It’s a true, Inland Southern California-Southern Paiute/Chemehuevi story that took place in the fall 1909 in a geographic area including the San Gorgonio Pass and southern Mojave Desert, told and retold for more than 100 years, perpetually shrouded in a gray space between fiction and reality.
It’s the story of Willie Boy and his escape from a San Bernardino County Sheriff’s posse, billed for decades as our region’s last manhunt, in which Willie was killed by the posse in a gun battle at Ruby Mountain. But, as more of the story has emerged over time, an entirely different version has surfaced, particularly as told by our region’s Native people themselves: Willie Boy actually escaped.
I became interested in this epic event as a child, after my father took our family to see the movie “Tell Them Willie Boy is Here” in 1973, starring Robert Redford and Robert Blake. Years later, as a scholar of California desert literature, I began to compile everything I could find. The body of work on this event, including essays, short stories, films, plays, songs and artwork, is voluminous.
Now, prolific Indigenous scholar-author Clifford Trafzer, with oral testimony from Southern Paiute-Nuwuvi elders – some of them family members of those involved — has written an up-to-date, accurate, and critically important rendering of this long-told story in “Willie Boy & the Last Western Manhunt,” published by Coyote Hill Press.
With care and masterful storytelling, Trafzer provides a Native cultural-historic context to the story of Willie Boy, noting in his preface that “the divergence in the stories told about Willie Boy especially concerning actions following the death of William Mike, are rooted in cultural disparities. The Chemehuevi story surrounding the Willie Boy affair differs greatly from that of the posse.”
With extensive input and support from tribal elders, members of the Twentynine Palms Band of Mission Indians, Chemehuevi people living today near Havasu Landing, California, and Parker, Arizona, Trafzer details that “to fully understand what occurred … cultural issues inherent to Native culture, especially tribal marriage laws …. must be appreciated.” His book also conveys a powerfully expressed rendering of the knowledge, culture, landscape, power, song, ceremony and family inherent to the Nuwuvi people.
This story has captured the attention of people locally and afar. Details — often vastly incorrect — have been written about primarily by non-Native authors in many news outlets, including the New York Times and the old Desert Magazine, and in the 1960 novel “Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt” by UC Riverside historian Harry Lawton, to name a few.
Until now, the only literary book that included Nuwuvi testimony — which disputes the claim that Willie Boy killed himself, and establishes the truth, that he escaped capture, to live many more years in the northern Mojave – is “Willie Boy: Indian Hating and Popular Culture,” by James Sandos and Larry Burgess, published in 1994.
Trafzer’s book discusses the life of Willie Boy – a Chemehuevi Spirit Runner – as he negotiated his way between his traditional culture and the rapid encroachments of Anglo cultures into his Mojave Desert homeland, and his romantic involvement with the teenaged Carlota Mike, a cousin. Due to strict tribal laws forbidding their romance because they were too closely related, they were separated by family members, and yet continued to pursue one another. Trafzer’s telling of the Chemehuevi creation story and discussions of culturally-impactful influences upon the Chemehuevi people of the early 20th century — including the teachings of the Ghost Dance Prophet Wovoka, a Northern Paiute man, as well as rapid urbanization and presence of non-Natives — provide deep insights into the tragic events that transpired in 1909 from an Indigenous perspective. This is a perspective that has long been sidelined and has now found its rightful voice in the pages of this book.
In addition to offering the correct telling of this story — Carlota was killed accidentally by a member of the sheriff’s posse, not by Willie Boy, and, critically, Willie Boy escaped the posse following a shootout at Ruby Mountain — Trafzer goes into great detail to depict what happened to Willie Boy after he escaped. He continues the story to trace Willie Boy’s journey into the northern Mojave, where he finds a home and, critically, spiritual re-connections and healing with the Pahrump Band of the Chemehuevi.
He also discusses the little-publicized impacts — many of them difficult — of this “watershed” event on the Chemehuevi and other Indigenous people in the fallout that followed, particularly those living at the Twentynine Palms Oasis. In this book, Trafzer conveys how the behaviors and actions of Willie Boy greatly impacted, and continue to impact, the lives of Chemehuevi people then and now.
“Willie Boy & the Last Western Manhunt” also continues the story into the present day: Trafzer dedicates a good part of his book to the inception and production of a new major film, “The Last Manhunt,” dedicated to telling the story of Willie Boy from its rightful and accurate Chemehuevi perspective.
In 2019, Indigenous actor Jason Momoa and Native Hawai’an screenwriter Thomas Pa’a Sibbett reached out to Dean and Darrell Mike to ask permission to begin discussions with Trafzer as a starting base for this film. With extensive involvement and participation in the making of this film from Chemehuevi people and a primarily Native cast of actors, including members of the Mike family, the film is the next chapter of this story, set in its rightful place.
Trafzer’s book is a critical read for all who are aware of the story of Willie Boy and Carlota, and an important landmark in Native people voicing their own versions of deeply impactful events directly involving them. For in this book, colorfully written in engaging narrative prose, the story has finally come home to where it belongs: the storied Indigenous landscape of the Mojave Desert and the Nuwuvi, who have lived and loved here for so very long.
Ruth Nolan grew up in the Mojave Desert and now teaches creative writing at College of the Desert. She’s a desert conservationist and author and editor of “No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California’s Deserts.”
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August 22, 2021 at 01:00AM
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New book offers Native telling of Willie Boy’s story - Press-Enterprise
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