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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 January
27, 2012 column
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