Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (42 page)

“From there I headed to the Big Range. Figured I'd wait out the winter with my kin. But before I got there I found a likely spot at the base of a mountain out there close by Newton, Utah, called Molly's Nipple. Don't ask me how it got that name,” he smiled, winked. “Because I am liable to get a little embarrassed.” He laughed, before continuing his story. “So I buried that money and didn't draw off it right then. Plenty of time for spending all that money down the road.

“That winter I visited with neighbors, family. One neighbor had a boy, couldn't have been more than a year or so old. You remember that?” Nelson smiled at Simmonds, who nodded, knowing that boy had been him, though too long ago to recall it.

“Wasn't long after that, along about the next year, I think, 1875 it was, that I made my way through Elko, Nevada, then south a ways toward the White Mountains near Ely. As I passed on through Elko I couldn't help it—I found myself leaving town with a team of horses. Imagine my surprise when the sheriff showed up at my camp. Not only did he catch me with those horses, but he had a wanted dodger on me for the stage coach job! Of all the nerve, rode right into my camp and that was that. I ended up spending the next nine years—nine years!—at Carson City prison. Wasn't until 1884 that I got out and bee-lined it back to Molly's Nipple and my loot. It was all still there too. I will admit—and no shame in it, either, that I lived like a king for a winter.

“By May, 1884, I found myself in Frisco, Utah, and found something I knew a little about—two horses that looked like they needed me to show them the way to a better trail. So the next day when I headed on out of town, why those two horses came with me. Problem was, they belonged to a local rancher who was all worked up over them being missing and all. I managed to hide them, but it didn't matter. They still rousted me at the line cabin on my papa's range.

“They tore everything apart, didn't find hide nor hair of those horses. But they yarned me outta there anyways. Kept me a few days, then had to let me go. I sold those horses for a nice little profit. Oh I spent the next ten or so years moving other people's dogies and ponies from Utah on up to Montana and back again, wherever there was men and money, and mining money, in particular. They always seemed to need good cattle and horseflesh. There was demand, see, and I was filling it. Plain good business savvy.

“After a fashion I grew tired of all that rousting up and down, even though parts of it were still exciting to me. I guess I was just getting older, I don't know. But soon enough I bought me a saloon. I tried to keep on the level and narrow road that so many other men don't seem to have a problem traveling, but so help me, it was all I could do to not shoot myself.

“I ended up making nighttime runs, found me a new product to peddle too.” Black Jack leaned forward. “It was wheat,” he sat back. “Yes sir. Wheat. I'd scuttle on in under cover of darkness and load up a wagon, drive it north ten miles or so, sell it to a mill, strike off in a different direction, find more, sell it, make my way home. No questions were asked, no answers were given. Now who's the crook, eh?” he laughed again, slapping at that knee.

“I tell you, though, those were tedious years. Still are. That blasted county sheriff, Rob Crookston, has been riding out to my place regular as clockwork, with warrants for my arrest. Ever since 1881 or so on up through today. Any time anything goes wrong, any time someone's kitten goes missing, anything at all goes amiss, and he comes trotting on out to my place, drags me back with him. I tell you it gets downright embarrassing.

“So after a few of those episodes, I hired me a lawyer, one George Q. Rich. He was a good attorney, but I tell you what, there was no competing with a warrant every month, sometimes more than one! I believe it was in 1904 that he got so fed up because I kept him so blamed busy that he sent me a letter. Mind you he sent it to me,” Nelson leaned forward, smiling, eyes twinkling, and he said, “The note had just two words on it: ‘You're fired.' Ha! Imagine that! My own attorney fired me! Oh but that was a hoot.

“Then those rascals in Newton, they outlawed booze two years ago, and me owning the only saloon in town. Imagine that. How can a man be a man without a bar to lean on and a fine friend to share a few swallows with?” He raised the bottle and saluted Simmonds, passed it to the younger man.

Nelson dragged his coat cuff across his mustachioed mouth and belched softly. “I'm selling up and heading on out of here. It's no fun anymore.” He stood and stretched his husky, five-foot-six frame, squared his hat on his head, and shook the younger man's hand. “Be seeing you, Simmonds. Good knowing you.”

He walked to the door and Simmonds watched Black Jack Nelson leave, a man not yet old, but no longer young, a man who had lived more adventurous years than any ten men Simmonds knew he was likely to ever meet.

Nelson paused in the doorway of the ranch blacksmith shop and half turned. “And if you ever tell anyone about all these things I just said,” he smiled, “I'll deny it all. Ha!” He slapped his leg and walked off, offering a slow wave over his shoulder as he made his way into the night.

Simmonds wasn't sure what to think of this man he'd just heard share secrets to which no one else had ever been privy. Outlaw? Thief? A man who'd swindled and stolen and pillaged up one side of the Big Range and down the other. A man who had stolen from friends, foe, and family alike. And yet, there was something about Black Jack Nelson that was likeable. Legend or outlaw. Or both.

Simmonds swigged the last of the bottle and headed for his house.

S
ometimes thievery and swindling take on different forms, become an oozing sickness that runs long and deep, a vein of illness coursing beneath a place, leaching evil upward into the inhabitants, causing good and bad to clash time and again. Sometimes swindling is a deep-rooted hoax rather than the surface-dwelling misdeeds of a fly-by-night thimblerigger. Such was the case with San Francisco when the nineteenth century collapsed, plundered and spent, at the feet of the shiny new twentieth century. But it didn't end there.

The Barbary Coast, a nine-block canker clinging to the wharves of San Francisco, was a premier red-light district, where brothels, saloons, and gambling halls numbered in the hundreds. Seekers of the dangerous district's ills numbered in the tens of thousands, following the overnight bloom of the California Gold Rush in 1849.

Though that hotbed of debauchery certainly existed for more than a decade, it was not until the early 1860s that the Barbary Coast earned its romantic moniker. Sailors pinched the name from the original Barbary Coast, along North Africa's coastline, a notorious region where pirates and slavers looted, raided, and instigated every possible pursuit of vice and corruption. It was a matter of time before someone named California's coastal version the same thing.

From the raw, wide-open hedonism, crime, and deviltry of the Barbary Coast to gang rule and warfare to decades of graft and corruption within the ranks of its elected officials, San Francisco has a fascinating history of lawlessness that exceeds better-known wide-open Old West towns such as Dodge City, Deadwood, and Tombstone. But what can we expect from a city whose population bloomed fifty-fold in a little more than two years following the gold rush? In 1847 San Francisco was a sleepy little coastal enclave of 492 people living in tents and crude shacks. By the time 1849 drew to a close, more than 25,000 people called the spot home.

So what qualifies nineteenth-century San Francisco as a swindler? In truth, the Bay City was not so much a swindler as it was a haven for them. Indeed, as a locale, it proved itself to be an ideal incubator for individuals and groups actively engaged in bilking others out of their money, their time, their votes, and ultimately, their most valuable possession—their lives.

Had San Francisco, and in particular Barbary Coast within it, not formed as it had—rapidly and with little oversight—there would have been far fewer incidences of swindlers and swindling farther afield throughout the West. But because San Francisco was such a hotbed of chicanery and deceit, like-minded individuals congregated and conjured more of the same until it was impossible for a man to leave a brothel without getting waylaid and robbed as he stepped out the door on his way to a saloon two doors down.

It wouldn't be long before the city became fractured into various neighborhoods filled with gangs, frequently allied or divided by nationality or political or social agendas. One of the earliest such gangs was a clot some sixty strong, tightly organized like a modern-day biker gang. These men, calling themselves the Hounds, set up shop in 1848 and made a business of the prevailing disorganized and unruly individualistic pursuits of swindling, thieving, corruption, and murder, and upped the ante to almighty heights.

The Hounds were discharged Mexican-American War volunteers, many of them former gang members from New York City with axes to grind. They tormented anyone of Spanish descent and shook down local merchants for protection money, promising woe to those who refused to pay up. The Hounds set upon the belligerent with a fury, and with a few quick flashes of knives or razor blades, they removed noses, ears, eyes, fingers, toes, or worse. Not surprisingly, the newly scarred merchant usually paid the extortion fee and continued to do so—minus an appendage. . . .

“Hey, Paco. . . .”

The slight, swarthy man tried not to let on that he'd heard the call, but it had hitched his step. So he thought, keeping his hands balled tight in his coat pockets. Tonight is my night, the thing I have been expecting is about to happen, unless I can run faster than them. He didn't quicken his pace until he heard the boot steps draw closer—it sounded like two men somewhere behind him, closing in.

“Hey, I'm talking to you, Mexican!”

Here we go, thought the man, and he slid his hands out of his pockets even as he bolted forward down the mud street, splashes of ooze spraying upward with each footfall. Behind him he heard shouts, “Get him! Stop that man!”

He ran faster, leapt over the remnants of a shattered wooden crate, dodged to his left to avoid piling into two scantily clad women leaning against each other.
Have to get away
—he knew what would happen to him. His only crime was working hard to make money to get out of the city.

He knew that the two men behind him were members of the Hounds, and the Hounds hated him because he was Mexican and because he owned a small business selling rough-weave shirts and trousers to miners. It wasn't his business the Hounds objected to, but the fact that he had refused to pay them the money they demanded. And he knew what would happen because he witnessed the results of their so-called protection. But business had been slow and he had no money to pay them, even if he had wanted to—which he didn't.

And now it would not matter—they were hard on his trail. His shop front, such as it was, would not exist tomorrow, of that he was sure, and he would owe money for the inventory.

As the shouts increased and the sound of the men's voices drew closer, he knew he might not make it away from them. Might not, but he had to try. His breath came in quick gasps now, hot and stinging in his chest. Sweat stippled his face, ran down his cheeks and nose, he felt its salty tang on his moustache. He might just make it—the shouts of the men were not as close as they had been seconds before.

And then a man ahead, a tall, thin-looking fellow with ratty clothes and a broken cane spun in his direction on hearing the shouts of his pursuers. He saw the man's smile widen, saw the black nubs and gaps where teeth had been. Then he was bolting by the man, then . . . his legs hit something and he heard a cackling laugh as he flipped forward. He landed face-first in a half-muddied patch just outside a saloon filled with drunken men and women. As he pushed himself up, he saw the tall man poking at him with his broken cane and knew the man had stuck his long leg out and tripped him.