The Last Ride of Long George Francis

There are precious few who are privileged, or brave, or foolhardy enough to live like the Hi-Line's Long George Francis, one of Montana's last outlaws, rodeo champion, cowboy, and onetime lawman.

But nobody dies like him.

For it was no illness that laid him low, no prolonged battle with time that left him aged and sapped. He died in such a bizarre, gruesome, and ultimately heartbreaking fashion that there are those even today who say it isn't possible. He had to have been murdered.

Francis's proponents, who outnumbered his enemies, might think he ascended to heaven, there to receive his reward for a life well-spent, or at least not too misspent. He never killed anyone, after all. And what was a little armed robbery, a little livestock rustling against a lifetime of friendship, service, and damn fine roping?

Hell, lots of folks called him, with obvious admiration, the "Robin Hood of the Hi-Line."

But if Long George Francis could speak to us today from wherever souls as outsized as his go, what would he tell us?

He'd probably say, "I never should've tried to make that damn car ride."

***

Long George Francis was many things: a prodigiously talented roper and rider, a man who loved books, a poet, a lover with a broken heart, a quiet and mysterious man, and, most probably, a thief. But he was a thief of the old school—not a burglar, perhaps a stick-up man, but mostly someone who strongly felt that, as long as you hadn't branded your animal, he had as good a claim to it as you did.

He was also lucky, having successfully avoided death all his life.

Among innumerable scrapes, misadventures and near-scrapes, he had managed not to die in the Windsor Hotel fire in Havre, although he did have to be rescued from the top floor. And he had ridden hundreds if not thousands of times in the rodeo (winning many championships, even competing while injured) without being tossed off and breaking his neck. In short, he might have felt that he was more or less immortal.

As concerns the law, however, he had recently been less lucky. The manner in which he had gotten caught shows how reckless he could be.

Francis stole a few horses, yes. He'd been arrested for it once in 1904 but the charges didn't take. Recently, he'd sold a stolen horse to another rancher in exchange for a handsome beaver-skin coat—Long George was a clotheshorse, and a spendthrift when it came to fashion. Someone saw their horse in another man's stable, and then someone saw Long George in his unmistakable coat. Francis thought he had enough friends that he'd shed the charges like a duck sheds water. He was mistaken. Francis had spent the last 16 months in hiding, and now, after his conviction, he was looking at 6 to 12 years behind bars.

On Christmas Eve, 1920, Francis was 48 years old, and in love. His heart had been broken, long ago, when he was a young man, by a girl named Beth. Amanda Spears, a schoolmarm who taught at the Spring Coulee school house, had helped to mend it. She loved him too, and stayed with him despite the rumors of his criminal hobbies. She knew what kind of man he was, underneath it all.

He was the kind of man who would load his 1914 Hupmobile up with candy, toys and apples for Spears and her students.

Francis, recently convicted for horse thievery, had asked the judge, please, to grant him a few days to see his lady friend. After that, he assured the judge, he'd turn himself in. In those simpler times, in which even an outlaw's word might be worth something, the judge agreed.

As he set off that Friday afternoon, following the road—snow beginning to cover rutted dirt tracks—and trying not to pay attention to the darkening clouds in the distance, he must have reflected that these would be his last days of freedom for a long time. Prison wouldn't be so bad, maybe, probably not much worse than the purgatorial stretch he'd just spent hiding in a dugout in the woods.

But, for the next few days he would enjoy this brief period of freedom granted him by the law; at the moment, there were no demands on him, and he had nowhere to be but warm in bed with Amanda. He told those he met shopping that he was going up to her place, and he'd be back on Sunday night or Monday morning, ready to pay the piper. So, feeling as merry as he could, he set off in his borrowed jalopy.

The modern driver should remember that Francis operated a vehicle with no seatbelts, a rudimentary heating system that labored to warm a poorly insulated cab, a hand-operated windshield wiper, and a flimsy cloth top. For a while the driving was bad, but nothing Francis couldn't handle. But then, ever cocky, he made an ill-advised turn, thinking to use an old wagon trail as a shortcut, perhaps in an attempt to mitigate weather that was getting worse by the second.

Shortly, the snow developed into a blizzard. Before he knew it, he couldn't see the road. Let's be honest, it wasn't much of a road in the first place. Rounding a curve, he hit a snowdrift and went into reverse, thinking he'd drive around it.

What he couldn't see, in the thickening snowfall and dimming sunset, was that the car was perched on the edge of a 12-foot embankment. As he reversed, the car slipped, one of the wheels caught, and the car flipped upside down.

Francis, lying in a shattered pile of glass shards, candy and tinsel, was pinned underneath, a jagged edge of bone jutting from a badly broken leg.

In shock, very likely concussed, he managed to use the remains of a wooden crate to craft a splint for the break. He couldn't stand for long, but he could crawl, dragging the leg behind him, and so he did, setting out for the closest shelter that he thought he might have a shot at finding in the snow, an abandoned shack belonging to a man named Percy Wilson.

He set out, painfully, interminably, toward his only chance at shelter, a fire, any possibility of ever seeing Amanda again. Could he have fired his gun, and in so doing attracted the notice of would-be rescuers? Perhaps, except that in his confusion he hadn't brought it with him. It was still in the wreck. Maybe he cursed himself for that, once he remembered. He probably also knew that there was a good chance that no one would hear the shots, not out here. Everyone was at home with their family, having dinner and singing songs. But the time would probably come, sooner or later, when he wished he'd brought that pistol.

He made it halfway to the shack, and roughly halfway to Amanda, before realizing he couldn't go on.

Knowing there were a lot of ways to die out here, and no ways to survive, he must have recognized that his choices were few. That freedom he had been intent on savoring had been reduced, with every drop of blood into the snow, until all that remained was the freedom to choose how to die.

The easiest would be, simply, to wait. The cold would surely do it for him, and maybe soon. Hypothermia had almost certainly already set in. All he'd have to do is lie there. Get comfortable, to the extent it was possible. Let sense and feeling fade away. But what if an opportunistic wolf or coyote came along? A pack of them would gratefully make a Christmas dinner out of a man Long George Francis's size: all six feet and six inches of him. He didn't want to be awake for that.

That left only one option.

He thought about the spiffy nickel-plated .45 he'd left in the smashed-up roadster.

Damn that gun, he probably thought.

That left his pocket knife. Somehow, in the cold and the dark, with no Christmas lights in the distance, no sound but the howl of the wind, Long George Francis gathered up the sheer will to stick himself deep in the throat with the small blade. Then, even as blood now rushed down into his wool coat, the first warmth he'd felt since leaving the smashed car, he stuck himself again on the other side of his neck. Better not to leave anything to chance.

In his life Francis had been a poet, writing lines during occasions that moved him, helping a tough cowboy connect with his tender side. He had written a handful, for instance, when a young woman had broken his heart. On that occasion, the young Francis had brooded in verse, "Now all this world/ looks dark to me."

Perhaps, before that last darkness overtook him, he composed a poem out of the words left to him. As blood cooled in the darkening snow around him, maybe he could only make sense of what was happening to him through the lens of poetry: all poems end on a note of regret, melancholy, and, hopefully, some measure of beauty. And the best ones end with a bang.