 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
(This has been one of our most popular stories yet in The Sun Runner Magazine.)
The story goes thus . . . If the British had won the Revolutionary War, then George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Paul Revere would have been arrested, tried, convicted, and executed as terrorists. It pays to win. And, the winner gets to write the story.
By 1909 the American Indians had lost just about everything. The Euro Americans had won, and they got to write all the stories. This is one of those stories.
Willie Boy was born in about 1882 near Pahrump, Nevada, to members of the Las Vegas band of Paiute Indians. As a small boy his family moved to the Oasis of Mara at Twentynine Palms, California, where they lived among their cousins the Chemehuevis.
Willie Boy was a skilled cowboy who worked with the ranchers during their roundup season. He did pickup work at the local farms and orchards, including the Gilman Ranch in Banning, to help support his family at the Oasis. Willie Boy was also a talented cross-country runner, in the tradition of the Paiutes, Chemehuevis, and Mojaves who were known to run across the California deserts with little difficulty and were experienced traders among the various tribes.
In late 1908 Willie Boy supposedly married an Indian woman from Pahrump. But the union did not last and by the spring of 1909 he dissolved the marriage by taking her back to her tribe and returning the wedding gifts. He returned to live at the Oasis in Twentynine Palms with his family. Then, he fell in love with Lolita and that is where all the trouble began.
Lolita was his cousin. In June 1909 he and Lolita left the Oasis to set up their lives together. Her father, William Mike caught up with them and at the point of his gun ordered them apart. They separated, and that should have been the end of the story. Indians do not marry their cousins. Unfortunately, Willie Boy was still in love.
On September 26, 1909, the Indians from Twentynine Palms were working at the Gilman Ranch. The newspapers tell us that Willie Boy stole a bottle of liquor from a friend and got thoroughly drunk. With somewhat foggy judgment, he stole a rifle and some bullets from the Ranch, confronted William Mike and murdered him in cold blood. He grabbed Lolita and forced her to escape with him up Whitewater Canyon and out into the desert.
Banning constable Ben de Crevecouer quickly put together a posse. His key deputy was his long time friend, Joe Toutain. Over the next few weeks the posse would include a number of other men looking for the excitement of the chase such as Charlie Reche, Riverside Sheriff Frank Wilson, John Lovren, John Holland, Ben’s brother Wal de Crevecouer, and others. They were joined by Indian policemen and trackers Segundo Chino, Henry Pablo and John Heyde.
For four days they chased Willie Boy and Lolita. They came across his tracks but never caught sight of him. They raced on horseback up Big Morongo Canyon, out into the flat country around Yucca Valley and toward Coyote Hole, and then back again to Pipe’s Canyon.
On Thursday, September 30th they made a grim discovery. A few miles north of Pipes Canyon they came across Lolita’s body. There was a bullet wound in her back. Some news reports indicated that she had written a farewell message in the sand next to her body that she was growing weary and was dying. Another news report indicated that the coroner stated she had been viciously sexually assaulted. The community was up in arms and the newsmen were hard at work keeping it all stirred up.
Lolita’s station in life improved with the telling of the story in the press. Lolita all of a sudden became a cultured well-educated Indian girl hoping to go on to higher education. The bottle of whisky that Willie supposedly drank, became “a suitcase full of whisky” and Willie Boy a hardened alcoholic Indian. He was accused of being involved in numerous other murders throughout Nevada and California.
The mounted posse became more determined than ever. But they could not seem to catch up with Willie Boy, who of course was still on foot. He cleverly found cached food at several locations in the desert and was skilled at locating springs where he could drink water. At several locations he allegedly built false ambush sites which lured the posse into wasting time puzzling whether he was really there.
And, of course, the press reported that he was still a blood thirsty savage. He returned to the Oasis at Twentynine Palms and discovered that an old woman had thrown his rifle and ammunition in the pond. He supposedly badly beat her up, and she may have ultimately died from those wounds.
By Thursday, October 7, the posse still had not caught up with him and made a big mistake. Willie Boy had holed up in a commanding hideout at Ruby Mountain. The posse of five mounted men came out into the open at about 300 yards from where he was hiding in the rocks. Willie Boy opened fire.
He was an excellent marksman. When he was through, all the horses had been shot and Charlie Reche was seriously wounded. His life was probably saved by the fact that his handcuffs deflected Willie Boy’s bullet from doing more damage.
The posse waited until dark so that they could safely bring Charlie back to town for medical assistance. As they were leaving, they heard a single rifle shot.
It had now been eleven days since William Mike had been murdered by Willie Boy. Constable Ben de Crevecouer still did not have his man.
Meanwhile, President Taft was busy visiting Riverside, with all of the attention that such a visit would receive in the press. The Willie Boy chase was treated as the last great manhunt of the old west and rumors were rampant of possible Indian uprisings and further murders. The Riverside Morning Mission printed the following:
“Oct. 12—President Taft was in Willie Boy country today. What? Never heard of Willie Boy, the Indian murderer, desperado and refugee? A score of crimes are laid at his door and locally he is described as the craven slayer of an old man, the slaughterer of a child whom he kidnapped for love . . . . Well, they are out after Willie Boy and they were just getting underway as the president of the United States whizzed by in his automobile through Redlands this afternoon. . . .”
It was now 17 days, and still no Willie Boy. How embarrassing it must have been to constable Ben de Crevecauer and Joe Toutain.
Then, on October 15, 1909, according to the numerous reported accounts, the chase came to an end. The posse returned to the site of the shoot out on Ruby Mountain and found Willie boy’s body. That last shot they heard on October 7th was Willie Boy’s suicide.
It was reported that he had shot himself with his last bullet. Willie Boy had placed the gun barrel against his chest and pulled the trigger with his toe. It was further reported that the Indians in the posse had decided that the body of this renegade Paiute should be burned in accordance with Paiute custom.
So, they piled brush over the body and set it on fire. All of this was reported by Randolph Madison, a newspaper reporter for the Los Angeles Record, who accompanied this last posse looking for Willie Boy. Author Harry Lawton, in his book Willie Boy, A Desert Manhunt wrote:
“The fiery brush fell in upon the corpse and they could see the blackened, twisted features of the face. Madison would never forget the face, the lips curled back in an animal snarl.”
Being a good story, Harry Lawton sold the film rights to his book. The movie, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here was released in 1969. It starred Robert Redford, Katherine Ross, and William Blake playing the role of the savage Willie Boy.
And that should have been the end of it. Ben de Crevecouer and Joe Toutain finally got their man.
But did they?
In 1994 the University of Oklahoma Press published The Hunt for Willie Boy, Indian-Hating & Popular Culture, by James A. Sandos, Professor of History at the University of Redlands, and Larry E. Burgess, who holds a Ph.D. in history from Claremont Graduate School and is Library Director of the A. K. Smiley Public Library in Redlands. Burgess and Sandos took a fresh look at all of the evidence in the case and examined the press reports of this last great Indian manhunt. They also spent considerable effort interviewing Native Americans who had strong views about Willie Boy which they had learned from their relatives and friends who had lived in the deserts in the early 1900s.
The most important contribution by Sandos and Burgess is that for the first time the incident was looked at from the perspective of Indians, rather than whites. They interviewed a number of Indians including members of the families of William Mike and Willie Boy.
It is important to identify the place of Indians in the larger culture of America in 1909. Indians were not considered citizens of the United States. That was still 16 years in the future. Indians were not allowed to give testimony in court in any practical sense. Between 1850 and 1909 over 150 California Indian Treaties had been broken by the United States.
It was only 33 years since Custer’s Last Stand in June 1876. Custer was a charismatic hero to the American public with long blond hair and colorful frontier buckskin clothes. The Sioux massacre of Custer’s troops was considered a national tragedy, and the Indians knew they were considered to be at fault for the massacre.
And, from the Indian perspective, it was 19 years since the Wounded Knee massacre where over 150 Sioux men, women and children were killed. The U.S. Army attacked with a force of 500 heavily armed men using Hotchkiss cannons capable of firing two pound explosive shells at a rate of 50 per minute.
The official policy of the United States was certainly not to see matters from an Indian perspective. Indian culture was considered of little value, and tribal and family groups were to be broken up and Americanized. Thus, it is not surprising that the American press of 1909 was looking through “White Only” lenses.
Sandos and Burgess established that most of the press stories and dispatches about the Willie Boy incident were a product of white racism. “Within the context of Indian-hating, local and regional newspapers reported any sensational story about Indians without regard to its internal logic or plausibility.”
Sandos and Burgess learned that the accusations about Willie Boy’s character were false, and fabricated by Ben de Crevecoeur for career-advancement purposes. A crime by a drunken and savage Indian drew on the prevalent atmosphere of Indian hating. The public was much in favor of posses which could effectively deal with such evil.
The authors found the stories about Willie Boy to be false. “At the time of the episode, then, Willie Boy generally was seen by whites as hard-working, not a drinker, somewhat aloof from other Indians, and of probable high-status.” The drinking allegations surprised many locals in the area who personally knew Willie Boy.
And of course there was the publicity value of linking the story of a drunken and dangerous savage, who raped and murdered innocent girls, to a visit by President Taft. That national publicity was a great career booster for the lawmen involved in bringing in their man.
In fact, a review of the facts indicates there was no danger to the President and no risk of an Indian uprising. The Indians were scared of offending the whites and knew that an uprising was out of the question against such a powerful force.
One of the sensational stories which was clearly a press manipulation was that Isoleta (Lolita) had written a farewell message in the sand. This was impossible since the Chemehuevi did not have a written language. But it added drama to a great story and spurred the posse on their chase.
Sandos and Burgess took a close look at the coroner’s report and other evidence about the death of Isoleta and came to the conclusion that her likely killer was the Indian tracker John Heyde. The coroner was skeptical and not convinced of Willie Boy’s guilt. He described death as coming from a gunshot by an unknown party. The gunshot trajectory is described as entering her body from the rear, just above the left shoulder, and traveling downward through her breast and exiting through the right abdominal cavity.
This is consistent with a shot fired from a long distance and coming down from high in the sky. If Willie Boy had done it, he likely would have been at close range and there would not have been such a long-range type of trajectory. In addition, she has been described as either wearing or carrying his coat. She was almost as big as Willie Boy, and it is likely that the lead tracker shot her by mistake thinking it was Willie Boy.
Sandos and Burgess also believe that the story about the old woman at the Oasis throwing Willie Boy’s rifle and ammunition in the pond was not supported by any evidence. Indian Superintendent Clara True reported that the Indians had left the Oasis. Some had fled into the desert out of a general sense of panic regarding what the white authorities might do to them, and the rest were rounded up and brought into Banning by Sheriff Ralphs for their safety.
The Willie Boy suicide story appears to be a complete fabrication. The Indians tell us today that Willie Boy was a great runner who could escape the posse and did. The suicide story of course was a necessary part of protecting the reputations of the lawmen in the posse. They could not just let Willie Boy get away. And burning Willie Boy’s body had to be part of the story, because there was no body to bring home. The Indian trackers knew the truth but were smart enough to know better than to contradict the constable and other lawmen in the posse.
Reporter and photographer Randolph Madison from the Los Angeles Record accompanied this last posse and faithfully recorded the scene on film. Willie Boy’s so-called body lies stretched and facing down alongside a large boulder with the posse surrounding him. What is it about this carefully recorded scene that lends credence to the Chemehuevi version that Willie Boy got away? First, this was a major manhunt widely reported throughout the country. It is hard to believe that these lawmen would not bring back the body, no matter what condition it was in.
Then there is the only photograph of the body. Look at it closely. Hazel Duro of the Cahuillas asks the question—Do his clothes look like the clothes of someone who spent his time from September 26 to October 7 outrunning several different posses across the Mojave Desert? She thinks not.
And what about the facial features which Harry Lawton tells us about. “Madison would never forget the face, the lips curled back in an animal snarl.” It is unlikely that Madison would have forgotten to photograph the face of a corpse which made such a strong impression on him. It was his professional job to take such photographs and write the story for his newspaper. Unless that awful looking face did not really exist.
Journalist Ann Japenga recently took the photograph of Willie Boy’s body to forensic anthropologist Deborah Gray with the Riverside Sheriff’s Office. According to the story written by Randolph Madison and others, the body had been at the scene of the suicide from October 7th, the date of the last shot heard by the previous posse, and October 15th when the posse returned to find the body. Deborah Gray indicated that a dead body could not have been in the desert for one week and looked that way. For beginners, the limbs were still articulated to the body which appeared to be in a bloated condition. A body in such climate conditions for that period of time would have been in a state of disarticulation, with limbs and features separating from the body. And there was no indication of visible facial features, scavenger damage to the face or body, or insect infestation of the body by ants, maggots, and such creatures. The shirt which clothed the “body” looks relatively clean. According to Gray, it should have been saturated with bodily fluids and had a very dirty mottled brown appearance. Gray is careful to point out that it might have been possible for Willie Boy to have lived most of that week. But that doesn’t tie into the official story reported in the press.
The Madison photograph does not show any of Willie Boy’s face. The body was burned. There was no way for the posse to prove they got their man except for their own self-serving and unlikely story of what happened. Remember the cultural setting of 1909. The white man had won the opening of the West. And, the winner gets to write the story.
Respected Cahuilla elder Katherine Sauvel tells the Willie Boy story in her landmark two volume book A Dried Coyote’s Tail written with ethno-linguist Eric Elliot. She reports that her father told her that Willie Boy got away and the Indians were instructed never to tell the true story to anyone or there would be trouble. A likely Chemehuevi version of the story tells us that Willie Boy died in the late 1920s in the Las Vegas area.
So, why is the corrected Willie Boy story important? First, we have a better understanding that our news comes to us through cultural filters and may not always be accurate. And, we have a better understanding of the Native American cultures that almost became extinct in the last 100 years. These are strong and complicated cultures with rich traditions worth preserving. -
