Augustine Chacon

            Despite not riding my bike at all the previous day my hip still bothered me when I got up on Tuesday. I’ll try two more days without riding and after that if the problem doesn’t diminish I think I’ll go see my doctor about it.

            For the last five years the bookshelf to the left of my desk has been pulled away from the wall because I’d kept it that way for the exterminator to be able to spray behind it for bedbugs. For the last three and a half years that's been unnecessary but I’d avoided moving it back against the wall because I had to clean behind it first. On Tuesday I finally tackled that job. I pulled my couch out so I could get behind it and access the shelf, pulled the shelf out and vacuumed thoroughly behind both the shelf and the couch and then pushed the bookshelf against the wall. My apartment is suddenly bigger but now I have to reach further for my beer. It’s okay though because I can just move the couch further to the right. My next project will be an even bigger one because my desk has been pulled out from the wall for just as many years and there’s a lot more to clean under and behind it.

            I played three versions of “Young Women and Older Men” that I’d recorded in 2017 and decided on which one I would make into a video for uploading. Musically they were all equally okay, except that on August 2 I seem to have sung “gem" instead of "them" at one point. I settled on the one from July 27, because the light was so soft and warm that morning that it made me look much better.

            I did a French grammar exercise on futur simple and futur anterieur. I got seven out of twelve right.

            I researched my hip discomfort symptoms on various sites and I’m more and more certain that it’s wallet syndrome or more technically piriformis syndrome. I found some exercises that might help.

            I used Cloud Convert to turn the Sound Recording of my July 27, 2017 song practice into a WAV file.

            I boiled four small potatoes, steamed some broccoli, heated two drumsticks and some gravy and watched the first two episodes of Stories of the Century. This is a western series in which each story focuses on a famous or infamous historical figure from the Wild West. They keep the main events of the character’s life historically accurate but then fictionalize some of the details and add two regular characters into each story. The fictional heroes are two railroad detectives named Matt Clark and Margaret Jones. I see upon looking this series up online that the titles in the file I downloaded were not in chronological but rather alphabetical order. What I watched then were the second and fifth episodes of the second season.

The first that I saw was about The Apache Kid. The narrator actually referred to "Apache infested territory of Arizona. According to the set-up the Kid was an Apache that was taken under the wing of a man named Sieber and raised to be an army scout, finally achieving the rank of sergeant before going renegade and becoming a murderer and a rapist. At first Sieber doesn’t want to believe his boy has gone bad but once he is convinced he, Clark and Jones track the Kid to Mexico where he gets knifed in the back by a woman he’d kidnapped and then he falls from a cliff. The Apache Kid’s real death was apparently from tuberculosis in Mexico. They mention that but say that Sieber altered the paperwork.

According to Wikipedia the Apache Kid’s real name was Haskay-bay-nay-ntayl. The article makes no mention of him having died of TB but there were different accounts of a violent death in the late 19^th Century by different people in different locations. Ranchers in New Mexico claimed the Apache Kid was alive and rustling cattle up until 1930.

In the other story Clark and Jones are called in to investigate because two men were left locked in the back of a wagon on a train track and killed when the train hit. They cross into Mexico and discover that they are looking for Augustine Chacon, a charming, handsome but brutal killer. He is in the business of helping outlaws get across the border and evade the Texas Rangers, but he often kills the people he is helping and takes all of their money. Clark and Jones find him in Arizona. Chacon discovers that Jones is a detective at the same time that he meets Clark, who pretends to want to pay Chacon for passage across the border. He puts both Jones and Clark in a wagon and plans on leaving them on the tracks when they are chased by rangers. Chacon is shot, caught and in 1904 he is hanged. In this depiction he was smiling as he climbed the gallows and joking about having to wear a tight collar.

According to Wikipedia Chacon’s nickname was "El Peludo", which means "the hairy one". For a lot of settlers along the US-Mexico border, Chacon’s criminality was more like that of Robin Hood. Chacon started out as a peace officer and then had a reputation for being an excellent cowboy. He became an outlaw when Ollney, the rancher who had been employing him refused to give him his pay. Ollney drew his gun and Chacon killed him. He then killed four of Ollney’s men who tried to stop him. A posse cornered Chacon in a box canyon but Chacon charged them on horseback with both guns blazing. He killed four of them and escaped with a flesh wound on his arm. He was later captured and thrown in jail but when a lynch mob planned on hanging him, his girlfriend, Ollney's daughter brought him a hacksaw. He escaped before the lynch mob arrived. Chacon formed a gang of horse thieves and rustlers that operated on both sides of the border. In 1895, after robbing a general store the Chacon gang retreated to their cabin overlooking the town. A posse surrounded the cabin; Chacon’s men tried to get away but were killed. Chacon was paralysed temporarily by wounds to his chest and shoulder. He was sentenced to be hanged on June 18, 1897 but on June 9 he escaped by digging out of the adobe jail while his fellow inmates played guitars and sang to cover up the noise. Chacon escaped to Mexico where he joined the Rurales, which were a kind of rural assisting force for the Mexican army. But after a year and a half he became a bandit again. In 1901 the Arizona Rangers were reformed and their first captain was Burton Mossman, who went after and finally captured Chacon in Mexico, bringing him back to Arizona. When Chacon was on trial in Solomonville, several local citizens petitioned to have his death sentence reduced to life. Chacon was hung on November 21, 1902. Before the execution he asked for a cigarette and a cup of coffee and then he gave a half hour speech explaining that he was innocent of the murder that he was being hung for. He shook hands with several of his admirers and his last words were, “Adios todos amigos” which means “goodbye to all of my good friends”. He still has living descendents and his gravestone in San Jose Cemetery has the inscription, “Augustine Chacon, 1861-1902, He lived without fear, He faced death without fear, Hombre muy bravo”.