Willie Boy

<p>The Coachella Valley lays claim to an iconic Western tale, a saga so exceptional it has been called “the last great manhunt of the West.” The athletic antihero, an Indian named Willie Boy, outran a mounted posse of white men over 500 miles of boulder-strewn mountains and bajadas on the fringes of the valley in 1909.</p>

<p>Willie Boy’s story has been told in two books, countless articles, and a 1969 movie, Tell Them Willie Boy is Here, with Robert Blake starring as Willie Boy and Robert Redford as the Banning sheriff who pursued him. The hunt has seeped into our mythos. Modern geocachers and off-roaders make pilgrimages to Willie Boy’s grave. At a hipster café in Joshua Tree, you can order up Willie Boy hash. And for years, Landers celebrated an annual event called Willie Boy Days.</p>

<p>Only it appears that our best Western may be partly fiction. As the ending has been told, Willie Boy took his own life with his last bullet at a place called Ruby Mountain, about five miles west of Landers. But UC Riverside history professor Cliff Trafzer now declares Willie didn’t die at Ruby Mountain after all — an opinion supported by a modern forensic discovery.</p>

<p>Local Indians have always claimed that Willie Boy got away, but no one paid attention because it was only talk — oral tradition as opposed to the written word of white men. Trafzer’s sources are people such as Katherine Saubel, Joe Benitez, and Dean Mike: Indians who are respected by anthropologists and historians. They say the posse did not get its man.</p>

"Willie Boy was a Chemehuevi who had lived with his Southern Paiute relatives in Nevada as well as in the Chemehuevi Valley. Among his people, he was known as a special runner and athlete. His grandparents lived at the Oasis of Mara, where Willie moved to find a wife, falling in love with a distant cousin, Carlota Mike, thus precipitating cultural complications that led to deaths and removal from the oasis."

This saga of the last Western manhunt begins, not in 1909—when it happened—but in the 1950s. Harry Lawton, a newspaperman for the Riverside Press-Enterprise, delved into an old case that he’d heard about around town: the story of Willie Boy, what he later called “the last Western Manhunt.” The years of storytelling preceding him made the true story hard to locate. In a letter to a friend, he commented that the story appears to be "so legendized that the truth becomes impossible to ferret out...

Reading through the many “non-fiction” accounts of the Willie Boy story, one wonders what inspired and influenced them. Most were seeking a good yarn, a piece of Western lore. As with Westerns in the golden era of John Wayne, Willie Boy was the story of another stereotyped “bad Indian.” Talking to Native Americans, you get a different side of the story.

“The posse never got him, you know,” Chemehuevi elder Alberta Van Fleet would tell Sandos and Burgess years later. Though it sounds absurd, it’s not much of a stretch: The body they found was bloated and unidentifiable—and they didn’t get a coroner to examine it on site. The Chemehuevi/Cahuilla tracker Segundo Chino had told his relatives that Willie had gotten away but that posse members had “threatened Chino, telling him not to divulge the fact that they never found Willie’s body”...

Chemehuevi elders Mary Lou Brown and Alberta Van Fleet, Cahuilla elder Katherine Siva Saubel, Willie’s mother, Mary Snyder and many others have long maintained that Willie Boy fled on foot after the Ruby Mountain posse ambush—possibly first to Twentynine Palms and then into the open desert. These stories suggest that Willie Boy made his way across the Mojave Desert where he came to live among the Southern Paiute of Pahrump of Nevada, until tuberculosis took his life sometime between 1927 and 1935.