Jess Harper: The Story of My Life
by Sevenstars
SUMMARY: Jess recounts his autobiography in his own words.
This piece, and its companion ("My Life: by Slim Sherman"), came out of an ongoing exchange on an online forum I belong to; someone asked how you could be certain that each character had his own unique "voice," and someone else suggested having each one tell his life story in his own words. I decided to have Slim and Jess do it, just to see if I could.
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My whole name's Jesse Devlin Harper, though I've gone by Jess as far back as I can recall. I'm a Texan, born the fourth of April, 1845, on the Pease River in the Panhandle Country, where my pa was foreman on the Wind Vane ranch, workin' shares instead of for wages. There was nine of us young'uns—my brothers Ben and Jake and my sisters Sophie and Francie was older'n me, and then there was Johnny, three years younger, and the littl'uns, Billy, Davy, and Julie. Ma come out of a good family back in Cherokee County, but when she run off with Pa they cut her off, 'cause the Harpers was—well, there was a passel of 'em, but they wasn't too high thought of; most was either wild and lawless or poor and shiftless, though a few, the most successful, was neither one, just kind of... dubious, is what Francie calls 'em. They didn't go for his choice no more'n Ma's folks done for hers, reckoned he saw himself as too good for 'em. So when I was comin' up the only one of my kin that I knew was Ma's brother, my Uncle Cam Cooper; he was a Texas Ranger, him and Pa had fought Indians together when they wasn't much better'n shirttail kids, and he knew there was more to Pa than his folks reckoned on. He used to come up and visit three-four times a year, and he was all that kept us in touch with our Cooper kin back in East Texas, though we never met any of 'em, nor got no letters from 'em neither, come to that; just pass-on greetin's.
We all grew up pretty much on our own resources; it was seventy-five miles to Amarillo, so we never went to church or to school—Ma taught us to read and write and cipher around the kitchen table. There wasn't much cash money, and most of my clothes was hand-me-downs from the big boys. But Ma always kept 'em clean and patched, and we had a good solid four-room house, a couple of cows and a truck patch, plenty to eat, horses to ride and a big wide spread of country to feed our spirits on; and we had each other—sometimes we teased and quarrelled and even come to sluggin', but we always knew that if ever one of us was in trouble, he could count on the rest to be at his side, no askin' necessary; I grew up figurin' that was what bein' a family meant. We heard stories about Indian fights and bandit and rustler raids, cow hunts and trail drives and the way Texas got to be independent, about Tennessee and North Carolina and the Shenandoah Valley where the Coopers and the Harpers had come out of, and about life in the piney woods and cotton country where they settled when they come over the Sabine, and often in the evenin's Ma'd read aloud from one of the forty or fifty books we had, mostly old ones she'd brought with her when she left home. We all played checkers and tiddlywinks and dominoes, jackstraws and kick-the-stick, and us boys had slingshots and wooden guns and swords—Pa could whittle 'most anything a body could want, that's where I learned how to do it—and we rassled in the grass and raced bareback ponies; I didn't have a saddle of my own till I was twelve and could earn the money for it myself. We got to town maybe twice a year, and 'cept for some Mexican kids that belonged to the vaqueros workin' on the place, we never hardly saw anybody our own age that wasn't related to us; about my best friend outside my family was Avonia Maylock, whose pa was my pa's segundo. She was a year younger'n me and could shoot a rifle better, though a pistol was too heavy for her. She was sent to school in Dallas when she was twelve and her ma died, and I didn't see her again for years.
Ben and Jake took off when I was barely six, hopin' they could do somethin' better with their lives than work somebody else's land and stock, and that left me the oldest boy and I took it plumb serious. Ma took the influenza and died when I wasn't quite fourteen, and Uncle Cam was killed on the Border the year before. Sophie got married and moved to Mesilla six months before we buried Ma, so it was just me and Pa and Francie tryin' to raise Johnny and the littl'uns.
I started workin' as a chore boy and cook's louse when I wasn't much past eight, and huntin' for the pot too, soon as I could keep two ends of a rifle or a shotgun off the ground. Even had a little homemade bow when I was five or six and took small game with it. I hadn't made nine yet when our boss wrangler, Jack Henry Milburn, took me in hand; he was half Comanche and he taught me to work with horses, to break 'em the slow Indian way, to track and to fight with a knife. Time I was ten I was wranglin' the remuda and breakin' new cowponies, and when I was twelve I started in as a regular cowhand at twenty a month, and bought my own first sidegun out of it too.
It was two days past my fifteenth birthday and we was gettin' ready for roundup when Frank Bannister and his gang hit the place. They wanted the horses, but they didn't believe in leavin' witnesses. They shot Pa down in his tracks and set fire to our house while me and Johnny and Francie was firin' on 'em from the windows. Francie got me and Johnny out, I ain't sure how to this day, and I tried to go back and get the littl'uns—Billy wasn't quite eight then, Davy was five and Julie was the baby, only three—but I was half dead from the smoke and the place was a bonfire, and Francie dragged me back...
No. It's okay. That was all a long time ago.
We got to the next ranch, me and Francie and Johnny, and the folks there got us to Amarillo, where our folks' friends the Bradys had the hardware store and took us in. But I'd made a promise to Pa and the littl'uns. So after roundup, when I'd earned enough money to buy a horse and saddle, I set out huntin' for Bannister.
Reckon I was lucky I didn't find him right off, or I wouldn't be tellin' you this story, 'cause I was pretty green. Oh, I could ride and work and track and fight, and I knew a fair bit about survivin' in the open, but I wasn't no gunhand, not the way an outlaw boss has to be. Then, not quite a year after the raid, I met Dixie Howard in Lampasas. Maybe you've heard of him; "the gentleman gunfighter-gambler," they called him, and he was wrote up in books, close on a dozen of 'em—I'd read some. I ain't plumb sure why to this day, but he took me on as a pupil and a partner, taught me gunfightin' and poker and somethin' of strategy too.
'61, that was, and the war had just started. To me it didn't mean much; fetched up like I'd been on that isolated spread, I never got too good a grasp of what all the shoutin' was about, nor the shootin' neither when it come to that. Anyhow, I had another obligation. Me and Dixie headed up to Colorado and spent a couple years workin' there and in New Mexico, then went back to Texas in '63 when we heard there was good money to be had guardin' the cotton trains to Brownsville. I killed me some fellers, too—a couple road-agents in Colorado while I was guardin' for the stage company, three stock thieves on payroll for a rancher near the New Mexico line, and two of Bannister's, one in Piños Altos, th'other in Kingsville—a spy, tryin' to get information about the train we was guardin'. But the Confed'racy was needin' men that could fight, and in Houston I was took up by the conscription officers and sent east to be a replacement for a cavalry outfit. I didn't rightly want to go, but I'd signed the muster roll, and that was givin' my word, so I stuck, till I was on a patrol with some of the rest of my outfit and we got captured by the Seventh Michigan Cavalry. I was wounded and passed about a month in a Yankee hospital, and then they shipped me to a prison camp and I got back together with my buddies, but I didn't stay; some recruiters for the U.S. Volunteers come 'round lookin' to sign up men who was willin' to fight Indians out west. Maybe I wouldn't'a' gone if I hadn't had Bannister on my mind, but I reckoned my life wasn't the South's nor mine till I could get him, so I had to do whatever I could to get out of that prison 'fore it killed me. They sent me out to Mescalero country and I spent some over a year with Sergeant Billy Jacobs and Major Stanton—though he was just a captain then.
When we got word the war was over, they let us Volunteers go, and I spent the next five years driftin', mostly followin' rumors of where Bannister or his boys'd been seen. Made somethin' of a name as a fast gun, and worked as one too, 'cause like Dixie had told me, it paid better'n just about anythin' else and give me the freedom to take off when I picked up one of them rumors. Never really wanted the name, though, and never enjoyed it, nor took no pleasure in killin' neither. Could'a' made big money sellin' my gun, but more'n once I took rock-bottom wages or none at all 'cause I felt I had to work on the side that fit my notions of right and wrong. Kept droppin' out, too, and doin' other things—ridin' shotgun on stages or dispatch for th'Army, goin' on trail drives, huntin' mustangs, ridin' rough string, one time even tried to make a go of a homestead claim. Drifted from Texas up to Montana, west to Carson City and back again; made a few good friends and lost some, piled up more enemies than a man rightly has a need for, and built me up a mighty fine collection of scars, some on my hide and some where it don't show. Got lynched in Laredo once, and put on wanted posters twice, in Soho, Texas, and in the Arizona Territory; that was what led me to meetin' a couple of U.S. Marshals, good men, Branch McGarry and Jim Tenney. Got captured by a band of Piegan Blackfoot one time, too, up in Montana; stayed with 'em three good months, ended up helpin' 'em get to Canada and near gettin' myself adopted into the headman's family. But always it seemed like the only trail-partner that stuck with me was Old Man Trouble.
Then, early spring of '70, I was in Dodge City with a feller called Pete Morgan, and I got in a poker game and come away a hundred dollars to the good, and he cracked me one over the head and cleaned me of every cent I had. Took me near a month to get on my feet, and when I did I started lookin' for him. Trail led me up to Wyomin' and I stopped to rest my horse at a little ranch in a valley under the Laramie Range. Sherman Ranch, it was called. Bossman was a feller name of Slim Sherman, his pa'd started it—big, tall, blond feller, straight as a pine tree and upright as a preacher, tryin' to make a go of that little spread on almost no money except what he earned doin' a team-change service for the Overland Stage, and raise his kid brother Andy, who was twelve then and took to me like nothin' you ever seen. Slim, he wasn't plumb sure of me right at the start, but then a varmint named Bud Carlin busted in on us, and we ended up workin' together to get him in jail. Oh, and I found Morgan too, in the end—turned out he'd joined Carlin's gang. Had to kill him... never did get my money back, he'd spent it all by then. Anyhow, Slim offered me a job, and I stayed, mostly on account of Andy, and then three weeks later I broke up a holdup at the stage office in Laramie, took three bullets for my trouble, and... well, almost before I knew it I'd been there a year and was part of a family again. I left a few times, when old obligations come up or I got thinkin' it wasn't safe for Slim and Andy and their old friend Jonesy that I should be there, and every time it was like gettin' the heart ripped out of me. So come a time I didn't do that no more, just stayed on.
Andy went off to school in St. Louis the second year, with Jonesy to ride herd on him, and it was just me and Slim for a spell, batchin' it, but then the third spring a kid name of Mike Williams come to us; he'd been goin' west with his folks in a covered wagon, and the Indians killed 'em, and some Japanese show folks found him and fetched him here. Mort Corey, that's our sheriff, couldn't track down no family for him, so the Judge made me and Slim his legal guardians, and a widow lady name of Daisy Cooper—no, she ain't no kin, she's from Pennsylvania—turned up at the place lookin' for a store that didn't exist in a town that wasn't there—some no-good back East tricked her husband into payin' pretty much his life savin's for it, just before he died—and we hired her to keep house and cook and keep an eye on Mike while we was workin'. Got us the next best thing to a ma out of the deal, too.
Bannister? Well, I didn't get to kill him myself, but I got to see him dead. He busted out of the Wyomin' Territorial Prison in '71 and the U.S. Marshal that'd put him there, Trim Stuart, heard I was a top tracker and deputized me to help run him down. We followed him plumb down to New Mexico to a tradin' post called Fort Defiance, and while I was laid up with a bullet hole through my side Stuart and the post boss—feller name of Gentry—they got a chance at Bannister and took it. So my family got paid for even if I couldn't be the one that done it. Plus I'd took down two of Bannister's brothers about three years before that, which maybe counted for somethin'.
Slim made me a full partner for my twenty-eighth birthday, and I hooked up with my sister Francie again, not long after—I'd thought she was dead, but somebody'd made a mistake about that, and she was married to a feller named Ben McKittrick who was in the same line I'd been, and wanted to quit same as me... they live in California now, up in the old Mother Lode country. Found my other sister Sophie last year—she's got a little ranch in Arizona, up around Prescott, her and her six kids, the Apaches killed her husband in '74. Mort deputizes me frequent—Slim too—and sometimes I ride guard on one of the stages. But mostly I'm a settled-down respectable rancher now, and Slim's my best friend and my big brother, and there ain't a day goes by I don't marvel at the chance that fetched me here, 'cause I'm happier now than I reckon I've ever been in my life.