Season of the Vigilante
Book I: The
Bloody Season
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Author's Note
This book began in 1978 as "The Vigilante." It's main character, Tappan Kittety, was then a huge, bearded brute of a man who killed mercilessly anyone he suspected of a crime or anyone who got in his way. But my heart wasn't in it, and it died with Chapter One.
Then, in 1982, new life was breathed into "The Vigilante." Although stuck in Idaho, I dreamed of a faraway place on an encyclopedia map of Arizona: The Baboquivari Mountains (pronounced Bob-o-KEE--vuh-ree). I dreamed up a town that was an oasis near there, just south of Tucson. The town was named Castor, the Spanish word for beaver. And into this fictional town rode Captain Tappan Kittery, now a much gentler, deeper character.
In 1982-83, I wrote in pencil in three spiral notebooks, and soon I had finished my first complete novel, The Vigilante, over 300 pages long. With a borrowed electric typewriter, I then typed up the book after proofreading it myself. I typed it again in 1984, completely, because I had no access to a computer.
In 1985 and 1986,1 proofread that typed copy while living in France, and in the absence of a typewriter, rewrote it with a ballpoint pen.
At last, in 1986 and 1987, I had the chance to move to Arizona with my friend Scott Darger, and his family. I didn't hesitate. I moved to Mesa, Arizona, just outside Phoenix, a short drive from Tucson. While in Mesa, I made many weekend trips to Tucson and just south of it, to the setting of The Vigilante. I rode the hills where the book takes place. I scoured them on foot and by automobile. I mapped and planned and dreamed. And in that time period Tappan Kitterv, to me, became a real being, and somehow like a close friend.
I returned to Idaho in June of 1987, bought a word processor and typed my book again, this time as "Season of the Vigilante." Now it seemed real, because I knew all the places I wrote about. I again honed it and reprinted it in 1989. By then, I had met and married my wife, Debra Chatterton. It is because of her that this book is in existence today. She read the book, she loved it, and it was she who pushed for it to be published.
Debbie and her mother met local publishers, Dean and Nancy Hoch. They said they would read my book and give me a critique and possibly some help finding a market. Instead, after Nancy read the book, she asked to be the publisher. Needless to say, I was elated.
I retyped Season of the Vigilante completely on an Apple computer in 1990. 1 then reworked it again, and it took me three eight-hour days to print it out, in 1991. It was while working on the computers at Idaho State University that I met Chris Taft, and it is due in great part to his friendship and his immense help with the computer that my final draft was able to be printed.
The decision was made by the publishers and myself to divide Season of the Vigilante in half. Thus, it became Book I: The Bloody Season, and Book II: Seasons End. Both feature original paintings I did just for the book. I hope you enjoy them both, and enjoy the story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Prologue Vigilante.. and death.
On the frontier of the American West, by the mid-1870's, those two words had come to walk hand in hand; the first was seldom present without the second.
"Vigilante" was the name employed for each member of a group formally called a "vigilance committee," which was, in effect, a committee of justice, an organization formed to act in force against the lawless element. Some called it a committee of death, for wherever they passed, dead men remained.
The insurgence of a vigilance committee was not a common thing, even in the proverbial "wild west." They arose only in the most tempestuous of times, periods of extreme frustration for those involved, when there was no law, or what little there was seemed incapable of arresting the onslaught of murder and thievery in their neighborhood. Then it was that the vigilantes, they who called themselves the "Knights of Justice," among various other over-glorified sobriquets, took the law upon themselves. They rode out in groups by day or by night to bring justice to the land through the only means they deemed effective-the gun or the rope.
There were no limits to the ground covered by vigilantes. They might work in a single town or at times in areas great enough to encompass several counties, depending mostly upon their own strength and numbers. Most often, their efforts began small, including a handful of men, and grew to cover larger areas as they gained in manpower.
The vigilantes ranged from school teachers to miners, bartenders to ranchers, railroaders to lawmen. Occupation made no difference when one rode with the vigilantes. They came from every walk of life, but all had one purpose in common: to bring crime in their community to a complete, bloody halt as far as it was in their power to reap quick, if violent, justice in a lawless land.
The vigilantes took upon themselves the name of the law, yet operated far outside its boundaries. They were outlaws themselves, in a sense, just as those they sought to prosecute. Like the banditti, they chose to ignore the written laws of the land, but the vigilantes superseded them with laws of their own. It was this that brought about the death of many an innocent man and, in the end, the inevitable ruin of any vigilante organization.
The southern border of the Arizona Territory, in the year 1876, was a land ripe for such an organization as the vigilantes. Sitting on the Mexican frontier, separated from Sonora, Mexico by a mere line on a map, as it were, Arizona presented a blatant invitation to anyone riding on the south side of the law and willing to make a fast profit. Mexicans, Apaches, and a number of white renegades living in Mexico crossed the border frequently. They came to steal horses and cattle, ore shipments, army and mine payrolls, to ravage wagon trains, murder men and carry their women away captive. What was left, they destroyed for the simple joy of destruction, Burning, raping, murder-ing, and plundering, they loaded their booty and fled back into the rugged desert mountains of Mexico, protected there by a government embittered against the United States and caring little for its welfare or that of its citizens.
To worsen matters, Arizona itself harbored scores of bandits in its rugged badlands. Numerous mountain ranges spanned the southern Arizona Territory, concealing canyons and caverns that in some cases seldom, if ever, felt the impact of human presence. Those bands of outlaws who did find sanctuary there, in the form of such hidden abodes, had found themselves a mighty stronghold where in most cases only an army could flush them out, and then only if that army could find them.
Thus, in that year, 1876, the people of southern Arizona at last grew weary of the uselessness of the law, where outlaw outnum-bered lawman by scores, and Arizona seemed certainly to be falling into the grasp of the former. The citizens rose up and banded together, adopting the vigilante name and oath. They began their work early in the year, the bloody cleansing process that accompanies any unauthorized army of outraged citizens. They came to be known as the Castor Vigilantes, named for the little town that spawned them and became their "centre d'affaires," and for nearly a year they wreaked havoc with the criminal element of southern Arizona and laid many in the grave.
Unfortunately, they also put their share of innocents under the sod. It was that one uncertain aspect of the vigilante organization that destined the fall of the Castor Vigilantes as surely as they had arisen. They could not always know of a certainty if those they put to death were indeed guilty, as accused, of any crime. And the law, even if they could not always find outlaws, could easily discover the vigilantes, most of them being citizens and personal acquaintances who resided nearby. Once discovered, steps were taken to bring all unauthorized military activity to a halt. In the end the Castor Vigilantes stood no chance.
But when the vigilante movement had come to an end, and the law fell once more into the hands of a bumbling government, not yet proven in law, perhaps never to he proven, and the smoke of battle cleared away, one vigilante remained, one who would not give in. This man alone continued to follow his quest and the vigilante ways, sworn to fill a promise.
The man was Captain Tappan Kittery. He rode alone...
Foreword In 1876, lawlessness gripped the town of Castor, in the Arizona Territory, and viglante rule became the only effective law. Into that land rode the bounty hunter, Captain Tappan Kittery.
At first, Kittery made a stand against vigilante justice. Then his life was forever changed by the Desperadoes Eight, an outlaw band led by the ruthless "Savage Diablo" Baraga. When the call came, Kittery took it upon himself to stop the bloodshed. With grim determination, he embarked on the most bitter death trail of his life, swearing to bring about the killers' demise...or suffer his own.
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