Chapter 16 - The Ups and Downs of Homer Bolton, Sheriff of Duncan Flats
I thought there shouldn’t be much trouble in town. After all, there were only 400 or so people. How much trouble could they cause anyway? I was a bit anxious with our country’s birthday less than a month away. I was prepared for some partying, firecrackers and a few drunks. I even figured they might start celebrating the day before. I didn’t figure on them starting on the second of July.
Well, start they did, two days early. Word came down from up north, from the other side of the border, that what we had been calling Upper Canada had joined politically with some provinces to their east. They declared themselves a nation on July 1, 1867. The town folk all seemed to be in favour of the event. The taverns were selling beer and whiskeys for half-price, people were partying all over the place, and it seemed to me that there wouldn’t be any fireworks left when our birthday arrived. So what I thought would be a party of a couple of days turned out to last almost a week.
Looking back over the notes I kept, I see that I put sixteen people in jail for intoxication, six for fighting, broke up a total of eight fights and even had to help put out a fire in a hay barn because of some fireworks. There was a point where my jail, small as it was, couldn’t handle everyone who was causing trouble. I had to let some out early, others I could only give a stern warning to. There was no point in me arresting them if I had no place to keep them.
Any thoughts I had that being Sheriff in this town was going to be easy, were quickly put aside.
One of the strangest events in my Sheriff days was when Mae‘s Travelling Show came to town. The show arrived in the form of two covered wagons. Inside them were props of their trade. In all, there were some ten people - a juggler, a fire-eater, two clowns, a sword-swallower, a fortune teller and a couple of others I don’t quite remember. I never did see Mae. Oh yes, there was an old man with an organ grinder and a monkey.
They didn’t really cause much trouble. They didn’t ask people for money. Instead, they had a little box where people could throw their pennies. The fire-eater had been a bit careless when he laid down one of his sticks. He set fire to a small bale of hay but it was doused quickly with a bucket of water he kept nearby. One of the clowns did try to steal some candy from the General Store but she was only ten years old. So all I did was give her a small talking to about right and wrong.
Myrona, the fortune-teller, was the biggest hit of the show. She claimed to be able to tell people’s fortune just by touching their foreheads. The box beside her was full of pennies. She was getting a lot of business from the towns folk. Yes, I admit I was one of them. She laid her hand on my forehead and told me that I would have a very bad limp one day as a result of a crushed leg. Claimed she knew the leg had been hurt once before and that it would be hurt again. How she managed to know I had been bitten by a ‘gator, I’ll never know. Then again, she never said anything about my having been bitten, just having been hurt. Perhaps it was nothing more than a lucky guess.
What did make me chuckle however, was her prediction that I would one day become famous after my death. I hadn’t reckoned on being famous when I was alive. How the heck would I become famous after I was dead, I wondered. She claimed that in the future, there would be an American who would write what would be called Westerns. His name would be Louis L’Amour and he would discover me in the course of his research and then write a novel about me. That would be great if it ever happened but I wasn’t prepared to bet the farm on it, even if I owned one.
Today, I look back on these memoirs and see that I started writing them on May 22 of this year, 1894. Today it’s the sixth of June. I just noticed that my inkwell is getting dry and I do not have a lot of paper left. I will have to end these memoirs soon which saddens me because there are still so many things to write about. I must try to tell you of two more events while I still can.
Back in the spring of 1875 three fugitives fled Mexico after robbing a bank in Tijuana and headed north. They were spotted in New Mexico and Arizona. Every Deputy, Sheriff and Marshall was on the lookout for them. Even the US Cavalry. It was interesting news to follow even way the heck up here in Northern Montana. People in town were betting among themselves on what date they would be captured. It was quite a shock for me when someone from the Thompson’s Silver Mine came galloping in to say they were robbed by three men wearing sombreros.
By then, I had a Deputy and we gathered together a small posse of seven men. I figured two against one was fair odds and we had a spare to boot.
We had heard that these banditos were dangerous. The people over at the silver mine were lucky that nobody had been shot. They might be dangerous but they sure weren’t smart.
It was just after noon when we caught site of a campfire near a bend in the river five miles out of town. We dismounted quietly and crept toward the fire, keeping behind some small fir trees to give us cover. I tramped on a dry branch which snapped, alerting the robbers. They scurried behind a large pile of rocks that had fallen from a small cliff beside them.
Their horses were tied to some small bushes and were standing between us and them. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t fire at us for two reasons: they didn’t know how many of us there were and they wouldn’t want to accidentally shoot one of their horses. The horses were their only real means of escape.
I didn’t want to shoot any of the horses either so I had my Deputy or two of the posse stay where they were. Then four of us crept carefully to our right in an effort to get to the side of the rocks where we could get a bead on them.
We found an opening behind the rocks and the cliff and could see all three huddled down on their bellies in the dirt. I called out for them to surrender but the only response I got from them were bullets flying into the trees beside us.
We fired back and almost immediately one of them cried out. It seemed we had managed to hit him but there were still two to go. Bullets were whizzing back and forth. One of my posses was hit in his left arm and rolled on the ground. A quick check on him told me he wasn‘t hurt too badly. Another of the banditos leaned over a rock, fired at me and just missed my head. I returned fire hitting him twice - once in the neck and once in the chest. He keeled over and I was pretty sure he was dead but we waited because we weren’t going to be suckered. There was still a third behind the rocks and we didn’t think he had been hit at all. He didn’t continue to fire at us. Perhaps he had run out of ammunition. We weren’t sure.
Then suddenly, he raised his sombrero on a stick and said he was ready to surrender. He threw his gun out from behind the rocks and stood up with his hands in the air. While my posse covered me, I ran to him with my gun leading the way. I patted him down to be sure he didn’t have another gun on him or worse still, a hunting knife. Once I knew he was unarmed, I had him lay flat on his stomach and hollered for someone to fetch me a rope. Once we had him secure, we checked on his two comrades.
One was badly injured from a bullet in his left shoulder but would live. We tied him up and checked on the third, the one whom I had shot. Clearly he was dead. The shot to his chest was right above the heart and I suspect he died right after the bullet hit him.
When we arrived back in town, half the population was there to greet us. We were being treated as heroes, which I guess was what we were really. A few people even patted me on the back and thanked me for capturing them that particular day. They had guessed that would be the day the robbers would be caught and won some money from some bets they made.
The towns people buried the dead robber with little ceremony and the other two, we turned over to the Marshall in Crooked River, here in Montana. My name was plastered all over the papers as far as Albuquerque, New Mexico. Was that the fame the fortune teller spoke of? I hoped not because she had said my fame would come after I was dead. I still felt pretty much alive.