Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen by Matthew P. Mayo

Author:Matthew P. Mayo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493018048
Publisher: TwoDot

In the gold rush days of the Old West, venues of accommodation were often rather funky affairs, more suitable digs for the high numbers of rats that lived in them than the miners themselves. They could be built of brick, timber, or stone, but more often than not they were hastily erected affairs of canvas, sometimes with dirt floors, and occasionally they were caves dug out of crumbling hillsides.

Such temporary abodes also became home to spiders, scorpions, lizards, and snakes, and these uninvited interlopers could be surly at times about who they shared their newfound spot with. Stories abound of miners being bitten by such critters, though there were far more reports of hardworking rock hounds becoming infested with lice, chiggers, and fleas when they bedded down in frontier hotels.

But such critters were hardly the sort to operate out of any malicious intent. Not so with the numerous nefarious hoteliers who set up shop either with the intent to roll their boozy guests or who developed a taste for such lowdown thievery as opportunities presented themselves.

There were numerous ways conniving innkeepers hustled their customers: cramming them into large rooms with nothing but chalk outlines on the floor delineating one’s rented sleeping space, and bunk beds many layers tall that allowed for little room between berths. Those men lucky enough to garner the top spot in such flimsily constructed affairs were able to avoid the showers of chaw spittle that rained down on their lower-level fellows. The floors of such places ran thick with brown drool from the tobacco habits of scores of rough, unwashed, drunken men crowded, spitting, and getting little sleep in such tight quarters.

Consider the person of one Clifton Hotchkiss, a man who took to the hotel trade late in life. He’d spent a good deal of his gravy years as a magician’s assistant and had little luck as a prospector himself. As proprietor of a boarding house located near Sonora, New Mexico, he was finding that inn-keeping was not much more lucrative than grubbing in the desert for sign of gold. But he did have a cat for company. And rumor has it that during his days as a lackey for the circus magician, Hotchkiss learned a thing or two about hypnotic suggestion.

One day while looking into his cat’s eyes and relating his various miseries to the only creature in the world who seemed willing to listen, Hotchkiss allegedly became mesmerized by the creature’s mysterious, trance-inducing eyes. When he snapped out of his brief reverie, the buddings of a new business came to him.

He figured he could fall back on his old circus skills and induce hypnotic trances in his guests. Only those with the fattest pokes would be the lucky recipients of the squirrelly landlord’s odd attentions. And it worked! He was able, over several years, to hypnotize a number of his lodgers and relieve them of their hard-won dust, nuggets, and various other valuables.

Eventually his beloved cat was eaten by a mountain lion, and not long after, Hotchkiss was thrown from a horse.

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