From the journals of Christopher Francis.
Daguerreotypes by Madame Noire and your humble servant.
Tucson, 1879 --
“They’re going to tire themselves out before the first dance!”
A ring of young ladies prance in a circle as our fiddler warms his strings. It started as a line of lasses linked arm to arm, parading through the hall like proud stallions of the Tucson Rodeo. Then the music hits their ears and they are off to the races.
Now I should be the tired one. The journey from Kansas City to Tucson is long enough to drain a man’s strength without him moving a muscle: part by train, part by stagecoach. I meet a prairie schoolteacher, and she wonders how I survived the trip through Indian country.
“We were outnumbered,” I say. “But six in the chamber and a good shot tends to do a lot of convincing.”
Nearby, my dear lady friend is seeking fashion advice. She has this beautiful lacy cream-colored frock, which I’ll say is a welcome sight to everyone. But it’s no big secret that she’s intrigued by the pretty hoopskirts surrounding her. I can tell she’s looking for a talented seamstress. I wouldn’t think it would be so hard to find one in St. Louis.
Then I see a soldier entering in his woolen blue uniform with this green-ribboned medallion of a harp dotting his chest.
So I say, “Are you in the band?”
“No,” he responds with kindness. “I’m Irish.”
Doggone it. Been a long time since the war, long enough to scramble my memories. I have to be honest with you: If he could be mistaken for a musician, I could be mistaken for a parson. I’m wearing this black frock coat, black vest and a string tie.
“I don’t think they wear the hats,” a lady says, referring to my Stetson.
“Those cowboy priests of the Rio Grande Valley do,” I remember. “The Padres Oblatos.”
We’ve got a hall full of ranch hands standing among us in blue jeans and work shirts mingling amongst the ladies sporting bright prairie dresses and bonnets. The cattle business in Cochise County is a right fine moneymaker. Our host, the Colonel, isn’t above wearing some faded denim below his white jacket and bow tie. All of us get to admire each other’s duds as we make the grand procession through the hall and into a circle for a little bit of fun. This is where the Colonel gets to call us all out and such so we can do a little bit of showing off. He calls out the ladies, and then the gents, and like so with the blondes and brunettes, all the short and tall folks, and the people of bad manners who keep on dancing with their hats on. That would be me. That would be a lot of us. But I say if a man’s mop of a top needs a little bit of taming, that’s what the hat’s for.
I like the set dances. A gent doesn’t have to do a whole lot of fancy steppin’, just a whole lot of walkin’. My lady friend and I do this first dance -- I think it’s called the Gallopade -- and everybody gets to sashay down the middle, but that’s as fancy as it gets. Our caller Miss Becky comes up with these numbers that everybody can learn really quickly without having to think too much. It’s not hard to get caught up in the dance, with all the swinging and do-si-doing and sashaying going on.
The same goes for the square dances. I never cared too much for them when I was a boy, but the ones Miss Becky is teaching us are the simplest I’ve ever learned. Even so, they have a few fancy parts. She teaches this one where the couples go round about the ring, taking hands in little circles. “Dive for oyster!” she calls and one of the couples steps forward underneath an arch made by the other two. “Dig for clam!” she calls next, and then the other couple does the same.
We also get to do this square she taught us some time ago, “Birdie in the Cage,” where one lady jumps in to the middle of the ring and we all circle round. Then Miss Becky calls, “Birdie flies out, crow flies in!” and the man’s partner takes her place in the middle. I see this one gent dive into the center, and he’s flappin’ his arms and cawing just like the real bird. We’re all lucky nobody got pecked!
It doesn’t take a whole lot to work up a sizable amount of sweat, so all of us are quite pleased the Colonel has provided for cookies and tea and orange-flavored punch. That punch has to be the best refreshment in Arizona, as it doesn’t take long for it to disappear from the bowl.
During one of these breaks for socializing and catching our breaths, a lady inquires of my trade, probably wondering why I’m all dressed up.
“The riverboat and barge business is doing quite nicely,” I tell her. “With the trade picking up with the South, I’ve gone from working on the boat to owning the boat. The South is diversifying now, branching out beyond cotton. Doesn’t matter if you’re shipping cargo or yourself -- if you need to get something up and down the Missouri and Mississippi, I can take care of that.”
I lean towards her in confidence and whisper. “And if you fancy the dice, that can be arranged too, although I don’t like to talk about that much in front of the ladies.”
All right, so maybe I shouldn’t have said that last part. But I’m still a businessman, and I have to seek out opportunities where I can. That’s how I got myself out of those overalls I once wore and into something more becoming of a gentleman.
Along the way, I learned a few things -- like how to charm a lady or at look like I’m tryin’. A fine miss whom I know from a few previous dances invites me to try a twinkle waltz with her. Lucky for her, I know what I’m doing. It’s a really pretty dance to look at, when you’re stepping forward to face each other and touch hands and before turning away and then turning back. It looks a lot like one of those old Colonial dances. I bet you my great-grandparents would’ve loved to see it.
Some of these cowboys and cowgirls look like they’ve been spending as much time in the dance hall as they have out on the range. I’ll be a Missouri mule if I didn’t see so much fancy steppin’ around during the waltzes, like it was a ballet in New York City or something. Mind you, some folks like to take it nice and easy, but you see these young ones with more grace than the birds soaring through the air.
“Keeping the peace, Marshal Francis?” the Colonel says to me while I’m helping myself to more punch.
“Well, between the riverboat business and law enforcement, I kinda have a divided workflow,” I respond. “I’ve hired a Pinkerton or two for help.”
Okay, so I admit I didn’t tell you everything. I took a job as deputy marshal in Wilcox. I was out this way exploring a shipping deal with the railroads when I saw the need for more security.
“I hope to be coming out this way often,” I explained to the marshal over dusty, day-old coffee. “I can’t stick around here, but with all the rustlers and robbers and Indian attacks, it’s to your benefit if you know what was coming your way, and chances are I’ll probably run into it between here and Kansas City.” It wasn’t a hard sell.
A few ladies, meanwhile, were cornering the Colonel with their own offers. Please, oh please, can we persuade the gents to show off some things they learned during the war? He hadn’t planned it, but he quite generously obliged.
So the Colonel steps back into his duties as a commander and orders the gentlemen to a line on one side of the room, facing away from the ladies. The young girls squeal and giggle with delight and quickly remove one of their shoes. They toss them into this pile in the center. The Colonel asks another lady to mix all those shoes up, as it seems some of them like to pre-arrange what should be all spontaneous and such.
“Count off by twos!”
Most of us still remember our days as soldiers, so the drill of splitting one long line into two shorter ranks isn’t hard. And thankfully, all of us can count.
“How do they look, Sergeant?”
A large man in a Union overcoat agrees we look a little rusty but good enough for the purposes of snagging some footwear.
“Fix bayonets... CHARGE!”
The saying goes like this: lead, follow, or get out of the way. I reckon I can still fetch myself a shoe without fallin’ all over somebody else, so that’s what I do. My shoe happens to belong to a pretty lady in a charming green frock. Both of us have plenty of energy left for “Chase The Squirrel.”
My lady friend is finding herself plenty attractive to all the gents and cowboys. I see her enjoying dances with several different people, the way it right oughta be. And I’ll be a Mississippi River toad if she wasn’t the happiest thing after winning a door prize: a gift certificate for some fashionable patterns. She was seeking some fashion advice, and by golly, she found it!
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the Colonel calls, “choose your partner for the old Virginia Reel!”
He loves calling it, even though many of us -- including myself -- know it by heart, from the lines forward and back through every honor and turn and swing. It’s tempting for some of us to dance faster than he can call it, but he insists otherwise: “Wait for the call!”
However, something seems missing: this seems too ordinary for the Colonel’s tastes. He has got to have something up his sleeves. We find out soon enough: “We’ll go through it one more time, in double time!”
He’s not kiddin’. All these ladies and gentlemen rush through that last reel like they’re dancing on hot iron or runnin’ through the Arizona desert. It’s a race with each set trying to beat the others to the end. I’m amazed somebody doesn’t get thrown clear across the room with all the fast swinging going on. A set right in front of the Colonel finishes just before my set does, and they’re proclaimed the winner. Pshaw, if I’d only known it was a contest I would’ve had a few more sips of punch.
The evening is drawing to a close, and a lot of us are worn down like an old set of boots. But the Colonel, he knows a lot of us still have some fire burning in the furnace.
“Are there any Scottish cowboys out there?” he asks.
“Aye!” I answer.
Didn’t I tell you I’m the proud descendant of Scottish parents? They’re working the mines in Kansas. I may have never set foot in the mother country, but their blood is still in me, and if I love a good reel, a good jig goes together with it quite nicely.
So the Colonel calls all of us Highland Cowboys to step to the center of the hall, and we all start doing a jig. Me, I seem to recall this other dance… I think it’s called the Highland Fling.
Ladies come in and tap me on the shoulder to relieve me, and I kindly step out only to step back in and continue dancing for the enjoyment of the fair ones and anybody else who cares to see me kick up my heels. Even the Colonel joins me for a wild swing or two.
After all of that, we have time for one final waltz, where I rejoin my lady friend, who has quite enjoyed all the dancing with all the ladies and gents, as I have encouraged her to do. We try a two-step, and then we both attempt a box step before falling back into the two-step. It’s nothin’ fancy. We don’t mind. Our lives have enough fancy steps.
HUZZAH! I mean, YEEEEE-HAW!!!!
Y'all see more pictures of the festivities here.
NEXT: Persuasion
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