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Published: January 31st 2013
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WHISKEY JIM
From Corona, NM go southward on Hwy 54 about 9 miles to Gaalinas Station Road. Turn left and go 0.93 miles to the east. Watch closely for Greathouse Road. It will be on the right and is not marked. It is barely even a road. The photo was taken about a quarter mile down that road on the right. The saloon may have once stood about about a half a mile further down the road near a small stock tank. You will need a vehicle with high ground clearance on that poor road. If it is muddy don't go. There are no fences, gates, or no trespassing signs so that land is probably BLM land. WHISKEY JIM
Jim Greathouse was one of the gnarliest of gnarly old hide hunters to ravish the southern herd on the plains of Texas. He was caught up with other hide hunters in the fight at Adobe Walls in the autumn of 1874. As the buffalo herd began to thin out he started in trading a pint of snakehead whiskey to the Comanche for a tanned robe. When that practice became known to Col Ranald MacKenzie at Fort Griffin Whiskey Jim was cordially invited to haunt other climes and to do so immediately if not sooner upon the peril of his life. He moved further out onto plains in the summer of 1875 to the area of Rath City. On March 4, 1877 Whiskey Jim set out with some other hide hunters in pursuit of the Comanche, Black Horse, who had lately been doing some raiding to the vexation of the white population. They caught up with Black Horse in the vicinity of the Yellow House Draws near Lubbock. After a brief confrontation they were content to withdraw without doing much harm to their enemies. Back in Rath City Whiskey Jim undertook a new enterprise with his pals Salapie Dan and Little Red. It involved stealing the horses of other hide hunters in town for revelry among the fleshpots. The horses were returned when a fair ransom was paid. The new business venture soon earned them another invitation to relocate. They shifted over to McCamey’s on the Clear Fork of the Brazos between where Snyder and Roby now stand. Salapie Dan and Little Red were caught removing the hobbles from some horses and were quickly strung up from an upended wagon tongue. By then buffalo hunting was scarcely worth the dangerous effort it took. The last of the big money hunts ended in the spring of 1878. Whiskey Jim slipped over to New Mexico to make a fresh start. He settled at Anton Chico, married a local girl, and tried to go straight, but it was a mighty crooked trail for him to follow. When the gold boom hit White Oaks Whiskey Jim started a freight line between there and Las Vegas. His home in Anton Chico was in between, but he needed another stopover closer to White Oaks. He took on a partner named Kuch and they started up a roadhouse called Red Cloud near the south end of the Galinas not far from where Corona was later built. The roadhouse offered popskull whiskey to the weary traveler and soon became a hangout for lawless men of every stripe. Within a year it brought him big trouble. During the early months of 1880 an 18 year old guy calling himself Billie Wilson turned up in White Oaks. He started up a sort of livery service and was well liked around town. In June a guy named W. H. West showed up. He had been a hide broker and was looking for new investment opportunities. He offered Billie $400 cash money for the corral and water trough that Billie had. Billie took the money and scampered off to Lincoln before West could change his mind. In Lincoln Billie bought a new six-gun from Dolan’s store and deposited the rest of the money in Dolan’s safe. West had paid Billie in counterfeit bills. Before long the feds were in Lincoln County with an arrest warrant on him. Tangling with the viciously corrupt Santa Fe Ring was not to be taken lightly and Billie went on the lam. He soon fell in with two others who were also on the lam and joined up with them. They were William H. Bonney and Dirty Dave Rudabaugh. Billy the Kid stole a saddle in White Oaks, and a few days later returned to rob a store of some heavy coats and warm blankets. Cold weather had set in. They took their booty and set off for Red Cloud. Rudabaugh was fond of bad whiskey. A White Oaks posse led by Deputy James Carlisle was hot their trail. The posse surrounded Whiskey Jim’s saloon and demanded that the outlaws surrender. The outlaws laughed and sent Whiskey Jim out to decline the offer. Whiskey Jim was held hostage and Carlisle was allowed to enter the saloon to negotiate the arrests, but he became a hostage too. The standoff ended when Carlisle dove out a window. Before he could get away Rudabaugh shot him in the back and killed him. Darkness had fallen with the outlaws still inside. During the night the outlaws escaped. Next morning the posse was left holding an empty poke. They shivered through a cold night and were hoping to get the hefty rewards out on Billy the Kid and Rudabaugh. It was all for nothing though, and the posse was so enraged that they burned Red Cloud to the ground. Carlisle was buried in the backyard. A month later the outlaws were captured by Sheriff Pat Garrett at Stinking Springs a few miles east of Fort Sumner. The new pistol that he took from Billie Wilson that day is the same one he used to kill Billy the Kid with a few months later. Dirty Dave Rudabaugh eventually escaped from jail and made it safely down to Chihuahua. He held up a card game at a cantina in Parral. When he went outside with his booty to ride away he found that his horse had been stolen. When he went back into the cantina to demand that the horse be returned the Mexicans he had just robbed chopped his head off with an axe. Billie Wilson was pardoned on the bogus counterfeiting charge by President Grover Cleveland and returned to his former home in West Texas. He became a well-respected lawman down there for the next forty years. In 1917 he was murdered at the train station by a drunken cowboy, and his friends lynched that cowboy within the hour. Whiskey Jim, still trying to go straight, continued to haul freight into White Oaks and Lincoln after his saloon got burned down, but his whole range was full of stolen cattle. He hired a couple of guys to manage those cattle and eventually they formed a partnership with a silver-tongued devil named Joel Fowler. Fowler enjoyed the income from those cattle but when he found himself implicated in rustling he double-crossed his partners by blaming the rustling on them. When it looked like the double-cross was not going to hold up he murdered all three of them. When his wife, Bronco Sue Yonker, found out what he had done she began to fear for life too and killed him with an axe. She claimed self-defense and scampered off to Tularosa before murder charges could be filed. The photo shows an area on Whiskey Jim’s range that I thought might be a likely location for his corral. There was no evidence found of Carlisle’s grave nearby though.
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