Peter Matthiessen - Killing Mister Watson

Walt Langford and some other riders had caught an old black man outside Doc Winkler's house and told him he must dance for them or have his toes shot off. People next door had closed their shutters but they heard it. And this old nigra close to eighty, white-haired, crippled up, bent over, cried out, No, boss, Ah cain't dance, Ah is too old! And they said, Well, you better dance! and started shooting at the earth around his feet.

Doc Winkler came running with his rifle. He hollered, Now you boys clear out of here, let that old man alone! And he ordered the nigra to go behind the house. But the cowboys kept right on shooting into the ground behind him, so Doc Winkler fired a shot over their heads, and just at that moment a horse reared, and the bullet caught a cowboy through the head and killed him.

At Jim Cole's request, Sheriff Langford called the episode an accident. Walt Langford and his friends were not arrested, and there was no inquest; Doc Winkler was left alone to chew the guilt. But the flying bullets and senseless death brought new resentment of the cattlemen, also a new temperance campaign to make Lee County dry, and the Langford family took Cole's advice to marry off young Walter, get him simmered down.

Of the town's eligible young women, the only one that Walter had an eye on was a pretty Hendry whose parents forbade her to receive "that young hellion" in the house. This caused stiff feelings in both families, and led eventually, from what I heard, to the bust-up of the Langford & Hendry store.

Well, my friend Walt couldn't help but notice-since she lived right in his house-the beautiful girl from the Ten Thousand Islands. Her mother was a lady by Fort Myers standards, a former schoolteacher and a religious person, cultured and well liked, whose husband would buy her a house on Anderson Avenue so that their three children might attend the Fort Myers school. But a recent book being passed around the town claimed that one Watson had killed the famous outlaw queen, Belle Starr, and it appeared that this bad man was none other than the husband of the refined and delicate Mrs. Jane Watson. The lucky few who had met Mister Watson had been thrilled to find that this "dangerous" man was handsome and presentable, a devout churchgoer when in Fort Myers, a prospering planter and shrewd businessman of good credit among the merchants, and altogether more genteel than the frontier gentry who gossiped about his reputation.

Out of the blue, the Watsons announced the engagement of their beloved daughter to Walt Langford. It was all so sudden that some people figured this young hussy had accommodated Walter and was already in a family way. Well, naturally, she wasn't any such a thing! I spoke up loudly every time I heard loose talk about a shotgun wedding, I was so fierce about her purity that folks began to look at me in a queer way. Probably wondered if Frank B. Tippins was the father, which he wished he was!

Knowing Walt Langford, I guess that marriage was inevitable. No doubt Mister Watson's shady past made Carrie Watson all the more romantic to this good-hearted, rambunctious young man. But Carrie was not yet thirteen, and no one quite knew how agreement had been reached whereby such a young girl would be married the following year. From what we heard, it was Jim Cole who persuaded both families of the advantages of such a union. He had even met privately with E.J. Watson in a salon at the Hendry House, though what those two discussed was only rumor.

Walt and Carrie were married in July of 1898, in the great new day for the Fort Myers cattlemen that began when the Spanish War got under way. I went to the wedding and mourned for my lost bride, with her big wondering eyes and soft full mouth-a different creature altogether from the horse-haired thin-mouthed cracker women I was used to. When the minister asked if anybody present knew why Carrie and Walter should not be united in holy matrimony, a wound widened in my heart- Because I love her!

Love, love, love-well, who knows anything about it? Not me, not me. I never got over her, I do know that much. I wouldn't have gone to that wedding at all except to see what Carrie's father looked like, and I never saw him. The noted planter, Mr. E.J. Watson, failed to appear.

MAY 10, 1898. Frank Tippins thinks he loves the girl who is engaged to his friend Walter!

Mr. Tippins is nice-looking, I'll confess, tall and lanky, in his early thirties, black handlebar mustache down at the tips that gives him a thoughtful air, or rueful, maybe. Around his horses he looks quite at home in the boots and battered hat from his days as a cow hunter in the Big Cypress-that's where he and Walter became friends. My new admirer has told me more than once, I fear, how that poor old hat had sheltered him from sun and rain and served as a water vessel for bathing. He might still bathe in it, for all I know!

Frank is thinking he might run for sheriff. His black and bag-kneed Sunday suit, a once-white shirt, bowtie and waistcoat, with the broad hat and boots, give him the look of "Wyatt Earp of the Wild West," a book much admired by the modest reading circle of our town. Like his Western colleagues, he seems calm, courteous, and soft-spoken, easy with firearms and horses, if not females, and a religious man with only his Maker to fear.

From Mr. Jim Cole's point of view, says Walter, Frank Tippins would make us a good sheriff mainly because, as a onetime cowhand for the Hendrys, he was sure to sympathize with cattleman problems in regard to rustling, disorderly conduct by the cowhands, undue enforcement of cattle-roaming ordinances, and the like. That's what Mr. Cole, who acts like he discovered Frank, promised the cattlemen. And the cattlemen like Frank because he is so amiable with our rare Yankee visitors, making a virtue of the flies and cow dung and dirt streets that all the rest of us afflicted citizens perceive as our city's greatest liability. (To Walter, that highest honor falls to our disgraceful lack of even so much as a road north, far less a railroad, that might permit our isolated town to follow the rest of the nation into the Twentieth Century.)

Walter imitates Frank Tippins very well: "You bet! This here is the leading cow town in the second largest cattle state in the whole U.S. and A.! The only state that got us beat is Texas. Second largest! I was a cowhand once myself!"

Mr. Tippins says that when he arrived here from De Soto County, in the early eighties, Fort Myers had no newspaper, its school was poor, its churches were irregularly attended. Visiting ships were mostly small tramp schooners in the coastal trade, beating upriver from Punta Rassa. The last Florida wolves still howled in the pinelands to the east, and panthers killed stock at the very edge of town.

"Be grateful, Mr. Tippins," Mama told him. "Your city seems splendid, I do declare, after life in the Ten Thousand Islands, not to speak of the Indian Territory-!" She shook her head. "Or even Fort White, where Mister Watson found me!" She stopped right there, having quickly sensed Mr. Tippins's peculiar craving to know anything we might reveal about dear Papa. "Fort Myers is wonderful!" she finished, already exhausted.

As a young man Frank worked at the Press, and learned something of local history and good grammar, though he affects a rough, bluff style of speech. When Mama and I first came to town, it was the ex-cowhand at the livery stable who informed us that Spanish Franciscans in the north part of the state had the first cattle ranches in the country. The first real cowboy-and-Indian fight occurred in Florida in 1647, he said, when Spanish vaqueros ran a herd through the Indian plantings.

Doubtless Mr. Tippins guesses that learning is the way to show a former schoolteacher how serious he is, how deserving of her handsome daughter, even if that young flibberty-jibbet is already engaged! And he speaks carefully, wishing to expose his attainments in a modest fashion that might captivate the Watson ladies' hearts.