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  Copyright © 2014 by Michael Zimmer

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  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-264-2

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-736-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Mary Zimmer

  A Cracker at Heart

  Foreword

  The American Legends Collections

  During the Great Depression of the 1930s, nearly one quarter of the American work force was unemployed. Facing the possibility of economic and governmental collapse, President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated the New Deal programs, a desperate bid to get the country back on its feet.

  The largest of these programs was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which focused primarily on manual labor with the construction of bridges, highways, schools, and parks across the country. But the WPA also included a provision for the nation’s unemployed artists, called the Federal Arts Project, and within its umbrella, the Federal Writers Project (FWP). At its peak, the FWP put to work approximately sixty-five hundred men and women.

  During the FWP’s earliest years, the focus was on a series of state guidebooks, but, in the late 1930s, the project created what has been called a “hidden legacy” of America’s past—more than ten thousand life stories gleaned from men and women across the nation.

  Although these life histories, a part of the Folklore Project within the FWP, were meant to be published eventually in a series of anthologies, that goal was effectively halted by the United States’ entry into World War II. Most of these histories are currently located within the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

  As the Federal Writers Project was an arm of the larger Arts Project, so too was the Folklore Project a subsidiary of the FWP. An even lesser-known branch of the Folklore Project was the American Legends Collection (ALC), created in 1936 and managed from 1936 to 1941 by a small staff from the University of Indiana. The ALC was officially closed in early 1942, another casualty of the war effort.

  While the Folklore Project’s goal was to capture everyday life in America, the ALC’s purpose was the acquisition of as many “incidental” histories from our nation’s past as possible. Unfortunately, the bulk of the American Legends Collection was lost due to manpower shortages caused by the war.

  The only remaining interviews known to exist from the ALC are those located within the A.C. Thorpe Papers at the Bryerton Library in Indiana. These are carbons only, as the original transcripts were turned in to the offices of the FWP in November 1941.

  Andrew Charles Thorpe was unique among those scribes put into employment by the FWP-ALC in that he recorded his interviews with an Edison Dictaphone. These discs, a precursor to the LP records of a later generation, were found sealed in a vault shortly after Thorpe’s death in 2006. Of the eighty-some interviews discovered therein, most were conducted between the years 1936 and 1939. They offer an unparalleled view of both a time (1864 to 1912) and place (Florida to Nevada, Montana to Texas) within the United States’ singular history.

  The editor of this volume is grateful to the current executor of the A.C. Thorpe Estate for his assistance in reviewing these papers and to the descendants of Mr. Thorpe for their cooperation in allowing these transcripts to be brought into public view.

  An explanation should be made at this point that, although minor additions to the text were included to enhance its effect, no facts were altered. Any mistakes or misrepresentations resulting from these changes are solely my own.

  Leon Michaels

  December 17, 2012

  Session One

  Boone McCallister Interview

  Fort Worth, Texas

  November 15, 1937

  Begin Transcript

  If that machine is running, I’ve got something I want to say right up front, and that is that I did not feed David Klee to an alligator.

  That damned rumor has hounded me my whole life. It’s been up and down the cattle trails between Texas and Kansas half a dozen times. It’s followed me as far north as Cheyenne, as far west as El Paso, and as far south as, well, hell, as far south as Punta Rassa. But it ain’t true.

  Dave Klee was killed by a ’gator, all right. That part is factual enough, and it’s also a fact that I was there when it happened. But I didn’t throw him in. Truth is, I was the one who pulled Dave’s body out of the swamp that night, and did my best by him until we were driven off by his brothers, cousins, and assorted kin.

  I suppose you already know all this happened back in 1864, while I was bossing my first cattle drive. I was eighteen at the time, and young for the position, but Pa had handed me the job on the day he was pulling out for the North with a herd of his own—over three thousand head of Florida longhorns, carrying not only our own Flatiron brand, but cattle from several of the neighboring ranches as well.

  I can still remember Pa’s voice that mid-spring day, made all the more poignant because it would be the last time I ever heard it. We were on the holding grounds north of the Pease River when he handed me a note made grimy from the hands of who knew how many strangers as it made its way to the Flatiron range.

  “One of Turner’s men just gave me this,” Pa said in a voice made low and gravelly by weariness.

  Pa believed strongly in the Cause and had been pushing herd after herd north to help feed the Confederacy ever since the war’s beginning. All that hard, unrelenting toil had taken a heavy toll on him. He was honed down to scarecrow dimensions, with blossoming gray in a beard that had once been as black as the bottom of a cast-iron skillet, and sagging lids above his work-worn eyes. Pa wouldn’t even talk about slowing down, though. He claimed the South’s armies were gill-full of men who would like nothing better than to do just that, but who knew they couldn’t without weakening the fabric of our new nation. Then he’d start north again, just as quick as he could pry another herd out of the scrub.

  That day on the Pease, Pa handed me the note without further explanation. I unfolded it and read it right there, the two of us sitting our horses side-by-side as a mottled river of tallow and horn and brindled hide flowed north before us. The letter read:

  To Jefferson McCallister, Flatiron Ranch, Pease River,

  Sir, I have need of cattle numbering the amount to fill the hold and deck of a moderately sized schooner, which I have received word will soon dock at Punta Rassa. If you can fulfill this contract for a delivery of no later than March 30th, I am in a position to offer the sum of $35 per head for full-grown beeves, payable in Spanish doubloons upon arrival. If unable to provide the numbers requested, please advise by post.

  It was unsigned, but we both knew who had sent it. Refolding the note, I tucked it inside a vest pocket. I didn’t ask Pa what he wanted me to do about it. He
wouldn’t have given me the letter if he didn’t expect me to fill the contract.

  “You reckon a couple of hundred head?” I asked.

  “Two hundred and fifty might be better, but take whatever you can find. That scrub over west of Turkey Creek ain’t been all the way combed out yet. Was it me, I’d start there.” He turned quiet for a moment, his gaze fixed on the flat plane of the horizon. Then he said: “Get the gold, Boone. Don’t let that slick-talkin’ son-of-a-bitch con you into taking script. Bring the herd back if he tries. There are soldiers in Mississippi and Tennessee who can use that meat a hell of a lot more than a bunch of Cubans.”

  I knew it galled Pa to sell even a shipload of cattle to outside markets—in this case, Havana—but we all knew how tough it was going to be to start over after the fighting was finished, no matter which side won. The gold I’d get in Punta Rassa for those two hundred and fifty head would be the seed money we’d need to rebuild the ranch to what it had been before the war.

  “I will,” I said.

  He nodded tiredly, then gathered his reins. “The Flatiron is yours until we get back. Keep it safe.”

  I said again that I would. Then we briefly shook hands, and Pa galloped off to join the herd. That was the last time I ever saw him, sitting ramrod stiff atop his flat, English-style saddle, his mount gouging up little clods of soil from beneath its hoofs. The sharp, pistol-like cracks of the cow hunters’ whips and the excited barking of the drovers’ dogs as they flanked the moving herd was comforting in its familiarity, and I found myself wishing that I was going with them. As the cattle streamed past, I raised my hand in a farewell salute to the men who were helping move the herd north. I had four brothers in that crew, and there were two of them that I’d never see again, either. That damned war was a mean one. I guess they all are, but the Civil War was a lot more personal for some of us, me included.

  Anyway, that note from a Punta Rassa cattle buyer named W.B. Ashworth was the reason I was trailing my own small herd of beeves toward the Gulf of Mexico that day, toward a small fortune in gold, too, $35 a head being about five times what we normally got for a cow.

  Although the worst of the fighting was up north, running a herd to Punta Rassa, even a paltry bunch like ours, wasn’t going to be any picnic. By ’64, there were federal patrols scouring that whole region, looking for cattle and caches of salt to supply their own armies, not to mention Confederate troops to tangle with. At first I figured that was why we were all feeling so unsettled as we neared the end of our journey, and why I kept looking over my shoulder every little whipstitch with such a sense of dread. As if there were something lurking back there—something mean and hungry, with a full set of teeth. Even though we didn’t talk about it, I knew the others were feeling it, too, so after a couple of days of trying to ignore our growing unease, I finally sent a man out to scout our back trail. Meanwhile, I kept the herd moving along at a good clip. I knew we were melting off what little fat those scrubby longhorns had started the drive with, but I was anxious to make our delivery, then get out of there before the Union garrison at Fort Myers caught wind of us.

  We were still three long days out of Punta Rassa—using a roundabout way to get there in order to avoid the bluebellies that infested that area—when I sent my man back. It was nearly dusk of the same day before he returned. The guy I’d chosen was a beefy Cuban named Pablo Torres, and I could tell from his hunched shoulders and downcast demeanor that the news he brought wasn’t going to be to my liking. Pulling my horse away from the drive, I loped back to meet him.

  My ramrod that trip was Casey Davis. Seeing me leave the herd, then spotting Pablo coming in at an angle from the direction of the Caloosahatchee River, Casey wheeled his mount and rode to join us. We met in the settling dust a quarter of a mile behind the herd. Pushing his broad-brimmed, straw sombrero back on his head, Pablo mopped the sweat from his brow with a dirty sleeve.

  “It is as you most feared,” Torres said in a dust-cracked voice.

  “Yankees?” Casey asked.

  “Worse . . . bandits.”

  “Rustlers,” I breathed, and Pablo nodded solemnly.

  “How far back?” I asked.

  “A few miles, but no more.” He hesitated, then went on: “I stayed hidden in the trees and did not let them see me, but they know where we are. I think they only bide their time now.”

  “Waiting until we get closer to Punta Rassa,” Casey said. “Letting us do the hard work, then they’ll swoop in like vultures, stampede the herd, take what they can grab quick, and hightail it for the coast while we lose time gathering up what they scattered.”

  I saw it the same way. It was a common practice during those turbulent war years, and for quite a while afterward, too. “Did you get a good look at them?” I asked Pablo.

  “Not so good, no, but I recognized their leader.” He paused again, his eyes shifting uneasily from me to Casey, then back again. Finally he said: “No man rides a horse like Jacob Klee. He makes that little Cracker pony of his look like a dung beetle.”

  I swore quietly. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that it was Klees trailing us—they’d been a thorn in the Flatiron’s side ever since we moved onto the upper Pease River in 1848—but the last I’d heard, the bulk of the clan had scattered into the swamps early in the war to avoid Confederate conscripts.

  I probably ought to add here that most of Florida’s cow hunters and salters had been exempted from the draft because of our efforts to supply the South’s armies. Most Klees lacked that exoneration, however, largely because the only cattle they dealt in had been stolen from someone else’s range, a fact the draft board was well aware of.

  With most of the good men away fighting Yankees, the cattle ranges all through Florida were just about overflowing with hardcases. But the Klees, well, they were their own little entity in that part of the world. Scattered like weeds across the southern half of the state, and probably three-quarters of them as crooked as a stream of piss in a high wind. Old Judah Klee was the patriarch of the clan, and about what you’d expect, with his wild, long hair and a white beard halfway to his belly button. Jacob and Jubal were his middle-aged sons, not quite as shaggy as the old man, but just as ornery. As far as I’m concerned, the whole bunch was as underhanded as snake-oil salesmen, although, in time, some of those Klees would rise high in state politics, while others became lawyers and judges and county sheriffs and such.

  Before Judah moved his extended family into the southern swamps, the Klees had squatted along the western shore of Lake Okeechobee in an almost fortress-like compound of run-down shacks and sagging chickee huts. In fairness, I’d never personally seen the place, but I didn’t doubt the word of men who had. More than one had insisted that those lakefront hovels smelled worse than open privies, and I was inclined to believe that, too. Of course, when it comes to a Klee, I might be biased.

  Dave Klee was one of Jubal’s boys, one of the good ones, folks would say after his death, although I’d ask you this . . . if Dave Klee was so good, what was he doing with his uncle Jacob, skulking after our herd like a pack of slobbering wolves?

  I’ll tell you what, just knowing those boys were behind us sent a chill dribbling down my spine.

  “How many?” I finally got around to asking Pablo.

  “I think seven,” was his vague reply. “Seven or eight. I could not get close enough to be sure.”

  “If they’re going to hit us, it’ll be soon,” Casey said tautly. “We’re getting too close to Punta Rassa for them to put it off much longer.”

  I nodded grim accord, but didn’t immediately reply. In my mind, I was picturing the route that still lay between us and the coast. Or at least what I knew of it. Although I’d been to Punta Rassa numerous times over the years, Pa had always avoided that land south of the Caloosahatchee because of its proximity to the Big Cypress Swamp and the general marshy terrain that made travel there so difficult. It was a tough country to tramp under any circumstance, but pushing a herd of
longhorns through those jungle-like forests, populated with water moccasins, rattlesnakes, and alligators, made it a nightmare of struggle and fatigue. The only reason I’d taken that herd so far south was because of the damned Yankees that Mr. Lincoln kept sending us.

  I don’t know how common this knowledge is, but with the Mississippi and most of the Confederacy’s coastal ports closed off by the Union blockade, Florida was about the only source of meat the South had any more, and Lord knew we were sending a bunch of it up there, cattle and hogs both. But now that the North was transferring more troops down our way, re-occupying forts they’d abandoned at the beginning of the war—like Fort Myers, a couple of hours’ ride east of Punta Rassa—the stakes were rising dramatically. I wasn’t worried about Pa making it through with his three thousand head. He’d push that herd straight up the central part of the state, following the highlands into Georgia, where the Federals hadn’t yet ventured, but the odds for me and my crew were a bit tighter. And now, as if prowling Yankees, poisonous snakes, and hungry ’gators weren’t enough, we had Jacob Klee and his gang to contend with.

  Turning to Casey, I said: “We’re not going to wait for them to jump us. We’re going to take the fight to them.”

  “Suits me,” Casey growled. “What do you want to do?”

  “You remember that little thumb where we found the chestnut that time?”

  “I ain’t likely to forget.”

  I don’t guess either of us would. We’d been on a drive to Punta Rassa with Pa and a small crew of drovers when Casey and I discovered the place. This was just after the war broke out in ’61, and times hadn’t seemed quite so perilous then, although I suspect we were just naïve in our thinking. At any rate, we were still north of the Caloosahatchee, following it southwest toward the lower ford at Fort Myers, when Casey and I crossed the river on a lark one evening after bedding the herd down for the night. Although we’d told Pa we were going to hunt for fresh meat, maybe some turkeys or a young deer to supplement the tough beef and beans we’d been eating, we were mostly just out on a ramble, a couple of young bucks filled with energy and aimless ambition.