Between the “Columbia” river and the “Cascades,” before the Oregon Treaty split the land at the 49th parallel, before the reservations, the fur traders and company men, the prospectors and the cavalry, the boomtowns, the gold rush, and the Grand Coulee Dam, and long before the California vineyards and green-horned retirees made their way to the to the Pacific Northwest, the Sylix people were the name-givers in the Okanagan Valley. To say this land was theirs is to overcode the open range with a kind of belonging, strange to the kind that bonds a people to their home, a juniper’s belonging. For the Sylix, “us” is a place; it is the capacity to know that the self and its tactics are inseparable from “everything that surrounds [them].” Language is the utterance and understanding between all things, sharing a juncture of time, space, and mind. It is the natural consonance that compels the cowbird to mosey with the cattle, like the chuckwagon triangle ringing the cowpokes to their dinner.

In the Nsyilxcən language, the words for “our place on the land” and “our language” are one and the same: “to know all the plants, animals, seasons, and geography is to construct language for them.” This kind of language doesn’t turn up abstractly from the individual’s need to muse and meditate, to release the soul’s internal pressure like steam out of prairie coal. It comes from without, the imminent relationships between the self and the all: the voice in an Iowa cornfield, saying, “if you build it, he will come.” To deny this language, to subordinate the lingo of the green skies before a twister or the well water dropping before an earthquake to the petty snapping of everyday chit chat, is to drift away from the soul’s vittles.

Language, bound by the voice and letter, takes the appearance of cyphers: puzzles, whose makers cleave the spoken and unspoken word asunder, and whose feverishly generative complexity conceals the violence that undergirds them. Dynamite can break an armored car; it’s the Pinkertons hidden within that pose a threat. It is they, puzzles and Pinkertons, that allow the masters of this argot to debase us by the methods of the Santa Fe ring: robbing the farmers and American Indians, not at gunpoint, but through soap boxes and highfalutin lawyers. There have been times and places when violence could not be expressed nonviolently, when a word could be called a gun, and a sheriff called a highwayman. Today, there are 50 living speakers of Nsyilxcen. Most of the valley’s occupants speak English.

Villa Bonita

There are two kinds of folks in the New Mexico territory, the kind what drives the cattle up and the kind what brands them: the cowboy and the rancher. The question that sent all of Lincoln County to sixes and sevens was and is “what sets the lasso in one pair of hands and the hot iron in another?” In the years leading up to the Lincoln County War, any feller worth his spurs knew how to get moneyed. You came out West with a caravan of drupes: lead plums and smoke wagons.

On August 17th, 1877, William “Billy the Kid” Bonnet eventuated Frank “Windy” Cahill for crawling his hump in Bonita. A witness came to his defense; “Billy had no choice; he had to use his equalizer.” In the West, the brandin’ iron shamelessly implied the barkin’ iron. Yep, when the blood was still wet on the grass, the cowpoke knew where equality emerged from. The battlefield that unyoked the landed feller from the saddle tramp was only level to the extent that any two hoopleheads could shuck their holsters, set sights, and drop their hammers concurrently. The gunshot didn’t materialize the bullet, as it does today, no more than the pain of a gibe comes from the sound of the voice. It’s who says it that hurts you. The gun, the bullet, and the outlaw slinging them were inseparable in the Bonita Village Saloon.

When news of Billy’s killing had spread, the two of them weren’t just reds and blacks in the pioneer’s account of “indiscriminate” violence. They were characters in a culture of radical honesty, where their words were intended to reflect the implicit power behind them. “Windy” wasn’t a victim of censorship; he woke snakes and bit dirt for bad-mouthing a faster hand. The first shot might as well have whistled right out of Windy’s lips, when he called Billy a “pimp,” cuz’ there’s more than one way to start a fight besides the slap of a glove or the drop of a hat. Enticing some sorry sonofabitch out in the streets and squinting your eyes at him are actions too; Windy knew what he was doing and what he was looking for. The Kid and the witness did too. There wasn’t a linguist in Bonita to ponder how if he had aired his lungs differently, calling him a “procurer” instead of “pimp” (semantics), Windy might have still been alive. The insult itself was a reference to the guns in their pockets and the muscles under their shirts. How often we find ourselves in a saloon and know just by the swing of the double action doors, and the shadow on the sawdust floor, who’s looking for trouble and who aint? A bantam of 17 years old, the Kid had never been a human trafficker. Calling him a “pimp” wasn’t to say, “you sell flesh.” It wasn’t a communication, but a reference to the system of violence belonging to both of them and the subordination of Kid to Cahill therewithin.

Those were the days when a gun wasn’t just a word in a lawman’s hand; it weighed heavy in yours. The manifest violence of ranch owners, bandits, neighbors, cavalrymen, and the law itself demanded preparation to meet that violence head on, physically and also conceptually: a Winchester in every hacienda and a bright-eyed son for every rifleman. Let’s ponder Henry Plummer, the Outlaw Sheriff of Bannack, Montana. Already a fugitive for two separate murders, in 1863 Plummer gunned down a horse trader named Jack Cleaveland in a bar fight over his future wife, Electa Bryan. The crowded saloon’s patrons were impressed by this stranger’s prowess with the steel and elected him Sheriff of Bannack; the robberies began that same year. Plummer and his road agents appropriated over 1,000 pounds of gold over the course of three months. They were eventually caught and summarily executed by the Vigilance Committee of Alder Gulch: a posse of citizen-vigilantes, given their authority by a miner’s court. The business of electing a Sheriff wasn’t about finding the goodliest man in the territory. Hopefully they were on the up and up, but being a capably violent man was the ticket: good chance he’d rustled a few cattle themself, maybe even robbed a bank.

This is what Bannack, Montana saw in Henry Plummer, a killer at a time when they thought they needed killing. Consequently, the cost of having a militarized police, one composed of soldiers, bandits, and gangsters as opposed to respected local community leaders, was understood by all: enough firepower to bed them down. Henry Newton Brown went from murderous outlaw, to murderous lawman, to murderous outlaw again: lateral moves in the Wild West. The purpose of “Law Enforcement” was self explanatory. It wasn’t about “providing criminals with the opportunity to reform.” Healing and forgiveness, the basis of redemption, was the work of townspeople, families, spiritual leaders, communities, et cetera, not gunmen. An outlaw wasn’t expected to thank a cop for slapping them in irons. Breaking rocks in Folsom Prison wasn’t considered “valuable work experience.”

But what a city slicker calls “frontier justice” doesn’t only represent a callousness to human life and due process (whether a process has been formalized or not), the savage indifference of the hanging as “hemp party.” It also represents a place and time when justice and living in a just world, as perceived, was a matter of both public and personal concern. Today’s righteousness rises out of the void like smoke signals. The tempestuous flame of justice is harnessed to call a crusade against faceless enemies, not by its light but its hazy shadow. Now’s an epoch of bad men in white hats. Millions die dispassionately under American bombers, or are detained illegally and lynched. The townsfolk don’t bat an eye. Their justice comes from one beacon, situated atop the mountain. Trail justice comes out the gut, the genuine appetite for the satisfaction of obligations.

This appetite is known to express itself ubiquitously in voices of dissent at all times and places of hardship. Justice oughtn’t be a flexing tool, magically fulfilling the abstract desire for money or establishing the systemic power of the few over the many. Beyond “frontier justice,” even beyond liminal justice, Bannack had fallen into a period of “abyssal” justice. When justice no longer emerged from the real, but from one man’s gold-fever, the frontierfolk of Banack got their guns. In the West, living in a just society had little to do with having a justice system. Sheriffs could come and go, and when one proved to be a tyrant, he was removed one way or another. Justice had to do with the extent to which obligations were satisfied.

The appetite for justice in the frontier states was mighty enough to entice the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union (White farmers of the south), the National Farmers’ Alliance (Black and White farmers from the Midwest and High Plains), and the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union (Black farmers of the south) to fight the crop-lien system together. They briefly organized their own political party, the People’s Party, on the Great Plains of Nebraska, and they encouraged cooperation and mutual respect between all their members. Their sense of justice was tangible: “I can’t feed my family and neither can they,” “our children have left home, and so have theirs,” “why has this been done to us?”  This language of mutual necessity briefly overcame even the racial antagonism between former confederate soldiers and formerly enslaved people moved West, language beyond words: the cries of the overworked land bellowed over the grumbling of Chicago’s stomach.

It took the concerted effort of the Democratic party in a White supremacist campaign to unseat the Populists even in North Carolina. “This is a white man’s country,” their official party handbook read, “and white men must control and govern it.” This sentiment was effectuated by the Wilmington, North Carolina “Insurrection” of 1898, a race massacre focused against the city’s biracial, “Fusionist ” government, its black citizens, and the only black newspaper in the city. It is said to have been the only time in American history where elected officials have been directly and violently removed and replaced by unelected officials, expelling both Black and White politicians.

The violence expressed in the party handbook didn’t incite a riot through its verbiage or by some psycho-congenital defect within its readers. Rather, for this reactionary movement, it was reference to the incessant violence of the antebellum South, remembered, felt, and threatened, that substantiated the statement “this is a white man’s country.” It was a demand to awaken that violence again, a brutality that had partially atrophied during reconstruction, rather than a communication of America’s essence. Despite being composed of bigots, the radical, political West recognized the violence which undergirded its own bigotry and presented a clear path to eliminate it. Said populist politician Tom Watson, a man who, following the collapse of the Populist Party, would identify himself as a White supremacist,

“You are made to hate each other because on that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded because you do not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system that beggars you both. The colored tenant is in the same boat as the white tenant, the colored laborer with the white laborer and that the accident of color can make no difference in the interests of farmers, croppers and laborers.”

If not in thought, at least in action, such a language compels racists to support the same interests of the people to whom they direct their hate. This language emerges when we recognize the root of our prejudices as violence, inflicted from without, rather than nature, emerging from within. When we allow ourselves to understand our thoughts and words as emerging neither from our own essence nor from the force of their mere existence (Chekhov’s six-shooter), but from the relationship between any individual and the system that produces them, we are engaging in the language of the cowboy and the mindfulness of the prairie. This language, emerging from the range, not the land claim, was accessible to the Left Handed Gun and Butch Cassidy, the Cisco Kid and Wyatt Earp. It was seen as well by the townsfolk who cleared the streets to watch them at high noon.

“Print the legend”

In the summer of ‘81, on some ranch just outside Fort Sumner, Sheriff Pat Garrett shot William Bonnet down. By ‘82 he sold the story – The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. We’ll never know very much about the Kid, in a tenderfoot’s sense. What we have left of the wild people of the West, are the musings of the folks who got the bulge on ‘em. The story of Poncho is told by Lefty. A great reporter outta’ Shinbone said once, “this is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The West is the place where legend and fact are indistinguishable, so let’s take a breather to discuss the first legends of the West. Before the ranchers put up their fences, and even before the American Indian herdsmen started to follow Bison from West to East and back again, when the Mastodons and Ground Sloths grazed the northern plains like broomtails, there was the Paleolithic Human. These were milestone mongers: nomads and hunter-gatherers. To them, a wire fence was a reservation, not a homestead. A nomad’s map of the West would damn sure include the Pecos River and maybe the Hole-in-the-Wall, but they never would have walled in “Lincoln County” or drawn in the parish lines. A nomad’s map isn’t made up of imaginary boundaries. They don’t land in Yucatan, like Cortez and Aguirre, and crown themselves the Kings of Mexico. To a nomad, owning something isn’t just stringing a whizzer about what bandwagon sold you the pastures you graze and what greasy spoons, full of bandoliers and buscadores, are itching for a chance to protect them.

Ownership, for a nomad, is like the tightening of a lariat. A lasso is built to constrict and to loosen. There’s no one dogey worth roping at the expense of the herd. It’s a constriction to a functional extent. Fencing off a piece of land and saying, “mine,” would be turning tail on the open range and all the prairie has to offer: endless horizon. The larger your claim is, the greater the opposition you face from the bandits and wolves around it, the rocks and gophers underneath it, and the locusts above it. A nomad’s respect for this mammoth nemesis, seeing as they ford its rivers and climb its mountains, precludes the arbitrary “my.” To recognize the rangeland’s significance is to accept the congenial stewardship of human life. It proves, by our every breath, the compassion given and owed to all. A human being can’t breathe in a vacuum of consideration: a gunslinger always has a friend to stitch them up. One Mastodon in the herd, surrounded by shouting hunters and shot down with Clovis points, was possessed to the extent it could be caught and eaten; it was free to the extent that it could run and buck and trample and holler in its kin. Meat is shared in hunting societies because when standing face to face with a 12,000 pound beast, holding nothing but a few pieces of flint and sticks, the institutional contingency that upholds the enterprise is immediately apparent. “My” in the paleolithic language was substantiated by action, participation, and sharing in the task of communal survival.

“Belonging,” in the modern conception, is divorced from action. It’s a paint-drying series of references to a past perfect instance of justifiable force: the violence which manifests the object of greed and sets it aside for one people over another. In the West, this reference takes the form of the brand, letters and symbols that, rounded up and accounted for, tell the tale of the cattle trade. The Immaculate Branding is the first. It justifies the full split sundering of the part (cow and self) from the whole (range and kin). If civil society is the sphere of exchanges between one pack and another, then the civility of society can be gauged by the extent to which these fixings are traded rightfully. The Immaculate Branding is what presupposes civility and justice in the cattle trade. It is the first scarification (“A” for Abdi-Illi), somewhere in the fertile crescent 10,000 years ago, when the proto-ranchers herded apart the ancestral breeding stock of the beef and dairy industries. It launches a cow into a transcendental future, so that the great great grand babies of that first Sumerian land race are owned by Tyson today.

The Oklahoma Land Grab of 1889 was an Immaculate Branding. The ethnic cleansing of five tribes left 12,000 tracts of land open to anyone who could light a shuck to the territory. The romance of the West has always emerged from the void of infinite possibility: a mountain that loses its allure for every trail driven to its peak, a piece of wood that loses its potential for every cut of a whittler’s knife. The NorthWest Ordinance, with its fee simple property rights, was an immaculate branding too. It divided the range into fiefs and placed them in a sequence of permanent and absolute tenures. Necessarily preceded and accompanied by force, the Immaculate Branding is the first in a series of exchanges, leading from an “A” in Ur to a branding “Z” in Lincoln County.

Then there is the space between A and Z, a chain of honorable handshakes, always fluctuating in length and composition (cutting one hand out and another in) to accommodate both endpoints. Between A and Z there are no physical brandings, only heavenly ones. Every head of cattle is born to an owner, regardless of what their scars, or lack thereof, may claim. Every calf bears a mark of Cain, signaling the violence owed to them what steal or harm the animal. The transformation of a living being into a speculative commodity (livestock), in order to profit the rancher, necessitates both an injustice and a monument to commemorate it: the hanged man on the road to town, that signifies “what we do with cattle rustlers.” Putting the fear in honyockers isn’t quite noble, but a fair shake at Z wants a fair break at A. Barbed wire covers the fence posts. The palisade walls mask themselves as a means of keeping cattle in rather than as the tools of an annexation: “husbandry.” The application of the hot Iron itself is only a convenience of justice between A and Z, a tenable reason for one to shootout or shake hands with another. It is also the physical subordination of an animal or a territory, colonized by forts and palisades. Brands take on all kinds of forms that the rancher understands sequentially. One set of initials proceeds from another, as one family goes bust and another goes boom. The brands fancy themselves facts, the data points which grade the diverse tactics of the cattle trade: “surely the rancher whose signature appears the most has perfected the methods of husbandry.” The succession of endorsements, waxing and waning in complexity, appear as the development of a science and not the canyon-echoes of a long forgotten murder. The ranchers’ fever for this lie, the maintenance of a fair shake across space and time, was at the root of the Lincoln County War.

The Regulators

In 1874, Andrew McSween refused to turn over the payout of an insurance policy to his competitor, the established and politically connected L.G. Murphy. Using his sway in Lincoln County to assemble a posse, Murphy obtained a warrant to claim not only all of McSween’s assets but also those of his partner John Tunstall. On February 18, 1878, Tunstall was mercilessly gunned down a short distance from his field hands, Richard “Dick” Brewer, Billy the Kid, John Middleton, Henry Newton Brown, Robert A. Widenmann, and Fred Waite.

The law in Lincoln County argued that Tunstall had been given a Fair Shake; to seize his land was just because of a warrant, issued by an officer of a territorial court: the transition from two points between “A” and “Z.”  The illegal seizure of his land and annihilation of his soul was accomplished by a Sheriff Brady, concealed in the trappings of justice, but the regulators were made up of cowboys.

These men were among the willows themselves, wrangling horses on the open range – nomads. The cowboy (“saddle tramp”) is a nomad: “I’m as free as the breeze and I ride where I please.” The cowboy’s map is incessant branding and rebranding in real time. Their days do not consist in a ceaseless push from the Texas to Kansas railheads. Rather, their task is the health and maintenance of a herd from one point to another with the whole horizon to pick through. The cows have to move, but only so far as they can still pack on meat. Their map consists of a series of variable points. Some years there’d be just a little rainfall, and the grass would be sparse enough that traveling closer to waterways was essential, other years were more yielding.

The Chisholm Trail, running from San Antonio to Abilene, Kansas, is only a rough sketch of the Journey, rather than a specific set of grazing grounds. The cowboys on Brokeback (Heath and Jake) didn’t herd their sheep to privately secured grasses. They herded them to a place where the grass was greener, illegally in that particular case. When a cowboy finds a place to graze their cattle and water their sun-baked horses, the land is branded immaculately. The violence which precedes and accompanies the Open Range is uncodified. Grazing rights fall under common law.

The rancher secures his land arbitrarily and into perpetuity through the myth of the Fair Shake and employs institutional violence, (i.e. the help of Sheriff Brady) to maintain it. The cowboy brands and rebrands the land as they move through it, based on a series of imminent relationships: the cows’ need for grass and water, the cowboy’s need for work and whiskey, even the grasses’ need of grazing. When these needs expire, the cowboy and the herd giddyap on out. If a couple hungry herds should be led to the same grasses, it could warrant a shootout between two crews of wranglers, especially if you find your boss’s branding in their lot. But once they drop their stock in Chicago, they don’t kill trespassers on their way back to Texas. The life of the cowboy, in relation to the plains, is the constant establishment of a belonging “A,” followed by a nonconsecutive belonging “B.”

This lifestyle necessarily runs afoul of the hyperextended hand of the rancher and compelled John Tunstall’s field hands to call themselves the “Regulators.” They regulated “belonging” as it was felt and needed, not warranted.

The Fair Shake writes histories, in terms like jus in bellum and military exigence. It exists to legitimize the barbed-wire fences, the ledgers of death, and the hawkishly violent head count. The black horse and hat is the Pinkerton and outlaw-for-hire, the servants of the banker and cattle baron. His violence is as perpetual as his scale is unbalanced. So long as the small farmer and the cowboy breathe, the blackhat sits by like a vulture with deeds and warrants in hand. The man with no name, seated on a pale horse, is death as an angel. His violence is imminent and inconstant. He kills within the sphere of killing, when guns are drawn, and he vanishes like Shane when the smoke has settled. The little girl in Pale Rider reads,

“…The third beast said, ‘Come and see.’ And I beheld, and lo a black horse. He that sat on him held a pair of balances. And I heard a voice amidst the beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny and three of barley for a penny and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine. When he opened the fourth seal, the fourth beast said: Come and see. And I looked and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death and Hell followed with him.”

Meanwhile, the same blackhatted bean counter’s sadism motivates the insurrection of one God over several others: the camp preacher is shot dead in the street, the hero kills the outlaws responsible. Religious conquest on the great plains is always retributive, a debt owed to God. Every new plot of “Godless” land seems another step towards insolvency and another massacre justified: fury tempered by discovery. The frontier is God’s keep and the itch of Old Scratch. As the Duke said, “there is no law West of Dodge and no God West of the Pecos.” On the one hand, the West was a place thought to be reserved for God. This was substantiated through papal bulls, transcendentalism, Mormonism, etc.

This was the Exodusters’ vision of the West, a land where God’s love of all creation is substantiated by the physical representation of freedom, a land to call one’s own. On the other hand, the unrelenting violence, greed, and hedonism of the “pioneers,” the impetuosity of Cowboys who would call The Bible “cigarette papers,” and the huge number of non-Christians at home on the plains, was a constant existential threat to God’s frontier-throne. It’s this hypnotic cycle between contradictions, a sense of preterite destiny and the perception of regional anarchy that perpetuates the myth of Westward Expansion as a justly vengeful and redemptive enterprise. Self-victimization validates, in the eyes of the big Rancher, the acts of brutality which catalyze the exchange between “mine” and “yours.” This fraud failed to justify John Tunstall’s murder in the eyes of the regulators. It was the beginning of the Lincoln County War.

Git along to Part II

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