Old West Panorama

TRAIL DRIVING DAYS (264 pp.)--Dee Brown & Martin F. Schmitt--Scribner ($7.50).

The situation in the Mingusville, S. Dak. saloon, that night in 1885, seemed to be stacked against the spectacled dude from the East. A Bad Lands drunkard who had just put a couple of holes in the clock over the bar waved his cocked pistols at the stranger and announced: "Four Eyes is going to set up drinks." Four Eyes paid him no mind, finished warming his hands at the stove, then turned and--as both bullets went wild--knocked the gunman cold with a single punch. After that, Tenderfoot Rancher Theodore Roosevelt was affectionately known around Mingusville as Old Four Eyes.

Authors Dee Brown and Martin Schmitt spin plenty of such robust yarns in Trail Driving Days, and for added flavor and authenticity they pack in 229 portraits and illustrations. Some of the stories they tell have been told before, but seldom if ever have so many good ones been strung together, with honest-looking pictures. The result is a book that takes the old West away from the spurious westerns and gives it back to the real cowmen and bad men. Reality, in the cattle-driving days of 1850-1900, was fully as lively as most of the subsequent fiction.

Prairie Godiva. The trail-end towns seemed to be designed with two things in mind: receiving cattle and raising hell. The very names of towns like Dodge City, Ellsworth and Abilene made decent folk shudder in the 1870s. When a drunken cowboy boarded a train and demanded a ride to hell, the conductor told him: "Well, give me $2.50 and get off at Dodge." In a hair-triggered town, Dodge City's cemetery, Boot Hill, became the resting place of such characters as Horse Thief Pete, Broad Mamie, the Pecos Kid and Toothless Nell. Ellsworth was just about as bad. One morning, on a bet, a lady known as Prairie Rose walked down its main street in the buff, waving a six-gun in each hand to shoot out any eye that peeked. Thanks to her dead-shot reputation, the prairie Godiva did not have to fire a shot.

Abilene, near the end of the line on the Kansas Pacific, was a particularly lively spot, for it was also the terminus of the long overland trail from Texas--the Chisholm Trail, named for the half-breed Cherokee trader who marked it out, Jesse Chisholm. It was in Abilene, moreover, that Wild Bill Hickok, the famed scout and gunfighter, roamed the main street as town marshal with a pair of pistols and a sawed-off shotgun.

Sing to the Longhorns. But except for end-of-the-trail benders, cowboy life on the drives was incredibly hard. Indians, choking dust, unbearable heat and bad food were normal features of the job. Night stampedes, sometimes started by Indians, often left cowboys and ponies smashed to pulp on the prairies by thousands of hooves. When cowhands sang sad songs through the night watch, it was not only because they were lonely: experience had taught them that teary ballads seemed to keep their shorthorns and longhorns from milling.

The greatest legend of all still centers around the transplanted youngster from Manhattan's Bowery, Billy the Kid. When General Lew Wallace interrupted his writing of Ben Hur to become governor of New Mexico Territory in 1878, Billy had already killed 19 men in those parts as the result of a feud. Novelist Wallace invited the hunted gunman in for a talk, and Billy actually showed up, dressed for the occasion but packing a rifle and a .44 Colt.

What Wallace saw was a slender, blue-eyed boy, only 5 ft. 3 in. and weighing about 125 Ibs. Billy refused to leave New Mexico, but after his chat with Wallace he killed only two more men. On July 14, 1881, 21-year-old Billy, like many a bad man, was caught in the time-honored way --in the home of the "only girl he ever loved." There, Sheriff Pat Garrett, a drawling ex-buffalo hunter from Texas, waiting in a dark bedroom, fired twice and the Kid fell dead. Said Garrett: "The second shot was useless."

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