him how to make a living working for himself as a fur trapper,
prospector, carpenter, woodsman, horses, etc. I know how to cook and so does he, not a
professional cook just plane cooking for himself. Bake bread, etc. hunt, and fish, trap, do
most anything else. As I said before, Perry likes to be his own Boss & if he is given a
chance to work at a job he likes, tell him how you want it done, then leave him alone, he will take great pride in doing his work. If
he sees the Boss appreciates his work he will go out of his way for him. But dont get tuff
with him. Tell him in a pleasant way how you want to have it done. He is very touchy, his
feeling is very easily hurt, and so are mine. I have quit several jobs & so has Perry on
account of Bully Bosses. Perry does not have much schooling I dont either, I only had
second reader. But dont let that make you think we are not sharp. Im a self taught man &
so is Perry. A White Colar job is not for Perry or me. But outdoors jobs we can master & if
we cant, show him or me how its done & in just a couple of days we can master a job or
machine. Books are out. Actual experience we both catch on rite now, if we like to work
at it. First of all we must like the job. But now hes a cripple and almost middle-aged man.
Perry knows he is not wanted now by Contractors, cripples can’t get jobs on heavy
equiptment, unless you are well know to the Contracter. He is beginning to realize that,
he is beginning to think of a more easier way of supporting himself in line with my life. Im
sure Im correct. I also think speed is no longer his desire. I notice all that now in his
letters to me. He says «be careful Dad. Don’t drive if you feel sleepy, better stop & rest by
the road side.» These are the same words I used to tell him. Now he’s telling me. He’s
learned a lesson.
As I see it — Perry has learned a lesson he will never forget. Freedom means everything
to him you will never get him behind bars again. Im quite sure Im rite. I notice a big
change in the way he talks. He deeply regrets his mistake he told me. I also know he
feels ashamed to meet people he knows he will not tell them he was behind bars. He
asked me not to mention where he is to his friends. When he wrote & told me he was
behind bars, I told him let that be a lesson — that I was glad that it happened that way
when it could have been worse. Someone could have shot him. I also told him to take his
term behind bars with a smile U done it yourself. U know better. I didn’t raise you to steal
from others, so dont complain to me how tuff it is in prison. Be a good boy in prison. & he
promised that he would. I hope he is a good prisoner. Im sure no
one will talk him into stealing anymore. The law is boss, he knows that. He loves his
Freedom.
How well I know that Perry is good hearted if you treat him rite. Treat him mean & you got
a buzz saw to fight. You can trust him with any amount of $ if your his friend. He will do
as you say he wont steal a cent from a friend or anyone else. Before this happened. And
I sincerely hope he will live the rest of his life a honest man. He did steal something in
Company with others when he was a little kid. Just ask Perry if I was a good father to him
ask him if his mother was good to him in Frisco. Perry knows whats good for him. U got
him whipped forever. He knows when he’s beat. He’s not a dunce. He knows life is too
short to sweet to spend behind bars ever again.
relatives. One sister Bobo married, and me his father is all that is living of Perry. Bobo &
her husband are self-supporting. Own their own home & I’m able & active to take care of
myself also. I sold my lodge in Alaska two years ago. I intend to have another small place
of my own next year. I located several mineral claims & hope to get something out of
them. Besides that I have not given up prospecting. I am also asked to write a book on
artistic wood carving, and the famous Trappers Den Lodge I build in Alaska once my
homestead known by all tourists that travel by car to Anchorage and maybe I will. I’ll
share all I have with Perry. Anytime Ieat he eats. As long as Im alive & when I die Ive got
life insurance that will be paid to him so he can start life Anew when he gets free again. In
case Im not alive then.
This biography always set racing a stable of emotions — self-pity in the lead, love and hate running
evenly at first, the latter ultimately pulling ahead. And most of the memories it released were
unwanted, though not all. In fact, the first part of his life that Perry could remember was
treasurable — a fragment composed of applause, glamour. He was perhaps three, and he was
seated with his sisters and his older brother in the grandstand at an open-air rodeo; in the ring, a
lean Cherokee girl rode a wild horse, a «bucking bronc,» and her loosened hair whipped back and
forth, flew about like a flamenco dancer’s. Her name was Flo Buckskin, and she was a
professional rodeo performer, a «champion bronc-rider.» So was her husband, Tex John Smith; it
was while touring the Western rodeo circuit that the handsome Indian girl and the homely- handsome Irish cowboy had met, married, and had the four children sitting in the grandstand.
(And Perry could remember many another rodeo spectacle — see again his father skipping about
inside a circle of spinning lassos, or his mother, with silver and turquoise bangles jangling on her
wrists, trick-riding at a desperado speed that thrilled her youngest child and caused crowds in
towns from Texas to Oregon to «stand up and clap.»)
Until Perry was five, the team of «Tex & Flo» continued to work the rodeo circuit. As a way of life,
it wasn’t «any gallon of ice cream,» Perry once recalled: «Six of us riding in an old truck, sleeping
in it, too, sometimes, living off mush and Hershey kisses and condensed milk. Hawks Brand
condensed milk it was called, which is what weakened my kidneys — the sugar content — which is
why I was always wetting the bed.» Yet it was not an unhappy existence, especially for a little boy
proud of his parents, admiring of their showmanship and courage — a happier life, certainly, than
what replaced it. For Tex and Flo, both forced by ailments to retire from their occupation, settled
near Reno, Nevada. They fought, and Flo «took to whiskey,» and then, when Perry was six, she
departed for San Francisco, taking the children with her. It was exactly as the old man had
written: «I let her go and said goodby as she took the car and left me behind (this was during
depression). My children all cryed at the top of their voices. She only cursed them saying they
would run away to come to me later.» And, indeed, over the course of the next three years Perry
had on several occasions run off, set out to find his lost father, for he had lost his mother as well,
learned to «despise» her; liquor had blurred the face, swollen the figure of the once sinewy, limber
Cherokee girl, had «soured her soul,» honed her tongue to the wickedest point, so dissolved her
self-respect that generally she did not bother to ask the names of the stevedores and trolley-car
conductors and such persons who accepted what she offered without charge (except that she
insisted they drink with her first, and dance to the tunes of a wind-up Victrola).
Consequently, as Perry recalled, «I was always thinking about Dad, hoping he could come take
me away, and I remember, like as second ago, the time I saw him again. Standing in the
schoolyard. It was like when the ball hits the bat really solid. Di Maggio. Only Dad wouldn’t help
me. Told me to be good and hugged me and went away. It was not long afterward my mother put
me to stay in a Catholic orphanage. The one where the Black Widows were always at me. Hitting
me. Because of wetting the bed. Which is one reason I have an aversion to nuns. And God. And
religion. But later on I found there are people even more evil. Because, after a couple of months,
they tossed me out of the orphanage, and she [his mother] put me some place worse. A
children’s shelter operated by the Salvation Army. They hated me, too. For wetting the bed. And
being half-Indian. There was this one nurse, she used to call me ‘nigger’ and say there wasn’t any
difference between niggers and Indians. Oh, Jesus, was she an Evil Bastard! Incarnate. What
she used to do, she’d fill a tub with ice-cold water, put me in it, and hold me under till I was blue.
Nearly drowned. But she got found out, the bitch. Because I caught pneumonia. I almost conked.
I was in the hospital two months. It was while I was so sick that Dad came back. When I got well,
he took me away.»
For almost a year father and son lived together in the house near Reno, and Perry went to
school. «I finished the third grade,» Perry recalled. «Which