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If I were going to make a movie version of John Adair’s life, telling how he came to be a Last Chance Canyon dweller, I’d borrow a story from Lowell Greenberg, a long-time Bickel Camp dweller. His tale is about an experience he had sitting in his outhouse. Lowell’s cabin is on a hill above Bickel Camp. His outhouse faces north and doesn’t have a door.
One morning, he saw a lone mounted cowboy in the sunrise light coming down from Black Mountain. “It looked liked like a scene from an old shoot-em-up movie,” Lowell always says when he tells the story. “I kept waiting for Spaghetti Western theme music to pipe in, and for Clint Eastwood to appear.”
Now keep in mind this really happened, but I’m borrowing it for the movie version and introduction to Adair’s life in Last Chance Canyon. To go on, Lowell said he became so mesmerized by the approaching rider that he didn’t bother to finish his outhouse business, pull up his pants, and go greet the visitor.
“I just sat there and watched the movie,” he said. The rider rode right up the open privy, and started a dialogue right out of a B movie. Lowell described the man as a tall, tan Marlboro man. His saddle leather creaked and his horse stomped and snorted adding dramatic sound effects to the quiet desert morning.
“Clear morning,” said the cowboy, tipping his dusty black hat, six-shooter at his side, rope on his saddle. “Looks to be a clear day too.”
“Yes it does,” Greenberg replied, perhaps excusing himself for not standing, or wishing he had responded with “Yep.”
“I’m looking for a sheepherder,” the cowboy said like a thousand gunslingers before him who were trying to track down some sheep-loving, range spoiling jasper. “Name of Lorenzo,” said the rider of his quarry. “Seem he’s got a taste for beef.”
Lowell told the rider what he knew of sheepherders in the canyon. The cowboy tipped his hat, said, “Obliged,” and rode off to the horizon, leaving Greenberg to wonder if the event had really happened.
I suppose one could use this occurrence in the movie version story of any of the cowboys’ who came to live at Bickel Camp over the years. Otto Adams, the famous rodeo cowboy, came in an old truck to live in the canyon, and that’s the real way John Adair came too. As far as anyone knows, the sheepherder-hunting cowboy kept moving.
When Willie Nelson said in one of his songs he, ”grew up dreaming of being a cowboy,” he spoke for many 11 or 12-year-old boys who aspired to become one of those high riding heroes. John Adair is one of the rare dreamers to actually make that fantasy a reality.
Adair grew up in Texas where any boy with cowpoke dreams has a leg up on boys raised in other parts of the country. After all, boots, buckles, jeans, and ten-gallon hats are standard dress for the average Texas hairdresser.
John tells of growing up in El Paso, and of a ranching cousin coming for a visit when he was about 11. “He was a real cowboy from Southwestern New Mexico, where he and his wife lived in the true pioneering spirit,” Adair said of his visiting relatives.
It was summer and young John was invited to return to the ranch with his Aunt Lena and Uncle Al. He had his first taste of cowboy life, and liked it so much he returned every summer until he graduated from high school.
“I participated in helping break horses, brand cattle, and worked with my uncle on other ranches, doing all-around cowboy stuff. I even rode a bull in the Cliff County Fair,” Adair said, telling how Lena and Al didn’t have any children of their own so they gave particularly close attention to his proper cowboy upbringing.
Adair helped Aunt Lena can vegetables, butcher chickens, turkeys, and rabbits to sell and eat. Early exposure to ranch life would have a profound influence on how John Adair would spend the rest of his life.
Adair was born in 1943, and young men of his age were expected to join the military to become a man. He joined the Marine Corps in 1962 and was honorably discharged in 1966. He started college in 1966, got married in 1968, and graduated from the University of Houston in 1970. He had a daughter named Amy, and would have lived happily every after had his wife not run off in 1973.
John stayed around Houston for two more years working in the city until his spirit led him back to his roots. “Aunt Lena was still alive and active on her 15 acre homestead,” Adair said of his return to the country life. “Uncle Al had died while I was overseas, but returning to the country really was a breath of fresh air and I never looked back.”
John said a typical cowboy wage was $20 a day in the Seventies. For that pay, he gladly spent his time roping, branding and shipping cattle. He only stayed with Lena for a few months, and wound up renting a trailer on Lobo Creek from a local rancher.
Since he was college educated, he was asked to substitute at Cliff High School from time to time, but he was always called back to the wilds. “I trapped fur with an old timer one winter and made $800 in fur sales,” Adair said of his backcountry wanderings. “I worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a Wilderness Patrolman in the Gila Wilderness, leading a pack mule with five days’ provisions into the mountains.”
In the fall of 1979 John Adair picked up stakes and traveled west. He would become a friend of Larry O’Neil, Walt Bickel’s son in law. Larry would take him out to Bickel Camp where he would feel quite at home. After all, retired cowboys were living all around the El Paso Mountains, and then there were the occasional riders looking for rustlers.
About that same time, I was starting to have a rather cocky opinion of myself as a wilderness fellow. True, I was a city-dwelling photography teacher at a Fullerton, California junior high school, but I spent most weekends tramping the wilds with a camera. I studied wild crafting and survival extensively.
I even had a job with the Natural High Program taking gang youth into the wilds to learn wilderness skills. I could hunt, fish, make traps, gather edible weeds, and tie most any knot. Having been in the Navy, I was especially proud of my knot tying skills.
When I first met John Adair, I didn’t realize I was meeting the real deal, and foolishly bragged about my rope skills to a man who had been roping calves since he was 11. He was with Larry O’Neil who, as it turned out, was also far more skilled at knot tying than I. Larry was a tree trimmer and needed to tie special knots on a daily basis.
“I can tie any knot you can name,” I can still hear myself brag, as we stood around Bickel’s yard playing a silly game of who is more macho. John didn’t say much, but Larry challenged me to tie a running bowline. I knew how to tie a bowline but Larry had to show me how one passed the line back the loop to make it a proper running bowline. Larry explained that he used the knot daily in tree trimming because it didn’t bind even when lowering heavy tree branches.
A wise man would have shut up at that point, having just learned that I indeed might have a few things to learn. Stupidly, I sort of goaded John into naming another knot for me to tie, so he said, “All right, Tie a diamond hitch.” Now I had no idea what a diamond hitch was, but thought I could weasel my way out by saying, “I didn’t mean some fancy, decorative macramé knot, I meant a working knot.”
John explained that , while he was leading pack mules into the Gila Wilderness, the diamond hitch was how he held the gear onto the mule’s back. That, as they say, gave me pause. So it was I learned my fist lesson from a soft-spoken cowboy: Not only is it best to shut up, listen, and learn something, it’s probably not wise not to brag at all.
John was medium height, dark and handsome in those days, and had Tom Mix, good-guy looks. He had clear eyes, shiny black hair, and a high school running back build. He had that singing-song East Texas accent that sometimes can get nasal. John’s natural voice was slower and softer than what’s heard around Dallas or Houston. He had all the time in the world to tell a story, and more to listen.
Walt Bickel took an instant liking to John Adair, and invited him to stay on and learn gold mining. So Adair, a cowboy, trapper, mule packer, and wilderness guide, lived in his truck’s camper in Bickel’s yard. He began to learn yet another 19th century profession.
It became Adair’s habit to stay with Bickel for a few weeks, and then drift around a bit. He went up to Alaska to work on fishing boats for a time, and came back with great stories to share of his adventures. He went down to Mexico and worked making cobble stone streets, and told of living there as a peasant off rice, beans and tortillas.
One of my nicknames for Adair was John The Baptist. He is a religious man, but was always reasonable about it. I remember sitting around camp passing a bottle of whiskey as we exchanged tales of all that had happened between his visits.
The spirit would move John to share his love of the Lord, and more than one Bickel camper came to know Jesus from John’s preaching. It was about then I learned another lesson from John.
I had divorced my first wife, Diane, and married a girl, Linda, who had barely turned 21. She had unintentionally gotten pregnant and was already unhappy with how her life was going. When our son, Jimmy, was about six months old, we were camping at Bickel’s. Visiting Bickel’s was something she said she loved doing before we were married, but later admitted she actually hated.
Linda, John, baby Jimmy, and I were exploring lower Last Chance in my old V.W. bus when we became stuck in the sand. To Adair and I this was no big deal, as we both knew well how to get out of such a mess. To Linda, it seemed like the end of the world. She was hot, tired, had a six-month old baby to think about, and threw a fit.
All the anger she had been suppressing since she had met, gotten pregnant, and married me came exploding out. She grabbed the baby and set out on foot to roar into the hot desert summer. It took us less time and skill to get out of the sand, than it did to get her to settle down and get back in the bus.
It was silent in the bus on the way back to Bickel’s. Linda maybe even realized that her outburst had been over the top. I had been deluding myself into thinking I was starting a new life, and was wondering where things were going. John wanted to say something to help.
“Y’all have that baby to think about, and you ought to get things right with the Lord,” John said from the back of the bus, and then he addressed Linda who was still fuming. “You know Linda, the Bible says a woman can tear her own house down brick by brick.” Linda didn’t seem to hear a word he said, but I did.
Five months later Linda called me from upstate New York to let me know she was gone. As if I didn’t know my world had been torn down brick by brick. “Got no news, got the blues, I’m tired old shoes,” were the words of a sad country song I wrote and sang in sorrow. “There goes my wife, my life, my joy with my baby boy…” I would plunk my guitar and wail into an empty house.
It was only John Adair’s words about getting right with the Lord that brought a little light to that darkness, I took my first steps down a long road that eventually led me to becoming a Christian. I’ve wanted to thank John The Baptist for that.
In all, Adair wandered the west for 25 years after he and his first wife parted. Working as a cowboy, horse wrangler, or dude ranch hand, he was a restless, lonesome traveler. He did come across a job he really wanted on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation once, but the whole deal seemed to have fallen through. He took to the highway again. He set out to Bickel’s again to spend time gold mining while he sorted his life.
He was playing Yahtzee in the cabin one night when Walt’s son, Johnny Bickel, came roaring into camp wanting to know if everything was okay with his father. Walt was just fine. It seemed Johnny had gotten a strange call from someone in New Mexico trying to locate Walt.
It turned out they were actually looking for Adair about the job. The whole thing had spooked Johnny who had thought his father might be in some sort of trouble. Johnny’s hurried trip to the camp, however, allowed Adair to call Arizona, take the job, and begin his first steps to settling down.
“The good Lord has been tough on me, but also merciful and kind in amazing ways,” Adair said recently of his life. “My new bride, for instance. I always thought I would remarry and God answered my prayers abundantly.” John is now 62, plans to draw Social Security soon, is learning to fly Ultra-Lites, and lives with his wife Laura in Carson City, Nevada.
Pictured above is Lowell Greenburg. Greenburg lived six months out of the year in Last Chance Canyon in a cabin on a hill above Bickel Camp. The rest of the year, he lived in Mexico. His great cowboy story is borrowed here to introduce John Adair's story.
Above, Adair is shown at Bickel Camp.
Pictured above is Linda hiking in Last Chance Canyon.
Pictured above is Otto Adams a noted rodeo cowboy. He's shown here with a friendly bull who helped him on his way to retirement as a Last Chance Canyon goldminer. Adams lived in a camper on Bickel's claim for years and eventually established a claim in lower Last Chance Canyon.
Pictured above is John Adair and Linda sitting in John's camper in Bickel's yard.