With his handlebar mustache, bowlegs, and raisin-skinned face, Bam White was a man high-centered in the wrong century. Overnight, new towns were rising, bustling with banks, opera houses, electric streetlights, and restaurants serving seafood sent by train from Galveston. The least-populated part of Texas was open for business and riding high in the Roaring Twenties.
The great ranches had been fenced, platted, subdivided, upturned, and were going out to city builders, oil drillers, and sodbusters. Within a year, Charles Lindbergh would cross the ocean in his monoplane, and a white man in blackface would speak from the screen of a motion picture show. Bam White was a ranch hand, a lover of horses and empty skies, at a time when the cowboy was becoming a museum piece in Texas and an icon in Hollywood. They were moving from the high desert chill of Las Animas, Colorado, to Littlefield, Texas, south of Amarillo, to start anew.
It was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a flat tire, except this was the winter of 1926. They had been on the road for six days, a clan of five bouncing along in a tired wagon, when Bam White woke to some bad news.
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