John D. Nesbitt

DARK SPARROW WINTER

Oh a cold wind blows tonight in wide Wyoming
And a wet late winter snow lies on the ground.
I build up the fading fire at my hearthstone
And imagine what the spring will bring around.

It’s been six long months since yellow leaves were falling
And I chose to make my camp on higher ground
Here upon the southern slope of Sparrow Mountain
To forget about the girl who turned me down.

But the wind and snow of winter quite outmatched me,
And my horses disappeared one moonlit night,
Leaving tracks in crusted snow through crooked canyons
My two horses and a leader traveling light.

Through the maze of horse-thief trails on foot I tracked them
Till I came upon a camp at close of day.
In a shadowed rope corral among the cedars
Stood a dark horse with my sorrel and my bay.

At the fire sat a man, his pistol gleaming,
With his long hair like a horse-thief or a tramp,
And he challenged me with words obscene and vulgar,
And demanded that I not approach his camp.

In a minute it was over, and the stranger
Was a lifeless form beside the flickering flame,
And the horses had stampeded, leaving nothing
But a killer and a victim with no name.

For a week I tracked those horses through the canyons
Till their trail led out upon the eastern plain
Where the snow from sun on rock and sage had melted,
And a dark cloud from the north brought snow again.

Back at home I tend the fire in my shanty
As I look upon the moonlight on the snow,
And I wonder if I’ll ever find my horses
Or if the final truth I’ll ever know.


John's YouTube video reading of "Dark Sparrow Winter":



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John confesses: "People who take the law into their own hands are sometimes justified, sometimes dead wrong, and sometimes somewhere in between. Their deeper motives are not always clear to them, and their knowledge is not always reliable. Some of them remain in a spiritual dark winter."

JOHN D. NESBITT is the author of many works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He writes mostly on subjects of the American West, present and past. His contemporary poem "Prairie Center" won the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Poem in 2019. He has won many awards for his short fiction and novels. He lives in Wyoming and has a good horse named Pearl. See his website at www.johndnesbitt.com.

John D. Nesbitt

ELLA WATSON

My name is Ella Watson; I was hanged
By a group of men who thought they had the right
To take the law into their grasping hands.
They said I rustled cattle but I bought them
In October from a man named Engerman.
I paid good money and I had my brand.
I also bought my moccasins, which fell
When Bothwell, Sun, and others put the rope
Around my neck and left me there to choke.
I was twenty-eight years old the day I died.

They put the story out in all the papers,
They called me rustler, strumpet, virago,
And said I traded favors for slick calves.
To justify the hanging of a woman
They called me Cattle Kate and made me cheap.

My name’s Frank Jameson; my wife and I
Picked up the moccasins that lay two days
Upon the ground beneath the strangled corpse.
We heard the stories of the witnesses,
How Bothwell, Conner, Durbin, Sun, McLean,
And Galbraith took the pair down to the river
And hanged them from a pine tree side by side.
We knew that Bothwell wanted both their homesteads
And filed false claims on other land nearby.
We heard how all four witnesses had vanished,
How all six men walked free without a trial,
And Bothwell ended up with both their claims.

My name is Owen Wister; I have friends,
Wyoming cattlemen, the very best.
I met a man, a friend of theirs, who helped
To lynch the man and woman in July.
I hope they let him off, he seemed a good
And solid citizen; the sheriff said
It’s only the wayward classes that complain.

My name is Ella Watson; I was hanged
By men who said my cattle were not mine.
They wanted all the Sweetwater to themselves,
So they rubbed us out and called me Cattle Kate.


Carmen and Steve Mendelson and John's YouTube video reading of "Emma Watson":



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John confesses: "The hanging of Ella Watson on the Sweetwater River in 1889, like the killing of Nate Champion in 1892, was carried out by powerful cattlemen who accused the victims of rustling and then conducted a smear campaign in the newspapers. The injustice demands to be written about."

JOHN D. NESBITT is the author of many works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He writes mostly on subjects of the American West, present and past. His contemporary poem "Prairie Center" won the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Poem in 2019. He has won many awards for his short fiction and novels. He lives in Wyoming and has a good horse named Pearl. See his website at www.johndnesbitt.com.