I have no recollection of the stop at the Poteau River where Rooster commandeered a wagon and a team of mules from a party of hunters at gunpoint. I do not mean to suggest the hunters were reluctant to lend their team in such an emergency but Rooster was impatient of explanation and he simply took the rig. Farther along the river we called at the home of a wealthy Indian farmer named Cullen. He provided us with a buggy and a fast span of matched horses, and he also sent one of his sons along mounted on a white pony to lead the way.
Night had fallen when we reached Fort Smith. We rode into town in a drizzle of cold rain. I remember being carried into the home of Dr. J. R. Medill, with Dr. Medill holding his hat over a coal oil lamp to keep the rain off the mantle.
I was in a stupor for days. The broken bone was set and an open splint was fixed along my forearm. My hand swelled and turned black, and then my wrist. On the third day Dr. Medill gave me a sizable dose of morphine and amputated the arm just above the elbow with a little surgical saw. My mother and Lawyer Daggett sat at my side while this work was done. I very much admired my mother for sitting there and not flinching, as she was of a delicate temperament. She held my right hand and wept.
I remained in the doctor’s home for something over a week after the operation. Rooster called on me twice but I was so sick and “dopey” that I made poor company. He had patches on his face where Dr. Medill had removed the shotgun balls. He told me the posse of marshals had found LaBoeuf, and that the officer had refused to leave the place until he had recovered the body of Tom Chaney. None of the marshals was anxious to go down in the pit, so LaBoeuf had them lower him on a rope. He did the job, though his vision was somewhat confounded from the blow on his head. At McAlester’s he was given such treatment as was available for the depression on his head, and from there he left for Texas with the corpse of the man on whose trail he had camped for so long.
I went home on a varnish train, lying flat on my back on a stretcher that was placed in the aisle of a coach. As I say, I was quite sick and it was not until I had been home for a few days that I fully recovered my faculties. It came to me that I had not paid Rooster the balance of his money. I wrote a check for seventy-five dollars and put it in an envelope and asked Lawyer Daggett to mail it to Rooster in care of the marshal’s office.
Lawyer Daggett interviewed me about it and in the course of our conversation I learned something disturbing. It was this. The lawyer had blamed Rooster for taking me on the search for Tom Chaney and had roundly cursed him and threatened to prosecute him in a court action. I was upset on hearing it. I told Lawyer Daggett that Rooster was in no way to blame, and was rather to be praised and commended for his grit. He had certainly saved my life.
Whatever his adversaries, the railroads and steamboat companies, may have thought, Lawyer Daggett was a gentleman, and on hearing the straight of the matter he was embarrassed by his actions. He said he still considered the deputy marshal had acted with poor judgment, but in the circumstances was deserving an apology. He went to Fort Smith and personally delivered the seventy-five dollars owing to him, and then presented him with a two-hundred-dollar check of his own and asked him to accept his apology for the hard and unfair words he had spoken.
I wrote Rooster a letter and invited him to visit us. He replied with a short note that looked like one of his “vouchers,” saying he would try to stop by when next he took prisoners to Little Rock. I concluded he would not come and I made plans to go there when I had the use of my legs. I was very curious to know how much he had realized, if anything, in the way of rewards for his destruction of Lucky Ned Pepper’s robber band, and whether he had received news of LaBoeuf. I will say here that Judy was never recovered, nor was the second California gold piece. I kept the other one for years, until our house burned. We found no trace of it in the ashes.
But I never got the chance to visit him. Not three weeks after we had returned from the Winding Stair Mountains, Rooster found himself in trouble over a gun duel he fought in Fort Gibson, Cherokee Nation. He shot and killed Odus Wharton in the duel. Of course Wharton was a convicted murderer and a fugitive from the gallows but there was a stir about the manner of the shooting. Rooster shot two other men that were with Wharton and killed one of them. They must have been trash or they would not have been in the company of the “thug,” but they were not wanted by the law at that time and Rooster was criticized. He had many enemies. Pressure was brought and Rooster made to surrender his Federal badge. We knew nothing of it until it was over and Rooster gone.
He took his cat General Price and the widow Potter and her six children and went to San Antonio, Texas, where he found work as a range detective for a stockmen’s association. He did not marry the woman in Fort Smith and I supposed they waited until they reached “the Alamo City.”
From time to time I got bits of news about him from Chen Lee, who did not hear directly but only by rumor. Twice I wrote the stockmen’s association in San Antonio. The letters were not returned but neither were they answered. When next I heard, Rooster had gone into the cattle business himself in a small way. Then in the early 1890s I learned he had abandoned the Potter woman and her brood and had gone north to Wyoming with a reckless character named Tom Smith where they were hired by stock owners to terrorize thieves and people called nesters and grangers. It was a sorry business, I am told, and I fear Rooster did himself no credit there in what they called the “Johnson County War.”
In late May of 1903 Little Frank sent me a cutting from The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. It was an advertisement for the Cole Younger and Frank James “Wild West” show that was coming to play in the Memphis Chicks’ baseball park. Down in the smaller type at the bottom of the notice Little Frank had circled the following:
HE RODE WITH QUANTRILL!
HE RODE FOR PARKER!
Scourge of Territorial outlaws and Texas cattle thieves for 25 years!
“Rooster” Cogburn will amaze you with his skill and dash with the six-shooter and repeating rifle! Don’t leave the ladies and little ones behind! Spectators can watch this unique exhibition in perfect safety!
So he was coming to Memphis. Little Frank had teased me and chaffed me over the years about Rooster, making out that he was my secret “sweetheart.” By sending this notice he was having sport with me, as he thought. He had penciled a note on the cutting that said, “Skill and dash! It’s not too late, Mattie!” Little Frank loves fun at the other fellow’s expense and the more he thinks it tells on you the better he loves it. We have always liked jokes in our family and I think they are all right in their place. Victoria likes a good joke herself, so far as she can understand one. I have never held it against either one of them for leaving me at home to look after Mama, and they know it, for I have told them.
I rode the train to Memphis by way of Little Rock and had no trouble getting the conductors to honor my Rock Island pass. It belonged to a freight agent and I was holding it against a small loan. I had thought to put up at a hotel instead of paying an immediate call on Little Frank as I did not wish to hear his chaff before I had seen Rooster. I speculated on whether the marshall would recognize me. My thought was: A quarter of a century is a long time!
As things turned out, I did not go to a hotel. When my train reached “the Bluff City” I saw that the show train was on a siding there at the depot. I left my bag in the station and set off walking beside the circus coaches through crowds of horses and Indians and men dressed as cow-boys and soldiers.