Uncle Dick" Wootton's unsurpassed adventure tale
spans a broad chunk of the history of the American frontier. As Uncle Dick
himself states in the first paragraph of his autobiography,
The man who has been fifty years in active life in any
part of the world must necessarily have had some interesting experiences,
but the man who has lived for half a century along the border line of
civilization which we call in this country the frontier has had fifty
years of adventure.
And, true to this statement, Uncle Dick relates with steely
calm dozens of adventures that a less daring man would not have survived. He
remembers the events of his life in incredible detail, and where his memory
fails his talent for storytelling takes over; either way we get an
entertaining and historically interesting book.
Wootton moved to the Southwest when it was still under
Mexico's rule and virtually unsettled by white people. In his eyes, the
frontier was a wild land inhabited by wild people, and, while he had many
battles with Indians, he also had friendships and trading partnerships with
them. He describes in great detail many of their traditions and beliefs,
including the famous Sun Dance of the Sioux:
They made preparations for the dance by attaching
strong rawhide ropes to good-sized saplings, which were bent over until
the tops came within eight or ten feet of the ground. When the time came
for the dance to commence, an Indian took his place under each of the
ropes dangling from the tops of the saplings, his body entirely naked
above the waist. With a keen edged knife, two deep gashes a couple of
inches apart were cut in the back of the savage and the rawhide rope was
passed under the skin from one gash to the other. The rope was securely
fastened and the Indian penitente, sometimes lifted clear off the ground
as the sapling swayed back and forth, kept up a sort of rhythmic motion
until the rawhide cut its way through the flesh and allowed him to drop to
the ground.
Over the course of his life, Wootton saw white communities
spring up and expand as they wiped out native tribes and the buffalo he once
hunted. The changes he saw were dramatic:
There were millions of [buffalo] on the plains at that
time. I say millions at a venture, although the fact is it was impossible
to make even an approximate estimate of the number we could sometimes see
at one time. You might as well have tried to make an estimate of the
number of ants in a big Colorado anthill. As far as the eye could reach I
have seen the Plains black with them, and it would actually look as if the
prairies themselves were on the move...It never occurred to me that I
would live long enough to see all the buffaloes killed off.
Yet he does live long enough; towards the end of his life
the buffalo are almost gone. Uncle Dick himself contributed to this
decimation, killing sometimes thirty buffalo in a single day. In fact he was
quick to kill just about anything or anybody; he always slept with a loaded
gun within arm's reach. If anything stirred in the night, he would shoot
first and ask questions later. Nighttime sounds variably turned out to be
Indians, deer, grizzlies, wolves, or his own horses, and they all met the
same fate.
Through Uncle Dick, we learn what it was like to be a white
man in the Wild West, whether mountain man, scout, hunter, trapper, trader,
freighter, rancher or soldier. He was all of those things, and he had quite
a sense of humor to boot.
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