10 Great Gunfighters

10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS FROM THE EDITORS OF

MAGAZINE

Hickok “never killed a man unless that man was tryng to kill him. That’s fair.”

—Buffalo Bill Cody

WILD BILL HICKOK BILLY THE KID JESSE JAMES DOC HOLLIDAY PAT GARRETT JOHN RINGO BAT MASTERSON BILL LONGLEY CLAY ALLISON KID CURRY HistoryNet.com

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Wild About Gunfighters THE WILD WEST—the western United States during its “lawless” Wild Gunfighters frontierAbout period—lives on in our magazine of that same evocative name. If you insist on dates, it largely covers the 100-plus years THE western United States during its “lawless” THE WILD WILD WEST—the western United of States during itsstatehood “lawless” between the WEST—the Lewis and Clark Expedition 1804-06 and frontier on in evocative frontier period—lives onArizona in our our magazine magazine of that same evocative for both period—lives New Mexico and territoriesof in that 1912.same But the prime name.

If you insist on dates, it largely covers the 100-plus years name.

If you insist on dates, it largely covers the 100-plus years years of interest for Wild West enthusiasts stretch over only three between the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06 and statehood between the 1860s, Lewis and Clark of 1804-06 and statehood decades, 1870s andExpedition 1880s. During those 30-odd (but oh for both and territories in But the forfascinating!) both New New Mexico Mexico and Arizona Arizona territories in 1912.

1912.

Butcowboying, the prime prime so years, settlers were settling, cowboys were years of interest for Wild West enthusiasts stretch over only years of interest for Wild West enthusiasts stretch over only three scouts were scouting, miners were mining, railroad builders three were decades, the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s.

During those 30-odd (but oh decades, the 1860s,were 1870sgambling, and 1880s.

During those 30-odd oh building, gamblers thieves were thieving and(but Plains so years, settlers settling, cowboys so fascinating!) fascinating!) years, settlers were were settling, cowboys were cowboying, Indians and U.S. cavalrymen were battling before were and cowboying, after treaty scouts scouting, railroad builders were scouts were were scouting, miners were mining, mining, railroad builders were making.

But what reallyminers makes were those post–Civil War years so intrigubuilding, gamblers were gambling, thieves were thieving and Plains building, gamblers were who gambling, thieves were andway Plains ing are the gunfighters were fighting withthieving guns, one or Indians cavalrymen were before treaty Indians and and U.S. cavalrymen were battling before and and after treaty another.

AndU.S. it was almost never inbattling the Hollywood way,after where one making. really makes War intrigumaking.

But what really holster makes those those post–Civil War years soStreet intrigugood guyBut in awhat low-slung waits post–Civil at high noon onyears Mainso for ing are the gunfighters who were fighting with guns, one way are the gunfighters whoanwere with guns, onefirst. way or or aing black-hatted badman with itchyfighting trigger finger to draw another.

And it was almost never in the Hollywood way, where one another.

And it was almost never in the we Hollywood one In each issue of Wild West magazine chronicleway, the where American good in low-slung holster at noon on Main Street for good guy guyand in aano low-slung holster waits at high highsay, noon onwas Main Street for frontier, matter what thewaits revisionists that often a danagerous black-hatted badman with an itchy trigger finger to draw first. a black-hatted badman with an man itchy(and trigger finger to draw place where almost every many women, too)first. owned In issue magazine we chronicle the In each each issue of of Wild Wild West magazine wethan chronicle the American American a rifle or a revolver, if forWest no other reasons for hunting or selffrontier, no matter what the revisionists that was aa danfrontier, and and no then matter what thethe revisionists say, that guns was often often danprotection.

And there were men whosay, carried to take care gerous place where almost every man (and many women, too) owned gerous place where almost every man (and many women, too) owned of business. These were the lawmen, the outlaws, the shootists, the gun asharks, aa revolver, ifif for for hunting or a rifle rifle or orthe revolver, for no no other other reasons than forcalled hunting or selfselfman-killers—who havereasons all comethan to be “gunfightprotection.

And there the who guns to care protection.

And then thengunplay there were were the men men who carried gunsdeadly to take takesericare ers.”

Their so-called (which in fact wascarried frequently of business.

These were the lawmen, the outlaws, the shootists, the gun of business.

These were the lawmen, the outlaws, the shootists, the gun ous) occurred in the frontier towns from Tombstone, Arizona sharks, the man-killers—who have all come to be called “gunfightsharks, thetoman-killers—who have all come to in beall called Territory, Deadwood, Dakota Territory, and that“gunfightlonesome ers.” so-called gunplay (which in was deadly seriers.” Their Their so-calledOutlaw gunplay (which in fact fact was frequently frequently deadly seriprairie in between. and lawmen aficionados continue to debate ous) occurred in the frontier towns from Tombstone, Arizona ous) occurred in the frontier towns from Tombstone, Arizona who were the top (fastest, most accurate, deadliest) gunfighters of Territory, to Dakota Territory, that lonesome Territory, to Deadwood, Deadwood, Dakota Territory, and inofall allour thatfeatured lonesome the Old West.

Whether the absolute No. 1 isand onein 10 prairie in between.

Outlaw and lawmen aficionados continue debate prairiegunfighters in between.here Outlaw and lawmen tocertain: debate great is debatable.

Butaficionados one thing iscontinue for deadto who were top most accurate, gunfighters of who Allison, were the theWild top (fastest, (fastest, most accurate, deadliest) gunfighters of Clay Bill Hickok, Bill Longley,deadliest) Jesse James, Pat Garrett, the Old West.

Whether the absolute No. 1 is one of our featured 10 the Masterson, Old West. Whether the Doc absolute No. 1John is oneRingo of ourand featured 10 Bat Kid Curry, Holliday, Billy the great gunfighters here greatare gunfighters here is is debatable. debatable. But But one one thing thing is is for for dead dead certain: certain: Kid all in the running.

Clay Pat Clay Allison, Allison, Wild Wild Bill Bill Hickok, Hickok, Bill Bill Longley, Longley, Jesse Jesse James, James, Pat Garrett, Garrett, Gregory Lalire Bat Masterson, Kid Curry, Doc Holliday, John Ringo and Billy the Bat Masterson, Kid Curry, Doc Holliday, John Ringo andWild BillyWest the Editor, Kid are all in the running.

Kid are all in the running.

Gregory Gregory Lalire Lalire Editor, Wild Editor, Wild West West The gold badge presented to The gold badge presented to Lincoln County, New Mexico Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, Sheriff Pat Garrett Territory, SheriffBilly Patthe Garrett for killing outlaw Kid. The gold presented for killing outlaw Billy theto The gold badge badge presented toKid. ON THE County, COVER:New A well-known Lincoln Mexico Lincoln County, New Mexico image of COVER: Bill Hickok made ON THE Folk hero of Territory, Sheriff Pat Garrett Territory, Sheriff Pat Garrett by Gurney & Son in 1873. for killing outlaw Billy the Kid. the American frontier James for killing outlaw Billy the Kid.

Butler Hickok, known COVER: COWAN’S AUCTIONS INC.,better CINCINNATI, OHIO; COLORIZED BY SLINGSHOT STUDIO ON ON THE THE COVER: COVER: A A well-known well-known as ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok. image image of of Bill Bill Hickok Hickok made made COVER: BUFFALO BILL OF WEST, by & Son in 1873.

by Gurney Gurney &CENTER Son inTHE 1873.

COLORIZATION

BY BRIAN WALKER; OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF RUIDOSO RIVER MUSEUM, N.M.

RUIDOSO MUSEUM, COURTESYRIVER OF RUIDOSO RIVERNM MUSEUM, N.M.

COURTESY OF RUIDOSO RIVER MUSEUM, N.M. COVER: COWAN’S AUCTIONS INC., CINCINNATI, OHIO; COLORIZED BY SLINGSHOT STUDIO COVER: COWAN’S AUCTIONS INC., CINCINNATI, OHIO; COLORIZED BY SLINGSHOT STUDIO

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CONTENTS

6 Wild Bill Hickock

38 Jesse James

A legend in his own time, James Butler Hickok was no average Joe when he went head-to-head with his enemies

When Bob and Charlie Ford decided to gun down Jesse James, their deed would overshadow everything they did for the rest of their lives

By Joseph G. Rosa

By Ted P. Yeatman

12 Bat Masterson

44 Pat Garrett

The legend began at a backwater hamlet in the Texas Panhandle

The lawman who shot Billy the Kid has never been half as understood or appreciated as the young outlaw with whom he is forever linked

By Gary L. Roberts

20 Billy the Kid The New Mexico badman lived up to his reputation, and two lawmen paid dearly for it

By Barbara Tucker Peterson and Louis Hart

26 John Ringo He was a gunfighter with a reputation as a dangerous man, one whom the anti-Earp Arizona Cowboys were glad to have on their side

By Casey Tefertiller

32 Bill Longley Texas-born William Preston “Bloody Bill” Longley killed more than his share of men but avoided face-to-face confrontations

By Rick Miller

By Mark Lee Gardner

50 Clay Allison The New Mexico Territory rancher with a killer instinct knew how to quickly settle all irreconcilable differences

By J.S. Peters

56 Doc Holliday A Southern boy named John Henry became a dentist, went West and was soon transformed into a legendary killer

By Ben T. Traywick

62 Kid Curry Unlike fellow gang members Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Harvey Logan, alias Kid Curry, killed with a coldblooded vengeance

By Donna B. Ernst

Billy the Kid, portrayed in the painting William the Lad, is etched into American folklore for his audacious crimes.

DAN MIEDUCH, SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA

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Wild Bill Hickok A legend in his own time, James Butler Hickok was no average Joe when he went head-to-head with his enemies—he reportedly could ‘draw and discharge his pistols with a rapidity that was truly wonderful’ By Joseph G. Rosa

J

JAMES BUTLER HICKOK’S REPUTATION as the Old West’s premier gunfighter or “man-killer” made him a legend in his own lifetime—a distinction shared by few of his gunfighting contemporaries. Thanks to an article in Harper’s New Monthly in February 1867 and other colorful accounts published in the mid-1860s, Hickok, or rather “Wild Bill,” as he was generally called, was soon elevated from regional to national status. Since his death in 1876, he has achieved worldwide fame.

But even without such publicity, Hickok would have made his mark, for he was a man whose personality, strength of character and single-mindedness set him apart. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer described him as a “strange character, just the one which a novelist might gloat over…a Plainsman in every sense of the word…whose skill in the use of the rifle and pistol was unerring.” Many others besides Custer regarded Wild Bill as the best pistol shot on the Plains— a man whose quick-witted reaction to danger enabled him, according to one account, to draw and fire his Colt Navy revolvers “before the average man had time to think about it.”

Credited with the deaths of 100 or more badmen, Hickok emerged as perhaps the most prolific man-killer of his generation. But when some of his critics branded him a “redhanded murderer,” his reaction was predictable. Hickok admitted his flaws and vices as do most people, but he reckoned that being called a red-handed murderer was going too far. In February 1873, it was widely reported that he had been shot dead by Texans at Fort Dodge in Kansas. Worse, it was suggested that, like all men of his kind, he had died with his boots on. Wild Bill broke his silence of some years and wrote angrily to several newspapers, declaring, “No Texan has, nor ever will ‘corral William.’” He also demanded to know who it was who prophesied that he and others should die with their boots on. “I have never insulted man or woman in my life, but if you knew what a wholesome regard I have for damn liars and rascals they would be liable to keep out of my way.”

Two years later, in conversaThe image of Wild Bill Hickok tion with Annie Tallant, one was etched into the minds of of the first white women to millions by this woodcut in the February 1867 Harper’s. enter the Black Hills, Hickok

again denied that he was a red-handed murderer, but admitted that he had killed men in self-defense or in the line of duty, adding, “I never allowed a man to get the drop on me.”

Sadly, it is Hickok’s pistol prowess and his image as the slayer of innumerable badmen that is best remembered today.

Indeed, many are unaware of his deserved reputation as a great Civil War scout, detective and spy; Indian scout and courier; deputy U.S. marshal; county sheriff; and town marshal. Wild Bill himself hated his desperado reputation, and he may well have regretted his famous alias, though it had been fastened upon him during the Civil War and he had no reason to feel ashamed of it. Nevertheless, he must have realized too late that once he pulled the legs of the likes of Colonel George Ward Nichols of Harper’s New Monthly and Henry M. Stanley of the St. Louis Weekly Missouri Democrat, he became a target for the press, sensationalists and reputation seekers.

The real Hickok, however, was in complete contrast to his newspaper-inspired desperado image. Rather, he was gentlemanly, courteous, soft-spoken and graceful in manner, yet left no one in any doubt that he would not “be put upon,” and if threatened would meet violence with violence. Wild Bill could be generous to a fault and, though slow to anger, would willingly defend a friend or the fearful if they were under threat. When angered, he became an implacable enemy and sought out and faced down those who insulted or challenged him. This man-to-man approach, rather than involving brothers or close friends in gunfights, feuds or disputes, earned him respect among his peers, especially when it was known that he only became “pistoliferous” as a last resort, and on occasion was known to slug it out with antagonists fist to fist and toe to toe.

It could be argued that Wild Bill Hickok’s alleged exploits as a city marshal or as acting county sheriff inspired the image of the lone man who, thanks to novels and the movies, walked tall and tamed cow towns, mining camps and indeed any other Western habitat where law and order was in short supply. This is nonsense: In reality, it took more than one man to clean up, civilize, or enforce the law, and city councils hired deputies to assist the marshal.

Custer’s statement that Hickok was both courageous and

WEIDER HISTORY GROUP ARCHIVE

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able to control others by threatening to settle disputes personally if they refused to back off reflected contemporary opinion. Old-timers in such places as Hays City and Abilene recalled that his presence did much to keep the violence down.

In the latter Kansas cow town, the cry “Wild Bill is on the street!” is said to have curtailed many a drunken brawl—or aided a harassed mother anxious to persuade an unruly child to do as he was told! An announcement that appeared in the Coolidge, Kan., Border Ruffian of July 17, 1886, is worth repeating because the character sought sums up the legendary Wild Bill’s own alleged attitude toward so-called evil-doers:

©ANDY THOMAS, MAZE CREEK STUDIO, CARTHAGE, MO.

WANTED A man for marshal, with the skin of a rhinoceros, a bullet proof head, who can see all around him, run faster than a horse, and is not afraid of anything in hades or Coolidge—a man who can shoot like [Captain Adam] Bogardus, and would rather kill four or five whisky-drinking, gambling hoodlums before breakfast than to eat without exercise. Such a man can get a job in this town at reasonable wages, and if he put off climbing the golden stair for a few years may get his name in a ten-cent novel.

Despite its humor, the foregoing opinion was shared by citizens in Kansas who were either the victims of, or feared, drunken desperadoes or the murderous Texas cowboys in their midst. For many knew that once Hickok assumed his position of authority, ordinary folk felt a sense of security. He never tried or succeeded in eradicating lawlessness, but he helped control it. Indeed, on November 25, 1871, the Topeka Daily Commonwealth, in a feature devoted to Wild Bill’s bloodless head-on clash with some roughs from a train (copied verbatim by the Abilene Chronicle), stated that the citizens of the state should thank him for “the safety of life and property at Abilene, which has been secured, more through his daring than any other agency.” A Leavenworth paper, following his death, added that his memory would be cherished by those whose peace and security he had sought to preserve.

Hickok did not wear a badge for long in Hays City (chosen Ellis County’s acting sheriff in a special August 23, 1869, election, he was defeated in the regular election that November) or in Abilene (city marshal from April 15 to December 13, 1871), but it was time enough for him to make his mark. Like most of his contemporaries, he was not a pro-

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fessional policeman but did what he was paid for. To suggest, as one writer has, that today Wild Bill would have difficulty getting a job as a dogcatcher is unfair to Hickok.

There is no comparison between a 19th-century frontier marshal and one of today’s professionally trained law enforcers.

Each must be judged by his own time. Hickok commanded respect and was vilified, based as much on hearsay as on fact.

His legendary life has long been subject to eulogizing and deflation. But what of the real man?

In appearance at least, Hickok matched his myth. He was a broad-shouldered, deep-chested, narrow-waisted fellow, over 6 feet tall, with broad features, high cheekbones and forehead, firm chin and aquiline nose. His sensuous-looking mouth was surmounted by a straw-colored moustache, and his auburn hair was worn shoulder length, Plains style.

But it was his blue-gray eyes that dominated his features.

Normally friendly and expressive, his eyes, old-timers recalled, became hypnotically cold and bored into one when he was angry. Around his waist was a belt that held two ivory-handled Colt Navy revolvers, butts forward, in open-top holsters.

When worn in this fashion, Hickok’s six-shooters could be

drawn underhand and spun forward for the Plains or reverse draw, or for a cross-body draw. Either way, the weapons were always readily and easily available.

A

n anonymous admirer in the Chicago Tribune of August 25, 1876, wrote that in his rapid and accurate use of his Navy pistols, Wild Bill had no equal. He then wrote: “The secret of Bill’s success was his ability to draw and discharge his pistols, with a rapidity that was truly wonderful, and a peculiarity of his was that the two were presented and discharged simultaneously, being ‘out and off ’ before the average man had time to think about it. He never seemed to take any aim, yet he never missed. Bill never did things by halves. When he drew his pistols it was always to shoot, and it was a theory of his that every man did the same.”

Charles Gross, who knew Wild Bill in Abilene, recalled years later that he watched Hickok shoot and was impressed both by his quickness and accuracy. He also said that Hickok told him one should aim for a man’s “guts”—it might not kill him, but it would put him out of action.

Hickok’s real and imaginary shooting skill had fascinated the public ever since Colonel Nichols in his Harper’s article described how Wild Bill pointIn an Andy Thomas painting, ed to a letter “O” on a signHickok guns down Davis Tutt in the Springfield, Mo., square board some 50 yards away that after a dispute between the was “no bigger than a man’s former friends over money. heart,” and “without sighting the pistol with his eye,” fired six times, and each ball hit the center of the “O.” Others later upped the distance to 100 yards, and soon amazing stories of Hickok’s marksmanship circulated that had him hitting dimes at 50 feet, driving corks through whiskey bottle necks 20 feet away, and other near-miraculous feats that are now legion.

Some of those alleged feats have been duplicated by modern gun experts. Although tests carried out during the 1850s had proved that Colt’s Model 1851 Navy revolver was accurate in the hands of an expert at 200 yards, Wild Bill, like most of his contemporaries, was more concerned with its accuracy and reliability at 10 or 20 feet. As the writer for the Tribune and others have pointed out, Hickok’s ability to get a pistol or pistols into action “as quick as thought” furthers the awe-inspiring image of a pistoleer who had no equal in the Wild West.

Besides Hickok’s obvious liking for Colt Navy revolvers, at various times he was armed with, or proficient in the use of, Colt’s Model 1848 Dragoon. By the early 1870s, however, the introduction of centerfire and rimfire revolvers to replace the still popular percussion, or cap-and-ball, arms was led in the United States by Smith & Wesson. That company’s No. 3 model in .44 rimfire, which broke open to load or eject 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 9

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its cartridges, was superseded by Colt’s New Model Army revolver, the “Peacemaker.” Hickok did not get his hands on the latter, but when, in March 1874, he left Buffalo Bill’s theatrical Combination, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro presented him with a pair of Smith & Wesson No. 3 “American” revolvers. Later that year it was reported from Colorado that Hickok carried them, but by the time he reached Deadwood in Dakota Territory, they had disappeared and he either had the old cap-and-ball Navy revolvers or perhaps a pair of Colt’s transitional rimfire or centerfire revolvers known as “conversions.”

Although he never met or fought them, Hickok was well aware that there were better shots, and deadlier men, on the frontier. Nonetheless, he must have realized the potential of his awesome reputation and, understandably, when it suited him, turned it to his own advantage, ever conscious that while drunken bravado rarely matched action, there was always some gunman eager to prove himself superior to Wild Bill.

But Hickok’s speedy reaction to danger was backed by the killer instinct. Without it, or the state of mind needed to react instinctively when threatened or under fire, even the best shots could hesitate and go down before a drunken desperado or someone coldbloodedly determined to kill or be killed.

Despite his awesome gunfighter reputation, Wild Bill did not draw his six-shooters in serious confrontations as often as one might think. Certainly his tally was considerably lower than the “hundreds” of badmen he tongue-in-cheek claimed to have laid away. In fact, the authenticated killings number six known victims with a possible seventh—David C. McCanles at Rock Creek in 1861. However, those six victims do serve to pinpoint the difference between a newspaper reputation and reality.

A

s we know, much of Hickok’s real and mythical reputation as a fighting man can be laid at the door of border scriveners who elevated Wild Bill into a kind of demigod. Some were genuine admirers, some tongue-incheek and others malicious, or they thought it was what the public wanted. Whatever the reason, Hickok typified the era of the man-killer or shootist, better known today as the gunfighter—a term in use as early as 1874 but not popularized until post-1900. Back in 1881, however, a Missouri editor was to write that the gentleman who had “killed his man” was quite common, and if “his homicidal talents had been employed in the enforcement of law and order, he would be ranked as a ‘great Western civilizer.’”

Predictably, some writers have eagerly seized upon the word “civilizer” to explain Hickok’s role in the control and eradication of the badmen who infested many frontier towns and habitats, ignoring the fact that when acting in an official capacity, every time he drew and fired his pistols and a man

was killed, he was answerable to the coroner and not necessarily applauded for ridding them of such characters.

We will probably never know how Wild Bill really felt about gunfighting. Old-timers recalled his bravery under fire, or deadly purpose when he drew and fired at another man who was as intent on killing him. Buffalo Bill Cody, in one of his last interviews, said that Hickok cocked his pistols as he drew— which gave him a split-second advantage—and was always “cool, kinda cheerful, almost, about it. And he never killed a man unless that man was trying to kill him. That’s fair.”

The first recorded shootout involving Hickok was the socalled McCanles Massacre at the Rock Creek, Nebraska Territory, station on July 12, 1861, when, according to Harper’s, Wild Bill killed 10 ruffians in a desperate fight that left him with shot and stab wounds. In fact, only three men died, and the fracas has been a controversial issue ever since.

The fight occurred following a row between former owner David C. McCanles and Russell, Majors & Waddell, the company that had bought the place from him for use as a Pony Express relay station. After making a down payment and promising to pay the remainder on a regular basis, Russell, Majors & Waddell went bankrupt. McCanles demanded his money or his property back or he would take it by force.

Hickok, who had turned up at the station in late April or early May 1861 and was employed as a stable hand or handyman, was not involved when the station keeper, Horace Wellman, who had failed to get money for McCanles or at least a promise to pay, returned empty-handed from the company office at Brownville, Nebraska Territory. McCanles and Wellman then had an argument, which ended with McCanles and two of his men dead and his young son William Monroe escaping to give the alarm. It has been alleged that Hickok shot McCanles, but it could well have been Wellman. However, Hickok, Wellman and one J.W. “Doc” Brink were arrested and taken before a justice of the peace, who accepted their plea of defense of company property and released them. Despite the lurid account in Harper’s and a mass of published material, no one knows for sure who killed McCanles.

If we ignore Hickok’s Civil War service, during which he is reported to have killed a number of bushwhackers and guerrillas, it was 1865 before he was again involved in a face-toface shootout. This was between himself and his friend Davis K. Tutt, an ex-Confederate turned Union man who, like Hickok, was an inveterate gambler. The pair played cards on the night of July 20 in Springfield, Mo., and Hickok lost. Tutt claimed he was owed $35, and Hickok said it was $25. Tutt took Wild Bill’s Waltham watch pending payment. The pair then spent most of the 21st arguing over the amount. Hickok stated that Tutt had loaned him money many times in the past, but he did not believe that he owed his friend $35 and

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WEIDER HISTORY GROUP ARCHIVE

Hickok the Gambler

It’s not so surprising that Wild Bill Hickok should die while playing cards, a passion of his since his youth. Old-timers in Monticello, Kansas, who knew him there in the 1850s recalled that he was an inveterate gambler, a characteristic that followed him through life. General Eugene Carr remembered that scout Hickok gambled with, and beat, many of his officers. In Hays City and later Abilene, when people wanted to see lawman Wild Bill Hickok, they were told he might be gambling but would be ever ready to act in his official capacity if called upon. By 1872, when Hickok gave up peacekeeping, gambling had become a major part of his life. He became well known in Kansas City, Cheyenne, St. Louis and, later, Deadwood, where his luck finally ran out.

J.G.R.

they should compromise. But Tutt stormed off, reappearing on the public square at 6 p.m. sporting the watch. When Hickok told him to stop, Tutt drew his pistol, and Hickok did the same. Seventy-five yards apart, both men opened fire, the shots sounding as one. Tutt had turned sideways (in dueling fashion) and missed, but Hickok’s ball entered Tutt’s right side and exited through his left, piercing his heart. Arrested and tried for manslaughter, Hickok was found not guilty by a jury influenced more by the judge’s remarks on one’s rights of self-defense than by the opinion of the prosecutors. Tragically, neither man had wanted the fight, which is a far cry from the anti-Hickok statements made in the 1920s by men who claimed to have witnessed the shootout, some of whom had not even been born when it took place.

It was to be another four years before Hickok again killed another white man (Indians did not count in those days), dur-

ing which time the press had been busy building up his repHickok’s horse Nell displays utation both as a man-killer her obedience in a fanciful and pistol dead shot. After his Harper’s illustration that boosts the Wild Bill mystique. election as acting sheriff of Ellis County in August 1869, Wild Bill shot dead Bill Mulvey, who when drunk had refused Hickok’s order to disarm and continued shooting at anyone who moved. A month later, Wild Bill was called to a saloon where Sam Strawhun and friends were raising a ruckus and threatening to shoot anyone who stopped them. Whether Strawhun threatened to shoot Hickok or thrust a broken glass into his face is hotly debated, but Sam was buried the next day, unmourned, and Hickok was congratulated for ridding Hays City of such a character. Wild Bill still lost the November election to his deputy, Peter “Rattlesnake Pete” Lanihan.

Almost a year later, in July 1870, when Hickok visited Hays City, either on personal business or in his guise as a U.S. deputy marshal, he was set upon in a saloon by two 7th Cavalry troopers, Jeremiah Lonergan and John Kile. Lonergan pinned Hickok and Kile pushed his pistol into Wild Bill’s ear, but it misfired, by which time Hickok had his hands on a six-shooter. Lonergan took a ball in the knee and Kile, who was shot twice, died the next day. Hickok, meanwhile, hid out on boot hill, determined to sell his life dearly if other troopers fancied their chances.

It was more than a year later, on the evening of October 5, 1871, when a number of Texans were roaming the streets of Abilene, carousing and drinking, that City Marshal Hickok heard a shot and found himself facing more than 50 armed and drunken Texans led by gambler Phil Coe. Coe said that he had fired at a dog, and then fired twice at Hickok, one shot hitting the floor and the other passing through the marshal’s coat.

Hickok’s first two shots thudded into Coe’s stomach, and he may have hit others in the crowd before he shot at another armed man rushing toward him out of the shadows. To his horror, Wild Bill later discovered that the man was a former jailer and now friend, Mike Williams, who, in trying to help Hickok, ran into the line of fire. Williams was the last known man to be killed by Wild Bill. Hickok paid for Mike’s funeral and later told his grief-stricken wife what had happened and why. That gunfight brought to an end Hickok’s career as a law officer. When the cattle season ended, the town officials decided to get rid of the cattle trade and had no further use for a highly paid marshal, so on December 13, Wild Bill was fired.

Wild Bill now left it to his reputation to deter most wouldbe rivals, while the legend builders eagerly spread the word.

But it is doubtful even they realized how much Hickok’s murder at the hands of the back-shooting coward Jack McCall in a Deadwood saloon in August 1876 would immortalize Wild Bill Hickok as a Western legend. ✭ 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 11

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Bat Masterson

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The legend began at a backwater hamlet in the Texas Panhandle when young Bat and a disgruntled 4th Cavalry soldier engaged in a deadly gunfight By Gary L. Roberts

LEGENDS HAVE TO BEGIN SOMEWHERE. Wyatt Earp had his O.K. Corral, Wild Bill Hickok his Rock Creek Station, Billy the Kid his Lincoln. For each it was a defining moment that established beyond doubt (for the legend at least) that the hero was brave, resourceful, skilled and in the right.

Legends require villains as well—Clantons for the Earps, the McCanles gang for Wild Bill, the Murphy-Dolan faction for the Kid. Most often, the foils of heroes are shadowy figures, remembered only for their villainy, black-hearted men whose purpose is to serve as symbols of the brutish essence of the crude and tawdry side of frontier life.

For Bat Masterson, the road to legendary status began at a backwater hamlet called Sweetwater, near Cantonment Sweetwater in the Texas Panhandle. For him, the moment of truth involved a gunfight with an obstreperous soldier of the 4th Cavalry known in the legend simply as “Sergeant King.” On the night of January 24, 1876, King and a woman named Mollie Brennan were killed, Masterson was seriously wounded and the essential componentsof the legend were in place, lacking only the embroideries of time to grow from a senseless shooting into Bat Masterson’s rite of passage to fame, replete with overtones of true love and the triumph of good over evil.

The legend would eventually insist that the Sweetwater shootout was the source of Mr. Masterson’s nickname “Bat.” Legend makers, pointing to the severity of his wound, concocted the idea that when the young Masterson pinned on a badge in Dodge City later that year, he was still relying on a cane, which he also used to “bat” lawbreakers over the head.

That he was called “Bat” before he ever met Sergeant King did not limit a fiction too good to pass up.

Bat apparently disliked the name his parents gave him, Bertholomiew, and he would eventually change it to William Barclay Masterson. The Anglicized version of his birth name, “Bartholomew,” may have been the source of his ubiquitous sobriquet, although Masterson would testify that he was not called Bat until he was a young man. Writer Alfred Henry Lewis attributed the nickname to Masterson’s compatriots on the buffalo range who compared Bat’s skills as a hunter to

those of an old-time mountain man, Baptiste “Bat” Brown.

Despite his youth, Bat Masterson was already a seasoned frontiersman by the time he killed King. He was born on November 26, 1853, in St. George Parish, Quebec, Canada.

Masterson’s parents, Tom and Catherine, shared the wanderlust of many of that era and moved from Canada to New York to Illinois before settling in Sedgwick County, Kan., near Wichita. In 1871 Bat and his older brother Ed left home for the buffalo range. The next spring they took jobs as graders on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, even then stretching west toward a little camp called Buffalo City, later named Dodge City.

Dodge, when they reached it, was the center of the buffalo trade and a genuine hellhole. The combination of a rough class of men, whiskey, whores, gambling and the absence of any real law enforcement made Dodge a particularly dangerous place in those days. More than a dozen men died violently there that first year, but the amiable Ed and the fun-loving Bat managed to stay clear of trouble. And the brothers earned a measure of respect from the hard men of Dodge when they collected at gunpoint wages owed them from a contractor who tried to cheat them.

The Masterson brothers soon returned to the buffalo grounds to be a part of the great slaughter of the American bison. It was a profitable, if dirty, enterprise, and the U.S. Army actively encouraged the hunters as a means of destroying native independence. Of course, the Plains Indians reacted violently to the destruction of the herds until, finally, the buffalo slaughter, combined with raids on the horse herds of the southern tribes by thieves like Hurricane Bill Martin, precipitated the Red River War in 1874.

That June, Bat was one of the small party of hunters who stood off 500 Comanches at the Adobe Walls fight in the Texas Panhandle. After surviving the siege, he signed on with the Army as a civilian scout Popular among the saloon and and served in some of the sporting crowds, Bat sharpest fighting of the war. Masterson lived to eschew Later he divided his time his reputation as a badman.

KANSAS STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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working as a teamster for the Army out of Camp Supply, in the northwest part of Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), and hunting buffalo in the Texas Panhandle. It was there, in Texas, that he had his fateful encounter with the 4th Cavalry soldier King.

Sweetwater began as a buffalo hunter’s camp called Hidetown on Sweetwater Creek deep in the Texas Panhandle. In 1874, Charles Rath, a Dodge City merchant, established a supply store there in partnership with Albert Reynolds, of the firm of Lee and Reynolds at Camp Supply. At first, Hidetown was little more than a rendezvous for hide hunters. Rath, Reynolds & Co. dominated the buffalo hide trade from the little hamlet.

In 1875 the Army established a camp nearby known as Cantonment Sweetwater (designated Fort Elliott the following year). The Dodge City–Camp Supply trail was extended to the cantonment, and when the military began to construct a permanent post there, Hidetown was found to be on the military reserve. As a result, the settlement was moved two miles closer to the cantonment, and its name was changed to Sweetwater.

Local tradition says that Bat Masterson surveyed the new town site of 40 acres. After Rath and Reynolds relocated their store, Henry Fleming built a stone building across the creek, and Sweetwater grew into a town of about 150 persons.

Tom O’Loughlin opened a restaurant and boardinghouse.

W.H. Weed built the first saloon, but Henry Fleming’s place,

the Lady Gay, was considered the best. Kate Elder, later Doc Holliday’s consort, said that Colonel Charlie Norton, a Dodge City businessman, built a dance hall there as well and brought in a bevy of girls from Dodge. Other sources credit Billy Thompson (the brother of well-known gunman Ben Thompson and a fugitive from Kansas justice at the time for the murder of Chauncey B. Whitney, the sheriff of Ellsworth County, two years earlier) with establishing the dance hall.

Most likely, Thompson and Norton were partners. A Chinese laundry opened, and several cabins were thrown up to complete the camp. The nearest town was Dodge City, 200 miles away in another state. There was no law enforcement. It was the perfect milieu for trouble.

The “Sergeant King” of the Western legend was a man with a formidable reputation as a gunfighter. “He was dark of brow, with cruel mouth and furtive secret eye,” Alfred Henry Lewis wrote of King in The Sunset Trail, his fictional biography of Masterson published in 1905. Lewis was the first writer to actually give King a history, declaring that he had been driven out of Abilene as the result of “an enterprise wherein he combined a six-shooter with a deck of cards—the latter most improperly marked—which resulted in the demise of a gentleman then and there playing draw poker against him.” But worse than being a cheat and a murderer, King was that “most detested and soonest to die” of Western wretches, “a blusterer

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and a bully.” His braggadocio was so despicable that “no The “Dodge City Peace one wanted his company and Commission” in 1883, from left but few his gold.” (standing), William Harris, Luke Stuart N. Lake added to Short, Masterson, W.F. Petillon, (seated) Charlie Bassett, King’s reputation as a frontier Wyatt Earp, Frank McLain and badman in 1931 with the Neal Brown. publication of Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. Lake dubbed King “the United States Army’s most noteworthy contribution to the ranks of Western gunmen” and averred that he was “a finished artist with the six-shooter and a cold-blooded killer” who terrorized the Kansas cattle towns in “a number of authenticated instances.” In fact, Wyatt Earp claimed to have arrested him in Wichita, Kan., only months before King’s death at the hands of Bat Masterson, but the “authenticated” record of his exploits is thin indeed.

Yet, if King was not the terror of the cow towns that the legend made him, he was a man with a checkered past. He was born Anthony Cook, not Melvin A. King, in 1845— apparently, like Masterson, in Quebec, Canada, though some records indicate he was born in Ireland. Like the Mastersons, Cook’s parents emigrated to upstate New York from Canada.

Cook grew up on a farm near Canton, N.Y., the eldest of three sons and two daughters. In October 1863, the month he turned 18, Anthony Cook enlisted in Company E of the 14th New York Heavy Artillery. He served continuously with his regiment until he was captured before Petersburg, Va., on March 25, 1865. He was paroled on March 31 and reported to Camp Parole, Md., where he was furloughed on April 7, 1865. A month later he briefly returned to active duty before being discharged in August.

Young Cook did not adjust well to his return to farm life.

On July 21, 1866, he enlisted in the 16th Infantry and soon headed south for Reconstruction duty in Georgia. He was apparently a good soldier, but he developed a penchant for getting into trouble. On August 30, 1867, near Macon, Ga., Corporal Cook fired his musket at a dog “without orders to do so” and wounded another soldier in the foot. He was charged with “conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline.” He was acquitted at his court-martial, which found him “guilty of the facts as stated” but attached no criminality to his act.

Cook was promoted to sergeant, but over the next two years his rowdy behavior kept him in trouble. He was involved in a riot at Albany, Ga. Confined to the post, he walked away from arrest, and when reprimanded by his commanding officer, Cook attacked him. Cook was reduced in rank and sentenced to hard labor for one year with forfeiture of pay, but the sentence was reduced in view of “his previous gallant serv-

ices.” He was transferred to the 2nd Infantry, but he was soon in trouble again on charges related to drunkenness, brawling, gross insubordination and absence without leave.

Apparently, he was a reliable soldier when sober, but he had developed a serious drinking problem. Eventually, on August 24, 1869, after assaulting a fellow jailed soldier during a dispute over a jailhouse game, he was dishonorably discharged at Mobile, Ala. Cook headed straight for New Orleans, where, on October 28, 1869, he enlisted again, this time in the 4th Cavalry under the name “Melvin A. King.” In 1871, the 4th Cavalry replaced the 6th Cavalry on the Texas frontier as the primary striking force against the Comanches and Kiowas. King apparently had cleaned up his act and limited his rowdy behavior to leaves because there were no further courts-martial. Far from the hulking brute the legend would later make of him, King was a blue-eyed, brown-haired man of only 5 feet, 5 1∕2 inches in height. He was regarded as a good soldier by his officers and the enlisted men who served with him. He also acquired new skills. King’s company herded remounts for the regiment, and he became an accomplished wrangler.

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hen the Red River War broke out in 1874, King’s company was initially stuck with escort duty between Fort McKavett and San Antonio, but in August, Company H joined Colonel Ranald Mackenzie (who had been a Civil War general) in the field. That September, King was in the Palo Duro Canyon fight, which broke the power of the Comanches on the southern Plains.

At the end of October, Private King was discharged. The next six months remain a mystery. So far, those “authenticated” raids on the cow towns have eluded researchers, but if they did occur, they most likely happened during this brief hiatus from service. On April 29, 1875, at Fort Richardson, he reenlisted and rejoined his old company. He was promoted to corporal almost at once and assigned as “herder in charge of Indian ponies.” In June 1875, he was relieved of that duty and assigned as Colonel Mackenzie’s orderly until October, when he went on detached service to Cantonment Sweetwater and his date with destiny.

Bat Masterson arrived in Sweetwater that December, hauling goods for the Army, as he would later testify. He found the place filled with buffalo hunters in from the range to warm their backsides and their insides in the hamlet’s saloons. More than 400 of them wintered there along with the storekeepers, government employees, teamsters, gamblers and dance hall girls. Frequently, soldiers from nearby Cantonment Sweetwater swelled the numbers in the saloons and dance hall even more. As Bat would point out later, “Everything was quiet…for two or three months and then [shortly after he 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 15

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ARIZONIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

arrived] things went lickety-bang.”

On the night of January 24, 1876, Bat joined the festivities at the Lady Gay Saloon. According to Kate Elder, he was soon absorbed in a poker game with Harry Fleming, Jim Duffy and Corporal King. Eyewitnesses said that King lost and left the Lady Gay disgruntled.

After the game, Bat fell into conversation with a soiled dove named Mollie Brennan. Brennan was well known in her profession. At some point she had worked as a prostitute in Denison, Texas. In 1872 she showed up in Ellsworth, Kan., where she married Joe Brennan, a saloonkeeper. In 1873, Mollie became involved with Billy Thompson. When he left town on the run after the death of Sheriff Whitney, she apparently followed him to Texas, but she was back in Ellsworth in 1875 in time for the state census. After that, she rejoined Thompson in Texas and probably arrived in Sweetwater with him. She was now apparently a dance hall girl at Charlie Norton’s place, along with “the seven Jolly sisters,” and probably Kate Elder, who had come down to Sweetwater from Tom Sherman’s dance hall in Dodge. Mollie was in the Lady Gay that night because Norton’s place was closed. The girls had decided to take a night off.

Near midnight, Bat left the Lady Gay in company with Mollie Brennan and Charlie Norton and walked over to the dance hall. While Norton lit a lantern behind the bar, Bat

and Mollie sat down near the front door and began talking.

Masterson (right) and Wyatt Apparently Corporal King, by Earp earned their formidable now well-oiled and still angry reputations as lawmen in Dodge City and elsewhere. over the night’s events, saw Masterson and Mollie go into Norton’s and watched them through the window before he approached the locked door of the dance hall.

He knocked on the door, and Bat got up to answer it. When he opened the door, King burst into the room with a drawn revolver and a mouthful of profanity. Apparently, Mollie threw herself between the two men at the first shot, although whether she was trying to protect Bat or simply trying to get out of the way is unclear. The first shot narrowly missed her and struck Masterson in the abdomen, tearing through his body and shattering his hip. King’s second shot hit Mollie squarely, and she crumpled to the floor in a heap, as Bat raised himself up and fired the shot that mortally wounded King.

The burst of gunfire aroused the town, and within a matter of minutes a crowd converged on the dance hall. When Harry Fleming arrived, he quickly realized that he had a dangerous situation on his hands. Billy Thompson was holding a group of angry soldiers at bay, and the buffalo hunters were organizing to protect Bat. Someone, probably at Fleming’s instigation, roused young George Curry from his sleep at Rath’s store and sent him off to Cantonment Sweetwater to report what was happening to the camp commander.

Soon a detachment of soldiers was en route to the town.

According to Curry’s later recollections, the soldiers stopped at the edge of town, and he and the officer in charge proceeded to the scene of excitement alone, “fearing that if the troops entered as a body the buffalo hunters might open fire on them and a battle ensue.” The officer conferred with Fleming and they quieted the crowd. Attention shifted to caring for the participants in the fight.

Mollie Brennan was already dead. Dr. Finley, the assistant surgeon from the post, examined King and prepared him for transport back to the post hospital, then turned his attention to Masterson. Frank Warren, a gambler, later recalled that he watched “the doctor run a silk handkerchief through Bat’s intestines....The doctor said if Bat had been eating anything he would have never recovered from the wound....” Whatever the truth about that, and Warren was not always reliable, there is no evidence that Bat was taken to the hospital. Instead he was made as comfortable as possible at the dance hall. King reached the post, but died early on the morning of January 25, 1876.

The military handled the whole episode discreetly. Curry said that the commander held a “brief hearing…after which officers and civilians agreed that the killing of King was justified,” but if there was an investigation, it was simple and unof-

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ficial. King’s company commander, Captain Sebastian Gunther, to return for his revenge. Although Lewis certainly got much noted simply in the “Final Statement” he was required to file on of his story from Bat himself, this appears to have been one of deceased soldiers that the “wound was not received in the line Lewis’ embellishments. What is clear is that King was disof duty.” The most detailed contemporary account appeared gruntled and left the saloon after losing money to Bat. On that in the “Medical History” of Fort Sill for 1876, under the headscore, Lewis, Tom Masterson, Kate Elder and Frank Warren all ing of “Deaths”: “Corpl. King, belonging to the escort which agreed. Other variations, involving King’s rage at seeing Mollie accompanied Col. Mackenzie to the Cantonment on the Sweet and Bat dancing together or, in a variation, King drawing Water Texas received a gunshot wound through the body the when Bat walked in to find the corporal and the girl dancevening of the 24th of January; he died on the 25th and was ing, seem less credible. buried at the Cantonment on the 26th. Corpl. King was shot, it is said, by a citizen with whom he had a quarrel in a public uriously, Bat Masterson was always very closehouse near the Cantonment.” mouthed about the Sweetwater affair. When asked So far, no contemporary accounts of the Sweetwater gunabout it in 1881 by the Kansas City Journal, Bat fight have come to light beyond these terse statements and the replied simply, “I had a little difficulty with some soldiers mere reporting of the deaths of King and Brennan in several down there, but never mind, I dislike to talk about it.” In The Texas papers, like the note in the Denison News of February Sunset Trail and again in “The King of the Gunplayers,” an 10, 1876: “It is reported that a shooting scrape occurred on article about Bat he wrote for Human Life in 1907, Lewis Contonment [sic], on the Sweet Water, last played down the relationship between Bat Sunday, in which a citizen, name unknown, and Mollie, suggesting that Mollie had a Corporal King, Co. ‘H’ 4th cavalry and crush on Bat and that King was obsessed Molly Brennan, formerly a Denison demiwith Mollie. Lewis portrayed Mollie as a Corporal King monde, were killed.” So far, no contempobystander whom King persuaded to was drunk, and rary reference to Bat Masterson as King’s knock on the door for him. Accounts that killer has been found, although there is no came from Tom Masterson, Bat’s brother, when he was doubt that he was the “citizen” (wounded, also played down the romantic connecdrunk, he was not killed, of course) involved. Everything tion, but the strangest account of all was mean, as his else known about the affair is in the form of the one Bat Masterson gave under oath in May 1913. Bat filed a lawsuit against reminiscences and the romantic tales of whole history the Commercial Advertiser Association, a popular Western writers. And that poses revealed. He was New York newspaper organization that some tricky problems. also angry with had published an article critical of him.

The point most in doubt was King’s According to the unpublished trial record, motive. He was drunk, and when he was Bat Masterson when questioned about the King episode drunk, he was mean, as his whole history by his attorney, Bat said: confirmed. He was also angry with Bat Masterson. But was he angry over the card game at the Lady Well, there was a little bit of a camp, like, right off the Gay or over Bat’s attentions to Mollie Brennan? Of course, the Reservation [Cantonment Sweetwater], where they sold whiskey practical consequences were the same whatever King’s motive, and general merchandise–a kind of one of those general merbut such questions provide the seedbed for the embroideries chandise stores. And this soldier had come down there, and I had of legend. And the possibility of a romantic involvement was taken down a load of grain and stuff to this store with my team; just too good an angle to pass up. Almost all third-party and he had had some trouble with some other soldiers, apparaccounts by contemporaries imply an affair between Bat and ently that night, and he was pretty full– Mollie, including those of Wyatt Earp (who heard the story The Court: You mean intoxicated? secondhand), Kate Elder, Frank Warren and Miles O’Loughlin.

The Witness: Intoxicated; and about twelve o’clock at night– Chroniclers from E.G. Little, writing for Everybody’s in 1902, I know I was just getting ready to go back, when I stepped out to Stuart Lake in 1931, to a bevy of latter-day “authorities” of the door he shot me right through the stomach; it went plumb could not resist having poor Mollie die for her man. through me, clear through me, with a big pistol.

But the root cause of the fight appears to have been the By the Court: poker game at the Lady Gay. Lewis, in the The Sunset Trail, Q. Colt’s? went so far as to have Masterson publicly humiliate King in A. A Colt’s an armed confrontation, from which King slunk away only

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Q. A Colt’s 45?

A. A Colt’s 45 army pistol. It knocked me down; I fell about five or six feet from him.

By Mr. Patterson [Bat’s attorney]: Q. Then what did he do?

A. I got mine out and shot him. He tried to shoot me again before I shot him; he shot again and shot a woman, a clerk in the store, and killed her. The second shot he fired struck her, and then I shot him, while I was down with the bullet through my stomach. This was all without any preliminary warning to me whatever....

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bviously, Bat had cleaned up the story somewhat, making the scene a general store and Mollie a “clerk,” but his testimony also made both him and Mollie the victims of a random shooting. It is also the second place—the Kansas City Journal being the other—where Bat mentioned “soldiers” rather than King alone. On balance, though, Bat was trying in 1913 to defend himself against charges that he had been a frontier badman, and he played down his role as a gambler throughout his testimony. Still it is an intriguing departure from most accounts and the only one that is clearly in Bat’s own words.

Other embellishments came later. The report of Ben Thompson’s leaping atop a faro layout and holding King’s friends at bay also has a curious history. The episode is first mentioned in The Sunset Trail, though Lewis tells it in a chapter on Thompson and has the episode occur in Tascosa, Texas.

Fred Sutton, in the 1927 work Hands Up, retells the story, making Ben the defender of a fallen Bat. Stuart N. Lake used this story to complete his melodramatic account of the Sweetwater affair, and after that, it became a staple in accounts of the incident.

But there is no real evidence that Ben was even in Sweetwater at the time. Still, Bat obviously felt indebted to Ben and Billy, because in 1880 Bat played a role in rescuing Billy from the clutches of the law in Ogallala, Neb. In Bat’s 1907 account of that episode, he described Billy as “a close personal friend of mine.” That, combined with Billy’s presence in Sweetwater and his relationship with Mollie Brennan, lends credence to the view that it was Billy who stood over Bat and protected him that night.

It remained for 1st Sgt. T.B. Gatewood, top kick of Company H, to provide the final commentary on Corporal King. On February 14, 1876, he penned a letter to Susan B. Cook informing her of “the untimely decease of your brother and my much esteemed young friend, Anthony Cook; he was mortally wounded in an affray at Cantonment of Sweetwater, Texas, January 24, and died from the effects the next day.”

Gatewood revealed to Miss Cook that her brother had been

The Legendary Bat: His Post-Sweetwater Career After his “little unpleasantness” at Sweetwater and a brief recovery period at the family home at Wichita, Bat Masterson returned to Dodge City, where he pinned on a badge as a deputy city marshal under the 300-pound Larry Deger.

Masterson and Deger never got along, and in the fall of 1876, Bat quit Dodge for points west. He returned in the spring of 1877 with enough money to invest in a saloon, but he promptly got himself arrested by his former boss, Marshal Deger, when he tried to interfere with the arrest of a frontier character known as “Bobby Gill” (real name Robert Gilmore). Later, Charles Bassett appointed him undersheriff, and in the fall of 1877, Masterson was elected sheriff of sprawling Ford County.

Gregarious and fun-loving, Masterson was a popular figure, especially among the saloon and sporting crowd. Bat also found himself a busy man. Masked bandits kicked off 1878 by trying to hold up a train at Kinsley, Kan., and Bat was soon at the head of a posse searching for Mike Rourke and Dave Rudabaugh and their confederates. Bat managed to capture four of the outlaws, which further enhanced his reputation as an officer.

But 1878 would prove to be a difficult year. On the night of April 9, Ed Masterson, who had succeeded Deger as town marshal, was killed by two Texas drovers. Both drovers were also shot, and one of them died. Bat has often been credited with arriving on the scene to avenge the death of his brother, and he later testified that he shot them, but reports in the local newspapers at the time say that Ed downed both Texas men. The cattle season was a busy one, and enough violence occurred along with it to raise the ire of the Ford County Globe, which linked Bat to the “gang” the editor claimed ran

serving in the 4th Cavalry under the name of Melvin A. King.

He added,“He was a general favorite throughout the regiment, both with officers and enlisted men, and especially so with his commanding officer, General Mackenzie, who he was escorting at the time of his death.” Cook’s mother tried to secure a pension based on her son’s service, but the manner of his death caused her requests to be denied time after time.

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n February 1876, Cantonment Sweetwater officially became Fort Elliott. That same year, the Texas Legislature created 26 new counties out of Clay County.

The town of Sweetwater became a part of Wheeler County,

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the city. Bat was active in politics and was in and out of Dodge that

Dodge City War. That June, Bat and some of Short’s other

summer. In the fall, he led the posse that pursued Jim Kenedy,

gun-toting supporters posed for a famous group portrait known

the murderer of a popular Dodge City personality, Dora Hand.

as “the Dodge City Peace Commission.” He continued to move in

In 1879, Bat’s popularity declined, partly because of criticism

and out of Dodge after that, even acting as a special officer to

that expenses were too high for his office, partly because people

close the Dodge City saloons in 1886, much to the surprise of

in the county outside Dodge City did not like his gambler’s

everyone. He was on hand in Fort Worth, Texas, the following

lifestyle, and partly because the Globe and the local reform

year to witness Short’s killing of Jim Courtright, but increasingly

element had targeted him for defeat. That fall he was beaten in

his life was centered in Colorado as a gambler. He operated

the election for sheriff by George T. Hinkle, and he left Dodge

saloons in Denver and Creede into the 1890s, followed big-time

City after letting everyone know exactly how he felt.

gambling and boxing and enjoyed his reputation as a frontier

Bat landed in Leadville, Colo., after that, and for the next

legend. In 1899 he helped to establish a boxing association in

couple of years drifted in and out of Dodge, following the

Colorado. He was squeezed out by others in the group and

gambling circuit. In 1880, he helped Billy Thompson escape the

established his own short-lived rival group. More troubles

clutches of the law in Ogallala, Neb. After briefly returning to

followed, and in 1902 he was asked to leave Denver.

Dodge, he took off for Tombstone, Arizona Territory, where he

Bat went east after that, settling in the canyons of New York

was reunited with an old friend, Wyatt Earp, until he received an

City. He was appointed deputy U.S. marshal for the southern

urgent message from Dodge concerning trouble brother Jim was

district of New York by President Teddy Roosevelt, and enjoyed

having with his partner in the saloon business. Bat’s arrival in

New York’s social scene on the strength of his reputation as a

Dodge sparked a general gunfight in which one of Jim’s enemies

frontier hero. Alfred Henry Lewis, a writer and newspaperman

was wounded. Bat was fined $8 and costs and promptly left town.

who had some experience on the frontier, took Bat under his

In the fall of 1881 a lurid story appeared in the New York Sun claiming that Masterson had killed 26 men, including an

wing. He not only helped Bat get a job as a sportswriter for The Morning Telegraph but also wrote about “Mr. Masterson,” most

unbelievable seven Texans at the time of Ed’s murder. The

notably in the 1905 novel The Sunset Trail. Two years later,

story was picked up across the West and prompted other stories

Lewis published a biographical article about Bat, “The King of

in the Kansas City Journal and elsewhere. While the stories

the Gunplayers,” for Human Life magazine and persuaded Bat

amused some editors, they contributed to Bat’s growing

to write a series of articles on “Famous Gunfighters of the

reputation. He was briefly deputy sheriff at Las Animas, Colo.,

Western Frontier” for the same publication.

and in April 1882 he was appointed town marshal of Trinidad,

Masterson gained some recognition as a sportswriter and was

Colo., in time to help prevent Doc Holliday from being extradit-

considered an expert on boxing. He more than once sued

ed from Colorado to Arizona Territory.

individuals and newspapers that tried to make him out to be a

In 1883 Bat was defeated as marshal of Trinidad and later

badman. He left the West and did not seem to miss it, although

turned up in Dodge City to help his friend Luke Short, who had

his legend continued to grow. In October 1921, he had a heart

been run out of town, in an affair that came to be called the

attack and died at his desk at The Morning Telegraph.

which was not formally organized until 1879. By then, Sweetwater was the economic center of the Panhandle and the seat of government for the region, although the town had undergone yet another name change. In 1878, the townsfolk had applied for a post office, only to have their request denied because there was already a Sweetwater in Nolan County.

After some deliberation, the town was renamed Mobeetie, which was said to mean “sweet water” in one of the Indian languages of the region. Mobeetie continued to have an unsavory reputation. “Taking it all,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled, “I think it was the hardest place I ever saw on

G.L.R.

the frontier except Cheyenne, Wyoming.”

Bat Masterson, though, did not tarry long in the Panhandle. As soon as he was able to travel, Bat went home to Wichita to recuperate. Within a matter of months, he was patrolling the streets of Dodge City, Kan., as a peace officer alongside another young man destined to become a Western celebrity, Wyatt Earp.

On November 6, 1877, Bat was elected sheriff of Ford County, and the Hays Sentinel observed that Masterson was “said to be cool, decisive and a ‘bad man’ with a pistol.” By then, Bat Masterson was well on his way to becoming a legend in his own time. ✭ 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 19

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Billy the Kid

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The New Mexico badman lived up to his reputation, and two lawmen paid dearly for it By Barbara Tucker Peterson and Louis Hart

IN WESTERN FRONTIER HISTORY, you might call it “the Great Escape.” After all, Davy Crockett didn’t escape the Alamo, George Custer didn’t escape the Little Bighorn, and Nez Perce Chief Joseph didn’t escape the U.S. Army. But Billy the Kid did escape the Lincoln County Courthouse! New Mexico Territory’s Lincoln County War boosted the Kid into the national spotlight in the late 1870s, but it wasn’t until his dramatic escape from the courthouse in April 1881 that he secured his place near the top of the all-time badmen heap.

Getting shot down by Pat Garrett at Fort Sumner less than three months later certainly cemented Billy’s legend—which might have suffered had he not died so young—but the Kid didn’t exactly go out in a blaze of glory. And Garrett never would have gotten his chance at the gutsy, if not heroic, gunman had it not been for Billy’s great—well, not so great for two Lincoln County lawmen—escape.

Actually, Garrett had a role—albeit in absentia—in Billy’s April 28, 1881, breakout. Running on a law-and-order platform, Garrett had been elected sheriff of Lincoln County in November 1880 and had captured Billy the Kid at Stinking Springs the next month. Then, in Mesilla on April 13, 1881, Billy had been convicted of the murder of Sheriff William Brady, one of the casualties of the Lincoln County War, and sentenced to hang. The execution was to be carried out in Lincoln on Friday, May 13, and seven guards had transported the prisoner there in the middle of April. So on April 28, the Kid was very much Garrett’s responsibility. And the sheriff did not take his responsibility lightly. Garrett did not keep Billy in Lincoln’s old cellar jail, which he knew would never hold a cunning prisoner whose very life depended on getting out. Instead, Garrett kept the Kid shackled hand and foot and guarded around the clock in the room behind his own office at the county courthouse, which had been the old Murphy-Dolan store (commonly referred to as “the House”) during the Lincoln County War. That bitter feud was fresh in everybody’s mind. Lawrence Murphy had aligned himself with James J. Dolan for economic control of the region, and when an Englishman named John Tunstall came along and proved himself to be competition, trouble followed. Tunstall’s murder on February 18, 1878, and

Sheriff Brady’s subsequent refusal to arrest the men responsible led to “war.” Teenager Billy the Kid (born Henry McCarty in 1859, probably in New York) had been employed by Tunstall. After Tunstall’s death, Billy and several other socalled Regulators killed three members of the Dolan faction and then assassinated Brady and Deputy George Hindman.

Additional killings followed, but it was the killing of Brady that now had the Kid cooling his heels in the makeshift “death row” at the Lincoln County Courthouse.

On Thursday, April 28, 1881, Sheriff Garrett was collecting taxes in White Oaks—a sheriff still had to carry out his duties even when he had a celebrated outlaw in his custody. Garrett had assigned deputies Bob Olinger and James W. Bell to guard Billy. The Kid’s room was on the second story, across the hall from the room where Garrett kept his more ordinary prisoners. Ironically, the room where Billy the Kid was awaiting his execution day had once been the bedroom of his old enemy, Lawrence Murphy.

If Billy the Kid didn’t have reason enough to free himself, Olinger gave him another reason by continually harassing him. A woman who had seen Olinger guarding Billy was interviewed more than 50 years after the fact. She said of the guard: “He was a big burly fellow, and every one that I ever heard speak of him said he was mean and overbearing, and I know that he tantalized Billy while guarding him, for he invited me to the hanging just a few days before he was killed. Even after he was killed I never heard any one say a single nice thing about him.” Garrett himself said that Olinger and Billy the Kid had a “reciprocal hatred.” Olinger and the Kid had supported opposing factions during the Lincoln County War, and Olinger had killed Billy’s friend John Jones in August 1879.

Billy’s guards supposedly drew a deadline in chalk across the middle of the room—should Billy ever step over it, he would be shot. If true, it was no doubt Olinger’s idea. The other guard, Bell, apparently treated the prize prisoner well; Garrett said that the Kid “appeared to The one, and likely the only, have taken a liking” to Bell. photograph ever taken of one Garrett, by his own account, of America’s most notorious also treated Billy fairly. In his outlaws, Billy the Kid. BRIAN LEBEL’S OLD WEST AUCTION

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JIM EARLE, COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS

Ten Billy the Kid Myths 1. Billy the Kid’s real name was William Bonney.

His real name was Henry McCarty.

2. He was born in New York and died at 21. The evidence points to New York, but he did tell an 1880 Fort Sumner census taker that he was 25years-old and was born in Missouri.

3. He had no relatives except for his mother. The Kid had an older brother, Joe, who died in Denver in 1930 at 76 years of age.

4. Billy the Kid was left-handed.

Billy the Kid was definitely right-handed.

5. Billy the Kid was practically a moron.

He was intelligent, and spoke two languages.

6. Billy the Kid was short and ugly.

At 5 foot 7, he was average for the time. His front teeth were a shade crooked.

7. Billy the Kid killed his first man at age 12, doing so in defense of his mother’s honor.

He killed his first man in Arizona in 1877 at 17.

His mother had been dead for several years.

8. Billy the Kid killed 21 men.

The Kid had only four provable slayings—Frank P. Cahill, Joe Grant, James Bell and Robert Olinger. He was indicted for killing Andrew L. “Buckshot” Roberts and found guilty in the murder of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady. However, both of these were gang killings. He most likely did not shoot Roberts, but he probably did put a bullet into Brady.

9. He is not really buried in Fort Sumner, N.M. Without question, he is buried there. However, some suspect he may be in a different plot than in the one that supports his tombstone.

10. Billy the Kid left no descendants behind.

He never married. There are suspicions that he had two daughters, both of whom died in infancy. A son, who never married, may have lived until his 40s. None of these possibilities can presently be proved.

—Leon C. Metz

The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, Garrett said that Billy Sheriff Pat Garrett’s singleacknowledged that the sheriff action Colt revolver he used had only done his duty “withto kill Billy the Kid in 1881. out malice, and had treated him with marked leniency and kindness.” But based on how the Kid treated Bell on April 28, it’s hard to imagine that he would have shown any “leniency” toward Garrett had the sheriff been in Lincoln that fateful day.

Between 5 and 6 p.m. on the 28th, Olinger took the five other prisoners across the street to Sam Wortley’s hotel for dinner. Billy remained in his room, with Bell keeping watch.

It is commonly accepted that the Kid asked Bell to take him to the outhouse in back of the courthouse. Bell obliged. The men went outside, Billy still in his leg-irons and chains and with handcuffs still on. Once back in the building, Billy the Kid made his move.

Godfrey Gauss, who had cooked for Tunstall and was living in a house behind the courthouse with Sam Wortley, happened to be outside at the time. He heard a shot, and when he looked up, he saw Bell burst out of the courthouse’s back door. “He ran right into my arms, expired the same moment, and I laid him down dead,” Gauss later said. Bell had been shot through the body.

Olinger, still dining at the hotel, heard the shot and came outside with the five prisoners. Gauss called out to him, asking him to hurry back across the street. Olinger did so, without the prisoners. As he entered the courthouse yard, Olinger heard his name called by somebody else—somebody from above. When Olinger looked up, he saw his own double-barreled shotgun pointing down at him from an upstairs window on the courthouse’s east side. Somehow, Billy had been able to get the shotgun out of Garrett’s office. “I stuck the gun through the window and said, ‘Look up, old boy, and see what you get,’” recalled Billy.“Bob looked up, and I let him have both barrels right in the face and breast.” Olinger died instantly.

Billy then spotted Gauss behind the courthouse, but Billy wasn’t after any more blood. Both men who had been guarding him were dead, and Gauss was a friend. Billy asked him to throw up a pickax, and Gauss did not hesitate in coming to the aid of a friend in need. The Kid then requested a saddled horse as he worked the pick on the chain connecting his shackles. Gauss brought the horse. By then, the Kid had quite an audience—the five other prisoners and many of Lincoln’s fine citizens. Nobody tried to interfere with Billy’s plans. No doubt some of them had nothing against Billy.

According to some accounts, the Kid shook hands with a lot of folks before riding out of town. Even more of them may have been paralyzed by fear. Garrett thought so. In any case, Billy found no reason to rush. One of the witnesses said that

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DAN MIEDUCH, SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA

by the time Billy finally rode off, Bell and Olinger had been dead for more than an hour.

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ne of the big questions afterward was how Billy the Kid had managed to get a revolver and shoot Bell.

Sheriff Garrett, who learned of the escape the next day, April 29, certainly wanted to know. After returning from White Oaks, he examined the building and interviewed Gauss and other witnesses. Garrett said he found that the room serving as the armory had been broken into; he also discovered a bullet in the wall of the stairwell. The bullet had apparently ricocheted off the right-hand wall, passed through Bell’s body and lodged in the opposite wall. From that evidence, he surmised that Billy had obtained the revolver from the armory.

But how had Billy been able to get away from Bell and reach the armory? Garrett’s explanation was that Billy—with leg shackles and all—had somehow hurried ahead of Bell on the way back from the outhouse, gone inside the courthouse well ahead of the deputy, rushed up the stairs and broken into the armory. Breaking into the armory would have been easy, Garrett said, because even when the door was locked, it could be opened with a push. One of the men watching from the street said that when Billy appeared on the upper porch in front of the building, he “had at his command eight revolvers and six guns [rifles]”—weapons undoubtedly filched from the armory. Of course, Billy would have only grabbed one loaded gun at first, which was all he needed to dispatch Bell as the deputy came up the stairs. But more questions arise. Was there time for Billy to do all that? Why did Bell dawdle so? If the Kid

had managed to get so far ahead, wouldn’t Bell have Artist Dan Mieduch depicts drawn his gun and shot him? the two-fisted violence of the Another possibility is that young outlaw Billy the Kid in Billy found the revolver in the his painting William the Lad. outhouse. Maurice Fulton, a tireless researcher of New Mexican history during the 1920s and 1930s, liked the version in which Sam Corbet, who had been Tunstall’s clerk, aided Billy. According to that version, Corbet had visited Billy every day and, despite the watchful eyes of Olinger and Bell, had managed to slip him a note on which one word was written—“Privy.” Not much of a clue, but Billy was a sharp youth, and he somehow got the message—there would be a revolver waiting for him in the outhouse. The revolver had been wrapped in a newspaper and planted in the outhouse by another friend, José Aguayo. The outhouse was open to the public, so somebody else could have found the weapon.

But nobody else did. On his trip to the outhouse in the early evening of the 28th, Billy had retrieved the gun and hid it in his clothes. Once back inside the courthouse, the Kid had then pulled the revolver from its hiding place and shot the unsuspecting Bell.

Another version involves Billy’s handcuffs and is offered by Robert M. Utley in Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life. Utley contends that “Bell carelessly lagged behind” when he and Billy were returning from the outhouse, and that after Billy reached the top of the stairs, he slipped one hand out of his cuffs. When Bell made it up the stairs, Billy “swung the loose cuff in vicious blows that laid open two gashes on the guard’s scalp” and knocked him down. Then, according to Utley’s ver10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 23

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sion, Billy wrestled Bell for the deputy’s gun. Billy got the gun and fired it as Bell fled down the stairs. The bullet hit the mark, and Bell staggered outside before he died in Godfrey Gauss’ arms. Billy, meanwhile, took Olinger’s shotgun from Garrett’s office and went to the window in the northeast corner room to deal with other threats. Soon, he eliminated the only immediate threat—Olinger.

Most likely the Kid would have been able to free a hand from the handcuffs. Pat Garrett said that Billy had large wrists that tapered into slender hands. And other people who knew the Kid mentioned his small, almost feminine hands. While under house arrest at the Lincoln home of Juan Patron in March 1878, Billy supposedly had greeted each visitor by slipping his hand out of the cuffs to shake hands. Garrett also learned, presumably from eyewitnesses, that Billy had removed his handcuffs in the same manner after killing Bell.

According to Garrett, Billy threw the cuffs at Bell’s body and said, “Here, damn you, take these, too.”

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arly in May 1881, the territorial newspapers began to receive letters regarding Billy’s escape, and the handcuffs were usually mentioned. The Santa Fe Daily New Mexican printed one such letter on May 3. “Quick as lightning he [Billy] jumped and struck Bell with his handcuffs, fracturing his skull,” said the anonymous correspondent. “He immediately snatched Bell’s revolver and shot him.” Another letter reported, “Bell lay dead in the back yard with two gashes on his head, apparently cut by a blow from the handcuffs.”

Still another correspondent wrote, “[Billy] said he grabbed Bell’s revolver and told him to hold up his hands and surrender; that Bell decided to run and he had to kill him.” The Kid himself may also have mentioned the handcuffs.

Not long after escaping Lincoln, Billy spent one night at friend John P. Meadows’ cabin on the Penasco River.

According to Meadows, who was interviewed by Maurice Fulton in 1931, Billy told him that he had hit Bell with his handcuffs and then had shot the deputy with his own gun.

All the details of Billy’s great escape will never be known, of course. Bell didn’t live long enough to say anything to anyone, not even to old Godfrey Gauss. Officials could never question the Kid about it because he remained a fugitive until Garrett killed him on the night of July 13, 1881, at Fort Sumner.

But every detail was not needed to stir up the newspapers and the public. If Billy had left the town of Lincoln stunned, he also left the territory in shock.

The Daily New Mexican of May 3, 1881, called the April 28 killings and escape “as bold a deed as those versed in the annals of crime can recall. It surpasses anything of which the Kid has been guilty so far that his past offenses lose much of heinousness in comparison with it, and it effectually settles the

The Death of Billy the Kid Much to the surprise of practically everybody, especially Sheriff Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid did not flee to Mexico after his Lincoln jailbreak. He headed straight for Fort Sumner. He knew everyone there and felt comfortable in their presence.

On the minus side, Garrett himself had also lived a year or so in Fort Sumner. His wife’s family still resided in the tiny community and he had his supporters, particularly Pete Maxwell, scion of one of the great New Mexico families.

A leading theory has it that Maxwell, disturbed by the Kid’s attentions to his daughter, Paulita, tipped off John Poe, lawman for the Canadian River Cattle Association, who told Garrett. A skeptical Garrett nevertheless rode with Poe to Roswell, where they reinforced themselves with Lincoln County Deputy Thomas C. “Kip” McKinney. They left Roswell on June 10 or 11 and reached Fort Sumner on the 13th.

They received no local information,but as they considered leaving, Poe suggested having a conversation with Maxwell, who lived in the abandoned officers quarters at Fort Sumner.

That night the moon was full. Heavy shadows from an overhanging roof fell across the wooden porch. Near midnight, Garrett posted his deputies on the porch as he slipped through the open door and into the bedroom. He pushed his holstered gun around to the middle of his back, sat down on the mattress and awakened Maxwell. They began to talk.

Within minutes after Garrett entered the building, Poe noticed a youth walking toward the house. The bareheaded boy stepped briskly in stockinged feet. He fastened his trousers as he approached. The deputies idly watched, never suspecting who he was. As Billy stumbled upon the two men, he flashed a revolver. “Quien es?” (“Who are you?”) he asked.

McKinney lurched to his feet, caught his spur in a loose board and nearly toppled off the porch. Meanwhile, the Kid backed away toward the doorway where Garrett had just entered. He apparently hesitated to shoot, fearing the two men might be friends of Maxwell.

question whether the Kid is a cowardly cutthroat or a thoroughly reckless and fearless man.” Billy, according to the newspaper, had exhibited “a coolness and steadiness of nerve in executing his plan of escape.”

“Newspapers across the country went wild,” writes Joel Jacobsen in his book Such Men as Billy the Kid. “The impossible had happened: Billy the Kid, the outlaw king of the frontier, had lived up to his reputation.”

Utley concurs. In his Billy the Kid, Utley says that the Kid

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The deputies failed to mollify the Kid, whom they still had not recognized, so Billy slipped inside the bedroom, asking,

Pat Garrett, 31 when he killed the Kid, had a long career as a lawman until he was murdered in 1908.

“Pete, who are those fellows outside?” At that point, the Kid Kid cocked his pistol and hoarsely whispered, “Quien es?” (“Who is it?”). Billy wavered about shooting, apparently for the same reason he had not killed the deputies outside.

Pat Garrett jerked his revolver clear and fired twice at Billy.

The sheriff then ran out the door and across the porch, screaming: “It’s the Kid! It’s the Kid!” Poe responded, “Pat, the Kid would not come here; you have shot the wrong man.”

After a second’s hesitation, Garrett responded: “I am sure that was him. I know his voice too well to be mistaken.”

At that same instant, Maxwell came charging out, dragging

UTEP LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

noticed a third man in the room. According to the Garrett, the

Since Poe’s account was written years after the deaths of the Kid and Garrett, and the two officers had had a falling-out, there was no credible reason for Poe to support Garrett. Poe’s account differs in detail from Garrett’s, so there are no compelling reasons why he should have mentioned a gun if indeed the Kid did not have one.

Garrett’s version rings with credibility, but it also shows a

his bedclothes. Poe started to shoot, but Garrett knocked his gun

strong sense of drama. But how much of it is true? Poe stated that

aside, yelling, “Don’t kill Maxwell!”

only 30 seconds elapsed between the time the Kid reached the

Maxwell then brought a candle and the officers placed it on the window sill, the flickering light revealed a man stretched out on the floor. It was Billy the Kid, dead with a bullet above the heart.

Several women carried the body to a nearby carpenter shop

porch until he was shot dead in Maxwell’s room. Garrett’s account allows for a minute or two. That time discrepancy is critical.

In his letter to Wallace, Garrett wrote: “I found him [Maxwell] in bed and had just commenced to talk to him…when a man

and placed it on a workbench. They dressed Billy in an oversized

entered the room in stockinged feet, with a pistol in one hand

shirt, and he was buried in the Fort Sumner cemetery the next day.

and a knife in the other. He…placed his hand on the bed just

Did Garrett really kill the Kid? Or did he shoot a stranger and

beside me, and in a low whisper [said], ‘Who is it?’ (and repeated

palm him off as the young outlaw? Volumes have been written

the question)....I at once recognized the man and knew he was

about that possibility, but Garrett most likely killed the Kid for

the Kid, and reached behind me for my pistol.”

several reasons: 1) The Kid could not be depended upon to “dis-

His story begs the question: In the stillness of that night, with

appear”; 2) Secrets like that could never have been kept, since

the bedroom door wide open, how could Garrett not have heard

the whole town viewed the body; 3) Garrett had his faults, but

the commotion outside between the deputies and the Kid? He

passing off the body of an innocent man as one of the West’s

must have heard it, and he had to have recognized the Kid’s voice.

most dangerous fugitives was not one of them; 4) No serious historian believes that Billy the Kid survived .

Two other controversial aspects arise from the slaying. The

Would Garrett have just sat there and waited for the Kid to stroll in and request identification? Any rational law officer would have pulled his revolver, knelt down beside the bed, used

first deals with the Kid’s alleged armament. The second with how

the mattress for cover and shot the Kid as he entered the room.

Garrett performed his job. Was the killing a cowardly action?

So Poe was probably right when he estimated that only 30

Garrett and Poe insisted the Kid carried a six-shooter. Since the sheriff had killed a man, it made better public relations for him to argue that he was armed and threatening.

was famous before his Lincoln escape thanks to the territorial press, but that despite his deeds during the Lincoln County War, he had not done enough in his 21 years to justify his fame. “The sensational bolt from Lincoln, however, transformed him into the territory’s foremost outlaw in fact as well as in name,” Utley suggests.

At the courthouse today, two plaques mark the spots where Bell and Olinger fell. A large hole in the wall at the bottom of the stairs may have been made by one of the Kid’s bullets.

seconds elapsed between the time the Kid hit the porch and the time he hit the floor.

Leon C. Metz

Billy the Kid probably took some pleasure in killing “mean” Bob Olinger, and he might have regretted killing the much more pleasant James Bell—well, maybe not too much regret.

Garrett had repeatedly cautioned his guards about the “daring and unscrupulous” Billy because he “knew the desperate character” of a man who “would sacrifice the lives of a hundred men who stood between him and liberty, when the gallows stared him in the face, with as little compunction as he would kill a coyote.” ✭ 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 25

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John Ringo

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He was a gunfighter without a résumé but with a reputation as a dangerous man, one whom the anti-Earp Arizona Cowboys were glad to have on their side in the early 1880s By Casey Tefertiller

THERE WAS SOME PECULIAR CHARM about John Ringo, the stuff that inspired legends and created a certain fear in those around him. It was never about his record as a gunfighter, since he had none. It was about something else, some innate toughness that proclaimed his intensity and put the rest of the world on notice that something might happen.“Every Tombstoner of his time I’ve met has recalled his force,” wrote author Eugene Cunningham, who interviewed many Arizona old-timers.“We have all met that type—good and bad men whose personality came out at others. Not whom he had shot but whom he might shoot seems to me the question men asked.”

John Ringo had an edge of danger about him, although his two most known encounters were a drunken shooting and a face-off with Doc Holliday that never materialized into gunfire. He was danger personified, yet that charm permeated. It did not escape the notice of Doc’s woman, Mary Katherine (“Kate”) Holliday, also known as Kate Elder but best known by the sobriquet Big-Nose Kate.

“Ringo was a fine man any way you look at him. Physically, intellectually, morally,” wrote Kate. “He was six feet tall, rather slim in build, although broad-shouldered, medium fair as to complexion with gray-blue eyes and light brown hair. His face was somewhat long. He was what might be called an attractive man. His attitude toward all women was gentlemanly.

He must have been a gentleman born. Sometimes I noticed something wistful about him, as if his thoughts were far away on something sad. He would say, ‘Oh, well,’ and sigh. Then he would smile, but his smiles were always sad. There was something in his life that only he, himself, knew about....He was always neat, clean, well dressed, showed that he took good care of himself. He never boasted of his deeds, good or bad, a trait I have always liked in men. John…was a loyal friend.

And he was noble, for he never fought anyone except face to face. Every time I think of him, my eyes fill with tears.”

It would seem that Ringo was a gentleman rustler, loyal to his friends and dangerous to his enemies. That was the image he left among the Tombstone pioneers who knew him.

The real story of Ringo is a mix of romance and raw meanness—a man capable of both charm and murder.

Born on May 3, 1850, in Wayne County, Ind., John Peters

Ringo spent his first 14 years in Indiana before his parents decided to go west. Disaster occurred on the wagon train trip when Martin Ringo shot himself in the head with a shotgun.

Martin died in what was apparently an accident, and young John was left fatherless. The family continued west to San Jose, Calif., where John grew up and left little record.

By 1874, John Ringo had migrated to Texas Hill Country, where he found himself in the midst of boiling tensions. There had long been lingering animosities between the German and American communities in Mason and Burnet counties, west of Austin. The Germans had supported the Union during the Civil War, and the past was not forgotten. There were constant accusations of rustling and misdeeds between the two groups.

By 1875, tensions had built into a full-scale feud, complete with bloodshed. There were ambushes and killings on both sides, most notably the murder of American rancher Tim Williamson, who had been led into a trap by Mason County Deputy Sheriff John Wohrle. Williamson’s murder had a critical result: It brought a new warrior into the battle.

Scott Cooley learned how to fight long before he showed up in Mason County. He had battled Indians during his youth in Arkansas and spent seven months with the Texas Rangers in 1874. He had worked as a drover for Williamson before joining the Rangers, and a bond of friendship remained. With Williamson’s death, the 20-year-old Cooley emerged as a warrior bent on revenge. Cooley quickly avenged Williamson’s murder by killing Wohrle; then the blood began flowing en masse. A local gambler named James Cheyney was hired by the German faction to lure two Americans into an ambush that resulted in a death and a severe wounding.

By this time, Cooley had assembled a tough band of followers, including the 25-year-old John Ringo. On September 25, 1875, Ringo and another Cooley satellite, named Williams, rode to Cheyney’s home near the town of Mason. According to the recollections of rancher Tom Gamel, Cheyney invited Ringo and Williams to The only known photo of the join him for breakfast. The legendary but overrated gunriders stepped onto Cheyney’s fighter John Peters Ringo, who porch to wash up, then stood was shot in the head in 1882.

ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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back while the gambler washed. As Cheyney dried his face with a towel, Ringo and Williams shot him down and left him dead on the porch.

In late December Cooley and Ringo were captured and jailed in Burnet for threatening the lives of law officers. The Galveston Daily News reported, “Deputy Sheriff J.J. Strickland has acquired some notoriety for his courageous conduct in arresting the celebrated desperadoes, Scott Cooley and one Ringo, alias ‘Long John,’ both of whom are now in jail at this place.” Cooley and Ringo received a change of venue and were transferred to Lampasas, where, on May 4, 1876, more than a dozen men helped them break jail. Cooley died quite unexpectedly in June. Ringo was recaptured in late October and spent more than a year in jail before he was released on bond in January 1878. The case against him was dismissed that May. And then, in one of those delicious twists that adds to the flavor of the West, John Ringo, feudist, fighter and backshooter, won election to a Mason County constable’s post in November 1878. He would serve only briefly before leaving Texas and moving on to a fledgling mining district in southern Arizona Territory.

C

arved out of Mexico by the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, southern Arizona Territory was a land most folks believed was better left to the Apaches, scorpions and rattlesnakes. The area held little appeal to settlers until a major silver strike occurred there in 1877. As miners, merchants and gamblers filled the burgeoning towns of Tombstone, Charleston and Galeyville, another breed began populating the backcountry. Hard cases from throughout the West drifted in, and during most of 1879 and ’80, they specialized in rustling beef from Mexican ranches and robbing Mexican smuggling trains. The Mexican government had begun levying heavy taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and smugglers turned a keen profit by purchasing the booty in Arizona Territory, then bringing it south to sell below the tax-added price. The smugglers became open targets when they headed north, loaded with silver to buy their goods.

Cattle were silver on the hoof. They roamed across the large Mexican ranchos almost inviting the unscrupulous Americans to ride south, collect a herd, then bring it north to sell to butchers to help feed the growing populations of the region.

The boomers, recently arrived from points east and west, were more interested in pursuing their dreams of riches than worrying about aggrieved Mexicans. And a little rustling kept down the price of beef. The backcountry toughs came to be called “Cowboys,” not to be confused with the drovers or ranchmen who worked the herds, nor with the later Gene Autry or Roy Rogers connotation. In 1880 Arizona Territory, Cowboy was a synonym for a criminal.

For most of this time, John Ringo, the former Mason County warrior, was only a shadow riding through the desert.

There are oblique references to an outlaw called “Dutchie” causing problems in Cochise County in 1879, and this may well have been Ringo. The first time he appears by name comes in December with the only shooting affray that can directly be linked to him during his Arizona years. According to newspaper reports, Ringo sat in a bar in the milling town of Safford drinking with a man named Louis Hancock. Ringo asked Hancock to take a drink of whiskey, but Hancock refused, preferring to stick with beer. Ringo angrily struck him over the head with his pistol, then fired a shot that passed through Hancock’s ear and into his neck. Hancock survived the wound. Ringo was arrested, then later discharged.

Ringo rode with the Cowboys, but he also became partners with Ike Clanton in a ranch in New Mexico Territory and invested in mining claims. Because the rustlers operated outside the law, there were no records left of their activities, and we can only surmise that Ringo played a role in the daring crossborder raids. In July 1880 Clanton, Joe Hill and a man identified as “Dutch Gingo,” who was probably Ringo, fired random shots into houses in the town of Maxey. They also broke into a Safford store, using the merchandise for target practice; made saloon patrons dance at gunpoint; and harassed some of Safford’s leading citizens. “It will be God’s blessing for this valley to get rid of them,” said the supervisor of the Safford mill.

Against a backdrop of outlawry and productive mines, more boomers streamed into the area, and politics were always part of every American expansion. During the late 19th century, elections were characterized by a fervor similar to a religious crusade, with much ceremony and excitement. The 1880 election was one of great importance because the delegates to the territorial legislature would be determining how Arizona reconstructed its counties and dealt with many issues.

For the course of history, perhaps the most significant was a proposal by Governor John C. Frémont to create a territorial militia that would be charged with controlling the border and preventing American rustling raids into Mexico. Another critical element of the election was the highly disputed race for sheriff of Pima County between Bob Paul, a tall, tough Republican with an excellent record of law enforcement in California, and Democratic incumbent Charlie Shibell.

John Ringo, former Mason County feudist turned backcountry troublemaker, now embarked on a new role: political kingmaker. He was selected to serve as a delegate at the Pima County Democratic Convention, despite some controversy because he had no legal residence. Ringo would help choose the slate of Democratic candidates who would seek office in the November 1880 elections. Ringo and Ike Clanton were appointed election officials for the San Simon district, only to have their

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DON PRECHTEL, AMERICAN GALLERY, CRESWELL, OR.

appointments revoked because of a question as to whether they actually resided in Arizona Territory. Revocation or no, Ringo and Clanton decided to serve anyway. Election inspector Ike and election judge John oversaw what was to become one of the strangest vote counts in territorial history.

The sparsely settled San Simon district had perhaps a halfdozen to a dozen voters, yet Ringo and Clanton managed to turn it into one of the most populous regions of the county.

When the votes were tallied, nearly all the results were the same, the Democrats receiving 103 to a single vote for the Republican candidates. It was a stunning majority, and one of the main reasons that Republicans complained bitterly about election fraud. Shibell barely outpolled Paul in the race for Pima County sheriff, a decision that would be overturned by the courts months later to give Paul the job. However, there was no way to remedy the other damage. In mostly close races, Democrats won eight of the 11 seats on the Legislative Assembly, the lower house of the territorial Legislature, and four of the five seats in the upper house. The San Simon vote was critical in electing several of the Democrats, most notably Tucson newspaperman Harry Woods, whose slim majority was built on the San Simon vote. Woods would become the leading spokesman for the founding of Cochise County and then serve as undersheriff to John Behan.

Strange as it seems, John Ringo had a lasting impact on Arizona history, not by his gun, but by his election tampering.

He was a key factor in electing the representatives who would In the 1999 Don Prechtel create Cochise County and painting Doc and Ringo, Doc who would reject plans for a Holliday is the one sitting and neither man is snarling. state militia to ride against the Cowboys. The new legislature carved out Cochise County in February 1881, with the predominantly Democratic body having a heavy influence on the appointment of the new county officers. Republican Governor Frémont appointed a compromise ticket that mixed Republicans with Democrats, including the new sheriff Behan.

Through the spring and summer of 1881, criminal activities grew, and Behan did little to stop the onslaught. The Cowboys had been more or less tolerated through the early years when they preyed primarily on Mexicans, but the situation changed dramatically in March when three masked men held up the Benson stage. Shotgun guard Bob Paul fired on the Cowboys, and they fired back, killing driver Bud Philpott and passenger Peter Roerig. The horses bolted, and the stage pulled away without surrendering its Wells, Fargo box. However, the killings led to outrage. On June 10, brothers Ike and Bill Haslett killed two of the stage robbers, Harry Head and Bill Leonard.

Two weeks later, Jim Crane, the other robber, led a raid into a saloon in western New Mexico Territory, killing the brothers and a German miner. The citizens of the region were put on notice that the Cowboys were well enough organized to ride as an army if necessary. Ringo, though, was probably out of the area at the time of the killing of the Hasletts.

Tensions continued to simmer. That same month, Ringo’s friend George Turner was killed during what the Mexicans believed to be a rustling raid. On July 27 a band of Cowboys, estimated at 50, attacked a Mexican pack train, leaving four dead bodies in the Arizona dust. The continuing problems led the Mexican government to establish a series of military posts along the border to try to stop the rustling. It is impossible to know Ringo’s level of involvement in these activities.

In August Ringo again found himself in trouble. He and his pal Dave Estes were playing poker in Galeyville, and Ringo had lost his money. Ringo and Estes proceeded to turn their guns on the other players and relieve them of about $500 in cash. According to Deputy Sheriff Billy Breakenridge, Ringo returned the money the next day, presumably upon sobering up.

Ringo ranged between Tombstone and New Mexico Territory during the next few months when tensions were running high.

On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, the explosion came when law officer brothers Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp, along with Doc Holliday, marched down Fifth Street, turned onto Frémont Street and went on to confront Ike Clanton and his brother Billy, plus Tom and Frank McLaury. The gunfight near the O.K. Corral left both McLaurys and Billy Clanton 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 29

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The Making of Gunfighter John Ringo More extravagant claims have been made about John Ringo than

Cochise County, also built elements of the Ringo myth in his 1928

for any other Western character, and the great majority of these

book Helldorado, ghostwritten by Earp-hating author William

claims are spurious. In life, Ringo was a shadowy hanger-on with

MacLeod Raine. “As for Wyatt Earp,” Breakenridge wrote, without

a gaggle of skulking Texas bushwhackers led by a psychotic killer,

elaboration, “certainly I had no reason to like the man.”

Scott Cooley. Ringo’s only recorded gunmanship was his role

Breakenridge’s dislike of Wyatt Earp was transmuted into

in possibly two backshootings in Texas, plus the shooting of

friendship with the outlaw element, particularly with John

Louis Hancock over a drink in Arizona Territory. Ringo may have

Ringo. He wrote: “Ringo was a very mysterious man. He had a

been a tough customer, but he was never the remarkable gun-

college education, but was reserved and morose…drank heavily

fighter portrayed in books and movies.

to drown his troubles…a perfect gentleman when sober,

Walter Noble Burns virtually created the Ringo image in his

quarrelsome when drinking…a good shot and afraid of

1927 classic Tombstone, An Iliad of the Southwest. The book con-

nothing....I met Ringo frequently…was very well acquainted.”

tained two chapters on Ringo, filled with gushing and fictional

When asked to identify the outstanding expert, both

superlatives that transformed Ringo from frontier thug to a

mechanically and temperamentally, among all the gunfighters

soaring Shakespearean eminence. “John Ringo,” wrote Burns,

he had encountered, Breakenridge responded, “John Ringo,”

“stalks through the stories of old Tombstone like a Hamlet among

without hesitation. However, there is no record of Ringo

outlaws, an introspective, tragic figure, darkly handsome, a man

engaging in any gunfighting at all in Arizona Territory.

born for better things…he was an honorable outlaw [to whom]

Other 20th-century writers and movie-makers came along

womanhood was an icon before which he bowed in reverence.

to chime in with other building blocks to the Ringo myth.

Ringo was born in Texas…his only brother was killed in [a] feud,

Even Lorne Greene, who played Pa Cartwright in the TV

and Ringo hunted down the three murderers and killed them.”

Western Bonanza, would sing the praises of Ringo in a popular

Burns’ portrayal of Ringo may have re-created something of the

1960s recording.

image recalled by the old-timers Burns interviewed, but he had

But Ringo was never the man legend made him out

some problems with facts. Both Ringo brothers (John and Martin

to be. He had no record as a gunfighter, and as for that college

Albert ) were born in Indiana. There was no murder to avenge.

education story, his only higher education must have come at

Martin Albert died of tuberculosis in 1873 in San Jose, Calif., at 19.

the Scott Cooley School of Bushwhacking.

William M. “Billy” Breakenridge, Sheriff John Behan’s deputy in

dead. Ike Clanton, who fled during the fight, swore out an arrest warrant for the Earps and Holliday. The preliminary hearing before Justice of the Peace Wells Spicer lasted most of November. Wyatt Earp and Holliday spent most of the time in Behan’s jail, while Morgan and Virgil Earp recuperated.

Kate Holliday led a much different life from her “husband.”

They had come together to Prescott, but Holliday, a dentist, left her behind when he moved to Tombstone. She came for an extended visit in March, then left in July. She hooked up again with Doc in October in Tucson and returned with him to Tombstone in time for the gunfight, staying at Fly’s boardinghouse. While Doc sat in jail, Kate apparently had surreptitious meetings with Ringo that developed into a friendship of sorts.

“I kept close to my room at Mrs. Fly’s during the EarpHolliday [hearing],” she said later. “Ringo had come to town and visited me at Fly’s twice. The second time he advised me to return to Globe, but I told him I did not have enough money to do so as Doc had lost all my money, about $75.00,

By Jack Burrows

playing faro while we were at the Tucson Fiesta. He said the Clantons were watching for Doc to come to the room and intended to get him there. ‘If you haven’t enough money to go,’ he said, ‘here is fifty dollars.’ So I left that evening.”

Did Kate’s meeting with Ringo during Holliday’s incarceration create more tension? We can only speculate, but an incident a few months later provides hints.

The battle that would become known as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral did little to quell criminal activities in southern Arizona Territory. Nothing had been resolved. The Mexican army had slowed the cross-border criminal activity, leaving the outlaws to do their thing on the U.S. side. Ringo remained close to Tombstone through December, staying in the Grand Hotel, where he and several others shared a shuttered room. They kept a close watch on Allen Street below and the Cosmopolitan Hotel across the street, where the Earps were staying.

On December 28, Virgil Earp, just recovering from the leg wound he received in the October gunfight, walked down Allen JIM EARLE, COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS

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Street. “I stepped out of the Oriental Saloon to go to the The six-shooter that was found hotel, when three double-barin John Ringo’s hand after the reled shotguns were turned outlaw was discovered dead with a bullet through his head. loose on me from about sixty feet off,” Virgil said later. The shotgun blasts tore into Virgil’s left arm and chest. The immediate expectation was that he would not survive the shooting. For three months he lay bedridden.

Virgil held dual commissions as city marshal and deputy U.S. marshal. Wyatt Earp had served as Virgil’s assistant U.S. marshal, handling most of the federal work while his brother concentrated on city activities. After Virgil was wounded, Wyatt wired for the commission of deputy U.S. marshal with the right to appoint deputies. Now it would be for Wyatt Earp to find a way to stem the crime in Cochise County.

A

week into the new year of 1882, the townsfolk were stunned by two stage robberies within a 24-hour period. The first occurred at about 3 a.m. on January 6, when three men stepped into the deserted road between Hereford and Bisbee and fired a volley of shots at the coach.

Shotgun messenger Charlie Bartholomew and a passenger jumped from the coach to exchange shots with the robbers and then remounted the coach and tried to make a run for it.

However, the bandits maneuvered in front of the stage and brought it to a stop, forcing the driver to throw down the Wells, Fargo strongbox holding $6,500. No one was ever convicted for the crime, but the San Diego Union would later run a dispatch from Tombstone that mentioned “a desperate character named Ringo, who is suspected as being one of the party who lately robbed the stage near Bisbee. He is one of the ringleaders of the cowboys.” No court records have been found to show he was ever charged with the crime.

Bad feelings blew like dust through the streets of Tombstone in January 1882, with the Earps and various Cowboys exchanging glares across Allen Street. On January 17, Ringo and Holliday apparently began snarling at each other and then put their hands on their pistols. Before either could draw, officer Jim Flynn grabbed Ringo from behind, and Wyatt Earp came forward to soothe Doc and lead him away. Ringo and Holliday were fined $32 each for possessing weapons. Ringo’s visits to Kate may have played a role in the argument. Doc and John were on opposite sides of the Tombstone trouble, but the conflict between them had seemingly taken on a personal note.

Ringo made his presence felt in the volatile town over the next few months. The once rare visitor to Tombstone was frequently seen on the streets and at the Grand Hotel. On the afternoon of March 18 Ringo approached attorney Briggs Goodrich and told him that if any fight came up with the

Earps, he would have nothing to do with it. He was going to take care of himself, and everybody else could do the same.

Goodrich passed along the cryptic message to Wyatt Earp.

A few hours later, two gunmen slipped into an alleyway behind the billiard parlor in Hatch’s saloon and fired two shots through a window. One shot just missed Wyatt Earp’s head.

The other crashed through Morgan Earp. He collapsed onto the table, slowly slid to the floor and lay dying in a pool of blood.

Wyatt Earp would come to believe that Ringo and Frank Stilwell were the two key figures in the assassination of Morgan Earp. On March 20 Wyatt escorted his badly wounded brother Virgil to the train station in Tucson, where he was surprised to find Ike Clanton and Stilwell. Moments later Wyatt Earp fired a shotgun blast through Stilwell’s chest—the first shot of what would come to be known as the Vendetta. Earp and his posse would spend the next three weeks riding through Arizona backcountry in pursuit of the Cowboys he believed wounded Virgil and tormented the area. He would leave Florentino Cruz and outlaw leader Curley Bill Brocious dead, plus wound Johnny Barnes, who later admitted to being one of Virgil’s shooters.

But, in an odd twist, Earp, Holliday and the posse members had also become wanted men for the murder of Stilwell.

Sheriff Behan formed one of the most unusual law posses ever created, deputizing such Cowboys as Ringo, Phineas (“Fin”) Clanton and Barnes to ride in pursuit of the Earp posse. As Earp’s group chased Cowboys, the Cowboys were chasing them. Earp’s avengers finally took a position atop a clump of rocks that formed a hill. With Earp ensconced in a very defensible position, Behan decided not to attack and retired his Cowboy posse without an arrest. Wyatt Earp rode off to Colorado. Ringo remained in Cochise County for at least another three months before his death in the backcountry. He was shot in the head in July 1882, but whether he pulled the trigger himself or someone else did remains a mystery.

John Ringo would leave behind a remarkable legacy.

Without a known kill in Arizona Territory, he was considered one of the most dangerous men of his era. In life, he had been a backshooter and a temperamental drunk. In death, he would be remembered as a cavalier—a nobleman among outlaws.

The Arizona Star called him “The King of the Cowboys.” The Tombstone Epitaph wrote, “Friends and foes are unanimous in the opinion that he was a strictly honorable man in all his dealings, and that his word was as good as his bond.”

Big-Nose Kate and others who knew him rhapsodized about Ringo, his character, style and force. He was a mass of contradictions. On one hand, he could engage in evil deeds, but on the other he possessed a charm and intelligence that led to respect even among his enemies. It is the complexity and depth of John Ringo that gave him an odd degree of respect in his time, and that made him the substance of legends. ✭ 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 31

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Bill Longley

I

Texas-born William Preston Longley killed more than his share of men, but ‘Bloody Bill’ avoided face-to-face confrontations By Rick Miller

IF EVER A MAN TALKED HIMSELF INTO a hangman’s noose, it was Bill Longley. As with so many other notorious Texans in the mid 1870s, Longley had an ego as large as a room, and his boastful nature ultimately sealed his doom when he was finally held accountable for his crimes. And this raises a question as to whether or not Longley deserves to be discussed in the same breath with better-known shootists like Wild Bill Hickok, John Wesley Hardin or Ben Thompson.

Rather than wearing the mantle of legendary gunfighter, perhaps he was nothing but a cold-blooded murderer.

Born in Austin County, on October 6, 1851, William Preston Longley was the sixth of 10 children produced by Texas Revolution veteran Campbell Longley and his wife, Sarah. He was raised on a farm near the small community of Evergreen, in what became Lee County. He grew into a lanky 6-footer, with curly black hair, an angular face with high cheek bones and, most striking, small, piercing black eyes through which the menacing forces within Longley made themselves most evident.

When the Reconstruction Act of 1867 introduced the military occupation of Southern states, including Texas, the world of young Bill Longley and other Texans was turned upside down. Fervent Unionists were now in control, and it was galling to the unprepared Texas communities to witness equally unprepared newly freed slaves awkwardly exercising their civil liberties, with both the Army and Freedman’s Bureau in place to make sure that the ex-slaves were not abused.

Considerable resentment grew, especially among men such as John Wesley Hardin and Bill Longley, who were too young to have fought in the war but felt compelled to keep the exslaves in what they perceived as their place. Longley preyed on black men when the opportunity arose. Stories survive of Longley and others disrupting traveling circuses by injudicious use of their pistols, as well as forcing confrontations with black men, usually with robbery in mind. The general community tended to overlook Longley’s rebellious nature, at least until he finally killed someone.

In mid-December 1868, three former slaves–Green and Pryor Evans, brothers, and another known as Ned–left Bell County on horseback to travel south and visit friends and rel-

atives in Austin County for Christmas. They passed through the Evergreen area, where Longley and several companions spotted them, especially eyeing the splendid horse ridden by Green Evans. The white men stopped the trio and proposed a swap for the horse, but the former slaves declined. A few minutes later, Longley and his group got the drop on the three travelers and forced them to ride into a remote creek bottom. Fearing the worst, Green Evans spurred his mount and raced to escape. A volley of pistol balls followed him, one tunneling through his head and killing him. In the confusion, the other blackmen fled. Longley and his companions rifled the dead man’s pockets and then rode off.

When the former slave owner, Alfred Evans, of Salado in Bell County, rode to Evergreen to investigate, he ran into a wall of silence. Longley was generally credited with killing Green Evans, though he later claimed that all of them shot at the fleeing youth. No formal charges were ever made. However, the danger of arrest by the military was sufficient to convince the 17-year old Longley that he should leave the area. At this point, the story of Longley’s life becomes one of tangled fact and fiction, the product of tall tales spun by him after he was arrested years later.

According to Longley, he left his familiar stomping grounds and by the spring of 1869 found himself in northeastern Texas, not far from Texarkana. He claimed that he was grabbed by a mob that believed he was part of the gang of cutthroat Cullen Montgomery Baker, and that they hanged him on the spot, along with a man named Johnson. According to Longley, the vigilantes left right away, and Johnson’s brother shot the rope holding him and he dropped to the ground, barely alive.

He then supposedly became one of Baker’s chief lieutenants.

Baker, though, had been killed in January 1869, and there is no record that Longley was ever a part of that gang.

In reality, Longley continued to rampage in south-central Texas, now accompanied by his older brother-in-law, John Wilson. They killed a This drawing of badman freed man named Paul Brice Bill Longley appeared in in Bastrop County, then took The National Police Gazette.

WEIDER HISTORY GROUP ARCHIVE

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ROBERT G. MCCUBBIN COLLECTION

his horses and reportedly killed a black woman near Evergreen. In March 1870, a Longley is seen here as he waits at the Galveston $1,000 reward was offered for County jail in Texas both of them by military in October 1872. authorities’ describing them as murderers and horse thieves, although accounts of many of their crimes have not survived. Longley later claimed that Wilson was killed and buried in Brazos County in the spring of 1870, even though there is some evidence that he was killed in Falls County in 1874. All of this was enough to force Longley out of Texas, and he headed north, perhaps on a cattle drive. In May 1870, he joined a gold-hunting expedition leaving Cheyenne, in Wyoming Territory, and headed into the Black Hills of Dakota Territory. However, a treaty with the Sioux prohibited mining activities in the mountains, and a cavalry unit intercepted the gold-hunting party, which promptly disbanded. Longley found himself stranded and penniless, so on June 22, 1870, he enilsted for five years as a trooper in Company B of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, stationed at Camp Stambaugh near the mining towns of South Pass and Atlantic City on the Continental Divide.

Longley quicky found military life not to his liking. He deserted two weeks later, but was caught, returned and courtmartialed for desertion. Pleading guilty, he was sentenced to two years at hard labor. Wearing a 24-pound ball and chain, he began serving his sentence in the newly built stockade at Camp Stambaugh. However, four months later, in December, when a harsh winter overtook the post with 20-foot snowdrifts, his company commander took pity on the young man, and Longley was released to resume his military duties. Private Longley was recognized as a skilled marksman, so he became a regular member of hunting parties. One sergeant, though, recalled Longley as “an idle boaster, a notorious liar and a man of low instinct and habits, but tolerated on account of his good nature, gift of gab, and excellent marksmanship.” Longley later denied he was ever in the U.S. Army; falsely claiming that he had been a teamster and had killed an officer with whom he shared a kickback scheme.

The young soldier tolerated Army life in the mountains of Wyoming for another 18 months, then deserted again in June 1872, this time for good. Where he went or what he did is not known, but he turned up in Texas in February 1873, when it was reported that he and others had murdered a blackman named Price in Brown County. In July of that year, he was in Bell County, where his parents had moved and were now farming along the Lampasas River. He was indicted for carrying a pistol but not arrested.

Two weeks later he was arrested in Kerr County when he was found with remnants of Frank Eastwood’s gang of horse

thieves. Vigilantes, grown tired of the depredations of Eastwood and his men, had about decimated the gang, and Longley had the bad luck of being with some of the gunfighters fleeing the mob. Identified as wanted for murder, Longley was taken to Austin by Mason County Sheriff J.J. Finney, who hoped to claim any reward. However, when the reward was not forthcoming from the state of Texas because it had been offered by the military during Reconstruction, Finney apparently released his prisoner, allegedly for payment of some money by one of Longley’s cousins.

Longley once again took to the road, but he showed up at his parents’ farm in Bell County at Christmas time 1874. With his 15-year-old brother Jim in tow, he rode down to his old stomping grounds at Evergreen in Lee County to visit an uncle, Cale Longley. Once there, the two brothers learned that their cousin, “Little Cale,” was dead, supposedly killed by an old boyhood friend of Bill’s, Wilson Anderson. Uncle Cale urged Bill to avenge his cousin’s death by killing Anderson.

Although there was some evidence that Little Cale had actually gotten drunk with Anderson, then rode his horse into a tree, revenge blinded the boy’s father. On the afternoon of March 31, 1875, the two Longley brothers rode over to Anderson’s farm and found him plowing in the field. Bill Longley rode up to him, told him that he was going to kill him, then shot him twice with a shotgun.

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The two brothers rode as far north as Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) before young Jim became home sick.

They turned around and, after a brief incarceration in the small town of Van Alstyne, where they became infested with body lice, returned to Bell County in July. Bill soon left again, but Jim was arrested for the murder of Anderson, for which he was later acquitted.

The wanted Bill Longley could not afford to stay in one place, and he adopted one alias after another to stay ahead of the law. In late 1875, he wrote a letter to a friend, Lee County Sheriff James M. Brown, who had purchased the Longley farm at Evergreen, that refiected his realization that the life he was leading was a doomed one, but he nevertheless remained defiant: “I expect to get killed sometime but you may bet your sweet life that I will keep the flys [sic] off of the son of a bitch that does it while he is at it.” Longley rode north to Waco in McLennan County, where, using the name Jim Patterson, he took a job at the farm and cotton gin of John Sedberry. Along with a companion, Robert Rushing, he engaged in occasional robbery and assault, but he was not arrested. On the crisp, cold evening of November 13, 1875, he was part of a drunken foxhunt and got into an argument with a young man named George Thomas. Words led to a fistfight, which didn’t settle the dispute for Longley. He acquired a six-shooter and shot Thomas three times, killing him.

Longley was subsequently indicted for shooting him in the back. Stealing a horse, he was once again on the lam.

H

e next turned up in Uvalde County, in the Dry Frio Canyon, in late 1875 or January 1876 using the name Jim Webb. He became acquainted with William “Lou” Shroyer, a Pennsylvania native and former Union soldier who also had a reputation as a badman. Lou Shroyer suspected Webb’s true identity, even allegedly conspiring to capture or kill Longley for the reward. Longley somehow learned of this and was able to get himself deputized at the town of Uvalde to go arrest Shroyer. Taking with him a hastily recruited deputy, William Hayes, Longley returned to the Dry Frio Canyon to set his plan in motion. On January 10, 1876, they told Shroyer that they had killed a cow and wanted him to share in some of the meat. Shroyer agreed, bringing with him a pack of dogs that he owned. Longley’s idea was to get the drop on him as they rode along. Shroyer, however, sensed trouble, and when guns were drawn he raced off, the two deputies in pursuit. Shroyer’s horse was shot, and Shroyer in turn killed Longley’s horse, then retreated into a glade of trees, followed closely by his dogs. Then Hayes took a bullet in the thigh, and his horse spooked and ran off with him. The two remaiuing combatants traded shots. Shroyer, lying in some tall grass, finally called out that he wanted to talk to

Longley, and Longley walked toward him. According to Longley, Shroyer then tried to raise his weapon, and Longley killed him. If Longley was ever in a legitimate gunfight, this was the one, and he later gleefully relished the details.

Longley fled Uvalde County, and by mid February 1876 he was at the other end of Texas, in tiny Delta County, east of Dallas. Going by the name of William Black, he stayed with farmer Thomas P. Jack in the small village of Ben Franklin. He quickly became enamored of Jack’s 16-year-old daughter, Rachel Lavinia. Deciding to stay in the community, he entered into a sharecropping arrangement with farmer William Roland Lay; who was also a preacher. At the same time, he discovered that he had a rival for Rachel’s affections in young Mark Foster, who was Mrs. Lay’s nephew. This led to chilly relations with the Lay family.

Longley later claimed that he kept finding anonymous notes left for him, waruing him to get out of the area. Finally, he forced a confrontation with young Foster and whipped him with both a quirt and a pistol. Charges of false imprisonment (rather than assault) were made against “William Black” and Thomas Jack, and on june 6, 1876, they were both jailed at Cooper, the Delta County seat. Early in the moruing six days later, Longley burned a hole in the jail door and escaped.

Blaming the Reverend Lay for his predicament, Longley armed himself with a shotgun and lay in wait at the Lay farm.

As dawn broke, and Lay was milking a cow, Longley coldbloodedly dispatched him with a full blast of turkey shot.

Where Longley went after this killing is uncertain. He reportedly freed two Lee County desperado friends of his, Jim and Dick Sanders, from the custody of a Grayson County deputy sheriff. The three of them rode south and disarmed a Milam County deputy, Matt Shelton, on their way back to Lee County. More and more lawmen, including the Texas Rangers, were now becoming interested in Longley’s whereabouts.

In the spring of 1877, Longley adopted the alias “Bill Jackson” and found work with farmer W.T. Gamble near Keatchie in Louisiana’s De Soto Parish. As he established himself as a hardworking farmhand, Jackson became close friends with a local constable, June Courtney, even occasionally assisting him in making arrests. But Courtney came across a circular from Texas describing the wanted Bill Longley, and contacted Sheriff Milt Mast in Nacogdoches County, across the Sabine River in Texas. Mast sent a letter to the Lee County district clerk,WA. Knox, asking for more particulars, and Knox provided them in a May 18 letter: “Longley is today the worst man in Texas....You will have to take the advantage of him— he will fight and is a good shot.”

Mast and his deputy, Bill Burrows, consulted with Courtney, the reward uppermost in their minds. On June 6, 1877, Longley was quickly captured and whisked to Texas 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 35

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RICK MILLER COLLECTION

without benefit of extradition proceedings. Within days he was in the rickety, escape-prone Lee County jail, to be held for the 1875 murder of Wilson Anderson.

Now Longley began in earnest to promote his legend as the deadliest gunfighter to ever prowl the Texas prairie, and unwittingly to seal his fate. The jailed man wrote letters to the Giddings Tribune detailing his gunfighting exploits, and other Texas newspapers picked up the stories. He not only claimed that he had killed an Army quartermaster in Wyoming Territory and had ridden with Cullen Baker but also boasted that he had killed a total of 32 men, a number that he said entitled him to be considered “the most successful outlaw that ever lived in Texas.” Longley was primarily competing for the title against noted gunman John Wesley Hardin, who would be captured in Florida in August and who reportedly had killed only 28 men. While most newspapers cast a jaundiced eye at Longley’s claims, the boasts nevertheless took hold in the public mind, and he became a notorious figure.

Longley shamelessly claimed that while he had killed men, he had never ridden with horse and cattle thieves or had ever stolen anything. Of course, this was far from the truth.

Longley thought about escaping, once writing young brother Jim about a plan to bribe his guards and flee the country: But Lee County Sheriff Jim Brown was determined that his prisoner would stay put. Samuel Kenada, a new attorney from nearby Washington County, was appointed to defend

Longley. The trial was held at a temporary courthouse in A manacled Billy Longley Giddings on September 3, stands between two of his 1877. Experienced prosecutor captors, Sheriff Milt Mast and Seth Shepherd took repeated Deputy Bill Burrows in 1877. advantage of Kenada’s inexperience. The jury took just an hour and a half to return a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree. It was death for Bill Longley. Longley was quickly transferred to the Galveston County jail, pending the outcome of his appeal of the death sentence. This turn of events seemed to sober Longley as he contemplated that he had literally come to the end of his rope.

While escape was still in the back of his mind, his thoughts turned to the choices he had made in his life that brought him to this point. The impact of his behavior on his aged and heartbroken parents weighed heavily on him. His letters became religious tomes, and he used his own experiences to illustrate the folly of a wasted life. “My first step was disobedience,” he noted; “next whisky drinking; next, carrying pistols; next, gambling, and then murder, and I suppose the next step will be the gallows.” Belatedly and in vain, he tried to disavow the earlier boasts. In somber letters to brother Jim, he reflected on where his crimes had brought him and what a better life was on the other side.When Hardin was finally tried for the 1875 shooting of Brown County Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb and received a 25-year prison sentence, Longley was outraged at the difference in punishment: “Don’t you think it is a one-sided thing to kill me for my sins and oniy give Hardin 25 years in prison?”

A feeble attempt at escape was thwarted in early March 1878, and then on March 13 the court of appeals affirmed Longley’s conviction, finding that his trial had been fair and further noting that the opinion “probably concludes the career of one of the most noted male factors of the state, whose imputed exploits have contributed largely to the most sanguinary chapters of her annals.”

In July, as Longley waited in the Galveston jail for court to convene in Giddings so that he finally could be sentenced, he converted to Catholicism. A petition effort was underway in Nacogdoches asking that the governor commute his sentence to life, and an uncle in California, Alexander “Pres” Longley, sent a letter to President Rutherford B. Hayes asking for a presidential pardon. But none of this was to any avail.

A heavily manacled Bill Longley was returned in August to Giddings, and on September 6, District Judge E.B. Turner ordered his execution for October 11. A contrite Longley pronounced himself “ready to abide by the decision of the jury.”

As Longley once more entered the Lee County jail, Sheriff Brown busied himself with tightening security to head off any escape or rescue attempt. On the night before his scheduled

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execution, Longley wrote his brother Jim: “I dont dread this at all. Tomorrow this time I will be in a much better place.”

was pronounced dead by three doctors. Brown then placed the body in a coffin, and it was taken to the town cemetery and buried outside the consecrated portion, where there were hen Friday, October 11, 1878, dawned, it was scores of other anonymous graves. murky and rain was threatening. Thousands of Longley was given credit by the press for “dying game,” but people poured into the tiny Giddings community his boasts lived on and became part of Texas gunfighter lore. to see Longley’s hanging. Two priests met with the condemned One newspaper referred to him as “Bloody Bill,” and the stoman throughout the morning, and after they left Longley ries he had spun gradually became accepted as fact. The nickasked some jailers to join him in singing “Amazing Grace.” He name “Wild Bill,” though often seen today, was never used carefully dressed in a black suit, with a white shirt and black by him; it was the product of a Texas historian, T.U. Baker, tie, then combed his long hair and goatee before donning a in the 1920s. But Longley’s tale was not yet fully told. Nearly broad-brimmed low-crown hat. On his lapel he wore a blue nine years after Bill’s hanging, his father, Campbell Longley, rosette arrangement. Beneath his shirt on a cord hung a small was quoted in an innocuous 1887 newspaper article, saying Catholic medal. Only one family member visited him, a 10that the hanging had been a hoax, that a rich uncle in year-old niece, and when he kissed her goodbye, even the California, “Pres” Longley, had provided $4,000 to bribe strongest hearts in the jail were touched.

Sheriff Brown and his deputies, and that a special harness had Shortly after noon, Sheriff Brown placed Longley in an been used to fake the hanging. enclosed ambulance wagon for the slow ride Bill Longley was then supposed to to the waiting gallows, escorted by heavily have become a successful landholder and armed guards on foot. At the gallows, cigar cattleman in Central America. Notfirmly clamped in his mouth, Longley took withstanding that Pres Longley was a ne’erShortly after a seat under the gallows and drank some do-well and that $4,000 wouldn’t go very noon, Sheriff water that was brought for him. In addition far to convince Brown and all his deputies to the guards on foot, armed horsemen to keep their mouths shut, the story neverBrown placed intently watched the massive crowd. At 2:15, theless became part of Longley’s legacy– the Longley inside the sheriff, Longley and others began to man who had been hanged three times and an enclosed mount the scaffold. When the rickety stairs lived to tell about it. appeared to shake or almost give way, The story was never refuted, and no one ambulance Longley warned the others before proceedstepped forward with the facts of the exewagon for the ing up the steps. Attended by two priests, cution. The family story behind Campbell Longley stood as the death warrant was read Longley’s statement was that his wife, slow ride to the

by Brown. Then Longley discarded his cigar Sarah, had never accepted the fact that one waiting gallows and briefly addressed the crowd, announcof her children was a cold-blooded muring that he thought God had forgiven him derer and had been hanged. Because of her and asking that none of his friends attempt to take any fragile mind-set, the family conspired to keep Bill Longley revenge. None of Longley’s family attended the execution. alive, even concocting letters from him in Utah Territory, After praying with the priests, he kissed them, then kissed where he was supposedly staying with a sister. Campbell his friend Brown on the cheek. Longley took his place over the Longley’s story was only a furtherance of that family contrapdoor, the noose was placed around his neck, and a black spiracy, and he likely regretted that it was picked up by the hood was drawn over his head. Brown looked around for his press and reported statewide. Sarah Longley died in April 1890 hatchet with which to cut the rope holding the trapdoor. at age 68, and the story of the many lives of Bill Longley died “Where’s my hatchet?” the sheriff asked. From under the out. For nearly 100 years, at least. hood, Longley asked: “What do you want with a hatchet? Are In 1988, Louisiana native Ted Wax wrote Dead Men on the you going to split my head open?” The rope was cut, and Bayou?, a small book in which he contended that Campbell Longley plummeted through the opening, but the sheriff had Longley’s story was true and that Bill Longley had surfaced miscalculated and Longley hit the ground hard but remained in Iberia Parish, La., in 1886 under the alias John Calhoun standing. It took but a second for the sheriff and a deputy to Brown, Wax’s grandfather. Wax interested Douglas Owsley, a haul up the dangling Longley. Longley emitted several moans, forensic anthropologist, in his story. In June 2001, though, it and attempted to raise his pinioned feet and arms severai was announced that remains taken from the Giddings cemtimes, but he slowly strangled to death. After 11 minutes he etery were indeed those of Bill Longley. ✭

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Jesse James

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When Bob and Charlie Ford decided to gun down Jesse James—out of fear for their own lives or hopes of a reward—their deed would overshadow everything they did for the rest of their lives By Ted P. Yeatman

THE HOUSE AT 1318 LAFAYETTE ST. IN ST. JOSEPH, Missouri, was a one-story white wood cottage with green shutters, sitting in a lot on the brow of a hill overlooking the town.

It was Monday, April 3, 1882, and over breakfast the man who rented the house, who was going by the name Thomas Howard, commented on a newspaper article about the surrender of Jesse James Gang member Dick Liddil to Missouri authorities. Liddil was a traitor and ought to be hanged, he said. There was considerable unease among the two guests, brothers Charlie and Bob Ford, but they pretended not to care.

After breakfast, Mr. Howard and Charlie Ford went to a stable behind the house to curry the horses. Upon returning, the two men entered the living room. “It’s an awfully hot day,” said Howard, pulling off his coat and vest and tossing them aside.“I guess I will take off my pistols,” he continued, explaining that he didn’t want anyone who might be walking by outside to look through the window and see him armed. He picked up a feather duster and stepped up on a chair to clean some pictures on the wall. Bob and Charlie quickly moved between Howard and his guns, Charlie giving a wink to Bob. Both drew revolvers on the man on the chair, now with his back turned. Hearing the click of a weapon being cocked, Howard started to turn his head, and then the report of Bob’s six-shooter reverberated through the house. Charlie didn’t even bother to fire but lowered his gun as the man fell to the floor, with a bullet in his skull.

Howard’s wife rushed into the room, and the brothers tried to explain that the six-shooter had accidentally gone off. “Yes,” the wife said as she bent over her husband’s corpse, “I guess it went off on purpose.” The Fords dashed to the telegraph office down the way and sent messages to Clay County Sheriff Henry Timberlake, Kansas City Police Commissioner Henry H. Craig and Missouri Governor Thomas Crittenden. Last, they used a newfangled device known as a telephone to call the office of City Marshal Enos Craig. Thomas Howard, the man they had killed, had earlier used the alias John Davis “Dave” Howard, among others. But his real name was Jesse James.

The Ford boys first became acquainted with outlaw Jesse James in the summer of 1879. Jesse had been living in

Tennessee since 1877, trying to “go straight” following the disastrous attempt to rob the Bank of Northfield, Minn., the year before. While his older brother Frank made the transition to peaceful citizen, Jesse suffered from malaria and found it difficult to adjust to honest work. He returned to Missouri to put together a new gang and in the process crossed paths with the Fords. James T. and John Ford, the father and brother of Bob and Charlie, had served in Virginia under Colonel John Singleton Mosby, the legendary “Gray Ghost” of the Confederacy. Jesse, who had served under guerrilla leaders William Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson, probably swapped more than a few war stories on his occasional visits.

Jesse liked to at least maintain the pretense of being harassed by former Unionists in order to obtain food, shelter and information from ex-Confederates while he was on the dodge.

One of the recruits to this new outfit was Ed Miller, whose brother Clell had been killed in the Northfield raid. Miller knew the Fords, and it was Miller who first brought Jesse to the Ford house, the Harbison place, outside the town of Richmond, in Missouri’s Ray County. In the summer of 1880, Jesse and Miller had a falling out. The exact details are unclear, but it appears that Ed wanted to leave the gang, and Jesse got the notion he was going to be betrayed and fatally shot Miller. Jesse turned up at the Harbison place with Miller’s horse, which he left there, telling Charlie Ford that Ed had become ill and had gone down to Hot Springs, Ark. Enter Jim Cummins, a former guerrilla comrade of Jesse’s.

Jim’s sister Artella had married Bill Ford, uncle of Bob and Charlie. The couple now lived at the old Cummins place in Clay County, a few miles from the James farm. Cummins became suspicious that something bad had happened and tried to locate Miller. A trip to Nashville, Tenn., where Jesse was living, in the winter of 1880-81, brought similar suspicions on Cummins, when he started asking too many questions. Fearing a bullet from Jesse, he fled in the night.

On March 25, 1881, Missouri guerrilla Jesse James almost two weeks following had yet to turn 17 when this the robbery of a Corps of photo was taken in July 1864.

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Engineers payroll at Muscle Shoals, Ala., gang member Bill Ryan got drunk at a small store a few miles north of Nashville.

Brandishing a revolver, he claimed to be Tom Hill, “outlaw against State, County, and the United States Government.”

He was soon taken into custody. On his person was found some of the Muscle Shoals loot, and he was quickly lodged in the Nashville jail. Jesse’s choice of gang members left a lot to be desired, and it would only get worse.

The bad news about Ryan arrived via the local newspapers, and Frank, Jesse, their respective families and gang member Dick Liddil were soon beating a hasty retreat to Kentucky, with the law on their tail. Soon that state was getting too hot, and they decided to go back to Missouri. Jesse saw this as a chance to lure his now unemployed brother Frank back into the holdup business. He also wanted to keep an eye on legal proceedings against Ryan, who was extradited to Independence, Mo., in June, to be tried for his part in the Glendale train robbery, and to follow up leads on Jim Cummins.

Jesse soon settled in Kansas City, and was planning a raid on the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad somewhere near Gallatin, Mo. It was said that the trains brought large sums of cash to the Farmer’s Exchange Bank there twice a week. On the evening of July 15, 1881, the gang struck near the whistle stop at Winston. Conductor William Westfall was killed in the process. It was later said that Westfall had been on the train that took Pinkerton detectives on their 1875 raid on the James farm, but this was apparently not known at the time. The crime created a sensation in the press. Governor Thomas T. Crittenden, who had vowed to rid the state of the James Gang in his campaign the year before, held a meeting in St. Louis with railroad and express company executives, who promised a collective reward of $50,000 to put the gang out of business. Frank and Jesse had a reward of $5,000 each on their heads for their capture and delivery to authorities, with another $5,000 on conviction. There was no mention of it being dead or alive.

Following the Winston robbery, the gang scattered. Dick Liddil spent a good bit of time at the Harbison place with the Fords, and the brothers were reportedly initiated into the holdup business in August 1881. Liddil, a convicted horse thief prior to joining Jesse’s new gang in 1879, took Charlie Ford with him to rob a stage running between Excelsior Springs and Vibbard. The driver was hauling just one passenger. “Charlie made them stand and I made them deliver,” Liddil recalled in his later confession, the take being a whopping $30. About a week later, Liddil put together another sub-gang consisting of himself, Jesse’s cousin Wood Hite, and Bob and Charlie Ford.

On Thursday evening, August 25, they robbed a man with a wagon of $20 to $30 halfway between Lexington and the railroad junction at North Lexington. They tied up their victim

and continued to wait for other prey. About five minJesse James, using the alias utes later, they halted a stage Thomas Howard, died at 1318 with seven passengers, six Lafayette St., St. Joseph, Mo. men and a woman.

“All of you hold up your hands and get out of there,” one of the outlaws commanded. Bob and Wood held double-barreled shotguns on the men after they stepped down, while Dick and Charlie, armed with revolvers, relieved them of around $200 and several watches. All the bandits wore blue masks.

The woman, a Miss Hunt from St. Joseph, was allowed to remain in the coach and to keep her valuables. One of the victims, C.W. Horner of Appleton City, a cripple studying for the ministry, was relieved of $52. Oddly, it was the same stage driver, a Mr. Gibson, who had been robbed by the James-Younger Gang seven years before, almost to the day, near the same place.

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eanwhile, Jesse James had other plans afoot. Gang member Bill Ryan was being held in jail in Independence to face trial for the robbery of the Chicago & Alton at Glendale. Jesse would kill two birds with one stone—rob the railroad again, not far from the same spot; and at the same time intimidate railroad employees, some of whom might testify at Ryan’s trial. On September 7, 1881, six years to the day after the Northfield robbery attempt, the James Gang went to work at a 30-foot chasm along a curve known as Blue Cut. The trains were known to slow down at this point, and men could be placed along the rim of the cut to cover the proceedings below.

A masked man was placed on the track, beside a pile of rocks, where he waved a lantern to get the oncoming westbound locomotive to halt. Wood Hite and Charlie Ford were to take the engine and express car. A few blows to the door by the now captive engineer were enough to open the latter, and the agent for the U.S. Express, who had slipped out, was coerced to return with threats on the engineer’s life. This and a perceived slowness at opening the safe caused Charlie Ford to pistol-whip the clerk. Less than $400 was found inside, and Ford gave the man another whack for good measure.

Little did the bandits know that an Adams Express safe, hidden under a pile of chicken coops, contained more cash.

Frustrated, the outlaws proceeded to rob the passengers. The whole affair lasted about half an hour. Before leaving, one of the outlaws, thought to be Jesse, shook hands with engineer “Chappy” Foote, gave him $2 and told him to “spend it on the boys.” The outlaw then warned Foote: “You’d better quit running this road. We’re going to make it so hot for this damned Alton road they can’t run.” Newspaper accounts reported the anguished passengers’ arrival at the Union Depot in Kansas City. Many had lost every cent they had and were stranded.

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In late September, Ryan went on trial in Independence.

An official of the Chicago & Alton told Jackson County prosecutor William Wallace that his superiors didn’t think any of the gang could be convicted in Missouri but that if Ryan was convicted, the railroad might be singled out for further raids.

He asked Wallace not to call any railroad men as witnesses.

During the trial, friends of Ryan, fully armed, hovered about the courthouse.

Wallace’s key witness was former gang member Tucker Bassham, convicted and sentenced to 10 years for participation in the Glendale heist. Crittenden offered him a full pardon for his testimony. Ryan was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in prison. There was talk of a possible rescue attempt, but the old jail was built like a fortress, and the prisoner was guarded by Captain M.M. Langhorne, described as “one of the coolest, gamest men” of Joe Shelby’s former Confederate Brigade. Several other guards were also former Confederates, and even prosecutor Wallace had been forced to relocate with his family during the war after their homestead was ransacked by Kansas jayhawkers. “The jury that convicted Ryan broke the back of outlawry in the state of Missouri,”commented Wallace. “Thousands of mouths that had been locked by fear were opened....”

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ometime in the fall of 1881, Jesse James resumed his pursuit of Jim Cummins. This took him to the home of Bill Ford, whose wife was Cummins’ sister. In an effort to get information on Cummins’ location, Jesse roughed-up Samuel Ford, 15-year-old first cousin of Bob and Charlie. It was a bad mistake. John W. Shouse, a neighbor who lived about a mile or so from the James farm, was a fellow Southern sympathizer who was also getting tired of

the brigandage. When he learned of what had happened to the Ford boy, he enlisted several neighbors who were armed and went on the watch for Jesse. It was around this time that Bill Ford and William Wysong, one of the neighbors of Shouse, brought Bob Ford into the fold.

Meanwhile, during a trip to Kentucky, Dick Liddil got into an argument with Wood Hite, first cousin of Frank and Jesse James. Liddil was said to be having an affair with Hite’s stepmother. It all culminated in a shootout at the Harbison place on December 4, 1881, with Hite and Liddil firing at each other and then Bob Ford joining the fray. Ford fired one shot at Hite, which he would claim was the fatal bullet. In fact, Liddil had shot Hite as well, and it’s still unclear who deserved credit for the killing. Both, however, would be considered equally guilty if Jesse only knew.

An arrangement was made for Bob Ford to meet Governor Crittenden on January 12, 1882, in Kansas City. While Bob would later claim that he struck a deal to get Jesse “dead or alive,” both his brother Charlie and the governor later denied this. It was for the “capture” of Jesse. Bob was to coordinate with Shouse, Wysong and other neighbors, as well as Sheriff Timberlake of Clay County and Police Commissioner Craig of Kansas City. “There was no sort of bargain about his receiving a portion of the reward and a pardon if he would kill Jesse James,” Crittenden later said. “It was of course known that the outlaw had sworn never to be taken alive, and men who went in search of him were acquainted with this fact.” If you went after Jesse you took your own chances. Dick Liddil decided not to risk it. On January 24 he secretly surrendered to authorities and soon helped Craig and Timberlake capture Clarence Hite, Wood’s brother. Clarence was taken without a fight (and without extradition papers) at his home near Adairville, Ky., on 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 41

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February 11 and hustled back to Missouri by rail to answer for his role in the Winston and Blue Cut robberies.

Time was running out for Jesse James. “He said he expected to be a bandit as long as he lived,” recalled Charlie Ford, who had helped Jesse move from Kansas City to St. Joseph in November 1881 and lived with Jesse and his family. In March 1882, Charlie accompanied Jesse in casing a number of banks in northeast Kansas. Jesse asked Charlie if he knew of any possible recruits to help with future robberies.

Charlie suggested his brother Bob. After looking over likely targets, Jesse and Charlie headed back to pick up Bob. On the day of the killing, April 3, Jesse had talked of leaving for Platte City, to rob the bank there the following day. A trial was in progress, and he felt this would distract the local population. The Fords wondered if he hadn’t suspected them after reading about Liddil and would try to gun them down as he had Ed Miller, out in the middle of nowhere.

The reaction of Commissioner Craig and Sheriff Timberlake to the news of Jesse’s death was mixed. “Hurrah for you,” telegraphed Craig, who said he was coming to St. Joseph. Timberlake, on the other hand, had expected to be in on the capture and to have a piece of the reward. According to one of his deputies, the news of Jesse’s killing “was a dampener.” Timberlake, who had served in the Confederate Army and knew Jesse from before his days as an outlaw, identified the body, as did others who passed through the funeral parlor

where the corpse was displayed and photographed. The body bore wounds from the Civil War that matched those carried by Jesse James. Jesse’s death had been reported at least as early as 1879, when a hoax was perpetrated by former gang member George Shepherd, who claimed he had killed the bandit in a shootout in southwest Missouri. Authorities wanted to be sure they had their man. In fact, on April 4, the day after the shooting, the Los Angeles Times raised the doubts in an editorial.

“Jesse James is like a cat; he has been killed a great many times, only to as often enjoy a resurrection.” The Boston Globe had a rebuttal two days later, “Any Western reporter who now resurrects Jesse James ought to be shot.”

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ndeed there had been a full coroner’s inquest, an autopsy and photographs taken of the corpse. The body was taken to Kearney, Mo., for burial in the yard at the farm where Jesse had been born. The Fords had been taken into custody.

Wood Hite’s body was dug from the Harbison place when someone got the idea that there was a reward, only to discover that, as with Jesse, it was for his capture. Bob and Charlie were arraigned on charges of first-degree murder on April 17, 1882, and sentenced to hang after both pleaded guilty, but they were pardoned that same afternoon by Governor Crittenden. If the Ford brothers had expected any reward money, though, they were most likely disappointed. There was much commotion over the killing of Jesse for the next several months as newspapers found that, in death as well as life, he could sell papers.

Although a very dead James But that wasn’t all. Jesse’s was displayed at Sidenfaden’s widow, Zee, had to support Funeral Parlor in St. Joseph, Mo., some doubted his demise. herself and her two children— 6-year-old Jesse Edwards and 2-year-old Mary Susan—and was forced to sell some personal effects at the house in St. Joseph, including the family dog. Ten cents admission was charged to visit the house, and souvenir hunters reportedly made off with almost as much as they bought, chipping off pieces of the fence, house and outbuildings. Henrietta Saltzman, owner of the house, would sue Missouri and Governor Crittenden, claiming that the killing was the work of state agents. Mrs. Saltzman had been renting the house for $14 a month to Jesse James, but a few weeks after his death, she moved back and began charging visitors a quarter a head to visit the place, now replete with bullet hole in the wall. Over the next year and a half, she would make a killing. A reporter who visited there in September 1883 estimated that she had made, between admission charged to thousands of visitors and splinters of wood sold as mementoes, $1,500 off the house. The reporter also noted that there were some 50 “bullets that killed Jesse James” floating around.

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Never mind that the slug had never exited the head and had been pulled out of Jesse’s A cast of Jesse James’ skull, which was found to be in 32 brain during the autopsy. pieces when it was exhumed Bob and Charlie Ford were in 1995 for DNA testing. lured to the stage, and by August 1882 were in Chicago playing what was described as a “State Street dive.” They considered moving on to Cincinnati, but instead took their act to Chicago’s Park Theater, where they began to do a depiction of the killing of Jesse James. At the end of the month, Bob was arrested for disorderly conduct and carrying concealed weapons. From Chicago the Fords moved to New York, playing Brooklyn in September. At Bunnell’s Museum, they were occupying a spot in Curiosity Hall when a woman thought by Bob to be Frank James’ wife appeared, panicking the brothers. They decided to move to the Broadway Museum, which they played through the first week in October.

Bob Ford was due back in Missouri that month for trial at Plattsburg on charges of murdering Wood Hite. The jury brought in a not guilty verdict on the 26th, and Bob and Charlie again left to pursue their career on the stage. On December 21, they were slated to give “a descriptive lecture” at Hartford, Conn., in Allyn Hall, but the door receipts amounted to only $2 and the appearance was cancelled. Next came Boston, where the brothers played the Dime Museum at Horticultural Hall.

This institution, which billed itself as a “select family resort for ladies and children,” was said to be “packed to suffocation” for the Fords’ appearance, at a dime a head.

The boys had just been introduced to the crowd when a young man in the front row, thought to be intoxicated, called the Fords “damned cowards.” Charlie was restrained from jumping off the stage, but there were other remarks, and the manager, somewhat indignant himself, allowed the boys to go into the audience. Guns were reportedly drawn and two men were pistol whipped. The audience stampeded, a woman screamed and fainted and a large group smashed a window to escape, while others surrounded the Ford boys. A police officer named Robinson led half a dozen other policemen to the building, and they were about to haul the boys off when the manager intervened. He begged the police to charge the Fords later, and he would vouch for them to appear. The police agreed, and the Fords made their later performances at the Dime Museum. There were some hisses from the crowd, and the atmosphere was tense, but the show went on without further outbursts. A Chicago Daily Tribune editorial commented that it was “a grave mistake…in allowing them any greater freedom than a comfortable cell affords.” A few days later, after the brothers had jumped bail and left Boston, the Boston Globe commented that “but for the undesirableness of the presence

of the Fords in the city under any circumstances,” the paper would suggest that Officer Robinson be made to find, arrest and return the Fords at his own expense. But their checkered career on the stage had a year further to run, in which time they threatened the manager of the National Theater of Philadelphia, who sarcastically replied via mail that he had an opening for them in July 1982, nearly a century later, if they wished to play there.

Meanwhile, on the evening of July 2, 1883, Charlie Ford left his pistol in a Kansas City saloon, and when barkeep George Wampel pointed it at a patron named Webster, the gun accidentally went off, killing the teamster. A month later, Charlie was arrested and charged with participation in the 1881 Blue Cut train robbery, but he made the $5,000 bond. He claimed in the press that he was working with local lawmen to infiltrate the James Gang at the time, but Sheriff Timberlake, Commissioner Craig and Governor Crittenden were dumbfounded by his statement. On September 20, the Fords appeared in a Louisville, Ky., variety house, in what was called The Brother’s Vow; or, The Bandit’s Revenge. They were hissed and hooted by the audience at the point where Bob killed Jesse.

In addition to Blue Cut, Charlie had been charged with the 1881 stage robbery north of Lexington, and was to go on trial in Richmond on November 23, but apparently a continuance was granted in the case, which had been brought by Jesse James’ widow and mother, in an attempt at revenge.

The stage career of the Fords ended in St. Louis in January 1884. Charlie, suffering from tuberculosis and addicted to morphine, shot himself. He had forfeited bond in the Richmond case, having failed to appear in court. Bob Ford would move west to Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, where he operated a saloon briefly with Dick Liddil and had an equally lackluster career as a policeman. Finally settling in Creede, Colo., where he ran another saloon, the man who shot Jesse James was gunned down on June 8, 1892, by Ed O’Kelley, with a sawed-off shotgun. Although O’Kelley might have had other reasons for murdering the unpopular Ford, one possible motive was that while growing up in Missouri, O’Kelley had viewed the notorious Jesse James as a hero. ✭ 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 43

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Pat Garrett

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The lanky lawman who shot Billy the Kid has never been half as understood or appreciated as the young outlaw with whom he is forever linked By Mark Lee Gardner

PAT GARRETT ADMITTED DREADING ONLY one thing, and it had nothing to do with facing down a killer. Instead, it was facing a stranger who, on being introduced to the lawman, would exclaim: “Pat Garrett! The man who shot Billy the Kid, the noted desperado! Glad to meet you! When I write home, I shall say that I actually had the honor of shaking hands with you”—or something similar. A soft-spoken and modest man, Garrett abhorred such encounters. “I sometimes wish,” he lamented to a friend,“that I had missed fire, and that the Kid had got his work in on me.”

Garrett’s feat of single-handedly killing one of the West’s most notorious outlaws had been a double-edged sword. It had given him instant celebrity, a cash bonanza via a reward and donations from grateful citizens, and entrée to prominent politicians and businessmen. But the dead outlaw’s growing legend also haunted Garrett. Kid sympathizers branded Garrett a coward for shooting down Billy in the dark and claimed the Kid was unarmed to boot. And in Garrett’s later years many viewed him as a violence-prone relic from an unseemly past. But Pat Garrett deserved better. The man had his flaws, but he was a sure enough hero when New Mexico needed one, and he rates in retrospect as one of the West’s greatest lawmen.

Born in Chambers County, Ala., on June 5, 1850, Patrick Floyd Garrett moved with his family to a Louisiana cotton plantation when he was 3 years old. He enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing, earning his first dollar working in his father’s plantation store. But the Civil War changed all that.

Losing his slave labor and seeing his crops confiscated, Pat’s father sank deep into debt and alcoholism, dying a broken man in 1868. Upset at the handling of his father’s estate, 18year-old Pat struck out for Texas on January 25, 1869.

Garrett farmed for a couple years around Lancaster (south of Dallas) but gave it up to become a cowpuncher. By 1876 he had switched occupations again, joining the hunters and skinners who were fast eradicating the bison herds on northwest Texas’ Staked Plains. His hide business partner, Willis Skelton Glenn, remembered Garrett as “rather young looking for all of his 25 or 26 years, and he seemed the tallest, most long-legged specimen I ever saw.” Garrett stood a remark-

able 6 feet 4 inches in his stockings. “There was something very attractive and impressive about his personality,” Glenn recalled, “even on a first meeting.”

It was on the buffalo plains that Garrett killed his first man, but that man was no outlaw or bully. He was a young friend of Garrett’s named Joe Briscoe. A silly tiff between the two quickly escalated into blows, and when an enraged Briscoe came at Garrett with the cook’s ax, Garrett grabbed the camp pistol and pulled the trigger at point-blank range. As Briscoe lay dying, he asked his killer’s forgiveness. A distraught Garrett turned himself in at Fort Griffin, but the law there had no interest in pressing charges against him. All they had to go on was Garrett’s story, and the evidence—Briscoe’s body— was buried miles away under a clump of mesquite.

With hunters like Garrett, who could kill 60 or more buffalo a day, it did not take long for the Texas hide men to put themselves out of business. Garrett and two companions drifted into New Mexico Territory, arriving at the small settlement of Fort Sumner on a cold February day in 1878. Garrett’s pals soon moved on, but Garrett made Fort Sumner home, the locals nicknaming him Juan Largo (“Long John”). He tried various business endeavors: hog farm, butcher shop and combination saloon and grocery. And he married two local gals.

The first, Juanita Martínez, fell sick with a mysterious illness on their wedding night. She died the next day. His second wife, Apolinaria Gutiérrez, whom he married in January 1880, would eventually bear him eight children.

Fort Sumner was where Garrett first encountered Billy the Kid, who found the settlement’s watering holes, young ladies and weekly bailes as attractive as had Garrett before him.

Nearly 10 years Billy’s senior, Garrett might find himself across a poker table from the Kid, but the two were neither chums nor enemies. “He minds his business, and I attend to mine,” Garrett once told a friend when asked about Billy. “He visits my wife’s folks sometimes [the Kid was friendly with the Gutiérrez family], but he Lincoln County Sheriff Pat never comes around me. I Garrett in 1881, after he had just simply don’t want any- etched his name in Western thing to do with him, and he lore by killing Billy the Kid. MARK LEE GARDNER COLLECTION

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PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS PHOTO ARCHIVES (NMHM/DCA) NO. 45559

knows it, and knows that he has nothing to fear from me as long as he does not interfere with me or my affairs.”

Once Garrett was elected sheriff of Lincoln County in November 1880, his business became Billy the Kid and his gang of stock rustlers. Why Garrett ran for sheriff and, more significant, why Roswell cattleman and business entrepreneur Joseph C. Lea handpicked the lanky former buffalo hunter for the job are unknown. But in hindsight, Lea’s assessment of Garrett as the right man to put a stop to New Mexico Territory’s most wily, if not most dangerous, outlaw was a stroke of genius. Smart, determined and brave, Garrett would take to the job as if born to it, quickly proving himself an unparalleled manhunter.

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arrett wasted no time in going after the Kid; he actually started his pursuit weeks before his official term as county sheriff began, having received appointments as a deputy sheriff and deputy U.S. marshal. In the midst of a memorably harsh winter, Garrett led posses all over eastern New Mexico Territory. Through sharp cunning, he ambushed the Kid and his pals at Fort Sumner, fatally wounding Billy’s close friend Tom Folliard when Folliard ignored Garrett’s command to throw up his hands and instead went for his gun. Billy and the rest of the gang escaped into the darkness. Four days later, in the early morning hours of December 23, Garrett and his posse tracked Billy and cohorts Charlie Bowdre, Dave Rudabaugh, Billy Wilson and Tom Pickett to an abandoned stone house northeast of

Fort Sumner at Stinking Spring (present-day Taiban).

Billy, who had helped gun down a former Lincoln County sheriff and deputy during the Lincoln County War, had let it be known he would never be taken alive, so Garrett instructed his men to shoot to kill if Billy appeared outside the house.

Unfortunately, Bowdre stepped through the door at first light wearing garb similar to Billy’s, and Garrett and his men let him have it. Bowdre lived only a few minutes. A siege of several hours ended when Billy and the gang surrendered after Garrett gave his word he would protect them from any lynch-happy New Mexicans.

Giving one’s word was no small thing to Garrett, and in one of the lawman’s finest moments, he and a handful of men stood off an angry mob at the Las Vegas, N.M., train station bent on lynching Rudabaugh for a previous murder. The armed crowd even had local law officers on its side, but Garrett made them back down, too. Garrett was so determined to keep his pledge that he told Billy and the others he would give them their guns if the mob attacked their Pullman.

Garrett and his men were able to get the train out of Las Vegas before it came to that, but if there was ever any question as to Garrett’s grit, that episode put it to rest.

A fact often overlooked when assessing Garrett’s career is that he had to hunt down the Kid not once, but twice. After a Mesilla court convicted Billy for the murder of Sheriff William Brady, it placed him in Garrett’s care to await the date of his hanging. But in what would become the most infamous

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jailbreak in Western history, Billy killed his two guards Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid and fled the town of Lincoln dead in the house of Pete while Garrett was in White Maxwell at Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881.

Oaks collecting county taxes.

Garrett bided his time for weeks until he received good information the Kid was hanging around Fort Sumner to be close to a sweetheart, Paulita Maxwell. Garrett then slipped out of Lincoln with two deputies, and on the moonlit night of July 14, 1881, he shot his man dead in the darkened bedroom of Pete Maxwell (Paulita’s brother), a scene that has been reenacted time and again in movies and on television—and one that has been the source of some controversy. Over the years various parties have questioned Garrett’s version of the shooting, some even making the bizarre claim that Billy didn’t really die that night.

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hat fateful face-to-face confrontation birthed an American legend and came to define Garrett, so much so that few today realize or care that Garrett lived another 26 years, each one filled with highs and lows—and not a one uninteresting. Contemporary newspapers contain numerous references to Garrett and his exploits post-Billy. In June 1882, for example, the Las Cruces Rio Grande Republican reported that Sheriff Garrett and posse trailed an Indian raiding party 90 miles in an effort to recover 21 head of stolen horses. After a “fearful storm” wiped out all tracks, and with their provisions exhausted, Garrett was forced to turn back, but he did recover six of the animals (one or two had been lanced). There would be more manhunts in Garrett’s future.

Garrett declined to run for a second term as Lincoln County sheriff in order to run for the territorial council. He lost the election, after which he devoted his energies to ranching near Fort Stanton. In 1884 Garrett returned to chasing rustlers for a living when the Texas governor commissioned him a captain of an independent ranger company, his salary to be paid by the panhandle’s larger cattle operations. At the time there was much tension between the big cattlemen and the small ranchers and cowboys. A recent gubernatorial proclamation prohibiting civilians from wearing six-shooters became a priority for Garrett, and according to his friend John Meadows, Texas “got Pat Garrett just in time to save another Lincoln County War, and Pat, he understood it, and he disarmed every doggone one of them.” Less than a year later Garrett quit the ranger business when it became apparent his cattlemen employers preferred he kill the worst rustlers rather than bring them to justice.

In the late 1880s Garrett masterminded and helped implement a plan to transform the Pecos Valley into a farmer’s paradise, with strategically placed dams, flumes and irrigation

canals. His own farm at his home near Roswell became one of the most valuable in the valley. Garrett also invested in several local business ventures: a Roswell hotel, blacksmith shop, livery stables in Roswell and Eddy (present day Carlsbad) and even a stage line. But Garrett was also running through a lot of money. When he and his partners were forced to bring in large capitalists to continue the irrigation project he had envisioned, Garrett, who could not match these substantial contributions, was forced out.

In 1890, when legislators carved Chaves County from Lincoln County, Garrett threw his hat in the ring to become the new county’s first sheriff. Because of his hard work and many investments in the Pecos Valley, he was an obvious front runner. But John W. Poe, Garrett’s former deputy and successor as Lincoln County sheriff, had fallen out with Garrett over a loan. Poe endorsed another candidate, which, along with something of a backlash over Garrett’s fame and popularity, cost Garrett the election. Disgusted, Garrett moved his family to Uvalde, Texas. It appeared his days as a lawman of any kind might be over.

At Uvalde, Garrett again invested in irrigation, but he devoted most of his time to breeding and racing blooded trotters. Garrett had always been a gambling man, which had contributed greatly to his financial troubles over the years, and he and his horses became well-known fixtures at racetracks from Albuquerque to New Orleans. Yet his winnings did not come close to reducing his growing debt.

Garrett’s fortunes took a turn for the better in February 1896, however, when New Mexico Territorial Governor William T. Thornton sent him an urgent communication.

Someone had murdered prominent Las Cruces attorney and politician Albert Jennings Fountain and his young son near New Mexico’s White Sands, and Thornton wanted the Southwest’s most famous manhunter put on the trail of the killers, who had disappeared, as had the bodies of their victims.

It was a triumphant return to New Mexico for Garrett, who soon secured the job of Doña Ana County sheriff. The leading suspects in the Fountain murders were rancher Oliver Lee and associates William McNew and Jim Gililland. Less than two weeks before his murder Fountain had obtained indictments against Lee and McNew for cattle theft and brand defacing. Garrett’s investigation took time, but in April 1898 he secured bench warrants in the murder case and promptly arrested McNew and another suspect.

Lee and Gililland, on the other hand, made themselves scarce, refusing to turn themselves in to the lawman. Lee was Garrett’s match in cunning and marksmanship, and at a nowfamous gun battle at Wildy Well, one of Lee’s satellite ranches in the Tularosa Basin, the two wanted men got the better of Garrett. From a commanding position on the roof of the 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 47

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Garrett On the Kid The controversy over a possible

posthumous pardon for Billy the Kid (ultimately denied by New Mexico’s governor in 2010) generated many negative comments about the Southwest’s most iconic outlaw. Writing for The New York Times, Blood and Thunder author Hampton Sides called Billy a “trigger-happy sociopath.” Kid specialist Bob Boze Bell referred to the young outlaw as a “little jerk” in a Wall Street Journal interview. But what was Pat Garrett’s take on the Kid? Garrett’s classic 1882 biography of Bonney is well known, but more candid observations appear in other sources.

A reporter for the Santa Fe Daily New Mexican interviewed Garrett six days after the lawman killed the Kid and asked if it was true the outlaw was “cowardly and never gave a man a chance.”

“No,” Garrett answered, “he was game. I saw him give a man [a chance] once. I have seen him tried. He would fight anyway. I’ve known him to turn loose in a crowd of Mexicans and get away with them. He would lick Mexicans that would weigh 25 or 50 pounds more than he did. He was quick as a flash.”

The reporter also wanted to know whether Billy was a good shot. “Yes,” Garrett said, “but he was no better than the majority of men who are constantly handling and using six-shooters. He shot well, though, and he shot well under all circumstances, whether in danger or not.” Garrett considered the Kid “as cool under trying circumstances as any man I ever saw.”

Miguel Antonio Otero, a former New Mexico Territory governor, claimed Garrett told him “many times” that the Kid was “one of the nicest little gentlemen I ever knew—kind and considerate, true and loyal to his friends, afraid of nothing on earth that walked on two legs or four.” This assessment seems rather dubious, especially coming from someone who, contrary to myth, was not a friend of the Kid’s. But the lawman provided another sympathetic view of the outlaw to a reporter in New York in 1902. “There were many good traits about Billy,” Garrett said. “He wasn’t what you’d call a killer. He never made a gunplay he didn’t mean, and he never shot up a town or committed any such foolishness. I’ve met worse men than Billy.”

M.L.G.

ranch house, Lee and Gililland pinned down Garrett and his After Garrett killed Billy the four deputies, mortally Kid, A.J. Fountain presented wounding one. When the Pat with this gold badge. shooting stopped, the fugitives agreed to let Garrett and his men retreat to a safe place, after which Lee and Gililland made their escape.

Garrett’s doggedness finally wore down the fugitives, however, who secretly arranged to turn themselves in to the district court judge in Las Cruces, thus bypassing the sheriff.

Their subsequent trial, in May and June 1899, received national press coverage and quickly turned into a battle between Republicans and Democrats, big cattleman and small ranchers. Garrett shined on the witness stand, but Lee and Gililland were acquitted, due in large part to their brilliant attorney and local power broker, Albert Bacon Fall. No one was ever convicted of the murders of Fountain and his son. Garrett chose not to run again for Doña Ana County sheriff, although he had conducted the sheriff ’s office better than any of his predecessors. He explained to a reporter in November 1900 that times had changed in the territory, and the sheriff ’s office no longer needed his “peculiar talents in the line of good marksmanship and quick action at the head of posses.”

A year later Garrett’s name was back in the national headlines when President Theodore Roosevelt chose Garrett for the post of El Paso customs collector. Roosevelt had appointed Garrett over the strong objections of Texas Republicans, who felt the plum job should go to a Texan—and one of their choosing, of course. But Garrett had a strong supporter in Lew Wallace, the former governor of New Mexico Territory, who visited the president to lobby for Garrett. Garrett later wrote his wife that Wallace had said, “He would do anything I asked him to do, says I did him a great favor once (in the ‘Kid’ affair), so he is anxious to express his gratitude.”

Garrett’s presidential appointment gave him a status and respectability he had not known as a county sheriff. Yet he retained his characteristic modesty. “Pat never talked about how many men he killed,” recalled one El Paso acquaintance, “and it was the hardest thing in the world to get him to tell the story about his killing of Billy the Kid.” Indeed, Garrett never went “Buffalo Bill.” He did produce a biography of Billy the Kid with friend and drinking companion Ash Upson, but Garrett saw that effort as his opportunity to answer falsehoods about his encounter with the Kid. And if he should make money on the venture (which he did not), there were nickel novel publishers back east profiting off of his exploits, none of whom had looked down the barrel of the Kid’s Colt.

Garrett was also known as a dandy dresser in his later years, but never in frontier garb. His writer friend Emerson Hough COURTESY OF RUIDOSO RIVER MUSEUM, N.M.

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once loaned Garrett a pair of souvenir Western leather gloves.

Hough had been pleased with the gloves’ embroidery and long leather fringe, but the next thing he knew, Garrett had cut the fringe off. “He was afraid of being thought Western,” Hough wrote, adding that Garrett “wore clothing which would have left him inconspicuous on Broadway.”

In fact, on a trip to New York City on customs business, Garrett had asked a policeman directions to his hotel when the policeman, looking Garrett up and down, cautioned him to hold on tight to his bag. “There’s lots of fellows in this town looking for marks like you,” the policeman said.

Cruces. Cowpoke Wayne Brazel admitted to shooting Garrett, but said he had done so in self-defense as the two argued over a lease. Brazel claimed Garrett had reached for a shotgun.

A witness, Carl Adamson, backed up Brazel’s story, but a Las Cruces doctor, after examining the crime scene and Garrett’s body, determined that Garrett had been shot in the back of the head while urinating beside the buggy in which Adamson and Garrett had been riding. Nevertheless, Brazel was later acquitted of murder. His attorney was none other than Albert Bacon Fall.

Garrett’s friends claimed he was the victim of a conspiracy, and to this day questions remain on the circumstances n El Paso, Garrett performed his job as customs collector of his death and whether Brazel was the actual triggerman. a little too well, causing complaints from those who Many believe that notorious killer Jim Miller was hired to thought they should have received some kind of break on assassinate Garrett. This is likely true. their duties. Others complained about his gambling, drinkOliver Lee Jr., in a long-sequestered interview from 1954, ing and absences from his post. What many believe finally claimed that his uncle, rancher W.W. Cox, had solicited Miller cost Garrett a reappointment, though, to do the deed. Cox was a neighbor (and occurred at an April 1905 Rough Riders a major creditor) of Garrett’s, and he was reunion in San Antonio. Garrett had said to be “deadly afraid” of him. But Lee brought along his good friend Tom Powers, also stated that someone else had beaten Pat Garrett’s owner of the Coney Island drinking and Miller to the job. friends claimed gambling establishment in El Paso, and he Garrett’s murderer, Lee claimed, was arranged to have a photograph taken of Brazel’s friend Print Rhode, a known he was the himself and Powers with the president. enemy of Garrett’s. Brazel took the blame, victim of a When Roosevelt later learned he had posed though, as Rhode had a family. Cox still conspiracy, and beside a professional gambler and saloon had to pay Miller, Lee added, to buy the owner, he was furious. Garrett traveled to assassin’s silence. No matter who killed questions still Washington, D.C., in an attempt to save his Garrett, it was a pitiful end for a Westerner linger about the position, but Roosevelt had made up his who Billy the Kid biographer Walter Noble mind. After a four-year stint Garrett was Burns called the “last great sheriff of the circumstances replaced with someone less controversial. old frontier.” of his death His collectorship gone, Garrett had litIn 1884 a Santa Fe newspaper predicted tle to rely upon for a steady income. His two Garrett would “ever be held in grateful small ranches in the San Augustin Mountains were hardly remembrance by the people of New Mexico for ridding the more than a hobby. Compounding difficulties was the fact territory of a gang which has so long held it in terror.”

Garrett could be generous to a fault. As one old-timer put it, Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Even within his own “Anybody ask for anything, they got it.” It might be a milk cow, lifetime Garrett began to see his popularity reversed with Billy cash money or a signature on a banknote. This trait, combined the Kid’s. Americans famously celebrate their outlaw heroes with his investments in get-rich-quick schemes and an while giving short shrift to the lawmen who risked their lives unabated passion for poker and horse racing, led to financial to bring those outlaws to justice. In 2010, however, Roswell woes. Garrett became notorious for not paying bills and for dedicated a bronze statue of Garrett by Texas sculptor Robert owing money to friends. There were also rumors that Garrett Summers. Incredibly, it is the first monument in New Mexico was spending money on an El Paso prostitute known only as to the man who, it can be argued, brought law and order to Mrs. Brown. the territory.

As Garrett struggled, he became bitter, angry, desperate and Right or wrong, Pat Garrett will always be the man who depressed. “Everything seems to go wrong with me,” he wrote shot Billy the Kid and thus is safe from the tragedy that befalls his friend Hough. many significant figures from our past who are forgotten with On February 29, 1908, Pat’s troubled life ended on a lonetime. The real tragedy of Garrett’s legacy is that he was so ly stretch of road in Alameda Arroyo, a few miles east of Las much more, and we have forgotten that. ✭

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Clay Allison The New Mexico Territory rancher with a killer instinct knew how to quickly settle all irreconcilable differences By J.S. Peters

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NEAR SUNDOWN ON NOVEMBER 1, 1875, on the edge of Cimarron, New Mexico Territory, Robert Clay Allison, who styled himself a “shootist,” suddenly met Francisco Pancho Griego, with whom he had irreconcilable differences. The startled Allison backed off cautiously, raising his left hand while keeping his right on his holstered six-shooter. “Pancho, you are better armed than I,” he said. “You have the best of me.”

Griego had not only a Colt and a Winchester but also a pair of armed compadres, his 18-year-old son Luis and Florencio Donaghue. But Griego didn’t start anything. The two protagonists exchanged a few words, then shook hands. Pancho agreed to join Clay for a drink to iron out their problems.

Leaving his rifle with Luis, Griego walked off with Allison toward Lambert’s saloon in the St. James Hotel in Cimarron.

The bar was empty. Proprietor Henri Lambert was working the kitchen and dining room. Hearing the men enter the barroom, Lambert served them, then returned to the kitchen.

What happened next is anybody’s guess. There was a pool table in the barroom. Perhaps Allison suggested a game of pool and then drew his six-shooter while Griego was fetching a cue stick.

In any case, Allison soon put three slugs in Griego and then left.

Lambert heard several shots, but when he re-entered the saloon, it appeared to be empty. Since business was slow on this Monday, he locked the front door against the darkening fall day, doused the lights and returned to the kitchen. Griego’s friends came to the door several times that evening in search of him. Lambert explained that Griego had left. It was not until he reopened the next morning that Lambert discovered Griego’s perforated body sprawled out on the floor.

Clay Allison caused, directly or indirectly, the deaths of seven men during his approximately eight-year residence in New Mexico Territory’s Colfax County. Francisco Griego had been number five. Although not known as a fast draw, Allison was feared because of his killer instinct. Since he was not shy about killing, he held Robert Clay Allison, who left a psychological edge over Tennessee for Texas after the most men. If nothing else, Civil War, poses in a bandage Allison was a survivor. in 1871 after accidentally Allison was born in shooting himself in the foot.

Clifton, Wayne County, Tenn., on September 2, 1841, the fourth of nine children. Six months after Fort Sumter, the three oldest Allison brothers—Jesse A., 22; Clay, 20; and Jeremiah Monroe, 17—enlisted in Company A of Captain J.W. Eldridge’s Light Artillery. Clay was given a medical discharge on January 15, 1862, in Bowling Green, Ky. Clay’s medical papers read: “I certify that I have carefully examined the said R.A.C. [sic] Allison of Elderidge’s [sic] company, and find him incapable of performing the duties of a soldier because of a blow received many years ago, producing no doubt a depression of the scull [sic], since which time, febrile, emotional or physical excitement produces paroxysmal of a mixed character, partly epileptic and partly maniacal. He is now suffering from such a paroxysm caused by an attack of pneumonia during which he manifests a great disposition toward suicide.”

That head injury has been used to explain Allison’s psychotic behavior when drinking—alcohol aggravating an old concussion, causing a biochemical disorder the equivalent of mixing gunpowder with matches.

On September 22, 1862, only about eight months after his medical discharge, Clay Allison re-enlisted. This time he joined the 9th Tennessee Cavalry, and he remained with them until the war’s end. The horse outfit apparently agreed with him, for he suffered no further medical complications. On May 4, 1865, Allison surrendered with his company at Gainesville, Ala. By then, he was probably sporting the Vandyke beard he wore the rest of his life in imitation of his old boss, flamboyant cavalry commander General Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Upon his return to civilian life, Allison became a member of the local Ku Klux Klan and was involved in several confrontations before he left Tennessee for Texas. Upon arriving in Texas, he reportedly won a knife duel with ferryman Zack Colbert at the Red River crossing. Benjamin Franklin Colbert was the proprietor-ferryman of the crossing, Colbert’s Ferry, until he sold his business in 1883. There was a Zack Colbert, a relative who may have worked for him, but the Zack-Clay incident may never have happened. Like many of Allison’s deeds, this duel is difficult, if not impossible, to validate.

Allison eventually made his way to the Texas Panhandle as a cowhand, and he brought enough attention to himself along

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the Washita River to earn the title “Wolf of the Washita.” In the late 1860s he helped Irwin Lacy and Lewis Coleman bring their cattle to New Mexico Territory’s Colfax County, where he started a ranch at the junction of the Vermijo and Canadian rivers, nine miles north of today’s Springer. He began his herd with cows he had earned as a foreman; he used the boxedcircle brand. Shortly after 1870, and probably at his request, he was joined at the ranch by younger brothers Monroe, 26, and John William, 16, and a younger sister, 24-year-old Saluda Mariah. In time, Lewis Coleman and Saluda would marry.

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eing a rancher didn’t mean Clay Allison stopped being dangerous, especially when drinking. After a spree in a local saloon, Allison scared off a man named Wilson, pinned county clerk John Lee’s sleeve to a wall with a knife and also used a knife to scare off young lawyer Melvin W. Mills.

Mills went to get his gun so he could kill Allison in self defense, but Mills lost his nerve and fled. Allison told a doctor acquaintance that he had nothing against Mills or Lee but wanted Wilson’s ear. Allison then rode off in a vain search for Wilson.

In the winter of 1870 in Elizabethtown, 35 miles northwest of Cimarron, Allison supposedly led a lynching party. James Kennedy, a 32-year-old carpenter from Tennessee, was suspected of killing and robbing overnight guests in his isolated cabin on Palo Fletchado Pass. After a trial resulted in a hung jury, Kennedy was temporarily chained in a butcher shop.

Fearing the carpenter’s release, Clay and a few others broke into the shop and hanged him from a beam.

On April 30, 1871, Allison and two others stole 12 government mules belonging to the new commander of Fort Union, General Gordon Granger. In the fall, Allison tried the same stunt again, but everything went awry and he accidentally shot himself in the foot. The permanent limp that resulted failed to improve Clay’s disposition.

John “Chunk” Colbert, a gunman wanted for murder, might have been the first victim of Allison’s Colt. On January 7, 1874, in Otero, New Mexico Territory, 12 miles below the Colorado line, Allison and Chunk Colbert were out carousing all day. They decided to have some canned oysters, which they took to a house to have cooked. While eating, Chunk reportedly drew and fired a shot at Clay, but the barrel of his gun hit the edge of the table, spoiling his aim. Clay then put a bullet into the gunman’s head, making it Colbert’s last supper.

It has been said that Chunk was a nephew of Zack Colbert of Colbert’s Ferry and had been out for revenge. Charles Cooper, an acquaintance of Chunk’s, had been present at the shooting but disappeared shortly thereafter. Allison is also usually credited with disposing of Cooper.

At about the time Clay Allison established his ranch in Colfax County, a change in the ownership of the enormous

Maxwell Land Grant occurred. Owner Lucian B. Maxwell had inherited, bought and acquired by quitclaim parcels of the acreage until, by 1870, he owned it all. Living in a gigantic hacienta on the banks of the Cimarron River, Maxwell thrived as overseer of an idyllic feudal domain. He collected rent— mostly in the form of vegetables, fruits and stock—from the farmers, settlers and squatters on his land. But after the post– Civil War population burst, the discovery of gold, and the boundary questions raised by an 1869 government survey, he wisely sold to a group of speculators in April 1870.

The first move made by the new owners—calling themselves the Maxwell Land Grant and Railroad Company—was to have their own surveyors solidify the grant’s lines.

Although legally limited to 97,658 acres, the property was expanded nearly 18 times, to 1,714,764.094 acres. The owners next began their eviction process, with almost every squatter, settler, farmer and small rancher now a persona non grata. But for some time the miners and settlers refused to pay rent, and the squatters refused to leave. Anti-grant organizations were formed.

The power behind the grant was the so-called Santa Fe Ring, a collection of politicians and financiers based mainly in the capital. To them the territory was a huge plum ripe for picking, and the Maxwell Grant turned out to be a cormorant’s paradise for the ambitious network. The Santa Fe Ring’s two prime movers were attorney Thomas Benton Catron and his law partner Stephen Benton Elkins, later a senator. Catron himself came to own the entire Tierra Amarilla Grant of almost 30 square miles.

The Santa Feans had to fight the Colfax Ring. Since the Maxwell Grant was in their county, the Colfax Ring members felt the grant rightfully belonged to them and did not take kindly to “outsiders” sticking a finger in their pie. The two rings were like a pair of investment developers battling each other for control of a choice piece of real estate.

In the beginning, Allison may have leaned toward supporting squatters and small ranchers, but somewhere along the way he hired himself out to the Santa Fe Ring as an intimidator. As the head of a gang, he was to “encourage” obstinate individuals to either settle with the grant or leave, and leaving was preferable. It was undoubtedly Allison’s most imprudent, if not shameless, action.

On September 16, 1875, Methodist minister Franklin Tolby was found shot to death in Cimarron Canyon, midway between Elizabethtown and Cimarron. His body had lain there since the 14th. The 33-year-old Tolby, a vociferous critic of the Santa Fe Ring, had sent a series of letters to the New York Sun exposing the group’s corrupt methods. The Santa Fe Ring was believed by many to be behind Tolby’s death, and Clay Allison was thought by some to be the murderer,

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even though he had been Tolby’s friend. bar and performed a war dance over the spot where he had Tolby’s 34-year-old Methodist friend, the Rev. Oscar shot Griego. Attorney Frank Springer said that Allison, after Patrick McMains, offered a reward for Tolby’s killer. Suspicion stripping naked, busied himself “dancing around with a ribfell on Cruz Vega, a mail carrier who had made the run from bon tied to his penis.”

Elizabethtown the same day Tolby was killed. Along the way, About this time, Manuel Cardenas was arrested and quesVega had been joined by his cousin Manuel Cardenas. tioned in Elizabethtown. He claimed that Vega had shot the McMains wanted to question one of them, believing they at minister, adding that Santa Fe Ringers Mills and Dr. Robert least must have seen something. The pastor turned to Allison Longwill were the men behind Griego and Donaghue. Mills for help, so obviously he was not one of those people who susbarely escaped a furious lynch crowd in Cimarron as he alightpected Clay. Allison was more than ready to play judge on ed from a coach, while Longwill fled in a buggy to Fort Union horseback. Perhaps he hoped to dispel the false rumors about and safety just ahead of pursuers Clay and John Allison and his involvement with Tolby’s murder. deputy Pete Burleson. Donaghue was arrested and jailed.

On Sunday, October 31, a group of drunken, kerchiefAt court in Cimarron on November 10, the charges against masked men led by Allison and McMains pummeled Vega and Allison for shooting Griego were dropped, as it was ruled yanked him repeatedly up and down a telegraph pole by the justifiable homicide. Cardenas, during his protracted hearing, neck. McMains, undone by the violence, retracted his earlier accusations against fled midway through the session, but in the Mills and Longwill, thus clearing the two end Vega confessed that Cardenas had shot men. Furthermore, he stated that in Tolby and that they had been hired by their Elizabethtown he had been coerced at gunWhen Constable uncle Francisco Griego and mail contracpoint into implicating the two. Mills was Charles Faber tor Florencio Donaghue. Allison and assoreleased for lack of evidence, while ciates then dragged Vega feet-first behind Cardenas and Donaghue were ordered shot John Allison, a horse for a time before putting a bullet held. Court adjourned near 10 p.m., and Clay automatically into him. as Cardenas was being escorted to jail, he drew his revolver was shot to death from ambush. This last shooting so enraged the Mexican populan Monday morning, November 1, and nailed Faber tion that they were said to have sought Griego and a friend transported with a fatal shot Allison’s scalp. Armed Mexican bands Vega’s boxed remains to the roamed the streets. The atmosphere was Cimarron cemetery. Clay Allison rode up so inflammatory that Sheriff Orson K. with his cowboys and informed Griego Chittenden and Deputy Burleson hid Clay for a time at the that Vega was not to be buried in the same cemetery as his Chittenden ranch, 20 miles south of Springer. victim. Angry but helpless, Griego and the mourners left and The truth about Tolby’s murder seems to be that the minthen began preparing for a burial outside the graveyard. ister had the misfortune of having witnessed Griego shoot a Allison dogged them, delivering further instructions that man in an argument. The man later died, and Tolby was planVega was not to be interred within city limits. The burial ning to seek an indictment. Griego then set up Tolby’s murparty shuffled off again with the coffin, and Vega was finally der to silence him. The Santa Fe Ring was dragged into it after put to rest about a half-mile west of the St. James Hotel.

Cardenas was “questioned” at gunpoint in Elizabethtown by Near sundown, the humiliated Griego consented to have Joseph Herberger. During the elections earlier in 1875, a drink in Lambert’s saloon with the gringo terror, Clay Herberger had been promised a political position by Ring men Allison. Perhaps Griego really believed that talk might make Mills and Longwill. When the two had failed to follow through, things better. That, of course, proved to be a big mistake that the revenge-minded Herberger had forced Cardenas to impliGriego would not live to regret. At about noon the followcate them. But who shot Cardenas? After Cardenas retracted ing day, Allison and his gang thundered into Cimarron his charge against the Ring men, perhaps Herberger, bent on spreading general chaos and bedlam. Then on Thursday exacting vengeance, did the dirty deed. afternoon, November 4, Allison and associates returned to Since December 1874, Frank Springer, railroad engineer hold the town at bay. They capped their visitation with a brief William Morley and Will Dawson had been publishing the tour of the anti–Santa Fe Ring News and Press, where they News and Press as a promotional instrument of the Colfax Ring menaced editor-printer Will D. Dawson, punching his hands while denouncing the rival Santa Fe Ring. Hence, the publiwith the muzzle of a rifle and brandishing a knife at him. cation became an assigned target for Allison, who began Returning on Friday night, the 5th, Clay took over Lambert’s

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J.S. PETERS

it was noted that “three of the Allison brothers moved in on the Gageby.” John and Monroe may have joined Clay at a homestead along Gageby Creek, although John and Monroe continued to use their Colfax County ranch for several years.

On February 15, 1881, 39-year-old Clay married young Dora McCullough, John’s sister-in-law, in Mobeetie, Wheeler County, Texas. Two months later, on April 27, John Allison’s second daughter was born in Texas. In 1882, in Wheeler County, John registered 101 as his brand, a variation of Clay’s old boxed-circle brand in Colfax County.

Clay Allison, for some reason, sold his property along the Gageby in October 1883 and then moved with his family to the Seven Rivers region in southern New Mexico Territory.

Clay continued ranching there. On August 9, 1885, Clay and Dora’s first child, Patti Dora, was born in Cimarron. In about 1886, the couple moved again, this time to Pecos, Texas, 50 miles south of the New Mexico line.

On the afternoon of July 3, 1887, cowboy John Coalson was riding about 10 miles north of Pecos when he came upon a loaded but driverless wagon drawn by a pair of horses.

Recognizing the team as Clay’s, he halted them and tied his mount to the tailgate. Coalson then proceeded afoot, backtracking the wagon’s route. After about three miles, he came to a deep draw that the road dipped into, and on the near

upslope he discovered the body of 45-year-old Robert Clay Allison. Allison’s neck was broken.

It appeared that Clay had approached the draw at too fast a clip. Whether the horses had spooked or Allison had been careless will never be known. It was thought he had tried to stomp on the brake lever, which was to his right, but was either too late or was failed by his right foot, crippled and weak from his old wound. Unable to stop in time, he had been flung from the wagon and instantly killed. Coalson returned the body to Pecos, where Allison was buried the next day. Dora was left with two daughters, Patti Dora, 2, and Clay Pearl, the latter born seven months after her father’s death.

The following month, on August 5, 1887, Monroe Allison died of a heart attack at his Gageby Creek ranch. The 43-yearold bachelor was found next to his horse. John Allison, after a brief and painful illness, died in Clifton, Tenn., on January 7, 1898, leaving a wife and four daughters. He was not quite 44.

As to the fate of the Maxwell Land Grant, its bloated boundaries were approved by the U.S. Supreme Court in April 1887; lawyer Frank Springer had argued the case successfully. There would be more litigations, shootings and riots in the years that followed, but the anti–land grant minister Oscar McMains died in 1898, and in the summer of 1900 the last holdouts on the property were finally evicted from the Colorado portion. ✭ 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 55

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Doc Holliday

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A Southern boy named John Henry became a dentist, went West for his health and was soon transformed into a legendary killer… but just how deadly was the ‘Deadly Dentist’? By Ben T. Trawick

“ALTHOUGH HE SOMETIMES DRANK THREE quarts of whiskey a day, he was the most skillful gambler, and the nerviest, fastest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever saw.” It is doubtful that even Doc Holliday drank three quarts of whiskey a day, and he didn’t kill many men with his six-gun, but that was the tribute paid to Doc by Wyatt Earp, who was his friend and something of a tough character himself.

Much has been written about Holliday, and in most accounts, inaccuracies abound. One writer said Holliday won “more than thirty duels to the death.” More than one historian has written that Doc killed 16 men. Many Holliday stories are sensational tales that won’t hold up to investigation. Still, the true story of John Henry Holliday’s short life is an exciting one.

John Henry was born in Griffin, Ga., on August 14, 1851, to Henry Burroughs Holliday and Alice Jane Holliday. The Hollidays’ first child, Martha Eleanora, had died on June 12, 1850, at 6 months, 9 days. According to church records, “John Henry, infant son of Henry B. and Alice J. Holliday, received the ordinance of baptism on Sunday, March 21, 1852, at the First Presbyterian Church in Griffin.” John Henry’s mother was a Southern beauty, and his father was a druggist, planter and soldier. Henry Holliday volunteered to fight Indians in Georgia in 1838, Mexicans in 1846 and Yankees in 1861. He rose to the rank of major during the Civil War, but sickness caused him to resign his commission in 1862. Two years later he moved his family to Valdosta, Ga., when he realized that his old home was in the path of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea.” Holliday quickly became one of Valdosta’s leading citizens, and in 1876, was elected mayor.

Alice Holliday died on September 16, 1866, after a long illness. Her death was a terrible blow to 15-year-old John Henry.

It did not help that his father married Rachel Martin, who was only a few years older than John Henry, three months later.

John Henry enrolled in dental college in 1870 and two years later, at the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery’s 16th annual commencement, he received a “Degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery.” He first practiced his profession in Atlanta, where he soon learned he had tuberculosis. Several doctors predicted a short future for him, but they did say that he would do better in a dry climate. So Holliday packed

up and headed west. His first stop was in Dallas, Texas. A listing in the 1873 Dallas business directory reads: “Holliday, J.H. (Seegar & Holliday) Elm between Market and Austin Streets.”

John Seegar, also from Georgia and a friend of Henry Burroughs Holliday, helped John Henry get established and then made him a partner. On March 2, 1874, the Dallas Daily Commercial reported:“Upon mutual consent the firm of Seegar and Holliday have dissolved.” Holliday practiced dentistry at another location for a while but was bothered at inopportune times by coughing spells and also found out that he could better support himself by gambling.

To protect his frail self he practiced with a gun and knife and soon developed a reputation as a man who could handle weapons, as well as cards and liquor. According to legend, Holliday was said to have killed one or more black youths in a dispute back in Valdosta, but in truth he had only fired over their heads. Through the years, many writers and newspaper reporters have had Holliday killing men he never met, in places he never was; killing men that were actually killed by someone else; and killing men that were not killed at all.

In Dallas, on January 2, 1875, Holliday and a local saloonkeeper named Austin had a disagreement that led to an exchange of six-gun fire. Neither man was hit. Holliday supposedly fled Dallas after killing a prominent citizens, but there is no newspaper account or court record supporting that tale.

That June, Holliday was indicted by a grand jury for “gaming in a saloon” in Fort Griffin, Texas. By the time he had reached Jacksboro, Texas, in 1876, he was known as the “Deadly Dentist,” thanks in large part to his own tales. In Jacksboro he supposedly enhanced his reputation with three fights. His alleged tally, accepted as gospel by some writers, was one gambler dead, two gamblers wounded and one 6th Cavalryman dead. No newspaper accounts, court records or Army records mention any such occurrences.

Arriving in Denver in the winter of 1876, Holliday Doc Holliday was a dentist who assumed the name “Tom sometimes used a six-shooter instead of a drill, as seen in Mackey,” which sounds the Derek Rush’s 1997 coloredsame as his mother’s maiden pencil drawing Doc’s Business.

DEREK RUSH, RANDOLPH, MASS.

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Great story, but it didn’t happen quite that way. Holliday had been arrested again for “illegal gaming,” not for killing Ed Bailey. Also, he was not locked in jail, as the town had no jail at that time. Holliday was being held in a hotel room under guard. Kate actually did set fire to a shed behind the hotel as a diversion and did free Doc. In Dodge City, the couple registered at Deacon Cox’s boardinghouse as Dr. and Mrs. John H. Holliday. The “Queen of the Cow Towns” had no dentist, so Doc hung out his shingle once more in 1878. An ad in the local paper read: “John H. Holliday, Dentist, very respectfully offers his professional services to the citizens of Dodge City and surrounding county during the Summer. Office at Room No. 24 Dodge House. Where satisfaction is not given, money will be refunded.”

Big Nose Kate soon made a spectacle of herself in the saloons and angered Doc by using the name Mrs. John H. Holliday. Doc lost his desire to practice dentistry and down came his shingle. Kate eventually took off for parts unknown, and Doc, feeling free and easy, headed for H.A.W. Tabor’s new town, Leadville, in Colorado Territory.

A story is also told about how Holliday saved Wyatt Earp’s life in Dodge City in 1878 when Wyatt was confronted by more than 25 Texas cowhands.One report said that 50 revolvers were picked up from the street, which suggests that virtually every one of the Texans was a two-gun man. The Dodge City newspapers did not report any such incident, and

ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

name—Mckey. There, according to legend, he was drawn into a fight with local bully Budd Ryan. In this imaginary altercation, Ryan drew a gun, but never pulled the trigger, because Holliday pulled his knife and slashed Ryan’s throat. There was a slashing in Denver, but it was much later, Ryan was the “slasher” and Holliday wasn’t even involved.

After leaving Denver, Holliday briefly went to Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, where he supposedly killed three unidentified men. There is no evidence. In the early fall of 1877, Holliday was back in Fort Griffin. In November, Wyatt Earp rode into the “Flat” (the civilian settlement near the fort) on the trail of outlaw Dave Rudabaugh. Holliday found out where Rudabaugh was and informed Earp of his whereabouts—near Fort Davis. Holliday and Earp thus became friends—a friendship that would last all of Doc’s life.

Holliday’s “killer legend” also has him claiming another victim at about this time. The story goes that in a poker dispute, he killed gambler Ed Bailey before Bailey could get off a shot.

After Holliday was jailed, he then supposedly was “saved” by Big Nose Kate, who was christened Mary Katharine Harony in her native Hungary. The dance hall girl and sometime prostitute had met Doc while he was dealing cards in John Shanssey’s saloon. With a mob engaged in lynch talk outside the jail, Kate supposedly set a barn fire to distract the men before freeing her man by brandishing two six-shooters at the terrified jailer. With horses ready, she and Holliday rode off to Dodge City, Kan.

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there is no record of any large number of cowboys being arrested at one time. More likely, Earp was arresting three cowboys, one of whom was trying to pull an out-of-sight pistol on Wyatt, when Holliday jumped up from a nearby poker table and stopped the man. In any case, Earp always said that Holliday had saved his hide that day.

On his way to Colorado Territory, Holliday is said to have become involved in an argument with two gamblers—an argument that he won by killing both men. And once in Trinidad, Colorado Territory, he supposedly shot down an elusive gunman named Kid Colton. But, once again, no newspaper account or court record has surfaced that makes any mention of those two incidents. And on his way to Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, in 1879, Holliday, according to legend, killed a man at the railraod construction camp of Otero. There is no proof. Many accounts make much over Holliday’s killing a man named Mike Gordon on July 20, 1879, in Las Vegas, but a coroner’s inquest ruled that the fatal gunshot was “inflicted by some person unknown to that jury.”

Another alleged Las Vegas victim of the Deadly Dentist was Charley White. Holliday had run White, a bartender, out of Dodge and told him that if he ever saw him again, he would kill him. Well, Holliday saw White again, tending bar in the Plaza Hotel saloon in Las Vegas’ Old Town. If they did fight, neither man scored a hit. Doc Holliday, the dangerous coldblooded killer, still had not killed anyone yet.

Holliday left Las Vegas for Arizona Territory in the fall of 1879. In Prescott, he had The Oriental Saloon in Arizona a fantastic run of luck at the Territory’s Tombstone was poker tables. Big Nose Kate where Holliday had a nasty joined him and under those fight with the saloon owner, Milt Joyce, in October 1880. circumstances, they got along just fine. When they finally left for Tombstone sometime after June 3, 1880, Holliday’s pockets were full of Prescott gamblers’ money. In Tombstone, Holliday found living quarters for Kate and himself between a funeral parlor and the Soma Winery, on the north side of Allen Street at Sixth Street. His friend Wyatt Earp had arrived in the boomtown the previous December.

The so-called Cowboy faction had had things its way in Tombstone for some time. The Cowboys resented the presence of the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday—men who weren’t afraid to stand up to them. Newton Haynes (“Old Man”) Clanton, his sons Phin, Ike and Billy; the McLaury brothers, Frank and Tom; Curly Bill Brocius; John Ringo; and other Cowboys lost no time in expressing their displeasure. Cochise County Sheriff John Behan usually saw things their way.

In October 1880, Holliday and a trouble-making gambler named Johnny Tyler had a dispute in the Oriental Saloon.

Holliday challenged Tyler to fight where they stood, but Tyler wasn’t eager to face Doc, so he turned and ran. Oriental owner Milt Joyce, who did not like Holliday or the Earps, continued the argument with Doc. Joyce had Holliday put out of the saloon, but he soon came back, revolver in hand. Holliday fired several shots, hitting Joyce in the thumb and Joyce’s partner in the big toe. Joyce fired one shot that missed, then hit Doc over the head with his revolver. Officer James Bennett then appeared on the scene and separated the men. Holliday appeared in court on October 12, 1880, and ended up paying a fine of $20 and costs of $11.25 for assault and battery Doc and Kate, both of whom could be abusive when drinking, had a falling out soon after, and he booted her out. After a stage robbery attempt (and the killing of the driver and a passenger) near Contention City on March 15, 1881, the Cowboy faction accused Doc of being one of the holdup men. Angry and drunk Kate, encouraged by Sheriff John Behan and county supervisor Milt Joyce (also the Oriental owner), signed an affidavit implicating Holliday in the attempted holdup and two murders. Justice Wells Spicer issued a warrant for Holliday’s arrest, but Kate sobered up and said she didn’t mean to sign such a paper. Witnesses to Holliday’s whereabouts at the time of the robbery and Kate’s new stand exposed the Cowboy plot, and Holliday was released. The district attorney labeled the charges “ridiculous” and threw them out. Doc gave Kate some money and put her on a stage leaving town. As far as he was concerned, his debt to her, which he had carried since she “saved him” in Fort Griffin, was paid in full. , arly the morning of August 13, 1881, near where the territories of New Mexico and Arizona meet, Old Man Clanton was driving a herd of cattle to the Tombstone market with Dixie Lee Gray, Billy Lang, Bud Snow, Billy Beyers, Harry Ernshaw and Jim Crane. Crane was one of the four men who had attempted to rob the stage near Contention City five months earlier. The other three men who had been involved were Harry Head, Billy Leonard and Luther King. King had escaped Sheriff Behan’s jail. Head and Leonard had been killed by brothers Ike and Bill Haslett in New Mexico Territory. Riflemen ambused the Clanton’s party, killing Clanton, Lang, Gray, Crane and Snow and wounding Beyers and Ernshaw. The attackers were said to be Mexicans. Several historians suggest that an Earp federal posse that included Holliday was also involved in the deaths.

Tombstone was more divided than ever with the Cowboys on one side and the Earps and Holliday on the other. Cowboys threatened to kill Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan and Doc if they did not get out of town. But running was not Holliday’s or the Earps’ style. On the night of October 25, 1881, Ike Clanton and Holliday drank heavily and then began hurling obscenities at each

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other. Doc finally ended the cursing match by inviting Ike to back to the Oriental, where brother Wyatt was playing poker. use his gun. Clanton claimed that he was unarmed, so HolliThe men responsible for the attack on Virgil were Ike day told him to go get heeled. Then, to goad him ever further, Clanton, John Ringo, Frank Stilwell, Hank Swilling, Pete he told Ike that his big mouth had caused his old man to be Spencer and Johnny Barnes. Some of the men were arrested killed and that he (Holliday) had had the pleasure of pulling the and brought into court. A number of Cowboy witnesses swore trigger. Furthermore, he would take much enjoyment in doing that those charged with the crime were in Charleston at the the same to Ike! time that Virgil was shot. The judge had no alternative but In shock, Ike Clanton left and went to the Grand Hotel. to release the defendants.

Holliday went to his room at Fly’s Boardinghouse. The next On January 17, 1882, Ringo confronted Holliday. Many writday, the 26th, Ike appeared at Fly’s, looking for Holliday. The ers would have us believe that Ringo challenged all the Earps, doctor wasn’t in. Big Nose Kate was visiting Doc at the time, too. Not true. Morgan and Virgil were still incapacitated with and Mrs. Fly told her that Clanton had been there trying to painful wounds and were not yet out and about. Wyatt was find Holliday. When Kate informed Doc of this, he replied, “If present, but Ringo was not running much of a risk as there God will let me live long enough, he will see me!” was little chance that his challenge would be accepted. Wyatt Shortly afterward, word was conveyed to the Earps that the knew that Ringo had been drinking heavily and that the Cowboys were gathered in the wagon lot next to Fly’s Photo whiskey was talking. Besides, Wyatt already had troubles Gallery and were wearing guns in violation of city law. enough in the aftermath of the October gunfight. Holliday, Holliday met the Earps near Hafford’s though, was quite eager to accommodate Saloon, at the corner of Allen and Fourth Ringo in any kind of fight he wanted. James streets, and demanded that he be allowed Flynn, the acting marshal, grabbed Ringo to join them in their little walk. Five men and held him while Wyatt hustled the strugHolliday met lay in wait just down Fremont—Ike and gling Holliday away. That was the extent of the Earps near Billy Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, the confrontation. and Billy Claibourne.

On March 18, 1882, assassins struck Hafford’s Saloon, When the Earps and Holliday confrontagain. Morgan Earp was playing pool with and demanded ed four Cowboys (Claibourne fled before Bob Hatch at Cambell and Hatch’s Saloon that he be the shooting) in that narrow, 15-foot space and Billiard Parlor on Allen Street when a between Fly’s and the Harwood house, guns shot, fired from the darkness of fired from allowed to join flamed and roared for less than half a the darkness of the alley, struck him in the them in their minute, then ceased abruptly. Plenty of back and snuffed out his life. When Doc damage was done in that short time. The Holliday learned of Morgan’s murder, he little walk McLaurys and Billy Clanton were dead, and vowed to kill all the men responsible. In a Morgan and Virgil Earp were wounded. wild rage, he went through the town, kickHolliday killed Tom McLaury and fired one of the bullets that ing in doors, searching for the men he suspected. Had he struck Frank McLaury; he may have hit Billy Clanton as well. found them that night, there would have been several more Three days later, Ike Clanton, who had run away when the bodies requiring the undertaker’s attention. Wyatt Earp, of shooting started, filed a complaint. Wyatt Earp and Doc course, was none too pleased, either. He had seen Virgil shot Holliday were arrested, and hearings were held in Justice Wells and crippled for life and the ambushers go free. And now, Spicer’s court from November 2 to November 29. When Spicer Wyatt knew the law would do nothing again. had heard all the testimony, he concluded “ that the defenA coroner’s jury ruled the next day that Morgan’s murderdants were fully justified in committing these homicides, that ers were Frank Stilwell, Pete Spence (also known as Spencer), it was a necessary act done in the discharge of official duty.”

Joe Doe Freis (real name Frederick Bode), John Ringo, Indian Retaliation from the Cowboy faction for the so-called Charley and another Indian, name unknown. Consumed with Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was sure to come, and it did. Near hatred and frustration, Wyatt wanted revenge. Someone had midnight on December 28, 1881, Virgil Earp, on his way from to pay for Virgil’s crippling and Morgan’s death. Then Stilwell the Oriental Saloon to the Crystal Palace, was ambushed by boasted that he had fired the shot that killed Morgan. He might three men with shotguns. Two out of the five shots fired struck as well have written his own death sentence. Either Wyatt, Virgil, one shattering his left arm, the other entering his left Holliday or both would certainly come for him before long. side and back. These wounds crippled Virgil for the rest of Morgan’s body was embalmed, dressed in a blue suit his life. Virgil’s wounds were serious, but he was able to walk belonging to Doc Holliday and laid out for viewing in the 60 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS

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WEIDER HISTORY GROUP ARCHIVE

Holliday died at this hotel in Glenwood Springs, Colo. He had hoped the nearby hot springs would help heal him.

Cosmopolitan Hotel. The funeral cortege started away from the hotel with the fire bell tolling out its solemn peals of “Earth to earth, dust to dust.” Morgan was sent to his parents home in Colton, Calif., for burial. Morgan’s wife, along with Virgil and his wife, went also. Wyatt and Warren Earp, Doc Holliday, Sherman McMasters, Turkey Creek Jack Johnson and Texas Jack Vermillion went along to provide protection all the way to Tucson.

The Earp party encountered Stilwell at the railroad station in Tucson on March 20. Wyatt chased him down the track and filled him full of holes. Holliday shot him twice more for good measure, even though Stilwell was already dead. A Tucson coroner’s jury named Wyatt and Warren Earp, Holliday, Texas Jack and McMasters as the men who had killed Stilwell. The Tucson Weekly Citizen of March 28, 1882, noted: “Frank Stilwell was buried this afternoon, the coffin being conveyed to the grave in an express wagon, unfollowed by a single mourner.”

The killing of Stilwell was only the beginning of Wyatt Earp’s bloody trail of vengeance, and Doc Holliday rode along all the way. When they learned that Pete Spencer was at his wood camp at South Pass in the Dragoon Mountains, Earp, Holliday and the rest of the “federal posse” rode there on March 22, 1882. They did not find Spencer, but they came upon Florentino Cruz. When Cruz fled, the posse shot him to pieces. Two days later, the Earp party was riding along a deep wash near Iron Springs when Curly Bill Brocius and eight of his men opened fire on them. Wyatt Earp slid down from his horse and killed Curly Bill with a blast from a double-barrel shotgun. Johnny Barnes, who had been one of Virgil’s ambushers, was badly wounded in the Iron Springs

fight and never recovered.

By May 1882, the two Earps and Holliday were in Colorado—the Earps in Gunnison and Doc in Denver.

Arizona Territory made an attempt to extradite Holliday from Colorado. Sheriff Behan and his Cowboy cronies would have been overjoyed to have had Doc delivered to them unarmed and handcuffed. Colorado Governor Frederick Pitkin, however, decided that he could not honor the request from Arizona Territorial Governor Fred Tritle.

In Arizona Territory on July 14, 1882, a teamster named John Yoast, bound for Morse’s sawmill, discovered a dead man in West Turkey Creek Canyon, east of the Dragoon Mountains. The body was sitting in the intertwined limbs of oak trees. A bullet had entered the right temple and exited through the top of the head. The dead man was one of the more famous Cowboys—John Ringo. Yoast notified the sheriff of his grisly find. A suicide, it was suggested by some members of a coroner’s jury, but others disagreed. Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday or both, some historians contend, had returned to Arizona Territory to kill Ringo.

In ay case, Holliday was in Leadville, Colo., on the afternoon of August 19, 1884, when he had a confrontation with old enemy Billy Allen in Hyman’s Saloon. Holliday shot Allen in the right arm and then fired again while Allen was on the floor screaming. The second bullet missed Allen’s head by a hairbreadth. Doc tried to shoot one more time but bystanders disarmed him. Holliday was arrested and tried for shooting Allen, but on March 28, 1885, a jury found him not guilty.

In May 1887, Holliday went to Glenwood Spring, Colo., to try the sulphur vapors, since his health was worsening. He stayed at the Hotel Glenwood and hoped to be “healed” by the Yampah Hot Springs. Nothing could be done for him; his tuberculosis was more relentless than any human enemy. He spent his last 57 days in bed and was delirious for 14 of them.

On November 8, 1887, John Henry “Doc” Holliday awoke, clear-eyed, and asked for a glass of whiskey. It was given to him, and he drank it down with obvious enjoyment. Then he said, “This is funny,” and died. ✭ 10 GREAT GUNFIGHTERS 61

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Kid Curry Harvey Logan, alias Kid Curry, participated in at least seven robberies and, unlike Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, killed with a coldblooded vengeance By Donna B. Ernst

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THE PINKERTON DETECTIVE AGENCY KNEW just how dangerous he could be. Near the bottom of a 1903 wanted poster issued by the agency, it says, “Officers attempting to arrest Logan are warned that he always carries firearms and will not hesitate to use them.” Harvey Logan, alias Kid Curry or Harvey Curry, was the most violent member of the loosely knit criminal band known as the Wild Bunch. He was involved in more robberies and killings than any other outlaw of his time. The Pinkertons considered him “one of the most remarkable criminals of modern time.” He was called evil, treacherous and a coldblooded murderer. His friends, though, claimed that he was a good cowboy who became a wanted man through many injustices and unfortunate circumstances.

Harvey Alexander Logan was born in 1867 in Tama County, Iowa, just northeast of Des Moines to William A. and Eliza J. Logan, the third of six children. His siblings were James W. (born in 1860), Denver Henry “Hank” (1862), Arda A. “Allie” (1868), John A. (1870) and Lorango “Lonnie” Dow (1872). Harvey was in his teens when his father died and the family moved to Dodson, Mo., just outside Kansas City, to live with his aunt and uncle, Lizzie and Hiram Lee. Not long after that, his mother died, too, and he and three of his brothers decided to stake their future farther west. By 1886 Harvey and all his brothers except James were homesteading a Rock Creek horse ranch just south of the Landusky mining camp in the Little Rockies of Montana. They registered the “4 T” brand and, in partnership with Jim Thornhill, the “Cover C Y.” Jim was actually Frank Jackson, the only surviving member of the Sam Bass outlaw gang from Texas. Twenty-year-old Jackson was already a respected, capable rancher when the Logan boys arrived in Landusky. But given his bank- and trainrobbing past with Bass, he was not exactly the best influence for Harvey. Jackson’s partners in crime had died bloody, set up by a former gang member, in Round Rock, Texas, in July 1878 . Jim eventually filed on five homesteads, all within range of Harvey’s Rock Creek horse Harvey Logan, a k a Kid Curry, ranch, and registered them appearing peaceable enough in under his “7 Up” brand.

1900, but he was regarded the “wildest of the Wild Bunch.”

Using the ranch at Rock

Creek as a base, Harvey and his brothers worked with the McNamara and Marlow Ranch in Montana Territory, running their own horses on a share basis. They would break horses for McNamara and Marlow and earn one of the horses in payment, thus building up their own herd.

Although the Logan brothers ranched peaceably for a number of years, Harvey, his brother John and his brotherin-law Lee Self had a confrontation on October 2, 1894, with a local tough named James Ross. They were arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Judge Dudley DuBose fixed bail at $500, which was met by Robert Coburn of the Circle C Ranch. Harvey Logan had developed a close friendship with Coburn, a friendship that was cemented when Harvey saved Bob’s life. According to Coburn, the two men were part of a roundup crew working Circle C cattle when Bob’s horse was spooked. The horse fell and pinned its rider underneath. When the crew finally freed Coburn, he was unconscious and seemed near death. Logan took it upon himself to ride 85 miles to Malta to fetch the doctor, who reached Coburn in time to save him.

The 1894 charges stated that Harvey “with a deadly weapon, to wit, a shot gun, in and upon James Ross did make an assault with intent then and there to inflict a bodily injury…having no considerable provocation for said assault and the circumstances of said assault showing the said Harvey Curry [had] a malignant and abandoned heart.” In defense, Harvey and John asked for a continuance so that eyewitness Jacob Launze could appear on their behalf. As a witness, Launze would testify that “when Self first attacked Ross, Harvey Curry pulled him [Self] back; when he [Self] attacked Lou Simmons, John Curry then took hold of Lee Self, and pulled him away from Simmons, when he again struck at Ross. That Ross then placed his hand behind him under his suit, in the act of drawing a revolver, when Harvey Curry drew a revolver, and told him to stop; that John Curry had no weapon of any kind with him on that night, and that neither of the defendants Harvey or John Curry struck or attempted to strike Ross.”

Harvey claimed that the assault charges filed by Ross were trumped up by their neighbor, Powell “Pike” Landusky, with whom Harvey and his brother Lonnie already had a contin-

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uing feud. Elfie, one of Pike’s stepdaughters, was apparently Kilpatrick, Will Carver and pregnant by Lonnie, and Pike was enraged. Pike was a man “Flatnose” George Currie Logan’s Montana Territory of influence, having control over the riches and mining claims (the man who had inspired Rock Creek ranch, which was in the area and also serving as a deputy. Given the responsiLogan’s use of the “Curry” later dubbed Robbers Roost. bility of holding Harvey during the assault arrest, Pike took alias) for a Union Pacific the opportunity to beat the prisoner unmercifully. When the Railroad holdup at Wilcox Station, Wyo. case later was heard in Fort Benton, Mont., all charges against During the escape, the robbers split up, with Harvey, Harvey were dismissed.

Sundance and Flatnose heading for their Hole-in-the-Wall The Logan-Landusky feud continued. As soon as he hideout in north-central Wyoming. A posse led by Sheriff returned home on October 20, Harvey signed a precinct elecJosiah Hazen got too close, and during a gunfight near Castle tion register listing the Rock Creek ranch as his residence. The Creek, Hazen was mortally wounded in the stomach. The outpurpose of the vote was to name the town that arose near the laws escaped, and Harvey was soon named as the shooter by mines. Logan wanted it called Rock Creek, but “Landusky” won the Pinkerton Detective Agency, whose agents were busy folout. For Harvey, seeing the town named for his hated enemy lowing a trail of stolen Wilcox bank notes. was like rubbing salt into his still-healing wounds. Feeling that Pinkerton operative Charles Siringo arrived in Harlem, justice had not been served, Harvey set out to get even with Mont., that fall to check up on a $500 deposit made by Lonnie Pike. Known as a brawler with a short fuse, Pike had a face Logan and his cousin Bob Lee through their Curry Brothers that served as evidence to some of his past Saloon, also known as the Club Saloon. fistfights. But that did not deter Harvey.

Because the bank notes had a torn corner On December 27, 1894, Harvey cornered like the Wilcox robbery bills, the bank sent a drunken Pike, who was celebrating them to Washington, D.C., for verification.

By 1899, Kid Christmas in the local saloon owned by When the deposit did not show up in their Curry was an Jacob (“Jew Jake”) Harris. In spite of Pike’s account by January, Lonnie and Bob large size and renowned strength, Harvey became suspicious. With barely 24 hours’ experienced thief struck him in the face. Lonnie Logan and notice, they sold their interest in the saloon and member of Jim Thornhill stepped between the fighters to George J. Ringwald, a local businessman, the Wild Bunch, and the saloon crowd and said, “The first on January 6, 1900. man that makes a move will be killed.”When Following the trail of Wilcox money, the led by Robert Harvey’s gun fell out of his coat pocket and Pinkertons quickly tracked Lonnie and Bob Leroy Parker, also onto the floor, Pike pulled his own gun. But to Cripple Creek, Colo. Before the detecThornhill quickly picked up Harvey’s gun tives could close in, however, Lonnie left known as Butch and tossed it to his friend. Pike’s gun mistown and headed home to the Lee farm in Cassidy fired, and Harvey shot and killed Pike. In the Dodson, Mo. Bob, meanwhile, found a job meantime, Lonnie had rounded up their dealing cards at the Antlers Gambling wagon and had it waiting outside for a quick retreat.

House, where on February 28 the Pinkertons arrested him for Shooting down Pike Landusky was the first killing attribthe Wilcox train robbery. On May 5, Lee gave a deposition to uted to Harvey Logan. Fearing local reaction, he ran. However, U.S. Marshal Frank A. Hadsell and Pinkerton Superintendent others indicted in the killing, including Lonnie Logan and Jim John C. Fraser. According to his statement, Lee had a torn Thornhill, were later found not guilty because the shooting Wilcox bill in his possession only because Lonnie Logan had was deemed to be self-defense. Therefore, had Harvey allowed been paid a debt by the Sundance Kid, and Lonnie in turn had the law to work, one has to wonder whether he would have given the bill to Lee. Bob’s trial began on May 24 in the fedtaken to the outlaw trail he soon traveled. eral court in Cheyenne, Wyo., and on May 28 he was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in the Wyoming State y 1899, Harvey Logan had rustled cattle, robbed the Penitentiary, then located at Rawlins. bank in Belle Fourche, S.D., escaped jail in On February 28, the same day Bob Lee was captured, Deadwood, S.D., and held up a train in Humboldt, Pinkerton agents went to the Lee farm looking for Lonnie.

Nev. He was an experienced thief and member of the Wild Accompanied by three Kansas City detectives, the Pinkertons Bunch, under the leadership of Robert Leroy Parker, alias tried to sneak up on the farmhouse. However, the house, Butch Cassidy. On June 2, 1899, he joined with his brother according to the Pinkertons, was “at the apex of a steep grade.

Lonnie, Harry Longabaugh (alias the Sundance Kid), Ben No stealthy approach to it was possible, as the ground in front

B

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DONNA B. ERNST COLLECTION

of it was open terrain…a strip of woods several hundred feet away.” Having spotted the agents outside, Lonnie tried to sneak out the back door and escape into the woods at the rear of the property. The Pinkertons saw him running and shot to kill. Lonnie landed in a snowbank and died instantly.

William A. Pinkerton later praised his agents’ work, saying that Superintendent Kimble of the Spokane office “had more to do with the killing of Logan than all of the other people who were present.” When Harvey heard that his brother had been killed and his cousin was in jail, his anger reached its peak; he was determined to kill any and all law officers he could.

Late in March 1900, a rural postal clerk saw Harvey Logan and Will Carver near St. Johns, Arizona Territory, and reported the suspicious pair to Sheriff Edward Beeler. A posse took off after the outlaws and tracked them for days before most of them gave up. Two Mormon boys from the posse, Andrew A. Gibbons and Frank LeSeuer, stuck with the trail. Logan spotted the two young possemen, and they soon rode right into his ambush. Harvey fired just two shots and killed them both. It was March 28, just one month after Lonnie’s death.

Still on the run, Logan and Carver headed south toward the WS Ranch in Alma, New Mexico Territory, where the Wild Bunch outlaws occasionally hid. Along the way, they stopped near the San Simon River to butcher a cow, and a passing lawman discovered their handiwork. Sheriff George Scarborough and cattleman Walter Birchfield followed the trail of the suspected cattle rustlers, but rode into an ambush on April 5.

Birchfield was only wounded, but Scarborough soon died in Deming, New Mexico Territory. Logan’s search for revenge had now claimed another victim.

Two weeks later, on April 17, while out tracking down cattle rustlers, Sheriff Jesse M. Tyler of Grand County, Utah, shot down Flatnose George Currie. Flatnose had been one of the

most important influences in Harvey Logan’s life other than his own brothers, and Harvey again set out to even the score.

Bitter, enraged and bent on vengeance, Logan headed north in search of the sheriff. On May 26, he found Tyler and deputized cattleman Sam Jenkins looking for a local cattle rustler on Hill Creek, about 40 miles north of Thompson Springs, Utah. Logan shot and killed them both. The Pinkerton criminal history dossier on Harvey states, “Logan committed this murder for revenge because Tyler and Jenkins were of the posse that had killed George Curry [sic], April 17th preceding.”

Five murders in two months was vengeance aplenty, but whether Logan really was responsible for them can be debated. The newspapers of the day all name Tom Capehart as one of a gang of outlaws in each of the five cases, and the references further claim that the name “Tom Capehart” was an alias being used by Harvey Logan. Capehart was actually a Texas cowboy who happened to work with many of Harvey’s outlaw acquaintances. So while the Pinkertons were quick to add LeSeuer, Gibbons, Scarborough, Tyler and Jenkins to the list of men murdered by Logan, he may have been innocent of those charges. The murderer may actually have been Tom Capehart. There is little question, however, that Logan would have been pleased to hear about the deaths of these lawmen.

A

fter Tyler and Jenkins were killed, Harvey focused once again on accumulating cash at the expense of the Union Pacific Railroad. On August 29, 1900, he led a train holdup at Tipton, Wyo., that netted about $55,000.

During a winter hiatus in Fort Worth, Texas, he was photographed with the Sundance Kid, Ben Kilpatrick (the “Tall Texan”), Will Carver and Butch Cassidy. The men in the photo, taken on November 21, became known as the Fort Worth Five.

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at the Kilpatrick family ranch, located between Paint Rock and Eden in west Texas, planning their next heist. About noon on Wednesday, March 27, Logan and Carver challenged brothers Ben, George and Ed Kilpatrick to a game of croquet on the ranch lawn. Neighbor Oliver C. Thornton happened by to discuss an ongoing problem with pigs belonging to Boone Kilpatrick. Whether Thornton overheard something he should not have, or whether the pig feud just escalated, something went drastically wrong. Logan pulled his gun and killed Thornton in cold blood.

After their hurried exit, Logan, Carver, and Ben and George Kilpatrick were seen in Sonora, Texas, where they intended to rob the First National Bank. Around 8 p.m. on April 2, while Logan and Ben Kilpatrick held the supplies and extra horses just outside of town, Carver and George Kilpatrick rode into Sonora. From the end of a draw on the edge of town, Logan and the Tall Texan heard gunshots, and escaped as quickly as their horses could travel. The two robbers in town had been recognized and resisted when an attempt was made to arrest them for Thornton’s murder. Sheriff Lige Briant shot Carver, and George Kilpatrick was badly wounded and taken prisoner. Upon questioning, George admitted who he was but denied killing Thornton. He blamed the killing on the man he knew as “Walker,” Harvey’s current alias. Carver was carried to the steps of the courthouse, where he died shortly before midnight.

For nearly three months, Logan and Ben Kilpatrick managed to evade the law, all the while heading north toward the Logan ranch in Landusky, Mont. There, the two men recruited O.C. “Deaf Charlie” Hanks, who had just been released from the state penitentiary at Deer Lodge, Mont.,

after serving time for a train robbery. The newly formed After a lifetime that included gang successfully held up the killing nine men, Kid Curry killed himself on June 9, 1904. Coast Flyer No. 3 of the Great Northern Railroad on July 3, 1901, at Wagner, Mont. Their total take included more than $40,000 in unsigned bank notes, a package of watches, a bag of silver coins and a bolt of green silk fabric.

Harvey Logan and the boys escaped across the Milk River and headed southwest for their hideout in the Missouri River Breaks, near Landusky. When Kilpatrick and Hanks left for Texas, Logan had one more chore to do before leaving Montana for good. While visiting his ex-ranching partner, Jim Thornhill, he presented the stolen bolt of green material to Jim’s wife, Lucy Tressler, in thanks for her hospitality. He also kept an old promise for retribution. Lucy had once lived with Harvey’s brother John, who had been killed by Jim Winters over a homestead feud back in February 1896. On the morning of July 26, 1901, Harvey waited for Winters to appear outside his cabin door and shot him in cold blood. The Pinkerton dossier on Harvey states, “Mr. Winters had some time previous taken an interest in his capture and location and had given some information to the officers in regard to him and out of revenge for this Logan killed him.” Winters’ partner and stepbrother, Abe Gill, also disappeared about this time, and he also may have been a victim of Harvey Logan.

After leaving Montana, Logan spent time in Dodson, Mo., with his aunt and in Texas and Tennessee with a woman, Annie Roger. In December 1901, he got into a fight in Knoxville, Tenn., and was arrested. A Pinkerton agent identified him, and in November 1902 Logan was tried and convicted on 10 charges, including forging and passing stolen bank notes. He was sentenced to 20 to 130 years in the federal penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio. His lawyers appealed, and Logan escaped from the Knoxville jail on June 27, 1903. On July 2, the Pinkerton Detective Agency released a wanted poster for him.

A year and a half behind bars had not taken any of the starch out of Harvey Logan. On June 7, 1904, he participated in the holdup of a Denver & Rio Grande train near Parachute, Colo. Two days later he was wounded in a gunfight with a posse. Whether fearing capture and jail or a slow death, Harvey yelled to his companions: “I’m hit. I will put an end to it all.” And with that he put a bullet through his brain.

Harvey Logan, aka Kid Curry, was accused of killing nine men, participated in at least seven robberies and escaped jail twice. He truly had been the wildest of the Wild Bunch.

However, the man the Pinkertons once called “the most feared and dangerous outlaw” could not seek revenge for his own death—maybe justice had finally been served. ✭

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