The South to which he returned in the winter of 1866 was firmly in the grip of federal occupation troops and Yankee carpetbaggers. Young McKenna's inevitable clashes with both soon convinced his mother that her eldest son belonged elsewhere, and in spring of 1867, he signed as deckhand on a Cape Horn clipper bound for San Francisco. His background and education distinguished him from his fellowsailors, but also made him a natural target of foredeck bullies. By the time Bonnie Clara reached Valparaiso, he had learned to use fists and knives as well as fluent invective and a modicum of seamanship. In fact, when the vessel finally docked in San Francisco in September, he was offered a mate's rating for the return voyage. He had had enough of the sea, however. Instead, he hired on as a driver with one of the several freighting companies supplying the California gold fields. To occupy his mind and for his own amusement, he kept a detailed diary of his experiences. Finding himself at one point with several weeks between trips, he made use of his leisure to write a rather florid sketch of life in the diggings entitled "Panners' Paradise," which he submitted to the San Francisco Morning Chronicle without much hope of publication. To his surprise, the story not only was published, but also produced an interview with the Chronicle's editor, who happened to be looking for someone to report on the burgeoning postwar cattle industry in Texas and New Mexico. Since none of his regular reporters was eager to trade the comforts of San Francisco for the rigors of Texas, he offered McKenna the assignment for a penny a printed word. Accordingly, in the winter of 1868, armed with his Chronicle credentials and his accumulated earnings, McKenna made his way through Arizona and New Mexico to El Paso and on to Fort Worth, whence the following spring he joined one of the early cattle drives up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene. For the next several years he roamed the railheads from Abilene to Dodge, filing stories with a growing stable of regional newspapers in addition to the Chronicle. His work allowed him freedom of movement, and he supplemented his sporadic publishing income by scouting, hunting, and occasionally assisting local peace officers (also, some claimed, by peddling watered whiskey, pimping, and forging the odd legal document). By the early 1870s, McKenna was a wellknown habitué of the cowtowns and could claim acquaintance with several of the West's leading characters, including Buffalo Bill Cody, Clay Allison, and Wild Bill Hickock, most of whom appeared sooner or later in his columns. Although his writing matured, he never suffered an immoderate passion for accuracy to interfere with telling a good story, and his articles accordingly tended to be long on color and short on fact, qualities that apparently disturbed neither his subjects nor his editors. On June 27, 1874, several hundred Comanche, Kiowa, and Southern Cheyenne Indians beseiged a buffalo hunter's trading post in the Texas Panhandle near a Spanish ruin known as Adobe Walls. The attack ignited the Red River War, the last major Indian campaign on the southern plains. Through his scouting contacts, McKenna managed to attach himself to Colonel Ranald Mackenzie's 4th U.S. Cavalry, deployed to the Texas panhandle from Fort Griffin, and remained with them throughout the campaign to its culmination at the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. |
Cimarron Scribbler S.A.S.S. #24599 |
"Cimarron Scribbler" was the nom de plume of James Francis McKenna, Jr., itinerant western journalist, essayist, and dime novelist. Born in Philadelphia in 1849 to a Main Line attorney and his Charleston Belle bride, the eldest of four children, he passed his first twelve years in an atmosphere of wealth, education, and privilege until, in 1861, secession sundered the McKenna family as well as the Union. Offended by her neighbors' hostility toward her homeland and embittered by her husband's staunch Unionism, Mrs. McKenna fled home to Charleston with her children. Expecting, like most on both sides, that the war would be short, her husband suffered her to go. Instead, the war lasted four bitter years, during which young James Francis grew all too familiar with both hardship and the handgun. In 1865, following the South's defeat, McKenna Senior journeyed to Charleston to retrieve his family. His wife flatly refused to return north or to relinquish her younger children. James Francis, however, being of age to attend college, reluctantly returned to Philadelphia with his father, whence he was packed off the following year to Pennsylvania College. After six restless months aggravated by the victorious arrogance of his mostly Yankee fellow students, he took French leave in defiance of his father and, on the residue of his university allowance, made his way to back Charleston. |
Cimarron Scribbler |
