I was delighted to scoop up several timeworn books on the American West from a generous pile of “Free Stuff” set outside an old log cabin above Bigfork.
My favorite, purchased for $30 at a Michigan bookshop after being “DISCARDED” by the Nesmith Library in New Hampshire, is titled “Way Out West: Recollections and Tales,” compiled and edited by renowned Missoula author and Rhodes Scholar H.G. Merriam (b. 1883) “in the belief that they are informatively entertaining and valuable as second sources of history.”
That they are, particularly the chapter “Partners in the Early West,” culled from the published and unpublished manuscripts of one Frank Bird Linderman (b. 1869), the legendary Flathead trapper, hunter’s guide, friend of the Indian (adopted by three tribes), politician and author.
To this day, the illustrious pioneer’s legacy lives on in the Flathead, from Linderman Elementary School in Polson to the Linderman Education Center in Kalispell.
What I never knew existed until now, though, is Linderman’s personal account of how he’d dropped out of an Ohio college at age 16 and made a beeline for “Flathead country,” where he unwittingly became the trapping partner of outlaw gunfighter “Black George,” who was fresh off “a killing or two” over the mountains.
“In one of these affairs,” Linderman would recall in graphic detail, “he had used his butcher knife in deadly fashion. ‘I felt her go bump, bump, bump, over every rib the feller had,’ he told me. Afterward, when on a spree, Black George never packed his knife. ‘It ain’t a white man’s weapon nohow,’ he said when he told me the story.”
So how did a youthful and innocent Linderman get tangled up with a gunslinger carrying a bounty on his head? As Merriam observed: “The picture of the lad with down on his chin, and the heavily bearded man, a fugitive from justice, is amusing.”
“I had [in 1885] ridden into Demersville, Montana Territory, consisting then of a store owned by Jack Demers and the saloon of Johnnie Foy,” Linderman began the tale, referring to Northwest Montana’s first incorporated town and — upon the birth of Kalispell — ghost town.
“Sleet, driven by a north wind that iced the grass and stung my face, obliged me to ride with my head bent downward,” he continued. “Near the saloon my horse shied at a canvas-colored bedroll that was sheathed with ice. Leaning against the roll I saw a Winchester, its muzzle up and exposed to the storm. ‘Somebody has gone on a spree and forgotten his rifle,’ I thought, getting down to attend to the gun that might become rusted. There was no ice in the barrel.
“Throwing a cartridge into its chamber, I fired it. Then, after wiping the piece as well as I could on the tail of my buckskin shirt, I shoved the rifle into the bedroll among the blankets. My horse had turned his rump to the storm. When I turned him back to lead him to the store, I saw Black George staring drunkenly at me from the saloon window.”
Uh-oh.
“He came to the door. ‘How!’ he called, coming out into the storm to stand before me, his lower legs encased in tattered Red River leggins that had once been very fine ones. He was just under six feet tall, with long black hair and beard that were both streaked with gray. His buckskin shirt, almost black with wear, was open far down, exposing his hairy breast. His hat was pulled down over his eyes. I noticed that his knife scabbard held no knife. Later on I learned why.
“‘Old hand, ain’t ye?’ he sneered, sticking his hands under his cartridge belt flat against his stomach. ‘Takin’ care of my rifle for me! A damned pilgrim takin’ care of Black George’s rifle!’”
Yikes!
“But by now I had caught a twinkle in his half-befuddled eyes. ‘You’d do it for another man,’ I said.
“‘How do you know I would?’ He smiled, and we were friends.”
Fast friends is more like it, the unlikely pair agreeing to become trapping partners and setting off for the fur-rich Swan Valley.
“Little by little I gathered bits of his story, even his real name,” recalled Linderman, and soon Black George confessed how the hangman almost “got” him “over in the basin.”
“Black George was a slave to whisky,” he added, which helped explain the outlaw’s short fuse. “I have known him, in the dead of winter, to snowshoe fifty miles to get drunk.”
The hangman might not have been able to rope Black George, but Linderman told of the time an otherwise trapped wildcat came close to setting up a meeting between the fugitive and his maker.
“One extremely cold day George and I … came to a trap that held a large lynx, not far from our cabin. ‘Big feller,’ said George, striking the animal with a sharp blow to the head. ‘Let’s us pack him to the shack where we can skin him out in comfort.’”
Black George proceeded to tie one of the cat’s front paws to a hind paw “and then lifted the animal up so that he might poke his own head through the loop made by the tied legs. The body of the lynx was thus under George’s arm against his body, nearly halfway down his side. The head of the beast was in front, so that its tail end was toward me when I fell in behind my partner to go the cabin.”
Wouldn’t you know all of the jostling “revived” the massive cat and “the first thing I knew George’s hat went flying. I cannot describe what followed,” Linderman penned in his manuscript. “I know that the lynx bit, spat, clawed, and growled, and that Black George swore strange oaths, all in a whirl of flying snow, before they came apart.”
Linderman, for his part, couldn’t contain himself. Down on his knees “limp from laughing,” he tried to regain his composure, only to go “off again into gales of laughter while George, muttering, made a hurried examination of his bloody arm and breast.”
“What you laughin’ at?” Black George yelled. “Want to see a feller gutted? Hell!”
George’s buckskin shirt, his partner wrote, surely saved his life. That and the turpentine poured “freely” into deep gashes until the cabin “began to smell like a paint shop.”
Only when Black George went from grunting to reliving the cat “fight” in colorful detail did Linderman know his friend was safely out of the woods, “and what a blessing this was to me!”
“‘Don’t never fool with ’em none,’ said George at last, very soberly … ‘Their cussed toenails can raise more hell with a man than a sharp butcher knife.’”
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author.