Tom Horn: Enigma or Contradiction

THE L IF E AND LEGEND OF TOM HORN "Talking Boy"

the voice shouted in guttural Apache. "We will join forces with you and kill all of them."

Twenty-five-year-old Tom Horn, known to the Apaches as "Talking Boy" because of his fluency in their language, looked across the narrow canyon. As young Horn suspected, the harsh voice belonged to Geronimo, standing half-hidden among the jutting boulders of Mexico's Sierra Madre. Members of his notorious band also were in evidence.

Horn yelled back in Apache. "Do nothing! The Mexicans are holding our commanding officer hostage!"

"Ah, Talking Boy," replied Geronimo, "together we can swoop down on the Mexicans, kill them all, and take their food."

But the wily Geronimo was surely thinking beyond a few parcels of food. If he could get the American forces, now without senior officers and under the command of the civilian Horn, to wipe out the Mexicans, he might well achieve a pair of desirable objectives. First, he would be rid of more than 150 potentially pestering Mexican troops. Second, and most desirable - since the U.S. Army was the sharper thorn in hisside - an incident of slaughter would so enrage the Mexican government that American forces would thereafter be forbidden to enter Mexico. Then he and his raiders would once again have a safe haven in the sprawling canyons of the Sierra Madre.

The American expedition, now inexplicably besieged by Mexican troops, was the brainchild of Gen. George Crook. Certain in his belief that only Apaches could fight successfully against Geronimo and his cunning desert marauders, Crook had organized a strike force of 100 enlisted Apache scouts. Crook also had obtained a treaty with the Mexican government permitting U.S. forces to operate freely in northern Mexico.

The commander of the small expedition was Capt. Emmett Crawford. Other officers were Lieutenants Marion Maus, Faison, and Shipp, and Surgeon T.B. Davis. The sixth American was Tom Horn, a protege of Al Sieber, the famed Army chief of scouts on the Arizona frontier for nearly 20 years. Sieber, now afflicted with rheumatism and too old for difficult campaigns, had passed his title and responsibilities on to Horn. Of the half dozen Americans on the expedition, Horn was the only one who could talk to the Apache scouts. Now, standing at the head of a narrow basin bordered by ragged, upward thrusting canyon walls, he was put to the test.

Horn,

personally acquainted with Geronimo knew the renegade's offer of help was no act of benevolence. The previous day, January 10, 1886, the American forces had attacked Geronimo's mountain encampment. The Apache scouts, incensed because a band of Geronimo's raiders had recently killed 21 Apache women and children on the San Carlos reservation, laid down a withering fire, killing more than a dozen renegades. Geronimo and the rest of his men fled into the deep canyons.

Low on rations and ammunition after the encounter, Horn and his group prepared to head north to the Mexican town of Nacori after a night of rest. Early the next morning, one of Horn's Apache scouts reported Mexican troops were entering the mountain basin.

It was obvious to Horn and the officers the Mexicans were preparing to attack them. Horn, who also spoke Spanish, could hear the Mexican commander's orders, and he relayed them to Captain Crawford.

Crawford could not imagine why the Mexicans were forming up against the U.S. troops, but he also knew that they would be no match for his fierce Apache scouts. His primary concern was to avoid bloodshed and an ugly international incident. As the Mexicans began their run across open ground, Crawford yelled at Horn, "Tom, tell the Mexicans to stop! Our scouts will kill them all!"

Horn ran forward, yelling in Spanish for the Mexicans to hold their fire. Crawford, waving a white handkerchief, leapt to a high rock. Suddenly the Mexicans opened fire. An Apache scout yelled to Horn that Crawford had been shot. Horn spun on his heel and started running toward Crawford's position. Then he was hit in the arm by a Mexican bullet, sustaining a bloody but not serious wound. Horn shouted to his scouts in Apache to open fire.

Looking back as he ran, Horn saw the Mexicans falling like ducks in a shooting gallery. At the base of a pile of boulders, he found the wounded Crawford, his skull ripped open. Horn, able to use only one arm, pulled the unconscious Crawford to safety.

Suddenly the battlefield became quiet: the Mexicans, suffering heavy casualties, had fallen back. With Crawford unable to command, Horn counseled with Lieutenant Maus. Neither could understand why they were being attacked.

After a stalemate of several hours, the Mexicans asked Maus to come over to their side for a talk. Against Horn's advice, Maus accepted the invitation. When he arrived among the opposing ranks, he was taken prisoner.

Shortly, a note from Maus was sent over to Horn. It stated that the Mexicans demanded they surrender all of their pack mules and supplies. Horn studied the note for a few moments, then appeared agreeable. "Send over a group of men to take everything back," he instructed the note bearer. As the messenger trotted back to the Mexican line, Horn called up to Geronimo, telling him to hold his fire and do nothing. Then, in Apache, Horn spoke to his dispersed scouts, giving them instructions the Mexicans could not understand.

Soon five Mexicans walked across the basin. One of the approaching men was the highest ranking Mexican still alive. When they were five feet from Horn, 12 glowering Apache scouts leapt out of the rocks with rifle muzzles pointed directly at the Mexicans' heads. "You have one minute to send my lieutenant back," Horn told the Mexicans. "If not, these men will happily kill you." And with that, the bizarre skirmish came to an end.

The Mexicans rode off with their dead and wounded. Geronimo and his warriors disappeared soundlessly into the canyons. Three days after the engagement Captain Crawford died. The soldiers learned from the Mexicans that they had never been told of Crook's treaty. Lieutenant Maus later wrote an account of the incident. The last words in the report were: "I cannot commend too highly Mr. Horn, my Chief of Scouts. His gallant services deserve a reward which he has never received."

Maus'

comments about Tom Horn contrast starkly and ironically with a public pronouncement made some years afterward by Judge Richard H. Scott of Laramie County, Wyoming. From his bench, on November 12, 1902, Judge Scott spoke these words: "It is ordered, adjudged, and decreed that you, Tom Horn, be taken by the sheriff of Laramie County to a place prepared by him... and there be hanged by the neck until dead."

And that is precisely what happened to Tom Horn. On November 20, 1903, one day before his 43rd birthday, he plummeted through the trapdoor of a hangman's specifically designed scaffold and 17 minutes later was pronounced dead by two physicians.

Horn's conviction for the murder of a 14-year-old boy suggests to some that he was a cold-blooded assassin who botched his assignment and killed the wrong party. Yet his defenders say Horn's trial was a gigantic railroad job.

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For more than three-quarters of a century, Tom Horn has remained a controversial character, an enigma, and a contradiction. And because he conforms to the definition of a legenda story with an actual but not entirely ver-ifiable basishe is that, too.

Historian John Greenway wrote, “Tom Horn had more of the right kind of stuff than any other man in the American wilderness.” Yet, another Western writer calls him “the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of the Western frontier.” And one of Horn’s biographers refers to him as an “exterminator.” Compounding the problem of Horn’s record both who he was and what he did is Horn’s autobiography, composed while awaiting the gallows.

Detractors contend Horn’s own version is mostly brag and baloney. Yet in its pages are clues to his character missing in all of the other books and papers that deal with Horn and his frontier career.

According to the autobiography, Tom Horn was born near Memphis, Missouri, on November 21, 1860. Horn tells us that at an early age, he developed a marked affinity for the outdoors. By his own admission, he ignored schoolwork and chores in order to lose himself in the woods with his dog, Shed. There he fished in the ponds and streams, hunted, and learned of Nature from Nature’s own book.

When Horn was 14, his dog was shot and killed by a migrant youth heading west in a wagon train. Not long after, during a family disagreement, young Horn was beaten so severely by his father he was confined to bed for a week. In Horn’s own words, “As soon as I could get around, I sold my rifle for $11, kissed my mother, went out to visit old Shed’s grave, got a lunch, and started west.” Young Tom followed the sun on foot and slept out-of-doors, arriving in Kansas City without having spent one cent of a meager nest egg. In Newton, Kansas, he obtained railroad work, and he later signed on with the Overland Mail as a guard. In time he became a driver and was transferred to the Verde River country of Arizona, where he learned to speak Spanish.

Near the end of 1875, Tom headed for a job in Prescott handling horses for the Army. Al Sieber, Arizona’s celebrated chief of scouts, who was nicknamed “Man of Iron” by the Apaches, visited Fort Whipple, became acquainted with young Horn, and hired him as an interpreter of Spanish. Horn accompanied Sieber to the San Carlos Agency on the 7,000-square-mile Apache reservation in east-central Arizona.

Sieber, recognizing Horn’s intelligence, wanted him to develop an understanding of Apache ways and learn the language. The old scout believed the Indian wars would last for a long time. So Sieber left Horn at the reservation encampment of old Chief Pedro, titular head of about a thousand Apaches.

Pedro was generally peaceful and attempted to keep his people that way. Horn became the old chief’s adopted son and soon was living in a wickiup with one of Pedro’s unmarried sons, a female housekeeper, three children, and five dogs. Horn, only 16 years of age, taller than six feet with a muscled body and steely eyes, had truly become a “white Indian.” Before longhe was one of the few Americans in the Southwest who could speak Apache fluently.

In May of 1877, with government funds exhausted, Sieber, Horn, and other civilian employees were discharged from government service. For a while, Sieber and Horn prospected for gold in the Tombstone area. But within a few months, with many groups of Apaches on the reservation becoming unmanageable, the two were called into service again Back in Pedro’s camp, Horn was told by the chief that “many broncos [renegade Apaches] must be killed before order is restored.” Shortly, word arrived that Nana and Geronimo, who were living and raiding in northern Mexico, wanted to return to the reservation.

With Sieber and scout Merijilda Grijola, the 17-year-old Horn set out for the rugged Terras Mountains of Mexico and his first meeting with Geronimo. The negotiations, with Horn as interpreter, were fruitless. Geronimo’s demands were reportedly more those of a victor than a vanquished renegade. Finally Sieber broke off the talks and told Geronimo he was leaving. Before parting, Geronimo turned his piercing panther eyes on Horn and told him, “You will always be at war with me; but war is one thing, talking business is an-other. I will be just as pleased to meet you in battle as in council.” The two of them would, indeed, meet again numerous times over the course of the next eight years.

Throughout Horn’s long term of service at San Carlos, hostile Indians were either breaking out, planning a breakout, or returning from one. And, periodically, the touchy situation with the renegades mushroomed into nasty episodes of warfare.

On such occasion, Juh, a Chiricahua Apache, came up from Mexico with more than 100 heavily armed warriors and persuaded old Chief Loco to leave the reservation with his people and follow him back to Mexico.

Sieber, Horn, and the troops under Lt. Charles B. Gatewood pursued the Apaches. Against Sieber’s call for caution, Gatewood attacked in a remote area of southern Arizona and lost six men in less than 60 seconds.

After this, a running fight continued in a southerly direction toward the Mexican border. A detachment of troops under Capt. Tullius C. Tupper joined Gatewood’s forces. Because there was at this time no “hot pursuit” treaty with Mexico, American troops were under orders not to cross the border. Nevertheless, Tupper decided to pursue the renegades into the Sierra Media of Mexico. During one charge against the Apaches, a Sergeant Murray was wounded badly by an Apache bullet. Horn dropped his rifle, put the wounded trooper over his shoulder, and carried him to safety 40 yards through a field of intense fire.

After returning to Arizona, Horn, Sieber, and scout Mickey Free went into the White Mountains to visit Chief Pedro. The old Apache warned the scouts that some malcontent Apaches encamped in a rugged area near Cibicue Creek were in a mood to cause trouble. Sieber and his scouts traveled to Fort Apache to report the potential problem and were ordered by the adjutant to guide troops to Cibicue and arrest the five Indians believed to be the most troublesome.

THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF TOM HORN

When the troops, under Capt. Edmund Hentig, stopped at an Indian camp near Canyon Creek, the daughter of one of Horn's Apache friends brought a warning from her father that an ambush would be waiting at Cibicue. Horn told Sieber, who, in turn, advised Hentig of the danger of riding into the canyon. However, Hentig turned a deaf ear and led the troops into a hail of Apache fire.

Hentig was killed almost immediately. Sieber ordered Horn and Mickey Free to race up the side of the canyon and attain the highest ground, which they did. From that position, Horn and Free began shooting down on the Apaches. They were joined by five soldiers, and the combined fire permitted the others to load Hentig's body onto a pack mule and help the wounded out of the canyon and back to Fort Apache.

Within a few days, troops from various Arizona posts were consolidated into a fighting body, and the renegades from Cibicue were encountered in the area of Chevelon Canyon, where most of them were killed. The few who escaped melted into the surrounding mountains. Horn participated in this engagement also . . . at least his autobiography says he did. And that brings us back to Tom Horn, the enigma.

The incursions

into Mexico, Horn's heroic rescue of the wounded soldier, and the later battle in Cibicue Canyon, as reported here, are based largely on Horn's autobiography. Dan Thrapp, in his biography of Al Sieber, says Tom Horn was not at the ambush in Cibicue Canyon. However, author Lauran Paine in his book, Tom Horn, Man of the West, says Horn was at Cibicue and gives him and scout Mickey Free credit for killing three Apaches and driving off the others.

More contradiction. Thrapp says Horn was not at the engagement in the Sierra Media in which a soldier named Miller (not Murray as stated in Horn's biogra-phy) was wounded. Paine says a Sergeant Murray was wounded and that Horn risked his life carrying the man to safety.

Britton Davis, an Army lieutenant of the period who later wrote a book about Geronimo, has stated that no one named Tom Horn was employed by the govern-ment in Arizona between 1882 and 1885.

Legends, by their very nature, offer fertile ground for controversy. However, the evidence is strong that Horn, after Sieber's retirement, served as chief of scouts and accompanied Generals Crook and Nelson A. Miles into Mexico on numerous expeditions to effect Geronimo's capture, surrender, or death.

It is almost certain Horn served as interpreter between the military and Geronimo. Author Paine writes that Geronimo, in negotiations with General Miles at Skeleton Canyon, insisted he would speak only through Horn because Horn was the only white man he knew who did not lie. It was on this occasion Geronimo surrendered for the fourth and final time.

After Geronimo and his band were shipped off to Florida and the government scouts disbanded, Horn's services with the government came to an end. He left Arizona and rode north toward new horizons.

In Colorado Horn became acquainted with "Doc" Shores, sheriff of Gunnison County. Horn cap-tured a horse thief for Shores, and the lawman was so impressed he recommended the former scout to the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

As a range detective in Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming, Horn became known for his uncanny track-ing abilities and raw courage. Some have written he also was a killer. Possibly Horn did kill rustlers. On the Western range of the 1890s, official law enforcement was often nearly nonexistent, and rustling was com-monplace - so widespread that many of the large cat-tle interests were in danger of bankruptcy. There is ample evidence that range detectives, frequently and unofficially, served as judge, jury, and executioner. But there is no evidence Horn ever killed a rustler.

It has been conjectured by some that Horn used psychology rather than bullets to chase rustlers out of range country. Horn, it is said, did everything possible to promote his public image as a gunman, and stories have it he would often drop in on rustlers for a visit and to weave bloodcurdling tales of his past kills. Some of the rustlers thus visited moved out of the area shortly after Horn came calling. The personality of a killer, supposedly fostered by Horn, contrasts marked-ly with his usual quiet and well-mannered demeanor. Among his friends, he was known as a modest man who rarely used profanity.

Did Tom Horn handle rustlers with brag or bullets, or a combination of both? We will never know, but it is likely such a self-built reputation - if true might have had much to do with his eventual murder conviction.

In time, Horn left Pinkerton and went to work directly for the large cattle interests. However, this employment was interrupted by the onset of the Spanish-American War. A surge of patriotism swept the land, and Horn was among those who signed up for active duty.

After the war, Horn returned to Wyoming and became closely associated with John Coble, a wealthy cattle rancher who controlled most of Wyoming's Iron Mountain range. Among Coble's problems was an acknowledged troublemaker named Kels Nickell, a crude, often violent man who had once knifed Coble. Nickell also had knifed and wounded a neighbor, James Miller.

The feud between Nickell and Miller was so heated both men began carrying weapons. In fact during this period, Miller's shotgun went off accidentally and killed one of his sons. Miller blamed Nickell for the death, saying if Nickell had not made it necessary for him to go armed the boy wouldn't have been killed.

On July 19, 1901, 14-year-old Willie Nickell, son of "knife-happy" Kels Nickell, left the family ranch house on an errand. He stopped his horse and dismounted to open a gate. From hiding, about 300 yards away, someone squeezed off a shot and toppled the boy. He got to his feet but was hit with a second and fatal slug. James Miller, holding Nickell responsible for his son's death, would seem the most likely suspect. And, initially, Kels Nickell did accuse Miller of the killing. But a young schoolteacher, Glendolene Kimmel, who boarded at the Miller home, later said she heard Miller's son Victor take credit for young Willie's death.

Two weeks later, Nickell was fired upon by an unknown assailant and hit by three bullets. Horn was in Denver at the time. Nickell survived. Miller and his sons were arrested and taken to the Cheyenne jail. However, no evidence could be collected against them, and they were eventually freed. Later Deputy Marshal Joe LeFors began investigating the case. LeFors came across a piece of evidence that was circumstantial at best. He located a bloodstained sweater supposedly given to a local cobbler by a man who resembled Horn. The question would be why would young Willie's killer have blood on his sweater when the boy was shot from a distance of 300 yards. Nevertheless, LeFors set a trap for Horn, who knew the deputy marshal but had no idea he was working on the case. LeFors took Horn out for a friendly day of drinking. Then, when Horn was reeling, LeFors led him to his office. Hidden in an adjoining room were Les Snow, a local deputy sheriff who disliked Horn, and Charlie Ohnhaus, a stenographer.

Under the pretext of discussing a job for Horn with a Montana cattle company, LeFors drew him, thoroughly drunk, into a talk about his past, particularly how he handled rustlers. What Snow and Ohnhaus overheard or said they did was passed off as Tom Horn's confession of the murder of Willie Nickell. Horn was arrested and put on trial. In the earlier years of the frontier, small settlers in Wyoming were few in number. But by the time of Horn's trial, they constituted the major portion of the area's population. Most were poor and nearly all resented the big cattle operations. The newspapers were aware of the general population's animosity toward the cattle interests and so were the politicians. Tom Horn, a symbol of the wealthy cattle barons, began to get bad press.

Several historians of the period believe that most, if not all, of the jury members at Horn's trial had stolen cattle or were acquaintances of rustlers. At any rate, the only evidence presented to the jury - except for meaningless circumstantial evidence like the bloody sweater was the so-called confession. At the trial, stenographer Ohnhaus read from his scrawled notes, but unbiased observers said the expletive-laden "confession" sounded more like foulmouthed deputy Les Snow than Tom Horn.

LeFors lied at least once to the jury, and it was a big lie. He contended he had met Horn at the train station where Horn arrived totally sober. From there, according to LeFors, they went directly to his office where Horn confessed. Five other witnesses testified they saw Horn throughout the day, that he was with LeFors, that he was intoxicated, and that he continued to drink. Horn's "confession" would never stand up in a modern courtroom. Historian John Greenway wrote, "The case against Tom Horn would not even be dignified by an arrest today, and if an appeal could be made against the verdict, there are some 80 errors a good defense lawyer could bring to the appellate court."

No matter. Tom Horn was found guilty. Appeals by his attorneys were rejected. On the morning of November 20, 1903, old friends Charley and Frank Irwin stood at the base of the hangman's scaffold and sang a farewell song to Horn: "Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad." Shortly after the last note faded, the trapdoor sprang open.

Less than a year after Horn's death, his autobiography was published. It contained an appendix with a lengthy statement attributed to Al Sieber, his old boss. Sieber was the most renowned Indian scout on the Western frontier, a man with a reported 29 bullet and knife scars on his body, an individual whose life depended on knowing at any given second whom he could trust and whom he could not. Surely he would know the true character of Tom Horn.

The statement says in part: "A more faithful or better worker or a more honorable man I never met in my life. I made numbers of scouting expeditions and often times needed the help of a man I could rely on, and I always placed Horn in charge; for it required a man of bravery, judgment, and skill, and I ever found Tom true to the last letter of the law and to any and every trust confided to his care. I cannot, and will not, ever believe that Tom Horn was the man the papers tried to make the world believe he was."

Unfortunately there is no proof this statement was actually written by Sieber. And the original publisher, now long dead, provided no verification of authenticity. So the question of Tom Horn's true character remains. It always will. For when Tom Horn hit the end of the hangman's rope, he instantly became a story and thereby transcended our ability to ever know him as a man. Men turned into stories do not return from the land of legends. Tom Horn will forever remain an enigma.