Charley Nebo had a knack for showing up where the action was—driving Longhorns for Charles Goodnight, tending cattle for John Chisum, hobnobbing with Billy the Kid and riding amid the Sioux at the time of Wounded Knee.
In the Academy Award–winning 1994 comedy the title character (played by Tom Hanks) describes what he did in Vietnam: “We was always taking long walks, and Forrest Gump, we was always looking for a guy named ‘Charlie.’” Gump wasn’t too bright, but he somehow managed to stumble into many watershed 20th-century events.
In the 19th century, a real fellow named Charley (or Charlie) Nebo took long rides out West and was always looking for adventure. By all accounts, he was a tobacco-chewing, epithet-spewing version of Forrest Gump, never mistaken for an intellectual yet present and active at many historic events. People who knew Nebo had a lot to say about him. His name often surfaces in personal letters and articles buried in obscure archives, and he makes cameo appearances in a number of books and memoirs. Sometimes his last name is misspelled as “Neebow” or “Niebold.” But Charley’s story hasn’t been told until now.
Nebo (1842–1926) almost always referred to himself as a cow- puncher, and indeed he spent the better part of his adult life herding cattle. No one ever accused him of modesty, but in a letter he wrote to Western pioneer Edmund Seymour on February 17, 1917, Nebo left out plenty in a summary of his career: “I have been a cowboy for over 40 years. Have driven herds of cattle from the Gulf of Mexico to Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota. In one bunch we had over 7,000 setters. I have driven ‘The Staked Plain’ three or four times with big herds of cattle—96 miles without any water in some parts of the journey. Am a veteran of the Civil War and an ex–Texas Ranger. Have had some exciting times in my career.”
Like Forrest Gump, Charley Nebo had understated his accomplishments. Along with his Civil War participation and service in the Texas Rangers, Nebo had befriended young William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, who seemed to regard him as a father figure; lived many years among the Plains Indians; was injured at Pine Ridge, S.D., while serving with the Army during the Sioux outbreak that resulted in the bloody December 1890 tragedy at Wounded Knee; and associated with the likes of pioneer cattlemen John Chisum and Charles Goodnight. Despite all this and more, Nebo has largely fallen through the cracks of popular Western history, though he seemingly fit as naturally in the Wild West as Forrest Gump fit in the U.S. Army.
Billy the Kid became a legend, far out of proportion to his actual contributions to the settlement of the West. Nebo, on the other hand, has remained as nebulous as Western clouds. It’s not hard to explain; there are plenty of other Nebo-like characters who ranged the Wild West. In 1978 Billy the Kid expert Philip J. Rash wrote, “In going over the old records, one occasionally runs across obscure eyewitness recollections which have a certain aura of possible authenticity about them, but which somehow have never found their way into popular accounts.” The roster of Westerners recognizable to the general public is short. As award-winning author Larry McMurtry puts it, “Of the thousands of interesting characters who played a part in winning the West, only a bare handful have any real currency with the American public now.”
Charley Nebo was born in March 1842 to an English father and Canadian mother in small-town Belle River on the south shore of Lake St. Clair (in what is now Ontario, Canada). Little is known about his early years, but he came to the United States in 1861 at age 18 and worked as a freight handler on a steamboat out of East Saginaw, Mich. On November 10, 1863, Nebo enlisted in Company M, 1st Regiment Michigan Volunteer Engineers and Mechanics. By the following spring, the young soldier was serving with Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops. Nebo’s outfit was trying to disrupt Confederate supply lines on Lookout Mountain, overlooking Chattanooga, Tenn., when a bushwhacker shot Charley in the elbow. The wound wasn’t properly treated until a month later, and his elbow never completely healed. Nebo, later mistakenly listed as a deserter, was honorably discharged in Nashville, Tenn., on November 22, 1865.
Nebo reenlisted in the U.S. 19th Infantry in 1866, and by 1869 he was a member of the U.S. 37th Infantry at Fort Stanton, New Mexico Territory. He worked as a teamster, limited to that duty due to his war injury; a contemporary reported that Nebo “could not fetch his arm up so as to carry his rifle to a carry arms.” During a skirmish with Comanches, Nebo broke his left leg. On February 14, 1869, he was discharged as a private at Fort Bascom, New Mexico Territory.
For the next decade Nebo worked in the cattle business on the Texas Panhandle. Among his employers was the legendary Charles Goodnight (1836–1929), co-founder of the Goodnight-Loving Trail. Nebo also served as a second corporal in Company F of the Texas Ranger Frontier Battalion from June 4, 1874, to June 5, 1875. Among the men who served under him was Thalis Cook, a relative of Billy the Kid pal Tom O’Folliard and later a noted gunfighter himself.
In 1878–79 Nebo worked as a foreman and wagon boss for John Chisum, “the Cattle King of New Mexico.” Edgar Beecher Bronson, a rancher-writer, described Nebo as “one of the most desperate, relentless feud leaders” of the Chisum faction during the Lincoln County War, although no history of that New Mexico Territory conflict mentions him. In a March 12, 1917, letter to Seymour, Nebo hinted at his participation: “The Chisolm [sic] party the McSwain [sic] party—the Kinney party. Always fighting among each other. I could tell a lot more about it— than I could write.”
After the Lincoln County War, Chisum sent three herds of cattle northeast to the Texas Panhandle, and Nebo went along as wagon boss. Billy the Kid went along, too, as a gunman instead of a cowboy; he spent the winter forming an outlaw band comprised of other “Regulators.” At one point, the Kid got angry with Chisum for not paying him for his “services” back in New Mexico Territory—at least what Billy thought he had earned. Nebo claimed Chisum offered the Kid $5 a day for his work as a hired gun, although it seems that if the cattleman did offer that amount, he never paid up.
Nebo wrote of his relationship with the Kid in several letters. There was a passage in his March 12, 1917, letter to Seymour: “As to ‘Billie the Kid’ I knew him well.…He was a good friend of mine. I advised him not to go back into New Mexico.…He stayed with me all the winter of ’78–’79 on the Panhandle of Texas. I was foreman of the Chisolm [sic] outfit.” One month earlier he had written to Seymour: “I knew Billie the Kid, well. Worked in the same outfit with him. He wasn’t the ruthless bad fellow that Western history has made him out to be. A good friend if he was a friend.”
On July 20, 1918, Nebo wrote another letter to Seymour: “I never had any trouble with the Kid. He always treated me on the level. Before he left Texas to go to New Mexico, he came to me and told me of his intentions. Said that he would trade me a bunch of horses for a sorrel horse that I had. I didn’t want to trade because I liked this fast horse of mine— but I said, ‘Well, Billie, I guess you will take him if you want him anyway’—He said, ‘No, Charley, I wouldn’t take anything from you that you don’t want me to take, but I’ll give you 10 heads of horses for this one.’ So I traded. He gave me a fancy saddle blanket before he left. He had a Mexican girl that he wanted to see down in the country where he met up with Pat Garrett.” Nebo recorded his impressions, and mentioned them in passing in much longer letters, before the Kid became a household name.
One person who observed Nebo firsthand was Margaret Lothian Hunter, who with husband David Hunter co-owned a Nebraska ranch on which Charley worked and lived. Charley had known David from the Texas Panhandle days when the Hunter brothers used to deliver cattle to the Chisum spread. Margaret Hunter wrote about Nebo in her unpublished 1938 manuscript Conquering the West: “Charley Nebo came in from riding the range, all riled up and in a fighting mood, jumped off his horse and ran to Mr. Hunter. In angry tone he said: ‘A goldarned son-of-a-gun ferner [foreigner] was riding up on the flats digging a little here and there. I rode up and asked him if he was prospecting for gold. I thought he was locoed [crazy] till he said he expected to stake out a claim and to bring in more folks to take up claims and settle up land that is good for farming. Well, I just cussed him and told him to leave. He cussed a blue streak but said, “I’ll show you who has a legal right to this land.”’ This was the beginning of the cattleman’s troubles—homesteaders.”
Nebo loved the horses and gambling as much as he disliked homesteaders (see sidebar). In her 1958 book The Cattlemen: From the Rio Grande Across the Far Marias, Mari Sandoz—whose father, Jules, lived near Nebo in Nebraska —mentioned Charley in a passage about horse racing in South Dakota: “Cowboys from far beyond the region began to place bets, hoping to see a big run, particularly those from the Dakota ends of the Texas outfits like the Driskills, the Hashknife, Turkey Track, Flying V and the old Chisum ranch hands who had followed the Jinglebob herd when it was sold north to Hunter and Evans—men like Johnny Riggs, sheriff of Sheridan County, which butted up against the Pine Ridge Reservation, and Charley Nebo and others who had their natural bent indulged by the gay and wagering ways around the old French trader families and their Indian relatives.”
In the second decade of the 20th century, Nebo engaged in round-robin correspondence with surviving old-timers Goodnight, Seymour, Bronson and William E. Hawks—despite never having learned to read or write. He dictated the letters to his daughter, Maude Nebo Spencer. To smooth her father’s rough edges, Maude put his words into what she considered proper English, in the process losing some of the colorful cadences of his speech. But Bronson, in his 1910 book Reminiscences of a Ranchman: Cowboy Life on the Western Plains, captured Nebo’s speech and its inflections, describing him as “a man as ready to take a life as take a drink, a staunch friend to the few he cared for, but a most dangerous enemy—a man who, oddly, in his passions or his cups, would heed no man’s restraining voice but mine.”
In an August 29, 1914, letter to Bronson, Nebo mentions having lived among the Sioux and Cheyennes for almost 30 years, trading Indian horses on their reservations. Although he didn’t witness the so-called Wounded Knee Massacre on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation on December 29, 1890, he was injured in a related skirmish. In his pension application of 1899, Nebo stated: “I was acting as scout for the troops under Captain Wells, 8th U.S. Cavalry, and was asked by Lieutenant Andrus of the 5th U.S. Cavalry, who was quartermaster for the Leavenworth Battalion under Lt. Col. Sanford of the 9th Cavalry, if I would take charge of the mule pack team belonging to the troops who were to advance to the Badlands and learn [sic] the drivers how to pack, and he told me to report the next morning for entry on the payroll, which I accepted and turned over the scouting to Robert Teago. I proceeded to the mule pack train and showed them the principal movement in making the pack knot. The next morning in making back to the camp, my horse stumbled and fell, fracturing my left shoulder. My only companion present during the accident was Jake Leonard, who has since died through accident on the Cheyenne River, S.D.”
The fractured clavicle, combined with his wartime elbow wound, left Nebo with a disabled left arm. The 1890 census shows Nebo living in Fall River County, S.D., with wife Anna Sorenson, whom he had married on October 8, 1885. The union produced three children. Around 1908 Nebo moved his family to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, near Canby, about 20 miles south of Portland.
On March 26, 1917, Goodnight wrote to Seymour, mentioning a letter penned by Nebo: “It may be the Charley Nebo I knew in ’67–’68 and up to the ’70s. However, the hardships he was going through and the quantity of bad whiskey he was then drinking …I should have thought him dead long ago.…He is a cowboy of the old stamp, and a jolly good fellow as I remember him.” Nebo died on April 28, 1926, at age 84 and is buried in Portland.
If Forrest Gump’s fictional life was “like a box of chocolates,” then Charley Nebo’s real life was like a bottle of redeye. In either case, “You never know what you’re gonna get.”
Jane Matson Lee is a researcher based in Mason City, Iowa, whose family has assisted with preservation of the Wyatt Earp Birthplace in Monmouth, Ill. Mark Dworkin has published numerous articles in Western history journals. His “Henry Jaffa and Wyatt Earp” was named 2005 outstanding article in the WOLA Journal. A resident of Ontario, Canada, Dworkin is author of the prize-winning 1990 book Mayas, Aztecs and Incas.
Originally published in the February 2009 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
