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Karen King prepares a meal using the signature technique that earned her the moniker "Flambé." |
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Kings of the Wild Frontier
Devon Jackson gets an inside look at a band of modern-day Davy Crocketts as these enthusiasts go from mainstream to mountain men in a weekend.
Photography by Kelly D. Gatlin
It’s like a flea market, circa 1833. The goods being offered are buckskin clothing, handmade knives and guns, and early 19th-century relics—and the people selling are dressed as if they just stepped out of Ye Olde Frontier. That’s because today, on a small part of the wooded 33,300-acre, National Rifle Association-affiliated Whittington Center, in a valley only 15 minutes outside Ratón in northeastern New Mexico, these 200 or so men, women, and children are a group of modern-day folks living the mountain-man lifestyle, and they’re here for the Santa Fe Trail Rendezvous, one of two-dozen such events held in New Mexico each year.
Most of the campers have already set up their tents, tepees, or lean-tos. Among the dozens of trader tents are Moon’s Trading Post and Hungry Henry Eatery, and for sale are bows and arrows, animal furs, and period clothing. Other than that, mountain-man gatherings such as this one are free, and activities are open to anyone willing to give them a try. This week’s activities board lists: the Ma & Pa Egg Contest (contestants must safely transport a fresh egg in a wooden spoon); the hawk and knife throw (for which several rustic tripods have been set up, each with a circular target of wood); and a course on handling a muzzle-loading rifle. Some activities not listed: stealing your neighbor’s flag, stealing cannons (which shoot only manure or dirt), and stealing somebody’s woman.
Moon Runnin’, a 50-something nurse from Austin, Texas, who sports a Cheyenne-style buckskin dress and 23-year-old moccasins, loves these rendezvous for the “escapism. There’s so much camaraderie among the mountain people. It’s like coming home.” Dave Kline, a retired high-tech worker from Colorado Springs, wears a loose cotton shirt over his breechcloth (and only a breechcloth—no underwear under there), and moccasins. Here with his wife, he says he likes the events because they’re the complete opposite of what his day job was—and “It’s a good place to bring kids. They’re out there shooting .45 and .50 caliber rifles. There aren’t too many other places to do that.”
Indeed. Mountain-manning ain’t just for mountain men anymore. A third of this rendezvous’s attendees are women and children, and perhaps as a result, gone are the hard-drinking, hard-partying yahoos of nearly 200—or even 25—years ago. Still, there’s just as strong a desire for authenticity and fun.
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The Santa Fe Trail Rendezvous is modeled after the first reported Mountain Man Rendezvous, held in 1825 in Henry’s Fork, Wyoming, where rugged individuals and trappers convened to sell furs and swap stories. New Mexico’s version upholds this social tradition of America’s first white explorers of the West, who preceded the American cowboy and Manifest Destiny by a generation. The mountain-man phenomenon lasted but another 15 years, till 1840, when the demand for—and the supply of—beaver fur bottomed out (the pelts were shipped to Europe to be fashioned into beaver hats). Hardscrabble types such as Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, James Beckwourth, Kit Carson—and, later on, the legendary outdoorsman Ben Lilly, who hunted mountain lions and bears in what is now the Gila National Forest—were survivalists who adapted both to the elements and to the ways of the Indians—as opposed to most settlers, who often forced nature and Native Americans to adapt to them.
This distinction is key for today’s mountain people. “The rendezvous time period was when the mountains weren’t open and the white man and the Indian got along,” points out Road Runner, a trader from Tombstone. “A lot of guys do Civil War reenactments, or Old West scenes, Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp type stuff, but that’s war and shooting. The rendezvous involves much more than just shooting. Part of this is also about survival—learning how to survive in the wilderness.”
Two modern-day mountain men who know all about survival are Jeff Hengesbaugh, a 64-years-young dealer in artifacts of the Spanish and Mexican frontiers who lives in Glorieta; and Wes Housler Jr., 49, of Cloudcroft, a building contractor who tanned buffalo hides (more than 600) until only a few years ago. Respected as purists among their brethren, these self-proclaimed “experimental archaeologists” have produced two instructional videos and published one book together, covering topics from butchering a buffalo to starting a fire using flint and steel.
In 1973, Hengesbaugh, a San Diego State zoology major fresh from a tour in Vietnam, set out with two buddies on horseback from his hometown of Scottsdale, Arizona, where he’d served as an altar boy and grown up wanting to be the Davy Crockett he’d watched on TV. He didn’t know how to ride a horse, much less pack one, but, geared up as mountain-man–authentic as possible, six months and 1,300 miles later he’d made it to Calgary, Canada. Over the years, he made several more such horseback treks, some with Housler.
“Journeys level the ego, and they force you to stay in the present,” explains Hengesbaugh, who has worked as a substitute teacher, traded glass beads, written several screenplays, and in 1985 helped start the Mountain Man Rendezvous and Trade Fair at Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors (held this year August 13–17). “It’s why we have all these extremist sports like skydiving and bungee jumping. You forget about the rent and the girlfriends and everything else, and it gives you the opportunity to get beyond your fears. That’s why I did those rides.”
Housler’s a bit more realistic about the mountain man’s past and future. “There’s no romance in what they were doing; it was a job,” he says. Housler’s mountain-man father, Wes Sr., goes by the name of Wild Bill, and his son, Wes III, attended last year’s rendezvous. “But like everything else that nobody has had to live through, it gets romanticized.”
Crazy Bear, Hengesbaugh’s 66-year-old silversmithing neighbor in Glorieta, went to his first rendezvous in 1956. Sipping from a bottle of Bud Light and lighting up a More menthol, he’s trying to pass along all he knows to his tepeemate, Mike, who goes by his first name only—a young buck from Kentucky who moved to Santa Fe 10 years ago. Bear has a yellow-white beard, long unruly hair, cracked fingers blackened by ash or gunpowder, and a bulbous nose; Mike, half Bear’s age, is skinny, with faded tattoos and a nose ring (and is drinking Clan MacGregor Scotch). Both wear leggings and breechcloths. For Bear, this is his vacation, a chance to get away from people. For Mike, it’s more about self-reliance.
“It’s the difference between knowing how to do something and putting it into practice. The people in New Orleans could’ve used this kind of knowledge,” Mike says, as he sews two leather strips around a glass bottle to make a sort of urban-survivalist canteen. “Like with Katrina. They needed mountain people to teach them how to survive.”
Jane, Crazy Bear’s Laguna Pueblo partner and 10 or 15 years his junior, nods her head. “Kids need this kind of knowledge. They need to get out in the open air and forget about TV and video games.” Adds Bear, who loves teaching and frolicking with kids, “I’ve got five tomahawks and two spears here.” He points to his collection. “My grandkids know how to throw ’em. They know how to kill a bear, if it comes to that.”
Talking to folks with names like Crazy Bear brings up another topic: mountain-man names. You don’t really choose your own; it’s bestowed on you by other mountain people, who themselves have already received such monikers. The name given often serves to reflect your character, or as a way into a story about who you are or what you’re known for.
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Mountain-man names or not, some live the mountain-man life more authentically than others. It’s easy to spot the die-hards: They’re the ones with the grizzled skin, the longer/
whiter/grayer/wirier beards, the gnarlier fingers, the raspier voices. The ones who look as if they shave every day, or whose beards are more meticulously clipped, are no less into all this, maybe, but they also seem a little more conscious of being able to blend back in when they return to their law practices, suburban homes, or weekend barbecues.
Then there are those like Shay Stone, this year’s leader, or bushway (from the French word bourgeois, which, in the mountain-man context of yore, meant a company man who supervised trappers). Decked out in a Cheyenne-style leather dress and moccasins, the petite, 24-year-old manager of a health club in San Antonio, Texas, clipboard in hand, reminds her campers on opening night that, “Starting right now, we should all be in period dress, and should be until the end of the rendezvous.” Nervousness might explain why Stone has forgotten to remove her wristwatch, but she refuses to ditch her wraparound sunglasses. “There’s no way I can bear all this sun so soon after having had Lasik,” she tells Dave Kline’s wife.
Tim Pray, a onetime bushway known as Broken Tip, is another individual who manages to meld his modern-day existence with the mountain-man lifestyle. A 58-year-old ex-hippie and son of an Air Force brigadier general, Pray, who used to run the J.W. Eaves Movie Ranch and now lives in Pecos, makes his living as a beadworker. He caught the Old West bug in 1959, when he was nine, while working as an extra in the John Wayne Western Rio Bravo, when director Howard Hawks was filming near Pray’s home in Tucson, Arizona. “I never thought, as a hippie living in a tepee and wearing my buckskin jacket, that I’d end up coming out to rendezvous in a buckskin jacket and living out of a tepee,” jokes Pray, who at one point worked as a design engineer for TransLogic, a Denver robotics company. “This is freedom. The freedom to be individuals. That’s what the mountain men were.”
“They were citizen rejects, the hippies of their time—carefree, law-free,” adds Wild Bill Housler, who still tans hides. “And Taos was the Florida of its time for the mountain men. It was the winter home for some of them.”
Taos also sits not far off the Old Santa Fe Trail, which happens to run right through the front yard of Hengesbaugh’s 1880s adobe home. “This is like the L.A. freeway of history,” says Hengesbaugh, whose home has everything from swords and saddles to masks and baskets—even a cinched-tight old sackcloth containing several dried-up heads. “Everybody from Coronado to Kearny came through here. You go to San Diego, Los Angeles, and history has been so laminated over it’s forgotten. But history’s an open book here. New Mexico’s the last of the wild states. The three cultures here keep it extremely fresh. People know who they are here, and they can’t be shoved around.”
Eccentric, sure. The original Libertarians, maybe. The mountain men of old were free, and the mountain-man experience today is just as free, and available to whoever’s willing to explore and experience it. “It’s probably one of the purest and quickest opportunities to know what made this country great and what makes an individual great,” proclaims Hengesbaugh. “And it’s out there to be discovered again and again.”
The New Mexico Mountain Men’s next event is the McGaffey Lake Rendezvous, August 29–September 1, southeast of Gallup on N.M. 400 (south off I-40, Exit 33). The public is invited to watch mountain men compete in shooting and knife events. Pre-1830s dress is optional. For info: www.NMMountainMen.com
In this age of shrinking oil supplies, floods, and hurricanes, Devon Jackson surmises that a little mountain-man knowledge could be a very useful thing.
