Featured Excerpt: Four Against the West

Four Against the West by Joe Pappalardo is a thrilling true saga of legendary Texas figure Judge Roy Bean and his brothers―and their violent adventures in Wild West America. Read on for a chapter excerpt from Four Against the West that focuses on the legendary American saloon-keeper and Justice of the Peace in Texas, Phantley Roy Bean, Jr. 

ROY

Louisville, Kentucky

March 1841

Phantley Roy Bean Jr. eyes the flatboat with excitement and trepidation. This floating wooden shack, scarcely fifty feet long and made of scrap wood, will be the sixteen-year-old’s home for the next two months. It has no keel—that’d cost too much time and money—and therefore will depend on the crew, of which he’s now one, to steer it with long poles.

It’s more than eight hundred miles from the banks of the Ohio River to the skiff’s destination of New Orleans. That’s a long way to be dodging sandbars, steamboats, and river pirates, but Roy—the name he now uses—is too eager to leave to feel many nerves. When he does, there’s bourbon.

These commercial boats require at least four crew and a pilot, who are contracted per trip. Roy’s a strapping youth, good with horses and familiar with rifles from a lifetime of hunting. He can read and is learning to gamble. And coming from a family of southern landowners, he’s comfortable manhandling slaves. That’s an important quality, given the cargo the flatboat is carrying—a dozen people, destined for sale in the slave markets of New Orleans.

It’s been illegal to import slaves from outside the United States since 1808, but Congress’s action did nothing to stem the internal market. The population of rural Kentucky is in steep decline, and as people leave they sell their slaves. The prices in New Orleans, the premier market for the human trade, are much higher than in Kentucky; at $600 to $1,200 a person, even a handful of slaves will pay for the trip and cover the crew’s pay.

Thousands every year make the trip after being “sold down the river,” and the unsavory business leaves slave-driving bargemen eager to find crew. Even an untested teenager, if they show enough pluck. And Roy has pluck to spare.

Running away from home is the best example of this. It’s a bold move, but Roy sees it as an obvious one. There’s little to keep him in Kentucky besides his family, and the Bean family is on a downward trajectory. In fact, the entire country seems to be faltering. 

When Roy was a child in Mason County, his family owned a sizable parcel of land and plenty of people to work it. An 1820 census listed a homestead of thirty-two people. Only six of them were Bean family members—father Phantley, mother Anna, and their four children. James was the eldest, born in 1814. Joshua was next, born in 1818, followed the next year by Samuel. Keeping pace, Sarah provided some household gender balance in 1820. Their parents must have exhausted themselves, Roy figured, because he didn’t arrive until 1825.

The Bean children grew up in an entitled existence of household servants, field slaves, and obedient hired hands. There were eight slaves in the family’s holdings, five of whom were females under twenty-four years old. The homestead also had a workforce of sixteen hired laborers, all living on-site. Phantley Sr., who went by “Francis,” was a skilled surveyor who took work establishing new post roads and racetracks. He also diversified; for example, he and his brother Benjamin in 1818 jointly backed a man named William Connett (from Mayslick) in opening a tavern. It was the first saloon in which the Bean family is known to have been involved, but it was far from the last.

Roy’s father was a charismatic and energetic man, a larger-than-life figure to his sons. He was given to delivering speeches in his lingering Irish brogue. Phantley Sr. consistently demonstrated how a man sizes up opportunities and uses confidence to claim them. His boys each shared a belief that they were men of action who deserved to capitalize on circumstances, no matter where in the world they found them. Nature and other, lesser men needed to yield before their ambitions. Even James, the eldest and most responsibly minded brother, inherited an aggressive pride.

These traits were not unique to the Bean family; they were hallmarks of American culture, particularly in the South. These attitudes migrated with settlers going into the western frontier and, in time, became the tenets of what’s called Manifest Destiny.

Kentucky dashed the proud aspirations of the Bean family. In March 1825, they sold a fifty-four-acre tract of land to neighbor Thomas Wells and moved from Mason into a humbler homestead in Shelby County. The 1830 census showed a household of just seventeen people—the family and eight slaves. By then, the Beans were already in a financial retreat, and things were about to get much worse.

In 1833, a cholera epidemic scythed through Kentucky, killing tens of thousands. The extended Bean family was swept into the carnage—a family slave named Harry Nichols offered a window on their suffering when he later recalled helping family members bury “three of old man Bean’s children,” among many others. It’s the first of several sporadic outbreaks, the disease sadistically taking long breaks between lethal waves.

In October 1835, Phantley Bean Sr. was struck down by a runaway team of horses, which killed him instantly. Any hope to hold the family together in Shelby County fell to James, at twenty-one years old, and Joshua, at twenty. Sarah was fifteen, Sam fourteen, and Roy just ten.

After their father’s death, Kentucky’s cholera-ravaged economy only grew worse. In 1837, the banks in the state all failed. It had something to do with the Bank of England overextending itself with loans, leading to a cut of all credit issuance to Americans, which halved the price of cotton that year. This in turn shuttered cotton companies and banks in New Orleans, and the infection reached New York, causing the Josephs Banking Co. to close and precipitating the panic of 1837, which crashed the dollar and tanked the entire US economy.

There was blame to go around—the loose credit in England, Andrew Jackson dissolving the Bank of the United States, bad weather—and the depression proved deep and lasting. Southern states suffered worse. The entire nation spoke of a malaise, but Kentuckians dubbed the era between 1834 and 1844 the “crisis decade.”

Given the resurgent cholera and sputtering economy, this generation of Beans never had much of a chance in Kentucky. Roy has watched his community, state, and nation cracking apart. Who could blame him for cutting out?

Hell, Uncle Ben didn’t stick around to watch the world collapse around him any further. He left Kentucky in 1837, leaving an imploded economy and family graves behind for the promise of a place called Missouri. Benjamin Bean, from all reports, has settled on his own land near a lake outside the town of Independence, when it was just an obscure fur trade village on the edge of the settled United States. Since then, the hamlet has become the premier jumping-off point for settlers, traders, and explorers heading to the foreign lands of New Mexico, Oregon, and California.

Roy is natural at justifying actions he clearly wants to take for his own gratification, and he applies this skill to abandoning his family in Kentucky. With him gone, his brothers will have one less thing to worry about. Strapping horseman Joshua is ready to head off on his own, not to start a family per se but to escape the laborious monotony of homesteading. Everyone knows that community-minded James will snare a wife as soon as he’s able, but if Roy knows his brother at all, he expects him to go to Missouri. The eldest Bean tends to pander to and emulate his elders, and he’ll float to his uncle in Missouri like a leaf pulled behind the wake of a barge. If Uncle Ben continues to find success out there, Roy bets James’ll make the leap, whether he’s married or not.

If the family doesn’t move west, Sam might just go renegade, like Roy is now doing. The pair are in many ways opposites—Sam with blond hair, Roy with dark; Sam slow-spoken and Roy quick-tongued; Sam largely abstaining from drink, Roy happily indulging—but they share a streak of adventurism. The two indulged this trait as young squires roaming the hills and fields of Kentucky. Roy hopes his departure will ignite Sam’s spirit of adventure, even if running off to New Orleans is too extreme an act. In any case, his brother is far too soft on slaves to consider working on a flatboat to New Orleans.

Roy has grown wilder than his elder siblings, having lived without a father for more of his childhood than the others. He’s clever and observant, but frustrated and rootless. And there’s no reason to stay put. Not while there’s a sprawling trade network running along the nation’s great rivers. So as soon as he’s old enough to be hired, Roy heads to nearby Louisville to find a flatboat. From there, on a rudderless barge carrying forlorn slaves, he can take the Ohio River to where it meets the Mississippi and head straight south for New Orleans and whatever the future holds.

Mississippi River

April 1841

Nights on the flatboat are both quiet and tense for the man on watch. Tonight it’s Roy, who puffs on a cigar to stay alert. His ears strain for any noise in the darkness: telltale splashes of incoming pirate boats, clicks of firearms being readied, the scrape of metal blades being pulled from scabbards. Amid the din of frogs, birds, and other riverside animals, anyone could be mustering for an attack.

But the rifles, knives, and pistols the crew carry are not just meant to repel river pirates. Roy considers their cargo, chained together under the glare of a lantern, as the real threat. He’s not just a boat crewman; he’s also a prison guard.

Even by the standards of a Kentucky slave’s miserable condition, being shipped to New Orleans is a nightmare of cruel uncertainty. Being separated from all friends and family and sent away for resale creates a dangerous desperation. Slave rebellions have occurred during trips down the river, with flatboat crews killed during the bids for freedom.

Roy sees lights downstream, and they’re getting larger—it must be a steamboat churning toward them. In daylight, he’d see the telltale smudge of stack smoke on the horizon. As the vessel gets closer, he can hear music on board and spies dark figures silhouetted in lamplit windows. To the steamboat’s crew, Roy’s slave skiff is a dot of light away from the river’s center, but to the teenager, the steamboat is a reminder of the wider community on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Both are plied by watercraft of all sizes and are serviced by a network of forts, trading stations, and taverns on the banks. These built-from-scratch outposts are hubs for news, political machinations, and commercial negotiations. In the world’s empty places, a saloon can become a beacon of civilization.

Each stop has been an education for Roy. Drinking, gambling, and fighting are a way of life for these rough, working rivermen, and the teenager proves to be a quick student. Best of all, he’s not alone in the world while he’s at a saloon. Or at least he’s alone with everybody else.

New Orleans, Louisiana

May 1841

Roy stands among the back of the crowd at the trader’s yard, having shown up late to the auction’s ten a.m. start. Attending the slave auction is not part of his job as a flatboat crewman, which ended on arrival. But he’s never seen one before, and it seems like he should watch the end of his first trip.

New Orleans is slavery’s unparalleled hub in the United States. Other cities confine their slave pens to one district, but this yard is just one of more than fifty sprinkled across New Orleans. Some are under rotunda domes; others, like this one, are conducted in open-air markets. Humans are bought and sold every Saturday and Sunday.

Taking in the place’s high brick walls and armed staff, Roy can see that the facility is an auction house only part of the time; it’s really a full-time prison for slaves awaiting sale. The enslaved are assembled to one side. Roy scans the glum faces for those he shipped here, but it’s not easy among the throngs. The men, women, and children on sale are of varying ages, each freshly washed, with hair combed and wearing clean clothes. They seem a far cry from the huddled, moaning cargo lying on the hard deck of the flatboat.

“When spectators would come in the yard, the slaves were ordered out to form a line,” an escaped slave Henry Bibb, will describe in his memoirs. “They were made to stand up straight and look as sprightly as they could; and when they were asked a question, they had to answer it as promptly as they could, and try to induce the spectators to buy them. If they failed to do this, they were severely paddled after the spectators were gone. And the object for flogging under such circumstances, is to make the slaves anxious to be sold.”

When he and the flatboat crew dropped off their cargo at the yard, Roy was able to see the staff using their equipment to punish uncooperative slaves. Several had been pushed over, elbows touching knees, with a stick forced between the bends of their limbs. Hands tied and helpless, they endure beatings by the auctioneers, who use wooden paddles, the flat sides pitted with auger holes that form dark blisters on the skin. Roy notices that the blows only land where prospective buyers won’t be able to see the damage.

He spots a throng of slaves, their faces unemotional, dancing in a courtyard under the watchful eyes of the trade pen overseers. The idea, he’s told, is to increase their health with some light exercise. To this end, the slaves here are also scrutinized by doctors and given healthy portions of food. It’s not humane; it’s just good for sales.

There are slaves exposed for bidding (i.e., displayed on the auction block), but most of the action happens on the sidelines, where savvy buyers can get a good look at the humans they’re considering for purchase. Prospects are often taken into rooms and stripped, then examined for indications of disease or scars from neck chains or beatings, signs of unwanted defiance. Once in a while a man or woman will act out, usually when a family is being split apart. There’s begging and crying, but such outbursts are rare and quickly tamped with brute intimidation. “I would have cried, if I dared to,” writes Solomon Northup, who that same year experiences an auction from the perspective of those being sold, after seeing a mother and child forcibly separated in a trade yard.

The final step is a trip to the notary tables. Under Louisiana law, all slave sales must be recorded by notaries in the city, who deliver this bureaucracy from several desks on-site.

After the novelty wears off, Roy finds slave sales a morose and dull process. He quickly gets bored and leaves. On the street, it’s impossible to forget that he’s unemployed. Flatboats can’t navigate upstream, so he knew it would be a one-way trip. He idly wonders if the skiff’s owner got even a third of its seventy-five-dollar construction cost when he sold it.

With his pay, he could take a steamboat north toward home. But with some money in pocket and New Orleans to explore, what’s the rush? Roy turns his back on the slave market’s tall brick wall and the miseries inside, strides down cobblestone streets toward the Garden District, and the city of New Orleans swallows him.