The Bad Old Days

MY LIFE IN THE MOUNTAINS AND ON THE PLAINS by David Meriwether. 301 pages. University of Oklahoma. $5.95.

David Meriwether is solidly fixed in the history of the Old West as a vigorous and colorful Governor of the New Mexico Territory. But until the appearance of this autobiography, now published for the first time some 72 years after Meriwether's death, few will have known anything about his early life as a frontiersman and Indian trader. Dictated by Meriwether to a granddaughter in 1886, when he was 85, the manuscript was hidden away as a family heirloom until a great-granddaughter made it available for publication.

Punishment at the Post. Part of the narrative's charm is that the old man did not consciously set out to recount history, but only to leave his descendants a straightforward personal account of all he saw and did. And that was considerable. One of Meriwether's earliest memories, for example, is of the massacre at Pigeon Roost, Kentucky, when Indian followers of Tecumseh slaughtered 24 white settlers. He was only eleven, but his father sent him off on horseback to warn the Kentucky countryside that the Indians were on the rampage. At 14, he rode 100 miles in 48 hours carrying military dispatches. He trekked to the Upper Missouri in 1819, saw Sante Fe as a prisoner of the Spaniards in 1820, spent a bitter winter on the Great Plains, became an Indian trader at Fort Osage.

Meriwether continually indicates that life on the early frontier was a grim business. Consider the punishment meted out to four deserters from an army post. They were tied up, stripped to the waist and every day for four days were given 25 lashes apiece. Then the regimental surgeon sliced off their ears. One of the victims, wiping away the blood that streamed down his neck, quipped: "This is a hell of a way, Colonel, to celebrate the Fourth of July." The colonel clapped him into a ball and chain. That night the soldier jumped into the river and drowned.

Survival on the Frontier. As Meriwether makes plain, it took a tough and stubborn man even to survive on the frontier. Mostly because he was big and brawny, and adept with both his fists and a gun, he managed quite well. But even after he became territorial Governor of New Mexico, he had to sleep with a shotgun by his side because some rowdy opponents threatened to tar and feather him. He had contempt for anyone who walked away from a fight. That included famed Kit Carson, who served under him as an Indian agent. Carson prudently ran away and hid when a gathering of Ute and Apache Indians became threatening. Meriwether suspended him forthwith. After Carson sent an abject letter of apology, Meriwether grudgingly reinstated him, but as long as the semiliterate Carson remained in his service Meriwether issued reprimands about his sloppy administration. "Poor Kit," he said, "was a good trapper, hunter, and guide, and . . . had acquired a reputation which spoiled him, and which in after life and in a higher position he failed to sustain."

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