geronimo (Simon &
Schuster, 2011), loc. 4926, Kindle Edition.
59
Mark David Ledbetter, America’s Forgotten History. Part Three: A Progressive
Empire (San Francisco: Mark David Ledbetter, 2015), 122.
60
“Nevada Rancher Cliven Bundy: ‘The Citizens of America’ Got My Cattle
Back,” CBS News, April 13, 2014, accessed July 23, 2017,
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nevada-rancher-cliven-bundy-the-citizens-of-
america-got-my-cattle-back/.
61
Wallace Stegner, The Sense of Place, (Madison: Wisconsin Humanities Committee,
1986).
62
Ibid, 1.
CHAPTER ONE
THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY
Fig 1-1: San Pedro River, 2017.
Ahead of us the twin blacktop lanes of Route 80 slash across the high
desert of the San Pedro River Basin before winding up the west side of the
craggy Mule Mountains. This is ranching land in Cochise County, the
scrap of Arizona that abuts Mexico on the south and New Mexico on the
east. Named for the famed Apache leader, this is home to Tombstone, the
Boot Hill Cemetery, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and, well, the entire
Wild West legend. In a process initiated in 1853 with Ambassador James
Gadsden’s signature on what would come to be called the Gadsden
Purchase, the surrounding territory became part of the United States when
President Franklin Pierce signed the treaty the following year.1 The
territory’s honeymoon with the United States wasn’t peaceful. Settler and
Apache conflict always smoldered and often blazed, boomtowns like
Tombstone attracted risk takers and lawbreakers, and cattle rustling was
the reigning leisure pursuit.
2 Chapter One
Cochise County was the epicenter of this tempestuous time period and
our road traverses a land peppered with Native American burial grounds,
the corpses of those who discovered that they were not the fastest gun in
the west, and the sad remnants of failed homesteads. But, we also pass
success stories of American expansion—lovely ranch houses surrounded
by huge cottonwood trees, cattle grazing peacefully, and cowboys out on
the range doing what cowboys have always done—before reaching 6,000
feet of elevation at Mule Pass and rolling down the other side into
Tombstone Canyon and the mile-high mining town of Bisbee.
Navigating the narrow, twisting road can be treacherous in bad weather
and I recall a close encounter with a precipice here some three decades
ago. Then, still a practicing lawyer, I was running late for a trial in the
Bisbee courthouse. After hurtling up the mountain and flying over the
summit, I took a turn too quickly, spun my car on the snow-covered road,
and got a rather scary 360-degree viewing of the canyon. But, navigated at
appropriate speed on a beautiful summer day like today, it’s a passage
worth traversing.
The pass is breathtaking to those of us weaned in these arid lands. As
you ascend the mountains, grasslands give way to scrub oak and tall,
spindly ocotillo cactus. The peak is dominated by rocky outcroppings and
views that, in good weather, extend a hundred miles into Mexico. Here
you experience the Big Sky Phenomenon: your view extends to the
horizon and between you and the end of the earth lie substantial, jagged,
leering features. These are the “Wide Open Spaces” about which the Dixie
Chicks sang: “Room to make … big mistakes” and places where there are
“high stakes.”2 But, if you spent your early years snuggled among the trees
in the Northeast, where I now live, you’ll likely feel the sway of
agoraphobia, and acrophobia if you glance over the edge as you navigate
yet another hairpin turn.
Your view may not be drawn to the horizon, though, because Bisbee
beacons. The former Phelps Dodge Mining Company town was once
home to laborers who toiled to persuade the surrounding mountains to
surrender pots of gold, silver, lead, and, most importantly, copper. Aptly
named streets like Tombstone Canyon Road, Moon Canyon, Star Avenue,
and Brewery Gulch are lined with turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century
architecture and spread out like a web in the canyons that lie between the
peaks of the hilly terrain. The town’s economic cornerstone, the Copper
Queen Mine, originated with prospector George Warren’s 1877 claim and,
with its sibling, the Lavender Pit Mine, yielded a billion tons of copper
before falling ore prices forced Phelps Dodge to close both in 1975.3
Aging hippie artisans have now displaced the miners and tourism has
The Devil’s Highway 3
superseded the earth’s treasures as the foundation of the area’s economy.

Cathouses have become art galleries. Mining company administrative
buildings have morphed into artisan cooperatives. And, bars have, well,
added ferns.
If you can resist the lure of Bisbee, you’ll snake past the huge, open pit
mine, pass through the neighboring village of Warren, named for that
prospector, and land upon a straight stretch of road that, after fifteen
minutes, or so, puts you at the US/Mexico border. The sister towns of
Douglas on the US side and Agua Prieta (“Dirty Water,” really) on the
Mexico side share a heritage, if not a future, or a present. Douglas formed
in the early 1900s around Phelps Dodge’s smelter that used giant blast
furnaces to separate the copper from less valuable substances in the ore
that originate in those mines up the road in Bisbee. The unwanted
byproduct—slag—is piled in heaps that still dominate the surrounding
landscape.
Agua Prieta, once the port for bringing ore from Mexican mining
operations to the Douglas smelter, lies on the other side of the border
fence. But, the fence is a relatively new addition to the topography. In my
childhood days in the 1950s, there was no physical demarcation of the
border. Indeed, the dirt runway for the tiny Douglas airport spanned the
border, as did those slag heaps.
In the latter half of the Twentieth Century, a modest three-strand
barbed wire fence came to demark the boundaries between the countries.
Locals still speak of the “alambristo” (“wireist”) who enters the US
illegally “de alambre” (“through the wire”).4 Even in the 1980s when a
chain link fence had replaced those wires, residents viewed the border
cavalierly. The border town of Naco, some twenty miles west of Agua
Prieta, hosted a loosely organized annual “international volleyball
tournament” in which the players used the fence as a net.5
That fence has changed. In 2012, the US invested $14.5 million on a
six-mile stretch of fence that towers eighteen feet over the Douglas/Agua
Prieta border and burrows eight feet under it. “This new fencing,” the
area’s Border Patrol chief has offered, “will greatly hinder transnational
criminal organizations from attempting to commit their criminal acts.”6
President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful wall,” if ever erected, may prove
an even greater hindrance to border crossing.
It will also hinder volleyball. But, then, as the Border Patrol chief
infers, not many people in the area are in the mood for international
frivolity. Gone are the days of the late twenties and early thirties when
folks visited these twin towns to seek refuge from the elements and the
law by enjoying “Douglas sunshine and Agua Prieta moonshine.”7 Gone,
4 Chapter One
too, are the days of my youthful, relaxed wanderings through these border
towns. The rise of the drug trade and the downturn in the economy,
marked most prominently by the departure of Phelps Dodge have
transformed these communities. Fear has replaced optimism as the
sentiment common on both sides of that fence. Instead of working side-by-
side in a joint quest for a bright future, folks here yearn for the peaceful
days long past and watch their communities buckle under the reign of the
drug cartels. Northerners blame the suppliers down south. Southerners
blame their wealthy neighbors and their insatiable appetite for drugs. No
one contemplates a friendly game; everybody wants to spike that
volleyball.
Culture here has shifted. Now, I’m certain that my recollections of
ethnic and racial equality are informed by the rose-colored glasses natural
to someone who grew up on a ranch here and departed these parts before
becoming burdened by the obligations of an adult trying to eke out a living
on this isolated land. I mostly recall carefree days spent riding horseback
with my cousins, receiving instructions from adults only to return before
nightfall because the ranch lacked electricity. Certainly, there were more
than a few occasions of ethnicity-based inequity and violence.
Fig 1-2: Warning sign, Cochise County, 2017.
But, Arizona has changed. That fence is exhibit A. The state is also
now home to the infamous “breathing while brown”8 state immigration
law that the US Supreme Court found unconstitutional.9 A mere judicial
ruling, and a federal one at that, hasn’t tempered sentiments here. I have
relatives who stand on the burial mounds of early inhabitants of these

lands and within a stone’s throw of an Indian reservation who lambast
“illegals who won’t even learn our language.”
And, we just drove past a rancher’s towering, homemade, faux
tombstone, about the same height as that new border fence, announcing,
“R.I.P. America, July 4, 1776—November 6, 2008,” the date Barack
Obama captured fifty-three percent of the popular vote and nearly seventy
percent of the Electoral College vote in the Presidential election. That
year, Cochise County voted fifty-three percent to forty five percent for the
Republican nominee, John McCain.10 In lock step with the reddening of
the US, in 2012, the county voted sixty percent to forty five percent for
Mitt Romney.11 The reelection of Obama caused a proliferation of the faux
tombstones, with some, like the one depicted here, changing the date of
the nation’s death to November 6, 2012 and warning trespassers that the
owner possesses “firearms and a backhoe.” Donald Trump’s election in
2016, when the county voted fifty-eight percent to thirty-five percent in his
favor,12 does not appeared to have convinced anyone to jettison those
grave markers.
So polarized are Arizonans’ views on political issues like immigration
that a few years back thousands of conservatives signed a petition to
secede from the Union and to form the Independent Republic of Arizona.13
When that movement failed to generate sufficient signatures to trigger a
(likely negative) response from the White House, liberals in Pima County,
which lies just north of Cochise County, sought a ballot initiative to create
a separate state, Baja Arizona, and to separate themselves from those
separatists.14 Other Arizonans responded more directly, petitioning the
White House “to deport everyone that signed a petition to withdraw their
state from the United States of America.” Both of those proposals failed,
too, and the cultural opposites remain side-by-side, rubbing uneasily
against one another.
That friction produces peak heat here along the border with the
Mexican State of Sonora, which runs from the Chihuahuan Desert in New
Mexico to the Sonoran Desert in western Arizona. Here at the midpoint is
ranch land, characterized by rolling hills sown with grass, mesquite trees,
and acacia brush.
The heat, both literal and metaphorical also generated the name for the
path that leads from Sonora up into southern Arizona before turning west
toward California: “El Camino del Diablo,” or “The Devil’s Highway.”15
The 250-mile trail, originally a Native American footpath, marks the
routes of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in the 1500s for his soul-
sacrificing search for the City of Gold and of Father Eusebio Francisco
6 Chapter One
Kino’s soul saving quest in the 1600s. In recent times, though, El Camino
del Diablo has worked its evil on the migrants making their way to what
they hope will be a better life. It’s a desolate path littered with grave
markers and the detritus of the desperate.
The Camino passes to the west of these ranch lands, but it cuts a wider
swath than the footpath of a half millennium ago, and the effects of El
Diablo’s labors are evident here, too. It was here that a decade ago the
vigilante border patrol group, the Minuteman Project, sprang to life.
Though the group formally disbanded several years ago, even more
radicalized citizen groups still patrol the border and humanitarian groups
have reported violent encounters with them.16 On the other hand, ranchers
report that the migrants commit break-ins and more violent acts. Recent
grave markers in this area bear witness to the continuing presence of evil.
Sometimes that evil has risen out of the landscape and loomed over the
populace, casting a dark shadow from the Mule Mountains of Cochise
County to the Sierra Madres in Sonora. Two of humanity’s darkest hours
occurred three and a half decades and a few miles apart on this parched bit
of earth. Mirror images of one another, memories of the two events
continue to haunt residents on both sides of the border.
The first of these tragedies, claimed the Mexican Consulate in Douglas,
Arizona, “opened the hunting season for every illegal alien who comes into
the United States.”17 On August 18, 1976, three young Mexican men,
Manuel García Loya, Eleazar Ruelas Zavala, and Bernabé Herrera-Mata,
entered the US illegally at the Douglas border and walked toward the
nearby town of Elfrida, where farm work waited. Their path took them
across the ranch lands of the Hanigan family. George Hanigan and his
sons Thomas and Patrick captured the men, announcing, “All right, you
fucking wetbacks. You’re not going anywhere.” 18 The Hanigans hog-tied
the Mexican men, beat them, hung them from a tree, burned their feet,
threatened to cut off their genitals with a knife, and in the one
transgression that would matter, robbed them. The Hanigans eventually
released the men and chased them back to Mexico, but not before filling
their backs with buckshot.
When an all-White jury in Cochise County state court inexplicably
acquitted the Hanigans of assault, kidnapping and robbery charges,
protesters demanded a federal intervention. To circumvent the prohibition
of double jeopardy, federal prosecutors focused on the robbery, charging
the Hanigans with violating the Hobbs Act, which makes illegal “the
movement of any article or commodity in commerce, by robbery ....” To
avoid local prejudice, the Feds also moved the trial one county west, to
Pima County. When that trial ended with a hung jury, the Feds then moved
a county north, to Maricopa County, and secured a conviction of one of

the brothers, with a three-year sentence.
In addition to robbing their victims, the Hanigans’ other meaningful
mistake, according to senior Border Patrol agent Tom Miller, was in
letting their captives survive. “I can see shooting them, you know, blowing
their heads off. But torturing them makes no sense.”19 But, survive they
did, and Musician Pedro Flores would immortalize “Los Tres Mojados,”
“The Three Wetbacks,” in song.20
The victim of the second of these tragedies, some three and a half
decades later, has not generated song or hero. Robert Krentz was, by all
accounts, one of the good guys … to everyone.21 A well-liked and highly
regarded cattleman who had recently been inducted into the Arizona
Farming and Ranching Hall of Fame, he was quick to offer help to anyone
regardless of legal status or the side of the border fence from which they
hailed. At around 10:30 am on March 27, 2010, while out doing what a
cowboy does—checking on the stock watering ponds on the 35,000 acre
ranch that had been in his family since 1907—he discovered a man in peril
and radioed his brother something to the effect, “illegal alien ... hurt ... call
Border Patrol.”
Krentz was not to be heard speaking again. His family discovered him
shortly before midnight lying dead on the land that had defined his life
with two 9 mm slugs in his chest. His trusty canine sidekick, “Blue,” had
also suffered a gunshot and, though still breathing, was not to survive. The
presumed perpetrator’s tracks led south across the Mexican border.
The case remains unsolved. Initial suspicions centered on the actions
of a surprised undocumented immigrant. Later theories and law
enforcement investigation postulated retribution for a roundup of illegal
drug couriers on the property the day before. Authorities have made no
arrests and offer little hope of unraveling this border mystery.
The Hanigan and Krentz cases, though mirror opposites, have spawned
a common legacy in the figure of vigilante groups that formed in the wake
of their long, dark shadows. Heavily armed and possessed of brutal
sentiment—“If I had my way, I’d shoot every single one of ‘em”22—these
groups round up people they believe to have entered the country illegally,
hold them for border patrol officials, and all too often abuse their detainees.
Although the number of these groups has waned in recent years, those
remaining are more radical and violent than their predecessors.23 The
recent arrival of children illegally immigrating to the US from Central
America has generated diametrically opposing stances. Some have
advocated that we ought to “support and welcome” the young people
seeking refuge from drug trade-related violence.24 But, the Ku Klux Klan
8 Chapter One
has announced that, to deter their immigration, “what [we] ought to do is

go to the border and kill someone.”25 Given the stark political divide over
this and related immigration issues, it’s difficult to envision Arizona,
whether one of the United States or an independent republic, remaining a
unified political entity.
Fig. 1-3: Sarah Grace Edgerton Bakarich McCool at age 14 in Iowa.
I’ve let my thoughts wander to the future. Today, though, is about my

present. And my past. My mother has died, and I’m with my daughter
driving to her funeral service at the family cemetery on the Lazy Y 5 Ranch.
My grandmother, Sarah Grace Edgerton Bakarich McCool, and my
grandfather and her then-husband, Michael Nicolas Bakarich, homesteaded
here in the late 1920s. Grace met Michael in Chicago circa 1924 or 1925,
when Grace was in her twenties and Michael in his early thirties. Grace, a
single mother with an infant in her arms and leading another child by the
hand, had just stepped off a train from New Orleans when she applied for
a position singing in the speakeasy Michael owned with his brother. Now,
just why Grace ended up in Chicago remains a family mystery, largely
because Grace refused to speak about her pre-Chicago life. And, she spoke
very few words about those Chicago years. Sort of the equivalent of name,
rank, serial number. For public consumption, her life began in Cochise
County.
Our family did, eventually, assemble a sketch of her pre-Arizona life.
Grace was born March 16, 1903 in Waterloo, Iowa to Frank and Etta Page.
The Page lineage in North America begins with Jeremiah Page, who
fought in the Revolutionary War. Poet Lucy Larcom memorialized those
early Page family years in “A Gambrel Roof,” first published in The
Atlantic Monthly in February of 1874.26 Jeremiah Page, Captain of the
Danvers, Massachusetts Militia and about to join the battle of Lexington
and Concord, decreed to his wife Sarah that “no tea would be drunk in his
house.” Apparently a clever and social being, Sarah arranged for a tea
party on the structure’s “widow’s walk” atop its roof, pronouncing, as
recounted in Larcom’s poem, “Upon a house is not within it.”
Grace may have been born into privilege, but her life’s path took an
anything but privileged route. When she was a preteen, her father died of a
gunshot wound when visiting Washington, DC. The family knew not why
or who shot him. Grace’s mother, Etta, soon remarried a man by the name
of Orr, who agreed to allow Grace’s brother to join the family created by
this new union, but embraced neither Grace nor her sister, Guenn. Etta
responded to her new husband’s wishes by sending her daughters across
the town of Waterloo to live with her sisters. Census records reveal that
over the next decade, Grace would alternate living with her aunts and with
her grandparents, who also lived in Waterloo.
On September 17, 1921, at the age of eighteen, Grace married one
Lloyd E. Gerholt. She lived with her husband for a short while—the local
paper, on an apparently slow news day, reported Grace hosting her
mother-in-law at Lloyd’s home in Waterloo. But, the marriage does not
appear to have been a love match. Grace, alone, boarded a train bound for
New Orleans, where, in March of 1922, far less than nine months into her
marriage, she gave birth to James, the first of what were to be her eight
children.
In New Orleans, Grace married a man named Rousseau—my mother
and I discovered the marriage license in an old trunk in my grandmother’s
house that we searched shortly after her death in 1992. Family lore has it
10 Chapter One
that she met him in the New Orleans hospital where she gave birth to that
first child. This also proved to be a short term, and demonstrably unhappy
relationship. About a year later, after Grace had given birth to another
child and was pregnant, according to my Aunt Guenn, Rousseau struck
Grace, slamming her against a wall, and causing her to miscarry. Again,
Grace hopped a train, this time bound for Chicago.
Fig. 1-4: Marriage proposal card.
A couple of decades after my grandmother’s death, I returned to that

trunk to see whether it might yield something that would help to unravel
the mysteries of her life. That Rousseau marriage license had been lost to
the ravages of time. But, other valuables remained, including her middle
and high school diplomas, a hard tack biscuit that a great, great uncle
saved from his service during the Civil War, and Jeremiah Page’s military
commission, signed by George Washington. Grace saved one other,
curious item: a card that appears to proffer a marriage proposal. One J. R.
McQuilkin declared himself “the only innocent man in town,” stated a net
worth of $15 million “in my dreams,” and concluded at the bottom of the
card, “Not married, but willing to be. Are You?”
The card is old, and there were McQuilkins in Waterloo when Grace
first married. So, she likely acquired it in her hometown and carried it to
New Orleans, Chicago, and out to the Wild West, where she preserved it
for decades. But, why? Grace was not sentimental. She saved very little,
typically only things of the magnitude of military commissions bearing
George Washington’s signature. For reasons unknown, she cherished that
card.
What makes this peculiar treasure all the more curious is that Grace
had no difficulty finding, and leaving, husbands. When she arrived in
Chicago, still in her early twenties, she’d discarded two husbands and
would soon acquire another.
Perhaps that first marriage, to Gerholt, holds the key to understanding
her attachment to the card. We know that within a few months of the
wedding, Grace had left Gerholt and moved to New Orleans, where she
gave birth to a child. Given her nearly immediate marriage in New Orleans,
Grace apparently harbored little sentiment for Gerholt. Moreover, Gerholt’s
marriage to another woman soon after Grace’s departure would seem to
indicate that he, too, shook off the dissolution quickly. Might their union
have occurred for practical, rather than romantic reasons? Certainly, that
Grace departed Waterloo alone while pregnant diminishes any claim of
deep affection between the two. Moreover, would a husband in the 1920s
countenance the disappearance into the night of a wife carrying his child?
Wouldn’t he, at least, seek to find her instead of remarrying quickly?
Whatever the reasons for those first two marriages and their informal
dissolution—I’ve not found divorce records, Grace never mentioned either
to anyone in the family. We’ve since pieced her pre-Arizona history
together courtesy of public records and her children’s fuzzy recollections
of having overheard conversations not meant for their ears. This might
indicate that the marriages were not happy affairs. This might also hint at
Grace’s attachment to that marriage proposal card. Why would a young
woman in the 1920s need to resort to marrying a man advertising his
availability on the sidewalk? Small communities, like Waterloo, in the
nation’s farming regions suffered an over-supply of men because young
women moved to big cities like Chicago, generating a “defeminization”27
that led men, like our card-bearing McQuilkin, scrambling for wives.
Under what circumstances would a young woman like Grace even
think of needing to resort to the desperate for a groom? The most common
reason at the time involved the “bridal pregnancy.”28 Women pregnant out
of wedlock clambered to find a marriage partner to avoid having to, as the
times demanded, put the child up for adoption. But, would Grace have
been in this position? She certainly didn’t bond with her husband, and he
did not show any signs of mourning her departure or her delivery of her
baby a thousand miles away. Might she have kept that card because,
though she did not marry the fellow who bore the name emblazoned on it,
the card reminded of her traumatic search for a husband? Her aunts did
take in boarders and around the same time as when she got married, the
census data report a single, male border in the home. Moreover, Grace
gave birth to that child but seven months after marrying Gerholt. Hmm.
In any event, Grace was never one to look back, except, perhaps, when
she peered into that trunk. That forward path, in the wake of Rousseau’s
12 Chapter One
attack on her in New Orleans, pointed to Chicago. Again, why the Windy
City? Grace never said. We do know that she had been a quick study,
completing high school early and studying music at the University of Iowa
with a goal of becoming an opera singer before motherhood intervened.
She also sang with the Tulane choir while in New Orleans. Perhaps she
thought a career in singing possible in Chicago. If so, she was right,
though she likely fantasized about performing in a venue different from
the one in which she began, and ended, her music career. Stepping from
the train in Chicago’s Grand Central Station—this was before Union
Station opened in 1925—and not seeing an opera house within view,
Grace apparently settled for my grandfather’s speakeasy.
Fig. 1-5: My grandfather, Michael Bakarich, late 1940s, at the Grand Canyon.
Michael, who was born in in 1892 in Kumrovec, Croatia, was also a

quick study. His formal education ended in grade school and at the age of
twelve, he apprenticed with his uncle Matt Popich, a forest ranger.
Michael and forestry were not to be and when he turned sixteen Michael
hopped a train for Ashwiller, Germany, where he worked in the mines.
Two years later, Michael boarded a steamer headed for the Land of
Opportunity, stepped off the boat at Ellis Island, and quickly developed
English fluency to add to his Russian, Polish, German, and Croatian
language skills. Mining took him to Pennsylvania, Newfoundland, and
eventually to gold country in Alaska. Although he arrived post-Rush,
Michael apparently found enough of the malleable metal to fund his
journey in 1920 to Chicago and his share with his brother of the purchase
price of a bar. The Eighteenth Amendment had been ratified in January of

1919, going into effect a year later, and the Twenties hadn’t even begun to
think about roaring. So, Michael likely entered the libations market at its
economic nadir. But, a year later, when Grace brightened the establishment’s
doorway, business was good enough to hire a cabaret singer. If earthly
rather than heavenly, a match was made.
The Twenties did eventually roar, and a bit too loudly for Grace and
Michael. The world of the speakeasy may have been a mom and pop
business in 1921, but when profits began looking good, the likes of Al
Capone moved into the neighborhood.29 Capone cut his lawless teeth
working for famed mobster John Torrio. When rival mobsters killed
Torrio in the mid-1920s, Capone inherited the top spot in the organization
and demonstrated his acumen by building the enterprise into a $100
million a year business in speakeasies, bookie joints, gambling houses,
brothels, horses and racetracks, and distilleries and breweries. Seeing the
Tommy Gun writing on the wall, Grace and Michael left Chicago sometime
around 1926 or 1927, probably when Capone’s war with rival gangster Joe
Aiello was approaching its bloody zenith.30 They’d had enough.
Grace and Michael loaded all their worldly possession and their now
three children into the car and headed southwest. Photographs of the day
reveal a striking couple. Grace was petite, fair-haired, in possession of
refined facial features, and, well, drop dead gorgeous. Michael, too, looked
to have stepped from the fashion pages. He was square jawed, had piercing
eyes, and displayed a well-earned confidence. Grace wears the elegant
dress of the times and looks past the camera, toward her future. Michael
challenges the camera, as if to counter any notion that fear of the likes of
Al Capone had driven him from Chicago. He wears the fedora and sport
coat that would be his trademark when not toiling on the ranch on which
they would settle or, again, in the mines. Both seem more suited to city
than country life. Grace would adapt, thrive, actually, but Michael wouldn’t.
The family initially stopped in Bisbee where Michael returned to
mining. But, the wide-open spaces beaconed, at least to Grace. The federal
government had provided just the vehicle to provide Grace with a new
challenge. In 1862, to encourage people to move west to occupy more of
the American territories, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law The
Homestead Act.31 An adult citizen who filed a homesteading claim, built a
twelve by fourteen foot dwelling on the land, and grew some sort of crop
would, after the passing of five years, gain title to 160 acres. This worked
well for the likes of Kansas and Oklahoma, but the arid lands surrounding
El Camino del Diablo did not support farming, and 160 acres of parched
earth sprouting sparse grass wouldn’t sustain enough cattle to make ranching
14 Chapter One
a viable option. So, in 1916, Congress enacted the Stock-Raising

Homestead Act.32 This law provided the claimant with 640 acres, or a full
section/square mile of land, and didn’t require growing crops, but only
modest “range improvements” like building fences and digging wells. The
rancher got four times the land that a farmer got under the Homestead Act,
but the trade-off was that the Stock-Raising Homestead Act granted only
surface rights, leaving mineral rights in the hands of the federal
government. In 1929, Grace and Michael staked their claim in this new
frontier by filing what would be the last homestead claim in Cochise
County.
Fig. 1-6: Lazy Y 5 brand, burned into a slice of oak from a tree on the ranch.
Perhaps it was the irony of owning no mineral rights to his new

acreage. Perhaps he missed the city life—my mother recounted tales of
Michael walking the streets of Bisbee, gregariously chatting with the
residents in whatever their common language. Whatever the reason,
Michael didn’t last long as a rancher; almost immediately upon their
arrival, he returned to working in the mines. He did return often enough to
father another five children with Grace. But, he spent most of his time
elsewhere and died in a mine collapse in the northern Arizona city of
Jerome in 1948 at the age of fifty-six.
Grace, though, took to the Arizona desert like the pioneer she was. The
homestead, initially the Quarter Circle B Quarter Circle (or, more
prosaically, a brand in the form of a B in parentheses) but later renamed
the Lazy Y Five (a 5 with a Y in the hook to the left at the bottom of the
numeral), lay near a dry wash known appropriately as Horsethief Draw.
The family settled in a shack on a hill overlooking that draw. It provided a
beautiful view and served as an efficient center point for ranching activity.
But, the nearest water was a two-mile walk, which Grace did without
complaint, using an oxen yoke and two wooden buckets to bring the elixir
of life to her growing family.
By 1935, Grace’s oldest sons had acquired sufficient skill to build the
house where Grace would live until her death at the age of eighty-eight in
1992. Those sons, with the help of their visiting father and some of his
friends, also dug a well. The family also raised chickens, ran a few cattle,
and grew a few vegetables. Having crossed the threshold of rural Arizona
survival and having children old enough to share some of the burden,
Grace’s academic aspirations resurfaced and she began writing Arizona
history articles for the state’s leading newspapers. She eventually
published four books—Gunsmoke: the True Story of Old Tombstone,
Sunday Trails, So Said the Coroner, and Buried Treasure—and became
one of the world’s leading historians on the early years of Cochise County.
She buried her own past by immersing herself in Arizona lore.
Fig. 1-7: My grandmother, Grace McCool, on the Lazy Y 5 Ranch, 1963.

16 Chapter One
I’m lost in thoughts of my grandmother Grace as I drive with my

daughter Grace, who was born the year following Grace I’s death and is,
of course, named for my first and biggest hero. Musing about both Graces,
I nearly miss my turn onto the road that will lead us to the Lazy Y 5 and
the family cemetery. Warning my daughter and braking hard, I make the
sharp right, slide a bit in the gravel, overcorrect and fishtail, but end up
pointing, roughly, in the right direction. “Nice turn,” my daughter says
sarcastically, but with a wide smile. “Sheesh,” I respond jokingly, “I
started driving on these roads when I was seven or eight. As soon as we
could see over the steering wheel, standing up, Grandma Grace would say,
‘The keys to my van are over there. Why don’t you load a bale of hay and
drive it down to the corral for your uncle George?’ Sometimes she rode
with us, and if we hit a bump, this was before seatbelts and before we were
tall enough to sit while driving so using brakes was a challenge, she would
look around and ask, ‘Is anybody killed?’ Well, I didn’t kill anybody with
that turn, making it just fine by your great grandmother’s standards. And at
least the road is paved now.” “Yeah,” says my daughter with a smirk, “But
you’re on the wrong side of it.”
The road is Moson Road, named for Frank Moson, Sr., one of the
best-known ranchers in Cochise County history.33 Frank was born on a
ranch near San Jose, California in 1878, moved with his family to the San
Pedro River Basin in 1882, and was raised in the saddle. A 1909 photo by
famed cowboy photographer Irwin E. Smith34 depicting Frank and his son,
Frank. Jr., reveals the elder Moson as a lean and dusty cowboy, arms
crossed and resting on the saddle horn, wearily squinting at the camera,
and looking twice his thirty-one years. A four-year-old Junior, dressed like
his father in full cowboy regalia and sporting at least as much dust, sits
upright on a pony half the size of his father’s steed, ready to follow
Senior’s difficult path in life. The photograph’s caption lists Frank, Sr. as
“General Manager of the OR,” another Cochise County ranch. Shortly
after the photograph was taken, Frank borrowed $5,000, struck out on his
own, built his herd and name, and in 1918 acquired the Y Lightning Ranch
(yep, a “Y” with a lightning bolt-shaped arm), one of the largest in the
county. The ranch, located about ten miles from ours, dwarfed the Lazy Y
5, which reached about 3,000 acres, or five sections (hence the “5” in the
brand) at its largest. When the Bakarich clan moved into the neighborhood,
Moson quickly became a friend and mentor to Grace and her gaggle of
kids. Senior died in 1959, when I was but four and I have no memory of
him, but I do recall my grandmother’s many tales about “that old
cowboy.” Junior ran the Y Lighting until his death in 1963 (when Frank III
took over), and I have memories of visiting that large ranch and watching
cowboys herd, rope, and brand the cattle, looking in the 1960s just as they
did in Irwin Smith’s 1909 photographs.
A road sign stirs another Moson-related memory. As we pass
“Horsethief Draw,” a narrow, rutted, and unpaved road (like all roads on
the Lazy Y 5) that leads to the house that my father built for us after we
moved from my grandmother’s, we see a sign. Like any road sign in rural
Arizona that has been in place for even a short while, it’s riddled with
bullet holes. My daughter reads the sign aloud, “Entering Naboth’s
Vineyard” and asks, “What’s that about?” That’s about Moson Road, and
my grandmother.
Some three decades ago, Cochise County decided that it needed to cut
a path from Route 80 to the tiny, unincorporated community of Hereford,
about ten miles south. At the time, Hereford hosted a water tank and stock
loading platform for the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, making it a
destination for ranchers taking their cattle to market. Those ranchers
herded their cattle by horseback and certainly were in no need of a road.
Perhaps county commissioners expected the community population to
surge once the new road reduced the drive time from points north by half
an hour. In any event, the commissioners had two route choices: across
state-owned lands or across the Lazy Y 5. They chose the Lazy Y 5, but on
the very edge of the state lands. Citing that the Stock-Raising Homestead
Act and the ranch’s lack of mineral rights, the commissioners later ruled
that the easement did not constitute a taking and denied Grace’s claim for
compensation. Maybe Michael was right all those years ago when he
balked at living on land that he couldn’t mine.
Grace’s response was to erect a sign beside Moson road referencing a
tale from the Old Testament. In 1963, at the age of sixty and having
accomplished enough for three life times, she went looking for a new
challenge: Grace enrolled in a correspondence course to become a Methodist
lay minister. It was during her studies that she likely encountered the
chronicle that she referenced on that sign. Naboth owned a small vineyard
on eastern slope of the hill of Jezreel.35 King Ahab decided that the
property would be an ideal location for “a garden of herbs,” and offered to
buy it. Alas, Naboth had inherited his land from his father and, accordingly,
Hebrew law prevented him from selling it. Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, intervened
to mollify the disappointed king and arranged a mock trial of Naboth that
rendered a death sentence by stoning, which the villagers happily carried
out. The prophet Elijah later visited Ahab on his ill-gotten vineyard,
exclaimed, “You have killed and also taken possession,” and foretold
doom in the King’s future. But, Ahab, ever one to shift misfortune,
18 Chapter One
humbled himself before Elijah and God visited the doom upon his son,
Joram.
Those county commissioners experienced a bit of doom, too. Hereford
never did thrive, and remains an unincorporated community. The railway
pulled up its tracks in 2000, ranchers take their cattle north now, and a
mere 6,000 people reside in the general area.
Fig 1-8: My grandmother’s house, circa 1980, where I grew up.
By the time I’ve told Grace II the sign’s backstory, we’ve reached East
Lazy Y 5 Road, a narrow dirt lane that was but a cow path when I last
lived on these lands. We turn right and bounce along for a mile before the
cemetery and my grandmother’s home come into view. The family sold
the house and the surrounding five acres when Grace I died, so I won’t be
able to show it to Grace II. We do pull up to the gate and get out while I
wax nostalgic. The fence made of ocotillo stalks and a few strands of
barbed wire are as they were when Grace I was alive. The dirt driveway,
too, is as I remember it: lined with Native American grinding stones that
we found lying about the ranch. The “yard,” such as it is, was never
cultivated and is still in its natural state, featuring a sprinkling of agaves, a
handful majestic saguaro cacti, a variety of smaller cacti like chollas and
prickly pears, mesquite trees, and a few springs of dry grass.
I point out to Grace II the peculiarities of the house, built by untrained

teenagers and enlarged on occasion. The tin roof sags and the corners are
not square. I think about my early years living in this house, before
electricity reached this isolated spot. We had a windmill to pump water
into a holding tank, which gave us running water to the kitchen sink, if
there had been sufficient wind to fill that tank. Children bathed in a metal
washtub placed next to the kitchen’s wood stove; adults heated buckets of
water on that stove and carried them to a tub in a nearby room. We
relieved ourselves in the outhouse out back and I remember frightening
journeys to it on cold, dark nights. We had a wind-charger, one of the very
earliest wind generators that sometimes worked, though the storage
batteries in the basement never functioned during my stay here. Mostly,
we read by the flickering light of kerosene lanterns.
Fig 1-9: Me, on the ranch, circa 1964, shortly before “I shot a man in Reno, just to
watch him die.”
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“If you have a ship to sell, or you are looking for positions, this is
only wasting time,” said he. “I presume you heard something of our
errand among the docks.”
“Yes, we have heard of it,” and O’Shea bit off the words. “Well,
Johnny, shall we go below and wait till His Majesty heaves in sight?
This minister of finance will give us no satisfaction. And I am not
used to dealing with understrappers.”
“You are impertinent!” cried the young man. “I have been as
courteous as possible. You will leave at once, or I shall ask the hotel
management to put you out.”
Up from a chair rose the massive bulk of Johnny Kent, and his
ample countenance was truculent as he roared:
“You’ll throw us out, you impudent son of a sea-cook? No, Cap’n
Mike, I won’t shut up. I ain’t built that way. Diplomacy be doggoned.
I’m liable to lose my temper.”
“’Tis a large-sized temper to lose, and I hereby hoist storm-
signals,” said O’Shea with a grin as he neatly tripped the minister of
finance, who was endeavoring to reach an electric push-button.
The fervid declamation of Johnny Kent must have echoed
through the apartments. It sufficed to attract the notice of an erect,
elderly gentleman in another room who opened a door and stared
curiously at the strenuous tableau. At sight of the kindly, refined face
with the snowy mustache and imperial, O’Shea gleefully shouted:
“The king, God bless him! So this bright young minister of
finance was a liar as well as a thief!”
Comically abashed, Johnny Kent mumbled an apology for
making such an uproar, at which the elderly gentleman bowed
acknowledgment and said to the perturbed and rumpled Strothers:
“My dear baron, will you be good enough to explain?”
“These ruffians insisted on seeing you, Your Majesty, and when I
tried to discover their business they called me names and assaulted
me,” sputtered the young man in a heat of virtuous indignation.
“He was afraid of the truth,” cried O’Shea. “We came to tell Your
Majesty that he has cooked up a job to cheat ye out of six thousand
pounds, and we can prove it up to the hilt. We caught him with the
goods.”
“That sounds a whole lot better to me than diplomacy,”
approvingly exclaimed Johnny Kent.
Bewildered by the vehemence of these outspoken visitors, King
Osmond I of Trinadaro turned to the sullen minister of finance and
inquired, still with his placid kindliness of manner:
“These men do not look like ruffians, my dear baron. What are
their names, and who are they? And what is the meaning of this
grave charge they bring against your integrity?”
“I am O’Shea, shipmaster, hailing from the port of New York,”
spoke up the one.
“I am Johnny Kent, chief engineer to Captain Mike O’Shea,” said
the other, “and I hail from the State o’ Maine. And we can show you
our papers. We didn’t lose ’em in the Bay of Biscay.”
Strothers stood biting his nails and shifting from one foot to the
other, for once stripped of his adroit, plausible demeanor, nor could
he find, on the spur of the moment, the right word to say. The royal
personage said it for him.
“I think you had better retire. I wish to hear what Captain O’Shea
and Mr. Kent may have to tell me.”
The amiable monarch was unconsciously swayed by the virile
personality of Captain O’Shea, who dominated the scene as though
he were on the deck of his own ship.
Baron Frederick Martin Strothers made a last attempt to protest,
but Johnny Kent glared at him so wickedly and O’Shea moved a step
nearer with so icy a glint in his gray eye that there was a moment
later a vanished minister of finance.
The etiquette of courts troubled O’Shea not in the least as he
cheerily yet respectfully suggested to the perplexed elderly
gentleman:
“Now, King Osmond, if you will please sit down and let us talk
things over with ye as man to man, we’ll tell you how it happened.”
The personage obediently did as he was told, nor could he feel
offended by the shipmaster’s boyish candor. O’Shea chewed on his
cigar and his eyes twinkled as he glanced at the stubborn visage of
Johnny Kent, which was still flushed. His Majesty began to get his
wits together and to wonder why he had permitted this brace of total
strangers to take him by storm. O’Shea broke into his cogitations by
explaining:
“You are surprised that ye chucked the trusted minister of
finance out of the room and consented to listen to us at all. In the
first place, we are not askin’ anything of you. What I mean is, we felt
bound to put you next to the dirty deal that was framed up to rob ye.”
“We saw you in the Jolly Mermaid tavern, and we liked your
looks,” ingenuously added Johnny Kent. “We decided to do you a
good turn, whether we ever saw the color of your money or not.”
“And we didn’t like the cut of the jib of your minister of finance,”
resumed O’Shea. “And we were dead sure that Captain Handy was
rotten.”
King Osmond earnestly interrupted:
“But I have had all the confidence in the world in Baron
Strothers, and as a British sailor of the tarry breed, Captain
Handy——”
“The two of them are tarred with the same brush,” exclaimed
O’Shea. “They fixed it up between them to pay twenty-four thousand
pounds for the Tyneshire Glen and sell her to you for thirty thousand.
’Tis a simple matter to produce the evidence. Send a messenger to
Tavistock & Huntley in Leadenhall Street. They named the price to
Captain Handy and your precious minister of finance. ’Tis a clear
case.”
“You can buy her yourself from George Huntley, and he’ll be darn
glad to get his price,” chimed in Johnny Kent. “That ought to prove it.
But if you’ll listen to me, you’ll have nothin’ to do with the Tyneshire
Glen.”
King Osmond’s faith in human nature had been severely jarred,
but somehow he could not doubt the statements of these rugged
men who drove their words home as with a sledge-hammer. Toward
the graceless minister of finance he felt more sorrow than anger as
he wove together in his mind this and that circumstance of previous
transactions which should have made him more vigilant. But the
culprit was the son of a dear friend, and his credentials had been
impeccable.
“I shall obtain from Tavistock & Huntley confirmation of your
story, as you suggest,” he slowly replied to O’Shea. “In the meantime
I wish you would tell me about yourselves.”
“We are looking for big risks and big wages,” said O’Shea with a
smile. “Johnny Kent and I are better known in the ports of the
Spanish Main than in London River. We have made voyages to Hayti
and Honduras and Cuba without the consent of the lawful
governments, and we know our trade.”
King Osmond I reflectively stroked his white imperial, and his
face assumed an expression of vivid interest. These men were
different from Captain Handy. They would neither cringe nor lie to
him, and they looked him squarely between the eyes.
“Will you be good enough to come into my own rooms?” said he.
“We shall find more privacy and comfort. I should like to hear of your
adventures along the Spanish Main.”
With a courteous gesture he showed them into a much larger
and more luxurious room which was used as a library or private
office, inasmuch as a large flat-topped desk was strewn with books,
pamphlets, and documents, and more of them were piled on tables
and on shelves against the walls. As temporary headquarters for
royalty at work, the room suggested industry and the administration
of large affairs.
So friendly and unconventional was the reception granted them
that Captain O’Shea and Johnny Kent were made to feel that their
intrusions demanded no more apologies. Their curiosity fairly
tormented them. It was on the tips of their tongues to ask the host
what kind of a kingdom was his, and where it was situated, but this
would be rudeness. O’Shea took note of several admiralty charts on
the desk, two of them unrolled with the corners pinned down, and a
rule and dividers for measuring distances.
While O’Shea talked, Johnny Kent let his eyes wander to a small
table at his elbow. It was covered with magazines, government
reports, and newspaper clippings. One of the latter was so placed
that he was able to read it from where he sat, and with absorbed
interest he perused the following paragraphs:
Colonel Osmond George Sydenham-Leach, of the ancient

Norfolk family, has lived on the Continent for the last dozen
years, and is better known to the boulevards of Paris than to
London. He was never considered eccentric until recently when
his claim to the island of Trinadaro in the South Atlantic as a
sovereign realm aroused much interest and amusement. He
assumed the title of King Osmond I.
It is said that he has created an order of nobility, and that the
insignia of the Grand Cross of Trinadaro have been bestowed
upon the fortunate gentlemen composing his cabinet and coterie
of advisers. A Court Circular is expected to appear shortly, and a
diplomatic service will be organized.
Until His Majesty is ready to sail for Trinadaro to occupy his
principality, the royal entourage will be found in the state
apartments of the Hotel Carleton. Elaborate preparations are in
progress for colonizing the island of Trinadaro, and a ship-load
of people and material will leave London in a few weeks.
King Osmond I has a very large fortune. He is unmarried,
and his estates, at his death, will pass to the children of his only
brother, Sir Wilfred Sydenham-Leach of Haselton-on-Trent. The
kinfolk of His Majesty are alarmed, so it is reliably reported, lest
his wealth may be squandered on this curiously mediæval
conception of setting up an independent principality upon an
unproductive, volcanic island in mid-ocean which no nation has
taken the trouble to annex.
Slowly and carefully Johnny Kent possessed himself of this
information with never a flicker of a smile. The solution of the
mystery of King Osmond I impressed him as neither grotesque nor
curiously mediæval. In all London the King of Trinadaro could not
have found two men of readier mind to fall in with his project and
pretensions. To play at being a king on a desert island, to have the
means to make it all come true—why, thought Johnny Kent, and he
knew O’Shea must instantly agree with him, any man worth his salt
would jump at the chance.
He was anxious to pass the tidings on to his comrade, and when
the conversation slackened he edged in:
“We must be on our way, Cap’n Mike. His Majesty is good-
hearted to listen to us, but it ain’t polite to talk his ear off.”
With this speech went so elaborate a wink that O’Shea
comprehended that the engineer had something up his sleeve. Their
host cordially declared that he must see them again, and made an
appointment for ten o’clock of the next forenoon. They took their
departure after friendly farewells and steered a course for Blackwall
and the tavern of the Jolly Mermaid.
O’Shea was as delighted as a boy to learn that Osmond I was
about to found an island kingdom. It was a more attractive revelation
than if he had been discovered to be the inconsequential ruler of
some effete little domain of Europe. And if one planned to set himself
up in business as a sovereign, it was proper to use all the pomp and
trappings and ceremony that belonged to the game.
“If he is to have a navy,” cried O’Shea as he pounded his friend
on the back, “I know where he can find an admiral and a fleet
engineer.”
“Not so fast, Cap’n Mike. I have a notion that he’ll have his own
troubles gettin’ to his kingdom. Any man that can be buncoed as
easy as he was is liable to have all his playthings taken away from
him before he has a chance to use ’em. I’ll feel safer about him when
he gets clear of London River.”
Before seeking the royal audience next morning they went to
Leadenhall Street to see George Huntley. The ship-broker greeted
them indignantly.
“You would try to hoodwink me, would you?” exclaimed he. “I
have found out who your mysterious king is. I received a letter from
him last night, asking information about the price of the Tyneshire
Glen. I had no idea it was this crazy Colonel Sydenham-Leach that
calls himself ruler of Trinadaro.”
“Own up like a man, George,” shouted O’Shea. “Ye would like
nothing better than to be this kind of a king yourself.”
“You have read my thoughts like a wizard. But, confound you,
you have spoiled the sale of a steamer for me. How about that?”
“We have tried to keep an estimable king from going to Davy
Jones’s locker in a floating coffin that ye call the Tyneshire Glen,”
severely retorted O’Shea. “Have ye any steamers that will pass
honest men’s inspection?”
“Plenty of them,” promptly answered Huntley.
“Then we will look at two or three of them to-day, after we have
paid our respects to His Majesty. We will not let him be cheated out
of his eye-teeth. We have decided to protect him. Isn’t that so,
Johnny?”
“He needs us, Cap’n Mike.”
Huntley became serious and took them into the rear office before
he confided:
“I don’t know, I’m sure, whether you chaps are joking or not.
However, here is a bit of news for you on the quiet. I met a friend of
mine, a barrister, yesterday. We had luncheon at the Cheshire
Cheese and something or other set him to talking about this
Sydenham-Leach affair. It seems that the lawyers are quite keen
about it. The family relations are planning to kick up a devil of a row,
to bring proceedings under the lunacy act, and prevent this King
Osmond from sailing off to his silly island of Trinadaro. They hate to
see a fortune thrown away in this mad enterprise, as they call it.”
O’Shea was righteously wrathful as he flung out:
“Would they interfere with a gentleman and his diversions?
Hasn’t he a right to spend his money as he pleases? Have ye ever
seen him, George? He is a grand man to meet, and ’tis proud we are
to be his friends.”
“Oh, I imagine they will have a job to prove he is insane,” said
Huntley. “But they may make a pot of trouble for him.”
“I suppose they can pester him with all kinds of legal foolishness
and haul him before the courts, and so on,” agreed O’Shea. “It would
break his heart and spoil all his fun. ’Tis an outrageous shame,
George. What is the system in this country when they want to
investigate a man’s top story?”
“I asked the barrister chap,” replied Huntley. “The friends of the
person suspected of being dotty, usually his near relatives, lay the
case before one of the judges in lunacy, and he orders an inquiry,
which is held before a master in lunacy. Then if the alleged lunatic
demands a trial by jury he gets it. If he can’t convince them that he is
sound in the thinker, his estate is put in charge of a committee duly
appointed by law.”
O’Shea listened glumly and glowered his intense displeasure. If
the law could interfere with a man who wished to be king of an island
which nobody else wanted, then the law was all wrong.
“And these indecent relatives who want his money will wait and
spring a surprise on him,” said the aggrieved shipmaster. “They will
take his ship away from him and knock all his beautiful schemes into
a cocked hat.”
“I imagine he would not be allowed to leave England if the
proceedings were started,” said Huntley.
Johnny Kent, who had been darkly meditating, aroused himself
to observe explosively:
“We’ll get him to sea in his ship whenever he wants to sail, and
the relatives and the judges and the masters in lunacy be darned. It
ain’t the first time that you and me have broken laws in a good
cause, Cap’n Mike. You come along with us, George Huntley. We’re
on our way to have a confab with His Majesty, and maybe you can
do some business with him right off the reel. He ought to load his
ship and head for blue water as quick as the Lord will let him.”
II
Behold, then, the pair of exiled Yankee mariners stanchly
enlisted on the side of King Osmond I of Trinadaro, against the
designs of all who would thwart his gorgeous and impracticable
purposes. That his rank and title were self-assumed and his realm as
yet unpeopled impressed these ingenuous sailormen as neither
shadowy nor absurd.
King Osmond I was an elderly gentleman of a singularly
guileless disposition, and the notoriety attending his unique project
had caused him to be surrounded by persons who knew precisely
what they wanted. Of these the vanished minister of finance, Baron
Frederick Martin Strothers, of the brisk demeanor and the red
waistcoat, had been a conspicuous example. It was a rare piece of
good fortune for the amiable monarch that there should have come
to his aid two such hard-headed and honest adventurers as O’Shea
and Johnny Kent.
As the result of several interviews they were engaged to select a
steamer and to take charge of her for the voyage to Trinadaro. Their
qualifications were warmly indorsed by the well-known ship-broking
firm of Tavistock & Huntley, of Leadenhall Street. The managing
partner, that solid man with the romantic temperament, took the
keenest interest in every detail of the picturesque enterprise. It would
have been a temptation not easy to resist if King Osmond had
offered him the place of minister of marine, with the bestowal of the
insignia of the Grand Cross of Trinadaro.
The august personage was prodigiously busy. Several
secretaries and stenographers toiled like mad to handle the vast
amount of clerical work and correspondence. The king planned to
carry with him a sort of vanguard of subjects, or colonists, who were
to erect buildings, set up machinery, till the soil, prospect for mineral
wealth, and otherwise lay the foundations of empire. These pioneers
were largely recruited from his own estates and villages in Norfolk,
and formed a sturdy company of British yeomanry.
Captain Michael O’Shea was never one to smother his opinions
from motives of flattery or self-interest, and what information about
Trinadaro he had been able to pick up on his own account was not
dyed in glowing colors.
“I have not seen the island meself, Your Majesty,” said he, “but
the sailing directions set it down as mostly tall rocks with a difficult
landing-place and a dense population of hungry land-crabs as big as
your hat. And if it was any good, would not some one of these
benevolent Powers have gobbled it up long ago?”
King Osmond pleasantly made answer to such objections.
“Several years ago I made a long voyage in a sailing-ship on
account of my health, Captain O’Shea, and we touched at Trinadaro
to get turtles and fresh water. It was then that I conceived the idea of
taking possession of the island as an independent principality.
Although it has a most forbidding aspect from seaward, there is an
inland plateau fit for cultivation and settlement. It contains the ruined
stone walls of an ancient town founded by the early Portuguese
navigators. And it is well to remember,” concluded the monarch of
Trinadaro with a whimsical smile, “that available domains are so
scarce that one should not be too particular. Trinadaro appears to
have been overlooked.”
“’Tis a rule that the Christian nations will steal any territory that is
not nailed down,” was the dubious comment of O’Shea. “They must
have a poor opinion of Trinadaro, but, as ye say, ’tis about the only
chance that is left for a king to work at his trade with a brand-new
sign over the door.”
Johnny Kent spent most his time down river among the London
docks. Wherever sea-going steamers were for sale or charter his
bulky figure might have been seen trudging from deck to engine-
room.
At length, with the royal approval, O’Shea had the purchase
papers made out for the fine steamer Tarlington, which was berthed
in a basin of the East India Docks. She was a modern, well-equipped
freighter of four thousand tons which had been in the Australian
trade and could be fitted for sea at a few days’ notice. The transfer of
ownership was given no needless publicity. George Huntley attended
to that. He had another interview with his friend, the barrister, who
hinted at forthcoming events which gravely threatened the peace
and welfare of Osmond I and the kingdom of Trinadaro.
O’Shea and Johnny Kent discussed this latest information at
supper in the Jolly Mermaid tavern with a platter of fried sole
between them.
“’Tis this way,” explained O’Shea. “There is no doubt at all that
this grand king of ours will figure in the lunacy proceedings that we
heard was in the wind. His relatives are getting greedier and more
worried every day. And until the matter is decided one way or
another they will use every means the law allows to head him off
from spending the good money that belongs to him.”
“And how can they stop him from scatterin’ his coin for these
wise and benevolent purposes of his?” demanded the engineer.
“Well, George Huntley says the law will permit them to clap some
kind of a restrainin’ order on the ship and hold her in the dock with
the judges’ officers aboard till the proceedings are over. And they
can serve the same kind of documents on King Osmond to prevent
his chasing himself beyond the jurisdiction of the court.”
“But all this infernal shindy can’t be started unless there’s proof
positive that His Majesty intends to fly the coop, Cap’n Mike.”
“Right you are, Johnny, you old sea-lawyer. They can’t bother the
king until he is actually on board and the ship is cleared, so the
barrister lad tells George.”
“Then they’ll be watchin’ the Tarlington like terriers at a rat-hole,”
exclaimed the engineer.
“No, they won’t,” cried O’Shea with tremendous earnestness.
“Do ye mind how we slipped out of Charleston Harbor in the
Hercules steamer, bound on the filibusterin’ expedition to Honduras?
’Twas a successful stratagem, and it could be done in London River.”
“Sure it could,” and Johnny Kent chuckled joyously. “And the king
needn’t know anything about it.”
“Of course we will keep it from him if we can,” agreed O’Shea. “I
will do anything short of murder to keep him happy and undisturbed.
And it would upset him terribly to know that he must be smuggled out
of England to dodge the rascals that would keep him at home as a
suspected lunatic.”
“We’d better put George Huntley next to this proposition of ours,”
suggested Johnny. “He itches to be a red-handed conspirator.”
The ship-broker admired the scheme when it was explained to
him. Yes, the old Tyneshire Glen which they had so scornfully
declined to purchase was still at her moorings, and they were
welcome to use her as a dummy, or decoy, or whatever one might
choose to call it. O’Shea could pretend to load her, he could send as
many people on board as he liked, and put a gang of mechanics at
work all over the bally old hooker, said Huntley. If the enemies of
King Osmond I took it for granted that the Tyneshire Glen was the
ship selected to carry him off to Trinadaro, that was their own
lookout. It was a regular Yankee trick, by Jove!
O’Shea and Johnny Kent took great care to avoid being seen in
the vicinity of the Tarlington. Such inspection and supervision as
were necessary they contrived to attend to after dark. The king was
up to his ears in urgent business and was easily persuaded to leave
the whole conduct of the ship’s affairs in their capable hands and to
waive preliminary visits to the East India Docks.
O’Shea employed a Scotch engineer, who understood that his
wages depended on his taciturnity, to oversee such repair work as
the Tarlington needed, and to keep steam in the donkey-boilers.
All signs indicated that the Tarlington was preparing for one of
her customary voyages to Australia. Soon the cargo began to stream
into her hatches. The ostensible destinations of the truck-loads of
cases and crates and bales of merchandise were Sydney,
Melbourne, Wellington, Fremantle, and so on. One might read the
names of the consignees neatly stencilled on every package. This
was done under the eye of Captain O’Shea, who, in his time, had
loaded hundreds of boxes of rifles and cartridges innocently labelled
“Condensed Milk,” “Prime Virginia Hams,” and “Farming Tools.”
But the place to find roaring, ostentatious activity was on board
the old Tyneshire Glen. This rusty steamer fairly hummed. Captain
O’Shea visited her daily, and Johnny Kent hustled an engine-room
crew with loud and bitter words. It appeared as though the ship must
be in a great hurry to go to sea. While they were stirring up as much
pretended industry as possible, the question of a cargo was not
overlooked. It was shoved on board as fast as the longshoremen in
the holds could handle it. Nor did these brawny toilers know that all
these stout wooden boxes so plainly marked and consigned to
Trinadaro “via S.S. Tyneshire Glen” contained only bricks, sand,
stones, and scrap-iron.
They were part of the theatrical properties of Captain O’Shea,
who could readily produce a make-believe cargo for a faked voyage
in a steamer which had no intention of leaving port.
The London newspapers showed renewed interest in the
schemes and dreams of King Osmond I of Trinadaro. The Tyneshire
Glen was visited by inquisitive journalists with note-books and
cameras. Captain O’Shea welcomed them right courteously, and
gave them information, cigars, and excellent whiskey. They returned
to their several offices to write breezy columns about the
preparations for the singular voyage of the Tyneshire Glen. So
severe are the English libel laws that never a hint was printed of the
possible legal obstacles which might bring the enterprise to naught.
For purposes of publication, King Osmond I was as sane as a trivet
unless a judge and jury should officially declare him otherwise.
Nevertheless, the intimation had reached the newspaper offices
that the relatives of Colonel Sydenham-Leach were likely to take
steps to prevent him from leaving England. And reporters were
assigned to watch the Tyneshire Glen up to the very moment of
departure.
Now and then Johnny Kent quietly trundled himself on board the
Tarlington, usually after nightfall, and was gratified to find that
progress was running smoothly in all departments. So nearly ready
for sea was the big cargo-boat that the time had come to devise the
final details of the stratagem.
Accordingly, Captain O’Shea went boldly to the custom house,
and took out clearance papers not for the Tarlington to Australia, but
for the Tyneshire Glen to the island of Trinadaro. The chief officer
whom he had selected to sail with him held a master’s certificate and
the ship was cleared in his name.
As for the Tarlington, which was really to sail while the Tyneshire
Glen remained peacefully at her moorings in the East India Docks,
O’Shea decided to omit the formality of clearances. As he explained
to Johnny Kent:
“The less attention called to the Tarlington the better. Once at
sea we will hoist the flag of Trinadaro over our ship, and His
Majesty’s government will give her a registry and us our certificates.
’Tis handy to be an independent sovereign with a merchant marine
of his own.”
The services of an employment agency enabled O’Shea to
muster several score bogus colonists or subjects of King Osmond,
persons of respectable appearance who were glad to earn ten
shillings apiece by marching on board the Tyneshire Glen with bags
and bundles in their hands. There could be no room for doubt in the
public mind that the eccentric, grandiose Colonel Sydenham-Leach
was on the point of leaving his native shores with his people and
material to found his island principality.
It seemed advisable to Captain O’Shea to take the Tarlington out
of the docks late in the afternoon, swing into the river, and anchor
until King Osmond should be brought aboard in a tug furnished by
George Huntley. There was much less risk of observation in having
the royal passenger join the ship after nightfall and away from the
populous docks, in addition to which O’Shea preferred to get clear of
the cramping stone basins and gates and hold his ship in the fair-
way with room for a speedy departure in the event of a stern chase.
He artlessly explained that this arrangement would allow the king
to spend several more hours ashore in winding up the final details of
his business. The unsuspecting Osmond I approved these plans and
had no idea that they were part of an elaborate conspiracy to
smuggle him out of England under cover of darkness.
As a crafty device to throw the enemy off the scent, O’Shea
conceived what he viewed as a master-stroke. George Huntley was
called into consultation and promptly sent for a superannuated clerk
of his office staff who had been pensioned after many years of
faithful service. He proved to be a slender, white-haired man who
carried himself with a great deal of dignity, and at the first glimpse of
him O’Shea exclaimed delightedly:
“You couldn’t have done better, George, if you had raked London
with a comb. Put a snowy mustache and chin whisker on him and he
will pass for King Osmond of Trinadaro with no trouble at all.”
“I think we can turn him into a pretty fair counterfeit,” grinned
Huntley. “And when he walks aboard the Tyneshire Glen at dusk and
all those bogus subjects at ten shillings each raise a loyal cheer, the
hoax will be complete. This is the artistic touch to make the job
perfect.”
“And what am I to do after that, Mr. Huntley, if you please?”
timidly inquired the elderly clerk. “If it’s only a practical joke, I don’t
mind——”
“Play the part, Thompson. Acknowledge the homage of the
ship’s company and go below at once. Dodge into a state-room. The
ship will probably be watched by persons keenly interested in your
movements. If they poke a mess of legal documents at you, accept
them without argument. The meddlesome gents will leave you alone
after that. They will merely keep close watch of the ship to make
sure that you don’t run away with her. When you come back to
London in the morning, pluck off the false whiskers, and be
handsomely rewarded for your exertions. I’ll see that you get in no
trouble.”
“It is a bit queer, Mr. Huntley, but you were always a great hand
for a lark,” said the clerk. “Thank you, I will do as you say.”
The genuine colonists of King Osmond stole on board the
Tarlington, singly, and by twos and threes, some before she pulled
out of the docks, others by boat after she swung into the stream. At
the same time the imitation voyagers from the employment agency
were making as much noise and bustle as possible as they trooped
on board the Tyneshire Glen.
Captain O’Shea intended to convey the king from the hotel to the
Tarlington, but at the last moment he was detained to quell a ruction
in the forecastle. George Huntley had been unexpectedly summoned
to the Hotel Cecil to see an American millionaire who was in a great
hurry to charter a yacht. O’Shea therefore sent a message to His
Majesty directing him to have his carriage driven to a certain landing
on the river-front of the East India Docks, where he would be met by
the chief officer of the Tarlington and escorted aboard the ship.
Within the same hour, the dignified, elderly clerk by the name of
Thompson might have been seen to enter a carriage close by the
Hotel Carleton, and those standing near heard him tell the driver to
go to the steamer Tyneshire Glen.
The chief officer of the Tarlington, waiting near an electric light at
the landing-pier, abreast of which the steamer was anchored in the
stream, felt a weight of responsibility for the safe delivery of King
Osmond, and was easier in mind when he saw a carriage halt within
a few yards of him. The window framed the kindly features, the white
mustache and imperial, which the chief officer instantly identified.
Hastening to assist His Majesty from the carriage, he announced
apologetically:
“Captain O’Shea sends his compliments and regrets that he is
detained on board. The ship is ready as soon as you are.”
The king murmured a word or two of thanks. The chief officer
carefully assisted him to board the tug, which speedily moved away
from the pier and turned to run alongside the Tarlington. The
important passenger mounted the steamer’s gangway and stood
upon the shadowy deck, whose row of lights had been purposely
turned off lest his figure might be discernible from shore.
Captain O’Shea was waiting to get the ship under way. It was no
time for ceremony. The business of the moment was to head for the
open sea, and beyond the reach of the British law and its officers. A
few minutes later, Captain O’Shea hastened aft to greet His Majesty
and explain his failure to welcome him on board. Meeting the chief
officer, he halted to ask:
“Everything all right, Mr. Arbuthnot? Did he ask for me? Did he
give you any orders?”
“All satisfactory, sir. The king said he was very tired and would
go to his rooms at once.”
“I wonder should I disturb him?” said O’Shea to himself,
hesitating. “’Tis not etiquette to break into his rest. Well, I will go back
to the bridge and wait a bit. Maybe he will be sending for me. My
place is with the pilot till the ship has poked her way past Gravesend
and is clear of this muck of up-river shipping.”
The Tarlington found a less crowded reach of the Thames as she
passed below Greenwich and her engines began to shove her along
at a rapid gait. She had almost picked up full speed and was fairly
headed for blue water when the noise of loud and grievous protests
arose from the saloon deck. The commotion was so startling that
O’Shea bounded down from the bridge and was confronted by a
smooth-shaven, slender, elderly man who flourished a false
mustache and imperial in his fist as he indignantly cried:
“I say, this is all wrong as sure as my name is Thompson. I never
bargained with Mr. George Huntley to be kidnapped and taken to
sea. I don’t want to go, I tell you. These people tell me that this
steamer is bound to some island or other thousands of miles from
here. I stand on my rights as an Englishman. I demand that I be
taken back to London at once.”
O’Shea glared stupidly at the irate clerk so long in the employ of
Tavistock & Huntley. For once the resourceful shipmaster was utterly
taken aback. He managed to say in a sort of quavering stage
whisper:
“For the love of heaven, what has become of the real king? Who
mislaid him? Where is he now?”
“I don’t know and I’m sure I don’t care,” bitterly returned the
affrighted Thompson. “I was an ass to consent to this make-believe
job.”
“But how did you two kings get mixed?” groaned O’Shea. “You’re
in the wrong ship. Have ye not sense enough to fathom that much?
You were supposed to go aboard the Tyneshire Glen, ye old
blunderer.”
“The man who drove the carriage told me this was the Tyneshire
Glen. I had to take his word for it. How was I to know one ship from
the other in the dark? I was told to pretend I was the genuine king,
wasn’t I? So I played the part as well as I could.”
“Ye played it right up to the hilt. My chief officer will vouch for
that,” and O’Shea held his head between his hands. He sent for
Johnny Kent and briefly announced:
“We are shy one king, Johnny. The deal has been switched on
us somehow. Our boss was left behind.”
“Great sufferin’ Cæsar’s ghost, Cap’n Mike!” gasped the other.
“Say it slow. Spell it out. Make signs if you’re choked up so that you
can’t talk plain.”
“The real king went in the discard, Johnny. We’ve fetched the
dummy to sea. The one that came aboard was the other one.”
“Then what in blazes became of our beloved King Osmond the
First?” cried Johnny.
“You can search me. Maybe his affectionate relatives have their
hooks in him by now and have started him on the road to the brain
college.”
“It ain’t reasonable for us to keep on our course for Trinadaro
without the boss,” suggested the chief engineer. “This is his ship and
cargo.”
This was so self-evident that Captain O’Shea answered never a
word, but gave orders to let go an anchor and hold the ship in the
river until further notice. Then he turned to glower at an excited
group of passengers who had mustered at the foot of the bridge
ladder and were loudly demanding that he come down and talk to
them. They were loyal subjects of the vanished monarch, his
secretaries, artisans, foremen, laborers, who ardently desired an
explanation. They became more and more insistent and threatened
to resort to violence unless the steamer instantly returned to London
to find King Osmond.
O’Shea gave them his word that he would not proceed to sea
without the missing sovereign, and during a brief lull in the
excitement he thrust the bewildered Thompson, the masquerader,
into the chart-room and pelted him with questions. The latter was
positive that he had directed the cabman to drive to the Tyneshire
Glen. And the fellow was particular to stop and ask his way when
just inside the entrance to the docks. At least, he had halted his cab
to talk to some one who was apparently giving him information.
Thompson was unable to overhear the conversation.
“And did ye get a look at this second party?” sharply queried
O’Shea.
“The carriage lamp showed me his face for a moment, and I saw
him less distinctly as he moved away. He was a young man, well
dressed, rather a smart-looking chap, I should say. I think he had on
a fancy red waistcoat.”
“Sandy complected? A brisk walker?” roared O’Shea in
tremendous tones.
“I am inclined to say the description fits the young man,” said
Thompson.
“’Twas the crooked minister of finance, Baron Frederick Martin
Strothers, bad luck to him!” and O’Shea looked blood-thirsty. “I will
bet the ship against a cigar that he sold out to the enemy. He stands
in with the king’s wicked relatives and schemin’ lawyers. And we
never fooled him for a minute. ’Tis likely he switched the real king to
the Tyneshire Glen, where the poor monarch would have no friends
to help him out of a scrape. Strothers bribed the cabmen—that’s how
the trick was turned. Just how they got next to our plans I can’t
fathom at all.”
“Then it is hopeless to try to secure the king and transfer him to
this steamer?” asked Thompson, easier in mind now that he
comprehended that he had not been purposely kidnapped.
“Hopeless? By me sainted grandmother, it is not hopeless at all,”
cried Captain O’Shea as he fled from the chart-room. Johnny Kent
had made another journey from the lower regions to seek
enlightenment. O’Shea thumped him between the shoulders and
confidently declaimed:
“We’re done with all this childish play-acting and stratagems. ’Tis
not our kind of game. ’Twas devised to spare the sensitive feeling of
King Osmond, and this wide-awake Strothers has made monkeys of
us. Now we’re going to turn around and steam back to London and
grab this genuine king of ours and take him to sea without any more
delay at all.”
“I like your language,” beamingly quoth Johnny Kent. “We’re
about due to have a little violence, Cap’n Mike.”
While the good ship Tarlington swings about and retraces her
course there is time to discover what befell the genuine Osmond I
after he entered a carriage at the Hotel Carleton and set out to join
Captain O’Shea’s steamer.
He was rapidly driven to the East India Docks and the carriage
drew up alongside the Tyneshire Glen. The royal occupant had been
informed by Captain O’Shea that the ship would be out of the docks
by now and a tug waiting to transfer him. In the darkness the
shadowy outline of one steamer looked very like another, and King
Osmond thought that perhaps the plan of sailing might have been
changed at the last moment.

One Hundred Years of Solitude Struggle and Violence Along The US Mexico Border An Oral History 1st Edition John Thomas

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One Hundred Years of Solitude Struggle and Violence Along The US Mexico Border An Oral History 1st Edition John Thomas

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One Hundred Years of Solitude

Struggle and Violence along the US

One Hundred Years of Solitude Literature Study Guide

Coloniality of the US Mexico Border Power Violence and

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One Hundred Best Books With Commentary and an Essay On

This book first published 2017

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2017 by John Thomas

ISBN (10): 1-5275-0301-1

Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 61

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 81

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 127

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 179

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 239

Index ........................................................................................................ 265

This story begins and ends at a section of land in Cochise County,

Fig P-1: Lazy Y 5 Ranch, Cochise County Arizona, 2017.

Translated from the Spanish, literally, this word conjures the

generates a cheeky, if inaccurate, explanation: “A country that claims the

masses yearning to breathe free” claims that it is through playing host to

In the 2016 Presidential sweepstakes, Donald Trump gave voice to

There apparently is no cure for ethnic or race-based, non-American

immigrants 27 to be among the “we.” Geography, no matter how many

of the West’s herds of buffalo,57 non-Hispanic whites soon achieved

we were distinguishable primarily by our preferred idiom and, perhaps,

stretches from Tijuana on the California border to Agua Prieta on the

THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY

Fig 1-1: San Pedro River, 2017.

superseded the earth’s treasures as the foundation of the area’s economy.

Fig 1-2: Warning sign, Cochise County, 2017.

relatives who stand on the burial mounds of early inhabitants of these

a county north, to Maricopa County, and secured a conviction of one of

has announced that, to deter their immigration, “what [we] ought to do is

Fig. 1-3: Sarah Grace Edgerton Bakarich McCool at age 14 in Iowa.

I’ve let my thoughts wander to the future. Today, though, is about my

Fig. 1-4: Marriage proposal card.

A couple of decades after my grandmother’s death, I returned to that

Michael, who was born in in 1892 in Kumrovec, Croatia, was also a

price of a bar. The Eighteenth Amendment had been ratified in January of

a viable option. So, in 1916, Congress enacted the Stock-Raising

Perhaps it was the irony of owning no mineral rights to his new

Fig. 1-7: My grandmother, Grace McCool, on the Lazy Y 5 Ranch, 1963.

I’m lost in thoughts of my grandmother Grace as I drive with my

Fig 1-8: My grandmother’s house, circa 1980, where I grew up.

I point out to Grace II the peculiarities of the house, built by untrained

Colonel Osmond George Sydenham-Leach, of the ancient

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