Horn’s own account of this episode provides a clue to his resigned attitude in the days preceding his death. It appears that he was much closer to his mother than his father, and when she did not or could not protect him from his father, the sense of being abandoned broke his heart. In the last months of Horn’s life, when the big cattle outfits that had employed him abandoned him — with the exception of a ranch manager named John Coble — it broke his spirit. The long months in jail were depressing; Horn became fatalistic and evidently at last welcomed the end of it all.

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At the same time, Horn’s departure from home as a youth seems to have prompted him to write off all women as unreliable. It appears that he decided subconsciously to rely primarily upon himself from that point forward. By leaving home, Horn removed himself from a situation in which he could not prevail. After reaching maturity, he always placed himself in situations in which he could dominate. When he was arrested, he was in an unfamiliar position; others were in control. Still, he no doubt would have resisted had he not been suffering from the effects of a long weekend of drinking and carousing.

To Horn, his horse represented his freedom. Money and his rifle represented power. His adventurous lifestyle and many jobs reflect his restless quest. Writing of the period after he left home, Horn described his employment with the railroad in Kansas, during which time he earned $21 for 26 days’ work. He wrote of a job as a driver for the Overland Mail in Santa Fe for $50 a month and ‘use of a rifle.’ Next came a job as a wrangler in Arizona for $75 a month, by which time he said he had outfitted himself with a good horse, tack and a rifle. Next, Al Sieber, chief of scouts for the Army in the Apache struggles, hired him as an interpreter for $75 monthly wages.

Horn’s period of tutelage under Sieber resulted in admiration for the old scout. The passages of Horn’s autobiography that describe Sieber’s rages and the incident in which Sieber nearly decapitated an Indian are almost laudatory — between the lines one can almost read Horn saying, ‘What a guy!’ Sieber may have been a father-figure to Horn.

Horn had an unusual ability with foreign languages, a talent that likely stemmed from his early years in a bilingual family and community. He knew German and learned to speak fluent Spanish and Indian dialects. This ability allowed him to fit into others’ worlds, and gave him a degree of power over those for whom he was translating.

Horn had an unusual ability with foreign languages, a talent that likely stemmed from his early years in a bilingual family and community. He knew German and learned to speak fluent Spanish and Indian dialects. This ability allowed him to fit into others’ worlds, and gave him a degree of power over those for whom he was translating.

In his adventures in the Southwest and during his childhood years of hunting and tracking, he had become inured to bloodshed. At the same time, both during his youth and the period under Al Sieber’s guidance, he developed his reputation for bravery, reliability and coolheadedness. Those qualities stood Horn in good stead in the Apache war.

Horn was involved in the Pleasant Valley war of 1887, a three-sided struggle among large cattle outfits, rustlers and sheepmen in central Arizona. There, Horn first developed his alliance with big cattle interests. Interestingly, Horn recalled that he had chosen to compete in a rodeo over the tedium of acting as a translator in the murder trial of the Apache Kid, a former Apache scout under Sieber’s command who later escaped and went on a killing rampage. To Horn, rodeo action beat courtroom tedium any day.

Although Horn acquired an interest in a silver mine, he found working it was ‘too slow’-too boring. Horn accepted a job with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Colorado in 1891, and for a year he was involved in violent episodes apprehending or ‘discouraging’ horse thieves, train robbers and murderers.

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