Glimpses of the past
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
One of the interesting things about my work is that people will sometimes share with me family letters, diaries, and other such items that give an interesting glimpse into the past. Sometimes these items provide relatively complete accounts and sometimes only a brief glance.
Several years ago, for instance, I was given a single-spaced, 60-page copy of the memoirs of Frank Maynard, who spent the decade of the 1870s as an open-range cowboy. His account is fascinating and full of details of both the pleasures and the hardships of the era.
In 1870 at age 16 Frank came to Kansas from Iowa, landing at his aunt's house in Towanda, but he didn't stay there long. After a short stint buffalo hunting and Indian trading, young Frank signed on with a Texas outfit that was trailing horses that had wintered in Kansas back to Texas so they could be used on another cattle drive.
Frank didn't get to go on this particular drive, however, because one of the Texans was an ex-Confederate who had decided to take out his anger at defeat against Frank, whose father had served in the Union Army. After a couple of run-ins and serious threats, Frank sought refuge in an army post, then made his way back to Kansas.
Later he did participate in a number of Texas-to-Kansas cattle drives, but his first big adventure was helping a man drive 100 head of good quality cattle east-to-west from Missouri across Kansas to Granada, Colo., where his employer was starting a ranch and wanted something better than longhorns as a foundation herd.
The most exciting part of this trip occurred on the Fourth of July when the cook, a teenager named Dave Rudebaugh from Greenwood County, got into a fight with the boss. Rudebaugh grabbed an ax, the boss pulled his gun, but Frank and the other trail hand separated them. Rudebaugh later joined up with Billy the Kid's gang and is said to have been the only man Billy was ever afraid of.
After a couple of escapes from New Mexico jails, Rudebaugh went to Old Mexico, where according to one account he was shot to death after cheating at poker. Then his head was cut off and mounted on a pole at the entrance to town as a warning to other gringos not to deal off the bottom of the deck.
But another version of his demise has him going to work on a Mexican ranch, driving cattle from there to Montana, then drifting west to Oregon where he lapsed into alcoholism and died in poverty of old age.
But back to Maynard, who, among other things, was in Dodge City when marshal Ed Masterson was shot. He recounts scuffles with cattle thieves and lynch mobs and once had a narrow escape from irate German homesteaders near Ellsworth.
It seems that the farmers had impounded some steers that had strayed after a stampede and wanted compensation for the damage the cattle had done to crops. The Texas trail boss, however, was in no mood to give in to Kansas farmers, especially ones who barely spoke English. So he took part of the crew to where the cattle were being guarded, rushed the cattle back toward the main herd, and somehow got the angry and armed farmers to chase after Frank. Which they did, but his pony was faster and hardier than the big horses the settlers were riding, so he made his escape and rejoined the herd in Ellsworth.
Toward the end of the decade Frank began courting a girl from Towanda, where his parents had moved shortly after he first arrived there. Frank and Flora were married in 1880 and moved to Colorado Springs. Frank traded his horse and saddle (metaphorically, that is) for a set of carpenter's tools and spend the rest of his life pursuing that trade. More glimpses into the past in my next column.
