Tascosa

You live around here, Spener?

No, I've been working in a saloon down in Tascosa.

Wanted a change, so I bought me a horse and rode north, but I shouldn't have come alone.

I don't know nothing about horses.

He's with the Pawnees.

They keep him as sort of a hostage till I get back from Tascosa with more ammunition.

You buy the rifles in Tascosa? Sure.

But them Indians is kind of mad about not finding .44 caliber bullets real handy.

We foxed them good.

You live around here, Speener?

No, I've been working in a saloon down in Tascosa.

Wanted a change, so I bought me a horse and rode north.

But I shouldn't have come alone.

Uh-huh.

I got time in Tascosa when I out-drawed the

Waco kid.

Yeah, I know, Cleve, but times are changing.

He played football at Canyon, finished his career around that 1962 football season.

Uh, he student taught as a wrestling coach at Tascosa High.

Now, I should mention too that Tascosa is the Texas town, it's actually a ghost town, but it grew up again and came back alive when Cal Farley put the Boys Ranch there The Tascosa ghost town actually came back to be an actual functioning, functioning town.

And by the time Dory Funk Jr. was there, he was the wrestling coach there at the high school at Tascosa.

And he turned pro in January 1963, the day after the Sun Bowl.

His first match was in Amarillo.

Mr. Bates struck out across the country to the Canadian River, taking me along to hunt the range, one large enough for at least fifty thousand cattle.

After being out three days, we landed at Tascosa, a little Mexican town on the Canadian.

There were only two Americans there, Howard and Reinhardt, who kept the only store in town.

Their stock of goods consisted of three barrels of whiskey and half a dozen boxes of soda crackers.

It was on this trip that I swore off getting drunk, and I have stuck to it, with the exception of once, and that was over the election of President Cleveland.

It happened thus.

We rode into Tascosa about an hour after dark, having been in the saddle and on a hot trail all day without food or water.

Supper being ordered, we passed off the time waiting by sampling Howard and Reinhart's bug juice.

In any case, the man's wanted, and you have the warrant.

Why don't you come down to Tascosa with us, Mr. Parker? No, no, that's not my job.

I'll wait right here in Dodge.

Yeah, I thought so.

And you couldn't both have come from the same town.

I'd hate to think so, Marshal.

All right, Mr. Parker, you keep nice and cozy here in Dodge, and we'll ride down to Tascosa for you.

Now, Marshal, I don't think that's quite called for.

It's true.

I was sheriff in Tascosa for six months.

You what? Yeah, it's in the record.

Well, they caught up with me there, but I'd already done such a good job taming the place that the governor pardoned

Hey, you just can't help thinking that some of its dirt is rubbed off on him.

And I never thought about that before, Matt.

Sure, how it was in Tascosa.

They wanted me there, all right, but they wanted me to...

During the month of September eighteen seventy-eight, the Kid and part of his gang visited the town of Lincoln, and on leaving there stole a large band of fine range horses from Charlie Fritz and others.

This band of horses was driven to Fort Sumner, thence east to Tascosa in the wild panhandle of Texas on the Canadian River.

While disposing of these horses to the cattlemen and cowboys, the Kid and his gang camped for several weeks at the LX Cattle Ranch, twenty miles below Tascosa.

It was here, during the months of October and November eighteen seventy-eight, that the writer made the acquaintance of Billy the Kid, Tom O'Fallard, Henry Brown, Fred Wyatt, John Middleton, and others of the gang whose names can't be recalled.

The author had just returned from Chicago where he had taken a shipment of fat steers and found this gang of outlaws camped under some large cottonwood trees within a few hundred yards of the LX headquarter ranch house.

He weighed about one hundred and forty pounds and was five feet eight inches tall.

His only defects were two upper front teeth which projected outward from his well-shaped mouth.

During his many visits to Tascosa, where whiskey was plentiful, the Kid never got drunk.