Wyoming and Joe Elliott

 On my first day in Sheridan I went to the public library to see what I could find relating to my great-grandfather, Joe Elliott. I had one title in mind, and a long one: Banditti of the Plains, or the Cattlemen’s Invasion of Wyoming in 1892 [The Crowning Infamy of the Ages] (1894), by Asa Shinn Mercer. Seattlites might know of Mercer. Here’s the biographical blurb from the dust jacket:

Asa Shinn Mercer founded the University of Washington and established several frontier publications before going to Wyoming in 1883. There he edited Northwest Live Stock Journal and wrote his most significant book, The Banditti of the Plains.

More about this book later. 

As I was browsing the shelves around Banditti I saw another title: Secrets: The Tom Wagoner Story (2007), by Collene Pottat. I thumbed through its notes section at the back and noticed reference to “Joe Elliott’s Story.” A little more page turning directed me to the archives of a magazine called Annals of Wyoming, which the Sheridan library has in their “Wyoming Room.” 

Thanks to my cousin Marny, most members of my family have a copy the story that B.W. Hope assembled after interviewing Joe Elliott in the early 1940s. I had assumed, for some reason, that it hadn’t made it into publication, so was surprised to find it. I was also very relieved, because I had managed to forget to pack my copy before coming out here. 

I will elaborate later on the Wagoner story when I find out more. What I know so far is what Joe Elliott wrote: that many people assumed at the time, and throughout his whole life, that he had killed Wagoner (he denies having done it, but admitted to threatening him). Indeed, most of the things I’ve found so far through web searches mention Joe Elliott as at least involved in Wagoner’s lynching.

After I had made photo copies of Joe Elliott’s Story, I talked to the Wyoming Room librarian about what I’m researching. He asked if I knew about ancestry.com or other genealogy web sites. Such sites typically charge monthly subscription fees, but the library subscribes to at least two sites, which library card holders can access from the library. To show me an example of what I can find, he asked me where Joe Elliott was in 1930. Within a minute he had printed out a page from the 1930 census for Boise, Idaho. Here is what I found under the categories that I could make out (many were illegible).

Head of household, Joe Elliott, age 64; age at first marriage, 42.

Wife, Nettie V. (my mother’s namesake), 56; age at first marriage, 37

Son, Sidney L. 17

Daughter, Virginia J. (my maternal grandmother), 15

Son, Joe, 14

Son, George, 11

Niece, (Della?) Smith, 18

The census also says that everyone in the household could read and write, and all of Joe’s and Nettie’s children had attended school at some time in 1929, though not their niece. They lived at 1419 24th Street in Boise, Idaho. The value of their house was $2,000.

The details that jumped out at me once I had deciphered the blurry printout were, first, that Joe Elliott, having been born in 1860, would have been 70 years old in 1930, not 64 as the census shows. Another discrepancy is Joe’s and Nettie’s ages at the times of their first marriages (and odd and telling category). Joe’s is listed as 42, and Nettie’s as 37. 

Joe Elliott was 42 years old in 1902. According to the Story, he was probably in California at this time. He didn’t meet Nettie until he got to Boise, Idaho. Assuming that her first marriage was to Joe, they would have married in or around 1911, when she was 37 — 9 years after Joe Elliott’s assumed first marriage. 

Only his marriage to Nettie is mentioned in the Story, and I haven’t heard from any family members about another marriage, but it is very believable, especially after hearing that a woman claiming to be Joe Elliott’s granddaughter is looking for his other descendants. As for the incorrect age on the census form, the only explanation I can think of, aside from a clerical error, is that he lied, perhaps because he was still working and was avoiding age discrimination. If it is a lie, I doubt is has anything to do with hiding the first marriage, as there would still be a 3 year discrepancy with the false age.

The librarian’s quick search also yielded information about Joe Elliott’s work. He didn’t show me where he’d found it, but said that Joe Elliott was a “laborer” and worked for the city of Boise (which might further explain why he would lie on the census). 

So, as you can see, the details are already coming in — and I’m just scratching the surface. 

So that you can get a better idea what and whom I’m researching, here is the note by B.W. Hope that introduces “Joe Elliott’s Story”:

Joe Elliott (1860-1946) was a stock detective for cattlemen’s associations in Wyoming and South Dakota in the 1880s and 1890s. His name appears frequently in accounts of the range conflicts of the those years. Particularly, histories and reminiscences of the period name him as one of those involved in the hanging of Tom Waggoner, as a member of the party that attacked Nate Champion in the fall of 1891, and as one of the “invaders” in the Johnson County War.

 

In met Joe Elliott in  Boise, Idaho, in the early 1940s. I found him to be an old gentleman who might have been a retired military man. He was intelligent, , well read,  respecter of law and authority, somewhat reserved and severe in manner, but as we became better acquainted, willing enough to talk about his past life.

 

In conversations that extended through several months, he told me of his experiences in the early days in Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. As my notes on our conversations began to grow into a sequential account of his past life, we decided that after the war we would take a trip into Wyoming and South Dakota, in expectation that visiting old scenes would bring forth new and more complete memories of his experiences. But before this expedition into the past could be undertaken Joe Elliott died, April 17, 1946.

 

The following record of Joe Elliott’s reminiscences was set down as nearly as possible in his own word. Much of it is exactly as he told it, and all of it is as faithful as possible to Mr. Elliott’s recollections, his opinions, and his manner of speech. Absolute accuracy cannot be guaranteed, of course, due both to the possible deficiencies in my note taking and to the limitations of Mr Elliott’s memory, particularly, it should be pointed out that he never saw my manuscript (since it was considered to be preliminary to the more complete account that I intended to draft after our trip to Wyoming) and he thus had no opportunity to correct or clarify the record. However, I regularly checked and rechecked with him concerning matters on which my notes were incomplete or uncertain, and I believe that the possibility of serious inaccuracy is minimal. 

A new chapter…

If you’re reading this you probably know I quit walking in the beginning of July, about a day’s walk west of Pocatello, ID, after walking almost 800 miles. For weeks I was losing motivation and fretting about money. Also, no matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t figure out how I would get through the western half of Wyoming without serious help. I could go pretty far without buying food, but barely more than a day without refilling water — and there were LONG stretches ahead with no water.

Amazingly, the opportunity has now come up to stay in Wyoming for a while. About a month ago, after spending some time with my family in Idaho and Washington, I came to Sheridan, Wyoming, for a couple of weeks. My good friend Chris lives there with her husband, Scott, and since they were already expecting me on my way through the state, they invited me out for a visit. We had such a good time together for those two weeks (despite Chris having to weather a family tragedy that happened the week I arrived) that they offered to let me stay longer, perhaps through the winter. I was here once nine years ago, also in the winter, and loved the snow and cold. Now I get to see if I can handle a whole Wyoming winter.

Aside from the snow, the Bighorn Mountains, and potential employment, Wyoming has something else that’s drawing me: family history. My great-grandfather, Joe Elliott (my maternal grandmother’s father), was a cowboy in Wyoming from the late 1870s to about 1888. From that time until the late 1890s he worked for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association investigating and arresting cattle rustlers, and he became known (‘infamous’ is the more correct word) for his involvement in the Johnson County Cattle War. (Link here to see a picture and to find out more about the Cattle War: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Invaders.gif>. (He’s the third from the right.) Forty years after the fact, Joe got to tell his side of the story to an interviewer, B. W. Hope. By that time, many books and articles had been written about the event, and he refers to a couple of sources in those interviews. So far, I’ve seen very little of the information that’s out there, but that will soon change.

The cattle war proved to be one of the defining events in the “taming” of the West, and afterward, he and the other “invaders” became known and widely hated. He was one of only a small handful of men from the posse who lived and worked in Wyoming (the majority of the fifty or so “invaders” were paid mercenaries from Texas), and living there after the incident must have been difficult. During my trips to Wyoming, virtually every local I’ve talked to about the Johnson County War was familiar with it, and they all said the same thing upon hearing which side my grandfather fought for: “One of the bad guys.” He ended up spending about six more years in Wyoming before leaving, according to his own account, on foot, making it about 200 miles before catching a train to Sacramento, California.

Nighthawk

I once saw one of these in mid-afternoon, but otherwise only in the evenings and at night. They make a strange sound sometimes that isn’t a normal “call,” and it wasn’t until my last night of camping that I got a firsthand demonstration of how they do it. As I was setting up my tent I heard the already-familiar sound just above my head. Then I got the first of many repeat performances: It flew high into the air, over 100 yards, and held a position face-first into the wind. It wobbled, almost vibrated, on its long, thin wings in drafts until the decisive moment when it brought its wings in close and dove, using the wind for downward accelleration until it reached a dizzying speed. Just before reaching the ground –once under six or seven feet — it pulled out of the dive, making a loud buzzing noise with its wings. After watching this stunt a few times, I saw that the wings were held in a downward bow while it pulled up from these dives — an impressive-looking feat of strength. I thought that it was another strictly territorial behavior until I saw another nighthawk sitting on a sandy patch of ground about 30 feet away, watching the other’s diving as attentively as I had been. The diver would occasionally land in the same sandy patch, where I once saw it give its mate an impressive display of fanned feathers. It appeared the two were courting, and I hoped that my presence, rather than a disturbance, had given the male an opportunity to show off how effective of a protector he could be. When I awoke at sunrise, six hours later, the diving was still going on above my tent.

Curlew

Every day, I would invade some curlews’ territory and be follow by between one and four of them, enduring their shrill squawking as they flew cirles above my head. I got to see one of their chicks once, which had wandered out into the dirt track in front of me. It was reluctant to leave the path and wove back and forth in front of me as its manic parent squawked madly above my head.

Willets

Cousin of the sandpiper, killdeer, and curlew. This was the only pair I saw, and one of the few strange birds that my small pocket field guide was any help in identifying. They behaved like curlews but more aggressively, flying circles around me and repeating a raspy, penetrating warning call.

Antelope

The antelope were thick along the foothills between Glenns Ferry and Boise. They often seemed curious about me and would come quite close, as if to get a better look. Once one of them came up behind a companion and actually nudged it closer to me with its horns. At the time, I had been reading Francis Parkman’s 1847 book, The Oregon Trail, where he had also observed their apparent curiousity. He later commented on an antelope wandering in among a herd of buffalo by saying, “It was like a pretty girl had walked into the room.”

Homeward

Back in Twin Fall I was already feeling like I had walked enough for the time being, and hoped it was just another mental hurdle. But when I arrived in Pocatello I was ready to get on the next bus west. So I did. Not back to Seattle, but to Boise to pick up my bicycle. From here my plan is to ride north through Idaho and into Washington to see my family. Then I’ll see. I’m not in the mood to make big decisions yet. I’ve got a little money left, so maybe I’ll ride for a few weeks and think about my options. One sure plan is to start typing up my daily journal, so hopefully a few of you can look forward to more of the story. It’s been an interesting go.

So now that’s explained, here’s my latest journal entry:

The man selling tickets at the Greyhound station in Pocatello told me if I was willing to go by van to the Boise airport, rather than by bus to downtown Boise, I would save the almost miraculous sum of $60. This was very good news, since it would more than offset a cab ride to Mark’s place in Meridian, just outside of Boise.

Once at the airport, I had to walk about a hundred yards from where the van stopped to the line of taxis outside of the baggage claim. The next taxi driver in line saw me coming after my first few steps in that direction. As I approached, he regarded me with a relaxed smile as if he were a friend or a relative ready to greet me after my long trip.

He was well over 6 feet tall, youthful looking (I later guessed him in his mid-30s), and had very dark African skin. He inspired trust with his open friendliness, and the way he took my pack from me and put it in the trunk, slow and fluid, made me later think of a passage from the Wallace Stegner novel I’m reading (Angle of Repose) where the narrator describes a character’s movements as sure and comforting, like one who works with animals. This taxi driver would never spook the livestock.

I told him I was going to Meridian Road, about 3 miles from the freeway, and asked about what the fare would be. $20 — $30, he said. Great, I said quickly, feeling I had committed a faux pas by asking the fair once I was already seated in the back of the cab: a breech of the trust he had so quickly and naturally established.

Wondering where he might be from, I looked at his ID on the dashboard. Mohammed, the most common name in the world. That didn’t help.

He started driving and said, “Pretty hot out,” just a bit accented.

I agreed. I think it was over 90 degrees.

“Where did you fly from?”

“I took the bus. From Pocatello.”

“Oh, I been there once.”

“It was my first time. It was a lot cooler than here: mountain air.”

Initial polite chat out of the way, he turned his radio to some rap music that I didn’t recognize or particularly like. I wanted to keep talking, as is often the case when seeing people after a long stretch of walking, so I said, “I’m from Seattle. It almost never gets hot like this.”

He turned down the music. “Seattle! I been to Seattle. I have friends there. Kent.”

“Huh,” I said. “Where are you from, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Africa. From Sudan. You heard of it?”

“Sure.”

“I’m from Darfur. You heard of it?”

“Oh, wow.” I didn’t know what to say.

“There’s war there.”

“I’ve heard about it. It sounds pretty awful. Hard for me to imagine.”

“It’s very bad. Killing people. Lot of people. Then burning. They burn the whole villages. Totally destroyed.”

I let that one sink in and looked out the window. “How long’ve you been in Boise?” I said.

“Six years.”

“You like it?”

“It’s OK.” He said. I think he said it was alright, “except for the people,” which made me grin. “Also jobs are hard,” he said.

“I know something funny about Sudan,” I said.

He looked at me in the mirror.

“In school,” I said, “when we were learning geography, there were little tricks for learning countries and their capitols. I’ll always remember Sudan’s capitol, because if your Sudan dies, you take it to the Khartoum.”

He laughed so hard I thought he would cry. Then he explained something about his school, but all I understood over the freeway noise was, “In school they give us candy.”

After a while of watching the ugly scenery along the freeway, I asked him if he had ever heard of the Oregon Trail. He hadn’t. I explained that it was a trail people used travel west on a hundred fifty years ago, before any of this was the United States. “The U.S. stopped at Missouri back then,” I said. Then I told him I had been walking that trail east for over two months.

This time he didn’t know what to say. Finally, he said, “Missouri. Is that clost to Kansas? I have friends in Kansas. From Sudan also.”

“Yeah. Kansas is just west of Missouri.” I said.

“Where you start?” he asked.

“Oregon. At the ocean. And I just stopped in Pocatello.”

“I been there,” he said.

“You’ve been a lot of places.”

“Ha! Too many!” he said.

I said, “I figured I’d walked enough. Almost nine hundred miles is enough.”

“You with someone, or by yourself?” he asked.

“Just me. Well, I had some people helping. They sent me things in the mail along the way. And shoes too. Somebody donated shoes. They would be really expensive; I need a pair about every month.”

“We hike a lot in Sudan,” he said and laughed. It’s great when people laugh that easily. “We all hike. You want to go somewhere, you walk three days!”

I laughed with him and said, “I know how you feel.” I found it very satisfying that I could say this to a guy from Sudan, Africa and mean it.

“So, do you miss Sudan?” I asked.

“Oh yes, very much.”

“What do you miss the most? Friends, girls, the cities?”

He thought for a moment. “I miss my mother very much. It’s been ten years since I seen her.” He continued, “For a long time I could not talk to her. Because of war she had to leave where she live. Then I call my uncle and he find her. I miss her very much. I try to get papers and maybe she come here, but it didn’t work.”

He pulled off of the freeway at Meridian and I said to go right. “It’s just past Ustick,” I said.

He looked in the mirror and said I should have said it earlier, he would have taken another way that’s faster. I looked down at the meter, which had just climbed to over $30.

“Oh well,” I said. “I didn’t know if you’d know Ustick, but I guess you probably would.”

“I know everywhere,” he said.

I was glad to have met him, and when he dropped me off I told him so.

“You too,” he said and shook my hand. “And good luck.”

“You too. I hope you get to see your mother.”

“Thank you,” he said.

I watched and waved from the driveway as he backed into the street. He waved too as he pulled away.

Cauldron Linn

Here I am at Cauldron Linn on the Snake River. It was remarkable travelling over the tame farmland of the river plain and coming to this wild, deep ravine. The recent rains had swollen the river and the falls were raging. This is the site where the famous Hunt expedition of fur traders met with disaster in 1811, on their way to Astoria, Oregon. They went over the falls and lost one or two of their party in the infamous wirlpool. From there they opted to travel overland, following directions given to them by local Indians. The route they took to the Columbia River was very close to what became the Oregon Trail.

Travis Miller, one of the son’s at Miller’s Dairy Farm, drove me here on the afternoon I came into Eden and took this picture. One of Travis’ sisters was gone that week on an L.D.S. reinactment of the Mormon handcart emmigration. Talking to Travis’ dad about it inspired me to find a book on the “Mormon Trail” — The Gathering of Zion, by Wallace Stegner — a very detailed description not only of the dramatic history of the Mormon Trail, but the conditions for all of the westbound emmigrants from the 1840s through 1869, when the transcontinental railroad effectively replaced the pioneer trail.

Tired

This was near the end of a long, tiring day. It was about 6:30 PM and it was finally cooling off. I spread my tarp in the sage brush, laid down and had a snack. I took the picture just to see how I looked, and yup, I looked as haggard as I felt. I went on that night another 3 or 4 miles before I camped. I was out of water, as the last creek crossing was dry. My plan was to camp then wait until dark and walk back up the creek, over private property, to a stand of trees I’d seen (a good sign of water). On my way through some monotonous sage brush to make camp, I passed by a puddle with enough standing water for my filter. I went on another quarter mile, pitch the tent, then walked back to the puddle. But by that time it was almost dark, and in a flat field with uniformly grown brush I lost the path and never found the water. Then I lost the tent. It became so dark that the distant electricity poles I was using for markers were invisible. I wandered back and forth through the brush for an hour before I found my camp. For a time, I was sure I’d spend the night in the open getting rained on by the inevitable nighttime showers. Lesson: don’t overestemate your ability to find your way in the dark.

Swale

This is one of the best “swales” of the Oregon Trail that I have seen. Before I learned what to look for, I was expecting two parallel ruts, forgetting that the oxen, the typical beast of burden, dug out the middle with their hooves. This is pretty impressive, I think, for a road that got most of its traffic between 1843 and the 1860s, when the railroad began taking up most of the westward emmigration. I’ve also noticed that the swale is most visible on slopes, due to settling land in the flat areas. The soil is almost cement hard when dry, but after a heavy rain, your feet easily sink in up to the ankle. This swale is about 8 miles northwest of Glenns Ferry, Idaho. From 200 miles eastward until past the Oregon state line, the landscape around the trail changed little from this type of sagebrush desert, broken up only by the occasional river/creek crossing.