A couple weeks ago the topic of this column was about taking things for granted. Well, that idea ran up and kicked me in the pants because right after those words appeared, the country started shutting down in the name of coronavirus. No longer can we take our old lives for granted. Where we’ve regularly visited churches, restaurants, libraries, theaters, malls, city offices, even each other, the doors are closed. It’s our new normal, at least for awhile.
Personally, we’ll cope all right since there are many books and materials at our residence to read or re-read. While flipping through some old files, I ran across an interesting newspaper article my mother-in-law clipped from The Carson Press of December 22, 1983. The headline stated, “Fred Schones Remembers Cowboys and Folks in Shields.” I enjoy tales of the old days told by someone who experienced them, so I kept reading the article.
Schones, a barber, remembered some of the interesting characters whom he shaved and cut hair with a hand clippers during the wild and woolly days of early settlement. One of them was William Wade, the subject of the first book I published. He told Schones that the horse “Comanche” wasn’t the only survivor of the Little Big Horn because he’d seen in Canada lots of horses with the U.S. brand on them. It stands to reason, because when the fighting started at the battle, I’d imagine many army horses broke away and ended up in the Indians’ herd. Sitting Bull had led his band to Canada after the battle to avoid another fight with the army.
The barber played poker with Turkey Track Bill Molash and Ott Black. (Local residents may remember a one-time area resident Larry Sprunk who portrayed the character of Turkey Track Bill in a chautauqua show he wrote and presented around the state.) Molash and Black had come north on one of the last big trail drives from Texas. Black married the woman named Mustache Maude, a one-time madame in Winona, a little entertainment town across the Missouri River from Fort Yates where soldiers frequented.
As is often the case, this begged further research, and I found she kept order in her place with a Colt six-shooter. After the town of Winona died, she and Ott Black headed west to Shields where Schones said they “brought Winona’s flavor to the Shields area.” We are left to guess what that means, but the couple also ran cattle on a ranch west of Selfridge.
After the couple separated, Maude continued ranching on her own but got in trouble by associating with a gang of cattle thieves. She confessed her guilt to North Dakota’s attorney general William Langer and appeared in court wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, a man’s shirt with a tobacco tag dangling from a breast pocket, and a short skirt. She beat the charge by turning state’s evidence after learning the gang had stolen 30 head of her cattle while she was in jail.
I saw Mustache Maude as a Robin Hood character in spite of her faults. Her obituary states, “Never was a neighbor neglected by Mrs. Black when trouble camped on his trail. A sick wife, or child, a shortage of feed in a hard winter or loss of stock brought the immediate assistance of this woman.” Another writer wrote that she “would drive miles to provide medical help for friends and neighbors. Best known as a midwife, she claimed to have spanked half the bottoms in the area.”
She died on September 12, 1932 in the Flasher, ND hospital.
No comments:
Post a Comment