Isidro Jackson

From The Great Outdoor Fight

Isidro Jackson began life as the only son of a moderately wealthy banker. Upon his father's retirement he inherited the bank, and under his shrewd guidance it quickly rose to prominence, naming as clients many of the leading factory tycoons of the day. However, a series of bad investments, a suspicious fire in the main office and a freakish influx of Peruvian rice in 1847 conspired to ruin both him and his bank. Jackson was forced to sell the bank in order to pay off personal debts and dropped out of respectable society after leaving a note to his wife telling her he was "... going on a little trip." Until his entry into the first Fight no one who knew him from his former life had heard from him for some time.

In the storm of publicity following his victory Jackson proved reluctant to divulge many details about his missing four years. He would only say that "I been some places, an' done some things. It ain't no 'portance." From a series of interviews that Jack Frest, an investigative reporter, did with hobos and migrant workers, the following story has been pieced together. Isidro Jackson left New York in 1847, shortly after selling the bank. Crushed by his failure to keep the family business running, he drank himself into a gutter and started riding the rails with other winos and the perpetually destitute. For most of 1849 he worked on a farm alongside other immigrants and wanderers in what would eventually become New Mexico. On this farm, whose name or location were never recorded by Frest, Jackson both gained the body mass which would later serve him well in the Fight, and made the acquaintance of Jorge Gonzalez, a wiry Mexican ranchero who would end up becoming Isidro's only friend after he left the farm at the end of the harvest season.

For the next two years Jackson and Gonzalez traveled all over the southwestern territories, with Isidro growing more and more despondent over his continuing poverty and sinking deeper and deeper into more and more bottles of whiskey. Gonzalez would frequently have to drag Jackson from alley to alley until they found one which was unoccupied by another, more territorially minded, homeless crowd. One morning, according to Frest's interview with him, Gonzalez awoke to find Jackson reading a flyer he had torn off a wall nearby. Despite Jorge's best attempts to dissuade him, Isidro insisted on entering the first Great Outdoor Fight, possibly as the culmination of a long-simmering death wish.

The first day of the fight found Jackson and Gonzalez well off. In those early years, many of the entrants were gentleman boxers who were unprepared for the chaos and ferocity of the Fight. Jackson, on the other hand, threw himself into the brawl with a zeal unlike anything he had done in the last four years. By the first evening, most estimates say, Jackson had single-handedly eliminated over eighty men with his trademark left hook to the jaw, followed by a swift kick to the back of the head. In his steel-toed boots this was especially devastating.

On the second day Jackson appeared to be resting. He engaged in relatively few fights, only taking on those challengers foolhardy enough to venture over to the tent he and Gonzalez had made from the clothes of the men Jackson had beaten. One of those who came after Jackson was Monterey Fitzgerald, the nephew of one of Jackson's former clients. Neither man knew this, of course, and Jackson promptly broke Monterey's right leg in three places, then knocked out eight teeth in one punch. That night, as revenge for what Monterey's relatives in the fight saw as a needlessly brutal treatment of a blood relative by a hobo, an unknown assassin snuck into the tent stabbed Gonzalez with a smuggled in pair of nail clippers.

Isidro did not leave his tent until two in the afternoon the third day, leading some romantics to attempt branding him with the moniker "Achilles of the Apple Orchard." Fortunately, this did not stick. When he did emerge, however, Jackson tore into the remaining contestants with all the fury that a man who has just spent ten hours treating his best friends wounds with old shirts and a fifth of bourbon can posses. Within fifteen minutes the only men left alive were the ones who had outrun the Fitzgerald clan. In a terrifying display of brutality Isidro Jackson hunted each of these men across the farm and strangled each one with their own shoelaces. Gonzalez, who had by now slipped into unconsciousness from blood loss, was removed and Isidro Jackson was declared the first winner of the Great Outdoor Fight.

After the Fight Isidro was heavily courted to appear on magazine covers, but refused all money and publicity. For unknown reasons his wife never contacted him. By the time of the 1852 Fight Jackson and Gonzalez had slipped once again into obscurity. Rumor has it that they would later found the Mexican wresting circuit, with Gonzalez as manager and Jackson in the ring as El Gringo, but these claims have never been substantiated.