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The
original teller of this story, John C. Jacobs, told it in Pioneer
magazine in the teens of the last century. It was later reprinted
by J. Marvin Hunter in the original Frontier Times. Jacobs
never gave the man’s name. He called him, simply, ‘Robin Hood.’
He was a man of considerable refinement when he came to Fort
Griffin Flat in the buffalo days. Jacobs describes him as a ‘Chesterfield.’
Long before that was a brand of cigarettes, Lord Chesterfield of Britain
was considered the ultimate in personal refinement. He was a paragon
of manners and behavior, as was the man Jacobs calls ‘Robin Hood.’
Unlike many easterners who came to the
Flat, stayed a few days or weeks, then left, Robin Hood took to
frontier life as though born to it. The harder life got on the frontier,
the better he liked it. When the Comanches or Kiowas raided, he was
the first in the saddle in pursuit. Jacobs says “…he never knew when
to quit.” That’s extremely high praise from a man who grew up on the
frontier.
He was a pharmacist by profession. He opened a drug store in the
Flat. Jacobs records a barbecue held there. There were no chairs,
so the ladies were seated on boxes. ‘Robin Hood’ pulled out the boxes
and seated the ladies, much to the astonishment of both the ladies
and the hardened frontiersmen at the gathering. No one had ever done
that before.
He was fascinated by the Tonkawa camp near the
Flat. He began spending time there. He apparently fell head over
heels in love with a young Tonkawa girl whose name Jacobs gives as
‘Kitty Gray.’ His infatuation with her was so strong that he all but
abandoned his drugstore. If you needed drugs or ‘notions,’ you had
to find ‘Robin’ at the Tonkawa encampment.
Eventually he closed his drugstore completely, married the young Tonkawa
maiden in the Tonkawa fashion, and moved permanently to the Tonkawa
camp. He became a Tonkawa in all but skin color. He let his hair grow,
plucked his eyebrows in Tonkawa fashion, and wore the same clothing
as his adopted people. He even mastered their language, a dialect
of Uto-Aztecan, also spoken by Comanches, Shoshonis, Utes, and Aztecs,
though the dialects differed. The Tonkawa dialect may have been the
root language of Uto-Aztecan. Jacobs says only one other White man
managed to master the dialect, but that would have been ‘in the area.’
Many Whites spoke one or more of the Uto-Aztecan dialects.
He became one of the leaders of the tribe. He sat in the council and
advised the Tonkawa in their dealings with the Whites. He became their
interpreter and negotiator in all dealings with Whites. When the Tonkawa
tribe was removed by the government to the Sac-Fox reservation in
what was then Oklahoma Territory, ‘Robin’ went along.
‘Robin Hood’ stayed with the Tonkawa for twelve years. Then the great
love of his life, his Tonkawa wife ‘Kitty,’ died. In the meantime,
his eastern family had moved west, to Arizona. He hitched a couple
of his ponies to a wagon and followed them. He cut his hair, washed
off his paint, put on White-man clothes, and returned to the life
he’d abandoned for the love of his Tonkawa wife twelve years earlier.
What happened to him after that we don’t know.
The Tonkawa tribe is essentially extinct today. When I was stationed
at Fort Sill in the 1970s I used some of my free time to try and find
a remnant of the Tonkawa. The closest I came was a Kiowa who told
me “You know, I knew a guy whose grandmother was a Tonkawa—but he’s
been dead nearly forty years.” The tale of ‘Robin Hood of the Tonkawa’
is apparently lost save for John C. Jacobs’ recounting of it. As my
Choctaw storyteller friend Tim Tingle says when he ends a story, “Now
the story is yours.”
© C. F.
Eckhardt
"Charley Eckhardt's Texas"
January
27, 2012 column |
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