COWBOYS AND COFFEE, Part Two

Nothing goes together better than cowboys and coffee

The love of coffee spread after the war as veterans from both North and South headed out to make their fortunes in the growing cattle industry, and in the gold, silver and copper mines of the West.

The Folgers Coffee Company had been founded by James A. Folger in San Francisco, California, in 1850. James came to San Francisco from Nantucket Island at the age of 15 with his two older brothers during the California Gold Rush. They imported coffee mostly from Brazil to supply the California miners.

Coffee was also being imported to the West from the Kona region of the Hawaiian Islands and the era from 1860 to 1890 saw a steady growth in Kona coffee being shipped to California and the West. Although far superior to the Robusta coffees from South America, Kona Arabica coffee was more expensive to grow and ship in rather meager amounts and so was making little progress economically in getting very far beyond the West Coast.

Before the end of the Civil war, only green coffee beans were sold in stores because, after exposure to air, roasted coffee beans would become stale or rancid. The green coffee beans had to be roasted in a skillet on a cook stove or over a campfire before it could be ground and brewed. A single coffee bean burned in the roasting process could ruin the whole batch.

In 1865, John Arbuckle and his brother Charles, partners in a Pittsburgh grocery business, changed all this by patenting a process for roasting and coating coffee beans with an egg and sugar glaze to seal in the flavor and aroma. Marketed under the name Arbuckle’s' Ariosa Coffee, in patented airtight, one pound packages, the new coffee was shipped all over the country in sturdy wooden crates, one hundred packages to a crate. The Arbuckle Brothers printed coupons on the bags of coffee redeemable for all manner of items including handkerchiefs, razors, scissors and wedding rings, everything a cowboy or a westward moving pioneer might come to need. To further entice the chuck wagon cook purchase, each package contained a stick of peppermint candy which became a means by which cookie could get the firewood collected and the coffee grinder handle spun with the call "Who wants the candy?" Some of the toughest cowboys on the trail would jump at the opportunity to satisfy a sweet tooth. Arbuckle’s' Ariosa Coffee became so dominant in the west, that many cowboys were not even aware there was any other kind.

Coffee has been a staple of cowboy cuisine since the days of the great cattle drives. The cowboy’s job was to bring herds of half-wild Mexican cattle through the range to the rail heads. After working cattle for hours, the cowboy was hungry. He welcomed the cookie’s call to "Come an' get it." With his famished appetite, he was prepared to chow down. The cookie's job was to prepare steaks, create stews, cook the beans, bake sourdough biscuits, and boil coffee. The staple of the cowboy was coffee. It kept him awake. It kept him alert for dangers on the trail. And to do that, it had to be black and strong.

There is a certain mystique about making coffee for the cowboy. The most common story about cowboy
coffee is that cookie has to toss in a horseshoe, and if it sinks, put in some more coffee. The standard coffee pot was three to five gallons, which handled ten to twelve cowboys. And those cowboys expected their coffee to be “brown gargle,” and that means hot, black and strong. Some ignore the horseshoe and say that it has to float a six shooter. The Cowboy Coffee folks up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming say that it should float a pistol, heal an ailing steer, scare off a pack of wolves and cure the effects of a short night.

The paniolas at the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company in New Mexico and Hawaii suggest that you start with a pot full of good, clean tasting water. In most towns I use bottled water. Measure out one rounded tablespoon of ground coffee for each cup. Now here’s where you’re experimenting. If that’s too strong for you, use less the next time. If not strong enough, add more. The best way to make coffee is with a French Press, but you want to make it the cowboy way. Put that coffee directly into the pot, if you’re not using a drip coffeemaker or a French Press. If you have a percolator… remember those? …throw it away. They always made bitter coffee. Don’t give it to the Salvation Army, toss it. If you’re brewing directly in the pot, bring it to a rolling boil and take the pot off the fire. Here’s where a splash of cold water will settle the grounds.

Or just let it sit a spell. Legend talks about dropping in an egg shell to settle it and you might have tried that. Then pour and enjoy a cup of cowboy coffee. And enjoy some history of the Old West at the same time. Or you could put a handful of roasted coffee beans into an old sock, beat the coffee beans in that sock with the butt of your six shooter, pop the sock full of crushed coffee beans into a pot of boiling water and end up with some pretty bad coffee and a clean, although brown, sock.

Western artists and writers such as Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour have embellished images of cowpokes brewing coffee over chuck wagon stoves and blazing campfires. And every Western film and every TV oater has featured those same scenes.

Thanks to history and legend, cowboys and coffee have been paired forever.

COWBOYS AND COFFEE, Part One

During the Civil War, Union General George B. McClellan issued the very unpopular General Order #136, which banned the issuance of whiskey among the Federal troops. Whiskey was thought to increase bravery, or at least bravado, but it also caused lethargy, indolence, sluggishness and not a little insubordination. Thus, the drink of choice for soldiers in the field became coffee. And a little caffeine made them more alert! And being alert, attentive and on the ball is what a general wants in a soldier.

In 1861, the standard daily ration of victuals in the Union army was based on the assumption that not all required ingredients would be available at all times and places. Supplies were issued on an either-or basis. Each 100-man company was to share ten pounds of roasted coffee or one and a half pounds of tea. The Confederate War Department adopted precisely the same ration allowance as the old prewar United States, except that the Confederacy recognized the scarcity of coffee and cut rations from ten pounds of coffee to six. In any event the Southern commissary was rarely able to provide coffee. The blockades were cutting off the importation of everything from New York apples to Brazilian coffee. In 1863, responding to the rigors of campaigning, even the Union War Department revised the ration from ten pounds of roasted coffee beans to ten pounds of green coffee beans or eight pounds of roasted beans. Because of an average twenty percent moisture loss in roasting, ten pounds of green equals eight pounds of roasted coffee.

Soldiers North and South could go for days without food as long as they had their coffee. In the Confederacy, coffee became as highly prized as shoes, and commanded outrageous prices in times of insufficiency. Substitutes were tried using burnt chicory or parched corn. Some used the roasted dry crusts of brown bread, others tried rye grain soaked in rum, if they could get rum, and even others attempted to roast peas in the same way as coffee. Even acorns were roasted and ground. Nothing approached the real article. As a result, coffee was the item most often asked for when Rebs informally met Yanks between the lines for illicit trading. Virginia tobacco was most often the commodity exchanged. The taste of coffee laced with burnt chicory became habitual, perhaps a sign of Southern pride, and you can buy coffee laced with chicory in Louisiana to this very day. 

There was rarely any shortage of coffee beans in the North, and coffee became so popular with the army that the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company issued a few experimental models of their New Model 1863 Carbine with a small coffee mill with a detachable handle in the stock! It has been said that the idea was to issue one Sharps carbine with a coffee grinder built into the butt stock per 100-man Company. According to research by David H. Arnold, the grinder might have been a mill for grinding forage grains into flour. It is reported that perhaps only four are now in existence.

            

According to the Civil War Cookbook, the best coffee was slow roasted over a low fire, "until of a chestnut brown color and not burnt, as is so commonly done." It was to be boiled briskly for two minutes, then taken from the fire at once, a little cold water thrown in, then the boiler's contents poured through a piece of flannel after it had settled for five minutes."

Every soldier was provided with some sort of bag in which he stored his coffee; but the sort of bag he used indicated pretty accurately the length of time he had been in the service. For example, a raw recruit would put his coffee ration in a paper sack and stow it in his haversack, only to find it a part of a general mixture of hardtack, salt pork, pepper, salt, knife, fork, spoon, sugar and coffee by the time the next halt was made. A recruit of longer standing, would put his coffee in a bag made of a scrap of rubber blanket or poncho; but after a few days the rubber would peel off or the paint of the poncho would rub off from contact with the greasy pork or boiled meat ration and make a black, dirty mess, leaving the coffee-bag unfit for further use. Now and then some young soldier would bring out an oil-silk bag lined with cloth, which his mother had made but even oil-silk couldn't stand everything, certainly not the peculiar inside furnishing of the average soldier's haversack, so it also did not last long. But the plain, straightforward old veteran, who roughed it, took out an oblong plain cloth bag, which looked about as clean as the every-day shirt of a coal miner and into it scooped both his sugar and coffee, and stirred them thoroughly together. That way he had sweetened coffee. As for milk in his coffee, condensed milk of two brands, Lewis and Borden, was to be had at the sutler's when sutlers were handy, and occasionally milk was brought in from stray cows. In any event, each time the march stopped, fires were built, coffee was roasted, roasted beans were either ground or crushed with a rifle butt, coffee was brewed and men were refreshed.

GOOD TIME TO START A WAR

February 1878 was a time for murder in the County of Lincoln, New Mexico.  There was a posse looking for Englishman and entrepreneur John H. Tunstall in order to take his horses and other property through a writ of attachment that was part of crooked deal with the Murphy-Dolan Ring in the town of Lincoln.  A mercantile rivalry had been going on for some time.  And Lincoln County sheriff Brady and the posse were in the pocket of the Murphy-Dolan gang.

At about three o’clock in the morning of a cold, snowy February 18, 1878 John Tunstall decided to drive nine horses from his ranch on the Rio Feliz on a fifty mile trek to the town of Lincoln.  At the break of dawn, Tunstall and his foreman Dick Brewer, along with ranch hands Billy Bonney, John Middleton, Rob Widenmann, Henry Brown and Fred Waite got an early start and headed for Lincoln with the nine horses.  All were on horseback except for Waite who was in a wagon.  Six of the horses they were driving belonged to Tunstall, two were Brewer’s and one was Bonney’s.  After about ten miles of riding they split up, with Waite taking the wagon trail that leads to La Junta on the Rio Hondo and the rest of the group taking a short cut through Pajarito Springs.

At about the same time, that forty-five man posse looking for Tunstall was headed for the Tunstall ranch on the Rio Feliz.  The posse was led by deputy sheriff Billy Matthews, an employee of Jimmy Dolan and, Jimmy Dolan himself, partner in the Murphy gang.  Well, as luck would have it, Henry Brown’s horse threw a shoe and he had to leave to Tunstall group and go back to the ranch on the Rio Feliz to get it fixed.  Brown ran into the Dolan-Matthews posse on the way back because they were also headed for the Tunstall ranch.  They all got to the ranch at the same time and Dolan was fit to be tied when he discovered that the horses they were going to repossess were gone.  The only person at the ranch was Godfrey Gauss, Tunstall’s cook.  When the posse asked where Tunstall and the horses were, both Brown and Gauss played dumb.

Concluding that Tunstall had taken the horses to avoid the posse, Mathews and Dolan figured that the best thing they could do to catch up to Tunstall and the horses was to follow the hoof prints left in the snow by Henry Brown’s horse.  So they decided to send eighteen men in a sub-posse led by Buck Morton to back-track the hoof prints.  Among the eighteen were members of the infamous Jesse Evans gang, such as Evans himself, Tom Hill and Frank Baker.  Jimmy Dolan, Bill Matthews and the rest of the posse stayed around the Tunstall ranch, in case Tunstall had a change of plans and would come back with the horses.

At about five o’clock in the afternoon, John Tunstall and Dick Brewer, along with ranch hands Billy Bonney, John Middleton and Rob Widenmann rode down a gorge leading to the Rio Ruidoso, about ten miles from Brewer’s own Ruidoso ranch.   Tunstall, Brewer, and Widenmann were in front of the pack of horses while Bonney and Middleton rode drag, bringing up the rear.

Suddenly Bonney and Middleton heard the sound of horses behind them.  They quickly turned in their saddles and saw the sub-posse rapidly approaching.  The two ranch hands then quickly rode forward, yelling for Tunstall, Widenmann, and Brewer to ride with them.  The sub-posse immediately opened fire on the five men.  Bullets tore through the air.  Widenmann and Brewer along with Bonney and Middleton rode fast through a hail of lead to reach cover.  Middleton yelled straightforwardly at Tunstall to run. 

For some unknown reason, Tunstall froze. 

Riding low and taking cover in a ravine, Billy Bonney, Dick Brewer, Rob Widenmann, and John Middleton all suddenly lost sight of Tunstall.  Seeing the unmoving Tunstall, the sub-posse ceased their fire and rode up to him.  John Tunstall, hoping to reason with the sub-posse, rode his horse closer to them.  As he approached, Tom Hill and Billy Morton each slowly and calmly raised his rifle and fired one shot at him. Tunstall took one bullet in the chest and one bullet in the head and was immediately killed.

For whatever crazy reason went through his head, one the posse then killed Tunstall’s horse by shooting it in the head.  At that point, to make it look as though the group killed Tunstall in self-defense, another one of the posse took Tunstall's pistol out of its holster and fired two shots in the air.  Members of the sub-posse then picked up Tunstall's body and laid it next to his dead horse.  Tunstall’s hat was then placed on the horse's head as a sick joke.  One sub-posse member, inexplicably, then took it upon himself to bash in Tunstall's head with the butt of his rifle. The sub-posse rounded up the nine horses that Tunstall was driving and drove them back to the Rio Feliz ranch.  

After hearing the shooting and the commotion, Billy Bonney, Dick Brewer, Rob Widenmann and John Middleton all realized that Tunstall had been killed. They waited, hiding in the ravine until dark, then rode on towards Lincoln when they were sure that the sub-posse had gone. The four men arrived in Lincoln around midnight and told Tunstall’s partner Alexander McSween what occurred.  McSween then called a mass meeting of most of his supporters and Tunstall's supporters at the McSween house.  Plans of vengeance were discussed.  With the murder of John H. Tunstall, the Lincoln County War had begun.

A COLD NEW MEXICAN JANUARY IN 1855

It was a chilly morning in southern New Mexico, as most mornings were in January. It was the morning of January 5, 1855 and a band Mescalero Apaches had disappeared into the Sacramento Mountains in the vicinity of Sierra Blanca, White Mountain, after stealing about 2,500 head of sheep. A large force of soldiers, with Captain Henry W. Stanton in command, had left Fort Fillmore, near Mesilla, to track them. 

Fort Fillmore was established less than four years before near Mesilla to protect settlers and traders traveling to California. Travelers heading west were plagued by Apache attacks, and a network of forts was created by the US Government to protect and encourage westward expansion. 

 Indians had been raiding, killing and stealing in southern New Mexico Territory since settlement began and in 1851 and 1852 treaties were signed with various bands by the United States government. These were to no avail and by 1854 Indian raids had become a real problem. 

 Captain Stanton, with a force of eighty men and three officers, as well as forty mules and eight packers, a guide and an interpreter, was to join up with Captain Richard S. Ewell and a force of soldiers from Fort Thorn by the middle of January. Fort Thorn was a settlement and outpost establish in 1853 near present day Hatch, New Mexico. Captain Stanton was instructed to ”…attack any party of Indians he may fall in with having sheep or cattle…” Stanton and Ewell, making good time, met up near the Rio Penasco on January 7 and set up camp. They began a regular patrol of the area because Ewell’s Dragoons had reported seeing an Indian running in the underbrush on the day they set up camp. The troop’s horses were spooked by something or someone on the night of January ninth. Mescaleros were assumed but, although the soldiers found some evidence, they found no Indians. 

The Mescaleros attacked the Dragoons’ camp on the night of the eighteenth, according to the New Mexico State Archives, stealing horses and setting the grass surrounding the camp ablaze. The soldiers woke up to the mocking of a band of Indians dancing around a fire on the hillside. Skipping breakfast, the troopers saddled up and went in pursuit of the warriors. Stanton and Ewell’s main force attacked along the banks of the Rio Penasco, while small parties of Dragoons maneuvered after various clusters of braves. This running battle lasted until about four o’clock that afternoon. Captain Stanton led a small detail of twelve men in pursuit of the Apaches while the main body of soldiers set up camp for the evening. They rode into a deep ravine, near the modern day town of Mayhill, where the Mescaleros waited in ambush. Upon hearing the gunfire, the soldiers in camp rushed to support Captain Stanton’s small force. A tough battle resulted but it lasted only twenty minutes. The warriors fled. 

 Having been shot in the forehead while attempting to cover the retreat of his soldiers from that hard fight, Captain Henry W. Stanton departed this life straight away. Private James A. Bennett, 1st Dragoons, recorded in his diary that Privates John Hennings and Thomas Dwyer were also killed in the Indian ambush. The soldiers wrapped their dead companions in blankets and buried their bodies, building fires over their graves in hope that the location would be hidden until they could make a return trip to recover the bodies. 

As the disheveled and grubby soldiers returned after four days of chasing Indians through the hilly, rocky and often precipitous terrain, they paused to recover the remains of Captain Stanton and the two Dragoons killed on the nineteenth. Someone had unearthed the bodies and stolen the blankets. Animals had mutilated the exposed bodies. The corpses were in a deplorable condition. While the horses and pack animals were given time to rest, the soldiers respectfully placed the bodies of their comrades-in-arms on piles of firewood and burned the flesh off the bones. The expedition, led by Captain Ewell, then took the remains back to Fort Fillmore for a proper military funeral. They arrived on February 2. 

Eagerly awaiting the return of her husband, Captain Stanton’s wife waited at her front door for over an hour before a soldier informed her of her husband’s death. 

The following day, the garrison buried the remains of Captain Stanton, Private Dwyer and Private Hennings with full military honors. According to John P. Ryan, author of Fort Stanton and Its Community, when a new fort was established on the banks of the Rio Bonito, later in that year of 1885, it was named in honor of Captain Henry W. Stanton

CHRISTMAS ON THE 150th ANNIVERSARY OF THE CIVIL WAR

“I should like to be home this Christmas night,” wrote Lieutenant Elisha Hunt Rhodes on Christmas day, 150 years ago.  Lt. Rhodes, of the second Rhode Island, spent Christmas Day in camp just like he did the year before, in 1861 and he would spend two more Christmas Days in camp before the Civil war was over.

Elisha Rhodes is one of the most famous of the diarists of the Civil War and his stunning accounts of the War Between the States was published in 1985 as "All for the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes"  by Robert Hunt Rhodes, his great-grandson.  Filmmaker Ken Burns featured Rhodes' war experiences in his 1990 documentary "The Civil War.”  Rhodes's words reveal the motivation of a common Yankee foot soldier, an otherwise ordinary young man who endured the rigors of combat and exhausting marches, short rations, fear, and homesickness for a salary of $13 a month and the satisfaction of giving "all for the union."

The son of a New England sea captain, Elisha Hunt Rhodes enlisted into the Union army as an eighteen year old private when fighting erupted in 1861.  Rhodes served with the Second Rhode Island Infantry for the duration of the war, and fought in nearly every major battle in which the Army of the Potomac was engaged.  Rhodes became an officer at age 20 and eventually rose from private to a 23 year old colonel commanding his own regiment. He fought hard and honorably in battles from Bull Run to Appomattox.
 

While we look back at the 150^th Anniversary of the Civil War, it is fitting that we celebrate this Christmas season with a first-hand look at what war was like so many years ago. Frequently cold, wet, tired and unfed, periodically the witness to death, destruction incompetence and poor generalship, Elisha Hunt Rhodes endured.

When in camp, Christmas was a welcome but short reprieve from the tedium of an army winter.  In between Christmases was battle after battle, shells screaming overhead, friends a few feet away wounded and dying.

Christmas 1862 was the second of Elisha Rhodes' four Christmases spent in the Army of the Potomac, and his location for each serves as a graphic representation of the progress of the army.   Rhodes spent his first two Christmases in the Army of the Potomac in camps around Washington, D.C.  He does not record an entry for 1861, and he remarks in 1862 that Christmas was a quiet day, a calm day in which the soldiers were excused from drill and he enjoyed a visit by his brother-in-law from Washington. 
  

On New Year’s Eve he wrote, “Well, the year 1862 is drawing to a close. As I look back I am bewildered when I think of the hundreds of miles I have tramped, the thousands of dead and wounded that I have seen, and the many strange sights that I have witnessed. I can truly thank God for his preserving care over me and the many blessings I have received. One year ago tonight I was an enlisted man and stood cap in hand asking for a furlough. Tonight I am an officer and men ask the same favor of me. It seems to me right that officers should rise from the ranks, for only such can sympathize with the private soldiers. The year has not amounted to much as far as the War is concerned, but we hope for the best and feel sure that in the end the Union will be restored. Good bye, 1862.”

In 1863, near Brandy Station in northern Virginia, Elisha Hunt Rhodes reported that he rode his recently acquired army horse, Kate, on Christmas Day, and gave a Christmas dinner celebration for other officers in the regiment, during which they endeavored to celebrate the holiday "in a becoming manner."

Elisha Rhodes spent his fourth and last army Christmas in a small hut in the trenches around Petersburg, Virginia.  The Union army was laying siege to the city, but there was little activity during the cold weather.  On Christmas Eve, Rhodes entertained officers from the 49th Pennsylvania, and after their departure officers from the 37th Massachusetts serenaded him. On Christmas morning, he took a ride and watched Union soldiers hauling logs to build warmer quarters.  Rhodes commented, "This is the birth of the Saviour, but we have paid very little attention to it in a religious way."  He closed his entry by writing, "This is my fourth Christmas in the Army. I wonder if it will be my last."

It was his last army Christmas.  Elisha Hunt Rhodes was mustered out shortly after the end of the Civil War in April 1865, and returned to his home in Rhode Island. He worked as a cotton and wool trader for the rest of his life and, like many soldiers, remained active in veteran affairs.  Elisha Hunt Rhodes died on January 14, 1917.

A DUELING TONGUE TWISTER

Some things have to be reprinted because they’re just downright funny!  The following article, probably first printed in Printers Circular in April of 1867, has been reprinted in numerous publications, most recently in the December 2012 (Vol. 25, No. 4) issue of Wild West.  They reprinted it from the January 16, 1878 issue (No. 45, Vol. II) of the weekly humor magazine Puck who, in turn, took it from the Lancaster (Mo.) Excelsior:

A duel was lately fought in Texas by Alexander Shott and John S. Nott.  Nott was shot, and Shott was not.  In this case it is better to be Shott than Nott.  There was a rumor that Nott was shot, and Shott avows that he shot Nott, which proves either that the shot Shott shot at Nott was not shot, or that Nott was shot notwithstanding.  Circumstantial evidence is not always good.    It may be made to appear on trial that the shot Shott shot, shot Nott, or, as accidents with firearms are frequent, it may be possible that the shot Shott shot, Shott shot himself, when the whole affair would resolve itself into its original elements, and Shott would be shot, and Nott would be not.  We think, however, that the shot Shott shot, shot not Shott, but Nott.  Anyway, it is hard not to tell who was shot.  

CHARITY, UNITY AND FRATERNITY HEAD WEST

Late 19^th century America, in particular the East Coast, was marked by hostility toward immigrants, mostly Catholics, and dangerous factory and mine working conditions that left many families fatherless.  Recognizing a number of needs in his New Haven, Connecticut community, Father Michael J. McGivney gathered a group of men at Saint Mary’s Church on October 2, 1881.

Forming a fraternal organization, the men vowed to be united with their fellowmen in the Catholic faith and to provide for the families of deceased members.  Catholic men were drawn to this new fraternity because of its emphasis on serving one’s Church, community and family with virtue.

As a symbol that their allegiance to America did not conflict with their allegiance to their Catholic faith, they took as their patron Christopher Columbus – recognized as a Catholic and celebrated as the European discoverer of America.  In 1882 they were chartered in Connecticut as the Knights of Columbus.  By 1897 they were established all the way west to California.

Edward L. Hearn wrote in 1898 that a Knight should live according to the vittues of loyalty, charity, courtesy and modesty, as well as “self-denial and careful respect for the feelings of others.”