Bearfoot Horton (v)

Once out the door, Norman ran through the dark streets near the railroad station and happened upon a freight train leaving the yard. He jumped it as far as Augusta where he bought clothes and sat in a hotel room wondering what had happened and what was he to do now. He could not go back. He would never see his mother again. He hoped he had killed Henry Pike even if that was the very reason his two worlds had come to a drastic end.

When Norman fled the Charlotte’s Men’s Club, he took with him almost eight thousand dollars. That would be enough to keep him on the run for a while. From, his hotel room he could see the train station, and he watched as passengers departed to go south and to go north. He wondered which way was best. Which way would be best in order to disappear. He made up his mind to go south after hearing two men in the lobby go on and on about St. Augustine, the vast amounts of money being poured into the small town to make it a resort, how it was a real boom town of construction laborers.

Pay day in a town of laborers is fertile ground for a card player, so Norman headed south. He stopped in Jacksonville, stayed at the St. James Hotel and discreetly tried to see if there was any news about a murder in Charlotte. Was heard to get any news at all, but one evening after dinner while strolling the south veranda of the hotel, he saw a copy of the Charleston News & Courier with a small article in the social section about Henry Pike. It said that he was recovering from a recent injury from a fall while horseback riding, was doing well, and would join in the family’s planned extended trip to Europe in the spring.

Norman held the paper for a moment, then placed it back on the table. He was not a murderer, but he was most certainly still on the run, certainly from the law and maybe even from Henry Pike himself. His stolen cash was security and St. Augustine might be as good as any place to become invisible.

Bearfoot Horton (iv)

When Norman arrived, Henry was not there, so he was forced to mingle as best he could and fudge details about his life in Huntersville. He was not comfortable talking about himself and his home was a sacred place he did not like to discuss with others. Norman was glad to see Henry arrive, not that he knew him well, but he knew him, and Norman was not comfortable mingling with Charlotte’s business elite. Of course he fell right into his stride once the card game began.

As the game progressed, Henry was interrupted by two men who would come in, wait for him in a corner, then whisper something to him and leave. It was as if he was receiving reports. Because there were so many men there, Norman was not obliged to enter into any conversation, not that he could have, and not that he would have. He did not understand the business talk and he had no reference for the upper social class talk. He just listened.

The game went well for Norman, but he was not winning every hand. Late into the evening most players were still in and most of the spectators still watching. Again the two men came in and spoke to Henry, but this time he gave each of them an envelope and shook their hands before they left. He came back to the table and before he sat down, he picked up his glass and toasted the air with the news that it appeared many of the men were waiting for. Rock Creek Church was now a pile of ashes and Reverend Horton would no longer be a problem. There would be no more pro-union sermons.

In what was later described to a newspaper as “like a panther,” Norman jumped up and in a single motion grabbed money from the center of the table with one hand a whisky bottle with the other, breaking it across the face and neck of Henry as he ran from the room. His motion was so rapid that the gush of blood from Henry never touch him. He was out the door and into the night before anyone realized what happened. Norman understood Henry’s announcement and the cheers from the room. He knew his father was dead, maybe his mother, and he was on the run.

Bearfoot Horton (iii)

There were three mills in Huntersville, the Pike Mills, Saunders Cotton Mill, and McKay Plaids. Every man and most boys, many women and too many girls worked in one of these three places. Everyone lived in a home owned by the mills, and all products from fruit to paint to coal were purchased through Catawba Valley General Mercantile also owned by the mills. Owners of the mills conspired to set prices in the town’s two general stores and its food market as well as to keep rents at a high-as-possible level.


The early part of 1886 was exceedingly harsh in the Carolinas both in temperatures and the spread of a dangerous strain of influenza. Absenteeism was high in the mills, and the owners sought to increase hours of healthy workers without additional pay. In addition, when production slacked and profits fell, the company stores prices went up to try to make up the difference. Relations were strained between owners and workers and the community was disheartened at the steady rise in deaths resulting from the influenza’s spread.

Reverend Horton found himself conducting more and more funerals and consoling more and more poverty stricken families. Even as summer came and the influenza retreated, the depressed wages and inflated prices continued and the gap between worker and owner grew. With the support of his congregation and other clergymen, the Reverend became more and more outspoken and the Rock Creek Church identified itself as pro-union.


Throughout these desperate times, Norman continued to prosper as a gambler. He remained true to his parents recognizing both that his life and theirs were separating, but that he would have had no life at all had they not saved him. He supported his father’s railing against the mills but not because he cared about the workers but he loved his father.

Occasionally Norman would be invited sit in on a game at the Anson Club, but only on a slow night, like a rainy Tuesday. It was during one such game that he met, competed hotly against, lost to, and then spent most of the evening drinking with Henry Pike, son of the Pike Mills owner. Several times in the summer the two would wind up in a games and grew familiar and fond, in a limited way, of each other. It was early September when Henry invited Norman to a game at the Charlotte Men’s Club.

Bearfoot Horton (ii)

Norman quickly lost any trace of his life with the Kiowa and grew up as a child of the Horton’s. After two years as an Army chaplain, Micah left his post and returned to the pulpit by returning to his native Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, near what is today Huntersville. The Rock Creek Methodist Church congregation was poor, mostly cotton mill workers and thus he too was paid mere subsistence. Young Norman started working in the mills when he was twelve to supplement the family’s income, although his father required him to continue his school work, hoping he would too want to be a minister.

Norman’s millworker-world overtook others in which he lived, unbeknownst to his parents. By his mid teens he was regularly traveling to nearby Charlotte to play cards in small games in the back of beer halls, but maintained a quiet, sky front at home. His gambling income became steady enough that he quit his mill job and played cards full time as well as finishing high school a year early. His parents believed he was their good boy, Norman Bearfoot, working a night shift in a Charlotte mill, a place with a future. But in the backrooms of Charlotte’s working class bars he was known as Barefoot Norman, because of his youth, the boy with a golden hand.

In the fall of 1886, Norman’s life changed in a matter of days when his separate lives merged with awful consequences.

Bearfoot Horton (i)

The 4th U.S. Cavalry’s surprise attack on Comanche, Cheyenne and Kiowa villages in Palo Duro Canyon ended the Red River War that had gripped the Texan Panhandle in the late summer and fall of 1874. When troops came roaring down the sides of the canyon, they destroyed the tribes’ ability to continue fighting. Those who were not killed and managed to escape into the plains quickly became desperate having had to abandon their belongings and supplies when they fled. As winter set in, many who faced starvation chose the alternative of giving themselves up at Ft. Sill to face forced removal to reservations.

Included in one group of these surrendering bands of warriors was a white child of about six years old. He spoke a little English, but not much more than his adopted family. This child, whom the Indians called Bearfoot, was believed to have been taken from his parents during one of the raids along the Red River Valley, perhaps as much as three or four years earlier. It was clear to the fort’s physician that the boy had lived with the Kiowa longer than with his own family.

The boy was kept behind when the Kiowa were removed to reservations farther west and was placed in the care of Reverand Micah Horton, the Methodist chaplain at Ft. Sill, and his wife, Rachel. The Reverend and his wife, had no children, so after confirming as best they could that he was an orphan, they adopted Bearfoot. Never being able to determine just who his parents were or when he was born, he was given a new name, Norman Horton, and a new birth date, the day he arrived at Ft. Sill. The Reverend insisted that Bearfoot keep his Indian name as well. “In this small way,” he wrote on a page in the front of his Bible, “we recognize the power of God to use even the savage to bring the blessings to our house.”