They Die But Once: The Story of a Tejano

By James B. O’Neil

Here is an utterly new departure in biography of the Old West. Writing in the hangered, hard-boiled style made famous by Hemingway and O’Hara, James B. O’Neil has succeeded in transferring the color and idiom of the wild and roaring days of the West to the printed page. They Die But Once is authentic biography—the life story of Jeff Ake, last of the Western gunfighters and vaqueros—yet because of the facility with which the author has translated the spirit of the period into language attuned to the twentieth century, the story moves with all the breathtaking speed of a current gangster thriller. O’Neil discards all the saccharine sentimentality that has clouded the real West of the seventies and presents Jeff Ake’s story in the sharp, biting understatement of contemporary prose.

With the reek of a Texan prison camp in his nostrils, Jeff Ake rode, rampant unreconstruction in his heart, away from the looted Federal Treasury in Austin, with three hundred of Price’s army, into Mexico, where he joined Porfirio Diaz’s bodyguard. Back he came, with horse-trappings of human Comanche-hide and six-guns blazing, to enter the bloody range wars. Hell-bent-for-leather, he rode up and down the range, while pistols barked their staccato tale of sudden death.

In They Die But Once, you will find the reason why Pat Garrett died; the sad tale of the bullet of Billy the Kid; the true cause of John Wesley Hardin’s capture. Bill Longley, Jim Gillett, John Ringo, Kit Carson, Jesse and Frank James, General Custer, Gene Rhodes and Roy Bean (“The Law West of the Pecos”) live and fight and love and die in the thrill-studded pages of They Die But Once. You who have read and not quite believed Clarence Mulford and William Patterson White, hear and know: What they told is only what they dared tell, Jeff Ake tells even more—and can prove a lot of it!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Feb 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789120233

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Text originally published in 1935 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THEY DIE BUT ONCE

THE STORY OF A TEJANO

BY

JAMES B. O’NEIL

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

FOREWORD 4

Chapter 1—Way Back Yonder 5

Chapter 2—Vamanos! 10

Chapter 3—Compound of Blood and Gold 14

Chapter 4—Arizona Viejo 20

Chapter 5—Red Death Beyond the Mimbres 25

Chapter 6—Warriors Unsung 31

Chapter 7—Tales of the Texans 35

Chapter 8—Price’s Critters 41

Chapter 9—Young Jeff Plenty Coups 49

Chapter 10—The Stuff They Made the Books Out Of 57

Chapter 11—Economics of Jeff Ake 64

Chapter 12—Even As In Gilgal 68

Chapter 13—On the Dodge 74

Chapter 14—Fences 81

Chapter 15—That Tejano Desperado 87

Chapter 16—The Foreman of the Two Circle 94

Chapter 17—Where They Kept the Elephant 103

Chapter 18—Thy Neighbor’s Ox 108

Chapter 19—Vanished Dreams 118

Chapter 20—Edna: Her Bedtime Stories 123

Chapter 21—Shadows at Sundown 129

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 132

FOREWORD

IN April of the year 1934, ‘Gene Rhodes—deeply immersed in a story he was writing; a story, more’s the pity, that was never finished—grasped Time’s scythe long enough to write to your editor:

Dear Jim: Jeff Ake is somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. You go and get him to talk to you. He has a real story. I have intended for years to do it, but now I never will....It would be a shame for it to go unrecorded.

Yours, The Ragged Individualist,

E.M.R.

Eugene Manlove Rhodes died in June of that same year. We who were honored in his friendship know that he has gone to find that Justice and Faith which he had seen pass from much of our world as Law and Ordinance and Ruling and Six Per Cent became our gods. No need for eulogy of this Man. Rudyard Kipling, dear to ‘Gene in his every word, might have devised If for that purpose. Who has read ‘Gene’s books knows him, for they were himself in all mutations of that kaleidoscope called the Human Being. Had we all so earned a Seat beneath the Throne, cobwebs would be thick upon many altars.

‘Gene’s vistas of value—human, historical, literary—were reasoned and definite. Therefore this story of Jeff Ake. Days and nights your editor, writing or listening, has sat in open amaze that one man had been and seen and done in the fashion of Jeff Ake. It is pleasant to remember that this old, old man, whose feet are uncertain now, whose eyes are dimming, has yet memory and spirit (and he is a judge of values, too) keen and clear anent a period in these United States when a man did what he had to do from start to finish, with heart and brain in the job; if and when necessary, with both hands and both feet.

Evil days, my masters, when we must turn to our own middle-distant past to find such men current among the crowd. Among us are a few still, of course. One such is trying singlehanded to build out of the wreckage his predecessors in Washington and their suzerains brought about. But with what minowderin’ and menanderin’ and blandandherin’ and widdershins walking and beatings around the bush are such men compelled to operate! Nor is it lack of courage—but the bitterly learned lesson that Virtue, leashed by millions of weakling hands lest she become a power, has no virtue save in secrecy and in stealth.

JAMES BRADAS O’NEIL.

Chapter 1—Way Back Yonder

"HE WAS A-SETTIN’ there and eatin’ chicken like nobody I ever seen befo’. I can see him right now, with his long white hair and his homespun suit. The rest of the chillern was standin’ in the other room, but I was the youngest and I stood in the doorway watchin’ in my shirt tail. Pants? I never had a pair of pants on till after I was six.

Us chillern always had to wait for second table. And we only had chicken on Sundays, mostly. This wasn’t no Sunday, and the Governor kept a-eatin’ and a-eatin’ till it looked like there wasn’t goin’ to be ary bite left. So I commenced to cry, and Mother says, soft, ‘Hush, Jeff.’ The Governor he looked over and s’e: ‘What’s the matter, son?’ So I up and told him. He bust right out laughin’ and s’e: ‘Here, sonny, take this, and if I don’t leave any, you run right out and buy all the chicken you want.’ And he handed me a five-franc piece. They was common in Arkansas then.

Governor Roane was guest-of-honor that morning in the house of his friend and liegeman, Felix Grunday Ake; his good friend and within an hour or two, his second-to-be; the Governor was about to meet an insulting Englishman according to the code of gentlemen. There was no shadow of tragedy over the breakfast-table; duels were not rare. Nor was there tragedy at the duel. The Englishman fired first, before the word, missed his opponent; the Governor, disdaining his shot at an antagonist of so mean caliber, dismissed him with a few well-chosen cuss-words.

It was a fitting end. The War of 1812 was not yet forgotten in the Mississippi Valley. The passage of thirty-five years had not eroded the pride of pioneers in victory at New Orleans over another Englishman named Pakenham and his red-coated, long-gaitered army and his high-handed navy; victory won chiefly by American trapper, American pirate and American Indian, plus a handful of the American regular army—in that time few potatoes. Pride was enhanced in the commander of the American forces—Andrew Jackson, of the true frontier breed; Old Hickory, half horse and half alligator.

To the children, matters of the past were past. Here under their very eyes was the Governor of the State. Governors still ranked as First Gentlemen in those days. Arkansas had not had so many of them as to remove the glamour. The state was only fourteen years old—comparatively new, as the land to the west and southwest was entirely new. New and fearful and fascinating; not overrun by people (except Indians, and they counted only as among the more dangerous varmints), therefore especially to be desired.

So the Ake youngsters—Ed and Bob and Jinny, Tennessee-born (as was Napoleon Rock Ake, the son now in California looking after his Dad’s gold claims), Anne and Will and Jeff, natives of Arkansas—waited in some degree of awe until the Governor had breakfasted, and took their places at table. Maugre Jeff’s fears, there was plenty of chicken left. Appetites may have been a bit less than normal among them. The Governor’s visit had made supper late enough the previous night to require candles—an unusual occurrence in the household where candles, hand-dipped by the slaves under Mother Ake’s eye, were not lightly expended. Handcraft governed a large share of the family economy. All the family’s shoes, Jeff says, were made by old Uncle Bob, our nigger handy man who had pretty nigh raised my dad. From my little-boy days up to and during the Civil War, our clothes were made at home. The nigger women and my mother spun and wove the cloth, and cut and sewed the clothes, jeans for winter, heavy cotton for summer. They made our socks, too. I never wore nothing but a long shirt and shoes and stockings until after I was six years old.

All this was down in the Vache Grasse country, below Fort Smith, in 1851—the year following enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law, and the admission of California into the Union as a state and of New Mexico, from the Rio Grande to the Colorado, as a Territory. Felix Grunday Ake had just returned from the gold fields of California, a Forty-niner, with amazing and exciting news for the children. They were going to California—the whole family.

Jeff’s dad was a popular man. He had been well-liked in Tennessee; in Arkansas, he was a power in the community as well. He had a big mill down on the Vache Grasse; he had scripped many acres on that creek after the Mexican War; he had taken his league and labore of land, the Mexican War veterans’ headright, in Texas—the league in Williamson County, the labore in Bowie. He owned sixty-two negroes, half of whom he had sent down into Williamson County to farm the new land and to build a rock fence around it—9 miles of fence. Further, he had built, by contract, the road from Fort Smith to Little Rock, 140 miles through swamp, hill, forest and stream.

Roadbuilding in the ‘forties was somewhat different from the modern system. Among other things, surveyor and pick-and-shovel man alike—long-haired, bearded, mustachioed, side-burned—worked with rifle at hand, knife in belt and eye over the shoulder, sometimes for Kansas ruffians on the prowl, more often for Indians. The Trail of Tears was not yet dry; indeed, Felix Grunday Ake had took the contract to move the Seminoles from Florida to Indian Territory. Little Jeff remembered them very well. They was very tall and quiet, he says of them; they didn’t make no trouble, but they looked pretty dangerous when they passed our house on the way to their land. The moving of the tribes to the Territory had left the Indians quiescent, stunned with defeat; but they still had their hours of remembrance, Choctaw, Cherokee, Osage, Pottawottamie, Cree, Shawnee, Seminole, alike; remembrances of broken treaties and white outrage and red reprisal; hours like to occur, as a rule, when the bootlegger of that day (who, oh, Repetitious History! seems to have formed no small fraction of the population) had been on the reservation.

Not that the Akes were especially dismayed by these things. Alarums and excursions, battle and scrimmage, were Ake heritage. Three of my grandparents, Jeff says, "came from Ireland. Grandfather Ake and his wife, Bridget O’Brien, were Dubliners; Grandmother Raines was Patricia Baldwin from Dublin—the same branch as the California Baldwins; her husband, Captain Billy, was a Scotch Highlander. Both grandfathers were with Jackson at New Orleans.

"Dad was Irish through and through, although they say that the name goes back to Norway or Denmark. He was tall, with dark brown hair and a sandy mustache and a brogue out of the bogs. ‘Be Jasus,’ he’d say, or ‘Begod.’ I never heard him use a worse oath. Like all the Irish, he was a hossman from where they laid the chunk. They used to say he was the handsomest man in Tennessee. He owned property in Peach Orchard, Tennessee, and some in Kentucky. He used to race hosses in both places, and he knowed all the tricks. As long as I can remember, his hosses were good enough so it wasn’t easy for him to get a race matched against them.

"The Raines family was good people, too. I remember Grandfather Raines—highbred Scotch, who thought the English was no good for nothing. He was a Catholic, like my father was. Dad and Mother—but she was a Baptist—took me down to San Antonio to be baptized, nigh 800 miles, because there was no priest nearer at the time, she has told me. Grandfather Raines used to wear knee pants with gold buckles, I remember, and gold buckles on his shoes.

"Mother was reckoned a beauty when she was young, and a fine dancer. She could cut a pigeon wing mighty pretty, even when I remember. Dancing in them days was what you could do; not wiggle around and shake your rump, like they dance now. Mother’s hair was jet black, and she had deep blue eyes, sparkling alive. She was small; I reckon she’d weigh about 125 pounds. She was expert at needlework; she did that all her life, and did fine work even when she was a hundred years old. She used to tell how Andrew Jackson escorted my aunt Martha home from a dance in Tennessee, where both of them had danced with him.

Dad inherited his farm in Tennessee, and some niggers. One old nigger family I remember come to Arkansas with him—Aunt Harriet and Uncle Bob. They had pretty nigh raised him after his father died. Dad was always kind and loving with us chillern. And he was mighty kind to the slaves, too. He never whipped ‘em, and he wouldn’t allow no other man to whip ‘em. I remember the patterollers one time caught one of our boys and whipped him. Dad run them patterollers outen the county for that.

Most everyone remembers the song, Run, nigger, run er the patterollers git you in Uncle Remus of blessed memory? In the Atlantic States, these patrols were hired to catch slaves absent from their quarters after hours or without pass. In Arkansas and Texas, they were not infrequently volunteer reward hunters—long-nosed snoopers, as it were.

Our niggers went to church on Sundays, Jeff says, "and Dad would always give ‘em passes to go visiting. They eat what we eat. The cooks would make great big pots of hominy and milk, and always plenty for everybody. We and the slaves was served outen the same kettle. Old Aunt Harriet had my dad right under her thumb, for she had raised him. Time and time I’ve seen him starting out to milk, and when he passed the cookhouse Aunt Harriet would say, ‘Grunday, I need somebody to make a fire.’ Dad would set down his buckets and make the fire. He would say to us, ‘That’s the only mother I ever knew. I suckled from her black breast when I would have died without her. I don’t mind doing anything for her. She made me what I am.’

"Old Uncle Bob was practically free. He could go and come when he wanted. He was a good old head, and the best fiddler I ever knowed. He fed me the first drink of liquor I ever had. In cold weather we would serve out rum to the hands. I was a-watchin’ him one day, and s’I: ‘That ain’t no good, is it, Uncle Bob?’ His old face cracked all over in a grin, and s’e: ‘Chile, you jest oughta taste hit.’ I did; I swallered near half a pint before I could stop. It was smooth old stuff like molasses going down—and I was drunk for nigh three days.

"The niggers were each give a plot of garden land by my dad. On the farm we raised lots of wheat and corn, and some oats, millet, Hungarian grass and cotton. Cotton wasn’t worth much then; we raised it for our own use, and we had sheep for our wool. The niggers knitted their stockings and made their own clothes, mostly. Old Aunt Sarah would make cotton dresses for the women hands, sometimes. I’ve watched ‘em spinning and weaving many times by torchlight, or by little lamps like teapots with a wick stuck in the spout, and burned tallow. We used pine torches mostly, out of doors.

"Our house was two stories high, made of logs and plastered in the chinks. We had fireplaces in both stories. The kitchen was a kind of L in the back, and there was three rows double of nigger cabins off to one side and back. Us chillern went to school in a little log house about two miles away at Sulphur Springs that Dad built for a school. Games? Oh, we played marbles, and baseball that we played with wooden paddles and an old yarn ball, and run, holler and run, and such like. There was a good deal of malaria around, and Mother used to give us a lot of quinine.

"The Indians used to play a ball game with wooden paddles. They had two posts, each with a ring and a sort of basket sticking out at the top. The paddles were like spoons, and they threw the ball with them. The ball that went into the basket scored one. They would play over two or three hundred yards of ground, and fight with them paddles pretty nigh like they was clubs. It was a serious game; they would bet hosses, Choctaws against Chickasaws. It was mighty interesting and exciting to watch.

"I’ll never forget the night that Dad come back from California. It was dark, and I was a-setting by the fire. Here come a man busting in the door; a tall, dark man with a beard down to his waist. He grabbed me up in his arms, and I fought him like a little wildcat. Mother jumped for him, and when he grabbed her I reckon she fainted. Next morning we had a jubilee breakfast—ham and eggs and egg bread and coffee and fixings. I set right beside my dad, proud as a turkey gobbler.

"Dad told us he had come back with plenty of money. He had gone to California in ‘49, driving 200 head of cattle, and taking Napoleon Rock, my brother, and the Peyton boys, our adopted brothers. He showed us his belt full of gold coins, the first gold coins I ever saw; and he had a bottle—a pint whiskey bottle—full of gold dust, and a three-pound sack of coins besides. He told us he had stopped in New Orleans to get his gold minted, and brought with him four iron-axle wagons loaded with supplies for our trip to California. He carried that bottle of gold dust with him until we got to San Antonio on the way back from New Mexico in ‘62.

"Of co’se us chillern was wild about going to hunt gold. We could hardly wait through the time till Dad sold his mill and land on Sulphur Springs and Flat Rock and the Vache Grasse. He was paid partly in cash and partly in livestock. I remember part of the price was an old swayback prairie wagon that we used on the trip for some of the chillern, till we had to take the chillern out and put young dogies or new-born calves in it, and spread the chillern around in the other wagons.

Dad said he was figgering on running cattle on the Russian River in California, where the boys already had the first bunch. I reckon Dad’s first drive was the first regular herd of cattle driven from Arkansas to California. I never heard of any before that.

The end of waiting came at last. The transfer of property was completed, such supplies as were available at Fort Smith were purchased and loaded, and in the early spring of 1853 the Ake family was off for California.

Chapter 2—Vamanos!

I WAS EIGHT years old when we started, Jeff says. "The train got together at Fort Smith—a long string of bull wagons and men mounted mostly on mules. And while I’m a-tellin’ you this all, don’t forget that I was only eight years old, and that was eighty-two years ago, so if I don’t remember some things it could only be expected.

"Our route was first to Fort Belknap, in Texas, where our family stayed about three weeks trading cattle and hosses. Dad was always a-trading, everywhere we went. He was a good business head.

"The train split up at Fort Belknap, one section heading for Salt Lake and the Mormon country. Our party took the Lower Road to California. From Fort Belknap we went to Fort Mason—the Old Emigrant Road to Uvalde. At Fredericksburg, the Joys left us, to take up Texas land. By that time there was only seven grown men left in our party: Dad, Bill Wadsworth, Tom Thompson (Jinny’s husband), Jim and Joe Ashworth, old Pat Malloy, who had soldiered in the Mexican War with my dad and lived with us till he died, and one other man whose name I can never remember.

Our bunch started north from Fredericksburg for the head of the Colorado, but when we got to Big Spring, they told us there was no known water for a long ways, and we had to turn back. We come out then through Fort Stockton, Fort Davis, the Van Horn Desert, Eagle Springs, Fort Quitman, Ysleta, to El Paso. It wasn’t El Paso then; they called it Franklin. Jeff says, Frankilene, Mexican fashion, as they called it then. "At that time, there was just one store on the American side of the river, run by old man Magoffin, who lived alongside it in a little picket house. There was three or four houses altogether. Magoffin and old Ben Dow were the earliest settlers. We camped just out from there, by the old Black Fort—Fort Concorde, that Captain Bliss built.

Then we went up to Las Cruces and camped there about ten days. It was just a little ‘dobe town, with vineyards and orchards around it. Then we went on up the river to Fort Thorne—Val Verde—where San Marcial is now. That was the first place where Dad could buy more supplies.

Only a very large, highly detailed topographical map can bring out fully the vivid epic in the story of this journey across the Great Unknown Plains. Bull-wagons, four or six steers to the wagon, and mules for mounts, were the motive power; the party was driving half a thousand cattle as well as their work stock. The route was measured by distances