The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [372]
Surrounding Fort Sill were the rugged Wichita Mountains—a jumbled landscape of rocky outcroppings, rock-crowded peaks, towering sentinels, granite ridges, and huge boulders strewn around 60,000 acres of prairielands. The Wichita Uplift—which occurred during the Pennsylvania Period about 300 million years ago—had created a number of peaks over 2,000 feet above sea level; they were older than the Alps or Himalayas. Four types of habitats could be found in the Wichita Mountains: rocklands, aquatic, mixed grass prairie, and cross-timbers.17 In this strange range, bunch grass was interspersed with scrub oak forest, cactus, and aloe plants. The Wichitas were a botanical crossroads (ecocene) with more than 270 bird species taking advantage of the buffet, fattening up for the winter. It was said by western frontiersmen that the ancestral Wichitas—this series of rock prominences—was where the East met the West at the vertex of the Great Plains.18 The Red Beds here—formed by prehistoric ocean currents, huge earthquakes, and glacial shifts—resembled the Garden of the Gods outside Colorado Springs. It was a geologist’s dream, a rock garden in which boulders hung off cliffs, seemingly ready to tumble in a roaring avalanche with a northerly gust.
The president’s lead guide in the Big Pasture and Wichita Mountains was going to be Jack “Catch ’Em Alive” Abernathy, a white, Anglo counterpart of Holt Collier; though his specialty was hunting the prairie wolf (Canis latrans) with catch rope instead of hunting the black bear with a knife. Born in 1876 in Bosque County, Texas, colorful Abernathy cut such a swath across the Red River valley of Texas-Oklahoma that he became a legend to drovers from Amarillo to Tulsa. By the time Abernathy was fifteen years old he had already had successful careers as a cowboy on the A-K-X Ranch and as a bronco buster with the J-A outfit. Nobody, it was said, could saddle a wild horse as skillfully as Abernathy. Some people complained that he overworked and underfed his stallions. But everybody agreed that at dusk, Abernathy was usually the last man to hobble his horse.
Brickish and bullnecked, Abernathy was an excellent pianist and bluegrass fiddler in the fast Smokies style of eastern Tennessee. At his regular gigs in bars in Sweetwater, Texas, “Dixie” was still the most frequently requested song, followed by “Ole Paint” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Gregarious to the point of causing irritation, Abernathy had the smile of a dedicated drinker. In reality, he was nearly a teetotaler, taking only an occasional shot or two of bourbon for a toothache. “My six-shooter was my friend,” Abernathy wrote of his youthful days, “and constant companion.” 19
Refusing to be an antihero Abernathy, a proud and devout Christian, lived on the straight and narrow. A man who could defend himself in a scrape, he was dutifully married and had five children. Abernathy was always looking for freelance law enforcement work; handcuffs often dangled at his side. Fairly regularly, he served as an under-sheriff or posse leader for day wages. Townspeople looked up to him. He also took on short ranch jobs at regular intervals. Around a campfire, Abernathy was always the guy tossing kindling on the flames, hoping to keep the conversation going. With his white horse, Sam Bass, and his brave dog Catch (a Scottish shepherd), he was as close to the character called “the Virginian” as was possible in north Texas and southwestern Oklahoma. Owen Wister could easily have woven Abernathy’s trademark quip—“I am a goner for keeps”—into The Virginian. Adding to his western appeal, a kind of Fort Worth drawl colored Abernathy’s utterances: “cow” was “kyow” and was “womb-man.” But for all of his decency, Abernathy wasn’t a nester. Restlessness was his normal condition.
By 1905, what had really made Abernathy legendary, a one-man show more dazzling than Annie Oakley shooting glass balls out of the sky, was his ability to catch a